The Leopard Unleashed (29 page)

The latter hooked his thumbs in his belt. ‘Stephen’s folly, not mine,’ he retorted. ‘You’ll discover it soon enough.’

The summer progressed in hot somnolence. A peace treaty between the opposing forces was mooted, discussed, and abandoned. War drifted across the land like August thunder, sometimes passing over, sometimes deluging an area in brief destruction and misery. Crops burned. People and livestock roasted. Storm-coloured smoke mingled with storm-coloured sky.

William went foraging and raiding with the Empress’s troops. By turns he found himself exhilarated by the joy of his abilities and the tensile strength of his young body, and sickened by the strewn aftermath of a raid and what some of his companions considered sport. He learned, he matured, and stubborn determination did the rest.

In early September Olwen was brought to bed of a son at Chester.

‘A fine boy, my lord,’ said the nurse, plucking the bawling infant from his cradle and presenting him to the Earl. ‘Born yesterday dawn.’

Ranulf declined to hold the baby, and pushing down his coif stared suspiciously at the red, unprepossessing features. There was nothing to commend or recognise, but then at one day old both his daughters had looked remarkably like wizened turnips too.

‘We did not think he would live at first, he nearly drowned in the birthing fluid. Father Barnard christened him Jordan because he had a vial of holy water from the river.’

Jordan FitzRanulf. It had a reasonable ring to it, but how did he know that FitzRanulf was the correct appellation?

‘He’s big and strong,’ added the nurse with a sly look at Ranulf. Men liked to hear things like that about their sons, and sometimes paid silver for the compliments.

Ranulf grunted at the woman and turned round to the bed. Too big and strong for a child delivered almost a month early? Olwen’s eyes were closed. Heavy smudges purpled the delicate skin beneath them. Otherwise she was waxen, her lips shockingly pale because he was so accustomed to seeing them painted scarlet. A difficult birth so the midwife had said, but she could have been lying in hopes of a higher payment.

‘Is he mine?’ he said to her.

Olwen’s eyes remained closed, but he saw the infinite -simal flutter of her lashes. Putting one knee on the bed, he braced his arms either side of her.

‘Damn you, answer me!’

The heavy lids half opened, revealing a glimpse of hazed dark blue iris. ‘Yours?’ The faintest of smiles played around the word she formed. ‘Yes, he’s yours.’

‘Hah!’ Abruptly he jerked away from the bed to look ferociously at the infant who had now settled hungrily at the wet-nurse’s ample breast.

‘Bought, but not begotten,’ she whispered, assailed by a terrible, seeping weariness. She had never dreamed in her life that such pain existed, that it could surge so relentlessly and for so long and culminate in a pushing, splitting agony beyond all her control.

Ranulf did not hear her thread-thin whisper. He was too occupied in watching the child, his expression a mingling of longing and doubt.

Olwen turned her face to the wall and closed her eyes again, but it did not stop the tears leaking from beneath her lids.

The Michaelmas fair at Ledworth went unaffected by the strife elsewhere and made an excellent profit for Renard from the tolls he was entitled to levy on all the booths and all the transport in and out of the town. Some of the proceeds he donated to the widening of the road approaching the town from Shrewsbury and also to a hostel for those seeking a night’s lodging. Laughing, he returned Elene the halfpenny fee that her own carrier had paid to bring the bales of Woolcot cloth into the fair. Woolcot and all it produced belonged to Renard, secured by the act of marriage, but he had gifted the herds and all profit from them back to Elene in the form of a ‘morgengab’ or ‘morning gift’, the ancient custom of presenting a bride with a gift should her husband be satisfied with his wedding night.

The product of Elene’s morning gift, the finely woven, soft and gorgeously dyed woollen cloths, had been sold
right down to the last ell on the last bolt, for it was of comparable quality to Flanders cloth and cost much less. Elene decided to reserve at least two-thirds of her clip from the following year and begin building up the flocks at Ravenstow, Ledworth and Caermoel.

A little before the commencement of the Martinmas slaughter, Elene was delivered of her own son. Her waters broke as the bell was summoning the pious to morning mass. Shortly after prime, she pushed the baby smoothly into the world – ‘With no more effort than using the garderobe,’ Alys said later, when asked.

Hugh, named for his maternal grandfather, was a large-boned, well-developed baby and amazed everyone by how little trouble his birth had caused his smug, smiling mother. By the time of his christening feast and Elene’s churching ceremony on Twelfth Night, he possessed a respectable amount of sandy-blond hair and from between lashes that were almost white regarded the world with vivid, light blue eyes.

‘Hugh suits him,’ Judith said to Elene. ‘He resembles your family.’

Elene smiled and agreed. She knew that Judith had been somewhat hurt at first that she and Renard had decided upon Hugh, not Guyon for their firstborn son, but as the baby’s colouring and features had developed over the ensuing weeks, Judith’s attitude had altered. ‘He looks like my brother Warrin,’ Elene added. ‘Particularly around the eyes, don’t you think?’

The fine lines at the corners of Judith’s mouth deepened. Elene’s brother had died in a street brawl in the city of Angers over twelve years ago. The circumstances had been decidedly murky and Adam and Heulwen somewhere
involved. No one had ever prodded a spoon too deeply into that particular bowl of stew for fear of discovering putrid bones. ‘Renard seems to beget the red hair,’ she remarked instead of agreeing. ‘The falconer’s daughter’s babe was copper, and there’s more than a hint in Hugh’s. It only ever showed up among Guyon’s in Heulwen. I’m glad you asked her and Adam to be godparents as well as Lord Leicester.’

‘One for policy, one from the heart,’ Renard said, edging his way between his wife and his mother.

Judith scowled at him. ‘I wish you wouldn’t creep up on people like that.’

‘You’re going deaf,’ he retorted disrespectfully, and lightly kissed her cheek before turning to Elene. ‘Are you coming to dance with me, Nell, or now that you’re a staid matron is it forbidden to show me a quick glimpse of ankle?’ He held out his hand, inviting.

‘If I show you my ankle, you’ll want to see other things too!’ she laughed at him.

‘Yes,’ he admitted cheerfully.

She let him whirl her among the laughing, swirling dancers, was passed from hand to hand, swung round, lifted, turned. Her milk-tender breasts started to feel sore. Ancelin slobbered a kiss on her cheek and trampled on her toes, his eyes as glazed as misted glass. From the corner of her eye she saw Judith unobtrusively retiring as the roistering reached a new pitch.

She was spun back into Renard’s embrace. He had seen the longing direction of her gaze, and squeezing her waist, stooped to murmur against her ear, ‘Let’s go to bed.’

Elene felt her face grow warm and her loins weaken. She would never accustom herself to just walking out of
a room full of people to lie with him, aware that everyone was looking – making assessments, even wagers on how long it would take them.

‘There’s Hugh,’ she prevaricated. ‘He needs feeding.’

‘Go and fetch him from Alys then and bring him up,’ he said practically, and then as she looked at him, ‘Oh in the name of Christ, Nell, I’m not about to pounce on you and ravish you! I just thought that you looked in need of respite from this wild horde.’ He gestured around and grimaced. ‘I know I am.’

She remembered the times when his laughter, the lightness of his remarks had been a cover for much deeper thoughts and emotions. She remembered the checked wildness in his eyes and body and him saying
‘What I need to ease the pressure is …’
And was suddenly contrite. ‘I’ll fetch Hugh,’ she said, and turned to weave her way through the gathering.

It was strangely quiet and calm upstairs in the main bedchamber, no sound, no hint of the revelry below, just the sputtering crackle of the alder logs in the hearth and the wind whining against the shuttered window slit. Hugh, as usual, guzzled with the speed of a sailor hitting the first alehouse after three dry months at sea, and choked in his frantic haste.

Renard sat down on the coffer, legs outstretched, spine propped against the wall, and watched Elene and the baby. Only a few candles were burning on the small pricket, their glimmer diffusing into a dull, grainy gold. Elene’s exposed skin gleamed softly. The baby’s hair had the sheen of pale, pure gold against Elene’s jet black, of which a strand was clutched tightly in Hugh’s small fingers.

Renard swallowed. It was a sight to gladden the eye, but
somehow it brought a lump to his throat, and not all of it was paternal tenderness. ‘I thought Henry would have come,’ he said in a tired voice. ‘The weather has been clear, and I expressly invited him.’

Elene glanced from her absorption with the baby. ‘Perhaps the wound is still too deep and new,’ she suggested. ‘Perhaps to see me with a child …’ She left the sentence hanging in midair.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe so. I thought that by now he would have come around. William’s in the enemy camp but he still managed to send good wishes and a christening gift through a Welsh carrier.’

‘Distance and differences of opinion do not separate the similarities between you and William,’ she said shrewdly. ‘You and Henry, even when you were smiling at each other never really scratched beneath the surface.’

Renard snorted and looked away, but was well aware that she spoke the truth. ‘Even so,’ he reiterated heavily, ‘I thought that he would come.’

She watched him sit down before the hearth in the chair that had been his father’s. His face was expressionless, but there were fine lines bracketing his mouth-corners where he had been smiling without being in the least amused. She could sense the tension in him, straining on a tight leash.

‘It’s too quiet, Nell,’ he said, eyes on the flames.

‘But you just said below—’

‘No, not up here. I’m talking about the war. Stephen, Mathilda and Ranulf de Gernons. No matter what Chester is given, he still wants more, and when one side has nothing else to give, he’ll turn to the other.’

Hugh had fallen asleep at her breast. Carefully she lifted
him away and went to put him down in his cradle, then turned again to Renard. She had not bothered to hook up her bodice and she saw him eyeing her cleavage. ‘You think he will really leave Stephen?’ she asked, not because at that moment she really cared, but because she felt too awkward to just boldly walk up to him and sit down on his knee. Absence of such contact had increased the shyness as well as the longing. It was not a familiar action any more.

‘Undoubtedly. He has no reason to stay, has he? Hands smacked off Carlisle again, and Lincoln denied too, not to mention Caermoel.’ His laugh was brittle.

‘Do you wish you’d stayed in Antioch?’ She was closer to him now. Tentatively she laid her hand on his shoulder. The side of her hand grazed his throat and she felt the sudden leap of his pulse.

‘Sometimes,’ he sighed. ‘But there it is an even more fractured mosaic of power-hungry warlords. I suppose I was always too low in the hierarchy to be much affected.’ Slanting one arm around her waist and hip he did what she had hoped he would do and pulled her down into his lap. Then he kissed her and all conversation stopped.

They had reached the bed and a state of breathless, urgent half-undress when Owain cleared his throat raucously on the other side of the curtain and announced that Lord Henry had arrived and that he wanted an immedi ate word with Renard.

Renard closed his eyes and pressed his lips into the silky hollow of Elene’s shoulder. ‘Judgement on me,’ he groaned, levering himself up. ‘All right, Owain, tell him to come up.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Renard sat up on the edge of the bed and fumbled his tunic back on with unsteady hands. He looked round at Elene, at the rapid rise and fall of her dark-tipped breasts and the loose hair spread abroad. ‘Wishes have a fickle habit of exploding in your face, even while they’re being granted,’ he said wryly. ‘Best cover yourself, love, unless you want to start a fight.’

Still dazed by the passion of a moment since, Elene was acutely aware of the soft furs against her shoulder blades, of the heaviness of her loins, of Renard’s eyes and the mingling of staunched need, exasperation and reluctant humour in his expression. Breathing out hard, he left the temptation of the bed and walking to the window slit stood in the draught from an ill-fitting shutter.

Elene dragged her skirts decently down, shrugged her gown back on to her shoulders, and with fumbling hands, fastened the neck of her gown and hooked up the bodice. Her hair she could do nothing about except grab a comb, tidy it quickly and place a circlet on top to hold it away from her face.

Owain drew the curtain aside and Henry strode into the room. Rain sparkled on his cloak. Eyebrows and moustache were frosted with it and his eyes were the colour of a rainswept riverbank. He had regained some of the flesh he had lost during his convalescence, but his bones were harder now, stripped of malleable youth.

‘I thought you had decided not to come,’ Renard said.

Henry went to the hearth and threw off his cloak, revealing a padded tunic of the kind worn under a hauberk. He flexed his good shoulder. ‘I would have been here sooner, but I had business with an armourer in Shrewsbury and while there I heard some disturbing news … Elene.’
He spoke her name in a stiff greeting, averting his eyes, and advanced on the cradle to regard his new nephew. ‘I’ve brought him a christening gift. Over there by the wall in the oiled cloth.’ Stooping over the baby, he made the usual adult gesture of putting his finger in the baby’s fist. Even in sleep the fingers curled and gripped. Henry’s expression became less tense and he managed a smile.