The Running Vixen (15 page)

Heulwen darted for the open door and screeched at the full pitch of her lungs for help. In the courtyard, Renard and Henry, just returned from their visit to see the jousting and already alerted by the squawking of the maids that something was seriously wrong, hurtled up the stairs.

‘God in heaven!’ Henry’s eyes were huge with disbelief. From behind his naked half-sister, there came the sound of a muffled crash and a howl of fury.

‘More like hell to pay by the looks of it,’ Renard said. Pausing only to gesture at two gawking serjeants, he pelted up the stairs.

‘Renard, stop them, they’ll kill each other!’ Heulwen screamed at him.

He pushed his cloak at her. ‘Cover yourself,’ he snapped. Thrusting her to one side, he entered his parents’ bedchamber. A hurled goblet crashed against the wall, narrowly missing his head. The air was awhirl with goose feathers, some of which had drifted into the brazier - which was, remarkably, still standing - and the room was filled with the stench of burning. At the far side of the room, as mother-naked as Heulwen, Adam de Lacey was cornered behind a badly scarred shield, and Warrin de Mortimer was swinging murderously at him.

‘In the name of Holy Christ, stop!’ yelled Renard, his voice cracking as it sometimes still did when pressure was put upon it. He was ignored and his jaw, which was very much his royal grandfather’s, tightened. He leaped on to the bed, took three paces ankle-deep in feathers and jumped down between the antagonists, ensuring that he faced de Mortimer rather than presenting him with the target of the space between his shoulder blades.

‘Renard, keep out of this,’ Adam snarled at the youth’s turned back.

‘In my father’s absence I have the authority here,’ Renard answered, his voice once more on the level and controlled. ‘Put up your swords.’

Adam shot a sidelong glance at the two hesitant but brawny serjeants standing to either side of the doorway, Heulwen shivering beside them, her face pinched and blue. He grounded his own swordpoint in the rushes, but kept his fingers wrapped around the hilt, and did not lower the shield.

Warrin bared his teeth at Renard. ‘Don’t get ideas above yourself, whelp! What kind of authority is it that allows your sister to play the heated bitch across the sheets with this forsworn cur!’

Colour slashed across Renard’s cheekbones. ‘Put up your sword,’ he reiterated and nodded to the serjeants, who started forward. ‘I think you should leave.’

De Mortimer stared into Renard’s flint-dark eyes, then beyond them to where Adam stood poised, prepared to defend, or attack. ‘I’ll have a reckoning for this,’ he said thickly as he slotted his blade back into the scabbard, ‘on your body.’

‘My pleasure.’ Adam returned the sneer. ‘And you had better start praying because I can see the flames of hell encircling your feet already.’

There was a tense silence while their eyes met and held, will beating against will. Warrin pointed an index finger at Adam. An ostentatious gold ring trembled on his knuckle. ‘You’re dead,’ he said hoarsely, and turning on his heel, stalked to the door. As he reached Heulwen, he struck her backhanded across the face, knocking her hard into the wall. ‘Whore!’ he repeated, and slammed out into the bitter, snow-pocked wind.

Renard gestured the serjeants out after him. ‘Make sure he leaves,’ he said, and went to pick up his sister from the floor. Adam shouldered him roughly aside, and, dropping the shield, stooped to lift her himself. A furious red blotch was fast marring her cheek and closing one eye. Her breath came in great dry gasps.

Renard took a sheepskin from the devastated bed and threw it around her shoulders on top of his cloak. ‘You’ve really set the fat into the fire this time.’ He shook his head. ‘Couldn’t you have trysted somewhere less dangerous?’

‘It wasn’t intentional,’ Adam replied without looking round. ‘It just happened.’

Renard arched a sceptical brow, thinking of himself and the falconer’s daughter, or that engaging little laundress at the palace who was as soft as a kitten, neither of whom had ever fired him beyond the loss of all caution. He lifted the shield and replaced it against the wall.

‘The trouble is,’ he said, pursing his lips, ‘you are likely to burn a lot of other people too.’

‘Renard, leave it alone,’ Adam said with soft vehemence, and sat Heulwen down on the bed. ‘Come, love, let me look at your face.’

She pushed him away. ‘It’s nothing, the least of my wounds,’ she whispered and bent over, arms folded to her middle, her face screened in her coppery masses of hair, as she began to sob.

Adam stretched his arm around her shoulders, feeling helpless, and held her. ‘Hush, Heulwen, it’s all right,’ he murmured over and over again, fingers smoothing and stroking.

Renard cleared his throat. ‘I’ll see if there’s any usquebaugh below,’ he said, and headed for the stairs, only to collide with his mother and her maid advancing up them. From the expression on his mother’s face, it was obvious that the news was already on its way to scorching a path through the city.

Judith stared at the shambles of her bedchamber with a face that wore the calm expression of forewarned disbelief. She took in her work basket and the riot of spilled silks, the overturned candle-stand, the raw slashed wood showing its flesh through the leather skin of her husband’s shield, the hacked pillows and the feathers that puffed gently into the air as she trod forwards, and finally, her gaze came to rest on the bed.

Adam de Lacey looked up at her. One lean-muscled arm lay across Heulwen’s shoulder and his hand was buried in her tangled hair. ‘It’s all my fault,’ he said, meeting her eyes squarely. ‘I’ll make amends.’

Judith looked quickly around the wrecked room again and back to Adam. ‘Indeed you will,’ she said severely. ‘I suppose you were caught in the act?’

‘Not quite.’ Adam coloured. ‘I’m sorry I—’

‘It’s too late for apologies to be of much use,’ Judith said waspishly, but having removed her cloak, she sat down at her stepdaughter’s other side. ‘Adam, put some clothes on before you freeze to death,’ she said in a brusque tone, ‘and you’d better let me have a look at that wound on your arm. It needs salve.’

He looked with surprise at the oozing narrow cut running between wrist and elbow. ‘I did it on the candle-stand, ’ he said vaguely. ‘It wasn’t de Mortimer’s sword. You’d better look at Heulwen first. He struck her full force across the face as he was leaving.’

Judith contemplated her stepdaughter, or what could be seen of her through the screening swathes of tangled red hair. She was whimpering softly now, and Judith judged the pain of Warrin’s blow to be the least of her agony.

‘Adam, when you’re dressed, I think it would be advisable if you went below to wait for Guyon,’ she said in a gentler voice, and to Heulwen, ‘Come, child, calm yourself. No one yet died of shame.’ Under the weight of Judith’s stare, Adam reluctantly relinquished his hold on Heulwen and sought out his clothes. Stony-faced, the maid picked up his crumpled shirt from the floor and handed it to him at arm’s length. Awkward in the uneasy silence, he fumbled into it and struggled with chausses, hose and tunic.

‘I suppose,’ Judith said wearily, ‘that I should have seen it coming.’ And then on an angry, exasperated note, ‘If you wanted each other this badly, why in God’s sweet name did you not speak to me or Guyon!’

Adam stamped into one of his boots, then hunted around the room until he found its partner half buried beneath a trailing length of creased sheet. ‘I was going to if you had been here this afternoon, but . . . well, the wain came before the ox.’

‘Not just the wain but an entire baggage supply of trouble!’ Judith said tartly as he pulled on the other boot and began latching his belt.

Renard returned with the usquebaugh flask in his hand. ‘Papa’s just ridden in,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘Good luck, Adam. I don’t know what he’ll do to you when he sees the state of his shield.’

‘Renard!’ Judith’s tone was peremptory.

He gave the flask to Helgund and came to the bed, where he squatted lithely on his haunches to peer under and within Heulwen’s curtaining hair. ‘Come on, Helly,’ he coaxed. ‘I’d have hated it to happen to me, but de Mortimer’s been deserving a kick in his arrogance for so long now that it’s a pleasure to see him get it. I’d rather have Adam for a brother-in-law any day than that conceited pea-brain . . . All right, Mama, I’m going.’ Grinning, less than contrite, he sauntered out of the door.

‘You’d better go down too,’ Judith said sternly to Adam.

He swallowed and nodded, but his feet drew him not to the door, but to stand and then crouch before Heulwen as Renard had done. He took her hands between his. ‘Heulwen, look at me,’ he pleaded.

She shook her head. He released one of her hands and parted her hair to expose her face. For an instant her eyes met his, and they were full of a furious misery before she turned her head aside.

‘Heulwen, please . . .’

‘Adam, go!’ Judith snapped. ‘Can’t you see that she’s in no fit state to deal with herself, let alone the burden you are trying to set on her?’

He bit his lip and stood straight, desiring somehow to set the thing to rights and knowing that what was right by his code was not necessarily right by Heulwen’s.

12

Guyon looked across the gaming board at the young man seated opposite, and suppressed with difficulty the urge to lay violent hands on him and throw him out of the house. It was a gut reaction. Adam de Lacey sometimes looked so much like his father that Guyon would find himself forgetting that physical similarity was the only resemblance.

He dropped his gaze to the jet and ivory counters and nudged one gently across the squares, reminding himself that life, unlike draughts, was mostly marked out in subtle shades of grey. ‘I do not know what to say to you,’ he admitted. ‘A part of me is so angry that I could kill you here and now without remorse, but only a part and that the lesser. I can see how it happened and how it was drawn out of all proportion, but Christ alone knows how long it will take to unravel all the tangled threads and sew them into some semblance of order - and I’m not talking about my wife’s tapestry silks.’ He sighed heavily. ‘It goes pride-deep, Adam, and you’ve done the equivalent of striking the de Mortimer family in the face with a rotten fish. Are you quite certain of your facts?’

Adam’s eyes brightened. ‘You saw the Welsh lad’s reaction for yourself when he laid eyes on de Mortimer, and your father was with me when I received from him the full tale and will bear me out. The lad was not lying or mistaken, I would stake my life on it.’

‘You will probably have to,’ Guyon replied grimly: ‘trial by combat is almost a certainty. Warrin’s not going to admit to the crime, and he’s got a very personal grudge now, hasn’t he?’ He shook his head at Adam. ‘Heulwen knows how to pick husbands,’ he grimaced, ‘all three of them.’

Adam felt the hostility emanating from Guyon. He was not really surprised. Guyon had shown remarkable restraint thus far over what threatened to develop into a full-blown scandal and had caused a serious rift with the de Mortimer family, formerly close allies to Ravenstow. Now and then, like steam escaping from a lidded cauldron, a spurt of anger was bound to erupt.

‘If I could undo it, believe me I would,’ he said.

‘Even down to retracting your request to the King?’ Guyon arched a sardonic brow.

Adam’s eyes kindled with a harder, amber light. ‘I’m sorry if I went to him first, but I did not know how much time I had, and I had to stop her from pledging herself to de Mortimer.’

A small, uncomfortable silence fell. Into it Guyon said, ‘It will break Hugh de Mortimer if his son is proven guilty.’

‘Perhaps you would rather I retracted the accusation, gave up Heulwen and sailed on the first ship for Outremer!’ Adam said, angrily as he heard Guyon’s ambivalence.

‘Perhaps I would,’ Guyon snorted. ‘But it wouldn’t be justice, would it?’ And then he clenched his fist and crashed it down on the board, sending the counters leaping awry. ‘Christ, Adam, why didn’t you ask me for Heulwen before all this blew up in our faces like a barrel of boiling pitch!’

‘Because I knew she wouldn’t have me!’ Adam retorted bitterly. ‘She wants a cold-blooded contract of convenience, not a love match.’

Guyon studied him, and gradually his fierce expression softened and he sighed. ‘It is not to be wondered at after the way Ralf treated her. She loved him so hard it almost broke her when he took off in pursuit of other women.’

‘I don’t need other women,’ Adam said intensely. ‘I never have, except as a salve to ease the wound of not having her. I know we have not had the best beginning, but God willing I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to her.’

Guyon made a rude sound. ‘And a fine martyr you will make!’ he scoffed. ‘As I have heard the tale, it was only half your fault. Granted, it was a serious breach of courtesy to go above uninvited, but I suppose your news warranted it, and Heulwen didn’t scream rape, did she? If one of the maids did hear her cry out, it was certainly not for help.’

Adam cleared his throat and looked down at his hands as if their conformation was of great interest. He remembered her undulating beneath him, the sounds he had dammed against her mouth with his own as the last fragment of sanity was consumed in the conflagration. Was it truly no more than a carnal matter of lust?

Guyon shook his head. ‘Christ knows, Adam, for I do not. You escort that sharp-clawed termagant across Europe, rescue her from a handful of dangers, weave your way with diplomacy through the courts of barons, princes and kings, only to bloody your nose on something as simple as this!’

‘Perhaps because it’s been too simple for too long,’ Adam said wearily, and raised the hands he had been studying to dry-wash his face. ‘I haven’t the ability to fathom it any more.’

Heulwen watched her father remove his thick outdoor cloak and pace to the brazier to warm his hands. Two rings winked in the light: one set with a ruby, the other with intaglio. Were it not for the need to dress in finery at court, they would have remained buried at the bottom of a casket so seldom opened that spiders had been known to weave their webs across its lock before now. Heulwen put down her piece of sewing, which was only a pretence anyway, and came to his side.