The Running Vixen (3 page)

He sat down on a low stool to remove his boots and hose. ‘When I left, the Welsh situation was fairly quiet, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone.’

‘Well it’s fluid now. They have a new lord over the border and he’s been cutting his teeth on your lands during your absence and on Ralf ’s since early summer. My father hasn’t had the time to engage him properly. Miles would have been of an age to take some of the burden, but Miles is dead - we can’t even mourn his grave because he drowned.’ She bit her lip and steadied herself. ‘John’s chosen the church because he’s blind as a bat, so he’s little use. Renard’s shaping up well, but he’s not old enough to bear any serious responsibility yet, and Henry and William are still only children.’ She gave him a taut smile. ‘Still, now you are home you can set the worst of it to rights, I am sure.’

‘Oh, there’s nothing I enjoy better than a good fight,’ he said flippantly, and lowered his eyes to the unwinding of his garters.

Heulwen’s smile dropped, and faint vertical lines appeared between her brows. Adam had always been difficult. Although not her brother by blood, she had always regarded him as such. She had romped with him in childhood - climbed trees and swung from a rope in the stables, stolen apples from the undercroft and honey cakes from beneath the cook’s nose. They had shared a passion for the fine blood-horses that her father and grandfather bred. A bareback race for a dare had resulted in a thrashing. She had been confined to the bower for a week and Adam had been sent in disgrace to one of her father’s other keeps to ponder the folly of his ways.

Adolescence had caught them both unawares. She had matured quickly, and at fifteen had married Ralf le Chevalier, a neighbour of theirs who was a past master in the art of training her father’s destriers. It had been her admiration for his dextrous handling of all that power that had first brought them together.

As her love for Ralf blossomed, Adam had retired into uncommunicative sulks, his natural reticence becoming a full-blown unwillingness to interact with anything or anyone. She could still see him now, his expression surly, his face cursed by a red gruel of spots, his body long-shanked and uncoordinated. Ye withal, he had had a peculiar grace, and a way with a sword. And even if he wore a constant scowl, he was always reliable and diligent.

Taking his shirt now, she clucked her tongue over its threadbare state. ‘I notice the Empress was not so finicky about garments not on display,’ she remarked. ‘You must let me measure you and get the seamstresses to stitch you some new clothes.’

‘Organising my life for me?’ he needled her.

Heulwen laughed and handed his remaining garments to the maid. ‘What else are sisters for?’ As she looked teasingly over her shoulder at him, the laughter left her face and her stomach wallowed. Her mind had been talking to the lanky, spotty boy of her childhood. Now the illusion was stripped bare, as if shed with his garments, and she found herself confronting Adam the man, a stranger she did not know. Renard had warned her and she had not listened, and now it was too late.

The spots had gone, replaced by the ruddy glint of beard stubble prickling through his travel-burned skin. His hair was sun-streaked, the russet-brown bleached to bronze where it had been most exposed, and his eyes were the colour of dark honey. His thin, long nose was marred midway by a ridge of thickened bone where it had been broken and reset slightly askew, and a faint white scar from the same incident ran from beneath his nose into the lopsided long curve of his upper lip. Her glance flickered lower, taking in a physique that was no longer out of proportion. There were a few scars on his body too that had not been there before. One of them, obviously recent and still pink, curved like a new moon over his hip. Hastily she looked away and gestured him to step into the tub. Her throat was suddenly dry and her loins, in contrast, were liquid. Never would she have thought to apply the term ‘beautiful’ to Adam de Lacey, but the cygnet had shed its down, and more besides. ‘You have seen some hard fighting recently,’ she said hoarsely, and busied herself finding a dish of soap.

He stepped into the oval tub and sat down. The water was hot, making him gasp and flinch, but at least it concealed the more unpredictable parts of his anatomy from her view. ‘We were attacked several times on the road by routiers and outlaws. They picked the wrong victim in me, but some of them took the devil of convincing. Am I supposed to use this?’

She took back the soap dish she had just handed to him with a puzzled look.

‘I shall smell as sweet as a Turkish comfit!’ he elaborated with a genuine laugh.

Irritated at her mistake, she replaced the rose attar lavender concoction with something less scented.

‘Renard told me about Ralf,’ Adam said into the uneasy atmosphere. ‘I’m sorry. He was a good man, and I know you loved him.’

Heulwen straightened up like a warrior preparing to resist a blow. Yes, Ralf had been a good man: a fine warrior and superlative horseman, all that men would admire. But he had been a poor husband and an unfaithful one, rutting after other women the way his stallions did after mares on heat - and then there was the matter of all that unaccounted-for silver in their strongbox. ‘It is never safe to build on quicksand,’ she said with a hint of bitterness, and fetched him a shirt and tunic of her father’s, his own baggage still being below in the hall.

‘What about Ralf ’s stallions?’

Heulwen shrugged her shoulders. ‘I thought I might sell them, but two of the three are only half trained and could be worth much more if they were properly schooled.’

He returned to his ablutions. Women and warhorses. Le Chevalier had been expert in the art of taming both. Adam only had the latter skill, learned out of a jealous need to prove that he was as good as the man Heulwen had chosen to love, a skill in which, as a mature man, he now took a deep and justifiable pride. ‘I could finish Ralf ’s work,’ he offered diffidently.

Heulwen hesitated, then shook her head. ‘I couldn’t take advantage of you when you’re so recently home.’

‘You would be doing me a service. I haven’t worked on a horse since leaving for Germany, and it will give me space to relax between curbing the Welsh and organising my lands. I am the one who would be beholden.’

His eyes met hers and then he averted them. ‘Well then, thank you,’ she capitulated with a nod. ‘There are two half-trained stallions as I said, and one that Ralf was hoping to sell at Windsor this Christmas feast.’

Adam stepped from the tub and dried himself on the towels laid out. Turning his back, he quickly donned the clothes she had found for him. Struggling with a sense of hopelessness, he felt like a fish caught by the gills in a net. Oh Heulwen, Heulwen!

‘They’re stabled in the bailey. My father and Renard have been exercising them since Ralf died.’ Her expression brightened. ‘You can see them now if you like - if you’re not too travel-worn. There’s time before dinner.’

‘No, I’m not too travel-worn,’ he said, glad of an excuse to leave this chamber and their forced proximity. Although she had made the initial suggestion, he was the one to move first towards the door. ‘I’m never too tired to look at a good horse.’

She smiled with sour amusement. ‘That’s what I thought you’d say.’

Hands on hips, Adam watched Eadric and two under-grooms lead the three destriers around the paddock at the side of the stables. There was a rangy dark bay, handsome and spirited, a showy piebald, eminently saleable but of less calibre than the bay, and a sorrel of Spanish blood with cream mane and tail and the high-stepping carriage of a prince. It was to the last that Adam went, drawn by admiration to slap the satin hide and feel it rippling and firm beneath his palm.

‘Vaillantif was Ralf ’s favourite too,’ Heulwen said, watching him run his hand down the stallion’s foreleg to pick up and examine a hoof. ‘He was riding him when he died.’

Adam looked round at her and carefully set the hoof back down. ‘And the Welsh didn’t keep him?’

‘I don’t think they had time . . .’

‘I’d have made time if I were a Welsh raider.’ He nodded to the groom, and with a practised leap was smoothly astride the stallion’s broad, bare back. The destrier fought the bit, but Adam soothed and cajoled him, gripped with his thighs and knees, and urged with his heels.

Heulwen watched him take Vaillantif on a circuit of the paddock and her stomach churned as he went through the same routines as Ralf had done, with the same assurance, his spine aligned to every movement the horse made. Even without a saddle, his seat was easy and graceful. Vaillantif high-stepped with arched crest. He rapidly changed leading forefeet. A command from Adam and he reared up and danced on his hind legs. Another command dropped his forefeet to the ground and eased him into a relaxed trot and then a ground-consuming smooth canter. A quick touch on the rump and he back-kicked.

Adam brought him round before her and dismounted, pleasure flushing beneath his tan. ‘I’ve never ridden better,’ he declared with boyish enthusiasm. ‘Heulwen, he’s worth a king’s ransom!’

‘God send that you should ever look on a woman thus!’ she laughed.

His face changed, as if a shutter had been slammed across an open window. ‘What makes you think I haven’t?’ he said, giving all his attention to the horse.

Heulwen drew breath to ask the obvious question, but was forestalled by the noise of the hunting party clattering into the bailey, and turned to shade her eyes against the slant of the sun to watch their return.

Her father sat his courser with the ease of a born horseman. He was bareheaded, and the breeze ruffled his silver-scattered dark hair and carried the sound of his laughter as he responded to a remark made by the woman riding beside him.

A packhorse bearing the carcass of a roebuck was being led away towards the kitchen slaughter shed where the butchering was carried out. The houndkeeper and his lad were taking charge of the dogs that enveloped the humans knee deep. A white gazehound bitch clung jealously to the Earl’s side, nose thrusting at his hand.

‘Yes, he’s still got Gwen,’ Heulwen replied to Adam’s raised brows. ‘It’s the first time since her pups were born that she’s left them to run with the hunt. If you ask Papa nicely, he might give you one once they’re weaned.’

‘Who says I want a dog?’

‘Company for you at Thornford.’

He angled her a dubious look and started across the crowded bailey.

Lord Guyon, alerted by a groom, lifted his head and before Adam had taken more than half a dozen paces, was striding to meet him. His wife gathered her skirts and hastened in his wake.

‘We’d given you up for a ghost!’ Guyon clasped Adam in a brief, muscular bearhug.

‘Yes, graceless whelp, why did you not write!’ This reproach was from Lady Judith, who embraced him in her turn and kissed him warmly, her hazel-grey eyes alight with pleasure.

‘It wasn’t always easy to find a quiet corner, the places and predicaments I was in, and you know I have no talent with parchment and quill.’

Lady Judith laughed in wry acknowledgement. Her foster-son was literate through sheer perseverance - hers and the priest’s - but he would never write a fluent hand. His characters had a disturbing tendency to arrive on the parchment either back to front or upside down. ‘No excuses,’ she said sternly, ‘you could have found a scribe, I am sure.’

Adam tried without success to look crestfallen. ‘
Mea culpa
.’

‘So,’ said Judith with a hint of asperity that reminded Adam for a moment of her half-sister the Empress, ‘what brings you to the sanctuary of home comfort when you could be preening at court?’

Adam spread his hands. ‘My task was fulfilled and the King gave me leave to attend my lands until Christmas.’

‘Henry is back in England?’ Judith took his arm and began to walk with him to the keep. ‘Last we heard he was in Rouen.’

‘Yes, and in fine spirits. He gave me letters for you and your lord. I have them in my baggage.’

Lady Judith sighed and looked ruefully at her husband. Letters from Henry were rarely social. Frequently they were commands or querulous complaints, and usually they elicited ripe epithets from her husband who had perforce to deal with them. ‘Can they wait until after dinner?’ she asked with more hope than expectation.

Guyon gave a caustic laugh. ‘They’ll either spoil my dinner or my digestion. What’s the difference?’

Judith shot him a reproving scowl. ‘The difference is that you can decently wait until Adam has settled himself. If the news was urgent, I am sure he would have given it to you immediately.’

‘Scold!’ Guyon complained, opening and shutting his hand in mimicry of his wife’s jaw, but he was grinning.

Her eyes narrowed with amusement. ‘Do you not deserve it?’ Turning her attention from him, she looked around the hall. ‘Where’s Renard?’

‘Training the falconer’s daughter to the lure I very much suspect,’ Heulwen replied. ‘That new hawk of his is past needing his full attention.’

Judith cast her glance heavenwards. ‘I swear that boy has the morals of a tom-cat!’

‘He’ll settle down soon enough once the novelty of what he can do with it wears off,’ Guyon said, unperturbed. ‘The falconer’s lass is no innocent chick to be devoured at a pounce. She’ll peck him where it hurts if he dares beyond his welcome.’ He nodded down the hall at the knot of men clustered at a trestle and deftly changed the subject. ‘Sweyn and Jerold are still with you, I see, but I don’t recognise the other two or the lad.’

‘I’ll introduce you,’ Adam answered. ‘The boy’s my squire, Ferrers’s bastard. His father had him marked out for a career in the church, but he was thrown out of the noviciate for setting fire to the refectory and fornicating in the scriptorium with a guest’s maidservant. Ferrers asked me to take Austin on and fit him for a life by the sword. He’s shaping well so far. I might ask to keep him when he’s knighted.’

Guyon, thirty years of winnowing wheat from chaff behind him, looked the men over with a critical eye. Sweyn, Adam’s English bodyguard, was as dour and solid as ever, his mouth resembling a scarred, weathered crack in a chunk of granite. Jerold FitzNigel had been with Adam for more than ten years - a softly spoken Norman with rheumy blue eyes, a sparse blond moustache, and the lankiness of a sun-drawn seedling. His appearance was deceptive, for he was as tough and sinewy as boiled leather.