The Wild Hunt (21 page)

He raised his cup to her in a mocking salute and looked her insolently up and down as if she was already a piece of his property.

In the bedchamber, Judith collapsed beside the hearth, her teeth chattering and her hands icy.

Helgund fetched a sheepskin from the foot of the bed, wrapped it around her mistress's shaking shoulders and hunted out the flask of aqua vitae.

Judith choked on the strong liquor. 'I'm all right,'

she reassured the maid, finding a wan smile from somewhere. 'Lord Miles will need to know. Have you seen him?'

'Not recently, my lady. He did not come here while you were gone.'

'My lady, he was talking to your mother in the hall before Lord Walter came,' Elflin offered timidly from her corner where she sat deftly spinning the wool, her manual dexterity far in advance of her mental. 'But they had gone when you summoned me to your chamber.'

'I'll try his chamber in a moment,' Judith said and, finishing the aqua vitae, cast off the sheepskin and went to look at Guyon.

He was sleeping deeply and his temperature, although still raised was, she fancied, not as high as it had been, or perhaps it was just wishful thinking. She turned round and saw the dainty English girl watching her with a wide-eyed mingling of expectancy and fear.

'Our visitor has gone,' Judith said. 'I think it will be safe for you to seek your husband now.'

'Thank you, my lady!' Elflin dropped her work and, blushing, bobbed a deep curtsy before departing the room at a near run.

'What it is to be young and eager,' smiled Helgund, addressing Judith as if she were a staid matron beyond love's first sweet violence.

'Yes,' Judith agreed flatly and smoothed the coverlet. 'What it is.' Her chin quivered. She mastered the urge to weep and straightened up. 'I must find Lord Miles and tell him what has happened. Let me know if there is any change.'

'Yes, my lady.'

Judith left the room almost as swiftly as Elflin had done, got halfway down the stairs, stifled the familiar panicky instinct to run and continued at a more sedate pace across the great hall and up the stairs to the small chamber that was her father-in-law's when he visited.

She could hear the murmur of voices as she approached, one deep and hesitant, the other her mother's and breathless. Then the voices ceased.

At the curtain, Judith paused, warned by some sixth sense that to clear her throat and just walk into the room would not be wise.

Cautiously she drew aside the merest fold of material and peered within to assess whether she should go or stay. Set into the thickness of the wall , the room was tiny with space only for a bed, a small clothing pole and a brazier for use against the cold. Before the brazier, blocking it from view, her mother stood locked in Miles's embrace, her blue gown melding into the dark green of his tunic and chausses, his hands lean and brown against the snowiness of her wimple. Her mother's arms were locked around his neck and they were kissing as, only yesterday in the hall , she had seen Elflin and her husband kissing.

Judith dropped the curtain, stepped away and wondered why she had not realised it long ago.

There had been enough beads to make a necklace if one had the eyesight to pick them up.

The swings of her mother's moods, the looks and counter-looks cast across the hall , met and avoided. What had her mother said? Understand when the time comes and do not judge me too harshly. No more harshly than Alicia had judged herself, she thought and wondered if Guyon, less naive than herself, had known.

At the foot of the stairs, she encountered the lady Emma about to ascend and quickly blocked her way.

Emma's gaze sharpened.

'I should not bother him until later,' Judith said, her voice slightly constricted. 'He is otherwise occupied.'

Emma searched Judith's face for meaning.

'With a woman, you mean?' Judith hesitated and Emma grimaced. 'That always was his source of oblivion.' She sighed, turning with Judith to go back down to the hall . 'He's not much use at getting drunk and he's too slightly built to go out and pick a fight. I've known him ride a horse half to death, but a woman by preference is his usual form of solace. At first after my stepmother died there was scarcely a night when he slept alone ...

God knows some of the sluts Guy and I had to tolerate in the early days!'

Judith coloured. 'He is with my mother,' she said quietly, 'and they still have all their clothes on.'

Emma's eyes rounded. She stopped and

turned. 'Your mother?' The thought seemed to have blocked her brain.

Judith stared her out. Emma drew a long breath between her teeth and let it out again slowly. 'Well then, I am sorry if my words gave offence but in the past it has been true.'

'The past is not now,' Judith said, not quite keeping the coldness from her tone. For all that Emma was Guyon's sister and he maintained that she had a heart of gold, Judith was hard pressed to find it beneath the layers of iron and ice.

Emma bit her lip. She and Judith were never going to be more than tepidly cordial. Their natures had too many similarities, subtle shades apart and, within this keep, like two stones in close proximity on a riverbed, they had begun to grate against each other. Emma began to think with new longing of her dower estates and how, when Guyon's crisis was resolved one way or the other, she would go there with her daughters.

Christen seemed to be cured of her affliction to flirt. No more was 'Alais says' the bane of their lives. In part she knew it was due to the seriousness of Guyon's condition. That, in itself, was sufficient to put meaningless frivolity in its true perspective, but part was also due to Judith's steadying influence. Guyon's wife might laugh and play childish games with her nieces, might have a puckish sense of humour and an impudent tongue, but attracting men appeared scarcely to interest her. Nor did she wish to gossip about them to the detriment of all else and her domestic skill s were more than competent, as was her knowledge of healing and sickbed nursing.

Christen, receiving an indifferent or bored response to most of her tattle, had steadied her own giddy attitude and begun to think a little for herself. What profit there was in that had yet to be seen. 'No,' she agreed, 'you are right. The past is not now.'

CHAPTER 15

A week came and went. So did the priest. Twice.

Guyon wavered on the narrow brink between life and death, teetered and stepped back from the edge. Another week passed. There was a terrific thunderstorm. Three sheep in the bailey were struck by lightning and one of the store sheds caught fire. Guyon's temperature descended to normal. He recognised those who stood at his bedside and spoke to them, but he was as weak and dependent as a newborn kitten and even the effort of speech left him exhausted.

In August they received the news that Jerusalem had fall en to the crusaders. The people of the town held a great bonfire and rejoiced for two days. Guyon got out of bed for the first time, walked three paces and collapsed.

Judith made him swallow iron filings in wine and more of the disgusting ox-blood broth and gave him a stick to help him walk.

Emma and her daughters left to go first to Emma's dower lands and then return. At the end of the month too, Alicia departed for her own dower lands with Miles for escort, her leave-taking of Judith somewhat tearful, but there was a new peace behind the emotion and Judith did not begrudge the cause of it, only hoped it would last.

By late September the wound in Guyon's thigh had healed to a livid pink scar that he would bear for the rest of his life, but, precluding the success of any schemes that her Montgomery uncles and Walter de Lacey might have in store, his life was not now measured in terms of hours and minutes.

Currently, Robert de Belleme was in Normandy conducting a private war against a neighbour who had offended him and was not expected back in England this side of spring. Walter de Lacey had been occupied in a localised but savage war against the Welsh, persuading them to stay on their own side of the border and leave his herds alone. The patrols went out from Ravenstow, but their own borders, due to the vigilance of Eric and de Bec, remained secure.

Outside, the wind was gusting a carnival of brown and yellow dead leaves against the keep wall s. Pigs rooted in the woods for acorns, or snuffled among the windfall apples in the garths and orchards attached to the cottages. In the fields, men ploughed over the stubble and prepared the land for its winter lying while women and children were out gathering the blown-down dead twigs and branches for kindling in the long dark months ahead.

In the main bedchamber, Guyon closed his eyes and buried his head on his forearms, lulled by the soothing motion of Judith's strong fingers on his back, massaging stiff muscles with aromatic oil of bay. It had been his first time on a horse since his illness. He had discovered that although his recently healed tissue protested, he was not overly uncomfortable and had thus spent longer in the saddle than he should. 'Learning to ride before you can walk,' Judith had said with exasperation.

Peevish with exhaustion, he had snapped at her that he knew his own limits.

'Then why overstep them?' she had smartly retorted with a toss of her head and left him to struggle upstairs on his own.

She had been right of course - as usual. He stirred beneath her touch as she found a strain and thought that he owed her his life. Without her knowledge of simples and her care in the early days, he would have died. In between, she had faced down and seen off Walter de Lacey and, with the aid of his father and the keep's official machinery, had run the demesne with commendable efficiency.

One of the maids murmured something and Judith replied softly. A slight shift of his head and a lazily lifted lid showed him the huntsman's wife Elflin for whose sake he had almost got himself killed. She was striking in a strange, ethereal way, her bones bearing the fragile delicacy of frost on glass. Brand, her husband, had been holding Guyon's courser's bridle this morning, a smile of welcome on his taciturn features. They had decided to remain awhile, he said. Judith had confirmed that Brand was indeed a skilled huntsman, quick, willing and conscientious. Judith had brought the girl upstairs to train. Kitchen work was too heavy for her and her beauty was the kind to cause trouble among the general melee of servants who visited the kitchens, or had recently been finding cause to do so. Here, within Judith's immediate governance, she was safe.

Guyon's thoughts drifted drowsily. Judith's hands worked lower over the small of his back.

She paused for a moment, and then there was the cold touch of the herbal oil and the slow, undulating motion of her fingers.

Long abstinence, the slow pressure of her hands above and the mattress below, made his reaction inevitable. Heat flooded his loins and burgeoned.

Judith felt the change in him. Quite suddenly, beneath her kneading palms, the fluid muscles were rigid with tension.

'Are you all right, my lord? Did I hurt you?'

Anxiously she leaned over him. The ends of her braids tickled his back. Her movement released a waft of gillyflower from her garments, spicy and warm.

'No,' Guyon muttered, voice choked. 'No, you did not hurt me, but I think it would be best if you made an end.'

'I was nearly finished anyway,' she said with a shrug, thinking that he wished to be left to sleep.

'Do you turn over and I will anoint your leg.'

There was a strained silence. Judith began to worry. 'Guy, what's wrong?'

He closed his eyes and willed the offending member to subside. It did nothing so charitable.

The feel of her breasts, warm and round against his back as she leaned over him, was only making matters worse.

After a moment, he raised his head from his buried arms and said with agonised amusement: 'What's wrong,
Cath fach
, is that the condition I'm in won't do either of us the least bit of good if I give it free rein now.'

'What condition?' She looked blank.

'Oh God, Judith, just give me the ointment and get out!'

'But your thigh, it needs ...' Her voice trailed off and her eyes grew as wide as goblet rims as belatedly she made the connection and with a gasp sprang away from him, her face flaming.

Picking up the jar of oil, she thrust it down beside him and fled the room in panic.

Guyon looked at the little pot by his head and, with a groan, buried his face again in his forearms.

It was impossible to run down the sharply twisting narrow stone steps when hampered by an undergown and thick wool en tunic. As Judith slowed her pace, the racing of her mind began to subside as well . Chagrin swept through her. She had been a fool to panic. More than ever now he would think of her as a child. Wherein lay the point of washing her hair in herb-scented water and perfuming the points of her body, tempting fate, only to flee in terror the moment that fate appeared briefly on the horizon?

And if I had stayed,
she wondered and gave a small shudder, half fear, half something else. It was like snatching hot chestnuts from the fire and hoping not to get burned. Was the prize worth the pain?
And if I go back
...

Poised at the foot of the stairs, her dilemma was resolved for her by FitzWarren stooping to inform her that the lord of Chester was here and asking hospitality overnight for himself and his retinue.

'I have found accommodation for most of his men, but the cook says we have not enough bread and no oven space to bake more with all the new preparations he will have to make.'

'There's an oven in the village, use that,' she said, her present problem abandoned for one of literally far greater dimensions. Where in the name of Holy Mary were they going to lodge Earl Hugh? The great bedchamber it would have to be, and Guyon could have his father's tiny wall chamber. She would make do with the maids in her mother's chamber on a straw pall et. Mentally clucking with irritation, she sent one of the girls scurrying aloft with the news and went forward wreathed in smiles to greet the lord of Chester.