The Wild Hunt (25 page)

'Probably you deserved it,' she said.

There was a momentary silence. The bonhomie slipped a little. 'You've a saucy tongue,' the King remarked sharply.

'It's the teeth you have to watch.' Guyon grinned, touching his bitten ear, and kicked her hard beneath the trestle.

Rufus chose suddenly to laugh. 'I can see that! Speaking of which, Hugh d'Avrenches told me a good one just now: "If you were a knight, you'd not have done that." "If you were a lady, you'd not speak with your mouth full !"'

Guyon snorted and laughed. Judith looked blank.

'I thought that knowing Alais de Clare, you'd appreciate it,' Rufus chuckled. 'Meet us tomorrow at Clerkenwell if you desire to hunt. I've a new Norway hawk I want to fly.'

Slapping Guyon's shoulder, Rufus moved on to accost another victim.

'Christ, are you trying to get me exiled?' Guyon demanded with exasperation.

Judith drained her goblet. 'I am not a lump of meat on a trencher to be poked and prodded and discussed intimately as if I have neither ears nor feelings!'

Guyon shrugged. 'Rufus cares little about such niceties where women are concerned.'

'I did not understand his joke.'

Guyon crumbled a piece of bread and watched the action of his ring-bedecked fingers. 'It is probably best you did not. It was very crude, and no, I am not going to give details.'

Judith narrowed her eyes at him. Her thinking processes were by now badly impaired by the wine and it was a struggle to remember how to control her limbs let alone set about cajoling Guyon into explaining what he did not wish to explain, or solve it for herself. She smiled hazily at the servant who refilled her goblet and raised it to her lips. 'Rufus still fancies you, doesn't he?' she said instead.

'Fancies is as far as he will get.' Guyon quirked his brow at her. If she had been less than sober before, she was now well and truly on her way to being gilded. It was seldom that she took more than two cups of wine at the evening meal and frequently they were more than half water.

Tonight, he had lost count of the quantity she had swallowed.

He wondered if Judith was anxious in the midst of such an important gathering, although it was not in her nature to soothe herself with drink. He had a strong suspicion that the opulent bed manoeuvred that evening into the bedchamber of the house they had rented was the main reason for her attitude now. Terrified of what the night held in store, she was taking the advice of many a mother to her daughter on a wedding eve and drinking herself insensible.

'Judith, no more,' he said compassionately, staying her hand as she reached to her cup.

'Why not?' she protested. 'I'm enjoying it now. It was hob ... hobbir ... horrible at first, but you get used to it, don't you ... like a lot of things?'

'When you're drunk,' he agreed wryly.

'Who's drunk?' she demanded in a loud voice.

Heads turned. Fortunately, at that juncture the King chose to leave the hall and amid the etiquette of rising and reseating, Guyon succeeded in calming his belligerent wife to a muttering simmer. That mood did not last long.

The wine had reacted upon her blood to produce aggression. Now it reacted against the contents of her stomach and she began to feel very sick indeed. When Guyon drew her to her feet she lurched against him, her balance awry, her hand to her mouth.

Guyon took one look at her green face and propelled her out of the hall and into the cool, blossom-scented night where she was violently sick, shuddering against his support.

'Sorry,' she gulped weakly.

'I can see that,' he said with exasperation.

After it was over, he swung her up in his arms and took her lolling and semi-conscious to where Eric waited with their horses.

'She won't want her head in the morning, my lord.'

'She doesn't want it now,' Guyon replied. 'And certainly not her stomach.'

'Poor lass,' said Eric with sympathy, recalling many a night of his own misspent youth. 'You'll not be needing the mare then.'

'No.' Guyon gave Judith to his captain while he mounted his horse, then reached to take her up before him. 'God's bones,' he muttered, trying to settle her so that she would not give him a dead arm on the ride home. 'You'd think to look at her that she weighed less than a feather.'

Judith merely groaned and flopped against him like a dead doe.

Helgund unbarred the door to him and exclaimed in horror at the sight of Judith's wan face.

'Too much wine,' Guyon said, sweeping past the servant to the capacious scarlet-bedecked bed, where he deposited Judith.

Clucking like a mother hen, Helgund leaned over her mistress. Judith's eyelids fluttered but did not open. Another maid goggled around the curtain, received a sharp command from Helgund and disappeared again.

'I'll sleep below with Sir Walter,' Guyon said, aware that he was now redundant, but oddly reluctant to leave. Judith looked so vulnerable, her hands pale and long-fingered against the cover of stitched beaver skins, her profile flushed and delicate. He knew how her nose would wrinkle when she laughed and that one of her teeth was chipped where she had fall en down the dais steps as a child. He knew that her waist was slender and her breasts as round and resiliently soft as the breasts of the white doves in the cote at Ravenstow. She had also quite deliberately drunk herself into a stupor rather than share the intimacy of this bed with him.

Helgund arranged the cover and looked around at him, her broad features creased with concern.

'My lady has been very unsettled of late,' she ventured.

'I know, Helgund.' The same could be said of himself, he thought and for parallel reasons. He looked thoughtfully at the maid. She owned a position of considerable trust and as a result knew most of what did, or rather did not, transpire between himself and Judith, and must also be aware of the undercurrents and tensions that existed as a result.

Helgund returned his scrutiny beneath the deference of half-lowered lids. 'She is like a vixen confronting food in a trap, sire. She wants the meat, but dare not attempt to snatch it for fear of paying the price.'

His brows twitched together. 'Am I the meat or the price?' he enquired.

'Both, sire. She fears lest she become reduced to the status of bitch or brood mare, or cast-off wife. It is rumoured at court that you prefer the chase to the kill .'

Guyon's frown deepened. Helgund swallowed, but continued doggedly. 'It is not her fault, sire. If you had seen what Lord Maurice did to her lady mother in front of us all , and mistress Judith no more than a mite of three years old. Said he would fill her belly with enough seed to plant a dozen children and dragged her to the bed there and then before us all and used her like a whore... Happened more than once too and sometimes he was in too much of a hurry to draw the hangings. We protected the child as best we could but ...' Helgund drew a shaken breath and fell silent beneath the onslaught of his stare.

'Thank you, Helgund.' His voice was frighteningly quiet, belying the anger she saw in his eyes. 'Thank you for telling me. I can see the kind of obstacles across my path now. Before, I just kept treading on them. Go back to your bed now. I'll seek mine in a moment.'

Relieved, Helgund curtsied and made herself absent.

Guyon drew a deep breath and controlled his ire. Maurice de Montgomery was already dead; the Welsh had got there first.

'Well ,
Cath fach
,' he said softly, brushing a stray wisp of tawny hair away from her eyelids and the thick, downswept bronze lashes, 'how do I avoid these obstacles of yours?'

He knew she was not indifferent and that the times when her guard was down, he would have sold his soul to keep her that way. The times when her guard was up, she was impossible to reach.

Never once of her own accord had she offered him a sign of affection or endearment. Jealousy, yes, but that was an emotion born of insecurity and mistrust. The moves were all his, and they were straining the bounds of her acceptance.

Today he had stepped beyond the limit. Tonight she was blind drunk. So what else was left? He shied from the thought.

'
Nos da
,
Cath fach,
' he murmured softly, tugged her braid and quietly left the room.

CHAPTER 18

On the crest of the hill , Guyon reined his courser to a halt and shielded his eyes to watch the goshawk assault the air on dark, swift pinions, gaining height against the hot blue sky before stooping like a wind-ruffled stone upon the desperate flight of a round-bodied partridge.

Prince Henry, triumphant owner, fisted the morning air as the partridge tumbled over in a puff of feathers and was borne to earth beneath the goshawk's talons. The falconer and a huntsman ran towards the two birds, one to be retrieved in proud prowess to Henry's wrist, the other to be added to the mound of soft bodies already culled that morning. The King's Norway hawk was a skilled killer too.

Henry stroked the breast of his own bird where she perched, dark wings folded, and deftly replaced the leather hood over the fierce golden eyes. Then he looked at Guyon.

'I hear your wife made quite an impression last night,' he remarked with a laconic grin.

'She is not accustomed to quite so much wine, my lord,' Guyon excused and eased himself in the saddle. He had backache as a result of sleeping on a lumpy, makeshift pall et within range of a sly draught.

Henry's grin deepened. 'I didn't mean that business with Alais, although I wish I had been there. I meant her resemblance to my

grandmother, Arlette. Old Hubert couldn't believe his eyes, thought he'd seen a ghost and Rufus remarked on it this morning at mass ... and he told me an appalling joke.'

Guyon lifted his stiff shoulders. 'As far as I know, the only blood she shares with your family is that of her maternal grandsire, and, even then, the Countess of Conteville is not of that line.'

'Maurice FitzRoger's girl, isn't she?' Henry looked thoughtful. 'How old is she now, Guy?'

'She was born in the November of 'eighty-three, my lord.' Guyon squinted against the sun at the Prince whose look had suddenly grown secretive, the way it sometimes did after he had been closeted with Gilbert and Roger de Clare. Still waters ran deeper than anyone could fathom.

'Any girl of seventeen who looks like my grandmother deserves closer examination,' Henry said, still stroking his hawk, his gaze intent upon the action of his fingers.

'Angling for an invitation sire?' Guyon jested with the familiarity of long acquaintance and the occasional deeper friendship.

'How did you guess? Anyway, I used to rent the house. You cannot refuse. Is tonight all right? After the hunt?'

Guyon's gaze flickered and sharpened, for Henry's interest was perhaps a little too keen for comfort.

'I did wonder,' Henry said softly to the bird, 'but she never sent word. Perhaps it was just as well .'

'Sire?'

Guyon's tone must have given him away, for Henry uttered a forced laugh. 'God's blood, Guy, stop thinking wild thoughts! With a face like yours, is it likely that I'd be able to seduce your wife before your eyes, or even behind your back! I want to meet her, no more than that. Look, Rufus has started a hare!' He turned to the falconer, gave him care of the goshawk and clapped spurs to his courser's sides.

Guyon followed more slowly, aware of a niggling doubt at the back of his mind. Henry could lie the hindleg off an ass if expediency demanded. Guyon did not believe that he was lying now, but he was sure the Prince was concealing something. The problem with such a devious man was knowing what.

Judith would need to know that they had guests.

He had looked in on her this dawn before departing to hunt and found her huddled beneath the pelts in a heavy sleep. He knew the symptoms and how dreadful she would feel on awakening.

Renewed nausea, a tight, swollen drum where her head should be and a raging thirst. Hardly the best equipment with which to organise food and entertainment for a prince of the realm who was coming to visit her because she resembled his grandmother. In her present state Judith would doubtless give a commendable imitation of the said lady risen untimely from her crypt.

He muttered an oath beneath his breath, bent a scowl upon Henry's fast-disappearing back and, calling Eric to him, sent him off with a message.

Judith woke late in the morning with all the vile after-effects Guyon had predicted and more besides. Half an hour voiding in the latrine made her swear a miserable oath that she would never again drink the seemingly innocuous wines of Anjou, whose potency was so wickedly

concealed. She had meant to drink enough to dull the edge of her fear and instead she had swallowed her way into hell . Of the night before she remembered little except being ill .

Green-faced, she directed Helgund to mix a valerian posset to ease her rolling gut and skull . It tasted disgusting and, fighting the urge to retch because by now her stomach was so sore, she retired again to bed to let the herb do its work.

She had been there perhaps an hour when Eric rode in with his message, half a dozen limp partridges over his saddlebow.

Panic ensued. Judith, her headacheaggravated to a megrim of titanic proportions, presided over a household that resembled a disorganised corner of hell . However, gradually, he r tenacious common sense reasserted itself.

This had once been Prince Henry's house. Well and good, let the Prince's machinery do what had to be done. Mustering her wits and drinking another cup of the valerian brew, she tidied her hair, put on a clean overgown and went below to visit Sir Walter and explain her predicament.

By noontide, the kitchen shed was bustling, the cook in receipt of the recipes for Henry's favourite dishes and two servants sent off to the markets to fetch whatever was not available on the premises.

A minstrel had been engaged, Helgund and Elflin were busy with brooms and beeswax polish and Judith had retired to the sinful luxury of a hot bathtub, the water scented with attar of roses, in order to compose herself for the coming ordeal.