Shields of Pride (23 page)

He was quiet for a moment, then he lifted his head and breathed soft laughter. ‘Conan was right,’ he told her. ‘We haven’t been properly bedded - yet.’

He was still within her, although somewhat diminished. Now she felt his surge of renewed eagerness.

‘Do you think he’ll come back?’ she wrapped her legs around him.

‘I’ll kill him if he does!’

Linnet strained her ears, wondering if anyone was listening outside the door, but there was nothing, just the intimate sounds of lovemaking: the growing harshness of Joscelin’s breathing, the movement of their bodies, the rustle of the bed clothes. Her voice catching in her throat. Her loins were stretching and filling with a pleasurable tension so huge that she knew she was going to burst.

Joscelin’s lips were upon her breast, his head butting the angle of her jaw. She clenched her teeth, trying not to make a sound, but the cries came anyway. Against the curve of her breast, Joscelin groaned. His spine arched, his head came up. She closed her eyes and gripped him, absorbing his tremors through her own.

As his breathing eased, he lazily returned his attention to her breast, throat and jaw. Linnet shivered, savouring the sensations. The edge between this tender, feathery nibbling and Giles’s sated wet fondling shone as keen and narrow as the edge of a blade. One slip and she would bleed to death. She did not want the memory of other occasions to mar this one and she pressed herself against Joscelin’s body, hiding her face in his sweat-salty skin as if by doing so she could absorb even more of him into her than she had already taken.

21

Maude de Montsart shook out her crumpled riding gown of Flemish twill. ‘Has there been any news, my dear?’ she asked Linnet as a groom led away the placid bay ambler to be watered and rubbed down. The two soldiers who had escorted her from Arnsby were already on their way to the guardroom to wait out her stay before the comfort of a stoked brazier.

Linnet sighed and shook her head. ‘Not since last Tuesday. Joscelin sent me some hides he’d bought at a bargain price from a tannery on Leenside and wrote that he was leaving Nottingham the day after, but that was all. What about you?’ She drew Maude across the bailey and up the forebuilding stairs into the great hall.

‘William sent a messenger to fetch his thick cloak and waxed linens. That must have been about the same time that Joscelin wrote to you. My brother never communicates well even at the best of times.’

‘No,’ Linnet said wryly, thinking of her wedding day.

Maude looked at her curiously.

Linnet told her about Ironheart’s ungracious behaviour. ‘And then he had the gall to soak in the tub until the water was nearly cold!’ she said indignantly. ‘Nor did he object when I gave him Giles’s old fur-lined bedrobe to wear afterwards while he was barbered, the hypocrite!’ Then she laughed reluctantly. Recounting it now, she could see the humour in the situation.

Maude’s eyelids creased with amusement. ‘William has a reputation to maintain. He’s not as hard as people think. That myth grew out of the time after Morwenna died when he was mad with grief and no one could approach him without getting their head bitten off.’ She smiled at Linnet. ‘Look at it this way, my dear, rather than riding to Arnsby, he chose to stay at Rushcliffe before leaving to rendezvous with the constable’s troops.’

Linnet nodded. It was a dubious sign of favour, she thought, and one she could easily have foregone.

Maude lifted her eyes to the high windows. ‘I cannot blame him either. This is a beautiful room.’

Linnet looked up too. The proportions of this, Raymond’s lair, were surprisingly elegant. The strong, pure lines picked up and carried the Romanesque curves of windows and supporting arches like embroidery on a beautifully cut but austere gown. ‘Giles’s grandsire went on Crusade and captured an emir. He put all the ransom money into this place,’ she said and led Maude up the stairs to the bower.

Panting somewhat from the climb, Maude surveyed the large, sun-flooded bower, its whitewashed walls decorated with Flemish hangings. ‘Oh, it’s lovely! Just look at the size of this fireplace, and a stone canopy too!’

Linnet was silent as Maude examined and enthused over the bower. At length the older woman plumped herself down on the padded settle. Something of Linnet’s mood must have communicated itself to Maude for she cocked her head inquisitively.

‘Do you not like living here, my dear?’

Linnet frowned as she studied the warm, bright room. ‘It is the memories I do not like,’ she said after a hesitation. ‘My marriage to Giles and what came after.’

Maude nodded. ‘But that is over now. You are a new wife and you have new memories to make. I trust Joscelin is treating you well?’

Linnet blushed and sat down on the other end of the settle. ‘He has been very good to me.’

‘More than that, to judge from the colour in your cheeks!’ Maude smiled.

Linnet returned the expression but without her entire heart. Yes, he had been very good to her but perhaps he would cease to be if she told him about herself and Raymond de Montsorrel. She had almost said something as they lay entwined in the afterglow of a second mating but her first tentative words had been met by the indifferent mumble of a man already three-quarters asleep and her courage had failed her. Why tell him at all? It was in the past, finished. And all the time, at the back of her mind, a small voice was crying,
You would revile me if you knew what I had done.
Not even to a priest had she ever confessed her sin. She would go to hell when she died and assuredly meet Raymond there.

Maude’s humour faded and, leaning over, she gently touched Linnet’s knee. ‘You are troubled, my dear?’

Linnet blinked moisture from her eyes and swallowed. ‘No,’ she lied. ‘It is nothing.’

The curtain across the bower entrance billowed and then was flurried aside by a giggling Robert, who was running away from Ella.

‘Just you come here this instant, young man, and wash those muddy hands!’ the maid cried, and catching him, tickled him into a state of helpless submission before sweeping him across the room to the laver.

Distracted by the intrusion, Maude craned round to watch the child complain and grimace at being scrubbed. ‘I never had infants of my own,’ she said wistfully. ‘William’s brood has been my family.’

Linnet saw the sadness in Maude’s face. Her lap was generous and made to nurse small children. ‘Robert has no grandparents,’ she said. ‘I would be honoured if you became one to him.’

Maude stared at Linnet as if she had just been offered a place in heaven, and her eyes filled with emotion. ‘There is nothing that would give me more pleasure,’ she said in a shaky voice. ‘Martin’s leaving Arnsby after Christmas to join Richard de Luci’s household and I’ll miss having a child about the place. To know I can visit you and be special to Robert is a gift beyond price.’ She embraced Linnet in a fervent hug.

‘It is as much for my sake as yours!’ Linnet responded, her own voice unsteady. ‘My mother died when I was a baby. I’ve never had an older woman to talk to, except Richard de Luci’s wife sometimes and the Countess Petronilla.’

‘That’s the name of my horse!’ Overhearing, Robert skipped up to them, his demeanor as chirpy as a squirrel’s. ‘She’s called Petra for short. Malcolm’s been teaching me to jump her over logs.’ He leaped in the air, demonstrating. ‘Joscelin says that he’s going to show me how to tilt at the quintain when he comes home and he’s promised me some bridle bells, too. Joscelin’s my papa now.’

‘Yes, my love, so that makes you and me relatives,’ Maude said and produced a small box containing squares of a sticky date sweetmeat, which she gave to the child. ‘Don’t eat too many at once; you’ll make yourself sick and your mother will be cross with me.’

Robert was more taken with the carvings on the little box than he was with the contents. Maude helped him to eat one of the glistening dark pieces and enquired after his coneys.

‘They’re grazing in the garth,’ Linnet said. ‘I’ve had the carpenter fashion an enclosure to keep them from harm and prevent them escaping and eating the salad leaves.’

‘The babies were all pink and blind at first but they’ve got black fur now,’ Robert announced somewhat stickily. ‘The messenger said he’d like a black coney-skin cloak but Malcolm told him my coneys were special pets.’

Linnet grasped Robert’s arm. ‘What messenger, sweetheart? ’

‘The one who arrived when we were unsaddling Petra. He was all covered in dust and his horse was foamy. Henry’s sister gave the man a drink.’

Linnet stood up, her mouth dry and her heart pounding. She had taken only two steps towards the chamber door when she heard voices on the stairs and Malcolm appeared on her threshold with Milo. They flanked a travel-stained, dishevelled and obviously exhausted young soldier.

Linnet stood straight and still as she looked at the men. ‘What news?’ she demanded. ‘Tell me.’

The messenger advanced and bent the knee. He was one of Conan’s Bretons, a stocky young man scarcely out of adolescence with a downy beard fuzzing his square jaw. ‘There is no need for fear, my lady, the news is good,’ he said as she gestured him to rise and face her. ‘Our troops met Leicester’s near to Edmundsbury at a place called Fornham. All swampy, the land was, and no fit place to fight but we forced them to a battle nevertheless and cut them to pieces. Them as we didn’t get, the peasants did with pitchforks and spears. The earl himself has been taken prisoner and his countess with him.’ Rummaging in his pouch, he withdrew a crumpled, water-stained packet. ‘A letter from my lord. He says to expect him in three days’ time, all being well.’

Colour flooded back into Linnet’s face as she took the packet from the mercenary’s blunt fingers. ‘And is he whole? He has taken no injury?’

‘No, my lady.’ The young man grinned, revealing a recently lost front tooth. ‘Mostly it was like spearing fish in a barrel. In the end we fetched up pitying the poor bastards that were left and let them run away into the marshes.’ He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Not as that’ll do ’em any good. Like as not they’ll drown or be picked off one by one by the eel fishers and fowlers round about.’ His voice dried up and he began to cough.

Maude quickly poured him wine from the pitcher on the side table and brought it to him. ‘Do you know what happened to your lord’s half-brothers, Ralf and Ivo de Rocher?’ she asked anxiously.

The mercenary took several gulps from his cup. ‘No, my lady. All I can tell you is that they weren’t taken with the earl and his wife. Sir William has offered a reward for their safe delivery into his custody and he’s stayed behind at Fornham to see if anyone turns them in. Lord Joscelin says Sir William ought to come home, the damp’s not good for him, but he won’t be swayed. Says he doesn’t care whether his sons are alive or corpses, they’re still coming home.’

Linnet unfolded the vellum sheet and gazed upon her husband’s firm brown ink strokes. Joscelin wrote almost as good a hand as a professional scribe, although the flow was a little too open and generous of vellum for a true craftsman. She imagined him seated at a table, one hand thrust into his hair, the other busy with a quill. It was a satisfying image and she deliberately enlarged upon it to banish the other one of him astride Whitesocks, brandishing a dripping sword.

‘My heart bleeds for them,’ Maude had said to her when the messenger had gone. ‘William and my nephews both. What if Ralf and Ivo are dead? How will William live with the burden of knowing he might have killed them? They may look like grown men but really they are still jealous little boys.’ And she had dabbed at her eyes with the trailing end of her sleeve.

Robert had taken Maude to the garth to look at his coneys, thus giving Linnet a moment alone to read her letter in peace. She sat down in the window embrasure. A puddle of late autumn sunshine warmed her feet through her soft leather shoes. The only sound was the muted conversation of two maids weaving braid by the hearth.

As a child, Linnet had received basic tuition in reading and writing from the household priest - enough so that she could understand but she was not particularly fluent. Painstakingly she picked up each word of Joscelin’s and consigned it like a jewel from page to memory.

Joscelin de Gael to my lady and before God mine own beloved wife, greeting. As you will know by the time you read this, I am coming home to you unscathed from our army’s meeting with the Earl of Leicester. A truce has been agreed with the rebels until spring.

We should reach Nottingham the day after tomorrow. I will lodge there the night at my father’s town house, and ride to you as soon as I have concluded business with the constable.

Until then, I give you keeping of my heart.

Witness myself on the third day after the feast of Saint Luke.

The words warmed her as much as the splash of sunlight and foolish tears blurred her vision. Not since childhood had affection been hers to command except in Robert’s eyes. Once she had made the mistake of believing that Raymond de Montsorrel was fond of her, that the gentle hands and persuasive voice were indicative of his concern, but it had all been a game to him, a bolster of his prideful boast that no woman, lady or whore, had ever refused him.

The sunlight blazed on the vellum as she folded it tenderly, her fingertips lingering on the strokes that bore the mark of Joscelin’s hand. She went to her work basket, and taking her awl worked a hole through the folded corners. Then she threaded it onto the cord around her neck, which also held her cross. The cord lay between her breasts and the vellum lay on her skin; Joscelin’s heart over hers.

22

‘We’re lost, aren’t we?’ Ivo snivelled.

Ralf clenched his fists on his wet reins and turned in the saddle to scowl at his brother. ‘God’s eyes, will you cease whining! You’re still alive, aren’t you?’