The Stone Rose (51 page)

‘No, Ned! Never.’ She touched gentle fingers to his lips. ‘I have promised to stand by you, and I will honour that promise. I do love you. I trust you more than anyone on earth. Trust is a great bond, Ned. Don’t undervalue it.’

He looked doubtfully at her, misery in his every line, and she cast about for something that would prove how much she did trust him. Pushing down her skirts, she climbed from their makeshift couch and dragged Ned’s saddlebag towards her. ‘Look, Ned. I want to show you something before Alan gets back.’

Mystified, Ned rested up on one elbow and watched as she pulled out the bundle of wrappings that hid her statue.

‘Do you remember my asking you not to mention to Alan that I had the Stone Rose with me?’ He grunted assent, and shifted over on the cloak to make room for her as she came back with her effigy. ‘Open the door of the lantern, will you? Look.’ She made a slight twisting movement. As the base fell away from the Virgin, a small pouch shot out. Gwenn picked it up, opened it, and held her bunched fist under Ned’s nose.

Her fingers uncurled.

Ned’s mouth fell open, and he reached the gemstone. It was cold and hard, and heavier than it appeared, and it caught the feeble lantern light, transmuting it into the clear sparkle of a fall of water on a sunny day. ‘Is it real?’ he breathed. ‘Did you have this all along?’

‘It’s real. Grandmama gave it to me. The women of our family have held onto it for generations, as a secret security. To my knowledge you are the first of our menfolk ever to have been told about it.’

‘A man could set himself up for life with this,’ he said. Over the gem, their eyes met. Ned smiled, and dropped the jewel into her palm. ‘Your trust honours me.’

‘Now I’m wed to you, Ned, everything I have is yours. In law, this gem belongs to you. You could buy yourself a warhorse, a farm, anything.’

‘No. I...I couldn’t. It’s yours.’

‘It’s
ours
, Ned,’ she answered softly, ‘ours. We are going to share it.’

Ned leaned towards her and kissed her shoulder. ‘My loyal Gwenn.’

‘All I’m saying is that I won’t desert you. I trust you. No woman in my family has ever trusted their man with this secret. You are the first, the very first. Ned?’

‘Mmm?’ Brow cleared of wrinkles, Ned idly weighed a dishevelled braid in his hand. His eyes lingered on the gentle swell of his wife’s breasts.

‘I’m telling you about the gem, but I don’t want Alan to know.’

‘Alan wouldn’t steal your jewel,’ Ned said, as he put a hand round her neck and drew her towards him.

‘You’re too trusting,’ Gwenn spoke into his mouth. Surprised by her husband’s ardour, she allowed herself to be pushed back onto the cloak. She had not thought that Ned’s need would return so soon, but she supposed she ought to feel glad that she had reassured him. While Ned’s hand groped for her skirt, she tried not to sigh, and fixed her unseeing gaze on the black, soughing canopy.

T
he hospital portal opened again after the tenth hour, and Alan led Firebrand out, laden with the goods he had bought. Brother Raoul, the hospitaller who had admitted him, had made it clear that Alan was being permitted entry at this late hour purely on account of his connection with Duke Geoffrey. Brother Raoul had been happy to supply Alan with foodstuffs – bread, cheese, apples, roast beef wrapped in muslin, and milk and oats for the infant; but more than this he would not do. There would be no physician to look at Katarin until they reached Gwenn’s kin at Ploumanach. Gwenn would be disappointed, but God willing they would reach Ploumanach in a couple of days.

A stoneware bottle hanging from the saddlebow caught Alan’s eyes. Brother Raoul had put it there for him; it contained the baby’s precious milk, which Gwenn had insisted must be boiled, and it was swinging on a lengthy leather strap by his horse’s neck. Concerned that Firebrand might be irritated by the bottle and that the milk might be churned to butter by the time he got back to camp – would boiled milk make butter? – Alan paused to pack the bottle more securely in the bag behind his saddle. It was difficult to credit that the Captain of the Duke’s guard was worrying over a baby’s milk...

Behind him, the iron bolt of the hospital grated home. The moon had risen, bleaching the stones of the wall and the bridge across the river. Tightening the strap of his saddlebag, Alan’s ears picked up a furtive movement in the shadows beneath the bridge. Every nerve pricked into alertness.

He ran his gaze over the road and riverbank. There was no one on the wide highway save himself, and he could see nothing in that dark place under the bridge. Thinking it must be a vole or a rat scuffling to its home in the bank, Alan had one foot in his stirrup when he heard the noise again. ‘Who’s there?’ he called.

There was a splash, and someone caught their breath. Alan could not ignore it. It might be Malait, or another of de Roncier’s company, and for his own peace of mind he must investigate. Swinging himself up into Duke Geoffrey’s high, knight’s saddle, and feeling less vulnerable on horseback, he rode towards the bridge.

He drew rein by a clump of dock whose leaves gleamed like large white tongues in the moonlight. He could hear his own measured breathing; the creak of Firebrand’s harness; the wind playing in the trees along the edge of the Blavet; and another barely perceptible flurry which brought the hairs on his neck standing to attention. Without doubt, someone was skulking about under the bridge. He could think of no good reason for them to be there.

Where road and bridge joined, a reed-lined path curled left along the riverbank. Alan urged Firebrand down it. Slender rushes brushed his boots. In the shady coverts to the west, a fox barked. Fast on the heels of the bark, another stealthy scuffle came from beneath the bridge, together with more flustered, frightened breathing. Whoever was down there, it was not the Viking. Otto Malait didn’t have a timid bone in his body.

Easing his sword out, Alan dismounted. His sword flashed in the starlight. ‘Who’s there?’ Someone whimpered. He moved closer. ‘Who’s there? Come out, damn you, and show me your face.’

Another whimper.

Alan moved his sword, and as the moonlight bounced off the steel, its reflection lit up an indistinct blur of a figure not three yards away. The figure was pressed against the moss-clad bulwarks of the bridge. ‘If you don’t come out, I’m coming in.’

The figure looked to left and right, as if to decide which way to fly. Alan lunged forward and the dark form was held at swordpoint. It had been so easy that he suspected a trick. ‘Come out slowly.’ He made an impatient gesture with his sword, and obediently the figure, who was cloaked, shuffled out. Lifting the point of his sword, Alan flicked back the captive’s hood, and gasped.

He had seen that pale face before. It was the woman who had emerged from the hospital. She was very young. Alan lowered his sword and sheathed it. ‘What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be abed?’

She bit her lip. ‘I wasn’t doing anything. Honestly, sir, I was only...’ a brief hesitation ‘...watching the river flow by.’

She was lying. She had something clutched in her hands, Alan saw her drop it behind her and kick it out of the way. ‘What was that you threw down?’

‘Threw down? Why, nothing, sir.’ Straight dark brows defined shifting black eyes.

Encircling the woman’s wrist with his fingers, Alan stooped to examine the ground behind her. He came up holding a scallop shell, such as were on sale to pilgrims at almost every shrine in Christendom. And a wilted bunch of flowers. She had probably stolen the shell from St Ivy’s shrine. Alan glanced at the flaccid plant, and his brows snapped together. ‘Spearwort, if I guess it aright,’ he said. He felt absurdly relieved, for the plant and the scallop shell told him what the woman had been doing under the bridge in the dead of night. It was so far removed from the quarrel between Count François de Roncier and the late Jean St Clair that he would have laughed, had it not been so pitiful.

The woman had a consumptive’s face. Her cheeks were fleshless and wan, the bones clearly visible even in the weak starlight. Alan regarded the limp plants and the shell for a moment, and then tossed them aside. Keeping a firm grasp of a skeletal arm, he pushed up the woman’s sleeve, and saw the telltale sores as dim blotches on her skin.

His prisoner made a moaning sound in her throat, and struggled weakly to free herself. ‘I wasn’t doing anything,’ she wailed. ‘I wasn’t stealing, honestly, I wasn’t.’

‘I’m well aware of what you were doing,’ Alan said, quietly. ‘Show me your legs.’

She went rigid. ‘I will not! I’m not that sort of a woman.’

Deaf to his captive’s protestations, Alan caught both her wrists in one hand and went down on his knees to examine legs that were as thin as lathes. There were sores there too, angry ones. He knew that in the morning they would be weeping and red. He climbed to his feet.

‘Let me go!’ The woman’s voice trembled, for she understood that this stranger had seen through her deception. He knew that she had been scratching the acid juices from the plants into her skin with the scallop shell in order to raise those ugly, blistering sores. She was a beggar and the trick with the spearwort, though painful, was her favourite stock-in-trade. She could attract more sympathy and consequently more alms from passers-by if she was covered in sores. She usually began begging at the hospital gate, after dawn. Brother Raoul knew her ploy and named it a sin, but Brother Raoul did not betray her to the townsfolk. Would this stranger betray her?

‘You fool,’ Alan said. ‘You could give yourself blood poisoning with that trick.’

‘You...you won’t cry it about the town?’ the beggar-woman asked. When he shook his dark head, she breathed more easily. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said, and her voice was not quite so defensive. ‘You can let me go, if you’ve finished manhandling me.’ She risked a direct glance, trying to make him out. ‘Who are you?’

‘A traveller,’ came the cryptic response. He tugged at the frayed rope girdle which barely held her ragged clothing together and started hauling her towards the river.

‘Hey! What are doing?’ Her tone sharpened as a different suspicion chilled her. She tried to fight him off, but in her feeble, half-starved state she was no match for him. ‘I told you I’m not a wh–’

He whipped the girdle from her too-thin waist and a heartbeat later she was stripped of her shift. Naked and shivering, she crossed her arms in front of her breasts. So this was to be his price, was it? He wanted to use her. ‘No! Please, sir. No!

‘Into the water,’ Alan said, harshly.

The woman stared in blank incomprehension.

‘Into the water.’ Alan nudged her shin with a booted foot, but gently. ‘I want you to rinse that stuff off you.’

‘You mean...you’re not going to...’

‘Rape you?’ Cold, quicksilver eyes ran dismissively up and down the length of her body until the beggar-woman felt a blush cloak her throat and cheeks. ‘No. I want you to wash that poison off your skin.’

She gaped, hugging her arms about her. ‘Wash it off, sir?’

Alan moved a step closer. The woman’s body was ivory in the half-light. She was more fragile than Gwenn, and so thin as to be almost all bone, but she would be attractive if she carried more weight. Her eyes were sharp as daggers, and hostile.

‘You want me to keep your secret?’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘Then scrub that poison off.’

The sharp eyes widened.

‘Move, damn you! Else I’ll do it for you.’

His tone was such that the woman believed him, and when he took a threatening pace towards her, she gave in to the inevitable and waded into the river. ‘It’s cold,’ she said peevishly.

‘If you hurry,’ Alan offered gruffly, not knowing why he should care if this waif starved or not, ‘I’ll stand you a meal at the inn.’ The pale, thin limbs gleaming in the starlight must have uncovered a store of compassion in him.

The woman in the water shot him a look which was a heart-wrenching blend of hope and disbelief, and hurried.

The Green Man was all but closed when they got there, and the landlord, a pot-bellied, pigeon-toed fellow with a shiny bald pate, was clearing the boards with economical efficiency. To judge by the way the beggar-woman slunk in after Alan, she had never been allowed past the door before. The landlord threw her a disdainful look, and half-raised a fist. The woman shrank closer to Alan, unable to prevent hungry eyes lingering on the cured hams hanging in the glow of a beaming fire.

Hands on his hips, Alan intercepted the landlord’s sneer. ‘She’s with me.’

Noting the newcomer had a fine cloak, stout leather boots, and a good-quality sword, the landlord shrugged. He made it a rule never to query likely customers, however odd their companions. He motioned the newcomer and the beggar-woman to a table by the fire.

‘Have you anyone to watch my horse?’ Alan asked, noting with approval the military orderliness of the tavern. Serried ranks of hams and sausages dangled from blackened beams close to the fire. The beams away from the smoke and heat were in use too, hung with long pendants of shiny, golden onions and bunches of dried herbs. Alan felt a sudden surge of longing to see his home, for his mother had always kept a good larder. He wondered how his father was faring without her. If it were not for his duty to the Duke, he would go and visit his father when he had Ned and Gwenn safe. But he was sworn to the Duke till after the tournament. After that, however, he would take his leave.

The landlord nodded. ‘Mathieu!’

‘Father?’ A spindly, weed of a lad popped up at the innkeeper’s elbow.

‘See to this man’s mount, will you?’

‘Aye, Father.’ The boy slipped like an eel through the door.

While they ate, Alan studied the beggar-woman. The inn-keeper knew her, and it was all too easy for Alan to conjure up a vision of her loitering by the tavern door, scavenging for discarded scraps like a stray. She would be pretty if she filled out a little, and now that her face was not twisted with that acute, feral mislike of all mankind that was common to most beggars, he glimpsed a hint of sweetness in the wasted features. Her injudicious use of the spearwort had not done much for her complexion, and her skin was marred with unsightly blotches. The lamplight revealed her to be even younger than Alan had thought, and he found himself wondering what had reduced her to beggary. Her eyes, like Gwenn’s, were brown.