A Blood Red Horse (16 page)

Every day brought new frustrations for Richard. Much to his fury, and to William's dismay, Gavin, who Richard hoped would forget his wild ways and turn into the useful adviser he had once been, was one of those knights who sailed back to Acre in search of amusement. He returned not only with a woman on each arm but also with something very curious.

“Will, look what I came by!” he said to his brother, kicking open the flap of the tent the morning after he got back. The women giggled. “No, not you,” Gavin squeezed their arms, then told them to wait outside. He dropped a roll of parchment into William's hands.

William unrolled it, then looked up at Gavin. “What is it?” he asked.

“It's a letter, or so they tell me,” said Gavin. “There was a pouch of documents that arrived for the king. Other people had also managed to get things to the ship that brought it over. Apparently this is for you. Look! This, so they say, is your name. And just guess who it is from.”

“I can't guess,” said William. “I don't know anybody who can write. Oh, except Brother Andrew, Brother Ranulf, and Old Nurse—and I am sure she has forgotten how. Anyway, nobody I know would send a letter all the way out here.”

Gavin jumped up. “You are wrong,” he cried. “Quite wrong.”

He leaned down. “The letter,” he said, “is from Ellie. There. Little Ellie has learned to write, and she has written not to me but to you. Well, what do you think of that?”

William was dumbfounded. “Ellie? How do you know?”

“I got somebody to read it to me.”

“You read my letter?” William was outraged.

“Well, you can't read it, can you,” Gavin retorted. “So would you like to hear what it says? It's not long. One of the girls here can read. I'll call her in.”

Before William could say anything, Gavin pulled one of his highly painted women into the tent.

The woman, winking at Gavin, took the letter from William and began to read.

“‘Dear William,'” she said in a heavy accent, clearing her throat. “‘It is a long time since you left. I have decided to learn to read and write. Brother Ranulf helps me. I hope you are being a fine crusader and have killed many infidels. I imagine you in Jerusalem with Hosanna lying on a bed of golden straw. We hear news of great victories. Not much has happened here, but I am sorry to say that Sir Walter has died. We buried him a week ago. Constable de Scabious is fussing about as usual. I don't trust him. The roof has been leaking. Sacramenta is well, and Old Nurse is as fat as ever. She was drunk last week and fell into the fishpond. Please come home soon. I love you very much and dream about you every night'—”

William looked up, horrified.

Gavin roared with laughter. “I got Marcella to make that bit up,” he crowed. He pretended to spank her. “Now, Marcella, be a good girl and tell Will what it really says.”

The woman grinned. “It says, ‘Please send love to Sir Thomas and to Gavin. Your affectionate sister, Eleanor.'”

William snatched the letter back. Gavin leered at him.

“‘Your affectionate sister, Eleanor,'” he squeaked in an attempt to imitate Ellie's voice. “‘Your affectionate sister, Eleanor.'” Affectionate
sister
, I
don't
think.”

William, his cheeks ablaze, leaped up and tried to push both Gavin and Marcella out of his tent.

“Get out, get out!” he cried. “Ellie does not even know our father is dead. Get out.”

“Keep your hair on.” Gavin was still laughing, but a little more uncertainly now. “She'll know soon enough.”

“Get out, get out before I punch you!” William shouted wildly. “How dare you allow one of those women to read Ellie's letter and pronounce our father's name! How dare you?”

Gavin sighed with mock remorse. “Marcella, we are not wanted here,” he said. “Come on, let's go and find somewhere where we can talk in a rather more civilized manner.”

And with that Gavin spun the woman round and caused her to shriek with delight as he pushed his hand into the fold of her clothes.

William threw himself back on his bed and stared at the marks on the page. It seemed extraordinary that Ellie had made them. He traced the letters slowly with his finger, trying to remember which word must be which. Ellie said not much had changed. But it obviously had. For a start, Sir Walter was dead. Then after years of both of them avoiding doing either, Ellie was now good at reading and writing. He tried to imagine her sitting with Brother Ranulf, struggling with the alphabet. He wondered if she had gone to the abbey or whether Ranulf had come to the castle. But
soon all he could see in his mind's eye was the green of English pastures, the chestnut trees outside the home he loved, and Ellie's face alight with fun as she told him of her latest ruse for teasing the monks. A terrible feeling of homesickness overcame him, and securing the tent flap so that Gavin and his women could not easily reenter, William, clutching the first letter he had ever received in his life, dropped on to his knees and wept.

Actually, Ellie had lied, not about Sacramenta being well or Old Nurse being as fat as ever, but about nothing having happened at Hartslove since the crusaders had vanished down the road on that May morning, now more than a year before. Crusaders' castles were supposed to be under the special protection of God while their lords were away, but it was beginning to be Ellie's experience that God did not always do His job very well. It was not Sir Thomas's fault. His complete faith in the immunity from harm of a crusader's domestic property had allowed him to leave Sir Walter de Strop and Constable de Scabious in charge without a moment's hesitation. Non-crusading knights exploited the lightly defended castles of their crusading brethren on pain of hell. And as for servants who took advantage of their master's absence in the Holy Land, well, the devil had special tortures lined up for them. So Sir Thomas never dreamed that his longstanding constable might prove an uncomfortable guardian for Ellie and Old Nurse. At first, Ellie could not quite put her finger on why constable de Scabious was making her uncomfortable. He was punctiliously polite and almost greasily pleasant. Nevertheless, by the time
William actually read the letter in which Ellie said she did not trust de Scabious, she not only mistrusted the constable but was frightened of him as well.

It all started after they had buried Sir Walter, just before the first, dismal Christmas the crusaders were away. She found the constable looking at her in a way that he would never have dared had Sir Thomas been around.

Ellie was right to be nervous. Constable de Scabious had always harbored ambitions. While Sir Walter had taken Sir Thomas's place, these ambitions had been kept in check. But now that Sir Walter was dead and, so de Scabious calculated, Sir Thomas himself was almost certain to take the constable's shameful, cowardly secret to a foreign grave, the time seemed ripe to allow those ambitions to flourish a little. His flirtation with women's clothing would not be revealed. He could concentrate on his future. After all, so he reasoned to himself, it was only luck that had made the de Granvilles powerful castellans and the de Scabiouses their servants. If the de Scabiouses had chosen to ride next to the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings, they might have ended up masters of Hartslove, with de Granvilles as lowly serfs. But the de Scabiouses were too humble for that kind of sword-wielding bravado. They had stayed with the baggage train as the Conqueror fought for his life, thus allowing others the opportunity to go for glory. With true generosity of spirit, the de Scabiouses confined themselves to dealing with more mundane matters. Now it was only fair that they should get their just rewards for not pushing themselves forward. Moreover it should not be overlooked (although it always seemed to be, which was another injustice) that crouching between two pack animals was just as dangerous as engaging the enemy. Why, one of Sir Piers's ancestors
had had his leg broken by a kicking mule, and very nasty it had been, too.

So, the constable reasoned as on the Twelfth Night he gave the orders for the Christmas holly branches to be taken out of the great hall and burned, should Gavin de Granville marry Ellie and end up master of even more valuable land while he, the faithful steward, had to make do with a common woman who would not even bring so much as a fishpond as her dowry? No. He would make Eleanor his. The man was not deluded enough to imagine that Ellie would choose to break her betrothal to Gavin and give herself willingly to a man growing gray and heavy in middle age. The way to secure his prize was to compromise her in some way so that she felt lucky to find anybody to marry her at all. And if Gavin did return, well, he was not going to want to marry a girl with a reputation.

De Scabious took to watching Ellie and noticed that she often rode out with only one serving woman, a dumpy creature called Margery, for company and was away for three or four hours. Neither rain nor sleet seemed to put her off. Business always seemed to prevent him from following her, so de Scabious began to smile at Margery and eventually took to paying her a few compliments. The woman was delighted. Maybe the constable was looking for a wife. She took to washing her hair and rubbing her lardy face with rose water. By the time the spring flowers began to push through, de Scabious thought he had Margery just where he wanted her.

“Where do you and Miss Eleanor go when you ride out?” he asked one day, with a glutinous smile.

Margery winked conspiratorially.

“Now then, Constable,” she purred. “That is between me and the young lady.”

“Of course,” said the constable, cheekily tweaking her arm. “You young ladies and your secrets!” They both giggled. Then the constable seemed to become rather more serious. “It is just that I am in charge of security, and we wouldn't want anything to happen to her now, would we?”

He spanked Margery lightly on the backside as he went off and called back to her, “You must keep Miss Eleanor's counsel if that is what she has asked, of course. My only concern is that if anything were to happen to her, well, the penalties for you would be … Still, I am sure you know what you are about.” Then he vanished.

A day or two later, the constable came into the courtyard just as Ellie and Margery returned. Ellie slipped away before he could speak to her, but Margery fluttered her eyelashes, inviting him to help her. De Scabious went forward and was nearly flattened as, like a sack of potatoes, Margery slid from the horse and into his arms. As her fat fingers twisted round his neck and her foul breath warmed his face, de Scabious struggled not to choke. But it was worth the effort. Rubbing her cheek against his, Margery disclosed that Ellie rode to a small clearing near the abbey at least four times a week and sat either in a tumbledown forester's hut or, now that the weather was better, out among the trees with Brother Ranulf, learning her letters.

“Teaching her her letters, eh!” exclaimed the constable. “She wouldn't learn them from Old Nurse. But maybe the monks have a better way of teaching.” He leered, and Margery leered back.

“Oh, no, I don't think so, sir,” she said, feigning innocence and feeling a tinge of guilt since Ellie had paid her chaperone well for her silence.

“Well, perhaps not,” said the constable. “But what does Abbot Hugh make of it?”

“I don't believe the abbot knows,” replied the woman, trying to keep hold of the constable just as hard as he was trying to disentangle himself.

“Ah,” said the constable as he finally released himself. “Well, run along now. You must hide that complexion of yours from the wind, or it will be ruined.”

Margery simpered and took herself off. It was really for Ellie's own good that she had spilled her secret. After all, two such attractive women alone in the forest with a load of monks nearby!
I must think of my own reputation
, she thought.
Particularly now that the nice constable has taken a shine to me
. And she hugged herself with glee.

The constable's plan was very simple. He would keep himself absolutely in the right. He quickly learned from Margery exactly where the clearing that had become Ellie's schoolroom was situated and, on the pretext of being concerned, ordered one of the garrison soldiers to follow her, taking care he was not seen.

“We don't want Miss Eleanor to think we do not trust her, do we?” he said. “But I would like you to report back anything you witness. The thing is, you just never know about these monks.”

Luck was with the constable. Ellie and Brother Ranulf had grown close. She never tired of hearing about all the stages involved in Hosanna's cure, and he, although knowing that he was going behind his abbot's back, found Ellie such an apt pupil that he could not believe it was wrong to teach her her letters. She told him that she wanted to surprise Brother Andrew one day by being able to read one of his books when he showed it to her. Surely, Brother Ranulf persuaded himself as he crept back into the abbey in time
for choir, praying that his absence had not been noticed, this was a praiseworthy ambition, one in keeping with Christ's parable of the talents?

However, as the weeks went by, the monk and the girl began to find more to talk about than just Hosanna and the alphabet. One day as Margery sat dozing under her fur cloak and the spying soldier shivered from his damp perch behind a bush, for the sun still had not much warmth in it, Brother Ranulf shyly showed Ellie that he kept the ring she had made for him from Hosanna's tail on a cord round his neck. This gesture unlocked Ellie's heart, and losing any kind of reserve, she began to tell Brother Ranulf openly of her mistrust of Constable de Scabious and her fears for the future.

The soldier reported this to the constable. From his hiding place, the soldier could not tell what Ellie said, but he could confirm that the girl and the monk were certainly thick as thieves. The constable tried to conceal his glee.