Court of Foxes (17 page)

She fought with him, struggling like a wildcat. Now, with her true love after all attainable, with the vigils of her attendance upon his helplessness so strong and sweet in her memory — now she was proof against the seduction, the desire and the melting. Now his hot, seeking mouth and ravaging hands only hurt and enraged her; his white teeth cut against her lips, his hard fingers bruised her tender breasts, she wondered how she could have come unscathed out of those other rough tumblings, what magic lay in the response to passion, that protected one from pain and the outward evidences of pain. But he cared nothing for her resistance, perhaps in his passion of desire at last to be fulfilled, was hardly aware of it. Only when he lay at last relaxed, did he say, half sullenly yet always with a touch of his own cool irony: ‘What change is here? The violence of your struggles on other occasions, has been matched at least by the ardour of your succumbing. Not this time, however.’

She had leapt to her feet, was furiously pulling together her disordered clothes, hoisting up the boy’s velvet breeches, fastening the wrenched buttons of shirt and waistcoat. ‘You outrage me! I am not a slut and wanton, to be flung down on to my back in an open field, for you to take your pleasure of.’

‘You deceive yourself,’ he said. ‘Slut and wanton is just what you are, and most deliciously so; only you’re too much of a silly little prude to admit it.’

She stood towering over him as he lay, looking up at her, now laughing. ‘I a wanton? When have I ever let you come to me without a struggle?’

‘Ah,’ he said, laughing still, ‘but nothing to the struggles before you let me leave you! That night at the inn…’ And he caught at her hand and gave her arm a jerk that brought her, half sitting, half kneeling by his side as he lay on the green bank, looking up, teasing, in the moonlight. ‘You had me near exhausted…’

‘I was a married woman in the matrimonial bed,’ she said haughtily, interrupting. ‘And you supposed to be my noble husband.’

‘Are the embraces of a peer of the realm, then, supposed to be superior to those of a poor common highwayman? Who has, in this case, however, the very self-same attributes: the self-same arms, the self-same lips—’

‘Very well, don’t continue, I have no desire to list your anatomical perfections—’

‘Why no: being well aware of them already. But tonight, my love, seemed less than usually appreciative; fought and snarled and used teeth and claws like a vixen—’

‘Well, and so I am a vixen,’ she said, glad to leave an argument that might lead dangerously close to the subject of her love for David of Llandovery. ‘ “Lluinoges”, they call me now at the Court of Foxes — Madam Vixen.’
*

‘Madame Vixen!’ He sat upright, dark eyes shining with delight. ‘A good name for you — who, after all, are the consort of the Fox. And fit consort too! What a piece of work was here with the post chaise, what despatch, what execution! Who taught you this trick, Madam Vixen, of attack from above? — and by the same token, who sent you alone upon this errand? Where is Dio, where is Sam? — ah, Sam was wounded, I recollect now — but where’s Willie-bach and James and Ivor and Huw Peg-leg and the rest of them?’

‘Ridden out towards Lampeter,’ she said and added sullenly, for now all the point of her desperate excursion was lost — and what would become of them? I am alone.’

‘Alone? But why? For what purpose?’

‘To rob the coach,’ she said. God forbid that he ever suspect the reality, with all her intended treachery towards himself and the gang!

‘But alone? Why alone?’ He caught her by the wrist, violently. ‘Come, answer me! What are you hiding?’

Away across the field, the coachmen and outriders had rejoined their charge and the chaise was in motion again, rumbling towards Pumsaint and the security of Castell Cothi. The distant movement deflected his attention, gave her breathing space. She made up her mind. She said: ‘If I must tell you, why then — was trying to gather together sufficient money for bribery.’

‘For bribery? Of my people?’

‘They’re afraid: afraid at having taken back to the Cwrt, David of Llandovery — Lord Tregaron. They think there may be trouble. They’re planning to — get rid of him.’

‘David of Llandovery — my little brother Dafydd!’ And he turned suddenly, swinging viciously round upon her and his eyes were as cold and bright as black stars. ‘Ah! — so that’s it, isn’t it? For the moment I’d forgotten, so hot was I for you: but that’s why your struggles in my arms were not quite like the old struggles, nor the succumbing at all like the old succumbing. It’s Dafydd of Llandovery, my lord Earl of Tregaron whose embraces now sicken you for mine.’

‘I’ve never touched him, not in the way of love—’

‘And yet would risk your life to plunder a coach… By the same token,’ he said, getting up to his feet, ‘we had better collect the booty and find our mounts again. I have a long ride before me.’ He made no effort to assist her to her feet, simply started off walking across the moonlit field towards where the coach had been robbed, leaving her to follow, manfully striding after him across the rough, ridged surface, in the unaccustomed riding boots. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said, catching up with him, walking alongside him, clutching his unresponsive arm. ‘They want to — make away with him.’

‘And so?’ he said coolly.

‘For God’s sake, Gareth! He is your brother.’

‘T’other side of the blanket. And would see me hanged a dozen times, wicked toby-man that I am, and never turn a fraternal hair. At least we’d give him a burial and not leave him to dance on a gibbet by the wayside, stripped of his hands and his tallow by the Glory men.’

They had come to the place and there, sure enough, was the trunk, a black hump in the moonlight, with the boxes and cases. He kicked out an ungracious foot towards them.

‘That lot you may have and welcome; send men to pick them up in the morning. Women’s finery, I daresay, with which you may at least buy a little kindness from the ladies at the Cwrt. For the rest…’ He delved his hands into his pockets and produced the handkerchief wrapping the jewellery and the bag of sovereigns. ‘Not much. Good pieces but few, such as sensible women would wear upon a journey. But there’s quite a little gold.’ He counted it over, appraising it. ‘I’ll make equal division, I keeping the gold since disposal of jewels isn’t easy in my present condition. You may have the gew-gaws.’ His cold face relaxed a little as he watched her stow away the bag in her breeches pocket, bending her leg, knee forward, to get at it, like a boy. But he started off immediately, again without ceremony, along the road to where their ponies dozed and dreamed in the darkness. She followed, trotting anxiously after him. ‘In this matter of Lord Tregaron—’

‘It’s all nothing to me,’ he said, walking steadily on.

But she persisted. ‘And yet it
is
something to you; or you wouldn’t be so angry. But — I don’t understand why. You and I have never loved one another, have been nothing to one another—’

‘I’d hardly say that,’ he said. ‘But as to love…’ And now he did come to a halt, standing facing her in the narrow, rutty roadway as it ran between the little scrub oaks. ‘As to love — why, Madam, if I may ask you so — why did you marry me? For my part there were other reasons, which by now you doubtless appreciate. But you — rich, highly born, free of other entanglements — loving me so little as you do, and make no secret of it — why did
you
marry me?’ He added with deliberate brutality: ‘The more so as you had already cast your lecherous eye upon this other.’

And indeed, short of telling him the truth, it was difficult to explain. She essayed a little shrug. ‘He was promised elsewhere.’

‘So was I supposed to be.’

‘You appeared to make nothing of it. He,’ she could not help adding with a flick of scorn, ‘was evidently a true gentleman: he would not go back upon a betrothal.’

‘And is so still, no doubt. And you a married woman, like it or not. So what do you now propose, if — as your husband — I may enquire? You can hardly set up, a young lady of title and wealth as you are, in your house in South Audley Street, as this honourable gentleman’s lorette.’

She could hardly keep from laughing outright at his continued ignorance of her true origins. ‘Any more than I can continue at the court,’ she said, however, ‘as yours; for wife or no wife, what else should I be? — sharing your favours with that sloe-eyed quean…’ Not that all that mattered to her. If once she were away… ‘Let me go,’ she begged, standing there looking up at him, and put out her hand again in a gesture of supplication, touching his arm. ‘Let him go! Exact a ransom if you will, he’s rich, what does it mean to him? — but let him go, let us both go.’ She felt the hardening of the muscle under her hand, the tautening of his whole body in swift repudiation, and lied outright: ‘He’s nothing to me, not really; I felt a little sentimentality towards him once, it’s true, but a sickbed cures the nurse of romanticism.’ One set of the vapours, she added, laughing, deliberately debasing the loveliness of her love, soon cancelled out another. ‘But — marriage or no marriage, love or no love — he can take me back into the world I know.’ And she pleaded: ‘You must let him go in the end, you dare not do otherwise. And when he goes — let me go too!’

‘What prevents you?’ he said. ‘Who wants to keep you? — once your ransom money is paid.’

The ransom. She said, beginning to tremble: ‘Is this really all? It’s only for the money that you keep me?’

Again in his eyes that look of black brilliance, cruel and chill. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘What else could I want you for?’

And so it had come at last. She stood facing him, her face lifted to his, pale in the moonlight as a misted pearl. She said: ‘There is no ransom money.’

‘No money?’

‘No money — none. And no title, no Italian husband, no Aladdin’s cave. I am a penniless adventuress, who married you for your supposed fortune, just as you married me for mine.’ And as he stood there, speechless, confounded, staring back at her, she tried to say jauntily: ‘So you may as well let me go after all,’ and waited, sick and trembling, for the cold fury of his reaction and wondered if it would not utterly annihilate her. It will be like a storm, she thought, the thunder and the lightning and the terrifying, drenching rain of his pitiless rage… And as there is silence before a storm, so there was silence now as she waited for it to break.

And it broke — in peal upon peal of laughter. ‘Oh, marvellous, oh, incredible, oh, exquisite irony! How is the biter bit, how wonderful are the ways of providence, my vixen, that should bring together two such as you and I!’ And he went off into great rolling roars of laughter again so that the sleeping birds woke to a startled shrilling and the dozy ponies lifted their soft noses and shifted on their feet before dropping off to sleep again. ‘And the playhouse? And the portrait of the old gentleman? And the little sugar cakes and — oh, preserve me, or I die of laughing! — the wolves of Italy who would prevent the lamb from enjoyment of her patrimony…!’ And he rolled and rocked again, holding his aching sides, mopping at his streaming eyes, spent with it, exhausted… ‘Oh, Gilda, my Gilda, you’ll be the death of me yet! Great lady — village bumpkin now it seems: vicious wildcat, doughty toby-man, and withal the most passionate prude that ever sent a man mad with longing… My lluinoges! — my doxy, my darling, my Vixen!’ And he pulled from his pocket the gold and ruby ring that he had given her as a token of their betrothal promises. ‘Here, put this back upon your finger where in all truth it belongs…’ In the night sky the stars were fading; faintly, faintly and far away came the first pale promise of a new day. He glanced up at it, caught with one hand at his pony’s bridle, with the other yanked her to him and, as she began as ever to struggle, head held back to avoid his kisses, looked into her face and spoke the old message, the old, discredited message of a hundred, a thousand red roses… ‘No use, Madam Vixen, for you to fight against it; or for me.’ And he held her close and murmured it into her ear and so let her go, slung himself up on to his pony’s back and rode away out of her sight.

The old discredited message, designed long ago for her intriguement, her enchantment, her enslavement — and surely for nothing more?

I will love you till I die.

*
Lluinoges,
a vixen: hluin-oh-gess, the g hard, accent on the oh.

S
HE SAT FOR A LONG
time after he had left her, thinking deeply over what she must now do; rose at last and led the pony, but slowly, still deep in thought, down the slippery mountain side, trusting him to ignore the misleading paths and take her back to the Cwrt. Dawn was breaking when they came there at last. As she had calculated, they did not arrive unobserved. ‘Fetch Dio,’ she said to the men who ran out to apprehend her; and to him when he arrived she said briefly, holding out her hand with the great ruby ring on it: ‘I have been with Y Cadno.’

‘With Gareth? Then,’ he said eagerly, ignoring all the rest, ‘where is he?’

‘Gone back whence he came. He wouldn’t tell me where. Meanwhile…’ She held out the ringed hand to him again. ‘Meanwhile, his message is this: that I am his wife, Madam Vixen as you yourself christened me. And that as his wife…’ She took a deep breath. ‘As his wife, Dio — these were his words to me: my orders are his orders and to be obeyed as such. Until he comes back — I am to be your leader.’

He thought it over doubtfully, silently. He said at last: ‘You had better tell the rest of them. See what they say.’

‘I will,’ she promised, grimly. ‘
And
see what they say.
And
see what Gareth y Cadno says when he returns — if meanwhile any deny me.’ A few of the gang standing about them stood, staring, trying to overhear. To them she called out:

‘Assemble at the council rock in two hours from this! I have a message for you all from the Fox. And meanwhile, go call down the sentries. And send no one to replace them.’

‘No one to—?’

‘No one. Every man of you must be present to hear what I have to tell you. And these sentries are a waste of your manpower, nothing but a formality — in themselves a danger, for their presence on the sky line in a ring round the Cwrt only points to the enemy where we lie—’