The Champion (37 page)
‘Gervais of Stafford?’
‘You know him?’
‘We have met before,’ Alexander said as they climbed the torchlit stairway, and left it at that. They had not even spoken, and from what he had seen, Gervais was completely under his father’s domination.
‘Come!’ shouted de Bloet in response to the fist that the knight banged on the door, and Alexander was admitted to a world of colour and opulence, far removed from the windswept night howling against the keep walls, a world that he had come to know well since entering the Marshal’s service. The floor was covered with a thick layer of rushes upon which dried aromatic herbs had been scattered to yield their perfume every time they were crushed by a footstep. There were tapestries on the walls, embroidered hangings, and painted scenes of dancers in a garden. Two charcoal braziers gave warmth to the room, and thick beeswax candles shed pools of golden light and shadows of dark amber.
Ralph Bloet, his silver hair tonsured like a monk’s by deepening middle-age, sat in a cushioned chair by one of the braziers. His nose was bony, his jowls had a decided droop, but his eyes were still hawk sharp and his voice was firm and strong as he took the packets from Alexander and asked him several pertinent questions. Lady, de Bloet, once a mistress of the old Henry, and still a beauty, with flashing dark eyes, brought Alexander a cup of sweet wine, and bade him sit in the seat opposite her husband’s.
The drink flowed through Alexander’s veins, invigorating him, although he knew that it would not be long before it mellowed in his bones, and with the warmth and relaxation sent him to sleep.
From the end of the room where the second brazier stood came the sound of a thick, rasping cough, and as Alexander glanced towards it, Gervais FitzParnell shuffled into the light, accompanied by a younger replica of de Bloet who had been keeping him company.
Two hot, red slashes of fever were branded across Gervais’s cheekbones. His eyes were puffy and his focus glazed. ‘It is you,’ he wheezed at Alexander through chattering teeth. ‘I was not sure …’
Weary though he was, Alexander rose to his feet and vacated the chair he had just taken. Without thanking him, Gervais sat down, and for a moment doubled over, shaken by cough upon cough. Alexander handed him the wine. A worried frown on her face, Lady de Bloet disappeared to consult with her women about preparing a steam inhalant to ease their guest’s congestion.
Gervais took a deep drink of Alexander’s wine and looked up at him through watering eyes. ‘Did you find her?’ he croaked.
Alexander shook his head. ‘I have continued to make enquiries wherever I have travelled, but no one has any knowledge.’
‘My father is looking for her too, you know.’ Gervais pressed his hand across his forehead and winced in pain.
Alexander gazed at him in surprise. ‘I understood that he desired nothing to do with her. Indeed, if I had not left his hall that day at Stafford, I think he would have thrown me out.’
‘Girls of the family make useful alliances when you marry them off,’ Gervais said huskily. ‘He wants her so that he can see his line continue in grandchildren. My own wife remains barren, and putting her aside is not possible without making enemies of her family. She is kin to the earls of Chester, and it would begin a feud we could not afford.’ Another paroxysm of coughing was dampened by several swallows of the sweetened wine. ‘If you do find her, you will be rewarded. I have been spreading the word from town to town.’
Alexander’s mouth curled slightly at the mention of a reward. Merely finding her would be a reward in itself.
‘It was my suggestion that he seek her out,’ Gervais continued, the fever making him loquacious. ‘But he has conveniently forgotten that and made it into his own idea. Do you know what it is to have your every action found lacking, no matter how hard you try to please?’
‘I think you should go to your bed and let the women tend you,’ Ralph Bloet intervened firmly, and turning in his chair, beckoned to his wife.
Gervais clenched his jaw and seemed as if he was about to make a stand, but he was really too sick, and de Bloet’s polite but cold tone of voice outmatched his bravado. Lady de Bloet appeared at his side, murmuring gentle words, and coaxed him to rise and go with her to a bed freshly made up with warmed linen sheets.
Alexander thought longingly of such himself, but knew that he would have to be content with a place beside the fire in the hall, with his cloak for a blanket. He was a common knight, and Gervais FitzParnell was a baron’s heir.
When Gervais had gone, Ralph Bloet raised a questioning silver brow in Alexander’s direction. ‘The girl?’
‘Stafford’s granddaughter, sir, from his daughter’s marriage to a landless knight.’
De Bloet pursed his lips, then he nodded. ‘Ah, yes. Something of a scandal at the time if I remember. Do you know what happened to the couple?’
‘They are both recently dead, God rest their souls.’ Alexander thought of the simple roadside grave outside Rouen, and the other, secret one in the heart of a convent of Benedictine nuns. ‘Their daughter … I do not know.’ He lowered his gaze to the herringbone pattern on his leggings.
‘There is more here than you are telling me,’ de Bloet said shrewdly.
Alexander cleared his throat. ‘It is true that I do not know the whereabouts of Monday de Cerizay. I wish that I did for my own peace of mind. We all have regrets in our past.’
De Bloet snorted and raised an admonishing forefinger. ‘If you have regrets in your past at your tender age, you are going to sink beneath a mighty burden before you reach even half my years!’
‘It was the fear of sinking that taught me to swim,’ Alexander responded somewhat grimly.
In the morning, Alexander departed Chepstow for Pembroke. The wind was still howling a gale, but the rain had blown clean across the country and the sky was a race of ragged blue and grey. Gervais FitzParnell lay abed, his body racked by chills, his fever burning higher as the congestion grew in his lungs. Despite Lady de Bloet’s aromatic steam inhalants, he continued to sink, until each breath he drew was tight agony. The priest was fetched, and a rider set out for Stafford to summon Lord Thomas to his son’s sickbed.
On the third day following his arrival at Chepstow, and another three days before his father arrived, Gervais FitzParnell died unconscious, suffocated by the fluid in his lungs, and Monday became Thomas of Stafford’s only living kin.
Monday was roused at first grey light by the plaintive voice of her two-year-old son demanding to be taken to the garderobe. He had recently learned to control his bladder, and using the garderobe was a novelty, much preferred over the piss-pot.
Monday sat up on her pallet and pushed her hair out of her eyes. There was an ache behind them from lack of sleep and straining to see the trail of her needle through fabric by candle glow. It had been almost three of the clock when her head had finally touched the pillow. No more than a couple of hours had passed since then, and little enough of that in sleep.
Florian tugged insistently at her sleeve. ‘Want pee-wee,’ he announced, his voice becoming louder, the tone imperative. Control he might have, but not the control to wait.
On the next pallet, Aline’s maidservant Eda turned over and mumbled to herself, drawing the cover up around her ears. She had made it clear on past occasions what she thought of being woken from sleep by a querulous infant. ‘You know where the pot is,’ Monday said quietly. ‘Bring it here.’
‘No, want big boy’s pee-wee.’ He pointed towards the garderobe which lay in the thickness of the chamber’s outer wall and was concealed from the main room by a heavy woollen curtain.
Monday sighed, cast her eyes heavenwards and pushed aside the bedclothes. At least he had not wet the sheets, which had been the case on several occasions. Taking his hand, she padded across the room in her chemise. Chests and coffers, the pallets of sleeping servants, were little more than dark shapes in the weak light percolating through the windows, which were protected from draughts by sheets of oiled linen.
The garderobe was cold and musty, smelling of its main function. There was a sealed pit at its base, which was intermittently broken into and emptied by two hardy individuals, a father and son. They were well-paid but not particularly popular members of the castle community – except when there was a stink to be disposed of.
A wooden board with strategically cut holes was laid across the mouth of the pit, and to one side there was a pile of soft moss and fabric scraps for wiping purposes. In a failed attempt to keep the smell from being all-pervading there was no covering across the narrow window slit behind the latrine. In the winter months, users almost froze to the seat, but today, close on the feast of St John, there was a mild, fresh breeze.
Monday lifted Florian’s small shirt and raised him up so that he could perform down the dark opening. He craned his neck and demanded to know where the hole went, obviously longing to follow his stream of urine to its destination. Monday gently dissuaded him, and since she was there anyway, sat down to her own ablutions, hoping that Florian would not start asking why she had to sit when he could stand. His intellect and his thirst for knowledge were developing at a frightening rate, and just keeping pace with him was exhausting.
Florian’s attention, however, had gone to the narrow window slit, and he peered out. ‘Tents, Mama,’ he said. ‘Lots of tents.’
Monday reached for a piece of the moss. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, her stomach churning. ‘Lots of tents.’
‘Want see.’ Florian turned round. The light from the aperture surrounded him, revealing a sturdy, confident child with dark hair and peat-brown eyes. He looked like his father, but he was so robust and forthright that he frequently reminded her of Hervi too.
‘Later, perhaps,’ she temporised as she rose from her hard wooden couch, and shook down her chemise. ‘Mama has a lot to do today, and it’s still too early.’
‘Want see,’ Florian repeated mutinously, and stamped his foot.
‘Later, after mass.’ She ruffled his hair, keeping her voice low and gentle.
For a moment the thing hung in the balance. Monday swept her hair off her face again and silently pleaded with her son not to throw a tantrum. She could not cope this early in the morning, not upon a sleepless night and the anxiety caused by the presence of those very tents to which Florian was so attracted.
Fortunately, he chose not to scream the roof down. He wanted to see the tents, but he was also hungry and usually when his mother said he could do something, she kept her word. He let her carry him back to her bed, and sat upon her pillow, content to play with a carved wooden figure of a horse while she dressed.
Monday donned her working gown and passed a braid belt twice around her waist before knotting it. Her hands shook slightly as she combed the night tangles from her hair, working until it was burnished with golden highlights and crackling with an energy lacking in herself.
Truces were constantly being agreed between Duke Richard and Philip of France, but sporadic war continued. There was supposed to be a truce at the moment, but men’s blood still prickled with the need to fight, to stay alert, and it was this need that had drawn Hamon to organise an informal tourney on his lands. Now, in fervent response to the summons, the ghosts of Monday’s former life were arraying beneath the walls of Lavoux, and she was sick with fear lest Alexander was among them. Whilst the other women had chattered together, speculating who would come and how great the gathering would be, while they took turns to preen in front of Aline’s mirror and soften their hands with rosewater unguents in case someone wanted to kiss them, Monday had retreated to a corner, shielding herself with her sewing, and scarcely speaking a word.
Not that they wanted her to speak. From break of day until late into the night, she had been rushed off her hands, designing and stitching garments that were supposed to trap knights into lovesick adoration of the bodies occupying them.
Monday could have told the women all about the character of the men who fought on the tourney circuits, but it would have revealed too much of her own past, and they would only have called her a killjoy and refused to heed her warnings. Hamon’s tourney was a sprinkling of spice on the mundane routine of their daily lives, and they were determined to make the most of every dangerous moment.
Monday braided her hair and concealed it beneath a wimple of cream-coloured linen. She coaxed Florian to put down his toy so that she could dress him too. Emerging from babyhood into a more independent state where he could walk, feed himself and be mostly continent, Florian now wore proper garments rather than baby smocks and caps – linen leggings and a tiny drawstring shirt topped by a smart tunic, green like her own and decorated with tawny braid. On his feet he wore soft shoes, which she had made herself from two layers of sheepskin. He looked adorable, but Monday knew to her cost how deceptive appearances could be.
She took him down to the hall, and since eating before mass was not forbidden to an infant, found him a chunk of bread and a beaker of buttermilk. The hall was slowly rousing to life. A cauldron had begun to simmer over the hearth, and a woman was stirring it with one hand and scratching her rump with the other. On the high table, the previous evening’s stained cloth still covered the board, the melted-down candles were still in their sockets, and a flagon and drinking cups stood at Lord Hamon’s place. A yawning woman was clearing the debris at a snail-pace. Monday noticed with a blink of surprise that Hamon had left one of his precious books on the trestle too. Obviously he had been well in his cups last night, for usually he took great and jealous care of his small collection, even to the point of keeping it under lock and key in an enamelled coffer in his private chamber.
