The Champion (60 page)

Monday squeezed the shears until her hand ached, and the blades crossed over. There was nowhere to run, the doorway blocked off by her grandfather’s imposing figure. Besides, his men would be in the hall, and she relished a confrontation with Eudo le Boucher even less.

Thomas of Stafford rested his fists on his belt. ‘I can see that you know me, even if I have never laid eyes upon you,’ he said in a harsh voice. His chest rose and fell rapidly and compounded the aggression in his stance.

Monday just stared. This was the man whose rule her mother had fled, choosing love over obedience, and of whom she had so seldom spoken, and only then in a neutral tone that revealed nothing except by absence.

‘Well, girl, aren’t you going to speak? You do have a tongue in your head?’

Monday swallowed, her throat so dry that she thought she was going to choke. ‘What is there to say?’ she replied. ‘Yes, I saw you at the Queen’s coronation when you rode past me. Yes, I know my connection to your blood line, and how you severed it before I was born.’

Isabelle glanced between the two of them. ‘I will bring wine,’ she murmured, and gestured to a padded bench against the wall. ‘If it please you, be seated, my lord.’

‘Thank you, I will stand,’ Stafford said, without even looking at her. ‘My arse has been in a saddle the day long.’

Isabelle’s face flamed. Her head high, she went to fetch the wine, and dismissed the goggling women to another chamber, leaving only the crone who kept the fire going, for propriety’s sake. Not that propriety was much in evidence.

‘Of course I severed it,’ Thomas said in a tone that suggested Monday was a half-wit for even bringing up the subject. ‘What else could I have done? Your mother was as good as betrothed to a man of my choosing, and against all respect and honour for her family, she despoiled herself with a common tourney knight. She was sixteen years old, with a head full of feathers from listening to too many troubadour tales. I went after her, you know, ordered her to return or be cut off. She thrust her wedding ring under my nose and told me she was never coming back.’

Monday leaned against the sewing trestle. The backs of her legs were trembling again, and she felt sick and cold. ‘Then what do you want now?’ She raised her voice in challenge, trying to find a refuge from her fear. ‘Why seek me, when I have such common tourney blood in my veins? I have lived my life amongst whores and hucksters – have been a whore and a huckster myself.’ She threw the last words down in challenge.

Thomas’s mouth curled with distaste. ‘I know all about your past,’ he said.

‘From whom, Eudo le Boucher?’

That surprised him. She saw the rise and twitch of his eyebrows, the annoyed firming of his thin, bloodless lips. ‘My sources matter not. Suffice to say that while your mother lived you were cared for and held to a moral path whatever the squalor of your habitation. But after your father killed her, and then himself, you were led astray by undesirables.’

Although Monday laughed, her emotion was raw anger at his sanctimonious bigotry. Instead of squeezing the shears, she opened and closed them. ‘Undesirables,’ she repeated, nodding her head. ‘Is that what you think? I must admit to you that I have never found my husband in the least undesirable. I could not say the same of le Boucher, and yet you see fit to employ him in your retinue.’

‘He is nothing,’ Thomas said impatiently, with a throwing gesture. ‘I can dismiss him as easily as he was hired. He has served his purpose now.’

‘As we all exist to serve your purpose and then be discarded? What is it you want of me?’ She jutted her chin.

He crossed the room until he stood a sword’s length from her, and then he perused her slowly from head to toe, as if assessing the points of a beast in a marketplace. ‘You’ve better bones than your mother,’ he acknowledged grudgingly. ‘Good child-bearing hips, and height to pass on to your sons.’

‘It must be the common blood in me,’ she retorted.

Thomas ignored the sally. ‘I have heard, too, that you have had no difficulty in conceiving.’

‘I will not be a brood mare to your ambitions,’ Monday said icily. ‘If your son and heir were still alive, would you be here today?’

Thomas flushed. ‘I have come in all good faith to offer to take you back to Stafford, to your rightful family place. To bury the shame of the past. You are my granddaughter, my heir, and your sons will be lords of Stafford when I am dead.’

‘Whose shame?’ Monday said in a quavering voice. ‘My mother’s, or your own?’

Thomas’s flush deepened. His eyes watered, and he drew breath in laboured gasps. Despite her fury and disgust, Monday began to fear that he would have an apoplexy in front of her.

The Countess reappeared with a large basket tray bearing a flagon and cups. ‘Some wine to quench your thirst,’ she said, declaring the obvious into the terrible silence pervading the room.

The very trivia of her words, speaking of hospitality and domestic routine, broke the spell. Thomas flung round and strode over to the flagon. ‘I offer her a barony and all she does is cast insults at me,’ he snarled.

‘I only return what was thrown in the first place,’ Monday retorted. Remaining backed against the coffer for support, she watched him slosh wine into a cup and drink it down hard and fast. A second measure followed the first.

Isabelle looked nonplussed. There was no precedent for dealing with a situation like this.

Thomas paced the length of the chamber. ‘You have spirit,’ he allowed, hurling a glance at Monday. ‘And you know how to hold your own. It’s a pity you were not born male.’

She wondered if his words were supposed to be an apology of sorts. Certainly his tone had calmed, and there was almost a twinkle in the gimlet eyes. But his hide was so tough, his perceptions so distorted that he did not realise he had just piled another insult on top of all the others. ‘Yes, what a pity,’ she repeated with sarcasm, but saw that it was lost on him. ‘If you make me your heir, that means that you accept my husband as your successor too. A common tourney knight like my father.’

Thomas drained his second cup of wine, filtering the dregs through his teeth. ‘I had thought about that,’ he said. ‘Long and hard on the way here.’ Returning to the flagon, he poured himself a third measure of wine, and swirled it around in the goblet. ‘An annulment is for the best, I think.’

‘An annulment!’

‘It will be costly, I know, but I can recoup the amount on your next marriage.’

‘You will find no grounds,’ Monday choked out, so furious that she could scarcely speak. ‘There is no consanguinity, no lack of consummation, nor was I forced against my will. Your spy will also no doubt have told you that my vows to Alexander were witnessed by no less than the Bishop of Winchester and the entire royal court!’

‘Grounds can always be found,’ he dismissed with a wave of his hand.

Swallowing, Monday opened and closed the shears again, then set them gently down on the coffer, not daring to keep them in her hand. ‘Let the family ties remain severed,’ she said huskily. ‘I renounce the blood knot that you would rebind for your own selfish need.’ Unable even to bear the sight of him, she turned her back, her spine rigid with the effort of control.

‘Perhaps it would be for the best if you left, my lord,’ Isabelle said quietly, looking between the two of them.

Stafford’s jaw worked, and Isabelle took an involuntary backstep from the red glare he gave her. She inhaled to scream for help, but he tipped the remainder of his wine on the rushes, and without a word, jaw clamped, strode from the room.

A stunned silence filled the space where rage had been. The Countess started to follow him, but stopped after three paces and turned back to Monday.

In a voice that was flat, devoid of emotion, Monday said, ‘He was offering me a treasure wrapped in poison. I had to fight; I could not let him win … Sweet Virgin, I feel sick.’ She put her face in her hands, retreating, trying to shut herself away. But it was no use; the door would not close.

Isabelle poured wine into one of the other cups on the tray and brought it to Monday. ‘Here, drink this, it’s Gascon, our best, and strongest.’

Monday felt the cold pottery rim against her knuckles. She wrapped a trembling hand around the cup and took a swallow. Her gorge rose, and she clenched her teeth until the spasm passed.

Isabelle placed a supportive arm around her shoulders. ‘Do I understand from what I heard that you are Stafford’s heiress?’

Monday forced herself to breathe slowly. If she could master the sense of panic, the cold sweat, she would not be sick. ‘My mother was his only daughter,’ she said in a constricted voice. ‘She eloped with a household knight rather than agree to the marriage my grandfather had arranged for her. He declared her dead from that moment forth. Now, because it suits him, because I am the sole surviving member of his blood line, he wants to put the past aside as if it never happened, and use me as a substitute for my mother … arrange a match for me, annul my marriage because it suits not his purpose.’ She swallowed, and looked at Isabelle with glistening eyes. ‘If my grandfather had given me one kind word, shown one mark of care or respect, I would have taken his hand and built a bridge.’ She sniffed. ‘I … I know that men often conceal their feelings by being bluff and brusque, but his were not feelings for me, but for himself. I wish he was different. I wish I hadn’t said those words.’ The first tears of reaction rolled down her face. ‘If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. Isn’t that what they say?’ To which Isabelle had no answer.

C
HAPTER
35

On the borders of February and March, the onslaught of spring had been curtailed by a heavy fall of snow. The cold gnawed at Hervi’s stump and penetrated his marrow as he rode through the woods toward the forbidding grey arches of Cranwell Priory.

He was accompanied by his brother, Reginald, and an escort of two knights. There were wolves in the vicinity – a pack from the higher peaks and wastes to the north had strayed south in search of food. In these woods, too, there had been deaths and disappearances. Three young men in the last six years, and a pair of sweethearts who had entered the trees to make love and emerged two years later as whitened bones dug from a shallow grave by rooting pigs.

The sheriff’s men had been unable to find a trail. Poachers were mooted as the most likely culprits, and a salutary warning was issued to the villagers not to tolerate them in their midst. But still the disappearances continued, and the woods and wastes between Wooton Montroi and Cranwell were rarely trammelled by lone travellers.

‘Although God alone knows what business takes you to the Priory,’ Reginald said on a burst of irritation.

Hervi smiled wryly. ‘God’s business,’ he said with a sidelong glance at his eldest brother. The years had not been kind to Reginald. His hair was receding with tide-like rapidity, and the flesh drooped on his solid bones, making him look like one of the slot hounds panting through the snow beside them. Hervi had not seen Reginald in more than ten years, and having spent two nights in his company at Wooton Montroi was prepared to forgo the experience for at least another decade. He could have ridden directly to Cranwell, but conscience had nagged him into paying at least a cursory visit to his former abode.

‘I do not believe you are a priest,’ Reginald muttered for the hundredth time. ‘And a crippled one at that.’ He gazed, as he had been gazing for the last two days, at the rigid shape beneath Hervi’s habit.

‘I don’t see myself as a cripple,’ Hervi retorted. ‘A man’s mind is what matters, and I count myself less disadvantaged than you on that score.’

‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ Reginald growled.

‘Oh, indeed it is.’

They rode in silence for a while, Reginald hunched into his cloak, a scowl on his face, Hervi facing the bitter wind with a complexion inured to the weather by constant exposure. The bay beneath him had been particularly chosen by Hervi for its smooth, even pace. He had even trained the animal to come at a whistle and stand perfectly still to be caught and mounted. A one-legged man needed every advantage he could get. He did not think he would ever be as fond of the horse as he had been of Soleil, but there was a growing bond between them.

‘You still haven’t told me why you’re going to Cranwell,’ Reginald said at length.

Hervi faced straight ahead. ‘Letters from the Bishop of Stafford and the Archbishop of Canterbury to deliver to the prior, if you must know.’

‘What, they chose you as a messenger?’ Reginald looked incredulous. The word ‘cripple’ hung unspoken in the air.

‘No, I snatched the letters out of their hands and rode off with them!’ Hervi snapped. Then he shook his head and drew a deep breath. Reginald would never be any different. ‘I thought also that I would visit the place where you intend to transfer our parents’ tombs. Alexander told me some time ago that you had an insane notion to move them from Wooton Montroi to Cranwell. I note they remain in their own church as yet, but I am curious to see what Cranwell has to offer that their home does not.’

Reginald’s scoured red cheeks grew redder still. ‘Prior Alkmund wanted me to pay a huge endowment to lodge them in his chapel. When I said it was too much, he suggested that I give the priory grazing rights on some of my land instead. I told him that I would think on it.’

And in his usual, procrastinating way, was still thinking, in the hope that the matter would resolve itself, Hervi thought. ‘You could always graze more sheep, open the forest and use the revenues to build a new church at Wooton,’ he suggested.

‘Yes, I suppose I could.’ Reginald looked doubtful.

Hervi suppressed the urge to throttle his eldest brother. What Reginald really needed was to be seated on a barrel of pitch at the moment it exploded. ‘Tell me about Prior Alkmund,’ he said, aiming for the core of what he wanted to know.

‘He’s a monk,’ Reginald said with a shrug, as if it explained everything.