“Piss on him then,” muttered Brice.
The sun had brightened, washing the last shadows in glitter as Ludovic took stock. With little trust in his own legs, when attack came, as he knew it would, he planned on using other advantage, noting where the light was strongest, where each stool and bench stood, and how many paces there were to the door. He turned back, and smiled. “You’ve a poor promised bride left lonely somewhere, I believe? I heard Father arranged some sort of match, an heiress, naturally, to suit the proud Sumerfords. Ask her father to buy you off.”
Brice snorted. “A nine years infant, daughter of some fool with more piss than sense up his codpiece. The girl’s not even bleeding yet, and no use as a wife for another four or five years. A proxy marriage was to be held this Christmastide. They called it off as soon as they heard of my arrest. I’m hardly heartbroken.”
Ludovic was intrigued. “You never met the girl?”
“It was her property, not her flesh I wanted. Sons are obligatory, but apart from that I’ve little interest in women.” Brice shook his head. “Nor in boys, before you ask. I’ll sweat for other passions, but not for lust and never for love.”
“I believe it. You’ve no love in you to give.” Ludovic resisted the urge to rub his knee joints. He further wondered, once forced to stand and fight, whether he’d fall before he swung his sword.
Brice smiled, as if guessing his brother’s mind. “And you, my dearest, are as lame as a dotard, and you’re a hypocrite besides. You whine like a querulous vintner about broken loyalties and poor Gerald’s fate, but it’s not him you miss. It’s that common trollop’s face in your thoughts, and her you’re saving your money for. Let his damned lordship mourn lost family pride if he wishes, but if you bring a servant wench into your bed, I wager he’ll throw you both out of it.”
Before Ludovic’s reply, Naseby interrupted, marching forwards again. “Still bleating over Sumerford honour? I shit on it. Get the silver you want from this snivelling cripple, my lord, and then send him home on his knees. Otherwise, give up your useless begging for I doubt you’ll be getting neither purse nor promises out of him. I’ll thrash the bugger instead and then cut his foul gullet.”
“A sweet natured pair.” Ludovic smiled. He slipped his thumbs casually inside his belt, fingers closer to his knife.
Brice nodded. “Indeed. So pay up, my love. Devise a manner of getting your money to me, promised and pledged, or I’ll let this cannon loose. He’s itching to fight, and you’ll never last the distance as you are, even allowing for past expertise. A shame to kill you quick of course but a neat end is better after all, since I’m impatient and Naseby’s temper is up. And don’t think I’d scruple to fight you two to one, little brother, for I’ve no interest in any absurd pretence at chivalry.”
Ludovic said, “Piracy, it seems, operates also on land, since it appears you’ve accepted my innocence, yet plan to murder me anyway.” His left heel, ankle joint creaking, pivoted, ready to spring.
“Let me at him,” Naseby complained. “Let me unarm the bugger at least.”
Brice still smiled at Ludovic. “And have I truly accepted your protestations of innocence, my dear? Perhaps. But can I trust you now? When you leave here, if you leave here, whom will you confide in, my love? Can you return home without tumbling into temptation? Can you resist the urge to tell of your banished brother remaining in England, ready to do battle for coin? Can I risk leaving you free to babble at will?”
“Don’t be a fool, Brice.” Ludovic slid his left elbow back, swinging his coat a little away from the hang of his scabbard. He edged his right elbow forwards, ready to grasp the hilt. He said, “I’ll not be threatened by my own brother, nor by any pirate scum. If you mean to kill me, get on with it.”
“What impatience, little one.” Brice still grasped the hilt of his sword, the fingers of his other hand playing along the blade, tapping against the steel like a woodpecker in the trees. “I’ve lost one brother to the axe. I’ve lost my father to his own pride. My mother is a braying jackass, my elder brother a senseless loon. Shall I destroy the only member of my family left to me?”
Ludovic said, “You already lost me, my dear, when I found you in Naseby’s company, and at Gerald’s death you made me your enemy. You’ll never live in England again. You don’t need a family. So make your play.” He flexed the fingers of both hands and began to breathe deep and even. He felt the dark cold of Naseby’s shadow to his right. He judged the distance.
“Culpa mia.” Brice leaned back. He felt his power and savoured the taste. “So, life or death? And how to choose?” he smiled. “Which way shall I decide, I wonder?”
Naseby took one abrupt step forwards. Hearing the boot leather creak and the knife swing, Ludovic came up immediately on his left foot, turning to face the falling blade. In the same breath, he drew his sword with his right hand and his kidney dagger with his left.
He threw the dagger, heard the thud of contact, and spun, facing Brice again. Now behind him, Naseby fell heavily to the flagstones, his knife clattering beside him. Ludovic’s sword point hovered at Brice’s throat, pricking the skin. “Drop your metal,” Ludovic said softly. “And tell your pappagallo to stay down, or my sword goes home and you never do.”
Brice smiled. “Quick as ever, my love. I’m impressed.” He held his hands clear of his own weapon, but did not remove it from his knees. “Though I’ve an idea your back is breaking. Your muscles are torn, every joint is pulling open and you are about to faint. You cannot fight us both, little brother.”
“I’m habituated to pain,” Ludovic said. “And your mule is all brute strength and little skill.”
He heard Naseby scramble to his feet behind him, reclaiming his fallen knife. In an instant Ludovic slashed down, then hooked Brice’s sword hilt, swinging it up high and wide. It hurtled, spinning in an arc of sunshine across the chamber and far out of reach. Brice slumped forwards, breathing fast. A wide cut across both his thighs marked the passage of Ludovic’s sword edge. The black knitted hose sprang open, the flesh cut almost to the bone. Blood was pouring across his lap. Brice wheezed, his head reeling, unable to speak. Ludovic turned away, pivoting again, and faced Naseby. Naseby leaped forwards in fury. His shoulder was bleeding but he was otherwise unhurt. His long knife stabbed out and down. Ludovic danced back, his sword firm in his right hand. He parried, keeping light footed.
Naseby’s toothless gape spat saliva. “Come on, you puddle of vomit. Come meet your death from a real fighting man as knows his trade. Knights and lords? Just a bilge drip o’ ballast with no value nor worth beyond fish bait. They hides behind their armour, but you, you shit, have none. I’ll slit you through, prick to teeth.”
Ludovic ducked the next lunge and moved easily sideways, sweeping up his own fallen dagger from the ground. Then crossing his blades before his face, he caught Naseby’s knife against his own steel and held it trapped. With two steps forwards, he forced Naseby slowly backwards. He knew his strength was limited, but he had judged the direction carefully. Unable to look back, Naseby shook his head and reeled, furious, stumbling away. He fell heavily over the unseen stool immediately behind him.
With his own grunt of pain from all joints, Ludovic knelt over the toppling man’s flailing legs, sword slashing straight to Naseby’s groin. Naseby gurgled, head rolling, trying to grapple for balance. Ludovic leaned further. He slid the point of his kidney dagger directly into Naseby’s open eye. Naseby jerked and screamed once. The steel slid in further, smooth as dawn over the horizon. The knife point hit brain and bone. Ludovic disengaged and staggered quickly backwards. Blood gushed from Naseby’s nose and mouth and both eyes as he slid heavy to the ground. The sweet perfumes of sun on damp grass from beyond the open doorway were now doused as Naseby lost control of his bowels and jerked, gargling blood. He was slow in dying.
Ludovic turned away. He could barely breathe. Though unwounded, every joint was inflamed and every bone and muscle screaming. He sat a moment beside the dying
man, but looked up at his brother.
Brice stared down at his companion’s corpse. “Enough,” he whispered. “You have your victory. Now help me.”
Ludovic shook his head. “You’ll not bleed to death yet,” he said, gasping for words. “Your bones aren’t broken and your legs aren’t sliced right through. Crawl to the corner by the old table. That’s where your sword fell. Take it and cut the shirt from your pirate friend. Use that to bind up your legs. Your horse is out back I imagine, and will carry you to some other place of hiding. But I won’t help you, Brice. Not anymore.”
“You’ll leave me to die here?” Brice said. “Then kill me quick.”
“I’ll not kill you nor help you, though I’ll forget you if I can,” Ludovic said. He pulled himself partly up, grasping the edge of the hearth, hanging onto the trivet, hands thick in ashes. His coat and hose were already bloodstained but it was not his own blood. “No doubt you’ll save yourself and still get to Venice one day,” he muttered. “But send no messengers, for you’re no longer my brother.”
Ludovic wiped his sword blade on the straw at his side and gradually stood straight, discovering balance, strengthening his calf muscles and ignoring pain. He sheathed his blade, leaving his knife wedged tight in Naseby’s skull. Then he unbuckled the purse concealed beneath his doublet, and threw it at Brice’s feet. It fell heavy and full. He turned, breathing deeply, and strode from the room.
His horse was still tethered outside. Ludovic heaved himself into the saddle, leaned forwards across the animal’s neck, and immediately lost consciousness.
Chapter Fifty-Four
The earl regarded his youngest son in faint surprise. Since he had long thought his father incapable of surprise, Ludovic smiled with a gentle but incongruous pride. “I believe I’ve disobeyed you yet again, my lord,” he murmured. “But if I don’t lie down very soon, I may not live to incur your choice of punishment.” He promptly collapsed on the bed, closed his eyes, and fell deeply asleep.
“Not every egg in a brood will prove fertile,” the earl said softly to himself, “but if one hatches, fledges and flies strong and high, the falconer must be well enough pleased.”
Once in the night Ludovic woke, sweating and lost in nightmare. He thought he saw his father sitting at his bedside, watching him intently through the gloom. Across the room a small fire flared across the hearth, flames dancing distant but seeming virulent as hell’s welcome. A smoky airless nausea filled the room. Ludovic flung off the covers that swamped him. The earl shook his head. His long fingered hands carefully smoothed back the quilt. “No, my son. Or your fever will turn to ice.”
“Summer,” Ludovic murmured, half in dreams. “Too hot. Not wounded.”
“The doctor has recommended you sweat out the ill humours, my child. We will comply with his advice. I will not risk your health.”
“Not my blood,” Ludovic muttered, “pirate’s blood,” and relapsed again.
Ludovic’s dreams were often nightmares, visions of Gerald’s execution, Brice crawling legless to Naseby’s gutted corpse, the rack, and the chill dark of the Tower. But when his dreams were gentle and harmless, they were always of Alysson. Her face came close each night, her mouth open for kissing, with the warmth of her tangible. But sometimes the two extremes of dream world came together, and Alysson cried out to him for protection. As her brothers had died within the shadows of Sumerford castle, so Alysson was under threat, and Ludovic could not yet struggle forwards to save her. Held back by distance, by briars, by stone and by his own helplessness, he repeatedly failed her and in his dreams, saw her fall.
It was a week he remained in bed, forbidden to rise even for the garderobe, staying naked and sweating beneath a wilful heap of covers. At first he could not hold a spoon and the milk diet the doctor prescribed decorated more blanket than tongue. “Slops! I shall arrive home thin as a scarecrow,” he objected.
“Your failing intellect matches your failing health, Ludovic,” his parent informed him, holding the bowl of gruel beneath his son’s nose. “You will oblige me for once in your life, and attempt some semblance of obedience. No doubt the experience will be sufficiently unique to shock you into some clarity of comprehension.”
“Dutiful son,” Ludovic mumbled, mouth full of broth. “Remarkably obedient. Always. Well, invariably. At least, often. Sometimes, anyway.”
The earl took advantage of the open mouth before him and inserted the spoon once more. “My dear boy, if you believe such manifest absurdities, then you are ill indeed. You have once again put your life at risk against my express wishes, chasing after your brother when I had requested you specifically to leave his whereabouts unsought. When you returned here covered in blood and ashes and bare able to stand, I believed I had lost you. Brice can be – let us say – ruthless in the acquisition of his own desires. Nor are his companions likely to be more compassionate. But your brother was already subject both to the severity of the law and to my own somewhat more practical measures of censure. There was no benefit to be gained in seeking your own personal retaliation.”
Ludovic meekly swallowed the gruel. “Not retaliation, sir, since I didn’t kill Brice,” he said. “Nor ever meant to. I intended killing the pirate Naseby, and did so. But I needed to speak with Brice. He believed I’d turned him in to the crown and I intended exonerating myself. Simple pride perhaps. But more importantly, I wanted him carrying the guilt of Gerald’s death.”
“Again to exonerate yourself?” The earl raised an eyebrow and held out another spoonful of broth.
Ludovic took it. “Astute as usual, sir. I felt considerable guilt, yes. I still do.”
“I imagine it would be pointless to explain how you could never have dissuaded Gerald from his chosen path,” said the earl. “Nor did you have the right to do so. He was a grown man, a clever and a loving knight. His decisions were his own and he paid the price he always knew hung there. I shall grieve my son’s departure for the rest of my own life, but I am not arrogant enough to hold myself responsible for his death.”
Ludovic smiled. “But presumably arrogant enough for everything else?”
“Naturally,” said his lordship. “I am a Sumerford.”
The fever passed but still Ludovic was forbidden to leave his bed. The liquid diet kept him weak while his aggravated joints calmed, the new swelling and inflammation dissipated and the pain faded into an occasional ache. When he was finally permitted to move around the room, it felt like Epiphany.
In fact it was mid-July and the bright hot morning of St. Everildis that a bumptious and noisy cavalcade left the Strand and set off towards Somerset. Ludovic, after some argument, rode. He felt strong, and the enthusiasm for his own home rebounded in waves as sparkling as the sunshine.
Regular replies had come to the earl’s letters, informing him that Humphrey and her ladyship were both thriving, the farms were prosperous, the property in good repair, the countryside at peace and the weather clement. Eventually a single and laboriously ill-spelled response arrived from Kenelm, finally replying to Ludovic’s own frequent letters concerning Alysson. The captain, aided by the inn keeper, informed Ludovic that all was well except that Mistress Alysson Welles had unaccountably left the castle, the village, and the vicinity.
Ludovic was bitterly disappointed but not surprised. He had promised Alysson to return and claim her before midwinter of the previous year, and now past midsummer of the year following, he was still far away. For the past two months of convalescence he had written concerning her each time a messenger had been available, but during the previous months he had been quite incapable of contacting anyone. How much information concerning his own circumstances had ever reached her, he did not know. He doubted whether the Lady Jennine would have considered it convenient to tell Alysson too much, and his own mother would never have deigned to speak to her at all. Some castle gossip at least should have slipped through, but gossip was rarely accurate. Ludovic had long expected Alysson to forget and desert him. That she had l
eft her employment at the castle might in fact be good news, though not to have returned to her nurse Ilara was more alarming. He intended to find her wherever she had gone, since determination might discover anyone, and then, as long as she had not rushed into the loving arms of some other man, he could begin again with a careful but faster courtship. And this time he would be less circumspect, and promise far more.
At first exuberant and then impatient, Ludovic soon found the journey home tedious. The earl insisted on short stages and frequent stops. They rested at only the most renowned and comfortable hostelries, stopping each afternoon and setting off again late the next morning once the sun was high. Some consideration was made for the lumbering speed of the accompanying carts and litters. Most was for Ludovic’s health.
“At this rate it’ll be winter before I see Sumerford again,” Ludovic informed his father over supper. “We’ll arrive for All Saint’s. In which case I shall be ill again and far too stiff to walk.”
The earl leaned back in his chair and regarded his son over the brim of his wine cup. “How lamentably predictable you are, my boy,” he sighed. “But I assure you, a woman who does not wait, does not merit the erection.”
Ludovic smiled. “If you expect me to blush, sir, you’re destined for disappointment. And I look forward to seeing many people and to finding the old comforts I miss, though I admit my girl’s by far the most essential anticipation. But I seem to remember your particular disapproval of her in the past.”
“I do not now speak of my own approval, but of yours, my boy,” murmured the earl. “But even I can become accustomed, given time. I have, naturally, been aware of your studious attempts to trace this female over some weeks. Since you prove so consistent, I might be persuaded to comply, reluctantly of course, with your choice of union.” He paused, revolving his cup between his palms. “I assume,” he continued, “that you now intend something more than dalliance with a common serving maid for a mistress?”
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