Margery bit her lip. She did not like to confide that she felt danger closing about them, as if they were venturing deeper and deeper into a dark, menacing forest.
"Well, we must survive as best we can," Anne was saying. "If we are sweet to the French, they will lend us arms and we can go home."
Margery frowned, "But what then? Ned has never lost a battle." And she watched Anne's fingers finally snap the stem of the lily.
Richard found Matthew Long staring hard at the huge beasts in the moat. "A real lion, master! Look at the size of those there claws!"
"And I shall feed you to him, piece by piece, if you deny me an honest answer! What madness possessed you back there?"
Matthew straightened up, his skin a dull red. "It was not the dogboy's fault, sir."
"No, yours!"
Long's eyes flickered about them before his huge hands fumbled in his pouch and swiftly thrust a coil of leather into Richard's hands. It was Error's leash, neatly sliced through at the collar end.
Richard swore. "You saw someone?"
"The lad thinks it was one of the Duke's swine. Says how some rogue cuffed him to the ground from behind and cut the dog loose before he could find his feet. Shall you beat him?"
"No." Richard sighed.
"I think, sir, 'twas to punish me for interfering when those plaguey rogues were molestin' the mistress afore your nupitals."
"And now I have lost my dog and my wife thinks I planned the entire incident."
His servant rumbled with laughter. "Shall I enlighten her?"
"Oh, no," snarled Richard. "I care not what the wench thinks."
"I think, master, pardon me for boldness, that you should not be talkin' that way. The mistress acquitted herself right well in her finery today an' I think that, given time, you will as likely be pleased, for all her wayward tongue. What with her bein' the Earl's by-blow and having good childbearing hips, everyone has remarked as how you have probably gotten yourself a fine bargain."
Richard shook his head in wonderment. "Well, Matthew, thank you for sharing that morsel from your vast pantry of philosophy." His face hardening, he clapped a hand upon his servant's shoulder. "Take especial care from now on, Long." And he left him with the lions.
Margery, making the inevitable visit to watch the feeding of the great beasts, noticed her new servant on the edge of the fascinated crowd.
"Mistress." Long touched his forehead deferentially.
"That was a foolish business with the hound, Matthew."
"Aye, mistress, I said my prayers, I can tell you. Though 'twould have been the kennelboy who'd have had the thrashin'. One moment the cur was there and the next instant some poxy varmit had hacked through his leash and that did it. There's no stopping the beast when he's loose."
"Hold, Matthew. Are you saying someone else freed Error?"
"Saints preserve me, you never thought I let him off, did you, mistress? Lady, your pardon, but neither my master nor I are that addlepated. Still, all's well. You should see where the great lolloping cur is housed. Better off than I am or many a Frenchman. Packed like piglets in a sow's womb we are, whereas the plaguey hounds are all in a kennel the size of a blessed manor hall with a brick wall at one end and a huge, new fangled fireplace. Have you seen your sleeping quarters, mistress?"
"Not yet."
"Alys says it is the same—not an inch to scratch."
Well, thought Margery as she followed her sisters into the Great Hall for supper and found to her astonishment that for once she was seated next to her husband, it was definitely a time for a spoonful of ashes and a wisp of sackcloth.
"You must be sad at losing Error."
His chin was cupped gloomily in his hand while his fingers drew plow furrows on the cloth. "The King is welcome to him. He was a gift from my father, but his education was unfortunately neglected. My mother spoiled him."
"And I suppose the King is welcome to me as well. I am not trained either. At least your horse behaves."
He raised an eyebrow and studied her suspiciously. "Is this a kind of apology? I gather Long must have lit a candle of innocence for me on your altar? I told him not to bother."
Margery's eyes sparkled, her lips moist and teasing. It was safe here to provoke and withhold. "Behold me an abject penitent if it please you, sir, but I should warn you my humility is of short duration."
"Then until the next hour bell, lady." He set a goblet in her hand. "Let us be at peace."
"Who cut the dog free?" She tapped the metal against metal. "Your health, sir."
"Truth is hard to come by these days." His green gaze caressed her face but not with gentleness. His voice was low. "Does it matter? Perhaps a certain person lusted after the beast and set an agent to cut it loose, or Long and I have enemies."
Margery glanced around to see if their neighbors had caught his gist but anyone watching would have seen a husband dividing a portion of spit-roasted capon for his wife. She took care not to glance toward the high table. "Surely you jest?" Her fingers trembled as she took the proffered morsel from the tip of his meat knife.
"I should advise you to weigh each one of your words like a miserly goldsmith. The balance is everything—to be seemingly at ease but to divulge nothing. This is Amboise. Have you not observed it holds more cages and dungeons than Valognes?"
Richard noted she could barely swallow the white meat down. "Why are you telling me this?" she asked.
"Because what spatters you with mud now inevitably sullies me. It is a pity there is no trust between us." He summoned a page to refill his goblet with Chinon red.
She spread her fingers across her winecup. "There could be, sir, if you would agree to free me from this foolish hasty marriage of ours."
"And begin again? You want me to woo you like a village maiden, pretend that your Ned never charmed you onto his daybed?"
He knew it was not what she meant. "You do not give up easily."
"Oh, I was trained as a soldier. Failure is unacceptable."
A sigh escaped her. Gauzy lashes fluttered modestly like iridescent insect wings. "I wish I knew why you want me stumbling behind your victory chariot."
"Fishing, lady? Because victory would be sweet and Matthew Long assures me you have good childbearing hips." She choked on her wine and had to be thumped carefully between her delectable shoulder blades. He let his fingers linger longer than they should, but when she looked up at him her eyes were sparkling with laughter. But what she read in his smoothed the mirth into gravity.
"I can hear the laughter and the music," she said softly, her blue eyes dark as lapis as her gaze flickered across his face like a shadow. "I can see the light of many candles but I am on the outside in the darkness and the porter does not answer. The lord of the house has commanded him to keep the gate shut. Why is that, do you imagine?" Her lips parted, soft, giving.
For an instant Richard was taken aback. Eventually he would have found the right answer but the little witch's face crumpled into mischief and he could not tell whether for a fleeting instant she had been in earnest. His fingers imprisoned her chin and he found he could laugh with her.
"Delilah!" His hand drew her face near and he saw her swallow nervously. Perhaps tonight. There had to be somewhere in the castle he could lead her. Then suddenly the dreamy look snapped out of her eyes and she jerked her head back.
"I—I have to—your pardon."
Before he could detain her, she had scrambled free of the bench. Raw pain assailed him as he watched her hasten down the hall with white-knuckled hands grabbing her skirts as if a demon were after her.
She did not return and when he inquired after her the next day, the wench was indisposed. That it was the sudden onset of her monthly course, not his unacceptable company, which had caused her hurried exit was little balm. He disliked the way the other ladies firmed their ranks and barred him access to his wife. That and then having to be in constant attendance on his new father-in-law, ready to give careful answers on estimates of armor,
crossbows, and biscuits had him seething like milk before a custard.
By the end of the week, he needed to quarrel with someone.
CHAPTER 16
"Ankarette has offered to take your duty for today so make ready," Richard Huddleston growled at Margery some four days later as he passed her on his way out of the Great Hall. "And pray, do not argue, I need a day free from loans, army provisions, maps, and maybes. I shall expect you at the stables as soon as you can."
It would be refreshing to be actually told that she was expected to ride, thought Margery. She assumed that was meant, unless he was planning to chase her through the hayloft for sentimental reasons. It would have been courteous to have asked if it was agreeable to her or even to have waited for an answer.
"A plague on him!" Margery swore through her clenched teeth and went off in search of Ankarette. "Did you have to agree?" she exclaimed wryly. "You know that spending the entire day in Huddleston's company thrills me to the very depth of my being!"
"Well," retorted Ankarette, "I should be delighted to spend a day in my husband's company and he is tedious and talks of nothing but milk cows."
Margery's sarcasm abdicated in favor of sincere remorse. She put an arm around her friend. "Your pardon, I should not complain."
"Oh, complain all you like if it helps but you really should make the best of things."
Suitably chastened, Margery exchanged her damask kirtle and thin leather slippers for her green riding gown and boots and sought her husband outside the stables. Long promptly materialized with three saddled horses but there was no sign of Richard Huddleston until the next quarter bell when he appeared with two dogs and a small cart in his wake. It was driven by a falconer accompanied by two youths. Behind them was a rail on which five hooded birds of prey perched, tethered and disgruntled like a row of magistrates on a bench before breakfast. The discordant bells on their legs mocked their pomposity.
Margery frowned at the cruel talons and sharp curved beaks but at least the birds would be chaperones. Everyone knew that men did not hunt women at the same time as they hunted game, otherwise she would have been tempted to leave Huddleston to ride with his ill humor for company.
Her husband looked ready to check any protest on her part, an eyebrow flexed to parry criticism. He raised a leather falconing gauntlet to the brim of his green hat in salute before he swung himself into his saddle. Long helped his mistress mount and followed after them at a respectful distance, attempting to chatter in loud, distorted French with the falconer who turned out to be a Scot.
Below the castle wall, the sloping town market square of sorts was untidy with laden barrows. It smelled like a great lord's kitchen, the yeasty aroma of fresh bread twisting in and out of the rich breath of roasting meat and beneath it all the stink of composting vegetables, rank meat, smoke, and human waste.
Richard drew his. sword and merrily lanced a pear off a stall, tossing down payment. He presented it to his new wife. She unskewered the gift gingerly with polite thanks, her mind elsewhere.
"Why are there no stone buildings, do you think, sir? There is stone aplenty to be had."
They had reached the bridge. He set his hand upon her reins, checking they were out of earshot. "A sensible question. Rumor has it that if a dauphin is born, the King will pull each dwelling around the castle asunder lest plague carry off the child. But there are some he cannot harm. You cannot see them from the castle walls but if you follow the road that runs south, you will find houses carved out of the cliffs. Such dwellings are common in this area and less costly."
"How? Like caves? You have seen them?"
"Not from the inside but I intend to."
"What freedom you have as a man," she sighed. "You can do what pleases you."
"It would please me to—" But he bit back his words, schooling his features into respectful gravity. "I can escort you if you wish. Give me a few days to arrange such matters."
It was excellent that she interested herself in such curiosities; it also gave him further opportunity to steal her away from her duties. There were other matters that deserved her attentiveness.
Across the bridge, beyond the peasant hovels, they finally smelled the blessing of the sweet summer air. Margery's soul, freed of the chateau, stretched invisibly in temporary delight beneath the cloudless hazy blue of the sky.
"The birds belong to the Lord of Concressault. I promised I would exercise them for him," her husband told her over his shoulder as he slackened pace. So things had changed, after all. For an instant, Comet's swishing black tail ahead of her palfrey had reminded her of the road to Exeter. "I will say this now, Margery, and have done. Next time you rush from my presence in such panic, I want reasons and I will not be banned from direct converse with my wife. If we were home in Millom…" He sighed as if he saw the crackle of rebellion beginning to smolder in her face. "I see you do not care for falconry but I need the sport after days of constant negotiating and I would think you need to fly just as much as the hawks."
With that, he touched his spurs to his stallion and the splendid harmony of equine sinew and muscle set a challenge to her palfrey. The wind billowed Margery's light summer cape and veil out behind her and drove the roses into her cheeks. When he slowed his horse to a trot, she was not far behind him and the grin he gave her warmed her unaccountably more than the sun.
He spent the morning putting the short-winged hawks through their paces with the falconer following on foot like a persistent peddler, a constant half pace from his spurs. The birds gripped grumpily onto a wooden frame that hung from the man's shoulders, fluttering furiously now and then to keep their balance. Long and the apprentices cheerfully ran hither and thither bagging the game. Despite the beauty of the morning, Richard was saddened; Error should have been there rolling in the grass and outpacing the other dogs.
Margery winced every time the birds made a kill and after two hours grew hungry and fractious. Huddleston had surprised her with a lady's hawking glove and taught how to hold her wrist but she had felt no rapport with the handsome goshawk. Her husband's businesslike tutoring brought her an exhilaration that the sport did not. To have him touch her without the usual battle of wills afforded her an unlooked-for pleasure.
"You do not approve?" Huddleston finally, to her relief, slipped the leather hood swiftly over the last, sated hawk's head before it could snipe his hand and set it back on the frame.
"I know how the small birds felt." Before she knew it, his gloves were about her waist and she was swung out of the saddle. Did he hear the rumbling in her belly? Had he instructed Long to bring food?
"Ah, we harp upon the same theme again, do we?" He dislodged a pebble with the point of his boot before fixing on her face. "Lady, face the realities of this world. If it had not been I who had tied your jesses to my glove, it would have been another. It is a wonder Warwick did not dispose of you in marriage sooner."
"He was hoping I would take the veil." She brushed away a persistent fly and was surprised when he pruned a switch from a sapling and proffered it to her like a rose.
"So why did you not? In time you could have become an abbess with land to administer, a multitude of servants, even, perhaps, a compliant young chaplain. Your passage through the local shire might have been a spectacle to behold—and you could have had books to your heart's content."
She waved the twigs like a fan. "And calluses on my knees."
"But a self-contained existence, a contract between you and the Almighty, a misericord eventually in Heaven." His irreverence had her laughing. "So why not, Margery?"
"I missed Bella and Anne and Ankarette. Besides, the contemplative life is too rigid, too disciplined. Every moment of the day was set out, whether it was weeding the Mother Abbess's herb garden or getting up at some unbelievably frosty hour to pray. Oh, it would have suited my lord to have presented one member of his family to God. Archbishop Neville—Jesu, he is my uncle, is he not?— spent three hours on my return to Warwick trying to persuade me
to change my mind. It was such hypocrisy. I doubt if he even remembers what the inside of York cathedral looks like since he spent most of last year helping my lord bring the King to heel."
Huddleston was not in total agreement. "There are a lot of clergy like him. On the other hand, you need educated, intelligent men such as Archbishop Neville in positions where they can advise. We both know of noblemen who cannot order a pigsty. The only reason they can manage to stay where they are is because they were born to their positions and have well-trained commoners to keep them there."
"Like you."
"Like me. Life is very unfair. Why should the inept inherit? Are you hungry?"
"As a toothless wolf," she admitted, laughing. "Have you not noticed I have been casting covert glances at Matthew's saddlebags."
"I can see our travels in Devon have spoiled you. We shall be too late for dinner at the chateau. Let us return the birds to the mews and our trophies to the kitchens and then I shall introduce you to a most excellent cookshop."
"Cookshop!" exclaimed Margery in astonishment, her insides reviving at the thought.
He grinned, his hand steering her back to her palfrey. "Aye, unless you want us to trap the local salamanders. I can see that keeping you hungry is the answer. How many pastries would buy a promise from you to behave for the rest of the day?" He tossed her back onto the sidesaddle.
"I am not sure," she said thoughtfully. "How many can you afford?"
With fresh color in her cheeks, Margery looked far from famished by the time Richard finally bestowed her happily at a trestle inside the cookshop and slid onto the bench opposite. Her eyes were everywhere and he could tell she was enjoying herself. Other patrons were staring at her as though she wore her eyes at the end of two antennae but he was pleased she was too hungry to care.
They were alone at the end of a long trestle table that had been politely vacated for them by some deferential apprentices. The large room was hot and dark but surprisingly clean. The other tables were full. A party of merchants was conversing enthusiastically, happily drunk; an artisan and his wife were stolidly eating without conversation; a Franciscan was on his own in a corner; and two townsmen were doing business over sops in wine, arguing solemnly.
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