by Grace Ingram
She appraised him candidly. “A Lorismond surely. You’ve a great look of my kinsman Maurice, God rest him. You must be the baby we saw born in Saint Osburga’s nunnery near Bristol?”
He shook his head. “I was born by a roadside in Provence.”
“You’re sure?” she asked foolishly. “He was such a beautiful redhaired baby. Maurice brought the mother to the nunnery for succor. A kinsman’s widow she was. So very young to be widowed, so golden and pretty.”
“Too old,” observed the serving woman behind her chair. “It’ll be but eighteen years come Easter. Year afore we come her.”
“I’m two-and-twenty,” Red Adam told her, “and my father outlived my mother.”
“But I don’t understand. Maurice told me, that visit before he died, he’d sent for his heir. His last legitimate kinsman, he said, and I was sure that must have been our baby. Emma here was midwife, and I washed and swaddled him—a fine strong child, and without doubt a Lorismond. There’s no mistaking the hair, is there? Maybe he died; so many babies do. I bore three myself, but they all died before they were out of swaddling bands.” She looked down at the sleeping puppies, and stroked their soft bodies; then her oddly innocent eyes lifted to survey Red Adam again. “I’m Maurice’s father’s cousin’s widow, you know. I never did find out whose widow Constance was; she was too grieved to talk of it.”
The servant’s skeptical snort rang like a worhorse’s. “Not her! Heartless little strumpet, and no widow at all, I’ll wager!”
“Shame, Emma! That’s prejudice and scandal-mongering. I’ve reckoned the kin over and over. My husband’s brother was childless, and his sister a nun. Such an ugly girl, but then, red hair and freckles are very unbecoming to a female. But there was another cousin, and I did hear he had two sons, Aymar and Arnulf. I supposed she’d been married to one of them.”
Again Red Adam shook his head. “Aymar died unmarried. Arnulf was my father.”
“She was Maurice’s leman,” Emma declared, “and the boy his bastard. I’ve told you often enough.”
“Maurice would not lie to me—”
“He couldn’t tell the Reverend Mother one tale and you another,” Emma pointed out. “You’re too trustful, m’ lady.”
Julitta dared not look at her husband. “What happened to the baby?” she asked.
“I never learned. Maurice came and fetched them both away that summer, before little Geoffrey was two months old. He told me he’d found a husband for Constance. Was it all lies?” She looked up at Red Adam, easy tears brimming in her eyes, her voice plaintive and bewildered. “You mean she wasn’t… she was… oh, I’d never have believed Maurice could have deceived me so!”
“It’s a way men have,” Red Adam said, wryly gentle. He took the agitated hands. “She was another man’s wife, and Lorismond brats are known by the headmark. Forgive him and let be; it’s eighteen years past, and he’s dead.”
“Old sins cast long shadows,” Emma croaked, and gave him a peculiar look. Julitta wondered how much she knew, and whether talk of a strange Lorismond boy at Crossthwaite had penetrated to the convent kitchens. Servants and serfs knew everything about their betters, and news flew on the wind.
“All those lies!” Lady Cecily mourned, tears dripping from her chins and spotting her dingy gown. “But it was his weakness; all Lorismonds are fools over women. I dare say you’re one too, and I should be sorry for Julitta here, but they are always kind to their wives even when they’re most unfaithful, so I suppose she’ll forgive you. Though Julitta—a dear girl, and so clever with her needle and skilled with simples—but she is rather inflexible, so don’t be flagrant about it, like Maurice, will you? He’d seduce Bertrade’s serving maids, and the girls give themselves such airs a wife’s bound to resent it. And it makes for such an unsettled household.”
“That’s excellent counsel,” said Red Adam with admirable composure. Julitta avoided his eyes.
Lady Cecily shook her head mournfully. “Do heed it, dear boy. It’s the family failing. Poor Maurice couldn’t resist a pretty girl, and look what befell—at least, no one knows what befell, but he rued it to the day he died. Besides, it’s so uncomfortable—unless you’re married to a jellyfish, and dear Julitta isn’t that. I mean, marriage is for a lifetime, and I don’t know whether it’s worse if she forgives you or doesn’t when you have to live with it, so for your own sake as well as hers, dear boy, do be discreet—”
“If I can’t be faithful,” he finished gravely.
“Lorismonds never are. And blatant too. So a timely word, I thought, as you’re new married—people are so uncharitable, and there’s talk of that wench you brought, and Julitta’s a girl of such hardy spirit—”
“Such a vixen, you mean. I shan’t dare transgress.”
Julitta, ruffling in ready protectiveness, subsided. His amusement was kindly. Having accepted Lady Cecily’s admonitions meekly, he seated himself behind the chessboard at her first hint that she would welcome a fresh opponent, and never stirred when a puppy lifted a leg against his boot. She watched the play. Lady Cecily’s father, she had often been told, had bred her up to it. Her game was unexpectedly shrewd, Red Adam’s erratically brilliant. She would like to match with him herself, she thought, following the battle. He paid the old woman the compliment of winning, and they smiled at each other over the pieces.
His stool scraped on the flagstones. “I regret your revenge must be postponed, Lady Cecily, until our next encounter,” he said, towering above renewed yelps and scrabblings. “We’d best begone if we’re to return in daylight.” He hesitated, his face hardening. “I’ve warned the Abbess, but I fear she reckons me unduly alarming. The Scots are over the Border, and they are no respecters of nunneries.”
“Dear boy, I’m old enought to remember ’thirty-eight.”
“Be ready to run.” He looked at Emma. “Prepare your bundles; food, warm clothing, money and jewels. If I prove unduly alarming, I’ll thank God.”
“Good lad,” Emma grimly commended.
They both reduced him to the status of a ten-year-old urchin, but he accepted it in amiable deference to their years. He knelt with Julitta to receive the old lady’s blessing; she kissed them both, and bestowed on her a silver brooch, whispering in her ear, “Not too inflexible, dear girl.”
At the gate, where their bored escort hurriedly broke off dicing and scrambled for the horses, he surveyed the head-high wall of unmortared stone that enclosed the nunnery buildings. It would hardly impede a scrambling brat, let alone a loot-crazed Galloway wolf. Behind the enclosure trees scattered and failed as the ground climbed to bare fells dyed by flowering heather; before them the open fields dropped away to the narrowing valley where dark woods closed in menace. In the saddle, he turned again, searching the purple tops as though he thought to see Scots bursting from the sky and streaming over the slopes.
Peasants were straggling home from the fields to the huddle of huts near the gate. Red Adam beckoned one to his stirrup and in halting, careful English repeated his warning. He was understood. The man’s face of alarm, his urgent thanks, his hasty summoning of neighbors showed that indeed ‘thirty-eight was not forgotten in the North. Red Adam frowned again at the gate, and then impatiently urged his horse into a canter.
“At least they’re warned,” he said grimly. “Not that there’s much use in warning the she-weasel of what she doesn’t wish to heed. But that good old woman—”
“She’s silly, but so kind.”
“Simple, but not silly. She spoke rare sense. Witness our King’s example. He insulted his high-couraged Queen with his low-born paramours, and she’s bred up his sons against him.”
They approached the woods, and he signaled to the six-archer escort following two by two. Four took station fifty yards ahead, Odo and the other two dropped back a similar distance. “Any suspicious sight or sound, yell and spur straight through,” he ordered. “That’s the last thing ambushers expect.” He checked his sword’s oiled movement in its
scabbard. Julitta glanced into his face and surreptitiously touched her knife’s hilt. His mouth twisted wryly, and then he frowned.
“We should have stayed behind walls,” he admitted. “I’m a fool. I could have borne with that dripping misery a little longer.”
“You expect—?”
“I’ve the scent of trouble in my nostrils. Unchancy times to ride abroad. But at least the warning’s gone forth.”
Yet the dusty miles spun back beneath their horses’ hooves, and the woods were quiet. Birds and beasts, alerted by the advance guards’ passage, were hushed and hidden, and only the chuckle of hurrying water and the dry leaves’ whisper accompanied the clatter of iron shoes. Rainclouds were blowing up behind them, darkening the evening as they swallowed the sinking sun. At the derelict cottage where the Ladies’ Delight had waylaid Julitta they halted briefly to breathe the horses before the long climb out of the valley, and swung down to ease their legs.
“It’s just reached my addled wits,” said Red Adam, “that you’re an uncommonly forbearing vixen. Here I’ve bereft you of your one honest serving maid, and you’ve not torn my ears off.”
“An oversight. Would it have availed me?”
“No. But in truth I’ve brought you to a wretched household. You should have a dozen demoiselles of good family to attend you, not a handful of insolent strumpets. Though how I’m ever to provide them the Devil knows.”
“They will come, she said serenely. “No careful parent would place his child in Lord Maurice’s charge to be debauched, but when your peers know that ours is a decent household we shall have demoiselles of good breeding, and pages and squires too, to train up.”
“Hell’s Teeth, can you imagine a peer of mine sending a maiden daughter to be trained up in my household?”
“Not easily, but if your access of virtue should last long enough—”
He laughed outright, and she warmed with pleasure. “I’ve a horrid foreboding, wife, that you’ll reform me into the virtuous head of that seemly household.”
“Consider its advantages. At least you’d not need guard against affronted husbands.”
“I’ll be far too frightened of my vixen wife,” he agreed, his face alight with mirth. He glanced up at the sky behind her, and beckoned Odo to bring up the horses. The tame bear’s face was creased with bewilderment as he looked from one to the other, unable to match his own opinion of Julitta to his master’s frank delight in her. Red Adam swung her up with a grimace for his bruises; his ribs had proved intact, but gaudily sore. Odo scowled and fell in behind.
They passed unchallenged through the woods, and came through spitting rain into Brentborough village as the dusk shut down. Dim candleshine illumined the church windows. Red Adam glanced aside at the three raw graves in a row, and crossed himself, his lips moving. Then he looked rather oddly at Julitta, his face shadowed.
“I’d come to loathe him, but he’d been nearly a year beside me.”
“You miss him.”
“Yes. A foolish matter; he was the only person left to call me by name.”
The words fell bleakly, and in vivid insight Julitta saw him exposed naked; not the wild young lord, arrogant in his honors, but the harried lad encompassed by enemies and burdened by responsibilities to which he had never been bred—and unlike her, he did not find them exhilarating.
“My wife might,” Red Adam suggested, “if it pleased her.”
Startled, she stared mistrustfully. He offered an uncommon privilege, and in her softened humor she might have agreed to his appeal, had she not recognized that acceptance entailed capitulation. He smiled at her, and she read sureness in that smile. The hatred of her enforced marriage day had worn away little by little as she lived with him, but a small remaining core of resentment hardened at his confidence; she was not to be cozened so easily.
“My lord, it would not be seemly,” she answered woodenly.
“And you’re not truly my wife.” Her refusal had smitten the smile from his mouth. “Julitta, a bargain. If ever you do call me by name, I shall know that you are my wife.”
She considered it a moment. “Agreed.”
The horses quickened their pace up the last incline, eager for their warm stables and well-filled mangers. A head moved against the gray sky in a crenel above the gateway, a helmet glinting. An order rasped. The drawbridge’s planks, hoisted in their faces, stirred and groaned, descending with ponderous precision a yard from the hooves of Red Adam’s mount, so that he trod it without breaking stop. They clattered across, beneath the portcullis’s teeth and into the arch’s black tunnel, the rearguard crowding close. The portcullis clashed down unbidden behind the last horse’s tail. Red Adam, swinging from his saddle as he reached the bailey, turned a startled face.
“Who—ah!”
Four men, standing unseen, flattened against the inner wall, pounced forward. A single cry of surprise was jarred out of him as he went down under their onslaught, and was answered by a bellow. Julitta’s palfrey reared up whinnying with terror at the scrimmage under his nose, and as she fought to control him, men sprang from every shadow. Odo charged roaring from the gateway, his right hand pointed with a stripe of light, straight for the first person he encountered. Julitta’s screech mingled with Red Adam’s breathless yell, “No, Odo!” The impact sent both rolling, a voice she knew squalled rage and pain, others flung themselves upon the pair. Someone caught the palfrey’s head and brutally mastered him, squealing and plunging; other horses were neighing frantically. She loosed the reins, and then arms wrenched her headlong from the saddle and pinned her fast. She stood still in their hold, a familiar laugh triumphant in her ears.
Red Adam, his wrists lashed behind his back, his swordbelt, spurs and weapons in his captors’ hands, his face and tunic patched with mud, was hauled erect. Odo was less easily subdued; twice he heaved up like a baited bear hurling off the dogs, before they clubbed him half-senseless with spearbutts and bound him fast. Others assisted Lord William of Chivingham to unsteady feet. He was nursing one hand in the other, dark-dripping, and swearing savagely. The pity was, Julitta thought bleakly, that his hauberk had saved his belly.
She looked about her. Her cousins Gilbert and Gautier were supporting their father, Gerald of Flackness stood swinging Red Adam’s swordbelt, and beyond them she recognized the redhaired boy’s shocked face.
“He drew steel on his lord!” Humphrey of Crossthwaite proclaimed, his breath warm in her hair. “Hang him!”
“God’s Death, he all but murdered me!” snarled Lord William, cherishing his gashed hand.
“He defended his master—you’re no lord of his!” Red Adam exclaimed sharply.
“God’s Head, you’ll learn who rules inside these walls!” Humphrey checked, and as an afterthought recited, “I have taken possession of Brentborough on behalf of its rightful lord Geoffrey, son of Maurice de Lorismond, in the name of our true King Henry, third of that name.”
“Two thieving whelps!” Red Adam snapped, contemptuously glancing at his kinsman. Gerald of Flackness swung about and clouted him across the face, right and left, while his guards held him braced to the blows. His nose began to bleed. The redhaired boy exclaimed in protest. Odo lurched erect, straining against the ropes and tugging his foes this way and that.
“Take the knave out and string him up!” Lord William ordered.
“Ah, no!” the boy cried. “I am Lord of Brentborough—I can pardon him.”
“That you can’t, you puling monk! You’re not of age, and in my wardship. He hangs.”
“But my lord … unjust… he was loyal to his master!”
“What’s loyalty to do with it? He’s a churl who let noble blood.”
“What do you know of loyalty,” Julitta raged, “when every servant in your household will skip for joy at your burial?”
His bloody hand slapped against her cheek, beating her head back against Humphrey’s chin. Her eyes watered, but she snarled back at him. Humphrey chuckled, tightened his hold
that gripped her arms to her sides, and shifted a hand to fondle her breast.
“Enough, enough!” Geoffrey entreated. “This is evil you do—to abuse prisoners and hang a brave churl for faithfulness.”
“In God’s Name!” Red Adam protested passionately. “Your spite’s for me, not my poor fool! Isn’t my life enough? I beg you—on my knees if it please you—spare him.”
An uneasy stir among the guards endorsed his appeal. Odo, standing still now among them, said wonderingly, “Lord Adam!”
“Think what you do!” Geoffrey charged them. “Whose man will defend his master at such a price?”
“He hangs,” Lord William pronounced. “Without this example, what’s to keep other knives from our backs?”
“In the Name of Christ, “ Red Adam pleaded, wrenching against the hands that held him. Another blow in the face snapped his head back, and only their grip kept him on his feet.
“Take him out!” Lord William ordered, and the portcullis creaked up.
“A priest—your own soul’s at peril if you murder him unshriven,” the boy croaked, sick with horror.
A jerked hand, and a man went running for Father Simon. The whole company moved out into the drizzling twilight, Julitta and Red Adam forced along with them, to the foot of the gallows beside the track to the village. The priest came, ventured objection, and was grimly bidden to do his office and leave justice to his betters. He was not of the stuff that makes martyrs. Julitta stood in paralyzing nightmare as the business was concluded.
Odo died with the stolid hardihood she expected of him, with a brief, “God aid you, dear m’ lord,” as the noose was adjusted. It was Red Adam who broke.
“Odo!” As the swinging body threshed and twisted, his cry tore through the priest’s drone and strangled to a sob. Tears of grief and helpless fury streaked through the mud and blood. “God damn you all to Hell’s fire, you murdering recreants! Now kill me too and make an end, or I’ll avenge him!”