by Grace Ingram
Gilded Spurs
For as long as he could remember Guy Armourer had cherished an impossible dream of knighthood. He had been bred to his craft by his English stepfather, but he was the bastard son of a Norman lord.
But when Guy and his father came face to face, neither the circumstances of their meeting nor the character of Reynald de Warby augured well. Yet for the sake of the coveted gilded spurs, symbol of knighthood, Guy was prepared to enter Lord Reynald’s uneasy household, to undergo his military training at the hands of a mercenary captain, to live with the knowledge that his father was a monster of evil who practised the Old Religion, and to take his chances with the spells cast to harm him by malicious witches. What he could not tolerate were attempts against Lady Helvie, daughter of his father’s enemy, and like him a bastard of Norman and English blood.
Set during the twelfth century, when England was torn by civil war, this swift, suspenseful story of battles, ambushes, witchcraft and a growing love ranks with Grace Ingram’s fine first novel, Red Adam’s Lady, as a historical novel which is careful in research, vivid in characterization, and lively in narrative.
by the same author
Red Adam’s Lady
Grace Ingram
* * *
GILDED SPURS
COLLINS
St James’s Place, London
1978
William Collins Sons & Co Ltd London • Glasgow • Sydney • Auckland Toronto • Johannesburg
First published 1978 © Grace Ingram 1978 ISBN o 00 821423 7
Set in Baskerville Made and Printed in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd Glasgow
Table of Contents
Gilded Spurs
GILDED SPURS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Dedicated to my first fan
and dear friend Peggy Arnett
who shares my addictions to ruins,
secondhand bookshops
and needlework
Chapter 1
The dawn woods were unnaturally hushed. The big young man on the dun gelding, who had been starting up screeching jays and clattering pigeons since first light, was too much a townsman to appreciate their silence’s significance until a horse whinnied close at hand. Steel glittered between the leaves alongside the track. He hauled fiercely on the pack-horse's leadrope, dug in his spurs and hurtled through the ambush, ducking his head as a bolt hummed past his ear.
Yelling faces streaked back. Then his horse’s legs were snatched from under him. He kicked his feet from the stirrups, catapulting over its head to land on his shoulders. He rolled with the impact, snatching at his dagger, but as he jarred flat a dagger pricked his throat. Rigid, he stared the length of the sword-blade, past the brown hand gripping it to the amused face regarding him,
'Very foolish,’ the ambusher observed. He lowered his hand a trifle, and his victim felt a warm trickle start from the pain and course round his neck. His belly dissolved, but he tightened his lips and waited. Other men were gathering; a half-dozen iron-framed faces looked without feeling from him to their leader. The packhorse peered over one’s shoulder while another briskly disembowelled the panniers.
'Armour, cap’n,’ he reported. ‘A good hauberk, a pair o’ mail chausses, and two helmets—one new, one mended.’
‘Happily encountered,’ said the swordsman. The prisoner snarled. His captor glanced aside at his sprawled feet. The spurs at his heels were of plain steel, unlike his own gilded ones that proclaimed him knight. ‘You’ve no right to bear arms, churl,’ he pointed out reasonably, in a marked Welsh accent. ‘We’ll confiscate them.
‘I’m delivering them to Lord Henry of Trevaine after repair— ’
‘Lord Reynald of Warby will make better use of them.’
‘Warby! You’re near ten miles outside Warby boundaries! ’ He had indeed ridden half the night to achieve that distance.
The swordsman smiled pityingly. ‘You’ve brought us ten miles out of our way. Warby boundaries reach as far as its sword’s point.’ He prodded shrewdly to emphasize his words.
‘Thieving routiers!’
‘Here’s heat! ’ The swordsman withdrew his point, considering him with singularly pale eyes, clear grey with a sharp dark ring about the iris. ‘And for goods not yours.’
‘They’re entrusted to me,’ the young man declared fiercely, thrusting up on one elbow. ‘But what’s honour to a brigand ?’ He rolled over and pushed to his knees, and the point lifted level with his eyes.
‘Disrespectful,’ murmured the Warby captain. ‘We’ll mend your manners with a rope.’
The young man struck the sword up and over his shoulder, launching himself under it at his captor’s legs. His dagger skidded and screeched on the knight’s hauberk-rings as they sprawled into the brambles. Before he could find the chink he aimed for, hands grappled him, wrenched agonizingly and hauled him off. Deft kicks behind his knees forced him down on them. Held so, he watched the knight scramble erect and scowled malevolently up, anger and terror churning within his bowels.
The captain had lost his helmet. He thrust back his mail coif from the face of a Lucifer, a damned angel, and plucked a thorn from his hand with his teeth as he contemplated the captive. ‘Reckless,’ he sighed, and the fair lad crouching at his feet chilled to his vitals. ‘If you’d been meek we’d have dealt gently.’
A square-set ruffian gathered up the fallen dagger and grinned as he tried its edge with his thumb. ‘His eyes first, Captain, or his privates?’
‘Cut out his insolent tongue,’ suggested another.
‘It’s no great matter,’ said Lucifer gently, ‘but we’ll leave his tongue until last, so that he may beg to be hanged.’
‘Wasteful of you,’ the prisoner retorted.
Lucifer’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Wasteful?’
‘I’m a skilled armourer—of whom your hauberk stands in need’ He nodded to a gap beside the knight’s armpit, where a ring was missing.
Lucifer poked a finger into the hole. The garment was too big for his slim body, probably battlefield loot. ‘Satan guards his own,’ he commented. ‘And as I’m a just man, in return for the warning I’ll merely hang you.’
The young man swallowed. ‘Take me before Lord Reynald,’ he commanded.
‘You’re cracked in the wits. Lord Reynald’s devisings make ours seem children’s amusements.’
‘You’ll not deny me—or him.’
‘Why, no,’ the knight conceded instantly. ‘So bold a cockerel should provide rare entertainment.’
He nodded to the troopers, who trussed the captive’s elbows and wrists at his back with savage thongs. One suggested tethering him to a saddle-bow to be dragged afoot to Warby, but the captain decided to save time and their prisoner’s vigour. They led up his own mount, still trembling from the fall. He inspected its grazed knees resentfully. They boosted him up, tied his ankles beneath the beast’s belly, looped the rope that had felled it around his neck and made it fast to Lucifer’s saddle.
‘So if you regain your wits before we reach Warby you may choose to break your neck,’ the knight suggested.
The young man shook his head, and his blue eyes regarded Lucifer with a contempt that pricked him, for he half lifted a hand to strike and then checked. He stared more keenly, and asserted, ‘We’ve met before! I know your face.’
‘No’
Lucifer opened his mouth to dispute it, and then shrugged. ‘Am I to take account of every craftsman I’ve set eyes on?’
The prisoner’s mouth twisted in a grim smile. ‘Your choice.’
Lucifer shrugged again and signalled to his men. They got to horse and started back the way the young man had come, through russet woods under the climbing sun. They baited him with descriptions of Lord Reynald’s ingenuity in devising entertainment upon his captives, which had the ring of grisly truth. He remained unresponsive. The thongs ate into his bound arms, that cramped into torment and then grew numb. Riding along the rough track without their use strained every muscle of his body. His face grew gradually whiter with pain and fatigue. He tightened his jaw, his blond head erect. Some measure of respect at last stilled his escort’s tongues, or his silence defeated them. At length they let him be to endure his discomfort, the plaguing flies and the dust that mingled with sweat on his skin to an itching plaster. The sergeant who had acquired his dagger wrangled with a subordinate over the prospective ownership of the captive’s good blue tunic and chausses.
Lucifer pushed briskly along the upland road and scarcely turned his head. The rope hung slack. They climbed Thorgastone Waste, a league of rocks, thickets and rough grazing that the young man had prudently skirted under last night’s moon, and from its ridge he sighted Warby keep across the valley, its new stone shining pale grey against the dark woods. His weary horse stumbled, and the rope clutched harshly at his throat. Lucifer jerked at it irritably and he lurched in the saddle, strangling until his mount caught up again. The troopers jeered as he gasped and coughed, but the knight moderated his pace.
All life emptied from the village street before they trampled through it. A woman’s voice called urgently to a scurrying urchin, a lame crone hobbled to an open door that slammed behind her heel, and a gaunt cur yelped and fled as they passed. Faces peered dimly round half-doors and shutters, lean pigs and squawking hens scattered from the hooves, and fear hung in the air like the stinks from the steaming middens.
The horses slowed for the climb to the castle on the ridge above the river. A horn bellowed, and the gate in its squat tower swung open. They passed under a portcullis’s menacing teeth, into a sunny bailey, and dismounted. The gate thumped shut. The troopers hauled the captive from his saddle, and one cut the thongs from his arms, which fell uselessly at his sides. He made no attempt to struggle, but met Lucifer’s malicious smile with composure. The knight twitched the rope and led him like a dog across the bailey to the keep, apparently unaware of the hoots and yells, the sympathetic mutters and the stares that followed him.
He mounted a flight of stairs and entered stone-grey gloom. Men casting dice on an upturned shield scrambled to their feet. Lucifer flipped his end of the rope into the nearest pair of hands.
‘He’s Lord Reynald’s meat.’
The fellow grinned, and then made a startling discovery. ‘He’s not afeared, Captain!’
‘I believe you expect Lord Reynald to spare you!’ Lucifer exclaimed.
‘Yes.’
They hooted. ‘As long as it takes him to think o’ some new sport!’ mocked the fellow with the rope. ‘Last man he spitted alive and roasted over the hall fire!’
‘And the one afore that he had took apart joint by joint,’ added another with relish.
‘So I have already been informed.’
‘He’s cracked in the wits,’ a third man declared.
‘All the better sport! ’
‘I’ll wager a month’s pay—’ began the rope-holder, and then checked. ‘God’s Blood, all your gear’s ours, so what have you to bet with?’
‘I wager my life,’ the young man replied, with a small grim smile. His neatly-clipped fair beard did not conceal his mouth; the left corner tilted up and the right down. The trooper flinched, backed a pace, and stared uneasily. All were suddenly silent.
‘Your name and home?’ Lucifer demanded.
‘Guy Armourer of Bristol.’
He turned and made for a curtained corner. His footsteps pattered up a stair. Guy Armourer, very white in the face, moved to a bench against the wall. Life was returning to his numbed arms in a red-hot throbbing of thwarted pulses. He endured in silence, watching his blue and swollen hands gradually turn crimson. The men had returned to their game, and showed a tendency to regard him white-eyed over their shoulders. He perfectly understood the reason for their uneasiness, which was more than they did themselves, but his face betrayed nothing.
The throbbing diminished, and the swelling lessened as the colour of his hands faded to pink. They had not died of the constriction, and his body relaxed against the wall behind him. He gently rubbed his arms. Though grimed from the forge, his hair was so fair that it shone against the stone, and his eyes were sparks of blue light in the gloom.
Other feet descended the stair, deliberate steps accompanied by the tapping of a stick. The curtain lifted, and the men-at-arms flinched like balky horses. One surreptitiously jerked up his hand with the first and last fingers extended, the sign to ward off the Evil Eye. An old woman stalked over the rushes, and they scuttled from her way. The last man yelped as her staff cracked across his rump. She ignored him.
Maybe she had seen three-score years; the wisps of hair escaping from her black kerchief were white, and her pale eyes showed the white rim of age round the iris. Yet there was force in her arm, and the staff was not needed to support her. The prisoner looked up into her face and felt the hairs prickle erect on his spine.
A bony talon gripped his arm, probing the muscles that knotted against her clutch. She gave a harsh chuckle, and her claws dug deeper.
‘Now here’s a fine angry cockerel to please Lord Reynald!’ she proclaimed. ‘An upstanding lad with a blacksmith’s thews, and look at the bold eye of him!’ She slapped his shoulder as though he were flesh on a butcher’s block, then cracked him across the shins with her staff. ‘Up on your feet, cockerel! Where’s reverence for white hairs? Where’s courtesy?’
He did not move. ‘Where it’s due,’ he retorted.
She laughed. ‘And what sport’s to be had out of a craven that squeals at the first tickle? We’ll tame you, bold whelp! You’ll cry and crawl and beg—if you’ve a tongue left to beg with!’
‘Hell will be home to you, when you reach it,’ he answered.
Fury flared in her wizened face; her lips lifted from half a dozen snags of yellow teeth. ‘Crow now, cockerel!’ she spat. ‘I'll remember it when you’re singing another song!’ She jabbed him in the belly, and swung away. Every man-at-arms flattened himself against the wall, wooden-faced and wary, but she stalked across the guardroom and tapped up the stair. Every man released his breath, and as one they moved forward to stand over the captive.
‘You’re mad!’ declared one. ‘That was Wulfrune, Lord Reynald’s old nurse, and she rules him yet.’
‘She’s mistress here more surely than his wife.’
‘She’s a witch!’ said the man who had made the sign to avert the Evil Eye.
‘She’s as crafty as he is in devising torments,’ said the first, 'and takes as much delight in it!’
Guy Armourer said nothing, very eloquently.
They glared at him, obscurely angered by his imperviousness to fear, and returned to their game, but after a few throws one pouched the dice, another set the shield in a rack with a dozen others, and they hunched on the rushes, muttering together.
Soft boots ran down the stair, and Lucifer put his head round the curtain. ‘Lord Reynald’s eager for a relish to his dinner. Fetch him up!’
Guy Armourer rose and moved to the stair. Lucifer lifted his slanted black brows, his pale eyes widening, and led the way. The men-at-arms tramped up behind, but the prisoner did not even glance over his shoulder at them. His only move was to unfasten and loosen the throat-lacing of his tunic. He was nine-tenths certain of being granted his life; whatever qualms the one-tenth doubt induced his face betrayed no
ne of them.
The stairhead opened into the hall, opposite a shallow dais. Just before it a man was adjusting the ends of a rope that had been tossed over a great hook set in a ceiling-beam, and at one side a brazier glowed red, with irons and pincers thrust among the coals. The fellow dropped his rope-ends and skipped aside, and Guy Armourer stared straight into the blue eyes of Reynald de Warby.
He sat in the high chair, a small slight man something past forty, with hair so fair it showed no grey, uncommonly good-looking but for his peevish little mouth. Old Wulfrune leaned on the back of his chair, and on a cushion by his feet sat a lovely girl who was surely his daughter.
The troopers gripped Guy’s arms from behind and thrust him forward, between men and women crowding expectantly. He halted at the dais foot, the rope brushing his shoulder, the brazier’s heat tingling at his other side. Lord Reynald leaned forward, his elbows on the chair arms and his folded hands propping his pointed chin. A small grim smile tilted the left corner of his mouth up and the right down. ‘You resisted my men when they would have taken my rightful toll?’ he asked softly.
‘I fought your thieves.’
‘And you insulted Mistress Wulfrune?’
‘That would not be possible.’
She squawked. ‘This cockerel crows too loud! Make a capon of him!’
‘Does the hen rule this midden?’ the captive enquired.
‘First tear out his ugly tongue,’ suggested the girl, gazing eagerly at the red irons in the brazier.
But Lord Reynald was frowning at the prisoner more in puzzlement than in wrath. ‘Where have I seen your face before ?’
‘In your mirror.’
For a moment surprise stilled them all in mid-breath; then folk began to push and crane and murmur, staring from one blond head to the other. Lord Reynald stiffened, sharply scrutinizing the young man. His beard partly disguised the likeness, but once remarked it was sure enough.
‘You claim to be my bastard?’