Gilded Spurs

by Grace Ingram

  ‘I thought nothing of it.’

  ‘As soon as you’re knighted,’ advised Lucifer with an earnestness entirely at variance with his usual cynical detachment, ‘get out of this devil’s den and take service with some rising lord—the Angevin lad if you believe he’ll be King. You’ll end seneschal of a castle, even sheriff of some county and given an heiress in marriage, if you’ve talent for administration and common diligence. Tourney champion—most likely you’ll never see a battle.’

  He swung about, and Guy stared after his back in double astonishment, first that within Lucifer were to be found the remnants of a human being, and secondly that a man whose livelihood was warfare should speak with such savage yearning of a career devoted to dull stewardship. Guy had dreamed, like every aspirant to knighthood, of distinguishing himself in battle and rising in the world by his prowess. It was difficult to swallow that the learning he had acquired in the cloister was a likelier aid to advancement.

  The next day the manor-court was held. The priest was still sick. Guy had escorted Lady Mabel on a visit to his side, and found him feverish and coughing, but a little improved. Today he must sit by Lord Reynald’s high chair to keep the rolls. The first matters were tedious enough; allocation of strips in the barley field before the spring sowing; the making-up of plough teams, appointment of next year’s reeve, hayward and the like. There were the miller’s tallies and dues to check, payments of heriot and marriage-fees, a vacant holding to be allotted.

  Finally they reached the criminal offences. These were petty enough; one man suspected of theft, Guy was not surprised to learn, had fled the manor. ‘Set him down outlawed, and all his goods confiscated,’ Lord Reynald instructed Guy, and turned on the half-dozen shivering offenders herded before him by the reeve, whose knees were scarcely steadier. He was more eager for silver than for blood, and imposed fines to the limit of the peasants’ resources. Two men who could not pay were ordered fifty lashes each, and Lord Reynald led the company out to the bailey to witness their administration while Guy remained to set down their crimes. ‘Trespass with dog on demesne land to take hare . . . Permitting cow to stray in Lord’s cornfield . . He wiped his pen, sanded the wet ink, tipped the sand back into the caster, and rolled up the parchment. The screaming had begun in the bailey. He had seen floggings in plenty and thought little enough of them, but he did not want to witness these. He sat on at the table. After dinner he would ride abroad to rid his mouth of the flavour Warby left in it, and resolved to ride towards the ford and return by Thorgastone.

  Guy’s luck was with him. As he reached the crossroads Helvie de Trevaine and her groom were approaching from her father’s hold, and he hoped it seemed entirely natural to halt and wait for them.

  ‘God save you, Lady Helvie. A happy encounter.’

  ‘God save you, Master Guy.’ She smiled at him. The groom scowled.

  ‘If you ride to Thorgastone, may I escort you?’

  ‘You may.’ He reined his mount round to her right hand, and she appraised him candidly. Since their first encounter he had relinquished his beard, and this, oddly, emphasized his dissimilarity to his sire. From some other forebear he had derived a wide mouth and a chin that was square and slightly cleft. Being as vain as most men, he knew the style became him, and that his shining fall of hair, nearer silver than gold, was the envy of every girl in Warby.

  ‘Lady Helvie, your father won’t be pleased,’ growled the groom.

  ‘If you must tell him. I’ll face his wrath.’

  ‘Lady Helvie—’

  ‘Do you choose my company, Sweyn? And where’s the harm?’

  Guy recognized his duty. ‘My lady, I must not embarrass you with my presence,’ he said formally.

  ‘You don’t. Ride along. I did not render you adequate thanks for your services that night, Master Guy.’

  ‘It was my pleasure, demoiselle.’

  ‘Even to sharing the brat’s lice?’

  He grimaced. ‘I’ll except them. But we found him before the wolves did, and it’s my Slut we owe thanks for that.’

  The Slut lifted her head at the sound of her name, and the girl regarded her with interest and respect.

  ‘She looks first cousin to a wolf herself.’

  ‘Her sire was one. Her dam was a mastiff bitch that broke her tether and ran off to the woods in heat, and at first sight of her whelps her master knocked them on the head and threw them into the river. I heard this one crying in the reeds and swam to take her up, and then withstood everyone who tried to make me throw her back.’

  ‘So stiffening your resolution. They should have known better. But it could not have been easy?’

  ‘Oh, I procured a mongrel bitch to suckle her, and she thrived. Time for her schooling was hard to come by, but she has a wolf’s wits and learned fast. My brother called her a misbred slut, and the name stuck.’

  The girl inspected the bitch more particularly. She had the mastiff’s heavy muzzle and broad head, and for the rest was an uncommonly stocky wolf. ‘She’s—imposing. She could kill a man.’

  ‘She has done.’

  ‘What manner o’ brute is that to take among Christians?’ Sweyn demanded.

  ‘Why, are they Christians in Warby?’ his mistress retorted. Her teeth gleamed white in her brown face. Her laughter warmed Guy.

  ‘He’s no business outa Warby!’ Sweyn grumbled.

  ‘Have you no respect for your neck, to venture it over my father’s boundary?’ she mocked Guy.

  ‘No respect for his boundaries, you mean?’

  ‘Take care you’re not suspended from a wayside tree to mark them.’

  ‘How dismally practical, one’s carcase used as a scarecrow.’

  ‘It would serve, while the winter lasts.’

  ‘If that’s what you intend by me, demoiselle, I must decline to ride with you.’

  ‘Now how could Sweyn and I achieve so much?’

  Guy knew his duty was to ride away, but he could not, for courtesy and his manhood’s pride. Half amused, half alarmed, and wholly fascinated, he chose imprudence, and raised a hand to his threatened neck. ‘Jesting apart. Lady Helvie, why did you permit me to ride with you?’

  ‘I confess to my share of curiosity.’

  ‘Curiosity?’

  ‘All the neighbourhood clacks about you. I’ve heard—’ she ticked the items off one by one on her fingers—‘that you must be a renegade monk, you are armoured against your father’s wrath and Wulfrune’s spells, too friendly with your stepmother and at feud with your half-sister. I wished to see more of such a portent.’

  ‘Before someone makes an end of him.’

  ‘Especially I would learn how a renegade monk served a craftsman’s apprenticeship.’

  ‘When I was nine my parents offered me to the monastery. After four years the Abbot bade them take me away.’

  ‘I’m surprised he tolerated you so long.’

  ‘Oh, the Abbot was almost as obstinate as I am. It was the novice-master begged him be rid of me while he kept his sanity.’

  ‘A repellent whelp you must have been.’

  ‘I escaped. And don’t waste sympathy on the novice-master; the qualification for that office is a strong arm with the birch rather than scholarship or understanding.’

  ‘Little use they’d be without the strong arm.’

  He laughed. ‘I’m prejudiced. Most of the last year I couldn’t sit down with any ease. But I won.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘My father—my mother’s husband—took me as his apprentice.’

  ‘Then it was not he who’d be rid of you?’

  Her insight startled him, and he made haste to do justice to Kenric. ‘He was the best of fathers. Though he got six children of his own after me, he used me always as his eldest son.’

  She was perceptive enough to probe no further. ‘One side and the other, you’re amply provided with kindred of the half-blood.’

  ‘Rohese I’d happily part with,’ he said, grimacing. �
��And you, Lady Helvie?’

  ‘You know I’ve none! ’ she exclaimed, anger flaring. ‘That was the curse your father laid on mine!’

  Guy stared at her. ‘What curse?’

  ‘In seed and breed and generation, that no son should ever call him father.’

  ‘Lady Helvie, this is the first I’ve heard of it.’

  She considered him, her anger receding, and nodded. ‘I suppose it’s so old a tale none has thought to tell it you.’

  ‘Amend that neglect, my lady, will you?’

  ‘It happened between kings, when word came that King Henry was dead and before Stephen was crowned, and there was no law in the land.’

  Guy understood; a King’s peace and a King’s law died with him, and until his successor had been crowned and anointed men might do as they dared. ‘So Lord Reynald raided Thorgastone?’

  ‘Yes. And killed and tortured and raped and burned. My grandmother was one they murdered. But some escaped, and in his arrogance Lord Reynald took no thought of consequences, for they roused Trevaine. When my father rode to avenge his folk they were beast-drunk and still at their filthy pleasures, no guards set. My father’s men hunted and killed them among the blazing houses, and in the morning hanged those still alive from the oak in front of the church. Lord Reynald was taken.’

  ‘Justice and prudence suggest your father would have done well to swing him likewise,’ commented Lord Reynald’s son.

  ‘One nobly-born knight doesn’t so use another, and besides, where’s the profit from a dead man? He demanded a ransom enough to beggar Warby for your father’s lifetime, and Lord Reynald swore to lay the curse on him if he didn’t release him freely. Of course my father put no faith in his threats, and wouldn’t forgo a clipped farthing. They say his wife was afraid, and wept and pleaded, but he held out for his price. He has rued it since.’

  ‘The curse was real?’ Guy crossed himself, and raised a hand to press the talisman that guarded him against witchcraft. The horses had slowed to a walk.

  ‘She was with child, and near her time. They had been married for years, and this was the first; all their hopes were set on it. It was a hard travail. She was in labour four days, and the boy stillborn. When she was told, Lady Clemence went mad.’

  ‘Holy Saviour!’ Appalled, Guy crossed himself again. ‘Quite witless, and stayed so to the end of her days. She’d sit and sew baby-linen, and sing to herself, biddable as a little child, but she couldn’t abide the sight of a man. If one came near her she’d run screaming, or cower in a corner as though she’d force herself into the stones. My father brought in priests and physicians and wise women, but no one could recover her wits, so in the end he built her a little house at the end of the garden, and she lived there with a couple of serving-maids and my mother to tend her until she died last winter.’

  ‘God rest the poor lady’s soul.’ At mention of her mother he looked at her with curiosity.

  ‘My mother was a sewing-maid in her service, and loved her lady so that when others flinched or sniggered she stayed to care for her. That made my father notice her, and he found comfort in her; she was no light strumpet. But the curse lay on her too. She bore me within the year, sturdy as you see, but the three boys were blighted from the womb; they sickened, turned yellow and died before their week was out. After them came stillbirths and miscarrying as Lord Reynald and his witch-nurse strengthened their spell.’

  ‘Your father has taken a new wife.’

  ‘Yes, and she’s pregnant. He has set his hope on an heir at last, and he’s in terror lest the curse should destroy this one too.’

  ‘I understand why he would be happy to hang me.’

  ‘His enemy’s tall son for his own dead infants.’ She gazed steadfastly at her horse’s ears, and they jogged in silence, their mounts’ hooves squelching in mire and dead leaves.

  ‘Failing this child, who is your father’s heir, my lady?’

  ‘His brother. He’s in Normandy, in the Duke’s service.’ Few men would provide more than the barest duty required for a brother’s bastard, Guy reflected. He watched her, wondering at his own interest; she was not even pretty. At best she had merely a blunt-featured comeliness, fresh colour still overlaid with summer’s tan, and a robust body of small appeal to a man who preferred his women little and dark and dainty. Fellow-feeling for another bastard it might be, but sympathy quickened in him.

  ‘Before your father brought home a new wife he should have found you a husband, Lady Helvie.’

  She grimaced. ‘May it be long before a knight’s fee falls vacant and he can find a knight to match with it.’

  Guy stared. ‘Don’t you wish to marry?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘But—but do not all woman wish—?’

  ‘To be handed over with a parcel of land to some heavy-fisted lout who fancies the bargain?’

  It was a definition of marriage that Guy had never encountered before, and it took him several moments to assimilate it. ‘But not all husbands are heavy-fisted louts,’ he objected.

  ‘What’s the difference between a husband and a raptor, beyond a priest’s intervention?’

  ‘A few of us,’ he declared, nettled by that wholesale condemnation, ‘profess some decency.’

  ‘I’ve never yet encountered a man I’d willingly be yoked to.’

  ‘But how else can a woman live?’

  ‘She has no other choice but a nunnery.’

  ‘Holy Mother, a rare sort of nun you’d make!’

  ‘No, that’s not for me. I’ll have to reconcile myself in the end to some brute whose size and strength give him the mastery.’

  ‘But,’ Guy expostulated, ‘it is ordained in Holy Writ —’

  ‘Our Lord said nothing of it.’

  ‘Saint Paul commanded, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands.” ’

  ‘Saint Paul,’ she stated unanswerably, ‘was a man.’

  ‘The world standing as it does,’ he commented, ‘you’ll have no choice but to conform. You’ll have an establishment of your own to govern, and children to rear.’

  ‘And the hope of widowhood to sustain me.’

  ‘You—er—regard that as the happiest state of woman?’ he enquired, his voice shaking with suppressed laughter.

  ‘A well-provided widowhood, of course.’

  ‘Has your father any candidate to hand, may I ask?’

  ‘None. And he has promised not to give me against my will.’

  ‘Then you may take heart.’

  ‘I may hope at least not to take a husband who will kick me in the belly when I’m six months gone.’

  He stared at her without words.

  ‘Oh, don’t pretend ignorance!’ she said impatiently. ‘You must know it’s a favourite way to be rid of an unwanted wife.’

  He nodded. ‘It’s a foul thought, but—yes.’

  ‘Twice I’ve known it, and no justice done on the man. It’s his right to chastise his wife, isn’t it? And if he’s too enthusiastic, a pity, but there are women in plenty to be had.’

  Guy nodded again, and reflected that he would be an unwise husband who set about chastising this bitter girl. ‘But why tell this to me, or to any man?’

  Her brows lifted in surprise. ‘I’m safe enough. There’s no chance on this earth that my father would ever make me marry you.’

  He gasped as if she had smitten the wind out of him. ‘Safe enough—’ His first reaction was anger, and then his odd sense of humour prevailed and he doubled over the pommel in rib-straining mirth.

  She scowled at him, reddening. He glanced up in time to see a reluctant smile tug at her mouth’s corners, and all at once she grinned. ‘I’ve longed for years to speak my mind to a man.’

  ‘In complete safety,’ Guy agreed gravely. He suddenly realized that it was no matter for jest. He had an imagination, however seldom it stirred, and he wondered how it would be to be born a woman, condemned to a lifetime of subservience, the pains and perils of child-bear
ing, household cares and the bringing up of children. Most women seemed to accept their fate; they married the men their parents chose for them and laboured with them to live. For the girl bound to a brutal husband there was no escape in this world but widowhood, and he wondered uneasily how many obedient wives secretly cherished that hope. A rare girl like this one, of courage and spirit and temper that few husbands would tolerate, had reason to rebel. Then, shockingly, he saw why Helvie was no common girl. Most were trained from infancy into submission. He recalled how rigorously his mother had disciplined every spark of independence out of his lively little sisters. Lord Henry de Trevaine’s only child had grown up in a freedom few maids were allowed.

  ‘You don’t seem shocked. What are you thinking?’ she challenged.

  ‘That your father has wronged you, letting you run free when it is woman’s fate to be shackled.’

  ‘I was the son he never had. You reckon I should have been broken to the shackles from the first?’

  ‘Would you not be happier so?’

  She looked at him, about her at the woods, and shook her head, drawing a long breath that brought his gaze to her breasts. ‘No. I have run free, even if I must be chained.’

  ‘God send you a husband of understanding then, my lady.’

  ‘Is there such a creature?’

  The woods were thinning, and Guy recognized landmarks; a crooked oak, a tall ash growing from a tangle of blackthorn. The girl drew rein. ‘We part here. And you must not seek me out again.’

  Startled, he parried the thrust. ‘Demoiselle?’

  ‘Don’t pretend. Last time was chance, this was not. I’ve no wish to pass your corpse swinging by the way every time I visit my mother.’

  ‘I suppose it might diminish your pleasure,’ he agreed lightly, concealing disappointment. ‘Perhaps on occasion—’

  ‘No. This once I can perhaps persuade Sweyn to hold his tongue, but not again. Someone will probably tell my father even so; there are always eyes to see what you’d not have known, and tongues to make mischief. I’ll not be your death.’