‘Cousin, it would be seemly if you respected Lady Hermeline’s wishes!’ Oliver de Collingford rebuked her peevishly.
‘You need not fear I shall flee to the nearest convent,’ the tall girl told him calmly. ‘At least, not until I have seen what next you choose for my husband.’
‘Let me tell you, cousin,’ he snapped, ‘that a husband for you will be hardly come by!’
‘Vallaroy will clinch the bargain, cousin, unless you ask too high a price.’
She left them wildly seeking an answer to the unanswerable and pressed past to join Sir Ranulf, who was chewing his nether lips to control his emotions, his face a deeper scarlet than nature had painted it. Hélie, vastly appreciative, followed close lest his own face betray his appreciation.
He was probably the only person present to observe an odd little incident. A woman near the gateway, a boldly handsome creature in a good blue gown, lifted her clenched right hand clear of its folds at her side and pointed it at Durande, the first and little fingers thrusting out like horns. Considerably startled, Hélie stooped to follow Durande under the arch. It was the sign to ward off the Evil Eye, and it did not require a moment's thought to realize why the wench should believe she possessed it.
If he had met Durande de Vallaroy formally at supper last night he would have felt vaguely sorry for her and given her no second thought, he knew. This morning she was a sight to make a husband blench. An ugly, ill-fitting grey-brown dress did its utmost to disguise her splendid body, and no more unbecoming headdress than a wimple could have been devised for her. All her hair was coiled away under it. The fillet hid her broad brow, the barbette the clean lines of jaw and chin, so that her heavy eyebrows, straight nose and full mouth confronted the world all unsweetened. She gave an impression of physical strength and competence, qualities few men find attractive.
Hélie glanced back at his companions and wondered why he had chosen to ride with them. He had never been well acquainted with Oliver de Collingford, a childless widower six or seven years his senior, nor with his weasel-faced sire, an omission he neither regretted nor intended to repair. About Fulbert of Falaise his mother's ceaseless discourse had been informative. He was a Norman knight's bastard who had achieved the captaincy of a troop of routiers, found King John's favour by means best not inquired into, and been granted a small fief a few miles away. Further services had been rewarded, to the scandal of the whole nobility, with the wardship of an infant heir and the hand of the boy's widowed mother. He promptly got the lady with child, and was looking forward to a long minority and tenancy in courtesy of the lady's dower lands for the rest of his lifetime, when all was snatched from his grasp. Some ailment of infancy carried off the ward, the lady miscarried and died of it, and Fulbert was obliged to restore all they had brought him to the lady's brother-in-law. The King's loss of Normandy had deprived him of employment, and he was trying to support an expensive mercenary troop on his own inadequate resources, and looking about him for another heiress to support him in the manner to which he had been briefly accustomed.
Fulbert of Falaise, Hélie reflected, would bear watching. In fact, the more he contemplated the noisome brew being fermented at Warby, the greater was his relief that he had decided to lend no hand to stir it. He would tend his estates, fight when the King summoned him, and marry by sober treaty. He had had his bellyful of the south's bloody lawlessness, and his memories of courteous love came between him and sleep at nights. He thrust the golden ghost of Osanne de Périval back into the Hell where she had been despatched unshriven in mortal sin, and pushed ahead to Sir Ranulf's stirrup.
The girl silently inclined her head and dropped behind. They had been presented that morning, on the way to the village church to hear Mass, but neither by word nor sign had she betrayed recognition. Hélie parted his lips to ask her company, and then closed them. The choice was hers, and she thought it wiser not to know him. His mind was troubled for her, too wise and hard and wary for her sixteen years, with so much enmity ranged about her.
‘A good lass that, Lord Hélie,' the marshal commented abruptly. ‘A rare steady head for a girl, and if ever I fell ill, which God forbid, I would sooner see her by my bed than a dozen leeches. All the virtues of herbs and simples in her head, and a proper chirurgeon too.'
‘A demoiselle of uncommon parts,' Hélie answered lightly, concealing the interest that pricked him.
Sir Ranulf turned a quelling grey eye upon him. ‘Do not be misled by Lady Hermeline, my lord,' he admonished him. ‘A sweet lovely lady, but not much reason to her fancies, as you should know.' After that somewhat infelicitous observation he lowered his fine penetrating commander's voice to a muted growl. ‘And between you and me, Lord Hélie, daft over Lord Robert. Reckoned the sun turned about him.'
Hélie grinned. ‘Lady Durande would hardly be her choice of sister-in-law.'
‘Aye, the lass is well out of that match. Something soft and pretty was what Lord Robert wanted. Set my teeth on edge, though, to hear him abuse the lass on one hand and press the match on the other.'
‘Her dower?'
The shrewd eyes were very bright and alert under shaggy grizzled eybrows. ‘Neck-deep in debt to the Jews, he was, Lord Hélie, and desperate for money.'
‘But surely those kinsmen have picked Vallaroy clean during their wardship?'
‘The lady's father knew them, my lord. When he fell ill he gave his plate, jewels and every penny he could scratch together into the Templars' keeping. No touching it until her husband claims it. And they want their share.'
Hélie grinned appreciatively; he knew the Templars' arrogant integrity. King John himself could not lay hand on what was entrusted to them. ‘A far-sighted man,' he said, hoping to divert the marshal from these embarrassing confidences.
Sir Ranulf's was a tenacious nature. ‘That was the bone betwixt them and Lord Robert,' he went on. ‘They paid King Richard a pretty price for wardship and marriage rights seven years ago. But you knew Lord Robert. What he could claim he would keep.'
‘Sir Ranulf,' Hélie bluntly halted him, ‘you tell me more than I should know.'
The marshal's bright grey eyes widened a little. ‘Lord Hélie, who has a better right to know?'
‘Right?' Hélie's wits floundered in a morass of bewilderment for a moment, and then reached firm comprehension a heart's beat before Sir Ranulf answered.
‘Since you are to marry my lady, you must know how matters stand. Warby is impoverished and deep in debt, and the King will demand a heavy relief. There will be small profits and heavy burdens out of Warby for years to come, and I reckoned it my duty to tell you so.' He fetched a grunt out of the depths of his chest that was his version of a thankful sigh, turned a little in the saddle and laid a broad paw on the young man's knee. ‘Praised be God and all his Saints that you are come home in our lady's hour of need!'
Hélie sat his horse appalled and speechless. His face betrayed little of the turmoil in his mind; he had schooled himself to that control in the turbulent south. Perhaps that frozen stillness made its own revelation. Ranulf was not perceptive of much outside military matters, but as his eyes met Hélie's he reddened and tightened his grip.
‘Maybe I have said too much too soon,' he growled defensively, ‘but I tell you, Lord Hélie, there is no man I would rather call lord.'
It was Hélie's turn to flush; he felt the blood burn under his skin. ‘No more, Sir Ranulf. It is indeed too soon.'
‘Better that than too late,' Ranulf grunted, let fall his hand and subsided into a pensive silence enlivened by a baleful gleam in the eye he turned on the other two suitors riding behind. Hélie struggled vainly to find words that would remove his misconception without offence; he could not brutally deny any intention of wedding Hermeline to her marshal's face. Though in rank and estate Hélie was his superior, Ranulf was twice his age, and had proved his good friend four years ago.
They had passed the ploughland now, and were crossing the waste, where sheep and cattle scattered from
the horsemen. The sun had swallowed the mist at one gulp, and now mounted the empty blue-grey sky. The dew that dulled the grass, dark-streaked where beasts had tracked it, was vanishing fast as the scorching rays gathered power. Sir Ranulf, conscientiously performing his duty as host, fell back to talk with his other guests.
Hélie, far from sorry to see him go, was still left with discomforting knowledge enough to occupy him.
He unclasped his cloak, rolled it and secured it behind his saddle. The sun burned through his woollen tunic, and his shirt already clung to his skin; this would be another of the flaming September days that would culminate before the week was out in a violent storm. They took the slope at a gentle canter to save the horses, the huntsmen trotting ahead with the hounds. Hélie heartily wished he was riding home. He considered his predicament with increasing dismay. Truly Warby took for granted, and it would not be easy to extricate himself from this entanglement without dishonour and a feud or two to boot.
The cavalcade had barely reached the woods when the morning added another to the tally of his tribulations; the first warnings of a headache, the throbbing in his temples and the blurring of his vision. He swore fervently under his breath. He would have to quit the hunt; he was quite incapable of a headlong ride under this blazing sun, and if he were fool enough to attempt it he would most likely tumble out of his saddle and ruin everyone's sport. Neither, however, was he going to complain of a headache like a queasy woman, and give his fellow-guests reason to raise their eyebrows.
He allowed the other men to overtake and pass him as they climbed the slope into the scrubby trees and tangled thickets of the forest's edge. A party of children gathering blackberries scampered closer to watch them go, hands and faces purple-stained. Sir Ranulf shot Hélie a curious glance, hesitated as if to speak and then went on in silence. Eustace de Collingford's persistent voice came thinly to Hélie's ears through the beating drums in his skull. He waited until they turned about a clump of stunted oak that had been cut over for tan-bark, and turned on its other side, reined in his mount and let the trampling and jingling fade into the distance.
The only treatment for a headache, Hélie had learned, was to lie flat in a darkened place until it passed. He started back towards Warby, and halted again. He had no wish to deliver himself into Hermeline's hands and submit to her solicitous cosseting and the ministrations of all her women, but if he found shade here on the hillside, some blackberrying brat would trip over his legs. He pushed his hand through his rough tawny hair, screwing his eyes up against the painful glare of sunlight, and then remembered a refuge. He started his horse into a walk, slanting up and along the ridge away from the hunt.
The place was not hard to find, though he had seen it but once before and that many years ago, and a scattered growth of young trees and thick bushes had over-run the once-extensive clearance that had given it command of all the ridge's summit and the lower lands for miles around. It was the ruin of that adulterine castle built by the Lord of Warby in King Stephen's evil day, and destroyed for good reason by the second Henry. After fifty years there was little enough left of it; much of the stone had been carted away to build the present manor a mile away, but he had what he needed.
Hélie threaded between the trees up the hill, every stride of the horse a jolt of pain in his brain, until he came to the old ditch, crumbled and silted and rank with tall dusty nettles, and beyond it scattered stones and low ragged fragments of a curtain wall. He slid from the saddle, looped the reins over a low branch, and leaned against the horse for a moment to steady himself. The stallion nuzzled his breast inquiringly and whickered softly. He tugged his cloak from the fastenings, floundered down through the nettles at a shallow place and up through a broken gap, and pushed through hip-high berried plants to where a corner of a square keep thrust up like a jagged tooth.
The greater part of the undercroft's stone roof still joined the broken walls, and in the corner bastion a spiral stair twisted up into open sunlight on the bare landing, where a doorway gave onto emptiness. He stumbled over a large stone and almost fell full-length, dizzy as he was and half-blinded by the dazzle-streaked shadow within the walls. He flung down his cloak and lay flat, drawing a corner over his face to shut out the light. The semblance of red-hot millstones was grinding behind his eyes, and his temples pounded like forge-hammers. He settled to endurance. He need not fear intrusion; the ill-fame of Hermeline's great-grandsire had so outlasted the generation that knew his works that no serf would venture near his ruin.
Darkness, quiet and stillness gradually had effect. After a hard space of unmeasured time the pain sank and ebbed away, and as his tension relaxed Hélie slipped without knowing it into sleep, his long body stretched like a tomb-effigy upon the drifts of dead leaves and the humble weeds that cushioned the cobble-stones under him. The endless drone of insects served to lull him, and the montonous crying of jackdaws above in the ruin.
He woke all at once, momentarily startled by the fold of cloth across his face. He lifted a hand to thrust it aside, and then was piercingly aware without sight that he was not alone. His right hand dived for his dagger and he rolled over on his left elbow, gathering himself to leap up. Then he uttered a grunt and stayed where he was, blinking rather foolishly at Durande de Vallaroy.
She sat bare-headed on an edge of the ruined wall, and for a moment it seemed to his dazzled eyes that all the light and fire of the sun had gathered into her hair. It was not harshly red, but the deep glowing colour of a chestnut shining from its new-split spiky case, before the air dulled its lustre. The sun lit it to flame, and he stared bemusedly, with scant courtesy. Then he recollected himself and sat up, passing a hand over his eyes. She rose unhurriedly, calmly appraising him.
‘ I saw when you quitted the hunt, my lord, that you were taken ill,' she explained in her rather deep voice, 'and having some knowledge of leechcraft, I followed you. When I tracked you here you were asleep, so I did not disturb you.'
Hélie's experience of women's meddlesome ministrations had not led him to expect such forbearance. He grinned at her. ‘You are a jewel of good sense, demoiselle,' he commended her, and began to rise. His skull thudded with a warning that was more a reminder to be cautious than an actual pain, and he involuntarily lifted a hand to his brow. The warning passed, leaving no more than a dull uneasiness, and he climbed carefully to his feet, acutely aware of her steady scrutiny. ‘It is nothing,' he declared impatiently, despising his infirmity. ‘My head ached.'
‘I saw your face. Sickness, or an old hurt, my lord?’
All a physician's authority was in her voice, and called from him its response. ‘Cracked on the head in a skirmish this spring, my lady.'
‘Stunned?'
‘I lay senseless two nights and a day, they told me. A lesson to forswear flat-topped helmets.'
‘These headaches—you have had advice?'
‘Yes. I was told they would pass in time.' He picked up his cloak and moved forward, and she halted him with a lift of one hand.
‘Stay out of the sunlight a little longer, my lord.' She turned away decisively.
‘Why, demoiselle, you are not going?' he exclaimed.
‘You have no need of me, my lord.'
He started after her. ‘But I have said no word of thanks for your thought! And at least I may escort you home?'
She turned to give him the same dispassionate scrutiny. Faint amusement tilted the corners of her wide mouth. ‘Imprudence still ruling you, my lord, or have you not given that offer mature reflection?'
‘Imprudence?'
‘The clack of gossip if we two return together.'
Common-sense doused his annoyance like cold water. A man and a girl did not usually lose themselves from a hunt to gather simples or to discuss the virtues of herbs. ‘My wits are still somewhat addled, demoiselle,' he admitted.
She coiled up her heavy braids of chestnut hair, and he wondered what a glory it would be loosed about her. Then she replaced her wimple without benef
it of mirror, a lamentable proceeding. All her splendour quenched, she was a big plain girl without attraction, but as Hélie moved to her side he noted that her eyes were deep brown, and her skin fairer even than Hermeline’s. Her hands did not falter at their task as he stood close, but her gaze that held his was hard and wary.
‘My lady, I hope I bear no resemblance to Robert de Warby,’ he said mildly.
‘None whatever, my lord, or I should not be here.'
‘And I should have lain here until the ivy grew over my mouldered bones, for all the thought you had for me?’ he asked in mock reproach.
‘Yes.'
‘Have you a stone for a heart, demoiselle?’
‘A flint, my lord.'
‘A flint holds fire,’ he grinned, and glanced about him at the broken masonry, mossed over by the years, stonecrop and toadflax thrusting bravely from its crevices. 'They would be hardy lovers who trysted with Reginald de Warby’s ghost,’ he observed. ‘I suppose no one ventures here from one year’s end to the next.’
‘No,’ she answered unexpectedly. ‘Someone has tethered a horse by the gateway within the month.’
‘No villager, then?’ His tawny brows lifted in surprise; nothing about this desolate place could bring any rider out of his way, except in sheer curiosity. That was an active ingredient in Hélie’s composition, and he regarded the overgrown bailey more particularly, his light hazel eyes narrowed against the too-bright sun. Here, as beyond the walls, the woodland was seizing back what had been won from it. A sea of high grass and tall weeds washed up to the ruin; several young ash trees had struggled clear of the thickets of elder and hawthorn and holly, and great sprawling tangles of bramble held up their purple and red fruit. Closer to the keep grew the tall plants he had thrust through unheeding as he sought shelter, and he had never seen their like before; hip-high, with stout green stems bearing unevenly paired leaves, pale purple bells of flowers and black fruit the size of cherries, still enclosed in the flower’s green frill.
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