‘It is a trifle,’ Tom demurred.
‘It is a generous gift, Sir Tom,’ Alyson said, delaying handling the bird by not pulling on the glove. Her father had spoken of hawks in a tone of longing: peregrines and such were kept by great lords. She had never seen any bird of prey so close before, not even the red kites that scavenged on the midden heaps. For herself, thinking of the talons and that tearing, hooked beak, she was glad the merlin was hooded.
‘Perhaps you can carry the perch?’ Guillelm had noticed her reluctance; a half-amused, half-indulgent smile played about his lips. Tempted to thrust out her tongue at him again, Alyson said only, ‘You have not tied your own jesses,’ and pointed to the loosened throat-strings of his shirt.
With a grunt of amusement, Guillelm attended to his clothes.
She and Guillelm set off soon after, Sir Tom supplying them with a generous pannier of provisions and wine, and long, needless instructions for the best route back to Hardspen. When it came to their farewells, Alyson was swirled off her feet into a rough hug, then as swiftly put down.
‘More and Guillelm will be challenging me,’ Sir Tom rumbled against her hair, his scars tickling her ear. ‘Come see me again soon, do you hear?’
‘We will,’ Alyson promised, springing lightly onto her horse before Guillelm could scold her for tardiness. She did not want either man to see the ready tears that had filled her eyes and even now threatened to spill onto the rough mane of her black palfrey. She would miss Sir Tom, more perhaps than her sister, and that was a bitter lesson to learn. Leaving Guillelm fussing with the merlin, she spurred her horse on, eager to be on her way before she broke down and disgraced herself completely.
Chapter 8
‘Her jesses must be tangled in the branches. She cannot break free!’
Shading her eyes, Alyson bit down on the rejoinder that he should not have been flying the merlin while they were traveling and reached across their horses to seize Guillelm’s arm.
‘You cannot scramble up there,’ she warned. ’That half-rotten tree will not take your weight. I will go. Give me her hood and some meat to tempt her.’
‘She needs to be fed, certainly.’ Dismounting, Guillelm squinted up at the bird, which had stopped baiting and thrashing about the intermingled oak and hawthorn branches and was quietly roosting, seemingly oblivious to the alarm calls of the woodland crows and blackbirds. ’You will take care?’ he added, handing Alyson the soft leather hood without checking how she alighted from her horse and without breaking eye contact with the merlin.
‘I climb well.’
‘I know that! I remember. I mean of her.’
‘Of course.’ Your precious merlin will be quite safe, Alyson thought.
Guillelm reached her as she was about to duck under the oak tree’s low canopy. ’Good luck, Bright-eyes.’
She nodded, mollified by the nickname and the mute appeal in his compelling velvet eyes, and began to climb.
‘She is baiting again!’ Guillelm shouted from below. ‘She will pierce herself!’
‘No, I see her now and she is not so close to the hawthorn!’ Alyson called back, cupping her hands round her mouth so as to cut down the sound the merlin would hear. ’She is not hurt.’
‘And watch yourself!’ Guillelm continued, crashing about the base of the oak with the hawthorn sprouting through its mat of branches as he tried and failed to shin up after her. She heard him cursing as he flailed in the undergrowth like some angry wild pig and felt a bubble of amusement soar in her throat.
‘What in God’s name are you giggling about?’
She playfully stamped her foot, kicking off a strand of lichen that drifted down onto Guillelm’s nose. Seeing his indignant upraised face, smeared with green, she laughed heartily. ’You look like a pagan.’
‘Well, from down here, mistress, I can see a great deal of you, too.’ Guillelm was also laughing.
‘You exaggerate,’ she replied, certain of her modesty.
‘Alyson —’
‘Hush, I am within a fingertip of our hawk.’ Should she try to tempt the bird with a morsel? Swiftly, at full stretch, she jammed a piece of raw meat into a jutting, sheared-off twig close to the merlin and backed up several paces along the main branch.
The little female hawk fluttered her handsome brown and cream wings and, with a soft jangle of the delicate bells on her jesses, hopped towards the tempting snack.
While she was occupied, tearing at the meat, Alyson was able to free one hanging strip of leather jess that had become snared on a mesh of hawthorn spikes. Having no desire to be torn at herself by that bright yellow beak, she called down to Guillelm.
‘She will be able to fly now. Have you something you can use as a lure?’
‘No need!’ Guillelm answered, for the merlin suddenly swallowed a huge gobbet of meat and launched herself in a stoop, falling like a fiery arrow through the tree branches, straight back onto the bow perch she had been fastened to all morning; a familiar, safe haven. When Alyson tossed down the hood, Guillelm had already secured the bird and the adventure was over.
Not quite over, for when Guillelm raised his golden head to look at Alyson again, an ‘Excellent,’ forming on his lips, he stiffened, then began wildly pointing.
‘What?’ Alyson looked over herself and the branches she was ‘walking’ on and clinging to. Nothing to be alarmed of here; no rotten boughs or wasps’ nests. She took another step—
—plummeting into empty space as the part of her gown that had already snagged on an oak bole remained caught, throwing her off-balance and pitching her off the gently swaying tree. She heard a hoarse yell and then hit a shimmering mass of blues, greens and browns, choking as ice-cold water poured down her throat.
Praise Christ the river was here to break my tumble, was her first thought, followed at once by the realization that she was sinking. She thrashed and pounded but her shock-stiffened limbs would not answer her wishes; she went under again, heavy, calm, unable to breathe.
Another yell, and a pair of strong tanned arms scooped her out of the drowning murk.
‘There, you are safe.’ Guillelm lifted her clear of the water. ’I have you, dear one, and all is well.’
He cradled her tightly, hoping she would not feel him shudder. He had seen the thorn branch hooking into her gown too late. Watching her fall, helpless to save her, had been the worst moments of his life. He had forgotten the river flowing beneath the oak—how foolishly preoccupied he had been with the merlin! A bird, when Alyson might have been lost. He had heard her hit the water, then clawing through the undergrowth to the water’s edge, he had seen her slide into the stream’s deep embrace. His Alyson was ever a fighter but she seemed unable to stop herself being dragged under in a deadly mesh of heavy skirts. Most eerie of all, a long trailing skein of hair bobbed on the top of the water. Never before had he swum so rapidly, never in such terror.
Her small white hand was still hooked beneath his mantle, clutching his sodden under-shirt. Shiver after shiver ran through her, though she did not seem to notice, whispering with her head against the crook of his arm, ’You have briared your face.’
‘You think that matters?’ The cuts and weals that stung on his nose and jaw, the result of beating desperately through the web of ferns, alder saplings and God knows what else, were nothing. ’I saw you gone!’
‘But you saved me.’ Wonder and gratitude warmed her voice where Guillelm would have had her berate him for putting her life in danger for a bundle of screeching feathers. For an instant his arms clamped tighter still about her small, willowy form as he thought of wringing the merlin’s neck, then decided there would be more justice if he could wring his own.
‘I was a fool!’ he said.
‘Then we both were, for I cannot swim.’
That stopped him in mid-rage, as she hoped it would.
‘Truly?’ He paused in mid-stream, his feet rocking on the river pebbles. ‘For all your clever book learning, there is something I know that
you do not?’
‘Will you teach me?’ The words were out before she could drag them back. I must be more shaken than I thought, Alyson reflected, appalled at her own question. Each time she was in Guillelm’s arms she forgot herself: it was a dangerous habit.
‘We should feed the merlin,’ she went on, but the hawk, which had been Guillelm’s great concern all that morning, was no longer a distraction. He merely grinned at her in that way of his that always made her feel as if her heart was suddenly lifted and jammed into her throat and said lightly, ’I will tend the spoiled little brute, while you prepare yourself.’ He raised a thick gold eyebrow. ’If you are certain you want me to teach you. My men will tell you I am a lethal task-master.’
‘Hard work never frightens me.’
She was no longer shivering but languid in his arms, smiling at him with absolute trust. Guillelm had a sudden, disturbing vision of himself as tutor, pulling a squirming Alyson over his lap while he applied a school-masterly discipline to her pert backside. He flushed, ashamed of his thoughts—Heloise was surely right about him—and plucked at the clinging sleeve of her gown.
‘You cannot swim in that,’ he remarked, determinedly averting his eyes from her bodice. The water had sculptured Alyson’s clothes to her closer than a second skin, making him even more acutely conscious of his own aroused state. Fervently he wished the river was cold, blanketed with ice.
‘What is the salve for ear-ache?’ he asked desperately as he attacked the gently shelving slope of the riverbank. Perhaps hearing her voice would bring him to reason, or at least be a comfort. Part of him was still grasping the dreadful marvel of her too-near escape from death.
‘I have heard doctors swear by blood-letting and a tincture of mercury, poured into the ear. But for myself, I have found the gently warmed oil of the olive a good remedy.’
‘And for backache?’
‘A hot bath to start.’ Alyson broke off, frowning at her dripping plait and checking with a swift downward glance that she had not lost her shoes. ’Why all these cures? Are you going to shout at me so much or make me swim this river to the sea?’
‘Worse.’ Guillelm deposited her onto the grass. ’I am going to make you as hungry as the hawk.’
She chuckled, that warm, throaty giggle that made him want to kiss her. ’So ’tis well Sir Tom gave us generous provender. Do we eat first or later?’
‘Later,’ said Guillelm.
The day was warm—more than warm, blisteringly hot, with a humidity than put Guillelm in mind of the East. It was airless under the trees by the river, or perhaps that was just him, he thought, as he kept busy, feeding the merlin, checking their horses, while Alyson shrugged off her soaking gown. It was at least a good day for a new swimmer, he told himself, tempted to ask if she needed help while he counted moorhen and coots with their young; bits of dark fluff swimming earnestly along the far riverbank. In these shallows the water would be perfect.
He heard her splash into the river and swallowed, his ears buzzing with heat and barely-thwarted desire.
‘I am ready.’ She was sculling the water with her hands. Would she be naked? No, for she was already growing nervous, perhaps even regretting her impulsive suggestion. ’Guillelm, do you think this is right? I mean is it seemly?’
‘Why not?’ He turned to reassure her and almost laughed: Alyson had sat down in the shallows and he could see little of her. ’We are after all betrothed.’
‘I have spread my gown on the hazel to dry.’ She pointed and he could see she was still wearing her under-shift; a modest choice. ’Will you swim as you are?’
‘My stuff dries fast.’ His clothes were little enough of a barrier but they were something, a reminder he needed that Alyson was an innocent. Or is she? muttered Fulk in the baser recesses of his mind, a thought he resolutely thrust away. He strode to the river, willing himself to be a perfect gentle knight while he felt anything but chivalrous.
Be a lady, Alyson thought, both relieved and disappointed when Guillelm stalked into the river fully clothed. He was so swift-moving when he needed to be that she forgot his size, but now he was beside her again he towered over her, an eagle to her merlin. And how that gift of Sir Tom’s had caused trouble! They were a good half mile or more off the recognized track through these woods and both them had endured a wetting. Fulk will wonder what we have been doing, she thought, but then she forgot him in the face of Guillelm’s grim stare. Perhaps he dislikes this, perhaps I have been too forward. The fears scurried through her mind like dandelion clocks blowing in the breeze as she tried not to shrink from him.
‘Peace, girl.’ Kneeling in the water beside her, he had spotted her slight movement. Alyson, knowing him sensitive to the point of wariness over her possible dread of him, was tempted to slap the river back into his scowling face, to prove she was in no way scared. Had she been younger she might have done so, but at one and twenty she knew she ought to have more finesse.
‘Did you swim the rivers in Outremer?’ Not a very original question, but when Guillelm was apt to make her tongue-tied Alyson was proud she had managed so much.
‘There are no such streams as these in the east.’ An evasive answer, made more mysterious by the ready stain of colour that bloomed along Guillelm’s jaw line and chin. ‘What is that strange scent? Like a spice or perfume.’
He did not think it was anything to do with her, Alyson noted, disappointed, but she breathed in deeply. ‘It is fennel,’ she answered, nodding towards the bank where a stand of the tall, yellow flowers swayed among the cobwebbed beauty of the white elder blossom. ‘I use it in eye-baths and for the colic. I dare say you have forgotten it, being so long away.’
‘And those birds?’ he asked, but there was a gleam in his eyes that made Alyson click her tongue.
‘Ducks, and you know it, you big oaf.’
‘Oaf, am I?’ He lifted his feet from the river pebbles and stretched, floating full length on his back on the sparkling, tranquil surface. ’Can you do this?’
She set to his challenge at once, only to sink as she tried to follow his example, wallowing in an ignominious stream of bubbles onto the sandy base of the stream.
‘Steady, little swimmer. Up with you.’ Two hands buoyed her to the surface, their strong palms supporting her across her shoulder blades and the small of her back. ‘Relax. Imagine you are a bird and this water is the air beneath your wings. It will carry you easily. See?’
She was floating, the blood-warm water eddying round her limbs. Feeling safe, she closed her eyes, dimly aware that Guillelm had lowered the hand beneath her back.
‘There,’ he said.
‘This is marvellous,’ she said. ‘It is like reading a new book!’
‘Only you would compare such things.’ His tone was indulgent. ‘I would have said riding a fresh horse, or petting a new dog.’
The hand beneath her shoulder blades swept down the length of her spine and away. Alyson’s eyes flew open and, with considerably less grace than her partner in the water she put her feet down hastily, sighing with relief as her bare toes dug into the sand.
‘Over with you.’ Guillelm gave her no time to protest, catching her round the middle and turning her, resting her stomach on his bent knee and saying, ’Put your arms like this—that is good! Now work them so.’
He showed her and she copied his movements. They paused a moment while he explained how to kick her legs and then she tried again.
‘I am swimming!’ she cried, delighted at her progress.
‘Something, certainly,’ Guillelm answered, amused by her jerky dog-paddling and making sure he had her safe at all times. If he released her now, she would drop like a stone and he did not want her to lose confidence.
But she was a distracting thing and she did not even know it. Her linen under-shift had turned half-transparent in the water, moulding to her limbs in a way an eastern harem beauty might envy. Attempting a churning, uncoordinated breast-stroke on her front displayed her wildly kicking
haunches and shapely legs to best advantage, while her breasts, cupped teasingly by the water and shown off by her beguilingly arched neck, were soft mounds he ached to caress. Their nipples were pink, he thought, although he was not entirely sure and did not trust his own countenance or continence to sneak a closer look.
He knelt again on the river bottom, gently withdrawing his hand from her trim stomach. Even through the water and linen, her skin was smooth and flawless as the inside of a freshly-split apple and smelled as sweet, as good to taste. It would be so easy, to brush his fingers lower—but that was outside his role as teacher, for now at least. Trust was everything, as Alyson herself proved, swimming three genuine strokes as he came round in front of her, stretching out his arms.
‘Hang on,’ he coaxed. ’I will give you a lift.’
She caught his hands willingly in hers and he drew her along, swimming on his back and praying there were no overhanging branches for him to blunder into and sink them both. ’Do you like it?’ he called.
She laughed, showing her white even teeth, giggling more as he accelerated in the water. ’It is flying!’
If you think that, wait until we have the nights together, Guillelm thought, but then he struck his head against a boulder and went under, swallowing a good yard of river.
Strong fingers yanked his hair and tugged: he surfaced, coughing, and with part of his skull feeling as if it had undergone an ordeal with a hot iron, but still afloat.
‘I have you,’ Alyson crowed. ’I am swimming for us.’
‘Peace, wench, and get me to the bank,’ said Guillelm. That was enough of lessons for the day.
Chapter 9
Three weeks later and there had been no time for more swimming, Alyson thought with regret, but with pride, too, for she and Guillelm had not been idle. The new well at Hardspen was being dug, the stores had been checked and added to, everywhere had been cleaned, including the stables, the sheep had been clipped, the hay harvest gathered, the wheat growing well, firewood and timber laid by and folk seen in the great hall with their appeals for help and justice.
Love and Chivalry: Four Medieval Historical Romances Page 10