Shields of Pride (14 page)

‘Do you remember your mother?’ she asked.

He gave a one-sided shrug. ‘Only in fragments. I was younger than Robert when she died. I know that she had long, dark hair and that she used to scent it with attar of roses.’ He looked beyond her. ‘I remember the ends of her braids hanging at my eye level when I stood at her side. She used to decorate them with ribbons and little jewelled fillets. Perhaps because she had lived such an uncertain life before she took up with my father, she was fond of frippery and fine clothes.’ He swirled the drink in the cup. ‘Truly, if I look into my childhood, my comfort wears the face of my aunt Maude. She had no children of her own, and since I had no mother, she decided that we could each fulfill the other’s need.’ He half-smiled. ‘The wonder is that I’m not as fat as a bacon pig and that I still have all my teeth the way she used to stuff me with sweetmeats!’ Then he added softly, ‘Maude’s care meant a great deal to me. It still does.’ His gaze had been idly following the linen maid’s progress towards the door but now it stopped and widened. Linnet had been about to say how much she liked Maude herself, but seeing the look on his face turned round instead.

A young woman had hesitated on the threshold of the room. The expensive dark-red wool of her gown encased a voluptuous figure that stopped just short of being plump. She had creamy skin and her glossy black hair was bound in two long braids. Her roving gaze lit upon Joscelin and she drew a deep breath that served to enhance her lush bosom. His eyes widened. Smiling, she ran her hands over her body as if to smooth her gown, although the motion was blatantly provocative. Then she undulated over to Joscelin and knelt at his feet.

Linnet stared with growing fury. The young woman’s pose meant that Joscelin was being granted a more than generous view of cleavage down the unfastened neck-opening of the red gown. And he was taking full advantage.

After a moment he came to his senses sufficiently to lift the girl to her feet. She laid her hand over his, her long fingers enhanced by several fine gold rings and tipped by elegantly manicured nails. Lifting her head, she slanted him a look through eyes as hot and dark as coals. Her gaze was feral as it ranged over his naked chest and shoulders. She moistened her lips.

‘Your shirt, messire.’ Linnet thrust the garment at him then rounded on the girl. ‘Where were you when you were needed earlier?’

‘I’m . . . I’m sorry, madam. I was paying my respects to Gile - Lord Montsorrel in the chapel. His death was a terrible shock to us all, and so soon after Lord Raymond’s, God rest their souls.’ She crossed herself and looked pathetically at Joscelin, her moist lower lip drooping.

‘I am sure it was a shock,’ Linnet retorted, adding for Joscelin’s benefit, ‘This is Helwis de Corbette, our seneschal’s daughter. She and her mother have been responsible for the housekeeping here these five years past.’

The girl shot Linnet a challenging look and moved closer to Joscelin. As she helped him don the shirt, her voice was low and intimate. ‘My lord, I will strive to perform anything you desire of me to your satisfaction.’ The final word was embellished with promise.

Linnet stifled a sound in the back of her throat. The words ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ burned the tip of her tongue. Joscelin’s eyes were very bright and his complexion slightly congested. Lust was a tangible aura in the room.

‘Then do this for me,’ he grated, his voice suddenly a harsh echo of William Ironheart’s. ‘Get out of my sight now and return to your devotions. Since you were so concerned for your lord’s soul as to avoid your duties here, you can spend from now until retiring in further vigil.’ He stepped away from the greedy touch of her fingers.

Helwis de Corbette gaped at him as if he had spoken in a foreign language.

‘Out!’ he snarled.

She uttered a gasp, stared between him and Linnet, then whirled and fled the room.

‘Giles’s solace in the time he was lord here, and yours if you want her, judging from her behaviour just now,’ Linnet said with bitter contempt.

‘You think I’d follow my father’s folly and take a mistress beneath my own wife’s roof?’ he growled and, before she could move or cry out, he put his arms around her waist, drew her hard against him and kissed her.

At first Linnet was too shocked to move. Images of herself and Raymond de Montsorrel embracing in this room were overlaid by the scratchy pressure of Joscelin’s kiss, the heat of his touch, the pungent odour of his sweat. If she had felt stifled earlier, now she felt well and truly engulfed.

He swept his hand down her spine in a slow, powerful stroke until he cupped her buttocks and pressed her closer to him. Her back strained. Against her belly she felt the vigorous surge of his erection. Releasing her lips, he nibbled her earlobe and the angle of her jaw. Then he took her hand and slowly, slowly guided it downwards. As her fingers touched the bulge in his chausses, he swallowed a groan.

Linnet knew what to do. Raymond had shown her once, his hand over hers, his voice coaxing. Oh yes, she knew. The quicker the release, the sooner she would be free, but not here, witnessed by her conscience, four wounded knights, two maids and quite possibly her son should he wake from his slumber in the wall-chamber beyond.

She snatched her hand away as if he had burned her, and struggled to free herself from his grip. Succeeding in wriggling one arm free, she hit him on his freshly bandaged shoulder with as much force as her position would allow.

He cried out and his hold slackened. She tore from his embrace and faced him, panting and wild-eyed. Joscelin stared at her then cursed and sat down on the coffer, his breath hissing through clenched teeth, his good hand clutching his injured shoulder.

Linnet gnawed her lip and, still poised for flight, watched him with apprehension.

His breathing eased. He extended his hand in a gesture of apology. ‘For what it’s worth, I’ve been on too tight a rein recently and that girl . . .’ He broke off and grimaced. ‘I give you my word of honour it won’t happen again.’

Linnet’s stomach was turning over and over. She knew he could have beaten her for defying him and that the incident might have ended in rape upon the floor rather than retreat and apology. ‘You frightened me,’ she said, then added, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

‘Nor I to frighten you. I don’t want to live in a household like my father’s.’ He did not elaborate but, after a moment, sighed. The act of drawing and releasing a deep breath caused him to wrinkle his nose. ‘Is there a bathtub in this place? I stink to high heaven.’

‘There should be one in the laundry; I’ll find out.’ Linnet relaxed as their conversation started to flow over the difficult moment. ‘What about the silver?’

His glance flickered to the great bed and the mattress that had recently been unloaded from beneath the coffin and thrown across the rope frame. Safe among the layers of goose down stuffing were nestled thirty leather bags, each containing five marks of silver.

‘Leave it where it is for the nonce until I’ve had time to commission a new strongbox from the carpenter and the locksmith.’

‘Will you not be sleeping on it?’

His smile was wry. ‘And deprive a lady of her bed? No, Stephen’s organizing something for me in the wall-chamber near the chapel.’

‘And you trust me with the coin?’ She was driven by a devil to challenge him.

‘You would not cheat your own son. Yes, I trust you.’ His tone held mild rebuke as if he suspected her of deliberately needling him.

After he had gone, Linnet wandered to the bed and sat down upon it. It would have eased her conscience if he had taken the money into his own keeping or not stated his trust in her with so steady a gaze. No, she would not cheat Robert, he was all her life, but for his sake she had cheated Joscelin. She and Maude had sewn the thirty money bags into the mattress that night in London, but there had already been thirty marks stitched into one corner, money that she had sequestered from the strongbox in secret on the night Giles died. This was her security for the future, a secret hoard of her own.

She had made her bed and now she had to lie on it, lumps and all.

13

‘For just how much is Corbette responsible in the keep and on the estate?’ Joscelin asked Linnet at table that night. The main dish was mutton. It was tough as saddle leather and in places charred black, speaking of an inattentive hand at the spit. Joscelin swallowed a final mouthful by resorting to a liberal gulp of wine and abandoned the meat in favour of a dish of steamed mussels.

‘I do not know. I haven’t dwelt at Rushcliffe since . . . since the quarrel.’ Linnet looked at him from the corner of her eye. He was acting as if nothing had happened between them a few hours ago but she could remember the taste of him too vividly to follow his lead.

He had made thorough use of the bathtub that had been found and he now exuded a scent of coarse laundry soap that stung her nostrils and made her want to sneeze. Time, she thought, and past time to set to work with the maids and manufacture something less caustic for personal use. Time would also have to be found to sew Joscelin some new tunics. The one he was wearing tonight was the brown wool from the horse fair and was beginning to look more than just hard-worn. Perhaps it would assuage her guilt about the thirty silver marks if she made him some good clothes, as befitted a dutiful wife.

He grimaced at the sourness of the sauce in which he had dipped a mussel and again reached to his cup. Then he said, ‘Corbette appears to have wide-ranging authority. It seems that he is steward of Rushcliffe as well as seneschal. Every time I have wanted a key to a coffer or asked a question, I am informed that Corbette has it or knows the answer and that worries me. He has his own little kingdom here and everyone is subject to his yeasay.’ Wiping his fingers on a napkin, he leaned back in the lord’s chair and studied the man through narrowed lids. Linnet, too, looked at Corbette. He was deep in conversation with a stout man clad in a dark-red tunic that made his corpulent torso look like a ripe plum. As Corbette spoke to him, the other’s pouchy gaze darted nervously in the direction of the high table.

‘Who’s that?’ Joscelin asked.

‘Fulbert, the senior scribe.’

‘What’s he like?’

She tilted her head and frowned as she sought to be impartial. ‘He’s pleasant and courteous and writes a fine fair hand, but he’s as soft as unfired clay.’

Joscelin nodded consideringly.

The words between Corbette and the scribe were becoming heated. Fulbert shook his head, his glance flickering towards Joscelin with fear. A woman leaned between the two arguing men and spoke sharply. Rolls of fat strained at the seams of her blue brocade gown.

Despite her annoyance, Linnet’s mouth twitched. ‘Giles bought that blue cloth she’s wearing because he wanted a new court tunic but, when we left at the time of the quarrel, it went missing. I don’t think Giles could ever have graced the stuff the way it now graces Mabel de Corbette.’

‘
That
is Corbette’s wife?’ Joscelin said in astonishment.

She watched him stare from Corbette’s lean, aristocratic profile to the woman’s blowsy overabundance and try without success to reconcile the two. ‘I am told that she was once as beautiful as her daughter, Helwis,’ Linnet added mischievously.

He gave an amused grunt. ‘Is that a warning?’

‘I would not presume so far, messire,’ she said sweetly. ‘Besides, I trust to your common sense.’

His lips curved with sour amusement and his regard travelled outwards again. ‘That brocade will have to last her a lifetime. She’ll find herself beggared of all but homespuns from this day forth.’

Linnet directed a servant to fill his empty cup but Joscelin swiftly set his palm over the top. ‘Would you have me so gilded that I spend the night under the trestle in a stupor?’

‘I thought that was your intent since you swallowed the last three with a swiller’s skill.’

He made a face. ‘I’d not have eaten my dinner else. We have enough tosspots in this hall already to drink an alehouse dry.’ He stared at the serjeant Halfdan who was arm-wrestling with another guard, lighted candle stubs set to either side of their straining wrists. Halfdan was using his free hand to raise a cup to his lips, egged on by his cronies.

Abruptly Joscelin rose to his feet and, leaving the dais, set out to mingle with the people gathered in the hall. It was not a conventional move and earned him glances of suspicion and hostility as well as approval. Raymond and Giles de Montsorrel would have retired to the private rooms on the floor above long since. However, for the moment, the new lord was a gardener in diligent search of weeds to uproot and plants to nurture.

Joscelin passed close to Corbette. The seneschal had ceased his vehement conversation with the scribe and bowed in deference to his new lord. His wife curtseyed and batted her lashes at Joscelin but she had run to seed and her flirting did not have quite the same effect on him as her daughter’s had done. Moving into the well of the hall, Joscelin sought the fletcher and immersed himself in a conversation about the possibility of making arrows to suit the Welsh bows he was thinking about introducing to the castle’s armoury.

The shouts of the soldiers watching the arm-wrestling contest drowned out what the fletcher was saying. Frowning, Joscelin lifted his head and stared down the long trestle to the chanting men. Halfdan was about to press his victim’s knuckles into the molten tallow of the burning candle-end. Fists pounded on the board in unison with the chanting. The wood vibrated. Cups leaped up and down. Halfdan applied a last burst of pressure and seared his opponent’s wrist into the hot wax. Then he held him there as if branding a beast. The other soldier gasped through clenched teeth. A stronger stink of tallow smoke thickened the air as a grinning Halfdan released his victim and scooped up his winnings to unanimous cheers. No one wanted to be on the wrong side of such a man. Flexing his powerful shoulders, Halfdan stared round the ring of fixed smiles and saw, beyond them, an unsmiling Joscelin.

‘Want to challenge me?’ Halfdan extended a meaty paw. ‘Or are you too frightened?’