The Champion (31 page)
‘You are too strong just to be shriven and released,’ Radulfus said, leaning over him again. ‘It may be true that you will only have one leg, but it will not make you a useless cripple. Only your mind can do that.’
Hervi swore at him then, a blasphemy that caused Radulfus’s novice assistant to suck in his breath and widen his eyes. Radulfus, however, absorbed the curse without so much as a flicker. He had heard the same and worse a hundred times over and knew that they were part of a fighting man’s armour, the bravado that concealed fear.
‘Your brother brought you here and entrusted me with your tending,’ he said. ‘I will not betray that trust. When he returns, I want to see you greet each other in the flesh, not lead him to your grave.’
‘Hah, what makes you think I will survive you butchering my leg off?’ Hervi demanded with a mirthless baring of his teeth.
‘You might not, but the alternative is certain death.’
‘The only sure thing in life is that it ends in death,’ Hervi retorted, and once more turned his gaze from the monk’s probing stare to the cool gold of the walls, wishing he could blend into them. He had seen chirurgeons at work on the battlefield and often thought that a good, clean cut from one of his own profession would have been preferable to some of the butchery that went forth.
He had to choose between a chance of life – an altered life – or certain death. It was the decision of a cornered man with a precipice at his back. Did he trust Radulfus? He had no choice.
‘Shrive me,’ he said, without taking his eyes off the wall, ‘and then do your worst.’
Alexander arrived at Stafford by way of a tourney at Blyth in Nottinghamshire. It had cost him twelve marks for the two licences necessary to take part but he had made triple that amount in winnings and had gained a useful second destrier and new packhorse into the bargain.
From Blyth he travelled north, working his way from tourney to tourney, recouping his losses with a grim determination that soon saw him in possession of the full accoutrements of a successful knight. No one had yet dubbed him as such, but he was fully accomplished and bitterly experienced. He was also, at the moment, bitterly cold.
Snow clouds had been gathering on the horizon since dawn, and now, in the short mid-afternoon, had begun to release their burden. White flakes lazily twirled and settled on the land like scurf on a scalp. Alexander blinked at their frozen touch on his eyelashes and drew up the green hood of his capuchon. Stafford Castle rose through the snow veil, promising at least a bed for the night, and perhaps the end of his search. Yet it seemed to him a forbidding place and his mood scarcely lightened as he approached the hollowed-out road leading to the first of the defensive gates.
Villagers watched curiously from their doorways, but lowered their eyes when he glanced their way, or retreated into their dwellings. He had seen such looks cast before in the towns and villages of Normandy and Poitu where he and Hervi had ranged.
They were acknowledging his noble rank and cursing him behind his back.
The entrance to the lower bailey was defended by a timber palisade flanked by two wooden towers. A guard emerged from the base of one of these to challenge Alexander, his hands red with cold on the haft of his spear. ‘Halt and state your business,’ he declared sullenly. A large dewdrop hung from the tip of his scarlet nose.
Drawing rein, Alexander affected a pleasant but assertive manner. He knew from former experience how thankless a task guard duty could be. ‘I am seeking a bed for the night, and audience with the lord of Stafford if he is in residence.’
‘If it’s employment you’re after, he don’t need no one,’ the guard growled. ‘Had his fill of penniless knights sniffing at his gates for midwinter lodgings.’
‘Do I look penniless?’ Alexander spread his arm to reveal the squirrel-fur lining of his blue cloak – an acquisition from a joust down in Salisbury. He expanded his gesture to include the horses. ‘I am on my way to my brother’s keep at Wooton Montroi, but it will take me until midnight to reach it, and the snow is falling faster now.’
The guard frowned, but with a loud sniff that dislodged the dewdrop reluctantly stepped aside. His reddened fist opened and closed on the haft of the spear. ‘You’ll get no joy out of Lord Thomas,’ he warned.
‘So I’ve been told.’ Alexander rode Samson into the lower bailey which was occupied by a mass of store sheds and stables, ramshackle dwellings, animal pens and service structures.
Although Alexander’s manner had exuded self-assurance to the guard, his confidence was far from solid. He had come to see Thomas FitzParnell, and see him he would, whatever the difficulty, but he was not looking forward to the encounter. What was he going to say to the old man?
I am seeking your granddaughter Monday, whom I have dishonoured?
Small wonder that Thomas of Stafford had no time for wandering knights. One had snatched away his daughter, another had debauched his grandchild. Alexander knew that he would quite likely be thrown out into the snowy night to take his chances with the cold and the wolves.
What he was going to say to Monday if she was here caused his mind to go blank and a lump of panic to tighten in his throat. And yet, if she wasn’t with her grandfather, he had to face the thought that she might be lying dead in some ditch, and that he was to blame.
Leaving his horses at the stables, he paid a young groom to care for them and made his way through the inner bailey toward the lord’s hall on the summit. Again he was challenged, but this time with wary respect, and in moments had exchanged the snowy January cold for the fug of the lord of Stafford’s great hall.
It was not as large as the stone-built one at Lavoux, but easily outmatched his family hall at Wooton Montroi. The wooden walls were decorated with woven hangings, banners and weapons, together with a rather macabre arrangement of wolf skulls and pelts, an entire pack by the looks of things, ranging from fully grown adults to small cubs, their pelts shaded with rust and silver and sable-black.
Layers of smoke drifted on the air, finding their lazy way out through the louvres above the firepit in the centre of the room. The walls were lined with trestles which were currently occupied by the castle’s servants and retainers, eating their evening meal of salt-pork stew and dark bread. The lowliest sat near the draught from the door, the last to be served, the last to leave when the meal was finished. The high table, reserved for the lord and his family, was situated on a raised wooden platform at the hall’s far end, their comfort augmented by charcoal braziers. A sweeping glance showed Alexander that there was only one woman amongst the company seated there, and it wasn’t Monday.
Filled with an equal mixture of relief and anxiety, he scarcely paid attention to the steward who led him down the length of the hall to a seat amid the knights and retainers immediately below the dais. Space was made for him, and a trencher of day-old bread set at his place. He exchanged the usual pleasantries with his immediate neighbours, telling them who he was and where he was bound, but not his other reason for being among them tonight.
Between polite conversation and mouthfuls of the pork stew which tasted ten times better than it looked, he glanced at the group on the dais. Its focal point was an elaborately carved high-backed chair, occupied by a robust man in late middle years. Thomas of Stafford had round, pugnacious features. His once blond hair was now the dirty yellow of encroaching age, but still abundant, tumbling over his brow like a lion’s mane. Thin lips surmounted a strong jaw, which at the moment was occupied in chewing food with a thoroughness that left no room for conversation.
At his right-hand side sat his son and heir, Gervais. The young man was made in his father’s image, except that his hair was still pale blond and his skin fine-grained. There were echoes of Monday’s mother in his expression, although her features had been altogether gentler, and of a more harmonious blend. Alexander recognised both FitzParnells from their occasional visits to Cranwell priory.
The woman, he assumed, was Gervais’s wife, a timid-looking creature with gaunt hollows beneath her cheekbones and a mannerism of constantly dabbing her mouth with her linen napkin. The rest of the places on the dais were occupied by two priests, probably chaplains, and four richly dressed men who would either be vassals or the most senior of the knights. Alexander looked around the remainder of the hall, his eyes settling on various women, none of them the one he sought. Although the pork stew was more than edible, he pushed his trencher aside less than half finished.
The meal drew to a close. Stafford lingered over a dish of nuts and raisins, and the hounds nosed between the trestles for scraps. It had been the custom at Lavoux for any petitioners to approach the lord after supper with their requests. It had been the way of Alexander’s father too. He could remember sitting on his nurse’s knee in the hall at Wooton Montroi, watching his father dispense favours with the tolerant lethargy that came from a bellyful of food and contentment. A sufficiency of food Thomas of Stafford might have consumed, but the lines dragging down his features were neither tolerant nor contented.
Swallowing his nervousness, Alexander rose, approached the dais, and swept Stafford a respectful bow. ‘My lord, my name is Alexander de Montroi, son of Adam,’ he said formally. ‘My brother holds Wooton Montroi and half a dozen manors as a tenant of the King. I have lately come from the wars over the Narrow Sea, and would speak with you about certain members of your family.’
Stafford narrowed his eyes. ‘I doubt that you have anything to say that will be of interest to me,’ he replied coldly.
Alexander’s throat was suddenly dry. He cleared it, but no offer of wine was forthcoming. Stafford just stared at him with hostile eyes. He read his own defeat in them even before he spoke another word, and yet he knew he had to try. Drawing a deep breath he said, ‘For a while I travelled in the company of your daughter, Clemence, her husband, Arnaud de Cerizay, and your granddaughter, Monday. It grieves me to tell …’
‘I have no daughter,’ Stafford interrupted, his face beginning to suffuse. ‘She died the day she rode out of these gates on the pillion of a faithless mercenary. I will not have her name spoken in this hall.’ He gave a dismissive flip of his hand. ‘Get out of my sight.’
Alexander met the older man’s glower, and refused to lower his eyes as protocol demanded. He was not family and he owed no obedience to this man. ‘She was a good and gentle lady,’ he said, and pitched his voice so that it carried clear and true to every person seated at the high table, and beyond. ‘I arrived in her presence sick and impoverished and she took it upon herself and her family to care for me. She led a decent, Christian life, and her husband, far from being a faithless mercenary, held to every code. It was her death in childbirth that broke him. You have no daughter now, my lord. I doubt your own passing will be mourned as deeply as hers.’
Horrified gasps followed his speech, and those people who were not staring at him stared at Lord Thomas to see what he would do. But Alexander was not about to give Stafford the advantage, and even as the older man drew breath, he plunged on. ‘I came here out of my own sense of what was right and wrong, to tell you that your daughter and her husband are dead. I came also in search of your granddaughter – I thought that she might have approached you for succour – but when I see the kind of welcome she would have received, I am glad that she is not with you. No,’ he held up his hand, ‘there is no need to call your guards. I will depart of my own accord.’ Turning on his heel, he left the dais and walked with rigid spine down the hall to the door. He half expected to be stopped, to be dragged back and forced to his knees before Lord Thomas, but no one called out, and no one tried to stop him.
Outside, the air was freezing and filled with a whirling dance of snowflakes, A jagged wind was blowing from the east, so sharp that it felt like a knife blade, slicing his skin and sliding along his bones. It would be impossible to travel on tonight, if not for him, then for his tired horses. He put his head down and forced his way towards the stables. Straw made a warm enough bed, and it would not be the first time in his life.
In the hall, Thomas FitzParnell jerked to his feet and without a word, stalked off to his private solar, where he closed and barred the door against all intrusion. Rage boiled like acid in his belly. He reached for the flagon, tipped himself a cupful of wine, and drank it down hard and fast. Then, with a curse, he hurled the cup at the wall and watched it shatter into a hundred fragments.
Even after all these years, the pain was too much for him to contain. His daughter, for whom he had nurtured such plans of dynasty, for whom he had cast his net far and wide to snare dazzling marriage offers, had betrayed her blood and eloped with a common, conniving tourney knight. The scandal had made him a laughing stock for months, and was still remembered with relish in several quarters.
Well, now she was dead and he was glad. No more would she drag the proud name of FitzParnell through the gutter. And the wastrel who had sullied her was dead too, and hopefully frying in hell.
A sound strangled in his throat. It was not a sob; Thomas had never cried in his life, not for a war wound not for the death of his wife, or their numerous stillborn children.
‘Sir … Father?’
He caught his breath at the knock on the door. ‘Go away!’ he snarled raggedly.
The knock persisted, and finally, in irritation, Thomas lowered the bar and flung open the door. ‘Can’t a man find any peace?’ he snapped at his son. ‘I have had enough of meddling fools for one night.’
