Elizabeth Chadwick - Shields of Pride

‘I’ve lived on crumbs and I’ve lived on largesse, depending on my fortunes, but I have never been reduced to begging in the gutter. Early on I learned to pace my income and not live beyond it. You will find me well qualified to govern.’

The weight of his gaze was almost tangible. ‘What advantage is there to me in becoming any man’s wife when I can remain Giles’s widow?’

‘De Luci will still have to appoint a warden for your son. And your dower lands will cause men to seek you in marriage, perhaps by force.’

‘Richard de Luci would never permit that to happen!’

He shook his head. ‘Possession is nine-points of the law and money the other. If the justiciar decides you are difficult because you rejected my suit, he’ll be far less inclined to sympathy on the next occasion - he might well choose to levy a fine and turn a blind eye.’

She stared at her hands, forcing them to be still so that her agitation would not be displayed to his miss-nothing stare. She studied the walls of her trap for a means of escape. There were doors in her cage but, as she examined them, she saw that they only led into other cages, smaller and meaner, without even the room to turn and chase her own tail.

She studied Joscelin from beneath her lashes. He had been kind to Robert and he had twice the patience of Giles but that by no means made him a saint. Like Giles, he was strong-willed, determined and ambitious; she had no reason to associate those traits with her own personal good, yet what was the alternative? The thought of men such as Hubert de Beaumont made her shudder.

‘What would you have done had I not overheard you talking downstairs?’ she asked curiously.

‘Approached you in the morning.’ A self-deprecating smile lifted his features and took her completely by surprise. ‘Probably on the turf seat in the orchard after Mass with Stephen playing his lute behind the wall and me on my bended knees.’

She had to swallow a treacherous answering smile. ‘Then I would have refused you indeed.’

‘And do you refuse me now?’

Linnet glanced around the current setting - a bedchamber at night in shadowy rushlight, with a curious audience a mere curtain away, and the bed itself, the satin coverlet gleaming like horsehide, inviting the wild ride and the nightmare. How she hated it. Throughout her life it had been a symbol of betrayal, pain and death. She inhaled deeply. ‘I do not refuse you,’ she said.

A spark leaped in his eyes. ‘And you are willing?’

‘I give my consent.’ Which was not the same thing. ‘And I want to observe three months of mourning for Giles in the proper manner. I owe him that duty at least.’ She uttered the last sentence softly, more than half to herself.

She saw him stiffen as he registered the tone and content of her reply. His own gaze on the bed, he said quietly, ‘I doubt you owe him any kind of duty at all.’ Then he looked at her and shrugged. ‘It’s as close as I’m going to get for the moment and the prize is worth the compromise. ’ He rose to his feet. ‘Will you agree to plight troth in front of witnesses tomorrow before we leave the city?’

Linnet hesitated then mutely nodded assent.

‘You’ll have no cause for regret, I swear,’ he said earnestly.

Her father-by-marriage Raymond de Montsorrel, had whispered those same words to her once and he had lied. Christ on the cross, how he had lied as he destroyed her.

Joscelin waited but when she did not respond and kept her face averted, he sighed and went to the door. On the threshold he stopped and turned round. ‘You were going to suggest something about the security of the strongbox earlier, before all this cropped up?’

Linnet rose unsteadily from the coffer. She had been silently praying for him to leave but obviously she was not a good enough Christian. It would be easy to put him off by saying that it was nothing, that it could wait until the morning. She knew he would not argue, for there were tired shadows beneath his eyes and he still had his vigil to keep at the bier of the soldier who had died. But by the morning there would be too many other considerations to snatch at her time.

And so she told him and was rewarded by a look of admiration and a dark chuckle. ‘I’ll set it in motion straight away before I go to prayer,’ he promised, and when he left her his tread was buoyant, as if he saw her willingness to cooperate with him where the silver was concerned as a willingness on other levels too.

In the warmth of a midsummer afternoon, Joscelin approached Rushcliffe by way of the Fosse road that ran through the undulating wolds to the east of the river Trent and the city of Nottingham, and then he struck on to a rutted byway that linked Rushcliffe to Southwell and Newark.

Leaning against his chest, tucked into his cloak, was Robert de Montsorrel. Joscelin had taken the child on to his saddle to give Linnet and her maid a respite and, besides, he now had a paternal responsibility to the little boy. Indeed, an empty space within him seemed a little less barren for the comfort of the warm weight lying against his ribs.

He smiled down at Robert’s drowsy blond head, imagining Ironheart’s response could he but witness the scene. His father would snort and say that he was storing up trouble, would say that people would consider him soft and afford him less respect. A child’s place was with its mother and its mother’s place was at the hearth if a man had any sense. Joscelin’s smile grew wry and dark. He was obviously not a sensible man.

As he rounded a turn in the dusty road, the castle of Rushcliffe came into sight, filling his vision, and momentarily taking his breath. Limewashed to protect the timber and stone from the weather, it stood out in the landscape like a perfect white tooth, proclaiming the local power of its lord. Joscelin had served garrison duty in imposing castles such as Dover and Nottingham but as a small cog in the doings of influential men. But this keep before him was greater by far because the authority was now his own. A warm feeling of possession washed over him but he did his best to hold it down. Rushcliffe was only on loan to him until the child in his arms should come of age and it was unwise when faced with a banquet after years of privation to devour and gorge. For his own sake he had to consume sparingly.

A village had grown up in the security of the castle’s shadow and, as they rode down the narrow main street and negotiated the market cross, folk emerged from their wattle-and-daub dwellings to watch the procession of soldiers and the funeral cortège. Poultry and children scampered from underfoot. Dogs barked. An enormous spotted sow held up their progress while she was persuaded to leave the middle of the road, where she had been lying in a puddle suckling her litter.

Women with children at their skirts and babies in their arms watched from their doorways. A carpenter stood outside his workshop, wood shavings curling from the plane in his hand. Joscelin was aware of cold eyes and unsmiling mouths. One or two people crossed themselves as the coffin filed past but most just stared. An old woman outside the alehouse was even bold enough to spit and shake her fist.

Joscelin guided his mount over to Linnet’s roan mare. ‘Giles was not popular,’ he remarked.

‘They hated him,’ she said. ‘He wanted their respect but never understood it was an entitlement he had to earn. He ruled them with a heavy hand - often with a whip in it.’

He gave her a searching look. ‘Did you hate him, too?’

She lowered her gaze. ‘He was my husband.’

‘A fittingly dutiful answer.’

She flushed. ‘Do you have a complaint?’

‘Only that I would know your true thoughts, not what you think you ought to say.’

She gave him a startled look.

Joscelin shrugged. ‘I’m used to the women of the barracks and the camps. Propriety never stands in their way and better so, I think.’

She considered this for a moment and he saw her hands clench on the reins. When she spoke, though, her voice was steady and dispassionate. ‘By all means let us be candid but I do not want to talk about Giles.’

Joscelin was enough of a strategist to know when to withdraw. From the set of her jaw he judged that persistence on the subject would cultivate hostility. He looked down at the sleepy blond head pillowed against his body. ‘Then let us talk about this young man’s future. As soon as I have an opportunity, I’ll find him a pony of his own.’

She nodded with alacrity and looked relieved. ‘Indeed, I agree with you. It is past time he began his training.’

In murmured conversation, so as not to wake the child, they rode on, past the water mill and then through some coppiced woodland of birch and hazel. Beyond the woods lay rich meadowland on which grazed the castle’s dairy herd and farther up the slope, closer to the keep, sheep and geese kept the grass nibbled to a springy turf.

Robert woke up and Joscelin returned him to his mother. The child straddled the saddle in front of her, small hands grasping the pommel. Dusty sunlight turned his hair to white gold and lightened his eyes to the palest grey-blue, making of him a radiant faery being.

From somewhere on their left at the far side of the coppice they heard the chunk of an axe on wood. The nape of Joscelin’s neck began to prickle. The coppiced trees resembled deformed fists with fingers sprouting from the knuckle joints. He glanced over his shoulder at the pall-covered coffin. The wain on which it lay creaked and jarred over the ruts in the track and Joscelin had an irrational expectation that they were going to jolt into one rut too many and awaken the dead.