Elizabeth Chadwick - Shields of Pride

‘Flemings, Brabanters, whoever he could get the cheapest,’ Conan said with a shrug. ‘Of course, like us, they’ll have to cross the Narrow Sea. Be quite an invasion, eh? If you ask me, they’ll come piecemeal, rounded up by those rebellious earls of yours and sent over here with promises of riches beyond their greediest imaginings. Most of ’em won’t be professional soldiers - jobless weavers and dyers for the most part. Won’t know the business end of a sword from the holes in their arses.’

‘But you are not part of the vanguard?’ queried Brien, persisting like a dog with a bone.

Conan half-closed his eyes. ‘You want to know a mortal great deal, my lord.’

‘Brien works for the justiciar,’ Joscelin explained and was amused by the look of consternation that briefly flickered in Conan’s eyes. ‘It is his duty to discover as much as he can about the doings of the rebellious barons.’

‘Well, don’t look to me,’ Conan growled. ‘I can tell you more about the latrine habits of Nottingham tanners than I can about the doings of Robert Ferrers. All he said was that he was going to replace us with Flemings, and we’re not part of anyone’s vanguard, although there’s hiring aplenty going on across the Narrow Sea.’

Joscelin regarded Conan with a mixture of exasperation and curiosity. ‘Well, what are you really doing in England when Normandy is your true field?’

Conan sucked his teeth and eased a fingernail between the front two to loosen a tag of meat. ‘I’m not getting any younger - eight and forty next Christmastide, although I know I don’t look it,’ he added with a sour grin. ‘One day, experience won’t be enough to save me from some youngster’s sword and I’ll be glad to die. But before that happens, I’ve to attend to some personal family business.’ He looked pointedly at Brien, who was swift to take a hint by rising to his feet to go and cut himself a portion of ox.

When he was out of earshot, Conan said, ‘I’m here to make my peace with your father - and Morwenna. When I heard you’d got yourself lands in the area, I thought I’d muster your support first.’

‘You might find making peace difficult,’ Joscelin said wryly. ‘My father never mentions her. If I bring up the subject, he looks at me as if I have deliberately stabbed him.’

Conan grunted. ‘Tore him asunder when your mother died. He begot on her the child that killed her. He wasn’t there to catch her when she tripped on her gown and fell down the stairs. You’ll never reason it away from him. God knows I tried in the months after her death, and in the end he kicked me out because he wanted to wear his guilt like shackles for the rest of his life.’

‘He has made a shrine of his guilt now,’ Joscelin said. ‘Near his hunting lodge in Arnsby woods he’s had a chapel built to house her remains. He has masses said for her every day and candles to burn in perpetuity.’

Conan shook his head and stared numbly at Joscelin, as if unsure whether to be pleased or appalled.

‘The first time I saw the white chapel, I wept,’ Joscelin confessed. ‘He had it built after I ran away to join you. In part I think it was a shrine for me, too. He never thought to see me again.’ He looked at the ground and stirred the grass with the toe of his boot.

‘He probably wouldn’t have done either, if not for me!’ Conan declared, his voice loud and overhearty. ‘You were greener than the grass stains on a whore’s gown when you arrived in my camp!’

‘I was, wasn’t I?’ Joscelin glanced sideways at his uncle, not in the least deceived. Conan was deeply affected by what he had just been told and, rather than flounder a reply, had taken refuge in coarse banter.

‘You grew up fast, though.’

Joscelin arched his brow. ‘I had no choice.’

Conan massaged his scar with two fingers. ‘I don’t suppose you did, nephew,’ he said in a gentler tone. ‘I saw your woman, Breaca, the month before we sailed. She gave me board and lodging in Falaise for two nights.’

‘She’s not my woman any more.’ Joscelin returned to stirring the grass. He watched the shiny, stiff stems bend and spring upright. Then he glanced at Conan, driven to ask despite his determination not to. ‘Is she happy?’

‘Merry as a nesting sparrow with three fine fledglings to show to the world - two little wenches and a baby boy in the cradle. She told me to wish you well the next time I saw you and to say that you and Juhel are constantly in her prayers.’

Joscelin bit the inside of his mouth. After Juhel had died, he had been unable to hold Breaca. She had been at a crossroads age, craving a roof over her head and more security than he could provide. In the year of grieving determination it had taken him to become a competent, tough soldier, standing on his own merits and paid accordingly, she had ceased following the mercenary road from one war to the next and settled down with a hostel keeper from Falaise. ‘She is in my thoughts and prayers too,’ he said softly. ‘And if she has found what she wants, then I’m glad for her.’ He changed the subject. ‘Are you seeking employment now?’

The older man eyed him suspiciously. ‘Depends. Why do you ask?’

‘I’m short of troops. I was thinking of riding into Nottingham to hire men but, since you’ve already lined your purse with Rushcliffe’s silver, perhaps you and your men would like the position?’

Conan stared. He grasped the drawstring pouch at his belt and waggled it at Joscelin. ‘What do you mean? See - empty as a hag’s tit!’

‘You’re not going to tell me that my seneschal rode into your troop wearing nothing but his drawers?’ Joscelin scoffed. ‘You said yourself that he was “a fatted calf, dripping in wealth” and not his at that. It belongs to my five-year-old ward.’

Conan continued to stare. Despite his best effort his lips twitched and in a moment he was lost to a full grin. Joscelin himself was similarly afflicted, his hazel eyes bright with amusement.

‘You are your father’s son,’ Conan growled by way of capitulation.

‘And my uncle’s nephew,’ Joscelin retorted.

‘Look, Mama. What are they doing?’ Robert wriggled upright on the saddle to point at the cage of scaffolding confining Arnsby’s tall, octagonal keep. Men stood on platforms or toiled on the ground, caparisoning the monstrous stone beast in white summer plumage.

‘They’re giving it a fresh coat of limewash to protect it from the weather,’ Joscelin said over his shoulder and slowed his courser so that Linnet could join him. ‘We’ve to do the same to Rushcliffe before the winter comes.’

‘Why?’

‘To protect the fabric from the bad weather and keep it strong.’

Robert sucked his underlip while he considered the reply. Linnet had watched her son gain rapidly in confidence during the weeks following Giles’s death. Given space to breathe without being slapped, glared at or found lacking, Robert had begun to emerge from his shell - tentatively at first, with much drawing in of horns, but growing bolder by the day. Joscelin had put him on an ancient pack pony in the tiltyard and begun teaching him to ride. He had fashioned a small, blunt-tipped lance for him and a wooden sword. Conan de Gael, Joscelin’s uncle, had played at knights and outlaws with Robert and conceded defeat with dramatic death throes, much to the boy’s consternation and delight. And Robert, so silent and withdrawn before his father’s death, had started asking questions. One after another they tumbled out of him, queuing up to trip off his busy tongue. Why is the sky blue? Why don’t people have fur like coneys? How does Job the shepherd know when it’s going to rain? Where does the sea go when the tide is out?

‘Why are we here?’

‘I told you; to visit Sir Joscelin’s father.’ Linnet kissed Robert’s fair hair.

‘Why?’

‘Because I need to talk to him,’ Joscelin said. ‘Here, come and sit on my saddle and stop bedeviling your mother with questions. You can guide Whitesocks if you want.’

The words were no sooner spoken than accomplished. Robert scrambled with alacrity from his mother’s arms into Joscelin’s and settled there as if they had been his security since birth.

They approached the open gateway, the horses’ hooves thudding on the solid drawbridge planks. The huge iron pulley chains were speckled with limewash and there were splashes of it, like enormous bird droppings, on the bridge itself. Robert’s small hand pointed and he chirruped a question. Joscelin bent over him and responded with patient good humour. A pang cut through Linnet to see them thus: the familiar sensations of guilt and love and a deeper, primal twisting of heart and womb and loins.

‘Ach,’ said Conan softly as he joined her on the drawbridge. ‘Give him a child and he turns to butter.’

There was a strange note in the mercenary’s voice that caused Linnet to look at him curiously. ‘Certainly my son has taken to him,’ she replied. ‘And in London I met him in the company of his youngest brother.’ She looked thoughtfully at Conan. He was wearing a garish tunic of Welsh plaid and riding Corbette’s piebald stallion. Bracelets of copper and silver jangled in abundance on his forearms. The word disreputable came easily to mind. And yet he had helped ungrudgingly with his own war-scarred hands to rebuild the farmhouse that he and his men had burned. ‘You must know Joscelin very well.’

Conan made a face. ‘Yes and no, my lady. He came to me when he was fifteen, stubborn, proud and half-starved. ’ A sardonic grin curled his lips. ‘I took him in and I took him on, taught him the bare-fist-and-teeth side of fighting, the kind that keeps you alive.’

‘Like a knife down your boot?’ she asked with a half-smile.