Elizabeth Chadwick - The Running Vixen

Adam scowled at her but was unable to maintain the expression and with a reluctant grin, took one. She put the dish on the trestle and sitting down again, picked up one of the glistening, sticky fruits herself and bit slowly into it. Adam regarded her through narrowed eyes. She returned his scrutiny and licked crystals of honey-sugar delicately from her fingers. His crotch grew warm. ‘It was sweets of another nature I had in mind,’ he said softly.

Heulwen leaned over her husband and pinched out the night candle. Before the light was extinguished she saw that Adam was already asleep and that the frown lines between his brows were for the moment but vague marks of habit rather than present distress. It was one of the few positive lessons she had learned from Ralf — how to ease the tension from a man’s body and leave him in a state of physical, if not mental well-being. As to what was troubling his mind to the point of him drowning it in drink, only he could resolve that one.

She gave a soft, irritated sigh and lay down beside him. He had ever been one to stopper things up inside, silently simmering like a barrel of pitch too close to a cauldron, giving no real indication of how volatile the mixture was until it exploded.

She pressed her cheek against his warm back, closed her eyes and tried to sleep. She must have succeeded, for when she opened her eyes again it was to hear the bell tolling for first Mass and to find the bedside candle lit, with Adam watching her by its flame. Sleepily she stretched her limbs and smiled at him.

He leaned across to kiss her tousled, inviting warmth, but it was a brief gesture, not a prelude to further play. ‘Heulwen, if I asked you to come to Anjou with me, would you?’

‘Anjou?’ she repeated, eyes and wits still misty with sleep. ‘Why do you want to go to Anjou?’ She yawned.

He traced small circles upon her upper arm and shoulder with a gentle forefinger. ‘I don’t want to go to Anjou,’ he qualified ruefully. ‘I wish the damned place did not even exist. Henry wants me to go there as a messenger.’

Heulwen was silent, digesting this surface information and wondering what nasty currents flowed swift beneath it. Three days of heavy drinking for one. She looked at his downcast lashes and waited for them to lift so that she could see the expression in his eyes. ‘Yes, of course I’d go with you.’

‘Without even knowing the kind of message I was bearing?’

Thoughts of Ralf scurried through her mind. She banished them and sat up, tossing back her hair. Adam’s character was totally different. To break his honour you would have to break the man. Perhaps that was the deepest, most dangerous current of all. ‘Yes, even without knowing.’ She cocked her head. ‘Was Anjou the reason the Earl of Gloucester wanted to speak to you so privately?’

Silence. ‘Yes,’ then more silence. He drew a slow, considering breath. ‘The King is breaking a promise he made to us all, and I am to carry the message breaking it.’

‘Oh Adam, no!’ Heulwen cried with indignant sympathy, and her eyes grew angry as she understood his dilemma. ‘Why couldn’t he have sent Gloucester himself?’

Adam shook his head. ‘And have everyone wondering what the King’s eldest bastard was doing in Anjou? I will be considerably less conspicuous.’ He turned his head on the pillow. ‘I keep thinking of Ralf and Warrin and wondering if they were so wrong. Henry uses men. Time and again I’ve heard your father say it, time and again I’ve seen him do it and been used myself. Is it any wonder that I begin to feel like a whore?’

She leaned over him and smoothed the lines that had reappeared between his brows. He laced his fingers in her bright hair and told her the nature of the message he was to bear.

Heulwen was momentarily surprised, but hardly shocked. Henry had attempted a marriage alliance like this before, between Geoffrey of Anjou’s sister and the son he had lost on the White Ship. ‘As I see it,’ she said, ‘it is on Henry’s conscience, not yours. It doesn’t matter what his letter says, you are only its bearer.’

‘So I keep telling myself,’ he said woodenly.

‘And if you renounced your allegiance, which would be the only honourable alternative, you’d have to sell your sword for a living, and I warrant that Henry would still have his way in the end.’

‘Principles do not put bread on your board. Is that what you are saying?’

‘I am saying there is no point going breadless for an inevitability. If your conscience troubles you, it is a sign you still have your honour. I don’t think Ralf ever suffered from either, and therein lies the difference.’ She assessed him, trying to decide whether his expression meant that he had heard her and was considering, or if he was just being obdurate. She folded her arms upon his chest. ‘You had better tell me how long I have to pack my travelling chests, and do I bring a maid, and is Geoffrey of Anjou really as handsome as they say?’

Adam sighed and pulled her mouth down hard to his in a kiss that was as much a reprimand as a token of affection. ‘What would I do without you?’

‘Brood yourself head-first into the nearest firkin of wine!’ she retorted.

It was not so far from the truth, he thought, letting her go and watching her as she picked up a comb and began to work her hair into a straight skein ready for braiding. She knew exactly how to cozen him out of a bad mood, although at the present, new as it was and so long waited for, just the sight of her was enough to raise his spirits and everything else. He glanced down at himself, but it was the need of his bladder rather than the need for his wife that was making him tumescent right now.

He stretched, heard the familiar sinewy crack of his shield-arm and sought out the chamber pot. He felt almost cheerful now that he had made the decision to to take Heulwen with him. The notion of leaving her behind had been part of his reluctance to go on this journey he had been asked to undertake. Her reaction had been important too when he told her the reason for his going. No scorn or revulsion, just a practical acceptance and words of common sense that put his fears into their true perspective. He had been tail-chasing again.

‘Be sure to pack the wolf brooch,’ he said over his shoulder with a wry smile.

Anjou, Spring 1127

The cockerel was a jewelled image cast in living bronze, and looked as though he had just stepped down from a weather vane to strut in the dust. Alert topaz eyes swivelled to study his surroundings. His coral comb and wattles jiggled proudly on head and throat as he paraded the circle, his tail a light-catching cascade of green-tipped gold, legs cobbled in bronze and armed with deadly spurs. Here in the city of Angers he was without rival, for all his rivals were dead.

He stretched his throat, raising a ruff of bright feathers, and crowed. Bets were laid. His owner rose from a lithe crouch, and with his hands on his exquisite gilded belt, he looked round impatiently.

‘He’s late,’ grumbled Geoffrey Plantagenet, heir to the Duchy of Anjou. He was almost as fine to look upon as his fighting cock, being tall with ruddy golden curls and brilliant frost-grey eyes. Thread-of-gold crusted the throat and cuffs of his tunic, and the dagger at his narrow hips blazed with gems; like his bird’s spurs it was honed to a wicked edge.

‘Have you ever known William le Clito not to be late?’ snorted Robert de Blou, watching the bird which had originally been his gift to the youth at his side. ‘He’d miss his own funeral, that one.’

Geoffrey flashed a white grin, but his fingers tapped irritably against his belt. ‘He will need to shape better than this if he wants my father’s continued support against the English King.’

‘My lord, he’s here now!’ cried another baron, pointing towards the river. Geoffrey turned his head and with a cool gaze watched the approach of William le Clito and his small entourage of mongrels — Norman malcontents, Flemings and Frenchmen, and the tall yellow-haired English knight who had been banished from his own country for the murder of a fellow baron.

‘You are late,’ he addressed the would-be Duke of Normandy who had recently married the French king’s sister. Geoffrey passed an indifferent look over the women they had brought with them. Not obviously strumpets by their appearance, but strumpets nevertheless. Le Clito might be a new husband but it was no reason for continence when a diplomatic visit to Anjou offered the chance of easy sin.

Le Clito gave Geoffrey a smile of blinding charm which, because he used it so often, had lost most of its impact. ‘My apologies. Our barge was held up. I’m not that late, am I?’ He touched the younger man’s shoulder with familiarity. Geoffrey stepped aside, nostrils flaring with controlled choler and regarded the bird that Warrin de Mortimer was holding under his arm — a handsome black, the feathers emerald-shot in the spring sunlight.

‘You wager that sorry object can beat my Topaze?’ he scoffed.

‘Name your price and we shall soon see,’ le Clito answered jauntily. ‘Warrin, put him down.’

Someone scooped up Geoffrey’s bird so that men could look at the form and condition of the black and make their wagers. The cockerel shook its ruffled feathers and preened, and stretched on elegant tiptoe to crow defiance.

Warrin de Mortimer leaned against the wall and rubbed his side where the thick, pink ridge of scar tissue was irritating him. He looked at the black and knew full well that Geoffrey’s bird would win because Geoffrey of Anjou always won. He had never had to beg at other men’s tables for his meat. His fingers paused directly over the scar: his own fault. He had underestimated de Lacey’s speed, forgotten to allow for the years of experience that followed squirehood. For that particular error of judgement he was now an outcast in the land where he had been his father’s heir, reduced to the status of plain household knight in the pay of a man whose own luck was about as reliable as a whore’s promise.