For the King’s Favor (40 page)

Gundreda whitened and crossed her hands over her breast. Will rose to his feet and stood protectively in front of her. “You go too far, brother.”

“I don’t go far enough!” Huon snarled. “She wants to sell our patrimony for a hundred marks. If that’s not whoredom, I don’t know what is! And you condone her, you gutless worm. You are no better!” Turning on his heel, he flung from the room.

In the dreadful silence that fell behind the hem of his cloak, Gundreda bent her head. “All I want is peace,” she whispered. “I have fought all my life for him and I cannot do it any more. How can he say such a thing to me?” The thought came that while he was of her blood, he was exactly like his father, who had called all women whores too, and like his father he knew how to hurt. Perhaps it was punishment too, for what she had said to Ida that afternoon—a rebound of her own cruelty.

Will awkwardly patted her shoulder, then without a word he too left the room. Gundreda covered her face with her hands and wondered how it had come to this.

***

Huon sat on the chair beside his bed. It had belonged to his father and he had brought it with him out of Framlingham in the days before they had had to leave. Sometimes he would sit upright, hands on the polished arms, and pretend he was the Earl, dispensing justice as he chose, exercising his power, advising kings. He had twice Roger’s ability and felt sick to the core that his own mother and brother had betrayed him by trying to make a settlement behind his back. His fists clenched on the chair’s finials, he swore he would never give up the fight. Huon still vividly remembered taking Roger’s sword and girding it on when their father was alive. He still remembered how good the weight of it had felt against his hip. He should never have let Roger take it back. He should have run him through when he had the chance. Holding out his hands, Huon stared at them. His flesh was starting to show the spots and mottles of age like the mould on a dead leaf. There was a scar where a Saracen blade had nicked him at the siege of Acre and a fresh mark where he had dug out a splinter earlier. Would that he could dig Roger out in a similar wise.

He looked up and then scowled as Will entered the chamber. “Get out!” he snarled.

An anxious frown furrowed Will’s brows, but he stood his ground. “You should not have called our mother a whore,” he said.

Huon’s lip curled. “Indeed you are right, brother,” he sneered. “I should reserve that title for the Countess of Norfolk and all of her get—and call my half-brother cuckold and taker of other men’s leavings.”

Will chewed the inside of his cheek. “You should make amends,” he persevered. “She does not deserve such words after all she has done for us.”

Huon didn’t answer. In a far corner of his mind, he knew he was being unfair, but fairness had little worth to him. It was a weak value and now more than ever he needed to be strong.

“Will you at least come and listen next week?” Will extended his hand. “See what he has to offer?”

“What, like a huckster bargaining at a market stall for cheap burel cloth?” It was an appropriate comparison, he thought, since burel was used to cover shrouded corpses on the way to burial if the weather was bad.

“You have nothing to lose.”

“And nothing to gain either. If we yield now, it makes a nothing of the entire struggle, don’t you see?”

“But we are going to be left with nothing anyway. Better to settle for something now. Why don’t
you
see?”

Huon gave his brother a look filled with loathing. Rising to his feet, he poked Will in the paunch overflowing his narrow leather belt. “You’ve always been soft as spilled guts,” he snarled.

“Maybe so, but it’s time to put a stop to the fighting—for all our sakes.”

“I’ll never stop,” Huon said, and there was a bitter taste in his mouth.

***

Roger faced his brothers across a scrubbed oak trestle table in the guest house at Thetford Priory, territory more neutral than Framlingham and just as ancestral. Outside, the rain of the previous day had given way to a pale, sun-washed morning, redolent with spring and new growth. In the midst of it, Roger thought Huon looked like an old dead tree. The five years since the siege of Nottingham had done him no favours and Roger was uncomfortably reminded of their father. It was almost as if his ghost had stalked from the crypt to be with them at this meeting. Huon’s features were hatchet-sharp and raddled. Broken veins threaded his cheeks and his mouth dragged down at the corners, while the petulant lower lip was a moist shelf of discontent. Will, dark-haired and carrying an excess of weight, leaned a little back from the trestle, the pose mirroring his general attitude to life and engaging with problems. They made an unprepossessing pair.

Sunlight rayed through the open windows on to the board where the brothers sat, and gilded the documents and tallies lying there with warm, pale gold. A scribe perched a little apart from the brothers, his ink horn and quills to hand and a clean sheet of vellum at the ready.

“I am only here to humour my mother and set to right any misapprehensions she may have given you,” Huon growled at Roger. “I’ll fight you to the death for my patrimony.”

Roger raised one eyebrow and indicated the documents. “You have no patrimony. This is the copy of our father’s will, lodged here at the priory and you see that it names you nowhere.”

Huon bared his teeth. “That will is not worth using as an arsewipe and you know it. It’s invalid on two counts. You are bastard-born and it’s a forgery. I don’t recognise it.”

Roger remained calm. Indeed, now that the moment was here, he felt as detached as he did on the judicial bench. “It bears my father’s seal and it is witnessed by his knights, some of whom still witness for me.” He gestured round at Hamo Lenveise, Oliver Vaux, and Anketil. “As you well know, an annulment does not convey bastardy on any children born of the marriage.”

Huon snorted. “Then there is no point in me being here, is there?”

“Your mother wanted to negotiate a peace settlement and I am willing to do that.”

Huon leaned forward. “The only thing that will satisfy me—brother—are the lands of my father that he gained after becoming Earl—as is rightful custom, and you know it. And I want Bungay too, which is my mother’s in dower.” The light in Huon’s eyes made them shine a bright, opaque grey against the yellowish whites.

Roger compressed his lips and tapped another document on the trestle. “At the time of my father’s marriage to your mother, it was agreed by all parties that Bungay would go to the heir that my father designated in his will.”

“So you hide behind parchments and steal my patrimony? You take it all and you wonder why I will baulk at sitting at a table with you, you bastard.”

Loathing coiled in Roger’s belly. “I steal nothing. I have come to an agreement with your mother over the estates which were hers in dower. I am prepared to offer you two estates in return for your quitclaim on the earldom.” He kept his tone impassive and signalled a squire to refresh his cup.

“I am not a beggar to be tossed a stale crust and expected to accept it with gratitude!” Huon spat with furious indignation. “You insult me!”

Roger said with weary distaste, “Tell me then, ‘brother,’ if our situations were reversed, exactly how much you would give me? At each turn, if you have ever thought you had the upper hand, you have sought to stamp on me. From the moment you learned how to steal you took my things and you broke them.” He set his jaw. He had not meant to say that and knew he was exposing his own bitterness. “I grant you lands worth two knights’ fees. Take them or leave them because that is all I will give to you and I know it is more than you would ever give to me.”

Huon jerked to his feet, his throat working. Out of long habit, he reached for his sword, but grasped thin air, for all weapons had been left in the custody of the Prior. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

“You never had the chance,” Roger retorted, his own hands gripped in his belt. “Do you want to take it to trial by combat now? Do you? Shall I have one of my knights fetch our swords and shall we fight across our father’s tomb? Do you want to test me, brother—to the death?”

Huon glared at him, his jaw grinding as if chewing on words that he was unable to spit out. Picking up his goblet of wine, he dashed it in Roger’s face and hurled from the room, flinging over the scribe’s lectern on his way and shoving an attendant into the wall. The two knights who had accompanied him followed at a swift stride. Roger stayed his own men, making a calming gesture with the palm of his hand. Someone handed him a napkin and Roger mopped his face and throat. The scribe and one of Roger’s knights picked up the lectern and the scattered writing materials.

“Close the door,” Roger said quietly to Anketil, then looked at Will, whose fleshy features wore an expression of stunned shock. “Unless you are leaving too?”

Will shook his head. “No, my lord. Where would be the point? He will expect me to follow—perhaps in a moment I will, but thus far we have done naught but trade insults, and that was not the purpose of coming here.”

The smell of wine filled Roger’s nostrils, metallic, almost like blood. It was on his clothes, his skin, his hair. He sat down again as Anketil closed the door with great gentleness. “The insults have not been mine.”

Will gave him a level look. “My brother certainly considers two knights’ fees an insult.”

“He was always going to consider whatever I offered him an insult,” Roger said with a shrug, and wondered about his youngest half-brother. Ten years separated them, and a gulf of bad blood and family strife. Roger had never known him except as Huon’s shadow. But then Roger supposed that it was easy to overlook the drab bolt of fabric at the back of a mercer’s booth, but drab did not necessarily mean unserviceable or weak. Sometimes the opposite. “I have nothing else to offer,” he said. “Huon has no sons, but I have five to provide for, and three daughters to find marriage portions. As matters stand now, his threats are nothing but bluster. I will not give him the wherewithal to make them more than they are.”

Will plucked at a loose thread on his cuff. “There is no love lost between us, and between you and our stepmother, but were you to offer a little more, it might be easier to compromise.”

“Such as?”

“My brother desires to set up a fair for the borough of Bungay and collect tolls as a source of revenue. You could use your influence to see it granted for a good price. You could see royal favours come his way now and again.”

Roger felt amusement and mingled with it a new respect for this drab, pasty half-brother of his. “And what do you gain from all this?”

Will eased to his feet and straightened the creases in his tunic. “My brother has no wife. He has had mistresses in the past but not one has quickened with a child. I am his heir and I have a wife and a small son. One day, in the fullness of time, that land and that grant to a fair will be my boy’s…I am not as proud and bitter as my brother, nor as ambitious. What would I do with half an earldom?” He gave Roger a bleak smile. “What would half an earldom do with me?”

Roger found himself returning the smile and it was a strange experience to have that kind of understanding and share the humour of someone whom he had considered his enemy for most of his life. “Yes,” he said, “I think I could do what you ask.”

“You think, or you are prepared to agree to bind yourself to do so?”

Roger’s smile deepened along with his respect. “I agree,” he said. “Before these witnesses, yours and mine, I agree.”

“And you will promote my son among the men of your mesnie when he is old enough?” Will gestured in a slightly embarrassed fashion. “If I am not ambitious for myself, then I want my son at least to do well within his means.”

Roger nodded. “I will do so. He will be a knight.”

Their concord ratified, he and Will left the guest house together. The birdsong flourished around them, and the sun was almost warm. Side by side, they entered the chapel and paced down the nave, entered the choir, and stood before the tomb of their sire.

Roger grimaced as he gazed upon the incised floral motifs and the cross outlined in the centre of the tomb slab. “My father and I will be united in bones and dust as we never were in the flesh,” he said.

Will too looked wry. “It is strange, is it not? Huon and I stayed with him throughout his life, but we will not lie with him in death.”

“I do not suppose it matters where we sleep before the final judgement, as long as it is in hallowed ground.”

Will gave him a sidelong look. “You were always the one he favoured the most, you know.”

Roger shook his head. “He hated me.”

“He didn’t like you, that I grant, but then he cared for no one anyway. He did respect you even if he never admitted or showed it.”

Roger exhaled down his nose. “I doubt that. I lost count of the times he’d demand something of me and then castigate me for failing.”

“Mayhap, but it was the same with us. He thought it would toughen us to the world. But we obeyed his will. We didn’t rebel and stand up for ourselves. You left him; you fought against him in battle and you won. You forged your own path and that was what made the difference to the will he left. You showed him you were the strongest of us all and the best man to take the earldom forward. I never saw it earlier, I just thought he was an unfair old bastard, but he knew what he was doing.”

Roger looked again at his father’s tomb and had a sudden sense of understanding as subtle as the change in the angle of sunlight across the top of the slab. He still could not bring himself to like his father, but Will had illuminated a degree of understanding. It was easier to have compassion too, now that he was long in his grave. Wounds healed even if they left scars. Falling to his knees, he touched his forehead against the side of the tomb in grudging respect, and felt as if a burden had been lifted.

After a while, he rose to his feet, lit a candle for his father, and went from the church. The monks were entering the priory for the service of nones and the sound of their chanting filled the space between the ground and God in an ethereal swell that was like sustenance.