The Love Knot (30 page)

Catrin's legs were suddenly weak. Her heart began to pound. She hoped against hope that Richard had found Godard. 'I do not know what you mean,' she said, and did not have to look at his face to know how feeble her defence was. 'I came looking for Oliver, that's all.'

'She said your horse was sick and that you'd asked her to tend it,' the soldier spoke out and stepped sideways, blocking her escape. Left and right, she was now hemmed in.

'Her and the boy are the only survivors from Penfoss,' de Mohun said over his shoulder, then looked broodingly at Catrin. 'Oliver told me. Full of pride he was, the fool.'

'It was you.' Catrin's voice quavered.

De Mohun lifted his brows. 'So you claim, but whose word will be considered law?' He stroked his beard in a parody of reasonable thought. 'There is room to negotiate. Tide's in, the river's high. A walk along the wharf should resolve matters.'

An image of Rohese de Bayvel's remains filled Catrin's mind; the ragged white flesh dragged up from the depths of the river. Her hand lay on top of her satchel and the latch was unfastened. She tensed her wrist and took a step back. 'Other people know where I am. They will raise the hue and cry against you,' she warned.

De Mohun snorted. 'You were never here. None of us ever saw you.' He took a step towards her, arms outstretched. 'You went out into the city, to a birth, and never returned.'

As he lunged, so too did Catrin, striking with the knife as Oliver had shown her. De Mohun recoiled with an involuntary cry of surprise and pain, blood dripping from a deep gash in the back of his hand. With a snarl, he drew his sword.

Catrin screamed at the top of her lungs. The other soldier made a grab at her arm and fetched up the same as his master with a bone-deep wound. But then the sword connected. Catrin swung desperately to avoid it. Her satchel caught the bulk of the blow and split open, spilling entrails of herb sachets, linen bandages, jars of ointment and oil, and a small plaster image of Saint Margaret which shattered on the straw-covered ground. The last of the blow bit through flesh to bone and although there was no pain, Catrin felt the heat of blood flooding her side. She screamed again, and her voice was answered by a huge, masculine bellow.

The sword glittered in the air again, but this time it was turned on the blade of another weapon. She saw a quarterstaff flail the air and heard the deep grunt of someone struck in the midriff. Oliver and Godard, she thought hazily, and swayed and fell. The smell of dung and straw filled her nostrils. It was very tempting to close her eyes and let the world disappear. Get up, she scolded herself, get away before it's too late.

There was pain now as she scrabbled to her hands and knees; hot, scalding, trickling pain, but it told her that she was still alive. She heard cries, the sound of running feet. A hand touched her shoulder and a woman's face, wide-eyed with shock, peered round into hers. "Tis the young midwife, she's wounded!' she cried over her shoulder to her companion. 'Help me with her.'

Between them, the two women lifted Catrin to her feet and bore her over to their tent, where they laid her down on a straw pallet.

Randal de Mohun parried Oliver's blow. A vicious upswing sent chips of steel sparking from Oliver's blade. As he flinched from the flying fragments, de Mohun grabbed a saddled horse belonging to one of his troop, clawed himself across its back, and rammed spurs into its flanks. Oliver lunged for the bridle, but just as swiftly snatched his hand back as Randal's sword chopped down and the horse lashed out. Then the mercenary was free, thundering across the bailey and through the open castle gates, leaving the guards staring in blank astonishment.

Most of Randal's men made their escape in the mayhem and confusion, the majority of them sneaking out as word spread. Randal's hefty serjeant was constrained to stay, as Godard finally got an arm lock on him, bore him to the ground and sat on him.

'Don't kill him,' Oliver panted. 'He has a song to sing to the Earl.'

'Do my best,' Godard growled, 'but I make no promises.'

Oliver nodded and, sheathing his sword, ran to the tent where the women were beckoning.

Catrin was ashen, her eyes dilated with pain. Her gown was soaked in blood from armpit to hip.

'Christ, only you could be so foolish and stubborn as to walk into the den of a hardened mercenary like Randal de Mohun!' He knelt at her side, his voice ragged and his hand trembling as he drew his dagger to slash the green wool, north and south.

'I'll need a new gown now,' Catrin jested weakly.

'In my estimation, you need new wits. Catrin, I swear you will be the death of me, if you do not kill yourself first!' Working rapidly, he tore open the dress and chemise and was flooded with both relief and anxiety when he saw the gash that de Mohun's sword had opened. It was long and moderately deep but, as far as he could tell, it had struck no

vital organ and the blood was only seeping now. But still it required stitching, and quickly. After that came the dangers of wound-fever and the stiffening sickness, either of which could kill in short order.

Thanking the women for their care, he wrapped Catrin in his cloak and bore her back to the house against the bailey wall. In a faint voice she told him the nostrums to mix to ease her pain and clean the wound. Earl Robert's chirurgeon was sent for to do the stitching.

'I only wanted to look at his saddle-cloth, to find out if it was fashioned of black and white cowhide,' she said. 'I thought he was safely away in the hall.'

'He came to the hall, but did not stop for long.' Oliver chafed her hands, wishing her flesh was not so cold. 'He wanted to ask me about some new spear heads I'd promised to get him when I ordered mine. Just after he'd gone, Godard found me and gave me Richard's message. Fortunate for you that we did not delay in following de Mohun to his camp.'

'Will the Earl raise the hue and cry against him?'

'Of a certainty,' Oliver said, but the words were bitter in his mouth for he knew that there was small likelihood of Randal de Mohun being captured. Earl Robert's army was almost ready to leave Bristol and begin campaigning towards Winchester and London. There was little time and even fewer men available to hunt down a rebel mercenary. Good riddance would be Earl Robert's philosophy on the matter. Besides, they had de Mohun's second-in-command to make a confession and become a scapegoat for the rest.

The look in Catrin's eyes told him that she had about as much faith as himself in Randal de Mohun being brought to justice.

Oliver turned his head aside. 'I regret ever bringing him to the Earl's attention,' he said, his voice filled with loathing. 'You were not to know.'

'I knew his kind, which is almost as bad.' He rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. 'I could have lost you, and for no more than a sense of foolish obligation long outgrown.'

'But you haven't and you won't,' Catrin said fiercely, and drew herself up on the bolster, her eyes dark and bright in her otherwise bloodless face. 'Randal de Mohun's days are numbered. Ours are not.' She drew his face down to hers and kissed him with a vigour that revealed how strongly the life still flowed in her. And it was in that embrace that Earl Robert's chirurgeon found them as he arrived with his needle and thread.

'I don't want to go,' Oliver said.

He was sitting on the side of their bed, stamping his foot into an ankle shoe as he spoke. The warmth of the spring sun filtered through the door curtain and laid a sparkle of gold on the hair springing from the back of his wrists.

Catrin eased herself up on the bolster and felt the uncomfortable tug of skin where her wound had been stitched. Six weeks had passed since the incident with de Mohun but she still felt pain from the cut and, although it was healing well, the scar was a deep red welt against her pale skin. For a few days after the attack, she had been very ill indeed; not at death's door, but running a high fever filled with delirious, senseless dreams in which she was pursued by a faceless man on a bay horse. When the fever broke, it left her as weak as a new-born lamb, and it was only now that she was beginning to rediscover her original, robust self.

Persuaded to talk, de Mohun's Serjeant had spun a horrific tale of murder and atrocity. Not only Penfoss, but several smaller hamlets had been destroyed, the mercenaries circling and raiding like a pack of wolves. Rohese de Bayvel had been their victim, and so had Gawin.

'I don't want you to go.' She laid a hand on his back and felt the warmth of his flesh through his linen shirt.

'Then I won't.' Turning round, he rolled over on top of her, careful to avoid her injured side, and for a moment they kissed and nuzzled. He pressed his hips down and she raised hers and then clasped her legs around him, only half in play. For a moment he groaned and almost yielded to temptation then, with a sigh, he sat up and pushed his fingers through his hair.

'Now look what you've done. Is that any way to send a man off on the road?'

Catrin giggled. 'The only way,' she said. 'You'll come home the quicker for the rest.'

'I had not suspected you of such cruelty.'

'Love is always cruel,' Catrin said, not quite in jest.

'And not always to be kind,' he retorted, and leaned over to fasten the toggles on his shoes.

'I will send you off with something else too,' Catrin said, her eyes upon the curve of his spine. 'The promise that when you return, we will be wed.'

He straightened and turned so swiftly that she actually heard the sinew crack in his neck the moment before he winced in pain. 'Jesu, that is grinding salt into a wound,' he said.

'Why?'

'Because I want to return even before I have gone, and I do not know how long I will be away this time.' He rubbed his neck. 'This damned, gory war creeps on and on like a leper dragging his useless limbs. The Londoners hate Mathilda. I do not blame them after the manner in which she dealt with them; she does not know the meaning of diplomacy. Every foothold gained is slippery and only made with the most arduous toil. I begin to think that Earl Robert is not losing his hair from age and wisdom, but from tearing it out in clumps at his sister's folly!' He shook his head and gave her a hopeless look. 'But I am locked to her cause. What else can I do?'

To which Catrin did not have an answer. Instead, she wrapped her arms around his neck and laid her cheek against his. 'Whatever you think now, it cannot last for ever. My talk of marriage was intended to cheer you and instead I have set you to brooding.'

'Nay. Without you, and the thought of you, I would have gone mad long before now.' They kissed and clung for a moment, but the dawn was brightening outside, and it was with reluctance that they broke apart. 'You will be Lady Pascal - a titled woman without lands,' he tried to jest.

Catrin smiled and gave a little shrug. 'I can live without them.' More easily than Oliver she thought, with a shrewd look at her betrothed through her lashes. 'But I know how much it irks you that a stranger sits in your hall and milks your estates.'

Rising from their bed, he donned his quilted gambeson and reached for his hauberk. 'Ashbury would not have been mine if my brother had lived, I freely admit it, but now he is dead the inheritance has fallen to me.'

'But surely Ashbury is only yours by right of Conquest in the first place?' Catrin ventured. 'Did not your grandfather or great-grandfather come to
England
with the Conqueror?'

'No.' He shook his head. 'My great-grandfather's name was Osmund, son of Leofric, and my family has held Ashbury time out of mind. He swore allegiance to the Conqueror and married a Norman noblewoman, Nichola de Pascal. Then, because all things French were in fashion, and he wanted to live, he changed his name to his wife's and christened his sons with Norman names. My colouring is true Saxon.' He tugged at a lock of his pale blond hair. 'Ashbury is mine by right of generations.'

'Why haven't you told me before?' Catrin eyed him curiously.

He shrugged. 'No reason why I should. It is not something that my family has ever bandied abroad. We are proud, but within ourselves.' His upper lip curled wryly. 'Or should I say within myself, since I am the only Pascal — the only Osmundsson - remaining.'

Catrin nodded thoughtfully. The pride was kept hidden because it went hand-in-glove with shame. Three generations after the Conquest, the nobility was dominated by men of French-speaking Norman extraction. It was true that their offspring were suckled by English wet nurses, and that their sons and daughters grew up speaking both tongues, but French was the language of the court and it was considered vulgar to admit to any great knowledge of English. Saxons were peasants and traders, occasionally merchants. Any who displayed overt signs of wealth were treated with suspicion and frequently harassed. For a man of rank to admit to Saxon heritage in public would be like throwing down a challenge to his peers. Older blood. A stronger claim, based on heredity not robbery.

She kept her perceptions to herself. To have spoken them aloud would have been cruel. Oliver must have them too. There was no need for words.

'Then our children will be true mongrels,' she said instead with a smile. 'Welsh and Breton from me, English and Norman from you.'