The Love Knot (6 page)

The war had made it too easy for them, Catrin thought. In King Henry's day, there had been peace, with few outlaws and the King's writ both feared and respected. Now, it was every man to his own gain, and devil take the hindmost. 'So you have small hope of capturing them?' she asked.

'I will do what I can - increase patrols and alert all my vassals and tenants. Like as not they're Malmesbury men.' He tightened his fists, and his gold rings gleamed. 'They will be brought to justice, I swear it.'

Well, that was true if he was referring to judgement-day. 'Thank you, my lord.' Once more she stared beyond him at the mural of the women in the garden. Oliver glanced at it too, but his gaze did not linger and he turned his shoulder so that the wall painting was not in his direct line of vision.

'I have brought Lady Amice here to Bristol in the hope that she might lie in the chapel and be vouchsafed a grave here,' he said. 'It was her dying request that you grant refuge to her son, and to her companion, Mistress Catrin of Chepstow.'

The Earl rose from his chair to pace the chamber. At the window embrasure he stopped and looked out over the narrow glimpse of the river Frome and the lush green cow pasture beyond. Then he turned round. 'Dying requests should not be ignored.' There was a slight frown between his eyes, deepening the lines of habit. He paced back across the room and, halting in front of Richard, tilted the boy's chin towards the light. 'Do you know who your father was?'

'Yes, sir, King Henry.'

'Then you must also know that I am your kin, your half-brother.' He gave a slight grimace as he spoke. The age difference of forty years was a telling reminder that their father's carnal weakness had not diminished with the passage of time.

Once more Richard nodded. 'Mama said I should remember that I was a king's son because I might have need of it one day.'

Robert looked vaguely surprised. 'I never thought her capable of looking further than the next summer's day,' he murmured, more than half to himself.

'She did the best by her lights for Richard.' Catrin spoke up in her dead mistress's defence, as again she heard undertones of judgement in a masculine voice.

'The best by her lights,' Robert repeated, looking at her and stroking his dark beard. 'Then I suppose it behoves me to do the best by mine. Let her be laid out in the chapel and the proper rituals observed.' He gestured with an open hand. 'I will provide both you and the boy with a place in my household. Sander, go and find out if the Countess has returned from the town.'

The squire bowed and left.

Catrin murmured dutiful thanks. Just now she cared not where her place was, only that it was quiet and dark and solitary. A prison cell would have been ideal, she thought wryly. A sidelong glance showed her that Oliver had drunk his wine to the lees. When the Earl turned to pace the room again, she tugged the cup from his hand and quickly replaced it with her own full one. After the first moment of resistance and a blink of surprise, Oliver let her have her way.

The Earl paused beside a gaming board and shuffled the agate pieces at random. 'Pascal, I want you to head the burial escort to Penfoss.'

Oliver took a deep gulp from the second cup of wine. 'When, my lord?'

'On the morrow. Take Father Kenric and as many footsoldiers and Serjeants as you deem necessary. Report back to me as soon as you return.' He waved his hand in dismissal.

'Yes, my lord.' Oliver swallowed down the rest of his wine and started towards the door, but before reaching it swung round to Catrin and Richard. 'I'll come and plague you with my presence,' he said, ruffling Richard's dark hair. 'I told you, I keep my promises.'

The boy gave him an enigmatic look and the smallest of nods that said he was not prepared to trust beyond the day.

Catrin produced a wan smile, the merest stretching of her lips. 'Thank you for what you have done.'

'I doubt it is enough,' he answered heavily. 'Let me know if you are in need and I will do what I can.'

She nodded, her smile warming.

As Earl Robert raised his head and stared, Oliver bowed and left the room.

A clear summer dusk had fallen by the time Oliver emerged from the keep. Grey-winged gulls clamoured in the skies over the Frome and the Avon, escorting fishing craft to their moorings. Others plundered the midden heaps and gutters, arguing raucously over the scraps.

Oliver breathed deeply of the evening air, uncaring that some of the scents were less than delightful. He would far rather the aroma of fish guts, smoke, and boiling mutton fat from the soap-makers' establishments, than the more civilised atmosphere of Earl Robert's private solar. It was not the Earl to whom he objected, he would never have given his oath of loyalty if he had; it was the room, and that mural of the two women in the garden. Although stylised in the court fashion, it had been painted from life more than ten years ago when Amice and Emma had dwelt here. The painter had been taken with their dissimilar beauty - Amice statuesque, golden-haired and blue-eyed, Emma fey and dark - and had used them as his models for that particular scene.

Oliver had visited the Earl's solar on several occasions since swearing him allegiance. He tried not to look at the mural, but it always taunted the corner of his eye and made everything else seem insignificant.

As the dusk deepened, Oliver supervised the conveyance of Amice's body to Earl Robert's chapel, and there saw it laid out decently before the altar, but he did not linger. He had sat in vigil the previous night and said his private prayers and farewells. Others would pray over her now and give her a fitting burial. Two girls in a garden and both now dead, one in childbirth, one in miscarriage. But their images still danced unchanged on Earl Robert's wall.

His thoughts strayed to the other young woman he had left in that room. Like Emma she was dark of feature, although not so fey of build or sweet-natured. He knew that she must still be suffering from a severe headache. Such maladies did not just disappear, and he admired the way that she had pushed her will through the pain. A vision of the red stockings filled his mind, and of the set of her jaw as she tugged the eel basket out of his hand. Without being aware, he started to smile, the grin deepening as he remembered how she had exchanged their goblets and made him drink both measures of wine. It burned in his blood now, making him a little giddy, for he had not eaten since a hasty noonday meal of stale oatcakes.

In the hall, the Earl's household would be sitting down to a feast of at least three courses - twice as many on the high table. Oliver could have claimed a place at a trestle and eaten until he burst if that had been his will. His will, however, took him not to a bench in the hall, beneath the pompous gaze of Steward Bardolf, but through the camp, between the tents and woodsmoke fires, until he arrived at one shelter in particular.

There was no sign of Gawin, but his dun stallion and Oliver's grey were tethered nearby, their noses in feedbags. An elderly woman was crouching by the fire and stirring the contents of a cooking pot. Her gown was of homespun wool, plain but clean. Deep wrinkles carved her face, and her expression was set awry by a slight dragging of the muscles on the left side. Whiskers sprouted from her chin and the corners of her upper lip, but her bones were fine and there was a lively gleam in her eyes.

'I'd almost given up on you, my lad,' she announced in a firm voice that had weathered the years better than her flesh. Holding a bowl over the cauldron, she shook in the chopped, skinned eels. 'Gawin's gone to find a dish more to his taste in the town - her name's Aveline.'

Oliver snorted. 'It was Helvi last week. Gawin's sown enough wild oats to cover a five-acre!'

'Aye, well, this war makes folks live their lives all in a day lest they don't see the next sunrise.' She gave the cooking pot a vigorous stir. Her hands were straight and smooth, with short, clean nails, and showed small sign of her seventy-four years, except for her favouring of the left one. Until a recent seizure in the winter, she had dwelt in excellent health.

Oliver had known Ethel all his life. She had delivered both him and his brother Simon into the world, and had held a prestigious position in the Pascal household as nurse, wise-woman and midwife to the women of castle and village. Ethel it was, who had fought tooth and nail to save Emma and the baby too large to descend her narrow pelvis, and when she had failed had grieved deeply. There had been no more infants to deliver after that, for Simon's wife was barren. When the Pascal family were disinherited of their lands, Ethel was branded an English witch by the new lord's Flemish wife, and forced to flee before she was hanged. It was a common tale and Bristol was full of such refugees.

Oliver sat on a small stool and looked at the steam rising from the cauldron's surface. 'Did Gawin tell you what happened at Penfoss?'

'Aye, he did.' Ethel shook her head and sucked on her teeth. Most of them were worn to stumps by a lifetime of eating coarse bread made from flour adulterated with minute grains of millstone grit. 'And it's right sorry I am. Nowhere is safe any more. If you stay in your village, the soldiers come plundering, and if you flee to a town, either they burn that too, or the cut-purses take your last penny and leave you in the gutter to starve. Don't suppose you know who did it?'

Oliver shrugged. 'A band of routiers led by a man on a chestnut stallion. Could be one of a thousand such.'

'Aye, and that makes me right sorry too,' she said with a sigh, then cocked him a bright glance from beneath her brows. 'Gawin also spoke of the woman and boy you brought out o' the place. Old King Henry's last bastard whelp, eh?'

She ladled the eel stew into two bowls and, while they ate, Oliver told her about Richard and Catrin. Ethel's expression grew thoughtful as she listened. She nodded her approval at his use of the betony and feverfew tisane, and the humour lines deepened around her eyes when he mentioned the scarlet hose and the way Catrin had straddled the grey.

'Sounds an uncommon young woman,' she remarked, watching him scrape the bottom of his bowl. 'Is she married?'

'Widowed.' He sucked the spoon. 'She lost her husband three years ago.'

Ethel absorbed this with a sympathetic murmur. 'You won't just abandon her and the lad now that you've delivered them safe, will you?' She tapped his knee with her spoon.

'No, of course not!' He looked at her with indignation. He still rose to her bait, although he knew that Ethel's badgering did not stem from doubt in his morals, but from long habit and her need to see decency in a world gone morally awry. 'My duties permitting, I'll visit as often as I can until they're both settled.'

'See that you do,' she said in a tone that made him feel as if he were still in tail clouts. But then she abandoned her attack. There was a gleam in her eyes that made him suspicious, but of what he did not know. Ethel was a law unto herself - half the reason why Ashbury's new Flemish lord had hounded her out of the cottage she kept against the castle wall.

The meal finished and respects paid, Oliver rose to leave. As he stretched his arms above his head to ease a kink, one of the castle's young laundry maids approached out of the shadows. She had a round, freckled face, ample proportions and chapped, red hands.

Noticing Oliver, she hesitated, and half turned to leave. Ethel held up a forefinger and, bidding her wait, rummaged in the copious leather satchel beside her stool. From it she produced a knot, woven from three colours of double-strand wool. There was also a scrap of linen tied in a small pouch with a twist of scarlet thread.

'I ain't saying this will work, Wulfrune, it don't always, but I've had more successes in my time than failures.'

The girl looked sidelong at Oliver as she exchanged a coin for the objects in Ethel's hand.

'Mind and make sure you ask the blessing of Saint Valentine before you use them,' Ethel said sternly. 'And don't forget to rub that cream I gave you into your hands.'

The girl nodded a promise and with another swift glance at Oliver hurried away.

Ethel chuckled and folded her arms. 'There's a lad she's after - sells charcoal by the postern gate.'

'And you think she'll catch him with love knots and other ensorcelments?' Oliver gave her a disapproving look.

'Mayhap she will, mayhap she won't. Even with help the course of true love's about as straight as a dog's hind leg.' Ethel stowed the coin in a leather pouch around her neck. 'It does no harm,' she added, as he continued to glower, 'and it earns me enough to eat.'

'What about the fact that you were harried from your home by accusations of witchcraft?'

'Why do you think I warned her to invoke the help of a good Christian saint?' she sniffed. 'Besides, it's tradition. Every wise-woman worth her salt knows about knot magic and love philtres. You can buy 'em anywhere. Show me a single sailor that don't have a herb-wife's knot in his sea-chest to control the winds, or a housewife who don't have one of scarlet thread for stanching nosebleeds.' She patted his arm. 'I keep within the bounds of what's permitted. That whoreson, Odinel the Fleming, chased me from my home because I would not acknowledge him as Lord of Ashbury, God rot his ballocks to a mush.' Her eyes gleamed.

Knowing better than to argue with her in one of her incorrigible moods, Oliver used the excuse of stabling his horse to make his escape and set about untethering the grey. His fingers were clumsy on the knot and he swore to himself, for his difficulty almost seemed like a portent. The skill of weaving cords, threads and rope into intricate knots was an ancient one, rife with superstition. At the making of the knot, a charm was spoken three times, thus binding great power into the curves and twirls. And when they were released, so was the power of the charm — for good or evil. He had no belief in such magic, or so he told himself, but he was glad when the tether slipped free.