The guard stood silently, his attention apparently fixed on the wall. It seemed that he was prepared to stay there the whole night, and the crouching figure behind him calculated quickly whether there was another route for him to take, but none sprang into his mind. He was about to turn and go back the way he had come, when the guard shifted. With a soft grunt, he turned away from the wall. There was a quiet trickling.
Grinning, and hoping that urinating would take all of his concentration, if only for a moment or two, the trespasser hurried to a section of wall some distance away and silently climbed up. Once there, he lay on top a while, peering back the way he had come. The man by the tree gave a little gasp, settled himself, and leaned back to renew his solitary watch.
Seeing he had noticed nothing, the shadow rolled off the wall into Godfrey’s land. He fell automatically into a crouch, his eyes darting hither and thither, seeking any new dangers, but he could see nothing to cause him alarm, and soon he was stealthily making his way to the window he knew so well. He never saw the second shape drop from the wall behind him and steadfastly follow in his tracks.
But after the murder he wasn’t so foolish as to walk straight up to it as before. There could be a trap waiting for him. He moved slowly from the wall to a great elm, and paused, then on to a holly a little nearer, then up to the shelter offered by a laurel almost at the hall’s wall, each time waiting, listening, and staring on all sides. The danger here was almost tangible, and he wasn’t prepared to put his life at risk for no reason.
At last he was content. He edged forward, until he was at the building, and tiptoed to the window. The shutter was closed, the tapestry drawn, and only a dull glimmer of light escaped. He reached up and scratched softly at the wood of the shutter, making a faint rasp as if a mouse were gnawing.
He had to repeat the signal three times before he heard Cecily call out, “Go and prepare my chamber. And see to it that my bed is properly warmed. I feel frozen to my very marrow.”
For a few moments there was nothing, but then the corner of the tapestry was lifted, and he could see her sweet face. “Thomas, are you there?” 11
T he guard almost jumped out of his skin when William dropped lightly from the wall in front of him. He grabbed for his sword and would have swept it out, if William hadn’t snarled quietly, “Leave that block of metal in its seat if you don’t want me to use it to beat some sense into your thick skull.”
Leaving the astonished guard, William walked pensively back to the hall. He had learned much tonight, and some of it might well be useful in the future, but he wasn’t sure that it was any business of his master, and William had a firm belief in information: when it was useful, it held value. Coffyn had hired William to be the officer of his men and to guard the house, not to be his informer, but he might still be prepared to cough up for something as juicy as this.
William went through to the private solar and knocked. Coffyn was awake still, his angry, unblinking eyes pouchy and red-rimmed from lack of sleep. As usual, his wife was nowhere to be seen. If William hadn’t heard her weeping earlier, he might have wondered whether she was still alive-but he didn’t believe in speculating on matters like that, not where they affected his master.
“Well?”
“Someone’s been trespassing over your land.”
“What? Who?” Coffyn leaned forward, peering closely, his swollen and bleary eyes screwing up with concentration. He chewed his nails, and William looked away.
It was ever the way, the guard thought, that men would be fooled by their women into trusting them too much, only to find that they had been deceived. He could only feel sympathy for his master.
“Tell me! It was the Irishman, wasn’t it?”
His words were spat out with as much virulence as if they had been a noxious draft, and it gave William a certain perverse pleasure to be able to shake his head. “Oh no, sir. It wasn’t him. It was a leper.”
“A leper!” Coffyn sank back in his seat, horrified. “A leper,” he breathed.
Fifteen minutes later William left the solar and made his way to the buttery to fetch a quart of ale. All in all it was shaping up to be a profitable night for him, and he smiled as he poured his drink.
Baldwin left his hall not long after Jeanne had departed to change from her travelling clothes. For the duration of her visit, Baldwin had given up his own bedchamber. It was the newest room in the place, and seemed to remain the warmest. The other upstairs room, the one at the opposite end of the hall above the buttery, he had allocated to Simon and Margaret. That left the undercroft beneath his bedchamber. It was to this little room that he now repaired, and as he entered, he found his servant sitting on his chest and watching Uther, who, on hearing his master, instantly left his bowl of food to leap at him.
“Down, you brute! Edgar, how could you-”
“Yes, Sir Baldwin, I’d think so,” Edgar said quickly, and strode from the room.
“I…Edgar?” Baldwin felt his mouth fall open at his servant’s behavior, and hared after him. He found Edgar outside in the little plot that Baldwin had optimistically termed his orchard. “Edgar, what in God’s name are you doing, walking away from me when I-”
In answer, Edgar glanced back at the building. “I could hear almost everything that Lady Jeanne said to her maid in the room above.”
“But I…” The knight fell silent. Two possibilities were suddenly opened before him: one was that his servant had just saved him from shaming himself by insulting Jeanne’s maid in full hearing of both women, something which, no matter what Jeanne’s private thoughts about Emma, must surely offend her to some extent; the second was that Edgar had, no doubt unintentionally, become privy to Jeanne’s views on her maid as well as, possibly, Baldwin himself.
“I hope you didn’t try to listen to their conversation. That would be quite shameful,” he said cautiously as Uther appeared at the door and sat down for a scratch.
“No, sir, I was careful not to listen,” Edgar said.
His response irrationally irritated Baldwin. He was of a mind to be insulted-not for any failing on Edgar’s part but because of Emma’s interruption of what Baldwin was already thinking of as his first attempt at romance. The fact that Emma had necessarily made it an abortive attempt made the knight want to share out his bitterness. “I should hope so too!” Uther shook himself, sending a small gobbet of drool flying against the wall. “And Uther-how could you have let Emma get to the door first like that? You know Uther is a guard.”
“I’d have expected Wat to leave Chopsie tied up. I wasn’t to know the dog would be free. Anyway, since then I’ve had the hound locked up in your room.”
Some women liked dogs, and Baldwin had no reason to think that Jeanne herself didn’t but there was a great difference between a little lapdog and Uther. There was a brash, confident slobbering enthusiasm about him that was entirely lacking in a gentlewoman’s small pet. Some dogs could subtly work their way into a household without being noticed. One moment there was a space in front of the fire, and the next a small mongrel had filled it. It was that way with old Ben, Baldwin’s farm dog. One day there had been space before the fire, the next the little mutt had inveigled his way in, and it was as if he had always been there.
Uther, on the other hand, was incapable of insinuating himself into a small gap. If there was a small gap, it soon became Uther-sized as he shoved his way through. When Uther was present, it was impossible to miss him. It wasn’t only the fact that a creature weighing over six stones was hard to ignore, nor the smell of three-week-old damp rags that he invariably carried with him wherever he went. No, it lay more in the fact that Uther had about him a variety of canine devotion that was touching to someone who liked dogs, and intensely repulsive to someone who didn’t.
But Baldwin wasn’t going to admit that in front of his servant. “This is nonsense!” he snapped. “Uther is my dog, and he always stays in the hall. How else can he protect the place? You’ll give him the run of the hall again immediately.”
Edgar raised an eyebrow, and opened his mouth as if to argue, but Baldwin held up his hand. “That is my decision. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Sir Baldwin,” Edgar said again with that irritating servility that felt like condescension. “If that is what you wish, I will see to it.”
“Good.”
“But…”
Baldwin glared. “What?”
“I was thinking, sir, that it might be best if we kept Uther from the hall while you’re eating. He might unsettle Emma-or Lady Jeanne.”
