The stubble prickled her palm as his lips moved. Judith studied him narrowly. 'When did you last eat and sleep?'
Guyon took her hand away to grasp it in his. 'You sound like my mother,' he said with a hint of weary amusement.
'Who by all accounts was a woman of sense,' she retorted. Her brow wrinkled. 'Why send for me if you did not want to be nagged?'
'Because ...' He drew a sharp breath as if to change his mind, then stopped and faced her, scraping a hand distractedly through his hair which was in sad need of cutting. 'Oh curse it, Judith, because you are the most infuriating, stubborn and capable woman it has ever been my misfortune to know!'
She burst out laughing. 'Is that a compliment or an insult?'
'To be honest, I do not know!' He set his hands on her shoulders. 'All I do know is that I need you as I've never needed anything in my life.'
Judith gasped and staggered. He was pungent with horse and sweat and smoke. His armour could have stood up of its own accord so strong were the mingled aromas.
'And why precisely should you need me?' she demanded archly. 'Apart from the obvious.'
He grinned at that, shaking his head at her tart perception, but sobered quickly as they began to walk again. 'Apart from the obvious, I need you to organise this shambles so that more than just cold pottage and dried meat graces the table.
The servants don't know their heads from their heels and Lady Mabell is in no fit state to organise them. I do not have the time.'
'Lady Mabell is here?'
'And her son.' A frown drew his brows together. 'They are both sick with the bloody flux. Look at them if you will , but I suspect it is in God's hands now.'
There was something in his tone, a harshening that made Judith regard him with sharp curiosity.
He paused at the foot of the forebuilding steps, fist gripped tightly on the hilt of his sword, as if holding it down in the scabbard.
'What is to become of them if they survive, Guy?'
He followed her gaze to his clenched fist and removed it carefully from the grip before he answered, his nonchalant shrug belied by the grim set of his jaw. 'The lands will be forfeit because de Lacey has rebelled against his King, but they were only his by right of marriage anyway. I suppose the child will inherit them when he is of an age to do so and in the meantime Henry will appoint a warden. The convent is the best place for Lady Mabel.'
'And de Lacey?' she asked.
'Is bound for hell !' he snarled. 'The reckoning is only postponed, not abandoned.'
Judith found Lady Mabell and the child in a chamber off the hall . The floor was strewn with new rushes and the bed had been made up with clean linen, but the air was still fetid with the stench of bowel sickness. Judith went to the shutters and threw them back, opening the room to an arch of smoky twilight sky. Helgund always swore that night vapours were bad for the lungs, but Judith had slept too often beneath the stars to give any credence to such superstition. Besides, night vapours were a sight more sweet-smelling than the human ones of the moment.
Sounds drifted up from the bailey; the good-natured raillery of two serjeants, the outlandish Welsh singing at the miners' fire, the neigh of a truculent destrier.
The woman on the bed thrashed and moaned.
Judith went to her and laid a gentle hand on the hot forehead. Mabell de Serigny raised sunken lids and struggled to focus. Her head rolled on the pillow and a shudder racked her wasted body.
Red stars of fever burned on the points of her cheekbones and her breath laboured in her lungs: a matter of time only, Judith thought, and short at that.
The child in the crib was awake and alert. As she approached him, his eyes locked on hers and tenaciously followed her movement. They were his father's eyes, ale-brown in colour, the tone echoed in the thick, straight hair. He drew his knees up to his chest and wailed hoarsely.
Judith bent and picked him up. He was hot to her touch, but not burning and, as far as she could see, his condition was not yet mortal.
'Poor mite,' muttered Helgund as she set down Judith's basket of medicines. 'What kind of life is he going to make with the start he's had?' She came to peer into the infant's face and crossed herself at the marked resemblance to his sire.
'Better than the life he would have had otherwise,' Judith answered as she laid him back down and set about mixing a soothing potion to ease Mabel's pain. 'A mother who cannot speak, who never wanted him and a father who has bullied, deceived and butchered and who harbours a vicious lust for young girls. What kind of example would he have had as he grew up? At least now he has a chance to learn honour and decency.'
'Mayhap you're right,' said Helgund, but she still looked dubious. 'I cannot help but think that wolves breed true.'
'He is only half wolf,' Judith said gently. 'And there is good blood on his mother's side. Come, help me lift her and then I want you to fetch the priest.'
'No hope then?'
Judith shook her head. 'There are others afflicted like this too. My guess is that the well water is to blame and that the weakest have succumbed. My lord has set the servants to cleaning out the shaft.'
'I wondered why you had left the shutters wide.'
'What do you mean?'
'To let her soul fly free, m'lady.'
Judith said nothing. Let Helgund believe that she adhered to that old custom if it would stop her from lecturing on the ill s of open shutters at night.
Mabell coughed and choked on the bitter nostrum and most of it dribbled down her chin.
The infant was dosed with more success than his mother and his soiled linens changed. Unlike Heulwen, he was slow to smile and exuded not one iota of her engaging charm. His stare was solemn, almost old ... but then, she thought, throat tightening, Heulwen had known only love and affection down the length of her short life and this child never had. Mabell had rejected him, so the maids said, and left him to the wet-nurse who had been a dim-witted slatternly girl from the village with more interest in her trencher and the attentions of one of the grooms than in the infant she was supposed to be suckling.
Judith blinked away the suspicion of tears and sat by the crib, smoothing the child's thick hair until his lids drooped and his breathing came slow and soft and then she rose and, leaving him with Helgund, went to administer similar comfort to her husband.
Guyon stepped into the tub, hissing softly through his teeth as the hot water found cuts and bruises he had forgotten he possessed until now. Slowly, he eased himself down into the herb-infused water until it lapped his shoulders and, tilting back his head, closed his eyes.
Clouded visions danced before his darkened lids. The imagined image of Eluned's death and the reality of the raw earth mound in the garth behind the churchyard. Rhosyn's mutilated body.
Heulwen asking in bewilderment for her mother.
Heulwen smiling at him through her lashes in the exact manner that had been Rhosyn's, her pudgy hand curled trustingly in his. He swore, opening his eyes, and jerked forward in the water. Judith cried out and backed away from him, almost dropping her basket of medicines.
'What's wrong?' She looked at him askance.
Guyon subsided with a shake of his head.
'Nothing,' he said, tight-lipped.
Judith set down the basket. 'Strange behaviour for a nothing,' she remonstrated. 'That's a nasty graze on your shoulder. You had better let me look at it before you dress.'
His mouth softened. 'Yes, madam.'
She bent to sort through his baggage and find him some presentable garments, clucking in irritation at the dismal state that three weeks without female attention had wrought on his clothes.
'What of Lady Mabell and the boy?' he asked far too casually as he busied himself with his wash.
