the side of the stables. There was a rangy dark bay, handsome and spirited, a showy piebald, eminently saleable but of less calibre than the bay, and a sorrel of Spanish blood with cream mane and tail and the high-stepping carriage of a prince. It was to the last that Adam went, drawn by admiration to slap the satin hide and feel it rippling and firm beneath his palm.
‘Vaillantif was Ralf ’s favourite too,’ Heulwen said, watching him run his hand down the stallion’s foreleg to pick up and examine a hoof. ‘He was riding him when he died.’
Adam looked round at her and carefully set the hoof back down. ‘And the Welsh didn’t keep him?’
‘I don’t think they had time. ’
‘I’d have made time if I were a Welsh raider.’ He nodded to the groom, and with a practised leap was smoothly astride the stallion’s broad, bare back. The destrier fought the bit, but Adam soothed and cajoled him, gripped with his thighs and knees, and urged with his heels.
Heulwen watched him take Vaillantif on a circuit of the paddock and her stomach churned as he went through the same routines as Ralf had done, with the same assurance, his spine aligned to every movement the horse made. Even without a saddle, his seat was easy and graceful. Vaillantif high-stepped with arched crest. He rapidly changed leading forefeet. A command from Adam and he reared up and danced on his hind legs. Another command dropped his forefeet to the ground and eased him into a relaxed trot and then a ground-consuming smooth canter. A quick touch on the rump and he back-kicked.
Adam brought him round before her and dismounted, pleasure flushing beneath his tan. ‘I’ve never ridden better,’ he declared with boyish enthusiasm. ‘Heulwen, he’s worth a king’s ransom!’
‘God send that you should ever look on a woman thus!’ she laughed.
His face changed, as if a shutter had been slammed across an open window. ‘What makes you think I haven’t?’ he said, giving all his attention to the horse.
Heulwen drew breath to ask the obvious question, but was forestalled by the noise of the hunting party clattering into the bailey, and turned to shade her eyes against the slant of the sun to watch their return.
Her father sat his courser with the ease of a born horseman. He was bareheaded, and the breeze ruffled his silver-scattered dark hair and carried the sound of his laughter as he responded to a remark made by the woman riding beside him.
A packhorse bearing the carcass of a roebuck was being led away towards the kitchen slaughter shed where the butchering was carried out. The houndkeeper and his lad were taking charge of the dogs that enveloped the humans knee deep. A white gazehound bitch clung jealously to the Earl’s side, nose thrusting at his hand.
‘Yes, he’s still got Gwen,’ Heulwen replied to Adam’s raised brows. ‘It’s the first time since her pups were born that she’s left them to run with the hunt. If you ask Papa nicely, he might give you one once they’re weaned.’
‘Who says I want a dog?’
‘Company for you at Thornford.’
He angled her a dubious look and started across the crowded bailey.
Lord Guyon, alerted by a groom, lifted his head and before Adam had taken more than half a dozen paces, was striding to meet him. His wife gathered her skirts and hastened in his wake.
‘We’d given you up for a ghost!’ Guyon clasped Adam in a brief, muscular bearhug.
‘Yes, graceless whelp, why did you not write!’ This reproach was from Lady Judith, who embraced him in her turn and kissed him warmly, her hazel-grey eyes alight with pleasure.
‘It wasn’t always easy to find a quiet corner, the places and predicaments I was in, and you know I have no talent with parchment and quill.’
Lady Judith laughed in wry acknowledgement. Her foster-son was literate through sheer perseverance — hers and the priest’s — but he would never write a fluent hand. His characters had a disturbing tendency to arrive on the parchment either back to front or upside down. ‘No excuses,’ she said sternly, ‘you could have found a scribe, I am sure.’
Adam tried without success to look crestfallen. ‘
‘So,’ said Judith with a hint of asperity that reminded Adam for a moment of her half-sister the Empress, ‘what brings you to the sanctuary of home comfort when you could be preening at court?’
Adam spread his hands. ‘My task was fulfilled and the King gave me leave to attend my lands until Christmas.’
‘Henry is back in England?’ Judith took his arm and began to walk with him to the keep. ‘Last we heard he was in Rouen.’
‘Yes, and in fine spirits. He gave me letters for you and your lord. I have them in my baggage.’
Lady Judith sighed and looked ruefully at her husband. Letters from Henry were rarely social. Frequently they were commands or querulous complaints, and usually they elicited ripe epithets from her husband who had perforce to deal with them. ‘Can they wait until after dinner?’ she asked with more hope than expectation.
Guyon gave a caustic laugh. ‘They’ll either spoil my dinner or my digestion. What’s the difference?’
Judith shot him a reproving scowl. ‘The difference is that you can decently wait until Adam has settled himself. If the news was urgent, I am sure he would have given it to you immediately.’
‘Scold!’ Guyon complained, opening and shutting his hand in mimicry of his wife’s jaw, but he was grinning.
Her eyes narrowed with amusement. ‘Do you not deserve it?’ Turning her attention from him, she looked around the hall. ‘Where’s Renard?’
‘Training the falconer’s daughter to the lure I very much suspect,’ Heulwen replied. ‘That new hawk of his is past needing his full attention.’
Judith cast her glance heavenwards. ‘I swear that boy has the morals of a tom-cat!’
‘He’ll settle down soon enough once the novelty of what he can do with it wears off,’ Guyon said, unperturbed. ‘The falconer’s lass is no innocent chick to be devoured at a pounce. She’ll peck him where it hurts if he dares beyond his welcome.’ He nodded down the hall at the knot of men clustered at a trestle and deftly changed the subject. ‘Sweyn and Jerold are still with you, I see, but I don’t recognise the other two or the lad.’
‘I’ll introduce you,’ Adam answered. ‘The boy’s my squire, Ferrers’s bastard. His father had him marked out for a career in the church, but he was thrown out of the noviciate for setting fire to the refectory and fornicating in the scriptorium with a guest’s maidservant. Ferrers asked me to take Austin on and fit him for a life by the sword. He’s shaping well so far. I might ask to keep him when he’s knighted.’
Guyon, thirty years of winnowing wheat from chaff behind him, looked the men over with a critical eye. Sweyn, Adam’s English bodyguard, was as dour and solid as ever, his mouth resembling a scarred, weathered crack in a chunk of granite. Jerold FitzNigel had been with Adam for more than ten years — a softly spoken Norman with rheumy blue eyes, a sparse blond moustache, and the lankiness of a sun-drawn seedling. His appearance was deceptive, for he was as tough and sinewy as boiled leather.
The two new men were a pair of Angevin mercenary cousins with dark eyes and swift, sharp smiles. Guyon would not have trusted either one further than he could throw a spear. Ferrers’s lad was a compact, sturdy youth with intelligent hazel eyes, a tumble of wood-shaving curls, and a snub nose that made him look younger than his seventeen years and a good deal more innocent than his history.
The group also numbered a dozen hard-bitten men-at-arms, survivors of numerous skirmishes across the patchwork of duchies and principalities lying between England and the German empire. A motley collection, but all wearing the assurance of honed fighters.
‘They’re good men to have at your back in a tight corner,’ Adam said, as they left the soldiers to arrange their belongings out of the way of the trestles that were being set out ready for the evening meal.
‘Were my doubts so plain?’ Guyon looked rueful. ‘I must be getting old.’ He glanced sideways at Adam. ‘Will they not grow restless without battle?’
‘Probably, but I don’t foresee a problem. I’m not expecting there to be much peace.’
The glance hardened. ‘In that case, you had better let me see that letter now,’ he muttered.
Adam shrugged. ‘I can tell you and spare my squire’s feet. I know what’s in it because I was there when Henry dictated it to his scribe. You are summoned to attend the Christmas feast at Windsor, and your family with you.’
