The destrier was as wobbly as a newborn foal. Adam’s face was chalk white with fury as he stalked back to de Mortimer. ‘What have you done to my horse?’ he snarled, seizing the sword from Jerold.
‘I haven’t been near the spavined beast!’ Warrin stared up the blade and Adam stared down it, a muscle ticking in his cheek. ‘Belike he took a blow on the head in the fighting!’
‘Do you know why this groove in a sword blade is called the blood gutter?’ Adam said through his teeth. He began to lean on the hilt.
‘Enough!’ commanded Geoffrey of Anjou, dismounting to thrust Adam aside from his purpose. ‘This melee is an affair to prove valour, not an extension of your trial by combat. You both shame yourselves!’
‘Shame?’ Adam cried incredulously. ‘Look at the way this whoreson came at me, choosing his moment and full intending to do murder. The shame is not mine!’
‘Do you know for certain that he has interfered with your stallion?’ Geoffrey demanded. His face was flushed, translucent with his own anger.
‘God’s blood, it’s obvious!’ Adam snapped. Geoffrey stared. Adam fished for control, netted a semblance, and setting his jaw returned the sword to Jerold. ‘Seek for proof and you’ll find it, sire,’ he said on a quieter but still vehement note. ‘I know when I have been set up like a quintain dummy.’
‘What’s the matter here?’
They all turned to face William le Clito who was leaning down from his champing black destrier. Pink runnels of sweat streaked his face and he wiped at them with the leather edge of his gauntlet.
‘A breach of honour from one of your side,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Best if you withdraw him and keep him confined until we decide how serious the breach is.’
Le Clito shrugged. ‘Personal grudges are bound to make this kind of sport more dangerous, and in the heat of the moment men tend to forget their manners,’ he said with complacence.
‘Is this the result of impulse?’ Adam gestured at Vaillantif. Austin had appeared and was very gently trying to coax the wobbling horse towards the edge of the field. ‘Is this the kind of weapon used in courtesy?’ He nudged the flail with his toe.
Le Clito took in the evidence and looked down at Warrin who was now sitting up, his helm on the grass beside him. His face was ashen, and against it a pink scar high on his cheekbone stood out like a brand. ‘What have you to say?’ le Clito asked with a raised brow.
‘I never touched his precious horse. I wanted to tumble de Lacey in the dust and bloody his pride as he did mine, and I took it too far.’
‘Horseshit!’ Adam rasped.
Geoffrey looked around. The melee was winding to a halt as men drifted over to listen to the altercation. ‘My lord?’ he said to le Clito.
Le Clito saw that he had no choice and gestured to the knight beside him. ‘Etienne, escort Warrin from the field and keep him confined in my quarters until I come.’
Geoffrey nodded curtly and remounted the grey. To Adam he said in a low, furious voice, ‘Is this a sample of the kind of behaviour I can expect from English barons?’
Adam made no reply, which was the best he could manage in his present mood. He stared at a thick streak of mud on his surcoat, and forced his limbs into rigid quiescence.
‘I suggest you go to your lodgings and have yourself and your horse tended.’ Geoffrey wrestled his horse around.
Adam watched him ride away, le Clito beside him, and became aware of the pain thundering through his arm. Warrin de Mortimer did not look at Adam as he straddled the piebald and departed from the field with le Clito’s knight. The flail hung down from his saddle, catching glints from the sun.
‘Will he be all right?’ The straw crackled.
Adam turned to regard his wife in the swinging light of the horn lantern. She was carrying his fur-lined mantle over her arm and also the morning’s abandoned picnic basket. ‘I thought you were abed?’
‘I was, but I couldn’t sleep knowing you were down here alone. How is he?’ She knelt beside him and laid a gentle hand on Vaillantif’s stretched red-gold neck. The horse was spread out in the straw, his breathing regular but noisy, his limbs twitching now and again in strange muscular spasms.
‘No real change, but if he was going to die he would have done so by now, I think.’ He compressed his lips and looked at her from the corner of his eye. ‘You warned me, didn’t you?’
‘It is no comfort that I was right.’ She took her hand from the horse’s neck to set it over his. ‘When I saw you go down this afternoon. ’ She swallowed. ‘Oh Dear Jesu!’
He felt her shudder and, a little awkward because of his bruised arm, drew her against him and kissed her. She began to cry then, burying her face in his chest, her fingers clutching his tunic and shirt.
Adam was taken aback by this sudden outburst of emotion. Saving an incident with one of his serjeants, who now sported a badly scratched face and the beginnings of a black eye in recompense for his efforts to prevent her from hurtling herself into the midst of the melee, she had been as remote as an effigy. When he had walked off the field she had neither cast herself hysterically into his arms nor turned the termagant, but had greeted him with about as much warmth as a stone. She had seen efficiently to his injuries, which consisted mainly of heavy bruising. That he had no broken ribs or fingers was a miracle, and she had said so a trifle tartly, but there had been no more reprimand than that. She had treated him with the dutiful courtesy she might yield to a stranger.
‘Come, sweeting,’ he said tenderly, ‘it’s over now. There’s no need for tears.’
Sniffing, she drew away to wipe her face on her cloak. ‘Blame my stepmother,’ she said, and suddenly there was an undercurrent of laughter in her voice. She busied herself finding a wine costrel and two cups from the depths of the basket.
He looked at her in puzzlement.
‘She trained me — drilled it into my head that in times of crisis the worst thing you can do is panic. When that crisis is past, then you can weep and turn into a jibbering half-wit if that is your need.’ She sniffed again and handed him the wine and a hunk of bread topped with a slice of roast beef.
He looked wry. ‘That sounds like the lady Judith,’ he said, and took a hungry bite of food. He had not eaten since the breaking of fast that dawn, indeed had not realised until now that he was ravenous.
‘I’ve never been so near to a blind rage as I was this morning,’ he said as he ate. ‘If Geoffrey of Anjou had not prevented me, I’d have killed Warrin there and then. Jesu God, all those high words about not jeopardising my errand, and then I go and lean on my blade.’ He shook his head in self-disgust and took a swallow of the cold, sharp wine. ‘Austin says one of the city’s beggar children fed Vaillantif a couple of wrinkled apples. He saw no harm in it, and I don’t suppose I would have done either — only in hindsight. A beggar child would not feed apples to a warhorse unless paid to do it. He’d eat them himself.’
‘You think that was what brought Vaillantif to this?’
‘Assuredly. What better way of evening the odds than to have Vaillantif founder at the wrong moment? All Warrin had to do was watch for the coming opportunity.’
‘What will happen to him?’
‘Not a great deal, I suspect. For the sake of political diplomacy the whole thing will be forgotten as quickly as possible. Le Clito will go back to France with his retinue, and we’ll return to England and the ripples in the pool will drift to the bank and disappear.’ He made a face. ‘Christ’s blood,’ he said softly as he put the empty goblet down, ‘I wish we were home now.’
She leaned her head upon his shoulder. A shiver of foreboding rippled down her spine. ‘So do I,’ she said in a heartfelt whisper. ‘Adam, so do I.’
‘How could you be such an idiot?’ snapped William le Clito and glared at the man stretched out on the bed. ‘All right, Adam de Lacey owes you a debt that can only be paid with his life, but what’s your hurry? Surely you could have arranged something a little less obvious? It is no wonder my cousin reached England in safety if this is the level of your ability!’
‘It was not supposed to be obvious,’ Warrin said, sulkily, and folded his arms behind his head, revealing armpits tufted with wiry blond hair. ‘There was nothing wrong with the idea. It was just pure mischance that the whelp interfered at the wrong moment. If he hadn’t, the world would now be rid of Adam de Lacey and no one any
