whittling.
‘He’s gone,’ Heulwen murmured.
‘
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, sensing the residue.
Adam shook his head. ‘Nothing.’ He twitched his shoulders. ‘A knife’s echo between my shoulder blades.’ He spoke abruptly to the horse coper. ‘How much do you want for her?’
Heulwen chewed her lip and considered him with exasperation. Tail-chasing again, she thought, and to no good purpose.
He bought the black mare for twelve marks, haggling the coper down from the fifteen he had first asked. Bargain struck, he turned to his pensive wife. ‘Can you take her home with you if I go to see the Count now?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She forced a smile. ‘Compline, you said?’
He grimaced. ‘Most probably…I’m sorry, love, but I cannot bring you with me. I wish I could.’
Heulwen pouted. ‘You’ve taken a fancy to one of the court whores,’ she accused him, ‘and you want me out of the way.’
‘They are rather engaging,’ he admitted, his face as straight as her own, but then his eye corners crinkled, marring the deception. ‘But I’d rather share a bed with you any day.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ She stood on tiptoe to kiss him. ‘For your sake.’
When Adam arrived at the castle, Geoffrey of Anjou was tilting at a ring that had been set up on a quintain in the bailey, and he was making a commendable job of it. Adam joined the gaggle of spectators, among them the kitchen girl with whom Thierry had been so familiar two nights before. She blushed and giggled behind work- roughened hands. Adam ignored her to concentrate on Geoffrey’s performance.
Geoffrey lifted the ring on the end of his lance and came away cleanly without encountering the sandbag. Turning the grey at the end of the tilt he saw Adam, and having handed the lance to a squire, jogged over to him. ‘What do you think?’ He was panting slightly, his lips parted in a grin that only just fell short of being smug. He knew he was good.
A rainy gust of breeze flurried across the ward. Adam hooked the fingers of his uninjured hand in his belt. ‘Not bad, my lord,’ he nodded in reply, ‘you check yourself slightly before you go for the strike. It would be better if you could maintain the pace.’
Geoffrey favoured Adam with a glittering look. ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ he said, and then gestured at Adam’s slung arm. ‘How do you fare?’
‘It is sore, my lord, but no lasting damage, I think.’
Geoffrey dismounted gracefully. ‘And your horse?’
‘He’s got his legs back and took a handful of oats from my hand this morning, but he’s still subdued. A splitting skull, I hazard.’ His lips tightened. ‘God knows the kind of potion he was given.’
Geoffrey snapped his fingers at a groom, and as the grey was led away drew Adam across the bailey in the direction of the hall. ‘We found the lad who gave him those apples,’ he said, watching Adam through eyes half shut against the rain.
Adam checked. ‘Did you? What did he say?’
‘Nothing. They took him dead from the river this morning and by the looks of him he’d been all night in the water. He must have slipped on one of the wharves. It’s easily done. We’ve had three drownings already, this year.’ He spoke without inflection.
‘I see,’ Adam said softly.
‘I thought that you would.’
They went into the hall. Smoke from a badly tended hearth stung his eyes and caught in his throat. He coughed and blinked. ‘Where does it all end?’ he said.
‘William le Clito told me all about your quarrel with de Mortimer.’ Geoffrey balanced on alternate legs as he removed his spurs.
Adam’s lip curled. ‘How generous of him.’
‘Not at all. He was explaining why we shouldn’t clap the whoreson in irons and leave him to moulder in a cell. Said the man had a right to be aggrieved by what you had done.’
Adam’s expression became intractable.
‘Is it true?’ Geoffrey asked, persisting where an angel would have feared to tread. Between his thick golden lashes, his eyes were very bright.
‘That he was responsible for Ralf le Chevalier’s murder? That he was involved with le Clito in plotting against the Empress? Yes, both counts are true.’
‘And the other?’
Adam gave Geoffrey a hard stare that told the youth he was walking a very dangerous edge, then he transferred it to the banners above the dais and said quietly, ‘When he discovered myself and Heulwen together, King Henry had already vouchsafed her hand in marriage to me.’
‘But snatched from beneath his nose,’ Geoffrey said as they mounted the stairs to the private rooms above. ‘Was that the reason you did not kill him?’
Adam’s anger, caught in mid-stream by surprise, submerged into thoughtfulness. He disliked Geoffrey of Anjou, but then he was not particularly fond of King Henry, and the latter’s ability to rule had never been in dispute. Geoffrey, it appeared, read men as easily as he read the vellum-bound copies of the romances which were currently so popular. ‘One of them,’ he answered.
Geoffrey paused on the stairs and glanced over his shoulder. ‘Is the Empress really as beautiful as they say?’
Adam struggled to keep pace with the fluctuating levels of Geoffrey’s mind: mirror-bright shallows, tepid mid-waters and opaque, cold depths. ‘She is handsome,’ he heard himself respond. ‘Rich-brown hair and milk- white skin.’
‘And a temper?’
Adam smiled faintly. ‘A royal temper, my lord, but then you said yourself that you liked spirit in a woman.’
Geoffrey continued up the stairs. ‘A mare too spirited to permit a man in the saddle is a waste of time…is she?’
There was a hint of satisfaction in Adam’s tone as he said, ‘You called her old enough to be your grandam, but the difference in age is a double-edged blade. She is hardly going to run with enthusiasm into the arms of a boy barely out of tail clouts. Believe me, you will have to catch and saddle her before you can even think of mounting.’
Geoffrey threw him an angry stare, but eventually it dissolved into a snort of reluctant laughter. ‘I thought you were supposed to be a diplomat?’
‘I am, my lord. I did not say that the Empress was unridable. When she is not being haughty and impossible, she makes interesting company, but you will need curb and spur and God’s own patience to deal with her.’
Geoffrey made a noncommittal sound. ‘And your barons?’
‘They will hope you get a son on her, the sooner the better — those of them that do not will hope that you fall off and get trampled in the act.’
The neutrality became another smothered ripple of amusement. ‘So that the child can grow to manhood before Henry dies and your barons change their fickle minds?’
‘You have nailed the shoe to the hoof, my lord.’
‘The mare’s hoof,’ Geoffrey compounded with a mischievous twinkle as he swept aside the heavy woollen curtain and led the way into his father’s rooms. ‘You have heard I suppose that le Clito’s gone to claim his own destiny?’ He took an unlit candle from the holder on the trestle and kindled it from another wavering in a wall bracket.
‘Yes, my lord.’
Geoffrey eyed him thoughtfully now, the mockery flown. ‘William le Clito’s going to be too busy to look to England for a long time. Flanders is a bubbling stew of trouble, and it will take all the housewifely skills he does
