Renard finished writing, discarded the quill which had started to split, and sent Owain from his task of oiling a spear tip, out into the sleet to find a messenger. Across the tent, as he sanded the parchment and set about melting wax to seal it, Henry clinked pitcher to cup again and focused on him with the owlish scrutiny of the well drunk.
‘Did you ask Elene for more wine?’ he said.
Renard shot his brother a frosty look. ‘Yes.’
Henry took several loud gulps. ‘Good.’
Renard added pointedly, ‘Whether I actually get to drink any myself is another matter.’
The smell of hot wax mingled with the other musty, pungent odours of the tent. Henry wiped his gambeson sleeve across his mouth. ‘You don’t begrudge me an odd measure, do you?’
‘The odd measure, not at all,’ Renard said in the same, cutting tone. Of late Henry had been resorting to entire flagons.
‘’S all right then,’ Henry said. ‘Wine numbs the pain from my wounds … all of them.’ He pointed at the letter. ‘Have you told her everything?’
Renard wrapped the letter in a square of waxed cloth and tied it up deftly, cutting the string with his dagger. ‘Such as?’ he said as he concentrated on the task in hand.
‘Such as that yellow-haired wench who came scratching round the tent last night?’
Renard looked surprised. ‘Why should I tell her about that? She knows full well that whores abound in an army’s tail and that they proposition every man in sight. If I made mention, she would think me guilty.’
‘And aren’t you? I saw what she was doing.’
Renard rested his palms on the table. ‘If you hadn’t fallen down drunk, you’d have seen me push her away. I wasn’t that desperate.’
Henry sneered. ‘You must think I’m an idiot!’
‘Jesu, Henry, just get out,’ Renard said wearily as if to a truculent child. ‘Take the flagon if you want. I doubt there’s more than dregs left in it anyway the way you’ve been swilling it down your throat!’
Henry lurched to his feet. Unbalanced by drink and his damaged right side, he almost fell, clutched at the table for support and knocked the pitcher sideways. Renard was right. Little more than dregs did remain to trickle away into the floor. ‘Perhaps I am an idiot!’ he snarled as he regained his feet. ‘But I do not need to be made to feel like one!’
The tent was very quiet after he had gone. Renard swore and stared unseeingly at a clump of black mould sporing there. It was not about a yellow-haired whore at all. It was about everything that he possessed and Henry did not.
He swore again, and the messenger just entering the tent in Owain’s wake baulked, stared for an instant and quickly dropped his gaze to the sheepskin hat in his hand.
Renard pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘It wasn’t personally intended,’ he said and picked up the neatly sealed package. ‘I want you to take this to my lady wife, wherever she may be. Try Ledworth first.’
The man took the letter, and bowed from the tent. Owain came forward and unobtrusively began to clear the shards of broken jug from the tent floor. ‘Shall I bring you a fresh jug, my lord?’
Renard shook his head and drew another sheet of parchment towards him, indicating that he wanted to be left alone. The parchment was beaded with wine, the colour of rain-diluted blood. He shovelled his thoughts impatiently to one side like an overworked groom attacking a pile of soiled straw, and with brisk decision trimmed another quill.
Moments later Owain burst back into the tent, Guy d’Alberin hot on his heels and both boys quivering and wide-eyed as a pair of young deer. ‘Sire, come quickly! The scouts have sighted the rebel army drawing nigh the river!’ cried Owain. ‘Thousands of them!’ A rapid swallow garbled the last word.
Renard dropped the quill, left his stool and the doubtful warmth of the brazier, and went outside. Cold needles of sleet stung his face and the ground underfoot was as treacherous as a butcher’s shambles. Men were leaving tents and watchfires to view the approaching army, their faces a mingling of expressions ranging from bored ‘seen it all before’ cynicism, through frank, fairground curiosity, to excitement and gut-wrenching dread.
Owain’s ‘thousands’ proved to be a vanguard of less than thirty mounted knights with perhaps twice that number of footsoldiers, and all of them spreading out along the far bank of the swollen Witham, searching for a suitable fording point. Renard narrowed his lids the better to see the shapes busying themselves below, industrious as aphids colonising an orchard leaf. Tents were being pitched and more men were riding to join them through the gathering afternoon murk.
‘How’s the fire in your belly, Renard, hot enough for a battle?’ asked Ingelram of Say, one of his fellow barons.
‘What fire?’ Renard hunched into the thick wolf-skin lining of his cloak. ‘To whom do that lot belong?’
‘Robert of Gloucester, so the rumour flies.’ Ingelram sleeved a drip from his narrow beaky nose and sniffed loudly. ‘Alan of Richmond’s sent a detail down to guard the ford. I hope he’s chosen doughty men or we’ll have that lot over our side of the river faster than a whore can lift her skirts for business.’ He jerked his head at the cath — edral. ‘Are you coming to the King’s Council of War? Give your pennyworth of advice to our beloved sovereign for how much notice he will take?’
Renard bestowed a tepid nod on the garrulous Ingelram. ‘In a moment.’
Ingelram shrugged at him and disappeared. Renard stared through the drizzle at the activity below and saw a figure on a raw-boned, spotted horse pacing along the river bank. The soldier, helmeted and grey-clad, was indistinguishable from any other of his kind, but the horse was all too sickeningly familiar.
Overnight the sleet turned to snow, a white curtain hissing silently into the fast-flowing river, blanketing one side’s view from the other. In a freezing dawn, breath wreathing the air, feet stamping to preserve some vestige of circulation, Stephen’s barons gathered in the cathedral, first to celebrate a special mass commemorating the purification of the Virgin Mary, and then, that dealt with, to hold another Council of War and plan their next move now it was known for certain that a huge rebel army was gathered on the opposite bank of the Witham and seeking a way across.
The candles were as cold in the hands as stalagmites, the wax inferior and as flaky as scurfy skin. Stephen’s flame sputtered with blue flickers of impurity as he followed Bishop Alexander up the nave. Cloth-of-gold shimmered on ivory and crimson wool. Jewels and link mail alternately twinkled and extinguished as the procession moved. Supplicating breath chanted heavenwards, sweetened with incense that blocked the more earthly smells of last night’s wine and garlic-seasoned salt-fish stew.
Renard uttered the familiar responses through chattering teeth. The candle wobbled in his frozen fingers, the flame fluttering and ghosting. The vast, cold, vaulted glory struck no answering chord in his soul. Bishop Alexander of Lincoln was a man too bogged down by temporal concerns to enthuse a spiritual uplifting in others similarly bogged down, beset by chilblains and varying lacks of piety.
The incense tickled Renard’s nose. He stifled a sneeze before it could disturb the chanting or blow out the precari — ous, coddled flame of his candle. The mass progressed, and responses learned by rote left his mind
