wants, then I’m glad for her.’ He changed the subject. ‘Are you seeking employment now?’
The older man eyed him suspiciously. ‘Depends. Why do you ask?’
‘I’m short of troops. I was thinking of riding into Nottingham to hire men but, since you’ve already lined your purse with Rushcliffe’s silver, perhaps you and your men would like the position?’
Conan stared. He grasped the drawstring pouch at his belt and waggled it at Joscelin. ‘What do you mean? See - empty as a hag’s tit!’
‘You’re not going to tell me that my seneschal rode into your troop wearing nothing but his drawers?’ Joscelin scoffed. ‘You said yourself that he was “a fatted calf, dripping in wealth” and not his at that. It belongs to my five-year-old ward.’
Conan continued to stare. Despite his best effort his lips twitched and in a moment he was lost to a full grin. Joscelin himself was similarly afflicted, his hazel eyes bright with amusement.
‘You are your father’s son,’ Conan growled by way of capitulation.
‘And my uncle’s nephew,’ Joscelin retorted.
Chapter 16
‘Look, Mama. What are they doing?’ Robert wriggled upright on the saddle to point at the cage of scaffolding confining Arnsby’s tall, octagonal keep. Men stood on platforms or toiled on the ground, caparisoning the monstrous stone beast in white summer plumage.
‘They’re giving it a fresh coat of limewash to protect it from the weather,’ Joscelin said over his shoulder and slowed his courser so that Linnet could join him. ‘We’ve to do the same to Rushcliffe before the winter comes.’
‘Why?’
‘To protect the fabric from the bad weather and keep it strong.’
Robert sucked his underlip while he considered the reply. Linnet had watched her son gain rapidly in confidence during the weeks following Giles’s death. Given space to breathe without being slapped, glared at or found lacking, Robert had begun to emerge from his shell - tentatively at first, with much drawing in of horns, but growing bolder by the day. Joscelin had put him on an ancient pack pony in the tiltyard and begun teaching him to ride. He had fashioned a small, blunt-tipped lance for him and a wooden sword. Conan de Gael, Joscelin’s uncle, had played at knights and outlaws with Robert and conceded defeat with dramatic death throes, much to the boy’s consternation and delight. And Robert, so silent and withdrawn before his father’s death, had started asking questions. One after another they tumbled out of him, queuing up to trip off his busy tongue. Why is the sky blue? Why don’t people have fur like coneys? How does Job the shepherd know when it’s going to rain? Where does the sea go when the tide is out?
‘Why are we here?’
‘I told you; to visit Sir Joscelin’s father.’ Linnet kissed Robert’s fair hair.
‘Why?’
‘Because I need to talk to him,’ Joscelin said. ‘Here, come and sit on my saddle and stop bedeviling your mother with questions. You can guide Whitesocks if you want.’
The words were no sooner spoken than accomplished. Robert scrambled with alacrity from his mother’s arms into Joscelin’s and settled there as if they had been his security since birth.
They approached the open gateway, the horses’ hooves thudding on the solid drawbridge planks. The huge iron pulley chains were speckled with limewash and there were splashes of it, like enormous bird droppings, on the bridge itself. Robert’s small hand pointed and he chirruped a question. Joscelin bent over him and responded with patient good humour. A pang cut through Linnet to see them thus: the familiar sensations of guilt and love and a deeper, primal twisting of heart and womb and loins.
‘Ach,’ said Conan softly as he joined her on the drawbridge. ‘Give him a child and he turns to butter.’
There was a strange note in the mercenary’s voice that caused Linnet to look at him curiously. ‘Certainly my son has taken to him,’ she replied. ‘And in London I met him in the company of his youngest brother.’ She looked thoughtfully at Conan. He was wearing a garish tunic of Welsh plaid and riding Corbette’s piebald stallion. Bracelets of copper and silver jangled in abundance on his forearms. The word
Conan made a face. ‘Yes and no, my lady. He came to me when he was fifteen, stubborn, proud and half- starved. ’ A sardonic grin curled his lips. ‘I took him in and I took him on, taught him the bare-fist-and-teeth side of fighting, the kind that keeps you alive.’
‘Like a knife down your boot?’ she asked with a half-smile.
Conan chuckled. ‘Never be without one.’ He regarded Joscelin as he was swallowed by the darkness of the portcullis arch and emerged again into the bright sunshine of the courtyard. ‘His own lad was about Robert’s age when he died,’ he added quietly. ‘It’s a hard life for a mother and child in a mercenary baggage train. It is a good thing that Joscelin has a place of his own to settle now and a family. There’s as much hunger in his soul as there is in his damned father’s.’
They entered the darkness themselves, emerged into light. Linnet was unaware of blinking in the brilliance, nor did she feel the warmth of the sun. ‘You are telling me that he was married once?’
‘They never had a priest say the words over them or witness borne to their handfasting but they were together for more than five years and she bore him a child. After the lad died, she wandered with us for a little longer but it was finished between her and Joscelin. She married a widower from Falaise and settled down with him to run a hostelry.’
Linnet was stunned. Conan leaned closer, taking her upper arm in his calloused, strong hand. ‘I’d prefer you to keep it to yourself, lass. Not even his father knows the tale and Josce would kill me if he thought I’d been interfering in his private concerns. But I thought it was something you should know.’ Releasing his grip, he leaped lightly from his mount and stood at her stirrup to help her down.
Linnet thought that he deserved murdering to spring something like this upon her at a moment when she needed all her social skills to be polite to her betrothed’s dreadful father.
Robert’s hand clasped in his, Joscelin appeared at her side. She saw his glance flicker to Conan’s bland expression. ‘What has he been saying to you?’
He spoke lightly and there was a smile on his face but she was still reminded of Giles, who had been suspicious of her every conversation with another man. ‘I . . .’ The words stuck in her throat and her mind went blank with panic.
‘I was giving her some friendly advice on being a dutiful wife to my nephew,’ Conan said smoothly. ‘If she is lost for words, it is because she cannot repeat what I told her without being indelicate.’ He winked at her, slapped Joscelin hard on the shoulder and turned to face the keep. ‘Hasn’t changed a stone in twenty years! I always liked this place - good and solid, a gem to defend against siege.’
Agnes de Rocher pushed the weft through the narrow shed of the wool braid she was weaving, knocked down the twisted threads into the pattern and stared at her work with dissatisfaction. The tension was uneven, dictated by her mood at the different times she had sat down to the work, and the braid snaked broad, thin and slantwise by turns, like the unruly river of her thoughts. The colours were supposed to be autumnal - gold, brown and soft green - but they looked sallow to her now, without enough contrast to make them interesting.
She laid down the horn weaving-tablets on the trestle and secured them with another piece of completed braid. Her hands were smooth and adorned with gold rings as befitted a baron’s wife and the only thing of vanity left to her. She tended them assiduously, anointing them with scented white fat and trimming and buffing her nails until they gleamed. Not that William ever noticed. To him she was either invisible or an irritation that he bore with ill grace and the long-sufferance of obligation. It was all the fault of the whore.
Sometimes in the corner of her eye Agnes would catch a glimpse of Morwenna de Gael: her luxuriant dark hair rippling down her back, her green silk gown trailing the floor rushes and her body ripe with the new life that
