Linnet frowned as she studied the warm, bright room. ‘It is the memories I do not like,’ she said after a hesitation. ‘My marriage to Giles and what came after.’
Maude nodded. ‘But that is over now. You are a new wife and you have new memories to make. I trust Joscelin is treating you well?’
Linnet blushed and sat down on the other end of the settle. ‘He has been very good to me.’
‘More than that, to judge from the colour in your cheeks!’ Maude smiled.
Linnet returned the expression but without her entire heart. Yes, he had been very good to her but perhaps he would cease to be if she told him about herself and Raymond de Montsorrel. She had almost said something as they lay entwined in the afterglow of a second mating but her first tentative words had been met by the indifferent mumble of a man already three-quarters asleep and her courage had failed her. Why tell him at all? It was in the past, finished. And all the time, at the back of her mind, a small voice was crying,
Maude’s humour faded and, leaning over, she gently touched Linnet’s knee. ‘You are troubled, my dear?’
Linnet blinked moisture from her eyes and swallowed. ‘No,’ she lied. ‘It is nothing.’
The curtain across the bower entrance billowed and then was flurried aside by a giggling Robert, who was running away from Ella.
‘Just you come here this instant, young man, and wash those muddy hands!’ the maid cried, and catching him, tickled him into a state of helpless submission before sweeping him across the room to the laver.
Distracted by the intrusion, Maude craned round to watch the child complain and grimace at being scrubbed. ‘I never had infants of my own,’ she said wistfully. ‘William’s brood has been my family.’
Linnet saw the sadness in Maude’s face. Her lap was generous and made to nurse small children. ‘Robert has no grandparents,’ she said. ‘I would be honoured if you became one to him.’
Maude stared at Linnet as if she had just been offered a place in heaven, and her eyes filled with emotion. ‘There is nothing that would give me more pleasure,’ she said in a shaky voice. ‘Martin’s leaving Arnsby after Christmas to join Richard de Luci’s household and I’ll miss having a child about the place. To know I can visit you and be special to Robert is a gift beyond price.’ She embraced Linnet in a fervent hug.
‘It is as much for my sake as yours!’ Linnet responded, her own voice unsteady. ‘My mother died when I was a baby. I’ve never had an older woman to talk to, except Richard de Luci’s wife sometimes and the Countess Petronilla.’
‘That’s the name of my horse!’ Overhearing, Robert skipped up to them, his demeanor as chirpy as a squirrel’s. ‘She’s called Petra for short. Malcolm’s been teaching me to jump her over logs.’ He leaped in the air, demonstrating. ‘Joscelin says that he’s going to show me how to tilt at the quintain when he comes home and he’s promised me some bridle bells, too. Joscelin’s my papa now.’
‘Yes, my love, so that makes you and me relatives,’ Maude said and produced a small box containing squares of a sticky date sweetmeat, which she gave to the child. ‘Don’t eat too many at once; you’ll make yourself sick and your mother will be cross with me.’
Robert was more taken with the carvings on the little box than he was with the contents. Maude helped him to eat one of the glistening dark pieces and enquired after his coneys.
‘They’re grazing in the garth,’ Linnet said. ‘I’ve had the carpenter fashion an enclosure to keep them from harm and prevent them escaping and eating the salad leaves.’
‘The babies were all pink and blind at first but they’ve got black fur now,’ Robert announced somewhat stickily. ‘The messenger said he’d like a black coney-skin cloak but Malcolm told him my coneys were special pets.’
Linnet grasped Robert’s arm. ‘What messenger, sweetheart? ’
‘The one who arrived when we were unsaddling Petra. He was all covered in dust and his horse was foamy. Henry’s sister gave the man a drink.’
Linnet stood up, her mouth dry and her heart pounding. She had taken only two steps towards the chamber door when she heard voices on the stairs and Malcolm appeared on her threshold with Milo. They flanked a travel-stained, dishevelled and obviously exhausted young soldier.
Linnet stood straight and still as she looked at the men. ‘What news?’ she demanded. ‘Tell me.’
The messenger advanced and bent the knee. He was one of Conan’s Bretons, a stocky young man scarcely out of adolescence with a downy beard fuzzing his square jaw. ‘There is no need for fear, my lady, the news is good,’ he said as she gestured him to rise and face her. ‘Our troops met Leicester’s near to Edmundsbury at a place called Fornham. All swampy, the land was, and no fit place to fight but we forced them to a battle nevertheless and cut them to pieces. Them as we didn’t get, the peasants did with pitchforks and spears. The earl himself has been taken prisoner and his countess with him.’ Rummaging in his pouch, he withdrew a crumpled, water-stained packet. ‘A letter from my lord. He says to expect him in three days’ time, all being well.’
Colour flooded back into Linnet’s face as she took the packet from the mercenary’s blunt fingers. ‘And is he whole? He has taken no injury?’
‘No, my lady.’ The young man grinned, revealing a recently lost front tooth. ‘Mostly it was like spearing fish in a barrel. In the end we fetched up pitying the poor bastards that were left and let them run away into the marshes.’ He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Not as that’ll do ’em any good. Like as not they’ll drown or be picked off one by one by the eel fishers and fowlers round about.’ His voice dried up and he began to cough.
Maude quickly poured him wine from the pitcher on the side table and brought it to him. ‘Do you know what happened to your lord’s half-brothers, Ralf and Ivo de Rocher?’ she asked anxiously.
The mercenary took several gulps from his cup. ‘No, my lady. All I can tell you is that they weren’t taken with the earl and his wife. Sir William has offered a reward for their safe delivery into his custody and he’s stayed behind at Fornham to see if anyone turns them in. Lord Joscelin says Sir William ought to come home, the damp’s not good for him, but he won’t be swayed. Says he doesn’t care whether his sons are alive or corpses, they’re still coming home.’
Linnet unfolded the vellum sheet and gazed upon her husband’s firm brown ink strokes. Joscelin wrote almost as good a hand as a professional scribe, although the flow was a little too open and generous of vellum for a true craftsman. She imagined him seated at a table, one hand thrust into his hair, the other busy with a quill. It was a satisfying image and she deliberately enlarged upon it to banish the other one of him astride Whitesocks, brandishing a dripping sword.
‘My heart bleeds for them,’ Maude had said to her when the messenger had gone. ‘William and my nephews both. What if Ralf and Ivo are dead? How will William live with the burden of knowing he might have killed them? They may look like grown men but really they are still jealous little boys.’ And she had dabbed at her eyes with the trailing end of her sleeve.
Robert had taken Maude to the garth to look at his coneys, thus giving Linnet a moment alone to read her letter in peace. She sat down in the window embrasure. A puddle of late autumn sunshine warmed her feet through her soft leather shoes. The only sound was the muted conversation of two maids weaving braid by the hearth.
As a child, Linnet had received basic tuition in reading and writing from the household priest - enough so that she could understand but she was not particularly fluent. Painstakingly she picked up each word of Joscelin’s and consigned it like a jewel from page to memory.
The words warmed her as much as the splash of sunlight and foolish tears blurred her vision. Not since childhood had affection been hers to command except in Robert’s eyes. Once she had made the mistake of
