little to do with the truth. 'Yes,' he said without looking up. 'But I don't make a habit of blabbing it abroad. You know what Lord Rolf is like.'
'He wasn't always that way. Morals of a torn cat at one time. Rutted his way through all the towns in Normandy and half of England.'
Benedict looked up. 'He took me on one side once and delivered me a lecture about the perils of sowing wild oats in furrows too close to home. Everyone at Ulverton knows about the tragedy of the woman from the north and the Lady Ailith.' He gave the mare a final slap on her muscular shoulder and wiped his hands on a wisp of hay. 'I wonder what happened to her and the little girl? Do you think they're still alive?'
'God knows!' Mauger snorted. 'He searched far and wide in the early days, but found neither hide nor hair.' He gave an impatient shrug as if the subject bored him. 'It's of no consequence now.'
Benedict frowned at Mauger's indifference. He did not remember the Lady Ailith well himself, but he knew that his mother had grieved and worried as much as Rolf when she vanished. Indeed, it had taken her a long time to forgive him for what he had done.
Benedict's memories of Lady Ailith's daughter were a little more focused. The impulsive, headstrong nature, the tantrums, the adoration she had poured out upon him. Without knowing, his expression softened as he remembered the day he had saved her from the greylag gander, and she had fallen asleep on the saddle behind him. How old would she be now? Growing into womanhood, surely? Was her nature still as wild, her hair still as curly? More to the point, was she still alive? Small wonder that Lord Rolf tortured himself.
The bath was hot, the woman's hands slow and sensual as she sat behind Benedict and massaged his soapy shoulders. 'Mauger tells me that you have not been to Southwark before?' Her voice was low and sweet with a strong Flemish accent. She had a lush figure, glossy brown plaits, and her name was Gudrun.
'Not to Southwark,' he murmured. 'But there are places like this in Rouen and Falaise.'
'You are well travelled for one so young.' Her hands came forward, slowly soaping his smooth chest. Despite his dark colouring, Benedict possessed very little body hair. Indeed, although fully developed in all other ways, he only needed to barber his face with a blade twice a week.
'So have you to judge from your voice,' he retorted. 'Ghent, I would say.'
Gudrun laughed and her hands plundered lower, exploring the firm bands of his stomach muscles, and then, with mischievous discovery, the equally firm length of his erect shaft which had risen to the occasion with adolescent joy. 'Bruges, my young lord,' she contradicted, 'but close enough. I was a simple townsgirl who followed my soldier lover across the narrow sea. When he abandoned me, I had to make my living as best I could.' Her hands stroked with exquisite gentleness and Benedict closed his eyes. The sensations were extremely pleasant, but not as yet unbearable.
'So Mauger visits often?' he queried.
'Whenever he is in London. He always asks for Aaliz, she's his favourite.' Her voice took on a curious note and she paused in her ministrations. 'Are you apprenticed to him? I heard him tell Aaliz that you were learning his trade.'
Benedict smiled somewhat sourly. 'I am apprenticed to the same master who taught him.' His spine stiffened with resentment. Gudrun, sensing that she had asked the wrong question, ceased speaking and resumed her fondling. Before she could bring him to his peak, he grasped her hand to stop her motions and directed her to join him in the tub. Casting off her linen robe, she straddled him. Water sloshed rhythmically onto the floor as Benedict practised what he had learned in the establishments of Rouen.
Whilst he was dressing, Gudrun tugged on a loose linen robe and went out to replenish the pitcher of wine. Glancing at the girl, then round the comfortably appointed room, Benedict had to admit that Mauger had sound taste. He wondered if the overseer had had to work as hard at acquiring that taste as he did at selecting breeding stock for the stud at Brize. It was an uncharitable thought and he was surprised to find it lurking in his mind when his body was so at ease.
Gudrun returned with the wine and a small bowl of raisin cakes. 'There has been trouble at one of the other bathhouses tonight,' she told him breathlessly. 'A good thing Mauger didn't take you across the way to Dame Agatha's.'
Benedict took a swallow of the wine she poured for him and raised his brows in silent question.
'Do you know Wulfstan the Goldsmith?'
'Vaguely.' Benedict's curiosity sharpened. His parents often moved in the same company as Wulfstan, but they were not on speaking terms due to some quarrel in the past that had never been explained to him. 'Why?'
'One of the other girls has just told me that he's lying stone-dead on the floor of one of Dame Agatha's cubicles. A seizure so she said, but there's another rumour that one of Agatha's girls killed him.' Gudrun's eyes glowed. 'It'll be all over the city by tomorrow. Wulfstan was well feared, but not well liked. No-one'll likely mourn him, not even his wife.'
Benedict digested this information while he finished his wine and blotted up some of its potency with a couple of raisin cakes. He could almost hear Rolf saying As ye sow, so shall ye reap, and having just sown a few wild oats of his own, he felt a little uneasy. When he departed, he paid Gudrun from the depths of his niggled conscience, and her eyes widened at the amount of silver he pressed into her hand. When she made to exclaim, he put his forefinger to her lips and glanced quickly over his shoulder at Mauger who was making his own farewells.
'Say nothing,' he whispered. 'Just put it away against a time when you might need it. My friend… he wouldn't understand.'
Gudrun nodded. Her eyes flickered to Mauger. Aaliz said that he was as solid and unimaginative between the sheets as he was out of them, and not particularly generous. She contrasted that description with the good fortune withdrawing from her own arms now.
'Will you return?' Her fingertips slipped the length of his sleeve, the final contact of flesh, hand upon hand, and then the space of air between them, wealthy young man and riverside whore. He drew a breath, and this time it was she who laid a forefinger to his lips. 'No, do not answer that,' she said quickly. 'It was a foolish question.'
'Ready?' Mauger nudged Benedict. Gudrun stepped back, a professional smile on her face. There would be other customers as the darkness thickened and the night grew older.
Benedict returned her smile and walked away, turning to wave once before he lost sight of the bathhouse. It was drizzling, the twilight soft and murky and the air pungent with the smells of wet earth and smoky cooking fires. The two young men made their way down to the river and sought along the bank for a boatman to row them back across the water to civilisation.
'Was it worth it then?' asked Mauger, a slightly patronising smile on his lips.
Benedict murmured a reply and hoped without much optimism that Mauger was not going to demand a detailed account of his experience. He knew that the older man, having introduced him to the delights of Southwark, would feel entitled to know everything and be aggrieved at anything less.
They found a boatman within minutes. He was tying up his craft with determined tugs on the mooring rope whilst arguing with a slender young woman. An older female sat on the ground, her cloak bundled around her body, which shook with spasms of coughing.
'I tell you, I be finished for the day. I been rowing this hulk back and forth across the river since afore cockcrow this morn. Do you think I've no other life to live?' the boatman snapped.
'My mother's sick, she can't go any further. You must take us across!' The girl compounded her frustration by stamping her foot.
The gesture was familiar to Benedict, but he could not remember from where or why. The girl wore a dark cloak and a hood of paler, gold wool, the colour dim in the twilight. Escaping from its edge were several strands of curly dark hair. He could not see her face.
'I must do nothing, wench,' the man growled and started to walk away. In desperation, the girl leaped in front of him and clutched at his sleeve. Benedict was granted a swift vision of delicate features marred by the pinch of exhaustion and despair.
'Please, for the mercy of God!' Her young voice trembled on the verge of breaking.
Benedict intervened, stepping across the boatman's path as the man tried to shake her off and go determinedly on his way.
