knew he could wait no longer. He said to the girl, ‘We can go in now!’
She looked at him brightly. ‘Is the party going to be soon?’
‘Yes, yes! Very soon.’
She had paused to fluff up her pretty hair and brush the dust off her cloak. The little gestures had gone straight to his heart. Before emotion could undermine him — remember why you are doing this! — he tightened his hold around her waist and kicked his heels into Star’s sides.
He went first into the lodge, holding her hand and drawing her in after him. Nobody noticed them to begin with. The lord was sitting in a fine leather-seated chair beside the fire, and two of his body servants were pulling off his boots. The boots were caked in mud. More servants had heated wine, and the aroma of spices was heavy on the air. The lord’s men all had mugs in their hands and were drinking greedily. As the man watched from the fringes of the group, the lord reached out a hand and took his own fine silver goblet from the servant who bowed low beside him.
‘To the chase!’ he roared, and all the others joined the toast. ‘To Madame Roe and Lord Fallow! Long may they thrive-’
‘And long may we hunt them!’ the men yelled back.
Then the lord caught sight of him. ‘There you are!’ he exclaimed. ‘We missed you on the hunt today. Where have you been?’
A narrow path opened up between the men crowding around the lord. His heart hammering in his chest, slowly the man walked along it. The girl’s small hand in his was hot and sweaty with nervous excitement.
The lord’s eyes fell on her and for an instant opened in recognition.
‘I have brought you an unexpected guest, my lord,’ the man began, ‘for I know that-’
He did not have the chance to explain himself. As if his lord saw everything that had happened in the past two days in the blink of an eye — he probably did, for he was very, very clever and his mind worked as fast as quicksilver — he turned to the man and fixed him with eyes that blazed with fury.
Into the hush that had suddenly descended, he said in an icy voice, ‘So you bring me a girl?’
‘I thought — I-’ the man stammered.
The lord, as if aware of all the ears straining to hear, flung out his arm in a wide gesture. ‘Get out, the lot of you,’ he shouted. ‘Go and hurry those blasted cooks. I want my dinner!’
One by one the others shuffled away. The man and the girl stood side by side before the lord. ‘You were saying?’ the lord prompted silkily.
The man sidled closer. Speaking almost into his lord’s ear, he whispered, ‘We — I know that your preference is for young women, my lord. Why, your good lady wife was scarce more than this girl’s age when you wed her, and she-’
The lord flung out his balled fist, and it was only the man’s quick reaction that saved him. ‘Do not dare speak of my wife!’ the lord hissed. His face was scarlet with fury, the bright eyes swelling alarmingly above the puffy cheeks. ‘She was young, yes, when first I laid eyes on her, but she was precociously mature and already a woman!’ He paused, panting. ‘What do you think I am?’ he demanded, the low, controlled voice almost worse than the awful shouting. ‘You have brought me a child!’
The man wanted to weep. Everything had gone amiss. He had got it wrong, as so often he did. Already, the voices were starting up their clamour inside his head, jeering at him, accusing him, calling him a fool.
His lord had beckoned to the girl, and she was slowly walking up to him. He held out a hand, and she took it. He was speaking to her; the man knew he must be because he could see the lord’s lips moving. He told the voices to be quiet so that he could listen.
‘-your name, child?’ the lord was asking.
‘Rosamund Warin.’ The girl spoke up clearly, causing the lord to smile.
‘Rosamund,’ he said. ‘Rose of the world. Warin… Yes, I know the name. Who is your father, Rosamund Warin?’
‘He is called Dominic and he lives at New Winnowlands.’
‘I know that name, too,’ mused the lord. He frowned in concentration for a few moments, and then, his prodigious memory coming to his aid, he said, ‘The abbess of Hawkenlye was called Warin.’
‘Yes, she’s my grandmother, only she’s not abbess there any more. She-’ Rosamund did not go on. The man wondered why. It was not that the lord had stopped her; more as if she herself had elected not to say any more.
The lord did not appear to have noticed.
The man watched him intently. As if the lord felt his eyes on him, he looked up and stared right at him.
The man bowed his head to receive whatever furious invective the lord chose to hurl at him. He did not even dare to think what his punishment would be. It would be severe and it would be painful, that was for sure.
The lord’s voice said calmly, ‘Look at me.’
Slowly, the man obeyed. To his huge surprise, the lord was smiling. ‘You are a fool,’ he said, quite pleasantly, ‘but then I expect you already know that, for people no doubt tell you all the time.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ the man muttered. He very much wanted to lower his eyes, for the lord’s hard stare was paining him, but he did not dare.
‘A fool, but it may yet be that in your folly you have unwittingly done me a service,’ the lord went on. He paused, frowning. ‘Yes,’ he said softly, more to himself than to the man. ‘Yes, I believe that would work very well…’
The man waited. Between him and the lord, Rosamund stood quite still, like a slender statue. The lord turned to her. ‘Why were you brought here, child? Do you know?’ he asked her kindly.
‘He said there was to be a party,’ she said, nodding her head towards the man. ‘He told me I would meet you, lord, and he said it was a surprise.’ She stopped, and it seemed to the man, watching her back, that her shoulders drooped a little.
The lord must have noticed, too. ‘Would you like to go home?’ he said gently.
Her head shot up. ‘May I?’ Then, as if she remembered her manners: ‘I mean, after the party, of course.’
‘Of course,’ the lord echoed. He leaned towards her. ‘Tomorrow I shall take you back to Hawkenlye Abbey,’ he announced.
‘But my grandmother-’ The girl bit off the rest of whatever she was going to say. If she had been about to point out again that her grandmother was no longer abbess of Hawkenlye, she must have thought better of it. Perhaps, the man reflected, she had decided that being taken to the abbey was as good an offer as she was going to get and she had better accept it. ‘Thank you, my lord,’ she said instead. ‘That would be most convenient.’
‘Good,’ the lord said. Then, his eyes dancing with light as if he were contemplating some wonderful event: ‘Good!’ He clapped his hands, yelled to the others that they could come back and told them to bring the food with them.
The remainder of the evening had passed in a blur. Everyone had drunk a lot, and the shouting and the singing had all resonated inside the man’s head, competing with the voices that alternately cajoled, threatened and, very occasionally, praised him.
The others made him the butt of their mocking jokes, and it had hurt him. He had done all this, conceived his brilliant plan, to stop them treating him like an idiot. He had truly believed that bringing the girl would please his lord so much that the lord would turn to him, thank him and announce that he was to be advanced to the post of one of the lord’s close guard. That would have shown them, all of them, for at long last he would have been in his rightful place at his lord’s side.
Where he, of all men, surely belonged. Even if nobody ever seemed to remember it.
It was late now, and everybody was sleeping. The girl had been accorded a corner to herself, and the lord had made sure that she was snug and comfortable. He had commanded that the men respect her privacy, and the man knew that nobody would dare to disobey. The girl was safe now.
Somehow, despite the fact that his plan had gone so badly awry, he could not help being glad about that. It had never been his intention to hurt her. He’d just had to use her as a means to an end, in much the same way that people used him.
Tomorrow they were taking her back to the abbey. The lord had seemed very pleased about that. The man tried to think why. He was quite good at thinking, or at least he was when the voices gave him a bit of peace. They
