Red Adam's Lady Read online

  The steersman, over the side, checked thigh-deep for the space of a long breath, his cheekbones and nose coloring dull red. Then he waded to them through the shallows.

  Red Adam, rechristened for his lifetime, grinned cheerfully, dismounted and went plunging and sliding down the shingle to meet him at the water’s edge. “I’m Adam de Lorismond. You’re very welcome to Arnisby, and to Brentborough Castle.”

  “Erling Thorvard’s son of Trondheim,” the seaman responded, still flushed. “My lord, I intended—”

  “I’m aptly served; make no more of it.” Red Adam was a tall man, but he had to tilt his head back to grin at the seaman, who overtopped him by a hand’s breadth and would have made two of him in girth.

  A stiff smile parted the sailor’s salt-soaked whiskers. He bowed. “Yet it was ill said. But for your warning I’d have lost my ship.”

  “Enough! You’re free of what harbor facilities we have.” His gesture took in the strip of shingle, the fishing boats, the racks of drying stockfish and the salt-boiling cauldrons slung over sulky fires. “Any damage?”

  “A few seams started. My thanks, Lord Adam. We’ll heave her over.” He spoke French fluently, but with an accent much like North-country English. “We were bound for Yarmouth from Flanders, but we were storm-driven north as far as Scotland. I’ve passengers aboard, and a hard voyage they’ve had of it.”

  “My guests, as you are. Get them ashore.” He looked round for Julitta, already picking her way to his side. “Wife, let me present Master Erling Thorvard’s son. Master Erling, my lady.”

  Erling bowed over her hand with dignity. She took an instant liking to him. His hair and beard, tangled with seawater, were so fair that they scarcely betrayed any gray, and his eyes, bloodshot from the long battle, were very blue and alive in his leather-brown face. “It is an honor,” he said in his stiff French

  “You must call on us for all your needs, Master Erling,” she endorsed her husband’s hospitality.

  The seamen had by now lowered mast and sail, propped the ship with timber balks so that she would stay upright when the tide withdrew, and were helping over the side a woebegone company, green-faced and tottering. Julitta, who had pricked her ears at mention of Flanders and Yarmouth, now assimilated their significance; those men who were not too far gone to forget all but the reality of land were clutching the unmistakable shapes of cased arbalests.

  One man, clad in what had been emerald green, now soaked to the hue of over-boiled cabbage, his visage a paler reflection of its color, wobbled through the surf on the arm of a blond young giant, and squelched wide-legged and reeling over the wrack of weed and shells and driftwood the ebb tide was stranding on the shingle. Half-dead from seasickness and exposure, he yet shook free of the supporting grip while the lad stared at Julitta, braced himself on the insecure footing and lifted his head to confront his host. His jaw sagged open, and he gaped like something flapping in a net.

  “Hell’s Teeth! It’s Baldwin Dogsmeat!”

  “Red Adam!” His mouth snapped shut, a faint insolence tilted the corners of his hard mouth. “A long way from the tourneys, Adam.”

  “I’ve inherited,” Red Adam answered, with an upward jerk of the head that included harbor, village and the castle looming on the promontory beyond.

  The man swayed, steadied himself, and broadened the insolent smile.”Pleasant to hear of an old comrade’s good fortune.”

  “You’re welcome to partake of it, Baldwin,” Red Adam answered with unruffled humor. “Bring your scoundrels up to the castle as soon as their legs will make it, and I’ll feed and house them—for old times’ sake.” He nodded in dismissal, and Baldwin’s hard mouth tightened. Red Adam would present the shipman to his lady, but not a mercenary captain. His gaze flickered to Julitta, standing beside her husband, and for the second time recognition gleamed. He grinned like a shark.

  “Here’s old acquaintance well-met again! You’ll not recall me, but you’re Gautier de Montrigord’s daughter. I encountered you in Toulouse when you were a little maid—a matter of five years past it’ll be.”

  “That is so,” Julitta replied sedately, conscious of her husband’s sharp scrutiny. She was not surprised; the world of landless knights and mercenary soldiers was a small one, a world of abrupt partings and unexpected meetings. The shark’s grin was already turned on Red Adam, taunting him with knowledge of his wife’s unacceptable antecedents.

  The sailor lifted a fist, wrath mounting in his face. Julitta caught his eye and slightly shook her head; he smiled sheepishly, blushed, and gazed at her with a look she had seen often enough, but never directed at herself: frank admiration and something more, that won a smile from her. A keener regret pierced her; she was married to Red Adam, whose esteem would sink to nothing now he knew how her childhood had been passed.

  The mercenary captain suddenly turned, distracting all eyes seaward. Julitta exclaimed under her breath; the passenger being assisted over the ship’s side was a woman, and as she steadied herself thigh-deep in the water a seaman passed to her a small child. She held him against her breast and stalked ashore, apparently unimpeded by dragging skirts, sucking waves and pebbles rolling beneath her feet, still less by any bodily distress. No power on earth, Julitta thought confusedly, would dare impede her.

  “Your latest woman?” Red Adam asked Baldwin Dogs-meat, respect in his voice.

  “My wife.” Baldwin corrected him with pride he had right to feel, and floundered to meet her.

  She was taller than her stocky husband by three fingers’ width, her vigorous flesh laid over broad bones. Her hair was that indeterminate brown to which fairness is apt to decline, her skin was weathered to the semblance of leather and lined about eyes and mouth, and if she had not passed forty years, at least thirty-five of hard living lay behind her. But her eyes, gray under level brows, lighted her face, and the sharply-defined cheekbones and jaw gave it a distinction more memorable than beauty.

  Julitta stepped forward impulsively, looking from her to the drooping child. “You’re cold and wet and weary. Come up to the castle and remedy all.”

  “You’re gracious, lady.” She spoke as to an equal, and her voice proved her gently bred.

  Her low-born husband jumped in feet-first where Red Adam had not permitted him to set a toe. “My lady, my wife Adela.”

  “Julitta,” Red Adam interposed smoothly, “we’d do well to ride ahead and make ready for our guests. Hot water, dry clothing and food are their needs.”

  Julitta looked at the little boy’s shadowed face and closed eyes as he lay against his mother’s breast. “Let me take him.” she said, holding out her arms.

  The woman held him closer and shook her head. “I thank you, but he’ll go to no stranger.”

  The mercenary set his arm about her shoulders. “You’re gracious, my lady, We’ll follow as soon as our gear’s ashore, and thank you.”

  Red Adam nodded, took Julitta’s arm and turned her towards the horses, which half a dozen fisherlads were competing to hold. He checked to smile at the sea captain. “Grant me your company at dinner this day, Master Erling,” he invited, and it was a command rather than a request.

  “At your service, Lord Adam,” he accepted, smiling drily. “With news from Flanders—and Scotland.”

  “Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks,” Red Adam declared, “so longeth my soul after news—from Flanders, Scotland, Leicester or anywhere. Keep it for me, friend.” They regarded each other with perfect understanding.

  They picked their way slowly along the foreshore, avoiding puddles, garbage and foraging pigs and dogs, while the fisherfolk converged on the stranger to compensate themselves for lost wreck-pickings by a little more or less honest trafficking. Julitta, bitterly contemplating Baldwin Dogs-meat’s betrayal, waited for her husband to denounce her, and then supposed drearily that he was magnanimous to wait until no listeners were in earshot. He maintained his silence even when they had passed the last hovel, until she ranged belligere
ntly alongside him.

  His face lighted with amusement. “I’ve been most shamelessly deceived in you,” he reproached her.

  “You know now I am no convent-bred innocent,” she burst out in defiance.

  “I’d already found cause to suspect it.”

  “Cause? she repeated, disconcerted. “What cause?”

  He grinned. “For one, it’s an odd convent would teach you to carry a dagger inside your sleeve, where you’ve kept mine since you won it. I’ve one with a smaller haft you’ll find handier. For another, your drastic way with Reynald.”

  “Then—then you don’t mind?” she whispered incredulously.

  “Why should it matter? It’s no shame that you accompanied your father.”

  “In castle and camp and army’s tail—among routiers and ribalds and whores—and it doesn’t matter?”

  “I respect you the more, lass. And I’m glad to be enlightened on a puzzle that had me wondering; how you knew precisely at which word to silence Reynald.”

  Julitta felt her face burn. His mingling of jest and earnest was beyond all her experience of men. “Yes, I’d heard it before,” she admitted dourly.

  They had reached the newer part of Arnisby that lay by the bridge. That structure, built before King Henry’s accession by Lord Maurice’s predecessor in a fit of exasperation at the perilous fords it had supplanted, had gathered to its head a growing settlement. The coastal road had diverged to use it. Country folk came to barter their produce for fish and salt. A colony of seven weavers plied a thriving craft, absorbing a fair proportion of the local woolclip and the output of every distaff for five miles about. Fulling, shearing and dyeing engaged another three households. Two smiths, a carpenter, a wainwright and a baker found trade enough to occupy them. To the opposite shore, on the narrow level beyond the bridge, a tanner’s noisome premises and limepits had been consigned. A carrier with an increasing string of packhorses made the village his headquarters, driving his regular rounds of the hill hamlets, York and the Pennine dales beyond on a traffic whose staples were salt, stockfish and wool. A hospice and tavern accommodated transients and residents, as after their different fashion did the brace of enterprising wenches who shared a nearby hovel. One of them, taking the air at her door, waved an impudent greeting to Red Adam as he passed.

  “Should do brisk business with old Dogsmeat’s routiers this night and I’d best double the curfew patrol.”

  “Why that name?”

  “It’s from the siege of Chastelbrûle in Toulouse. Lord Berengar had a pack of hounds he cherished and fed as his own children. When it came to quarter-rations Baldwin rashly proposed dining on dog, and Berengar swore that before he’d slay his hounds to feed a mercenary he’d slay the mercenary to feed his hounds.”

  She chuckled involuntarily. “A proper appreciation of values!”

  He grinned. “If you weren’t accustomed to such animals, I’d warn you to keep your distance from him and his whore.”

  “She is a whore?”

  “I’d not knowingly slander her, but certainly the child’s not his; when I encountered him, a year last spring, he had another woman to warm his bed.” They passed a group of gossiping housewives coming from the well with buckets, greeted them and clattered on to the bridge. “It’s my guess—and no more than a guess, from tavern and campfire talk—that she’s Adeliza Dagger-hand.”

  “She’s gently bred.”

  “And there’s many a gently-bred strumpet in an army’s tail, as we both know.”

  “My mother for one,” she agreed savagely.

  Surprisingly, his face burned. “Julitta, I’d no intention—Devil fry my reckless tongue—”

  “It’s true. She’s such a one as Adeliza Dagger-hand, if she’s still living—I pray she’s not.”

  “Yes, death’s an easier grief than being abandoned.”

  “Oh, she never cared for me. My brother was all her life. He was two years older than I, always ailing. I suppose the life was too hard for him, and there were two younger boys who died. But I was hardy as a young goat, and my father preferred me and despised Henry for a cossetted weakling. And they quarreled! Holy Mother, I don’t remember any peace between them.” Once started, she could not check herself, and not until later marveled that she had betrayed to Red Adam all that she had hidden and brooded over so many years. “Never any peace, never comfort or love; nothing but hate, and Henry and I between them, and no love there either. God rest him; I suppose it was sickliness made him spiteful.

  “One of my father’s men gave me a rabbit, a pet rabbit warm and soft to hold, and Henry wanted it. When I refused him he tore it from me and threw it to the dogs. My father beat him, and my mother was furious; she reckoned it was his right, and a sister’s duty to give up whatever he chose to demand. And within three days he sickened, and was dead before the week was out. My mother blamed us. She had borne with my father only for Henry’s sake; when he died she would stay no longer. We never heard of her again, never knew whether she were alive or dead—and—and—the fear’s always in me—any worn-out whore starving in the gutter might be my mother.”

  “Do you remember her, Julitta?”

  “It’s eleven years and more, and I was a child. Now and again there’s a memory. She was fair, I think, and tall, with a high color and a scalding tongue that put men in awe of her. But remember her—no.”

  “How did you come to the nunnery?”

  “My father could not dower me, and his fortunes fared worse as he grew older.” She could not recount the morose temper, the self-pity, the drunken bouts and the cheap strumpets that ousted him from every employment he obtained and ruined him. “I was a burden that grew heavier, and he feared for me. You know what happens in the end to any girl in an army’s tail. So he brought me back to England, to his brother, but they’d quarreled over his marrying my mother and he’d have none of me. But the old Abbess was of my mother’s kinfolk, and she took me in. My father went back to France and died the next year. I remained near four years, until the Abbess died too.”

  “And the she-weasel cast you upon your uncle’s charity,” he finished. They topped the rise beyond the bridge, and stirred the horses into a canter across the level ground. The watchman’s horn blared, and as they crossed the drawbridge four men of the guard scrambled into station two by two at the gate and brought up their spears in slovenly salute.

  Scarcely were they out of the saddle when they were surrounded by a vociferous crowd, and a dozen voices clamored at their lord in accusation and counterattack. Red Adam took one step forward and slashed the back of his hand across the nearest and loudest mouth. The noisy one staggered back into his supporters, the throng fell silent, and he glanced about him with the white wrath Julitta had seen before.

  “Hell’s Teeth, am I to be beset in this unseemly fashion as soon as I set foot in my own bailey?”

  The fellow he had smitten, a greasy lout with a straw-hued thatch, wiped blood from a split lip and glared at Odo, aflame with righteous wrath, while the skirmishers behind tried to dissolve into the pool of spectators. A curt “Stand!” halted them, a gesture brought the crowd to order, and the bailey, its ruffled mud glinting under the sun, was suddenly a court of justice, and the lanky lad an austere judge. Julitta attended alertly.

  Odo, inquisitively looking into the kitchen, had surprised a scullion in the very act of making water into the cooking-fire, to the peril of meats on spit and in pot, and had incontinently tried to kick his backside through his teeth. To this chastisement the lout in office, the head cook, took exception with a meat cleaver. Odo had rammed him in the belly with a bread peel, and partisans and idlers had fallen on in a joyful scrimmage.

  Under Red Adam’s cold stare the cook made no attempt to defend the indefensible, though Julitta privately reckoned that any nasty malpractice might be expected in a kitchen of his. He took his stand on the principle of lawful authority; it was for him alone to discipline any scullion under his rule, not some prying houn
d who had no business to set his foot over the kitchen threshold. “And him seeking what he could thieve most like! He’d no right!”

  “You stand on your rights, do you?”

  “He’d no call to put his nose inside my kitchen—m’ lord.”

  “If you’ve rights, you’ve duties, and tolerating such filthiness isn’t among them. Hell’s Teeth, is my table to be served with food so sauced? Stand out, the swine who did it.”

  A mat-headed oaf was thrust forth by his fellows and scowled about, shifting from one bare foot to the other and absently scratching himself. A rank stink heralded him, and Red Adam took one sniff.

  “Since filth’s your nature you may go to it. Set him forking dung from the stables and cleaning the kennels; there’s need enough, with good horses risking hoof-rot fetlock deep in dung.” The redhaired groom hurriedly retreated from the front rank of the witnesses. “You’ll not enter the kitchen again. Out of my sight!” He swung on the head cook. “You’ve yowled about lawful authority. If you’d keep it, set your kitchen in decent order and discipline your scullions—yes, and scour them clean also! Or there’s a dung fork for your hands!”

  The man departed with what dignity was left him. Red Adam turned to Odo and removed the smirk from his face. “As for you, the next time righteous wrath assails you, restrain yourself from brawling and bring it to me.” He regarded the spectators distastefully and demanded, “Is it Christmas Day that you all keep holiday?”

  An empty bailey presented itself. He tucked Julitta’s hand under his arm and made for the keep. “The marvel is we’re not all poisoned.”

  “Master,” Odo said plaintively, “you could take my head—”

  “What use have I for it, unless we run out of mangonel missiles in a siege?” Red Adam demanded, with the exasperated affection he kept for his tame bear. “It’s what’s inside it I wish you’d stir up.”

  “But you’d never have let pass such mucky doings.”

  “I’d most likely have booted him through the rafters,” admitted his lord. He looked down into Julitta’s interested face, and grinned most unjudicially. “Lord, I’d have given a month’s rents to see the set-to! A bread peel this time! He once routed a tavernful of roisterers with a broom, but I was under all their feet and missed the best of it.” She chuckled, and he sighed. “And now I must find time to reform this den of a kitchen, if that lout’s not to make middens of our bellies.”