Red Adam's Lady Read online

  “If he waits until England’s ours he’ll forfeit all he has,” William declared forcefully. “It’s your duty, I tell you, niece, to bring him to his senses.”

  “You waste your wind,” said Humphrey. “He’s the Old King’s man, and you’ll not budge him.”

  “God’s Head, am I to stand by and see my niece and her husband driven back to following the tourneys?”

  “You’re magnanimous, after he ordered you out of this very hall.”

  “Let be, let be, since Lord William is prepared to forgive it.” Everard hurried to make peace. “There is nothing nearer to his desire than reconciliation. You must persuade Lord Adam to it, my lady.”

  It was by now clear to Julitta that her uncle and Everard did most earnestly desire reconciliation and Red Adam’s alliance in rebellion, and Humphrey emphatically did not. “Be sure I shall faithfully repeat your arguments to my lord,” she said sedately, and nodded to the servers to bring round the second course.

  “I marvel,” Humphrey said sourly, “that you’ll so tamely swallow his insults.”

  “God’s Death, he insulted you also, and here you sit swallowing his meat! Nor did we ask your company—”

  “My lords, no good will come—”

  A sudden bustle at the stairhead checked the rising voices, and Red Adam himself threw back the leather curtain with a clatter of rings on the rod, and strode impetuously up the hall. Julitta half rose in her chair, her face alight with welcome.

  “My lord!”

  He grinned at her through a mask of dust streaked to mud by sweat. It matted his hair and dulled his blue riding gear to dim gray as he came closer she saw his eyes-rimmed and bloodshot by its irritation and fatigue. “God save you, my lady!” he saluted her, took the dais steps in one stride, and swung round the table to grasp her extended hands and kiss her on the mouth. Then he turned, still holding her hands, and surveyed his uninvited guests with one sardonic eyebrow lifting. “A pleasure I’d not looked for,” he observed with edged politeness; Julitta knew him well enough now to recognize intense anger hard-held.

  “We are here on your behalf—” Everard began.

  “To command your allegiance to your rightful King—” Lord William took up the tale.

  Red Adam’s grin was a mirthless snarl. “Your rightful King, my lords, has sold the North Parts to the Scots!”

  They gaped in plain unbelief. “No!” Everard whispered.

  Lord William lurched to his feet. “That’s not true!”

  “Your feckless whelp has acknowledged King William’s claims to Cumberland and Northumberland in exchange for his aid.”

  “He could not! He could never—it’s a lie put about by his enemies,” Everard desperately protested.

  “Hell’s Teeth! Are you besotted blind? The Justiciar and the Constable are in York. They made truce with the Leicester rebels. The Scots are over the Border; they’ve overrun Northumberland; you know better than we do whether Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, is of your party, but if he hasn’t raised Durham to fight them off they’ll be over the Tees next. Will you blather of plots when the Galloway devils are beating your doors in?”

  “It’s a good tale,” Humphrey sneered, “to keep us sitting fast at home when our King needs us.”

  “You haven’t a daughter to be raped or a wife to be ripped up,” Red Adam retorted brutally. The two men had gasped and glanced in quick alarm at each other. He drew a long breath and spoke more temperately. “In God’s Name, heed me! Send out the warning and look to your defences, or we’ll have the invasion of thirty-eight over again!”

  They looked resentfully at him, reluctant to credit his story. Lord William, still standing, pushed back his stool. “We waste our time,” he said heavily. “Maybe you will regret not heeding us, when the Young King rules. Come, friends. We are not welcome here.”

  “Finish your dinner, unless your appetite’s clean departed,” Red Adam jibed. “I don’t drive my guests from my table midway through their meal.”

  Lord William glared at him. “Only concern for your welfare, nephew, brought me here, and small gratitude you show. Next time you will beg our charity.” He shook his head mournfully over Julitta. “Farewell, niece. You have failed in your duty, and will regret it!”

  “If I can reconcile—” Sir Everard began ineffectually.

  “Enough!” growled Humphrey, though he seemed pleased at the outcome as he smiled at Julitta behind Red Adam’s back; satisfied as a cat at an unguarded cream bowl, and unresentful of yesterday’s discomfiture. In courtesy she and her husband accompanied their guests to the stair, and for all her wariness Humphrey contrived to possess himself of her hand and bent ostentatiously over it, murmuring just too audibly, “Until our next meeting, fair lady, when I promise amends for the last.”

  She flushed to her hair. Red Adam cocked an inquiring eyebrow as the clatter of departure ceased in the stairwell. “And what did that cryptic farewell signify, sweet wife?”

  “Why, you are a day too late, Lord Adam,” Constance said smoothly from behind him. “Yesterday your sweet wife met him secretly in the woods.”

  He whirled, and as she recoiled he caught her by the shoulders. “You filthy viper, you dare slander your mistress?”

  Fury turned her white and red, and she spat malice. “Ask her why she said she would visit the convent and never went! Ask her—”

  “Hold that foul tongue or I’ll rip it from your jaws! You’ll not make me believe the least ill of my lady!” Sir Bertram was blundering forward, and he thrust her into her husband’s arms. “Remove her from my sight! Before God, I’ll have you out of my household, Lady Serpent!”

  The half-blind giant folded protective arms about her, and Julitta caught the glint of triumph in her face as she hid it against his shoulder.

  “If God would but grant me my eyes to avenge your wrongs—”

  “You’re blind indeed!” Red Adam snapped. “She defamed her lady, and the wrong’s not hers!”

  “It’s truth! Ask her!” cried Constance.

  Julitta stood frozen with dread and anger, defenceless against any lie; her one witness, Alain, was dead. Avid faces gaped at her as she stood accused of whoredom before all the household. Scalded by shame and injustice, she lifted her face to her husband’s.

  “My—my lord—”

  His arm came about her rigid waist. “You are my chaste wife, and you don’t stoop to answer such filthy ravings,” he declared. “Take that reptile out!” His fierce gaze turned on the audience. “Hell’s Teeth, is this supposed to be a seemly dinner?” Men and women cowered on the benches, not daring to look up from their trenchers. He drew Julitta back to the dais through a grisly hush. Her heart hammered in her breast as she took her seat, and her breath came with difficulty. She kept her wits to nod to the servers, who brought on and set forth the second course with anxious care.

  Red Adam struck a cloud of gritty dust from his tunic, and the boy came scuttling with water. “I’m not fit to sit at a decent table,” he said, “but rather than delay further I’ll pray you pardon my state.” She murmured acknowledgment, knowing the reckoning was but postponed, and tried to eat. Nor did he find much appetite. Half way through the course Reynald, Giles, Odo and the men of Red Adam’s outdistanced escort came clattering in, saddle-sore and empty. It seemed an eternity before she and her husband could leave the hall to seek privacy.

  “Walk with me, my lady,” he said, gripped her hand beyond withdrawing and led her briskly between the buildings, out on to the windy headland. He uttered no other word until they reached his favorite outlook over the sea. His silence was that of bitter anger, the more terrifying for its restraint, and she stumbled after him among the stones, afraid as she had never been for all her uncle’s blaring wrath. He stared out over the gray-green waste all alive under the sun, and drew and loosed one hard breath. Then he turned abruptly and grasped her shoulders. She flinched, and surprise widened his eyes.

  “Julitta, you’re not afrai
d of me?”

  “My lord, truly—truly it was not by my design—”

  “My dear, there’s no need to assure me. It’s not you I’m angry with.”

  He believed her. He dismissed all insinuations with a perfect trust in her integrity. She gulped on a sob, tears flooding her eyes. He tipped up her face and kissed her on the cheek like a child. “Never be afraid of me, Julitta,” he bade her, and she realized afresh that she could hurt him.

  He drew her to a hollow in the lee of a rocky outcrop, with a lichened slab for a seat, and curled up on the turf at her feet, hugging his knees. “How I kept my hands from throttling that female viper I don’t know,” he commented. “Tell me what happened.”

  She started on the story. “She must have been the one who betrayed me. How else did he know I’d ride that way?” she interrupted herself.

  “Oswald,” he said cryptically.

  “Yes, he was her escort.”

  “He’s the one runs her dubious errands. She’d have sent him ahead to give Humphrey time to intercept you. I’ll take him into a corner with my riding whip and hear all he knows. Go on.” His face hardened, but all he said at the end was, “The Ladies’ Delight doesn’t know how lucky he is to have his guts still safe in his belly.”

  “What will you do to him?”

  “I’d like to challenge him and carve his liver out, but since that would involve you in worse scandal I’ll have to pretend ignorance. He won’t boast that a groom and a girl bested him. I wonder, though, that he had the impudence to show his nose in Brentborough today.”

  “He’s at odds with my uncle. None of them trust each other. And he was against your joining the rebels, while my uncle and Sir Everard were urging it.”

  “I suspect that his intentions are matrimonial.”

  “But how—oh!”

  “When you were a dowerless maid you were only fit to be his leman, but he’d condescend to marry my widow—reminding you of his condescension every day, and thrice on Fridays.”

  “That means—”

  “I reckon the next move in this plot is my murder, and the production of this boy as rightful heir in my place. Brentborough controls the coast road and the moors; the rebels can’t move south or on York and leave it at their backs. The Ladies’ Delight is a foresighted man. If the Old King wins, when the dust of battle settles he hopes to emerge wedded to my widow and professing loyalty.”

  “And he imagines I’m besotted enough to fall into his arms!”

  “He’s a vain man. At the least your dower-rights would give him one-third of all my estates. As I’m the last legitimate Lorismond he’d have a claim to the whole.”

  “I’d put my knife under his ribs first!”

  “You’d do well. There’s neither mercy nor honor in him. Even your uncle has some trace of feeling in his carcass, if he strives still to convert me to his cause rather than slay me.”

  “You are in danger, and enemies in our own household.”

  He grinned. “Lady Viper and that drunken lout in the kitchen conspiring to poison the pottage?”

  “He’ll afflict our bellies no longer,” she declared, and finished yesterday’s story with the account of Alain’s valor and Thyra’s end.

  “I thank God for him,” Red Adam said, with such earnestness that she flushed and stared out over the sunlit sea. “If I’d lost you—”

  He reached up and caught her hand. She felt her flush burn hotter, and spoke hurriedly to hide it. “Alain told me of old Lord Maurice and his wife. He—he said that he was too soft with women ever to strike one—that he did not kill his lady.”

  “That old tale haunts you too?” He was silent a long moment, plucking at the coarse grass with his free hand. “He knew she was dead. He sent for me.”

  “Yes. He’d not have done that—no. But he was soft with women.”

  “Feckless,” he amended wryly. “It’s in the breed—witness that valiant knave Alain. So was I. My father too. He was a landless knight, forever wandering from war to war Fecklessness runs in the Lorismond blood. It’s ruin to them, unless they marry advisedly.” He smiled up at her, his hold tightening on her fingers. “My mother was a merchant’s daughter; maybe she explains my taste for Erling’s unknightly practices.” He plucked again at the dry seed heads. “She held my father to sense. She and Annora were heart and core of our family. Annora died of hunger and the bloody flux in the siege of Laverne castle; my mother two days after we were relieved, in untimely childbed of a stillborn girl.”

  He gazed out to sea, and abruptly released her hand to link his own about his knees. She gazed in appalled sympathy on his dust-matted hair. “She was scarcely buried when he conceived a crack-brained scheme to amend his fortunes by going on Crusade and marrying some heiress of Outremer. He’d one encumbrance: I’d survived. So he bore me to the nearest monastery and offered me as an oblate to be bred up a monk. Aymar and Adrien were already provided for, squires to a lord in Poitou; he could sail with a clear conscience.” He held his voice level, but she sensed the outrage of abandonment to that desolate boy.

  “I could not abide it. I was eleven years old, raw from that free life. You know it too; you also were thrust into that cage. Rules, supervision, the endless spying and talebearing, no liberty, and dear God, the boredom—the creaking bell-ridden hour by hour routine from year’s end to year’s end! And the novice-master had the weightiest arm I’ve ever encountered.

  “I ran away seven times in four years, and each time I was dragged back, as soon as my stripes healed I’d be planning the next try. The last time, a knight guesting in the monastery on his way Outremer had pity on it and offered to relieve it of me. By then I reckon the Abbot suspected I’d disrupt any cloister, and the novice-master admitted I’d a devil he couldn’t thrash out of me, so they consigned me to his charge and I sailed off to the Holy Land with a witless notion of finding my father again.”

  “Did you?” she asked at last, as he stayed silent.

  “He was dead. He’d died within three months of reaching it.” He sighed and wriggled down to stretch full-length at her feet, his hands clasped under his head. “Oh, it wasn’t entirely wasted. I can read and write Latin, so I can occupy my old age inditing scandalous chronicles—”

  “If you achieve old age.”

  “Vixen! And I can misuse Holy Writ, and also cast accounts, which makes me a hard man for an embezzling steward to cheat.” A wheeling gull swung down to inspect them, uttered a raucous squawk and soared away on an updraft. He grinned at it. “Mention of stewards puts me in mind. You’ve done marvels, lass. What’s been the state of stewardship here?”

  “Criminal,” she answered briefly, and told him of the meat store. He took it calmly, as though he had expected no better.

  “I’m not afraid of a siege,” he explained. “Only disciplined mercenaries can sit down to a siege; knights and raiders like the Scots won’t dig. Moreover, this countryside can’t support siege warfare; the besiegers would be starved out first. It’s surprise we must guard against. I’ve promised Richard de Luci, the Justiciar, to lend him thirty men, and he expects me to lead them in person. He’s scraped up what force he could, but he had to leave a watch on Leicester, and his raw levies need stiffening. There’s no trusting that shifty knave the Bishop of Durham, and still no sure news from over the Tees, but we reckon he’s let them pass. You’ll be captain of Brentborough again, Julitta. Simple enough; keep the drawbridge hoisted and all rebels and Scots outside.”

  The prospect daunted her, but she knew her duty. “I’ll endeavour to justify your trust, my lord.”

  “Valiant vixen! At the first chance I’ll rid you of that serpent Constance. You report well of Brien; he shall be seneschal.”

  “Sir Bertram—he has served long—”

  “He’s too blind to perform his duties, and he’s given his wits into his wife’s keeping. He goes. I’ve a small estate down in Sussex; he’ll manage that harmlessly. Hell’s Teeth, I’d have that creature out this
day but for the consideration I owe him! I can guess what battles you’ve had.”

  Julitta grinned. “I won every skirmish.” She did not relate the tale of her grievances; in her experience nothing interested men less than a recounting of women’s paltry disputes.

  “You take a deal of defeating, obviously,” he said lazily, shifted a little on the turf and shut his eyes against the sun’s glare. Julitta, her story done, sat looking out over the sea, down the swoop of the cliff’s side to the foaming turmoil at its foot. A contented silence fell about them, compounded of many harmonious sounds: the roaring of the waves, the wind’s thin song in the grass, the gulls’ crying, the shrill exulting of a lark twinkling high above them, the chirp of grasshoppers and a faint popping of gorsepods. The sun was warm, reminding her of days under hotter skies than England’s. She sat and dreamed until it occurred to her that Red Adam’s voice was unnaturally stilled.

  He was asleep. He looked, with his dirty face and tangled hair, like an overgrown urchin—like that boy who had lost the heart and core of his life, his mother and little sister, and been abandoned like a stray pup by his father to a hateful existence. She understood his revolt, his embracing the disorderly life of the tourney circuit, his reckless wenching and drinking with like-minded profligates; what no contemplation could fathom was his sudden access of sobriety at his enforced marriage.

  She leaned back against the rock, soaking contentedly in the sun. For days she had been driving resentful servants and herself to perform prodigies of labor, bearing responsibility for all Brentborough; yesterday had been overpiled with horror; after a haunted night had come the morning’s burials and her uncle’s advent. Now gloom fell away. It had no place in this warmth and peace, with her husband asleep at her feet. She could study his face; the harshly-defined bones of brow and cheek and jaw, his beak of nose and slightly projecting ears, the red stubble pricking through the dust and the fair skin that even high summer had but lightly tanned. With his mocking eyes closed and wide mouth relaxed, he looked vulnerable as now she knew him to be, not the monster she had once reckoned him. She found herself flushing unaccountably, and turned her attention elsewhere.