Red Adam's Lady Read online

  “I’d begun to suspect it,” she replied sourly.

  “Not given to hasty judgment,” he commented. A gull, riding the updraft, uttered a derisive squawk, so apposite that she had to stifle a giggle. Red Adam lifted a hand in acknowledgment, and the bird swung away. They followed the headland’s curve until they looked down on the river-mouth, the wooden bridge, and the fisher-village of Arnisby straggling inside the curve of the opposite headland. Smoke drifted from the curingracks and salt-boilings, and from the cottages’ roof-vents. Four boats were drawn up on the shingle, bare at ebb tide, and figures moved about them. Under the hill’s edge the wind cut less keenly, and he reined in.

  “What’s the truth of this old scandal about Lord Maurice?” he asked abruptly.

  “Anyone at Brentborough could tell you better than I.”

  Anger reddened his cheekbones. “I’d reckoned on an honest answer from you if not others! I’ve had naught but lies and evasions from his people, and how could I ask it of the peasants, even if I had English enough? Why did he roost the year through like a molting shag on this rock, and let his estates go to ruin while his neighbors shunned him?”

  “He murdered his wife.”

  He stared a long moment, and then said, “Tell me.”

  “But it was all long ago, in King Henry’s early days, when the castle was still building—before I was born. Who’s to say what the truth was, after near twenty years’ gossip?” He waited, and she picked out what honest fact she knew. “He was a lecher, filling these parts with redhaired bastards from his youth. He was not young then; he was past sixty when he died last October. She was his second wife, and my uncle would call her ill-schooled. She upbraided him for his rutting with trulls and peasants. And she was carrying the first child he’d begotten in lawful wedlock, and near her time.

  “Whatever happened, it was on this very headland. There are parts cannot be overlooked, even from the keep roof—”

  “This path, for one,” he agreed, and glancing about, she saw that it was so. “And the sentinel watches landward; this way there’s only sea and sky.”

  “He’d ride out, none doubting his purpose. One day in jealous rage she followed him. That’s why folk claimed she surprised him with a woman, and in his anger he was the death of her. Lord Maurice declared that her horse bolted with her and fell into the sea. There were hoofprints, and the rock broken away, and the horse dead below. But no trace did they find of the poor lady, God rest her, with the child in her belly that should have been heir to Brentborough.”

  He looked at the dim path below the ridge that cut off their view of the keep, and the fall on their left. “It could have been true.”

  “No more has ever been known. Folk have guessed eighteen years. But it was a gentle palfrey, fit for a big-bellied woman to ride.”

  “If nothing were ever found, she must be dead.”

  “And if he were guiltless, why did he never clear himself with her kin? He never entered a church nor went to bed sober thereafter, and flinched whenever a skirt rustled at his back. Truly she haunted him, and all believed he had killed her and the unborn babe.”

  “Surely if he did he’d have confessed it on his deathbed?”

  She shook her head and crossed herself. “He damned himself. Though he ailed many months, death surprised him at the last.”

  “He served his Purgatory on earth, I reckon,” Red Adam commented, likewise crossing himself. He folded his hands on the pommel and watched the waves, his hair whipping up from his face. “He sent for me. It’s in my mind that he wished to entrust his secret, whatever it was, to his heir, for he desired me most urgently to come to his side before he died. I was too late. I’m sorrier now than I was then, if his soul depended on it. And I am deep in his debt for the pains he took to secure the inheritance to a stranger.”

  “A stranger?”

  “We never met. He was my father’s second cousin. I’m the youngest son of a younger son, and never dreamed of standing near the succession. I did not even know my brother Aymar was dead…. Did you ever see Lord Maurice?”

  “Often. He’d a kinswoman in Saint Hilda’s nunnery, and visited her every month.”

  “Visited a nunnery—every month?” he exclaimed, between derision and incredulity, and then his mouth softened. “If he found comfort so, why not?” he murmured, more to himself than to her.

  “Why not?” she echoed. “She is silly and kind.” She remembered too vividly the old man stalking along passages gaped at by scandalized nuns, his white hair still streaked red, his drink-raddled flesh strained over craggy bones, seeking in his loneliness comfort from a woman’s twitterings. She glanced at her husband. He had Lord Maurice’s cheekbones, brow and nose, and like him would never lay on flesh, but grow gaunt with age. But the reckless humor of his mouth was his own, and his eyes’ thoughtfulness.

  Abruptly he moved on. The way had diminished to a yard-wide ribbon of grass twisting along the slope, a onetime track no longer trodden. It dipped towards the ravine that almost separated the headland from the ridge beyond. The castle overlooked the ridge, which sloped on the one side to Brentborough village and on the other to the River Brent’s estuary. Its outer wall ran along the ravine’s crest until it faced the river, and no missile could reach it across that gulf. Julitta glimpsed its terminal buttress above and beyond them as their horses sidled past the crag that marked the steepening descent. Here she was surprised to find nothing within her vision but sea, cliff and sky; the headland’s curve cut off even sight of the fishing village. Then she was compelled to give all her attention to her mount’s footing; the way was a narrow ledge above the drop to the churning sea, and an unwelcome thought lodged in her mind of the wife who had perhaps gone from this very path to her death. She glanced at the bright head guiding her down, and wondered whether Red Adam were tempted to rid himself likewise of an encumbering wife.

  “That’s the worst of it!” he called back encouragingly, and a few yards further down the green ribbon widened and he moved faster. His mount’s shoes had bitten into the sodden turf. No other hooves had printed this track at least throughout the harvest season, nor had men’s feet worn down the thin grass.

  They were in the ravine now, here wide and shallow-sloping, its further ridge hiding from them the track between the castle and Arnisby. A stream quarreled with the boulders below them, and a carrion crow lurched from a rock with a squawk and flapped away. A little further, and Red Adam turned right into a small gully and followed it upward. A trickle of clear water twisted and dropped and pooled along it, and the stones of its bed were stained rusty red, like a streak of blood in a gash. Superstitious peasants might have crossed themselves, but Julitta regarded it indifferently. Pockets of ironstone were common in these hills, and the springs that rose through them always carried the stain and flavor of rusty iron. In some parts their water was drunk as a remedy for certain ailments, but not here.

  “The dead men’s blood still running,” Red Adam observed, grinning over his shoulder. “You’d not get a peasant near it after dark, nor in daylight for that matter. I reckon no one has ventured up here since I came in January.”

  “Is this way accessible from the other side?” Julitta asked, nodding back at the ravine.

  “An active man could scramble across, yes. There’s at least one place where it can be done unseen; I tried it.”

  “It’s a weakness in the defences?”

  “No one could bring in an army that way, but it’s a weakness, and I don’t like it,” he admitted readily. “When I can afford it, if I still rule Brentborough, I’ll take a wall down the hillside to the sea, and build a jetty at its foot so that boats can moor there.”

  “That would make it impregnable. But what do you mean, if you still rule?”

  “After this rebellion has been put down, King Henry, if I know him, will take all castles of importance into his own hands.”

  “But that would be injustice, to dispossess so loyal a vassal!” she excla
imed, momentarily forgetting for whom she invoked justice.

  “And Leicester’s case has proved, my dear, that the most loyal of vassals may at any hour be succeeded by a far from loyal heir.”

  “I am not your dear!” she snapped childishly, recalled with a jolt to her state of feud with him.

  “The sole object of my unrequited devotion,” he declared, gazing at her with so idiotic an air of yearning that she bit at the inside of her lip to steady it. He was trying to tease her into laughing, and she felt obscurely that succumbing would be her first step in capitulation.

  “Your true vocation is that of court jester!”

  “That’s exactly how a tourney knight earns his winter quarters, entertaining some great lord’s household—though it has its hazards.”

  “Husbands?”

  “Yes, I’d reckon them foremost.”

  They turned to the right about a sharp outcrop, and the gully opened into a hollow that looked as though an age ago a giant’s spoon had scooped it from the hillside like a lump of butter. The iron spring welled from under the rock into a basin of rusty-red stone which might have been wrought by men’s hands, it was so regular in shape, and trickled over its lip to start the stream. Ruined walls, jaggedly broken, lifted out of the grass tussocks and tufted reeds.

  Red Adam dismounted, tossed his reins over his mount’s head, and put up his hands to lift her from her saddle. Taken by surprise, she could not evade his courtesy, and his hands gripped her by the waist as she slipped down. Her heart thumped sharply and her body quivered in his hold. He set her on her feet and loosed her, smiling crookedly. The horses snuffled at the water, blew in disgust at the taint of iron, and turned from it to crop without enthusiasm at the poor grass. Red Adam caught Julitta’s hand and drew her to a gap that had once been a doorway.

  The wind could not pursue them inside, and a burst of sunshine suddenly filled the roofless shell with warmth and light. Centuries of rain and wind and frost had crumbled the stones and the mortar and mossed them with orange and white lichens, had hung them with ivy, permitted stonecrop and toadflax and harebells to root in the crevices, and cushioned over the wreckage on the floor with hummocks of fine turf. Only the walls themselves, between knee and shoulder height, showed recent breakages, scarcely weathered, where they had been part-demolished for the stone. A tumble of raw debris at the foot of the furthest demonstrated the work’s abandoning with strange eloquence. As Julitta looked, a weasel popped out of a cranny, poised on his hind legs to turn his snake-head this way and that, and flicked from sight again.

  “That’s where the skeletons were found, and the helmet,” said Red Adam, nodding at an excavation under the wall. The tug on her hand was needless; she peered eagerly into the shallow hole, slightly silted, and saw only ends of square-cut stone and fragments of curved red tile, mixed with black and gray soil like the ashes of dead fires. “It’s all tiles from the roof and rubble from the walls, under the grass,” he told her, and picked up a shard of tile. “The place was fired; see, even the broken edge is blackened, and there’s the ash. The bones were lying in the angle of the wall; I suppose when the roof fell the beams wedged above the dead men and protected them, for they were neither burned nor crushed. I persuaded Sweyn the oldest sergeant to tell me of it, but he shied like a balky horse from showing me.” He flipped the bit of tile from him, so that it rebounded from the wall and fell back into the hole with a tiny clatter, and his face lighted with enjoyment as he went on.

  “One morning when the workmen entered they found a new hole, and a helmed skull perched over it grinning at them. They flung down their tools with one accord and fled, screeching of dead men rising from their disquieted graves. By the time they’d drunk the alehouse dry they were yammering of skeleton hands reaching for them out of the earth and teeth gnashing at their necks, and I doubt not found them between the blankets with them when they fell into bed.”

  “But—but where were their wits that they did not realize—”

  “Peasants have only two thoughts about old ruins; one’s ghosts and the other’s treasure. Lord Maurice and the priest kicked half a dozen guards here, and found a spade and a doused tallow dip. The priest sprinkled holy water and exorcisms about, and Lord Maurice belted the guards into digging out the bones, with the helmed skull tucked under his arm and grins matching. Very eloquent Sweyn was, sweating just to remember it; he’d been one of the diggers. My kinsman wanted to set up helm and skull together in his hall; he’d a witty humor, though his taste in trophies was a trifle grisly. But the priest held to it there’d been Christians in Roman times, and one of them was Roman—by that time they’d uncovered the second skeleton—and christened bones would lie quieter in a consecrated graveyard. Old Maurice had no mind to surrender his skull, and by reason of the diggers’ haste, by the time he was convinced there was no sorting Christian bones from heathen. So they bundled all the fragments into a sack and so into hallowed earth.

  “Of course, a day or two later the other story trickled out. They’d come to dig for treasure in the night, two of them to hearten each other, poor fools, and melted to their entrails for fear of dead Romans. Then the spade strikes metal, and one knave scrabbles with his hands to grub it out while the other slavers down his neck and holds the taper. And just as he lifts up the helmet and sees the skull grinning within it, there’s a shriek that never came from mortal throat and out of the dark some presence swoops upon them with silent wings and the light blinks out. Incontinently they cast all from them and never stop to take breath until they’re in their own beds with the blankets over their heads, palsied witless.” Her eyebrows had lifted skeptically, and he shook his head. “No, that’s the exact tale as it was told me. True, Sweyn forgot to mention how owls favor ruins. There’s a nest in that hole by the corner.”

  She smiled despite herself, and then recollected her rancor and tried to conceal her lapse by gazing about her. She was not a fanciful girl, and Red Adam’s tale of helmed skulls and ghostly wings had given her no more than a momentary thrill. The men who had killed each other, long ago when these blackened fragments had been a roof flaming over them, were shadows out of a remote age. That was not the cause of the unease that prickled the hairs on her nape. Her senses sharpened; the yelp of a gull wheeling overhead, and the flicker of its shadow in a glint of sunlight, made her start. Yet there was nothing to perturb anyone of sense, in this empty ruin set in the hollow of the hill. It was incredible that the raucous castle stood not a half-mile above this secret place.

  “What’s amiss? Has my tale of skulls and ghosts scared you?”

  “That? Oh, no!” She hesitated, but he did not mock her. She blurted out, “This place—it’s a lovers’ trysting place.”

  “Perfect for the purpose.”

  “And Lord Maurice set up the helm and called it Brent-borough’s Luck.”

  Red Adam needed no laborious explanations. “Likely enough he forced the luck too hard, since it was on this headland his lady vanished.”

  “He’d not bring a peasant here unless he haled her by the hair,” Julitta pointed out, and shivered. The sun had gone, but it was the adding of hint and suspicion into a total that tingled down her spine.

  “I’d as soon lay a wench on a tombstone, myself,” candidly commented her husband, and his arm came about her shoulders and urged her towards the doorway. She flinched, and stiffened against the contact, but no resolve could stay her heart from thumping and her blood from quickening.

  The last gleam of sun blinked out, and as they traversed the hillside path, stooping their heads into the rising gale, heavy drops came spattering and chased them back to the castle, where they arrived half-soaked.

  Red Adam lifted her from the saddle at the foot of the keep steps, hustled her up them, and shouted for Avice as they emerged into the hall. The windward fireplace was gushing smoke like Hell’s hearths newly fueled, the rain came hissing down the chimney vent, and every window along that wall admitted a deluge, while the hanging
s flapped and the rushes blew along the floor and drifted against the dais step. No one had attempted to remedy these matters, though half a dozen serving men were engaged about the other fire in a game of knucklebones. They did not stir while Red Adam stalked towards them, and only recognized menace when his foot thudded against the nearest rump. Tart words sent them scuttling, and Julitta moved to the heat and wrung what water she could from her hair and clothes. Her husband surveyed her critically.

  “See whether there’s aught in the bower to contrive you new clothes,” he ordered, “and be done with your kinsfolk’s lendings. There’s a gaggle of idle strumpets to set stitching—and where’s that misery, your wench?” A squeak turned him about to scowl at Avice. “Don’t goggle, drizzle! Help your lady out of those wet garments!”

  Avice squeaked again, her hand up to her mouth, and as he strode to the door she cringed away from him.

  “Mary Mother, girl, do you expect my lord to devour you?”

  “He—he frightens me—so angry.”

  “He’ll do you no harm, silly child.”

  Sitting on her bed in her smock while Avice rubbed her hair dry with a musty-smelling towel yellowed along its folds with long lying, she wondered again what was amiss with her. The girl had been timid enough, harried by Lady Matilda, but never so wretchedly terrified. Again she tried to hearten her.

  “You’ve no need to fear my lord. Don’t cringe from him, and he will like you better.”

  “God forbid, my lady! I’m—it’s that I’m afeared—”