‘I wanted to,’ Randal said quickly, and looked up in reproach. ‘I have done squire’s work for you for as long as I have been your varlet, d’Aguillon.’
D’Aguillon nodded, his dark eyes narrowing into a shadow of a smile, and sat himself down in his carved chair, leaning on one elbow to watch the boys still. When he spoke again, it was to Bevis, but clearly his words were for Randal as well.
‘I have been thinking, these past few days: Bevis, do you remember how when first he came among us, you bade him understand that you and not he were to be my body squire when the time came, and we decided that since he must always be two years behind you in his training, there could be small risk of his forgetting that?’
Bevis flushed like a girl. ‘I was a jealous puppy!’
But Sir Everard took no notice of the interruption. ‘His full time is not up until the autumn, but how say you, shall we forgive him the last few months, this Randal of ours, and give him his squirehood tonight?’
And so, when Sir Everard rode for Bramber next morning, not one squire but two rode behind him.
The south wind was booming in the elm tops, and the cloud shadows were sweeping up the valley and over the downs like a charge of cavalry, and as they brushed by the hazel bushes at the ford, the yellow pollen-dust clouded the sunlight for yards around them. It seemed to Randal that winter had flowered into spring overnight, and he did not care if the world ended tomorrow, he was a squire with Bevis, riding behind his knight today.
The life of the great Castle was both strange and familiar to Randal. He knew as he knew the feel of his own skin, the talk of the men-at-arms in the crowded bailey, the baying of hounds from the kennels and the scream of hawks in the mews, the sour smell of the Great Hall and the richly greasy one of the kitchens: all the teaming, furtive, sweating, laughing, brawling life of the place. It was the life that had bred him and been part of him until he was ten years old. But now he was seeing it all from a different level, and so came the strangeness. It was odd and disturbing, like being two people at once. It was not only that the dog-boy had become a squire; but that the Randal who had slept with the Montgomery’s Irish wolfhounds had become a different Randal altogether. The change had come on him so gradually through the years at Dean that he had not noticed it until now, and it made him feel a little strange inside his own skin.
It was eight days before the return of young de Braose and his bride, when Sir Everard and his squire rode in to Bramber, but already there were many more people in the Castle than usual, guests invited and uninvited, for the door stood open to all comers at such a time. Priests and jugglers, merchants to spread their wares in the courtyard, knights and squires, a Saxon harper, a wild-eyed Welshman with sure tidings of the end of the world, a horse dealer, a goldsmith, a seller of charms against colic and the Evil Eye. More and more they came, and all the while, among the in-swarming of new faces, Randal was looking out for Herluin, de Bellême’s minstrel. He knew that de Bellême was campaigning in Wales, but he might send his minstrel to the wedding festivities, just as a man might lend his cook to a neighbour for a special occasion. But the days went by and Herluin did not come.
Instead, on the very day before young de Braose was expected, Randal came out of the stables where he had been overseeing the Dean horses at their evening fodder, just in time to see Sir Thiebaut de Coucy clattering into the bailey on his bay palfrey. He drew back instinctively at sight of the man, fancying even at six spear-length’s distance that he could catch the scent of musk, and the queer dark smell of evil that de Coucy seemed always to carry with him. Then he told himself not to be a fool, and turned off about his own affairs. And in the days that followed there was so much happening, so much to do, that he managed for a while to thrust Sir Thiebaut out of his mind.
Next day Sir Philip de Braose rode in with his bride. The King had made the marriage, as he made all the marriages among his nobles, for his own advantage, mating this great house with that, as old Lovel had mated his hounds. But in spite of that, Sir Philip and the Lady Aanor, riding with his young knights and her ladies behind them, looked as though they might do well enough together. Randal, pressing forward with the rest of the crowd about them, saw a tall girl with a grave face that had laughter and eagerness somewhere at the back of it, who rode her fine white mare with the ease and freedom of a boy, despite the graceful, hampering folds of crimson silk that hung down on either side of her almost to cover her feet in the silver stirrups. But he looked with a quicker and deeper interest at the young man beside her, who would be Lord of Bramber one day. A thick-set young man with brown hair and a square, steady face, who might have passed easily enough for one of his own men-at-arms but for something of mastery in the level, iron-grey eyes. Sir Philip de Braose would not be an easy lord to serve, but Randal thought that he would be very well worth the serving.
After Sir Philip’s coming, life at Bramber seemed even more crowded than it had done before, and it was three evenings later before suddenly Randal had bitter cause to think of Sir Thiebaut again.
That evening there had been much harping and merry-making in the Great Hall, and when the company split up and the fires were smoored for the night, Randal’s head was still full of the bright harp music and the jewelled, bird-like flash of the juggler’s cups and balls, as he huddled himself in an old cloak to lie down with the squires and hounds and lesser folk about the hearth. Bevis had gone after Sir Everard to the closet above the guardroom where the old knight was housed, to help him disarm and take charge of his harness; but it seemed that he had scarcely left the Great Hall before he was back beside Randal, saying quietly and quickly as he bent over him, ‘Grandfather wants you.’
Randal looked up in quick anxiety from the warm nest he had been making for himself in the rushes. ‘What is amiss? He is not ill?’
‘No. I don’t know what it is. He told me to fetch you, that’s all.’
Randal nodded, and turned with him and they slipped out together, down the steep spiral stair to the guardroom, then up again and along a narrow passage in the thickness of the wall, groping their way in almost total darkness, until a bar of light shone to meet them down three steps from the chink in a leather curtain over a doorway.
Sir Everard was standing beside the narrow shot-window, making – or rather pretending to make – some adjustment to the buckle of his sword belt. He had lately come from guard duty, and still wore his hauberk, though he had slacked off the lacing of the coif and let it slip down so that it lay about his neck like a monk’s cowl of glimmering mail. And as he turned from the window at their coming in, Randal thought that his face in the light of the candle on its ledge was grimmer and more sternly set than he had ever seen it before, his mouth an even straighter gash.
He gestured them to come and stand before him, but did not speak for a long moment.
‘Bevis, Randal,’ he said at last, ‘I have something that it is in my mind I should tell you both – you, Bevis, as my grandson, and you, Randal, because I know that in any case Bevis has no secrets from you, and because I think that to you, also, Dean is very dear.’
Randal’s heart gave a small, sick lurch. His eyes on d’Aguillon’s face, he waited for what was coming next.
‘I have been with de Braose this evening since coming off duty. He sent for me to give me warning that Sir Thiebaut de Coucy has cast hungry eyes on the Manor.’
There was a long, stunned silence, and then Bevis said, ‘You mean that Sir Thiebaut de Coucy has cast hungry eyes on the gold that he thinks to be buried on the Manor land.’
‘Undoubtedly. But that makes little difference so far as we are concerned.’
Randal said in a thick, hot rush, ‘But Dean is yours! Sir – sir it can make no odds what de Coucy thinks; Dean is yours!’
D’Aguillon smiled, a smile that made two hard lines run from his nose to the corners of his mouth. ‘That was your Saxon mother speaking, Randal. By our Norman custom, all land is the King’s. The Barons hold from the
King, and we lesser folk from the Barons. Have you forgotten that? I pay knight’s fee for Dean, as all men pay for their manors, though, like most other men, I have come to look on the Manor, both land and folk, as mine – have come to love it very dearly.’ He looked up into the darkness of the shot-window, and fretted with his sword belt. ‘Bone of my bone, it has become, flesh of my flesh . . . But Sir Thiebaut has the ear of the new Bishop of Durham, who owes him something in the matter of the roof of the new Hall at Westminster, and the Bishop of Durham has the ear of our Red William. And Red William is ever joyful at any excuse to change about the holders of his fiefs, lest with passing from father to son the bond between lord and land should become too strong, and something of the King’s power be lost thereby.’
Bevis shook the dark hair back from his forehead in that swift, defiant way of his. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘So far as I can see – and I have given some little thought to the matter already – there is nothing under heaven that we can do.’ Sir Everard sounded unutterably weary. ‘There is no appeal save force of arms against the King’s decision in such a matter, and we can scarce expect de Braose to raise his banner and bring out the Honour of Bramber in revolt against the King and the rest of the Kingdom, in the cause of one knight’s fee.’
In the silence which followed, Randal carefully traced out with his eyes the shape of a greenish damp-stain that made the likeness of a grotesque face on the wall behind d’Aguillon. Then Bevis said very gently, ‘If we lose the Manor, what will you do, sir?’
‘De Braose will yield me another fief, out from among his own manors. If I were a young man, I think that I should not take it, but turn my back on Sussex and my face towards Constantinople and the Emperor’s Varangian Guard. But I am old, my children . . .’
Bevis said quite quietly, and quite seriously, ‘Would it help if I killed him?’
And Sir Everard swung round from the window, and looked at him with a queer mingling of expressions on his stern face. ‘No, Bevis. When there is killing to be done, I kill for myself, and do not delegate the task to a squire scarce seventeen summers old. How shall it avail us that you are hanged or made Wolf’s head? And even though by some miracle the deed were not brought home to you’ – he leaned forward a little, his dark eyes holding the boy’s gaze – ‘I will not hold Dean by right of murder in cold blood, and nor shall you!’
And all the while Randal said nothing, and all the while he was thinking – thinking that there was one weapon that might save Dean, and he held it in his hand; if only he had the strength and skill, and the courage, to use it properly.
Sir Everard slipped free the buckle of his sword belt, and crossed to the sleeping-bench and laid it down. The tiny golden roses that diapered the worn and scuffed red leather of the scabbard caught the candlelight, and made a pattern in Randal’s mind that he did not see at the time, but that powdered the darkness for him all night, afterwards.
‘No use that we talk more of the thing tonight,’ Sir Evarard said, and raised his arms slowly above his head. ‘Come and aid me out of this lizard skin of mine, Bevis, for tonight it weighs as heavy as the whole world on my shoulders.’
When Randal got back to the great Hall, somebody else was of course asleep in the warm corner he had marked out for himself, but he had a heavy heart and too much to think about to trouble with turning him out. He crawled in among the hounds for warmth, and lay down with his head on the flank of an old wolfhound. But there was no sleep for him that night. Instead he lay going over and over in his mind the words that he had had overheard on the water stair at Arundel. He had almost forgotten for so many years, but now every word, every inflexion of the smooth voice, the snarling softness of Hugh Goch’s laugh, were clear in his inner ear again, as though he had heard them not an hour ago. ‘Be ready when the time comes, and before high summer we’ll have done with Red William and his self-made laws, and mount Stephen of Aumale in his place . . .’
If he went to Sir Everard or straight to de Braose with his accusation against de Coucy it would be only his word, the word of someone who had been a child at the time, against that of the knight; and having tried and failed, there would be nothing more he could do. But perhaps the threat might serve where the actual deed would not . . .
He was coldly afraid. He had always been afraid of things and people. Men had put that fear into him with many kicks when he was so small that it had become a part of him. But when he tumbled up with the rest before it was daylight, shaking himself like a hound and rubbing the dusty feel of the long night’s wakefulness out of his eyes, he knew exactly what he was going to do, and the only uncertainty in his mind was how he was going to get word with de Coucy alone.
But that was to be made easy for him, for on his way down to feed and groom Valiant, he was overtaken by a fellow squire in a kind of cheerful ill-humour, who demanded of him, ‘Does your knight ride with the hawking party this morning?’
Randal shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Neither does mine, but I’m lent to de Coucy to tend his horse and saddle the brute for him. If a man comes travelling without a squire, he should saddle his own horse or leave it to be done by the stable churls, say I,’ and he darted on.
Randal followed more slowly. So there was a hawking party planned for this morning, and de Coucy was riding with it. Well, that might be his chance. He turned into the long, thatch-roofed stables that were already alive with grooms and squires hard at work, and went to Valiant’s stall. He brought down hay from the loft and filled the manger, then set to work to groom. While he was still at it, the horses for the hawking party were already being led out, and he heard the falconers gathering, men’s laughter, and the baying of a hound in the still frosty air; and the trampling of hooves dying away as he turned from Sir Everard’s horse to his own. Swallow greeted him with a whinny of pleasure, thrusting a soft muzzle with delicately working lips against his shoulder, but Randal had no time to give the grey more than a hurried pat, and a couple of handfuls of fodder in his manger while he saddled up. He was not worried about the hawking party being away ahead of him; they would ride slowly and he could easily overtake them. But at any moment Bevis might be here to groom his own Durandal and there would be the need for explanations. And any explanations that there had to be would be much better left until later.
He was done now and ready to be off. He led Swallow out into the bailey, where the fowls were beginning to scratch around the garbage pile and the breath of hurrying men hung in little puffs of cloud on the grey air that was turning silvery as the sun rose; he swung into the saddle and headed for the gatehouse, settling his feet in the long Norman stirrups as he went. He had a story all ready for the gate guard in case of need, about having been sent after one of the hawking party with a message; but the men-at-arms lounging in the guardroom doorway seemed to assume, despite the lack of any hawk on his fist, that he was one of the party who had overslept, and made no attempt to check him.
‘Up river, or down?’ he asked of one man-at-arms leaning against the wall and idly picking his teeth with an old goose quill.
‘Up,’ said the man, pointing with the feather and returning to his pastime as Randal, with a word of thanks, clattered out over the bridge.
Swallow was fresh and eager to be away and broke forward into a canter, shaking his head and scattering foam over his breast as they headed down the steep track that curled about the Castle mound. Once past the thatched huddle of St Nicholas’ Church and College among the willows at its foot, Randal turned him up-river, into the marshy country that ran in a long, watery tongue far into the Weald, and settled down to overtake the hawking party.
Presently he saw them, through a screen of still bare alders and crack-willow. The hounds had been slipped from leash and were working the rushes and dank tangle of last year’s hemlock and willow-herb on the river bank, while the horsemen, falcon on fist, gentled their horses to and fro on the fringes of the tangle, watchful for the heron to break co
ver. Randal drew rein among the alders, looking for de Coucy among the rest, and found him without much trouble, some way farther down the bank. The party was a large one, and well scattered. No one was likely particularly to notice his coming.
After a few moments he urged Swallow out of the thicket, and rode forward at an amble. The hounds, who had been working in silence, gave tongue at that instant, and amid a flurry of baying and shouting, a heron broke from cover of the rushes and leapt upward in swift, spiral flight. Three of the knights loosed their falcons at her, and the chase was on. The heron climbed desperately the blue circles of the upper air, striving to gain height to use her own weapon, her dagger bill; and behind her the falcons mounted steadily, dark-winged death on her track. Randal could hear the hawk bells ringing, a shining thread of sound as thin as lark song, as they climbed, and narrowed his eyes to follow the deadly chase. Up and up and up into the sunlit blue and silver of the February sky, until at last the foremost falcon, soaring like an arrow from a bow, overtopped her and stooped, avoiding the despairing dagger thrust of her beak, and made his kill.
Randal brought his dazzled gaze down out of the sky as the falcons dropped, and while the hounds were searching the river-bank cover for the fallen heron, and everyone seemed riding here and there, brought his horse up beside that of de Coucy.
‘God’s greeting to you, Sir Thiebaut.’ His mouth felt uncomfortably dry.
Sir Thiebaut looked round, his plump face startled for an instant, then covered as with a mask. ‘D’Aguillon’s varlet, is it not?’ he said after a pause, and there was something guarded in his voice as well as his face.
‘D’Aguillon’s squire.’
‘So – Have you some message for me?’
‘No message. I came to speak with you on my own account,’ Randal said. ‘When the rest move off, fall behind a little, that we may talk the more easily.’