Elizabeth Chadwick - The Leopard Unleashed

Juditta ignored the woman and shaded her eyes against the hot, golden beat of the sun.

‘It’s all right!’ Juditta cried. ‘It’s Papa! It’s his shield and he’s riding Lyard. I’d recognise him anywhere!’ And as if her skirts were not already raised to an indecent level, she drew them higher still and began running towards the party.

Hilda screeched after her but to no avail. She lumbered round to detain Rhosyn, but heels flashing, like a hare’s, she too evaded the maid and headed at a direct run for the horsemen.

Renard reined down as he saw the girls approaching. For a moment he thought that they were serfs’ children but quickly dismissed the notion. Serfs’ children would not run yelling at a strange troop of riders. To the contrary, they would run screaming in the opposite direction and warn everyone else.

Adam pulled Lyard round. ‘The hoydens!’ he growled with a mingling of anger and amusement.

‘Surely not … They can’t be!’ Renard’s eyes widened with disbelief. ‘Juditta and Rhosyn?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ Adam said ruefully. Taking Lyard out of the company, he cantered the last twenty yards to reach his nearest daughter before she could reach him amidst a press of iron-shod jittery horseflesh.

‘Papa!’ She held out her arms for him to lean and sweep her up on to his saddle. Then, half-choking him, she smacked kisses on his cheek and the corner of his mouth and wriggled herself secure, by which time Rhosyn had arrived at her father’s stirrup and was clamouring to be lifted up. Adam thought it fortunate that Lyard was no longer young and full of fire or they would probably all have been thrown, but he could not bring himself to scold his daughters.

‘Mama’s not here,’ Juditta said. ‘She’s gone to visit Elene up at Woolcot, but she’ll be back before Michaelmas.’

‘Will she?’ Adam felt a small twinge of disappointment but did not let it show on his face. It was selfish and Woolcot was but a day’s ride away, not half the world as Jerusalem had been.

‘I don’t like your beard.’

‘Don’t you, puss? It was easier to grow than to shave off while we were travelling. Your Uncle Renard’s got one too.’

‘Uncle Renard?’ Rhosyn, seated behind her father, arms squeezing his waist, looked at the riders in her father’s company. A man was staring at them. His smile was very white against a skin that was almost as brown as her homespun gown, and bracketed by a full, beech-red beard.

‘Don’t you remember? No, I suppose you’d both be too small.’ Adam wheeled the sorrel and trotted him back to the line.

‘Who is the lady?’ whispered Juditta.

‘Her name’s Olwen. She’s travelling with us,’ Adam said, telling the literal truth. Time enough for revelations later. ‘Rhosyn, it’s rude to stare.’

‘But she’s very pretty, Papa. I wish I had hair like that.’

‘But then you wouldn’t be mine. Here Renard, what do you think of these two hussies?’

‘I think they have more than doubled in size.’ Renard laughed and tweaked one of Rhosyn’s black braids.

‘Grandpa does that to me too,’ Rhosyn said, giving him a wary brown stare.

‘Does he now?’

‘You don’t look much like him.’

‘It’s probably the beard,’ he replied and turned to his other niece who was watching Olwen with the kind of fixed fascination found in young children who had yet to learn the artifice of manners. ‘As I remember, you’re Juditta?’

Her eyes came back to him, Adam’s eyes but differently tinted by the reflection of copper hair, brows and lashes. ‘Yes.’ Her round chin came up. ‘I’m the eldest.’

‘So,’ sniffed Rhosyn from behind the safety of her father’s bulk. ‘You’ll get wrinkles sooner than me!’

Renard grinned. ‘Not for the sake of half an hour,’ he chuckled.

Adam tightened his grip on Juditta as she drew breath to do battle. ‘Is this how you have been taught to behave? Will you shame yourselves and me before family and visitors?’

Both girls fell silent beneath the tone of his voice. ‘Sorry, Papa,’ murmured Juditta, lowering her lashes to purple-stained fingers. Rhosyn laid her cheek against his back and gave him a squeeze.

‘Come,’ Adam said with a rueful look at Renard who was biting back his laughter. ‘We’ll ride on to Ravenstow and let them know Renard’s on his way, shall we?’ He slapped the reins against Lyard’s neck.

Renard shook his head, and chuckled into his beard. ‘They wrap him round their little fingers,’ he said to Olwen.

‘Women are born with their weapons already honed, otherwise they would be defenceless,’ she replied.

Some of the humour left Renard’s expression. ‘You were certainly born with an abundance!’

‘The gift matches the need,’ she retorted. ‘Are those the Welsh hills over there?’

He narrowed his eyes against the sun. ‘Yes. That line of trees marks the border dyke. Where was your father from?’

‘Near Ruthin.’

‘That’s north of here. Closer to Caermoel than Ledworth and Ravenstow.’

They rode on in silence. Olwen gnawed her lip and looked at her lover’s broad, hauberk-clad shoulders. Their relationship was as volatile as a barrel of hot pitch and occasionally she had the disquieting feeling that the passions invoked were beyond all control. Had they all been on Renard’s part, it would not have mattered; it was her own responses that troubled her.

On the road from Brindisi when her flux had come at the appointed moment, she had feigned a miscarriage. As it happened, she had indeed been mildly ill at the time with a stomach upset from eating tainted meat. The results had been convincing, particularly as she had been overtaken by a storm of grief, as if the child had been real and not a figment of her imagination. Certainly Renard had believed her dramatics, had been so gentle and tender with her that she had wanted to lash out at him from the depth of her guilt. That release had not been feasible. She wanted to keep him, not drive him away. Her anger had turned inwards against herself, but every now and then some of it would surface and she would be unable to keep from baiting him.

When they reached the keep defences, the people were out in force to greet them. Serving maids, scullions, soldiers, hound-keepers, the blacksmith and his apprentice, the falconer, knights, squires and serjeants, all pressed forwards, cheering. There was a lanky boy who strongly resembled Adam de Lacey. There was also a young woman with fat, honey-coloured braids, a toddler balanced on one hip, another child ballooning beneath her skirts. Renard leaned over the saddle to speak to her and she blushed.

As it came to her turn to pass the young mother, Olwen changed her grip on the reins, jibbing her mount sideways, forcing the girl to dart back out of the way. As the young woman met Olwen’s eyes her pretty colour faded. A former mistress, Olwen surmised, and busy in his absence if the child and advanced pregnancy were any indication.

The bailey was thick with people jostling and clamouring, cries of delight and welcome on their lips. Renard felt the euphoria sing through his blood. His eyes filled and he had to blink as he slid from Gorvenal’s back.

‘Jesu!’ his mother said, ‘Adam has brought me home a Saracen!’

He turned swiftly to face his mother’s scrutiny. ‘It’s a good disguise, isn’t it?’ His light tone contradicted the expression on his face. ‘Sometimes I even forget that there’s a man living behind the mask.’

And then they were in each other’s arms, hugging hard, kissing and weeping.

Judith, practical as ever, sniffed, and wiping her eyes stepped back to study the whole of his long, lean form. ‘Is a beard part of the mask too?’

Renard fingered the luxuriant growth on his jaw. ‘It was more convenient to let it grow while we were on the road. If you promise not to cut my throat, I’ll let you barber it off.’

‘I’ll do my best.’ Her laugh was shaky. ‘But my eyesight is not as good as it was!’

‘Rubbish!’ said Guyon from behind her. ‘It’s still sharp enough to pluck a needle from a haystack!’

Renard had expected to set his eyes upon a walking skeleton or an old man, hunched and incapacitated. His father was neither. Thinner, yes. There were marked hollows under his cheekbones and his eyes were set further back in their sockets and pouched with wrinkles, but they still glowed with vitality, and there was not a great deal more grey in his hair for the sake of four years.

Renard wondered briefly if Adam had been wrong and merely panicking, but as he embraced his father, Renard felt the roughness of the older man’s breathing against his palms, and heard a faint whistle that would only need an injudicious sprint across the bailey to turn it into a severe wheeze.

‘You made good time,’ Guyon said as they parted. ‘We did not expect to see you for another month at least.’

‘The summons was urgent. I came as fast as I could, and the good weather has been a blessing.’ He turned to face the keep.

‘Yes, it has,’ Guyon said, turning with him.

Judith had not moved with her husband and son but was regarding the young woman who had dismounted unaided from a brown mare and was staring at Renard’s back with an almost hostile expression in her deep blue eyes. Adam had very briefly told her that Renard had a female travelling companion. His expression had said far more than his few words, but now Judith was wondering how to deal with the situation.

Renard’s associations with women before he left for Outremer had been fleetingly casual. The closest he had ever come to forming a permanent bond was with Eloise, the falconer’s daughter who had borne him a little girl. The infant had died of a fever the summer before he left. Since then Eloise had married the farrier’s journeyman and settled well to the yoke. Renard, it seemed, had moved on to more exotic fare, and if he had brought her all the way from Antioch, then it was more than just casual.

‘Renard’s absence has certainly not taught him any manners,’ she said to the girl in a carrying voice. ‘It seems that we must introduce ourselves.’

Renard turned. Both women were watching him expect — antly, and his face grew ruddy beneath his tan. He cleared his throat. ‘Mama, this is Olwen. She has travelled with us from Antioch. Her father was a Ruthin man who took the Cross with Duke Robert and settled there …’

There was a drawn out pause where much went unspoken but a great deal was communicated. Eventually Guyon stepped into the space where courtesy and etiquette were unmapped.

‘Come within and be made welcome,’ he said formally to Olwen, giving her the kiss of peace and flickering a brief, eloquent look at his wife and his son. ‘Time later for all else. Today is a day for celebration.’

It was not quite dawn when Judith discovered Renard seated at the huge chopping trestle in the keep kitchens. There was a beaker of milk at his right hand and he was eating a slab of rye bread topped by a thick slice of cold salt beef.

‘I see time has not moderated your appetite,’ she observed as she fetched a cup and sat down beside him. ‘You ought to be as fat as a bacon pig!’

Renard stretched his legs and leaned back, raising his shirt to show her his flat, muscle-banded stomach. He smacked his palm on it. ‘I challenge you to find an ounce of spare flesh!’ he said indignantly. ‘We’ve been on pilgrim rations for four months and travelling so hard that we’ve hardly had time to eat them!’ Lowering the garment, he returned with gusto to demolishing his bread and meat.

Judith poured milk from the pitcher. ‘Your companion weathered the journey well, considering she miscarried your child on the way.’ Her tone was barbed with the dis approval that had been evident ever since the rudiments of Olwen’s story had been relayed at table the previous evening.

Renard’s mouth was too full to make answering mannerly and it gave him time to raise his defences and prepare to do battle. He had known this was coming since last night, but some things could be said in public and others were best left to the firelit darkness of an early kitchen where the only ears to overhear were English and would not follow the rapid Norman French.

‘Do you love her?’

Renard sighed. ‘I do not know,’ he said when his mouth was empty. ‘It is like being in the heart of a thunderstorm. We strike sparks off each other all the time.’

An aroma of fresh bread filled the kitchen as one of the cook’s apprentices paddled a batch of loaves out of an oven. Over at the stone sink a scullion clattered utensils together and whistled loudly. Judith watched the work go forward, noting its alacrity, doubtless the result of her presence. ‘Tell me about her,’ she said.