‘When does the king not want to go hunting?’ Jude murmured.
‘And I expect that two or three days later we shall return to London. That doesn’t give you much time, does it?’
‘Indecent haste, in the circumstances.’
‘Think you can do it?’
‘I intend to try. But I’ll want to know more than you’ve told me.’
‘Then you’d better know that the king has begun proceedings—’ he glanced behind him, lowering his voice ‘—to confiscate her late father’s estate.’ As keeper of the king’s seal, the young Ranulf Flambard was in a better position than most to know that.
Their manner became suddenly serious. ‘Now that,’ said Jude, ‘is not funny, is it?’
‘No, it certainly isn’t.’
‘Does the Lord Gamal’s widow know yet?’
‘No, but she soon will. The sparks will begin to fly when she finds out before the ceremony tomorrow. She’ll be prevented from donating to the new abbey. And, worse still, she’ll be thrown out of her house because the land it stands on will be part of the new abbey buildings.’
Rhoese called to the men, their hair now blackened with rain, who hurried to unload the carts and pen the animals. ‘Come inside to sup, when you’re ready.’ The storerooms were packed with foodstuffs and fleeces from the dales. ‘And bring the carters in too, Bran,’ she reminded him. ‘They’ll have to stay overnight.’
The great hall was quiet after the blustering wind, enclosing her and Brother Alaric like a warm blanket that smelt of wood smoke and the nourishing pottage that hung in a cauldron over the fire. Blue smoke swirled and hung in the wooden rafters before filtering out through the heavy thatch, and Rhoese’s glance swept possessively round the substantial space that was the men’s living, cooking, eating and sleeping quarters all in one. Her own small bower was situated apart, between two storehouses for more privacy, but here she was still mistress of the house. Here were stout timber pillars dividing the side aisles into curtained cubicles drawn back to reveal fur-covered benches that became the household’s beds each night. There was the daily food store at one end, and another door to the croft outside.
A woman stirred the pot over the burning logs within a circle of stones, looking up as her mistress entered, at once filling two wooden cups with honeyed mead for her and the red-nosed chaplain. A young maid lifted a sleeping cat off a fur-covered chest where she expected Rhoese to sit, but saw that she was still looking in silence at her beloved territory as if to remind herself of its sanctity and of the time when she had first escaped the wounding intrusions into her grief.
Rhoese took the cup from her nurse with a whisper of thanks. ‘Where’s Eric?’ she said, sipping.
‘Wrestling with Neal,’ said Hilda, disapprovingly.
‘In the rain?’
Two young men came in at the far end of the hall as she spoke, half-naked, laughing, and dripping with wet, reddened with the exertion and the grip of strong hands. Eric’s smile in his sister’s direction would have given a stranger no indication that he had known of her presence by every keen sense except sight, and now he came forward with one hand resting lightly on his friend’s shoulder to greet her with a wet cold peck on the cheek. ‘I beat him.’ He laughed.
‘My lady,’ said Neal with a courteous nod of the head, ‘he did beat me only because I let him.’
‘Rubbish, man!’ Eric gently punched his friend in the general region of his shoulder. ‘I had you down twice.’ For all his blindness, Eric led the way confidently to the fire and stood before it to peel off his sodden loincloth, heedless of Els and Hilda, Rhoese’s maid and nurse. Neither of them could quite ignore the sight, for one of their advantages was that they could indulge themselves without being seen. Like his sister, Eric was beautifully made, tall and graceful with deep auburn hair tied back in a pony-tail that the rain and wrestling had partly undone. At twenty years old he was nearly three years younger than Rhoese and four years younger than Neal, the Icelander who was his constant companion. With Neal to act as his eyes, Rhoese had no fears for Eric’s safety, not even from the women whose eyes followed him everywhere.
Openly admiring, Els was nudged roughly into action by the nurse with a curt nod to take her mistress’s damp clothes and give her dry ones to wear. Mechanically, Rhoese co-operated with a lack of conversation they all noticed, especially Eric who had expected an animated account of the day’s takings. Rubbing his hair with a linen towel, and still naked, he found his way to her side to perch on the edge of the chest lid.
‘What is it, love? Are you not pleased? I thought it was going well.’
It had gone well, though at that moment she had been possessed by a strange sense of foreboding that had been growing since the brief visit of the Norman, who had not even offered her his name. It was usually the first thing inquisitive men did. She recalled the shiver of fear she had felt instead of pleasure while she had treated him to her scorn, and the cool self-assurance of the man as he walked towards her with his too-many questions. No, she would certainly not be at the ceremony tomorrow, not even to see the new king.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I am well enough pleased. Everyone came who was supposed to.’
‘Father would have been proud of you.’
Only one year ago, Lord Gamal still lived, and she had loved Warin, her father’s most trusted assistant, a man with an excessive ambition that included the pursuit of his master’s daughter. At the time of his first interest, Rhoese had neither understood nor cared about his reasons, being then only twenty-one years old and ready to be caught by a man with enough brash persistence. Warin’s success with York lasses and his tales of escapades in Norway and Iceland had excited her and had more than made up for his lack of sophistication and finesse. He had been eager and impulsive, and she had been swept into his big lovemaking arms with hardly time to savour the chase, such as it was. Her father had approved, and neither he nor Rhoese had seen any weakness in the man that could not be put down to the ignorance of youth.
Ketti, her Danish stepmother, had also encouraged the relationship, having taken quite a fancy to the young merchant whose affability towards her as Gamal’s young wife could not be faulted. She was, after all, only a few years older than Warin, and to take on the role as future mother-in-law to a twenty-four-year-old man did not come naturally to her.
It was only a few months before Warin persuaded Rhoese to become intimate with him, since they intended to be betrothed as soon as he came back from the next trip to Iceland. Rhoese had truly believed that nothing could go wrong with her plans, even going as far as to clear out her father’s merchandise from her property on Toft Green ready for their eventual occupation as a married couple. She had given herself to him here, in this very hall, just before he went off with her father on their voyage north to buy furs. Having no experience with which to compare the event, she assumed with a kind of contentment that Warin was probably better than most, if women’s looks at him were anything to go by. But although the boat returned three months later with walrus ivory, unicorn’s horn, furs and Warin, her father had been lost overboard in the icy waters of the North Sea and, by November of last year, 1087, Rhoese and Eric knew themselves to be orphans. And she was pregnant, having just passed her twenty-second birthday.
‘You all right, love?’ Eric said, holding her arm.
‘Yes. Just remembering, that’s all.’
‘Don’t.’
‘I must.’
‘Was it that woman with the howling bairn this morning?’
‘No, I think not.’
‘Then what?’
A squall of rain hit the thatch and burst through the door, flinging it hard against the wall and bending