‘It will be me that’ll have to do the explaining afterwards, if I let you in,’ Perrin said simply. And then, as she showed no sign of giving way, his voice rising into something that was almost a howl of injury and exasperation. ‘Oh why don’t you go back to your stitch-craft and leave what doesn’t concern you to them as it does concern?’
The girl’s eyes widened. ‘Why, you – you impertinent oaf!’ she spat, her face bright with fury. ‘How dare you speak to me like that!’ Her hand shot out, and she dealt him a sharp blow, not open-palmed as Randal would have expected a girl to hit, but with her clenched fist on the side of his face.
The sound of the blow fell, duller than a slap, into the close, dog-smelling quiet of the kennels, and for a long moment afterwards nothing and nobody moved. The boy had clenched his own fist, but gave no other sign, and stood staring straight before him with sullen blue eyes, while the mark of the blow flushed slowly crimson on his cheek and jaw.
All the careless blows and casual cruelties of his own early days surged up in Randal in that one moment as he watched, and he longed to catch hold of the girl and shake her until her teeth rattled in her cruel, stupid head. But the feeling was mingled with an exasperated helplessness, because he knew the ways of men and hounds but not girls, and certainly, save for giving her the shaking, which he supposed regretfully was out of the question, he had not the faintest idea how to deal with a girl as angry as this one seemed to be.
‘Gervase is trying out a new horse in the river field,’ he heard his own voice saying with careful courtesy, as he stepped forward. ‘Maybe you would like to come and watch him, Mistress Gisella.’
She swung round and stood looking at him as he reached her side, her eyes flickering with scorn. ‘You sound just as though I was four years old and you were trying to coax me out of here with a sweetmeat.’
That, Randal realized with fresh exasperation, was perfectly true.
‘If you’d not be treated as though you were four years old, maybe you’d best not behave as though you were,’ he snapped. ‘Now you come out of here and leave Perrin in peace.’
For a long moment they stared at each other, the girl’s eyes stormy and challenging, Randal’s grimly determined. Then, with a small, furious shrug, she turned to the outer door. Randal followed behind her as she stalked out with her nose disdainfully in the air.
Outside in the bailey where the heat danced a little on the cobbles, she rounded on him in a fine, singing passion. ‘And you a squire – going to be a knight some day, I suppose – and you take that wretched dog-boy’s part against me, after you heard how he spoke to me!’
‘He was in the right,’ Randal said levelly. ‘He had de Braose’s orders. And de Braose was right, too. Bitches are easily upset in the first few days.’
‘Do you suppose I don’t know that? Always I went among my father’s hounds whenever I would; I helped tend the bitches and their puppies. I’ve been with them when they whelped before now.’
‘They knew you! Linnet doesn’t,’ Randal told her flatly. Then, as he saw her mouth open for a furious retort, he added, ‘And maybe you did not hit whoever was in charge of them. It was a coward’s trick to hit Perrin.’
She flushed, but said defiantly, ‘Why?’
‘For the obvious reason that he couldn’t hit you back.’
Gisella swallowed, and said in a slightly smaller voice, ‘Because I’m a girl, you mean?’
‘Oh no. If you had been one of the kitchen wenches I don’t doubt he’d have clouted you back as you deserve. Because you are one of the Ladies from the Great Chamber.’
There was a little silence, while they stood in the midst of the crowded bailey and glared at each other, and he saw that she was in some sort driven into a corner. Then she gathered herself together again and lashed out, jibingly: ‘It seems you have a vast deal of fellow-feeling for a dog-boy – almost as much as though you had been one yourself.’
Randal’s temper went with a twang like a snapped bowstring. ‘I was a dog-boy at Arundel, until de Bellême’s minstrel won me from Hugh Goch with a game of chess, and gave me to Bevis d’Aguillon’s grandfather to be bred up with Bevis,’ he told her through clenched teeth. ‘I’ve had a good many cuffs and kicks in my time, more than Perrin, maybe, but none from such a stupid, cruel, heartless little creature as you are!’
‘Not until now!’ Gisella said, also through clenched teeth, and flashed up her hand and dealt him a stinging, open-palmed slap – a girl’s blow this time – on the cheek. ‘There! I’m not a bit sorry I hit Perrin, and I’m glad I’ve hit you! That’s what I think of dog-boys! ‘And she whirled about and ran from him back towards the Keep.
Randal stood for a moment watching her, the marks of her fingers burning on his cheek. Then he carefully unclenched his own fists, shook his shoulders as though to shake off the whole stupid incident, and strode off by himself to watch Gervase and the new horse.
Bevis was to be made a knight at Easter time. There would be many new knights made that Easter, five of them from Bramber, for the King was gathering his forces to invade Normandy, and a good supply of new knights was always made in the eve of a campaign.
Duke Robert’s popularity when he returned from the Crusade had been shortlived; now his Duchy was in a state of chaos, and his harrassed lesser folk begging Henry to come and take them. It was the younger brother’s chance, and Henry seized it as he had seized his chance before. The days of the Lenten Fast were full of the steadily mounting din from stable and store and armourer’s shop. Harness was being readied up, war gear forged and mended, great bundles of arrows brought from the fletchers, horseshoes, spare mail and weapons sealed in barrels against the salt of the sea crossing, sheaves of spears, bales of bandage-linen and wound salves that the Lady Aanor and her women had provided, wine and salt meat and coarse barley meal in sewn skins, all made ready for taking down to the merchant ships that lay waiting at the wharf below the Castle mound. And all day and all night the great Castle rang with the clash of the armourer’s hammers, the voices of men, the neighing of horses and the tramping of feet.
Now Easter was one day past, and the ring and throb of last-minute preparations that had been silent since Good Friday, had sprung up again more urgent than ever. Tomorrow the candidates for knighthood would keep their vigil in the Castle chapel, kneeling with the new swords that they were so soon to use laid before them on the altar steps; Randal, hurrying up with Bevis and Gervase de Machault to the Keep at supper time, thought that the ring of hammer on anvil, where the Master Armourer was renewing a link in a hauberk, sounded like the note of a struck bell; a fiercely insistent note that seemed to get inside your head and go on beating there, bright as the sparks that flew up from the anvil in the hurrying grey and silver of the windy day.
De Braose’s senior squire, a strong and very ugly young man with a disarming grin and a trick of making friends, flung an arm across Bevis’s shoulder as they hurried. ‘I wish you were going to keep your vigil with the rest of us tomorrow. What do you want to go skulking off to that Manor of yours on your own for?’
‘Not on my own. Randal is going with me,’ Bevis said quickly. And then, ‘Being knighted is one of the things that can only happen once – like being born or dying. I want it to happen to me in my own place, with my own folk around me.’
‘De Braose wasn’t best pleased, was he?’
‘No.’ The seriousness that had touched Bevis’s voice the moment before, splintered into laughter. ‘He said I was a pest, and the Lord of Bramber had other things to do just now than ride half over to Shoreham for the very doubtful pleasure of dubbing me knight.’
‘What did you say to that?’
‘I told him I was very sure that le Savage would ride over from Broadwater to give me the accolade, for my grandfather’s sake.’
Gervase whistled dolefully. ‘And you would really take your knighthood from that old cider barrel instead of de Braose, just for the sake of being at home?’
&
nbsp; ‘He was my grandfather’s friend,’ Bevis said carefully avoiding the question, as they swung into the alleyway behind the long row of workshops.
But it had not come to that, thought Randal who had been present at the interview. De Braose was not the man to have it said that one of his own squires had had to turn elsewhere for his knighthood. He remembered the Lord of Bramber saying with a bark of laughter, ‘Have it as you wish, then; go free of your squirehood a day early, and take Randal with you. I ride down to Shoreham after the ceremony here is over, on some business of horse transports; and I’ll turn aside to give you the accolade if you will give me the stirrup cup you once promised me.’ He had even given Bevis in advance the tall Spanish stallion he would have given him afterwards, for it was his custom, as it has been the old Baron’s, whenever he made a knight, to give him his first war-horse.
So tomorrow they would ride home to Dean, the Bramber years behind them, and ahead, only a handful of days away, the time when Sir Bevis d’Aguillon and Randal his squire would be sailing with the King’s host for Normandy.
At that moment two things happened in quick succession. Firstly Randal saw that somebody had left the garden door open. Usually the door of the narrow Castle garden where the Lady Aanor and her women brought their sewing in the fine weather was shut to keep out stray dogs, pigs wandering from the butcher’s yard, scullions and other such creatures. But now it stood wide, letting out the luminous, grey-green turmoil of wind-tossed, budding branches into the garbage-strewn and rain-puddled alleyway below the Keep. Secondly there broke out behind them a great baying and snarling, followed by a rush of flying paws; and two of de Braose’s great wolfhounds came streaking past, the foremost carrying a red bone from the butcher’s yard, the other in furious pursuit. Math and Mathonwy were brothers, even as Bran and Gerland of the Arundel days had been, but all the Castle knew how little brotherly love there was between them when either had a bone.
‘One day these brutes will kill each other,’ Randal said, as they circled a pile of stacked timber and sprang yelling into view again; and even as he spoke, Mathonwy, seeing the open door and the sheen of grass and leaves beyond, swerved in his tracks and shot through, followed by Math with every hair along his spine bristling like a wolf’s.
Randal heard the rush and scatter of their paws, and the sudden sing-song snarling as Mathonwy, finding that there was no other way out, turned to rend his brother; heard also one small human cry, cut short and not repeated.
‘Someone is frightened in there,’ Bevis said. ‘Come on.’
‘No, I’ll go. We’re late already and you two are on duty for supper,’ Randal said over his shoulder, already doubling in his own tracks towards the garden door.
Inside the narrow garden, a tall girl with red hair stood pressed back against the wall in the far corner where the two great hounds had penned her, half engulfed in their struggle as they rolled over and over, each striving for a throathold. Randal saw the strained stillness in her face above the whirling slavering turmoil of their bodies, and dived into the fight himself, no longer Randal the squire but Randal the dog-boy. How many yelling dog fights he had broken up, and how many scars of old bites he had to show for them! He twisted one hand in Math’s throat, hammering between Mathonwy’s eyes, with a clenched fist, snarling at them, not as a man giving orders, but in something very like their own tongue. This was something they were not used to, and it seemed to puzzle them and come between them and their deadly purpose. Mathonway snapped at the boy’s wrist, but did not hang on. Sullenly, panting and snarling, they allowed themselves to be flung apart. Randal caught up the bone from where it lay at Gisella’s feet, and turned back to the door, holding it above his head, the two great brutes with every hackle raised along their spines leaping and slavering about him as they tried to reach it. He kicked them out into the alleyway, and flung the bone over the nearest wall, where he thought it might take them some time to find it, then rattled the little deepset door to, and turned again to Gisella.
She had come out from her corner, and stood beside the turf seat under the still bare quince tree. The blue of her torn and muddied kirtle made a patch of strong colour in the hazy greens and greys of the awakening garden, but not so strong as the angry, sparkling red of her hair.
‘All’s over,’ Randal said. ‘They can’t get in through the closed door even if they wanted to, and they’ll take their quarrel elsewhere now.’
‘Good,’ said Gisella breathlessly, with the colour coming back in two little crimson patches on her cheek-bones. ‘So now you can go away and – and not have to stop here and play the hero any more!’
Randal felt slightly jolted in the stomach. He had not expected to be thanked, but he had not expected quite such a rebuff, either. He stood and glared at her, while she glared back. They had taken great care to ignore each other ever since their first encounter, but if she still wanted an open fight, then she could have one.
‘If you feel like that, I am sorry I came at all,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t suppose Math and Mathonwy would actually have killed you, they were too busy trying to kill each other. But I thought you sounded frightened – despite being so used to your father’s hounds.’
‘I wasn’t frightened, I was startled,’ she said crossly. ‘I wasn’t expecting anything, and I’ve never actually had two brutes the size of war-horses fighting on top of me before.’
Something in her crossness struck Randal as funny, and despite himself, he grinned. ‘Well, if you want no more rescuing, I’m away. You had best come too, or you will be late for supper.’
‘Go and get your supper. I’ve still to find the Lady Aanor’s scissors. She thinks she dropped them here –’ And then, glancing down as though she thought he might be hiding them somewhere about himself, she saw his wrist, where the close-fitting linen of his shirt sleeve was torn and stained with crimson, and her face and voice changed on the instant, as though she turned before his eyes into another and very much gentler person. ‘Oh! You’re bitten! Show me.’
Randal had been bitten so often before he was seven years old that it no longer seemed to him a thing to make a fuss about. ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Mathonwy was not really giving his mind to it.’ He pulled up the tight sleeve and sucked his wrist and spat blood into the roots of a rosemary bush.
‘Show me,’ she persisted, and when, with a shrug, he held his arm out to her because it was less trouble than refusing, she touched the torn skin with one finger. ‘Oh, it is a bite! It must hurt – and I didn’t even thank you.’ She swallowed, and looked up. ‘But I do thank you. It was splendid, the way you parted those two!’
‘It is a thing I’ve done often enough,’ Randal said. ‘I’m a dog-boy – remember?’ Odd, how that rankled.
There was a long silence in which he heard the insistent bell note of the armourer’s hammer ringing to war, but small and shut out beyond the high wall; and the soft hushing of the wind through the budding twig-tangle of the Lady Aanor’s beloved briar roses. Then Gisella said in a small, steady voice, ‘I am sorry about that. And I’m sorry I hit you, and I’m sorry I hit Perrin.’
Randal was so surprised that he simply stood and stared at her. And after a few moments she said in the same small, steady voice, ‘Now it is for you to say you are sorry that you called me a stupid, cruel, heartless little creature.’
At first he was not sure whether she was laughing at him; then he realised that she was completely in earnest. But he still hesitated. He was not going to say he was sorry for the things he had said if it was not true; oddly, he felt he owed the red-haired girl that, not an empty apology for courtesy’s sake, but the truth. But even as he hesitated, he knew that if she was sorry, so was he.
‘I am sorry I called you a stupid, cruel, heartless little creature,’ he said at last, without a shadow of a smile.
Her eyes were fixed on his face, very wide and grave. Grey-green eyes with a feathering of tawny gold. ‘I’m not really,’ she said. ‘Not stupid and he
artless, I mean. But I was so miserable and – and homesick, and I did have a lot to do with my father’s hounds, and when they said Linnet had got puppies, I thought – I thought I would go and see them, and it would be just a little bit like being at home. And then Perrin wouldn’t let me in, and I got angry because I was so m-miserable, and then you came, and I was ashamed as well as miserable.’
‘And that was why you smacked my face and flung “dog-boy” at me – because you were ashamed?’
‘Yes,’ said Gisella simply.
They were sitting, turned to face each other, on the turf seat now, without any recollection of having sat down there, without at all noticing that there was anything odd in their doing so, when they had been enemies so short a time ago.
‘Are you still homesick?’ Randal said after a little while.
‘Often. But I’m more used to it now.’
Another silence, and then she added hesitantly, ‘I suppose that is a thing that cannot happen to you, anyway – feeling homesick?’
Randal was gazing into the wind-ruffled grey-green depth of the rosemary bush, as if he were looking through it, and seeing a track leading from a ford, and a thin old knight on a great war-horse riding up it, with a small boy with a whip-scarred back and strange feelings waking in his small, sore heart, mounted on his saddle bow. ‘You don’t know Dean,’ he said, ‘or you’d not say that.’
‘Dean?’
‘Bevis’s home – and mine since I was ten years old – over the downs that way, towards the sea.’ He turned again to her, with a deep contentment. ‘And I’m going back there tomorrow.’
‘You? Are you going tomorrow?’ she said quickly. ‘I knew Bevis was going, because he wants to be knighted among his own folk. But you’re de Braose’s squire – you’re not going to be knighted yet.’
‘I’m only de Braose’s squire until Bevis is knighted. When we sail for Normandy, I shall be d’Aguillon’s squire, not de Braose’s.’ Randal hesitated a moment, and then added, ‘I shan’t ever be knighted, you know.’