Elizabeth Chadwick - The Running Vixen

‘What about Ralf ’s stallions?’

Heulwen shrugged her shoulders. ‘I thought I might sell them, but two of the three are only half trained and could be worth much more if they were properly schooled.’

He returned to his ablutions. Women and warhorses. Le Chevalier had been expert in the art of taming both. Adam only had the latter skill, learned out of a jealous need to prove that he was as good as the man Heulwen had chosen to love, a skill in which, as a mature man, he now took a deep and justifiable pride. ‘I could finish Ralf ’s work,’ he offered diffidently.

Heulwen hesitated, then shook her head. ‘I couldn’t take advantage of you when you’re so recently home.’

‘You would be doing me a service. I haven’t worked on a horse since leaving for Germany, and it will give me space to relax between curbing the Welsh and organising my lands. I am the one who would be beholden.’

His eyes met hers and then he averted them. ‘Well then, thank you,’ she capitulated with a nod. ‘There are two half-trained stallions as I said, and one that Ralf was hoping to sell at Windsor this Christmas feast.’

Adam stepped from the tub and dried himself on the towels laid out. Turning his back, he quickly donned the clothes she had found for him. Struggling with a sense of hopelessness, he felt like a fish caught by the gills in a net. Oh Heulwen, Heulwen!

‘They’re stabled in the bailey. My father and Renard have been exercising them since Ralf died.’ Her expression brightened. ‘You can see them now if you like — if you’re not too travel-worn. There’s time before dinner.’

‘No, I’m not too travel-worn,’ he said, glad of an excuse to leave this chamber and their forced proximity. Although she had made the initial suggestion, he was the one to move first towards the door. ‘I’m never too tired to look at a good horse.’

She smiled with sour amusement. ‘That’s what I thought you’d say.’

Hands on hips, Adam watched Eadric and two under-grooms lead the three destriers around the paddock at the side of the stables. There was a rangy dark bay, handsome and spirited, a showy piebald, eminently saleable but of less calibre than the bay, and a sorrel of Spanish blood with cream mane and tail and the high-stepping carriage of a prince. It was to the last that Adam went, drawn by admiration to slap the satin hide and feel it rippling and firm beneath his palm.

‘Vaillantif was Ralf ’s favourite too,’ Heulwen said, watching him run his hand down the stallion’s foreleg to pick up and examine a hoof. ‘He was riding him when he died.’

Adam looked round at her and carefully set the hoof back down. ‘And the Welsh didn’t keep him?’

‘I don’t think they had time. ’

‘I’d have made time if I were a Welsh raider.’ He nodded to the groom, and with a practised leap was smoothly astride the stallion’s broad, bare back. The destrier fought the bit, but Adam soothed and cajoled him, gripped with his thighs and knees, and urged with his heels.

Heulwen watched him take Vaillantif on a circuit of the paddock and her stomach churned as he went through the same routines as Ralf had done, with the same assurance, his spine aligned to every movement the horse made. Even without a saddle, his seat was easy and graceful. Vaillantif high-stepped with arched crest. He rapidly changed leading forefeet. A command from Adam and he reared up and danced on his hind legs. Another command dropped his forefeet to the ground and eased him into a relaxed trot and then a ground-consuming smooth canter. A quick touch on the rump and he back-kicked.

Adam brought him round before her and dismounted, pleasure flushing beneath his tan. ‘I’ve never ridden better,’ he declared with boyish enthusiasm. ‘Heulwen, he’s worth a king’s ransom!’

‘God send that you should ever look on a woman thus!’ she laughed.

His face changed, as if a shutter had been slammed across an open window. ‘What makes you think I haven’t?’ he said, giving all his attention to the horse.

Heulwen drew breath to ask the obvious question, but was forestalled by the noise of the hunting party clattering into the bailey, and turned to shade her eyes against the slant of the sun to watch their return.

Her father sat his courser with the ease of a born horseman. He was bareheaded, and the breeze ruffled his silver-scattered dark hair and carried the sound of his laughter as he responded to a remark made by the woman riding beside him.

A packhorse bearing the carcass of a roebuck was being led away towards the kitchen slaughter shed where the butchering was carried out. The houndkeeper and his lad were taking charge of the dogs that enveloped the humans knee deep. A white gazehound bitch clung jealously to the Earl’s side, nose thrusting at his hand.

‘Yes, he’s still got Gwen,’ Heulwen replied to Adam’s raised brows. ‘It’s the first time since her pups were born that she’s left them to run with the hunt. If you ask Papa nicely, he might give you one once they’re weaned.’

‘Who says I want a dog?’

‘Company for you at Thornford.’

He angled her a dubious look and started across the crowded bailey.

Lord Guyon, alerted by a groom, lifted his head and before Adam had taken more than half a dozen paces, was striding to meet him. His wife gathered her skirts and hastened in his wake.

‘We’d given you up for a ghost!’ Guyon clasped Adam in a brief, muscular bearhug.

‘Yes, graceless whelp, why did you not write!’ This reproach was from Lady Judith, who embraced him in her turn and kissed him warmly, her hazel-grey eyes alight with pleasure.

‘It wasn’t always easy to find a quiet corner, the places and predicaments I was in, and you know I have no talent with parchment and quill.’

Lady Judith laughed in wry acknowledgement. Her foster-son was literate through sheer perseverance — hers and the priest’s — but he would never write a fluent hand. His characters had a disturbing tendency to arrive on the parchment either back to front or upside down. ‘No excuses,’ she said sternly, ‘you could have found a scribe, I am sure.’

Adam tried without success to look crestfallen. ‘ Mea culpa .’

‘So,’ said Judith with a hint of asperity that reminded Adam for a moment of her half-sister the Empress, ‘what brings you to the sanctuary of home comfort when you could be preening at court?’

Adam spread his hands. ‘My task was fulfilled and the King gave me leave to attend my lands until Christmas.’

‘Henry is back in England?’ Judith took his arm and began to walk with him to the keep. ‘Last we heard he was in Rouen.’

‘Yes, and in fine spirits. He gave me letters for you and your lord. I have them in my baggage.’

Lady Judith sighed and looked ruefully at her husband. Letters from Henry were rarely social. Frequently they were commands or querulous complaints, and usually they elicited ripe epithets from her husband who had perforce to deal with them. ‘Can they wait until after dinner?’ she asked with more hope than expectation.

Guyon gave a caustic laugh. ‘They’ll either spoil my dinner or my digestion. What’s the difference?’

Judith shot him a reproving scowl. ‘The difference is that you can decently wait until Adam has settled himself. If the news was urgent, I am sure he would have given it to you immediately.’

‘Scold!’ Guyon complained, opening and shutting his hand in mimicry of his wife’s jaw, but he was grinning.

Her eyes narrowed with amusement. ‘Do you not deserve it?’ Turning her attention from him, she looked around the hall. ‘Where’s Renard?’

‘Training the falconer’s daughter to the lure I very much suspect,’ Heulwen replied. ‘That new hawk of his is past needing his full attention.’