Juliet Landon - The Bought Bride

‘Warin…stop…shh!’ Ketti warned, placing a hand on his arm.

But he shook it off. ‘We’ve had to rebuild our warehouses, relocate our businesses, give up our orchards and grazing, see our houses engulfed in your stockades, see them trampled underfoot, and you dare to tell us that we can’t live here now? We’ve built this place with hard-earned sweat on our land, and there’s nobody…nobody,’ he yelled to the man’s damp receding back, ‘going to get us out. Tell that,’ he called across the courtyard, gesturing rudely, ‘to your lord the sheriff, whatever his bloody name is.’

His return to Ketti was nothing like the hero’s welcome he thought he deserved. ‘You idiot!’ she screeched, resorting at last to English. ‘What good d’ye think that’ll do. Eh? He’ll go straight back and tell the sheriff, the sheriff will tell the abbot, the abbot will tell the king, and before you know it there’ll be a crowd of his strong-arm men here to tip us out into the street. You couldn’t have waited for the king to go back home before you shot your mouth off, could you?’ Her plain, sharp-nosed, thin-lipped face was blotchy with anger, and her fair-lashed pale eyes bulged more than ever in the stare of scalding reproof that Warin had already grown tired of.

The king, she was certain, had bided his time in this matter, waiting until he was up here in York at the end of the first difficult year of his reign. Feeling that some show of benevolence was appropriate, he had granted permission for the monks of St Mary’s to extend their new abbey next to the church of St Olaf, and had granted them properties to sustain them with tithes due four times a year. He had come all the way up here to Northumbria with an impressively inflated retinue to lay the foundation-stone and to show them how bounteous he could be, when he wanted to. And like sheep, the rest of the Norman landowners in Yorkshire had followed suit, donating land to the new abbey so that it would be said in years to come how they cared about the spiritual life as well as the temporal one. Liars. It was their own insurance they paid into, for their own quicker passage through purgatory.

Craftily, the king had let the monks have Bootham, the stretch of land beyond the minster next to the new abbey grounds where booths and stalls were set, and where the late Gamal of York’s house stood. Now he could confiscate it for the best of reasons.

Ketti’s screeching assault stopped Warin in his tracks, shocking him into a counter-attack. ‘Well, what did you expect me to do? Stand here and be spoken to like a child who’s been scrumping apples?’ he yelled back at her. ‘Don’t be so daft, woman. He’s not going to do anything before the king leaves for London.’

‘Even so, you fool, you might have thought up a better way of handling the matter than by insults. Where d’ye think that will get us? You’ll have to go to them and find out how we can get ourselves out of it.’

‘It’s no good me going to speak to anyone,’ he snapped. ‘I’m not the owner. You are. You go.’

‘What good will it do for me to go?’ said Ketti, spreading her hands so that the tips of her wide sleeves skimmed the floor. She was not minded to do her own dirty work if someone else could be found to do it for her. ‘So what are you doing here?’ She waved a hand with some drama. ‘If you want a home with me, go and fight for it. You wrestle with your mates like a prize bull; go and wrestle with the sheriff for a change.’ She turned away, glaring at the smirking face of her twelve-year-old son Thorn. ‘Get out!’ she snapped. ‘This is private.’

‘Ketti.’ Warin’s voice dropped to a wheedling pitch, warming her back. ‘Ketti, my love. We shouldn’t quarrel over this.’ He took her by the shoulders and pulled her back against him, sliding his great working hands over her breasts and kneading gently, knowing how that was guaranteed to soften her.

Her hands came up to cover his. ‘Get off,’ she whispered, pressing herself backwards into him.

Warin was careful to conceal his smile. It had worked already. ‘No,’ he said, bending to her veil-covered ear. ‘You’re so lovely, Ketti.’ Her breasts were, in fact, the only lovely part of her, and not even the self-seeking Warin could pretend that she had either a face or a nature to match. ‘There’s no problem,’ he whispered. ‘We’ll go and move in with Rhoese. She’s still your ward. She’s obliged to help.’

Her hands snatched his away and threw them aside as she whirled to look at him, her face suddenly hard with jealousy. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ she said. ‘To live with her. My stepdaughter. Still hankering after her, aren’t you?’

Still puzzled by his faulty timing, Warin’s blue eyes opened like a child’s, though behind his façade of innocence was a frantic attempt to backtrack. He caught at her hands, holding her still. ‘No, sweetheart. Not to live with her, of course not,’ he blustered.

‘What, then?’

‘Look, she’s got her own place at Toft Green. She moved out of your home, didn’t she? Well, what d’ye think she’d do if we said we had to move into hers because we have nowhere else? Eh?’ He shook her hands to make her reply.

But Ketti’s face was still hard. ‘You think she’d move out of Toft Green, don’t you? Rubbish. She won’t. She’s still crazy for you. She only moved away because she couldn’t bear the sight of you with me. She’d let you into her bed every time my back was turned. No, my lad. I’m not having that.’ There was a finality in her voice that Warin knew better than to challenge.

‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘we’ll try sending her to the king to see if she can negotiate another patch of land for this one. Once she sees the threat of us moving into her house, she’ll fall over herself to be helpful.’

In that one respect, he was a better judge of the situation than Ketti, though the flutter of pride and excitement he felt at her jealous suppositions was sadly misplaced. Rhoese would not have let him into her bed if he’d been the last man alive in England.

By dawn next morning, the news had been delivered to Rhoese at Toft Green that her stepmother had been deprived of everything she had inherited from the Lord Gamal. The steward who delivered the message had been with the family for as long as Rhoese could recall and was almost in tears. ‘Go and collect your things,’ she told him. ‘You can live here with us.’

The man knelt and kissed her hand. ‘My lady,’ he stammered. ‘My wife…may I…?’

‘Of course. Bring your wife.’

After he had gone, Eric voiced his doubts. ‘Was that wise?’ he said. ‘To take him so soon? Him alone?’

‘After that woman took what was mine?’ she replied. ‘It may not have been too subtle, but it was vengeful. And if they think they’re going to come and move in here, they’re mistaken. They’re not.’

Eric sought her hand and took her from the end of the hall out into the croft that was fenced with a wattle hurdle to contain pot-herbs and medicinal plants. The greenery dripped with diamonds and rustled with the sounds of recovery after the heavy rain. ‘Rosie,’ he said. ‘Whatever you think of her, she’s our kins-woman and we cannot refuse to help. You know that. She’s also your legal guardian.’

Together, they leaned on the whitewashed wall of the house beneath the steaming overhang, and Rhoese knew a sense of despair yet again at the constant negativity of the Danish woman’s influence upon her life. Ketti had been married to Lord Gamal for only five years with no apparent advantage to anyone except herself and her family. Her son Thorn was well named, and the old hag who was Ketti’s mother rivalled the yard cockerel with her cackling. They could not be allowed to disturb the peace of Toft Green.