Ken Follett - World Without End

He was already speaking differently, she noticed. He was losing the slow rhythms of village speech. And he used French words for ‘hawking’ and ‘horsemanship’. He was becoming assimilated into the life of the nobility.

“What about the work?” she said. “It can’t be all play.”

“Yes, there’s plenty of work.” He gestured at the others cleaning the armour. “But it’s easy by comparison with ploughing and harrowing.”

He asked about his brother, and she told him all the news from home: Davey’s madder had regenerated, they had dug up the roots, Davey was still involved with Amabel, no one had fallen sick of the plague yet. While they were talking, she began to feel that she was being watched, and she knew her feeling was not fanciful. After a moment, she looked over her shoulder.

Earl Ralph was standing at the top of the staircase in front of an open door, evidently having stepped out of his room. She wondered how long he had been looking at her. She met his gaze. His stare was intense, but she could not read it, did not understand what it meant. She began to feel the look was uncomfortably intimate, and she glanced away.

When she looked back, he had gone.

The next day, when she was on the road and half way home, a horseman came up behind her, riding fast, then slowed down and stopped.

Her hand went to the long dagger in her belt.

The rider was Sir Alan Fernhill. “The earl wants to see you,” he said.

“Then he had better come himself, instead of sending you,” she replied.

“You’ve always got a smart answer, haven’t you? Do you imagine it endears you to your superiors?”

He had a point. She was taken aback, perhaps because in all the years he had been Ralph’s sidekick she had never known Alan to say anything intelligent. If she was really smart she would suck up to people such as Alan, not poke fun at them. “All right,” she said wearily. “The earl bids me to him. Must I walk all the way back to the castle?”

“No. He has a lodge in the forest, not far from here, where he sometimes stops for refreshment during a hunt. He’s there now.” He pointed into the woods beside the road.

Gwenda did not much like this but, as a serf, she had no right to decline a summons from her earl. Anyway, if she did refuse she felt sure Alan would knock her down and tie her up and carry her there. “Very well,” she said.

“Jump up on the saddle in front of me, if you like.”

“No, thanks, I’d rather walk.”

At this time of year the undergrowth was thick. Gwenda followed the horse into the woods, taking advantage of the path it trampled through the nettles and ferns. The road behind them swiftly disappeared into the greenery. Gwenda wondered nervously what whim had caused Ralph to arrange this forest meeting. It could not be good news for her or her family, she felt.

They walked a quarter of a mile and came to a low building with a thatched roof. Gwenda would have assumed it to be a verderer’s cottage. Alan looped his reins around a sapling and led the way inside.

The place had about it the same bare utilitarian look Gwenda had noted at Earlscastle. The floor was beaten earth, the walls unfinished wattle-and-daub, the ceiling nothing more than the underside of the thatch. The furniture was minimal: a table, some benches and a plain wooden bedstead with a straw mattress, A door at the back stood half open on a small kitchen where, presumably, Ralph’s servants prepared food and drink for him and his fellow huntsmen.

Ralph was sitting at the table with a cup of wine. Gwenda stood in front of him, waiting. Alan leaned against the wall behind her. “So, Alan found you,” Ralph said.

“Is there no one else here?” Gwenda said nervously.

“Just you, me and Alan.”

Gwenda’s anxiety went up a notch. “Why do you want to see me?”

“To talk about Sam, of course.”

“You’ve taken him from me. What else is there to say?”

“He’s a good boy, you know… our son.”

“Don’t call him that.” She looked at Alan. He showed no surprise: clearly he had been let in on the secret. She was dismayed. Wulfric must never find out. “Don’t call him our son,” she said. “You’ve never been a father to him. Wulfric raised him.”

“How could I raise him? I didn’t even know he was mine! But I’m making up for lost time. He’s doing well, did he tell you?”

“Does he get into fights?”

“Of course. Squires are supposed to fight. It’s practice for when they go to war. You should have asked whether he wins.”

“It’s not the life I wanted for him.”

“It’s the life he was made for.”

“Did you bring me here to gloat?”

“Why don’t you sit down?”

Reluctantly, she sat opposite him at the table. He poured wine into a cup and pushed it towards her. She ignored it.

He said: “Now that I know we have a son together, I think we should be more intimate.”

“No, thank you.”

“You’re such a killjoy.”

“Don’t you talk to me about joy. You’ve been a blight on my life. With all my heart I wish I had never set eyes on you. I don’t want to be intimate with you, I want to get away from you. If you went to Jerusalem it wouldn’t be far enough.”

His face darkened with anger, and she regretted the extravagance of her words. She recalled Alan’s rebuke. She wished she could say no simply and calmly, without stinging witticisms. But Ralph aroused her ire like no one else.

“Can’t you see?” she said, trying to be reasonable. “You have hated my husband for, what, a quarter of a century? He broke your nose and you slashed his cheek open. You disinherited him, then you were forced to give him back his family’s lands. You raped the woman he once loved. He ran away and you dragged him back with a rope around his neck. After all tnat, even having a son together cannot make you and me friends.”

“I disagree,” he said. “I think we can be not just friends, but lovers.”

“No!” It was what she had feared, in the back of her mind, ever since Alan had reined in on the road in front of her.

Ralph smiled. “Why don’t you take off your dress?”

She tensed.

Alan leaned over her from behind and slipped the long dagger out of her belt with a smooth motion. He had obviously premeditated the move, and it happened too quickly for her to react.

But Ralph said: “No, Alan – that won’t be necessary. She’ll do it willingly.”

“I will not!” she said.

“Give her back the dagger, Alan.”

Reluctantly, Alan reversed the knife, holding it by the blade, and offered it to her.

She snatched it and leaped to her feet. “You may kill me but I’ll take one of you with me, by God,” she said.

She backed away, holding the knife at arm’s length, ready to fight.

Alan stepped towards the door, moving to cut her off.

“Leave her be,” Ralph said. “She’s not going anywhere.”

She had no idea why Ralph was so confident, but he was dead wrong. She was getting out of this hut and then she was going to run away as fast as she could, and she would not stop until she dropped.

Alan stayed where he was.

Gwenda got to the door, reached behind her and lifted the simple wooden latch.

Ralph said: “Wulfric doesn’t know, does he?”

Gwenda froze. “Doesn’t know what?”

“He doesn’t know that I’m Sam’s father.”

Gwenda’s voice fell to a whisper. “No, he doesn’t.”

“I wonder how he would feel if he found out.”

“It would kill him,” she said.

“That’s what I thought.”

“Please don’t tell him,” she begged.

“I won’t… so long as you do as I say.”