Abandoning Judith, Melyn leaped on to the bed and began to wash. Judith's eyes followed the cat and then settled on the linen undersheet. White as the snow that had fall en in the night. Pristine.
Unstained. She gave a gasp of panic. Any moment now they were likely to be disturbed by their guests and the first task of the morning would be to display that sheet to all , stained with the sanguine proof of her virginity ... or lack of it.
Startled, Guyon left off buckling his belt. 'What's the matter?'
'The bed ... the sheet. They will think that I am impure, or else that you were unable.'
He gaped at her.
'There is no blood!' she almost shrieked at him.
Enlightenment tardily dawned and with it a glint of amusement. 'Ah.' He rubbed the back of his neck. 'I don't make a habit of deflowering virgins.'
He shot her a sour grin. 'I wonder which choice they would settle upon.' Pushing Melyn gently to one side, he drew his short eating knife from the sheath at his belt and, forcing up his left sleeve, made a shallow cut upon the inside of his forearm. As the blood welled in a thin, bright line, he smeared it over the centre of the sheet.
'Self-inflicted,' he remarked with wry humour as he stanched the bleeding on his shirt sleeve. 'I beg a cup of valerian to mend my disordered wits, and a pot of honey to smear this slit in my hide.'
Judith handed him the jar of nettle salve. 'This will serve just as well for the nonce.'
His tone was self-mocking. 'And have all the women condemn me for a clumsy oaf and risk your mother's censure? I have a reputation to keep up, you know.'
Judith blushed, for she had not thought of how others would misconstrue the finger marks in the ointment.
'It's a scratch, don't concern yourself.' He rolled down his sleeve and grinned at her. 'I dare say it is not the last wound I'll take defending a lady's honour.'
Before Judith could decide how to reply, Cadi began to bark outside the entrance curtain and a woman cried out in anxiety. On the bed Melyn became a stiff horseshoe of growling orange fur.
Guyon tugged a strand of Judith's hair, gave her an encouraging wink and went to draw aside the curtain and wish good morning to his mother-by-marriage, the small entourage of female wedding guests in her wake and the plump maid bearing a ewer of warm, scented water and a towel.
Cadi greeted her master boisterously. He commanded her down, but although she obeyed him, her forepaws danced on the floor and her whole body quivered with precariously subdued enthusiasm. Alicia returned Guyon's courtesy with a tepid nod and entered the room. At her side an older woman, a second cousin or some such as he remembered, fastidiously brushed white dog hairs from her dark blue gown.
Alicia's gaze went from the bloodied sheet to Judith who was clutching the salve pot in her hand. Judith flashed a dismayed glance at Guyon, caught her under-lip in her teeth and quickly put the salve down, but the damage was already done. Alicia's mouth tightened.
Frightened by the crowd and the dog, Melyn leaped off the bed to make her escape and was immediately spotted by Cadi. Barking excitedly, the hound took a flying lunge at the cat. As Cadi flung past Agnes, the ewer flew out of the maid's hands and a warm deluge christened the two women immediately in front of her. Screams and squawks rent the air, intermingled with a cat's snarls and the hysterical barking of the dog.
Melyn streaked for the door and with Cadi hot on her heels, scorched up the thick curtain to cling yowling at the top, claws fiercely dug in.
Guyon seized Cadi's collar, drew breath to speak, saw from the basilisk glares turned his way that it would be a waste of time and beat a hasty retreat with the bitch to the haven of male company breaking their fast in the hall .
Judith, tears of laughter brimming in her eyes, went to coax Melyn down from her precarious refuge.
The breaking of fast was an uncomfortable affair, fortunately not prolonged because the men were eager to be out on the trail of the boar that Ravenstow's chief huntsman assured them lurked in the forests on the western edge.
The bride put in a tardy appearance as the men were preparing to leave, her manner much subdued, the glances she cast at her husband swift and furtive. When the bloodied bridal sheet was displayed by the women, she almost lost control. Her narrow shoulders heaved and she covered her face briefly with her veil while she mastered herself. Alicia's arm went protectively around her daughter's shoulders and she threw Guyon a look boiling with murder.
'Why was Judith weeping, were you clumsy with her?' Miles demanded of his son as they slowed their mounts to enter a patch of bramble-tangled woodland. Ahead of them the dogs could be heard barking as they trailed the rank scent of boar.
Guyon drew himself up. 'Credit me with a little more experience than that. The blasted wench was laughing. I ought to drown that cat of hers!'
Miles raised his brows, justifiably baffled and more than a little worried, remembering Alicia's fear of the previous evening, his own reassurances and then the look on her face this morning. If looks could kill , his son would have been a dead man and himself frozen to stone.
Guyon regaled him with the details of the morning's disaster and Miles's eyebrows disappeared into his hair.
'So there we were,' Guyon said ruefully, 'Judith with the pot of salve in her hand, not daring to look at me lest she laugh, and the sheet all bloody and my mother-in-law itching to geld me ...' He paused on a breath and turned in the saddle as the constable de Bec rode up to join them on his sturdy dun.
His manner was tangibly cool, his mouth tight within its neat grey bracket of beard. He too had witnessed Judith's struggle for composure in the hall and had been filled with a protective anger, at first so hot that he had almost enquired of Lady Alicia whether she desired to be rid of her new son-by-marriage. Almost, but not quite, for as he had been gulping down his bread and wine and preparing to leave, he could have sworn Judith had smiled at him, a sparkle of mischief in her eyes. Girls distraught to the point of tears did not do such things. Besides, he had reasoned, if Guyon died, the King would only select another man to fill the position, probably of far worse moral fibre and, when he thought about it rationally, the new lord had only had his right and seemed in public gently disposed towards the child.
'Judith tell s me that you have been teaching her to hone a blade and use it,' Guyon remarked pleasantly to the constable.
De Bec rubbed his fist over his beard. 'She asked me so I showed her, my lord. Nothing wrong in knowing a bit about weapons, especially here in the marches.'
'No,' Guyon agreed, hiding a smile at de Bec's stony expression and his father's sudden wide stare. 'Did her parents share your opinion?'
'Lord Maurice never knew. Lady Alicia wasn't keen, but she knew when to give a little and when to rein in.'
'So you have been a nursemaid as well as constable,' Guyon needled gently. 'Devotion to duty indeed.'
De Bec glinted him a look. 'Mistress Judith is the daughter I never had the opportunity to settle down and sire. Don't be deceived by what you saw yesterday. She is one of a kind.' He cleared his throat. 'Have a care, my lord, or you may wake up one morning to find yourself gelded.'
'She is maiden still ,' Guyon replied. 'I have no taste for rape. The blood on the sheets is my own and freely given.'
De Bec cleared his throat. 'It is your right,' he muttered gruffly into his chest.
'Indeed so,' Guyon answered, 'but one I exercise at my peril. I hazard that if I harmed so much as one hair of her head, I'd not wake up at all the next morning.'
Their eyes locked and held for a moment before the older man dropped his gaze to the smooth muscle of his mount's shoulder, knowing he had gone as far as he dared with a man he did not know. Guyon turned his head. Distantly the hounds gave tongue in a new key, a sustained tocsin, belling deep.
'Boar's up and running,' Miles said, jerking his courser around.
Guyon swung his own horse.
De Bec spoke abruptly. 'Keep your eyes open, my lord. You have as many enemies among your guests as you have allies and when I see men huddling in corners and glimpse the exchange of silver in the darkness, I know that no good will come of it.'
Guyon smiled thinly. By disclosing his suspicions when he could have held silent, de Bec had accepted his new master, even if the man had yet to realise the fact. 'I was not blind myself last night, but I thank you for the warning.
The sooner this mockery of a celebration is over, the better.' He set his heels to his courser's flanks and urged him in pursuit of the dogs. De Bec wrenched the dun around and followed.
Guyon bent low over his mount's neck to avoid the tangled branches that whipped at him.
Shallow snow flurried beneath the chestnut's hooves. The frozen air burned Guyon's lungs as he breathed. His eyes filled and he blinked hard to clear them, and braced himself as the horse leaped a fall en tree in their path. Ahead he could hear the loud halloos and whistlings urging the dogs on and the excited belling of the dogs themselves.
The hunters pressed further into the depths of the forest. Thorns snagged their cloaks.
Hoofbeats thudded eerily in the echo chambers created by the vaulted span of huge beeches, the daylight showing luminous grey through the fretwork of empty black branches. They galloped across a clearing, the snow fetlock deep, splashed through a swift-flowing stream, picked their way delicately round a tumble of boulders and plunged back into the tangled darkness of the winter woods. A branch snapped off and snarled in Guyon's bridle. He plucked it loose, eased the chestnut for an instant, then guided him hard right down a narrow avenue of trunks pied silver and black, following the frenzied yelping of the dogs and the excited shouts of men.
The boar at bay was a sow, a matron of prime years, weighing almost two hundredweight. She had met and tussled with man before. A Welsh poacher had lost his life to her tushes when he came hunting piglets for his pot. The huntsmen had found his bleaching bones last spring when they came to mark the game. The sow bore her own scar from the encounter in a thick ridge of hide along her left flank where the boar spear had scored sideways and turned along the bone.
She stood her ground now, backed against an overgrown jut of rock, raking clods of beech mast from the forest floor. Her huge head tossed left and right, the vicious tushes threatening to disembowel any dog or human foolish enough to come within their reach.
Guyon drew rein and dismounted. The senior huntsman tossed him a boar spear which he caught in mid-air. It was a stout weapon, broad of blade, with a crossbar set beneath to prevent the boar from running up the shaft and tearing the hunter to pieces. A dog ran in to snap at the sow's powerful black shoulder, was not swift enough to disengage and was flung howling across the path of the other dogs, a red slash opening in its side. Cadi barked and darted. She was a gazehound, bred to course hare, not boar, but her narrow-loined lightness made her too swift to be caught.
The men began cautiously to close upon the sow, their spears braced, knives loose in their belts, every muscle taut to leap, for until the moment she charged no man knew if he was her intended victim. It was exhilarating, the tension unbearable. She raked the leaves with her trotters, rolled her small black eyes and tushed the ground, smearing her bloody incisors with soil.
'Come on girl, get on with it,' muttered Hugh of Chester licking his lips. Another man whistled loudly, trying to attract her attention and waved his spear over his head. Ralph de Serigny wiped his mouth, a pulse beating hard in his neck. Walter de Lacey remained immobile, his only movement a darting glance of challenge at Guyon. Guyon returned the look with glittering eyes and crouched, the spear braced.
The sow paused, quivering; the massive head went down; the damp leaves churned. A squealing snort erupted through her nostrils and she made a sudden powerful lunge from her hams, straight at Guyon. Driven by her charging weight, the levelled spear reamed her chest.
Guyon braced the butt against the forest soil, the muscles locking in his forearms and shoulders as he strove to hold her. The barbed tip lodged in bone and the shaft shuddered. Guyon heard the wood creak, felt it begin to give as the sow pressed forward, and knew that there was nothing he could do. The spear snapped. Razored tushes slashed open his chausses and drew a bloody line down his thigh. The sow, red foam frothing her jaws and screaming mad with pain, plunged and spun to gore him, the broken stump of the spear protruding from her breast. Guyon rammed the other half of the boar spear down her throat. A fierce pain burned his arm. Miles's hunting knife found the sow's jugular at the same time that de Bec's spear found her heart.
Silence fell , broken only by the eager yelping of the dogs and the whimpers of the injured one.
Blood soaked the trampled soil and snow. The chief huntsman whipped the hounds from the dead pig, his face grey. He darted a look once at de Lacey and Pembroke behind, and then away.
They ignored him.
'Are you all right?' Anxiously Hugh of Chester laid hold of Guyon's ripped sleeve to examine the pulsing gash.
Guyon nodded and smiled for the benefit of those who would have been only too pleased to see him seriously injured or killed and wadded his cloak against the wound to stanch the blood.
De Bec crouched beside the broken spear shaft and examined it. Then he rose and stalked to the senior huntsman and thrust the stump beneath his nose. The man shook his head, his complexion pasty. De Bec began to shout. Arnulf of Pembroke moved between the two men.
Guyon shouldered him aside.
'Let it go,' he commanded. 'There was a weakness in the wood. It could have happened to any one of us.'
'A weakness in the w--?' de Bec began indignantly, but caught the look in Guyon's eye and realised that the young lord was totally aware of the situation. 'Faugh!' de Bec spat, threw down the shaft and stalked to his horse, muttering under his breath.