"Marshal!" William bellowed to Mallard and sprang upon Milli's constable with all the vigour and determination of a young knight with a reputation to carve, rather than the experienced veteran he was. Monceaux's gaze widened in shock. He flung up his shield, but William swept it aside as if swatting a fly off his dinner, and brought his sword down on the constable's helm with the full strength of his right arm. Finest steel of Cologne, the blade hewed through the helm and arming cap and opened a gash in Monceaux's scalp. The shock of the blow dropped the constable like a stone at William's feet. William snatched the sword from Monceaux's hand and sat on him to make sure he stayed down. Besides, William needed a respite after the fierce exertion of his ladder climb and frantic battle on the wall.
The fight raged around them as the defenders strove to reach and rescue their castellan, but Jean, Mallard, and the Marshal knights, aided by the Flemings, kept them at bay, until the defenders realised their defeat and began throwing down their weapons and crying surrender. Mallard waved William's standard triumphantly aloft and further along the wall the leopards of England replied.
De Monceaux was beginning to turn purple. Easing to his feet, William stood back, but kept his sword levelled at his captive's throat.
"God's bollocks, Marshal, what in the name of all that's holy did you think you were doing?" The voice was deep with a harsh metallic timbre sharpening the edge.
"Sire?" William turned, bowed, then looked questioningly at his King. Richard's complexion was scarlet beneath his helm; runnels of sweat streaked his face. His grey-blue eyes were ablaze with battle fire and as always with Richard the line between laughter and rage was so fine it was difficult to tell which side of it he stood. Behind him, his mercenary captain Mercadier was watching the exchange and smothering a grin behind his mailed fist.
"You're a commander, not a young glory-hunter. Why didn't you stay back and leave the heroics to youths like these?" He made a peremptory gesture towards a gasping Jean D'Earley, who was cleaning his sword blade on the surcoat of a fallen defender.
William's shoulders stiffened with affront. "Sire, the assault was failing. I took a commander's decision and acted. You have your castle and the surrender of its constable." He forbore to add that the King was a fine one to talk. Richard's penchant for leading from the front was legendary. "I am not so far into my dotage that my will outstrips my strength."
Richard grunted. His gaze flickered to the castellan whose windpipe remained mere inches from the steady point of William's sword. "I saw you sitting on him," he said and his narrow mouth suddenly twitched. "That either means you were keen to make sure no one else took him for ransom, or you were too exhausted to stay on your feet."
"Or that I was rendering him
hors de combat
." William retorted calmly. "A good commander is capable of doing more than one thing at a time."
Richard yielded his irritation to an open grin. "I cannot argue with that, Marshal. For what you've accomplished I would let you have this one's ransom even if he was worth ten times the sum you'll get for him. Nevertheless, I value your counsel too much to enjoy seeing you take such risks. Your wife is too young to be a widow and your sons too small to lack a father. If anything happened to you, I'd never hear the end of it. The Countess has an Irish temper."
It was William's turn to grin. "Isabelle is as sweet as honey if you know how to handle her."
"And, like my mother, she stings like a bee when provoked," Richard retorted and, chuckling, moved on. Arms folded, Mercadier started to follow him, then paused in front of William, his dark eyes sparkling with amusement.
"When he saw you running up that ladder, he was fit to burst," he said in a low voice, glancing to make sure Richard was out of earshot. "If he's annoyed with you it's because he saw de la Bruiere dancing on the pick too and would have gone to his aid had you not beaten him to it. We had to pull him back—we couldn't risk both of you on the same ladder. The moment he saw you gain the wall walk there was no stopping him."
"Better I should take the risk than him."
"He didn't think so." With a nod to William, Mercadier strode after his paymaster.
William sheathed his sword. He had answered Richard with robust assertion but, in the aftermath of hard effort, he was aware of aching, strained limbs and of the fact that before long he would mark his fiftieth year on God's earth. The sweat chilling on his body made him shiver. Stooping, he hauled the dazed constable to his feet and gave him into the custody of Mallard, telling the knight to keep him under close but courteous guard and attend to his scalp wound. When he turned round, Jean was holding out a cup of wine, his expression studiously blank.
William took the offering with gratitude, drank thirstily, and wiped his mouth on his gambeson cuff. "When I was newly knighted and still wet behind the ears, I was involved in a street battle at Drincourt," he said. "The commander told me to stay back and let the experienced knights do their work—said I was too young and a hindrance, but I ignored him and forced my way to the front." He leaned on one hip, his left hand resting on his sword hilt, and drank again, this time more slowly. "I lost my horse, took a nasty shoulder wound, and impoverished myself into the bargain because I demanded no ransoms from the knights I put down. But we won and I lived to tell the tale." He gave a self-deprecatory smile. "I was a whelp then; I'm an old dog now, and unlikely to change my ways."
"I'm wise enough to leave that kind of persuasion to the Countess," Jean said with a straight face.
William laughed and started towards the stairs leading down to the bailey. "She'll boil my hide in oil when she hears about today's battle," he said over his shoulder. "Tell the men not to exaggerate too much for my sake."
"I'll do my best, my lord," Jean replied with a rueful grin.
***
Isabelle set the final stitch in the scrap of linen on which she had been working, secured the thread, and snipped it with her small silver shears. "There," she said to her fidgeting three-year-old daughter. "He's finished. What do you say?"
Mahelt's little face lit up as she took the representation
of a swaddled baby from her mother. It was the size of a man's thumb; the body made from whittled wood and fleece purloined from the spinning basket, then wrapped in a strip of linen. "Thank you." Mahelt gave her mother a smacking kiss and a fierce hug before dashing back to the corner where she had been playing with her
poupées.
Isabelle smiled with tender amusement. Mahelt might be little more than an infant, but already the maternal, nurturing soul was as fierce within her as the warrior spirit was in her older brothers, although she owned plenty of that too. She possessed a moppet made of soft cloth to nurse and cuddle, but this new, smaller addition was for her "family" of
poupées,
each one the size of a tent peg. They dwelt in a small carved chest by Mahelt's crib-bed and she played with them most days, chattering to them as brightly as a magpie and making up stories about them. They had briefly fallen out of favour when her baby brother had been born, but, fascinated as she was by Gilbert, once the immediate novelty had worn off, she had returned to her toys. Now she tucked the baby
poupée
gently against the arm of the mother one who sported a rose-coloured gown and long golden braids like Isabelle's.
Isabelle brushed threads from her lap, rose to her feet, and went to look at Gilbert, now almost five months old. Despite his awkward birth, he was thriving and showed no ill effects, either of body or disposition, the latter being remarkably sunny. Providing he was fed, kept dry, and played with, he made few demands, unlike his two older brothers who at seven and six were into every scrape imaginable and frenetic with energy from the moment they woke until the time they were sent to bed, Richard in particular. She could hear his voice now through the open shutters, raised in a shriek of excitement, and his brother's yelled reply.
Isabelle frowned. Their training in weapon play must have finished early, or else Eustace, their tutor, was letting them have a moment to run wild. But the shout of masculine laughter that followed their exclamations was not from Eustace and it caused her heart to kick in her breast and her breath to shorten. She ran to the window arch and looked out. Eustace was standing on the sward, hands on hips, a broad grin on his face as he watched her sons blithely attacking their father and Jean D'Earley with their wooden practice swords. Behind them, the knights and serjeants of the Marshal coterie were making their way towards the hall, shields slung at their backs, arms filled with baggage rolls and equipment.
Gathering her scattered wits, Isabelle turned from the window and began issuing swift commands to her women. She didn't know whether to laugh or be furious that William had not sent heralds to warn of his arrival but had chosen rather to sweep in like an autumn gale and take her unawares. Once the matter of a bath and food had been set in motion, she sped down to the hall, checking her wimple and smoothing her gown as she ran.
A son bundled under either arm, William was entering from the courtyard as she emerged flushed and breathless from her chamber stairs. Composing herself, aware that all eyes were upon them, but only having eyes for William, she went forward to greet him. His cloak and boots were pale with dust from the road but he himself was tanned from his summer of campaigning. He looked lean, fit, and dangerous.
He saw her and released the boys. "Go to," he said, tousling their hair. "Let me greet your mother fittingly."
Nudging each other, grinning, Will and Richard stood aside. William went to Isabelle, lifted her right hand in his, and formally kissed it. He had grown a beard whilst away in the field and his whiskers tickled. The expression in his eyes filled her heart and liquefied her loins. "My lord, welcome home," she said with equal formality, although the look she returned him was incandescent. "If you had sent word ahead, we would have been better prepared to greet you."
"And that would have been a pity. I wanted it to be a surprise." He turned to take the welcome-cup of wine presented by the hall steward. Having taken a formal sip, he passed it on to Jean D'Earley who also drank and in his turn gave it to another knight of the mesnie.
"Your supper will be a surprise too, depending on what supplies we have to hand," Isabelle answered, but she was laughing. She felt giddy, a little drunk on his presence. It was always the same after so long a parting. Appetites that had been suppressed of a necessity were suddenly brought into sharp focus, both the physical and the intellectual.
"After the rats' tails and boiled worms we've been eating, anything will taste like manna," he said with a wink to his sons, and headed for the tower stairs. All around the hall wives, sweethearts, and children were greeting their menfolk and the sound of voices raised in pleasure and merriment filled and warmed a room that had been too long empty.
"That bad?" Isabelle said.
"Some of the time," William answered evasively. Entering the chamber, he acknowledged the curtseys of Isabelle's women with a nod and went over to the cradle at the bedside to gaze down at the slumbering baby. He had received news in the field of Gilbert's birth and baptism. A third son to vouchsafe the bloodline.
"He chose to come feet first into the world and frighten everyone into thinking he might be stillborn, but he's behaved himself ever since." Isabelle joined him in his scrutiny. "From the tales I have heard of your days as a squire, he takes after you."
He looked amused. "In what way?"
"It was said that you did naught but eat and sleep and earn yourself the nickname 'Guzzleguts.'"
"Unfair," William protested. "I liked food and sleep when I could get them—what youth of those years does not? But I had to work for them."
"Still, the name suits him. He's already got a tooth and he's started eating pap." She looked at him through her lashes. "I employed a wet nurse last week."
William said nothing, but his body reacted instantaneously. Isabelle liked to suckle the children herself for a time at least, viewing it as both a maternal pleasure and an obligation. Her offspring were of de Clare blood and it was only fitting they were nourished from that source, at least until they were ready to begin weaning. However, the Church declared it a sin for a nursing woman to have carnal knowledge of her husband. While he and Isabelle sometimes ignored the strictures, the burden of guilt in disobeying them added furtive worry rather than piquancy to their marriage bed. It was always a relief when the time came to employ the wet nurse, especially following a long, dry summer.
He became aware of another presence at his side and, looking down, met the wide solemn gaze of his three-year-old daughter. Her bottom lip was caught in her teeth as if she wasn't quite sure who he was and what her response ought to be. He squatted on his heels so that his gaze was on a level with hers. Her eyes were winter-deep like his own and her hair was rich brown with coppery lights. Freckles peppered her dainty nose and there was a smear of dust on her chin. He raised his hand and gently thumbed it away.
"And how goes it with you, young mistress?" he asked solemnly.
Mahelt made a face at him and giggled. She presented him with some of her
poupées
to admire, including two he hadn't seen before: a swaddled baby and a knight with a surcoat and shield of green and gold.
"Who's this?" he asked.
"It's you," she replied, eyeing him as if he was a lackwit.
"I thought you already had one of me," he said.
"Yes, but that's when you're my papa at home. This one's you when you're gone. Mama's going to make me a king next."
He bit his lip to avoid laughing, and at the same time felt a little sad. He swung her up in his arms. "Well, I'm home now, sweetheart."