arm detained her until he had taken his proper leave. ‘Until tomorrow, my lady,’ he said with a slight bow. ‘Do not venture out after curfew again.’
‘No indeed,’ she snapped. ‘Who knows what ruffians one might meet?’
‘Exactly,’ he countered. ‘York is a violent city. Sleep well.’ In one fluid movement, he mounted the stallion and swung away, cantering off into the shadows in the direction they had come, leaving Rhoese shaken and puzzled, her body still tingling from his daring treatment. She was also concerned for the package she had intended for Father Leofric that would not benefit from spending a night in wet undergrowth, though she was not inclined to venture out again into the woodland that night. Turning in sudden fury, she aimed a savage kick at the innocent door, wincing with pain of a different kind as she hobbled into the dark warmth of her bower.
Dawn came ever later during those early autumn days, and the household was up and about before it was light enough for Rhoese to enter the woodland to retrieve the linen-wrapped bundle from its damp bed of leaves. To her relief, it was intact and undamaged. Last night, with the fear of a sudden interest in her ownership of an apparently thriving estate, she had felt the need to take this priceless treasure to a safer place. Father Leofric was the obvious one to understand the worth of a leather-bound, gem-studded gospel-book, its pages covered with a Celtic script and intricate patterns lovingly worked by skilled nuns in the last century. There was only one such nunnery where nuns’ scholarship rivalled that of monks. It was Barking, in Essex, many miles away from York, but no ordinary citizen ever owned such a thing meant for the glory of God and for the use exclusively of holy men and women. And royalty. If it was ever found in her possession, she would have to offer a very convincing explanation of why it was in her keeping and, more to the point, why she had not delivered it immediately to the proper authorities. The brief joy she had derived from owning such a thing had long since been drowned by the fear of its discovery. She held the bundle close to her body as if it were a child.
Stooping to examine the ground, she noted the huge hoof-prints. Footprints, too. There was the oak. There was the slippery heel-print where she had tried to keep her balance. And there, when she closed her eyes, was the shockingly intimate and unlawful pressure of him against her, his hands roaming where they should never have been and which she should be trying to forget instead of remembering. An insistent pulse beat in her throat as the memory of his mouth reached her, catching at her breath and holding it until the tremor passed. ‘Men,’ she whispered. ‘Treacherous men.’
Chapter Two
Ketti’s House, Bootham, York
T he sheriff’s man reached Gamal’s widow just before dusk at her large house in the area near St Mary’s Abbey. He would have to deliver his message with some brevity if he wanted to reach home before the city gate closed at sunset.
With water forming a large puddle on the wooden floor around his feet, he delivered his most unwelcome news, if not with enjoyment, at least with a distinct absence of sympathy. Everyone in York knew of the woman’s faithlessness. He stared the couple down with pale protruding eyes and wiped drips off the end of his nose with his wrist. ‘If I may say so,’ he replied to their protests, ‘the news cannot be much of a surprise to you when my master the sheriff warned you during the summer that the consequences of ignoring the king’s summons for knight-service would be the confiscation of property.’
‘In the summer,’ the woman called Ketti yapped, stumbling over the Norman-French, ‘I was a newly grieving widow. I had other things on my mind.’ Immediately, she wished she had a better grasp of the language when the sheriff’s man glanced sideways at the strapping young man by her side, coolly assessing his bedworthiness by a pause at the bulge below his pouch.
‘Yes,’ he said, bringing his eyes slowly back to her angry blush. ‘In scarce one month you must indeed have been grief-stricken, lady.’ He cast an eye around the fine dwelling while Ketti and the young man, who had once intended to become her son-in-law instead of her lover, faced each other like a couple of rival mastiffs, each of them thinking how best to savage the other.
‘It’s Michaelmas,’ Warin pointed out as if it would make some difference. ‘The end of Holy Month. Where are we to go? This is our home.’
‘That’s something you should have thought of earlier,’ said the sheriff’s man, omitting the respectful ‘sir’ that an older man would have warranted. ‘My lord the sheriff has instructed me to tell you that this land has been donated to the new abbey of St Mary for their extensions. The house and all the outbuildings will be demolished once the king returns to London, and you will have to find somewhere else to live. You will be sent signed confirmation of this in due course.’
Warin, bold, brawny, and not inclined to negotiate if it threatened to take longer than his limited attention span, would have liked to throw the impudent messenger out on his head, but even he could see the danger in that. He could also see, perhaps not for the first time, that he might have been a mite too hasty in his change of allegiance from daughter to stepmother, now that the latter was not as secure as he had thought.
Ketti swung her white veil over one shoulder. ‘And I’ve already told you, whatever your name is, that my husband died last winter. He was in no position to send knights for the king’s service.’
‘But no message was sent. No excuse. No fine or relief in lieu of men. As you know, lady, a thegn holds his estate from the king in return for properly equipped knights whenever the king should need them. And the king has needed them sorely in this first year of his reign. His brother and uncles defied him. He needed all the men he could get. Any thegn who fails in this duty must forfeit everything to the king. That’s always been the law and you must have known it. Now the monks need this land for their new building plan, and you will have to—’
‘Bugger the new building plan!’ Warin bellowed, unable to contain his anger any longer. It was bad enough to have made a wrong decision, but to have this pompous little toad-face telling him what they had ignored in the hope that it would go away was too much to suffer politely. The time for civilities had passed. His healthy outdoor complexion darkened with fury and his fair curls stuck wetly around his face. ‘We’ve had your building plans up to here in York,’ he blustered, levelling his fingers to his brow, ‘and we’re sick to death of them! You’ve raided our fair city and razed it to the ground, wrecked our homes and livelihoods, dammed the bloody river to make a moat for your bloody castles—’
‘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