“If they bring it, they’re welcome to it,” Frevisse answered shortly.
Ela saw to guesthall matters when Frevisse was not there, and neither of them made pretense to each other of how little they wanted Sir Reynold and his men on their hands, but neither did they bother to talk of it at length. There was no need; they had worked together long enough to understand each other’s mind.
The stores were the last thing Frevisse needed to see. That done, she was free to make her escape back into the cloister without having to deal with Sir Reynold, just as she had hoped. But the hope was blighted by the too familiar sound of Domina Alys’ voice railing at someone at the far end of the guest hall’s great hall as Frevisse came up the stairs from the kitchen. The words were unclear but the irk was plain, telling that someone had come under the prioress’ displeasure, and Frevisse flinched to a stop, then drew a deep breath and went on out into the high-roofed hall where meals were shared and most of their guests and servants slept. The trestle tables had not been set up yet for supper, so except for benches, the hall stretched open to its far end and the outer door, a generous space for Domina Alys to rant in, and she was taking full advantage of it, standing over Nell, one of the kitchen servants, declaring at full pitch of ire, “And don’t think I don’t know what you’re all at here! Helping yourselves to food and ale beyond what you’re given and then my folk blamed for eating us out! Fool who you can, I know better! And don’t think…”
Nell was taking the battering of words with bowed head and hunched shoulders, probably thinking of nothing except the likelihood that a blow would come with the words before they were over. Domina Alys had been hosteler in her time; the guest-hall servants knew as well as anybody else that she believed a hard slap would drive words into a thick head better than anything-and to Domina Alys all heads were thick but her own.
Frevisse, as afraid for Nell as Nell was and knowing the surest way to draw Domina Alys off one anger was to give her another, started up the hall toward them, saying far too loudly for respectful, “My lady, is there something I can help you with?”
As expected, Domina Alys turned on her. “Dame! Where were you when I was looking for you? I’ve seen what’s toward here, don’t think I haven’t.”
Frevisse made a small flick of one hand toward Nell, telling her to escape while she was forgotten. Hands knotted in her apron, shoulders still hunched, Nell slid away toward the kitchen stairs as Domina Alys closed on Frevisse, declaring, “I’ve seen enough to warn you here and now that your accounts had best be better than I expect them to be or you’ll be answering for it from now to Lent. And where’s my cousin gone to? Why’s he not back yet?”
Forcing her voice to hold level, lowering her eyes for some semblance of humility, Frevisse said, “I don’t know, my lady.”
“Well, he ought to be back by now!”
Frevisse was saved from finding a reply by the clatter of horses and a burst of men’s voices and laughter and shouting in the yard outside. Domina Alys swung toward the doorway. “And there he is!” she declared as triumphantly as if she had just proved some point on which Frevisse had been willfully troublesome.
With no other way to go, Frevisse followed her out of the hall to the head of the stairs and down to the yard, where the afternoon’s sun-warmed doze had turned to a loud crowding of mounted men and a scurry of servants among shifting horses, a confusion of movement and laughing exclaims, raucous as a roost of rooks. Domina Alys stopped at the top of the stairs and, hands on her hips, glared out at it all until she found whom she wanted and yelled to him across the seethe of men and voices, “Reynold, you dullard, hereafter leave your horses in the outer yard, thank you!”
“Cousin!” Sir Reynold yelled back at her, unoffended, taking off his riding hat and tossing it toward her over the heads of the men between them. Domina Alys caught it and flung it back at him, less true, but he reached out a long arm and caught it under the face of the man beside him while she shouted, “You heard me, Reynold! The outer yard after this!”
“Ever yours to command!” Sir Reynold called back, laughing, sweeping her a bow from his saddle. He was large-built, heavy-boned, well-muscled-so like Domina Alys, except that he was tall above the average, that he could as easily have been taken for her brother as her cousin. They were matched in tempers, too, Frevisse had found; she would not care to be near at hand if they should ever turn ill-tempered against someone at the same time or, probably worse, against each other.
But just now Sir Reynold was alight with laughter that took no heed of Domina Alys’ anger. He crowded his horse toward the foot of the stairs, asking, “What brings you out of your hole, Alys? Come to see the sun for a change?”
“Come to see you,” she snapped. “Did you bring back something more than your appetites this time or have you slipped your word again?”
Sir Reynold threw back his head, breaking into immense laughter. “No holding coy with you, my girl! Look you.” He pointed toward the yard’s gateway, crowded with a dozen mounted men with heavy bags slung either side, in back and front, of their saddles. “There’s enough of this and that to see us through a few days, surely, and something or two better than usual for you and yours, too, so don’t be looking to quarrel with me over it.”
Domina Alys, swinging her gaze around the yard to see if there were still more, drew her breath in harshly. “And that? she demanded, finger out accusingly. ”What is that?“
“What?” Sir Reynold looked around where she was pointing, his face too elaborately casual for true innocence. “Ah, that.” He grinned like a boy who did not care he had been caught out at mischief. “Benet!”
Among the shift and clutter of men and horses, Frevisse had not particularly noticed anyone beyond Sir Reynold. Between them, he and Domina Alys took up most of any noticing wherever they were, and all Frevisse was truly interested in just now was returning to the cloister as simply as might be, but now she looked past him to the man whose head jerked around in answer to his call. A young man, not much beyond a boy but his face already strongly Godfrey in its bones and coloring and probably in pride and temper, too, to judge by the strong line of his dark brows, drawn together now as he turned toward his lord and Domina Alys. But Frevisse read alarm in his face, too, and well there might be, because in front of him on his saddle he was holding tight in the circle of his arm a girl who did not-to guess by the set of raw scratches scored down one side of Benet’s face from brow to chin and the closely wrapped cloak that pinioned her arms to helplessness-want to be there.
Her dark hair had fallen loose from whatever had once held it; it was tumbled now around her shoulders and to her waist, obscuring her face as she twisted angrily in Benet’s hold despite that she had no chance of breaking free, trapped as she was in the cloak and his tight hold. Cheerfully Sir Reynold called, “Don’t let her slip! Some of the taming you’re going to have to do yourself from here on.”
There was laughter among the men to that, though not from Benet, as the girl threw back her head, missing his chin with the back of her skull only because he ducked away from it. Domina Alys, finally finding words, demanded at Sir Reynold, “What have you done, you fool?”
Sir Reynold answered, grinning, “There’s naught wrong. Benet means to marry her.”
Her hair thrown back from her face at last, the girl cried out in open fury, “Not this side of hell he won’t! Help me!” She turned desperate eyes on Domina Alys and Frevisse.