A stoneware bottle hanging from the saddlebow caught Alan’s eyes. Brother Raoul had put it there for him; it contained the baby’s precious milk, which Gwenn had insisted must be boiled, and it was swinging on a lengthy leather strap by his horse’s neck. Concerned that Firebrand might be irritated by the bottle and that the milk might be churned to butter by the time he got back to camp – would boiled milk make butter? – Alan paused to pack the bottle more securely in the bag behind his saddle. It was difficult to credit that the Captain of the Duke’s guard was worrying over a baby’s milk...
Behind him, the iron bolt of the hospital grated home. The moon had risen, bleaching the stones of the wall and the bridge across the river. Tightening the strap of his saddlebag, Alan’s ears picked up a furtive movement in the shadows beneath the bridge. Every nerve pricked into alertness.
He ran his gaze over the road and riverbank. There was no one on the wide highway save himself, and he could see nothing in that dark place under the bridge. Thinking it must be a vole or a rat scuffling to its home in the bank, Alan had one foot in his stirrup when he heard the noise again. ‘Who’s there?’ he called.
There was a splash, and someone caught their breath. Alan could not ignore it. It might be Malait, or another of de Roncier’s company, and for his own peace of mind he must investigate. Swinging himself up into Duke Geoffrey’s high, knight’s saddle, and feeling less vulnerable on horseback, he rode towards the bridge.
He drew rein by a clump of dock whose leaves gleamed like large white tongues in the moonlight. He could hear his own measured breathing; the creak of Firebrand’s harness; the wind playing in the trees along the edge of the Blavet; and another barely perceptible flurry which brought the hairs on his neck standing to attention. Without doubt, someone was skulking about under the bridge. He could think of no good reason for them to be there.
Where road and bridge joined, a reed-lined path curled left along the riverbank. Alan urged Firebrand down it. Slender rushes brushed his boots. In the shady coverts to the west, a fox barked. Fast on the heels of the bark, another stealthy scuffle came from beneath the bridge, together with more flustered, frightened breathing. Whoever was down there, it was not the Viking. Otto Malait didn’t have a timid bone in his body.
Easing his sword out, Alan dismounted. His sword flashed in the starlight. ‘Who’s there?’ Someone whimpered. He moved closer. ‘Who’s there? Come out, damn you, and show me your face.’
Another whimper.
Alan moved his sword, and as the moonlight bounced off the steel, its reflection lit up an indistinct blur of a figure not three yards away. The figure was pressed against the moss-clad bulwarks of the bridge. ‘If you don’t come out, I’m coming in.’
The figure looked to left and right, as if to decide which way to fly. Alan lunged forward and the dark form was held at swordpoint. It had been so easy that he suspected a trick. ‘Come out slowly.’ He made an impatient gesture with his sword, and obediently the figure, who was cloaked, shuffled out. Lifting the point of his sword, Alan flicked back the captive’s hood, and gasped.
He had seen that pale face before. It was the woman who had emerged from the hospital. She was very young. Alan lowered his sword and sheathed it. ‘What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be abed?’
She bit her lip. ‘I wasn’t doing anything. Honestly, sir, I was only...’ a brief hesitation ‘...watching the river flow by.’
She was lying. She had something clutched in her hands, Alan saw her drop it behind her and kick it out of the way. ‘What was that you threw down?’
‘Threw down? Why, nothing, sir.’ Straight dark brows defined shifting black eyes.
Encircling the woman’s wrist with his fingers, Alan stooped to examine the ground behind her. He came up holding a scallop shell, such as were on sale to pilgrims at almost every shrine in Christendom. And a wilted bunch of flowers. She had probably stolen the shell from St Ivy’s shrine. Alan glanced at the flaccid plant, and his brows snapped together. ‘Spearwort, if I guess it aright,’ he said. He felt absurdly relieved, for the plant and the scallop shell told him what the woman had been doing under the bridge in the dead of night. It was so far removed from the quarrel between Count François de Roncier and the late Jean St Clair that he would have laughed, had it not been so pitiful.
The woman had a consumptive’s face. Her cheeks were fleshless and wan, the bones clearly visible even in the weak starlight. Alan regarded the limp plants and the shell for a moment, and then tossed them aside. Keeping a firm grasp of a skeletal arm, he pushed up the woman’s sleeve, and saw the telltale sores as dim blotches on her skin.
His prisoner made a moaning sound in her throat, and struggled weakly to free herself. ‘I wasn’t doing anything,’ she wailed. ‘I wasn’t stealing, honestly, I wasn’t.’
‘I’m well aware of what you were doing,’ Alan said, quietly. ‘Show me your legs.’
She went rigid. ‘I will not! I’m not that sort of a woman.’
Deaf to his captive’s protestations, Alan caught both her wrists in one hand and went down on his knees to examine legs that were as thin as lathes. There were sores there too, angry ones. He knew that in the morning they would be weeping and red. He climbed to his feet.
‘Let me go!’ The woman’s voice trembled, for she understood that this stranger had seen through her deception. He knew that she had been scratching the acid juices from the plants into her skin with the scallop shell in order to raise those ugly, blistering sores. She was a beggar and the trick with the spearwort, though painful, was her favourite stock-in-trade. She could attract more sympathy and consequently more alms from passers-by if she was covered in sores. She usually began begging at the hospital gate, after dawn. Brother Raoul knew her ploy and named it a sin, but Brother Raoul did not betray her to the townsfolk. Would this stranger betray her?
‘You fool,’ Alan said. ‘You could give yourself blood poisoning with that trick.’
‘You...you won’t cry it about the town?’ the beggar-woman asked. When he shook his dark head, she breathed more easily. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said, and her voice was not quite so defensive. ‘You can let me go, if you’ve finished manhandling me.’ She risked a direct glance, trying to make him out. ‘Who are you?’
‘A traveller,’ came the cryptic response. He tugged at the frayed rope girdle which barely held her ragged clothing together and started hauling her towards the river.
‘Hey! What are doing?’ Her tone sharpened as a different suspicion chilled her. She tried to fight him off, but in her feeble, half-starved state she was no match for him. ‘I told you I’m not a wh–’
He whipped the girdle from her too-thin waist and a heartbeat later she was stripped of her shift. Naked and shivering, she crossed her arms in front of her breasts. So this was to be his price, was it? He wanted to use her. ‘No! Please, sir. No!
‘Into the water,’ Alan said, harshly.
The woman stared in blank incomprehension.
‘Into the water.’ Alan nudged her shin with a booted foot, but gently. ‘I want you to rinse that stuff off you.’
‘You mean...you’re not going to...’
‘Rape you?’ Cold, quicksilver eyes ran dismissively up and down the length of her body until the beggar-woman felt a blush cloak her throat and cheeks. ‘No. I want you to wash that poison off your skin.’