Taking hold of Guyon’s free arm, she stood on tiptoe in mimicry of Alais, but instead of whispering, she bit him. Guyon jerked with a stifled yelp. ‘Just thank Christ I chose your ear,’ Judith said and looked at the startled older woman. ‘You must be Alais,’ she said. ‘I have heard much about you, so I won’t waste any more of my time, yours, or my husband’s,’ and, in guardroom English, purloined from childhood escapades, she told Alais de Clare precisely what she could do.
Guyon spluttered. Alais gaped at Judith in horrified astonishment. Judith, taking her rival’s rooted shock for defiance, raised her arm to strike her, but Guyon seized her wrist and bore it down in a grip of steel.
‘It is best if I go, Guy,’ Alais cooed in a pillow-soft voice and patted his arm. ‘You can give me your reply later.’ Ignoring Judith’s dagger-bright stare, indeed ignoring Judith altogether, she left him and moved on to intercept, with a ready smile, a young baron attached to Chester’s household.
‘What in God’s name do you think you are doing?’ Guyon hissed at her. ‘You’re a marcher baroness, not a fishwife and the sooner you remember that the better!’
‘And she’s a high-bred gutter whore!’ Judith spat in return. ‘I suppose you have arranged to bed with her!’
‘You’ve hardly grounds for complaint, have you?’
For a moment they glared at each other, the air between them charged with tension. And then Guyon released his breath on a hard sigh. ‘I wasn’t making a liaison behind your back,’ he said and tugged her silk-twined braid. ‘Jesu God, don’t you think I have enough trouble controlling the woman I’ve got without noosing myself to a featherbrain like Alais de Clare?’ He grimaced and rubbed his bitten ear.
Judith lowered her lids and looked down at her soft gilded shoes. The impetus of the wine was beginning to wear off. She felt foolish and a little sick. ‘But I thought … Christen said that you and she used to …’
Guyon snorted. ‘Once, twice, no more. I was too drunk the first time and too desperate the second to make better provision and Alais was so pleased with herself that she made the whole court a party to her conquest until her husband clapped his hand over her mouth and pushed her at Henry. He’s very partial to brainless blondes.’
‘And you are not?’
‘I have a marked preference for tawny-haired vixens.’ He slipped his arm around her narrow waist, drawing her close to his side.
On the dais, William Rufus laughed again and clapped a brawny arm across the shoulder of the slender young man seated next to him. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed with a mouth like a freshly bitten strawberry.
‘His latest toy,’ Guyon said. ‘He’s called Ernoul and comes from Toulouse. It’s fortunate that Anselm of Canterbury isn’t here, he’d have a seizure.’
‘Who’s the priest on the dais with him, then?’ Judith asked and shifted her hip from the intimate sidelong pressure of his thigh.
Guyon pretended not to notice. ‘Rannulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham. He wouldn’t flinch if Rufus led a goat in here and held a black mass before his very eyes, providing there was money in it of course.’ He cast his gaze around.
‘Flambard designed this hall. Rufus says it’s too big for a room and too small for a great hall, but that’s just his nature.’
‘As is Ernoul?’
‘As is Ernoul,’ he said and tried not to think of how it felt to have the King’s arm draped heavily across the back of your neck, or to feel his breath hot on your cheek and know that any moment you were going to be sick. Probably Ernoul didn’t mind. Probably Ernoul was being paid a lot of money.
Judith shuddered. The royal court was twice as dangerous and barbaric as life in the marches. As in nature, the bright colours were a warning not to touch. She too knew how to stalk and snarl in all that jungle of colour, but inwardly it worried her. When everyone was a predator, someone was bound to get eaten.
The evening continued. Yet another course of the interminable feast arrived. Things disguised as other things, stuffed and gilded and caparisoned in mimicry of the great gathering they were intended to feed. The wine changed from cold, sharp Anjou to a cloying French red. The dishes ran the gamut of the head cook’s heat-sweated imagination. Decorated roast meats served with spicy perfumed sauces, pies filled with fruit and chopped meat and one full of tiny live birds that flew amok and twittered around the hall, soiling the new hangings in their panic. The King sent to the mews for his sparrowhawks.
Musicians played with varying degrees of skill. A jester told some bawdy jokes. A sword swallower amazed the gullible. The knife juggler attempted a refinement that did not quite work andwas carried off bleeding like a stuck pig. Rufus did the rounds of his vassals, full of a bluff, jovial bonhomie, the force of it hinting at the choleric temper that lay close to the surface.
The King was a squat, compact barrel of a man with a round, sanguine face and short, powerful limbs. None of the Conqueror’s sons were able to boast their sire’s inches, although all of them possessed his breadth and inclination towards middle-aged corpulence. Florid and strutting like a barnyard cockerel, Rufus chucked Judith beneath the chin as though she were a kitchen maid. ‘So,’ he grinned, ‘this is Maurice FitzRoger’s wench, eh?’
‘Sire.’ Judith lowered her lids. His fingers were as thick and clammy as raw sausages, but instead of being limp they gripped powerfully, pinching her flesh.
‘Skinny little thing, isn’t she?’ Rufus mused to Guyon as if Judith was deaf. ‘No sign of a belly on her yet either?’
‘I’m in no hurry, sire,’ Guyon responded with a lazy smile. ‘A flat furrow’s easier to plough than one with a slope.’
Rufus let out a great guffaw and his variegated grey-brown eyes squeezed into puffy slits. His sense of humour was crude and boisterous and it was the kind of remark that he wholeheartedly appreciated.
Judith lifted her taut jaw off his fingers, feeling like a market beast on a block. Rufus opened his eyes and she glared back at him.
‘God’s blood!’ He chuckled softly. ‘I remember my grandam Arlette giving me that look when she was wrath.’
It was the second time that evening that she had been compared to the dead Countess of Conteville and it disturbed her not a little. ‘Probably you deserved it,’ she said.
There was a momentary silence. The bonhomie slipped a little. ‘You’ve a saucy tongue,’ the King remarked sharply.
