The Stone Rose Read online

  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.’

  She gaped, hugging her arms about her. ‘Wash it off, sir?’

  Alan moved a step closer. The woman’s body was ivory in the half-light. She was more fragile than Gwenn, and so thin as to be almost all bone, but she would be attractive if she carried more weight. Her eyes were sharp as daggers, and hostile.

  ‘You want me to keep your secret?’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  ‘Then scrub that poison off.’

  The sharp eyes widened.

  ‘Move, damn you! Else I’ll do it for you.’

  His tone was such that the woman believed him, and when he took a threatening pace towards her, she gave in to the inevitable and waded into the river. ‘It’s cold,’ she said peevishly.

  ‘If you hurry,’ Alan offered gruffly, not knowing why he should care if this waif starved or not, ‘I’ll stand you a meal at the inn.’ The pale, thin limbs gleaming in the starlight must have uncovered a store of compassion in him.

  The woman in the water shot him a look which was a heart-wrenching blend of hope and disbelief, and hurried.

  The Green Man was all but closed when they got there, and the landlord, a pot-bellied, pigeon-toed fellow with a shiny bald pate, was clearing the boards with economical efficiency. To judge by the way the beggar-woman slunk in after Alan, she had never been allowed past the door before. The landlord threw her a disdainful look, and half-raised a fist. The woman shrank closer to Alan, unable to prevent hungry eyes lingering on the cured hams hanging in the glow of a beaming fire.

  Hands on his hips, Alan intercepted the landlord’s sneer. ‘She’s with me.’

  Noting the newcomer had a fine cloak, stout leather boots, and a good-quality sword, the landlord shrugged. He made it a rule never to query likely customers, however odd their companions. He motioned the newcomer and the beggar-woman to a table by the fire.

  ‘Have you anyone to watch my horse?’ Alan asked, noting with approval the military orderliness of the tavern. Serried ranks of hams and sausages dangled from blackened beams close to the fire. The beams away from the smoke and heat were in use too, hung with long pendants of shiny, golden onions and bunches of dried herbs. Alan felt a sudden surge of longing to see his home, for his mother had always kept a good larder. He wondered how his father was faring without her. If it were not for his duty to the Duke, he would go and visit his father when he had Ned and Gwenn safe. But he was sworn to the Duke till after the tournament. After that, however, he would take his leave.

  The landlord nodded. ‘Mathieu!’

  ‘Father?’ A spindly, weed of a lad popped up at the innkeeper’s elbow.

  ‘See to this man’s mount, will you?’

  ‘Aye, Father.’ The boy slipped like an eel through the door.

  While they ate, Alan studied the beggar-woman. The inn-keeper knew her, and it was all too easy for Alan to conjure up a vision of
her loitering by the tavern door, scavenging for discarded scraps like a stray. She would be pretty if she filled out a little, and now that her face was not twisted with that acute, feral mislike of all mankind that was common to most beggars, he glimpsed a hint of sweetness in the wasted features. Her injudicious use of the spearwort had not done much for her complexion, and her skin was marred with unsightly blotches. The lamplight revealed her to be even younger than Alan had thought, and he found himself wondering what had reduced her to beggary. Her eyes, like Gwenn’s, were brown.

  ‘Have you no family?’ Gwenn had lost her family... Thank God for Cousin Ned.

  The girl, for that was all she was, paused in the act of biting into a chicken leg, and as she lifted her head to look at Alan, her face took on a cunning, shiftless look. ‘I’m a widow,’ she said, employing the whine of the professional beggar. ‘When my husband died, he left me destitute.’

  Alan estimated her to be sixteen – about Gwenn’s age. ‘Isn’t there something else you could do, apart from begging?’

  ‘Like what?’ she asked, strong teeth worrying at her chicken bone.

  His wave took in the orderly tavern. ‘Work here, for instance?’

  ‘Ha!’ Hurling an acid glance at the landlord, the girl spoke through a mouthful of meat. ‘Work for that mean old wind-bladder? You must be touched if you think he’d employ me.’

  Alan dropped the subject. He had neither the time nor the inclination to root into her past, and he wondered at himself for showing even this much interest in her. It felt good to have seen her eat a decent meal, though. Thank God Gwenn had Ned.

  While he waved for another pot of ale, it occurred to him that he had not purchased liquor from the hospital, and wine would be welcome on the road. ‘Landlord?’

  The man shuffled over, almost tripping over his feet. ‘Sir?’ The cloth he had tucked into his belt was snowy white and spotless.

  ‘I’d like to buy some ale to take with me, and perhaps some wine. I’ve a couple of leather bottles you could fill. What have you got?’

  While the landlord scratched his polished pate and began listing his stock, the girl studied her benefactor. This rare consideration from a complete stranger had won her interest. He was tall for a Breton and sounded vaguely foreign. Her guess was that he was a soldier, probably a mercenary. She eyed his sword – he’d been quick to draw it when he’d prised her out from under the bridge. Black brows arched over alert, grey eyes. His nose was straight; his mouth full and sensuous. The man was handsome, if one went for those strong, dark, pirate looks. She knew his type, his creed was bound to be love them and leave them, just like her Eujen’s had been. And just like her Eujen, she found him dangerously, devilishly attractive.

  While giving his order, Alan glanced briefly across at her. Feeling her cheeks glow, she dropped her eyes to her trencher in case he misunderstood her look, and thought she was making eyes at him. She never looked at men these days, not since Eujen had gone. She never looked at anyone, only glancing at people’s purses to see how plump they were, or at their hands to see if they were giving her anything. The only face she had looked at properly in months was Brother Raoul’s, and that was because he saw her fed, and asked how she was, and seemed to care.

  She listened to her companion’s deep voice asking the landlord how much he was owed, and wondered where he came from. She tore a chunk off her trencher. She could not for the life of her work out why a man like him should have taken it into his head to buy her a meal. If only she could find a man to protect her, and care for her, and not run off like Eujen had done when he had discovered she was pregnant. The girl sighed. It was easier to catch a rainbow than catch a man.

  She cast her mind back to the unhappy time after Eujen had abandoned her and she had been forced to tell her parents that she was to have a child. Her parents, deeply religious, had been horrified by her pregnancy. They had thrown her out of her home in a nearby village, and she had trudged to Pontivy, thinking she could find work. But no one wanted to employ a pregnant girl who might become a burden on them, and she had soon been reduced to begging for scraps. Her baby had died, and the old crone who had helped her through the birth had told her that she was unlikely to bear another child. She remembered weeping at the time, not only for the loss of her Eujen’s child, but also because she was become barren. What man would take a barren woman to wife?

  But the old woman had taken her by the shoulders and had shaken her. ‘You fool!’ she had hissed. ‘You should count it a blessing that you are barren.’

  ‘A b...blessing?’ Tears had streamed down her cheeks.

  ‘Aye. For now you can follow the oldest profession in the world, but unlike most of the other poor sluts, you need never worry about the consequences. You need never beg.’

  But she had not been able to bring herself to look at a man in that way, for none of them were Eujen. Unable to become a whore, in the end she had been driven to begging.

  And now, for the first time since Eujen had gone, she had stopped to look at a man. Her heart warned her that this one was not the sort to let himself be pinned down by the likes of her. He was Eujen all over again. He had not told her his name when she had asked, only replying that he was a traveller. A traveller. What the foreigner meant was that, like Eujen, he had the wanderlust. He wanted no ties. Nonetheless, she warmed to him. He had made her wash the poison off. He had fed her. He had cared for her, if only for a few hours. Why was it that she was only attracted to men who’d run a thousand miles to escape commitment? This man’s eyes were not green like Eujen’s had been. This man had grey eyes which were as cold as a December frost. But by the saints, he was comely.

  ‘There’s no need to devour your trencher.’ The foreigner sounded amused. Pulling her hand from her trencher, he loosed a ripple of sensation up her arms such as she had not felt since Eujen.

  Determined not to blush, she thrust her hands under the table. Her companion smiled at her with his mouth, but his eyes still carried December in their depths.

  ‘You’re not a beggar tonight. If you’re hungry, I’ll order more meat. Landlord!’

  Half an hour later, they left the tavern. With her belly full for the first time in what seemed like a lifetime, the girl waited till they reached the stranger’s princely horse. ‘My thanks, sir, for your hospitality. I wish you God speed.’ She wished he was not leaving. She wished he would stay.

  Alan took Firebrand’s bridle, and pressed a coin into the girl’s palm.

  ‘My thanks,’ she acknowledged, in a small voice, blinking at the bright disc. ‘You are very generous, sir.’ She wished she could give him something in return.

  ‘No, I’m not.’ Gathering his reins, he swung up into the high saddle.

  ‘A knight errant,’ she murmured, head tilted to look at him.

  He heard her, and his lips curled in amusement. ‘I’m no knight,’ he said, raising his hand in a gesture of farewell, ‘though there might be some truth in the errant part.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, wishing he would stay. A black brow lifted, he was waiting for her to continue. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she finished. He would be gone in a second or two. She drew as close to his horse as she dared, for she had no familiarity with horses and was a little afraid of them. She heard herself say, ‘I...I’d like to repay your generosity.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Drawing in a breath, she nodded and, mimicking the women who hung about the Rohan garrison, smoothed her shabby gown about her hips. She even moistened her lips and looked into his December eyes with the bold, direct stare she had seen those women use. ‘I could give you my body.’

  ‘No,’ he said curtly. Once Alan would have taken her up on her offer without hesitation, but not now, not any more. He could not so abuse her. He had put all thoughts of finding a bedfellow out of his mind when he had run across this half-starved waif. Her suggestion almost shocked him.

  ‘You find me ugly,’ she murmured, head drooping.

  Alan’s
mind stirred with the memory of the beggar-girl’s long, slender limbs, gleaming white as a lily in the moonglow. ‘No,’ he repeated, and then, guessing at her misery and what it had cost her to make her astounding offer, he lowered his voice and sought to soften his rejection of her. ‘You are fair when you forget to hate the world.’

  Now that she had taken her courage into her hands and offered herself to this foreign soldier, she discovered that she had not done so purely to repay a debt. She wanted some loving herself, and she did not think this man would use her roughly, as others might. This man would take his pleasure slow and gently...

  She looked at the capable hands holding the horse’s reins. She was a beggar and the town pariah, and she had not been touched by anyone in a loving manner since Eujen. Apart from Brother Raoul’s vague enquiries, all she ever got from anyone was a clout about the ears or a choice curse. Now, tonight, she yearned for closer contact. She wanted to kiss the stranger. She wanted to be held by him, even if just for one night, even if it was a lie and in the morning he would ride into the forest and forget he’d ever lain with her. ‘Please, sir.’ It was easy for a beggar to beg; any pride she had ever possessed had long been bludgeoned out of her.

  ‘No, you told me yourself you were no whore.’

  She tossed her head, dark hair rippling out over her threadbare cloak, and looked straight into his eyes. ‘By St Ivy, I am no whore.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘I want some loving.’

  Moved by the girl’s simple admission, Alan made a strange noise in his throat. He spoke bluntly. ‘We shared a meal, that’s all. You can’t offer yourself to a chance-met stranger and hope it will turn into love.’

  ‘I know that. But I want...need...’

  Alan dismounted and took her hand. He needed it too, but not if this girl-woman was to be left to pay the price. ‘Look,’ he said quietly, ‘I am honoured by your offer, but I see you are not a harlot. You are forgetting the consequences.’

  ‘Consequences?’ The pale, oval face was strangely vacant. ‘There can be no consequences. I’m barren.’