Knight's Fee Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  1. The New Lord of Arundel

  2. A Game of Chess

  3. The Water Stair

  4. River of No Return

  5. Red Amber

  6. The Wise Woman

  7. The Custom of the Manor

  8. All Souls’ Eve

  9. The Hawking Party

  10. The Flowering Flint

  11. Witch Hunt!

  12. De Braose’s Banner

  13. The Red-Haired Girl

  14. Sir Bevis D’Aguillon

  15. The Wealden Blackbird

  16. Michaelmas Eve

  17. Knight’s Fee

  18. The Lord of Dean Comes Home

  Historical Note

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Randall is an unloved and unwanted orphan kennel boy at Arundel Castle. And then, one fateful day, he upsets the new Lord’s mettlesome horse.

  Against the violent, greedy and turbulent backdrop of Norman England, Rosemary Sutcliff tells the moving story of a young, badly treated boy who is wagered and won in a game of chess between a lord and a minstrel . . .

  Once again Rosemary Sutcliff brings her unique storytelling gift to an exciting and absorbing story.

  Knight’s Fee

  Rosemary Sutcliff

  1

  The New Lord of Arundel

  HIS NAME WAS Randal, Randal the Bastard, Randal the Thief. His father was a Breton Man-at-Arms, and his mother a Saxon lady, one of several who had waited on the old Countess. She, having nothing to live for, had died when he was born; his father had been killed when he was four years old, in the constant warfare along the Welsh Marches, and neither among his father’s people nor his mother’s was there any place for Randal. The only person who had ever shown him any kindness, and that was of a somewhat rough and ready sort, was Lovel the Huntsman, who had taken him over from the time when the woman who sold cheap wine to the men-at-arms had thrown him out like an unwanted nestling because with his father dead there would be no more money for keeping him. Lovel had brought him up, or rather, allowed him to bring himself up in the kennels along with the hound puppies, and treated him as he treated all the rest of his charges, thrashing him mercilessly with the same long oxhide whip when he was wicked, purging him with buckthorn in the spring, and sitting up with him when he had the colic.

  He was nine years old now, going on ten, and officially a dog-boy, but in actual fact just something of no account, to be kicked by anyone who felt like kicking, and plenty of people did. Sometimes, when he had been kicked particularly hard, or Lovel had used the whip more savagely than usual, or when he was especially hungry, he would crawl away into a dark corner and indulge in a welter of self-pity, wondering if his mother knew what they were doing to him, until the tears made white stripes down his dirty face to echo the red stripes that the oxhide lash had made on his scrawny brown back. But for the most part he contrived, somehow, to enjoy life.

  He was enjoying it now, in this hot, blue August noon, lying on the gatehouse roof to watch for the new Lord of Arundel. He should not, of course, have been on the gatehouse roof, and at any ordinary time, since the only way of reaching it was up the guardroom stair, there would have been no chance of his getting here. But the workmen who had been doing something to the roof had left their ropes and tackle for pulling timber up in position, and where there was a rope, Randal could climb, especially with a projecting buttress to shield him from interruption. They had left some of their timber up here too, ready for use, and between the stacked beams and the parapet was a small secluded strip, well out of sight of the sentinels who paced to and fro on the roof of the great Keep.

  Randal lay on his back, lapping up the sunshine until he felt that it was pouring right through him so that if he got up he would have no shadow. Nothing to see but the coping stones of the high, crenellated parapet on one side, the stacked timber on the other, and overhead the burning blue laced with the flight of swallows. He heard the bustle of preparations going on in the bailey far below him, the Master-at-Arms bellowing orders, the high voices of the women, the pad of hurrying feet on the beaten earth, all small and distinct with distance. Somewhere below the gatehouse two men were talking. Their voices carried up to him along the face of the wall.

  ‘They should be here soon,’ one of the men said. ‘It must be full two hours agone that Gilbert Goaty-Beard rode out in state to meet them.’

  ‘A fine thing ’twill be to have a Lord of Arundel here in his stronghold again,’ said a deeper voice with a note of recklessness in it. ‘Three years of Steward Gilbert and our saintly Lady Adeliza is more than enough for any man’s belly, while the Old Lion sits in his own abbey of Shrewsbury, making his peace with God.’

  The first gave a snort of laughter. ‘’Tis to be hoped he managed it by the end. It must have taken quite a bit of doing . . . Aye well, at least we shall have better living than we’ve had in these past years, with the Lady so busy feeding the Poor and the Church that there was naught but outworn plough-ox beef and watered beer for her own men-at-arms.’

  ‘Aye, young Montgomery won’t make that mistake.’ There was a deep chuckle.

  Silence followed, and then the first man spoke again, reflectively. ‘Young Montgomery . . . You’d think, seeing what’s come of the Conqueror leaving England to a younger son and only Normandy to the eldest, that the Old Lion would have more wisdom than to do the same thing.’

  ‘Meaning that the two cubs will be at each other’s throats? Na, na, I’ve known those two since they were children. They were devils then and they’re devils now, but they don’t turn their devilry against each other. If ’tis true as they say, that de Bellême rides in with his brother today, then I’d say more like they’re planning to turn it against – someone else. ’Twouldn’t be the first time. They have no more love for Red William than have most of his Barons, I reckon, and they’re as fire-headed as he is himself.’

  ‘Careful with that sort of talk,’ the other man growled in sudden caution, and Randal, listening in his sunbaked corner, heard their feet scuffle, and the lowered grumble of their voices as they moved away.

  He reached for one of the three dried figs that he had stolen from the kitchen – he always stole anything he got the chance to, because nothing ever came to him otherwise – flicked away a couple of flies, and bit into it. It was soft and very sweet, sticky with the heat, and added to his sense of holiday. He sat up, then scrambled to his feet and peered out through the nearest crenelle.

  It was like being a kestrel, up here; a kestrel hanging in the sky, looking down on the thatched roofs of the little town beneath their faint haze of woodsmoke, on the Hault Rey looping out through the downs, brown and swift under its alders, winding away through the tawny marshes to the sea; and nothing as high as you were yourself until the oakwoods on the far side of the river valley started climbing the downs again. A little breath of wind came siffling over the shoulder of the woods, and blew a long wisp of hair that would have been barley pale if it was not grey with dirt, into the boy’s eyes, and he thought that it brought with it the faint sound of a horn.

  He thrust the hair out of his eyes with the back of his dusty olive brown hand in which he held the rest of the fig, and pulled himself up with a foot in the crenelle, staring out along the track that followed the flank of the downs. Far off where it ran out from the deep-layered shade of the oak woods, a faint cloud of dust was rising.

  A few moments later the trumpets of the Castle sang from high on the crest of the Keep. The new Lord of Shrewsbury and Arundel was in sight.

  Truly in sight now for the dust c
loud was rolling nearer, and under it Randal could see a dark skein of men and horses. Nearer and nearer. They were pouring up the track through the town, between the staring townsfolk and scratching dogs who had crowded to their doorways to see them go by. Colour and detail began to spark out from the general mass, and the blink of light on sword hilt or harness buckle. Some of the Arundel knights who had ridden out with Sir Gilbert that morning wore the new fashionable long sleeves and trailing skirts to their tunics that all but tangled in their stirrups; but the newcomers, straight from warfare and the Welsh Marches, were shabbier and more grimly workmanlike. Several of them wore their padded gambesons, and here and there was even a glint of ringmail from men who had worn harness so long that they had forgotten how to wear the gayer garments of peace-time.

  Randal leaned farther and farther out, his half-eaten fig forgotten in his hand, his gaze fixed on the man who rode at their head. It was the first time, at least to remember, that he had seen this new Earl of Arundel, Hugh Montgomery, whom the Welsh called Hugh Goch – Hugh the Red – from the colour of his hair and maybe for other reasons also. He was a tall man in an old gambeson, who rode bareheaded, flame-haired in the dusty sunlight, managing his black Percheron stallion as though he and the beast were one. Sir Gilbert the Steward rode beside him, leaning confidentially toward his ear; and on his other side rode another man, red also, but a darker red, the colour of a polished chestnut. Randal knew him well enough, for he had seen the Old Lion’s eldest son before; Robert, not Montgomery but de Bellême, for he had taken the name of his mother’s lands in Normandy. His gaze flickered from one brother to the other and back again. The man-at-arms had called them the cubs, because the old Earl their father had been called the Old Lion, from the strange golden beast on a red ground that he had on his war banner; but Randal thought suddenly that what they really were, were birds of prey – like the great, beautiful, half-mad hawks and falcons in the Castle mews.

  Half a length behind de Bellême rode another man who stood out from the rest almost as much as the red-headed brothers, a long, loose-limbed man clad from throat to heel in monkish black – save that no monk ever wore garments of that outlandish cut, and the long, fantastically wide sleeves falling back from his arms were lined with the shrill, clear yellow of broom flowers. He carried no sword, this man, but a light harp on his saddle bow, and played and sang as he rode, his voice coming up on the little wind, light, but strong and true above the swelling smother of hoof-beats; and him also Randal knew, for anyone who had seen de Bellême before must also have seen Herluin, de Bellême’s minstrel. But it was on Hugh Goch that all the boy’s attention was fixed, as he leaned farther and farther out from his perch while the head of the cavalcade swept nearer, the baggage train of its tail lost behind it in the white, August dust-cloud.

  The trumpeters on the Keep were sounding again as the foremost riders swept up to the bridge. The horses’ hooves were trampling hollow on the bridge timbers. Hugh Goch was directly below him now, in another instant the dark tunnel of the gate arch would have swallowed him and it would be time to dart across the roof and hang over the other side to see him come riding into the bailey; and in that instant, as the new Lord reined back a little, looking up at his inheritance, the thing happened. A very small thing, but it was to change Randal’s whole life. He dropped the half-eaten fig.

  Before his horrified gaze the dark speck went spinning downward for what seemed an eternity of time. It struck the black stallion full on the nose, and instant chaos broke loose. The great brute tossed up his head with a snort of rage and fear, plunged sideways into de Bellême’s bay, and flinging round in a panic that was as much temper as anything else, went up in a rearing half-turn. There was a flurry of shouts above the savage drumming of hooves: ‘Look out, for God’s sake! . . . Ah, would you now? – Fiends of Hell . . .’ The stallion had become a mere plunging and squealing tempest of black legs and rolling mane and flaming eyes and nostrils. He would have had a lesser rider in the ditch before a heart might pound twice, but in Hugh Goch he might have been trying to shake off part of his own body. The red-haired man clung viciously to his back, and Randal, staring down with wide, horrified eyes, saw him whip out his dagger and hammer with the pummel between the laid-back ears. In a few moments it was over, the black Percheron trembling on all four legs again, and the chaos that had spread behind him sorting itself out. Hugh Goch swung him round once more to the gate arch, and reining him back with a merciless hand that dragged his bleeding, bit-torn mouth open against his throat, sat looking up, straight up along the face of the gatehouse wall, until his eyes met those of the boy, still leaning out from the crenelle and no more able to move than if he had suddenly become one of the Castle stones.

  Hugh Goch’s face was white and thin under the flame of his hair, long-boned and almost delicate, but his eyes were the cold, inhuman, gold-rimmed eyes of a bird of prey, and looking into them, Randal was more afraid than he had ever been in his life before. For a long moment the two looked at each other, the dog-boy and the new Lord of Arundel, and then the power of movement returned to Randal, and he darted back from the crenelle, and turned and ran.

  Half-sobbing in terror, he made for the ropes and scaffolding that he had come up by, and almost flung himself over the edge. The ropes tore the skin from the palms of his hands as he dropped, but he scarcely felt it, and a moment later he was crouching in a bruised heap on the narrow rampart walk behind the curtain wall. He heard the hallow clatter of hooves pouring through under the gate arch, and a reckless burst of laughter caught up by a score of voices, and knew that Hugh Goch was turning the thing into a jest. But it would be an evil jest for him, if the Lord of Arundel knew him again. With one hunted glance at the scene in the bailey, where the Lady Adeliza and her women stood waiting and all the Castle had turned out to see the new Lord ride in, he gathered himself up and bolted. He ducked under the hand of a grinning man-at-arms stretched out to catch him, hurtled down the rampart steps and dived panting into the dark alleyway behind the armourer’s shop.

  Over the years a veritable town had grown up round the inner side of the curtain wall, like the fungus that grows up round a tree stump; barracks and mews, stables and kennels, granaries, armouries, storehouses, baking and brewing sheds, all jumbled and crowded together in higgledy-piggledy confusion, and Randal knew the ways round and through and under the confusion better than almost anyone else in the Castle. So now he took to it as a small hunted animal taking to furze cover, making for the only sanctuary he knew, the kennels, right round on the far side of the bailey behind the vast mound of the Keep.

  He reached it at last, stumbled in through the walled court where they turned the hounds out while they cleaned the kennels every day, and dived, still sobbing and shivering, into the darkness of the open doorway. Inside it was surprisingly cool under the thick thatch, and sweeter smelling than the Great Hall, for they changed the hounds’ straw every few days, the Hall rushes only two or three times a year. There were no humans there, for Lovel had been sick with some kind of fever in his own quarters these three days past, and Gildon who was supposed to be in his place would be round on the far side of the Keep with everybody else. But the hunting dogs greeted him with thumping tails, great tawny shapes rousing from their noonday sleep; Beauty stood on her hind legs to lick his face, but Garm sniffed at him whimpering, as though he smelled the boy’s fear. Randal stumbled straight through them, up the long, barnlike place towards the little shut-off lair at the far end, where Lovel kept his whips and leashes and medicines, and had a fire-place for warming sick puppies. Next to this lair was a corner partly screened off with hurdles, and into this he turned, and flung himself down in the straw between the two huge, brindled shapes that already lay there.

  Bran and Gerland accepted his coming, though woe betide any other hound that came trespassing round their side of the hurdles. The two great Irish wolfhounds had been the old Earl’s constant companions until he left the world for his abbey three yea
rs ago, and since then, refusing their allegiance to anyone else in the Castle, they had chosen to take up their quarters here with Lovel, who had the right smell. The only person, save for the huntsman himself, who could do anything with them was Randal, who stood little higher on his two legs than they did on their four, for they were about the size of ponies.

  Now they made room for him as an equal, and he crawled between them and lay shivering with his face buried in Gerland’s neck, telling them over and over again in a terrified whisper, ‘I didn’t mean to do it – I didn’t mean any harm – I didn’t . . .’

  For a long while he lay there, his heart hammering against his ribs as though it must fly out of his body, his breath coming and going in little jerks, his ears on the stretch for any sound that might mean the hunt on his trail. But he heard only the usual sounds of the Castle, and bit by bit his heart quietened and his panic died down a little. ‘He’ll forget,’ he told himself. ‘If I can keep out of his way for a few days, he’ll forget all about it. And he did laugh – afterwards. Maybe he wasn’t so very angry after all, maybe it was just the sun that made his eyes look like that.’

  So he lay, telling himself over and over again in the same frightened whisper inside his head, that the Lord of Arundel would forget, while the long, hot summer’s day crawled its length towards evening.

  About sunset, Gildon came with the great baskets of raw meat, and the baying and snarling that always broke out at feeding time sounded from end to end of the long kennels. Bran and Gerland got up and shook themselves and went out, proudly pacing, to demand their share, the royal share, and Randal was left quite alone. He was hungry too, as hungry as the hounds. Usually at this time of day he went up to the Keep and hung about the kitchen below the guardroom, waiting for the food that the Great Folk had not eaten to come down from the Hall. He had eaten with the hounds before now, but he did not really like raw meat. But this evening he was too afraid, too afraid even to creep out of his corner and fight one of the hound puppies for a lump of worn-out horse meat.