Robert began: ‘Father—’
Malet raised a hand against his son’s protest. ‘What have you come seeking this time?’ He almost spat the words. ‘More gratitude for your good service? Further plaudits for your prowess at arms? Your weight in gold coin, perhaps? I can tell you now that you will find none of those things here.’
‘I ask nothing of you, lord,’ I said.
But he was not listening. ‘I do not wish to see this man,’ he said to Robert. ‘Why have you brought him here?’
He had never fully forgiven me for the treachery, as he saw it, that he had suffered at my hands. That was why he had dismissed me from his service: because, in his eyes, I had betrayed the trust he’d placed in me, even though I’d done so for good reason and in good conscience. At the same time, however, he couldn’t deny that he owed me, and that was why he resented me. Twice I had rescued his hide in the last few years. More galling than the knowledge of that debt was his continuing inability to pay it. Each time he saw me must have seemed a further insult. Nonetheless, a little more gratitude would not have gone amiss. He’d hardly had a single kind word to say to me since the night of that battle in Beferlic all those months ago.
‘I come bearing no ill will,’ I tried to assure him. ‘I merely wished to know how you were faring.’
He snorted scornfully, as if he didn’t believe a word that came out of my mouth. ‘Leave us,’ he snapped at Dudo.
The priest said nothing but bowed. Without meeting either my eyes or Robert’s, he made for the door, although I sensed he wouldn’t venture too far in case his lord needed him. Why it crossed my mind just then I do not know, but for some reason I found myself thinking again of ?lfwold, the Englishman who had been Malet’s previous chaplain and who had met his end some two years earlier. A kind-hearted man, he had tended to me while I was recovering from injury and fever. From our first meeting I’d taken to him in a way that I could not to this Dudo, which was a strange thing to admit given what ?lfwold had later done, and yet it was true, since for a time at least I had counted the Englishman as a friend.
‘This enmity must end,’ Robert said when the priest had left, his tone sharp and his eyes hard as he glanced first at his father and then at me. ‘I will not have the two of you at each other’s throats.’
This was the real reason why he had brought me here, then. To try to forge a reconciliation between us.
‘Why should I waste my breath dealing with him?’ Malet asked, and turned his back.
‘Because I wish it,’ Robert said.
Shaking his head, Malet limped stiffly across the room to where a pitcher stood on a table beside a stack of parchments, and poured himself a cup. I remembered when our paths had first crossed, in his richly decorated palace at Eoferwic, a very different place to this. How long ago it all seemed, though only two years had passed. How far his fortunes had fallen.
Certainly it was true that I’d never had any especial love for him. While he was more astute and quick-minded than most great barons, many of whom had won their reputations through the sword alone, he was not nearly as cunning as he liked to think. Indeed Malet had always seemed to me arrogant, aloof in manner and calculating: everything that his son was not. But even though I had little respect for him as a lord and a leader of men, I would never wish any harm upon him, and it saddened me to see him brought so low.
‘It was Tancred who came for us at Beferlic,’ Robert said. ‘How can you hold a grudge against a man who risked everything to help save your life?’
‘He never came for me,’ Malet said, almost spitting the words. ‘He came for you, Robert. You are his lord. He would have left me to my fate otherwise.’
The barb stung, but what stung harder was the realisation that there was probably a grain of truth in his words.
‘No, lord—’ I started to protest, but he cut me off.