‘I’ll live, I suppose,’ I muttered. ‘I’ve suffered worse injuries in my time.’
She smiled at that. When first we met she had not much liked me, I remembered, and it was a while before I ever saw such warmth from her. She sat down on the damp ground beside me, amidst the leaves and the windfalls. She wasn’t wearing a cloak, and I wondered that she wasn’t cold.
‘Your brother sent you, didn’t he?’ I asked.
‘Why do you think that?’
‘He means to convince me to join him on this expedition to Flanders.’
‘He tells me you have it in your head to go to Dyflin.’
That was neither a confirmation nor a denial, although, I thought, if he had told her that much, it meant that at least he had been listening.
‘Where’s your husband?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t he concerned about you seeking out the company of strange men?’
She gave me a wry look. ‘He went hawking in the woods with some of my father’s other vassals. He’s a keen falconer. Robert lent him his swiftest bird, Ligetsleht. He said they wouldn’t be back until dusk.’
‘All the same,’ I said, teasing her, ‘if he hears that you’ve been arranging secret meetings in the orchard while he’s away, he won’t be pleased.’
Guillaume d’Archis, for I’d learnt that was his name, seemed a humourless sort, although perhaps that was unfair, given that I had only met him properly for the first time that morning, after the funeral. To my mind he was rather cold, not easily approachable, and taciturn, too, with hard eyes that betrayed no feeling. Not the sort of husband I imagined being well suited to Beatrice, who was warm in heart and gentle in spirit.
Was there a touch of jealousy there? Perhaps, but only because it had been so long since I myself had last felt a woman’s touch. Whatever feelings Beatrice and I might once have shared, they were long buried.
‘My being here isn’t any secret,’ she said. ‘Robert asked if I would come and speak with you.’
There, finally, was my answer. ‘You mean he asked you to talk some sense into me.’
‘That’s not why I came, though.’
‘Then why?’
Beatrice picked up one of the dappled pears that lay beside her, looked it over for signs of worms before, satisfied, she took a bite out of it. ‘If Robert wants to follow the king on another expedition, that’s his business, and his alone. He doesn’t need you to always be there to defend him from the evils of the world.’
But what if he did? I remembered only too well what had happened to Fitz Osbern. Robert was a competent swordsman, but no more than that, and at times he could be, in his own way, every bit as reckless and headstrong as myself. If I and Eudo and Wace and all his other vassals allowed him to venture across the sea alone, with only a contingent of his hearth-troops for accompanying him, what was to say that he wouldn’t suffer the same fate?
‘Before I ever gave my oath to your brother,’ I said, ‘you made me pledge myself to his protection. I still remember that promise, even if you’ve forgotten.’
‘I remember,’ she said quietly. No doubt she remembered the kiss we’d shared then, too. ‘But Robert is a better knight now than he was then; older and wiser, too. He can take care of himself.’
‘I hope you’re right. For his sake.’
‘Why do you want to go to Dyflin, in any case?’
I inhaled deeply. Until now, I had kept everything Eithne had told me to myself.
‘Oswynn,’ I said simply.
‘Oswynn?’ Beatrice repeated, frowning. ‘Your woman? I don’t understand. I thought—’
She didn’t say it, but I knew what she meant. ‘So did I. But then at Beferlic last year I saw her. She was there, alive and as well as I’ve ever seen her, in the company of one of the Danish jarls, who goes by the name of Haakon, or so I’ve recently learnt. Dyflin is where he was last seen.’
‘So you mean to go after her?’
‘And to bring her back.’
‘What if you can’t find her? What if she’s no longer with this Haakon, or if he’s gone so far away that you can never catch up with him?’
Such doubts had been plaguing my mind ever since my meeting with Eithne, but I didn’t want to hear them from someone else’s lips as well.
‘I’ll find her,’ I said.
A magpie hopped close in front of us and nibbled for a brief moment at a fallen pear, before a crow descended, screeching, its jet-black wings outspread, and chased it off.
‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘Are you happy? With him, I mean.’
She would not meet my eyes. ‘I am content,’ she said, but the set of her lips betrayed her.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Does it matter whether I am or not? The fate of women is not to be happy but merely to serve the wishes of our menfolk and to spit out children. My father made the arrangements earlier this year. It was hardly as if I had a voice in the matter.’