Every time the wet-nurse Prima brought Musca to his mother, his perfect, miniscule fingers curled deeper into her heart and every time he was carried away from her, he took part of her clenched in his tiny fists.
Estela had seen motherhood. She had visited the cottages with her mother, seen love and hope creating magic and miracle, seen despair over death, and the worse despair, over unwanted life. She’d administered the herbs to soothe after-fevers and melancholy, or the holy thistle if the mother’s milk wouldn’t come. Estela’s own herbal lore had grown from the knowledge Malik had passed on, but she had no need to add his recommendation of fenugreek to holy thistle, for Prima. No problems there for the wet-nurse, whose generous body doubled its output with ease to feed Musca along with her own son, Simo, a week older than his foster-brother. What would it be like to suckle a baby? Estela wondered, her own breasts newly unbound and no longer aching.
When Musca’s face screwed up with hunger screams, the nurse held her arms out for him and would have left the chamber to feed him but Estela stopped her. ‘There is nothing that you need hide from me,’ she told Prima, who protested at this breach of custom but gave in, settling on a stool, closing her eyes peacefully as the grasping hands and mouth latched onto their one goal. From agonised screams to total contentment in three seconds, such was babyhood. There was a kind of peace in the simplicity of it. Food, sleep, wiping up mess. Again. And again.
Yes, Estela had seen motherhood. But nothing could have prepared her for how she, Roxane de Montbrun, felt as a mother. Even the word seemed full of strange flavours as she turned it on her tongue, to savour it. The word ‘husband’ had slipped down her throat, tasteless as stale water, but ‘my son’ jerked a string in her deepest core.
Estela pushed the reluctant Prima to talk to her and what began as an interrogation became shyly two-way. The nurse’s name had come from an unimaginative peasant father, who still farmed Dia lands, with the five sons who had luckily followed his disappointing firstborn. Her own man had died in the summer sickness, leaving her with a baby on the way and a place at her father’s hearth. Even though she had a baby, sometimes it was useful to have the extra protection of her father and brothers. Prima flushed and looked away as she spoke.
For the first time, Estela noticed the young woman as a man might. Her honey-brown hair escaped in curls from under a demure cap and the curves of her body, enhanced by childbearing and the glow of happy motherhood, were equally rebellious under the constraints of dun homespun. Her manner, too, attracted. Comfortable with who she was and how she was, Prima knew how to behave in keeping with her rank. Unlike Estela, who continued to ask unsuitable questions.
‘How did you meet Raoulf?’
Prima blushed once more, fetchingly. Raoulf had chosen her midwife well, Estela thought cynically, her suspicions heightened.
There was a hint of a stammer in the response. ‘He was collecting dues for my Lord of Dia and I was helping my father with the tally.’
‘I see.’ Whatever pleasure Raoulf might have in mind with the farmer’s daughter, he would see she was better off from his attentions, Estela was sure of that. And a soldier far from home was never likely to worry too much about his wife. Or children. Her heart squeezed in that new way it had acquired. She shrugged it off. Raoulf was not the sort of man to worry too much about his wife even if she were at his side. And Dragonetz? What would he be like as a husband? Another train of thought to cut short. Had her fancy been so unruly before the baby? Pff. All that mattered was that Raoulf had chosen a good wet-nurse.
Frowning, Estela demanded abruptly. ‘How old are you?’ hiding her surprise at the answer, ‘Seventeen.’ So they were of an age but Prima had been weathered by farm-work outdoors and chores indoors, her skin brown and her hands calloused.
In her turn, Prima asked Estela hesitant questions about her family, most of which were smoothly evaded. No outright lies were required as the key question never arose. And if anyone ever did ask Estela ‘Who is the baby’s father?’ she had all her answers prepared, depending of course on who did the asking. As the women grew to know each other, Estela made a decision.
‘I want you to bring Simo with you,’ she told Prima, whose mouth made a frozen ‘O’ in shock. ‘We’re sharing one baby,’ Estela pointed out, ‘so I don’t see why we can’t share two. That way, you can spend more time here, I can spend more time with Musca, and with Simo too. Why not?’
Unable to pit, ‘It’s not done’, against the force of Estela’s will, Prima accepted the new arrangement and whatever the Chateau of Dia thought of the new craziness of its latest troubadour, ‘artistic temperament’ was held responsible.
No-one was foolish enough to speak to Estela of convention and respectable behaviour, although the young Comtessa-to-be did speak of new songs. ‘New songs?’ Estela repeated in a dazed voice, hearing tambours and cymbals, lute and rebec, over the imagined sound of a baby wailing. Impatient brown eyes fixed hers across the gulf of maternity.
‘You’ve talked about nothing but the baby for two months now,’ snapped Bèatriz, ‘and it’s boring! I can’t believe you’re turning out just like the other women. I really don’t care whether your offspring slept for an hour or a month, or whether his dribble alchemised into pure gold! He’s just a baby. And I’m stuck on the repeated end-rhyme of a canso! I need you to help me finish it.’
‘Two months,’ Estela repeated. Had she been living in baby-world for two months? She smiled, feeling cow-like dreamy happy. ‘End-rhymes ... canso...’ Her brain stood to attention. ‘Sing it to me.’
‘At last!’ Bèatriz breathed a sigh of relief and launched straight into the passage that was tormenting her. Eyes shut, Estela teased apart the words and the melody, feeling for the wrong sound, finding the right syllable, the right note, the way Dragonetz had taught her. ‘Play on ‘ion’,’ she told Bèatriz. ‘You could use ‘jazion’, ‘volon’, ‘desiron’, and try dropping, not rising. More passion, less jollity. Languish a bit.’
‘Thank you!’ Bèatriz rushed off to experiment alone, leaving Estela humming a melody that had come to her, which she was still singing hours later when she cradled Musca in her arms. He smiled his gummy smile and she sang his future to him, a life of daring and damsels. Like his father’s. Estela was back to work.
It was on just such an afternoon of babies and melodies that the visitor came. Nici was dozing in a corner, one eye flicking open occasionally to check on his people. Since Musca’s birth, he too had changed. From the moment he risked approaching the new-born that mewled on Estela’s lap, sniffed its sicky-milky smell, he had grown fully into the role for which he had been born. The role for which generations of selective breeding had prepared him, however scatter-brained he had been when sent to do his job with the flocks on the hillside.
Or so Estela saw the change in him, as she watched the great white dog and he watched her baby. Nici roamed less, spent little time with the packs of curs scavenging round the chateau environs, alert in a second when Musca whimpered. The appearance of a second baby seemed to have merely confirmed his belief that here was work worthy of a good dog. On this particular day, he was peacefully stretched out on the stone flags.
Prima was feeding Musca while Estela tested out a trill on Simo, skipping a dance step round the chamber and shooting him in the air for the high notes. ‘He’s too young!’ protested Prima but Simo remained defiantly contented while the world whirled round him. ‘You’re turning him against his mother,’ muttered Prima half-heartedly.
‘Turn, turn,’ sang Estela, suiting action to words. Simo gurgled, wriggled and waved his arms, blinking in the bright light that came in when the great oak door swung open, seconds after Nici had transformed into the Beast of Gévaudan. He’d leaped impossibly from semi-sleep to full alertness, glancing once at Musca on Prima’s lap, then placing himself between Estela, Simo and the door. Hackles raised, teeth bared, legs braced to jump, Nici’s low growl prickled the small hairs on the back of Estela’s neck.
‘My lady,’ squeaked a page, and was interrupted by the figure behind him, whom Estela had not recognised with the sun back-lighting him to silhouette. Evidently, Nici did recognise him, and that was enough to warn Estela.
‘I’ll introduce myself,’ interrupted a voice with the warm accent of Estela’s southern home. But there was no warmth in this voice. Instinctively, Estela pulled the baby close to her and Prima covered up the suckling Musca in a layer of shawl. The growling dog waited, tense.
‘No, Nici,’ Estela told him, but she didn’t add, ‘It’s a friend’. The dog stayed where he was, waiting, fixing the visitor with unwavering brown eyes.
‘So you even stole one of father’s dogs when you ran!’ sneered the man. ‘Ever the thief, and too stupid to know how useless this one is - though it seems you found out. You should both be called ‘Nici’.’
Thinking rapidly, Estela told Prima, ‘Take the baby and leave us,’ holding out Simo towards Prima, but it was not to be.
‘Take your own brat and leave us. The bastard stays with his mother,’ came the cold counter-instruction.
Prima looked to her mistress, made no move, said nothing, for all of which Estela could have kissed her. Instead, all she could do for now was to nod and dismiss the nurse, along with Musca. And to promise, ‘The baby will be safe. Trust me,’ as Prima left the chamber, her precious son in Estela’s arms.
The man had moved aside to let them pass, watched closely by Nici, then he closed the door after the nurse, restoring the balance of the light and shutting Estela in, alone with her brother, her nurse’s baby and an angry dog. Should she choose to set him on the intruder, Nici was as dangerous a weapon as any sword.
‘Miquel,’ she said flatly, shifting the baby to her left hip as if naturally, leaving her right hand free to delve into her undershift if need be. She smoothed her gown lightly, feeling the hilt of the dagger hidden under the layers of stuff, and she tugged her fingers into the fold that was really an opening.
That gave her access to her second weapon, one that was not vulnerable to Miquel’s sword. His hand had been on the hilt ever since he’d entered the chamber and although she didn’t doubt Nici’s courage, neither did she doubt her brother’s ability to kill the dog without thinking twice. She didn’t want to test who was faster unless there was no other way. If she had a third hand, she’d hold the dog to make certain he didn’t make a move unless she wanted him to. ‘No,’ she reminded him firmly, clutching the dagger.
‘Big sister,’ he sneered, his face losing its initial resemblance to Estela - Roxane, as he knew her from childhood. They had the same straight black hair, although his was shoulder length and hers swept below her waist when unloosed; the same topaz eyes, wild as a mountain lion’s, their mother’s eyes.
Female softness and male angles made less of a difference between them than the tracks left by their habitual expressions. Bitterness and suspicion drooped Miquel’s wide mouth - also from his mother, but curving upwards in her and in his sister. His eyes were hardened to chips of glass and made him seem far older than his fifteen years. The face Estela saw in her precious mirror could be serious, her generous mouth straight and pensive, could be wistful and hint at tears, but retained a belief in people, which glowed in her eyes, in her smile, in her curiosity about the world and everyone in it. She took the measure of the young man in front of her, the stranger she knew intimately, and it came to her that the doors to his soul were locked. She shrugged off the foolish fantasy.
‘My dear, dead big sister. The mourning for you was as fake as your death.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’ She looked him straight in those cold eyes and held his gaze. She had to try. He was her brother after all. ‘Miquel, there’s so much you don’t know, so much that you’ve been told that’s just not true. If you would just listen and think...’ Simo gurgled sleepily, his fuzzy brown head nodding, and Estela shuggled him gently, crooning nonsense words, pacing a little to lull him with the movement. This seemed to ignite whatever burning issues Miquel had brought into the room with him.
‘Whore,’ he hissed, provoking a warning bark from Nici, ‘flaunting your bastard, seeking my inheritance for that.’ His sword was unsheathed in a clang of anger but he came no nearer.
Estela still had time to throw a dagger before he made a move, and she could throw a dagger to lethal effect - Gilles had made sure of that. Thanks to Gilles, the dagger through the placket was of best steel, however pretty it looked - and it had to look pretty because it was Miquel’s dagger.
Pretty mattered to Miquel. Too closely watched by her stepmother to keep or hide her own blade, Estela had stolen Miquel’s the night she’d run away, relying on his usual carelessness. The servants who daily searched her bed and her clothing, who watched her every move, had not thought of her hiding Miquel’s dagger under his own window, to be reclaimed from there in stealth while he slept in his usual liquor-ridden stupor. If he were in his own bed at all.
‘The misbegotten brat of a stable-hand,’ he spat at her. ‘What would you know about truth? Rutting in the straw, tainting the name and the blood of de Montbrun with that animal!’
Estela blinked and flushed, wounded despite herself, for there was some truth in the words flung. How could she have forgotten? He thought she’d conceived from her stupid, youthful notion of becoming a woman in the hands of a boy working in the stables. Once and once only. No, there had been no consequences for her. Or at least, no physical ones apart from the loss of her virginity. But the consequences for him!
With an effort she remembered his name. Peire. Yes, that was it. A shock of brown hair, bright eyes. A mistake. A stupid, youthful mistake, that’s all it had been. She’d been married after all. To a man who’d made his vows and then quietly, kindly abandoned her as he’d arranged with the ruler of Narbonne. A marriage of convenience. So she’d had the right to become a woman, her own way, with a man of her own choosing. But it had not been what she wanted at all. It had been exactly what her brother called it.
If Dragonetz had not healed the damage caused, she might never have become a woman, in the richer senses of the word. And then Peire had been found murdered and mutilated, in such a way that made it clear why he’d been killed. Executed by someone unknown, for his folly with a lady of higher rank.
Her nerves on edge, Estela remembered her suspicions. No unknown would have murdered Peire as a message to her, a message underlined by sending Gilles to find her, falsely accused, his right hand amputated, with words from her stepmother Costansa, hoping she had received both messages. She studied this brother of hers. Who else would jump to Costansa’s bidding, like the lapdog he’d become?! Better that he believed Peire to be her baby’s father. But she must try, for their mother’s sake. She made the mistake of saying the words aloud.
‘For our mother’s sake,’ she began and his face burned white with hatred.
‘Don’t dirty our mother’s name from your whore’s mouth! Spare your poisonous breath. Costansa told me every lie you’d tell. That you’d pretend you never stole her jewels, you’d say that she hid them, that she accused you so our father would whip you, that she wanted you out of our lives. She knew that you’d blame her for every evil thing you’ve done.’
Estela snapped. ‘Including swiving her husband’s son?!’ she hurled at him and saw she’d hit home. Simo woke at the shouting, crying with baby-fears. ‘There, there,’ she shushed him, wanting to change hip for carrying him but not daring to put the dagger out of reach.
Miquel rallied, suddenly sounding young as his years, and Estela remembered them climbing the big apple tree together, playing ‘who could go the furthest’ along an ever thinner branch, to reach the furthest fruit. ‘I don’t have to justify the love between Costansa and me. Someone like you could never understand. What she puts up with from that man.’ He shook his head, shaking spittle with the movement.
So much anger! Look out father, Estela thought, and then the question she didn’t want answered spoke itself, a cold statement of fact. ‘You killed the stable hand,’ she heard herself saying.
‘Hurt, did it? Seeing your lover like that, your little love toys covered in blood. No more playing.’
‘You are mad. Possessed.’ Another cold statement of fact.
His smile was worse than his sneers. ‘Costansa told me you’d do that too. That you’d try to shake my confidence in my own mind. Won’t work, big sister.
I’ve enjoyed our talk but I’m not stupid. Your servant has had the time to fetch your man and no doubt the cripple can find someone with two hands to help him out, so I’ll not finish the job here, where my way out might be blocked. That wouldn’t be very clever, would it.
I want you to sweat. I want you to wake in the night knowing that I’m out there, that I’m coming for you, that people will always let me in to see you because I’m your brother.
And don’t rely on your watch-dog. Dogs die so easily. Who knows when a bit of poisoned meat will be Nici’s final treat?’ He gave a spectral grin, opening the door behind him, about to leave.
Thank God, thank God.
But not without a parting shot. ‘And when I choose, I shall kill you both.’ He pointed his sword at her chest. ‘You.’ He twirled his sword in a flourish, while Estela’s grip tightened on the dagger, but he never moved closer. ‘And the bastard.’ He assumed an attacking pose with the point towards Simo.
Outraged, Nici barked and sprang but the distance between them allowed Miquel enough time to escape, vanishing with the light as he heaved the great door to. Nici stormed round the perimeter of the chamber, rearing on hind legs and barking his rage while Estela expressed her feelings in one anguished war cry as she threw the dagger to stick good and true in the oak where Miquel’s heart had been seconds earlier.
When the door started to open again, she thought she’d been tricked and rushed to retrieve her weapon, joggling an irritated baby into full screaming complaint.
Daylight streamed in again and Estela fell into the solid arms, one-handed or not, of Gilles, who had always been there, always, from when she was a baby. Nici rushed past her, barking and sniffing, searching.
The tears came, anger and relief, as she told him, ‘In the apple tree. He used to cheat. He always went first so he could cut the branch when he thought I wasn’t looking and then I would fall before I got as far as he had. I fell twice, then I knew what he was doing. I’m not falling again! He cheats!’
‘Where’s the whoreson?’ Raoulf demanded, drawing an ironic laugh from Estela.
‘You mustn’t speak ill of our mother,’ she told him, light-headed with shock. ‘Legitimate, I assure you, and I’m equally certain he’s long gone.’ Nevertheless, Raoulf took all but two of the armed men with him to search the environs, leaving Gilles and the wet-nurse with Estela.
Prima had extricated her squalling son from Estela’s arm the moment she’d arrived with the men, and she was soothing him in a corner, unlacing her bodice for his preferred comfort. ‘With the Comtessa’s women’ she answered Estela’s unspoken question.
The need to know Musca was safe was swiftly replaced with an overwhelming desire to see him, to hold him in her arms, to know he was safe and to keep him safe. The two armed men followed her as she stormed through the passage to the women’s quarters. Would anywhere ever be safe again?