Read Online The Champion by Elizabeth Chadwick - Free Book Online

remember her when she was a tiny maid no higher than my kneecap. Time passes too quickly.’
    ‘Indeed it does,’ Arnoud agreed with a maudlin nod.
    Monday tugged at the edge of her wimple. ‘It makes my head itch and it’s hot,’ she complained. ‘I hate it.’
    ‘You’ll soon grow accustomed,’ said Clemence. ‘After a few weeks you will feel strange without a head covering.’
    ‘Other girls don’t have to wear one.’
    ‘That has no bearing on what is fit for you.’ Her mother’s tone was sharp with warning.
    ‘Yes, it does, I …’
    ‘Monday, enough,’ Arnaud interrupted. ‘You are embarrassing our guests and shaming yourself. You wear a wimple because we have judged that it is time you did so. I will hear no more on the matter.’
    The girl’s chin quivered. She compressed her lips and took the empty jug into the tent, leaving an awkward silence in her wake.
    With a rueful smile, Hervi rose to his feet, pulling Alexander with him. ‘Your own fault,’ he commented to lighten the moment. ‘Now you have two women on your hands when this morning you had only one.’
    Arnaud snorted with reluctant humour. ‘She will come round in a while,’ he said. ‘Always stalks off in a temper, and then returns full of remorse.’
    As Hervi and Alexander took their leave, Arnaud followed them to the perimeter of his fire. ‘Two women on my hands, and one of them with child,’ he announced. ‘Before Martinmas I am to be a father again.’
    Hervi’s eyes widened. ‘Small wonder that you fought like a demon on the tourney field today!’ he exclaimed. ‘My heartiest congratulations to both of you.’ He belted Arnaud between the shoulder blades. ‘I will pray that the babe resembles its mother!’
    Arnaud forced a smile. ‘As long as both are strong and healthy I care not.’ He gazed back at his wife with troubled eyes, and added, as if reassuring himself, ‘She has Monday to help her, and we are going to seek winter quarters early. It is not as though she has been worn out bearing a child every year. We have tried to be careful.’
    Hervi’s expression sobered in the face of Arnaud’s obvious anxiety. He had no comfort to offer; he knew nothing of childbirth except that it was messy and fraught with danger. Those thoughts would be uppermost in Arnaud’s mind too. ‘If you need anything, you know where to seek,’ he said, and thumped him again, but more gently by way of support.
    Hervi and Alexander were halfway across the camp when they encountered a man crawling through the grass in a drunken stupor. He wore the tattered habit of a Benedictine monk and the bald ring of his tonsure was fuzzy with stubble.
    Hervi gave a snort of amused disgust and stooped to haul the sodden cleric to his feet. ‘Lost your way again, Brother Rousseau? Alex, help me hold him up.’
    Grimacing with revulsion, Alexander grasped the man’s sleeve. Even to be near a monk made him shudder. The stench of wine and ginevra warred with the pungency of the man’s unwashed body. Red-rimmed eyes surveyed him owlishly, then lost their focus. ‘ Carpe diem, quam minimum credula poster ,’ he slurred, then belched. Alexander averted his head and fought the urge to gag.
    ‘Do you know what he said?’ Hervi enquired. ‘He always speaks Latin when he’s in his cups.’
    ‘Enjoy the day, trust little in tomorrow,’ Alexander replied in a constricted voice, as he fought not to inhale the priest’s foul breath. The man was like one of the cadavers out of his nightmares.
    ‘That sounds like Brother Rousseau’s philosophy. Come on, his tent’s just over here.’
    They half dragged, half carried Brother Rousseau beyond another ring of firelight occupied by a group of ragged-clad women and children, and brought him to a dilapidated canvas awning, one of its poles surmounted by a crude wooden cross.
    Brother Rousseau collapsed from their arms on to his pallet. His eyes rolled in their direction. ‘ Dominus vobiscum ,’ he said,