‘My lord the sheriff has instructed me to tell you that this land has been donated to the new abbey of St Mary for their extensions. The house and all the outbuildings will be demolished once the king returns to London, and you will have to find somewhere else to live. You will be sent signed confirmation of this in due course.’
Warin, bold, brawny, and not inclined to negotiate if it threatened to take longer than his limited attention span, would have liked to throw the impudent messenger out on his head, but even he could see the danger in that. He could also see, perhaps not for the first time, that he might have been a mite too hasty in his change of allegiance from daughter to stepmother, now that the latter was not as secure as he had thought.
Ketti swung her white veil over one shoulder. ‘And I’ve already told you, whatever your name is, that my husband died last winter. He was in no position to send knights for the king’s service.’
‘But no message was sent. No excuse. No fine or relief in lieu of men. As you know, lady, a thegn holds his estate from the king in return for properly equipped knights whenever the king should need them. And the king has needed them sorely in this first year of his reign. His brother and uncles defied him. He needed all the men he could get. Any thegn who fails in this duty must forfeit everything to the king. That’s always been the law and you must have known it. Now the monks need this land for their new building plan, and you will have to—’
‘Bugger the new building plan!’ Warin bellowed, unable to contain his anger any longer. It was bad enough to have made a wrong decision, but to have this pompous little toad-face telling him what they had ignored in the hope that it would go away was too much to suffer politely. The time for civilities had passed. His healthy outdoor complexion darkened with fury and his fair curls stuck wetly around his face. ‘We’ve had your building plans up to here in York,’ he blustered, levelling his fingers to his brow, ‘and we’re sick to death of them! You’ve raided our fair city and razed it to the ground, wrecked our homes and livelihoods, dammed the bloody river to make a moat for your bloody castles—’
‘Warin…stop…shh!’ Ketti warned, placing a hand on his arm.
But he shook it off. ‘We’ve had to rebuild our warehouses, relocate our businesses, give up our orchards and grazing, see our houses engulfed in your stockades, see them trampled underfoot, and you dare to tell us that we can’t live here now? We’ve built this place with hard-earned sweat on our land, and there’s nobody…nobody,’ he yelled to the man’s damp receding back, ‘going to get us out. Tell that,’ he called across the courtyard, gesturing rudely, ‘to your lord the sheriff, whatever his bloody name is.’
His return to Ketti was nothing like the hero’s welcome he thought he deserved. ‘You idiot!’ she screeched, resorting at last to English. ‘What good d’ye think that’ll do. Eh? He’ll go straight back and tell the sheriff, the sheriff will tell the abbot, the abbot will tell the king, and before you know it there’ll be a crowd of his strong-arm men here to tip us out into the street. You couldn’t have waited for the king to go back home before you shot your mouth off, could you?’ Her plain, sharp-nosed, thin-lipped face was blotchy with anger, and her fair-lashed pale eyes bulged more than ever in the stare of scalding reproof that Warin had already grown tired of.
The king, she was certain, had bided his time in this matter, waiting until he was up here in York at the end of the first difficult year of his reign. Feeling that some show of benevolence was appropriate, he had granted permission for the monks of St Mary’s to extend their new abbey next to the church of St Olaf, and had granted them properties to sustain them with tithes due four times a year. He had come all the way up here to Northumbria with an impressively inflated retinue to lay the foundation-stone and to show them how bounteous he could be, when he wanted to. And like sheep, the rest of the Norman landowners in Yorkshire had followed suit, donating land to the new abbey so that it would be said in years to come how they cared about the spiritual life as well as the temporal one. Liars. It was their own insurance they paid into, for their own quicker passage through purgatory.
Craftily, the king had let the monks have Bootham, the stretch of land beyond the minster next to the new abbey grounds where booths and stalls were set, and where the late Gamal of York’s house stood. Now he could confiscate it for the best of reasons.
Ketti’s screeching assault stopped Warin in his tracks, shocking him into a counter-attack. ‘Well, what did you expect me to do? Stand here and be spoken to like a child who’s been scrumping apples?’ he yelled back at her. ‘Don’t be so daft, woman. He’s not going to do anything before the king leaves for London.’
‘Even so, you fool, you might have thought up a better way of handling the matter than by insults. Where d’ye think that will get us? You’ll have to go to them and find out how we can get ourselves out of it.’
‘It’s no good me going to speak to anyone,’ he snapped. ‘I’m not the owner. You are. You go.’
‘What good will it do for me to go?’ said Ketti, spreading her hands so that the tips of her wide sleeves skimmed the floor. She was not minded to do her own dirty work if someone else could be found to do it for her. ‘So what are you doing here?’ She waved a hand with some drama. ‘If you want a home with me, go and fight for it. You wrestle with your mates like a prize bull; go and wrestle with the sheriff for a change.’ She turned away, glaring at the smirking face of her twelve-year-old son Thorn. ‘Get out!’ she snapped. ‘This is private.’
‘Ketti.’ Warin’s voice dropped to a wheedling pitch, warming her back. ‘Ketti, my love. We shouldn’t quarrel over this.’ He took her by the shoulders and pulled her back against him, sliding his great working hands over her breasts and kneading gently, knowing how that was guaranteed to soften her.
Her hands came up to cover his. ‘Get off,’ she whispered, pressing herself backwards into him.
Warin was careful to conceal his smile. It had worked already. ‘No,’ he said, bending to her veil-covered ear. ‘You’re so lovely, Ketti.’ Her breasts were, in fact, the only lovely part of her, and not even the self-seeking Warin could pretend that she had either a face or a nature to match. ‘There’s no problem,’ he whispered. ‘We’ll go and move in with Rhoese. She’s still your ward. She’s obliged to help.’
Her hands snatched his away and threw them aside as she whirled to look at him, her face suddenly hard with jealousy. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ she said. ‘To live with her. My stepdaughter. Still hankering after her, aren’t you?’
Still puzzled by his faulty timing, Warin’s blue eyes opened like a child’s, though behind his façade of innocence was a frantic attempt to backtrack. He caught at her hands, holding her still. ‘No, sweetheart. Not to live with her, of course not,’ he blustered.
‘What, then?’
‘Look, she’s got her own place at Toft Green. She moved out of your home, didn’t she? Well, what d’ye think she’d do if we said we had to move into hers because we have nowhere else? Eh?’ He shook her hands to make her reply.
But Ketti’s face was still hard. ‘You think she’d move out of Toft Green, don’t you? Rubbish. She won’t. She’s still crazy for you. She only moved away because she couldn’t bear the sight of you with me. She’d let you into her bed every time my back was turned. No, my lad. I’m not having that.’ There was a finality in her voice that Warin knew better than to challenge.
‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘we’ll try sending her to the king to see if she can negotiate another patch of land for this one. Once she sees the threat of us moving into her house, she’ll fall over
