The Champion Read Online Free PDF Page B

almost finished. Just this length here to do.’ Clemence shook out the garment and turned it round. One half was blood red, the other a light orangey yellow.
    ‘Who is it for?’ Monday asked.
    Her mother’s lips tightened. ‘Eudo le Boucher,’ she said in a voice cold with distaste.
    Monday swept the chopped vegetables into a wooden bowl and carefully tipped them into the cauldron. Eudo le Boucher was a man who not only fought to live, but lived to fight. He was her father’s age, perhaps slightly younger, with a shock of prematurely iron-grey hair, disfiguring battle scars and eyes like black ice. Men avoided him if possible, but no one was foolish enough to make him their enemy.
    ‘We have to eat,’ Clemence justified, as much to herself as to her silent daughter. ‘In the good times we have to save our silver so that we can weather the bad.’ She bit off the thread on a broken tooth and held up the garment for inspection. ‘I would lief as not sew for the man, but I cannot afford to refuse him.’
    Monday stirred the stew with a large carved spoon and glanced at her mother. Clemence had been out of sorts for a couple of weeks now, tense and snappish, swift to find fault, slow to be pacified. Her father had been quietly avoiding his wife, a rueful look in his grey eyes. For Monday it was not so easy. Unless sent on a specific errand, she had no excuse to make herself scarce. It was not safe for a girl of her age to venture too far from her own fire. Even fetching water from the stream had its hazards.
    She thought of her encounter with Hervi’s half-brother and the motion of her stirring increased. Alexander de Montroi bore small resemblance to Hervi, who was huge and blond and hearty. There was a brooding quality about the younger man, a hunger of the spirit as much as of the body.
    ‘Careful!’ Clemence scolded. ‘Watch what you’re doing!’
    A cloud of hissing steam billowed from the fire beneath the cauldron and bubbles of stew bounced on the iron sides before vanishing in wafts of burned vapour.
    ‘Sorry, Mama.’ Monday gave her mother a flushed, apologetic look.
    ‘Daydreaming again,’ Clemence chided with exasperation. ‘Monday, you must learn to keep your wits about you.’
    ‘Mama, I didn’t mean to …’ Monday broke off as a powerfully built man wearing a green quilted gambeson arrived at their hearth and commanded their attention. Eudo le Boucher was even taller than Hervi. Once he had been handsome, but the tourney circuit and the battlefield had taken their toll. His nose zigzagged down his face, following the line of successive breaks, and the flesh of his jaw was puckered from mouth corner to missing ear lobe where a sword had sliced him open to the bone.
    ‘Is it ready?’ he demanded.
    ‘Of course,’ Clemence said disdainfully, as if she had finished her sewing hours ago. Rising from her stool, she gave him the completed surcoat. Both her spine and her expression were as stiff as wood. Eudo’s black eyes crinkled with amusement.
    ‘I know that you like me not, Lady Clemence,’ he observed, ‘but you do like my money, and that makes us equals.’
    ‘You flatter yourself,’ she said coldly.
    ‘Then that makes us equals too, since you do the same.’ He delved in the money pouch at his belt. Monday watched her mother’s mouth make small chewing motions and stepped up beside her, offering moral support.
    Le Boucher assimilated the gesture and his amusement increased. ‘Tell your daughter that she will spoil her face and her fortune scowling like that,’ he said to Clemence.
    Clemence drew herself up, her lips parted for a retort, but it went unuttered as her husband arrived at the fire. Le Boucher withdrew from any further confrontation by placing two small silver coins in Clemence’s palm, and turned away, the surcoat draped over his arm.
    She closed her fist over the money, her expression one of barely controlled revulsion.
    ‘Your wife sews a fine seam,’ the knight