Free Lady of Hay by Barbara Erskine

where the ice-rimmed puddles were melting slowly in the rain. The track was growing increasingly treacherous and slippery.
    She quickly drew level with him again, her white veil blowing for a moment across her face from beneath her fur hood. “Richard,” she called, “wait. Slow down. This will be our last chance to talk…”
    He slowed fractionally, wiping the sleet from his eyes. “We have had time enough to talk,” he said abruptly. “You have chosen to tell me very little. I have no idea, even, why you are here, which will make it hard for me to face your no doubt irate husband with a satisfactory explanation as to why I have brought you to him.”
    He saw her flush. “Just tell him the truth,” she retaliated defensively.
    “Very well.” He lashed his reins across the horse’s neck. “I shall tell him how I was quietly riding, minding my own business, from home in Tonbridge to Gloucester when I met his baggage of a wife, completely unescorted except for one trembling female, hell-bent on riding the breadth of England to his side in midwinter. I shall tell him that I saw it as my chivalrous duty to escort you myself. And I shall tell him that any man who leaves a young, beautiful, newlywed bride alone in Sussex with her mother-in-law, while he travels to his farthest lands, is a mutton-headed goat.” He managed a wry grin, ducking the wet slap of a low-hanging branch in his path. If Matilda had been his wife he would not have left her. He clenched the reins fiercely; no man would accuse Richard de Clare of lusting after another man’s wife. He admired her daring and her humor and her spirit, so unusual in a woman, no more than that. He glanced across at her and saw that she was smiling. “Why did you choose to come to Wales?” he asked suddenly.
    She looked down at her hands. “Because I have nowhere else to go but to my husband,” she said simply. “With him I am a baron’s lady, mistress of a dozen castles, a woman of some importance.” Her mouth twitched imperceptibly. “At Bramber with his mother I am merely another female with the sole distinction of being hated by her twice as much as anyone else. Besides,” she added disarmingly, “it’s boring there.”
    He stared at her in disbelief. William de Braose was a vicious, ill-bred man at least twice her age, with a reputation few men would envy. Even the thought of the brute’s hands touching her made the blood pound in Richard’s temples. “And you would prefer your husband’s company to being bored?” he echoed incredulously.
    She raised her chin a fraction, a mannerism he was beginning to know well. “I did not ask your opinion of him, just as I did not ask you to escort me to him.”
    “No, I offered.” He took a deep breath. “So—I shall tell him also,” he went on, “that an invitation to this Christmas banquet we hear he is to give for Prince Seisyll tomorrow is the only reward I shall ask for all my trouble. I shall wave aside the gold and jewels he is bound to press on me for my services in escorting you. I shall nobly ignore his passionate outpourings of gratitude and praise.”
    Matilda made a small grimace, all too well aware of her husband’s reputation for tight-fistedness. She frowned, glancing at Richard sideways. “Supposing he’s furious with me for coming?”
    “So you have considered that possibility at last!” Richard squinted into the wind. “He’ll probably beat you and send you back to Bramber. It’s what you deserve.”
    A racing shadow in the trees distracted him for a moment. He scanned the surrounding forest, his face set. They were passing through a clump of junipers, thick and impenetrable: the ideal hiding place for an ambush. Secretly he suspected that his men, however well armed, would be no match for the leaping, yelling Welsh should they choose to attack. He had heard that they could sweep down, cut a throat, rip open a horse’s belly, and be away again before a man ever had the chance to