The Red Knight

‘The Old Men – the Archaics of long ago – they asked “Who shall guard the guardians?”’ The Queen looked around. ‘We shall, ladies. We choose the best of them. We may also choose to punish the worst. Hard Hands was not deserving, and the king found him out. We should have known first – should we not? Did none of you suspect he was merely a braggart? Did none of you wonder where his prowess lay, that he made no show or trial of it?’

Mary burst into tears. ‘I protest, madame.’

The Queen gave her a small embrace. ‘I relent. He is a good man-at-arms. Let him go prove it to the king. And prove himself worthy of you.’

Mary curtsied.

The Queen nodded, and rose to her feet. ‘I go to attend the king. Think of this. It is our duty. Love – our love – is no light thing. It is be the crown of glory, available to the best and only the best. It should be hard won. Think on it.’

She listened to them she went up the stairs – broad marble stairs of that the Old Men had wrought. They didn’t giggle, which pleased her.

The king was in the Arming Room, with two squires – Simon and Oggbert, as like as two peas in a pod, with matching freckles and matching pimples. He was down to his shirt and his hose and his braes. His leg harnesses still lay on the floor having been removed, and each squire held a vambrace, wiping them down with chamois.

She smiled radiantly at them. ‘Begone,’ she said.

They fled, as adolescent boys do when faced with beautiful women.

The king sat back on his bench. ‘Ah! I see I have won your esteem!’ he grinned, and for a moment he was twenty years younger.

She knelt and undid a garter. ‘You are the king. You, and you alone, need never win my esteem.’

He watched her unbuckle the other garter. She buckled the two of them together and placed his leg harnesses together on a table behind her, and then, without hurry, she sat in his lap and put her arms around his neck and kissed him until she felt him stir.

And then she rose to her feet and unlaced her gown. She did it methodically, carefully, without taking her eyes off him.

He watched her the way a wolf watches a lamb.

The gown fell away leaving her kirtle – a sheath of tight silk from ankle to neck.

The king rose. ‘Anyone might come in here,’ he said into her hair.

She laughed. ‘What care I?’

‘On your head be it, lady,’ he said, and produced a knife. He pressed the flat of the point against the skin of her neck and kissed her, and then cut the lace of her kirtle from neck to waist, the knife so sharp that the laces seemed to fall away, and his cut so careful that the blade never touched her skin through the linen shift beneath it.

She laughed into his kiss. ‘I love it when you do that,’ she said. ‘You owe me a lace. A silk one.’ Her long fingers took the knife from him. She stepped back and cut the straps of her shift at her shoulders and it fell away and she stabbed the knife into the top of the table so that it stuck.

He rid himself of his shirt and braes with more effort and far less elegance, and she laughed at him. And then they were together.

When they were done, she lay on his chest. Some of his hair was grey. She played with it.

‘I am old,’ he said.

She wriggled atop him. ‘Not so very old,’ she said.

‘I owe you more than a kirtle lace of silk,’ he said.

‘Really?’ she asked, and rose above him. ‘Never mind the shift, love – Mary will replace the straps in an hour.’

‘I was not being so literal. I owe you my life. I owe you – my continued interest in this endless hell that is kingship.’ He grunted.

She looked down. ‘Endless hell – but you love it. You love it.’

The king pulled her down and hid his face in her hair. ‘Not as much as I love you.’

‘What is it?’ she asked, playing with his beard. ‘You are plagued by something . . . ?’

He sighed. ‘One of my favourite men left me today. Ranald Lachlan. Because he has to make himself a fortune in order to wed your Lady Almspend.’

She smiled. ‘He is a worthy man, and he will prove himself or die trying.’

The king sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But by God, woman, I was tempted to give him a bag of gold and a knighthood to keep him by me.’

‘And you would have deprived him of the glory of earning his way,’ she said.

He shrugged and said, ‘It is good that one of us is an idealist.’

‘If you are in a giving mood,’ she said, ‘might we have a tournament?’

The king was a strong man with a fighter’s muscles, and he sat up despite her weight on his chest. ‘A tournament. By God, lady – is that what this was in aid of?’

She grinned at him. ‘Was it so bad?’

He shook his head. ‘I should be very afraid, were you to decide to do something I didn’t fancy, inside that pretty head. Yes, of course we can have a tournament. But the wrong men always win, and the town’s a riot for a week, and the castle’s a mess, you, my dear, are a mess, and I have to arrest men whose only crime was to drink too much. All that, for your whim?’ He laughed.

Desiderata laughed, throwing her head back, and she read his desire in his eyes. ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘All that for my whim.’