The Winter King--A Hawkenlye 13th Century British Mystery Read online

He was not alone. Behind him, holding a beautiful scarlet cap with a fox-fur trim between nervous hands, was an expensively dressed young man.

  Ninian bowed to the abbess. ‘Good day to you, my lady.’ Obviously impatient to explain, he wasted no more time on the courtesies. ‘On my way out of the stables, I witnessed the arrival of this man.’ He indicated his companion, who also bowed. He shot a glance at Helewise, then turned back to the abbess. ‘He wants to know how to find Wealdsend.’

  Helewise shot to her feet. With an apologetic glance at the abbess, she addressed the young man.

  ‘You want to go to Wealdsend?’ she asked.

  ‘I have to!’ the young man said fervently. ‘You can’t stop me – you don’t understand!’ His voice had risen.

  ‘Such a visit may not be wise,’ she said. ‘May we know your purpose?’

  He looked at each of them in turn. Studying him, Helewise wondered if this show of passion might be disguising another emotion: fear. The youth was pale, and his forehead and upper lip were beaded with sweat. The beautiful scarlet cap was steadily being twisted out of shape by his anxious, busy hands. ‘I … there’s a …’ He stopped. He took a deep breath, and went on: ‘I have to find two friends. I know they were going to Wealdsend, and I must follow them. We said we’d go together,’ he added, ‘and I could not find the courage to accompany them when they set out. Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I’ve made up my mind, and I’m going to join them.’

  Helewise went to stand beside him. She said gently, ‘I am very much afraid that your friends may be dead.’

  He stared at her, his expression horrified. ‘Dead! No, oh, no – they can’t be! Symon’s strong, and he’s a fine swordsman – oh, you are mistaken, my lady.’

  Helewise reached out and put a hand on his. ‘One was called Symon?’

  ‘Yes – Symon de St Clair, and his cousin Guillaume was with him. He’s a St Clair too – they are the sons of two brothers. It’s a great family, long renowned for their prowess, with many knights among their ancestors who have earned distinction on the battlefield … Dead?’

  Gently, Helewise described how she had found the young man at the sanctuary, too late to save him, and how the body of his companion had subsequently been discovered. She told him how they were dressed and what they had looked like. When she had finished, the young man doubted her no longer.

  He was so pale now that he seemed on the point of fainting. ‘Help me, Ninian!’ Helewise said, and together they led the youth to the visitors’ chair and sat him down.

  Abbess Caliste poured a mug of the drink for him, holding it while he sipped. ‘Thank you, my lady abbess,’ he said, trying to rise to his feet. Gently the abbess pushed him back.

  He has been raised in courtly circles, Helewise thought. He knows how to address an abbess, and he has good manners. She wondered how old he was; younger than she had originally thought, she now decided. Fifteen? Fourteen? She crouched in front of him.

  ‘May we know your name?’ she asked.

  He met her eyes. His, she noticed, were dark brown. They held a wounded look, giving him an air of vulnerability.

  ‘Luc Jordan.’

  ‘Luc. Thank you. I am Helewise, this is the Abbess Caliste, and the man there is Ninian.’ Luc muttered a response. ‘We need to ask you to do something for us,’ she went on, keeping her voice calm and level. ‘There can be little doubt that the dead men are indeed your friends, but it would be better to be absolutely sure, for then their names can be recorded and, in time, their kinsmen notified. Would you, Luc, be willing to view the bodies?’

  He seemed to grow even paler. ‘They – they are here?’

  ‘They are in the crypt, beneath the abbey church.’ Helewise wasn’t sure of this, but a quick glance at the abbess earned a nod of confirmation.

  ‘Are they …’ Luc swallowed and tried again. ‘Are they very damaged?’

  Abbess Caliste came to crouch beside Helewise. ‘My nursing nuns have prepared them for burial,’ she said gently. ‘They look now as if they are merely asleep.’

  Luc looked up at Ninian, who was standing by the door, one shoulder leaning against the wall. ‘I’m sorry to seem so weak,’ Luc said. ‘It’s just that – well, I’ve never seen a dead person before.’

  Helewise gave him a moment to find his courage. Then she said, ‘Will you do it?’

  The soft brown eyes met hers. ‘Yes.’

  ‘He bore himself well,’ Helewise murmured to Abbess Caliste as the four of them returned to the abbess’s room. ‘It cannot have been easy, viewing the friends he last saw riding off with such high hopes lying on trestles and waiting for the grave.’

  ‘No indeed,’ Abbess Caliste agreed. ‘Oh, but I am so relieved we now have names for those poor young men – I will send word to Brother Saul immediately that he can now make the arrangements for interment.’

  ‘You will put them in the abbey’s burial ground?’

  ‘I will. And,’ the abbess added with some force, ‘in the absence of a priest, I shall say the words to accompany them before their heavenly father.’

  Back in the abbess’s room, it seemed to Helewise that, in facing the challenge of viewing his dead friends, Luc had found some strength. And, having accepted that the worst had indeed happened, he seemed more willing to open up to them.

  ‘How did you come to know Symon and Guillaume?’ Helewise asked him.

  ‘The three of us were squires together, in the household of Sir Eustace of Hazelgrove,’ he replied. ‘We began our training at the same time, and our friendship grew.’

  ‘That is the way of it,’ Ninian remarked. Helewise turned to him; she often forgot that he too had once undergone the knightly training. He smiled at her. ‘It’s tough,’ he said. ‘You quickly find life is easier with someone to watch out for you.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Luc said eagerly. ‘Although Symon and Guillaume were but cousins, and I wasn’t related to them at all, the three of us were like brothers.’

  ‘How did they hear of Wealdsend?’ the abbess asked. ‘What drew them there?’

  Luc looked awkward. ‘It’s supposed to be a secret,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t think I ought to tell you.’

  Ninian made an impatient sound. Helewise looked up quickly, shaking her head. Getting angry with Luc was not, she realized, the way to make him confide in them. ‘Luc, your two friends were murdered,’ she said. ‘They came here to the abbey to ask the way to Wealdsend – just as you did this very morning – but they never got there. Somebody made quite sure of that by killing them.’

  Luc had tears in his eyes. ‘They were so excited,’ he muttered. ‘They teased me and ragged me because I was hesitant about going with them – Symon said it would be the best adventure ever.’ He wiped a hand across his nose.

  ‘Who were they hoping to see at Wealdsend?’ Helewise prompted. ‘Its lord?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Luc admitted. ‘We were just told the name: Wealdsend.’ Again, he looked up at Ninian, then at the abbess, returning his gaze to Helewise. As if he had suddenly made up his mind to confide in them, he burst out, ‘There’s a group – small but very powerful – which has its own secret symbol. It’s a special double-headed axe called a labrys. I’ve seen a drawing of it, and it’s depicted within a sort of maze. The group’s going to do something extraordinary: something that’ll change the course of England’s history, so that the names of those who carry out the deed will be remembered for ever.’ He sat back in his chair, looking drained. ‘That’s why Symon – it was his idea, really – was so keen for the three of us to find Wealdsend and join the group. He wanted to be famous.’

  Helewise could have wept.

  Ninian spoke up. ‘If the group is so very secret, how did Symon discover where to go to find it?’

  Luc risked a quick glance at him, then dropped his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’

  Swiftly Ninian abandoned his casual pose, moving to stand in front of Luc’s chair, his hands on its arms impr
isoning the youth. ‘I think you do,’ he said softly.

  Luc was no match for him. ‘Symon was … he’d gone somewhere he shouldn’t have been,’ he admitted. ‘He overheard something.’ He rallied, making himself face Ninian. ‘It’s no use asking me to tell you any more, because that’s all I know!’ he cried. ‘Symon said it’d be dangerous if he told me and Guillaume. He was scared,’ he added in a whisper. ‘He thought whoever he spied on might have known he was there.’

  ‘He was very brave, then, to proceed with his mission,’ Ninian said. ‘A lesser man might have given up.’

  Luc seemed to sit up a little straighter, as if some of his late friend’s courage had stiffened his own backbone. ‘Symon was brave,’ he agreed. Then, dropping his face in his hands, he whispered, ‘I wish he hadn’t gone.’

  Then he began to sob.

  Helewise put her arms round him, but after a few moments, he shook her off. He stood up, bowing to the three of them in turn.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Helewise asked. She felt a cold foreboding.

  Luc did not reply.

  ‘Don’t go to Wealdsend,’ the abbess urged. ‘You don’t know what you will find there, Luc. Would you risk your life, when your two friends have lost theirs?’

  But Luc did not answer their questions. ‘Thank you for your kindness,’ he said stiffly. ‘And for your care of my friends.’ Then, bowing again, he let himself out of the room. They heard his footfalls striding away.

  After an instant of stunned silence, Ninian flung the door open again and hurried after him.

  Josse was on his way back from Medley Hall. He was cross and tired, and his sore throat was worse. Hunching deeper into his cloak, he reflected sourly that he might as well have saved himself the journey, for nobody at Medley recognized his description of the hooded rider and his bay.

  Or, at least, Josse amended, nobody’s admitting to recognizing him. Which wasn’t the same thing at all.

  As he rode, he tried to remember if he had actually seen the rider emerge from Medley Hall’s courtyard, or if he had simply assumed that was where the man had come from. He shut his eyes, the better to visualize the scene. Without a doubt, the rider had been on the spur of track that led solely to Medley, but Josse could not recall if he had seen him riding out through the gates. It was, he decided, possible, if unlikely, that the man had left his bay tethered somewhere beyond the settlement, rather than in Medley’s stables. And the only reason for anyone to do that, he concluded, was if they wished to keep their visit a secret.

  FOURTEEN

  Late in the evening, Josse, Helewise and Ninian sat by the fire in the House in the Woods’ wide hall. Eloise had retired to bed soon after her daughter, both of them worn out by Inana’s fractious day. The rest of the household, too, had settled for the night, leaving the three alone.

  Ninian had not managed to follow Luc Jordan. ‘He evaded me,’ he had announced bitterly when, cold and tired, he had finally arrived home. As he hurried out of the abbess’s room on Luc’s heels, Ninian had been detained: by Meggie, of all people. Still unable to find Lilas, and with her guilty conscience troubling her, she had turned to her brother in her distress, demanding if he had any news of the old woman. By the time Ninian had explained that no, he hadn’t, and he was in fact in a great hurry to follow and apprehend someone else perceived to be in danger, it was too late. Although he raced to fetch his horse and dashed straight out on to the road to try to pick up Luc’s trail, it was impossible. With no real clue as to which direction Luc had taken, he was simply faced with a confusion of far too many hoof prints patterning the track. Deciding that Wealdsend was the boy’s most likely destination, he had cantered off along the route to the isolated manor to see if he could catch Luc up, but without success. Although he had ridden as far as the hanging valley, there had been no sign of the lad.

  Even now, some time later, Ninian was still angry with himself for his failure. ‘You did your best,’ Josse said, probably for the fifth or sixth time. ‘We understand that you could not ignore your own sister. It was just bad luck that, unwittingly, she held you back.’

  Ninian, it seemed, was not to be comforted. Filling his mug from the jug by the hearth, he lapsed into brooding silence.

  It was just as well, Josse mused, that Meggie had remained at the abbey, or she might well have been the recipient of some angry words.

  Helewise, evidently deciding that they needed a change of subject, said softly, ‘Regrettably, the disappearance of Luc Jordan is not our only problem. There are also the three deaths – Benedict de Vitré and the St Clair cousins – as well as the whereabouts of poor Lilas. Whoever is holding her, and wherever she is,’ she added hopefully, ‘we can at least be fairly sure she will be looked after, since the aim of her abductors is to make her broadcast the content of her visions.’

  Josse grunted. ‘Not if she’s been taken by supporters of the king. If that’s the case, the aim will be to stop her talking.’

  It was all too obvious, he reflected grimly, how that would be achieved. Helewise’s soft ‘Oh!’ of distress suggested she thought the same.

  ‘We know she’s not at Tonbridge or Medley,’ he said after a moment. ‘We have the stable lad’s evidence that Fitzwalter’s man didn’t find her when he went into the infirmary to look for her and, presumably, take her. At Medley, too, I am inclined to believe them when they deny knowledge of her. Can she be at Wealdsend?’ he went on, half to himself.

  ‘You suggest that there is a connection between Medley and Wealdsend,’ Helewise remarked, ‘since you followed your hooded man from the one to the other.’

  ‘Aye, and the fact that I first saw him at Hawkenlye Abbey, in the forefront of Fitzwalter’s gang of bodyguards, makes me conclude that he has a connection with the faction down in Tonbridge, too,’ Josse said. ‘Although how this three-way link works is beyond me, I confess. First, we have Benedict de Vitré, a loyal and devoted friend of the king who amassed revenue for him and, incidentally, made himself extremely rich in the process. Second, there is Nicholas Fitzwalter, whose aim, I’m led to believe, is to curtail the power of the king, thus benefiting himself and his fellow barons. Third, there is the largely unknown quantity of Lord Robert Wimarc, who may or may not be involved with some outlandish outfit known as Labrys, which – or so we’re told by an impressionable lad scarcely out of boyhood – is conspiring to do something extraordinary that will change the course of England’s history.’ He gave a rueful laugh. ‘And if that’s not some wild tale dreamed up by a bunch of bored squires with nothing better to do, then I’m the next Pope.’

  Helewise sighed. ‘It does seem outlandish, I agree. And, even if there is an element of truth in it, what on earth would the conspirators want with Lilas?’

  Josse shook his head. ‘I have no idea.’ An image of Wealdsend formed in his mind: isolated, enclosed, forbidding. ‘I fear for her indeed, if they have hidden her away within those grim walls. There is an air of dark mystery there that affects even the countryside around.’

  ‘You thought the place was deserted,’ she reminded him, ‘yet you observed your hooded rider being admitted.’

  ‘Aye, I did.’ He put his hand to his head, kneading his brow as if it would help him to think. ‘He’s a Fitzwalter man – he must be – so does that mean this Labrys business is somehow linked to what Fitzwalter’s doing?’

  ‘Josse, stop.’ Her hand was on his, gently removing it from its furious massage of his head. ‘Think about something else. The murders of Guillaume and Symon de St Clair, now: the bodies were found several miles from Wealdsend, so let us speculate on why that might have been.’

  Grateful for the distraction, he said, ‘Guillaume told us they – he and his cousin – were lost. “They came for us,” he said, “although I do not know how they found us.”’ In a flash of insight, he exclaimed, ‘I don’t think they ever got to Wealdsend. I think someone – two men, perhaps, maybe more – from Wealdsend found them, still some way away, and, after kill
ing them, deliberately arranged that they were left well away from Wealdsend.’ He paused, thinking hard. ‘The first one, Guillaume, we found near the sanctuary and, according to Geoffroi, his bitch’s clever nose discovered the other cousin, Symon, deep in the forest between here and the abbey,’ he went on slowly. ‘The body was concealed in a bramble thicket. Whoever was responsible either dumped both of them at the spot where Symon was found, believing Guillaume too was dead, or else deliberately deposited the two of them in separate places.’

  ‘You’re suggesting then, if the former is true, that poor Guillaume crawled all the way to the sanctuary,’ she said very quietly. ‘Oh, Josse! He was looking for help, and he made such an effort, and it was all in vain.’

  ‘We cannot know that’s how it happened,’ he said, trying to make it better but knowing he wasn’t succeeding. ‘The killers may have deliberately left the two of them in different spots, perhaps thinking that, if they weren’t found together, it would be that much harder to identify them.’

  She was silent for a long time. When, eventually, he looked up at her, she gave a minute shake of the head, indicating Ninian.

  After a while, Ninian drained his mug and, with the briefest of goodnights, stomped out of the hall. Instantly Helewise turned to Josse. ‘I didn’t want to speak in front of him, as he’s cross enough with himself already,’ she whispered. ‘But, Josse, if our postulated pair of murderers were trying to stop anyone identifying – or even finding – the dead St Clair cousins, whatever are they going to do when they find out Luc Jordan’s now trying to get to Wealdsend too?’

  The next day, the body of Lord Benedict de Vitré, late master of Medley Hall, was at long last going to be buried. The interment was long overdue: he had been dead for more than a week and, even in the cold cellar, time had not been kind. The delay had been unavoidable, for Lady Richenza had refused to act until some sort of ceremony could be arranged – and, with England under the interdict, that had been virtually impossible. Finally, Sebastian Garrique had managed to persuade her that they really could put it off no longer. Sitting in the solitude of the steward’s room early in the morning of the burial, door firmly closed and barred against interruption, he spared a moment to congratulate himself.