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

  Lilas smiled. ‘I’ll do very well here. In fact …’ She shifted her position, plumping up the straw-filled sacking palliasse. ‘I reckon I’ll go back to sleep.’

  Mounted on Eloise’s mare, Meggie was on her way down to Tonbridge. Ninian rode ahead, detailed by Josse to escort her on her journey. She had tried to accept the necessity for her brother’s presence with good grace – she knew Josse only acted out of concern for her safety – but, as always, it chafed. Ninian, too, she reflected, probably had several places he would rather be: back at home with his wife and his enchanting infant girl, for one. Inana, her aunt thought fondly, was becoming prettier by the day.

  Life at the House in the Woods had settled down again over the past few days and, as ever, the ordinary daily routine became more valuable immediately after events had conspired to threaten it. It was clear to Meggie that her father and Helewise had not told the entire truth about what had happened up at Wealdsend: they had merely said that they had been talking to Lord Robert Wimarc about the three dead young men – asking him if he had known they were coming to see him – when Gervase and his men burst in to arrest him and his killer for the attempted murder of the king. She knew, in her heart, that it had been considerably more dramatic than Josse would admit. For one thing, there were all sorts of unanswered questions and, in addition, she was quite sure, in her own mind, that her father and Helewise had been in grave danger. She had noticed that the pair of them repeatedly caught one another’s eye, exchanging a secret look which she could not interpret but which she guessed meant something like we nearly lost each other; thank God we didn’t.

  Lord Robert Wimarc was awaiting trial. Everybody believed he would hang, for King John would not tolerate a man to live when that man had sent a skilled assassin to kill him.

  Of the assassin there was no sign. Gervase de Gifford had delved into his own purse to hire parties of extra deputies, selecting skilled huntsmen, subtle trackers, upright citizens and even reformed poachers, and the countryside around Wealdsend had been scoured over and over again. Meggie could have told Gervase not to bother. Undoubtedly, the killer was far away by now.

  Meggie wondered how he would have felt when he heard – if he heard – that the man he had been commanded to kill was alive and thriving; when he discovered that he had stuck his lethal blade not into living flesh, but into a shoulder of pork.

  With a shudder, she turned her mind away from the subject. She almost wished she had not been told the details, but Gervase appeared to be under the impression that, after having treated her so unfairly over the matter of Sabin’s potion, he owed her the full story.

  In front of her, Ninian turned in the saddle. ‘All right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  He nodded and turned round again. She smiled; knowing him as well as she did, she guessed that this chance to think his own thoughts was as welcome to him as it was to her. People with whom you can be happily silent, she thought, are both rare and to be treasured.

  Her thoughts roamed on. Her innocence in the matter of the death of Lord Benedict was now beyond dispute, the true story having been broadcast by the highest in the land. ‘The man known as Manticore is responsible for both the death of Lord Benedict de Vitré and for the attempt on the king’s life,’ said the proclamation, widely believed to have been worded by King John himself, ‘and the forces of law and order throughout the land will hunt him down and bring him to justice.’

  That, thought Meggie, recalling Lilas’s prediction, remains to be seen.

  Ninian, she noticed, had got some way ahead of her and, as she urged the mare after him, down the long hill towards the town, her mind stayed with Lilas.

  The old woman had gone when Meggie finally went back to the hut. Initially Meggie had been very concerned: surely it wasn’t safe to leave, because the Fitzwalter faction might very well still be hunting for the old woman. But then, on further reflection, she came to understand that perhaps there was no need to worry …

  News had spread like fire about the assassination attempt on the king, and now people were doing their best to make out they were fervent John supporters and had been all along – and wasn’t it a terrible state of affairs, when a man plots to murder God’s anointed sovereign lord? In this climate of self-righteous loyalty to King John, Nicholas Fitzwalter had gone rather quiet. Ralph of Odiham had apparently decided he was suddenly needed back at his monastery, and it was rumoured that Caleb of Battle had fled; taking advantage of the flurry of activity in and around Tonbridge Castle, he had quietly slipped away, presumably back to the safe, strong walls of his abbey. Word was that he had learned a hard lesson: keep your opinions to yourself.

  Maybe, she reflected hopefully now, Fitzwalter no longer wanted to get his hands on Lilas? She smiled. In the light of what she had recently learned, it seemed unlikely that he would find her, even if he wanted to …

  It had been a day or two before Meggie learned what had become of Lilas: she had gone off with Tiphaine. Lilas had no desire to return to Hamhurst, Tiphaine reported when she came to explain the old woman’s disappearance. She had no kin there, and her outspokenness – seen as a threat by many villagers to their anonymity and their safety – had made her unpopular, and she knew full well that nobody in Hamhurst was going to welcome her back with open arms.

  Tiphaine was going to take Lilas to meet the Domina. Putting village life behind her forever, the old woman was about to embark on a very different life and, according to Tiphaine, she was embracing the prospect joyfully. The forest people were far away now – Meggie knew this without being told, sensing it as a sort of sad absence deep in her heart – and from now on Lilas would be out of the reach of anyone who wanted to use her or harm her.

  With a soft smile, Meggie remembered their exchange: Got forest blood, have you? Lilas had asked. When Meggie had said yes, she’d replied, Me too.

  Perhaps, after all, Lilas was going home.

  Sabin de Gifford was in the cool little room where she made her preparations. When Meggie was shown in, she greeted her unenthusiastically. ‘Oh. It’s you.’

  Meggie, fully prepared to be forgiving, was taken aback. ‘Yes, it is,’ she agreed. After briefly looking up, Sabin was once more intent on her pestle and mortar, her head down. ‘I believe,’ Meggie went on, ‘you owe me an apology.’

  Sabin did not reply. The hand wielding the pestle stepped up its efforts.

  ‘Sabin, look at me,’ Meggie commanded. Reluctantly, Sabin raised her eyes. ‘You came to me for help,’ Meggie went on, ‘quite desperate, because you thought one of your potions was responsible for the death of Lord Benedict. It certainly was potentially harmful, I might add, since it contained ingredients that must be treated with the greatest care, although I haven’t said too much about that to anyone else.’ She paused, watching Sabin intently. ‘In your panic, you demanded that I go to Medley Hall with you, to make sure, as I later realized, that his death could not possibly be attributed to your potion.’

  ‘You …’ Sabin began.

  But Meggie hadn’t finished. ‘Then, when suspicion fell on me and they said I had made and administered a harmful potion, I thought – I remember it vividly – I thought, Sabin will speak up, and tell them it was she who made the remedy.’ She paused, waiting until she had controlled the flare of anger. ‘But you didn’t,’ she said neutrally. ‘You kept your mouth tightly shut, and you let me take the blame.’

  ‘I have a husband, children and a reputation as the town apothecary!’ Sabin cried. ‘I could not risk losing all of that!’

  ‘But it was all right for me to risk my reputation?’ Meggie flashed back. ‘Which surely you must see would have been wrong and totally unfair, when I hadn’t had anything to do with the accursed potion?’

  ‘You’re different.’ Sabin spoke the two words with cold detachment. ‘It doesn’t matter what people think of you, because you’re a …’ As if she was suddenly aware of what she was saying – who she was saying it to – she stopped
. A faint flush crept into her cheeks.

  ‘Because I’m a bastard child born to a forest woman,’ Meggie finished softly. ‘Yes, Sabin, I know what I am. But, unlike you, I know what constitutes honourable, decent behaviour, and allowing a friend to take the blame for my own mistakes is not something I would ever contemplate.’

  It was a relief to emerge out into the courtyard, where Ninian waited for her with the horses. He took one look at her face, then handed her the mare’s reins and said, ‘Let’s go.’

  Riding home, Meggie fought to overcome her disgust and, she had to admit, her deep disappointment. Sabin, she realized, had put self-interest – and the advancement of her husband, herself and their children – far above anything and everything else. So far above, indeed, that Meggie’s possible fate, if she had been arrested and put on trial for murder by potion, had not affected her at all – or, if it had, not enough to make her confess and take the blame on herself. Where it belongs! Meggie thought, fury racing up again.

  Sabin really was not to be trusted.

  They had reached the summit of the hill, where the road out of Tonbridge met the track that ran round the forest, turning right for the abbey and left for the House in the Woods. Ninian had gone on ahead, towards home, but she hesitated, not sure which way to go; not sure, in truth, whether she was yet ready to follow him. Turning in the saddle, she gazed down at the town in the valley below.

  I thought better of Sabin, she reflected sadly. I believed we were friends.

  She found that her confidence in her own judgement had been badly shaken. To have had faith in someone, and then been let down, was, she discovered, a hard lesson.

  From somewhere within herself, she seemed to hear a very familiar voice: Meggie, you’re grown up now, it said. Its tone was calm, and very, very loving. It’s time to realize that not everyone’s nice.

  Ninian, noticing she had stopped, had turned his horse and was riding back towards her. ‘Are you coming?’ he asked.

  She looked at him, her eyes suddenly full of tears. ‘I just … I heard our mother’s voice,’ she said quietly. ‘She … I was a bit upset about something, and she was giving me a piece of wise advice.’

  He was watching her, understanding and love in his bright blue eyes. ‘She does tend to do that from time to time,’ he replied. He grinned and then, seeing her tears, reached out for her hand. ‘Don’t be sad,’ he said. ‘She’s with us, you know, all the time.’

  She sniffed, wiping a hand across her face. ‘Yes, I know.’ She managed a smile. ‘I’m so glad you sense her, too.’

  ‘I,’ he said with dignity, ‘am her oldest child. Of course I do.’

  Her smile broadened. ‘Pompous ass,’ she muttered.

  ‘Forest child,’ he flung back.

  It was normally funny, but it wasn’t today. Jerking her head towards the town, down in its valley, she said, ‘She just said as much to me. You’re different, she said. It doesn’t matter what people think of you. I knew exactly what she meant.’

  Ninian gave a sound that eloquently expressed his disgust. ‘Meggie, you and I didn’t have the conventional family arrangement to bless our birth, any more than Geoffroi did, but, personally, I’ve always thought that to be an advantage.’ He hesitated, then said, ‘I never met my real father, and once I’d outgrown some childish notions concerning him, I didn’t want to. We share our mother, and both of us know how special she was. I wish that, like you and Geoffroi, I was Josse’s blood son, but he is my father in every other respect.’ Again he paused, watching her with an expression so kind that it brought more tears to her eyes. ‘We couldn’t do any better, Meggie, and if Sabin de Gifford can’t see that, the fault is in her.’

  Slowly she nodded. He was right; she knew it.

  Suddenly she realized exactly where she wanted to be. Putting her heels to the mare’s sides, she said, ‘Race you home.’

  POSTSCRIPT

  Midwinter 1211

  Jehan de Ferronier reached down and patted the neck of his horse. ‘Not far now, Auban,’ he said, speaking in Breton since Auban was a Breton horse. ‘It’s been a long road, and both of us are hungry and weary, but soon we’ll be able to rest.’ The horse responded to his voice with a shake of his head, making the long, pale-coloured mane fly out in an arc which released a cloud of dust. Jehan, waving the dust away from his face, gave a short laugh. ‘Yes,’ he added, ‘and we’re both filthy. I forgot to mention that.’

  He turned round in the saddle, looking back into the west. The sun would soon be setting – this was, after all, the shortest day of the year – but he reckoned enough daylight remained for him to reach his destination. The thought of yet another night curled up under some hedgerow that provided inadequate shelter from the cold was all but unendurable. Once or twice, at the start of his journey, he had treated himself and Auban to a night in an inn, but now he felt he must save every coin of the money that remained in his purse.

  He thought – he hoped – he was going to be needing it.

  He had been in Wales, where he had sought out and joined the group of fellow Bretons who had gone to add their strength to the Welshmen fighting under Llewellyn ap Iorwerth. Neither Jehan nor any of his companions had any personal allegiance to the Welsh lord; none had even met him before arriving in Wales. It was simply a case that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Llewellyn was fighting King John for reasons of his own – most of Jehan’s fellow fighters had only the haziest idea of what these reasons were – and Jehan’s Bretons were willing to put their strength of arms behind anyone who fought the king of England.

  Their own reason for fighting him was crystal clear, and it amounted almost to a holy crusade: King John had murdered his own nephew, and that precious young man had been the Bretons’ beloved Arthur, son of Constance of Brittany and King John’s brother, Geoffrey. The rumour – so widely believed that, in most men’s minds, it had turned into gospel truth – was that, at Easter 1203 in Rouen, John himself had crushed the life out of the young man, then weighted the body with a stone and thrown it out of a window into the Seine.

  Jehan and his Bretons had found a confused and constantly changing state of affairs in Wales. The problem, as Jehan saw it, was that the majority of the Welsh lords were primarily – some of them solely – concerned with themselves and their own small fiefdoms, and, accordingly, they tended to switch their loyalty depending on which of the two protagonists, Llewellyn or John, was in the ascendancy. John’s initial attack had been an abject failure, leading the Welsh lords to flock to Llewellyn, but his second advance – better-planned, better-executed – had been devastatingly successful. When Jehan had left Wales, rumour had it that Llewellyn was in the middle of forming new and powerful allegiances with other Welsh lords, and that their uprising against John, when it happened, would have the support of no less a figure than Pope Innocent himself.

  Less widely broadcast – in fact, Jehan had only heard it as the merest whisper – was the suspicion that Llewellyn was in touch with the French king, Philip Augustus, and together they were planning a massive counterstroke against John.

  Jehan had not been the only Breton to leave Wales late that autumn, as the season slowly and irrevocably turned to winter. As the brave stand against King John had deteriorated into a squabble between rival Welsh lords, many of Jehan’s companions had also decided they’d had enough. Most of them were only there, in that mountainous, incomprehensible land so far from home, because they had believed they would be offered the chance to take a swing at the man who had murdered their Duke Arthur; because, with any luck, they might witness the royal head severed from the royal shoulders. Sitting in a dirty, damp, cold camp, with inadequate and pretty disgusting food and, most days, nothing to do, most of the Bretons had decided they would be better off back home. We can always come back, they reassured each other as they packed up their meagre possessions and prepared to leave. When the fight begins anew, we’ll be here!

  Jehan knew they meant it; knew they sincerely bel
ieved the brave proclamations. And, in truth, the mass departures suited him, for nobody thought to comment when he, too, announced he was off.

  He said farewell to the last of his fellow Bretons – a group of seven who came from a small town near to Duke Arthur’s former stronghold in Nantes – as the road they had been travelling on diverged. His friends headed south, to the coast and a boat to take them home. Jehan went on eastwards, giving as his reason his urgent need to find a town or a village with a decent blacksmith to attend to Auban, who had cast a shoe and was beginning to favour his off hind leg.

  Nobody questioned him, and the farewells were affectionate and sincere, with many calls of, ‘See you in the spring, when the fight resumes!’

  As he headed off on his long road, Jehan felt a moment’s regret at his duplicity. Auban did indeed need the attentions of a blacksmith, but only because Jehan had himself removed the shoe. But he’d needed an excuse for not proceeding with his companions, and that was the best he’d been able to come up with.

  He had two reasons for not returning to Brittany, and he was prepared to share neither of them with the men with whom he had been living and fighting for the past couple of months. The first was personal: he had promised Meggie he would join her in the Wealden Forest before winter made travel impossible. He knew he had left it very late, for the temperature had been steadily dropping and he was sure it would be snowing before long. The second reason was involved with the campaign he had just left behind in Wales.

  Although Jehan had been careful not to say so out loud, he sensed that he was more deeply committed in his opposition to King John of England than many, if not most, of his Breton companions. He had nodded in agreement with the comments that suggested there was no point in remaining in Wales, while in his heart he had been angry with those who made them. The struggle is not over, he wanted to shout. We should take the initiative, and ally ourselves to Llewellyn himself, offering our swords and reiterating our reasons for joining the fight! We should tell him what to do!