‘You were holding it back.’
‘That as well. I thought on top of what I’d told him already it might be too much in one go.’
‘What else are you holding back, Hildegard?’
‘Why should I be—?’
‘Come on,’ he interrupted savagely, backing her into an alcove. ‘We’ve known each other ever since we were bare-legged little heathens running wild in the woods round Castle Hutton. There is something – what is it?’ He turned her face up to his. ‘Is that a bruise on your cheek?’
Her eyes filled. ‘Ulf. It’s all such a mess.’
‘Did he touch you?’
She knew what he meant. She avoided his glance. ‘Please – don’t …’
‘Did he? Tell me, Hildegard. If he did I’ll break his balls.’
‘It was nothing …’
‘He’s come back for you, hasn’t he?’
‘Never!’
‘You said you loved him, you’d have absconded with him—’ His voice was harsh.
‘It was true … long ago. I was headstrong. That’s what I was like in those days. But I was a fool. A child. I was fifteen! I thought I knew everything!’
‘But when he left for the war … ?’
‘It ended long before that. I realised I’d made a mistake almost straight away. There was no love in it. What I felt to begin with was like a mist. It dissolved at the first sign of reality. I realised pretty quickly he was no good. His violence. Self-pity. The cruel games he played. It was a marriage of convenience. Nothing more. I tried to accept it. It was what I was expected to do.’ She twisted away. ‘I didn’t love him, Ulf, not after that first rush of romance. I could never love a man I didn’t respect.’
‘I wish you—’ he clamped his lips together and his eyes were splinters of blue as they searched her face. ‘You know what I wish.’
‘Everything might have been so different. I know that.’
He reached for her and pulled her powerfully into his arms. ‘If Roger fails in his promise, Hildegard, I shall not fail in mine. I promise I shall kill him.’
‘No!’
‘What?’
‘If I say spare him, will you?’
Ulf stepped back as if she had slapped his face. ‘Would you want that?’
‘It depends on who I am, doesn’t it?’ She looked at him in open confusion. ‘As a nun I must not draw blood or cause it to be drawn. Ulf! I don’t know who I am or how I’m bound until I’ve talked to—’ She could not say his name.
‘Damn him to hell!’ Ulf ground out between his teeth. He knew whom she meant and what prevented her from naming him. Hubert de Courcy. Always her abbot standing between them.
He gazed bleakly into her face, then after a moment of indecision reached out and crushed his mouth against hers. His lips moved hotly, drawing a response she could not resist. She tasted blood. She weakened in his arms. He released her, all the time staring into her face to read her expression with his piercing blue gaze.
‘Damn them both,’ he intoned hoarsely after an agonised pause. His eyes flashed murderously as he turned and stalked off.
As soon as she went out she found herself in the middle of a huge crowd. It was no apprentices’ brawl this time. It was mostly pilgrims and sightseers and for some reason they were singing a
Te Deum
. Loud voices bawled the Latin to the skies. Hats glittered with saints’ badges. Cloaks flapped in the wind.
‘Has the King arrived?’ she asked somebody standing nearby.
‘Not yet. But any time now!’
As usual the yard around the Great Hall was seething with people as well. The pungent aroma of food being cooked on open spits floated on the air. Rabbit. Wild duck. Teal. Song thrush. Chestnuts roasting in shallow pans. Eel pie, too hot to handle. And the constant smell of ale. The drift of woodsmoke. Watching over all this, like a brooding spirit from another world, the dancing bear, now sitting on its haunches staring dully at its
chains as if wondering how to free itself.
Scarcely a cobblestone was without somebody standing on it. Necks were craning at a procession approaching across the bridge.
A herald appeared in the thick of the crowd.
Trumpets shrieked.
A high voice made an inaudible announcement.
The trumpets blared again.
Hildegard turned to a fellow with a cockleshell in his hat. ‘Is it him, master?’
He was standing on tiptoe. ‘It’s somebody in red and gold,’ he told her, overcome by excitement. Then he stood down again. ‘Not the King, I’m afraid, just somebody from the Lancaster affinity. I can’t see who it is from here. Doesn’t your abbot tell you what’s going on?’
‘He hasn’t arrived yet. And I expect when he does he’ll be as much in the dark as I am.’
‘It’s a constant show just now. All the nobles! Both archbishops! Every magnate in the land. The guildsmen in their regalia! God bless them all! May the saints provide wise counsel!’ The pilgrim smiled and moved off to find a better vantage point.
A path was being opened by some rough-and-ready men-at-arms with pikes coming in from the direction of the wooden bridge leading down from the city. Hildegard was pushed back with the rest of the crowd as someone strode towards them through the path that had been carved for him.
She looked askance. She knew him all right.
He headed for the open north door of the church.
It was the Duke’s son, Harry of Derby, young
Bolingbroke. The subject of the York servants’ ribald comments.
It wasn’t the first time she had seen him.
It had been a year ago at Bishopthorpe Palace when he had tried to buy the Cross of Constantine from the Archbishop. She remembered his brusque manner, the way his eyes had hardened when he had been refused.
About nineteen years old, the same age as his cousin the King, he was still short but he had filled out and even started a little reddish goatee beard, maybe an attempt to give himself some
gravitas
.
And a pace behind him, Thomas Swynford.
She could see no family similarity between the two men except maybe in their swaggering self-importance.
At least Bolingbroke can be forgiven for throwing his weight around, she thought, watching him march inside with great pomp and accompanied by another brassy blare of trumpets. His father was said to be the richest man in England. Soon, if the Duke won the crown of Castile by means of his second wife, he would be one of the richest in Europe.
Young Harry had a weight of responsibility now his father was away on campaign. He was heir to the Duchy of Lancaster and would need swagger to carry it off.
The gowns of the court ladies fluttered as they followed after him.
She joined the stragglers.
Harry Derby and his inner circle filled all the standing room at the front near the altar and she had to press in among the rest of his retinue at the windswept open
end of the nave where the missing west facade was filled with scaffolding. Craning her neck she could just make out the figure of the abbot near the high altar. Nicholas Lytlington.
He looked frail and aged but his voice carried clearly to every corner of the building.
They had three or four small boys to sing the anthems and a vicar choral with a deep bass voice to add weight to their soaring trebles. It was all done without fuss, the responses right on cue. To Hildegard it sounded somewhat chilling, no more than a merchant’s bargain: sell us a seat in heaven then we’ll build you a church.
She guessed the rest of Henry Derby’s bargain. He had made that clear when he committed the sacrilege by trying to purchase the Cross of Constantine after she brought it from its hiding place in Italy.
His father might have accepted that the English crown was not for him.
His son was another matter.
So far he had not got his hands on what he might see as the stepping stone to the crown and Hildegard pondered the lengths he would go to get the cross.
What was it worth to him?
She remembered the ambush when nothing had been looted and the marauders had ridden away, stealing not so much as a crust of bread.
She remembered Neville, handy with a sword, riding away from the battle scene with the bag under his arm. And she recalled his suspicion that a thief had tried to steal it from his chamber at Lincoln.
From where she stood she could see the back of
Bolingbroke’s head. He removed his velvet, jewel-encrusted cap. His hair was short. It was red like a fox’s pelt.
She made her way outside. It was still busy in the palace yard. The wind was howling upriver making the flags on the towers snap.
The arrival of King Richard and Queen Anne had been greatly exaggerated. The royal barge, apparently, had come out onto the water, but instead of turning upstream to the seat of government, it had turned and headed down towards the mouth of the river.
Nobody knew where it was going.
Down to the docks at Rotherhithe maybe.
Escaping to France, some joker suggested before he was set on by a couple of the King’s supporters.
The crowd judged that there was nothing here for it and began to disperse. Hildegard decided there was nothing to stay for either and was just turning away with the intention of going back up to her guest quarters when someone murmured in her ear.
‘How did we ever get into this situation?’
She felt hot breath on her cheek. With it came a scent of sandalwood reminding her piercingly of Hubert de Courcy and her cheeks flooded with colour. She spun round. Then her lips parted.
It was her rescuer from All Hallows.
He was smiling, his expression wolfish, his large brown eyes exploring her features with a liquid softness that was ambiguous coming from a friar.
She could not step away, the crowd was too pressing,
and as a consequence she became sharply aware of the scent of his clothes, his skin. It was unfamiliar, enticing and disconcertingly intimate.
‘This situation?’ she asked more sharply than intended, trying to draw back. The sense of having been followed swept over her.
‘Battle after battle won against the odds,’ he murmured. ‘Crécy, Poitiers. No one to beat our heroic archers. And now – people on the very streets of London quaking with fear at the prospect of being overrun by an enemy they despise?’
‘I see, yes,’ she agreed. ‘Once so strong. Now so weak.’
‘The old King, God save his soul, gave too much away when he gave his heart to Alice Perrers.’
His lips were only inches from her own and as he spoke he seemed to mould the words with a sort of caress. She found she couldn’t take her eyes off them.
‘Now we have the boy King reaching manhood to the alarm of his uncles. A recipe for disaster, wouldn’t you say?’ He was smiling. ‘Our beloved and gracious King Richard, surrounded by the ambitious and thwarted brothers of his poor war hero father. How can he hope to live up to an example like that, withstand them, and fulfil all our hopes and dreams of victory?’
‘Perhaps if he had control over the war chest he could assign resources for our defence,’ she countered sharply.
‘Indeed. That would be a solution.’
He seemed to look at her with some kind of assessment in mind but she had not said anything seditious. It was most people’s view that the King needed money – but they would rather he took it from those who could afford it
than from the poor who scarcely had enough to put food into their mouths. She said as much.
The friar laughed exposing long even teeth. Like a wolf, she thought. But his soft lips came together again and he ran the fingers of one hand over his mouth with a meditative gesture, half closing his eyes as he considered her words.
‘What is your interest in these secular affairs, magister?’ she asked.
He chuckled. ‘Matters of state are everybody’s concern if we have a care for our own survival.’ Bending over her he adopted a tone of concern. ‘But tell me who that man was – the one who tried to defile you in the crypt?’
Despite the softness of his voice she felt it was a thrust of some kind – attack was too strong a word – but there was an edge. Her fault.
She had only herself to blame.
‘It was the man I was married to before I joined the Order.’
‘So he was your husband?’
When she hesitated he went on staring at her until she was forced to reply. It was a mere nod of the head.
A crowd of newcomers were pressing all around them, heading for the hall, and she allowed herself to be swept along with them, and when she looked back the friar was staring after her with that enigmatic expression that could have been kindness – or an invitation to a confession to be used against her.
She shook herself free.
‘Master Edwin!’ she exclaimed. The archbishop’s clerk was waiting with his page in the lodge. She had changed her
clothes again, had another look at the bruises Ravenscar had inflicted, and moved in a miasma of balsam.