Authors: Cassandra Clark
Waiting for a response would be like waiting for an axe to fall.
* * *
Ulf returned. When he entered the kitchen he was forced to stoop under the low ceiling. The widow tactfully withdrew to another part of the house.
“Roger’s at the first station inspecting the stand they’ve built for him and his guests,” he told Hildegard. “He’s delighted at being able to call off the search for you and he’s now switched his efforts back to finding out who destroyed Deepdale. He sends you this.” He held out a brace of pheasant.
Hildegard took them and for a moment stood with the birds dangling from her hand before hurriedly telling him of her fear, that by now it would be common knowledge that she had been to the rebel camp.
Danby had told Stapylton. Stapylton would have told other guild members. They would have spoken about it in front of their servants. The servants would have spread the story of her involvement far and wide about the town.
Then there was the fact that one or two rebels had survived the massacre. They would be wondering what had happened to the cross. They knew it had a value. When the coast was clear they might return to look for it and, failing, extend their search elsewhere.
She herself would be one of the leading suspects in its disappearance. Whoever wanted it badly enough would come looking for it. For her.
“But it’s not the rebels I fear so much,” she told him. “They’re unlikely to risk entering the city themselves. It’s…” She hesitated.
Ulf understood at once without the name being voiced.
He paced the kitchen floor. “Back to your former suspect? You believe it was him who staged the theft at Bishopthorpe?”
“I don’t know what to think. We’ll find out soon enough though, won’t we? They’ll come looking.”
“You can’t stay here. The walls of York won’t protect you. There’s no protection whatsoever.” He went to the window as if expecting Bolingbroke’s men-at-arms to come thundering into the yard.
When he turned back he said, “You’d be safer at the manor, Hildegard. Come back with me.”
She shook her head. “And stay in hiding with the cross? For how long? I’ll have to get back to Swyne some time.”
She put the birds on the slab and watched the blood dribble from their beaks.
“Everything is mere supposition, Ulf,” she said at last. “We don’t know if he, Bolingbroke, is involved.”
“If it wasn’t Acclom’s ship you saw in the bay then it was someone else with sufficient wealth to commission a ship. In my opinion it leaves only one contender. We know how ambitious the Lancasters are. Even the rebels recognise the use of the cross as a symbol of power. That’s a fact Bolingbroke would never ignore.”
She sat down on the bench and rested her elbows on the table with her head in her hands. “I can’t think straight. It could have been Earl Douglas, couldn’t it? The Scottish connection.”
“Then how did the rebels get wind of it if not through Bolingbroke?”
“I don’t know. I’m still in shock. I’ve never been so close to men butchering each other in cold blood like that, Ulf. It’s the most barbaric thing I’ve ever seen.”
She gave him a stricken glance. “It’s what my husband used to do as a knight-at-arms. No wonder he would never talk about it. The blood, the hacked limbs, the wounded flesh … men dying in agony with the exultant shouts of their killers in their ears.”
He put his hand on her shoulder. She could feel the warmth, the life of him, through her linen shift again. It was more than she could bear. Tears slid silently down her cheeks. She dashed them away.
“It was the look on the leader’s face as his guts spilled out…” she whispered when she managed to speak. “His awareness that it was all over. I felt such compassion for him but there was nothing I could do. Not one thing. The rest of it was horrific. An atrocity. No standards of civilised feeling. No humanity. Broken skulls. Brains revealed, still pulsing. The sound of swords grinding through bone. The horror. And for what? To stop a group of people with no real power thinking and speaking the truth as they see it?”
Another thought surfaced, based on something Hubert de Courcy had told her during that strange, revelatory night of vigil in Beverley Minster last year.
He confessed that he had been a knight in the service of a French duke before he became a monk. “I have killed men,” he had told her. She saw his face in her imagination now. The horror in his eyes.
I have killed men.
She lifted her head. “I can’t make sense of it at present, Ulf. To hear stories of battle is one thing. Chivalry. The glory of it. All the glitter and romance. But to witness it is different. It’s brutal. I can never feel the same again.”
He looked down at her in consternation.
“Go now, if you will.” She touched the back of his hand. “I need to think about it. Don’t worry about me. No one will come looking for the cross here. I’m sure the rebels—the one or two who survived—have more pressing concerns on their minds just now. They won’t risk showing themselves in York. No one else will know that I was present. Whoever was pulling the strings probably wanted only to exterminate a cell of the brotherhood. Constantine’s Cross was merely the lure to that end.”
When he saw she was determined to stay where she was, he reluctantly took his leave.
After he left, for once the yard was empty. It seemed to pulse with heat, the sun a small, burning disc in a cloudless sky.
Agnetha and Thomas had gone back to their duties earlier and the widow was out visiting in the town somewhere. Baldwin and Julitta were inside their house with the shutters across.
Even Edric had retreated indoors to the cool of the workshop and could be seen sprawling there, half-cut, in Dorelia’s chair next to the cold kiln, another flagon of wine at his feet. Gilbert, at work on the vidimus, was visible as a patch of silvery light in the window of the otherwise shadowless grey of the workshop.
She had reassured Ulf that the surviving rebels would have more pressing matters on their minds than the cross. Now she was alone with her fears she was not so sure. And there was Bolingbroke to consider.
She recalled that flash of light from the vessel in the bay. There had been no ensign. It was a ship that could have belonged to anyone, to any fleet. It was a fact, however, that no one had made much of a search for the cross in the aftermath of that surprise attack.
The few survivors had given only a cursory inspection of the battle scene. Once they had dealt with their dead they had set off by way of the carters’ track over the moor. She had seen them leave. It suggested that they were taking the same long route back to the camp.
And yet, according to Roger, they had not returned there. He and his men had met no one on the road from York, and when, following Danby’s instructions, they had found the camp it had been deserted.
The surviving rebels had probably turned north, maybe hiding out in the woods again, maybe even making for Durham where they might expect to find a safe house in the wake of the magister.
Hildegard was familiar with the moors. She had crossed back to York by the narrow trail that was used by travellers unencumbered by carts. The moorland eventually gave way to the vast tract of royal forest known as Pickering Vale. There was a well-fortified castle on a rise in the middle of it. It commanded a view over the forest for the purpose of keeping the king’s deer safe from poachers. She had avoided it. It belonged to John of Gaunt.
It occurred to her that any survivors with an affinity with Gaunt’s son would probably make for Pickering Castle. There they were sure to find food, shelter and a change of horses.
She was convinced no one had followed her by the less well known route she had taken.
If, however, Bolingbroke’s men were in fact looking for the cross, they might now turn their attention to the place where information could be more easily picked up.
To the nearest town of any consequence.
To York.
Ulf was right. There was no protection here.
* * *
The town stables were situated down Walmgate and conveniently next to them were the kennels. As soon as she appeared in the yard the kennelman hurried up to Hildegard with a look of relief. “Am I glad to see you, sister. We had a bit of trouble early on—”
“What, with my hounds?” she demanded in astonishment.
One of the kennel lads stood grinning nearby. “Not their fault, sister,” he broke in. “They’re fine characters.”
His master gave him a scowl. “You speak when you’re spoken to. Nobody wants your opinion.”
The lad didn’t wipe the grin off his face but he kept his mouth shut to allow his master to tell Hildegard what had happened. “Some visitors came roaring in here this morning asking about hiring a brace of hounds to help ’em fetch back an absconding servant, and your two animals were out in the yard being exercised by that grinning young devil and they nearly had his arm off, trying to get at ’em. I can’t be having my customers frightened off by undisciplined animals—”
“I’ve come to take them anyway,” she told him, not wasting time by trying to defend them. “I never intended for them to be here for so long. Can we settle up now?”
“Gladly.” He cuffed the grinning lad on the head as he passed him on the way into his office. It was a lean-to shed on the side of the kennel compound. When, business done, Hildegard came out, the lad was still there.
“So you got on all right with my hounds, did you?”
He nodded. “Sorry to see them leave, sister.” He eyed them both as if they were old friends and they returned the look with kindness.
Hildegard pondered the three for a moment. “Mm, well…” She couldn’t think of any particular use she could make of his enthusiasm. “These fellows they took exception to, what were they like?”
“Usual swaggering types with big money-pouches, sister. One had a hawk on his arm.”
“Maybe it was the hawk my hounds didn’t like?”
He pushed his hands in the pockets of a rather grubby tunic and, evidently unconvinced, kicked a stone. “Mebbe.”
“What would your master say if I asked to hire you to help with these beasts for a few days?”
He looked up with shining eyes and demanded eagerly, “Might you think of asking him then to find out?”
One of the swarm of children who ran about the town, he was unkempt, skinny with lack of regular meals and destined to a life of servitude. That was the best he could expect. The worst was to lose his work and have to beg with all the unpleasant consequences that would entail.
His master’s eyes gleamed as he pocketed his fee and willingly gave him leave to go. The lad himself almost danced along as he accompanied Hildegard and the hounds back to Stonegate.
* * *
Danby was surprisingly coherent when she appeared at his door with a request. “Plenty of room in that back kitchen of mine for a little’un. Let him curl up on a pile of straw with my kitchen lad.” He eyed the hounds. “They’ll look after you. Is that the idea?”
“I thought they would be no problem out here in the yard,” she told him.
He nodded. “Take the lad through if you like. See if it suits.”
To Hildegard’s surprise the workshop opened out into a substantial living chamber with a brick-arched fireplace at one end. An old woman was bent over a cooking pot and a small boy was chopping something on a wooden board close by. Straw bedding jutted from an alcove near the fire. Through the window was a parched-looking garden enclosed on all sides by the backs of other houses.
“This all right for you, young Kit?” she asked her new kennel lad.
“Better’n what master has.” He went over to the small boy, slipped out his knife from his belt and without being asked, started to help him with the chores.
“I’ll call you when I need you.”
The old woman hadn’t looked up once.
Danby beckoned when she came out. He led the way to the inner workshop and invited her inside. For once Gilbert was not at his bench. He closed the door.
“I went over to Stapylton while you were gone. It sounded urgent, what he had to tell me.”
“Yes?”
“He thinks Gilbert set fire to his workshop.”
Hildegard frowned. “I thought that was the way his thoughts were wending. What would make him think that?”
Danby was grim. “Gilbert was there, down below by himself, while we were talking guild business t’other morning. Then we leave. Then the fire starts.”
“But why would he want to set the place on fire? Does he have a grudge against Stapylton?”
“I can’t see why he should. No, it’s more than that. At least, this is Stapylton’s thinking.”
Danby seemed to be finding it difficult to get things straight in his mind and he went over to the bench and gazed down for a moment at Gilbert’s meticulous and graceful drawings. His expression was sad and the words seemed to be forced from him.
“I told Stapylton that we’re all on the same side. Gilbert wouldn’t cause malicious damage. I told him that and do you know what he said? He said: ‘These young hotheads, who knows what they won’t do in the name of the cause? They see us as old has-beens, waiting patiently for a change that will never come. We’re on the same side as far as our hopes go, but they’re impatient with our methods. They have no faith in us.’”
Danby gave her a bleak glance. “So, after that, it’s in my mind that Gilbert might be willing to put lives on the line in the mistaken belief it’s going to further our aims.”
“Lives?”
Danby nodded. “Anybody’s—and maybe even his own.”
Hildegard went to the window.
Her hounds were lying in the shade next to a bowl of water. Duchess had her head between her paws and her ears over her eyes and Bermonda was sitting upright as if on guard. They took it in turns. First one, then the other. In the manner of wolves. The sun was beating down without mercy. There was no breeze at all. She decided she would take them to the river to allow them to cool down. While this was running through her mind, her thoughts were going over what Danby had just told her.
When she turned round he was touching the edge of the whitewashed trestle marked out with Gilbert’s drawing. He wore an expression of such deep sadness her heart turned over.