Authors: Cassandra Clark
The boat lurched as he felt feverishly around in the bottom of the boat. Then, in a dead voice, he said, “They’ve stolen it.”
There was no point in bewailing their loss. Looking back at the river bank they could see and hear no sign of their assailants. They had melted away as smoothly as they had emerged, at one with the black night.
“We have several choices,” said Hildegard rapidly, pulling herself together. “Either we get back to shore and try to follow them with the help of the guards. Or we return to York and rouse the constables. Or…” She hesitated.
“Or?” he prompted.
“Or we go on downstream to Naburn Manor.”
He gave a start. “Lord Roger de Hutton? Do you think he might help? What can he do?”
“I don’t know. I just feel it’s the wisest course. I’m not sure I trust the palace guards.”
“There’s only one problem with any of that,” Thomas commented.
“What’s that?”
“They’ve taken the oars as well.”
* * *
The fire was banked high until it was roaring up the chimney in a sheet of flame and everybody had to keep standing up to move the benches back in case their clothes caught light. Hildegard and Thomas sat swathed in woollen blankets on stools right in front of it. They were still shivering, more from shock than from the fact that they had had to swim from halfway across the river when the boat drifted past Naburn Manor. Someone now thought to place jugs of mulled wine beside them.
“So just run through this again,” said Roger, sweating in the heat despite the ties of his nightshirt being undone to the waist revealing a mat of glistening ginger hair. There was no standing on ceremony since the two wet and shaking monastics had emerged from the river and come dripping up from the gatehouse with a guard of half a dozen armed men. Even Melisen was wearing just a long blue silk over-gown and probably nothing underneath. The entire household had been roused from its slumbers. A crowd of servants still hung about the doorway in their nightshirts.
“There were six or seven of them. They just burst out of the woods,” Thomas repeated. “We had no warning whatsoever. It’s all my fault. I was carrying the box with the cross in it. The Donation of Constantine, he said! You know what that means.”
“What does it mean?” asked Roger irritably.
“Oh sweeting—” Melisen interjected. “It’s the pope’s right to hold power over kings. The King of England is the pope’s vassal just as you’re the vassal of the king. Obviously most of the kings of Europe object. Especially with two popes claiming precedence.”
“Oh, that,” scoffed Roger. “What’s Neville worried about? Neither pope’s intending to show his face here, are they?”
Melisen ignored Roger and assessed the newcomers. “Aren’t you both warm enough yet? This fire’s likely to set the whole manor alight.”
“Damp it down,” ordered Ulf, nodding to one of the servants crammed in the doorway. “And then get out of it. The show’s over.”
“Why don’t we ask our guest to look at poor Brother Thomas’s head wound?” suggested Melisen, giving the monk a sympathetic glance as he made a slight groan. “This strange fellow turned up at our gates yesterday and so charmed us with his wit he earned bed and board for himself. He claims to be an expert in the healing arts.”
“Yes. Bring him forth!” ordered Roger, regardless of the hour. “But I still don’t understand.” He turned to Hildegard. “How couldn’t you get any sort of glimpse of these ruffians? Didn’t they wear livery?”
She shook her head. “It was too dark to see anything.”
“Any ideas who they were?”
“Doesn’t it seem obvious?” She felt bitter. She had already told them about the mysterious stranger who wanted to buy the cross. Thomas had repeated that he knew who it was and would lay down his life if he was wrong. Now she gave Roger a bleak glance. “I should have known he wouldn’t be thwarted. The son of Gaunt? Hah!”
“If Bolingbroke’s got his hands on it you’ll never get it back,” Roger told her.
“We have to,” she exclaimed. “He’ll use it to usurp the throne. It’ll be a sign to everybody that he has the divine recommendation of Constantine. You don’t realise how seriously people take these signs and symbols.”
“Only when it suits them,” he interrupted irritably.
“He’s probably the so-called eminent personage who’s to share our stand at the pageant,” Melisen commented.
“I won’t be able to look him in the eye.” Roger glowered and shifted his chair farther back from the fire. He seemed to have taken it for granted they would not be accusing a royal prince of theft. “Damp it down,” he growled, with a gesture towards the fire. “Do as my steward tells you.” A boy crouching among the ashes threw some more sods on it. The heat gradually abated.
“It’s the middle of the night,” somebody remarked as if they had only just realised.
“You’re right. We’ll think more clearly after a good sleep.” Roger got up and gave a professional examination of Thomas’s head. As a veteran of the French wars he was used to wounds and bloodshed. “He’ll live,” he commented. “But you might as well get that fellow to have a look. Hildegard’s in no fit state to tend the wounds of others.”
She had an emerging bruise over her right eye from being thrown into the bottom of the boat.
* * *
“He didn’t have much to say that was any use,” Thomas remarked when Roger and Melisen retired.
Ulf quirked one eyebrow. “Never underestimate my lord. He’ll cook something up in that devious brain of his. He’ll have riders scouring the country on the other side of the river in a trice.”
“I thought I heard a boat put out.” Hildegard went to the window that was patched with hundreds of small mullions. It was half open and let in the night air.
The river was visible between the trees more as an absence than anything else. She and Thomas were lodged in the guest wing where there were several vacant and spacious chambers for them to choose from. The guests at Naburn, Roger and his large retinue, had taken over the master suite and the lord of Naburn himself, one of Roger’s tenants, had been relegated to the chambers over the gatehouse. Other guests were yet to arrive.
She turned. “Whose land is that on the other side of the river?”
Ulf was tight-lipped. “It belongs to Lord Malbas.” He didn’t need to say more. The name had come up often enough in the past. He and Roger were often in dispute over boundaries as Malbas claimed land adjacent to Roger’s de Hutton territory in the north.
“Would he be likely to shelter the thieves?” she asked.
“Not if he knew they came from Bolingbroke. He might be a litigious devil but he and Roger share some affinity. He’ll have his men out of their beds as soon as he knows what’s happened, don’t you worry.”
“Then all we can do is wait for morning,” she said.
But just then the door opened. Someone entered. He looked surprisingly familiar. Hildegard watched as he came into the room and, spying Thomas, went straight over to him. “So you’re the fellow they say has a wound?” He ran sensitive fingers over Thomas’s head. “It’s just the one blow,” he murmured. “Looks clean. What did they use? A piece of wood?”
“Felt like half of Filey Brigg,” muttered Thomas.
“You’re from that way on, are you?” asked the newcomer. His accent slipped from that of the southern counties into a hint of Yorkshire. Hildegard knew where she had last seen him. He had looked somewhat different then. The spangled cloak and give-away boots had been exchanged for a more sober houpelande and night boots.
When he had recommended a pain-killing unguent she would probably have recommended herself if she’d been asked, he turned, about to leave the chamber, and it was then she spoke up. “I see you managed to escape Master Baldwin’s attentions at the booths the other morning, sir?”
The stranger came to a swift halt. He turned. “Sister?”
“I saw you on York Pavement selling a love potion. Your magic was sufficient to make you vanish into thin air, much to the chagrin of certain men whom I suspect you already knew.”
He came over to her. “You witnessed all that, did you?”
She nodded.
“I’d never seen them before in my life. It was most unexpected. Luckily I can think on my feet otherwise I guess I wouldn’t be standing here now.”
“They seemed to know you well enough.”
“And it was a Master Baldwin, you say?”
“He’s a glazier,” she told him.
“Baldwin.” He looked thoughtful. “If it’s not too late, sister, I’d appreciate further conversation?”
“I feel refreshed from my swim in the river,” she told him. “What is it you want to know?”
“I want to know about this fellow, this glazier. Is he working here in York?”
“His brother is Edric Danby, master glazier and guildmaster of York.”
“Means nothing to me. Anyone else in the household?”
“Mistress Julitta, Baldwin’s wife—”
He shook his head.
“And his brother-in-law’s wife, Dorelia, and a couple of—”
“Dorelia?” He looked stunned. He went over to the window seat and dropped down onto it like a puppet with cut strings. After a pause he said, “I thought I saw her in the crowd when I was assembling my equipment for the show, and yes, she was accompanied by a fellow in an orange turban and one other fellow. I took no notice of them but looked only at her, remembering how I had once known her in Wakefield and yet not quite able to believe my eyes. She didn’t notice me, of course, and was too soon swallowed up in the crowd, and I thought that was the end of the matter, that I had been mistaken…” His face had turned dark. “But married? To a guildsman? And here … in York?”
“Is there something wrong?”
He looked bemused. “Only that she was betrothed to a handsome young devil without any fortune of his own when I knew her. I’m surprised she gave him up, especially after inheriting her uncle’s fortune. They could have been comfortable together.”
“They must be two different people,” said Hildegard. “This one is poor. According to gossip she arrived without a dowry and practically with nothing but the clothes she stood up in.”
“Is that so.” He frowned. “And I am attacked by men I know nothing of—for what? Glancing at a beautiful woman?” He got up. A skinny man, skeletal almost without the swirling folds of his mage’s cloak, he moved towards the door. “Dorelia,” he murmured half to himself. “A beauty beyond compare. Once seen, as they say, never forgotten. I was not mistaken.” He turned with his hand on the latch. “Thank you, sister. There’s more to this than meets the eye.”
He left.
* * *
Hildegard’s mind was in turmoil. Intriguing though the mage’s response had been it was to the loss of the Cross of Constantine that her thoughts returned again and again through what remained of the night.
The theft had been so well organised, so quickly executed after they left the archbishop, that it was difficult to believe that Bolingbroke could have organised it with such speed. He would scarcely have had time to issue the orders to his men. But would he stoop to common theft to get what he desired? Yet it had to be him. There was nobody else who could make use of a talisman with such a potent reputation.
* * *
A hard, cold rage had slowly crept over her. She couldn’t believe she was so stupid as to lose the cross, not after everything she had suffered in Tuscany to get hold of it last year. It was as if she had already forgotten the lengths people will go to achieve their ambition … as if she thought things would be different here in England. She was a total fool. It was humiliating … enraging … and also, she was forced to admit, frightening. If the Gran Contessa could commit those heinous crimes of which she was guilty in order to grab the cross to enable her to rule a city, the depths to which someone might descend in order to gain the Crown of England could lead them to the very mouth of hell itself.
This might only be the start. But she would not let them win—whoever they were. She could not let them win.
All this she said as she paced the floor in front of the three men. Roger wore a ferocious scowl and was pulling at his red beard. “The last thing I want is that bastard Gaunt putting either himself or his son on the throne,” he growled. “What do the rebels say? ‘We want no king called John.’ I second that.”
Ulf was gazing out of the window, his eyes like ice. His fingers played up and down the hilt of his sword as if he couldn’t wait to use it.
Brother Thomas had his hands folded and his head lowered as if he were meditating. In fact, he was, but not on any religious theme. He looked up after Roger spoke. “I think you’re right. Bolingbroke must be behind it. We should report the theft to Archbishop Neville and let him deal with it. It happened within the purlieus of his palace. That makes it a church matter and canon law must be applied.”
“Tell Neville his guest’s a thieving bastard?” Roger threw his head back in a mirthless laugh. “He’d deny it to hell and back. He’s clearly in on the whole thing.”
“Oh now, surely—” Thomas remonstrated.
Ulf turned from the window. His voice was cold. “The men are just about to beach the boat. Let’s see what Lord Malbas has to tell us.”
* * *
Roger’s tenant, a mild, middle-aged knight with a rather bossy, buxom wife, had already descended from his gatehouse by the time Roger had led the rest of them down the stairs and across the yard. They all went together to the landing stage where four of Roger’s men were alighting along with a couple of strangers in the Malbas livery—a red water bouget on a white ground. They saluted Roger and nodded pleasantly in the direction of his steward.
“No go, my lord. They must have got clean away along the bank back towards York.”
The leader of the two men they had brought over stepped forward. “He’s right. We’ve had men out most of the night keeping a look-out for sheep-rustlers our side of the river. We lost near twenty or so night before last.”
“Haven’t you got them down to the summer feeding ground yet?” asked Roger, looking smug.
The man lowered his head.
“Still, that’s neither here nor there. Could a gang of ruffians have slipped through your cordon?”
“Only with a dozen arrows in their backs.”