Silk and Song

by Dana Stabenow

  “Harfleur?”

  “It is the Faucon’s home port.”

  Wilmot brightened a little. “Harfleur is still small enough that we may escape notice. Will you arrange passage for us?”

  “How many?”

  “The king and one attendant.”

  “Is there money?”

  “There is, more than enough. I’ll explain later.” He looked at Alaric. “I’m sorry, Alaric, but there is no one else to ask. I need your help to get him away.”

  “There was no need to ask, Wilmot.” Alaric stood up, his shoulders squared, his chin high, his expression that of one who had heard the trumpets sound one more time. “Of course I will go with you.”

  “So will I,” Jaufre said.

  “What?” Tregloyne said.

  “What!” Johanna said.

  “It’s forty-five leagues to Berkeley,” Jaufre said, thinking out loud. “Four to five days—”

  “If we can get there in four,” Wilmot said, “the king’s keepers will be away overnight in Bristol.”

  Tregloyne regarded Wilmot, clearly wondering how Wilmot had arranged that.

  “Four days,” Jaufre said, “provided we camp and carry our own food. We’ll take the Arabians. They’re the best over distance, and God knows they’re used to a hard pace.”

  “Jaufre!”

  “You heard what was done to the Despensers, Johanna. Can we really leave that man, that tired old man who listened to us sing with so much pleasure, who rewarded us so handsomely, to that kind of end? When we could have helped to prevent it?”

  “You can’t be serious,” Shasha said flatly, and next to her Tregloyne, arms crossed over his chest and a glower on his face, gave a most emphatic nod.

  “Shasha, listen—”

  “No, Jaufre. You listen to me. I have followed the two of you halfway around the world, and make no mistake, I don’t regret a moment of it, but after five years we have finally come to rest. I can plant a garden and begin my book of herbal remedies, and—and perhaps begin a family.” She glanced at Firas. He smiled at her. Visibly heartened, she turned back to Jaufre. “You can build your wool business. Johanna can start her breeding stable. For a full year we have been making a home for ourselves here in Glynnow, and now you want to hare off on some idiot mission to rescue a man whose rule, by every report we have ever heard, this adopted country of ours is well rid of? You want us to think of what happened to the Despensers? Let’s think for just a moment of what they will do to you if they catch you!”

  She had been gaining in volume as she spoke and by the end she was standing on her feet with her voice ringing off the stone walls. She paused, breathing heavily and glaring at Jaufre.

  “Besides,” Tregloyne said, leaning forward, “you are the new master of Glynnow, or had you forgot? You have responsibilities here, people depending on you here. Or did I go through all that legal nonsense for nothing?”

  “I don’t take up those responsibilities in full until you leave,” Jaufre said.

  “And if you are killed during this ridiculous rescue attempt? If you don’t return?”

  “Then you’ll have to find another Jaufre.”

  Tregloyne’s face a turned a dark red. “God’s nightgown, mayhap I should find another Jaufre now, if the one I have is determined to risk his life on such a foolish and dangerous and useless mission!” His voice boomed so loudly it created its own echo.

  For the first time since she’d known her, Johanna saw that Tiphaine was afraid, and tried to give her a reassuring smile. It wasn’t much of a success, because Tiphaine flinched away from it and went to curl up in a ball next to the hearth, studiously ignoring the ongoing argument.

  “That is of course your choice, Tregloyne,” Jaufre said, so politely and in so comparatively calm a voice that Johanna for one realized there was no moving him from his purpose. Her mind raced for a solution, and found only one.

  Into the fraught silence Wilmot, who was looking at Jaufre with an expression Johanna could not quite interpret, said softly, “There is much of your father in you, boy.”

  “The name’s Jaufre, not boy,” Jaufre said curtly, and turned back to Shasha. “Alaric and Wilmot were friends of my father’s. My father can’t help them. I can.”

  Shasha gave a sound very much like an infuriated cat. Tregloyne growled.

  “Very well,” Johanna said. “If you’re going, I’m going, too.”

  As one, all the men turned to gape at her. “Oh, of course,” Jaufre said scathingly. “On North Wind, I suppose. Whom no one will notice as we gallop over the countryside, or recognize as the reigning racing champion of all England!”

  “I’ll darken his hide with dirt, and need I remind you that North Wind is an army in and of himself?” Johanna said. Her voice was as calm as his had been when he faced down Tregloyne. “Jaufre, if you thought being together meant I stay at home like a good little girl while you ride off on some Sir Gawainish quest, you much mistake the matter. Being together means being together, no matter the journey or the destination or the danger.” She crossed her arms. “We are together, truly together, sharing everything, going forward from this moment. Or we are apart. Choose.”

  She stood before the fire on the hearth, slim, vibrant, willful, determined. He knew her well enough to know that she meant exactly and precisely what she said.

  “You can’t bring a woman,” Wilmot said, who looked horrified at the prospect. “We have to move fast. She’ll slow us down, and if there’s a fight we’ll have to protect her.”

  Alaric cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Wilmot, but I’m afraid they come as a set.” And he smiled at Johanna, the first time in all their acquaintance he had ever done so. “And I promise you, she won’t slow us down, and you will not have to protect her in a fight.”

  Jaufre couldn’t help it. He laughed out loud.

  Johanna laughed, too, and ran upstairs to get her belt, boots and short sword.

  They rode by day and by night, stopping only to rest the horses before pressing on again. Alaric was reminded of the ride from Sant’ Alberto to Milano and over the mountains into Lyon, with Jaufre nagging them on every step of the way. This time it was Wilmot pushing them, but there was no need because everyone was in a hurry for different reasons. “For one thing, the Faucon is expected any day,” Jaufre said, “and I don’t want Edward sitting around Glynnow waiting to be discovered while he waits for transportation.”

  They went around Launceston at night and avoided Exeter altogether, eating dried meat and fruit and feeding the horses on oats they had brought with them. Covered with dirt to color his white hide, North Wind was in excellent form, nipping at the rumps of the others when he felt they were going too slow. “By Christ’s holy bones,” Wilmot said on the second day, “he can practically talk,” and there was no further grumbling about women slowing them down.

  The fourth day they passed Bristol near enough to see the castle on the hill and the glitter of sunlight on the Avon. When they approached Berkeley it was coming on sunset. Wilmot led them to a thicket of trees clustered below the high walls far enough out of earshot of any guards patrolling the crenelated wall. There was a large round tower, looking solid and impenetrable. “That is where he is being held,” Wilmot said, pointing.

  “Is the front door the only way in?”

  “No.” Wilmot hesitated. “Jaufre, if you and Johanna could provide a diversion, Alaric and I can get the king out of his cell and outside the walls.”

  “What kind of diversion?”

  “Draw the attention of the guards to the front gate.”

  “How?” Jaufre said.

  Wilmot smiled. “You had no problem getting and holding the attention of the king the last time you met.”

  Johanna looked at Jaufre and smiled. “Well,” she said. “It worked at L’Arête.”

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “I could swear I heard someone singing.” The guard peered over the wall.<
br />
  A woman strolled up the road to the front gate like she owned it.

  I came riding into a land on a blue goose

  There I found marvels

  A crow and a hawk catching pigs

  A bear hunting a falcon and flies playing chess

  A stag spinning silk and if this is true

  A donkey makes hats

  Her voice was a fine, warm, contralto. She looked up to see them peering down at her, and smiled at them. “Ho, my fine gentlemen,” she said, “have you a few coins for a hungry minstrel? I promise to sing for my supper, and sing well, too.”

  They came through the small door cut into the larger one and gathered round to hear her sing. What was the harm, after all? Their lords and masters were away and their prisoner was safely tucked away. They might have hoped for other favors in addition to the serenade, but Jaufre put paid to that notion. He looked muscular, protective and like he knew how to use the short sword at his side.

  He was also her accompanist, keeping time on two sticks he’d picked up in the forest. They could have taken him at a rush but some of them would have been hurt in the process, and besides, she sang so prettily, they just wanted to listen to her. She sang the drinking song, and the song of wandering clerks, and the song about the farmer’s wife and the traveling tinker, and a Mongol marching song, and a song about a knight and his lady love. She sang for what felt like hours but was probably only one and perhaps a little more, before Jaufre heard an owl hoot three times from the trees to their left and poked Johanna in the back with one of the sticks. She finished the verse of the current song with a little trill and a bow and a beaming smile that set all of them aglow. “Thank you for your kind attention, good sirs. Your generosity will make the difference between my husband and I going to bed hungry or not this eve.”

  Jaufre doffed his cap and passed it around. The guards were generous within their means, and Johanna felt badly for fooling them, and for the punishment that would undoubtedly be coming to them in the morning. Jaufre returned with a respectable clank of coin and she thanked them warmly again, and sang her way down the road and out of sight.

  She looked at Jaufre. “It can’t be that easy.”

  A shout was heard behind them.

  “No,” he said, and hustled her toward the thicket, where North Wind stamped his impatience and where they found Wilmot and Alaric with a man they scarce recognized as the king who had commanded their performance. Gaunt, almost bald, he managed a smile that only made him look more like a death’s head. “Good people, I thank you for the timely rescue.”

  “You got yourself out, sire,” Wilmot said, “now we have to get you away.”

  Edward of Caernarfon cocked his head at the steadily rising clamor coming from behind the castle walls. “Indeed.”

  Jaufre unbuckled Johanna’s sword and handed it back to her. She put it on while he untied his father’s sword from North Wind’s saddle and slung it over his shoulders. It wasn’t a sword a poor minstrel would wear, and it would have been a curiosity and possibly a temptation to the castle guards.

  They mounted without further ado, the king behind Wilmot for the first leg of the journey. Wilmot and Alaric had wrapped their horses’ hooves in rags to muffle the sounds of their passage. The horses sensed the urgency of their riders, especially North Wind, who snorted and sidled impatiently, but Johanna kept him on a short rein, patting his neck and whispering soothingly into his ears. They moved at a forced walk, ignoring every instinct to break into a mad gallop, picking their way downstream through the forest, letting the trees hide them as long as possible.

  “The king got himself out?” Jaufre said to Wilmot.

  “Indeed, and slew the porter at the door who would bar his way,” Wilmot said.

  Jaufre and Johanna exchanged a glance. The death of one of the castle’s men would make a hot pursuit that much more certain, particularly if the porter had friends among the guards. North Wind’s pace quickened, and the other horses followed suit.

  It had taken them four days to get from Glynnow to Berkeley. It took them nine days to return, with Jaufre fretting and swearing beneath his breath every day they had to remain hidden in dense thickets and rocky caves and one memorable evening in the middle of a moor that on every side threatened to suck them down to their deaths. The king took turns riding with Wilmot, Alaric and himself. Johanna brushed dirt into the stallion’s hide every morning after they made camp, and every evening he ghosted his way over the countryside. The only people they saw were two young lovers trysting in a hay stack, who took one look at North Wind and ran screaming into the night.

  For his part Jaufre lived every moment of the journey in the fear that Angelique would have come and gone before they got home. It had been easy to be caught up in the excitement of the rescue, but in the aftermath he was very much afraid that Tregloyne had been right, that his action had been foolish beyond permission and that he had risked the lives not only of every member of Wu Company but of Tregloyne, too, and everyone else in Glynnow for that matter. The farther south they traveled, the less triumphant he felt. Shasha had been right, and he had known it when they quarreled that last evening. After all, he had said the same many times himself. He was a trader, not a warrior.

  He compensated by sleeping very little during that fraught journey, remaining awake no matter who was on watch, doggedly seeking out the least-traveled paths with the most cover, constantly alert to the possibility of anyone picking up their trail. He took it upon himself to check the horses at the beginning and end of every day, for fear that one would pick up a stone or cast a shoe or suddenly go lame. Days he sat with his father’s sword drawn, laying across his lap, ready at need to defend himself and Johanna to the last drop of blood in his veins. Which it might come to, he thought bleakly.

  But either they were very clever or very lucky, for they saw no one who looked like they might be interested in the king’s whereabouts. Alaric in particular could not account for it, and was inclined to be indignant. “A royal prisoner escaped, and no hue and cry?”

  “Under the circumstances,” the king said dryly, “I will forgo the honor.” He had held up remarkably well on the journey, unflagging and uncomplaining, although it was evident that he was unused to rough travel and was exhausted and half faint from hunger, as indeed they all were.

  They reached Launceston at last. They stopped well out of town and Alaric went in on foot for food. He came out without food, stumbling in his haste to impart the news. “They are saying that you are dead of an accident, majesty,” he told the king. “They say the warders cut your heart out and sent it to the queen as proof. Your body is to be buried in Gloucester Cathedral.”

  “What?”

  “What!”

  “But—”

  “They lied,” Johanna said. She looked at Jaufre, a smile spreading across her face. “The guards. They lied.”

  “Very probably at Maltravers’ instigation,” Wilmot said, thinking out loud.

  “Maltravers?”

  “The queen made him responsible for the king’s person,” Wilmot said. His mouth curved into a small, satisfied smile. “He is even now undoubtedly shaking in his boots imagining what Isabella and Mortimer would do to him if it became known the king had escaped his custody while Maltravers was off whoring in Bristol, never mind while guards under his command were humming along to an itinerant minstrel.”

  “Whoring?” Alaric said.

  Wilmot shrugged. “One of his mistresses lives in Bristol. Maltravers is the veriest of dogs. It was easy enough to arrange.”

  “That’s why no one is looking for him,” Jaufre said.“ Or for us.” He felt dizzy, and held a hand out to lean on a tree that was across the clearing, and then Johanna was there beside him, warm and solid. He looked up to see her grinning at him.

  “Not yet,” she whispered in his ear. “Wait to faint until we get home.”

  He let out a short laugh and pulled his scattered senses together.

 
; “They took the porter’s heart and sent it to the queen as proof,” Alaric said in an almost awed voice. “And the porter will be buried in Gloucester Cathedral.”

  The king started to laugh. He laughed until he could no longer stand and Wilmot helped him to a seat on a fallen tree, where he laughed still more, clutching his belly and rocking back and forth.

  Wilmot was distressed. “Majesty. Majesty, please, be calm. Be calm, sire.”

  Johanna thought His Majesty was in the first stages of hysteria, aggravated by hunger and fatigue, and wondered what the protocol was for slapping a king. Edward did calm, eventually, although occasional chuckles erupted like hiccups as they remounted and left Launceston behind. He was in much better spirits during the last leagues to Glynnow. They detoured around the village, wanting as few witnesses as possible. Along the cliff they rode and down the path to Tregloyne, where Tregloyne himself waited with a scowl on his face. The king dismounted. He was moving a little stiffly, but he looked less like a death’s head and more like a man who might live to see the next day.

  “Has Angelique been and gone?” Jaufre said.

  “Once,” Tregloyne said. “She should return shortly.”

  Jaufre went limp with relief.

  “I tell you, Jaufre, I did not look to see you again alive,” Tregloyne said. “And now that I do, I am not sure that I rejoice in the sight of you.”

  Jaufre held up a hand. “Peace, I beg you, Tregloyne. You cannot damn me any more than I damned myself all the way here from Berkeley.”

  Before Tregloyne could start in on him, Johanna said, “Have you heard the news, Tregloyne? Edward of Caernarfon is dead. They have sent his heart to the queen as proof.”

  Tregloyne scowled, looking from her to the king and back again. “What is this nonsense then, mistress Johanna?”

  So they told him, and Tregloyne stared, dumbfounded, and then a rumble began in his chest that erupted in a braying laugh. He laughed until tears started from his eyes and then he laughed some more. They watched him, grinning, not least the king.

  “Well,” Tregloyne said, wiping away tears, “if I am to entertain royalty uninvited, I’d best get on with it. This way, sire.”