by Jack Whyte
He pulled himself together with an effort and waved off her question, muttering something unintelligible in reply as he stepped forward to lay his hands on the undisturbed pile of fodder, but as he did, he became aware of his clean green boots and the building within which they stood. The central channel had been swept out long since and its surface was dry underfoot, but he saw the looming bulk of approaching beasts beyond the low doorway, and at once his nostrils seemed filled with the acrid, pungent stink of liquid dung mixed with urine. An image flashed into his mind of what the floor of this place would look like moments after its occupants returned, and he backed away quickly, lifting each foot with exaggerated care. By the time he turned back to face Jessie, however, he had regained his voice.
“Forgive me, Baroness, I was woolgathering. It’s plain to see, even in the dark, that nothing here has been disturbed, save by our own presence, and now your tenants have come home. Shall we go on?”
The sky had faded to a dark, purplish hue, and the last lingering rays of the vanished sun were firing the low western clouds with brilliantly glowing, flaming tints of orange and gold and red. Jessie stopped walking and gazed up at the display.
“How can one look at that and not believe in God? It is different every night, never the same from day to day nor even from hour to hour, and it is never ugly. Even at its worst, the sky is always wondrously beautiful. But everything changes constantly, everywhere we look.” She glanced sideways at him, standing quietly beside her as he, too, stared out at the panorama in the west. “I will admit, though, sir knight, that the changes I have seen in you these past few weeks have amazed me. I expect change, as a part of life, inevitable as night after day, but still you astound me.”
“Astound you? How so, madam?”
“Let me see … you astound me in a host of ways, and I have to say that I would be hard put to name but one … But no, that is untrue. I have one. You have learned to listen.”
His mouth widened slowly into a grin. “I assure you, Baroness—”
“Jessie.”
“Jessie, aye … I assure you, Jessie, that I have never had the slightest trouble with my hearing.”
“Nor did I say you had. I said you have learned to listen, not to hear. Hearing is an ability, but listening is an accomplishment. I know few men who really listen to anyone or anything, let alone to women. Your friend Tam is one of them.”
“Tam …? You will explain that to me, I hope.”
It was Jessie’s turn to grin, and he felt his spirits lift with the quick merriness of it.
“I will, and I’ll do it slowly, for the sake of your masculine ears. But may we walk while I do so? It’s growing cool.”
She fell silent as they began to walk again, and before she could resume, Will turned his head towards the gates, attracted by the sound of voices.
“Did you not say you had given Tam the night to himself?”
She glanced up at him quickly and he laughed aloud and turned away again, failing to notice the look on her face as he crowed, “Well then, it would appear he didna listen to you. Tam! Sergeant Sinclair! Here, to me!”
A large group of men had just entered the enclosure, indistinct in the rapidly growing darkness, a mere block of black male shapes, some of them carrying longhandled shovels, but there was no mistaking Tam’s upright form at their head or the massive bulk of Mungo MacDowal by his side. They stopped as one, and Will heard Tam say something to the others. He weaved slightly as he approached, but Tam Sinclair was a long way from being the worse for drink. When he was close enough to see them clearly he stopped short, his eyes widening and his jaw dropping as he looked at the spectacle of his kinsman dressed in the sumptuous garb of a French nobleman.
“Name o’ God,” he muttered, more to himself that anyone. “What in—?”
“Good evening, Tam.” Jessie cut him short before he could blurt out anything else, and he turned to her, blinking owlishly.
“And a guid e’en to you, Baroness,” he growled, his Scots burr thickened by drink. “A braw night.” He swung his head back truculently to look again at Will, but Will was ready for him.
“What have you been doing out there, so late in the day?”
“Late in the day? We’ve been there a’ day lang. What d’ ye think we’d be doin’? We’ve been buryin’ bodies. Ye may mind there wis a wheen o’ them lyin’ about the place.”
“I do.” Will looked towards where the last of the distant group was vanishing around the corner of the main house. “How many were you?”
“Six to dig—the prisoners—and eight o’ us to guard them. The four o’ us, and four o’ Lady Jessie’s men.”
“And how many bodies?”
“Nine, and every one o’ them a heavy whore to shift—Your pardon, Baroness.”
Will nodded. “Well done. But the Baroness has just been telling me she set you free and at leisure today.”
“So she did.” Tam frowned. “Are you telling me I’m no’?”
“No, not at all. I merely wondered why you did not take her at her word.”
“I did, and I thanked her for it. Did I no’, Baroness? Aye. This night, I intend to get very drunk. We ha’e the drink in the bothy, and food to soak it up, thanks to the stewart, Hector McBean. So, ’gin ye’ll let me, I’ll—” He stopped again, scanning his kinsman slowly from head to foot, missing no slightest detail, and then turned to Jessie, pointing a thumb towards Will. “This is your work, I jalouse?” Jessie smiled, rather tenuously, but said nothing, and he shook his head. “I ha’e never seen the like. An’ I wouldna ha’e believed it wi’out seein’ it for mysel’.” He looked Will up and down again, slowly. “Green boots! Green boots an’ nae armor … No’ even a dirk.” He glanced again at Jessie and then drew himself up to his full height, clearing his throat loudly. “Well, ye look grand, Will Sinclair. Grand and braw and … no’ just different, but … right, ye ken? Ye should aey wear green.” He grinned wickedly. “It suits ye.” And with that he turned and walked away.
How long Will might have stood there speechless he would never know, but beside him he heard Jessie stifle a sudden shudder and saw her clasp her elbows, hugging her breast. “It’s cold,” she murmured. “I want to go back inside now.”
They crossed the courtyard quickly this time, striding towards the house, and both of them were shivering as they entered the main room and moved directly to stand as close as possible to the roaring fire. They stood side by side, gazing into the flames, each of them lost in thought until Jessie broke the silence, giggling gently.
“You see? Tam approved my choice. Did that surprise you?”
“I’ve been speechless ever since.”
They both turned to say something else, and suddenly they were face to face, no more than a hand’s breadth between them. Neither said a word for some moments, until Jessie raised a hand wonderingly to her mouth.
“I had never heard you laugh before tonight. Did you know that?”
Will stepped away, lowering himself into one of the two large chairs that had been repositioned during their absence to face the fire, and Jessie sat down in the other. “Never? That is hard to believe,” he said, resisting the urge to call her by name. “How long have we known each other now? You must have heard me laugh at one time or another.”
“Six years since we first met, that night in La Rochelle. And you have never laughed. Not in my presence. Until tonight.”
“That is ridiculous,” he blustered. “You make me sound like … you make me sound as though … Bah!” He threw up his hands.
“I make you sound like a grim and intolerant knight I once knew, a Templar knight called Guillaume de St. Clair … a man who never smiled, as far as I could see, let alone laughed. Come now, be serious. When do you last remember laughing, really laughing so that it hurt your ribs? Can you recall?”
He sat still, thinking, his face growing sober as the moments stretched, and then his eyes lit up and he smacked the arm of his chair. “I can! I
t was the time when Tam fell in a river, fully armed, and couldn’t climb out. I fell out of my saddle laughing, and the angrier he grew, the funnier it seemed.” He laughed again, gently, recalling the scene. “It had been raining hard that day … straight down, relentless, and the riverbank was sodden. Tam slipped and dropped his sword in the mud—I can’t recall why he had drawn it or why he was afoot—but he was angry at himself and went to wash it clean in the river. He stooped and stretched until his feet went out from under him and he landed on his backside. Then he spun around until he was looking up at me, his face wild with outrage … and he slid slowly backwards, scrabbling at the mud, his legs in the air, all the way down and off the bank, into the water. And once in, fully armored, he could not climb out.” Will was really laughing now, pinching the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb and snorting with mirth, his eyes tearing over. “It wasn’t deep, but it was slippery. I tell you, Jessie, he was howling, baying with anger, and it was the funniest thing I had ever seen.” He pulled himself together then, shaking his head and blinking the tears from his eyes. “It took him a long time to forgive us, but he did, eventually. Sweet Jesus, that was funny.”
Jessie was smiling with him, and as his laughter died away, she said, “I’m glad I asked you that. When did it happen? Was this on Arran?”
His face grew somber and his voice changed, becoming quieter. “No. It was in the Languedoc, close to the Pyrenees, on the way to Navarre to fight the Moors. It was … fifteen years ago.”
Jessie sat stunned, for there was nothing she could say, she thought, that would not sound petty, but after a few moments she drew in a breath and spoke brightly. “Well! We may be glad it happened, for it has brought laughter back to you, for my pleasure, after all this time.”
“Aye, mayhap, Jessie.” His voice was barely audible. “But you were right. I doubt I have really laughed since that afternoon, for we lost more than half our number in the fighting that followed hard on that day. Fifteen years!”
A silence stretched after that, and she watched him. Ah, Will Sinclair, you dear, dear man, how I wish I could show you what laughter does to your face, to all of you … It strips years away from you, years and years and years, and shows the boy in you …
A log spat and cracked in the fireplace and the blaze subsided, throwing sparks and whirling smoke up into the canopied flue.
“What were you thinking there?”
The question caught her by surprise and she answered unthinkingly. “I was watching you, thinking you should laugh more often … all the time … and wishing I could show you how you change when you do …”
He sat gazing at her, and then a tiny smile tugged at his mouth. “That would be a clever—”
A shriek of female laughter rang out somewhere beyond the door and snapped them both out of the mood they had been sharing.
“Marjorie! That child is …” Jessie was on her feet, unaware of having moved, and now she stood glaring down at him as they listened to the clatter of running feet, her eyes sparkling with an emotion he could not define. “I swear, since that boy entered this household all sense of decorum has been tossed aside. And Marie and Janette are no better than my ward. Wait for me here, if you will. I have to go and assert some authority.”
Wide eyed, Will watched her go, her skirts swirling about her, and he was still unsure whether the look in her eyes had been one of anger or of perplexed amusement. She left the door open as she went, and he heard her going up the stairs, her voice raised in exasperation until it dwindled beyond hearing. Only then, when he could hear nothing but stillness, did he settle back in his chair, gripping the arms and looking absently about him as he began to take stock of this unusual day. Unusual was not the word for it, he thought; this had been a day beyond imagining. This was her room, Jessie Randolph’s room, despite whatever claims her nephew might hold to it. Her influence, the signs of her presence, her dominance of this household, were visible everywhere: they shone in the colors of the room, the banks of candles cunningly arranged, the shawls and cushions on the furnishings, and the jugs and pots of living flowers on practically every level surface. And in the middle of it all, he sat wondering what he was doing there … How had he come to this, and what was happening to him?
There was a time, he thought, when he might have believed the woman had bewitched him, and as the thought occurred to him, he acknowledged that she had, in fact, bewitched him, slowly and surely. But where years earlier he might have run in confusion to some priest, seeking absolution, he was now content to sit and await the next developments. He had become a different man today from the one he had been the previous year, or even the previous month, and he was well aware that the rigorous, unyielding Temple knight of a decade earlier was long since dead. But the process of that particular knightly death had been assiduously executed by men, by those same men to whom he had dedicated his life, swearing to serve, to honor, and to obey. No witchcraft there … Exorcism, perhaps, in that the spirit that possessed him as a younger knight had been expelled, cast out forever. But that had happened through no fault or influence of Jessie Randolph’s. All she had done was frighten him with unchaste thoughts and lustful dreams, phenomena that, in his single-minded dedication to doing his duty by and for the Temple, he had forgotten were harmless in the eyes of his true Order, the Brotherhood of Sion. And in the past few weeks, all that he had learned had combined with all he had decided in recent years to generate a new Sir William Sinclair, another man altogether; a man mature in years and battle-hardened, but owning all the terrors of an unworldly, virgin boy.
IN THE STILLNESS, the long howl of a distant wolf came clearly through the unglazed window high above his head, followed by the sound of marching boots and a loud challenge that marked the changing of the night watch. The fire settled again, and he noticed that several of the banked candles on the table and sideboard were guttering, close to burning out. He had lost track of how long Jessie had been gone, but he felt utterly at ease as he pushed himself to his feet and went to snuff the dying candles, pinching them out between a moistened finger and thumb and smelling the odor of smoldering wick as he scratched congealed wax from his thumb afterwards. Only a few had burned out, and he left the others as he went to rebuild the fire, settling new logs in place and only remembering at the last moment not to push them down with his bright new spotless boots. He stood for a few moments gazing down into the fire and frowning slightly, and then he sat down again, plucking at his lower lip, and let his thoughts run free, aware only that he had never been indecisive, and that he needed to be constructively decisive now.
He was deep in thought when Jessie stepped back into the room and stopped near the door, observing him. But when she spoke he turned to her immediately, showing no sign of surprise.
“You are still here! I thought you would have tired of being alone and be abed.”
“Not at all. I have been sitting here thinking, of many things—things to be done, decisions to be made. Are you for bed yourself?”
“No, not yet, unless you wish to be alone.”
“No, I am content. Come and sit then, if you have a mind to share the fire.” He watched her as she came to sit across from him again, and when she was settled, stretching out her hands towards the flames, he smiled. “You have quelled the mutiny up there?”
“Oh aye, long since. High spirits are a blessing from God, but they need to be curtailed from time to time. Now Marjorie and Henry are abed, lights out, and Marie and Janette are at their chores, preparing for the morrow, spinning yarn for the loom. Am I permitted to ask what you were thinking about?”
“In your own house you may ask anything you wish, Jessie …” He hesitated, then plunged ahead. “I’ve been thinking about myself, in the main—about my life and what’s to be done with it. I’ve never had to do that before, can you imagine that? Here I am, growing old already, and I have spent my life being told what to do and when to do it, so thinking about what I ought to do is a new concern for m
e … very new … and strange … But you spoke of changes earlier tonight, and that set me off. My entire world has changed in the six years since I left Master de Molay in Paris. I still have duties, God knows—tasks to do and decisions to make that will influence far more lives than my own. But now I am thinking for myself, commanding others to obey my wishes and decisions.”
He chewed on the inside of his cheek, frowning, and then he looked directly at her. “I have been thinking about you, too. About this wish of yours to sail with us when we leave. How did you come to that?”
She stared at him for a long moment. “Not with us, Will. With you.”
He blinked. “You need to move away from here, I ha’e no doubt of that, but coming with us is nonsense. The place where we are heading is unknown, Jessie, it is—”
“What, dangerous? Savage? Wild? Filled with perils and uncertainty, with savage, brutal men on every hand looking to ravage, steal, despoil, kill, and destroy? It will be nothing at all like the douce and placid land we live in now, will it? Nothing like this civilized Scotland. Is that what you were going to say?”
“No, it wasna that—”
“Good then, for I would rather live in the uncertainty of your unknown Merica than live here in the sure and certain knowledge of being killed and in the foolish, hopeless hope that my death, when it does come, will be swift and painless.” She inhaled sharply. “In God’s name, Will Sinclair, where will I go if I leave here and do not go with you to your Merica?”
“To Arran. We have room for you there. You will be safe in Lochranza Castle, and all your people.”
“Lochranza Castle.” She almost spat the words. “And when you sail away, what then? The lord there is Menteith.”
“Not now. He is disgraced.”
“He may be, but the place is a Menteith fief and I will have no safety there. Take me with you, Will.”
“I cannot.”
“Why not, in God’s name? Will you be taking priests with you?”