Albert had lost interest. His attention had drifted out the window but his mind, once again, was painting Harvest Lossburgh in the guise of Robert Tiptoft. “I wonder where it was painted.”
“Where what was painted?”
Jeremy wasn’t about to let the thread of the conversation slip through his hands. “Oh no you don’t.” He tapped Albert on the knee and, turning to Huffy, said, “What other things are you talking about?”
“Well, I hain’t exactly a medical person,” said Huffy, “but it could cause hallucinations, seizures, mood swings, all that kind of thing.” He twirled his finger suggestively in the vicinity of his left temple for Jeremy’s benefit.
Albert wasn’t looking. “It wasn’t painted here.”
That was a bold assertion Jeremy Ash could not allow to stand unchallenged. “How do you know?”
Albert had been wondering the same thing. He wasn’t sure. “It’s not right.”
“What’s not?”
It Albert wanted to say. “The walls. There are no walls in this house that are like the walls in that painting.”
“Which was painted like five billion years ago,” said Jeremy. “Things change, A.”
Albert looked around; he wasn’t sure that wisdom applied in places like this. In England they still had kings and queens and horses and things. Probably dragons and damsels in distress, as well, if you knew where to look.
Jeremy knew what Albert was thinking. He had a point. The pores of the dark oak paneling oozed a primeval mustiness that would have made a dinosaur lie down and take a nap, feeling himself right at home. “Even here,” he said unsurely.
Something told Albert he was right. It was an unusual sensation. “It wasn’t painted here,” he declared, something he seldom did. By way of appendix he added: “The light’s not right.”
“Oh, you’ll want to go to the west country, I should imagine,” said Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hamilton as she, together with Albert and Jeremy Ash, watched Huffy away, his squashed-looking little sports car flinging gravel into the hedges, startling such wildlife as made their home there. By the time the vehicle turned out of sight, Huffy—having delivered his line—had become a footnote and would soon be relegated to the appendix of Albert’s mental Rolodex until such time as his intervention was required to move the story along with some other Cause For Alarm.
The housekeeper had spoken in response to Albert’s query as to whereThe Blue Robertmight have been painted. “That’s where Annabella’s family was from.”
“Annabella?”
“The lady who hired the cow-painter to paint it,” Jeremy reminded. He had become accustomed to keeping Albert abreast of the program, and Albert had become accustomed to trying to keep up.
“Oh. Yes. She didn’t live here?”
“No, no,” said Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hamilton, turning toward the house, drawing the little retinue along with her. “She was west-country stock. Out in the Cotswalds, as I recall, but don’t quote me on it.”
“I know where that is,” said Albert, who thanks to that little trick in his cognitive apparatus knew not only where most places were on a map, but what the people who lived there sounded like, even if he had only a foggy notion of his own position in relation to them.
“You know your trouble, A?” said Jeremy Ash, performing wheelies on the parquet. “You’re a guy tryin’ to figure out why a girl did something.” He alighted with a thud and looked hard at Albert. “Can’t be done.”
There were times when living in the orbit of Jeremy Ash was illuminating. This was one of them. “You’re right,” said Albert. “I need a woman.”
The words tasted strange on his tongue, and his lips looked up at him in disbelief. Deirdre Ponsenby-Blythe-Hamilton was going through some mail that sat on a silver tray by the door. Either she hadn’t heard the comment or chose not to nominate herself for the position, which was just as well, since Albert didn’t think of her as a woman. Not in the way Melissa Bjork had been a woman. Or Angela McLauren. The association gave birth to an audible burp.
“Angela.”
“Angela? The . . .” Jeremy Ash mimed a violinist.
“Yes. She’s a girl,” said Albert. “A woman,” he amended, though, frankly, the distinction wasn’t at all clear to him. “Female.”
“You want her to come up here?”
Albert had been surprised by the mention of Angela’s name, even though he was the one who made it. He had just been holding it up for a closer look when, from nowhere, Jeremy made this suggestion.
“I do?”
“I’m asking if you want her to come up here. You said you wanted a woman to help you figure out that painting, and you said her name, and she’s a woman, and . . .”
To Jeremy Ash these were links in a chain, each leading, logically, to the next. To Albert, they were unrelated, indeterminate objects strewn on the floor.
“It’s Socrates again, A. You want a woman. She’s a woman, ergo . . . ”
“I want Angela?”
“Bingo.”
Put that way, it made sense. “Yes,” said Albert. “But not here. I want her to go to the museum and see the painting, and tell me why she thinks that woman . . .”
“Annabella.”
“Yes. Annabella. Why she had it painted.”
Jeremy Ash was skeptical. “I don’t think she’s gonna be able to help you with that, A. My bet is Annabella was loopy. Must’ve been to have Lossberg make a picture of himself as some old dead guy in blue pajamas, with eyes looking the wrong way. I mean, she had to be, right?”
Albert knew something about Angela McLauren that Jeremy Ash didn’t know. “She’s loopy.”
“Who is?”
“Angela.” What better way to get inside the thoughts of a loopy woman than with another loopy woman? “She’s loopy, too.”
Jeremy Ash suddenly stopped spinning in his wheelchair. “What makes you think that? Because she plays her violin in the subway?”
“She told me so,” said Albert. “When we were in Tryon, she wasn’t just pretending to be Heather Antrim. She really started to forget that she wasn’t. Isn’t that loopy?”
Jeremy Ash was forced to agree. “She really did?”
“Mm.”
“So you think that because she’s nuts, she’ll be able to tell you why another nut did something?”
Albert almost smiled at his own ingenuity. “And they’re both women.”
It wasn’t so much the logic, as the illogic of Albert’s logic that intrigued Jeremy. “I’ll call Quiggs and have him track her down.”
Chapter Ten
October 13, 1216 - The Wash, road to Bishop’s Lynn, England
William Longspear’s hands were hot inside his gauntlets. He clenched and unclenched them as he watched a little tragedy unfold across the fens where the North Sea was slowly, relentlessly consuming the wagon containing the King’s household treasury. Already it had lent over into the sand that would presently form its grave.
“Those were good horses,” he said, morosely as the team of four, unable to gain a purchase on mud that gave way beneath their frantic stamping and thrashing, sank further and further beneath the inrushing tide. Unable to break free of the yoke by which they were bound to the wagon, they were dragged, wild-eyed, to their deaths.
“They’re not going to make it,” said his companion, Foss, the King’s jester, over whom Longspear towered like a menhir. At six and a half feet, Longspear towered over everyone, but none more than Foss, a dwarf less than half his height, even including his constant companion, a raven that, more often than not, sat on his head.
Having seen all he could stomach, Longspear turned away and began walking north, toward the bridge to Bishop’s Lynn. “Horse’s like that are not easily come by.”
Foss pendulumed along behind in that fashion common to his kind, neither of his legs seemed quite long enough to reach the ground. He had to run in spurts to keep pace, but he was accustomed to that. At such times, the rave
n hop-scotched ahead, keeping mostly to the ground, as a congenital dearth of feathers constrained it to flights of no more than three or four feet in altitude. “Not the horses,” he said on the exhale. “The men. They’re not going to get to shore before the tide. . .”
Men, woman, and children—dead, dying, and in every obscene contortion between the two—formed an endless, parade marching from the depths of Longspear’s memory. Their companionship is all he had known since first going to battle for Henry the Second, his father - though neither of them had been aware of their relationship at the time. After that, the first Crusade with his half-brother King Richard,Coeur de Leon.
Rivers of Christian and infidel blood surging through the wadis of the Holy Land, nourishing a crop of misery.
He had been with Richard on the return when they were shipwrecked on Corfu, and was one of the four who, in the guise of pilgrims, accompanied their liege lord across the wilds of Europe where bandit kings and murderers reigned. Those rare fortified cities that could claim a semblance of order were presided over by hostile royals, self-styled kings and emperors, most of whom Richard had offended in one way or another in his journey to the Holy Land and now had a predatory eye out for him, and the ransom his capture would command. To say nothing of the chance to rub his large, Gallic nose in it.
It was Duke Leopold of Austria, of all people—whose flag Richard had besmirched at Acre—who won that lottery. A king’s ransom, indeed, levied by Eleanor, his mother, and brother John through crippling taxes on noble and peasant alike across that island kingdom Richard regarded as personal treasury, his to plunder at will.
When at last the Lion was freed from his cage in Dürnstein castle and set about the business of subduing lands he felt were gifted him by God—and in no small part to reconstitute his treasury—his blood lust knew no bounds.
And Longspear had been the strong left arm at his side, cutting an indiscriminate swath through whatever flesh came within reach of his blade.
That’s the way it was with kings; their command was God’s command. And so, when Richard was sent to the grave by the chance bolt from baker-boy’s crossbow as he circled the walls of miserable little Château de Châlus-Chabrol, that, too, was God’s will. Or His judgement.
Arriving back in England half-dead, Longspear pledged himself to his remaining half-brother, the new king, John. Then Louis had invaded and, with the aid of the barons who had set themselves against their natural lord, seemed, for a season, about to carry the day.
That is when, in a lapse of judgement and forgetting the fact that John was never more resourceful than when pressed to extremes, he defected to the French King.
And suddenly the world flipped on its head as, in one inexplicable victory after another, John began to regain his kingdom. Soon the trickle of defectors from Louis to John became a flood and Longspear realized that, unless he wished to be lost in that flood, he had best renew his allegiance to his brother. To do so, he must be seen to be not merely in of the flood, but its motive force.
So, imperiled by the threat of discovery by either side, he had made his way across the geographical, spiritual, and political no-man’s-land separating the two, wading through that haunted region and its peripatetic population of the half-dead; traitors, cowards, opportunists, deserters, spies, whores, assassins and camp followers, with no idea whom he could trust.
When in doubt, he dealt a swift death.
What was another face or two, upturned in supplication, among the thousands in the menagerie that plagued his dreams with the memory of the look in their eyes when they awoke to the realization that mercy would not be forthcoming? They had long ago ceased to be ghouls and become his only companions, always willing to make room for a few more.
So he had debased himself, fallen at John’s feet and begged clemency, and wily John, who saw the wisdom in keeping one’s enemies, real or imagined, close, granted it, and bundled with mercy the return of properties he had confiscated.
But, Longspear knew, all gifts from John came wrapped in packages to which he held the strings.
It was a tug on one of those strings that had brought him to this unhappy, desolate Norfolk shore.
Even from so great a distance, with his back to them, and above the howl of the wind, he heard the cries of the men as they battled the waves; a battle they would not win. And Foss, John’s faithful eyes and ears, was there to record that the deed was done.
“What was the point?” the giant said, without turning around.
Foss’s shrug went unseen. “Who knows? Maybe he figures he can come back for it someday.”
Longspear cast a quick, sidelong glance down at the jester. “Out there?” He tore the glove from his right and and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder, toward the ocean.
“Or maybe he just wants to make sure it doesn’t fall into Louie’s hands,” said Foss. “Who knows?”
They walked on for a few minutes in silence, soon falling in behind the troop of foot soldiers General Marshall had assigned to accompany them and who wearily and warily parted for them as they made their way to the head of the column.
“What are you thinking?” said the dwarf.
Longspear made a sound that might have been a laugh, if so, there was no humor in it. “From my lips to the King’s ears! I think not.”
“I can keep a secret!” the dwarf protested.
“Oh, I don’t doubt that. I’m sure there’s any number of secrets you keep - but they’re the King’s secrets.”
That was a compliment. Foss smiled.
“And no man can serve two masters,” Longspear continued.
“Oh but there’s no distinction, my lord! To me, you and my lord the King are one and the same. Both my masters. After all, hasn’t he put me in your charge?”
“My charge!” This time Longspear laughed outright. “In doing so, he put me under your eye.”
Foss smiled again. He was enjoying himself.
“However, since any one of these men at our backs may turn traitor and have our heads at any moment, I may as well make you my confessor,” said Longspear. “I was thinking how odd, how incomprehensible it is that someone as fond of his trinkets as the King - it might be argued that they possess him rather than otherwise . . .” He arched an eyebrow at Foss who betrayed nothing in his returning gaze. “How inexplicable then, that he should dispense with half his fortune like that. As if it was nothing but a burden to him.”
“Perhaps the flux has constipated his brain,” said Foss, who is the only one who could say something like that of the king in the hearing of a king’s man. “He’s not himself. He doesn’t even trust me! Threw me in the fire night before last. You were there! You saw!”
“You overstepped yourself with that crack about his beard. He’s vain about his beard.”
“His beard! I’ve criticized his balls before, but never got more than a box behind the ear for that!”
“Besides you weren’t long in the flames. I’ve never seen you move so fast!”
A couple of soldiers who were in earshot of the exchange guffawed, but Foss silenced them with a glance.
“One little ball of fire. Didn’t even singe your hair!”
“Not the point,” Foss retorted. “The point is censorship. If I suddenly have to start watching my words around the King, I might as well close up shop. My job is to pull the King’s beard on behalf of the populace; defuse their frustrations.”
Longspear swept Foss up in his arms and strode purposefully forward until there was some distance between them and the foot soldiers, and set him down. “Those men . . .”
“Them?” said Foss, pointing behind him.
“No, the one’s with the wagon.”
“Oh, the late lamented.”
“They were the only ones who knew what was in that wagon, weren’t they?”
“What do you mean? It was the household treasure. That’s the only thing ever kept in that wagon. It’s the wagon the King’s got with him that has the
crown jewels.”
“Is it?” said Longspear softly. “Why did the King have me destroy it?” but the wind tore the words from his lips and ran away with them. The dwarf wouldn’t have heard them anyway; having just stepped in a steaming pile of horse dung he seemed otherwise occupied.
The raven found this amusing.
Castle Combe, that night
Beauchamp’s horse, despite the weight of its armor that that of its rider, cleared the wall of the kitchen garden by several inches, so dumbfounding de Rode that, for half a second, he stood rooted to the spot. By the time he got possession of his senses, Beauchamp was nearly upon him and it was too late to run, so he threw himself down the slope in a tumbling, clanking mass of chain mail, his gambeson bound to him by two thin strips of rawhide and a silent prayer.
He slammed to a stop against an oak sapling, which offered just enough resistance to cushion the blow of the limestone outcropping from which it grew. With no small effort, he struggled to his feet which, of themselves, seemed animated by the desire to slide, together with loose leaves and soil, down the steep slope toward the valley floor.
Directly above him, almost free-falling through the forest, he glimpsed the massive underside of Beauchamp’s steed, framed by flailing stirrups. Instinctively he grabbed at the scabbard slapping at his side, but it was empty. There was no time to feel for his sword among the leaves, though he was sure it was there somewhere. There was no time to grab a rock, or a branch so, as the horse fell within reach, he grabbed blindly in the direction of its right foreleg and, seizing upon it more by chance than design in the near-pitch darkness, dove beneath the animal, twisting the leg backward with all his might.
The horse whinnied in shock and pain and crashed with its full weight into the limestone ledge, nothing abated by the sapling. Beauchamp was thrown from his saddle with such force that his impact with the ground compressed him like a metal ball and hurled him down the hill, toward the fleeing women and children.
Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3) Page 13