Unbroken in Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  Philippe was pleased to see that Nogaret’s neck was red. “It is possible.”

  “Thank you, sire.” Nogaret bowed.

  Philippe made a chopping motion with one hand. “That is quite enough about my bodily functions. We must discuss the situation with David and his family. Has he signed the document releasing Aquitaine yet?”

  “Bishop Mornay was on his way with Flote to see to it when I spoke to him just now.” He cleared his throat. “The thought was that David might respond better to someone other than me. Besides, I’ve been busy with our plans to move him this morning.”

  “You said last night you intended to.” Philippe stepped off the dressing stool. “I would have preferred David to have signed the document already. We should have done it in the hall with everyone watching.” He made his tone revoltingly petulant.

  “All will be well, my lord. We felt it best to move him from the hall to someplace out of the way as quickly as possible so as to avoid a scene. He isn’t going anywhere. He will sign it.”

  “And if he does not?”

  “Then we will tell him his son is a hostage to his good behavior.” Nogaret canted his head. “It is distasteful, but necessary.”

  Philippe nodded. “I said I would leave it to you, and I am grateful you have assumed the burden of the more unsavory aspects of the situation.” He had a moment’s fear he was being too commending, so he opted next for renewed petulance. “I do miss Joana.”

  Nogaret was only too happy to change the subject. “I’m sure her time at Vincennes will convince her where her duty lies, and she will remember her attachment to your person.”

  “I’m sure.” Philippe made one last adjustment to his robe. “It is difficult to wait.”

  “Was not the girl I sent to your bed yesterday to your liking?”

  Philippe curled a lip. “She was not my wife.”

  “No.” Nogaret bowed again.

  Most of last night, once Philippe achieved the peace of his own chamber and sent Nogaret’s doxy away, he’d lain awake, fearing David’s absence would be discovered too soon.

  But even Nogaret had to sleep sometime, and the audience in the hall had gone on until midnight, making everyone glad to get to their beds when they did. Philippe had half-expected Nogaret to have burst into his room before his ablutions, but it seemed now that Nogaret had thought to let David stew in his own juices.

  A mistake.

  Not that Philippe was going to tell him so.

  From the moment Nogaret had informed him that Mornay and Flote were on their way to David’s rooms, Philippe had found himself holding his breath, listening for a commotion in the corridor outside his room that would indicate David’s absence had been discovered.

  He forced himself to breathe easily—and then the awaited news finally came in the form of Bishop Mornay himself, who threw open the door to the room and stood in the doorway, breathing hard. He might have run all the way from the other side of the palace. Running was not something Philippe had ever seen Mornay do before. Flote followed hard on his heels, much less flustered and far more angry.

  “Sire!” Mornay bowed in Philippe’s direction, and then, after a moment’s hesitation and a strong look from Nogaret, Flote did too.

  Philippe glided towards the bishop, ignoring Flote entirely. “What is it, my friend? You look extremely agitated.”

  Bishop Mornay swallowed, glanced nervously at Nogaret, and then recovered some of his composure. “Excuse me, my lord.” He made a gracious gesture with one hand. “I have a matter to discuss with Guillaume here. It need be no concern of yours.”

  Philippe wavered for a moment as he went back and forth in his mind between what would be the most ‘natural’ behavior for the man he used to be. In the end, he decided that the Philippe of old would have insisted he be told about any ‘private matter’.

  “Nonsense. I must know.”

  Mornay glanced at Nogaret, who was actually starting to look concerned himself, for all that the man had the ability to remain expressionless under the most trying of circumstances.

  “Sire, King David is not in his rooms.”

  Philippe narrowed his eyes and said, as if he didn’t believe Mornay, “What do you mean he isn’t in his rooms? How can he not be in his rooms?”

  “Pardon me, sire, but Flote and I were there just now. The door was locked, but when we opened it, the rooms were entirely empty.”

  “That isn’t possible.” Nogaret’s nostrils flared. “You went to the wrong room.”

  Mornay turned on him, an exasperated tone to his voice now and sounding more like himself. “It was the room with guards on either side of the door. They swore that nobody had been in or out since they arrived on duty at dawn.”

  “Who was on duty before dawn?” Philippe said, delighted to muddy the waters, even if only a little. “You must question them at once! They must have let them out, or at best, fallen asleep while on duty and failed to stop them from leaving.”

  Nogaret was still staring at Mornay. “I must see this for myself.” He set off for the door, Mornay and Flote—and a bit belatedly Philippe himself—at his heels. The four of them marched across the palace, up one corridor and down another and then up a flight of stairs until they reached David’s room. When they arrived, the guards’ commander was in the midst of dressing down his underlings verbally while both stared straight ahead. It was too little too late.

  One of the guards attempted a defense: “We didn’t do anything wrong, sir. We just got here.”

  “Did you open the door to the room when you arrived?”

  “No, sir! We don’t even have a key, sir!”

  Mornay was so agitated he was walking stiff-legged, but Nogaret seemed to have returned to his usual unruffled self because he strolled past the guard and into the room, at which point he stopped in the middle of the suite and turned slowly on one heel. Philippe hadn’t been in the room since he’d led David out of it, so he took a hasty look around too, fearful he’d left something of himself behind.

  Fortunately, he saw nothing of immediate concern. His half-drunk goblet of wine was where he’d left it on the table, but Nogaret would have no way of knowing to whom it had belonged.

  Philippe went to the window and leaned through it. “I suppose they could have climbed down?” He made his voice sound appropriately dubious.

  Nogaret moved to stand beside him. “How, sire?” His tone was flat.

  “He didn’t tie the bedsheets together, if that’s what you’re wondering, my lord.” The commander of the guard, a man Philippe didn’t know, having followed them into the room, spoke anxiously from behind them.

  Nogaret snapped his fingers at him. “Where are the men who were charged with watching the door after I left?”

  “They are on their way, my lord! I sent for them as soon as I learned Duke David and his family were gone.”

  Nogaret sneered. “He isn’t a duke.”

  The commander of the guard recoiled.

  Philippe had swung around to watch the exchange, and then found himself horrified to see a piece of fabric caught in the bottom corner of the secret door into the wall. Possibly it had come from the hem of one of the women’s dresses or the tail of a cloak.

  Before Nogaret could notice it, Philippe drew himself up to his full height and spoke in a haughty tone he hadn’t used since before his daughters’ deaths. “This is a monumental failure, Guillaume.”

  “Sire—”

  “I left you in charge. I allowed you to secure David because you told me you had it all in hand. But you did not, and you do not!” Philippe was thundering now, incredibly pleased that it had all worked out so perfectly. All along he had planned for David’s disappearance to fall on Nogaret’s shoulders, and to be able to chastise him in front of witnesses was too rich an opportunity to pass up. “I have had enough of your incompetence! I expect you to discover how this happened and find me in the chapel when you’re finished. If I am not there when you arrive, you will not
seek me out elsewhere but instead will wait!”

  He strode through the door and into the corridor. As much as he would have liked to gloat over his victory, he didn’t look back to see if Nogaret, Flote, and Mornay were still gaping at him or if, as soon as his back was to them, they’d turned on each other.

  When he reached the end of the corridor, he did risk a single glance. Seeing that nobody was watching, not even a guard, he entered an empty room and accessed the passageway he knew to be there, making sure the door closed solidly—and quietly—behind him. Then he worked his way back to the room in which David had been kept. Once there, he put his eye to the peephole and had to clap his own hand over his mouth when Nogaret was only three feet away, though fortunately looking towards Mornay, who was walking away towards the door.

  “I’m missing something, Pierre,” Nogaret said.

  Philippe’s stomach clenched. Nogaret would figure out about the passages. It was a wonder he hadn’t already. He was the cleverest man Philippe knew. Really, he was too clever by half, and if Philippe hadn’t been so grief-stricken these past months, he would have realized it sooner.

  “It was the guards, Guillaume, it has to have been.” Mornay spoke the words over his shoulder.

  Nogaret shook his head. “I’m not so sure—” he was just turning around and could have been staring right into Philippe’s eye a heartbeat later, if the commander hadn’t returned in that moment with the two guards who’d had the responsibility of the late night shift. Nogaret broke off what he was going to say and, with Flote, who’d come out of the adjacent room, strode across the floor towards them.

  Philippe took that moment of distraction to reach down and tug on the scrap of fabric, while holding tightly to the latch on his side of the door to prevent the door from swinging wide. A moment later, he had the scrap in hand and was hastening away. He didn’t leave the hidden passageway until he was two floors below, coming out in an entirely different privy from the one in which Nogaret had found him last night.

  Then he strolled across the courtyard to his beautiful church, where Nogaret found him a half-hour later, on his knees, thanking God for his deliverance and praying with all of his heart that David could free his family.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Day Two

  Christopher

  The previous evening in the audience hall, Christopher had been regretting his obligations to John Jr. When he’d agreed to be the one to go with him to see his father, Christopher had seen it as a way to stay close to David. Whether or not his cousin knew it, he was reckless, as was this entire endeavor, never mind that it was currently going according to plan—more or less. At one time, his parents would have said that there was nothing too reckless for Christopher to be enthusiastic about.

  Now, it turned out that he was participating in one of the most hair-raising parts of the plan—and he wasn’t doing anything other than returning to the palace. At least watchers had reported seeing George leave the palace for the left bank at first light. Michael had put a tail on him. They would see how long it took George, a trained spy, to shake it.

  “They have to know by now that David is free,” John Jr. said under his breath. “We really are walking into the lion’s den.”

  It was a reference to the Book of Daniel in the Bible, one that Christopher had read for himself, just to know how the story really went, since medieval people quoted the Bible all the time.

  “Actually, John, we’re doing exactly the opposite. We’re walking into the palace of a king who wants to be worshipped like a god, just like King Darius, who then threw Daniel into the lion’s den for not going along with it.”

  John Jr. turned his head to look at Christopher. “So you’re saying things are going to get even more dangerous?”

  Christopher laughed. “Or less. Daniel survived the lion’s den after all. That’s the whole point.”

  John’s expression turned grudging. “Yes, but will we?”

  They entered the great hall and found it full of people, a hundred or more, in various stages of dining. The French drank wine at breakfast, rather than beer or ale like the English, and empty carafes littered the table. It appeared that the gossip was equally delicious, since they’d hardly gone three steps before Christopher overheard someone say, Does anyone know where he went?

  John Jr. heard it too, and he had a definite spring to his step as he made his way to where his father sat at the front of the hall. John Jr. had dressed for the occasion in a somewhat flamboyant outfit, in that his breeches were tighter than Christopher would have been comfortable in, bright yellow in color to match his tunic, with heavy gold and red embroidery around the collar. And somehow, overnight, his boots had acquired a leather fringe.

  John Sr. was sitting at the end of the long table, deep in conversation with Pierre Flote, and Christopher’s stomach did a flip-flop at how close he’d been to him yesterday evening when Flote had been talking to George. Flote and John Sr. were so involved they didn’t initially notice John Jr. and Christopher’s arrival, but as John Jr. bowed and said, “Father,” they both looked up.

  As had been the case the previous night, John Sr. couldn’t keep the sneer off his face, but Flote’s look was more noncommittal, and Christopher had a moment’s fear he knew who Christopher really was.

  Then he let out a breath to realize that, while George may have told Flote he’d seen the Hero of Westminster in the palace last night, there was nothing to connect Christophe de Clare with that man.

  Flote’s eyes were full of intelligence, however, and Christopher saw instantly why everyone considered him, with Nogaret, a formidable opponent—more so than John Sr., who pronounced his own worth with every sentence. If Christopher had learned anything from David in the last few years, it was that people with real power didn’t have to bluster.

  “This is my son,” John Sr. gestured to the young men, “and his friend.” John Sr. snapped his fingers at Christopher. “A Clare from England. What are you doing here?”

  It seemed he’d genuinely forgotten he’d asked them to dine.

  To his credit, John Jr. wasn’t so intimidated that he bothered to explain. “What’s all the uproar?” Now that the plot was afoot, so to speak, Christopher was pleased to see his friend growing more of a spine.

  They’d agreed John Jr. should do all the talking, though that made the two of them similar in style to John Sr. and Flote. Christopher hoped Flote wouldn’t realize it. Real villains in the movies often needed to be more omniscient than plausible to make the plot work, because the protagonist needed a powerful threat to make a movie out of it. Christopher thought the forces arrayed against them were daunting enough without omniscience, though Flote and his buddies must be feeling about now that David had a bit of it too, to have escaped their clutches without leaving a trace.

  “I might as well tell you, since you’ll hear about it soon enough,” John Sr. said. “King David and his family are no longer in the palace. They disappeared in the night.”

  “They escaped?” John Jr. asked, all innocence.

  John Sr. snorted. “Please. They were never prisoners.”

  At John Jr.’s skeptical look, his father waved a hand. “Regardless, they are no longer here.”

  Then John Jr. threw a little more oil on the fire. “What do the guards posted outside their rooms say?”

  “They know nothing, saw nothing.” Another snort of disgust. “Idiots.”

  Flote had been looking at John Sr. with a bit of alarm on his face, and now he stepped in to interrupt. “Was there something you wanted?”

  “My father asked me to breakfast with him today, but I can see he is busy, and I will return later.” John Jr. made a move to step off the dais.

  “Nonsense.” Surprisingly, it was John Sr. speaking. “Sit. Eat. I might as well speak with you while you’re here.”

  Surreally, Christopher then spent the next hour sitting silently beside John Jr. as his father grilled him about his estate in England. The Earl
dom of Richmond was one of the largest in Britain, and it was astounding to Christopher that John Sr. had visited it only three times in his life, leaving the running of it to his steward. With democracy on the rise in Britain, he was going to lose it if he wasn’t careful.

  Christopher’s sole role was to act as friend to John Jr. today, so he was content to eat silently, his ears perked for any news that would be worth reporting back to his mother.

  That news finally came in the form of King Philippe himself, who appeared on the dais without fanfare towards the end of the meal, followed by Nogaret.

  All talking stopped until he took the central seat, which turned out to be across the table and a few seats down from Christopher. Christopher kept his gaze focused on his food as everyone sat again. Philippe had freed David, so he might really be on their side, but it would be disastrous if he recognized Christopher not as Christophe de Clare but as David’s cousin and said something about it in front of everyone. Christopher would have pre-empted the mistake and introduced himself, but it was practically a hanging offense to speak to the king before he was spoken to.

  It occurred to Christopher also that if he’d come to this meal and Philippe hadn’t already rescued David but had truly been in league with Nogaret and the others, it could have been very, very bad to have been recognized. Then again, if it was business as usual, maybe Philippe wouldn’t have come. Mornay had told them the previous night not to expect him.

  Plans and opportunities, as David had said.

  Fortunately, Mornay waved a hand and inadvertently rescued him. “Sire, this is John Jr., Brittany’s son, and his friend Christophe de Clare, lately of England.”

  “Sire.” John Jr. and Christopher spoke in unison, half-rising to their feet and bowing at the same time.

  “Welcome to my table,” Philippe said.

  Christopher kept his head down as he retook his seat, and by the time he looked up, Philippe was turned away, glowering at Nogaret, who was actually looking somewhat downcast. Everyone else around the king seemed equally cowed, and Christopher deliberately shrunk into himself, trying to take up less space at the table, physically and figuratively, so no kingly ire would be directed at him by association.