by Alys Clare
Then my wits returned from wherever they’d fled and I thought, Idiot! He’s not going to destroy your clothes, he’s going to dry them.
While he was gone I looked around the boat. I was seated on the bench that ran around its sides, and on an upturned chest in front of me were a pair of lamps. At the rear of the boat was Thorfinn’s accustomed place, where there were a couple of lanterns and, beneath the bench, rolled-up blankets and what looked like spare clothing. In the bows there were chests of various sizes containing his supplies of food and drink and a small water barrel. As my eyes ran along the benches, I noticed that the seats were padded with well-stuffed sacks to keep out the cold.
Tentatively I flexed my toes. They were steadily getting warmer. I smiled. My grandfather was an Icelander. If anyone knew how to restore someone who had managed to immerse herself several times in dark fen water and who’d thought she was about to expire from the cold, it was him.
Presently he returned. He smiled at me. ‘The rain will not return for some time, I’m thinking,’ he said. ‘I will go outside again now and then to turn your clothes, and I hope they will be dry by morning.’
I nodded. He didn’t seem to expect an answer. I watched his quick, economical movements as, humming to himself, he set about preparing food and drink. I hoped he wasn’t expecting me to share his meal. I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat a thing. I was doubting I’d ever be hungry again.
But then he reached outside and brought in a vessel of hot water, and he poured some of it into a coarse pottery mug. He added something from a small flask and thrust it at me.
‘I can’t,’ I muttered.
‘You can.’ He took my hand and wrapped it round the mug.
Steam was rising from the mug, and it tickled and tantalized … against my instincts, I found myself taking a sip.
I tasted green herbs, honey, something very sharp, and, overriding everything else, strong alcohol.
I took another sip, and it felt as if this incredible liquid had flooded my body, warming me from my hair to my toenails. I sipped again, although in truth this was nothing so ladylike as a sip, more like a thirsty seaman’s gulp.
And my grandfather, chuckling, said, ‘Steady, now.’
While I was still reflecting in amazement over the miraculous drink, he was bending over the upturned chest, busy with something. Then he handed me a thick chunk of bread in which he’d cut a deep groove, now overflowing with a salty, savoury slice of bacon.
I felt my mouth water. I’m not hungry, I can’t eat, my aching heart said. I’m starving and this is irresistible, replied my sensible head.
I gobbled down the bread and bacon. My grandfather prepared a second.
Then he made me another drink, although this one wasn’t nearly as strong. He saw my disappointed expression as I tasted it, and grinned. ‘You’ve had more than enough already,’ he said. ‘I doubt very much you’re accustomed to strong alcohol.’
I wasn’t accustomed to alcohol at all.
I drained my mug, then I was overcome by a huge yawn. Thorfinn fetched a pillow and helped me lie down along the bench. He tucked me up warmly, and for a moment I was confused, and I thought he was my father and that I was a small child again. ‘My father—’ I said muzzily. ‘I love my father.’
‘I know you do, child,’ Thorfinn murmured. He smoothed his huge hand across my brow. ‘Do not worry, all will be well.’
‘It won’t,’ I said, but sleep was gaining on me. ‘It won’t because he’s dead. Not my father – oh, no, no.’ Thorfinn’s expression had briefly changed, but my words seemed to reassure him.
‘Someone else is dead, someone that you also love?’ he prompted, when I didn’t go on.
‘Yes,’ I whispered.
He took my hand. ‘Loving hearts will always suffer,’ he said softly, ‘for they give without restraint and, when those they love die, as die we all must, the pain is indescribable.’ His grip on my hand increased. ‘But never permit yourself to accept that as a reason not to love, for without the strong ties and loyalties that love brings, the rewards that by far outweigh the pain, what point is there to being alive?’
Loving hearts will always suffer.
Something was niggling at me; something my aunt Edild had said, years ago, when she cast my natal chart. I was so tired, so warm, so comfortable, and I very much wanted to surrender and sleep. But, although I was too confused to work out quite why, I knew that this was important.
I closed my eyes.
Then, as if already I’d entered the dream world, I saw Edild, as clearly as if she’d been standing there before me. She was speaking. You are essentially a private person, and your friends and your lovers will sense that they are never truly close to you. You must learn to distinguish between independence and its darker face, isolation.
Her image seemed to shimmer, then it clarified again.
And she said, You have a core that is private to yourself. Nobody breaches it, for it is yours alone.
When she told me these things, I had thought – I still thought – that she meant I couldn’t love; that I didn’t know how to love.
And yet my grandfather Thorfinn seemed to be suggesting something quite different …
My eyes still closed – I didn’t think I could open them – I whispered, ‘Have I got a loving heart?’
He bent over me and kissed my forehead. His luxuriant beard and hair brushed against my skin. He said – and I was sure he was smiling – ‘Yes, Lassair. Now, go to sleep.’
NINETEEN
Jack was very tempted to set out after Batsheva straight away, but sense managed to make itself heard. It was now quite late in the day and already the light was fading. The mist was closing in again and it was raining. If he was to stand a chance of picking up her trail, it was surely better to wait until morning. But he was restless, and he couldn’t do nothing. Although he had recently been searching the razed village, he returned to it and had one final look. If she had been there, she’d been very careful to remove any sign, and she certainly wasn’t there now.
Trudging home again, he asked himself where she’d go. She’d lost her lover and her sons. He understood her need to get away from the place that had taken them from her. Would she return to the house in Norwich? His instincts told him not, for, with Gaspard Picot dead, what was the purpose in her living there? Furthermore, and far more relevant, if it had been him who paid the rent, she wouldn’t be able to stay in the house anyway.
Angry, frustrated and in pain, Jack went back to his house, closed and barred the door and poured himself a large mug of ale.
He slept soundly and woke with a headache. He made himself eat and drink, then stowed some bread, cheese and a flask of water in a pack. Then he set out to the place just out of town where horses were stabled for the use of Cambridge lawmen. His favourite grey gelding, Pegasus, looked up with interest as he approached, and a short time afterwards the horse was tacked up and Jack was riding away. The gelding’s long, silky mane and tail blew in the light breeze.
He didn’t know where to start. He had no idea where she was. He was on the road to Ely and the fens, and eventually it met another road that veered north-east to Norwich. It seemed as good a place to begin as any.
It was late in the day when he found her.
She was sitting beside the road, and the hems of her skirts and cloak were wet and muddy. Her pack was on the ground beside her and, as he approached, she shoved a large and curiously shaped object out of sight beneath the folds of cloth.
He drew rein and stared down at her.
Her eyes, huge and very dark, met his. Hers were full of such grief that he sensed she was close to despair.
He slid off the grey gelding’s back, tied the reins to a tree branch and went to her, sitting down beside her and putting his arm round her shoulders. For some time neither spoke.
Then she said, ‘I was planning to go back to Norwich. Now, I’m not sure there is any point.’
He nodded. ‘
The house will no longer be available to you.’
She smiled very briefly. ‘A tactful phrase, lawman, but correct.’
‘Should you not return to collect your belongings?’ For some reason it worried him to think that her former life could be so easily and totally abandoned.
She shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’ She turned to him, and he saw tears in her eyes. As if she’d read his mind, she said softly, ‘But that life is gone, and I have no heart for the objects that pertained to it, Besides’ – she sighed – ‘it is a long way to Norwich.’
Silence fell again. Jack had no idea how to break it; how to begin to say all that was in his mind and his heart. His pity for her was almost overwhelming, but he couldn’t think how to help her. She wasn’t safe back in Cambridge, with Sheriff Picot still on the rampage for someone to punish for the widow Elwytha’s death. And she’d just said she wasn’t going back to Norwich … She was alone, all alone, in a hard world.
It didn’t bear thinking about.
He tightened his grip on her and she leaned into him.
After a while she said, ‘I had to get away from you to find him, to tell him he must let you stay alive because you are a good man who is very much needed in the life he lives and the town in which he resides.’ She smiled. ‘I’m not at all sure I’d have persuaded him, but you were kind to me and I had to try.’
He thought for a while, but even having done so, he had no idea what she was talking about.
In the end he said, ‘Who are we talking about, and why would he want to kill me?’
She smiled again, and he even heard a soft laugh. ‘My son,’ she said. ‘My boy Gideon, who I conceived by Gaspard Picot.’
Jack thought he understood.
‘He sought vengeance,’ he said quietly. ‘He came to Cambridge to seek his father’ – something must have prompted the young man, he thought, some sudden need to find the man who had, with his mother, brought him into being; perhaps, growing to manhood, he had come to resent the fact that this man kept his distance; that he was content to use his mistress for his own pleasure while his real life was elsewhere – ‘only to find he was dead.’
Because I killed him, he thought.
‘Yes, I believe that is how it was,’ she said. ‘He would have asked questions and discovered how Gaspard met his death.’
‘He wouldn’t have had to ask many questions,’ Jack said bitterly. ‘I imagine that everyone was talking about it.’ He looked down at her. ‘I am more sorry than I can say that he had to find out like that. He was alone, he had hoped to find his father and perhaps have some sort of reconciliation, some sort of recognition, but by the most awful stroke of fate, he arrived too late.’
But she shook her head. ‘It is true that Gideon came to demand that Gaspard acknowledge him, for Gideon was so very angry.’ She paused, eyes staring into the distance. ‘He was … something had happened to him. As a child, as a boy, he had been happy with me in our little house, and I believed that what I could offer him was sufficient. But then, he changed.’ She glanced at Jack, a swift look, there and gone again. ‘I believe something had entered his soul; something that was evil. Something that was very dangerous.’ There was a brief silence and, just for an instant, Jack almost believed he felt the shadow of that danger, that evil, like a cold finger on the back of his neck.
Suddenly he remembered the lament he’d heard the night the widow Picot was murdered. He knew without asking that the terrible sounds of grief and regret had emanated from Batsheva, hidden away in the ruined village, huddled in shock and horror because she knew what her son had just done.
He gazed at her bent head, wondering how her mind managed to contain so much sorrow.
But then, her voice quite matter-of-fact, Batsheva spoke again. ‘As for Gaspard acknowledging Gideon in any way, it would never have happened,’ she said. ‘Gaspard was a man of position and power; a man of wealth, or, at least, married to a wealthy wife, which amounts to the same thing. To accept a bastard son into his life, by even the tiniest deed or gesture, would have put everything he held dear at risk. Elwytha was a bitter, angry and very unhappy woman,’ she added, and he detected sympathy in her voice. ‘She couldn’t bear him a child, and in the end his attempts to make her conceive became nothing but a burden and a humiliation to both of them, so they stopped.’
‘But he had you,’ Jack said.
She nodded. ‘He had me,’ she agreed. ‘And he also had Gideon, had he only been courageous enough to abandon the life he believed he needed and come instead to the one that was right for him.’
And that, Jack thought, he would never have done.
‘He would have killed you, you know,’ Batsheva said. ‘I know my son so well. To arrive full of hope, only to find his father had just been slain, without a doubt would have driven him to take revenge. He would see it as a matter of honour, the son taking the life of the man who had taken his father’s.’ Briefly she fell silent; perhaps, Jack thought, in tribute to her son’s stern and unshakable resolve. ‘I knew what else he would do,’ she went on very quietly. ‘Which was why I was watching Gaspard’s house, for all that it proved quite useless.’
Jack recalled what had been done to Elwytha. The bruising on the breasts and lower belly. He tried to understand. He failed. He said, ‘He’d beaten her, on her – on the chest and stomach.’
Batsheva nodded. ‘Yes.’
Jack waited but she made no further comment. ‘Why did he do that?’ he asked.
She turned to him. ‘I imagine it was some sort of recognition of the fact that she, Gaspard’s wife, kept in luxury and idleness, waited on at every turn, was barren and useless, whereas the secret mistress, always hidden away, unacknowledged, no part of any but the most private, intimate part of his life, was the one who had given him the longed-for son.’
I always knew there must have been a sexual element in that murder, Jack thought. ‘He must have hated her very much,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ Batsheva replied. ‘But then Gideon hated very many people.’
‘And he burned down the house,’ Jack said softly, speaking his thought aloud.
‘He did.’ She looked at him again. ‘You very nearly caught him that night. He had only just fled when you came across me in the shadows of the old wall.’ She lowered her eyes. ‘I’d stayed to make sure everybody got out,’ she muttered.
Because someone had to, and your son, who started the blaze, didn’t care if innocent servants died, Jack thought.
He was going over the sequence of events in his mind. Many things had become clear, but some had not. ‘But what of the two blond young men?’ he asked her. ‘Did he kill them too? If so, why?’
But she shrugged. ‘I have no idea.’
And they sat on, beside the track, as the day wound down to evening.
After a time he said, ‘It’s getting late, and the temperature is falling. We should go.’ He got up and held out his hand to her.
She too rose, and as she did so, the object she’d been concealing in her skirts fell free.
It was a crossbow.
Both of them stared down at it.
Then she said, ‘It’s his. Gideon’s.’ She gave a shaky sigh. ‘It was his favourite weapon, and he was deadly accurate with it.’
‘I see,’ Jack said, although he wasn’t at all sure he did.
‘I was right over there’ – she waved an arm towards the east – ‘on the far side of the fen. It was washed up on a little beach, at my feet, as if he had sent it out onto the water in the hope that it would make its way to me.’
Then surely he is dead, Jack wanted to say, for why else does a man abandon his favourite weapon? But he held his silence.
She knew, thought, what he would have said.
‘Yes, in all likelihood he is indeed dead.’ She turned her face up to him and her eyes glittered with tears. ‘But if I do not know for sure, then there is always hope.’ She managed a smile. ‘Always the consoling thought that perhaps he is alive s
omewhere, his demons vanquished, and happiness and contentment a possibility.’
But Jack, staring down into her eyes, knew she didn’t really believe it.
‘Where will you go?’ he asked, his voice breaking so that he was barely able to speak.
She nodded, as if recognizing and accepting his compassion. ‘I shall return to where I came from,’ she said. ‘To the place I was born, and where, until my father was commanded to uproot us both and come to England, I was happy.’
‘Yes,’ he said very quietly.
She reached down to pick up the crossbow. She had attached a length of fine rope to it and now, hitching up her cloak, she tied it to her belt, letting the cloak fall again to conceal it. ‘I shall keep this in memory of my son, whom I have loved more dearly than anyone on this earth.’ She stood quite still, staring up at him for a moment. Then she said, ‘Farewell, lawman.’
‘Farewell,’ he echoed. ‘God go with you.’
She turned and walked away, and he watched her go.
He untied his horse, mounted and rode on. He knew he should head for home – it was getting dark and he thought it was going to rain again – but something was drawing him on.
After a time, he realized what it was.
He was on the track that led to Aelf Fen.
He drew rein and for a long time simply sat there, the grey gelding restless beneath him.
The he turned the horse’s head and set off back for Cambridge.
In the morning, my clothes were dry enough to put on. Thorfinn handed them to me, then stood tactfully outside while I dressed. I rummaged in my satchel and found a comb, and I felt considerably better once I’d got the tangles out of my hair, plaited it and wound it up under a fresh cap.
Thorfinn and I ate breakfast. He was watching me, and I knew he had something on his mind. I was pretty sure what it was.
After a while he said, ‘Lassair, it’s very clear that something very bad has happened to you. I won’t press you to tell me until and if you want to,’ he went on, for I had made as if to respond, ‘but there is something I must say.’ He paused, frowning. ‘I have come to do what I should have done a long time ago, and reveal to my son – your father – the secret of his paternity. You, dear child, already know it, and I know that you have respected my request for confidentiality. In the past, indeed, you have quite rightly told me in no uncertain terms how unfair I am being to insist on a situation where you are forced to withhold the truth from your father, who I know you love profoundly.’