The Exiled
Page 1
The Exiled
continues the story which began in
The Innocent
‘The reader is taken on a galloping ride through the Middle Ages . . . there’s lust, conspiracy and impressive historical detail to set the scene.’ Daily Telegraph, Sydney
‘I was surprised to find myself burning the midnight oil with this racy tale of conspiracy betrayal and lust set in 15th-century England. This page-turner comes alive with its colourful and often sumptuous descriptions and intriguing plot . . . I can’t wait for the next one.’ Australian Women’s Weekly
‘A gripping plot.’ Country Living
‘An explosive novel with a glamour and tension that speeds the reader along at Graeme-Evans’ brisk pace, making for a galloping good read.’ Sydney Weekly Courier
‘Graeme-Evans captures the energetic spirit of a distant age.’ Weekend Australian
Also by Posie Graeme-Evans
The Innocent
The Beloved
The Dressmaker
The Island House
About the author
Posie Graeme-Evans was born in England but travelled all over the world with her parents, a novelist and an Australian spitfire fighter pilot. Posie has worked in the Australian film and television industry for the last 25 years as an editor, director and producer on hundreds of prime time television programmes including the number one drama series McLeod's Daughters and the worldwide pre-school phenomenon Hi-5.
Posie and Andrew Blaxland, her husband and creative partner, live in Tasmania.
The
Exiled
Posie Graeme-Evans
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Australia in 2003 by
Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty Limited
First published in the UK in 2005 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Posie Graeme-Evans 2003
The right of Posie Graeme-Evans to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 978 1 444 77839 7
Paperback ISBN 978 0 340 83650 7
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.hodder.co.uk
To my loving, kind, funny and patient husband, Andrew Blaxland.
Thank you for understanding my obsessional need to write, for making this winter so cosy, and for the good red wine. I am blessed by your care of me.
Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication page
Prologue
Part One: The Apprentice
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Two: The Merchant
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Part Three: The Triple Death
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Epilogue
Prologue
The storm came down like God’s hammer.
The wind, violent servant of the bruise-black sky, sucked and churned the sea until it flung mountains onto the shore, salt-water mountains which heaved and broke and shattered; rock is stronger than cold sea.
‘I see it!’
There were two of them riding ahead of the storm searching for shelter — a cave in the cliff wall ahead.
‘There! There it is!’
Neither brother heard the other, words taken by the rain, but the horses knew where to go, scrambling up the wet, slick shingle, closer, closer.
‘Hold up, hold up!’
Did the big man call to his brother, his horse or himself as the hooves struck sparks from the rain-black scree?
‘Yes! Sweet Mary, yes! Up now!’ One last clambering rush, but the smaller of the two reached the cave mouth first, ducking under the sea-made lintel with perfect timing as he brought his horse, Hautboys, to a stop with steel wrists. The cave was vast, dark and the rain-grey light from the opening was soon lost inside.
‘Thanks be.’ The young man shook himself like a dog or a seal as his brother — bigger, wetter and annoyed at not having won the race — made the same faultless entrance, neatly turning his stallion, Mallon, to one side at the last moment. Now the two horses, flanks heaving, heads down, were neatly ranged side by side as if stabled for the night.
Richard grinned. ‘So Edward, you let me win, did you?’
‘I was looking after Mallon’s legs.’ A virtuous response, but Richard snorted as he slid down from his saddle. ‘Liar. I outrode you; be a man, admit it.’
Edward, King of England, the fourth of that name, choked on laughter and annoyance. It was true this time; his youngest brother had outridden him, but he’d been honest: he didn’t like running Mallon over broken ground, least of all wet shingle.
‘Think it’ll last long?’
Tossing Hautboys’ reins to the king, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, sauntered towards the cave mouth, the opening veiled by a temporary waterfall from the tonnes of water falling down the cliff face.
‘I hope so.’ Edward spoke without thought as he patted Mallon’s neck, jumping down to the clean, sanded floor of the cave.
Richard turned to look at his brother. ‘What did you say?’
‘Never mind.’ The king joined the duke and together they looked out through the falling water at the violent sea.
Peopl
e seeing them together for the first time were always surprised they were brothers; Edward was taller by half a sword’s length and so fair-headed that in summer his hair was barley-straw white; and his was a long, strong, open face with the beauty of an avenging angel — or so a girl had once told him, long, so long ago it seemed. He shook the sadness away as he saw her face, unsummoned.
No one had yet compared Richard to an angel, of any kind.
He was watchful and dark: dark-eyed, dark-skinned, dark-haired and whipcord slight where his brother was big and massive-armed. However both had the strength of men who fought from horseback: strong backs, strong thighs.
The young duke looked at his brother. Edward was brooding again, eyes so far away he might be in another country.
Richard shrugged, impatient. The king had been gloomy for far too long; it was part of the reason he’d suggested they go riding, just the two of them, to get away from the courtiers and the tedium of the ‘Progress’ as Edward’s court moved south towards London and the Palace of Westminster.
The duke smiled faintly. They’d know both brothers were missing by now and there’d be great alarm, especially from the queen. She’d be furious that Edward had slipped his noose.
Richard looked around him with interest. This cave was famous, famous enough to have a name, Loki’s Hall: Loki the old god of shapeshifters, of fire, of sorcerers.
It was big enough to be a hall, certainly, and yes, there were columnlike rock formations marching back into the belly of the cliff, very like what you saw in Westminster, for instance; curiously carved by something too — some shaping force. They couldn’t be the work of human hands, could they? Perhaps a sorcerer, servant of the old gods, had made them?
Richard shivered and quickly crossed himself, touching the seal ring on his left hand. Under the carved onyx there was concealed a tiny but assuredly powerful relic, one of the milk-teeth of St George. The duke wasn’t frightened of old magic, of course, but ...
Boom! The cave shuddered and both men leapt to hold the horses as an enormous grinding groan shivered the air and jangled their heads, shaking their very teeth.
Dust filled the cave and light blinked out; sudden darkness, grit as they tried to breathe and a deep, bowel-loosening thunder beneath their feet, all around them, in the cave with them!
‘Brother!’ Richard couldn’t help himself. He was gripped by terror, a shameful thing.
‘I’m here, I’m here. All’s well.’ Yes, it would be, Richard knew that. It was his brother’s greatest strength — his calm when the world shook loose and became a fearful place. He’d learned that skill early, at Towton, Palm Sunday, when he’d used his battleaxe in combat for the first time and the snow ran rich red, rose red, and the order of the world was remade.
The shuddering stopped. Suddenly. All four, men and horses, took deep, urgent breaths in the instant quiet, sucking at a stream of clean, pure air where there was none before. Richard coughed explosively and spat grit.
‘What was that?’
The raging wind was gone and with it the veil of water over the cave mouth turned now to breaking dribbles. Light returned.
‘Let’s see.’ Edward gave Mallon one last pat and stepped cautiously towards the light.
Much had changed. Whole sections of the headland had come away and the shingle was littered with crushed rock and uprooted, broken trees from the missing clifftop.
But the mouth of the cave was open, open enough, though they would need care leading the horses out amongst the storm wreckage. No race home for them.
The king laughed. A harsh laugh. His luck had held. Again.
‘Edward?’
The duke was a pale shape behind him, a white, indistinct pillar from the dust; the king’s right hand reached for the pommel of his sword — he’d heard the fear. Silently, quickly, the king moved towards his brother, one pace, two, three and then he saw ...
‘Is this sorcerer’s work, Edward?’
Richard nearly controlled his voice — it was low, which was good, and steady, but ‘work’ came out as a squeak. Edward often forgot how young he was.
In the depths of the cave, a curtain wall of rock had fallen away to reveal a man lying on a rock ledge. In the gloom, he could have been asleep, but as Edward bent down he saw ... a naked corpse. A black, naked corpse.
Cured and darkened by the salt air, perhaps, the skin of the man was the colour of sea-coal, but it lay in strange inhuman folds; muscle had dissolved from beneath leaving an outline, an approximation, of the collapsed shape of a man. That was repellent enough in its sucked-out strangeness, but this death had been a cruel one.
The man’s throat had an old, profound wound, a gash just beneath the jaw that was deep enough to show the spine’s junction with the skull. There were blade-marks on the white bone and a stiff noose of animal-sinew had dropped into the tear as the flesh of the throat decayed around it, a noose which had once been brutally tight.
‘Look.’ Richard had his voice steady now. In the uncertain light, he pointed and Edward just made out, black on black, a thin, leaf-shaped blade between the dead man’s ribs. It had been rammed into the chest with such force that several of the ribs were broken. A strange thing for such a small blade.
Edward reached down to take it.
‘Don’t! Don’t touch it. It could be cursed. He could be cursed.’ Richard’s voice shook but the king ignored the subtle, fearful breath of old magic, old beliefs.
‘No, brother. See? It’s just a kind of knife, I think.’ The king held the black thing up: it was beautiful, fitting his hand so well it might have been his own, yet he was puzzled. It was made from no metal he knew and the cutting edge was slightly scalloped, though lethally sharp. Perhaps it was stone, but stone such as he had never seen before, more like black glass, and very cold.
The man-thing lay silent before them, curled up like a sleeping child. A slow, unwilling shiver touched the king’s spine.
‘Edward, I think we should go. They’ll be looking for us, after the storm. The queen will be unhappy.’ Richard laughed nervously. He really wanted to leave this strange place, right now, but thinking of Elisabeth Wydeville’s certain rage was a bracing thing, a human thing that helped somehow. He made a move towards the horses.
‘Wait. Richard, what did you mean, cursed?’
Richard was suddenly very busy with the girths of both horses, he spoke over his shoulder.
‘Well, the triple death. You know: drowned, or burned or buried after hanging and cutting the throat. There were different ways of doing it when they wanted to make a sacrifice or ...’
‘Or what?’ The king was almost conversational as he bent down and carefully left the nasty little black knife, if knife it was, lying near one of the dead man’s hands.
‘Or to prevent an evil man walking after death. Sometimes they buried them at crossroads. Just old stories, I expect, but ... Edward, what are you doing?’ Richard’s voice was sharp with nerves.
‘There, my friend. Sleep well.’ If the dead fingers were ever to reach out, ever to uncurl, they would touch the murderer’s final weapon. Did the dead have need to defend themselves? Edward shook his head at the strange fantasy.
The brothers walked their horses out of the cave and away between the crushed rock, over the new landscape as the sea slowly quietened, slumping back hissing softly on the shingled sand.
Gratefully, Richard snuffled the salt on the air as he mounted and crossed himself, kissing the relic ring. ‘Thanks be to Our Lady, and Saint George! That old Loki didn’t get us! Lucky again, brother — we might have been companions to his friend back there for all time. No one would have found us.’
But Edward, once more on Mallon’s back, riding towards duty, towards responsibility, took no notice of his brother’s words. Luck? Once, when he’d really needed it, his luck had run dry. And thinking of that time, unwillingly, nearly a year ago, he only heard one thing, the sound of sea birds calling, and only saw one thing, Anne’s face.
<
br /> From a distance he’d watched her go, hadn’t prevented it as she and Deborah sailed away from Dover’s harbour. And now, as Mallon stretched out to a gallop on hard sand at the sea’s edge, the pain came again, fresh, clear and almost sweet; the pain under his ribs which was there when he saw her face as if he too had been sliced open with that black knife, sliced to the quick. And died. Died for her.
Where was she? Where was she?
Part
One
The Apprentice
Chapter One
‘Enough. Rest now. You must be stiff.’
The girl kneeling in front of the casement window stretched and sighed, easing her clenched muscles. It was true she was stiff, and cold also, from holding the pose. The charcoal braziers had burned out long ago and the room was frigid.
‘We have worked well today, you and I.’ The painter, oblivious to the temperature and happy to chat as he ground pigment in his mortar — it would yield rich scarlet when bound with boiled linseed oil and powdered gum Arabica — spoke truthfully, for the girl had knelt uncomplainingly for several hours. That was unusual amongst his clients, and he was grateful.
Satisfied, finally, with the consistency of the bloody paint he’d now mixed in an oyster shell, he took some to the tip of his brush and smiled apologetically.
‘If you are ready, I must use this light, mistress; perhaps a little more padding for the knees?’ He smiled encouragingly as she knelt again, but then frowned as he leant towards his canvas, lost once more in catching that annoyingly elusive highlight on one small fold of the velvet which was giving him trouble, such trouble ...
Sound travelled well in that still, icy dusk. The shouts of children playing on the frozen canal outside the painter’s narrow house bounced off the walls inside the studio when, finally, the man put his brush down and stood back from the picture.
He flicked a glance towards his sitter, obediently kneeling still. She was rimmed by the last of the light outside his casement and he could barely see her face, for the red sky in the west was darkening; soon the oil lamps, tallow dips and the candles would be lit against shadows all over his city.