by Alys Clare
But there was a job to do. Ruthlessly I put my fears aside.
Jack found stabling for the horses, then we split up, each taking a different segment of the settlement. I worked my way to and fro, up the narrow tracks leading away from the water and back down again. People had died, I learned; not many, but one fatality would have been more than enough. A few were missing, but none of their descriptions matched our dead woman. After what seemed hours, I met up with Jack once more. He reported much the same story.
‘We may yet find out that she came from Lynn, although the population is small and most people seem to have been accounted for,’ Jack said. ‘Apparently they’re still getting word of the damage in outlying places, and reports of missing people. I’ll ask around again in the morning. I’ve been told about a place we can put up overnight.’ He smiled briefly. ‘It sounds all right; better, anyway, than the monastery.’
I was barely listening. I was seeing that image again, of the body in the water. Briefly I shut my eyes, and I was suddenly very sure of something I’d previously only suspected. ‘She isn’t from here.’
His voice seemed to reach me from a distance. ‘How do you know?’
‘She was a very long way from home,’ I whispered. ‘She—’
But the strange moment had passed. I opened my eyes, feeling awkward. ‘Sorry,’ I muttered.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think you need to be sorry. What happened?’
I sighed. ‘It was nothing – just a strong feeling that we’re not going to succeed.’
‘We still have to try,’ he said. ‘But, for now, I think we should turn our attention to that other matter. Come on – there are still several hours of daylight.’
He spun round and strode away, and I hurried after him. Quite soon, we emerged from a narrow and extremely smelly little alley out on to the quayside. Here, down at the waterfront, the area had received the full force of the encroaching sea. There was damage everywhere, and the air echoed with the sounds of industry as small groups of people went about repairs. Several smaller craft had been hurled up on to the land and as we stood taking in the scene, a gang of some dozen men gave a ragged cheer as one such vessel was finally shoved back into the water.
Larger boats were at moorings along the quay, and, again, it was clear that few had escaped unscathed. There were quite a lot of vessels; no doubt, alerted to approaching danger, their masters had made for the nearest port, many of them ending up here at Lynn. The captain of The Maid of the Marsh had mentioned a boat out of Yarmouth, The Good Shepherd, which had transported Lady Rosaria to Lynn; thinking that it was too much to hope for that her master would have been one of those who had made a run for this particular port, nevertheless I crossed my fingers surreptitiously behind my back as Jack and I set out along the quay.
I’ve never really had any faith in crossed fingers. This time, the ruse worked. The Good Shepherd was second to last in the line.
She was a much bigger vessel than The Maid of the Marsh; she was a seagoing ship, considerably longer and broader in the beam. Few people were visible on her deck. At the stern, a group of five men stood close together, apparently deep in conversation, and a couple of youngsters lounged on the foredeck, close to where a narrow plank ran up to give access from the quay. Her master, it seemed, had already effected whatever repairs might have been necessary, and the ship looked as if she had just received a thorough clean.
Jack called out to the lads, who jumped to their feet and stood stiffly in response to the authority in his voice. They both looked guilty, and I suspected their master was a hard taskmaster who would not encourage his crew to stand about idle.
‘We’re looking for your master or your mate,’ Jack said. ‘If either is aboard and willing to see us, we’d be grateful.’
The two boys put their heads together and muttered for a while, then the taller one said warily, ‘Captain’s gone ashore. But the mate’s here, only he’s busy, see.’
‘I’m sure he is,’ Jack said politely. ‘All the same, we wish a few moments of his time.’
The boy, perhaps recognizing that Jack wasn’t going to give up, dipped his head in a sort of bow, and hurried off down the deck towards the five men. Waiting until one of them deigned to notice him, he spoke some urgent words, pointing back at Jack and me. The man who had addressed him – he was short and wiry, with a soft cap pulled down over curly dark hair – studied us for a few moments. Then, muttering something to his companions, he detached himself, strode up the deck and ran nimbly down the plank.
‘Thomas Gournay,’ he said. ‘You wanted to talk to me?’
He was looking intently at us, the deep-set brown eyes flashing from one to the other. But his expression was pleasant; he seemed more curious than hostile.
Jack introduced us – Thomas Gournay gave me a courteous nod as Jack spoke my name – and said, ‘I understand from the master of The Maid of the Marsh that you recently carried a passenger here from Yarmouth? She was a noblewoman, dark-eyed, well-dressed and—’
‘She had a baby with her – a little boy,’ I interrupted. It was the most distinguishing feature about Lady Rosaria.
Thomas Gournay was shaking his head slowly, his expression puzzled. ‘We didn’t pick up anyone in Yarmouth,’ he said. ‘We only stopped to unload some cargo. Wine,’ he added, ‘from Spain, for the lords and ladies up at Norwich Castle.’
‘You’ve come up from Spain?’ I asked. Maybe that was where Lady Rosaria came from! Gurdyman had told me a lot about Spain, and its dark-eyed, olive-skinned inhabitants.
‘Oh, no!’ Thomas said with a short laugh. ‘We don’t venture much further away than northern France, and it’s only very rarely we go down to Bordeaux, although that’s where we’ve just been. We picked up our cargo of wine, as well as a party of pilgrims on their way back from Santiago. But, like I said, no passengers came aboard at Yarmouth.’
I remembered something that the master of The Maid of the Marsh had told us. She’d underpaid the cost of her passage, and one of the crew came after her to collect what she owed. ‘She didn’t pay her full fare,’ I said. ‘One of your crew had to follow her to The Maid of the Marsh and ask her to settle with you.’
Thomas Gournay’s eyes widened in understanding. ‘Her!’ he exclaimed. ‘Oh, yes, I remember her, all right.’ He frowned. ‘She maintained it was a mistake, apparently. Said she didn’t understand the coinage. A likely tale,’ he added in a mutter.
‘Where did she board your ship?’ Jack asked. Although you couldn’t have detected it from his voice, I sensed that he was suddenly very tense.
‘She was with the pilgrims waiting at Bordeaux,’ Thomas replied promptly. ‘There was quite a party of them, all glowing with the joys of Saint James’s shrine, and eager to get back home and tell everyone all about it. And that showed just how impressive the place must be,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘when you consider they had bad weather all the way from Corunna.’
‘Do you recall the lady’s name?’ Jack went on.
Thomas grinned. ‘We don’t usually bother to ask,’ he said. ‘It’s all the same to us as long as they pay, and when people do volunteer a name, very often it’s not the one they were given when they came into this world.’
‘Did she have servants with her?’ I demanded.
But Thomas was shaking his head. ‘Now that I can’t tell you,’ he said. ‘They all came pushing on board, and it was pelting down with rain, so they were shoving each other out of the way so as to get to the best spots. Not that there’s much to choose one place from another,’ he added, glancing up at the exposed deck, ‘especially when there’s a south-west wind blowing hard. You don’t notice the rain so much once the spray hits you!’ He laughed. ‘And then most of them started being sick, which added to the confusion. You’d be amazed how many folk don’t know not to vomit into the wind.’
‘You didn’t notice if—’ Jack began.
But Thomas Gournay, evidently, had just experienced a flash of memory. ‘Seasickness!�
�� he cried. ‘Now then, that does recall something to mind. She did have a maid with her, that haughty woman, and the maid was poorly. She’d been fine on the run up from Corunna, apparently – and usually, if you can survive those conditions without losing your breakfast, you can survive anything – but she started being sick maybe half a day after we left port, and the lady rigged up some sort of a shelter for the pair of them and the baby. Folk quite often do that; anything that keeps even a part of the wet off them is welcome. It wasn’t much, just a heavy cloak and a bit of blanket fastened to the rail above them and stretched out to the deck so as to make a little private space underneath. Now you’re likely to find rough seas anywhere in the Bay of Biscay, even hugging the shore, and normally the sickness eases once you find calmer water. That poor maid, however, went right on suffering, and her lady was forced to roll up her sleeves and look after her.’
He paused to draw breath. I saw Lady Rosaria in my imagination, all alone with her infant son in an alien world except for one single maid so ravaged by seasickness that she had become a liability rather than a help. I began to feel very sorry for her, and I experienced a sharp stab of guilt at the way I’d judged her so harshly. She—
Jack’s quiet voice broke into my thoughts: ‘What happened to the maid?’
I understood the importance of his question even as my mind raced to catch up. The maid had gone aboard at Bordeaux with Lady Rosaria, but by the time the veiled lady and her baby reached Cambridge, she had been alone. We knew the servant hadn’t boarded The Maid of the Marsh; had she actually left The Good Shepherd, or had something happened to her on the journey up from Bordeaux?
Thomas Gournay was screwing up his face in his efforts to remember. ‘We’d been disembarking passengers all along the coast, and we dropped off a handful here,’ he said, ‘and then there was only a couple left who sailed on with us to Boston, and that was the end of our run. I wouldn’t swear to it, but, as far as I can recall, the lady enlisted the help of two of the other pilgrims to get her maid ashore. Well, I can tell you that two men carried someone on to the quay, and I’m guessing it was the maid, because the lady was fussing about and giving orders. It was raining again, like it had been in Bordeaux, and they all had their hoods up.’
‘Do you recall what the maid looked like?’ Jack asked.
Thomas frowned. ‘I’m trying to remember if I ever noticed,’ he admitted. There was what seemed like a very long silence. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘She approached me at the start of the run, soon after they’d all boarded and had finished elbowing each other out of the way. She said her lady needed fresh water, and complained because all that was available in the barrel was brackish. I told her it was the best they were going to get, and she sniffed and turned on her heel.’
‘And?’ Jack prompted.
‘And, what?’
Jack gave an almost inaudible sigh, which I thought was remarkably restrained of him. Personally, I felt like screaming with frustration. ‘What did the maid look like?’ he asked again.
Was she fair-haired and blue-eyed? I wanted to shout. Was she tall and strongly built? Surely she must have been; suffering terribly, exhausted from prolonged seasickness, our poor dead woman had been carried off the ship that had brought her so far, only to succumb to death once she was back on dry land. Had she fallen into the water? Had her body lain somewhere in the complex system of river estuaries here at Lynn, to be dislodged and swept far inland with the flood? Oh, it must be so! At last we would be able to establish who she was, even if not her name, and we could go back to Lord Gilbert and—
Thomas Gournay, after another pause to assemble his recollections, was speaking. ‘Like I say, they were cloaked and hooded most of the time, both of them, lady and maid,’ he said slowly. ‘Muffled up with veils and scarves, too, like the other passengers. But I noticed the way the maid moved – she was nimble, and quick on her feet. She wasn’t very tall, and I remember thinking that people like her seem to do better on a rolling deck than tall folk.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Shows how much I know, when the poor lass ended up being sick all the way home.’
She wasn’t very tall. Oh, no …
‘Do you remember anything else?’ Jack asked, although I could tell from his expression that he was as disappointed as I was. ‘Was she fair and light-eyed, like a northern woman?’
‘No, oh, no,’ Thomas Gournay said, shattering the last of my hopes. ‘I reckon she was probably a Spaniard, or some such. She was dark as they come.’
Something was niggling at me, and I couldn’t seem to pick it out from the tangle of my thoughts. It was something to do with what the mate of The Good Shepherd had just told us. As Jack led the way up into the settlement and towards our lodging for the night, I almost had it. But then abruptly the rain began again, and the problem of trying to keep at least a bit of me dry in the downpour drove everything else from my mind.
NINE
Rollo was on the run. He had almost been caught, and the knife wound on his left upper arm, inflicted as he slipped from his would-be captor’s grasp, was bleeding, throbbing with pain. That had been late yesterday, and he had spent a sleepless night down among the stinking alleyways that wound their way behind the quays along the Golden Horn. Before dawn this morning, in an attempt to change his appearance, he had crept through a tunnel lined with unspeakable filth and eventually emerged into a tiny square, off which was a wash house where the women of the neighbourhood did their laundry. He had stripped, sluiced off the dirt and then rummaged through his pack and found a reasonably clean faded tunic to put on, winding a length of cloth around his head.
He had hardly dared look at the cut on his arm. He had bathed it thoroughly, then filled it with several drops of lavender oil. Lassair had given him the oil. He pictured her as he treated his wound. Strangely, he could not see her as clearly as he usually did. It was almost as if she stood behind a veil of mist.
As the day broke, he gathered his strength. The chase was about to begin again, and his pursuers must not be permitted to catch him.
He was skilled at trailing people, and at observing men but not allowing them to realize it. Had he not been, he would already be dead; or, perhaps, worse than dead. It was said that there were dark, dank dungeons below the emperor’s palace, where his gaolers had honed their talent for extracting the truth out of reluctant prisoners. Nobody held out for long, for the promise of ending the agony outweighed just about everything.
The men following Rollo were good, but he was better. He had noticed a particular man who appeared in his vicinity a little too frequently for coincidence, and, once his suspicion was aroused, swiftly he saw other tell-tale signs. A man, unremarkable to the casual eye, who, having observed Rollo for some time, slipped away like a shadow. To make his report to whoever had sent him? Another man, less professional, had noticed that Rollo had seen him and instantly fled.
Then Rollo had been faced with the terrible decision: Do I run and demonstrate that their interest in me is justified; or do I continue about my business, in the hope that they will realize I am no threat?
He had inclined to the latter. He was no threat to Alexius Comnenus; he had attempted to speak to someone who had the emperor’s ear for no more sinister purpose than an honest and open exchange of information. Rollo had seen much in the lands under the power of the Seljuk Turks, storing his observations in his well-trained mind. He had tried to seek out Alexius to lay them before him, asking in exchange that the emperor hint at his next course of action and how it would affect the lords of the west: would he, as King William believed, appeal to Rome for the arms and the men to help him in the great mission to repel the Turks from Constantinople and drive them out of Eastern Christendom?
Rollo had his own view of what would happen if Alexius did so. He had witnessed a vision, if that was what it was; a scene from hell that still haunted him. He had seen not a well-drilled professional army, focused and tightly disciplined, but a great mass of ordinary people, men, women and
children, hungry, barefoot, sickening, dying, but driven on by the faith that burned within them.
It was something that Rollo prayed would never come about.
The irony was that if he could only have managed to speak to the emperor, he was prepared to pass on the crucial discovery he had made in the south; the discovery which might have prompted Alexius to act sooner rather than later, and perhaps avoid the scenario of Rollo’s vision.
He had found out that the Seljuk Turks were not the invulnerable force the outside world believed them to be. Their conversion to Islam in 1071 had filled them with the fierce zeal of all new converts, and they had been unstoppable, meeting little resistance as they persecuted Christians, desecrated churches and overran city after city, culminating in the biggest prize of all: Jerusalem. But back then they had been led by an extraordinary man. Nizam al-Mulk had been Malik Shah’s vizier, but it was he who had held power, and it was said that his assassination the previous year had been at the hands of a man in the pay of the sultan, who had tired at last of his underling’s supremacy over him. Not that Malik Shah had enjoyed his liberation for long; he had been murdered later that year, killed, many believed, by someone loyal to the dead vizier.
With both vizier and sultan gone, a desperate struggle had begun between the men competing for the throne, and they were forced to fend off local men, grown too powerful already and intent only on increasing their kingdoms. The new sultan, Mahmud, had a fist of iron, but even he seemed unable to bring all the disparate, quarrelsome elements into a whole.
Rollo’s conclusion was that the power of the Seljuks was gravely weakened. If a strike against them could be made soon, before Mahmud had a chance to organize himself, it might meet with success.
This was what Rollo had been prepared to share with Alexius Comnenus. But he hadn’t had the chance. He didn’t know why the officials he saw had become suspicious of him, and he was unlikely ever to find out. At first they had seemed welcoming enough, treating him courteously, speaking openly of the emperor’s views, more than willing to listen to what Rollo had to say. It was likely that men like him were not unusual; in those troubled times, surely many men came to Alexius with intelligence to barter.