by Alys Clare
‘But he was a terrible person.’
‘Yes, he was,’ Helewise replied. ‘But he is dead and gone, and you must balance his evil with the good that is in all your other ancestors, those brave men and women who took on a great and dreadful task. A job,’ she added, ‘that, thanks to your mother and you, is now complete.’
Slowly he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. Then, with a very faint smile, ‘I’m taller, broader, fairer-skinned and lighter-eyed than almost everyone I know at home, as are many of the men in my close family. Now, at least, I know why.’
Then, turning to Meggie, he made her a graceful, formal bow.
‘As this kind lady just pointed out,’ he said gravely, ‘my family’s great task is now done, and I cannot tell you how relieved I am. But my own part in it could not have happened without you, Meggie. From the depths of my heart, I thank you.’
And, to judge by Meggie’s expression, astonishing her as much as it did Helewise, Faruq took Meggie in his arms and kissed her.
POSTSCRIPT
Jehan’s forge had stood cold and dead for many weeks now. He had gone, and would never come back. Later rumours, steadily turning to legends and becoming fixed in local folklore, told of the man with the dark skin who wore his long, black hair wound up in a cloth, who had a gold hoop in one ear and whose dark eyes flashed out the fire with which he lit his furnace. He was guilty of a terrible deed, the tales said, for through his actions the beloved brother of a kind, benign giant was transfixed with an ill-placed arrow that Jehan had believed to possess magic powers, until those powers betrayed him. He could not live with his guilt. His tears of remorse fell into his furnace and made a great swirl of silvery steam, and he rose up into it and disappeared.
Perhaps Jehan Leferronier would have been gratified that history did not remember him as an evil man, only a misguided one.
The forge furnace in the old charcoal burners’ camp was relit on the last day of the October that King John died. Geoffroi d’Acquin stoked it, fired it and tended it, for he had learned well from Jehan Leferronier, and was preparing to step into the footsteps of the Breton blacksmith. He would continue to provide the growing population of Hawkenlye with a smithy throughout his long life. It was his hope, as he put the flame to the wood that momentous day, that in time he would have sons and daughters who would continue the tradition.
It didn’t occur to him not to think of women in that capacity, for his dear sister often worked alongside him, and she was almost as strong and as skilled as he.
The furnace had been going for some hours when those invited to attend slowly arrived in the clearing. The household from the House in the Woods were all present, from the eldest, Josse, to the youngest, the infant daughter who was Tilly and Gus’s first grandchild. Ninian and Eloise came, with their children; Dominic and Paradisa; even Leofgar and Rohaise, with most of theirs. With the death of King John, rifts in many families were healing, Helewise’s among them.
At the last minute, silently, unobtrusively, the abbess of Hawkenlye slipped in from the shade of the trees, the old herbalist Tiphaine just behind her.
Meggie stood beside Faruq, and he held an object in his hands. He held it up. It was utterly beautiful, but they knew now that it was also utterly evil.
The furnace was roaring now, its heart white-hot. Meggie, Geoffroi and Faruq stepped forward. Geoffroi nodded to indicate that the time was right. Faruq held the silver cup high for a long moment, and the flames sparked glittering flashes from the fire opals and, from the pale ones, lit brilliant rainbow colours of blue, green and yellow.
Then, crying out words in his own tongue, he threw the Devil’s Cup into the fire.
They let the fire go out that night.
It would be the final time that this happened for many a year, but there was a reason. The evil in the silver coins that had gone into the Devil’s Cup would persist for as long as those coins remained in the world, and so they raked through the ashes until every last contorted lump of metal had been found, enclosing them in a heavy old piece of sacking.
Meggie and Faruq rode to the high cliffs above the sea and Faruq hurled the sacking package into the water. It seemed to Meggie that a big wave rose up to greet it. But she might have been mistaken.
Josse d’Acquin kept his promise. He was, after all, a man who usually did.
Late in the evening of the day that Meggie and Faruq had thrown the last of the metal from the Hospitaller’s tainted bag of coins into the sea, he and Helewise sat side by side by the hearth in his hall. The advancing night was chilly and the first hard frost of the autumn was predicted. Everyone else had gone. Gus, Tilly and their family were in bed, as was Geoffroi, and Meggie and Faruq had set off for the little dwelling beside the forge.
‘He seems rather taken with her,’ Helewise said, breaking quite a long silence.
Josse gave a snort that might have been interpreted to convey virtually anything.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘you’re going to have to elucidate.’
He chuckled. ‘I would if I knew what it meant.’
She smiled. ‘Go on with you. Tell me your opinion.’
He paused to think. ‘I agree with you that Faruq is attracted to Meggie, but that’s no surprise. For one thing, she’s a beautiful, comely woman – aye, I know full well she’s my daughter, but it doesn’t alter the fact; and for another, she’s just helped and supported him through this mission of his and the death of his mother. She’s everything to him at the moment.’
‘But you’re not sure it will last,’ she finished for him when he didn’t continue.
‘Who can say?’ he said shortly. He didn’t like to think of Meggie believing in this young man’s love for her, then discovering, once she’d given him her heart, that it was only a temporary infatuation.
As if Helewise had read his mind, which wouldn’t have surprised him, as she so often did, she said, ‘My dearest, don’t worry about Meggie. She has, I think, recently learned a very valuable lesson about herself. She was in love with Jehan Leferronier, and set up home with him believing it was what she wanted. Believing, I’m quite sure, that love would lead to commitment, marriage, children. But, once these gifts were hers for the taking, she realized that wasn’t the role for her after all.’
He turned to her, astounded. ‘How on earth do you know all this? Has she been confiding in you?’
She laughed. ‘I keep my eyes and ears open, Josse. And she most certainly hasn’t confided in me.’ She glanced at him, and something must have told her that imagining his beloved daughter spilling her heart to Helewise rather than him had cut deeply. ‘If she were to confide in anyone – which, in truth, I can’t really see her doing – it would be you.’
He knew he shouldn’t have been as pleased as he was with her reply. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘I think, for what it’s worth, that just now Meggie is enjoying being with Faruq. They’ve shared a great deal. She is far more affected by the death of the King than she is admitting, and the fact that Faruq was there with her means that he is important to her at present.’
‘D’you think he’ll stay?’
She shrugged. ‘Who knows? Meggie will survive, whether he does or not.’ She hesitated, as if not certain whether to continue.
But it was his turn to read her thoughts. He decided to say it for her. ‘She’s like her mother,’ he said very quietly.
And Helewise murmured, ‘She is.’
He stared out at the flagged floor on the far side of the hearth. There, just there, warm and snug in a pile of furs, he and Joanna had first made love. Images flashed through his mind, and for a while he was back there in the past. It might have been that very night that Meggie had been conceived.
Joanna was gone, but her spirit lingered. Quite often he sensed her presence, and always, always, she was smiling, enfolding him with love, giving her blessing on his life.
Love doesn’t die, she had said to him the last time they had met as living, breathing human bei
ngs. That is the one rule of the universe that cannot change.
He smiled at the memory. How right you were, sweeting, he thought.
She lingered there with him for some time more. Then quietly, gently, she slipped from his mind and was gone.
Beside him was the woman he had loved for as long as he could remember. He’d loved her before Joanna, all through the turbulent years when Joanna had been a part of his very soul, and she had been there when Joanna had departed.
He turned to look at her, but she was gazing down into the gently dying fire.
He reached out and took her hand.
‘I meant what I said, you know,’ he said. His voice sounded gruff.
She smiled. ‘Which particular bit?’
‘You know full well,’ he said reprovingly.
‘Yes, but tell me anyway.’
‘I’m not going adventuring again. I went this time because King John sent me a summons and he included a note just for me. I couldn’t refuse him!’
‘No, I know,’ she said quietly.
‘I’ve served three kings, Henry, Richard and John, and that’s enough,’ he went on. ‘I’ve never met this lad who’s to be the new King, and I don’t want to. He’s not ten years old yet, so he’ll be surrounded with men trying to make him do this, that and the other, and hopefully some of them will bear in mind the lad’s interests and those of the realm at least as much as their own. Whether they do or they don’t, I want no part of it. Not,’ he added modestly, ‘that anyone’s likely to ask me.’
‘It was hard for you too when King John died,’ she said.
‘Aye, it was.’ He felt the tears well up in his eyes. He blinked them away. ‘Known him from a boy – unreasonable, pig-headed, arrogant, loveable, capricious sod that he was.’ He gave a laugh that was almost a sob. ‘But, God knows, I’ll miss him.’
‘And there’s Yves,’ she said very softly.
Yves.
In all the fierce, urgent activity of the last days, Josse hadn’t had nearly enough time to think about Yves.
He had lost people very dear to him before; nobody got to his age without that. But as the immediate shock had faded, he came to realize that nobody’s death had affected him like that of his brother.
He had noticed, with a part of his mind that seemed to stand back and observe him, that an element of grief consisted of a succession of what felt like punches to the heart. Some aspect of his loss would occur to him: Yves will never walk by the water in the evening again, or he still smiled that quiet smile of his that he had when we were children, or, he won’t see his grandchildren grow to maturity. Sometimes this punch was relatively minor, necessitating no more than a brief pause in whatever he was doing while he quietly absorbed it into himself and let it pass. Sometimes – far more often, in those early days – the punch would have the power to bring him to a total stop while the pain endured and he would stand there, tears falling down his face, and suffer the agony of loss all over again.
Sometimes the images of Yves’s death crashed into his mind, driving out whatever he was thinking about or doing, and he saw again that terrible moment when the arrow struck. Yves had died almost instantly. That was the one, the only blessing: the archer had been an expert. Josse had fallen from Alfred’s back, stumbling, rushing to his fallen brother, cradling his beloved head in his lap, crooning words of comfort, reassurance.
Yves’s brown eyes had met his own, just for an instant. He whispered, ‘Oh, dear!’ and Josse had seen a faint smile.
Then blood had welled up out of Yves’s mouth and he died.
There was a long time of mourning ahead. Josse sensed it waiting for him, patient and calm. It was as if grief said to him in a kindly voice, When you’re ready, here I am.
Again he felt the tears form in his eyes. Even as they did so, Helewise gave his hand a squeeze.
I’ll get through it, he thought. I am lucky, for I have someone beside me whose support and love will not waver.
He knew, then, how it would be. Perhaps it was Joanna who allowed him the vision; perhaps it was Yves, his benign shade still lingering. But he could see the years ahead, here with Helewise. Living quietly, lives gradually more restricted as they aged together, but always there would be contentment. Always love.
It was, he thought, more than enough.
They sat in silence for quite a long time.
Then he said, ‘Ah, well, the fire’s dying. Shall we go to bed?’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The cause of King John of England’s death is not known for certain. He seems to have had a bout of food poisoning, perhaps dysentery, at King’s Lynn, although the symptoms may just have been the aftermath of a colossal blow-out and rather too much to drink. He was sufficiently recovered, anyway, to set out from Lynn a day or so later. This was the journey across the Wash that led to the loss of part of the baggage train.
Contemporary accounts say that it was the terrible news that Dover Castle was about to fall to Prince Louis that led to a recurrence of King John’s sickness. It is indeed possible that a low, depressed state of mind can lessen the body’s defences so that a lurking illness can once again break out, but it doesn’t seem likely that this could apply to either food poisoning or dysentery, which surely require the ingestion of a causative agent of some kind.
Regarding the suggestion of hostile action by the Queen, with or without the assistance of the Lusignans, there is of course nothing in the record either to support or refute this.
Three years after John’s death, his widow Isabella married Hugh X de Lusignan, the son of the fiancé of her youth.
FOOTNOTES
Chapter One
1 See The Rose of the World.
2 See The Song of the Nightingale.
Chapter Twelve
1 See The Faithful Dead.
Chapter Nineteen
1 See Ashes of the Elements.
Chapter Twenty
1 See The Winter King.