Veil of Lies cg-1

by Jeri Westerson

  He sat on the floor, which seemed the most convenient, and gingerly palmed his head and then his chin. His head throbbed and ached. Feeling woozy, he stared at the blackened maw of the empty fireplace and willed it to ignite. When that failed, he laid back against the wall, the cold stone chilling his back.

  “Why do I seem always to be on the wrong side of the king?”

  He closed his eyes. It made the room seem less slanted.

  The air thickened with the stench of frightened men. The last occupant of the room left behind his own odor of fear, marking the cell with a distinct haze of despair. Crispin tried to ignore it. No telling how long the sheriff would leave him here. When Crispin had been imprisoned for treason, he had languished in his cell for five months.

  He allowed his heart its drumroll for several minutes before taking a deep breath. He was done with fear. Hadn’t he suffered enough humiliation? If they wanted to kill him then it was years overdue.

  Bracing his back against the wall, he inched upward. “I’ll stand, thank you,” he said to the shadows. “I will die indeed before I ever give Richard the satisfaction of defeating me.”

  “Ah, Lord Crispin,” came the voice from outside the door.

  Crispin stiffened. He felt a curse rumble up from his throat.

  Keys clattered and dug into the lock, dropping the pins into place. The door creaked and hung ajar, spilling a swath of irregular light across Crispin’s chest. The guard Malvyn stood in the doorway and blocked the rest of the torch’s flame.

  “So,” Malvyn said, fat arms crossing over his chest, “you were never going to be a prisoner in here again, were you? You know, you weren’t very polite to me a few hours ago.”

  Crispin managed a grin. “You’re not going to hold that against me, are you?”

  Malvyn scowled and eyed him up and down. “You’re a high-and-mighty bastard, aren’t you? Born into court society, eh? Title, riches. Where are they now? Who will help you now?” He stepped into the room. His footsteps made a hollow sound. “Do you remember the fun we had eight years ago?” He took a short whip from his belt. “You never once cried out, did you? Let’s see if we can’t change that.”

  Malvyn raised the whip but never brought it down. Crispin kicked it out of his hand and it skidded across the room.

  Standing half a foot taller than the gaoler, Crispin straightened. “I tolerated a great deal then. I don’t now.” He slammed his boot down on Malvyn’s foot. The gaoler howled in pain and bent toward the floor. He never got there. Crispin’s fist reached his jaw first. The punch met flesh and tooth, tearing the former and cracking the latter.

  Malvyn lost his balance. Crispin lunged at him for more—until spear butts jabbed his chest and stopped his progress.

  He stumbled back and looked up at two guards. They raised their spears, but he lifted his open hands and backed away from the door. They hauled out the barely conscious Malvyn and ticked their heads. “He’ll make certain you get a beating for that, Master Crispin,” said one of the men.

  Crispin rubbed his scraped knuckles and smiled. “Yes, but it was worth it.”

  The sound of Malvyn’s heels scraping against the floor and the door closing for the second time filled his ears before all fell silent again. The profound stillness echoed throughout the chamber and rumbled down the passage.

  Crispin listened to the silence for a long time. He remembered it well. He used to hum to himself to keep the quiet at bay, all the songs he knew. He tried now to think of a song to hum, but he did not much feel like singing.

  As the time crawled by, he felt more and more alone. How much time had passed? He wasn’t certain. Only an arrow slit of a window allowed him to measure the sunlight. But with heavy cloud cover, even that was an uncertain sundial.

  In the utter quiet, his thoughts caught up to him. He slid down the wall and sat. He scowled, thinking of the king; scowled further thinking of Wynchecombe; then lost the scowl completely when his mind lighted on Philippa.

  Resting his throbbing head against the stone, he closed his eyes. “Philippa,” he whispered, liking the sound of it in the empty chamber. She should be quite safe with Gilbert and Eleanor. It surprised him that he missed her. Women passed through his life like the seasons, and though he knew he was susceptible to a woman in peril, he did not consider himself a fool where they were concerned. “Well,” he admitted with a lonesome chuckle, “not too much a fool.”

  He remembered he still had her portrait and jammed his hand into the purse. The light was poor but he cupped the portrait in his hand and gazed at it. Her face peered back at him with a mischievous expression that seemed to say she had a secret.

  He frowned and lowered the portrait to his lap. Too many secrets.

  The fact that she was a chambermaid—no, worse, a scullion—should have struck down any emotions and concern. What he was, what he was born to, was in the blood. He couldn’t change. He didn’t want to.

  “I don’t like to fall in love,” he said. The hollow sound of his lone voice gave poignancy to his assertion. “But I—” He shook his head. “It’s no good. There’s no place for her. Hell, there’s no place for me in my useless life!”

  His dizzy brain ran through the memories—of jousts and duels, of all-out combat. He had been alive then. Worth something. “What am I now?” he asked the portrait. “The Tracker. What the hell is that?” He’d cobbled the vocation himself from shards of his former knighthood tied with the string of concocted peasant chivalry. Little better than a mummer in a play mouthing verse written by another, a minstrel strumming an instrument. No more real than the tattered honor that he struggled to believe he still possessed.

  “My ‘true image’ indeed! If I owned a shred of my true self I should have fallen on my sword years ago. If I had a sword. Is it cowardice that keeps me alive?”

  He glanced at the portrait before tossing it across the room. “She is truer than I. At least she knows what she is.”

  He heard his own voice and touched his tender head. “What’s the matter with me? Must be a fever. Indeed, I do not feel well.”

  He rocked his head in his hands for a time before raising his face. A chill breeze breathed over him from the window, feeling surprisingly refreshing to his beaded forehead.

  The tiny portrait lay facedown among the straw. A crescent edge of frame gleamed. “I will not entertain the possibility,” he said to it. “I will not!” He glared at it, almost waiting for a response. The silence overwhelmed again, fell away with an echoed cry somewhere down the passageway, and welled again like something solid, encasing him in its shell. He stared again at the little portrait until a crack in the mortar of his defenses crumbled, only a little, and he crawled across the floor to recover the little painting and cradled it again in his palm. She still smiled at him. “You do not care about your past.” He shook his head, partly in wonder, partly in self-loathing. “How is it done?”

  He gazed at the portrait for a long moment before embarrassment stiffened his shoulders and he stuffed the miniature back in his purse. He heaved a sigh, stood, and decided to start a fire in the hearth.

  One of the better cells designed for nobler occupants, it boasted a fireplace and a bed. The other cells had no such luxuries. Most of London’s thieves and murderers shared a communal dungeon where food was scarce and warmth a mere memory. That Wynchecombe bothered to retain any proprieties and place Crispin in such a cell surprised him, but maybe the sheriff simply did it on instinct. Surely if Wynchecombe remembered, he’d move Crispin to a less hospitable place.

  He found in the hearth small squares of peat left behind by the previous occupant, but the tinderbox was damp. He might ask the guards for dry tinder when they revisited, though if it were Malvyn who returned, he knew he could kiss a fire farewell.

  “Well,” he said. “If I freeze to death then my worries are over.”

  He decided to try to ignite the fire and covered the peat with the driest straw he could find. Spotting Malvyn’s whip, he to
ok particular delight in tossing it on the fuel. Taking the tinderbox, he tried to ignite the straw.

  He worked diligently for half an hour before the dry straw smoldered. Bending forward, he puffed a breath across the small flame. The peat began to burn but it was a cool fire. He sat with his back to it and rolled his shoulders into the small portion of warmth and watched the light from the arrow slit turn gray and slip slowly up the damp wall.

  He stared at the wall opposite the fire—each carefully laid stone one more piece in the edifice that was Newgate, all flush against one another—and one irregular stone that refused to lay as flat as the wall.

  “Christ!”

  He rushed to the wall and felt the dried mud with his fingers. “I’m in the same damn cell!”

  Behind that crude mortar that he placed himself lay the Mandyllon.

  Peering through the spy-hole in the door and seeing no one in the passage, Crispin reached for his knife before remembering the sheriff had taken it. Instead, he used his fingernails to pry the stone loose and dropped it into one hand. He thrust a hand into the hole and touched the cloth with his fingertips. Dragging it out, he stoppered the hole again with the stone.

  His thumbs rubbed the smooth cloth and he turned toward the fire and sat before the weak flames. Unfolding the cloth he first laid it on his lap and then raised it. The reflected light caught the image, so faint it was barely recognizable, yet it was recognizable enough to Crispin.

  The Mandyllon. “Vera icona. True Image,” he snorted. If there was one thing he couldn’t afford to know, it was his true nature. Not now. “What are you?” he asked. His voice echoed softly in the dimming cell. “Is this truly the image of God?”

  He ran his rough fingertips over the image, feeling nothing different in its texture. “If this is what everyone thinks it is, then what would you have me do with it?” He raised his face to heaven, but all he saw were dusty, wooden rafters. He looked back at the fire. “I would rather burn this than have it fall into the hands of the king—or any other villain. Tell me now, Lord, what you would have me do. Would this relic not be better out of the greedy hands of man?”

  He waited, listening to the silence. He wasn’t certain if he expected a reply, but he caught himself holding his breath and expelled it unevenly. “Does your silence indicate affirmation? After all, I cannot speak an untruth in the Mandyllon’s presence. If this cloth is not of your doing then nothing is lost. If it is, then I say it is better destroyed.” He thrust the cloth toward the meager flames and waited.

  He scanned the room. The gloom descended as the sun lowered. “You know how invincible Richard would become, he whose vain favorites rule the court. And these wretched Italians. Would you unleash them on the world?”

  His hand clenched the fabric. He felt the smoke curl around his fingers, felt the warmth of the fire grow warmer on his wrist, but still he held the Mandyllon.

  “The truth is not a blessing. It is a curse. Speak, Lord! Tell me! There is little time left.”

  A clatter. A scrape. The key turned in the lock.

  Crispin scrambled to his feet and thrust the cloth behind his back.

  The door whined open and a silhouette blocked the door’s light.

  “Well, Crispin?”

  As close to the voice of doom as he had ever heard.

  24

  Simon Wynchecombe planted his feet wide apart. Crispin braced for an attack and flicked his glance toward the edge of the doorway.

  No guards? The sheriff alone? What was Wynchecombe playing at now?

  “Are you ready to talk?” asked the sheriff.

  With one hand Crispin dragged his cloak over his shoulders, a poor substitute for dignity. “What shall we talk about?”

  Wynchecombe strode forward and stood before the fire. He watched the small flames sputter for a moment before turning his back to it. “You know I will be fair with you.”

  “I know no such thing.”

  Crispin knew that his hair was mussed and his coat was spattered with dots of blood from the guard’s fists. His face was a quilt of purple and yellow bruises from old wounds and from the newest assault. Nothing lordly about him anymore, except his manner and his mind. But even those slipped under the weight of time and poor living. What did Wynchecombe see when he looked at him, he wondered. Was it a former knight or just another beetle under his boot?

  The sheriff nodded grimly. “We are often at opposites sides of a dilemma, are we not? I am under the auspices of the crown, and you very decidedly outside them. I make no secret of the fact that I know on which side my bread is buttered. And I like buttered bread.” He crossed his arms over his broad chest and looked down his nose at Crispin, who stood shorter by half a foot. “If that makes me a tool of the king then so be it. When all is said and done, kings come and go. I plan to remain.”

  Crispin said nothing. His fingers slowly bunched the cloth into a tight ball behind his back.

  The sheriff grinned. “I know more than you think I do. About this syndicate, for instance.”

  Crispin raised his chin. I’ll wager you don’t. Aloud he offered, “If that is so, then why didn’t you speak of it before?”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “The girl, Crispin? I’m surprised at you.”

  “I’m a little surprised at myself.”

  “We have known about this Italian syndicate for some time,” Wynchecombe went on. “We think they are responsible for a conspiracy to forestall goods, thus raising the prices. And for piracy. The king is not pleased. He has charged me with breaking up this ring. What can you tell me about it?”

  “I have connections, my lord. What will it be worth to you to have this matter settled quickly?”

  Wynchecombe’s face elongated with disbelief. “Are you trying to extort me?”

  “‘Extort,’ my lord? That’s such a strong term. I prefer ‘negotiate.’”

  Wynchecombe laughed, a deep, rolling sound that rambled along the walls and trickled out the open cell door. He wiped away his laughter tears with a gloved finger. “Crispin, if you weren’t such a traitorous bastard, I might actually like you. Very well. I might consider forgoing your surety.”

  “My good Lord Sheriff, surely putting the king’s mind at ease is worth more than that! I am looking for coins.”

  “You want me to pay you?” He laughed again. “And what good are riches if you rot here?”

  “Good point. My freedom, then. And the gold.”

  Wynchecombe’s smile fell. “I don’t believe you. I do not think you have these ‘connections.’”

  “Oh, but I do. For instance, I happen to know that the duke of Milan is behind this syndicate.”

  Wynchecombe scowled so deeply his mustache completely covered his lips. At last he exhaled, blowing out the cold, foul air in a plume of fog. “I will cover your surety, I will give you your freedom, and I will pay a small amount of remuneration. After all, I cannot be entirely certain that you are telling me the truth.”

  Crispin clutched the cloth. “You can be certain that it is all the truth.”

  “How then does this cloth, this Mandyllon, cross paths with the syndicate?”

  “They stole the original and commissioned a clever thief to make a copy.”

  “And this clever thief? Where is he now?”

  “Dead. The man erstwhile known as Nicholas Walcote.”

  The sheriff whistled. “Christ’s toes.”

  “Indeed.”

  “But you claim they did not kill this mock Walcote.”

  “Yes. The cartel killed the real Walcote by mistake. This thief—similar in appearance and age, apparently—simply took his place and ran off with the original Mandyllon. The syndicate wanted it back—for themselves, I imagine—and pursued him for five years. They finally caught up with him, I would say about six months ago. But they did not kill him. They wanted the Mandyllon back first.”

  “And this cartel…run by the duke of Milan, i
s it? What does it hope to accomplish?”

  “They want to stop our war with France in exchange for a deal for control of Calais. And on top of that, they want to bankrupt our wool market.”

  Wynchecombe’s lips parted but he said nothing. He paced in a circle, head down, hands behind his back. Finally he stopped and looked up. “This cloth seems to be in the center of all these unholy tidings.”

  “Yes,” said Crispin. “The Mandyllon has caused a great deal of the grief we now see. Were you able to discover its history?”

  “No. Only that men die when associated with it. Wouldn’t you rather just hand it over?”

  “Should I subject the king to such risks? What sort of loyal subject would I be?”

  Wynchecombe merely stared at him, his fist at his hip.

  Crispin shrugged. “So I am not so very loyal. Everyone knows that. But Simon, if it is authentic, do you honestly want the king in possession of such a powerful tool? He would be virtually invincible.”

  “I don’t want it in the hands of Visconti. Should I not want my own king to be invincible? And how many times do I have to remind you not to call me Simon?” Wynchecombe regarded Crispin a long time before he dropped his gaze. “I have no great love for Richard either.” But after he said it, his face broke into surprise and he looked up. He clamped his lips shut and turned his glare on Crispin. “That is a private admission. I do not expect it to leave this cell.”

  Crispin bowed. “As you will, my lord.”

  Wynchecombe stepped toward the bed and sat.

  Crispin edged toward the wall and leaned against it, keeping the cloth behind his back.

  They said nothing to one another for a long interval. Wynchecombe fingered the sleeve of his houppelande. “The king will be furious when he discovers your involvement in this,” he said quietly.

  Crispin fisted the cloth tighter. “No more than he already feels for me.”

  “His games are no longer your concern, Crispin. Court politics. I would think you were well rid of them.”