“There’s no earthly reason you should have killed Saladin’s messenger,” William said it aloud, “that he knows of.”
Richard relaxed, the showman gone. “Exactly. I hope that empty mystery drives him mad.”
* * *
THE DWINDLING HOURS BROUGHT a camp quiet but for horses and wind. A gentle hour, lit by milky white ribbons across the sky, when a man could fall asleep without fear. If he ignored the ocean, William could almost convince himself he was at home in Derby, lazily watching the stars with his brothers. The same sky he stared up upon now looked impossibly down on England, too, and William could only be envious.
The war council’s members had long left to feel more important in the company of their subordinates. But William was still awake, mind racing with a thousand possibilities of what the next days had in store. The enemy knew about Richard’s use of body doubles, and there was no way to calculate what that meant. Not that it mattered. All William could do was sit and wait for Richard to make another unpredictable decision.
Days such as this left a sour taste in his mouth. The king could be exceedingly kind and competent when he chose to, but he had an equal capacity for mania. Yet in each of Richard’s rants, there was always a nugget of startling clarity. Whether it was all calculated or not, William could never tell.
The king threw himself at the floor, fussing with his blanket. “We should send a messenger back to the city, with the body,” he said off-handedly, as if they had already been in mid-conversation. “You’re in the crown tomorrow? Send that earl, Derby. He’s a tiring one, no?”
Ferrers deserved many wretched things in this life, and worse in whatever came after, but he did not deserve this. Sending the earl to the city with the dead messenger was a certain death sentence. “A bit obvious, that?” William said mildly. “I thought you’d let Saladin stew and wonder for a couple days.”
“Hm?” Richard seemed to have already forgotten his own order. “Oh, yes, I suppose that’s fine. And on second thought, I’ll stay in the crown myself tomorrow.”
The king looked up, where the wisps of smoke from the tent’s brazier curled through an opening to mingle with stars above. William, on the other hand, found himself staring down at the dark spot below where the messenger’s blood had fed the dirt. Within moments Richard was asleep, disappearing from the world without a care.
Why William had bothered to save Ferrers’s life, he couldn’t say. The man was responsible for so much of the grief that defined William’s past. Fifteen years ago, Ferrers had answered another call to war, to fight for Henry the Younger in his attempted rebellion against King Henry. William often wondered how different his life would be if not for that one selfish act. The rebellion had failed, Ferrers’s siege of Nottingham Castle was unsuccessful, so nothing would be different for most of the world. But his brothers would be alive. William probably would have married Arable de Burel, and her family would have escaped ruin.
Selfish acts and their unknown consequences, they tugged at William’s fingertips. Returning to his bedroll, he caught Robin’s gaze across from him, eyes wide open, giving solemn approval of his suggestion that spared Ferrers’s life. But William could only wonder what his own father would say of this tiny act of mercy, and chose better than to linger on it.
This war would have consequences, too. And William knew that if things went poorly, King Richard would not lose any sleep over them. Power was worse than any wine at dulling the senses. William knew exactly why his king had tried to casually send an annoying earl to his death, and exactly why he had taken a messenger’s life for a petty mind game.
Because he can.
William could only hope that, given the same power, he would make different choices.
FIVE
ARABLE DE BUREL
NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
OF COURSE ARABLE WAS still awake when they came through the kitchen. Their voices carried right through to the maids’ chambers loud and clear, even though they thought they were whispering. And of course they found it necessary, as all young men do, to touch everything they walked by. She could tell precisely where they were by the number of times the soup lid rattled open and crashed down again in disappointment. Each one slapped the side of the wide stone archway that split the kitchen in half as he walked through it. Each one clattered his hand against the line of hanging spoons above the cutting table. Four tonight. Then the soup lid again. Good thing you checked, your friends may have not looked hard enough. Five.
There was no point in following them. It was past midnight and she was tired. Her hands were sore from scratching wax trails off of candleshelves and something wasn’t sitting well in her stomach. She’d already visited the cold castle privies several times to relieve herself and was likely to need another, judging by the strange crackles in her belly. That was why she had left her stockings and shoes on, in case she needed to go again. Not so she could follow the errant Guardsmen when they returned tonight. Following them would be dangerous, and pointless. Better to roll back to sleep, and let them about their business.
Arable de Burel was always losing her own arguments. She slipped out of bed to follow them.
“Don’t do it,” tisked the younger girl from the bed below. Gunnore was probably half Arable’s age, just barely old enough to be indignant about still being called a girl. She had more brat than sense in her, but even she knew the folly of prying into Guardsmen’s secrets. But Gunny had never known anything beyond a servant’s life, so her concept of danger was limited to that which risked her daily meal. Arable had yet to succumb to the hopelessness of this life, and prayed she would not need to. Someday she’d climb up again, when it was safe. But for now her safety depended on Roger de Lacy’s generosity.
And when men gathered in the night to whisper secrets in the bottom of the castle, it usually meant trouble for someone at the top.
“Don’t follow them,” Gunny whispered again.
“I’m not! It’s my stomach!” Arable actually felt bad about the lie.
Gunny gave her a sad pout, waving her over to brush her hair back.
“You poor thing, here,” she said, tying Arable’s black curls behind her head. “In case you retch. This is the second time tonight!”
Third, Arable thought. You must have slept through one of them. Back to sleep with you now. She tucked Gunny in and stole away, careful not to wake up the other girls, sleeping row upon row above each other. If the other maids could sleep through headmistress Roana’s snoring, they’d never notice Arable leaving. But still, she made sure to walk softly, pulling up on the balls of her feet with each step, rather than plodding them down like meat the way the Guardsmen in the kitchen had.
The maids’ chambers were connected to the kitchen by only a wide foyer, since the castle was built by men. A hundred years ago, William the Conqueror wanted no time to pass between the time Arable woke each morning and the time she started cooking. She was probably the only servant in Nottingham who even thought about why things are, rather than just reacting to what things are. Arable tiptoed through the kitchen without touching anything which wasn’t very hard and came to the cut spiral steps that dug down and curled under the floor. Down the staircase to the wine cellar at the end, just like last night, but this time Arable didn’t hesitate to slip into its darkness. Last night she had been too fearful to approach the door, and then drove herself mad wondering what they’d been up to. No good, that’s what they’d been up to. Which was exactly what Roger de Lacy had asked of her, his only stipulation for keeping her surname a secret.
“Don’t go out of your way now,” he had insisted. “But keep an ear out for anyone up to no good. I don’t have as many friends in this castle as a sheriff should.”
Nearly two years she had been here now, almost as long as de Lacy himself. The longest she had lived in a single place for fifteen years, and the closest thing she had to a home since she had been forced to flee her real one. Arable had played the role of a forgettable fac
e in dozens of places since, almost always in exchange for her privacy. But she had learned that staying small rarely meant staying safe. Before Nottingham, she had spent half a year outside Grantham assisting an aging cartwright with his clerical and household chores, and happily seen nary another soul in that time. But her security there was exactly as unreliable as his failing business. When Roger de Lacy was made High Sheriff, Arable dared to write him. He was an old acquaintance of her family and gave her pity enough to bring her in. But that stability, too, brought risk. A position within Nottingham Castle, so close to Derby, might mingle her with those who could have once recognized her.
Fortunately, she had found advantage in the role’s anonymity. It was better than hiding, because as a servant she was invisible. Perhaps that was what gave her the courage now to breathe through the pitch black of the corridor, softfoot by softfoot, into the vegetable larder beside the wine cellar. A tiny spot of light trickled through a hole between the rooms, back against the wall and impossible to see through, but when Arable pressed her ear to the stones she could hear the muffled whispers of the Guardsmen much clearer.
She snuggled up against a sack of potatoes and let her weight down slowly, one limb at a time, into a position she could keep. It was cold down here, more a cave than a room, and her ear went quickly numb against the stone. She listened as long as she could stand it, and though she could not make out all of what was said, she heard enough to know she had to visit Sheriff de Lacy as soon as possible.
* * *
BARON ROGER DE LACY—High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and the Royal Forests—kept his office in the highest level of the highest keep. There was a proper room at the bottom of the tower which every sheriff had used since the first Peveril, but not Roger de Lacy. He preferred the tiny confines of this bird’s nest. Arable had asked him about this once, on a perfect spring morning well over a year ago, when he had invited her to stay and share in the breakfast she had brought. He answered by moving to the window and pulling it open, inviting her to push her face out with him, looking down upon the hills of purple crocuses to the southeast.
“I chose this room,” he’d whispered, conspiratorially, “for the singularly spectacular reason that it is the farthest I can possibly get away from Nottingham.”
Arable had climbed the five sets of stairs to his office a thousand times by now, probably more. Along the way she often wondered about who had first laid the stones together, and if they had been proud of their work. She always lost her breath by the top stair, but she rarely took them any slower, for the same reason de Lacy chose the room. Though he did not often have time to idle with her, she treasured their infrequent conversations and often found herself memorizing his clever retorts. Even when he tired of her, he wouldn’t complain. “I must make for terrible company,” he’d say, “surely there’s some younger man who you’d prefer to give your attention.”
It was one of the few times he was mistaken.
On this morning, Arable climbed those stairs as soon as the sun braved the horizon. Her secret had made a poor bedfellow and she’d barely slept at all, but still she was apparently not early enough. Not only was de Lacy wide awake, he had company. The Captain of the Guard, Guy of Gisbourne, sat with the unmistakable pursed lips of someone on the losing end of a conversation.
“Arable,” Roger de Lacy cleared his throat, his thin face brightening immediately upon seeing her. “Did I call for something?”
“If you did, she didn’t bring it.” Gisbourne squinted at Arable’s obviously empty hands. “Did you call for nothing, perhaps? She has plenty of that.”
“Oh, don’t take it out on her,” de Lacy grumbled. His face was well weathered with deep lines, forged in equal parts from smiling and scowling. Watching them fold upon themselves as he shifted between the two was like opening a wooden puzzlebox. But for Arable his eyes were always kind, the corners of his lips always turned up. “What brings you, then?”
She hesitated and glanced at the captain, who gave no indication he might offer them privacy. No matter. Guy of Gisbourne was a good man if a bit stern, and this news was just as important to him. “I overheard a private conversation between a group of young Guardsmen,” she explained, “that I think you should know about.”
Arable described everything she heard. She mentioned the five Guardsmen and their late-night meeting, she talked about the wine cellar and the larder, and their mysterious whispered plans. “I could not make out the details, but they were talking about some other Guardsman. I don’t know who. They mean him harm.”
“Some sort of fraternal indoctrination, I would guess,” de Lacy waved it off. “Just normal roughhousing. It happens all the time when you throw men at each other.”
“No,” Arable insisted. “This wasn’t playful, and it wasn’t normal. I got the impression they meant something much more serious.”
“I know precisely what this is,” Gisbourne turned sour, but it was aimed at the Sheriff, “and I warned you this would happen.”
De Lacy’s response was careful. “You don’t know anything yet.”
“Shall I wait until one of my boys is dead?” The captain placed his fingertips on the table. “Thank you, Arable, this was very important. You were right to bring this to us.”
“I know,” she said flatly.
“Did you recognize any of these men?” Gisbourne asked. “Their names?”
Arable shook her head, suddenly feeling foolish.
“Hm. What about their faces?” he pressed.
“No.” She only knew a handful of the Common Guardsmen anymore. Thankfully. She rarely worked in the barracks halls, where she quickly became a target for the men’s drunken gropings. Early on, de Lacy had reassigned her to duties centered in the upper bailey, closer to him. She was friends with most of the Guardsmen in Gisbourne’s private regiment, but not many others. Which meant she had no names to share. What a waste of time, she scolded herself. “Unless…”
Gisbourne raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“They’ve gone through the kitchen each night before they meet,” she continued, before she fully thought it out. “I suppose I could hide there and spy on them as they pass through.”
“Of course not,” de Lacy was quick to protect her. “You’ve done enough already, I should think.”
Gisbourne nodded. “Agreed. Besides, I have a good idea who they are. I ought to just throw them all back into the gaols where they belong.”
“You ought?” de Lacy turned sharply on him. “You have a whisper and a rumor, and you want to condemn innocent men for that?”
“We’re using a new definition of the word innocent, are we?”
“You want to prove me wrong?” De Lacy gave a labored smile. “Then gather evidence, not hearsay.”
That challenge lingered in the air a bit, leading Gisbourne to turn reluctantly back to Arable. “I wouldn’t want you to do anything with which you feel uncomfortable, but I need to know which recruits you overheard.”
Arable ignored his patronizing tone. “I wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t comfortable with it.”
This was, apparently, an impressive thing to say. “Very well,” the captain continued. “If they meet again tonight, try to get a good look at them. Focus on just one if there’s not enough time. Then you can describe him to me in the morning.”
“Describe him to you?” Arable was incredulous. It would be a dirty young man with pale skin and long brown hair. The Nottingham Guard was full of them, and not much else.
“Do you expect him to have an obvious scar of some sort?” de Lacy mused with a wicked smile, leaning back in his chair.
Gisbourne rolled his eyes. “Alright, describe him to me if you can. If not, then … here!” He quickly drank the last drop from a dented pewter tankard at the desk, and placed it in Arable’s hands. “I’ll recognize this cup. Tomorrow night at the dining hall, be sure to catch my eye. Serve this cup to the man you recognize, and then think no more of it.” He ga
ve her a meaningful smile and returned to his seat, throwing his leg over its back like a saddle.
De Lacy flashed his eyebrows playfully at her. “What a delightful bit of morning. Intrigue before breakfast!”
“It’s not delightful, it’s dangerous,” the captain scowled. “Tell me I’m wrong. I’ll wager anything it’s one of your new recruits.”
“You’re so eager to assign me the blame for this. I trust you’re equally prepared to give me full credit for each day we do not have an incident? Or is causality only important when it plays to your favor?”
Gisbourne shrugged it away. “I warned you if we pulled men from the gaols, they would turn on us.”
“And I warned you,” de Lacy’s voice tightened, “to be discreet.” He threw a piercing look at Arable, but did not ask her to leave. She wondered if the captain expected her to miraculously close her ears in his presence, or if he simply forgot that girls were smarter than rocks. “You were also meant to be diligent in your selection. There are plenty of men in gaol for tax evasion, yet you seem to have recruited the ones comfortable with plotting secret beatings. I fail to see how this deficit in reasoning falls on my shoulders. Unless,” he wrapped his fingers delicately around each other, “you’re purposefully trying to undermine my policy?”
Gisbourne seemed honestly taken aback. “We may disagree on a very many things, but I would never intentionally put my own men in danger. That hobby remains solely yours.”
“Hm.” De Lacy squinted but did not contest it. “Investigate this. And stop recruiting violent men.”
“You overestimate the number of debtors in our cells.”
“Then find more of them.” De Lacy’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead. “If you don’t like your lot down below, start enforcing the tax collections, that you might have more docile options. But do not complain to me of being shorthanded and also complain about my solution. You can’t throw a rock in this county without hitting someone who didn’t pay their part of the war fund. This would put them to work.”
Nottingham Page 5
