The Stone Rose

by Carol Townend

Clutching Katarin to her breast, Yolande’s knees buckled. One of Jean’s arms whipped round her waist, and Katarin was eased into the crook of his other.

  ‘No. No!’ Yolande backed away. ‘I don’t believe it, I won’t believe it!’

  Someone stepped into the unhappy circle in the middle of the yard, a hardy young man with a shock of fair hair and pleasant, open features which were easy to read. Sympathy filled his blue eyes. ‘Madame,’ the young man said, and his accent was strange to Yolande, ‘I am very sorry. We did all we could, but we could not get her out. We got your daughters out, but the roof caved in.’

  ‘Roof? Caved in?’ Yolande did not like the compassion in those blue, blue eyes. It told her that Izabel was truly gone. ‘No,’ she muttered fiercely. ‘Not now, when we have finally come here.’ In Kermaria, Izabel could have lived free of the shame that had shadowed most of her unhappy life. Desperately, Yolande willed the young man to vanish back into the mist, but he remained large as life, feet planted firmly on the ground, and his beautiful eyes were round with fellow-feeling. She would never be able to look at anyone with blue eyes again without remembering this day. She lifted a hand to block out the sight of those eyes, and gripped her daughter’s bridle for support.

  ‘Face it,’ someone rasped from the ground by her feet.

  It was the stranger in the litter. There was no compassion anywhere on that dark visage. Yolande looked at his eyes which were a drab grey and dark with pain, but pitiless. Strangely, she found it easier to regard this man who gave no quarter than the other, compassionate one. ‘I...I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Ned’s telling the truth.’ His voice lacked the foreign ring of the younger man’s. ‘Face it. The whole street was a mass of fire. The old woman’s gone. Be thankful we got your daughters out.’

  Jean surveyed the man on the litter. ‘Your name?’

  ‘Alan le Bret.’

  ‘Master?’

  The man paused before replying. ‘None, at present.’

  ‘Is it true, Alan le Bret, that Izabel Herevi is dead?’

  Alan, whose skin was ashen under his black mask, grunted assent. ‘Aye. Izabel Herevi sleeps her last sleep in yonder box.’

  Yolande gave a soft moan and stepped blindly towards the coffin.

  Jean thrust Katarin at his son. ‘Raymond, take your sisters inside, and see the man’s hurts are seen to, will you? I shall look to your mother.’

  ***

  Having settled Katarin with Klara in the relative comfort of one of the alcoves off the solar, Gwenn elected to tend to the routier herself. His litter had been dragged into the hall downstairs, and she was examining a willow basket the serving woman had told her was stocked with bandages and salves, while Raymond nosed around the solar.

  ‘God, what a midden of a place,’ Raymond said.

  Gwenn looked up. Her brother was picking flakes of limewash from the damp-stained walls. Gwenn had been so full of grief for her grandmother that she hadn’t had eyes for Kermaria. ‘I expect the walls will dry out when the fire’s been going awhile,’ she said.

  ‘For two pins I’d return to Vannes,’ Raymond continued. ‘I have friends there. I can’t see that there’s going to be much going on here. The nearest tavern must be three miles away.’

  ‘You can’t return, Raymond. None of us can, not now.’

  The shock was back on Raymond’s face, and for a moment Gwenn thought he was about to break down. ‘I know.’ His voice cracked. ‘It’s not something that’s easily forgotten, is it?’ His voice strengthened. ‘I know de Roncier’s to blame. One day, I’ll make him pay, Gwenn, I swear it.’

  Gwenn’s eyes filled. ‘Revenge won’t bring Grandmama back.’

  Her brother strode over the rushes and gave her a rough hug. ‘Don’t cry. That snake’ll pay, I’ll make certain of that, if it’s the last thing I do.’

  Her brother was offering her the only comfort he could, and Gwenn nodded. Folding a linen cloth, she added it to the basket of medicaments.

  ‘Why are you soiling your hands tending to that villain?’ Raymond demanded abruptly. ‘Let someone else do it. Let that wench, Klara, see to him.’

  ‘No. I want to help him. If it wasn’t for him, I’d be dead.’

  ‘I don’t trust him. He could be working for de Roncier.’

  ‘I don’t trust him either, but he did save me, and I confess I’m curious. That day we were chased, I saw him.’

  ‘What? In the mob?’

  Gwenn nodded. ‘He was the first to throw a stone.’

  ‘Mother of God!’ A dark flush mottled Raymond’s cheeks. ‘And you want to bind his wounds as though he were some unsung hero! I’d steer well clear of him if I were you. That man’s a bucket of trouble. I shall mention that you saw him in the mob to Mama.’

  Gwenn grimaced in the direction of the spiral stairs. ‘He couldn’t hurt a fly at the moment.’

  Making an impatient sound, Raymond swung away. ‘And what about when he’s healed? What then? Believe me, sister, there lies a wolf that’s not to be tamed.’

  She dug in her heels. ‘I don’t want to tame him, I only want to heal him. It’s a debt I owe him, for my life.’

  Her brother flapped her out with a weary hand. ‘Oh, go and tend your wounded wolf, Gwenn. But don’t come crying if he bites.’

  She picked up the basket. ‘I won’t.’

  ‘The sooner he’s better, the sooner we’ll be rid of him,’ he observed sourly.

  Gwenn smiled back from the doorway. ‘There is that. Raymond?’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Father Mark said the man has not been born who cannot be redeemed.’ Basket tucked securely under her arm, she stepped quietly into the stairway.

  ‘Christ on the Cross!’ Raymond exploded. ‘Women! Will they never learn?’

  ***

  Alan was stretched out on a pallet close to the fire in the hall, thinking that a drink would ease the throbbing in his leg. Someone was walking down the stairs, and he glanced up to assess his chances of persuading whoever it was to see to his needs. It was the girl, Gwenn Herevi.

  ‘I’ve come to look at your leg,’ she announced, clutching a basket close to her breast.

  That sounded hopeful. She had obviously decided to play at being an angel of mercy. Her eyes were wary, but brimming with good intent. At the moment nothing could suit Alan better. ‘I could murder a drink,’ he told her.

  ‘M...murder?’

  He had forgotten how young she was. ‘I’m thirsty.’

  ‘I’ll find something.’ The concubine’s daughter set her basket on the edge of his pallet.

  Alan put out a hand. ‘Wine would be good. It kills pain.’

  Having poured a generous measure from a pottery bottle into an earthenware cup, St Clair’s daughter handed it to him. Alan noticed she was careful to avoid contact with his fingers. Ignoring this, he drank deep. It was a coarse red wine, flavoured with herbs. It warmed his stomach. Alan had never appreciated how much it meant to have a healthy, pain-free body until this moment. His pain dulled. She watched him. The girl, Gwenn, made him feel self-conscious, though he was dammed if he knew why this should be. ‘My thanks, Mistress Gwenn.’ He looked pointedly at the bottle.

  The girl took the hint and thrust the bottle into his hands. ‘Here, you’d better have charge of this.’ Kneeling at his side, she unwrapped his makeshift bandages.

  Pain knifed through him. ‘I hope to God you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘I do. Grandmama taught me.’ Her face clouded, but though her grief was fresh she did not give in to it. Head high, she waved at two yokels who were lurking in the doorway. ‘If you must watch, you can make yourselves useful. This man must be held down.’

  ‘I can hardly run away,’ Alan said dryly.

  She flashed him a look. ‘Nonetheless, you must be restrained, or you’ll wreck the bone-setting.’

  The two boys took hold.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  Alan assented and gritted his
teeth. Black pain swallowed him up, wrenched him out of the hall, and he was master of himself no more. He gave himself up to the agony and rode it out. After an eternity in a dark vortex with nothing to cling on to, the girl’s soft voice hooked him back. ‘There. You can relax now, Alan le Bret. It’s over.’

  He came back slowly. He’d spilt the wine. He was sweating like a pig and he could hardly see for the perspiration running into his eyes. He could taste blood in his mouth. Lifting his fingers to his lips, he discovered he’d all but bitten them through. ‘My thanks,’ he managed to croak.

  The two serfs had gone. His leg was neatly bandaged. He had new splints. ‘It doesn’t feel as though its mine.’

  ‘It will.’

  Her eyes were steady. Candid, truthful eyes.

  ‘Will it set straight?’ An important question, that. Lame mercenaries didn’t have a prayer.

  ‘Like a lance,’ she assured him, dipping a cloth into a bowl of water. She began wiping his face as tenderly as though he were a babe.

  ‘Don’t do that.’ He tried to bat her hands away.

  ‘You’re all sooty, and you’re in no fit state to do it yourself.’

  It unmanned Alan to have a maid like Gwenn Herevi washing him. ‘No amount of polishing will make me shine, mistress. I’m tarnished to the heart.’ Her steady, brown eyes flickered, but that was the only sign that she gave of having heard him, for the gentle, inexorable washing continued. Alan wanted to jerk his head away, but to his shame found that she was in the right, he hadn’t strength even for that. Fighting the pain had used up all of his reserves. The hall was rocking from side to side as though an enormous crowbar had been placed underneath it and a giant was levering it up and down. He endured in stoic silence while the room tilted.

  ‘You were very brave,’ the girl said, conversationally. ‘I should have screamed.’

  Talking was the last thing Alan wanted to do, but he reminded himself that it might be useful to win the girl’s friendship. At Huelgastel, Alan had overheard de Roncier and the Dowager Countess discussing a statue and a gemstone; and in the fire, Izabel Herevi had babbled about Our Lady. She had said that she had given it to Gwenn. Was it the same statue? And what about the gem? Alan forced his bitten lips to smile. ‘I’m a soldier, I’m meant to be brave.’

  The cloth was withdrawn. The large, brown eyes were thoughtful. ‘You’re a mercenary. I’ve never talked to a mercenary before.’

  Alan sighed.

  She stared at his purse which he had restrung about his neck. ‘And you make your daily bread by killing people.’

  Alan fastened the neck of his tunic and watched her tip back on her heels. With a faint feeling of alarm he recognised the light dawning in her eyes as a missionary one. Useful though her friendship might be, he’d not stand for that.

  ‘How many people would you say you have killed?’

  Transferring his gaze to the fire, Alan refused to answer, hoping she’d change her tactics, or grow bored as children do. She was very young.

  ‘How many people have you killed?’ She rinsed out the cloth, and started on his face again.

  Alan smothered an oath. Gwenn Herevi was persistent in more ways than one. ‘I provide a service, little Blanche,’ he said, and having disconcerted her with the French version of her name, he succeeded in pushing her hand away. ‘I help people fight their battles.’

  ‘Blanche?’ she wrinkled her nose.

  ‘Your name.’ Pain made his response more curt than he had intended. ‘Gwenn is Breton for Blanche, is it not?’

  ‘Aye, only no one ever calls me by the French version.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘The Church condemns mercenaries,’ St Clair’s daughter went on without rancour.

  ‘Do you condemn me as a murderer?’ he asked softly.

  ‘You...you make your money by killing people, don’t you?’

  He flung back his head and gave a creditable laugh. ‘Pot calling the kettle black, is it?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Lunging for a slender wrist, Alan pulled Gwenn Herevi so close that her face all but touched his. Beneath the grime from the fire, her skin was smooth as marble. Her breath was sweet and stirred his hair. ‘Who are you,’ he whispered in her ear, ‘to call me a murderer? You’ve been brought up on the proceeds of whoredom, when all’s said and done.’

  The girl gave an inarticulate cry and wrenched herself free. ‘You...You...’ Poppy-red, she stammered to a halt.

  ‘Bastard?’ Alan only mouthed the word, but he could see from the way her face grew pinched that she understood him at once. To be quite certain, he rammed his message home with a callous smile, murmuring, ‘That name belongs to you also, sweet Blanche.’

  The girl leapt to her feet and flung the cloths and bandages into her basket. Her mouth was set and her hands were trembling. She was speechless with hurt, and fury, and wounded pride. Alan’s conscience stabbed him, and he found himself wondering how low it was possible for a man to sink. He felt no triumph. It was as though he had kicked a puppy who had come running up tail a-wag, not a pleasant feeling. It was disturbing too, to find he was not yet able to put guilt behind him.

  She snatched up her basket and twisted away, taking a second to dart a malevolent look at his broken limb. ‘I could kick it,’ she hissed through clenched teeth.

  Alan looked straight at her. ‘Inadvisable,’ he said, smooth as silk. ‘It would undo all your good work.’ It was only after she had stormed up the stairs that it occurred to him that in wanting to kick his leg, she had mirrored his own guilty thoughts with peculiar accuracy.

  ***

  In answer to her mother’s summons, Gwenn pushed past the faded, rotting rag that a generation ago might have been a creditable door-hanging, and entered the sleeping-alcove that Yolande was to share with her father. Her grandmother’s bier had been placed in the chapel, and Jean was organising a vigil for her. Gwenn would attend the vigil, as would her mother; none of them would rest that night. ‘Mama?’ Her mother was reclining on a moth-eaten mattress, a hand shielding her face.

  The hand was removed and red-circled eyes met hers. ‘Come in, Gwenn.’

  Gwenn sat down by her mother. A musty odour filled the small chamber, and by it Gwenn knew that the mattress was filled with chopped straw and that it was damp. ‘I wouldn’t lie on that, Mama. It will make your joints creak.’ She reached for her mother’s hand, which gripped hers hard.

  ‘It’s only for a moment,’ Yolande answered distantly. ‘Tomorrow, you can help me organise new ones for us all.’ She hesitated. ‘Gwenn, I...I’m sorry to have to ask you this, I’ve asked Raymond, but as he wasn’t there at the time, he couldn’t tell me.’

  ‘Tell you what, Mama?’

  Her mother’s breast heaved. ‘Was...was it a swift end for her, do you think? I...I cannot bear to think of her suffering.’

  Gwenn’s throat closed up. ‘Oh, Mama. It...it was the smoke. I was with her at the end. She charged me with asking for your forgiveness.’

  A sob. ‘She wanted my forgiveness?’

  ‘She loved you, Mama.’

  This was not the moment to inform her mother that the Norseman had set the fire. Had he escaped? Was he in de Roncier’s pay? It seemed likely. And what had he wanted from her grandmother?

  ‘Grandmama did not suffer long.’

  Yolande closed her eyes and turned her head away. After a few moments’ silence, she lifted swollen eyelids. ‘Raymond told me that you’ve seen Alan le Bret before?’

  ‘Aye. He was by the cathedral when the Black Monk–’

  ‘He could be a de Roncier man. I won’t have him lodged here.’

  Gwenn remembered how Ned Fletcher had tried to warn her by waving her away from the cathedral. While she was not certain of Alan le Bret, she would trust Ned Fletcher with her life. And if Ned Fletcher was Alan le Bret’s friend, le Bret could not be all bad...

  Aloud she said, ‘But he saved me, Mama. He broke his leg saving me.’r />
  ‘He’s got to go.’

  ‘Let him stay till his leg is healed, Mama. We owe him that.’

  Yolande sighed wearily. ‘I don’t trust him.’

  ‘Please, Mama.’

  ‘I shall consider it. Now, will you lend me your arm as far as the chapel? I...I feel a little shaky.’

  Chapter Nine

  Later that evening, with his belly filled, Alan took stock of his surroundings. As halls went, this one was small. Damp torches smoked in cobwebby wall sconces. The trestle tables – so recently scrubbed they had eaten from them before the water had dried – had been cleared and pushed to the walls. The wine had been stowed under lock and key in vaults below. He smothered a sneer. The St Clair family had fled to this rundown, pigsty of a manor, and despite the tragedy that had struck them, they were already managing to run it as though it were a full-sized castle. De Roncier was obviously no fool to fear St Clair’s ambitions, for the man had pretensions that soared way above the station of a lowly knight. The St Clair family themselves had not eaten a morsel, spending most of the time in the chapel, watching over the body of the concubine’s mother.

  Not surprisingly, Alan’s leg was aching. Wearily, he sank back into his pillow and chastised himself for antagonising the Herevi girl. He hoped he hadn’t ruined his chances. If what he had overheard Marie de Roncier say about the statue was correct and it did indeed contain a jewel, Alan intended to have it.

  His cousin entered the hall via the solar stairway. Dragging a stool to Alan’s pallet, he sat down beside him. ‘Feeling better, Captain?’ he asked, in English.

  Alan glanced around the hall, but no one was paying them any attention. ‘Don’t call me Captain, Ned. Alan will do. Although it’s unlikely that anyone can understand us, I for one don’t wish to cry it about that we were signed with de Roncier. And I’m no longer your captain.’

  ‘Aye. I’m sorry. It’s become a habit, Alan.’

  A companionable silence fell over the two men. The combination of too much wine and the warmth of the fire made Alan sleepy. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift.

  Ned dragged him back to reality. ‘Cousin?’