Did he remember as well? He must—how could he forget? And why was he angry? I had the reason to be angry! I hadn’t chosen to go with King Richard, had I? But Enoch had chosen that Scottish hag Fiona! How could I forgive him? Easy. I couldn’t!
Yet Wanthwaite was an unexpected problem.
Should I approach Bonel’s friends in London now? No, no, Theo must see Wanthwaite no matter what; I must bring my baby home. And yet—another problem—were either Theo or I safe in Wanthwaite? King John was still very much abroad. I frowned. King John might not know my whereabouts in France, but he could find me easily at Wanthwaite in England. How tenacious was he? He had the Crown, after all, and I’d heard somewhere that he’d wed. Did his bride satisfy Raoul? Would he still seek me? Theo? My heart thumped; Queen Eleanor had moved for some reason, and there was the peasant girl waving in Rouen!
I hadn’t noticed when we began our climb in the foothills of the Pennine Mountains. Now I was plagued by another memory, of when Enoch and I had first ridden this road together, how I’d suspected him and how kind he’d proven to be. I’d been so raw after the slaughter of my family. Oh, I wished there were another road to London!
“We be gang high,” Gruoth’s uneasy voice jarred me back to the present.
“We have to cross the Pennine Mountains,” I explained. “We’ll soon descend.”
She pointed to the vast valley we’d just left. “Be we lakely to fall over the edge?”
“Of course not.”
“Than quhy do they call these mountains ‘fells’?”
Donald squeezed her fat knee. “Doona be concerned, Lady Alix. Gruoth be a-skeered of hights; she’s fram the lowlands.”
Enoch and England. I still had England, I thought again: the sky was certainly blue and the earth a dazzling green. And Enoch? As I watched his easy roll in his saddle and his pipes flopping on the horse’s rump, I recalled his sweat in the dark, smelling slightly of boiled lamb, the way he ran thistles between his teeth, how his toes overlapped slightly on his long feet, the way he emanated heat (for he was never cold), the way he jumped into icy water every day he could find it. Aye, once I’d known him better than I knew myself. Now he was a curious mix: a stranger who evoked intimate memories.
As I watched him now, he struggled out of his wedding finery and into a bearskin vest, his half-cape held by the silver cat of his clan; he pulled on deerskin socks laced over knarry calves, and placed his fur hat with horns where his bandage had been; and, finally, his Lochinvar ax, his gavelock, and his bow with a quiver of arrows. If you like savages, he was magnificent! At the same time, I prayed that Lady Matilda de Braose never saw him.
Oh, Theo, brave sweet Theo; my eyes stung. Why did I think of Enoch when I had a love of my own, love without duplicity, the love of a small son for his mother and a mother for her son. Yet when I opened my eyes, there was Enoch.
So I closed my eyes, and there was King John. Someone in the commune had revealed my presence, which meant that John was still seeking me. Queen Eleanor’s revelations—true? Why would she be false? John must think I was in Normandy—why else would he close the ports. How many young women in red, I wondered, had paid the ultimate price? How many boy children? (My heart thumped—Theo, oh, Theo!) I’d promised the peasant girl in red—and John was looking for me as I looked for him. Where was he? My stomach became a ball of ice. Aye, hide, baby brother, for one of us will pay with our life and it will not be me!
Would I—or John—have my present dilemma if Bonel had not existed? Did I forgive him for his original role? Moot questions; I would never see him again. Despite his brave words, I knew it was true. As for the king’s attitude toward the Jew, I could only hope he never discovered how Bonel had saved me.
I concentrated on the dangerous mountain path. We would not tumble into the valley, as Gruoth feared, but the narrow way tilted precipitously and there were many roots. We stopped at Haute Tierce at Meg’s circle of stones on a flat mountain plateau.
My mother had worshipped stones. My mother—my mother. I fought morbidity. Her decapitated head, her poor raped body. Because of her, I’d learned the law about rape, about murder, and I’d turned to the moot court—did it still exist? Now I must learn the law about annulment. Perhaps about murder. What law governed a king’s death? The king was the law, he was the assize.
Enoch tore off a piece of Gruoth’s ham, left over from his wedding feast. Likewise the oatcakes he stuffed into his mouth.
“Didn’t you bring your own sustenance?” I asked coldly.
“Aye.” He grinned with his mouth full. “Gruoth brang me my ham quhat I cured last fall.” He held up a cake. “Ond these be made fram my estate below the oat line.”
I walked away.
Though the sky was still bright, the path became difficult to see, as if I were again sailing on the North Sea. By the time we stopped to make camp, I was so exhausted that I failed to recognize the site: the very same narrow cave between rocks above a foaming tarn where Enoch and I had stayed our first night together. Was this deliberate? Aye, Enoch glanced in my direction as he pulled his knights inside. Then he hung the selfsame skin before the opening. Gruoth and Donald and I fought the wind in vain with our skimpy pelts on a line.
We ended wrapped in furs on the rocky ground.
“We don’t need to be so close to Enoch,” I said.
“’Tis safer,” Donald pointed out.
Enoch, reeking of heat and haggis, emerged from his cave.
“’Tis a starry nicht,” he said pleasantly.
“Aye,” Gruoth answered.
“A guid breeze offen the moors.”
If you call a gale a good breeze; I pretended to sleep.
Now I must scheme. Could I persuade Gruoth and Donald to stay with me after I’d picked up Theo? I needed their help badly. Would they fight against Enoch if it came to that? I must hire at least thirty people to run the estate, ten of them knights. Could I enlist help from men in Dunsmere? Would anyone fight the king on my behalf?
And how would Enoch react when he learned the truth about the jewels, about Theo? I would pick up Theo, and Enoch could make of it whatever he wished.
Enoch took my arm to guide me across the shallow Thames at Oxenford, the first time he’d touched me.
“Tal me, Alix, did ye e’er see Richard’s jules?”
“Aye.” I pushed his hand away.
“Con ye recall quhat they were?” He took my arm again.
“A pearl of great worth . . .” and I stopped. The pearl was Theo.
“Ond rubies ond diamonds?” He had bathed in the Thames—his hair was still wet. “King John ha’e demanded a thousand marks in scutage. ’Twould be amusin’ to pay him fram his ane inheritance.” He stopped. “Except I doona knaw how to dispose o’ fine jewels.”
He needn’t worry.
When we joined Icknield Street, I approached him. “Lord Enoch, forthwith you will address me as Lady Angela, if it please you.”
His blue eyes studied me. “Quhy?”
“Lady Angela. Do you promise?”
“Aye, yif ye call me Saint Peter.”
“The lady I’m meeting is expecting a Lady Angela.”
His eyes narrowed. “Ha’e she ne’er seen ye before?”
“No, she’s a friend of a friend.” I hesitated. “And of King John’s, which is why the friend thought she could be trusted.” I hesitated again. “The jewels are in a packet—she doesn’t know the content. She merely has the name I told you.”
“Ye entrusted swich a prize to a straunger?” His brows shot up. “Ye’ve changed less that I thocht.”
For once, I agreed with him.
He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Yet ye ha’e changed.”
Eating worms and hiding in bushes while someone tries to kill you will change anybody.
“Ye’re still shifty, anely moreso.”
I replied mildly, “This lady is expecting a Lady Angela.”
“Angela maybe, boot nocht an a
ngel,” he agreed. “Quhat did Richard think quhan ye became a houri growed? He liked his boys young!”
My eyes filled. “Why did you refuse to release me when he asked? He offered you money, Wanthwaite.”
“Ye shuld thank me!” He turned away.
“Why are you so greedy now?”
“I be nocht greedy—I’ll gi’e ye that horse.”
Gruoth tugged on my sleeve, wanting me to explain the wonders around us. From Icknield Street, we could now see London spreading below us on the far side of the city wall. I pointed to the Thames, winding through the city, as a reference point.
Enoch interrupted my description. “Con ye pay fer yerself ond yer people at the inn, Lady Angela?”
“Yes.”
“Ond I tak it ye doona wish to gae through Newgate.”
My heart thumped. If the king had searched the commune in Rouen and knew I’d fled . . .
“No, if it please you . . .”
So we bypassed Newgate, though it lay directly on our path. I grew totty: I was now breathing the same air as Theo; I could feel his presence. I kept my eyes on Enoch or I would have fallen from my steed as we hugged the wall leading toward Smithfield, the route we’d taken before when led by Enoch’s doxy. Now, as then, the roaring mill at Old Bourne below us stopped conversation.
We reached Smithfield in good time. The horse fair was not in progress, meaning it was not Monday. Venders sold a few horses, however, though the nags were used mostly to display equipment such as fancy saddles and bridles. Some were studded with semiprecious jewels—rough work, in my opinion, but work that might be easy to secure. Sidesaddles designed for great ladies (sambue), especially, were heavily studded. Aye, in an emergency I might support Theo for a few months while I sought legal help.
Enoch led us to the horse pool, where we dismounted to let our steeds drink. Gruoth again questioned me about the sights, but I waved her off, now heartsick when I saw a young boy selling ducks—poor Mistress Eglantine. How were Henry and Clmence faring with the sisters? Better than they would have fared at Wanthwaite, where we had so many mouths to feed. Poor Mistress Eglantine, I thought again. The shallows of England had done her no good, nor had my religious garb. Had she suffered? I hoped the mast had struck her, that her demise had been swift. I turned my back to cross myself and say a prayer for her soul.
At dusk, Enoch led us to Aldgate, where we all stopped as he surveyed the situation. When the guards aleoir stopped an unruly group of tipplers who had a courtesan in their midst, he signaled that we should slip through.
Once on the other side of the high wall, we had to dismount in order to make progress through the disorderly mob thronging the street. We linked arms in order to stay together, and wide-eyed Gruoth pulled on me to explain the puzzles and verses smeared in human excrement on the eighteen-foot wall; I could read only one for her: Sal be a houri. When she asked the meaning of houri, I pulled her forward as swiftly as the crowds would permit, saying that curfew would soon ring. Now she gaped at the spires of St. Paul’s looming on the horizon. I explained the importance of the great cathedral that dominated London, only to find that she had been distracted by a large yellow-stone house with ornamental portals—was it also a church?
“No, private; the yellow stone is imported from Caen,” I informed her.
She was struck silent at the sheer wealth of the city. She was so diverted, in fact, that she accidentally stepped into the stream washing down the middle of the road. Donald and I cleaned her foot at once lest she become infected. The stream was awash with dead dogs and cats and fowls, human garbage, offal and animal shit and waste, even the stinking body of an old man whom hogs were eating apace. We Christians would be lucky if leprosy was the only disease pigs carried.
“Quhar cum all them swine?” Gruoth cried.
“Nobody knows exactly; they breed faster than flies and die faster, too—today’s street cleaners will be tonight’s pork pies.” I suddenly yearned for a pie from the famous pantry along the Thames. “Tomorrow there will be new pigs.”
We turned off Newgate Street onto the even more crowded Thames Street beside the river; I suspected (correctly) that Enoch was leading us to Jasper Peterfee’s Inn of the Red Fox, where we’d stayed before. Now Gruoth was intrigued by the private ports carved into the banks of the Thames. She’d never seen such a grand river—even in Scotland—or such tall boats. I was struck by one craft myself, a merchant ship with a tall mast anchored in Queenshithe, Queen Eleanor’s port. I’d seen this very ship before, aye, in La Rochelle!
Great ladies and gentlemen dressed in fine brocaded tunics, some decorated with sparkling gemstones cut in facets and cabochons, strolled on the Strand for the evening vapors. I counted six lion pendants.
“Be he the king?” Gruoth asked as we passed a tall wight decorated in gilt.
“No, probably a duke.”
Aside from the fact that the king would never stroll unguarded, King John was a short man. Yet he was here; his red banner flew over his palace of Bermondsey on the other side of the river. Had he followed me here? Or Theo?
I shook as if with palsy.
Now we passed one castle after another, each with tall, forbidding walls against invading armies. Only one castle had a dock on the Thames—Baynard Castle, it had to be! So huge, so ancient, my heart squeezed, I lost breath. Shading my eyes against the low sun, I found tiny slits that might serve as windows. Did I see a small hand waving?
The sun set; Baynard Castle loomed as a menacing black behemoth above the swift-flowing Thames, now white as milk. White as death. I moaned aloud.
“Quhy be ye stopped?” Enoch stood beside me. “This be Baynard Castle.”
“Do you know it?”
“I knaw Lord Robert fitzWalter quhat owns it.”
I was astounded. “How do you know him?”
“He be one of our Brotherhood.”
“A clan brother? A Scot?”
“Nay, milady. Remember that I’m an English baron nu fram Wanthwaite in the north. Sae is Lord Robert; he ha’e the honor o’ this castle, boot his real hame be in Dunmow, close to Wanthwaite. There be aboot forty o’ us barons in the northern Brotherhood.”
“It sounds like a clan.”
“’Tis mar a financial organization.” He considered. “Aye, we ha’e a clase financial relationship, lak the Jews. We gi’e pledges o’ money whan a brother be unable to pay his scutage or quhan crops fail or quhan one be under attack.” He gazed at me significantly. “Notice, milady, e’en yif the wives inherited the estates, the men mun run them.”
“Is bigamy also a requirement?” I asked sweetly.
As he turned away abruptly, I caught his sleeve. “Are we going to the Inn of the Red Fox?”
“Aye, I hope ye have coin to pay fer Gruoth and Donald.”
“I told you I do.”
We entered the inn in a long slow twilight. Inside, everything appeared exactly the same as I remembered. Though Master Peterfee now wore white hair atop, he still swung on his ropes, spry as any spider, though instead of eight good legs, he had no legs at all. I looked automatically for my wolf, Lance, whom I’d left with the innkeeper, though I knew he must have died by now. In his place, however, a large gray wolf curled on a pile of straw in the corner; he growled from his chest, then whined. He trotted directly to me, rubbed my hip, then put his paws on my shoulders and mouthed my face.
“Wolves lak ye,” Enoch observed.
“Isn’t he sweet?”
“Not at all!” Master Peterfee was astonished. “I keep him tied because he be fierce.” He tried unsuccessfully to pull the wolf off me. “That be Wolfbane, son o’ a wolf I once had called Lance.” Master Peterfee, who didn’t recognize me, of course, was still amazed. “He’s never that friendly. I never see him act so.”
The wolf retreated to his corner, where he watched me, whining softly.
Since it was too late to send to the river pantries for pies, Master Peterfee offered us a bit of dried fish to s
hare. After we’d all eaten, he showed us to our rooms: I’d hired a double for Gruoth and Donald and a single for myself, a most luxurious choice since most travelers—for example, Enoch and the Scots—lay on the floor in one room together. I would soon share mine as well with Theo.
I sat in the dark and listened to bedbugs rustling in my mat. Curfew rang; I couldn’t see my own walls. I could no longer wait—what to do about Enoch? If he hurt Theo . . . Theo’d never heard a cross word from anyone. Yet Enoch would never . . . not the Enoch I knew. Did he like children? He’d liked me when I was a child.
I paced till and fro. A strong breeze came off the Thames, along with bawdy songs and shouts as ruffians took to the streets. Tomorrow, tomorrow—all would be over.
I stopped. Why wait until tomorrow? I must do my deed tonight! Aye, that was my solution!
I fumbled in my saddlebag for my nun’s habit. I added a dark veil over my face I’d not worn with Bonel. Then I cautiously opened the door; all was silent in the dark hall except for drunken songs coming from Enoch’s quarters, Deo gratias. I glided silently to the top of the stairs, carefully avoiding the web of ropes Jasper Peterfee had hung from the ceiling. The lobby was empty; Wolfbane growled from his corner. I snapped my fingers, tore a rope from its peg, and leashed the brute.
Together, we stepped outside.
6
The lane in front of the inn sloped to the Thames in total darkness. Wolfbane snarled, then lunged behind me. I sensed a presence; someone was following me. A Scot? Enoch? Probably. I stopped and started—my follower did likewise. It took all my strength to pull the wolf forward.
The Prince of Poison Page 9
