I’ll let him do it, the king thought. I can do with the money Christ knows. Give him enough rope before I hang him. Tell d’Athee to make some show but hold off until I give the word. It's only Wales, after all.
There had been one other matter in the letter, which he had not shared with his captains. Breos had sent his wife and sons into the safekeeping of his son-in-law Walter de Lacy, in Meath, but was not without feminine company in Kilkenny. Another woman had joined him there — John’s former mistress, the witch Julitta de Beauris.
The king watched the parchment writhing in the brazier and smiled. It would give him great pleasure to meet the lady Julitta again. Just a year ago her involvement, and her husband’s, in a plot to murder him had come to light; her husband had paid with his life but Julitta had somehow managed to escape to Brittany. Now she had thrown in her lot with Breos. Why?
He would know soon enough.
John watched the last blackening shreds of the letter curl and fall to grey feathers on the charcoals. Just so would Julitta burn when she was delivered into his hands.
Chapter Five
On the dungheap a cock — gaudy, randy and proud — crowed exultantly. At four in the morning the stables, ward and bailey of Ludlow casde were already busy with grooms attending to the horses, carrying feed and water, boys shovelling dung, early travellers calling for their horses, kitchen sluts hurrying to and from the well, men-at-arms changing watch, dogs yapping and hens scratching in the straw and mud. The great gates stood open, cows had already been milked and taken out to pasture, and the daily stream of hawkers was pouring over the drawbridge into the bailey carrying fruit and vegetables, butter and lard and cheeses, chickens, ducks, geese and sucking-pigs and anything else the castle cooks might buy.
Bane found Straccan in the stable. ‘Our drowned rat’s asking for you.’ He produced an apple from his sleeve, took a bite and offered the rest to Zingiber. The stallion lipped it from his palm and chomped, nuzzling his sleeve in hopes of more.
Straccan looked up from the hoof he was examining. ‘All right, is he?’
‘A bit quiet. I think his head hurts.’ Bane reached for the rasp Straccan was using. ‘He’s in the dormitory. I’ll finish this.’
Gold and rose light touched the towers — painting them for a few moments with the hushed splendour of legend — until the cock seized and trod an indignant hen, and somebody swore and threw a stone at the squawking pair.
The man was sitting on the edge of his bed in his rough-dried soiled clothes, shoeless, pale and looking rather frightened. He stood up as Straccan came in.
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘My head aches, but. . . Sir, Master Bane said you brought me here. It was good of you. Thank you.’
Decent manners. Whoever he was, he was used to the civilities and his English had a slight Welsh accent. ‘Who attacked you?’
‘I don’t know. I. .. Sir …’ He sat down again suddenly, as if his legs had given way.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Something’s wrong. I don’t know anything! Who am I? What am I doing here? I don’t know anything.'
He put his face in his hands and turned away, trembling.
Straccan hooked a stool with his foot and sat down. ‘You’ve lost your memory.’
The man nodded miserably.
‘I’ve known a couple of men it happened to after a wallop on the head. It came back after a few days.’
The man looked hopeful. ‘Did it, sir? I’ll be all right, then?’
‘I’ll have the surgeon take another look at you.’
The surgeon, when he came, gendy felt the man’s skull all over, peered into his eyes and made him look to left and right, up and down. He shrugged. ‘Well, sir, I could tell you he’ll come to himself tomorrow or next week or never, but to tell you the truth I don’t know any more than you. I’ve seen this before, as you have yourself. All I can say is he’ll probably get his memory back in time. In bits and pieces at first most like, then one day’ — he snapped his fingers — ‘it’ll be there like it was never lost. His skull’s not cracked. It’ll just take time.’
After the surgeon had gone Straccan said, ‘Let’s see what we do know about you, shall we?’
‘What do you mean, sir?’
‘Simple things first. You’re not a monk or a clerk — no tonsure. You’re not a beggar. Your clothes are of decent stuff, not expensive, a bit worn but not worn out; they fit properly so they are your own, not cast-offs. You’re too old to be an apprentice so you’re probably in someone’s employ. You’re not married—’
The man looked up, amazed. ‘How d’you know?’
‘A wife would make a better job of darning.’
‘Oh.’ He regarded his foot as if he’d never seen it before. ‘Fancy that!’
Straccan warmed to his deductions. ‘Until very recently — when they set on you, I suppose — you wore a ring.’
‘I did?’ He looked at the pale patch round his middle finger and rubbed it. ‘So I did.’
‘You look to be about, oh, twenty. And we’ll have to call you something until you remember your own name. What d’you fancy?’ The man frowned. ‘I don’t know.’
‘William? Henry?’
Well…’
‘No? What about David? Or Wulstan? Two mighty saints to choose from.’ There was not a flicker of recognition at the last name. Straccan sighed. It had been worth a try. ‘I like Wulstan myself,’ he said. ‘Let’s call you that for the time being.’
‘Right, sir.’
‘Two things you had on you,’ Straccan said. ‘This,’ producing the scrap of parchment, ‘and in your left-hand pocket, something else.’
Wulstan found the curl and looked at it without recognition. The words on the parchment left him equally blank.
Straccan laughed. ‘Never mind, lad. All’s not lost. You remember your left from your right.’
Chapter Six
Lepers weren’t allowed to enter churches, of course, and most of them didn’t give a toss anyway. God had abandoned them; as far as they were concerned He could get stuffed. But this wet morning one of the accursed had left crutch, bell and pack at the foot of the steps and clambered awkwardly to the squint, where he could peer into the church itself. Wisps of white hair clung wetly about his shoulders but he was not old. Just dead.
Not all corpses were decently hidden under the earth. In the lazar houses up and down the country dead men still breathed. Officially, legally, they were dead although they walked, talked, laughed sometimes (but cursed more often), dreamed, suffered and despaired. Cast out from homes, families, communities, rejected with full and appalling ritual by the Church, as abhorrent to God as to mankind. Forced to attend their own funerals — the solemn Mass for the Dead, the symbolic burial, grave dug, priest gabbling — then driven out, often with stones, while priest and kinfolk, smug in their bodily well-being, went home to their hearths, bacon and ale, warm beds and warm bedmates.
Lepers must either beg on the roads or enter that fearful abode of the living dead, the lazar house. So dreadful was the hopeless finality of its walls that many, even the old and feeble, preferred to chance it and beg, always on the move, starving, freezing, ringing the bell or rattling a wooden clack-dish for alms. Shunned, loathed, imploring charity, praying for compassion. Waiting for the final death.
There was no one within the leper’s limited field of vision inside the little church but candles burned as always on the altar and through the squint he could see the Holy Rood. It was veiled, of course; the whole of England being under Interdict the face of Christ might not be gazed upon until the Pope lifted his ban. But the cloth had slipped a bit and one spiked hand of the crucified Christ reached towards the leper. His own right hand, clumsy in bandages, moved to sign the cross on his breast.
Back in the cell the leper had left behind in Scotland, a crucifix had hung over his bed. He longed to take this one loved, familiar thing wi
th him, but might only take his crutch and alms dish, bell, and water bottle. In addition to the clothes he wore, his pack held a change of drawers, clean bandages and some food. Round his neck, under the scratchy hospital-issue shirt, hung his purse and a small cross made of olive-wood from Jerusalem: God and Mammon on a single thong.
‘Comrade,’ he whispered through the grille to the wooden Christ, ‘lend me your strength to go on. There’s work for me, after all.’
His hands pressed the rolled letter in a pocket inside his shirt. He had its words by heart. It had taken more than half a year to find him, sent at first all the way from Wales to the lazar house at Sainte Colombe in Normandy, which he had left long ago. There it waited until a traveller could be persuaded to take it back across the Channel. Sainte Colombe was too poor to pay anyone to do this service but at last a pilgrim agreed to carry it in exchange for the monks’ prayers. On the journey the pilgrim fell sick, the prayers not being sufficient to keep him in health, and was delayed until Christmas. After that the letter made its way in fits and starts whenever anyone could be bothered with it, until at last it reached Scotland, coming to Garnier’s hands at the lazar house outside Stirling just before Easter.
From Sulien of Cwm Cuddfan to Gamier the leper, greetings, trusting to God His mercy that thou livest yet. I pray thee, for our old friendship, to come to this our community and take upon thyself the task of Master of the lazar house, and the charge, bodies and souls, of our lepers here.
His old friend would probably have given him up by now but the letter had given Gamier a new lease of life, and with God’s help he would get there. He had said his farewells at the lazar house at Stirling, and the medicus had given him an innocent-looking bottle containing the combustible whisky normally reserved for snowbound wayfarers, and only then if they seemed at death’s door. The medicus made it himself from an old family recipe; it would raise blisters on a boot.
Gamier stared at the shrouded head of Christ, bowed beneath its wreath of thorns. ‘Comrade, you carried your cross. Help me to carry mine. It is a weary way.’
More than three hundred miles he had come already, a weary way for a dead man.
‘Comrade, I’ll be glad of your company when you’re not too busy.’
Descending the wet steps cautiously, he settled the packstrap over his shoulder under the cloak and made sure his mask was securely fixed before picking up bell and crutch. Head down against the wind, he crossed the graveyard. The porter, who had popped inside for a warm, scuttled beetle-like out of the little gatehouse, cursing weather and leper alike, and tugged the heavy gate open once more, just enough to let him edge through.
Gamier looked at the road ahead. Strung alongside it, straggling downhill like irregular lumpy beads on a cord, loomed a few squat thatched huts, each with its bit of ground, chickens, a goat or two and sleeping pig. The houses clotted into a small village at the foot of the slope and here and there light gleamed around the edges of shutters. Picking a way through ruts and refuse, skirting puddles, he started down.
This early there were few folk about and they ignored him. A dog snarled and lunged at him, but a prod from his crutch gave it second thoughts. A child, running from his door, saw the big cloaked figure limping quietly past and whooped happily, looking around for something to throw. Dog turds lay handy, missiles satisfactory to both parties, giving the boy the pleasure of flinging them and his target relief they were not stones.
The road ran south to Shrewsbury where there was a hospice for his kind; he would rest there for a day or two. He had run more than half his gauntlet but the worst lay ahead: the Welsh Marches, the dangerous territory known as Murderers’ Country.
Chapter Seven
Like most travellers, on his journey Straccan picked up letters and messages for delivery at later stopping-places, among them letters for Engelard de Cigony, one of the king’s trusted mercenary captains and temporary constable of Ludlow castle since the hasty departure of its former castellan, William de Breos.
Cigony greeted Straccan with an enormous sneeze, flipped the letters to his clerk and invited his visitor to share breakfast, regaling him with an account of his latest bag of outlaws.
‘Thick as fleas in a whore’s bed,’ he said. ‘One thing you have to say for Breos—’ He paused and Straccan eyed him expectandy, but the constable was in the throes of another massive sneeze.
‘A-a-aratcha!’
‘That’s a nasty cold you’ve got, my lord.’
Cigony mopped his nose with a square of linen. ‘Damn funny thing, I get one about this time every bloody year and it lasts the whole bloody summer! My wife’s tried every remedy she can think of. Nothing works. Where was I? Oh yes, outlaws. Breos did at least keep em down. They don’t know me yet; they think I’m a soft touch. Ha! They’ll learn! Forty-three we’ve rounded up this week, and that’s just for starters. I’ve got two new alaunts, splendid dogs, brave as lions, can’t wait to try em! The forest’ll be safe as a nun’s garden by the time I’m through.’ Another sneeze hovered, making his eyes water, but came to nothing after all. He wiped his eyes and jammed the hanky up his sleeve.
In his turn Straccan related the story of the man who had lost his memory, and they swopped anecdotes of similar occurrences.
'Yves de Pontgarron,’ said Cigony. ‘You know him. Lost an eye at Mirebeau. Farts like a trumpet! Lost his memory after his helmet was split in the tilt yard.
Aratcha!
Bugger it! Chinon, it was, in ninety-eight. Got it back but turned nasty. Started knocking his wife about. Mind you, she was Welsh. She bolted. Messy business. Big scandal. And what about Auberi d’Umfraville — remember old Dummy?’
Straccan searched his memory and found a cheerful, thuggish face very much the worse for wear.
‘No teeth? Broken nose?’
'That's the chap! Lost his memory and his wits. His wife fetched him one with a cook-pot; caught him at it with their son’s wet nurse. Poor sod! Got his memory back after a while but never the same man. Hell of a wallop,’ the constable said reverently with an oddly nostalgic look in his eye. ‘Splendid woman, Constance, splendid …’
Time passed amiably, punctuated at intervals by Cigony’s ringing sneezes, and Straccan confided to the constable his concern for the man he called Wulstan. ‘My business is done and I hardly like to leave him here alone.’
‘Not your responsibility, old boy.’
‘No.’ Straccan fell silent, his memory casting back to his meeting with Bane six years ago when Bane had insisted that by saving his life Straccan had assumed responsibility for him. Now there was another injured man on his hands. Wryly he recalled the sorcerer Rainard de Soulis taunting him, last summer in Scodand, about the ‘misfits’ he’d gathered round himself, his friends and companions. He grimaced at the thought of Soulis’ dreadful death and came full circle again to the matter of Wulstan. Another misfit!
‘Tell you what,’ Cigony offered, ‘I’ll have a word with Prior Anselm. The monks’ll take care of him until he gets his senses back. Meanwhile I’ll have enquiries made, see if anyone knows him.’
‘Thank you, my lord.’ Straccan got up to go, seeing the constable’s squires hovering impatiently by the door. ‘I mustn’t delay you any longer.’
‘Right enough! Things to do, outlaws to catch. Like to come along? I can promise good sport.’
Straccan declined the offer and took his leave, hearing another shattering sneeze as the door closed behind him. The outlaws would have a better than even chance, he reckoned; they’d hear the constable coming a mile off.
A light shower sprinkled him as he crossed the inner bailey. In the stable their horses stood saddled and ready but there was no sign of Bane; he must be fetching their packs. Zingiber wuffled a greeting. Straccan stroked the velvety nose and rubbed the stallion’s ears then, stooping, checked the hoof he’d left to Bane and the other three. All well there. Zingiber shifted impatiendy, smelling the rain and eager to be away.
‘Sir Ri
chard Straccan?’
He turned and saw a man wearing royal livery over his hauberk, a blocky young man, fair-haired with a jutdng jaw and intent, intelligent blue eyes. The sword at his hip was plain and businesslike, its leather grip and scabbard well worn. A professional, this one. ‘I’m Straccan. Who are you?’
‘Bruno von Koln. I come from the king, Sir Richard. He bids you attend on him at Bristol.’
Hell and damnation, thought Straccan. 'Now?'
'Ja, I am to escort you there, vith your servant Bone.’
‘Bane,’ said Straccan. What does the king want with Bane?’
‘Pardon. Bane. The king said he must come.’ Von Koln shrugged. ‘I do not know vy. I see you are ready to ride. Das ist gut. Ve lose no time. Vere is Bane?’
Fuming, and with the German mercenary at his heels, Straccan returned to the hall. No Bane, but there, on a bench against the wall, wearing a clean shirt and breeks Straccan recognised as his own, was Wulstan, looking lost.
‘Just a minute,’ Straccan said. As he made a beeline for Wulstan the German grasped his arm.
‘No vun must know the king has sent for you.’
Trailed by Captain von Koln, Straccan crossed the hall and sat down. ‘How are you, Wulstan?’
The young man looked up with a shy smile. Well enough, thank you sir. My head’s healing.’ He touched the seared patch gingerly. ‘Did you get any breakfast?’
‘I don’t feel like eating. I keep thinking I ought to be somewhere or doing something. Perhaps somebody’s worried because I haven’t turned up.’
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