“So where is Christopher now? Tell me you know,” David said.
“I don’t.” But before David could chastise him, Robbie hurried to add, “Or not exactly. He escaped all on his own after Thomas de Clare and one of the O’Rourke lords attacked O’Reilly’s fort at Drumconrath.”
Robbie poured out the story, though his voice trailed off at the end where James had ridden off in one direction and Robbie in another.
“How could you?” Mom glared at Robbie. She’d been forgiving of Callum, and accepting as their fate the overtaking of Trim. But this was different. In her eyes, no matter how many times David or Christopher himself told her otherwise, Christopher was her responsibility, in large part because her sister would think he was. To have lost him in the middle of Ireland was a nightmare to her. Not long after he’d arrived in this world, she and Christopher had gone at it, in fact, about David’s plan to teach him to be a medieval nobleman. Swords were for killing, she’d said.
Nobody had ever pretended otherwise, and David understood her concerns, as did Christopher, at least theoretically. But arriving as he had, killing Gilbert de Clare and being heralded as the Hero of Westminster, left them with few options as to what profession he could pursue. And the truth was, Christopher had wanted to fight at David’s side ever since David had shown up on his doorstep in Pennsylvania when Christopher had been a little boy. Mom had no business denying him the right to become a man on his own terms—which in this world happened to mean turning himself into a knight, just as David had.
“So you don’t actually know where Huw, Christopher, and William—or James for that matter—have got to?” Callum said.
“No, sir. Christopher thought it was more important that you know about Comyn’s arrival and the attack on Gilla O’Reilly.” Robbie gestured behind him to where Trim Castle was receding into the distance. “He was right.”
“Why did Gilla want Christopher?” Mom asked.
“I’m not sure that he did,” Robbie said. “He wasn’t with his men when they came upon Christopher and abducted him. It was kind of a spur of the moment thing.”
David snorted laughter. All of Christopher’s friends were starting to sound like him.
“I can tell you,” Robbie continued, “that neither Christopher nor Aine—Gilla’s daughter, who escaped with Christopher—thought Clare knew he was there. If he had, he would have demanded him from Gilla first thing. Instead he killed most of Gilla’s men and was gloating about it.” Robbie gave an uncontrollable shiver, and his teeth chattered.
They were all cold and wet, and Robbie’s blue lips were a reminder that they couldn’t stay out on the water much longer. They needed shelter, new clothing, horses, and a plan—none of which looked to be immediately forthcoming. They’d already passed an Augustinian friary, the cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, and a leper hospital, but all were within a stone’s throw of Trim castle, and David hadn’t thought any of them could be a safe place to find refuge.
He pulled on his oar. “So … you ride to Trim to warn me, only to find that Trim is under attack too. You’re lucky you didn’t end up dead. How’d you escape?”
“My horse went lame a few miles out of Trim, so the going became even slower. I’d just arrived and was seeing to my horse when I heard shouts and people running. Because of what happened last night to Gilla O’Reilly, I was warier than I might otherwise have been. Once three men outside the stables turned on their companions right in front of me and killed them, I hid myself.” Robbie shook his head. “It all happened so fast!”
“The attack was long planned and almost perfectly executed,” Callum said.
“Almost.” David looked at Callum. “It’s a good thing that you sent us away, Callum. They were coming for us too.”
“Why wouldn’t they kill you first, my lord?” Robbie said.
“They tried,” David said. “They were slow about it.”
“I know why,” Mom said, “though you’re not going to like it.”
“Just tell me,” David said, though her reluctance told him he already knew.
“Because you’re the return of Arthur, even to the Irish.”
“Bad luck to kill the return of Arthur,” Callum said through teeth gritted against chattering. “Nobody wanted to do it.”
“Well, if I had to pick a moment to be the return of Arthur, then today is as good a day as any,” David said.
Mom made a huh sound, and when she spoke next her voice was thoughtful. “In a single hour, a significant portion of the nobility of Ireland, both Irish and English, were murdered. Have you noticed that the men who died were of the most powerful class, while the ones doing the killing were the next rung down on the ladder?”
David hadn’t thought about it like that before, and maybe nobody else had either since everyone remained silent as David and Callum maneuvered the boat around a half-submerged tree that had fallen into the river.
“I think you might be right, cariad,” Dad said.
“We need to regroup,” David said. “We know much of the who now, but hardly any of the why, and we’re not going to find answers out here on the water.”
“Where can we go? I don’t know this country well at all.” Mom looked at Magnus. “Do you?”
“Well enough, but whom can we trust?” Magnus said.
“I had a hope when we first found the boat that we could end up at Drogheda Castle, which is downstream, but Robbie’s news makes that impossible,” David said.
Mom leaned forward to speak to Robbie. “Do you have any sense as to what Comyn was really doing?”
“At the time, just talking.”
Callum growled under his breath. “A man doesn’t bring a dozen ships to Ireland to just talk. Each ship could have been carrying fifty men and horses.”
David nodded. “That means five or six hundred men.”
“That’s what we concluded,” Robbie said. “He didn’t get those men just from his own lands either. He has to have been sent by King John.”
“I shot one of Red’s men in the great hall,” Callum said. “What are the chances that Aymer de Valence isn’t far behind?”
“High.” Dad and Mom said together.
David glanced behind him to his parents. Dad needed to get warm and dry sooner rather than later. His mom hadn’t had to swim, but his father had, and both of them were looking as blue around the lips as Robbie. David’s stomach clenched at how close they had all come to dying today. This was so much worse than David’s sojourn in France last year. Then, he’d had only himself and King Philip to worry about—and he hadn’t cared all that much about Philip as a person.
“This isn’t all on you.” Callum elbowed David—reading his mind, as he so often could. “We’ll get ourselves safe, we’ll get Christopher back, and we’ll figure this mess out, all of us together.”
David nodded. Callum was right, and he would be smart to remember it. “So … do we know where we might find the nearest Templar commanderie?”
Chapter Fifteen
The Boyne River
Meg
Unfortunately, the Templars could not be the answer this time. Ireland was about as far from the Holy Land as you could get and still be part of the known world, so while there were Templars here, their centers were exclusively in English territory, which wasn’t any safer for Meg’s family today than Irish-controlled lands. David had archers in Dublin and ships in the harbor, but they were twenty-five miles away. Nobody was going to be able to walk that distance without food and dry clothes.
“How about just a regular abbey?” Llywelyn gestured ahead to the bell tower of a church, poking up above the trees that lined the Boyne River.
The tower was made of gray stone, and until Llywelyn pointed it out, it had blended in with the gray sky, water, clouds, and air around them. Ireland was green, admittedly, but in order to get that green, it had to rain a lot. Even after living for so many years in rain-soaked country, first in Oregon and then in Wales, Meg had rarely felt
so waterlogged. Three days in Ireland, and she was convinced she was growing mold between her toes, the fear of which this trip down the river had done nothing to assuage.
“That’s Bective Abbey,” Meg said.
David twisted in his seat to look at her. “Please tell me it’s Cistercian.”
“Oh yes. One of the big ones. They’re rich, and though it was founded by an O’Rourke before the conquest, it’s English now.”
“I don’t know if that’s good or bad,” Callum said.
“That it’s Cistercian gives me hope,” Llywelyn said.
He and David had a particular fondness for Cistercian abbeys because those in Wales had refused to fall in line when the Pope had excommunicated Llywelyn during the wars with England. Whether that independence of thought would translate to shelter for them in Ireland, however, remained to be seen.
“Ultimately I don’t think it matters,” Meg said. “This is Geoffrey’s land, or was. Surely whoever is behind this coup wouldn’t waste men garrisoning an abbey—or spend much effort trying to convince the monks there to be disloyal to Geoffrey in advance of the rebellion.”
David glanced at Callum, who nodded. “I agree that it’s worth the risk.”
“Okay.” David began to steer the boat more towards the left bank of the river.
The Boyne River wasn’t dammed, so from Trim Castle, it wended its way sinuously until it reached the town of Navan, at which point it began heading more directly east to the Irish Sea. They were south of Navan, so the left bank was the western one, putting them beyond the Pale, as the English in Ireland said. Meg loved that people in the United States used the phrase all the time without a clue as to its origin, even if they knew the meaning: here be dragons. Thus, the abbey had been built beyond the Pale. As she’d told the others, its origins were Irish, not Norman.
“This could get interesting,” she said under her breath for only her husband’s ears. Still, Meg was glad that they were going to ask for sanctuary, because she was colder than she’d ever been in her life—and she hadn’t spent any time in the river. She hated to think how everyone else was feeling. She’d been holding Llywelyn’s hand in both of hers, and it was cold too, though perhaps slightly warmer than her own.
Llywelyn leaned in to speak to her, also in an undertone. “Are you all right?”
“I was going to ask the same thing of you.”
Since his brush with death a few years ago before David had been crowned King of England, Llywelyn had worked determinedly to maintain his health and fitness and had the body of a man at least twenty years younger. It helped that the men in his family tended to be long-lived, provided they weren’t killed in battle or, in the case of Llywelyn’s father, by falling from a window in the Tower of London while trying to escape. Which, now that Meg thought about it, hit a bit too close to home today of all days.
The boat nudged against the bank, and David and Callum eased back on the oars.
Llywelyn was in the bow, so he hopped out first, and then he helped Meg over the rail. Callum and Magnus, both wet from head to foot, sloshed through the water on their own and helped drag the boat farther up the bank so it wouldn’t float away.
While he waited for the others to get out, David stood on the rowing seat with his hands cupped around his eyes to protect them from the rain.
Meg looked with him. “See anything?”
He dropped his hands. “It looks quiet to me.” He clambered out of the boat last, following Robbie, whom he allowed to go ahead of him. The young Scotsman seemed hardly able to move for the stiffness in his limbs, and Meg grabbed his hand to steady him as he staggered up the bank.
Meg waited for David before following the others towards the abbey. “The monks shouldn’t have any idea what has happened at Trim yet. It’s wet. They’ll be indoors where all sensible people should be on a cold March day.”
“You are a hopeless optimist, Mother,” David said.
She shot him a grin. He only called her mother when he was teasing her, and the fact that he was capable of it after the morning they’d had gave her hope. God forbid they ever got used to the death, chaos, and carnage that was part of life here, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t meet what came at them head on with humor, macabre or otherwise.
She set off resolutely after the others, down a narrow path that followed a stone wall. The closer they got to the abbey, the quicker everyone walked, despite (or maybe because of) their bare feet. She was pleased to see that the abbey looked more than prosperous. All the buildings were built in stone, with glass in the windows of the church itself.
Within a few minutes, they arrived at the gate and stood under the shelter of the gatehouse eaves. Unlike a castle door, the entryway into the abbey wasn’t much—just a wooden door with a smaller inset wicket gate. It didn’t have a guard tower either.
Magnus pursed his lips as he inspected it. “This place isn’t defensible.”
“It’s an abbey.” David reached up to ring the bell, which jangled on the other side of the wall. “Unless a compound belongs to Templars, it rarely—not to say never—is.”
Magnus still didn’t look happy, but Meg managed a laugh, relieved at the prospect of finally being warm and dry. “I’ve never seen a more bedraggled group.”
“We were pretty worse for wear when we arrived in Windsor from Avalon,” Llywelyn pointed out. “We were wet then too.”
Llywelyn and Meg grinned at each other and turned to face the door in time to see its little window open. Again, it wasn’t at all a defensive construction. More than anything, the purpose of the wall appeared to be to keep out the riffraff. Cistercians liked their privacy, and their purpose was prayer, not healing the sick or succoring the poor. In fact, many Cistercian abbeys had become extremely rich due to owning large tracts of cultivated land and pasture for sheep and cattle. It wasn’t any wonder that when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries two hundred years from now (in Avalon) and confiscated the Church’s wealth, there’d been something gleeful in his actions.
The monk who answered the bell was a thin man in his middle-thirties with bulbous brown eyes. As he looked them over, David pushed back his hood and opened his cloak to reveal his sword, a match to the ones the other men wore. Though their bare feet seemed to give the monk pause, he hastily rearranged his expression from his initial suspicion and skepticism to obsequiousness. The Church tried to stay above the petty politics of the region, but wealth and authority were to be respected. “My lords! How may I help you?”
“As you can see, we are in need of shelter,” David said, “and we need to speak to your abbot on a matter of great urgency.”
“Of course. Of course. May I ask your names?”
They all looked at each other, and Meg almost laughed again because they hadn’t discussed a cover story, if that was, in fact, something they needed. Despite being rulers of England and Wales, not one of them knew how to lie properly, other than perhaps Callum, who’d been a spy. As the monk waited for a reply, Meg could see David dithering. She knew that he was worried that this was France all over again, which it could easily be.
Then Llywelyn stepped up to the plate. “I am Llywelyn, the King of Wales.” He introduced everyone else, saving David for last with just the words, “This is David, my son. I’m hoping that this is enough for you not to keep us waiting on your doorstep.” He had left off David’s title with the understanding that anyone in the known world—even an isolated monk in a Cistercian abbey in Ireland—should know that Llywelyn’s son was the King of England.
As Meg would have hoped, the monk’s jaw dropped. Outside of the justiciars who’d gathered in the great hall at Trim, it was hard to imagine six more important people in Ireland—especially if one took into account that in Avalon, the grown up Robbie Bruce became the Bruce, the King of Scotland.
“My lords.” The monk recovered himself and swung the door wide. “I apologize for the delay. Please follow me.”
He gathered his voluminous undy
ed robes, holding the hem well above the wet of the courtyard, and hastened towards the guesthouse. It was a substantial building located next to the stables and, as was usually the case with abbey guesthouses, separated a bit from the rest of the monastery buildings. A stone foundation ran all the way around the bottom of the building, above which were two stories built in wood. Even better for their purposes, a chimney poked up above the roof at the back, giving Meg hope that warmth awaited them.
Once through the guesthouse door, the monk beckoned them inside with the comment, “Give me a moment, and I will tell the abbot that you are here.”
Callum had been the last to pass through the gate and, once inside the courtyard, he held back, his eyes searching the area—inside and out of the monastery—for signs of pursuit.
“See anyone?” Meg said, holding the door open for him.
The others were already standing before the fire, and she could see the steam coming off their clothes. The monk took a stack of blankets from a cupboard and gave one to each of them. Meg accepted hers gratefully.
Callum shook his head, but he still looked worried. “They saw us jump. They know that they don’t have you and David either. Why haven’t they followed?”
“I imagine they have bigger things to worry about right now than us,” she said.
“Maybe.” Still in the courtyard, Callum faced away from her, looking northeast. Then he motioned with one hand, saying come here.
David noticed. He dropped his blanket onto a nearby chair, passed Meg in the doorway, and returned to the courtyard. Once outside, David looked to where Callum pointed. “Boats, Mom.” He took off at a run towards the abbey’s perimeter wall.
Meg had remained in the doorway, so the angle was wrong for her to see what they were looking at. She looked longingly at the fire, but she was the least wet and, unlike Callum, wearing boots. With a sigh, she went after them.
“Whose boats?” Llywelyn called after her. “Comyn’s?”
“I need to see this.” Magnus left his post by the fire and followed.
Outpost in Time Page 12
