by Candace Robb
Owen shook his head. ‘He left Weston too soon to know she’d been found alive. She has survived to give witness against him.’
‘I’m glad she’s alive,’ said Jasper. ‘Hubert’s suffered enough.’
Lucie tugged Owen’s arm. ‘Come to the kitchen, my love. Gwenllian and Hugh will be so happy to see you.’
Owen accompanied her across the hall. In the space between the hall and kitchen doors, beneath the stairs, he paused. ‘He’s my son, there’s no question of that,’ he said. ‘When I thought he was dead –’ His breath caught. ‘If Sir Baldwin hadn’t been there I would have thrust deep into Osmund’s heart and watched him bleed to death.’
Lucie pulled his face down to hers and kissed him long and hard. When she let him go, she said, ‘Come back to me now, my love. It is over. Your part is finished.’
He took her hand in his and breathed more easily. ‘It is. It is done.’
For George Hempe it had only begun. The bailiff’s court was crowded with people who suspected Osmund Gamyll of selling goods stolen from their homes and businesses, as well as the usual onlookers, curious what sort of heir to a knight of the realm would stoop to theft and murder merely to accumulate wealth. He judged that with so many already making claims there would be more to come, and in the interest of recovering as much as possible he postponed Osmund’s execution for a fortnight or longer – most likely he would be in the castle gaol until after the Yuletide. Archbishop Thoresby agreed to the delay.
His notoriety as the bailiff who’d scotched the thief brought him even more trade. He felt he was too busy to sleep. But even had it not been good for business, Hempe would not have regretted assisting Owen with the investigation, for he did not see how he might otherwise have begun his courtship of Lotta.
EPILOGUE
As Jasper gazed down on the wonder of Emma Archer, her impossibly tiny fingers wrapped around Captain Archer’s calloused one, he felt at peace. This was Jasper’s family, this was where he belonged, where he would always belong. He was at ease as he laughed with Archbishop Thoresby and Brother Michaelo over Gwenllian’s and Hugh’s efforts to dominate their new sibling. He was comfortable helping Kate and Alisoun greet people at the hall door, helping them out of their snow-encrusted cloaks and directing them to the refreshments. He felt himself moving in time to Tom Merchet’s merry fiddling.
He’d had the honour of taking the beautifully wrapped mazer from Brother Michaelo on his arrival and delivering it to the captain. He’d watched as Emma Ferriby, first godmother, had cradled her namesake in her arms so that Dame Lucie – his ma – could unwrap her gift. She’d exclaimed in wonder at the beautiful workmanship and held it up to Jasper to examine while the captain – his da – beamed and the archbishop proclaimed loudly, ‘Well done, Archer.’
Maud, the wet nurse, stood with Magda Digby off to one side, awaiting her charge, her own pretty babe in her arms. Jasper was glad Magda had been there when his mother’s labour began, even though the Gamyll birthing cross had made an easy delivery likely. Sir Baldwin had gladly let the captain keep it until after the birth. Still, Magda’s presence had eased everyone’s fears.
It was a wonder how everything changed with the birth of a healthy child.
‘We’ve all much to be grateful for,’ Master Nicholas said, quietly joining Jasper. ‘May God watch over this household.’
‘Amen,’ whispered Jasper. He noticed Alisoun sitting down, free for a moment. He went to her.
She smiled up at him as she fanned her face with her long-fingered hands. She had beautiful hands. ‘Come, sit beside me, tell me all the gossip,’ she said.
‘I’d hoped to hear of your meeting with the shipman’s daughter,’ said Jasper.
Alisoun shrugged. ‘She found me unsuitable. I know nothing of cloth and ribbons, jewellery, shoes, hats.’
‘That’s part of what’s so pleasant about you,’ Jasper said. He reached for her hand.
She gave it to him, curling her long fingers through his.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This tale is told against the larger historical background of Prince Edward’s declining hold on the Aquitaine, the south-western expanse of present-day France that had been added to the kingdom of England by Eleanor of Aquitaine. Several factors were turning the tables on King Edward’s war with France in the favour of the French: King Charles V of France proved a far more formidable opponent than had his predecessor King John; in joining Pedro the Cruel’s fight to regain the throne of Castile, Prince Edward had wasted his resources, thereby jeopardising his ability to hold the allegiances of the Gascon lords, and had also contracted a virulent illness, most likely dysentery, on the mission that hastened his untimely death (in 1376 at the age of forty-six). But King Edward planned a double offensive against the French in the summer of 1372, the Earl of Pembroke striking first with a campaign in the Aquitaine, to be followed by the king himself and Prince Edward campaigning in northern France. The offensive was abandoned when a Castilian fleet trapped the Earl of Pembroke’s fleet in the harbour of La Rochelle, capturing the earl and destroying the fleet. Few on the English ships survived. At the beginning of the story, Aubrey de Weston and his lord are feared lost in this battle, but they had fortunately been away from the fleet on a separate mission. An absent father provided a necessary piece of the foreground I planned for the book, the minster’s grammar school, St Peter’s.
One summer afternoon I was sitting in York Minster Library with a collection of the present-day St Peter’s School newsletters, which often carry titbits of school history – I’d decided that it was time to give Jasper de Melton, Owen and Lucie’s adopted son, a larger role in a book, and that it was high time I explored the Minster grammar school. I found a historical account of a bargeman who fell into the Ouse during a skirmish between the scholars and the bargemen; I was struck by the image of him being carried to the statue of the Virgin outside St Mary’s gates, and the fact that despite the prayers he died – particularly because the event actually took place in the month of May, which told me the man did not die of hypothermia. I found Angelo Raine’s book on the history of St Peter’s School that same day. Apparently the tension between the young scholars and the bargemen had existed for a long while, a variation on ‘town and gown’ conflicts in many university towns. This brought the past alive for me – suddenly the young scholars were mischievous and the bargemen gruff and resentful.
I’d earlier discovered Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran’s paper and book regarding education in York in Owen’s time, and had adopted the real-historical Ferriby family in the previous Owen Archer mystery, The Cross-Legged Knight, with an eye towards using Nicholas Ferriby’s struggle with the dean and chancellor regarding his grammar school in a future book. Happily, this controversy did not ruin Nicholas’s career, not by any means. In 1379 he was a canon of York Minster and in 1393 he was master of the grammar school at St Leonard’s Hospital in York. His brother John (see the note below) went on to become subtreasurer of the Minster. [Note: the name of Nicholas’s brother ‘William’ was actually John, but Master John de York, Dean John, and Archbishop John Thoresby made too many in the book so I chose the second most popular name of the time.]
I also thought it an excellent example of Archbishop Thoresby’s reasoned thinking that he had, in fact, condemned a song school five years earlier, but did not support the move to excommunicate Nicholas for his grammar school. The grammar schools taught children Latin grammar – the students might be destined for any walk of life; the song schools were for young men who were training to sing in the choir and therefore learning to read portions of the liturgy, and so those schools were appropriately connected with a church.
FURTHER READING
Richard Barber, Edward Prince of Wales and Aquitain: A Biography of the Black Prince (The Boydell Press, 1978, reprint 1996)
Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran Cruz, Education and Learning in the City of York 1300–1560 (Borthwick Paper No. 55, 1979)
Jo Ann Hoeppner Mor
an Cruz, The Growth of English Schooling 1340–1548: Learning, Literacy, and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese (Princeton University Press, 1985)
Angelo Raine, History of St Peter’s School: York, AD 627 to the present day (London: G Bell and Sons, 1926)
Clifford Rogers, The Wars of Edward III: Sources and Interpretations (The Boydell Press, 1999)
