The Cross Legged Knight (6 page)

Lucie took another sprig from the bush of rosemary.

‘Hast thou brought Poins into thy house as a penance for thy despair?’

Lucie disliked the question, feeling naked to Magda’s probing mind. ‘I thought it was charity, but I do not know myself these days.’ Lucie thought of the man’s suffering and how much worse it would be when he woke to discover the loss of the arm. ‘I should go in to him.’

‘Phillippa is there.’

‘What of the arm?’

‘It is in the shed out here. Someone should bury it on the morrow, before a pig or a dog sniffs it out.’

Lucie thought of her own partly formed child, baptized by Cisotta and buried so recently. ‘The arm was part of him.’

‘Aye, that it was. As thy child was part of thee.’

‘Are all my thoughts so plain to you?’

‘In this time, mayhap. Magda lost children as well.’

‘I mourned Martin when he died of the pestilence, but not like this, not with such hopelessness, as if now all I love are marked for death.’ Martin had been her first-born, her child with her first husband, Nicholas Wilton.

‘Each loss is as if the first, and yet ever different.’

‘Tell me about your sorrows.’

Magda tossed the rosemary into the darkness. ‘Those
are tales for another day. Let us see whether Phillippa has drawn Poins out of his swoon.’

While Owen waited to be shown into Thoresby’s parlour, Wykeham’s two clerks descended upon him.

‘Why were no guards posted at the townhouse when we know the bishop has enemies?’ Alain demanded, though his attack was diminished by a fit of coughing. The clerk was suffering the result of being near the fire – or in it. And his dark robe was stained with wet ash near the hem, one sleeve hanging damply.

‘That omission was at your master’s request,’ said Owen.

‘You remember,’ said Guy, who showed no sign of having been near the fire. ‘The bishop did not wish his new tenants to be inconvenienced or unnecessarily concerned.’

‘You have breathed too much smoke this evening,’ Owen said to Alain. ‘Word came quickly to the palace, did it?’

‘I was about in the city when the alarm was rung.’

Owen noticed the singular. ‘Where in the city?’

‘You have no right to question me.’

‘His Grace will wish to know.’

‘He is right, Alain,’ Guy told his fellow.

Alain cleared his throat. ‘I dined at the York Tavern.’

‘And what of you?’ Owen asked Guy. ‘Where were you?’

Guy dropped his gaze. ‘I have spent the evening in prayer,’ he said in a quiet voice.

Owen leaned back, looked at the two men, considering them. Both seemed devoted to the bishop and protective of him. But at the moment Alain seemed concerned about his own status and Guy anxious to ensure peace. Before Owen could speak again one of
Thoresby’s servants announced that His Grace and the bishop were ready to see him.

Owen bowed to the clerks. ‘I shall want to talk with you later.’

In the parlour, Wykeham stood clutching the back of a chair. He was not dressed in his clerical robes, but in an embroidered silk houppelande. Thoresby sat near the fire in a deep-blue velvet gown. Their ruddy faces suggested they had drunk and dined well this evening.

It irritated Owen. ‘You sent for me, Your Grace?’

‘I did, Archer.’

‘You must find the arsonist, Captain,’ Wykeham said in a tight voice. ‘We must know the enemy.’

‘My Lord, a fire such as this –’ Owen stopped as Thoresby shook his head in warning.

‘The bishop is understandably concerned,’ Thoresby said, emphasizing the last two words. ‘What do you think? Was the fire set?’

‘It seems likely.’ Owen wondered what Thoresby knew.

Wykeham pressed his hands together as if in prayer and bowed his head, but as Owen described what he had discovered, drawing the belt from his scrip, and the piece of girdle, the bishop leaned forward, muttering something to himself.

‘God have mercy,’ Thoresby murmured.

Owen noticed the stench of death on the pieces of leather. He wondered whether Wykeham and Thoresby smelled it, too.

‘Who has seen these?’ Wykeham asked, not touching them.

‘The girdle was handed to me by one of the men who carried the woman from the fire. The other, only me.’

‘Then it is not widely known she was murdered?’ said Thoresby.

‘I may be the only one who knows, besides the murderer. And possibly the servant Poins, if he is not the guilty one.’

‘Where is this servant?’

‘At my house.’

Thoresby nodded. ‘If he talks, it will be to a member of your household. You can trust your servants?’

‘Aye, Your Grace.’ Owen was more uneasy than ever about taking Poins in.

‘Where have the Fitzbaldrics gone?’ Wykeham asked, as if only now remembering that his townhouse had been occupied.

‘To the home of a goldsmith on Stonegate, Robert Dale and his wife Julia.’

‘Such charity might not be long extended once the gossips spread fear in the city,’ Thoresby said.

‘It was aimed at me, it is plain,’ Wykeham said with a catch in his throat.

Thoresby’s expression was cold as he glanced at the bishop. ‘You must work quickly, Archer,’ he said. ‘The good bishop’s name must not be dragged through the mire.’

It is too late to prevent that
, Owen thought as he departed. And the bishop’s reputation should suffer if that was the extent of his concerns. What of the dead? What of the family now homeless?

Owen fought to put the two clerics out of his mind as he walked through the now quiet city to his home. In the dim kitchen he found Magda nodding in a chair beside Poins. Seeing the stump where the injured arm had been, Owen felt sick at the thought of Lucie assisting in the amputation. He would have spared her if he could. He took a flagon and two cups up to their chamber.

She had fallen asleep waiting for him, lying atop the covers, still in her clothes though she had removed her cap and her long hair fanned out on the pillows. A lamp burned brightly beside the bed. As Owen began to undress, Lucie turned, asked sleepily, ‘Is the fire out?’

‘Aye.’ He bent to her, kissed her cheek. ‘I saw your night’s work below. You held him down?’

Lucie sat up, blinking. ‘It took little effort. Magda’s dwale mixture is potent.’

What a beautiful woman, this wife of his, Owen thought, despite a softening to her jaw, silver strands in her warm brown hair. Carrying a child took a toll on a woman and with each child a little more, it seemed. It was a brave thing, to bear a child, and to bear the loss. He tried to remember whether those signs of ageing had appeared before her fall.

‘Help me with my sleeves?’

He sat down on the bed, untied her sleeves from the bodice of her gown, kissed her neck.

She reached back and held his head there a moment. ‘Your hair smells of smoke.’

Thank God that was all she smelled. Though he had stripped down to his leggings Owen still smelled death on himself.

Lucie stood to step out of her gown. He noticed how she held on to the corner of the bed to steady herself. She had not done that before the accident. ‘Did His Grace send for you?’ she asked.

‘He did.’

She looked so weary and so thin – he had not realized how much weight she had lost this past month. Or was it the loss of the child, the bloom of carrying the baby shattered? He would save the worst news for the morrow. ‘I brought wine.’

She had crawled beneath the covers. ‘Why did you post a guard on our house?’

‘You saw them?’

‘Magda and I saw Alfred in the garden. He said that Colin watched, too, out in Davygate. Why?’

‘I thought it best to protect Poins, in case he is a witness. Has he said anything?’

‘Nothing. Was the bishop of help?’

‘He fears that the fire was set because the house belongs to him. He glances over his shoulder at the slightest sound.’

‘Do you think he’s right?’

Owen could not answer that. To murder a woman and set fire to the house in which she lay was a terrible act, but to have done it to teach a lesson or threaten the absent bishop would be even worse. ‘My mind is a muddle.’

Lucie drew his hand to her mouth and kissed it.

He thought to coax the conversation into less dangerous territory. ‘You are a good woman, to bring Poins here. But it means more work in the household.’

‘I cannot deny that. I should not have put off finding a new nurse for the children. It is too much for Kate, with Aunt Phillippa underfoot.’

Owen knew why Lucie had put it off – first she had hoped Phillippa might recover enough to return to Freythorpe, then they had hoped being with the children might balance her. And once Lucie knew she was with child, no one had seemed quite right to take care of the older children and the baby to come.

‘Magda suggested I have someone help while Poins is here,’ said Lucie. ‘She suggested Cisotta.’ Cisotta was a young midwife who had helped Lucie in the first days.

Owen poured a cup of wine, handed it to Lucie. She shook her head.

He slipped into bed beside her, sitting up to drink his wine. ‘You truly want none?’

‘I need no wine to coax me to sleep.’ She turned to face him, though she did not sit up and barely opened her eyes. It was not like her to be so drowsy when so much had happened. ‘It is passing strange, that of all the houses in York, it is Wykeham’s that catches fire, and less than a week after he arrives,’ she murmured.

‘It is a dry autumn.’

‘Still.’

‘I pray you do not dream of the surgery you just witnessed.’

Lucie did not respond. Her breathing was deep and slow.

T
horesby paced his parlour long after Wykeham had retired for the night. Never had Thoresby disappointed the Church when he might help her and he would not fail her now. He would protect the Bishop of Winchester even against his ally the Duke of Lancaster, putting aside his disapproval of the man himself.

But how? He must try to reconstruct the events since the mishap with the tile a few days earlier. The Pagnell steward had come but a few hours after the incident at the lady chapel with a note from Lady Pagnell angrily denying a rumour that her family was behind it and requesting that under the circumstances Wykeham absent himself from Sir Ranulf’s funeral – as if the bishop had intended to play the uninvited guest. It was the first Thoresby had heard of the rumour. But by the following day even Sir Ranulf’s level-headed daughter Emma Ferriby was caught up in the atmosphere of ill will.

*

After presiding over his old friend’s requiem mass, Thoresby had been restless, unable to apply himself to any task. He had returned to York Minster seeking a quiet moment in the Pagnell chapel to make peace with Ranulf. But he found Emma Ferriby still kneeling before her father’s tomb, her veiled head bowed, her gloved hands pressed in prayer. A wisp of incense hung in the air over the marble effigy, not yet dispelled by the drafts that criss-crossed the great minster.

Thoresby had imagined the family and mourners long dispersed. Not wishing to interrupt Mistress Ferriby’s grief, he began to back away, but a pebble betrayed him.

Emma raised her head, turned towards him abruptly, her back tensed. ‘Who is it?’ As the veil swung away from her face Thoresby saw the marks of her weeping and was even sorrier for having disturbed her.

But the damage had been done. ‘Forgive my trespass. I did not think to find you here still.’

‘You are welcome here, Your Grace.’ Emma had a low voice for such a small woman, a calming voice, even when ragged with emotion, as now.

Thoresby knelt beside her and bowed his head in the prayer that had been his purpose in returning to the minster. His old friend’s death had been difficult to bear, dying in a French prison of a wasting disease while his ransom was being negotiated. Wykeham was sadly right, Sir Ranulf had been too old to return to France and resume the persona he had created thirty years before as a spy for King Edward – his failing memory had betrayed him. Thoresby had warned Ranulf, but the knight had insisted that God called him on the mission. Despite his frailty the old knight had been honourable to the end, refusing to divulge any
other names to his captors. For that he had been tortured, Thoresby was sure of it, though diplomatic channels denied it, claiming that it was the heat of summer that had led them to bury Sir Ranulf in haste, saving only his heart, now buried here.

Thoresby had grieved to hear of that last indignity. Ever since he had witnessed the removal of a heart from a corpse, seen how the flesh was torn open, the ribs cracked, he had agreed with Pope Boniface that severing or removing any part of the body was a desecration. It seemed impossible after such mutilation that the body would arise whole on the day of resurrection. Sir Ranulf had not deserved that.

Thoresby’s aged knees began to ache. Emma Ferriby had lifted her head and now studied her father’s tomb. She had taken charge of the stonemason for the work, knowing her brothers would settle for something less than Sir Ranulf deserved, that they had thought him foolish to return to the king’s service in France. Emma honoured his loyalty and courage. As it had been her father’s dream to go on crusade against the infidel, she had ordered his effigy carved as a cross-legged knight, which was the style of many crusaders’ tombs, with heart in hand, which now gave it a terrible poignancy. The face was very like Sir Ranulf’s, even down to the way he squinted his left eye. Emma must have stood by the carver as he worked on the face. Thoresby found it disturbing.