The Marsh King's Daughter (52 page)
The fish lay on the thick wooden slab, its body still a fresh, bright silver, and its eyes as bright as amber and onyx discs. Madame le Pecheur brought the knife down with a solid whack, separating head from body. Another practised motion slit the belly from red cavity to anal fin, and the finger following the knife hooked out the entrails and dropped them in a bucket with the head. The entire, brutal procedure was made graceful by Madame le Pecheur's fluid skill. Nicholas eyed the knife and decided that she was too handy with the implement and the door too far to attempt an escape.
She saw him look, and a grim smile twitched beneath the dark moustache on her upper lip. 'My mother taught me, and her mother before that,' she said. 'We are the best in all the Isles of Genesies.' She tossed the gutted pollack in a basket to her left and reached for a fresh victim from the corresponding basket on her right.
Nicholas wondered if she was warming to him, or whether it was pride in her skill that had made her open her mouth. Whatever, it would do no harm to show interest. 'Yes, I've seen the fishwives at work in Rouen, but none as fast as you.'
'Hmph.' She gave him a warning look, telling him that flattery of any sort was completely out of order. 'I have to be,' she said. 'With a face like mine, what man would take me in marriage unless I had other skills?'
Nicholas shrugged. 'Perhaps you were beautiful in youth?' he said gallantly.
She snorted and chopped off the fish's head. 'I wasn't. My father's wealth and my mother's skills handed down were what bought me a husband.' 'But Guichard is fond of you.'
'Oh aye,' she said. 'All cats are grey in the dark.' She looked at him from beneath her brows. 'You have a wife, no?'
Nicholas sighed. 'I do indeed, mistress. When I left her, she was less than a month away from bearing our first child.'
Madame le Pecheur resumed gutting her fish. She tossed it in the basket and took a fresh one. 'What is she like, this wife of yours?'
'Tall,' he said, 'copper-haired, beautiful in my eyes.' He shifted uncomfortably on the bench. 'I married her because I could not have the woman I wanted, but Magdalene has come to dwell first in my heart. I hope that she knows it.'
'Hmph,' said Madame le Pecheur again, her mouth pursed in disapproval. 'If you ask me, love's for minstrels' tales.'
'I know the difference between the confection of love as sung in a minstrel's tale and the sustaining bread of love in reality,' he defended himself. 'Both are to be savoured in their own way.'
The fishwife arched one eyebrow to show her suspicion of such thinking. Her red, chapped hands worked methodically through the catch. The knife slashed and a fine rime of silver scales adhered to the steel above the blade. 'This is love,' she said as she tossed the last fish into the left-hand basket. 'I wouldn't be doing it otherwise, skilled or not.'
'It's reality,' Nicholas argued, thereby earning himself a scowl.
The door banged open and Guichard strode into the room. He had been running, and a red flush mantled his leather-brown cheeks.
'Get your cloak,' he said to Nicholas without preamble. 'I'm letting you go. You're too dangerous to keep.'
Both Nicholas and Madame le Pecheur gazed at him in astonishment.
'You can't!' said his wife, recovering first, her hands going to her hips in the age-old stance of argument. 'We've already fed and clothed him at our expense for a month. He's the means by which you'll never have to go to sea again, and I'll never have to gut another of these accursed fish!'
'No, because we'll likely be dead.' Her husband grabbed Nicholas's cloak off the back of the bench and thrust it at him. 'If I release you now, I want an undertaking that you will pay your ransom to me in full before Easter next year.' Darting into the main room, he returned with a scrap of vellum, an ink horn and quill.
'Guichard!' His wife's voice boomed as powerfully as a man's. 'Tell me why you are letting him go and let your reason be good!' She brandished the knife.
'Here, your promise.' Guichard pushed the quill into Nicholas's hand, and flattened out the vellum on the trestle.
Curious, more than a little apprehensive, but happy to cooperate if his freedom was imminent, Nicholas dipped the quill into the glutinous brown substance that passed for ink.
Guichard le Pecheur turned to his simmering wife. 'His would-be killers have not been paid their full fee because they've been told he still lives and that his wife is negotiating with us for his release. The original price offered by the contractor has been put up to six hundred marks.'
Nicholas felt cold. The quill was split and the ink splattered everywhere as he tried to write. 'So why not do the deed yourself?' he asked.
Le Pecheur's lip curled beneath his beard. 'Believe me, I have thought about it, lad. Six hundred marks is a fine sum -but when it comes to setting a man up for life, it's not much different to the five hundred already pledged to save your hide.' He parted his hands in a gesture that asked what else he could do. 'You have had my protection and hospitality for over a month. I cannot just throw them out of the window and cut your throat. Pledge me the ransom and you are free to make your own way home.'
'Free to go out and get my own throat cut, you mean,' Nicholas said with a grimace.
'I am counting on you not to, since then I won't see a single silver penny. At least this way I do not make my house a target for men in search of your death. Something tells me that they would not stop at your throat alone.'
Nicholas signed his name in a blot of ink and handed the vellum to le Pecheur. A few greyish-silver fish scales adhered to the surface, and a smear of entrail blood. 'You will have your money, I promise,' he said, not without raising an ironic eyebrow that it was his would-be murderers who had secured his release. 'If I live, that is.' He held out his hand. 'Of course, you could improve my chances by giving me coin to pay my passage.'
Le Pecheur rolled his eyes. 'If you die before you pay up,' he said, 'I will make a vow never again to put down an oar for a drowning sailor, and it will be your soul that carries the burden, not mine.' He unfastened the pouch from his belt and tossed it to Nicholas. 'I expect its return, filled with gold,' he said.
His wife wiped her gutting knife in a fold of her skirt and gave the weapon to Nicholas. 'You have more need of it than me if I'm to live in luxury one day,' she said.
Nicholas stowed the weapon in his belt. 'My thanks.' A wayward impulse made him take her moon face in his hands and kiss her on either vein-reddened cheek.
'Away with you!' She swatted at him crossly, but there was a gleam in her small blue eyes.
'Little wonder your life is sought if you go seducing other men's wives beneath their noses,' le Pecheur said, pretending to be offended.
Nicholas pulled a face. Wondering how close to the truth the statement might be, he strode to the door and opened it.
'There are plenty of trading galleys headed for
'Board the wrong one and I'm dead.' Nicholas smiled grimly. 'You had best hope my instincts and luck runs true.'
He stepped out into the blustery morning and the door closed behind him. A stink of fish guts remained but was dissipated by the bracing salt wind. The scent of the sea and ships filled his lungs. He inhaled deeply and with the joy of freedom stretched his cramped muscles. Hand on the hilt of his knife, he moved through the narrow alleys to the dockside and paused at the wharves to view the harboured vessels. There were numerous small nefs, used as inshore fishing craft, with shallow sides and sails fashioned in all manner of colours, plain and striped.
Amid a pile of netted traps, a fisherman sat with his morning's catch of lobsters, mottled blue-grey like the sea, and rustred crabs the same hue as his sail. Nicholas stepped over coils of rope and a ship's mast laid lengthwise along the quay. A group of sailors stood talking, and beyond them, out to sea, Nicholas saw a large cog tacking into the harbour, her banners flying red and gold. He narrowed his glance, thinking that she looked familiar, but then his attention was caught by another vessel moored up along the same line of vision as the cog. The sound of hammering echoed off her deck, and several workmen were industriously employed in what appeared to be a major refurbishment. Although she was no longer the gleaming beauty of a month ago, he would have recognised the Empress anywhere. He had commissioned her birth from Rohan on the Schelde and, by the same right, had tried to put her to death rather than see her taken. Obviously he had not quite succeeded, although she would never be the same again. They would patch her with different timber and it would change her spirit. In a way she was dead.
He studied the men working upon her, but could not tell if they were his would-be murderers or hired shipwrights. Whether the men were innocent or guilty, it was not a wise place for Nicholas to linger. He turned away to search the wharfside for other vessels with a look of deep ocean travel about them. The group of talking sailors had ceased their conversation and were eyeing him speculatively. One of their number, concealed from him by the angle of vision before, now came clearly into his sight and he found himself gazing in clear daylight at the red-bearded man who had stabbed Maurice de la Pole to the heart. Their eyes met. Even before Redbeard had set his hand to his knife, Nicholas read the man's intent in his expression. There was no way past the group that would not bring him too close. Nicholas spun back the way he had come and started to run.
With a shout they were after him like hounds after a buck. Nicholas knew he was at a serious disadvantage. He was unfamiliar with St Peter Port and unfit after a month confined in le Pecheur's small dwelling. He knew that he would be unable to outrun them. Six against one and all of them with gutting knives as sharp as the one in his belt. It was inevitable. There was no point in bursting his heart and lungs in the effort to flee when they were going to be burst by a blade anyway, but still he ran.
Folk leaped out of the way. A woman screamed and clutched her small child to her skirts. Men and boys stared, but no one did anything to help. On an island where Eustace the Monk had recently held sway, people had learned to keep themselves to themselves where wharfside feuds were concerned. ,
Nicholas heard the sound of footsteps swift in pursuit, the hard panting of breath. Fear briefly lent his feet wings. He sprinted through a narrow alley between dwellings, turned a corner, found another entry leading back down to the wharfside. His pursuers spread out, cutting off his escape. One of them came close enough to rip at him with a knife and split his tunic, shirt and flesh in a single sharp flash. Pain seared down Nicholas's side and his feet faltered. His stagger caught his opponent off-balance and the second blow went wide, giving Nicholas an opportunity to use Madame le Pecheur's gutting knife in the manner for which it had been intended. The man fell, his belly flooding red beneath his clutching hands.
Nicholas saw another dark opening and, with a last burst of speed, ran for its embrace in the manner of a wounded creature seeking a den. The darkness led to a fence of woven hazels at the back of someone's vegetable patch and it barred his way as effectively as a wall of stone. He turned at bay, his knife at the ready, prepared to sell his life at a high price.
They gathered around him like wolves, eyes glittering, teeth bared, each man measuring his likelihood of striking without being struck in return.
A sudden flurry of movement behind broke the terrible concentration. Men turned and their faces changed. Another blade flashed in the darkness, this time a sword of full length and cleaving power. In a single smooth motion, Stephen Trabe pinned Redbeard against the alley wall and sliced off his head as he had done to Eustace the Monk and with no more effort than beheading a pollack. There were some taut moments of vicious fighting as Trabe's crewmen took on Nicholas's attackers, and then there was silence. Three bodies, including Redbeard's, littered the alley. One man had made his escape at the expense of several fingers. Stephen Trabe gave a nod of satisfaction, wiped his reddened sword-edge on his victim's tunic, and sheathed his weapon.
'A moment later and you'd have been fish food,' he said to Nicholas, who was leaning against the withy blockade for support and clutching the bloody stripe in his side. His legs felt as if they had turned to curds.
'God's life!' he gasped. 'I never thought I'd be grateful to see you do that again!'
Trabe's teeth flashed. 'I like to make a clean job, which is more than he would have made of you.'
'What are you doing here?' Gingerly Nicholas straightened.
'Coming to bring you home. As we sailed into port, we saw you running along the dockside like a hare with the dogs on your scut.' His grin deepened. 'You owe me with interest, de Caen.'
'Gladly, and that's something else I never thought to admit with gratitude,' Nicholas said, and staggered.
Trabe reached a strong arm and bore him up. 'Come,' he said. 'Let's get you safe on board and bind up your wounds. There is much that you have to know.'
The convent rose out of the flat, fenland landscape, the ragged flint of its tower echoing the mottled sky and the thatched roofs of its outer buildings reflecting the surrounding reeds and lush grassland. Miriel sat in the well of the barge and watched its approach with feelings of oppression and inevitability. The runaway had been caught and was being returned to face her punishment. Robert informed all who enquired that he was taking her to St Catherine's to recuperate from the traumatic childbirth that had not only damaged her body but scarred her mind. She was in need of peace, he said, and he wanted to do all in his power to ensure that she had it.