Prince of Darkness (30 page)

And so he’d heeded his fear and his hunger, thinking that he might be striking a deal with the Devil, but at least the Devil was feeding him well. He’d tried to keep away from the She-wolf and the Knight, for that was how he’d christened Durand, staying close to the ones he instinctively recognized as his protectors—Justin and Morgan, the Groom. Gradually the terror knotting his stomach had begun to ease and the death dreams no longer came each night without fail. He’d even relaxed enough to admit that he knew more of their French tongue than they’d first thought, and because of the Plum’s careless kindness, he dared to hope that she really would keep to her word. But now that they were in Paris, a hive from Hell aswarm with alien bees, he was afraid that he’d made a great mistake.

They escorted the women to the town house of Claudine’s cousin Petronilla, planning to spend the night there themselves, for curfew had rung. Justin had been hoping to delay his meeting with John for one more night, but it was not to be. Petronilla had invited John to be her guest, ostensibly because his lodgings with the Templars lay beyond the city walls and a residence within the city would be more convenient, as well as more comfortable. Petronilla did not seem pleased with her coup, though, and Claudine felt a flicker of relief, for she’d warned her cousin that a dalliance with the Devil was a walk on the wild side. This prince was best left to his own dark domains. Seeing Petronilla’s discontent, Claudine was thankful that nothing had come of her cousin’s high-risk flirtation, although she was very curious why that was so. She was wondering how to find out what had gone wrong when she saw her answer framed in the doorway of the stairwell.

Claudine recognized the other woman at once, for John’s continuing involvement with Ursula had been a source of much court gossip. Ursula had lasted far longer than most of his bedmates, and Claudine did not understand why. She was a spectacularly beautiful, lush creature, but Claudine thought she was also a selfish, slow-witted bitch and John could do better. She was very glad, though, that it wouldn’t be with her cousin. Amused in spite of herself by John’s sheer audacity in bringing his mistress along when he accepted Petronilla’s misguided invitation, Claudine greeted Ursula with one of those brittle, fake smiles that women use to convey a social snub. Much to her annoyance, Ursula did not even seem to notice.

John had entered the hall with Ursula, and he hastened in their direction. “How did Lupescar get you out? I did not really think he’d be able to do it.”

“He did not,” Durand said, very emphatically. “We freed ourselves.” Glancing sideways at Justin, he added grudgingly, “With some help from the Earl of Chester.”

But Justin had other matters in mind than giving credit where credit was due. On the ride to Paris, he’d remembered Lupescar’s mocking words:
You’d been clumsy enough to get yourself caught, bloody-handed, over some poor pilgrim’s body.
It was possible that John, for whatever reason, had chosen to mislead Lupescar about the identity of the murder victim. It was also possible that the message sent by Guy de Laval had been mangled and that John himself did not know Arzhela had been slain.

“My lord John,” he said, “I think it best that we continue this conversation in a more private place.”

John agreed, but at that moment, Emma sauntered over. “Aunt Emma, what a delightful surprise. I thought you might have stayed in Laval with my cousin Guy.” John smiled, and only those in the know would have recognized his pleasantry as a sarcastic reminder of her son’s plight.

Emma parried his thrust with a sharp smile of her own. “I was sorely tempted, John, but we still have so much to discuss, do we not?” Linking her arm in his, she suggested that they retire to Petronilla’s solar. “We have much to tell you. There have been some unexpected developments since the Lady Arzhela’s death.” John stopped so abruptly that she glanced at him in surprise. “John—?”

John’s face was very still, as rigid and impassive as a sculpted death mask; only his eyes showed life. “The Lady Arzhela is dead?”

Emma nodded. “She was the pilgrim slain at the abbey. Did Guy’s messenger not tell you that?” Getting her answer when John turned away without a word.

Justin had fallen asleep almost as soon as he’d stretched out on his blankets. When he was awakened a few hours later, he fought his return to reality, had to be shaken before he could clear the cobwebs from his head. Durand was leaning over him. “Come on,” he said. “John wants you.”

All around Justin, men were rolled up in blankets, sleeping peacefully, and he yearned to be one of them. With a sigh, he sat up and tugged on his boots. He followed Durand from the hall, the two of them threading their way through the sleepers, and up into the stairwell. He had not even asked where they were going; he’d find out soon enough.

It was John’s bedchamber, so lavishly furnished that he decided Petronilla must have given him her absent lord husband’s room. Which John was now sharing with his concubine. Too tired to marvel at the morals of the highborn, Justin looked around, then saw John sitting in the shadows beyond the light cast by the hearth. He was still dressed, a wine cup in his hand, a flagon at his feet. Two other flagons had already been discarded in the floor rushes.

“Sit down. But keep your voice low lest you awaken Ursula,” John said, gesturing toward the canopied bed. “I want you to tell me what you found out in Brittany.”

“I thought we were to do this in the morning, my lord.”

“I decided I did not want to wait.” John drained his cup, refilled it with an unsteady hand. “There is wine over there. Help yourself.”

Justin made one final try to get back to his bed in the great hall. “Durand is here, my lord. He must have already told you what we learned.”

“He did. But now I want to hear it from you.”

Durand shoved a drink into Justin’s hand, saying in a low voice, “Do what the man says or we’ll be trapped here all night.”

Justin did, dropping down onto the cushions scattered about the floor, and taking a long swallow of what turned out to be a very good Gascon wine. “We confronted the Lady Emma’s son at Laval,” he began.

The hearth flames had burned low and a distinct chill had crept into the chamber, but the men were warding it off with wine. Durand was sprawled out in the floor rushes, a wine cup balanced on his chest, which rose and fell so evenly that Justin suspected he slept. John remained in the shadows. He’d killed two more flagons, adding them to the other empties, stacked, one upon the other, like a funeral bier for wine gone but not forgotten.

This was such a fanciful thought that it occurred to Justin that he was not entirely sober. He’d been trying to limit his own wine intake, for John was the last man in Christendom with whom he’d want to get drunk. But he was bone-tired and there was something oddly lulling about the dying fire. If he stared into it long enough, he could make out all sorts of strange shapes, putting him in mind of summer days when he’d lain out in Cheshire meadows with Bennet and Molly, finding castles and ships under full sail and swans in the clouds floating over their heads.

“So... you truly do not think that swine Simon killed her?”

Justin started and glanced toward the sound of that voice. John remained well camouflaged in shadows, preferring the obscuring gloom to the warmth of the waning hearth. What had Claudine liked to call him—Prince of Darkness. To Justin, that seemed unusually profound, although he was not exactly sure why. He groped for this understanding but his thoughts were as elusive as minnows, impossible to catch.

“Wake up, man!” John tossed an empty flagon in his direction. “I asked you if you thought that hellspawn killed her.”

“I already told you, my lord,” Justin said testily, “that I do not. We did at first, but not now. Now I think it was that canon, though God knows why...”

“God knows why,” John repeated solemnly, and then laughed suddenly. “Indeed He does.” There was a clatter in the darkness as he fumbled for another flagon. “The last one,” he announced, in the grave tones of a man on a sinking ship, watching the spare boat drift out of reach. “I’d send you to the buttery for more, but I do not trust you to come back.”

“Send Durand,” Justin suggested, and John laughed again.

“Tell you what, I’ll share it with you,” he offered. “But you’ll have to wait till the room stops moving.”

“I do not want to share with you, my lord,” Justin said, slowly and distinctly, while the image of Claudine’s face formed behind his closed eyelids.

“All the more for me then.” John swore as he spilled some of the wine onto his tunic. “I loved her, you know,” he said softly, and Justin sat up straight, for a moment thinking he meant Claudine.

“She was my first love,” John said. “I was sixteen when she took me to her bed. It was a revelation...”

Justin thought that over. It did not seem very likely to him. “You are not saying she was the first woman you bedded, are you?”

“No, of course not.” John sounded mildly offended. “But she was the first one who showed me what sinning is like if it is done right. She taught me a lot, did that lady. She claimed that most men could pleasure a woman about as well as a dog could read.”

Justin laughed, for he could hear Arzhela saying exactly that. “She deserved better than Simon de Lusignan,” he said, not drunk enough to say that she’d deserved better than John, too.

“She always did say she had bad taste in men.” John sounded wryly amused, but he sounded sad, too, and Justin decided he’d definitely had too much to drink if he was starting to feel sorry for the queen’s son.

“To the Lady Arzhela,” he said, raising his wine cup high.

“To Arzhela,” John echoed, leaning out of the shadows to clink his cup against Justin’s. “
Requiescat in pace.
But not the whoreson who killed her, de Quincy. Not in this lifetime nor the next.”

The following day, Justin was suffering the aftereffects of their bizarre, drunken wake for Arzhela. It was some consolation that John was, too, but he was irked that Durand seemed to have been spared. The knight’s trencher was piled with pasties stuffed with trout and he was eating with gusto, whereas the mere sight of them was enough to chase away Justin’s appetite.

John was faring no better with his meal, and when a messenger arrived for him, he pushed away from the table with no noticeable regret. Justin made do with almond milk and bread, refusing to watch as Durand devoured yet another fish-filled pasty. Even Claudine’s good news—that she’d coaxed Petronilla into taking Yann into her household—did not raise his spirits all that much.

John soon returned, beckoning abruptly to Justin and Durand as he strode toward the stairwell. By the time they reached the solar abovestairs, he was pacing back and forth impatiently, a rolled parchment in his hand. “It seems,” he said, “that I’d have done better to keep you both here in Paris. For certes, it would have saved me a fair sum of money!”

“It is early in the day for riddles, my lord,” Durand said. “I assume yours has something to do with that letter you hold.”

“Indeed it does.” John brandished the parchment like a processional torch. “I’ve finally heard from the one man I’ve always been able to depend upon. The Breton got the last message I sent, thanks to Emma’s assistance. Not surprisingly, he took action straightaway, learning more in a fortnight than the two of you could in a twelvemonth. And,” John said, triumphantly, “he has obtained what you two could not—proof that it is a forgery!”

Petronilla’s great hall was a scene of superficial domestic tranquility. Most of the trestle tables had been taken down after supper. A fire burned in the central hearth. John was absent, having gone off soon after dusk to meet the Breton at the cemetery of the Holy Innocents. Petronilla and Claudine were listening to a harpist while chatting and doing the needlework that was the lot even of women of rank. Emma was reading. Her young knight Lionel was playing chess with a knight of Petronilla’s household. Rufus and Crispin were hunched over a game of queek, others occupied with merels, but most of the men in the hall were wagering on a raucous dicing game of raffle. Ursula was reclining in a cushioned window seat, idly petting the small lapdog that was a recent gift from John, apparently oblivious to the admiring male glances being cast her way. Morgan had disappeared after supper, but Justin and Durand were seated at a table, gazing gloomily into half-filled wine cups, looking as frustrated as they felt.

They were not in John’s favor at the moment, as he’d made abundantly clear by not taking them as part of his escort that evening. Now that he no longer needed their services in proving his innocence, he’d felt free to berate them for their failure to prove the letter was a forgery, complaining that he’d paid Lupescar “enough to ransom the Pope,” and had got little to show for it. While he’d exercised enough restraint not to blame them for Arzhela’s death, they knew he did. Anger was an easier emotion to deal with than grief, and the hunt for scapegoats was a favorite pastime of the highborn.

Justin should have been pleased with the turn of events, for if John could produce proof of the conspiracy, he ought to be free, then, to return to England. But as much as he yearned to see Aline, as much as he detested being yoked to Durand, and as much as he’d disliked taking orders from John, he felt oddly unsettled and dissatisfied with this outcome. He knew John would do all in his power to find and punish Arzhela’s killer. He’d hoped, though, to play a part in that reckoning. He owed it to Arzhela.