The Lord of Ireland (The Fifth Knight Series Book 3) (25 page)

Palmer waited for de Lacy’s answer.

But the Lord of Meath said nothing.

Ahead, the other men still discussed battles. The tales that floated back on the soft evening air would keep a troubadour in
gold.

Palmer didn’t care. ‘You did, didn’t you? Killed her?’ He wasn’t going to let this pass.

De Lacy shrugged. ‘She was nearing the point of death, Palmer. I saw it for myself.’ He fixed Palmer with his one-eyed look, his face lit with anger as well as the flare of the setting sun. ‘I know what John is capable of. My men too: they will do what they are ordered to do. If they’d found her alive, they could have done anything to her. Anything,’ he repeated. ‘And probably would. So I put my dagger straight through her heart. She didn’t know a thing – gone between one breath and the next.’

‘You call that a merciful release.’ Palmer shook his head. ‘If she was that close to death, she’d have been gone long before John got there.’ He jabbed a finger at him. ‘You’d no right to do it, de Lacy.’

‘The release wasn’t for her.’

‘Who else did you murder in that house?’

‘No one. The merciful release was for her family. Regret is a poison, Palmer.’ He gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘I should know.’

‘You think you’re the only man to know that?’ came Palmer’s retort, sharp from his own conscience.

‘I carry the scars of it every day of my life, for all the world t
o see.’

Palmer wouldn’t allow him that. ‘There’s no shame in battle scars, de Lacy. Many brave men carry those. But not from killing defenceless old women.’

‘How about those that have acquired them through killing their brothers?’

Palmer missed a breath in disbelief. ‘You killed your own brother?’ Treacherous: Henry had been so clear in his fears about de Lacy. And here the Lord of Meath admitted to one of the greatest betrayals a man could commit.

‘Robert, Lord of Weobley before me. Yes. I did.’

Palmer took in de Lacy’s powerful shoulders, the man’s sword ready for use and one that Palmer knew had such deadly effect. ‘That must have been some fight,’ he said drily.

‘Me against Robert?’ replied de Lacy. ‘Robert, with his shortness of breath the fear of our mother’s life, always needing to be kept warm, to be nursed. Me, with my muscles that outpaced my stature in growth, and so much thick, dark hair all over my body that Robert said I could
have been
a wolf leader.’ He gave a brief smile to himself. ‘Yes. Some fight.’

‘I thought you more of a man than that.’ Palmer eyed him in disgust.

‘Steady down, Palmer. It’s not what you might think. I didn’t kill with a sword or a knife.’

‘Poison, then. Or smothering. Kind, were you?’ He knew he sneered. He couldn’t help it.

‘No.’ De Lacy’s voice dropped. ‘There was no kindness. I killed him with my own stupid, selfish behaviour.’

‘How?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes, it does.’ Palmer looked to the hooting, jostling group ahead.

They were getting Simonson to practise whistles now.

He went on. ‘You pulled my secrets, Theodosia’s past, pulled them from us with
the
point of a sword, threatening to help no more if we didn’t tell you everything. You at least owe me the same
courtesy
.’

‘Or you’ll leave?’

‘No.’ Palmer’s jaw set. ‘The Lord John needs to be stopped. But that won’t be easy. I fight best when I have men alongside me who
I ca
n trust. Doubt makes for mistakes.’

De Lacy rode in silence.

Palmer waited.

Still nothing.

‘Well, at least I know who I have on my side.’ He went to kick his mount on to join the others.

‘You have a man who made the biggest mistake of his life.’

Palmer
eased
back in the saddle. Waited
again
.

‘I loved my brother. When we were boys. It was simple, everything was simple.’ De Lacy’s words came clipped, careful. ‘As the eldest, Robert would get the lordship. Didn’t bother me, the second son. By God, I think I came out of my mother’s womb ready for war. As I was near enough the age John is now, preparing to seize my part of the world. The larger the better. For myself. When our father told me I had to stay.’

‘Serving your father isn’t a mistake.’

‘If only my service had been to him.’ De Lacy gave an impatient shake of his head. ‘My father announced he would be resigning his lands to Robert and joining the Templars. I would have to stay, to serve and protect Robert. I railed against my father, day and night. He wouldn’t budge. Robert became our lord in hi
s stead.’

‘There are worse fates, de Lacy.’ Palmer couldn’t help his terse barb. His own father had died unable to put food on the table.

‘I know that now, Palmer. I should have been glad for Robert. This was not his doing.’ His voice tightened. ‘But I was more jealous than Cain was of Abel. My meek and mild brother, a lord while our father lived. My father, a glorious Templar. Me, the fighter: nothing, except a prop to my older brother. To my young mind, I suffered the greatest injustice. I was being penalised for my strength. Robert got rewarded for weakness. But I was angry with the wrong person. Robert had not asked for any of this either. Father had abandoned him, same as he did me. It broke Robert’s heart when I forso
ok hi
m too. I did as little as I could to help him. Found my solace in the bottom of a wine barrel as I carried on fighting, waiting for my time. I was surly, vicious.’

‘Like thwarted young men are. But being thwarted is a poor excuse for murder.’

De Lacy shook his head. ‘The night I killed Robert, I had been drinking and riding with lances all day. It was a winter’s day: iron cold, with a hard, hard frost. I felt nothing. The exercise kept me warm, as did the wine flowing through my veins. All the others gave up early from the cold and made for the castle. I mocked their weakness and carried on. When dusk fell, I couldn’t be bothered to go to the castle. I was too tired. Too wine-soaked, more like. A nearby barn gave me all the shelter I needed. I often slept there when I was too drunk to go any farther. I collapsed onto the straw.’

Palmer nodded but said nothing. He could definitely guess the fate of de Lacy’s older brother now. A drunk, angry young man with a sword. They made mistakes often. And with mistakes came regret. But de Lacy’s next words had nothing to do with a blade.

‘A kick woke me,’ said the scarred lord. ‘Not the kick of another man, like a watchman. But a huge hoof into my back. I opened my eyes, not to a barn, but to hell. Blazing flames. Heat that wa
s m
aking my skin bubble. Bellowing, panicking cattle. Smoke filling my lungs.’ He took a sharp breath. ‘I scrambled for the door, but it was bolted from the outside. The screams of the burning animals drowned me out as I hammered on it, screamed too. A chunk of burning thatch came down from the ceiling, then another. Caught my hair. So fast. I was howling, beating at it – then my cloak caug
ht to
o. Fire was eating up the right side of my face. Someone finally got the door open. I fell out, the dousing with water hurting even more. I lay on the ground, still howling like a beast in my agony. Faces bent towards me, their mouths moving. I could hear nothing above my own voice. Then the only face that mattered. Robert. He’d come for me.’

‘Then you regret the fire?’ Palmer looked at de Lacy, shocked by the man’s unexpected, horrific account. No wonder de Lacy had flinched at his offer of sizzling beef the night they’d sat by the fire at Tibberaghny.

‘No, Palmer.’ De Lacy shook his head. ‘I regret that Robert had to come running to save me. He’d heard the commotion that a barn was on fire. Then the panic when word spread that that was where the drunkard brother often lay.’ He gave a taut smile. ‘They all knew me better than I realised.’

Ahead, Uinseann was the butt of another joke; the laughter and the last of the birdsong in the darkening woods another world from what de Lacy related of his early life. And from the lord’s actions in murdering a dying woman.

‘He did what any brother would do,’ said Palmer. ‘You can’t regret that.’

‘Oh, no?’ De
Lacy
’
s
voice deepened. ‘He breathed smoke and frigid air for hours on that icy night. And with me back in the castle, he sat with me while my burns were bandaged and I writhed and howled, my right eye a bloody mess and my skin peeling off. Sat with me the day after. Then the night after that, as I slipped into a fever from my wounds. Sat urging me to life, uncaring of his own fragile health.’

‘A good man.’

‘He was.’ De Lacy’s voice came quieter than Palmer had ever heard it. ‘Robert died a month later. No one dared say it, but I could see in everyone’s eyes that they blamed me. I blamed myself. The cold, the exhaustion: his chest filled with a fluid that drowned him slowly. His meagre strength ebbed like a tide that never washed back in, leaving me, alone. Alone, and Lord of Weobley.’

‘You’ve said he wasn’t strong. You can’t know that it was your fault.’ Palmer knew his words reached de Lacy in the same way that an arrow reaches the centre of a rock.

‘Keep your pity, Palmer. If I hadn’t been a jealous, drunken oaf, then I would have known that Robert had a tenant that bore him deep ill will. It was he who set the fire in the barn. The man hadn’t even realised I lay in there. He was screaming that at me when I hanged him from its ruins.’ De Lacy nodded to himself in satisfaction before he went on.

‘All I know is that I had power, wealth – everything I’d always prayed for, wished for. Resented my brother for. I was twenty and I was a lord, an important tenant-in-chief of the Crown. But I only had it because my beloved brother was dead. I came to despise every stone of the castle, every blade of grass of that cursed place.’
De Lac
y spat hard. ‘It was like it had been poisoned. By me.
I c
ouldn’t st
ay there.’

‘Which is why you’re in this country. Which is why you took Eimear in marriage.’

De Lacy nodded. ‘When Henry asked me to come to Ireland,
I di
dn’t hesitate for a second. It was a land unstained by my brother’s blood. A land I will do anything to keep, one I
never want to
leave.’ He drew in a long, shuddering breath. ‘And you’re correct. I had no right to kill that poor woman.’

‘It doesn’t matter if I’m correct. Yours is the hand that took her life. The hand of the Lord of Meath.’

‘But at least her daughter, her family, can come home. Can rebuild their cottage, sow their fields. Without being haunted at every turn that their mother was tortured in her last moments, abandoned by them.’

Palmer looked at de Lacy, his scars. Despair carved forever into his flesh.

De Lacy didn’t drop his certain stare. ‘I kept the poison from them, Palmer. For that, I will never be sorry.’

‘You are so welcome to the Rock of Saint Patrick. Every blessing to you, every blessing.’ The voice came from the far end of the hall in the Archbishop’s Palace at Cashel, but Theodosia could not make out anyone in the gloom of dusk in the high-ceilinged room.

The clean-shaven young monk who had escorted her and Eimear in here had not appeared perturbed by their dishevelled appearance. Now he left their sides with a patient sigh. ‘My Lo
rd Archbish
op, you forgot to summon someone to light your lamps again.’

‘Did I? Oh, dear. Is it that time already, Brother Fintan?’

‘It is, my lord.’ The monk set about his task, his height reaching the tallest lamps with ease as pools of light pierced the
darkness
. ‘Your visitors are here.’ He added his prompt as silence had descended again.

Eyebrows raised, Eimear exchanged a glance with Theodosia.

‘Oh, yes. Indeed.’

The monk lit a tall, wrought-iron candlestick, revealing
Archbishop
Matthew O’Heney sat at a huge desk, surrounded by piles of documents and manuscripts. He squinted hard, waving them forward. ‘Come closer, my lady, closer.’

Brother Fintan cleared his throat. ‘Eimear O’Connor, wife of the Lord of Meath, Hugh de Lacy, is accompanied by Sister
Theodosia
from the court of King Henry.’

The Archbishop’s face lit in a delighted smile. ‘Why, two
visitors
. Why didn’t you say?’

‘He can see nothing that isn’t in front of his face,’ murmured the monk as Theodosia went forward with Eimear. ‘Even when he can, his head is always in his books.’

‘My Lord Archbishop.’ Eimear gave him a deep bow, Theodosia matching her.

‘Every blessing of Saint Patrick be on you both.’ The plump Archbishop, his tonsured hair the colour of bleached straw in messy tufts, made a swift sign of the cross with ink-stained fingers. His pale blue eyes, large in his small head, moved in their direction, and he squinted again. ‘So honoured. The daughter of the Irish High King and a servant of King Henry. Brother, go and have us some food and drink prepared. Bless you.’

‘My lord.’ The monk left, closing the door behind him.