The Stolen Queen (30 page)

‘Gilbert. You will bury him, as we agreed.'

‘Indeed, Majesty.'

I struggled to find a phrase that would sound suitably solemn and portentous. ‘You have done as my mother commanded, and I thank you. It is not for us to question a sacrifice.' They nodded like a pair of monks at a Latin oration. I turned to the silk man. ‘And you. All is ready?'

‘As you wished, Majesty.'

‘Then we leave. You may leave those … things,' I gestured towards his costume. ‘Come.'

As we turned away from the river, I looked back one last time at the father of my son. His hair still glowed, as Arthur's had done, once. And now they would be bone and worm together. I fingered my own loosened braid, and thought how quickly Pierre should have done the same, had he no longer needed me. Then the silk man untethered his horse and attempted awkwardly to mount. In the part of my mind that was not still there, but in the firelight, I recalled that one such as he would never have ridden a horse. Horses were for lords and knights. ‘Where is your cart?' I asked him, as he eased himself gingerly into the saddle.

‘A little way down the road, Majesty. Not far.'

I unbuckled his rein and took it in my hand so that I could lead him, and began to walk us quietly along the road. The animals were skittish, I wondered if they had scented the blood. Gilbert would take both mounts. They would not be seen in Poitiers again.

In a while, a good long while, John would receive word that Pierre de Joigny had ridden for the Holy Land and gave over his lands to the English crown. Thus Henry would possess his father's inheritance. And there were many knights who had died there, far away in the desert, fevered with wounds or plague, that lay in unmarked graves beside dusty mountain roads. Pierre would disappear, and only my mother might mourn him, should she choose. This was not a punishment for her, no. It was my acceptance of the ruthlessness of her own beliefs. Do hinds mourn when the wolf takes their fauns from them? Perhaps. But it was my own disappearance that concerned me now.

When we came to the clearing where the silk man had left his cart, I unlaced the red garter and tied it to a tree as a sign to Gilbert. Any country person passing would see it, and leave the horses alone. The silk man had bundled a feather bed among what remained of his wares, and as soon as I lay upon it, I fell into a dead sleep, even before he had untied the mule and set off, at last, for Lusignan.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

W
HEN I OPENED MY EYES, I SAW ONLY THE MISTY
blue of the spring sky above me. For a moment or two, I thought myself still on the ship that had brought us to the coast of Normandy, until I realized that the swaying around me was not the pull of the waves, but the slow, lurching tread of the silk man's mule. A queen in a cart, I thought. What would Lady Maude think? And that made me smile, and I pushed the hair from my eyes and sat up to look around. We were moving slowly across a plain, dotted with clusters of trees, no house or village visible. ‘Where are we?' I called to the silk man's back.

‘We have come ten miles, I think, my lady. Still a great way to go.'

In the freshness of the morning air, it was as though the scene last night had never occurred. I swung my legs over the back of the cart and jogged along, eating an apple and a hunk of bread with honey, dangling my feet as merry as a peasant girl on a hay wagon. We had plenty of time, I thought. John himself would not miss me, and even if my women raised alarm, they would see
that Pierre was gone and assume I was with my brother. It would be days before my absence would be questioned, and by then, I hoped, I should be safe at last. The strange, calm simplicity of my thoughts astonished me. Aside from the clothes I wore, I had brought two things with me from Poitiers: Lord Hugh's serpent brooch, and my royal seal. I fumbled in the pocket of my gown for them, stroking them over and over like a rosary. The brooch would prove me, when we got to Lusignan, and the seal? With that, I could give commands.

We saw no living soul that day nor the next. As it grew dark, and the mule weary, we pulled the cart into the scrub at the roadside and made our beds, I above and the silk man on the ground below. I watched him prepare soup over a small charcoal burner, and then we lay down between heavy sacks of fabric, covered with canvas to protect them from the dew. I loved that wandering time, and though it was cold, and we were dirty, though our food was scarce and simple, and there was nothing to break up the monotony of the days save the passing of the landscape and the progress of the weak spring sun across the sky, all these things which had at Corfe seemed abominable privations had become joyful, as though this were a game. I gave no thought to what I had left behind, or indeed to what was before me, and when the silk man shyly poured a little of his watered wine on the roadside, or muttered one of his strange prayers, I did not turn away, but watched him pay his obeisance to the land through which we passed as a thing which was right, and which could be contained by no church, or no palace.

It was on the third day that the French king's riders came. We had passed several villages by then, where the peasants came out to stare at the silk man's cart, where I would conceal myself under the canvas until we had continued beyond their curious eyes. I had thought the silk man travelled only with cloths for fine ladies, and it surprised me to discover that he had also a sack of ribbons and kerchiefs, gaudy worthless things that the poor women handled and exclaimed over in the same manner as my maids in the castle. Sometimes I would have to lie for hours, scarcely breathing, as they made their choices and handed over the small coins they had saved against his coming. I thought it wise to conceal myself, in case John sent after me, but I had no real fear of these people; after my time at Corfe I was glad to hear them plucking a moment of brightness out of their dull, weary lives of fieldwork. But I noticed that in the towns we passed many of the cottages were shuttered, and several were burned, and when the women came forward to cheapen the silk man's goods, the men waited in the doorways, with a scythe or an axe in their hands, watching. So as soon as I saw the French riders, I dived beneath the coverings and lay there trembling.

There were a dozen of them, mercenary troops from the north, un-liveried, leading a single loaded destrier with a ragged fleur-de-lys banner atop. Their harried French captain was as far gone in drink as the rest of them, reeling along the road with his sword catching ridiculously between his legs. We heard them before we saw them, and smelled them after that, roaring drunkenly, though it was barely noon. I could see nothing except the road between a chink in the slats of the cart, yet I knew that
the silk man would be hunched down behind the mule, hoping to pass them quietly, and I knew that he would be stopped. I made myself as small and motionless as possible and began to mutter a silent prayer that they would not accost us. For a moment all was silent, except for the straining creak of the cart's wheels beneath me, but then I heard their heavy, unsteady steps approach, and the protesting snort of the destrier as its halter was dragged towards the ditch at the roadside.

‘You! Hey, you! Where are you going, then?'

This close, I could smell the filth on them beneath the high stink of the wine. I could hear the relish in their thick voices, the eagerness for the release of violence. The silk man spoke up bravely, his voice low, but measured and clear.

‘I am a pedlar. Please to search my wares, if you wish, Captain. You will find nothing but women's trinkets.'

‘Got anything to eat?'

‘I will be glad to share what I have with gentlemen in the service of the king of France.' I heard a rustling, the silk man must be rummaging for our packet of bread and hard cheese – then a gasp.

‘Chew on that, you foreign swine!'

‘You're no Frenchman!'

‘A spy, that's what he is, a spy!'

Another gasp, and the sound of something falling, the mule began to jerk between the carts of the shaft, shaking the coverings over my head. More sounds, soft thuds, followed by grunts, which grew sharper, until they bloomed into screams, and then I knew that they would kill him, and me too if they found me.
Even as this realization came to me, as slow and somehow unthreatening as the approach of terror in a dream, I felt what remained of the fabrics in the cart lighten over my body. Then, for a second, I was dazzled by the light of the sky across my exposed face, and then there was no time for thought, I was up and over the shoulders of the first of them before he had time to exclaim, my feet hit the hard mud of the road and I was flying.

Agnes's voice came to me as I ran, speaking across the years. Light as a fox, fleet as a hare, strong as a horse. That was what the old faith believed. Later, when I considered my escape, which could in reality have taken no longer than a cloud's journey across the sun, it seemed not that Othon was with me, but that I became his spirit, the spirit I had rejoiced to feel in the rides at Lusignan and later, when I rode with Pierre to his end. How else could I have escaped those cruel men, whose blood was raised against any living thing in their path? I took my dear friend into me, and it was his strength, which had bled out beneath me at Mirebeau, which carried me back along the road, so fast that even the exclamations of the French mercenaries were lost to me, so fast that it was not until I veered off into the scrubland and collapsed beside a thicket of gorse that I felt the searing ache in my lungs and the fluttering of my heart, which beat so loud that I was certain they should hear it, and find me, but which my blood would not allow me to bend around myself and disguise. I would make tribute to the silk man, as was fitting, but my first prayer was not for his poor soul, but of gratitude to Othon, who had come to me in desperate need for the third and what I knew to be the final time.

I lay there among the thorns until twilight came, and lay on until the moon bloomed in the sky. I had not heard the mercenaries pass back along the road, they must have continued on their way as soon as they had finished with the silk man. When I rose, I winced and gasped with pain where the thorn spikes had pierced me, spitting on the hem of my robe and doing my best to clean the cuts, awkward with stiffness. I crept back to the road and set off the way I had run, keeping close to the ditch and the overhanging shadow of the trees. I had no doubt what I should find, and when eventually I came to the cart – I had flown indeed – it was only with a dull sigh of shock that I absorbed the huddled figure lying beneath the shafts. Even as I turned the body over I felt the heavy pull of death in it. I ran my hands over the silk man's face, remembering it as he had removed the mask by moonlight, the night of Pierre's death. Now his features were blotched with the shadows of bruises, a hideous creeping mould, and at the back of his skull I felt the wound that must have killed him, a deep slit from a dagger or a spur. My fingers came away wet and sticky, as though dipped in cooling jam, and though from the temperature of his skin and the blood I knew that he could not have lived long after I left him, his clothes, when I fumbled beneath them, still contained an eerie vestige of warmth. As I gingerly worked off his breeches, I could smell him in the clear air of the night – sweat and the thin ammoniac tang of urine, an ancient tinge of lavender from the gloves he donned to handle his fine silks, and that made him tender to me, so broken, so human.

I tried to clean him, as best I could, to give him dignity. As I did so, I remembered the joy his visits had brought, the marvels that had billowed from his pack, the whole mysterious world bundled in the flaring colours of his fabrics, and I gave thanks. I closed my wet eyes and prayed to God for his soul, making the sign of the cross above his heart. At least, in his last moments, the silk man would not have wished for a priest. He had no need of that. At least he knew the manner of his going, and I prayed, too, that he had had time to speak to his own god. If only I could have known that he had died quickly. I did not feel shame at leaving him, he had believed that he was serving his faith in carrying me from Poitiers, and I knew he would have encouraged me to escape, had he had time for words. But I sorrowed for him, nonetheless. I wept for his brightness and his courage, for the breaking of the link that bound us together to Angouleme, however warped and ruined it had grown.

When I had got his britches down, I kept my eyes from his privities and slid my hand along his cold leg until I found the red string, which I untied and placed in my pocket along with the seal. I could not bury him, I had not even a tool to make a hole. The soldiers had emptied the cart, except for a few reels of ribbon, they had driven off the mule and availed themselves of our provisions. I had no food, no water, no coins, nothing. I took some time scraping out a shallow hollow in the mulch of the roadside with my filthy hands, then rolled the silk man's body into the dent. I scattered a handful of earth and gathered grasses and leaves to cover him decently. That would have to do. I thought to take his coat, to cover myself as a disguise, but
it was stained with his blood and I did not like it. The darkness had thinned now, diluted with the first glow of morning, and the birds were beginning to wake. I laid a hand on the silk man's face, beneath its last mask, and set off along the road.

*

Even at Corfe, where I had been so neglected and deprived, I had never been truly hungry. As I walked into that day, and on into the next, it twisted in my hollow belly like a tapeworm, writhing with need. Even had I known how to beg I did not dare to seek out a farm or a village, for fear that John's men would be following me. And who knew what tales the mercenaries might have told of the strange apparition that had flown from the silk man's cart? As my hunger swelled, I laughed to myself at the thought of being burned now, for a witch. I knew that we had been close, and I knew that I had to walk west, but at nightfall on the second day I felt a strange coldness creep over me, and I began to shiver. The scratches from the thorns must have poisoned my blood, I thought. There was a patch of blue flesh above my ankle, and another, tracing down my arm. I thought to lie and rest a little, so exhausted that even the damp sod appeared a delightful bed, but I knew I must go on, or die of thirst and fever. I would see the towers of Lusignan, I thought. I should see the château and then I should be safe.