The Widow and the King (18 page)

‘That one? You have strange friends, sir, but I love you for it. And yes, you may withdraw. You will find that scoundrel in the kitchens, I guess. Yet come you back here
straight. Now I must lose your counsel, I feel that I want it sorely.’

The monk turned to go and found his way blocked. A man stood in the doorway wearing the red and white chequers of the Widow's house over his mail. He bowed.

‘What is it?’ said the Widow.

‘A party of armed horsemen, my lady. They have come across the bridge and are approaching along the gate road.’

‘Armed horsemen? Who?’

‘We see no banners, my lady. But the watch has counted fifteen or sixteen horses.’

‘My lady,’ said one of the others in the room. ‘I guess that these may be Lackmere's pursuers.’

‘So. Is Lackmere aware?’

‘He is gone, my lady,’ said the newcomer. ‘This past half-hour. He mounted and rode as soon as he left you.’

‘Gone? Did he not even stay for meat?’

The Widow rose and peered through the window as if expecting to see through its narrow scope the figure of a horseman fleeing across the hills. Her fingers still held the letter, but she had forgotten it.

‘I did not mean that he should part without even a drink from my wells,’ she said.

‘Yet if these are indeed his pursuers, my lady, and they serve someone of rank, then it is better that he is not found within our walls.’

The Widow glared at the counsellor who had spoken. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘If they wish to parley, then I will speak with them. Maybe I will win that old rascal another halfhour yet.’

Her eye fell on the man in the door. Ambrose saw at once that there was something more he would say, and did not know how to.

‘The Lady Sophia, my lady …’

‘At her lessons, at this hour, I hope.’

‘She … we think she may have gone out beyond the walls …’

There was a moment's silence. The men around the Widow had stiffened like deer that scent a wolf. Ambrose trembled.

‘
So!
’ barked the Widow. ‘You are telling me that my feather-brained daughter has played truant again and gone frolicking among the daisies, is that it?’

‘My lady …’

‘At the very moment when a troop of armed men, who may well be brigands, have chosen to ride up to my gate as bold as you please, sir?

‘And that you have allowed her to pass, although you knew that I would not let it?

‘
And
I guess, that this is not the first time?’

The man could do nothing but bow.

‘Angel's knees, sir! Do I have walls for no purpose? Gates, guards, all useless?’

‘I have ordered a sortie, my lady. Thirty armed men on horse …’

‘I doubt it will come to that. But when this is past, I do not think the Lady Sophia should remember this day with pleasure. Nor should the guards who let her out, knowing she should be at lessons. And you and I, sir, will speak of this again this evening. Now, show me these brigands who think to crack their lances on my gate-bells!’

She stood among them: a short, round woman in black among those tall and colourful men. They bowed to her as she passed, her black shawl lifting slightly in the air of the room. The armoured men and the red counsellor followed her through into the passage way. Calls sounded in the corridor. Somewhere, someone began to run. The noises receded.

Three men remained in the room with Ambrose, muttering among themselves.

‘It would be easier if we knew who they were,’ said a greybeard in a blue gown.

‘She will not take sides,’ said the bald priest, Martin. ‘She has made that plain. So she will be careful. For all that, I guess that these people – from Velis, or someone else – will receive little help from her.’

‘And Lady Sophia?’

‘Will find it easier to sleep on her front tonight, I suppose.’

They laughed, in spite of the tension in their voices.

‘You think she is not in danger, then?’

‘Oh, I fear she may be. But I tell myself that it is not for her that they came. Nor do I think that they will prove to be just brigands.’

‘So you know who these men are?’

‘Fifteen riders? I might make a guess.’

There was a pause. Ambrose looked up. He thought that a moment before they all had been looking at him. The man Padry cleared his throat.

‘I think it falls to me to show the boy his place in the house. Ha, er –
Luke
, if you are ready?’

‘Fifty scholars now, and only ten masters,’ said the
other man.

‘And more councils in a week than we used to see in a month. We shall have our hands full. But I would rather be here with five hundred young ingrates than follow you to Velis, Martin. That's a thankless task she has given you.’

‘She has spoken of it before, although I had halfhoped she had forgotten. It was not a surprise. Yet I am sorry that I shall not have the pleasure of instructing our fiftieth scholar.’

Ambrose, who had been picking himself up to follow the man Padry, stopped. The monk was watching him. This was the one who had known Mother. There was something like sympathy in his eyes.

‘Come, boy, come,’ said Padry from the door.

The monk nodded in dismissal. Ambrose left. Padry was waiting in the corridor, tapping his foot.

‘Come on, boy!’

Outside the Widow's chamber the sound of singing swelled again. It floated up the stair and seemed to flood the corridor. Maybe all these stone passages were always filled with music, just as they were always lit with lamps. But there were other sounds, too. From somewhere below came the sound of men hurrying in mail. Horses were snorting and turning in the courtyard. Through narrow windows Ambrose glimpsed red and white pennons dipping on the ends of lances. Somebody called an order, and another voice cursed him and yelled at him to keep his voice down. Ambrose scampered after Padry, infected by urgency as the sortie armed in the courtyard.

They came to a landing with stairs running up and down, and a door that opened on the far side into what
seemed to be a long corridor with wooden walls. Padry listened. His mind was plainly on the fighters, and the threat to the house. But the sounds from outside were less now. Probably the Widow's fighters had all moved down to the outer gate. Perhaps the parley was already beginning. Padry turned back to Ambrose and smiled, absently. Then he looked away over the boy's shoulder and began to speak.

‘This is the School Stair,’ he said. ‘Through this door is my lady's library, which with great generosity she has placed at the disposal of her scholars. Remember that each book is worth the harvest of several farms. Therefore you may come here only in the hours between Nones and Vespers, and no flame is permitted here at any time. You may take down and handle any work from the presses at will, so long as they bear directly on your studies, but you must make no attempt to unfasten them. Certain quires and bound volumes of exceptional value are kept in locked chests. These you may only examine at the direction of a master. This is the rule for all scholars. If you break any part of it, we will thrash you in due measure. We will thrash you also if you do not study. Above is a dormitory where you will sleep, and where we masters have our rooms. My lady has gone to much expense to see that the dormitory is divided into cells, one for each scholar. Remember that we will thrash you if you are outside your cell after curfew, and double if you are found in the cell of another scholar. Also, since the partitions are only of wood, we will thrash you if you snore …’

He must have said these words many times to students before this. Ambrose supposed that they would have known
what words like
Nones
and
Presses
and
Quires
meant. He did not; nor was he sure whether the threat of a beating if he snored was a joke. He did not laugh.

‘So much for food for the mind,’ said Padry, beginning to descend the stairs. ‘Food for the belly you will have too. I will show you the refectory, which is also the scholars’ hall …’

Ambrose ducked through the low doorway on the landing and peered down what he had thought was a long passage, with many other passages opening off it. Now he saw that the walls of the passage were not walls but the ends of great open cupboards, with benches between them. The cupboards had shelves, festooned with light chains, and in the shelves were books, folded papers, scrolls, more papers – so many things. A crowd of young men were gathered at the nearest bench, with a scroll open on a broad shelf that was part of the cupboard. One of them was reading aloud. The others craned over his shoulder. Further down the room other groups were doing the same thing. The buzz of low voices filled the air.

The nearest boys had noticed Ambrose. Their eyes had turned to him all together, like a many-headed beast. The voice of their reader stopped. Ambrose recoiled onto the landing.

‘… We take our meal after Vespers, which at this time of year is at sundown,’ Padry was saying as he diminished down the stair.

More sounds came flooding up from below – knives on blocks, and voices arguing. There was steam, and woodsmoke, in the air. The corridors still hummed with the distant song.

So many rooms, so many people! In a place like this it was possible for men to be singing, and for crowds of boys to be reading in the school, while in the outer courtyard thirty armed horsemen sat tense, waiting for an order to charge. And somewhere down at the foot of the stair there were yet more people who fed them all.

Ambrose hurried after the man Padry, feeling his courage deserting him again. Wastelands was gone. Stefan was gone. He had never been among so many people, and he knew none of them. There had been one man who had known Mother – the monk in the brown robe – and he too was now being sent away.

Brown robe, or grey robe?

No – it had been brown robe, surely, tied at the waist with a rope.

Yet – yet had there not also been a
grey
robe, there, among the men in the council chamber?

It is a trick!

Ambrose stopped, gripping the stair-rope. Suddenly his heart was going very hard.

That thought – when the Widow had been testing him – where had it come from? Like a whisper in his head that he had heard before?

There had been a half-dozen of them: Padry, the bald monk, and the man with the faded blue tunic, all of whom must have been masters at the school. And the red counsellor, and two men in mail … There had only been one monk, because earlier the Widow had talked of ‘
the
monk', and had turned to Martin …

It was too late to go back and make sure.

He forced his legs to carry him on down the stair. But
as he hurried after Padry through the uproar of Develin's kitchens, his mind's eye showed him more and more clearly the memory of another figure by the Widow's chair, silent, in a grey robe and hood. And watching.

And none of them had seen it. And it had spoken to Ambrose, whispering in his head about the Widow's test.

He had passed because of the Heron Man.

The white stones clacked at his hip as he walked. He put his hand on them. He thought he was about to be sick.

The Heron Man! How could he be
here
?

he Lady Sophia Cataline diCoursi Develin was not frolicking among daisies. She was holding up her skirts and trying to creep forward among bushes and tall weeds to a hiding place from which she could see the riverbank.

She was not feather-brained either. There were several reasons for what she was doing. One of them was that she was sure the Widow would have a fit if she knew what her sixteen-year-old daughter was up to.

Like everybody else at Develin, Sophia thought of her mother as ‘The Widow’. It was right for her. It made Sophia think of a great, black spider sitting over everything and covering them all with her webs. And it was a sort of revenge for her own name – Sophia, for Wisdom – which her mother had chosen for her at birth. She hated it. When her mother was finally dead she would have herself called … well,
something
different. She would have liked to be Cataline, but her governess had once told her that that had been the Widow's choice, too. She did not feel that any name her mother had chosen for her could truly be hers. There were days when she did not feel ‘Sophia’ at all.