Girl In A Red Tunic (20 page)

     ‘But even if Walter Bell should be found alive,’ she said slowly, ‘his brother Teb has been murdered.’

     ‘By an unknown hand,’ Josse countered swiftly. ‘De Gifford has no suggestions to make on the matter, my lady; at present he has no idea what the motive can have been and therefore he hesitates to speculate who might have killed the man.’

     ‘That is wise,’ she murmured. ‘I wish that I—’ But whatever she wished was to remain known to herself alone, for she folded her lips on the rest of the remark. Then after a moment she said, ‘And you, Sir Josse? What will you do?’

     He had been thinking about this and had made up his mind; it was partly in order to tell her what he had decided to do that he had come to see her. ‘I shall go out into the forest,’ he announced. ‘Aye, I know that Saul and the brothers carried out a thorough search, but I want to see for myself.’ He smiled grimly. ‘They are capable and I do not doubt their diligence, my lady. But the forest has secrets, as you and I well know, and it may be that I can find my way into hidden places that other eyes, no matter how well intentioned, would not see.’

     She watched him. Then she said softly, ‘Be careful.’

     ‘I am always careful.’ He tried to smile at her but he did not think he made much of a job of it.

     He bowed to her and turned to go. He thought he heard her say ‘Thank you, my friend’, but he could not be sure.

He decided to walk up to the forest. Horace was a big horse and not renowned for moving silently and, besides, the trees grew low above the lesser paths and tracks and Josse would pass along beneath the bare winter branches more easily on his own two feet than high up astride his horse. He went to collect his sword and dagger and then strode quickly out through the Abbey gates and crossed the track, hurrying across the grass and increasing his pace as he drew nearer to the fringe of trees that circled the main forest. As always, he began to feel the unique atmosphere of the Great Forest reach out to embrace him and he hoped – prayed – that its touch was not hostile.

     You could never be sure  ...

     He followed the main track through the trees for some time. Memories sprang up to haunt him. Over there, down that smaller path, was the old charcoal burners’ camp, long disused by the charcoal burners but a refuge for others in times of crisis. Up along that path the ways branched and one led to a clearing where a woman had hanged herself. And dead ahead, deep in the forest’s heart, was the mysterious place that he and the Abbess had stumbled across and where they had witnessed something that he was still inclined to believe had really been nothing more than a disturbing vision.

     And then there was Joanna.

     He dreamed about her often. But he had not consciously thought about her for some time other than the fleeting images that he always tried to suppress whenever he saw the Abbess riding that beautiful golden mare. For Honey had been Joanna’s horse and she had left the mare in the Abbey’s keeping when she went away. Josse sometimes had the impression that people
knew
about Joanna but refrained from telling him; there had been one or two hints to that effect and Sister Tiphaine had once muttered that he wasn’t to worry about the lass, she was doing all right, whatever that meant. Sister Tiphaine, it was widely rumoured, had dealings with the strange and elusive Forest Folk, that self-contained band who appeared like the sunrise and vanished like the morning mist. Did that mean that the Forest Folk had taken Joanna in? Or merely that they knew where she was –
how
she was – and somehow contrived to pass word on to the Hawkenlye herbalist? Josse had no way of finding out; Sister Tiphaine had never said anything further and Josse wondered if perhaps the duty of obedience that she owed to her Abbess made her keep any knowledge she might have had strictly to herself. Sister Tiphaine might, as they often said, have one foot in the pagan past but her loyalty to the Abbess was, Josse guessed, born out of respect and quite possibly love and therefore unbreakable. The Church – and so it followed, went the reasoning, also the woman who ordered the comings and goings of Hawkenlye Abbey – would seriously disapprove of a nun even thinking about pagan forest dwellers, never mind having clandestine dealings with them, and so if indeed it were true that Sister Tiphaine had mysterious ways of contacting them, she was not going to boast about the fact and she would probably do her utmost to make sure her superior did not know.

     Now as he tramped along the forest tracks he wondered if he could find his way to wherever it was that Joanna lived. If, that was, she were still there  ...

     Then he decided simultaneously that there was no possibility of his finding her hiding place and that he wasn’t really sure he wanted to anyway. Squaring his shoulders, he reminded himself what he was doing out there and turned his full concentration to the search for Walter Bell.

It was hard to judge the time when deep inside the forest, for the thickly growing branches and endless network of almost leafless twigs above made it difficult to get a proper idea of the sun’s position. But, judging from the way in which the light was starting to fade, it must have been quite late in the day when Josse finally turned for home.

     He was coming to the conclusion that Brother Saul was right: only the animals were at present living in that corner of the Great Forest. He found many traces of the brothers’ passage and he noted, impressed, just how carefully they had searched. My day has been a waste of time, he thought; I should have taken Saul’s word for it and done something more fruitful than obeying my own proud voice telling me to go and check because I know the forest better than the lay brothers. Well, I’ll just have to—

     He heard something.

     He stopped stock-still, hardly breathing, ears straining.

     Nothing.

     He began to walk cautiously on. The path just there circled a shallow dell bordered on its steeper slopes by thick brambles and overshadowed by a large beech tree whose roots curled out from the dell’s banked side. There were a few coppery leaves still adhering to the beech’s branches and the ground in the dell was thick with beech mast.

     I have disturbed some small creature picking through the beech mast, Josse told himself. Even so small a noise sounds loud in this uncanny silence.

     Bracing his shoulders – his hand on the hilt of his sword for good measure – he walked on.

     He had gone no more than a dozen paces when a voice just behind him called, ‘Sir Josse!’

     Whipping round, drawing his sword, he would have lunged towards his assailant except that the man made no move to attack. Instead he spread his arms to indicate that he held no weapon and, in a voice just tinged with amusement, said, ‘No need for your sword! I am not your enemy.’

     It was Leofgar.

     Pushing his sword back down into its scabbard, Josse let out his breath and felt his fast heartbeat gradually return to normal. ‘Leofgar,’ he said, ‘oh, that glad I am to see you.’

     Then, without thinking about it, he put his arms around the younger man and gave him a hearty embrace. Returning it, Leofgar laughed shortly. ‘I did not expect this sort of a greeting from my mother’s good friend,’ he observed as Josse let him go.

     Josse shrugged. ‘You have worried her gravely, I’ll not deny it. But you’ve come back, so I would guess that whatever went wrong to make you run off as you did must either have been put right or cannot have been too serious in the first place?’ He tried to make the remark a statement and not a question, but he did not think he had succeeded.

     Leofgar shook his head. ‘Oh, Sir Josse, I wish that were true! But I must first say that I have not come back, if by that you mean that I am on my way to the Abbey to give a full explanation of my actions.’

     ‘Then why are you here?’ Josse spoke more gruffly than he had intended; to see the happy outcome that he had envisaged for the Abbess disappear without so much as a farewell was hard to bear.

     ‘I have to talk to you.’

     ‘To
me
?’

     ‘Yes, don’t sound so surprised.’ The note of amusement was back. ‘My mother trusts you absolutely. Here I am, in dire need of a reliable confidant and adviser, so what better, I thought to myself, than to hide away in some place where the great Sir Josse d’Acquin is bound to come looking?’

     ‘You can’t have known I would search the forest!’

     ‘I admit I was downcast when the lay brothers made their hunt – very thorough they were too, let me tell you, and one of them almost found me. He would have done had I not climbed up a very large old yew tree and hidden till he had gone. But still I believed that you would come, for I judge you to be a man who is not satisfied until he has seen for himself.’

     ‘You judge right,’ Josse muttered. ‘Yet it was a dubious plan, for all that.’

     Leofgar shrugged. ‘Dubious or not, it was the only plan I had.’

     Suddenly Josse thought of something. ‘You have not forced your wife and child to share your vigil, have you?’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s
cold
, man, and—’

     ‘Of course not.’ Leofgar’s tone was almost scathing, as if to say, you cannot believe I would do such a thing! ‘They are safe in a warm and welcoming refuge.’

     Josse studied him. He was well wrapped-up against the weather and he looked clean and, although his face was anxious, he did not have the pinched, shrivelled look of someone who had spent any length of time starving out in the cold. ‘You too have been staying in this refuge,’ he said.

     ‘I have. My days I have spent here, waiting for you. By night I return to my hiding place.’ His eyes fixed to Josse’s, he said with a smile, ‘And do not try to follow me, Sir Josse. I ask for your word on this.’

     Josse hesitated and then said reluctantly, ‘You have it. I shall not follow you.’

     Leofgar laughed. ‘The promise was not to
try
to follow me,’ he corrected. ‘A man should not boast of his own abilities but I doubt that you could pick up my trail if I did not want you to. You missed me in the dell there and I believe that I took you by surprise when I spoke your name just now?’

     ‘Aye,’ Josse acknowledged. ‘You merge well with the woodland, Leofgar.’

     ‘I learned when young how to use the cover of the forest,’ he said. ‘So would you have done if you’d had to live with a gang of boys all bigger than you who were intent on giving you a hiding for every real or imagined misdemeanour.’

     Josse guessed he must be speaking of the household where he had lived while he learned the duties of page and squire. ‘You were not happy in the place where your mother put you?’

     ‘Happy?’ Leofgar appeared to consider. ‘I’m not sure that I expected happiness, Sir Josse. I was well fed, well clothed, my duties were no more than those of any other boy. And when I was one of the older ones, I dare say I was not above making some smaller lad’s life a misery from time to time. It’s the way of things,’ he concluded. Then, with a flash of anger in the grey eyes that were so like his mother’s, he hissed, ‘Don’t you dare tell her!’

     Josse almost laughed. ‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘You have my word on that, too.’

     They had moved away from the dell, walking as they talked, strolling a short distance back down the path that would eventually emerge out from the trees just above the Abbey. Now Leofgar stopped and, putting a hand on Josse’s sleeve, said, ‘I will not come any further. Will you stay here with me while I tell you what I have to say?’

     ‘Aye, lad. That I will.’ But then a thought struck him; he said, ‘Just now you implied that you expected me to come looking. But I wasn’t looking for you; I’m searching for somebody else.’

     ‘I know who you’re looking for. My mother told me about the search party.’

     ‘You know who he is, then?’

     ‘Oh, yes.’ Leofgar’s face was grave. ‘You won’t find him, Sir Josse. Nobody will, or I pray that they won’t.’

     ‘But you—’

     ‘Please,’ Leofgar said urgently, ‘let me tell my story. Then all will become clear.’

     With an ironic bow, Josse said, ‘Go on. I will try not to interrupt.’

     Leofgar had snapped a length of twig from the beech tree and his long hands were steadily peeling off the bark. Intent on this small action, he began to speak. ‘My wife Rohaise, as you observed, is not well. She suffers from unaccountable miseries and she thinks things – bad and terrible things – that are not true. As I told you at the Abbey, we have sought help from various sources and our parish priest encouraged us to pray. When that did no good, Father Luke decided that Timus was a changeling and must be taken away to the monks, where hopefully the real Timus would miraculously appear to replace the spirit child.’