Gisborne: Book of Pawns (26 page)

She hurried to a salver and grabbed early apples and some cheese and thrust the food into my hands.

‘I shall get some bread and…’ she reached for a stoppered leather bottle and threw it into Gisborne’s hands. ‘There, watered wine. Go quickly.’

She pushed at us and we had little option but to let her, allowing the thick tapestry to fall behind us.

‘Go!’ she whispered.

I headed toward the footsteps of my childhood. Ever upward, where darkness shut out today and touch focused on yesterday. The cheese was squashed to my chest together with the apples, and the smell of the orchard raised a dozen memories and threatened to stop me in my tracks. But I kept stepping up, aware of Gisborne close behind.

‘Here,’ I muttered, turning into the slim space.

Gisborne hovered, aware of the lack of room.

‘Oh for God’s sake, just come and sit where you can.’

An arrow loop bled a measure of light onto the floor upon which lay a rolled blanket and a tapestry-covered pillow. Perfect for one person. I flopped to the floor, exhaustion beginning to bite at my legs.

‘Have some fruit and cheese,’ I offered as he folded his height half in and out of the space. I threw an apple to him and he took his knife and sliced pieces, doing the same with the cheese. I ate because my stomach demanded it but in truth food mattered little as my mind went over and over the scenario outside the walls.

‘What are you thinking?’ he said after sucking on the leather bottle.

‘You don’t know?’

I hunched back against the wall, sighing and resting the back of my head against the cold stone. The light through the arrow slit lay on my toes, a measure of comfort.

‘De Courcey has the place,’ he said, mirroring my thoughts. ‘You wonder how it has happened so quickly. You wonder if you are safe; if Cecilia is safe. How you shall find your father.
What
you shall discover
when
you find your father.’ He held his knife between his hands, the point and haft pressing against the balls of two fingers, bridging a gap over no-man’s land.

‘Do go on. You have all the answers.’

‘If I tell you what I think, you must accept that I know a little more than you and that I have tried to prepare you for this eventuality all through our journey.’

There was an earnestness about him that dismantled my anger just a fraction.

‘I think your father has been imprisoned by De Courcey, Ysabel. Perhaps he hasn’t paid his gaming debts in full and De Courcey is angered. As to your role in this, I think he plans to have you as well. I believe he sees it as a neat way to tie up Moncrieff. Marriage takes the taint of robber-baron away.’

Blood pounded in my ears.

‘Good God, how can this man get away with what he has done? I will go to King Richard, I will…’

‘I suspect that De Courcey has supporters. Supporters who may have the King’s ear and there is little you can do.’

‘No. You’re wrong, my father was gulled.’

‘You and I know this but to others it would seem your father gambled away his estates in full knowledge of what he was doing.’

‘No one who gambles is in their right minds. Besides, you said they would get him blind drunk on their sorties. Is that not coercion?’

‘And how would you prove it?’

‘I…’ I threw a piece of apple at the wall.

‘Truth?’ He looked neither smug nor righteous. ‘You cannot. Not when someone has proved himself invaluable to the king. Have no doubt, Ysabel, the mercenaries that De Courcey fields are earning the king’s notice and gratitude.’

I barely debated my next comment. I really didn’t care if I offended anyone right now. I wanted to kick out and kick hard.

‘And you think to be a Free Lancer? With De Courcey and Halsham as your senior officers? Your sense of purpose and self-preservation does you credit when your integrity does not.’

His expression did not change, his voice did not harden, but his fingers gripped the haft of his knife until the knuckles showed bone-white.

‘I have been charged with your safety. I must protect your interests and those of Cecilia, even if Moncrieff is beyond my care at this point.’

I dipped my head in mock deference.

‘Then we must thank you, my dear Gisborne, for such
perceived
loyalty.’

He stood up, the apple cores and cheese rind falling at my feet, and clipped away down the stair. I heard his boots tapping and his shoulders scraping the walls well past the entrance to my mother’s chamber. I wondered if he left me to cool his anger or whether he departed the castle and any further involvement with the Moncrieffs. Or if he left to sign up with De Courcey and divulge my whereabouts.

Whichever was the case he was gone and I was alone.

The sun drifted past the arrow loop and I lay down as I did as a child and peered through. In those far off days, I would pretend I was a bird on a sill about to take flight and I would gaze across the view imagining it from the bird’s eye … over the lake, trees and fields. Villeins working my father’s lands … tilling, seeding, weeding, scything, gathering in the harvest – colours changing from brown to acid green, to pale gold and to brown again – like some beautifully illuminated Book of Hours right before my eyes.

Now the fields were tinted bright green as the seeded crops grew to maturity. After harvest they would plough them again and then let them lie fallow until the spring thaw when the men, women and children would seed the soil with barley or oats. My childish memory recalled the rime-edged furrows, the crows swooping in flocks to feed when the fields were seeded and the children lined up with stones to keep the birds away until the crop struck.

A noise far below dragged at my attention, horses clattering out over the drawbridge … a cohort of a dozen men on thickset rounceys with powerful quarters. Their quilted saddle cloths carried the Free Lancer’s colours – De Courcey’s own it would appear. My fingers balled into fists as I watched them scatter a group of Moncrieff folk across the stony road, a child falling into a ditch and crying as they swept by.

The place had all the appearance of a military encampment. How the people of Moncrieff would hate this regime. Under my mother’s care and with my father’s wealth, they had wanted for very little – they were never hungry, they were allowed to cook their own bread instead of paying the lord of the manor for the privilege and they were paid in coin for any service they rendered Moncrieff. They had a chance to better themselves and to become free men but now a fool could see all that had changed when my mother died.

I lay my head on the tapestried cushion, my hand underneath it to lift it a little higher off the cold stone. I pulled the blanket over me, thoughts darting everywhere and then slowing, drifting…

‘Ysabel, wake you.’ Cecilia’s voice gently prised me from a place of dreams where exhaustion was salved and worry smothered. ‘You poor young thing, you’re washed out.’

Her hand smoothed over my head. A faint flickering light glowed behind her, giving her the appearance of a religious vision in my sleepy state.

‘Ysabel,’ she asked. ‘Where is Guy?’

I growled as I sat up, pulling the rucked surcoat down over my back, noting the candle further down the stair.

‘I know not nor care. He is untrustworthy.’

Cecilia looked at me, her eyes dark circles in a face marked by shadowy lines. ‘You say? Then you misjudge him to be sure.’

‘He’s Halsham’s cousin, Ceci, and the man himself dogged our footsteps from Cazenay to Moncrieff.’

‘I know he’s Halsham’s cousin but he is cut from different cloth I can assure you.’

‘You think? He plans to join the Free Lancers as soon as we are safe. How can you trust someone who wishes to work under De Courcey’s banner?’

‘Ysabel, this is hardly the time to dispute Guy’s future. When he has delivered you safely far from De Courcey, what he chooses to do with his life is none of our business. What matters is that you are alive and free.’

‘Ceci’, I snorted. ‘I am in the lion’s den. He has brought me straight into a lair from which I may not escape.

‘That is untrue, Ysabel,’ Gisborne’s voice broke in. In the heat of argument, I had missed the sound of his footfall as he climbed the stair. ‘If you had stayed in Walsocam where I left you, I would have taken you far from here where you could get to Wales or Ireland safely. But as always you acted impulsively and ill-advisedly.’

‘
Lady
Ysabel…’ I muttered.

‘Lady
Ysabel,’ he sneered.

‘Stop it,’ hissed Cecilia. ‘This serves neither of you. Ysabel, Guy is right. You should not have left Walsocam so precipitately.’

‘But I needed to … my mother, you, my father…’

‘Your father is of little use to your situation. In fact he could make it worse.’

My heart skipped as her words sank in. ‘What do you mean, ‘
of little use
’
?’

The church bells began to peel in the village and I realized they marked Vespers. Such a long dark night yet to follow…

‘He is very frail, Ysabel. Immediately after Guy left to retrieve you from Cazenay, he and De Courcey had an argument. Everyone inside the Hall and out heard it. De Courcey wanted the debt paid in full; for his ownership of Moncrieff to be acknowledged in writing and that any valuables within your father’s possession be handed over. Your father declared that he must retain something as the dowry for his daughter, that it was only right and proper and that she should not be condemned to penury because of her father’s sore actions. He argued the demesnes of Moncrieff, including the castle, paid the debt. De Courcey objected, showing your father a paper that calculated each loss your father had made at dice, chess, even cockfighting and horse-races.’

Papa, you didn’t forget me.

I could not help a choke in my throat. ‘But why did he…’

Cecilia reached over and touched my hand, squeezing gently.

‘Ysabel, he was bereft; a parlous grief that settled on him so that he seemed to know and feel nothing else. Common men would have been called mad.’

‘Truly?’

‘I think so. You must remember his adoration of your mother, almost an obsession. His heart broke when she died and he replaced one obsession with others. Drinking and gaming blotted his pain. It was only after he lost Moncrieff and after I chided him, that reality began to set in. He tried to ignore De Courcey but the man is choleric and that last day in the Hall was frightful. He roared at your father, even drew his sword on him and your father screamed back. He was livid. I tell you, I have never ever seen Joffrey so incensed. I expect the anger was with himself more than anything, that he could treat Moncrieff with such lack of respect. I am sure he thought he cast dirt on your mother’s memory.’

‘What happened?’

I had an ugly image of my father shaking with disgust and distress, De Courcey’s face ruddy, his bullish bulk rearing over the diminished form of Joffrey.

‘Your father was gesticulating wildly and of a sudden he had a seizure. He fell straight down, awake but insensible. The infirmarian from the abbey diagnosed an apoplexy. Your father lost the power of speech, his face collapsed sideways and he lost the ability to walk or hold things in his hands. De Courcey allowed him to be taken to the Master Chamber and I have nursed him since, but he can barely eat, chokes even on liquids and is fading away. He is incoherent and yet I would swear there is recognition in his eyes when he looks at me… oh Ysabel…’

Tears ran down my cheeks as I remembered my sweet, detached father who had, all of his life, worshipped at the altar that was Lady Alaïs. This was a man who wrote poetry and I couldn’t imagine him never being able to speak it aloud.

‘He is dying,’ I said.

I looked up at her and she met me with a steady, honest gaze.

‘I think so. He is not yet quite ready to die but it will be no more than a month.’

‘Do you think De Courcey knows that he is dying,’ I asked.

Cecilia shrugged and sighed.

‘Till yesterday I nursed him and would report only good things to the man, as it suited me to see him discomforted. I do not want him to think that all is going his way. I had hoped that you would return and that … well … that things might return to normal, but it is a fool’s dream, my dear. Your father is dying, Moncrieff is lost and for your own safety, you must leave. It was not what I intended but it is surely what must happen now. You must get away.’

‘I
must
see him, Cecilia. I
must
let him know I came home.’

‘Ysabel, they took me away from him and locked me in your mother’s chamber and for all I know he might be…’

‘He has been moved.’ Gisborne butted in. ‘When I left earlier, I searched all those parts of the castle I could get to and he is no longer in his chamber. It is De Courcey’s own…’

Cecilia sucked in her breath.

‘You were not seen?’

‘I think not. But that De Courcey has taken the chamber is obvious. His accoutrements are everywhere.’