Heart of Ice (29 page)

     ‘I cannot do it!’ she wailed softly to herself. ‘I have left the world of the Outlanders behind me. This is my place now, mine and Meggie’s, and here is where I must remain.’

     When the stars began to fade ahead of the dawn, at last she slept. But it was to dream that the Bear Man was with her, holding her in strong arms as she wept, and somehow – for he did not use spoken words – imparting the message that there was a purpose to everything and that included the claw that he had given her and the healing powers that she now possessed.

     It was only a dream. On waking, she told herself that over and over again; he was far away, she knew he was, and so it was strange that, in the mud on the bank of the stream that ran close by her hut, she should find the marks of huge, claw-tipped paws.

In the dense forest around the isolated settlement at Robertsbridge, poachers crept beneath the trees searching the monks’ land for anything edible. One of them was a trembling lad not much more than ten out on his first hunt and forced into the excursion because his father was sick, his brother was in hiding from the law and his mother and three little siblings were slowly starving. He was spooked into an evasive leap and a suppressed scream by a movement in the shadows; seconds later a large, pregnant sow boar broke cover and ran off into the night, twigs and low branches snapping with loud cracks marking her progress. The lad received a cuff round the ear for his carelessness and went home empty handed.

     The sow’s panicky rush through the undergrowth was, however, heard by someone other than the poachers; she took a track that went close by the monks’ settlement and even closer to the rough guest accommodation, where yet another person lay sleepless. For him, however, it was a fairly routine state, for he was very old and did not need much sleep.

     The noise of the boar made hope of even an hour or two’s light slumber towards dawn quite out of the question, for the old man misunderstood the innocent sounds of the boar’s headlong flight and ascribed them to a very different cause. He lay in a cold sweat of terror for some time after the boar had gone, waiting almost without breathing for the creak of the door, the knife at his throat or – terror of terrors – the first hint of smoke like that which had come that last dreadful time.

     When dawn came and he was still miraculously alive, he roused his companion and announced that they were leaving immediately. In answer to the puzzled questions – why? What is the rush? Where should we go? – he simply said, ‘He’s found us.’

     And then there were no more questions; only a fast-growing fear that soon overtook his own. The pair were packed up ready to go within moments and as soon as Stephen could be persuaded to provide an escort – which, given Stephen’s urgent wish to be rid of his guests, for which he would subsequently do grave penance, took even less time – they were on their way and riding off along the road that led north-westwards.

He was losing control.

     The sensation was unfamiliar for one such as he, who was meticulous both in the planning and the execution of a mission. He had not experienced failure in all the years he had been operating and it was this reputation for total reliability which, he believed, had caught the eye of the powerful man who had commanded the present task.

     But things were going wrong.

     For the first time in his professional life, he was indecisive and he was quietly, smoulderingly angry, for the indecision came about purely because his master kept changing his mind. Well, to be fair, he had changed it once: he had outlined the mission – and how well the man recalled that moment when his employer had announced the target! – and the man had considered the proposal, agreed that he would do it and, after the usual careful planning stage, had set off to accomplish it. Everything had gone smoothly; he had located his quarry, finalised the details of how the deed would be done and, even more important, how he would ensure a clean escape afterwards, and he had been poised to strike.

     At the very last moment, the messenger had arrived to tell him to withdraw: the employer was in receipt of new intelligence and no longer wanted the mission to be carried out.

     And then, purely because the man’s softly spoken fury had for a moment got the better of him, everything had started to go wrong. He always worked alone and the very presence of the messenger had disturbed him, making him act out of character. That must have been it, he told himself yet again, for what else could explain his breaking of his self-imposed rule of total silence until an operation was over? But the messenger had been there right in front of him, white-faced with the pain resulting from his own stupid clumsiness, cowering because he could plainly see the effect that the new instructions he had just relayed had had and, knowing the man’s profession and reputation, understandably terrified. The man had used the trembling messenger as a whipping boy and, for one self-indulgent moment, said, quietly but viciously, exactly what he thought about employers who changed their minds at the very last second.

     It should have been all right and he ought to have got away with it. He and the messenger were in an out-of-the-way place where surely it was highly unlikely for them to have been overheard. But overheard they were: as the man had finished his brief but articulate rant, an emotion-charged silence ensued and into this silence came a small sound.

     Anyone lacking the man’s long experience of survival against the odds and his talent for self-preservation might have dismissed the little noise as rats in the drains or mice in the stone walls. But the man’s acutely developed sense of hearing picked up the sound, checked it against like sounds stored in his memory and located the source. It was a very particular noise and the man knew exactly who had made it: nobody else coughed quite like that.

     And that moment had led to this endless pursuit that had resulted in two deaths and would probably soon lead to two more.

     Sitting on his horse in the forest clearing above the Hastings to London road and watching the five-strong party emerge from the track and set out northwards, the man wondered yet again why the pair of them had suddenly decided to run. They knew he was after them, he was quite sure of that, and he had begun to think that, if they persisted in demanding sanctuary at Robertsbridge, he was never going to get at them; this morning’s move was a surprise. He had almost missed the departure. They must have been up at dawn to have been on the road so early and it was pure luck that the man’s sleep had been restless that night, so that he was at his observation post some time sooner than he had been for the past few days.

     Again he went through the possible reasons for the pair’s sudden move. This time he started further back, with the intention of trying to discover if there were some salient fact that he had left out of his considerations.

     He had followed the pair to Troyes, where they had made the acquaintance of the apprentice lad. The man was quite sure they’d told him what had happened, what the old man had overheard; why else would the lad suddenly start looking over his shoulder, acting like a bodyguard, hardly letting the pair out of his sight and going about with his hand on his sword? The lad had been trying to impress the girl; of that the man was quite sure. Not that she’d have been very impressed if the man had chosen to make his attack in the open, for he would have made short work of the apprentice
and
his sword and dispatched him with the ruthless speed of a heavy boot crushing a cockroach.

     But it was not the man’s way to attack in the open; he had got rid of the old man and the girl by firing their lodging house and then, still under cover of night, he had gone after the apprentice. He ought to have cornered him and seen to him that same night but the lad must have found a very good hiding place; the man had not been able to find him.

     If he had only succeeded in finishing the business and curtailing the dangerous secret there and then in Troyes! It would have been a simple matter to go on to Paris, claim his payment and proceed on his way, putting the whole affair out of his mind. But he had been foiled again, this time by sheer bad luck: the old man ate a bad oyster at supper and, when the lodging house had gone up in flames, he had been alternately kneeling before and squatting over the privy in the yard voiding his system and the girl had been tending him.

     The man was not to discover this until much later.

     Although several other people were killed in the blaze, both the old boy and the girl had escaped unharmed. But, thinking them dead, he had hastened to pick up the apprentice’s trail and had followed him up to Boulogne. Somewhere along the road the lad must have become aware that he was being followed, for he had displayed all the symptoms of increasing fear. So close had the man been upon his trail that the man was quite sure the apprentice had not revealed his dangerous knowledge to anybody; there simply had been no occasion for such a sharing of confidences. In Boulogne the lad had met up with a merchant and on board the ship that they took for England, on to which the man had stealthily crept after them, the two had soon put their heads together. The man knew exactly what had been the main topic of conversation for, concealed in the dark shadows, he heard the lad speak. Eager to impress his wealthier and more sophisticated companion, the apprentice had carefully looked around him to make sure that none of the crew could overhear and then spilled out the full tale.

     The man followed the merchant and the apprentice ashore in England and as soon as he could he killed them. The merchant he smothered with his own pillow – an easy death, that one, for the merchant had been weak with fever – and then he had set out to find the apprentice. The lad almost got away for, just as the man was about to make his move, the apprentice set off on his master’s horse and made his slow way to Hawkenlye Abbey. But there again the man’s luck was in, for the lad reached the Abbey on a very cold day just as the light was fading. Nobody had been about and it had been a simple matter to strike down the lad and roll his body into the pond.

     That should have been that. The four people who knew what the man’s sensitive mission had been were dead and the secret had died with them.

     Then, as the man had set off back to the coast to pick up a boat back to France, he had seen what at first sight he had thought must be a couple of ghosts. In deep countryside outside Hastings, following his usual practice when out in the wild of drawing off the road and concealing himself when he heard riders approaching, he had watched with increasing disbelief as the old man and the girl rode up from the port towards him. There was no time then to ask himself what they were doing in England or, indeed, how it came to be that they were still alive. In that urgent moment he calculated swiftly and, deciding that it would be best to slay them there and then, he had been about to pounce.

     Then an ox cart had come crawling along the road from Hastings, in the direction from which the old man and the girl had come, accompanied by three horsemen and a troupe of peasants. The old man and the girl had paused to rest at the top of a rise and the group had caught up with them. With a quiet curse, the man had withdrawn deeper under the trees; unless he was prepared to kill the lot of them, attacking the old man and the girl here was just going to create yet more problems.

     He followed them and watched from a safe distance as they rode for a few miles with the ox cart party and then turned off at the track for the abbey at Robertsbridge, where they were given lodgings. A few days later he trailed the girl as, escorted by a couple of burly monks, she rode to Newenden to ask after the apprentice, and he was sure she must also have made a similar excursion to Hawkenlye; there was a day where he had not been able to find her and he guessed that was where she had gone. She would probably know by now that the apprentice lad was dead, unless his body were still under the ice in the dark heart of the pond.

     There had never been an opportunity to attack her and, indeed, killing her would only have achieved half the task, for there remained the old man, and
he
had the good sense not to leave the settlement at Robertsbridge.

     And there matters had stood, the girl making occasional forays on to the tracks and the roads, always accompanied and therefore unassailable, and the old man all but camping out under Robertsbridge’s altar.

     Until now  . . .

     He waited until the group of riders were almost out of sight – a monk led the way, followed by the old man and the girl, with a pair of monks bringing up the rear – and then he nudged a knee into his horse’s side and, moving with his usual stealth, set out after them.

‘Are those structures also part of Hawkenlye Abbey?’

     Sabin de Retz’s accented words managed to sound authoritative and faintly dismissive, as if the sight of the Abbey buildings down in the Vale was somehow a disappointment.