Standard of Honor (18 page)

“
WELCOME
,
SIR ANDRÉ ST
.
CLAIR
. You look older … more
mature
than when we last met. But then you are … two years older, at least. As are we all. Stand easy.”

The young knight relaxed from the upright military stiffness he had maintained since marching in the door and coming to a halt before the table to salute his liege lord formally and ceremoniously, fist clenched upon his breast. He spread his feet more comfortably and placed his arms behind his back, gripping one wrist with his other hand, but continued nevertheless to stare respectfully at a spot somewhere slightly above the Duke's head.

“Your father has been telling us about your recent misadventures, and I admit I am surprised to see you looking as wholesome as you do, after two months of living in hiding. You look remarkably well.”

He looks
miraculously
well
, Sir Henry thought, hardly able to believe the change in his son's appearance.
You should have seen him but an hour ago.

André had made good use of his father's stout wooden bath and had obviously used Henry's short grooming shears and metal mirror to trim his hair and beard in the morning light from the window. Now he stood before them as a knight, complete in a suit of supple mail over which he wore a mantle the twin of his father's own, the blazon of St. Clair embroidered finely on the left breast. He carried no weapons, however, and his mailed hood hung down at his back, leaving his head uncovered, for as an accused felon, he had no right to bear arms, especially in the presence of his Duke.

“Remarkably well,” Richard repeated, musingly. “And remarkably guiltless, for an arraigned priest-killer.”

André St. Clair did not even blink, and Richard, who had pushed his chair back from the table, waved a hand towards his companion. “This is Sir Robert de Sablé, who rides with me for Paris, to meet with King Philip. He is a man of great wisdom and sagacity, for all his apparent youthfulness, and he is familiar with your situation, explained to us by your father … although I know not whether he be convinced of your innocence in this matter. You may greet him.”

The young knight swiveled his head towards de Sablé and inclined it respectfully, and de Sablé returned the nod, his face expressionless.

Richard crossed his long legs and locked his hands below the upper knee, then bent forward and spoke quietly to André.

“This is not a formal court, Sir André, but an inquiry into the details of your story, as one of my vassals. And
I must tell you here and now that, irrespective of my own beliefs, my main concern is this matter of the vanishing woman. With her dead body to back up your tale, your allegations against the priests would be unshakable. But lacking her completely as you do, without even a name or a description, you cannot provide even a smidgen of proof that she ever existed. We have no complaints of a missing woman anywhere, no knowledge of who she was or where she came from, and no possibility, it appears, of that knowledge miraculously appearing. Look me in the eye.”

André did as bidden, and the two gazed at each other for long moments before Richard said, “It was the sodomy report that convinced me yours is more probably the true account of what occurred. But this other matter, your lack of evidence to demonstrate the truth of what you allege, could prove insurmountable. That, in itself, is likely to hang you … unless, by some miracle, you could conjure the woman's name.”

“Eloise de Chamberg, my liege.”

“Eloise de Chamberg … And whence came she, this spectral Eloise?”

“From Lusigny, my liege. It's nigh on thirty miles south of Poitiers.”

“I know where it is, man. I own the place. But why have you said nothing to anyone about knowing who she was?”

St. Clair shrugged. “I could not, my lord. I have spoken scarce a word to anyone in months. Jonquard, who knew my hiding place and showed it to me that first day, never came near it afterwards for fear of being
followed. He would ride by every few days and leave provisions for me in a clump of bushes under a nearby oak, and I would collect them after he had gone. It was only last night, on my way here, that I learned from him the full extent of what has been going on. That may sound strange to you, knowing how much time has passed, but it is true.”

Richard sprang to his feet and began to pace the room with the irrepressible energy that Sir Henry, watching him closely, recognized from the Duke's early boyhood. Even then, Richard Plantagenet had been incapable of sitting still in one spot for more than a few minutes, and as he paced he ground his palms together, pressing them firmly one into the other and twisting them constantly so that, when he was most intellectually engaged, the sound of his weapons-hardened calluses rubbing against each other was clearly audible.

“Strange it may be,” he growled eventually, “but no more strange than this: how come you, a knight of Poitou, to know a woman called Eloise de Chamberg from Lusigny?”

André accompanied his answer with the slightest shrug of his shoulders. “By accident, my liege. I met her by sheerest chance when I attended a tourney in Poitiers two years ago.”

“And fell in love, eh? But why so secretive?”

For the first time, a trace of color showed on the young knight's face. “Because I had no choice, my liege. At first I seldom saw her, for my duties kept me far from Poitiers, and so I never spoke of her to anyone.”

The Duke stopped, almost in mid-stride, and looked André straight in the eye. “And later?”

The flush spread farther, suffusing André's temples. “And later it became impossible to speak of her.”

“I see, and I can hazard why. She is from Lusigny, and yet you met her in Poitiers and visited her there later. Why was that?”

“She lived in Poitiers then, with her parents. But fifteen months ago … she was wed, by her father's wishes.”

“Aha! For most men that would spell
finis
.”

André nodded. “True, my liege, it would. But hers was a loveless marriage from the first, with a man almost three times her age who lived in Lusigny. It was her father's wish, not hers, and she was an obedient daughter.”

“But plainly not an obedient spouse. You continued seeing her.”

“I did, my liege, although we met far less often then.”

“And how came she to be here in Poitou at the time of her … misfortune? Need I remind you that, married or not, the lady is now dead and beyond the reach of clacking tongues, whereas you are very much alive and stand in need of her? Speak out, then.”

A swift, uneasy glance at his father preceded the younger St. Clair's response, but then he raised his chin and looked directly at the Duke. “I received word from her, nigh on three months ago, that her husband would soon be traveling southeastward from Lusigny to spend a month visiting an aged, ailing brother in Clermont,
and she had a plan, set in place months before, that would permit the two of us to meet. And so I arranged for an escort to conduct her on a prearranged visit to a distant cousin of hers, a recently bereaved widow who lives close by here, on the outskirts of our lands.”

He glanced again at his father, whose face betrayed nothing of his thoughts. “It was complex in some ways, yet in others exceedingly simple, for no one knew her here, and her cousin knew nothing of me, or of the relationship between us.” Again he gave the tiniest of shrugs, almost imperceptible. “It was straightforward and it worked well. The widowed cousin made her farewells to Eloise on the morning of the day she was killed, believing her safely on her way home to Lusigny, escorted by her husband's men-at-arms. But the men were in my pay, hired through a friend in Poitiers, and they brought her to the spot where she and I were to meet for the last time, for we had decided that to continue this charade was purest folly, tolerable to neither one of us. They settled her comfortably there to wait for me, and then they departed as ordered, to await my later summons … I can only presume that when they heard no more from me, they eventually returned to Poitiers. They had been well paid, and in advance, and they knew our meeting was a tryst, so they would have—must have—assumed the lady had decided to remain here with me.”

He paused, frowning in recollection. “Be that as it may, the priests found her before I arrived, and you know the rest, my liege, save for this: when Eloise failed to return home to Lusigny, no one could have begun to
imagine where to look for her, because she had told her own household attendants that she was traveling north and
west
, towards Angers, to visit yet another cousin, whose husband had sent an escort to accompany her. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that no one has come seeking her here.”

“Hmm …” Richard crossed the floor and stood behind his chair, grasping the knobs on its high back. “Explain, if you will, why you did not tell your father you knew this woman? It would have saved everyone a great amount of grief and frustration.”

André's face had flushed bright red before Richard finished speaking, and he nodded, miserably. “I know now how foolish and misguided that was, but I only saw it today. It had not occurred to me before. I was distraught when I reached home that day and at the time it seemed the right thing to do … to protect her name and reputation.”

“And where were you the following morning, when the Baron's men came to arrest you?”

André St. Clair's eyebrows rose as if in disbelief that anyone could ask him such a thing. “I was at the Devil's Pit searching for her body. I had not slept all night and could not believe that two bodies could vanish without trace. I found the tracks my father's man had reported, and followed them to edge of the pit. Then I attempted to climb down into the hole, but it proved impossible. Within twenty paces down from the only point of access on the rim, I reached a spot where I could descend no farther without falling to my own death, and when
I attempted to turn back I almost despaired of climbing out again. It took me more than an hour to make my way back up and even then I would not have succeeded without help at the end from Jonquard, whom my father had sent to find me and to warn me to stay far from home. He found me and pulled me out.”

Duke Richard moved around his chair and sat down again, silent after that, staring at the younger knight, then turned to Sir Robert de Sablé.

“Robert? What think you?”

De Sablé inhaled deeply, and Henry, noticing the flattening of his nostrils, the frowning brows, and the implacable set of the man's mouth, braced himself for the condemnation he felt sure must follow. But de Sablé turned his eyes instead to where the Duke sat watching him. Unfazed by Richard's gaze, he shook his head slightly and raised one hand in a plea for patience and time to make his decision, while André, who had most to lose or gain from what would be said next, stood still, looking at no one.

Having watched the young knight as he was telling his tale, de Sablé now believed the man implicitly, and he was making a great effort to contain his own sense of outrage. No one would ever accuse Robert de Sablé of being naïve, and he had been fully aware all his life of the rampant corruption among the clergy at all levels of the Church's hierarchy. But his knowledge and his critical acumen had been sharpened through a more radical circumstance than any that influenced the vast majority of his fellow men. Robert de Sablé was a
member of the secret Brotherhood of Sion. He had been admitted into the Order on his eighteenth birthday, and since then he had learned much, and studied more, about the Order's teachings, and the accuracy of its lore and its archival sources regarding the errors and misguided policies of the Catholic Church over the preceding thousand years. The corruption within the Church was worldly and cynical, certainly, and it cried out for correction. But murder and rape such as were involved here was beyond his experience and insulted his credulity. He drew himself upright.

“My lord Duke,” he said, his frustration evident in his tone, “I know not what to say, other than that I am convinced we have heard the truth spoken here. But admitting that, I must admit, too, my own relief that the burden of responsibility is yours and not mine. You are Duke of Aquitaine, and this matter rests squarely within your jurisdiction, but I fear I can offer nothing of guidance in how you must proceed henceforth.”

Richard rose to his feet again and resumed his pacing, his palms grinding together relentlessly, his eyes shining with a zeal that Henry recognized with both pleasure and misgiving.

In the course of the years he had spent shaping, training, and grooming the boy, he had learned to read Richard Plantagenet like a book, and now he found himself observing the Duke dispassionately, guessing, before Richard even opened his mouth, at what he would say. When swift, unprecedented judgments and decisions were required, Richard had
proved, time and again with overwhelming consistency, that no man in Christendom, even his own formidable father, could match him in ruthless and precise decisiveness. Richard was brilliant, cynical, mercurial, overwhelmingly ambitious, relentlessly manipulative, and every inch the warrior Duke, and his proposal, whatever form it might take, would, Henry knew, be simple, clean, straightforward, and drastic. He clasped his hands together in his lap and crossed his ankles, knowing from the Duke's expression that a decision would quickly be forthcoming. Even so, the swiftness of Richard's response surprised him, demonstrating clearly to the older man that, once again, his former protégé had made up his mind beforehand and that his consultation of de Sablé had been no more than a formal courtesy.

“So be it,” Richard said. “I concur. It is my task and my responsibility alone, as Duke of Aquitaine, to make the decision on what is to be done in this matter. When we ride out of here today, Robert, we will go together to visit this vindictive fool of a baron, de la Fourrière, and if he escapes my wrath with his barony intact I will be more astonished than he. I have more than enough pressing problems to occupy my time without having to step aside from all of them to kick the arrogant arses of my petty vassals. And speaking of arrogance, before we even set out, I'll send a captain and four men to arrest the unsaintly Abbot of Sainte Mère … what was his name? Thomas?” This was flung at Henry, who merely nodded. “Well, he will lose his every doubt, just like his
doubting namesake the Apostle, when he finds himself being frog-marched in chains to confront me.”