The Exiled (39 page)

Both men laughed. An unpleasant sound. In these uncertain times, paranoia spread easily. Implying the girl might be a spy for the French had worked: the duke wanted to question her as soon as possible.

‘Got them, got them both!’ His father and Mother Elinor could wriggle on the hook all they liked. Here, in his hands, Henry had the means to force the convent to give him the girl so she could be taken to York. And woe betide the convent for hiding a suspected spy, a threat to the realm!

Henry held his hands up to the fire, to warm them. It was a cold day, but it was more and more promising. Influence with the duke, now that was a fine thing to have.

‘Ah, sir?’

‘Yes, Simon?’

‘What will you tell the duke when he finds the girl is not, actually, a French spy?’

Once again that dreadful smile.

‘Well, I just have to get her out of that convent and away from my father, don’t I? How can I help it if she, the spy, tries to run away, en route, and so unfortunately dies an accidental death? So sad, but a dead spy is just as useful as a live one, wouldn’t you say?’

They both laughed. Clever, very clever.

‘Any word of Ewan?’ Simon shook his head. ‘No, Sir Henry, your father’s man has been delayed in York, waiting for the archbishop to return. It seems His Grace is not expected back from a jaunt to Reivaulx Abbey until tomorrow at the earliest.’

Simon was well informed — he was well paid to be. Henry relaxed and yawned expansively. ‘Then see to it that he’s even further “delayed”. Find me someone in York who’ll get his hands dirty for money — Ewan will be no loss to anyone but my father.’

Even Simon was surprised at the extent of Henry Hardwell’s ruthlessness in pursuit of his own way — something to remember and consider when the time for choosing sides declared itself. However, whilst he was in high favour, all would be well and he’d be rewarded. He’d cast his lot with the son now, no point in holding back.

‘As you wish, Sir Henry.’ Simon bowed to his master, his real master, and hurried away to rouse Michael from the kitchen.

Henry called after him, ‘I feel the need to pray, Simon. Return to me soon for we are both sinful men and it may be that the words of a certain holy abbess can be a comfort and a shriving for both our souls.’

I
t was evening of the following day and Duke Richard was furious. He’d just received word that the presumed spy had disappeared from the convent of Our Lady of the Sands. Angry too was the Archbishop of York, though his anger took a different form.

The two men stared at one another. One was just older than a boy, the other a well-fed man in his thirties, younger brother of Earl Warwick and therefore, a covert enemy of the pup standing before his archbishop’s Cathedra daring to masquerade as a duke.

George Neville saw with unvoiced satisfaction that his summons to Richard had made this stripling very angry indeed.

‘I am confused, Duke Richard. You instructed one of your vassal knights, Sir Henry Hardwell, to attempt armed entrance to one of my convents to abduct a girl in the care of the nuns?’

The archbishop’s tone was freezing. Richard of Gloucester might be the youngest brother of the king, but church lands were sacrosanct, as were those who lived on them. In this incident, he would not deal with a boy, the issue was far too serious. Unfortunately his contempt for the young duke flashed over his face for a moment, one fatal moment.

The duke’s impotent fury compressed sharply into something hard.

‘Be careful, Archbishop. Be very careful. I am my brother’s chief vassal in the north. If I am told that a spy for the French is hiding within
my
domain it is my duty, and yours, to hunt that spy down. To do else is treason to the king, my brother.’

He could be as wintery as the other man when he chose. Gaze locked on gaze and an onlooker might have heard each man breathing as if at the end of a long race.

The archbishop sucked in breath and spat his words back. ‘Treason, Duke Richard? I owe allegiance to a power greater than any king’s.’

Richard bared his teeth and in that moment the archbishop felt fear. He’d known this boy’s father, the great Duke of York. This boy’s eyes were suddenly formidable.

‘Ah yes. You are Earl Warwick’s brother after all.’

This was a most direct insult, to him personally, and to his office, and for a moment the archbishop struggled to find suitable response. The ingratitude of this pup! As a boy he’d lived with the earl, at Middleham!

‘Viper! After all my family has done for ...’

Richard raised his voice, shouting the prelate down.

‘Henry Hardwell was doing his duty when I asked him to enter that convent. These are desperate times, as well you know. We’ve had alarms from the French all year. And now the girl has gone. Fled. What does that tell you!’

He roared out the last sentence — a bellow of rage and frustration distantly heard even by the monks in the cloister of the Minster’s Garth. In some things, he was like his brother.

Fire with fire. The archbishop was only a man and he was sorely tempted. ‘This audience is over. Leave my palace! Your brother will hear of your insolence to the church.’

‘My brother, or your brother?’

Richard was normally moderate and careful in all he said, but he had rarely been so angry. This archbishop had been a burr under his saddle from the beginning and never more so than now. But Richard, as Duke of Gloucester, was second heir after his brother Clarence to the throne of England, and he would find that girl; and when he did, the archbishop would be made to eat his own insolence, slowly and painfully.

‘This girl was in the care of the Church; if she fled it must have been in fear. From your thugs! Anathema, this is worthy of anathema!’

It was a powerful threat and most men would have been cowed by the thought of the ultimate power the archbishop held: excommunication. But these last menacing words were delivered to the duke’s back as he stomped away from the archbishop’s throne without one look behind him.

In a churning blur of rage, Richard rode away from George Neville’s palace towards his own, where Henry Hardwell waited. Angry as he was, the duke knew that having botched what he’d been given to do, the knight would be more than keen to prove himself in the task he was about to be given.

Together they would catch that girl, his brother the king would expect nothing less.

The prioress of Our Lady of the Sands had finally overplayed her hand and the mischief she’d made came home to roost with a vengeance.

‘What did you tell the Hardwells?’ The Reverend Mother’s voice was sharp as she inspected Aelwin, prostrate on the flags in front of the altar, face down, weeping.

‘I was only trying to help us, Lady Elinor, help the convent.’

The bald lie incensed the Mother Superior. Kneeling down beside her sister in Christ, she hauled Aelwin’s head up by the veil.

‘I want the truth, Aelwin.
He
wants the truth.’ She flourished a crucifix in one hand, so close to Aelwin’s eyes that the suffering, bleeding body of Christ seemed like a weapon. ‘If you do not tell me, then blood will be on your head and I shall thrust you out from these walls, naked.
Tell me
!’

Aelwin wailed with terror. ‘I thought it was my duty. They’re our patron.’

‘God is watching and judging, Aelwin. Be careful, very careful for your soul.
Did you tell the Hardwells where Anne went
?’

Elinor had Aelwin by the shoulders now, eyes burning like coals. Aelwin gave up with a gasp. ‘Yes’. Her eyes filled with frightened tears.

Elinor was brutally direct. ‘For money?’ The other nun said nothing. ‘Oh Aelwin, Aelwin, they paid you to betray that girl.’

Aelwin thought about speaking the lie, but here, in the chapel, in sight of the great rood hanging in bloody, tortured majesty above them — the nunnery’s chief treasure — she found she couldn’t do it.

‘Yes, Mother.’ Her voice rustled, wind through dead grass.

‘You have accepted money; you have therefore put their souls, the immortal souls of both father
and
son — and your own — at risk, if they find that girl. It will be your fault if anything happens to Anne or your sister Joan — or to the Hardwells. Judas was paid to betray Our Lord also, and he was cursed for all eternity.’

Aelwin, with shaking hands, attempted to set her veil to rights, but did not dare get off her knees.

‘But, Mother, once Sir Henry had forced it out of me, I had to tell his father — I was so frightened for her. The baron said he would find Anne, and protect her from his son. I was terrified, too, that Sir Henry would burn the convent if he wasn’t told where she’d gone. I saved this place, Mother — and I was going to give the money to our treasury.’

Aelwin had nothing to lose and a certain resentful courage seeped back with the boldness of the lie.

Mother Elinor closed her eyes, crossed herself. When she spoke, her voice was bleak. ‘I do not believe you. God does not believe you. Go to your cell. You are to stay there and meditate on your sins without food until you are summoned. The archbishop must advise me in this matter.’

Aelwin shuffled from the chapel, badly shaken, in the custody of the porteress. It was so unfair. She
had
been threatened by the baron’s son when he’d tried to force his way into the convent looking for Anne, until, later, he’d found that money provided a more useful path to knowledge; money that Aelwin planned to use in buying herself the abbess’s seat when the nuns next elected their superior.

That dream was now ashes and the prioress snuffled tearfully as she was locked, locked! into her cell by the porteress to wait on the pleasure of the abbess. Aelwin now knew, with searing clarity, that money
was
the root of all evil. She’d taken Sir Henry’s coin and that had made her think of milking the baron as well, to add to her election hoard. But Sister Bertha, her enemy, had betrayed Aelwin to Elinor. She’d seen the prioress talking covertly to the baron outside the walls of the convent — the day after Anne and Joan had left the convent, the evening of the same day his son tried to storm the gate — and watched as Aelwin accepted the old man’s bribe.

Aelwin was deeply, deeply resentful. It seemed the world had come undone; her career at Our Lady of the Sands was over; the Mother Superior would see to that when she spoke with the archbishop.

Elinor had won, the convent was hers now. God and Mammon — perhaps it was true? The evil one had tempted her and she had fallen; fallen for half an Angel and one silver sixpence. Nowhere near thirty pieces of silver, nowhere near.

T
he third day since Anne and Joan had left the convent was nearly ended, yet the women continued to push themselves and their little donkey as fast as they could heading north, always north, towards Whitby, driven by Anne’s passion to go home to Brugge, to go home to her son.

The hare meat, the bannock and sheep’s cheese Mother Elinor had supplied them with were finished, and now they were chilled and hungry as the last light of day leached out of the western sky.

Behind them, the empty moor stretched away with no sign of shelter anywhere amongst the billows of heather.

Beside them, they could just make out the line of cliffs in the evening gloom. They’d have to stop soon, find what shelter they could, for walking tonight would be treacherous — too much cloud cover for the moon to light their way.

Anne shivered. Over the last days they’d been careful to avoid all roads and most tracks, reasoning that some few travellers would still be abroad whilst the ways were passable. But it was very lonely; this world of heather and sky was nearly silent, and, walking close to the edge of the gorse-clad clifftop, Anne longed, really longed, for the sound of voices, for lights to break up the gloom.

Would the candles be lit in the big house in Brugge now? Would her son be in the kitchen, warm and snug, with Deborah? And where was the king? Did he think of her, as she did of him?

Sometimes Anne’s courage failed as night came down, for it was then she felt most achingly alone in the world. Joan had become a friend, yes, but she wanted her son and she needed his father! If only they could hurry the journey to Whitby. Each day that passed brought them closer to winter, closer to the time when passage sailing across the open sea could not be bought, at any price.

Anne trembled convulsively. The wind from the east cut to the skin. Be practical, be sensible — and first, find somewhere to sleep tonight. They might find a way down to the shingled beach far below and perhaps there’d be a cave to shelter in? Anne was suddenly despondent. A cave, a dank cave? Had they become animals?

‘Anne!’ Joan’s voice was unnaturally loud and jerked Anne out of her reverie. ‘Look!’

From her greater height on top of the donkey, the nun had seen another, broader track joining the path they were on. It was just beneath the brow of the little hill that Brendan was stolidly plodding over and it led towards the edge of the cliff.

There
was
a way down to the sea!

‘Should we?’ Joan was nervous, but unless they could face sleeping on the open moor without a fire — in this large, rolling empty place, flames would be seen for miles and miles at night — they had little choice.

‘Yes. It will be fine on the beach, a good place, you’ll see. Perhaps there’ll be welks or even oysters to find.’ Anne was determined to keep Joan’s spirits up.

Suddenly a woman’s voice called to them from nowhere. ‘Hola! Hola, Sisters. Are you lost?’

A woman’s head appeared over the lip of the cliff, immediately followed by the rest of her body, clothed in home-woven woollen cloth. Then they caught her reek. Fish! She smelt of fish and smoke in equal parts — pungently.

‘Not lost, kind friend. That is, we’re on pilgrimage and may be a little off our chosen path.’

‘Ah, aren’t we all now, Sisters?’ The stranger laughed heartily, kindly.

Anne took the initiative. ‘Do you know if there’s somewhere we could pass the night nearby? A farmstead, perhaps?’