The Monsoon (63 page)

“Father, I heard-”

“You heard nothing, Tom. Nothing.”

“But I did.”

Tom’s voice was tight with outrage.

“Close the doors, Tom. There is something I must say to you.”

Tom did as he was told, then came back to the bed.

“There is one thing you must remember for the rest of your life, Tom. You must never interfere between a husband and wife. Alice is William’s chattel, he can do with as he wishes, and if you try to step between them he is within his rights to kill you. You heard nothing, Tom.” When he went down to supper Tom was still seething with anger.

Three places were set at the long polished table, and William was already seated at its head.

“You are late, Thomas,” he said, and he was smiling, relaxed and handsome, with a heavy gold chain around his neck and a bright ruby brooch hanging on his chest.

“We sit down to supper at eight o’clock at High Weald. Please try to abide by the custom of the house while you are a guest here.”

“High Weald is my home,” Tom protested coldly.

“I am not a guest.”

“That is a matter for debate, but I hold the contrary view.”

“Where is Alice?” Tom looked pointedly at the empty place on William’s lefthand side.

“My wife is indisposed,” William answered smoothly.

“She will not be joining us this evening. Please take your seat.”

“It is passing strange, but I find myself without appetite.

There is something hereabouts that has put me off my food. I will not be dining with you this evening, brother William.”

“As you wish.”

William shrugged, and turned his attention to the stemmed glass the butler was filling with red wine.

In his present mood Tom could not trust himself to spend the night in the same house as his brother. He threw on a cloak and stormed down to the stables. He shouted for the grooms, who came tumbling down the ladder from their quarters in the loft above and saddled one of the horses for him. Tom galloped the first mile, standing in the stirrups and driving his mount on through the night. The night air cooled his rage a little, so he took pity on the horse and reined him in to a trot along the Plymouth road.

He found Aboli with Luke Jervis in the taproom of the Royal Oak near the harbour. They welcomed him with unfeigned pleasure, and Tom drank the first pot of ale without taking it from his lips or drawing breath.

At one stage of the evening he climbed the back stairs to a small room, overlooking the harbour, with a pretty, laughing lass who helped him when he lost his balance and steadied him when he almost fell back down the stairs.

Her naked body was very white in the lamplight, and her embrace was warm and engulfing. She laughed in his ear as she clung to him, and he spent his anger on top of her. Later, she giggled and waved away the coin he offered her.

I should be the one who pays you, Master Tom.” Nearly everyone in the town had known Tom since childhood.

“What a darling boy you’ve grown into. It’s been many a month since my porridge pot was so well stirred.” Much later Aboli prevented him from accepting a challenge to arms from another over-refreshed seaman, and dragged him out of the tavern, helped him up onto his horse, and led him swaying in the saddle, singing lustily, to High Weald.

orly the next morning Tom rode up onto the moors with one of his saddlebags bulging. Aboli was waiting for him at the crossroads, a dark, exotic figure in the thick mist. He wheeled his horse in beside Tom’s.

“I think the good burghers of Plymouth would have preferred an attack by the French rather than your last visit.” He looked sideways at Tom.

“Do you not suffer still from last night’s alarms and excursions, Klebe?”

“I slept like the innocent child I am, Aboli. Why should I suffer?” Tom tried to smile but his eyes were bloodshot.

“The joy and folly of youth.” Aboli shook his head in mock wonder.

Tom grinned, put the spurs to his mount and sent him soaring over the hedge. Aboli followed him and they galloped over the brow of the hill to where a grove of dark trees nestled in the fold of ground beyond.

Tom pulled up, jumped down, tied his horse to one of the branches, then strode into the field of ancient stones that stood in the grove.

They were mossy with age, and legend said that they marked the graves of the old people who had been buried here back in the infancy of time.

He chose a propitious spot among them, allowing his feet, not his head, to guide him. At last he sTomped his heel into the damp turf.

“Here!” he said, and Aboli stepped forward with the spade in his hand.

He drove the blade deep into the soft earth and began to dig.

When he paused for breath, Tom took his turn and stopped when the hole was waist-deep. He climbed out of it and went back to where he had tethered his horse. He unbuckled the flap of his saddlebag and carefully lifted out a cloth-wrapped burden. He carried it back and set it down on the lip of the hole they had dug. He unwrapped the cloth from the jar. Through the glass, al-Auf glared back at him with one sardonic eye.

“Will you say the prayer for the dead, Aboli? Your Arabic is better than mine.” Aboli recited it in a deep, strong voice that echoed weirdly in the dark grove. When he fell silent Tom rewrapped the jar, hiding its grisly contents, and laid it in the bottom of the grave they had prepared for it.

“You were a brave man, al-Auf. May your God, Allah, pardon your sins, for they were many and grievous.”

He closed the grave and sTomped down the loose soil. Then he packed the green sods over it to hide the disturbed earth.

They went to the horses and mounted. From the saddle, Aboli looked back into the grove for the last time.

“You killed your man in single combat,” he said softly, “and you have treated his corpse with honour. You have become a warrior indeed, Klebe.” They turned the horses” heads and rode together down the moor towards the sea.

IT was as though Hal Courtney had realized that the hour-glass of his life was dribbling out the last grains of sand. His thoughts dwelt much on death and its trappings. From his bed he sent for the master stonemason from the town, and showed him the design he had drawn for his tomb.

“I know full well what you want Of me, my lord.” The mason was grey and grizzled, with the stone dust etched into his pores.

“Of course you do, John,” Hal said. The man was an artist with chisel and mallet. He had carved the sarcophagus for Hal’s father and for all his wives. It was fitting that he should do the same for the master of High Weald.

Then Hal ordered the funeral of his father to be conducted by the Bishop. His body would be laid to rest at last in the sarcophagus that John, the master mason, had prepared for it almost two decades before.

The chapel was filled with the family and all those who had known Sir Francis Courtney. The servants and labourers from the estate, dressed in their best clothes, filled the back pews and overflowed into the churchyard.

Hal sat in the centre of the aisle, in a special chair that the estate carpenters had adapted for him, with high sides to steady him and handles at each corner so that he could be carried about by four sturdy footmen.

The rest of the Courtney family sat in the front pew.

There were a dozen cousins, uncles and aunts as well as the closer relatives. William was in the seat nearest his father and Alice sat beside him. This was the first time she had appeared in public since the night Tom had tried to force his way into their private apartments.

She was dressed in mourning black, with a dark veil covering her face.

But when she raised the corner of it to dab at her eyes, Tom leaned forward and saw that the side of her face was swollen, a deep cut in her lip was covered with a black scab and an ugly old bruise on her cheek had faded purple and green. She sensed Tom’s eyes on her and hurriedly dropped the veil.

In the pew on the other side of the aisle sat the guests of honour: four knights of the Order of St. George and the Holy Grail.

Nicholas Childs and Oswald Hyde had come down from London together.

Alice’s father, John Grenville, Earl of Exeter, had ridden across from his own vast estates, which bordered High Weald, with his younger brother Arthur.

After the ceremony, the party returned to the big house for the funeral banquet. The family and the guests of honour ate in the great dining room, while trestle tables groaning with food and drink were set up in the stableyard for the peasantry.

Hal’s hospitality was so bountiful, the offerings from the cellars of High Weald so copious, that before the afternoon was out two peers of the realm were forced to retire to their rooms to rest. The Bishop was so overcome by the exigencies of his office and the fine claret that he had to be assisted up the main staircase by two footmen, pausing on the landing to dispense blessings on the mourners gathered below to watch his progress.

The revellers in the stableyard, after freely availing themselves of the pots of foaming cider, took advantage of the hedgerows and haystacks for similar purposes, and others less sedate. Mingled with the snores of the imbibers were the lusty rustle of hay, the giggles and happy cries of young couples otherwise occupied.

At dusk the four knights of the Order came down from their rooms in various stages of recovery from the mourning banquet, and climbed into the waiting carriages. The small cavalcade left the house, and followed Hal and Tom in the leading carriage back up the hill to the chapel.

In the vault, the ceremonials of the Order had been set out in the crypt. The mosaic design on the floor was in the shape of the five-pointed star and in the centre were three bronze cauldrons containing the ancient elements of fire, earth and water. The flames from the brazier danced on the stone walls and cast weird shadow shapes in the corners beyond the lines of stone tombs.

Hal’s chair stood ready to receive him at the door of the chapel.

Once he was seated in it, his brother knights carried him down the steps into the vault and set down the chair in the centre of the pentacle, with the three cauldrons surrounding him.

Tom, wearing the simple white robes of an acolyte, waited alone in the nave of the chapel above, praying before the altar in the light of the torches in their brackets set high on the walls. He could hear the voices of the knights murmuring and echoing softly from the vault below, as they opened the Lodge in the first degree. Then there was a heavy footstep on the stone stairs as the Earl of Exeter, Tom’s sponsor, came up to summon him.

Tom followed him down the stairs, to where the other knights were waiting for him within the sacred circle.

Their swords were drawn and they wore the gold rings and chains of their offices as Nautonnier knights, the navigators of the first degree of the Order. Tom knelt at the border of the pentacle and begged for entrance.

“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost!”

“Who would enter the Lodge of the Temple of the Order of St. George and the Holy Grail?” his father challenged him, in a gusty voice, like a man saved from drowning.

“A novice who presents himself for initiation to the mysteries of the Temple.”

“Enter on peril of your eternal life,” his father invited him, and Hal’s gentle tone made the warning more poignant. Tom rose to his feet and stepped over the mosaic marble pattern that marked the boundaries of the mystic circle. He had not expected to feel anything, but suddenly he shivered as though an enemy had marked his grave with the thrust of a sword into the earth.

“Who sponsors this novice?” Hal asked, in the same reedy voice.

The Earl spoke up boldly.

“I do.” Hal looked back at his son, and his mind wandered away to the hilltop in the savage, untamed land far below the equator where he had made his own vows so long ago.

He looked out of the circle to the stone sarcophagus, which at last held his own father’s body. He smiled almost dreamily as he considered the continuity, the enchanted chain of the knighthood that linked one generation to the next. He felt his own mortality creeping towards him like a man-eating beast stalking him from the darkness. It will be easier to meet the dark one when I have placed the future firmly in the hands of my sons, he thought, and it seemed then that he could see that future merging with the past and evolving before his eyes. He saw shadowy figures he recognized: the enemies he had fought, the men and women he had loved and who were long dead, mingling with others whom he knew had not yet passed into the mist of days to come.

The Earl reached out gently and placed a hand on Hal’s bowed shoulder to call him back to the present. Hal roused himself and looked at Tom again.

“Who are you?” He began the long catechism.

“Thomas Courtney, son of Henry and of Margaret.” Hal felt the tears rise in his eyes at the mention of the woman he had loved so dearly. The melancholy was deep in his soul. He felt an exhaustion of the spirit, and he wanted to rest, but he knew he could not until he had completed the tasks appointed to him. He roused himself once more and offered Tom the blade of the blue Neptune sword, which he had inherited from his own father. The light of the torches danced on the gold inlay of the blade and glowed in the depths of the sapphire on the pommel.

“I call on you to confirm the tenets of your faith upon this blade.” Tom touched the blade and began the recital: “These things I believe. That there is but one God in Trinity, the Father eternal, the Son eternal and the Holy Ghost eternal.”

“Amen!” said the Nautonnier knights together.

The question and answer continued, while the torches guttered.

Each question adumbrated the code of the Order, taken almost entirely from that of the Knights Templar.

The catechism outlined the history of the Templars. It recalled how in the year 1312 the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon had been attacked and destroyed by the King of France, Philippe Le Bel, in connivance with his puppet Pope Clement !” of Bordeaux.

The Templars” vast fortune in bullion and land was confiscated by the Crown, and their master was tortured and burned at the stake.