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Then Gloucester laughed. “You are very clever, Barby,” he
said, “but that does not amend the fact that Simon and Guy are nasty pieces of
work and need a good lesson.”

“But not at the cost of open defiance of the king’s writ
forbidding the tourney,” Alphonse said. “All that can accomplish is to provide
Leicester with a good excuse to lock you up.”

Gloucester did not look at all startled by what Alphonse had
said. Barbara realized the idea was not new to him. “I may have provided that
already,” he said sourly.

“Oh, no.” Alphonse shed his own cloak and walked past
Barbara, stopping beside her but closer to the fire. When he turned to
Gloucester again, his face was shadowed by the brightness behind him. “I am
sure Leicester did not intend to provoke you. He will not use your natural
response to his unfortunate manner as an excuse to arrest you. If he wanted to
do that, he would have done it before we left his presence.”

“I do not mean today’s quarrel.” Gloucester glanced at
Alphonse and then looked away, into the fire. “You remember that before we left
Worcester I gave Mortimer and his friends leave to delay their departure for
Ireland by a month. I did not tell you before because it did not seem to
matter, but Leicester took exception to my lenience. He accused me of taking
his enemies under my protection.”

“Well,” Alphonse said, “perhaps it might not be a bad idea
to leave London…ah…quietly.”

“But not to go to Dunstable,” Barbara put in.

“I must go to Dunstable, Barby,” Gloucester said. “I will
not hide like a scolded puppy. If the king’s writ is delivered there and the
tourney forbidden in Henry’s name, I will not defy the writ. But this has
nothing to do with you anymore. If there will be no tourney, then Alphonse’s
purpose here is ended, and I think the time has come for you to leave the
country—”

“No!” The male and female voices, though different in pitch,
sounded exactly the same note of determination.

Gloucester looked from one to the other and laughed.

“I am forbidden to leave anyway,” Barbara said.

“And I am no puppy either, to be chased from my bitch by a
bigger dog,” Alphonse added.

“That is not in question,” Gloucester said. “Had Leicester
known about either of those orders, he would not have greeted you as he did.
Tomorrow I will write to Leicester to ask about having the prohibition against
travel for Barby removed.”

“No.” Barbara shook her head energetically, and the young
earl vented an exasperated sigh.

“This is not your stinking stew but mine,” Gloucester said.
“I mixed it and cooked it. Why should you eat it?”

“Oh, Gilbert—” Barbara began, but Alphonse cut her short
gesturing with one hand and squeezing her shoulder with the other.

“Wait, Barbe,” he said. “Gilbert’s idea is not such a bad
one.”

“I will not go off to France alone and leave you two here to
brew up more trouble,” Barbara protested.

“No, no.” Alphonse laughed. “We could not do without you, my
love. What I was about to say is that if Gilbert uses that prohibition as an
excuse to write to Leicester, he will learn at once whether a reasonable
request will receive a reasonable answer. If it does, it would be stupid for
Gilbert to annoy Leicester by rushing out of London, especially to Dunstable.”

The reasonable request, sent off the morning of the next
day, received no answer at all, which was puzzling. The lack of response might
have been alarming rather than puzzling, but after dinner Gloucester received
what could be looked on as a gesture of reconciliation from Leicester—a long
report detailing the proposed exchange of property between the prince and
himself. The exchange was designed to break Edward’s power in the west, so that
he could not begin a new war, but at the same time not deprive the prince of a
decent income.

Gloucester looked at the parchments spread over the table in
his bedchamber with some distaste and repressed his impulse to carry them out
and show them to Alphonse. Although he knew the report had been sent to soothe
him by implying he was important and must be included in the negotiations, he
also regarded Leicester’s gesture as a warning. A significant portion of
Gloucester’s own property was in the west. Once Leicester had control of what
had been Edward’s lands, he would be in a far better position to suppress any
rising against him. Gloucester sat and stared at the closely written sheets of
parchment. Did he really want Leicester breathing down his neck in the Marches?
Worse yet, he and Leicester’s sons were young—Leicester himself was not. When
the earl was dead, the lands would go to his sons. Gloucester grimaced as he
thought of having Simon or Guy as a neighbor.

His glance lifted from the parchments at which he had been
staring unseeingly and settled on his writing desk. Within it there lay a
letter from Mortimer, which had come the day after the attempt to arrest and
deport Alphonse. The letter was a request for another postponement of his
departure for Ireland. Mortimer said his wife had fallen ill with strain and
grief and he wished to stay until she was more settled. Gloucester knew quite
well that Mortimer’s request was only a device to avoid exile; if he granted
it, every other lord Marcher would also beg to stay in England. He had been
about to write a curt refusal. Now…

He thought again about Simon and Guy as neighbors in Wales
and ground his teeth. Even if they did not attack him, they would almost
certainly upset the delicate balance of the relationship he had maintained with
the Welsh. Mortimer had been a good conduit to Llywelyn before Leicester had
offered Llywelyn better terms to turn on his cousin. But Gloucester knew
Llywelyn. That he accepted Leicester’s terms would not necessarily make
Llywelyn Mortimer’s enemy. So if the situation changed—if power in the west
shifted out of Leicester’s hands—Mortimer would be useful again to bargain with
his cousin.

The question was rapidly becoming, Gloucester thought,
whether it was better to endure the rapacity of Leicester’s favorites or the
king’s favorites. He pushed away the parchments, then pulled them closer but
did not read from them. Whatever property was confiscated, whatever was
“temporarily” placed in Leicester’s hands, only his sons and a few very close
friends would profit. It had not been that way in the beginning. The Council
had agreed to control the king’s extravagance and dismiss his favorites. The
power and responsibility had been evenly distributed. Only since the battle of
Lewes, since Leicester had taken and kept the king a virtual prisoner, had the
earl, little by little, made himself all powerful.

Again Gloucester suppressed an urge to talk over the subject
with Alphonse, which reminded him that Barbara still did not have permission to
leave the country and that she and Alphonse clearly intended to accompany him
to Dunstable. It was stupid and unnecessary for them to do so, but Gloucester
understood why they insisted. He had stood by them when they were in trouble,
and now they intended to return the favor.

Irritably, he reached for a clean sheet of parchment. He
would think about Alphonse and Barbara later. Right now he had to decide what
to write to Mortimer—and if he was not going to refuse Mortimer’s plea to
remain at Wigmore, decide to whom he should entrust the letter. He did not want
Leicester to intercept it because— He broke off the thought, rather relieved at
not needing to complete it and delighted that the solution to both his problems
had interrupted an idea too dangerous to formulate before he obtained more
information. Alphonse could take his letter to Thomas at St. Briavels, and
Thomas could send it on to Mortimer.

He started to get up at once to explain his brilliant
notion, then laughed aloud and sank back in his seat. The letter had to be
written first. Gloucester took a quill from the writing desk, fished around for
the small, sharp knife that was always kept in it, and trimmed the quill, his
lips pursed. If Alphonse was going to carry the letter to St. Briavels, there
was no chance at all that it would be lost or taken from him. He would destroy
it before he was captured, or Barby would destroy it for him. Thus it would be
safe to write…what? It would be safe, but what did he want to say?

The quill cut, Gloucester unstoppered the ink horn, dipped
the point, and drew a short line on the bottom of the nearest piece of
parchment to test it. Then he paused. Mortimer would see at once that the
letter had not been written by a clerk. Would that make him read too much into
anything that was said? A man did not trouble himself to write unless he wished
to keep very secret what was written. Should he call his clerk? No. Gloucester
smiled. To write in his own hand would solve the problem of what to say—he need
say nothing that would commit him to any act. It would be sufficient to write
good wishes for Mortimer’s well-doing. That plus the extension of Mortimer’s
leave to remain in England for another month would be enough.

He began to write, then stopped and smiled. And now he had
his insurance that Alphonse would not refuse to go to St. Briavels. He could
give Alphonse a word-of-mouth message for Thomas: to arrange a meeting between
him and Mortimer during the early part of March. Alphonse would surely
understand that he would not wish to commit that message either to writing or
to a common messenger. And his clerk was old. It would be cruel to send him all
the way to Wales in winter weather.

Chapter Twenty-Five

For the first few weeks after she and Alphonse arrived at
St. Briavels, Barbara enjoyed being the lady of the castle. Though the keep was
in good order, many of the amenities provided by a woman were lacking. Thomas
de Clare had no wife, and the widow of the old castellan had retired to a
convent when Thomas took hold for his brother. Within a day of arriving,
Barbara was hearing from Clotilde of menservants in rags because the cloth
readied for their new clothes had never been cut or sewed, of wool carded and
spun but not bleached or dyed because no one knew what its purpose should be,
of waste and mismanagement of food because Thomas was often away and there was
no one to say what part of a slaughtered animal should be served, what part
salted or, if there was more soft curd than anyone wanted to eat, that the
excess should be pressed into hard cheese.

Absently, her mind on the more serious problem of what she
should do about her husband’s intention to ride back and meet Gloucester at
Dunstable, Barbara allowed Clotilde to shepherd her to the trouble spots and
settled the household problems. Realizing later what she had done, she
apologized for interfering to Thomas, who had comically got down on his knees
and begged her to continue. Thus, she almost accidentally became the lady of
the keep.

The occupation the task had given her was fortunate because
she was totally unsuccessful in stopping Alphonse from leaving for Dunstable.
When, in the privacy of their bedchamber in the west gate tower, she protested
to Alphonse that Gloucester did not want him at Dunstable and that he had not
yet given Gilbert’s message to Mortimer, Alphonse laughed at her.

“Thomas will give the message to Mortimer, if he responds to
Gloucester’s letter before I return here, but I expect to be back from
Dunstable by the twentieth or twenty-first of February.”

“You will only encourage Gloucester to fight,” she said
bitterly.

“No.” Alphonse cupped her face in his hand. “I swear I will
not. And though I do not wish to crow like a cock on a dung heap, if I am with
Gilbert, the young Montforts are less likely to plead with their father to
allow the tourney to take place. Not that I think their appeal would move
Leicester, but why take the chance? And the last thing we need is another
confrontation, so I hope to keep Gilbert from losing his temper again, if I
can.”

“And if you cannot? You will both end up in prison.”

“Not I. The worst Leicester will do to me is expel me from
the country.” He burst out laughing again at the expression on her face, lifted
her from her seat beside the small hearth, crushed her to him, and kissed her.

Taken by surprise, Barbara clung to him. When their lips
parted, he said playfully, “I could swear from your sour look that you do not wish
to part from me. Confess! Tell me you love me!”

For once Alphonse had struck the wrong note. Later Barbara
asked herself whether he was awkward and off balance because she was more
important to him than other women, but at the moment the teasing infuriated
her. She pushed at him, and his arms tightened brutally. When she failed to
free herself, she tilted back her head and lifted her brows.

“If you intend to ‘press’ a confession out of me, you are
wasting your time. I told you before we married that I had loved you since I
first laid eyes upon you—like every other woman.”

He was hurt. The warmth and laughter disappeared from his
voice and eyes, and though he made a light answer, he released her quickly.
Then he had mumbled that he had forgotten to tell Chacier he thought a stirrup
leather was wearing and should be replaced before they rode out again, and went
away. Still angry, but more because her sense of fairness was in direct
conflict with her jealousy, Barbara let him go.

She could not think of a way to open the subject of his
remaining in St. Briavels again either, because she did not really fear any
harm would come to him in Dunstable. Had she been truly afraid, she would have
used other devices, even admitting that she was jealous if it was the only way
to keep him safe. But she could not try to force Alphonse into what he would
believe was abandonment of a friend in need just to keep her private green-eyed
devil at bay.

Besides, he soon returned to her, seemingly cured of his
hurt, in fact in a singularly good mood. Barbara guessed he might have put
together her remark about every other woman with her reluctance to let him out
of her sight to come to a conclusion too close to the truth. To betray her
jealousy would be worse than letting him know she really did adore him. Thus,
she was more yielding than usual when he began to caress her abed, and she let
him ride off to Dunstable the next day with no more than an astringent reminder
that he had promised to keep Gilbert from fighting, not goad him into it.

Alphonse left St. Briavels on February 12. On the sixteenth,
a messenger came from Mortimer with thanks for the extended leave to stay and a
warning that he had yielded two of his fortified manors in Wales to Montfort’s
deputies. If Thomas was wise, the messenger said, he would warn his brother
that Montfort had sent far too few men. Mortimer, the message continued, was
not sure whether this was a sign of weakness in Leicester or a sign that the
earl did not wish to defend Mortimer’s property. Whichever was true, one thing
was certain, the Montforts would not try to protect Gloucester’s nearby Welsh
estates from raiding.

“And what am I to do about this?” Thomas said to Barbara
when he had dismissed the messenger to find a meal for himself in the kitchen.
“No rider from here could reach Dunstable by tomorrow, and I have not the
faintest notion where Gilbert will go afterward.”

“You are not really worried about the lands, are you?”
Barbara asked.

Thomas shook his head. “What Mortimer says is very likely true,
and I may send an extra troop to each manor, but Mortimer sent this warning to
bring Gilbert west. You know Gilbert intends to meet Mortimer in March, but if
I now suggest that meeting to Mortimer’s man, will it not sound as if Gilbert
is too eager? But if I do not use this messenger, I may not find it so easy to
discover where to send the invitation later. Mortimer is moving often and
keeping his whereabouts secret to reduce the chance he might be arrested
despite Gilbert’s order.”

Experience with an uncle and a father who moved often and
rapidly around the country had taught Barbara the answer to that problem.
“Mortimer cannot guess how uncertain Gilbert’s plans are. He will not know that
Gilbert may be out of your reach, so thank him for his warning, tell him you
are sending it on to Gilbert, and ask him to send a man again in six
days—unless he wishes to tell you where he will be at that time—because you are
sure Gilbert will want to thank him for the warning, perhaps in person.”

“Now that is a clever notion.” Thomas smiled at her.

“It is possible too,” Barbara added, “that before the six
days are over, Alphonse will be back here with news of Gilbert’s whereabouts if
he has gone elsewhere than Tonbridge or London.”

In fact it was on the sixth day, only a few hours before
Mortimer’s second messenger arrived in St. Briavels, that Barbara and Thomas
learned Gilbert had gone to London after leaving Dunstable. They did not learn
it from Alphonse, however. Alphonse had gone with Gloucester to London. It was Sir
John Giffard who came with the news—and with a hundred men and more to follow.

In response to Gloucester’s invitation to the proposed
tourney, Sir John told them, he had gone first to Dunstable. While there, he
had heard of the capture and arrest of Robert de Ferrars, the Earl of Derby,
for lawlessness.

“Good riddance,” Thomas muttered. “Who has Ferrars for a
friend needs no enemies. That man is like a wild beast. Whatever he wants, he
takes without regard to law or loyalty.”

“But will the arrests stop with Derby?” Sir John asked.
“Leicester said publicly that he hoped Derby’s arrest would prove that all men,
whether or not they were his supporters, were equally subject to the law. If
they had taken property—even in lieu of ransom from those who had been their
prisoners—they must be prosecuted.”

“That is not going to sit well with many,” Barbara remarked
tartly. “But I cannot believe Leicester could be so unreasonable. There have
been so many years of disorder. To speak of prosecuting every crime is crazy.”

“Not if Leicester is seeking a legal excuse to rid himself
of anyone who is not blindly obedient to his will and his vision,” Sir John
pointed out bitterly.

There was a brief, tense silence, then Thomas cried, “But if
Gilbert thinks that too, why did he go back to London?”

“For my sake, curse me,” Sir John groaned. “I went to
Gilbert when I heard what Leicester said. In fact, I have taken land in lieu of
ransom, as you know, Thomas, and I have had various other disagreements with
Leicester. Then,” he nodded at Barbara, “there was that trouble with your
husband. You could not know, but Guy rode up to Warwick at the end of October,
foaming at the mouth, and accusing me of being party to making an attempt on
his life. He said your husband laid an ambush for him, backed by a troop of the
prince’s friends.”

“That is not what happened!” Barbara exclaimed, and gave a
brief explanation of the attack by Guy’s larger party on their smaller one and
how Hamo le Strange had become involved. “But surely Guy cannot blame you for
what happened outside of Gloucester. How could you know he would go to
Gloucester?” she pointed out.

Sir John shrugged. “One can be blamed for anything at all,
when an excuse for blame is sought. Anyway, Gloucester said I should take my
men and come here and he would try to find out exactly what Leicester planned.
I argued until I was blue, but he would not listen to me.”

Thomas only shook his head, but his young mouth looked so
hard and grim that Barbara could have wept. Her anxiety increased when, over
the next few days, she realized Thomas and Sir John were quietly making ready
for war. She feared any moment to see Gilbert and her husband come flying down
the road pursued by an army, but no one came except the serfs whose service was
due and Mortimer’s messenger. The messenger reported that Lord Mortimer did not
wish to be offensive and did wish to speak to Gloucester in person, but he
could not help fearing this suggested meeting was a trick to take him prisoner,
like Derby, and he wanted hostages for his free coming and going to and from
the place of meeting.

Thomas threw up his hands in despair. He was offended that
Mortimer would not trust his brother’s word of honor and wanted to refuse
outright. Then recalling that they might be on the verge of a war, he realized
he could not afford to cast away any ally. Sir John agreed, and began to
ruminate on what was best to do. Barbara, eager to fix her mind on any problem
that did not include a pitched battle between Leicester and Gloucester in which
her husband was involved, came to a quick decision. She urged Thomas to offer
her and Alphonse as hostages to Mortimer.

“I cannot do that,” the young man cried, looking horrified.
“Gilbert would kill me if I suggested that his guests be turned into prisoners.”

“Not if the offer came from the guests. And who else can
Gilbert send? Besides, I am not at all sure Mortimer will accept us. He may not
think we are of enough value to Gilbert, but to make the offer will gain time.
The messenger will have to go and come back again. I am sure Gilbert will be
here by then…”

Her voice faltered. She was beginning to have visions of
Alphonse dead on the road instead of fleeing before an army, but both visions
turned out to be false. In the late afternoon of February 27, one day before
Mortimer’s messenger made his fourth appearance, Gloucester and Alphonse rode
into St. Briavels. They were cold and muddy, but that was the worst danger they
had suffered on their journey. The red-brown stains on their armor and
surcoats, which had made Barbara bite her lip when they shed their cloaks, were
rust, not blood.

At first everyone asked questions and no one answered, but
once mail and wet cloaks had been shed, dry clothes donned, and the whole party
settled around the roaring fire, little by little everything was made clear.
Gloucester had had no open confrontation with Leicester, but neither had he
obtained any assurance that Sir John—or anyone else—would be pardoned for past
offenses. He had thus been very glad to use the excuse of danger to his Welsh
lands to leave London for St. Briavels. Then Thomas brought him up to date on
Mortimer’s demands.

“Hostages!” Gloucester exclaimed. “After I have put myself
at risk to delay his banishment to Ireland—”

“Gilbert,” Barbara interrupted, “do not take at face value
anything Mortimer does or says. I cannot swear that fear of capture has not
overpowered his real knowledge that you can be trusted, but equally I cannot
swear that the hostages you send will not serve some far cleverer purpose than
ensuring Mortimer’s safety. In any case, do not take as an insult what cannot
have been meant as one.”

“Cannot?” Gloucester asked, but more curiously than angrily.

“Oh, Gilbert, a man who wishes to insult another does not
send messengers back and forth a half-dozen times. Mortimer made the first
moves toward reconciliation too. And you may as well know that by my advice and
urging Thomas has already offered him hostages—me and Alphonse.”

Gloucester looked at Alphonse, who was sitting beside
Barbara. He had taken her hand in his own and, after she spoke, raised and
kissed it. Then Gloucester looked back at Barbara.

“I think you should know, Barby, that Alphonse has already
confessed to me that you were not really held as prisoners at Wigmore. I must
tell you also that I am no longer satisfied with the Earl of Leicester’s
control of the king, the prince, the government—everything. I may be forced to
oppose him openly, and that would perhaps make me your father’s enemy.”