The Prince and the Pilgrim (31 page)

“Except to ruin my wedding night!”

“Let’s hope you’ll be back beside your lady long before she wakes,” said Jeshua, and turned to call softly: “Mariamne? Come now.”

She had been waiting in the shadows some way along the corridor. As Alexander went for clothes and weapon she came quickly, stopped beside Jeshua for whispered question and answer, reached up to kiss him, then slipped silently into the bedchamber and over to her mistress’s side. Alice did not stir. Alexander, dressed and sword in hand, lifted a hand in salute and, as silently, left the chamber.

Jeshua had gone. Alexander, his doeskin slippers making no sound, ran along the corridor towards the duke’s room.

The duke’s rooms were on the south front of the castle, and to get to them Alexander had to reach the corner tower, feel his way (for there was no light on the tower stair) down a dozen steps of the spiral, and then find the door of Ansirus’ bedchamber. From the quick directions that Jeshua had managed to give him, he knew this to be the third door along, plain to see, as it was normally lighted by two cressets, one to either side of the archway.

What was also plain to see, as Alexander ran towards the pool of light thrown by the torches, was that the door of the duke’s chamber stood open.

And as he gained the doorway with a rush he saw three things. A man, presumably the duke’s servant, lying on his face with a dagger’s hilt standing in his back; the duke himself, asleep in the great bed and apparently undisturbed; and Count Madoc stooping over the sleeping form with a pillow in his hands.

A still, startled pause, then Alexander gave a breathless shout. “To me!” and flung himself forward. In the same moment he saw that the count was unarmed: on this secret mission he had come
without
his sword, and his dagger was lodged in the body of the man he had killed.

Alexander checked momentarily, and the moment was all that Madoc needed. He flung the pillow straight at Alexander’s face, and as the young man dodged aside he leaped back from the bedside and tore the duke’s sword and dagger down from where they hung on the wall. Then, with fury in his eyes, but showing all the terrifying control of the seasoned fighting man, he sprang to the attack.

Alexander, meeting that first rush, had all he could do to hold his assailant off. This was a very different matter from those other fights of his – so very long ago, it now seemed. The count was a big man, both angry and desperate, with more even than his life at stake, and how the fight would have gone in those first minutes if the odds had not been on Alexander’s side, it is hard to tell. But fate – or justice – worked against the older man. When he had stooped over his victim, ready with the smothering pillow, his eyes had been near the night-candle that burned beside the duke’s bed, and its little plume of flame still burned ghostly but blinding on his sight. And the sword he wielded was not his own: Ansirus’ weapon, being a sword for state rather than for killing, was both longer and lighter than his own accustomed blade. There had been no fighting in Duke Ansirus’ life for a great many years.

Alexander, on the other hand, had his eyes adjusted to the dimness, and was using his own sword – his father’s sword, a fighting weapon that
had
already been blooded by him in the skirmishes with the Cornishmen, and since then in practice had grown used to his hand, and fought now as an extension of it.

And whatever of ambition or fear Madoc had at stake, Alexander already knew that, if he lost this fight, the duke would die also, and Alice, his sweet Alice, would be seized by the murderer and used without mercy to help him possess and control Castle Rose and its people for his own base ends.

The swords met, clashed, slithered, hacked and clashed again. Madoc, beating forward with both sword and dagger in murderous attack, managed to force the young man back and give himself a few precious seconds in which to pull away. He whirled the whistling metal round and over his head, testing the unfamiliar weight, and cursing as the jewels of the hilt grazed his hand, then brought it down to meet Alexander’s blade again as the prince lunged after him. Madoc’s dagger cut down at the stretched sword-arm, caught in the seam of the sleeve, and came away bloodied. He laughed, a brief breathless grunt of pleasure, and then, hand and eye adjusted, pressed forward again, urgent to finish the fight before the noise should rouse the sleeping castle.

One sleeper, indeed, could surely not fail to be disturbed. The duke was waking. He stirred, half turned, said something in a blurred undervoice, then subsided again on his pillows.

Neither man took any notice. Slashing, thrusting, dodging and leaping, first to one side of the
bed
and then the other, they fought, while the duke, sinking back into drugged slumber, lay without further sound or movement.

Alexander, forced back towards the doorway by the double attack of sword and dagger, and desperately conscious of being outweaponed, and so outfought, was also sharply aware of the servant’s body lying somewhere in the dim doorway behind him. To trip over it would mean his almost certain death, and he dared not, as he fought to parry both sword and dagger, take even one precious second to look aside. His left hand was out to feel for the jamb of the door, flailing behind him as he tried desperately to remember just where the body lay.

Another step back, as short as he dared make it, while Madoc’s face, suffused with rage and triumph, was thrust forward towards him into the light cast by the cressets in the corridor. It was the sudden change in those gloating eyes that warned Alexander that something new had happened. In the same moment, cool and infinitely comforting, he felt the hilt of a dagger pressed into his left hand.

Alice’s voice, as cool as the metal, was speaking. “Now, Mariamne! Help me pull poor Barty’s body out of the way. My lord needs room. Never mind the blood, woman! It’s only where I pulled the dagger out! Good. Now, quickly! Run, tell the guards to hurry, and rouse anyone else you see! Run!”

If she said more, Alexander did not hear it. Armed now equally with his opponent, and sensing the doubt overtaking the man’s rage, he felt
nothing
but a kind of exhilaration. His cut arm he felt not at all. He laughed, brought the dagger round into play alongside his sword, and leaped forward as if this were the first attack, rather than a desperate saving from defeat.

Twelve seconds later he killed Madoc with a blow from the murderer’s own dagger. Standing over the body, his breathing ragged, his tunic splashed with the count’s blood, and a trickle of his own dripping down from one hand, he dropped both weapons to the floor, and turned to hold out his arms to Alice. She flew into them, and he took her in an embrace as close as any other of that stormy wedding night.

“Alice. Alice.”

“I thought he was going to kill you.”

“He would have done, I think, but for you.”

“No, no. My brave lord, my love.”

She reached up, and his head went down in a kiss that seemed to be given by his whole body. “Alice, Alice –” It was all he could say.

“
Alice?
”

The voice from the bed brought them both back to earth and to the present. The duke, still dazed with sleep, and the fading fumes of the drug, was trying to push himself up on the pillows.

“What is it? What do you do here, child? Alexander?”

She pulled herself from her husband’s arms and ran to him. “Nothing, nothing, father. All’s well, truly. It’s over. And Madoc is dead.”

So few minutes had passed, though to Alexander, busy twisting Alice’s kerchief round the shallow cut in his forearm, the fight had seemed to take an eternity of time. The guards, sent by Jeshua, came running, and hard behind them the castle servants, sobered now and eager to rid their master’s home of the threat that all had feared, but been powerless to prevent.

Now by the count’s own action that threat was removed. It emerged that when he and Ansirus had been closeted together for a private talk after the wedding feast Madoc had spoken frankly of his disappointment, but had agreed that no binding contract had been made. He had even laughed, accepting the inevitable change of his plans with a kind of wry humour (“When children fall in love, what are grown men to say to it? Well, what’s done is done, so let us pledge them once more, cousin, and then get to our beds.”). If the duke had been less exhausted by the events of that long day, he might, even in his relief at the outcome of the talk, have been wary of accepting wine poured by his kinsman. But courtesy and trust demanded it, so he had taken the cup, and in a short while succumbed to that heavily drugged slumber.

Jeshua had been right about the count’s desperation. It had forced him in haste into a rash and very risky plan. By smothering Ansirus in his sleep he must have hoped that the duke’s death would be attributed to another seizure. What he planned after that could only be guessed at. The discovery of the body would of course have thrown the castle into an uproar, in which it might
have
been easy for the count – the duke’s nearest kinsman, who had already established some sort of right there – to assert his authority above that of the two he had called “children”; the authority of a regent, perhaps, for which he could quote Ansirus’ own sanction, claiming that it had been given last night in that private talk, a statement that no one could contradict.

And after that? Defiance by Alexander, a quarrel easily picked, that would let him fight the young man and kill him? Then, as kinsman and heir, Madoc’s way would be clear to invoke the duke’s first proposal, and take possession of Alice, hoping that in her grief and confusion she would accept his claim as her father’s first choice of husband and ruler of Castle Rose? Knowing nothing of Alice, he might have expected that she, being young, alone, and in distress, would not try to deny his claim, but would accept his “protection” for herself and her people. And even if, in her grief, she threatened to ask for the High King’s judgment over Alexander’s death, she would hardly pursue the matter once she was with child by Madoc of an undoubted heir.

About the murdered servant Count Madoc, being what he was, probably did not think at all. A body carried out and flung into the river, to be found and wondered over perhaps days after that tragic night …? By the time questions were asked – if indeed anyone troubled to investigate a servant’s death – he himself would, with luck, be lord of Castle Rose and above questioning.

The count’s men, not knowing that they had been prisoners through the night, emerged at
daybreak
to be told – with an irony they could not appreciate – that their master had suffered a seizure during the night and had died of it. Their captain, escorted by Jeshua to the count’s room, looked at the blood-stained body on the bed and, after a due pause for reflection on his and his men’s situation, agreed that it had been a seizure. His men would leave that day, and take their master’s body home for burial. Meanwhile the dead servant’s body was carried to the duke’s own chapel, and the duke, shaking off the mists of the sleeping-potion, went there himself to add his prayers to those of the man’s sister, a kitchen-girl, who knelt there weeping.

And eventually, as it usually does, morning came.

Neither Alexander nor Alice took any part in all these complicated matters. They stole out of the duke’s crowded bedchamber, picking their way over Madoc’s body, and went back to bed.

So ended the adventure of Alexander the Fatherless and Alice the Pretty Pilgrim. They found their home and, as the chronicler relates, “They lived there in great joy.”

But first there were a few things to be settled. Count Madoc’s body was taken home by his men, there to be given honourable burial. It is on record that the captain, who knew something of his late master’s plans, and who certainly knew the manner of his master’s death, said nothing about either. Between the duke and his distant kinsmen there was, as before, indifference and courtesy.

Or rather, between them and Castle Rose. The duke did not remain there for much longer. With Alexander confirmed as the castle’s master, Ansirus made his final preparations for retiring to St Martin’s monastery. Meanwhile a messenger, a trusted servant, was sent to Camelot. He carried an account of all that had happened, Queen Morgan’s connection with the dissident faction, her attempts to get hold of the grail of power, her plan, through Count Madoc, to acquire Castle Rose for some purpose of those same would-be rebels, and Madoc’s attack on the duke and the murder of his servant. Finally, a kind of confession
that
asked for merciful judgment on Alexander’s killing of Count Madoc.