The Stone Rose (68 page)

She sat up, cloak clutched to her breasts, and he couldn’t miss the apprehensive look she shot at the saddlebag, nor the lines of tension which appeared round her mouth. ‘Anything of worth? Whatever are you talking about?’

Alan’s smile died. She would not trust him. She was not going to confide in him. Doggedly, he continued, praying she would change her mind. ‘In France, at the tourney, I caught someone sneaking into the tent.’

‘You never told us.’

‘I saw no point. I thought I’d routed a thief.’ Alan patted the purse which hung round his neck. ‘You know I carry my valuables on me. I wondered if the man was after something that you or Ned were carrying.’

Her cheeks emptied of colour. ‘No,’ she said, very curt, and hunched her shoulder on him in that dismissive way of hers. ‘Cut-purses aren’t selective. They go for anything they can lay their hands on, don’t they? There’s no reason to assume your thief was after something in particular.’

‘That was what I thought, the first time. But when I found him hanging around the second time–’

‘Second time?’

Alan wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Gwenn had gone a shade whiter. Trust me, Gwenn. Please trust me. ‘Yes, he was lurking by the King’s cookhouse, eyeing my tent as if waiting his chance. I concluded he must be searching for something special.’

‘I can’t think what.’

‘Can’t you?’ Alan reached for her chin, and gently brought it round. Her eyes were hooded. Crushing an overpowering feeling of disappointment, he added, ‘I recognised the thief, the second time.’

‘Re...recognised him?’ She had forgotten to hold the cloak over her breasts and was twisting the material into a ball.

Fighting a yearning to slide his hands about her face and kiss her till she was senseless, Alan peeled his hand from her chin. Her lack of trust betrayed her lack of feeling for him, but the knowledge did not douse the fire she had lit in his veins. Where was his pride?

‘I’d seen him before, in Vannes.’ Alan gave her time to digest his announcement. ‘Our sneak thief was a pedlar who went by the name of Conan.’

Frantic fingers clutched his forearm. ‘Did you say Conan? From Vannes? Johanna, Philippe’s nurse, had a brother called Conan, a pedlar. Oh, God. I don’t understand.’ She shoved her hair over her shoulders.

Alan threw what pride he had left to the wind. A few, simple words, but it was the hardest thing he had ever done. ‘Gwenn, trust me. I’d like to help.’

The eyes that stared out of the pale, discomposed face were distraught, but this did not hide their astonishment. ‘Help? You can’t help.’ Reaching for her undergown, Gwenn dragged it over her head, murmuring distractedly, ‘I must think. Pass me my gown, Alan, I’m going to wash.’

Complying with her request, Alan held down a sigh and grabbed his breeches and chainse.

***

They were proceeding along another dusty English highway. Gwenn had been lost in gloomy reverie for hours. The sun was sinking towards the west, and Alan had not decided where they would stop that night. He saw her launch a furtive glance over her shoulder, not her first by any means. She had been doing that at intervals all day. Sometimes she turned her face towards him, but he knew she hardly saw him. She was riding in another world, and it wasn’t the one he inhabited.

‘Gwenn, don’t be afraid.’ On impulse, he reached for her hand. ‘What is it? If it’s the pedlar, forget him. He can’t trouble us.’

‘How so?’

‘He was murdered the same day that Ned...’ a shadow crossed her face, and Alan cursed himself.

Gwenn glanced at the hand clasping hers, admitting she warmed to his touch. All day she had studiously avoided contact with him, half afraid that if she touched him, it would spark off the extraordinary passion they had shared the night before. Alan made her feel, and she wasn’t sure she could cope with it. She didn’t want to become dependent on him. What would happen when they reached Sword Point and had to part? She could not bear any more losses. Gently, she withdrew her hand. ‘Why do the good have to die, Alan?’

‘The good? I doubt that the pedlar–’

‘I’m not referring to him. I’ve been thinking about Ned and my family, all of them good people in their way. I’m not saying that they were perfect, no one is. But they didn’t deserve to die. I feel betrayed, not by them, they couldn’t fight fortune. But I loved them all. God has betrayed me.’ Her smile was crooked. ‘My grandmother would have been very shocked to hear me say that. Is it blasphemy, Alan?’

Alan regarded her helplessly and wished he had a gift with words. An impassable gulf yawned between them. Gwenn was educated. From an early age, she had sat with her brother and poured over his books. She could read
and
write. Her education enabled her to puzzle out the finer nuances of her feelings and come to some understanding of herself. But while Alan spoke three languages passably well, he could neither read nor write. He had no mastery of words, and no glib answers. How did you counter grief such as hers? Biting his lip, it occurred to him that the most learned, silver-tongued churchman in Christendom probably had nothing to offer her.

She may not trust him, not yet, but Alan knew one way to take her mind off her hurts. He brightened and, quite forgetting that he was supposed to have worked her out of his blood, he offered her his hand again.

Gwenn’s heart lifted at Alan’s gesture and, reading the question in his eyes, she gave him a watery smile. Perhaps the carnal comfort Alan offered, however short-lived, was better than nothing. Blushing, she let his warm fingers close tightly over hers.

***

The trail having gone cold on him, Otto was seething when he rode into the village. Village? It wasn’t so much as a village as a stretch of common land enclosed along its length by two tracks edged with an assortment of shabby farmsteads. Empty stocks stood in the centre of the green. Pigs, hobbled by their hindlegs to stakes, were rooting around the common; and the village children were in the bushes, guzzling ripe blackberries, screeching and squabbling over the juicy fruit like a flock of unruly starlings.

Since he’d realised that he had lost Gwenn Fletcher and her escort, Otto had been racking his brains, trying to guess where she was going. Ned Fletcher had come to Brittany from England with his cousin Alan le Bret. Was the concubine’s daughter going to Ned Fletcher’s family? He could think of no other reason for her to be in England. Where was it the two English cousins had hailed from? Somewhere in the north, Otto thought. The word Richmond sprang into his mind. Wasn’t Richmond connected in some way with the Dukedom of Brittany?

Otto wasn’t about to travel that far, not unless he was positive he would catch her. He drew rein by the brambles, near the children. While he pondered what to do, he ran his gaze over the nearby cottages in search of an inn. A drink would slide down beautifully.

No inn. Otto swore, and the children turned purple, juice-stained faces towards him. The youngest – it might have been a girl, Otto was unsure whether the darned sack the child wore was a long tunic or a short gown – stuck its thumb in its blackberry-dyed mouth and stared.

‘I’m lost,’ impatiently, he addressed the children. They took a step back, blinking like wary owls. Selecting his softest voice, he went on, ‘I’m looking for an inn. Where will I find one?’

‘No inn here,’ the elder of the children said. This one was definitely a boy. In chausses and bare-chested, he had freckled skin and a mop of badly cut brown hair which refused to lie flat. Some bramble leaves had stuck in it.

‘Where can I buy food?’

Shrugging, the boy wiped blackberry juice from his cheeks and pointed a dirty finger at the nearest cottage. ‘Try Henry Smith’s. The others went there. His wife sold them bread and cheese.’

‘Others?’

‘Strangers, like you. A man and a woman. They had
two
horses
and
a mule,’ the boy said, clearly awed by such riches.

‘Two horses, eh?’ Otto looked suitably impressed and not, he hoped, too eager. It had to be them. He beamed at the children. ‘You like horses, do you, lad? Good ones, were they?’

Vigorously, the boy nodded. ‘The man’s was a wonder, a glossy chestnut racer.’ He paused, adding fairly, ‘The woman’s wasn’t bad either; a pretty brown mare with three white stockings on her feet.’

‘How extraordinary! An acquaintance of mine has just such a mare. You don’t by any chance happen to know if the woman was called Gwenn Fletcher, do you?’

The untidy head shook, and a bramble leaf fluttered to the ground. ‘Didn’t get close enough to hear her name. But I think the woman called the man Alan.’

‘Alan, you say?’ His tone had the children backing into the bushes. ‘Not Alan le Bret?’ Surely the concubine’s daughter would never hire Alan le Bret as her guide and protector? It couldn’t be him. On the other hand, Alan le Bret had been in service with Duke Geoffrey, and he was Ned Fletcher’s cousin. It was possible.

‘Don’t know,’ the boy said. ‘But Mistress Smith might.’

‘Aye, that she might. My thanks, boy.’ And Otto smiled.

S
word Point Farm, so named because it was perched on the southern edge of a sword-shaped spit of land, was owned by the Duchess Constance. Agnes Fletcher and her late husband had been her tenants. Agnes, Ned’s mother, suffered a great shock when her nephew carried the sad tidings to the farm. She had last seen Alan riding off in the company of her son, but instead of bringing her Edward back to her, Alan broke the news of his death.

Accompanying Alan was a Breton lass. She was dark and pretty, with sympathetic brown eyes which were crowded with secrets. Agnes saw the girl’s wedding ring, and something in her manner led Agnes to believe that she was attached to Alan, but Alan had introduced her as Ned’s widow. Her name was Gwenn, and she had shyly announced that she was bearing Ned’s child. Her grandchild.

‘I’ve brought you the money Ned earned,’ Gwenn added with a sweet smile. ‘I know he would wish you to have it.’

Agnes realised that Ned’s wife must stay awhile, so they could get to know each other.

Alan did not stop long at Sword Point; no blame to him, for he had reconciliations to make with his stepfather in Richmond, and was anxious to be on his way. Filled with grief as Agnes was at the tidings, she yet thought it odd that Alan should ride off without so much as a wave or a smile to the girl with whom he had travelled so many long miles. But her nephew had been a cold fish when he had left England, and Agnes had no reason to suppose that he had changed.

After five days Agnes felt she had known Gwenn for years, and she had to shake herself and pinch her arm to remind herself that a week ago she had not even met her. It was not hard for her to see why her son had loved her. Gwenn was kind and patient. She suffered Agnes’s many questions concerning her son with a tolerance unusual in one so young. And then, when Agnes’s greed concerning Ned was satisfied, Agnes started enquiring into Gwenn’s life. Gwenn was hesitant at first, not wanting to reopen old wounds, but Agnes sensed she needed to talk and persisted, and after a few days it all tumbled out, and Gwenn told Agnes the whole, not withholding anything, not even the fact that she and Alan had become lovers on the way to Sword Point.

Gwenn had given Agnes a straight look, and said with disarming frankness, ‘I won’t apologise, Agnes, for it did not affect my relationship with Ned. I never betrayed Ned. It was a comfort. But I do hope you don’t hate me for it.’

‘Hate you?’ Agnes had taken her hand. ‘I couldn’t hate you. My son chose you, and you kept faith with him and have brought me his child.’ Agnes guessed then that Gwenn loved Alan, and had loved him for a long time. She looked closely at her daughter-in-law, and wondered if she knew it, and then Agnes remembered how Gwenn’s brown eyes had stared hungrily after him till he had ridden out of sight round the bend in the road. She knew.

‘Does Alan know? That you love him, I mean.’

Gwenn gave her a startled look, and a faint flush stained her cheeks. She shook her head. ‘No, he doesn’t know.’

Agnes tried to analyse what it had been about the two of them when they had first ridden up and she had seen the ring that made her assume Gwenn was married to her nephew. She recalled Alan taking the Richmond road, riding stiffly in the saddle, carefully, oh, so carefully, not looking back. ‘Why don’t you tell him?’

‘No.’ Gwenn was adamant. ‘He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t need it. And I’m not sure I do. It will only lead to more pain.’

‘But, Gwenn,’ Agnes began to protest, but Gwenn was having none of it, and changed the subject to the Stone Rose, and how she had come to fear it. When she had done, Agnes examined the statue Gwenn had placed on the scrubbed oak table and the gemstone lying in her hand, and for a moment Gwenn’s fear infected her.

‘I have decided it must be evil,’ Gwenn whispered. ‘Everyone who keeps the Stone Rose comes to grief. What do you think will happen to me if I keep it?’

Throwing off her fear, Agnes ladled out some common-sense advice. She told Gwenn she was being over-imaginative. She was suffering from delayed reaction to the crises she had gone through. ‘The Stone Rose is only a statue,’ Agnes said firmly, ‘and a statue – especially one which represents the Mother of Our Lord – could not possibly be evil.’

***

It was Holy Rood Day, and roughly a month since Ned had been killed. Gwenn had been at Sword Point for almost a week. Dancer needed exercising, and Gwenn had fallen easily into her old habit of riding at dawn. Ned had always ridden out with her at Kermaria, and she found herself thinking of him, but as the days passed, the pain of his loss, though still keen, grew less piercing.

The upper road from Richmond to St Agatha’s was lightly wooded, and Gwenn liked to ride that way, for at that time of day she usually had the road to herself. Agnes had reassured her she was perfectly safe on that path, for it snaked round the White Canons’ monastery at Easby – the nearest village to Sword Point – and no outlaw in his right mind ever attacked anyone so close to habitation. From the road, Gwenn could not see the abbey or St Agatha’s Church which the White Canons attended, for their pale stone walls lay beyond a shifting screen of beech, hazel and oak. The trees were trying on their September colours, and ambers and golds were beginning to blend in with the green. They would soon loose their leaves, but for another week or so the abbey would remain concealed. Squirrels leapt and darted among the trees, dropping cob-nut shells onto the road. Pigeons clattered in and out of elders, gorging themselves on the dark, shiny berries. Rooks cawed, and the wind carried the rich, damp scents of autumn.