‘I do not have any diadem,’ I said as forcefully as I could.
‘This is truly some fantastical tale,’ Edmond said slowly, but even he was regarding me speculatively.
I felt increasingly ill with fear. Was this why the imps had been in our house at Cornhill? But I did not have any diadem! I did not! I closed my eyes briefly, praying that Raife did not mention the imps.
‘Did your father give you anything before he died?’ Edmond said.
‘How many times must I say this?’ I said. ‘My father gave me nothing but a few rags to wear and the name of his house. That is all. Sweet Jesu! He left everything else in his will to the Templars! You have it, Master Hugh! You must have! Perhaps buried in the crypt at your round church on Holbournestrate. Has your Brother Fulke neglected to mention it to you?’
‘We have searched your father’s old estate carefully,’ Fulke d’Ecouis said. ‘There is nothing there.’
‘Then I give you full permission to search my chests and chambers, Brother Fulke. You may search my body, too, lest you think I secrete the diadem in this belly.’ I struck my belly with my hand.
‘You may have hidden it anywhere,’ d’Ecouis said. ‘You’ve had long enough.’
‘I do not have the damned thing!’ I cried, and the note of hysteria in my voice finally brought Raife to my support.
‘My wife has no diadem,’ he said. ‘I know her belongings as well as any. She does not harbour the diadem. If what you say is true then my wife must be carrying it about, hither and thither, but yet I have not seen it, nor have, I wager, any of her attending women. Believe me, if she was secreting the Devil’s diadem then I think I would know it.’
‘I have nothing to hide,’ I said, still emotional and frightened. ‘Search what you will. You have my entire permission. Ask my women! Search! I dare you to find this thing!’
I was so angry that I found myself weeping, and Raife put a hand on my shoulder.
‘If the plague is, as you suggest, coming now to London,’ he said to the Templars, ‘then you must believe that the diadem is here, now, in London. Then come search my house, I beg you, and let this matter rest.’ He paused, then thumped the table with his fist. ‘Lord God above, I am heartily sick of these attacks on my wife! How often must she prove herself innocent to you?’
‘I stand with my lord of Pengraic on this issue,’ said Edmond. His voice was calm, but very authoritative. ‘The countess has already been venomously attacked and proven by God and before all to be innocent. This is a truly fantastical tale you weave, Master Hugh, and on what? Mere supposition?’
‘How many other people have been through Jerusalem and then back in England in the past few years?’ Raife said. ‘If the diadem is here — if it exists at all — then anyone might have brought it. Thousands of pilgrims and crusaders have been to and fro this realm and Jerusalem in the past years. Why fixate so on my wife?’
‘Because, unusually for a mere sergeant, her father had access to the crypt before he vanished from our Order so precipitously,’ said Hugh. ‘We kept stores of gold there, which he accounted for.
‘Because the plague clearly follows your wife’s steps. And because of your wife’s sheer damned luck over the past year — she survived the plague, and rose from obscurity to sit at the king’s right hand as your wife. I find that … fascinating.’
‘My horse, Dulcette, might be harbouring the diadem,’ I said. ‘The plague could as easily have been following her as me.’
‘Think not to use wit to —’ Hugh began.
‘Enough!’ Edmond said, raising both hands. ‘I have heard enough of this! It is a fine tale, master, but I cannot yet believe it. I have a city half burned and de-populated, a people terrified by the renewed ravages of the plague, and here you sit prating of strange jewels and devilish pestilences and accusing one of my court of harbouring a crown so vile that it surely must have stained her hands black with venom had she ever handled it. Yet I see no stain, Master Hugh, not on her hands nor on her character.’
He threw his hands up in the air. ‘What will the Countess of Pengraic be accused of next? Crucifying Christ himself ?
‘Enough, I say. Now all I want to hear from this table are practical measures by which we can aid those affected by fire and drowning, as those by plague who are either in its grip or in its path. Speak, if you will.’
‘Raife, look. This is all my father ever gave me.’
We were back in our privy chamber in the Cornhill house. Soon my ladies would be with me to aid me pack for our removal into the chambers in the Tower. But for now, Raife had wanted to see what precisely I had from my father.
Raife held the old, ragged folded cloth in his hands, fingered it to make sure it was not concealing a diadem, then he shook it out and looked at it.
‘It displays a somewhat poorly worked depiction of the Last Supper,’ I said.
He nodded, laying it back in the chest from whence I had taken it. ‘It is nothing but tapestry,’ he said. ‘There is nothing else?’
‘No, he gave me nothing else. Most of what I brought with me from my childhood home have been passed on. Two kirtles and several chemises and ribbons. The ribbons I still have, there,’ I pointed to where they lay atop my new chemises, ‘and the kirtles and chemises I gave to two good wives in Crickhoel before we came to Edmond’s court. After your generosity, I had no further need of them.’
‘You are sure your father gave you nothing else?’
‘I am certain!’
Raife sighed and sat down. ‘What are those Templars on about?’
‘I do not know why they fixate on my father.’
‘He brought nothing back with him from the Holy Lands?’
‘Raife, how am I to know? He might have brought Christ’s crown of thorns with him for all I know, and buried it somewhere along the way. I was not his keeper. I do not know where he went or what he brought here or there! All I know is that I do not have this diadem and I saw no evidence of it in my father’s possession in those few months at Witenie before he died. He made no mention of any such thing.’
‘And the Templars have your father’s lands and manor at Witenie.’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps I should ride there …’
‘And search for this piece of Templar fabrication? You cannot believe this story!’
He gave me a long, considering look, then a small smile. ‘Of course not. Now, send for your women that they may pack your finery, and we shall be off to enjoy Edmond’s hospitality once more.’
As our house was to be prepared to take in victims of the plague, should it arrive in London, we moved much of our household into the apartments Edmond gave us at the Tower. There Isouda, Ella and Gytha and I unpacked and tried to make our chambers as homely as possible. I felt safer here, not so much from the plague that approached, but from the Templars.
I wondered if Henry was behind their accusations. It seemed that those who plotted against me, having failed to prove me the murderess in God’s eyes, had now moved to making me the consort of the Devil — or at least of his diadem.
I might have laughed away their accusations, their fanciful tale, but for one thing.
Those imps who seemed to follow me. Had not one of them been searching among my linens? Had not one of them followed me when I’d got lost within Edmond’s palace at Oxeneford? God’s truth, one had even secreted itself under the ice, no doubt to see if I had hidden the diadem under my skirts!
Why did they believe this of me? I had no diadem!
I did not speak to Raife of these doubts. He had been late in my defence when the Templars had related this tale in Edmond’s council, and I think he had truly been considering riding to Witenie to find this mythical diadem himself. I had also never mentioned the imp under the ice to him, so could hardly bring this matter up now.
So I sat, and worried, and wondered what fate, or God, or even the Devil, had in store for me.
Chapter Ten
I tried to put the Templars and their accusations behind me. The days passed. I kept mostly to our chambers within the Tower complex. My child was growing heavier, I needed to rest more and, as Edmond was so concerned with London, there was no court to attend. I saw little of Raife, as he spent most of the days out in London, helping where he could.