“So, Christopher of Hewes. You have involved yourself with our clever beauty.”
“She hath saved mine life.” He pronounced it say-ved. And Sir Daniel seemed to understand.
“I hope it will not cause you trouble.”
“Trouble?”
Sir Daniel sighed. “She tells me, friend Chris, that you are gentle, yet not a knight. You are a squire?”
“In sooth, yes.”
“A very old squire,” Sir Daniel said. “What is your training at arms?”
“My training at arms . . .” Chris frowned. “Well, I have, uh—”
“Have you any at all? Speak plain: What is your training?”
Chris decided he had better tell the truth. “In sooth, I am — I mean, trained — in my studies — as a scholar.”
“A scholar?” The old man shook his head, incomprehending. “Escolie? Esne discipulus? Studesne sub magistro?” You study under a master?
“Ita est.” Even so.
“Ubi?” Where?
“Uh . . . at, uh, Oxford.”
“Oxford?” Sir Daniel snorted. “Then you have no business here, with such as my Lady. Believe me when I say this is no place for a scolere. Let me tell you how your circumstances now lie.”
:
“Lord Oliver needs money to pay his soldiers, and he has plundered all he can from the nearby towns. So now he presses Claire to marry, that he may gain his fee. Guy de Malegant has tendered a handsome offer, very pleasing to Lord Oliver. But Guy is not wealthy, and he cannot make good on his fee unless he mortgages part of my Lady’s holdings. To this she will not accede. Many believe that Lord Oliver and Guy have long since made a private agreement — one to sell the Lady Claire, the other to sell her lands.”
Chris said nothing.
“There is a further impediment to the match. Claire despises Malegant, whom she suspects had a hand in her husband’s death. Guy was in attendance of Geoffrey at the time of his death. Everyone was surprised by the suddenness of his departure from this world. Geoffrey was a young and vigorous knight. Although his wounds were serious, he made steady recovery. No one knows the truth of that day, yet there are rumors — many rumors — of poison.”
“I see,” Chris said.
“Do you? I doubt it. For consider: my Lady might as well be a prisoner of Lord Oliver in this castle. She may herself slip out, but she cannot secretly remove her entire retinue. If she secretly departs and returns to England — which is her wish — Lord Oliver will take his revenge against me, and others of her household. She knows this, and so she must stay.
“Lord Oliver wishes her to marry, and my Lady devises stratagems to postpone it. It is true she is clever. But Lord Oliver is not a patient man, and he will force the matter soon. Now, her only hope lies there.” Sir Daniel walked over and pointed out the window.
Chris came to the window and looked.
From this high window, he saw a view over the courtyard, and the battlements of the outer castle wall. Beyond he saw the roofs of the town, then the town wall, with guards walking the parapets. Then fields and countryside stretching off into the distance.
Chris looked at Sir Daniel questioningly.
Sir Daniel said, “There, my scolere. The fires.”
He was pointing in the far distance. Squinting, Chris could just make out faint columns of smoke disappearing into the blue haze. It was at the limit of what he could see.
“That is the company of Arnaut de Cervole,” Sir Daniel said. “They are encamped no more than fifteen miles distant. They will reach here in a day — two days at most. All know it.”
“And Sir Oliver?”
“He knows his battle with Arnaut will be fierce.”
“And yet he holds a tournament—”
“That is a matter of his honor,” Sir Daniel said. “His prickly honor. Certes, he would disband it, if he could. But he does not dare. And herein lies your hazard.”
“My hazard?”
Sir Daniel sighed. He began pacing. “Dress you now, to meet my Lord Oliver in proper fashion. I shall try to avert the coming disaster.”
The old man turned and walked out of the room. Chris looked at the boy. He had stopped scrubbing.
“What disaster?” he said.
* * *
33:12:51
It was a peculiarity of medieval scholarship in the twentieth century that there was not a single contemporary picture that showed what the interior of a fourteenth-century castle looked like. Not a painting, or an illuminated manuscript image, or a notebook sketch — there was nothing at all from that time. The earliest images of fourteenth-century life had actually been made in the fifteenth century, and the interiors — and food, and costumes — they portrayed were correct for the fifteenth century, not the fourteenth.
As a result, no modern scholar knew what furniture was used, how walls were decorated, or how people dressed and behaved. The absence of information was so complete that when the apartments of King Edward I were excavated in the Tower of London, the reconstructed walls had to be left as exposed plaster, because no one could say what decorations might have been there.
This was also why artists’ reconstructions of the fourteenth century tended to show bleak interiors, rooms with bare walls and few furnishings — perhaps a chair, or a chest — but not much else. The very absence of contemporary imagery was taken to imply a sparseness to life at that time.
All this flashed through Kate Erickson’s mind as she entered the great hall of Castelgard. What she was about to see, no historian had ever seen before. She walked in, slipping through the crowd, following Marek. And she stared, stunned by the richness and the chaos displayed before her.
The great hall sparkled like an enormous jewel. Sunlight streamed through high windows onto walls that gleamed with tapestries laced with gold, so that reflections danced on the red-and-gold-painted ceiling. One side of the room was hung with a vast patterned cloth: silver fleurs-de-lis on a background of deep blue. On the opposite wall, a tapestry depicting a battle: knights fighting in full regalia, their armor silver, their surcoats blue and white, red and gold; their fluttering banners threaded with gold.
At the end of the room stood a huge ornate fireplace, large enough for a person to walk into without ducking, its carved mantelpiece gilded and shimmering. In front of the fire stood a huge wicker screen, also gilded. And above the mantel hung a patterned tapestry of swans flying on a field of lacy red and gold flowers.
The room was inherently elegant, richly and beautifully executed — and rather feminine, to modern eyes. Its beauty and refinement stood in marked contrast to the behavior of the people in the room, which was noisy, boisterous, crude.
In front of the fire was laid the high table, draped in white linen, with dishes of gold, all heaped high with food. Little dogs scampered across the table, helping themselves to the food as they liked — until the man in the center of the table swatted them away with a curse.
Lord Oliver de Vannes was about thirty, with small eyes set in a fleshy, dissolute face. His mouth was permanently turned down in a sneer; he tended to keep his lips tight, since he was missing several teeth. His clothes were as ornate as the room: a robe of blue and gold, with a high-necked gold collar, and a fur hat. His necklace consisted of blue stones each the size of a robin’s egg. He wore rings on several fingers, huge oval gems in heavy gold settings. He stabbed with his knife at food and ate noisily, grunting to his companions.
But despite the elegant accoutrements, the impression he conveyed was of a dangerous petulance — his red-rimmed eyes darted around the room as he ate, alert to any insult, spoiling for a fight. He was edgy and quick to strike; when one of the little dogs came back to eat again, Oliver unhesitatingly jabbed it in its rear with the point of his knife; the animal jumped off and ran yelping and bleeding from the room.
Lord Oliver laughed, wiped the dog’s blood off the tip of his blade, and continued to eat.
The men seated at his table shared the joke. From the look of them, they were all soldiers, Oliver’s contemporaries, and all were elegantly dressed — though none matched the finery of their leader. And three or four women, young, pretty and bawdy, in tight-fitting dresses and with loose, wanton hair, giggling as their hands groped beneath the table, completed the scene.
Kate stared, and a word came unbidden to her mind: warlord. This was a medieval warlord, sitting with his soldiers and their prostitutes in the castle he had captured.
A wooden staff banged on the floor, and a herald cried, “My Lord! Magister Edward de Johnes!” Turning, she saw Johnston shoved through the crowd, toward the table at the front.