Gisborne: Book of Pawns (7 page)

‘You know about me, thus I should know a little about you.’

I tried to pose the
reply lightly, as if it didn’t really matter.
Again
there was a taut silence, as though
he warred with himself about what he should and shou
ld not say
.

‘I needed employment.’

Short and to the point.

‘You needed employment? Gracious.
Since wh
en do sons of the nobility
need
employment?’

‘Again this idea that I am a noble.’

‘Deny it then.
Tell me that your courtly manners and your education are a product of a lowly upbringing.’

A very small smile appeared and I felt the warmth of it
across the breadth between us.
‘Honestly Ys
abel, you are like a horsefly.
Apart from swatting you away, one can’t get rid of you until you have your bite.’

‘At least I am plain Ysabel now,’ I muttered.

I
f he heard he made no comment.
What he did say opened up a discussion that filled the miles left until we reached Le Mans and which left me
breathless and filled with sorrow for a man and his mother.

‘I am noble born,’ he said. ‘I am the son of Baron Henry
of Gi
sborne and his lady, Ghislaine.
Like yourself, Ysabel, I am an only child.’

‘Why aren’t you at Gisborne then, helping your father manage his estates at the very least?’

‘Because there are no estates left to manage.’

I gasped
and pulled my mare to a halt.
‘You say?’

He sighed and I could see the story hurt
him deeply.

‘My father went to the
Crusade as a Templar knight. He …
renounced his marriage and passed his p
ossessions over to the knights.
Admittedly he sought a guarantee that my mother and myself should be housed and some of the monies from the
estate should go to our welfare but the Templars were
so much bigger than my father and a year after he left for Jerusalem, my mother a
nd I were turned off Gisborne. We sought to travel to Anjou
to my mother’s family, but she caught an ague and died
in a small priory near Great Harwich.
As for my father, he is still alive I believe
; if you call the way he lives a life.
Somewhere near Jerusalem, he
leads the life of a leper…
’

My breath sucked in. ‘Guy…
’

‘He may be aware
of hi
s wife’s death, I don’t know.
The Knights Templar seemed to lose interest in him once they had our estates and
once my father became a leper.
So you see, I have nothing, Ys
abel, and yet I am noble born.
I am the son of a madman who
believed
he could secure a passage to Paradise if he joined the Knights Templar and
fought in a Holy War and t
hanks to him my mother died in ignominious circumstance
s.
My ow
n future is what I make of it.
I took employment where I could
find it and because I am high
born and educated, I have be
en the steward for a number of nobles.
Bu
t I do not stay long with any.
I leave whilst I am respected and liked and I work my way
back
up the chain.’

I
t seemed I could not stop him.
Once he started, it was like a confessional and words flowed from him, drippin
g in un-camouflaged bitterness. I found I hardly blamed him. It was a sad story and
I was
not a little afraid of the chill manner with which he told it
.

‘I said to
you once that status is power. T
hu
s I work my way to knighthood. Have no doubt –
I shall be knighted and recognised an
d shall have lands and wealth.
And no one, not any single man, shall ever tak
e from me what I see as mine.’

We rode further and my heart sank just a little, for bitt
erness is a hard nut to crack.

‘I would lay bets that
this is not what yo
u wished to hear, Lady Ysabel,’ he commented. ‘
But you
now know with whom you travel.
If it offends yo
u, I apologise.
But it is what I am.’

I didn’t know how to respond. I had lost my mother
but she died in comfort in the magn
ificent Lady Chamber as they called her room at Moncrieff.
I still had my father and he hadn’t disavowed himself of me
, but not only that,
Moncrieff
was still our family demesnes.
I had led a charmed and spoiled
life in Aquitaine
where my father’s wealth and that of my mother’s family meant I wanted for
nothing, least of all status.
How could I possibly understand what he felt?
Every word he spoke had been underlined with wicked irony by church bells clanging on the wind from Le Mans, and I wondered if he had repudiated the Church altogether after being treated so falsely by men of God.

‘
Those bells are loud,’ I said to break the tension but he didn’t reply and so against my better judgement I pushed him further. ‘
Have you never wished to find your father?’

‘I know where he is.
There is a leper order, the Order of
Saint Lazarus outside Jerusalem. It’s an H
ospitaller order run like the Knights Templar and they care for each other and others who have the illness.’

‘Then he is a man to be admired.’

‘He had no choice.
He was
a Templar and he was a leper.
It was join the Order or d
ie on the streets of Jerusalem.
I fee
l nothing but disgust for him.
He killed my mother.’

‘You should forgive him, Guy.
He will die a terrible death.’

‘He will have monks around him to hear his final conf
ession and give him his rites.
He does not need my forgiveness.’

I felt to ask him anything else was to open wounds that he w
as perhaps trying desperately to heal.
Heal and forg
et?

Somehow I doubted
Guy o
f Gisborne was a man who would
ever forget.

To arrive in Le Ma
ns on that day was to learn of a change in the course of history.
We had heard rumours on the road of the Plantagenet family wars and
thus
it was no surprise to hear that
King Henry had fallen sick whilst at Le Mans wh
ere he had been born.
He and Richard w
ere in the middle of a
brawl over succession, with Phillip
of France siding with Richard.
Philli
p and Richard attacked the town
and feckless, disloyal H
enry ordered parts of his birth
place to be burned to
stall their invasion.
But e
ven a king could not control a wind that
changed and caused a massive conflagration, threatening t
o burn his birthplace utterly. Henry fled, l
eaving the town to put out
its fires and lick its wounds.

He
had retired to Chinon but his health failed by the day and he died two days
before we arrived at Le Mans.
I was surprised the town
even
thou
ght to ring mourning bells.
Guy said such was the power of a king.

‘Bu
t’, said I, ‘the king is dead.
Long live the king.’

The bells rang with heavy resonance anyway.

It was a relief to me that we had arrived in scorched Le Mans
at all
because I was exhausted beyond belief: saddle sore, heart
sore, tired, dirty and hungry.
I should have mou
rned my former king but I did no
t
. To be frank I cared little and found the smell of burned buildings still lingered in the air, not unlike Henry’s memory.

I wondered w
ho could mourn an obsessive man who burned innocents alive to satisfy hi
s need to make a point and overpower a son.
Further, I decided that if
any
of his sons wanted to fight to secure their
kingship, I cared not at all.
I wanted to divest myself of all memories of fighting, of blood and g
ore and yet I knew that what Gisborne
and I had dealt with between Tours and Le Mans would live with me forever.

The Sisters of the Priory Saint Jean
were kind and generous,
providing hot water and a small oak bath despite the fact th
at it was late in the evening. The lay sisters had been directed to care for their new guest who obviously had coin to pay her way and I briefly thanked the Lord that Gisborne had lined palms to make it so.
The bells of the
Priory chimed and despite the fact they marked Vespers, I wondered if they also tolled as a reminder of the deceased monarch. I gave
thought to Eleanor, wondering what she felt a
bout her king-husband’s death. They always said
she loved him despite his
despicable treatment of her, what with his florid temper,
his loose morals with
the fair Rosamunde and others.

I only knew that when
I
fell in love it would be forever and that I would only ever
marry a man that I truly loved.
Which b
r
ought me back to Eleanor, whereupon I decided she would be brokenhearted.

My thoughts also went to Gisborne
.

I shrank from the i
dea of investigating why.
Whilst I soaked in the tiny bath in front of the
brazier at the priory, I knew he might
well
be doing the same at his inn.
We had arranged to meet after we had
broken our fast the next day.
The town of course would be in some sort of mourning ordained by the Church, but as long as we could arrange our forward passage,
he seemed less than worried.

How he felt about Henr
y’s death, I could only guess.
What I suspected was that he would shift the pieces around on the chessboard that was his life, and
work out how to move forward and upward.
There was a part of me that hoped it would be at Moncrieff
but in reality I doubted it.
The man had ambition and for all that Moncrieff was a w
ealthy estate it was not his.

Ah yes, status was all.

The bells r
ang through the night
but I
managed to sleep
by telling myself they rang for Richard rather than Henry and that there would be a corona
tion and England would be
cont
ent
and my homecoming would be filled with the
excitement of this new reign. But in truth,
I was so tired the bells
merely
rang me to
a long and heavy
sleep.

The other guests
in the dorter had risen and left by the time I woke and dragged on my filthy clothes to make
haste to the refectory. The portress of the p
riory handed me a message and as I ate a slice of fresh
bread, I read Gisborne’s words.
He wrote with a good hand and I add
ed it to his other attributes. T
here were stories that even some kings could not read a
nd write but my father’s steward appeared to
do both.

He asked that we delay our meeting till midday and that he would co
llect me from the priory to purchase fresh clothes and supplies. But w
hilst heavy of leg and low in energy, I had no int
ention of watching the Sisters follow their daily devotion to God.
Such placid, quiet rhythms might have been sustaining but instead I asked for
directions to the marketp
lace
.

‘Should you venture alone?’ The portress asked.
‘You are a Lady, it is not seemly.’