Sword of Justice (White Knight Series) (34 page)

“And here I expected the riposte to be …
We didn’t sell Jenna.
”

Rosaline lowered a pale face—a face so much like her daughter’s—into quaking hands.

Henri drove forward, flicking his blade like an ill-trained, ill-mannered knave. “Fight, Drake! Why won’t you fight?”

Each stroke of Berneval’s blade, consistently diagonal and consistently left, was consistently defended with the same monotonous counter. Drake barely need change position to beat off the strokes. “Or, perhaps, when you sell your daughter to a royal bidder, it isn’t a sale, as such.”

Henri attacked in earnest, three athletic strides from a man well past his prime. Drake retreated measure for measure. Another clash of swords was followed by another defensive action, easily executed.

“Was the deal struck with letters? Courting, betrothal, pact, and subterfuge wrapped up in tidy packages, sent hither and yon by courier. Formal introductions first, between parents and suitor. Terms and negotiations discussed. A bargain struck. Then missives of courtly love to the intended. Promises of riches and wealth, and fealty and fidelity. Is that how he wooed her? Along with letters meant for other eyes, which she passed along innocently at first. Then not so innocently. How she must have railed at you. But you prevailed, pointing out to her the daily reminders of your existence.” His eyes swept the arena of their poverty. “And so she acquiesced.
She
had no choice. She revered you. She should not have been so free with her love!”

A prisoner to her many sins, Rosaline silenced the truth behind clasped hands while her eyes, gut-wrenching reminders of Jenna’s, remained wide open, unable to blink away their guilt. Mutely she watched her husband and her daughter’s betrothed warily circle each other, pretending that the engagement of words and swords mattered.

“What did John promise you? A captaincy?”

Jenna’s father backed Drake handily to the wall. Berneval’s blade descended. Drake threw his up. Two swords crossed, held, and formed a single crucifix. Drake flung his foe back and scuttled into the middle of the floor.

“And then he married another when he promised to marry her. How did you convince her, I wonder …” He looked first at Rosaline and then at Henri, and finally forced his eyesight away from both. “… to become his mistress?”

Berneval beat the dragon sword halfheartedly.

“And you sanctioned it. Nay, encouraged it.” His skin, once a parched desert, was drenched.

“Jenna didn’t take her own life. You killed her, Drake fitzAlan, when you discovered her betrayal.”

Steel engaged steel, two men fighting for personal dignity and the dignity of a fair maiden, who ultimately was destroyed by both.

“Not I.
You
! Because you knew Jenna was in torment. She told you so. Told you she wanted to be released from the bargain, to end it, to confess everything. Three knights dead. Nearly four but for half-witted hangmen. Perhaps more to come. You knew she gave Stephen a note to deliver to John. She told you, the dutiful daughter that she was.”

Henri’s sword descended, slowly, until the point clanged onto the floor.

“Stephen wasn’t the courier.
I
was. Men employed by John stole the missive from me …
a missive he believed was meant for Richard
.”

Matched astonishment attacked the faces of two bereft parents.

“Why else would John have had a note, meant for him from the first, purloined? In it, she asked him to meet her. At their secret place. The same place as
our
secret place. But John, thinking her as treacherous as he, as treacherous as her parents, believed the invitation was meant for Richard. Only a dolt would believe such stupidity!”

Rosaline gasped.

“But I ask myself,” he went on, running a callused thumb over the gilt dragon. “Why was he was convinced she intended to betray him? What made him think she would invite the king to share her starry bed and midnight secrets? The note revealed no misgivings, no confessions, no ultimatums. It said only, ‘I’ll wait for you at the aerie.’”

Henri choked on rising bile.

“It was
you
who told him.
You
who thought the worst of Jenna.
You
who betrayed your only begotten child.
You
who warned the one man who had too much to lose.
You
who inspired him to send an assassin.”

Rosaline sobbed, salt tears for a woman with no heart. Berneval shook his head, more to himself than to his accuser. The sword dropped from his hand. The clatter of steel on broken tile was a high note at the end of his lament.

Drake tossed Graham’s purse onto the trestle. The metallic clank revealed a hoard of coins. “There! There is the price of Jenna’s death.
My transgression is sealed up in a bag,”
Drake said,
“and thou sewest up mine iniquity
.”

He sheathed his sword and examined two wretched souls. Blood had been drawn, for once not his own. Henri and Rosaline de Berneval, the man and woman who conceived a golden nymph, were bleeding all over the rush-strewn floor.

“In God’s name, who did you send to warn John?”

Berneval was sitting at the trestle, his head bent down and his heart split in two. Unable to look Drake in the eye, he said, “I told … I spoke to des Roches. It was he who … everything went through him.”

“Because the man dispatched to warn John … whoever he was … he returned to Winchester … he knew where to find Jenna … he went straight to the aerie … and he killed her.”

Henri was sobbing uncontrollably. Rosaline was trying to comfort him. “Baldric la Forêt,” said Rosaline. “La Forêt was the courier.”

Chapter 32
                
 

AVELINE CUPPED HER
HAND ON
Drake’s cheek and searched his eyes. The golden-flecked irises penetrated a knight spent to the depths of his being. “It’s over? Well and truly?”

“Aye,” he said, and meant it.

Her spine straightened, sharp as a sword. “Why is it, Drake fitzAlan, you’re always rushing to the precipice without once thinking of what may befall you below? Do you court death so eagerly?”

“Nay. But would you not weep over my funeral bier?”

“I would spit in your grave.”

He grinned broadly. “Not likely, Aveline Darcy.”

She harrumphed and spun around, briskly attending her kitchen, skillets and caldrons beating a tattoo.

He wanted to say so many things to her, but her stiff back forestalled words that must be said and were not to be said, along with tenderness that burned to be expressed and would die a quiet death. For in that single gesture of turning away, the daughter of an alewife freed the son of a lord to rejoin his liege lord and king, unencumbered by earthly ties or a woman’s apron strings.

Her elbow wrenched away at the touch of his fingers. “Be gone with you. I have no more chambers to rent. By the half night or otherwise.” Her head swung around, the silken hair swaying back from a face washed white. Her hazel eyes were direct and unflinching when she said, “Away to your castle.” She turned away once more.

He stared at her steel spine for a long while. She never again turned back to look at him, or turning to find a knife or hang a pot or wipe the trestle, cast her eyes his way. She had made him invisible.

After packing what little belongings he accumulated during his stay, Drake hied himself back to Itchendel. The very next day, the same daughter of an alewife threw out Drake’s twin brother, still on the mend and one-armed, his care given over to brother and father, and his transport provided by two apologetic brothers of that same daughter of an alewife.

Two months passed. Aveline’s silence prevailed. Her kitchen and portals, fore and aft, were vigilantly guarded by those same two apologetic brothers.

Two other brothers, mirror images of each other, healed mind and mended body as they made final preparations to join their king and sail for Normandy. As expected Stephen won the bet, as did Drake, since they were on the same side of the wager. William got his way. And Drake’s twin, who was destined to be neither monk nor canon, was to travel with his brother and protect him as he had always protected him.

Rachel ben Yosel sent a message.
Manna
, she wrote in a small, precise hand,
had fallen from heaven
. Two guards, a courier, and a strongbox arrived, carrying no message save the implicit one: her children would not starve.
Grace to God and you
, she closed.

Drake had nothing to do with it but guessed who did. For manna had descended upon many a man and woman all across the southern coast of England, men and women who would have descended into poverty otherwise, and would have had no choice but to go to the side of a pretend king and pretend savior who had not the wherewithal to make good the losses in any event.

The night preceding their departure, twin brothers with a taste for wine, women, and mirth rode into Winchester and frequented the Hogshead Tavern. Hell-raising companions briskly spirited Stephen away. Drake found solace with a flagon of wine and an empty chair.

Fully restored to her alluring self except for a cracked tooth, Tilda eventually occupied that empty chair. “The prodigal son returns. As himself, no less.”

Glancing up from his goblet, Drake sent her a winsome smile. “Has Matilda des Roches been blessed with the same stroke of fortune as Rachel ben Yosel?”

The twinkle in her eyes said she had.

“I’m glad to hear of it.”

Putting to use a treasure hidden beneath the floorboards of a riverside hut, only one agent, or possibly two, could have manifested the seemingly impossible: the sheriffs of Winchester—
pro tempore
and
de facto
—Randall of Clarendon and Godfrey de Lucé. The latter, acting on information supplied by the former, turned over incriminating evidence to a single benefactor, who in turn acted swiftly to redress the wrong, thereby rescuing the kingdom from perfidy. That same benefactor put under lock and key two journals—insufficient of themselves but the single most damning evidence of
lèse-majesté
—the traitorous deeds of his younger brother.

“Sheriff Clarendon will need more than a little luck to find that scamp,” Tilda said of her own brother.

“He’s not looking.”

“Randall knows when the game is up,” she said. “Wherever Gervase lands, he’ll be living in high style and anonymity, never again to poke his homely face around England’s shores again.”

“Anonymity, aye. High style?”

“So. That was the price for his freedom. Silence and beggary. It’s fitting.”

Narrowing his eyes, Drake studied her beguiling smile. “It’s a wonder you two are related.”

She posed like a regal hawk. “I take after my father. Gervase takes after neither side of the family, which can only mean he takes after
his
father.”

Drake laughed into his goblet.

“You’re growing up, Drake fitzAlan. A pitiful thing when a man has to leave behind his boyhood and all unsullied notions.”

“Better to look at those toys you played with in childhood as the cheap playthings they once were than as the glittering jewels you hoped they might become.”

“You’ll be joining King Richard then?”

“Aye. Nothing to stop me now. He’s in Bury St Edmunds
en route
to Canterbury and thence to Dover. Stephen and I leave in the morning.”

“Then on to Crusade?”

“As we have vowed.”

“I owe Stephen a couple of items.” She reached into the downy crevice of her gown and drew out a fine silver chain. Her painted fingernails removed a garnet ring from the linked length.

I lost it … misplaced it.

Drake took the ring—a perfect match to the one Graham had taken from him—and slid it onto his hand.

“He meant to pay off his debt with it. Along with a destrier you’ll be finding in the stable out back. But seeing as how the debt’s been settled by an anonymous benefactor ….” She put her dry lips against his. “God go with you, Drake fitzAlan.” And rising like a bird of prey, she approached another of her enraptured admirers, her lilting voice carrying the distance.

Not much later, a
chevalier
slapped Drake on the back and pulled up the vacated chair. “I see you’re back amongst your countrymen, Drake fitzAlan, and fully recovered from your voyage across the channel.” Mallory d’Amboise had been absent from Itchendel for the better part of the last two months.

“And I see you’ve returned from your service with Richard.”