She smoothed wrinkles from the red velvet skirt. ‘You wait here,’ she told Thomas, ‘and I’ll send Pierre back with a message, maybe even some money. I’m sure the Duke is going to be generous. I shall demand a pass for you. What name shall I use? A Scot’s name? Just Thomas the friar? As soon as he sees you,’ she was now talking to her son, ‘he’ll open his purse, won’t he? Of course he will.’
Pierre managed to hoist the armour onto his shoulder without falling over and Jeanette took her son’s hand. ‘I shall send you a message,’ she promised Thomas.
‘God’s blessing, my child,’ Thomas said, ‘and may the blessed St Guinefort watch over you.’
Jeanette wrinkled her nose at that mention of St Guinefort, who, she had learned from Thomas, was really a dog. ‘I shall put my trust in St Renan,’ she said reprovingly, and with those words she left. Pierre and his wife followed her, and Thomas waited in the yard, offering blessings to ostlers, stray cats and tapmen. Be mad enough, his father had once said, and they will either lock you away or make you a saint.
The night fell, damp and cold, with a gusting wind sighing in the cathedral’s towers and rustling the tavern’s thatch. Thomas thought of the penance that Father Hobbe had demanded.
Was the lance real? Had it truly smashed through a dragon’s scales, pierced the ribs and riven a heart in which cold blood flowed? He thought it was real. His father had believed and his father, though he might have been mad, had been no fool. And the lance had looked old, so very old. Thomas had used to pray to St George, but he no longer did and that made him feel guilty so that he dropped to his knees beside the wagon and asked the saint to forgive him his sins, to forgive him for the squire’s murder and for impersonating a friar. I do not mean to be a bad person, he told the dragon killer, but it is so easy to forget heaven and the saints. And if you wish, he prayed, I will find the lance, but you must tell me what to do with it. Should he restore it to Hookton that, so far as Thomas knew, no longer existed? Or should he return it to whoever had owned it before his grandfather stole it? And who was his grandfather? And why had his father hidden from his family? And why had the family sought him out to take the lance back? Thomas did not know and, for the past three years, he had not cared, but suddenly, in the tavern yard, he found himself consumed by curiosity. He did have a family somewhere. His grandfather had been a soldier and a thief, but who was he? He added a prayer to St George to allow him to discover them.
‘Praying for rain, father?’ one of the ostlers suggested. ‘I reckon we’re going to get it. We need it.’
Thomas could have eaten in the tavern, but he was suddenly nervous of the crowded room where the Duke’s soldiers and their women sang, boasted and brawled. Nor could he face the landlord’s sly suspicions. The man was curious why Thomas did not go to the friary, and even more curious why a friar should travel with a beautiful woman. ‘She is my cousin,’ Thomas had told the man, who had pretended to believe the lie, but Thomas had no desire to face more questions and so he stayed in the yard and made a poor meal from the dry bread, sour onions and hard cheese that was the only food left in the wagon.
It began to rain and he retreated into the wagon and listened to the drops patter on the canvas cover. He thought of Jeanette and her little son being fed sugared delicacies on silver plates before sleeping between clean linen sheets in some tapestry-hung bedchamber, and then began to feel sorry for himself. He was a fugitive, Jeanette was his only ally and she was too high and mighty for him.
Bells announced the shutting of the city’s gates. Watchmen walked the streets, looking for fires that could destroy a city in a few hours. Sentries shivered on the walls and Duke Charles’s banners flew from the citadel’s summit. Thomas was among his enemies, protected by nothing more than wit and a Dominican’s robe. And he was alone.
Jeanette became increasingly nervous as she approached the citadel, but she had persuaded herself that Charles of Blois would accept her as a dependant once he met her son who was named for him, and Jeanette’s husband had always said that the Duke would like Jeanette if only he could get to know her better. It was true that the Duke had been cold in the past, but her letters must have convinced him of her allegiance and, at the very least, she was certain he would possess the chivalry to look after a woman in distress.
To her surprise it was easier to enter the citadel than it had been to negotiate the city gate. The sentries waved her across the drawbridge, beneath the arch and so into a great courtyard ringed with stables, mews and storehouses. A score of men-at-arms were practising with their swords which, in the gloom of the late afternoon, generated bright sparks. More sparks flowed from a smithy where a horse was being shoed, and Jeanette caught the whiff of burning hoof mingling with the stink of a dungheap and the reek of a decomposing corpse, which hung in chains high on the courtyard wall. A laconic and misspelled placard pronounced the man to have been a thief.
A steward guided her through a second arch and so into a great cold chamber where a score of petitioners waited to see the Duke. A clerk took her name, raising an eyebrow in silent surprise when she announced herself. ‘His grace will be told of your presence,’ the man said in a bored voice, then dismissed Jeanette to a stone bench that ran along one of the hall’s high walls.
Pierre lowered the armour to the floor and squatted beside it while Jeanette sat. Some of the petitioners paced up and down, clutching scrolls and silently mouthing the words they would use when they saw the Duke, while others complained to the clerks that they had already been waiting three, four or even five days. How much longer? A dog lifted its leg against a pillar, then two small boys, six or seven years old, ran into the hall with mock wooden swords. They gazed at the petitioners for a second, then ran up some stairs that were guarded by men-at-arms. Were they the Duke’s sons, Jeanette wondered, and she imagined Charles making friends with the boys.
‘You’re going to be happy here,’ she told him.
‘I’m hungry, Mama.’
‘We shall eat soon.’
She waited. Two women strolled along the gallery at the head of the stairs wearing pale dresses made of expensive linen that seemed to float as they walked and Jeanette suddenly felt shabby in her wrinkled red velvet. ‘You must be polite to the Duke,’ she told Charles, who was getting fretful from hunger. ‘You kneel to him, can you do that? Show me how you kneel.’
‘I want to go home,’ Charles said.
‘Just for Mama, show me how you kneel. That’s good!’
Jeanette ruffled her son’s hair in praise, then immediately tried to stroke it back into place. From upstairs came the sound of a sweet harp and a breathy flute, and Jeanette thought longingly of the life she wanted. A life fit for a countess, edged with music and handsome men, elegance and power. She would rebuild Plabennec, though with what she did not know, but she would make the tower larger and have a staircase like the one in this hall. An hour passed, then another. It was dark now and the hall was dimly lit by two burning torches that sent smoke into the fan tracery of the high roof. Charles became ever more petulant so Jeanette took him in her arms and tried to rock him to sleep. Two priests, arm in arm, came slowly down the stairs, laughing, and then a servant in the Duke’s livery ran down and all the petitioners straightened and looked at the man expectantly. He crossed to the clerk’s table, spoke there for a moment, then turned and bowed to Jeanette.
She stood. ‘You will wait here,’ she told her two servants.
The other petitioners stared at her resentfully. She had been the last to enter the hall, yet she was the first to be summoned. Charles dragged his feet and Jeanette struck him lightly on the head to remind him of his manners. The servant walked silently beside her. ‘His grace is in good health?’ Jeanette asked nervously.
