his weary eyes to acknowledge his daughter with a smile. He raised a finger to his lips, nodding in the direction of the bed, where her mother slumbered. Clamping her lips together to prevent her next question, Alice closed the door quickly and tiptoed over. The table held a collection of medical equipment: bandages and salves, sewing needles fashioned from animal bone, and fine thread made from sinew. These items were disappearing one by one as her father packed up a sturdy leather satchel.
‘What’s happening?’ Alice whispered, her periwinkle blue eyes wide, curious.
‘’Tis what Queen Margaret feared, ‘tis what we all feared.’ Fabien’s face clouded. ‘The Duke of York has challenged the King’s leadership, now that we have lost France. He has mounted an army, and awaits the King’s men on a high plateau not far from here.’
Alice nibbled at a fingernail. ‘Will King Henry fight?’
Fabien’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘Nay, not he, lass. You know he’s…he’s not well at the moment. But the Queen is fully aware of the situation; she intends to send two or three of the King’s more loyal dukes.’ He tucked the last roll of bandage into a corner of the satchel and sighed. ‘I only hope that this will be enough. The Duke of York’s men are notorious for being savage fighters.’
Alice’s heart lit with excitement. ‘Let me come too, Father. Please.’
But Fabien was already shaking his head, his hands stilling momentarily as he looked at his daughter. In the light beginning to filter in at the window, the grey streaks in his hair seemed more prominent, the lines on his face more pronounced. ‘Nay, Alice,’ he said finally. ‘The battlefield is no place for a young lass. Especially one that is betrothed.’
Alice gasped, colour flushing into her cheeks. ‘You know!’
Fabien nodded. ‘Edmund came to me last night, to tell me.’ He smiled, his mouth creasing up at the corners. ‘And I gave him my blessing. As I give you mine now.’ He leaned down, planted a soft kiss on his daughter’s forehead, smoothed her wayward blonde hair with one hand. ‘Your mother is relieved,’ he added.
Alice frowned, fiddling with the curling end of her loose braid. A curious reluctance sheared through her, a reluctance to share in her father’s obvious joy at the news of her marriage. ‘I suppose it was inevitable.’ Uncertainty weighed her voice.
Fabien caught her glum look. ‘Is it not what you wish?’
Alice’s head snapped upwards. The last thing she wanted was to load any further worry on to her parents. ‘Nay, of course not, Father. It’s happening so fast, that’s all.’
Fabien’s head whipped around at another shout from below. He touched his daughter’s cheek. ‘I have to go, Alice. We will talk again about this…I wouldn’t want you to enter into anything you’re unsure about. And marriage is a huge undertaking.’
She nodded, distracted by the sounds outside the window. ‘Please let me come, Father.’ Already she had a sense that times such as these, helping her father, supporting him, would dwindle and eventually die out, even with a liberal husband such as Edmund. ‘I’ve been with you before,’ she reminded him. ‘I—’
Fabien stopped her sentence with a hand on her arm. ‘Aye, you’ve come with me to the village or to some minor skirmish between two landowners.’ His blue eyes, set in his tanned, weathered face, regarded her gently. ‘Your skills are excellent, daughter, but I would not lose another child on the battlefield.’
Alice stepped quickly around the table, coming to her father’s side. ‘Don’t speak like that, Father! We don’t know that he’s dead!’
‘We’ve had no news for two years, Alice. What am I supposed to think?’ His quiet burr hitched with emotion as he recalled his son, Thomas. He smothered a deep sigh, unwilling to show the depth of his true feelings to his daughter.
‘I miss him too, Father, but until we hear definitely, I cannot believe that he’s dead.’ Alice’s voice held the edge of conviction. ‘Look, you need me with you; I’ll wear some of Thomas’s clothes. Nobody will have any idea.’
Fabien laughed, patting Alice’s hand. A sense of elation crowded into her chest; she knew she had won.
To the south of Ludlow, the lands belonging to the Duke of York stretched away in a series of low, folded hills, green and fertile. Balanced on the edge of slopes, or flat in the valley bottoms, the fields were small, bounded by hawthorn-sharp hedging and narrow, stony lanes. High on one of the ridges, where the west wind blew the horses’ tails into fans, dark strands against the clear blue sky, two riders sat, almost motionless, surveying the land spread out beneath them.
‘Ah, it’s great to have you back in England!’ One of the horsemen, Richard, the Duke of York and cousin to the King of England, slapped Bastien companionably on his back.
‘I thought I’d come home for a rest!’ Raising his visor, Bastien grinned at his friend, the metal of his helmet cold against his cheek. He hadn’t even returned to his own manor, having been waylaid by the Duke as they had passed through Ludlow.
Richard gave a swift snort, his square-shaped face set into a scowl. ‘’Tis unlikely we’ll have much rest with that feeble-minded cousin of mine in charge of the country. He’s let the land go to the dogs, the barons are feuding under his very nose, and what does he do? Nothing!’ His dark hair, untouched by grey despite being Bastien’s senior by ten years, stuck out in tufted spikes from under his helmet. ‘I need to see the King, Bastien, to talk to him, but his Queen protects him like a child. She won’t let me near. The only way is to openly challenge the House of Lancaster in battle.’
Bastien shrugged his shoulders. ‘So be it, my lord. My men are willing and ready, although they are tired from the long march home.’ As he was, he thought wearily. Yet he sensed the frustration, the annoyance emanating from the Duke, and understood his motives.
Richard ran a critical eye over Bastien. ‘Still not wearing full armour, I see.’
Bastien openly shunned the body-plate armour worn by most knights, preferring to wear just chainmail over a padded gambeson with a steel helmet. By contrast, Richard wore a full set of plate armour that had been made especially for him: breast and back plates, articulated steel gauntlets covering his whole arm, and leg pieces attached to the front of his shins by leather straps.
Bastien adjusted himself in the saddle, the leather creaking with the movement. ‘Plate armour is too heavy, it weighs me down too much.’ The tint of a far-off memory laced his voice, the familiar whisper of guilt licking along his veins. After all these years, he just couldn’t forget.
‘So you said in France, young man,’ Richard chided him. ‘I’ve told you before, you take too many risks.’
‘And you move too slowly, laden down with all that steel,’ Bastien teased. ‘Admit that I’m quicker and faster than you in a fight.’
Richard smiled. His friend’s prowess on the battlefield was legendary. ‘Just make sure you don’t get yourself killed by your own foolhardiness.’
‘I’ll try not to,’ Bastien replied, dropping his visor down. But in truth he didn’t really care.
Alice helped her father erect the tent beneath a line of beech trees; their distorted, knotty roots afforded some shelter from the north, and the ground, though rough and sloped,
