Alys Clare - Girl In A Red Tunic

Bracing his shoulders — his hand on the hilt of his sword for good measure — he walked on.

He had gone no more than a dozen paces when a voice just behind him called, ‘Sir Josse!’

Whipping round, drawing his sword, he would have lunged towards his assailant except that the man made no move to attack. Instead he spread his arms to indicate that he held no weapon and, in a voice just tinged with amusement, said, ‘No need for your sword! I am not your enemy.’

It was Leofgar.

Pushing his sword back down into its scabbard, Josse let out his breath and felt his fast heartbeat gradually return to normal. ‘Leofgar,’ he said, ‘oh, that glad I am to see you.’

Then, without thinking about it, he put his arms around the younger man and gave him a hearty embrace. Returning it, Leofgar laughed shortly. ‘I did not expect this sort of a greeting from my mother’s good friend,’ he observed as Josse let him go.

Josse shrugged. ‘You have worried her gravely, I’ll not deny it. But you’ve come back, so I would guess that whatever went wrong to make you run off as you did must either have been put right or cannot have been too serious in the first place?’ He tried to make the remark a statement and not a question, but he did not think he had succeeded.

Leofgar shook his head. ‘Oh, Sir Josse, I wish that were true! But I must first say that I have not come back, if by that you mean that I am on my way to the Abbey to give a full explanation of my actions.’

‘Then why are you here?’ Josse spoke more gruffly than he had intended; to see the happy outcome that he had envisaged for the Abbess disappear without so much as a farewell was hard to bear.

‘I have to talk to you.’

‘To me ?’

‘Yes, don’t sound so surprised.’ The note of amusement was back. ‘My mother trusts you absolutely. Here I am, in dire need of a reliable confidant and adviser, so what better, I thought to myself, than to hide away in some place where the great Sir Josse d’Acquin is bound to come looking?’

‘You can’t have known I would search the forest!’

‘I admit I was downcast when the lay brothers made their hunt — very thorough they were too, let me tell you, and one of them almost found me. He would have done had I not climbed up a very large old yew tree and hidden till he had gone. But still I believed that you would come, for I judge you to be a man who is not satisfied until he has seen for himself.’

‘You judge right,’ Josse muttered. ‘Yet it was a dubious plan, for all that.’

Leofgar shrugged. ‘Dubious or not, it was the only plan I had.’

Suddenly Josse thought of something. ‘You have not forced your wife and child to share your vigil, have you?’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s cold , man, and-’

‘Of course not.’ Leofgar’s tone was almost scathing, as if to say, you cannot believe I would do such a thing! ‘They are safe in a warm and welcoming refuge.’

Josse studied him. He was well wrapped-up against the weather and he looked clean and, although his face was anxious, he did not have the pinched, shrivelled look of someone who had spent any length of time starving out in the cold. ‘You too have been staying in this refuge,’ he said.

‘I have. My days I have spent here, waiting for you. By night I return to my hiding place.’ His eyes fixed to Josse’s, he said with a smile, ‘And do not try to follow me, Sir Josse. I ask for your word on this.’

Josse hesitated and then said reluctantly, ‘You have it. I shall not follow you.’

Leofgar laughed. ‘The promise was not to try to follow me,’ he corrected. ‘A man should not boast of his own abilities but I doubt that you could pick up my trail if I did not want you to. You missed me in the dell there and I believe that I took you by surprise when I spoke your name just now?’

‘Aye,’ Josse acknowledged. ‘You merge well with the woodland, Leofgar.’

‘I learned when young how to use the cover of the forest,’ he said. ‘So would you have done if you’d had to live with a gang of boys all bigger than you who were intent on giving you a hiding for every real or imagined misdemeanour.’

Josse guessed he must be speaking of the household where he had lived while he learned the duties of page and squire. ‘You were not happy in the place where your mother put you?’

‘Happy?’ Leofgar appeared to consider. ‘I’m not sure that I expected happiness, Sir Josse. I was well fed, well clothed, my duties were no more than those of any other boy. And when I was one of the older ones, I dare say I was not above making some smaller lad’s life a misery from time to time. It’s the way of things,’ he concluded. Then, with a flash of anger in the grey eyes that were so like his mother’s, he hissed, ‘Don’t you dare tell her!’

Josse almost laughed. ‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘You have my word on that, too.’

They had moved away from the dell, walking as they talked, strolling a short distance back down the path that would eventually emerge out from the trees just above the Abbey. Now Leofgar stopped and, putting a hand on Josse’s sleeve, said, ‘I will not come any further. Will you stay here with me while I tell you what I have to say?’

‘Aye, lad. That I will.’ But then a thought struck him; he said, ‘Just now you implied that you expected me to come looking. But I wasn’t looking for you; I’m searching for somebody else.’

‘I know who you’re looking for. My mother told me about the search party.’

‘You know who he is, then?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Leofgar’s face was grave. ‘You won’t find him, Sir Josse. Nobody will, or I pray that they won’t.’

‘But you-’

‘Please,’ Leofgar said urgently, ‘let me tell my story. Then all will become clear.’

With an ironic bow, Josse said, ‘Go on. I will try not to interrupt.’

Leofgar had snapped a length of twig from the beech tree and his long hands were steadily peeling off the bark. Intent on this small action, he began to speak. ‘My wife Rohaise, as you observed, is not well. She suffers from unaccountable miseries and she thinks things — bad and terrible things — that are not true. As I told you at the Abbey, we have sought help from various sources and our parish priest encouraged us to pray. When that did no good, Father Luke decided that Timus was a changeling and must be taken away to the monks, where hopefully the real Timus would miraculously appear to replace the spirit child.’

‘But Father Luke did not really believe that!’ Josse burst out. ‘Your mother and I have been to see him and he told us he made that up to try to help Rohaise! He hoped that if he took Timus away and then brought him back again, explaining to Rohaise that this was her real child, it might just put everything right!’

Leofgar was nodding. ‘I wondered if that might be his thinking,’ he said. With a brief self-deprecating smile, he went on, ‘Perhaps I should have tried to argue with him. But if he made Rohaise believe there was a reason why she felt she was failing with her son — the reason being that he wasn’t in truth her son but a changeling — then she might feel as if she had been offered a new beginning when her so-called real son was returned to her.’

‘Aye, that’s it!’ Josse said eagerly. ‘Almost exactly the priest’s words!’

Leofgar looked questioningly at him. ‘You think Father Luke did right?’

‘No, of course not! He utterly misread Rohaise’s distress and his attempt was at best blundering, at worst deeply damaging. But your mother and I felt him to be more a fool than an intentionally cruel man.’

‘Yes, I agree,’ Leofgar said, ‘although it is difficult to maintain a charitable view when someone is threatening to return very shortly and take your child away.’