Alys Clare - Music of the Distant Stars

He studied her for a moment, and he understood. She was upset because she had failed to find the answer she had gone looking for, and the talk of the journey to Aelf Fen had prompted the strong desire for home. ‘Very well,’ he said.

Gurdyman led them back along the passage to the door on to the alley. He, too, seemed to recognize Lassair’s dejection. Stopping beside the open door, he said, ‘I am sorry that I could not help you.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, managing a smile. ‘It was good to meet you anyway.’

He bowed. ‘Thank you. We shall meet again.’

Lassair, apparently unable to think how to answer, merely nodded.

Hrype had followed her down the steps and was about to turn to take his leave when Gurdyman said thoughtfully, ‘What has Sir Alain to say on the matter?’

Hrype looked at Lassair, then said, ‘What matter?’

Gurdyman tutted. ‘The lad at Heathlands who made Ida pregnant.’

Hrype saw his own incomprehension mirrored in Lassair’s expression. ‘What would he know of the household there?’ he asked. ‘He didn’t know Lady Claude personally before she came to Lakehall. The idea, or so we understand, was for her to stay with her cousin Lord Gilbert while she met and became acquainted with her future husband, who had recently been appointed justiciar and was living close by.’ He shook his head. ‘Sir Alain de Villequier would not know any more about the servants at Lady Claude’s home than she chose to tell him, and I can’t imagine the two of them are so desperate for conversation that they have to discuss the staff.’

Lassair gave a little gasp. Gurdyman turned to her, his eyes twinkling. ‘And what has Lassair to say?’ he enquired.

‘We have made a false assumption,’ she whispered. ‘We all thought that Lady Claude went to Lakehall to meet her future husband. We believed that the marriage designed to unite the two families — first between Sir Alain and Lady Genevieve and, when that failed, Lady Claude — was arranged before the bridegroom had met either bride. That is not so, is it?’ She looked up at Gurdyman standing on the steps, her eyes wide.

‘No, it was not,’ he said. ‘Sir Alain was a frequent visitor at Heathlands. Before he was awarded his new appointment and went to live at Alderhall, his home was close to Thetford. He used to ride over regularly to play chess with Claritia, and usually he let her win.’

Hrype found himself saying their goodbyes by himself. Lassair, lost in her own thoughts, barely said a word until they were almost home.

One good thing about Hrype as a companion is that he’s content in his own thoughts and is about as loquacious as a door post. On the long walk home from Cambridge, he seemed to accept that I didn’t want to talk and so left me to the whirl of conjecture and suspicion that filled my head.

Sir Alain de Villequier had visited Lady Claude at Heathlands! To begin with, I was totally preoccupied with trying to decide how, and when, I had become so certain that the two had not met until she was staying with Lord Gilbert. Moreover, it was not only I who had been convinced. Hrype had been too, for he had just told Gurdyman that Lady Claude had gone to Lakehall to meet Sir Alain. Had Lady Claude said something that had allowed me to receive this wrong idea? I cast my mind back over the two occasions that I had met her, and I realized swiftly that she had not even mentioned her future husband except indirectly, when she had showed me the beautiful but sinister embroidered panels that would decorate the marriage bed. What about Lord Gilbert and Lady Emma? Again, I pieced together all that I could recall of their exchanges with me and came up with nothing.

But there had to be something . I knew it, and I could not cease worrying at the problem until I found it.

In the end the memory surfaced while I was thinking about a different matter. Breaking the long silence as we trudged along, nearing the end of our journey, Hrype asked me if, having seen Gurdyman’s attempt to represent a journey as a diagram on a piece of parchment, I now felt better able to do the same for the road from Cambridge to Aelf Fen. I had been fascinated by what Gurdyman had shown me, and for some moments Hrype and I discussed the extraordinary potential in what the sage was trying to do. Then we came to a place where the road forded a shallow stream and, once we were safely across and had replaced our boots to walk on, once again we lapsed into silence.

And out of nowhere I heard Sir Alain’s voice: When she knew she was to marry me it was arranged that she should come here to meet me and stay for these weeks before our wedding with her cousin, Lord Gilbert .

It was the day that Edild and I had laid out Ida’s body. Sir Alain had walked with us back to the village, and I’d thought it was because he’d wanted to repair the damage that Lady Claude had done by her apparently callous remarks about Ida, to the effect that she mourned her only as a skilled seamstress and not as a likeable human being. Now, thinking back, I realized the extent of my mistake. For one thing, the opinions of lowly folk such as my aunt and me mattered not a dried bean to the likes of Sir Alain de Villequiers. It would make no difference to him and his future wife what we thought of her. We were totally unimportant.

I also realized — far more significantly — how very clever he had been. Subtly, skilfully, he had slipped in that innocent little comment and thereby removed himself from the list of men who had known Ida at the time she became pregnant and, horrified at the news that she bore a child, might have had reason to dispose of her.

I thought the possible sequence of events through again, right from the start, this time without the erroneous conclusion concerning when Sir Alain and Ida had first met. .

Lady Claude was informed by her formidable mother that, with her elder sister sick and unfit for marriage, it would be Claude, the younger sibling, who would marry into the powerful and influential de Villequier family, in the shape of Sir Alain. Lady Claude did her best to protest, but her mother was adamant. Lady Claude conceded and set about sewing her trousseau, engaging the help of the skilled and personable Ida. With Sir Alain now resident at Alderhall, close to the home of Claude’s cousin Lord Gilbert, what was more natural and compassionate for a reluctant bride than to suggest she went to stay at Lakehall, where she and her bridegroom could get to know each other before the wedding?

The purpose of the visit was not, however, for the pair to meet each other, for they had already done so. According to Gurdyman, Sir Alain had been a frequent visitor at Heathlands. He used to play chess with Lady Claude’s mother.

Now I wove another thread into my tapestry. I made an image in my mind of Sir Alain arriving at Heathlands for the first time and being escorted into a great hall, richly furnished and with an extravagant fire burning in the hearth. Well-trained and expensively-clad servants were hovering in the background, ready and waiting for the subtlest signal that would make them spring into action to obey the least whim of their mistress. There she was, Lady Claritia — I pictured her as a fleshed-out version of her daughter Claude, with the same stiff, mirthless face and the same small, carefully expressionless eyes — dressed in a gorgeous gown of heavy silk, the cuffs lined with fur, with heavy gold jewellery encrusted with precious stones at her throat, ears and wrists. Here is my daughter , she would say to Sir Alain, and Lady Claude would step forward, pale, skinny, unlovely, unloved, unlovable, the black habit-like gown as effective as a smack in the face proclaiming fiercely I don’t want to be your wife, for it is my vocation to be a nun .