Alys Clare - Music of the Distant Stars

He looked at me. ‘Don’t think about her now,’ he advised. ‘Go home, girl. If there are matters concerning her that I need to speak to you about later, I will send for you.’

I bowed my head. I wanted desperately to get away and was more than ready to obey his command. ‘Very well, my lord.’

I remembered then who was lying asleep in my aunt’s house. I think Lord Gilbert had forgotten, in which case it would not have occurred to him that I would have to break the news of Claude’s death to the man who had been going to marry her.

As I hurried away from Lakehall and headed for home, I wondered what he would say.

Of all the sad moments that followed on from what Claude had done, the worst was when I explained to Sir Alain de Villequier that his bride-to-be had murdered the woman he had loved.

He was awake when I opened the door and went into the house, and I told him straight away. His eyes registered his shock and his horror. Then, covering his face with his hands, he wept.

‘I was out looking for her, that morning when you came to the hall to tell Lord Gilbert you’d found her body,’ he sobbed. ‘We’d arranged to meet in our usual trysting place, but she didn’t come. I waited all night, and I thought Claude must have caught her slipping out and locked her back inside that damned sewing room.’

‘I thought she was locked in every night,’ I said. ‘How did she get out?’

He grinned briefly, the expression there and gone in a heartbeat. ‘She had a second key,’ he said. ‘She wheedled it out of old Bermund. She said it was in case she wanted to get on with her work when Claude wasn’t there. That night when she didn’t come out to meet me, I thought Claude must have discovered Ida’s key and confiscated it.’

Edild was watching him. I was very afraid she would try to stop him talking, convalescent as he was, but she said nothing.

‘When you took so long to answer Lord Gilbert’s summons that morning, you said you’d gone hunting,’ I reminded him. ‘I, for one, believed you.’

‘I was hunting,’ he said softly. ‘I was looking for Ida.’

My thoughts ran on. I remembered the day Ida was buried and saw in my mind’s eye the figures of Lord Gilbert, Lady Emma, Sir Alain and Lady Claude up on the low rise above the grave. ‘She was looking at you, when Ida was buried,’ I murmured. ‘Lady Claude, I mean. I was touched because I thought she was looking to you for the strength to get her through the ordeal of burying the girl who had been her seamstress.’ I knew different now; Claude, I had no doubt, had been watching Sir Alain like a hawk to see if he gave away his feelings for the dead girl.

‘Claude didn’t need anyone else’s strength,’ he said wearily. ‘She had more than enough of her own.’ Then, in a burst of passion, ‘I wish I’d realized that she was in the habit of sneaking out of Lakehall! I thought, just like everyone else did, that she locked herself away all day and every day working on her sewing, but she didn’t.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘She went out with Ida the day of Ida’s death, and she went out again to set the trip wire that Derman ran into. Then, when he had fallen in the water, she beat him over the head with a piece of wood and killed him.’ I thought of something. ‘ I knew she used to slip out,’ I said quietly. ‘I was treating her, you know, for her headaches and her insomnia. One day when I went to see her she wasn’t there. Lady Emma was quite upset, because she’d invited Lady Claude to go on an outing with her and the children and she’d said no, and then she went out by herself.’

I felt Edild’s hand on my shoulder. ‘None of this was your fault, Lassair,’ she said firmly. ‘It was impossible for you to have realized the significance of Lady Claude’s absence.’

Perhaps it was. It didn’t stop me feeling guilty about it.

Silence fell. After a while I looked at Sir Alain and said, ‘What will you do?’

I have rarely seen anyone look so hopeless, so bleak. He gave a deep sigh and said, ‘I shall have to make my report for the king concerning the three deaths here.’ He looked at Edild, then back at me. ‘Unless you two have told anyone else, only the three of us know what Ida and I were to each other.’

‘Alberic knows,’ I said.

Sir Alain smiled grimly. ‘You can safely leave Alberic to me.’

Edild said thoughtfully, ‘You will keep the fact that Ida was pregnant with your child when she died a secret.’

He held her eyes. ‘I will. And you, will you do so too?’

‘Lassair and I are healers, and as such we are privy to many people’s secrets,’ she said. ‘We do not tell.’

His relief was evident. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘What will you give as Lady Claude’s reason for killing herself if you withhold the true one?’ I asked. It was forward of me, I dare say, but after what I had suffered at Claude’s hands, I felt I had a right to ask.

Evidently, he did too. ‘I shall explain discreetly, first to her mother and then to the king’s officials, that Claude’s frustrated desire to enter the convent finally overcame her, and she decided that life other than as a nun was not worth living.’

‘Won’t that make her mother feel very guilty?’ I asked. ‘It was she, after all, who proposed that one of her daughters should marry you.’

‘If it does, then she deserves it,’ he said harshly. ‘God knows, I have my own guilt to bear, over both Claude’s death and poor Genevieve’s withdrawal, but it was not I who made the sisters what they were.’

I thought he was letting himself off lightly, but I did not say so. I met Edild’s eye and guessed she was thinking the same.

I looked down at Sir Alain. His face was pale, and his eyes were closing. ‘He’s almost asleep,’ I whispered to Edild.

She nodded. ‘We will leave him to rest.’ She got up, and so did I. We stood over him for a few moments, watching as his breathing deepened.

He would go away and make his report to whoever it was waiting to receive it, I thought. He was our justiciar; he could reveal as much or as little as he wished. Three people were dead, two of them killed by the third, who had died by her own hand. Alain de Villequier could, if he so wished, attribute all three crimes to Claude’s extreme reaction to the thwarting of her ambitions to take the veil, a reaction that had driven her to insanity. He could, and he probably would. Because of who and what he was, no doubt he would be believed.

It wasn’t really fair. But that was the way life usually was.

We never found out whether Sir Alain’s face-saving version of the events at Aelf Fen that summer was accepted. We heard no more of it — nor, indeed, of him. I was sorry, in a way; he was a likeable man, and we could have done worse in a local officer of the law. Especially since my aunt and I knew his most carefully-guarded secret. .

He went away, and he didn’t come back. Lord Gilbert seemed more than ready to forget all about Lady Claude and her seamstress. The summons to return to Lakehall and give my account of what had happened the day Claude died never came. We concluded, my aunt, Hrype and I, that Lord Gilbert, too, might have known more about what had been going on than he wanted to reveal.

I do not know what became of poor Alberic. I never saw him again after that day I encountered him beneath the oak tree and, for a while, I assumed he had returned to Brandon. He hadn’t. Sibert was sent to the village on some business of Lord Gilbert’s, and he reported that Alberic’s little house was standing empty. I like to think he went away from the scene of his unhappiness and settled elsewhere, finding a measure of contentment, but it isn’t very likely. With the death of Ida, his hope had died too, and when I look into my heart, I sense he is dead.