Alys Clare - The Rose of the World

Olivier drew a shaking breath. ‘Very well.’ He looked up at Josse. ‘What I have to say is this. Up in the clearing by the chapel, my lord and I were attacked by a madman wielding a sword and knife, and both of us were badly wounded.’ He winced, as if speaking of his wound had made it throb with pain. ‘The madman was acting, or so it would seem, in defence of the two women, the girl and her older companion.’

Josse realized that he meant Meggie. He felt very cold suddenly.

‘I believe,’ Olivier went on slowly, ‘that it may have happened this way: the madman somehow learned of Hugh’s plan and, while I was engaged with taking the girl to the hunting lodge, he sought out Hugh and challenged him, demanding to know where the girl was. Hugh, determined to carry out his scheme, would not tell him, and the two men fought. Perhaps the madman did not mean to kill him — ’ he turned earnest blue eyes first to the king and then to Josse — ‘but, all the same, my brother died.’

Josse’s heart was thumping very hard. The madman. Ninian. Dear Lord, this man was suggesting that Ninian had killed Hugh de Brionne!

He hadn’t, he could not have done, Josse told himself over and over again.

But then, as if in a waking dream, he seemed to hear his own voice speaking.

I fear we must face the possibility that the man who fought the dead man is the one person who ought to be here and isn’t. Whom none of us has seen since the evening we discovered that Rosamund was missing.

Ninian.

The king lay back and closed his eyes. He was alone; a state so rare in his life that he was tempted to simply relish the moment. It would not last, for the old knight Josse d’Acquin had just been informed that the sheriff had arrived and so had hurried away to inform him of the recent developments. Soon both of them would be there, and undoubtedly they would very quickly be joined by the gaggle of self-promoting lords and lordlings that habitually flocked in the king’s wake like seagulls after a fishing boat. Not to mention his bodyguards…

The curtains that enclosed the recess had been left partly open, and he looked out at the infirmary. He usually had an instinctive reaction against all abbeys: the result of having spent the first years of his life a virtual prisoner in his mother’s beloved Fontevrault. They had thought to make a monk of him, but even as a child he had summoned the means to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that, no matter what they did, that was never going to happen. He had escaped the cloister, yes, but those early experiences had left him with a deep-seated revulsion against the soft footfalls and the sombre robes of the avowed.

It was strange, then, he mused, that this Hawkenlye Abbey did not make his skin crawl. Quite the opposite, in fact; against all expectations, he was enjoying himself. The wound in his shoulder was not severe, and it was pleasant to be fussed over. In addition, that glorious woman was here and, whatever happened, he was determined to see her again, preferably alone.

Meggie. Her name was Meggie.

She had raised her sword to him, and normally that was a hanging offence. They would call it treason, in fact, and so the means of death would be longer drawn out and decidedly more painful. For a moment he thought of her suffering. Dying. It was not a good thought. He would spare her, he decided. He would make no accusation against her. She would be so very grateful, but he was sure he could come up with a way in which she could demonstrate that gratitude.

He thought about that, too.

Presently, his breathing slowing once more, he recalled that she had said her mother’s name was Joanna de Courtenay. She’d had a distant cousin at court. He let his mind wander freely, and after a while a memory surfaced.

It had been one of those wild, rollicking Christmas celebrations when it seemed that almost all the rich and the powerful in the land gathered together, determined to have a good time. It had been at Windsor; he thought hard and tried to recall the year. It had been soon after his elder brother Henry, the Young King, had died, succumbing to a terrible attack of dysentery following his hare-brained looting of the holy shrine at Rocamadour. The Young King died in 1183, so the Christmas in question must have been 1184. And a laughing, dashing, daredevil of a man called Denys de Courtenay had brought a young cousin to court, and the king had bedded her every night for almost a fortnight.

King John smiled at the memory. He’d had his fair share of women that Christmas, but he hadn’t been invited to share any of his father’s. He remembered Joanna de Courtney, though; she had been gorgeous, and they’d all envied King Henry and grumbled because a bandy, randy old man had won the best pickings of the season.

If she had borne a child following the rampant days of that Christmas, he had never heard tell of it. Meggie was too young to have been conceived so long ago and, besides, Josse d’Acquin had said she was his daughter and the resemblance between them supported the claim.

Yet there had been a child; a son. He was certain of it, for the evidence had been right before his eyes only a matter of hours ago. A young man had stood challenging him, a sword in one hand and a knife in the other, and for a weird, disorienting moment John had thought he was looking at his own father, as he had looked in John’s earliest memories.

If he was right — and in his mind there was no shadow of a doubt — then his opponent in that short and ferocious struggle up by the chapel had been his half brother.

A slow smile spread across the king’s face. He did not care to have stray half brothers loose in the land; you never know when some hothead might decide to make such a man a rallying point for insubordination. Well, this particular bastard brother had just attacked his king and gravely wounded one of his close companions, which had effectively signed his death warrant.

It was just a matter of catching him.

There was the sound of booted feet coming into the quiet infirmary; it appeared that Josse had located the sheriff. Swiftly, the king turned his mind to the orders he would issue, and then it would only be a matter of time before his blue-eyed half brother was screaming out his death agony.

The king’s smile broadened, and he gave a soft laugh.

Josse and Gervase stood outside the recess where the king lay. The king had just finished issuing his orders to Gervase. The sheriff was to gather together as many men as he needed and send them out searching for the man who had attacked the king and Olivier de Brionne in the clearing by the chapel. The man was accused of gravely wounding Olivier, of causing the death of Hugh de Brionne and, most serious of all, of raising arms against the king. The king had given a detailed description of the wanted man and curtly commanded Gervase to circulate it among his men.

Several favourites from the king’s inner circle had gradually insinuated themselves into the recess, and they were joined by a quartet of bodyguards and a couple of servants. As soon as the king announced he was ready, they would organize a litter or a cart and take him back to one of his London residences, where he could be nursed and fussed back to health by his own team of physicians. Josse, Gervase and everyone at Hawkenlye were redundant.

Gervase looked at Josse and silently jerked his head towards the infirmary door. They walked quickly away, only stopping when they were out of earshot of the building and the many men loitering outside it.

Josse waited. He was all but certain Gervase had recognized Ninian from the king’s description. If so, he appreciated that the sheriff was in an impossible position. His duty to his monarch was indisputable, for he had been given a direct order to find the wanted man and bring him to justice. But this wanted man was the adopted son of his oldest friend, and Josse was well aware that Gervase himself had grown to like, trust and admire Ninian.