Alys Clare - The Joys of My Life

She would have liked to talk it over with Josse, but the poor man had worries enough. He had come running to find her yesterday evening, red in the face, out of breath and, unusually for him, frightened. ‘It’s back in that damned tree!’ he said, instantly apologizing for the profanity. She had not believed him — it was twilight, after all, and his eyes could be playing tricks — but the figure was gone from the cupboard in the wall.

This morning, just before the midday office, Helewise went out to look once more at the site on the forest fringe. She tried to ignore the stonemasons, the carters and the shouts of the men engaged in unloading the carts, and looked beyond them to the small area of flat land in front of the trees. Would it be so very bad to have the chapel outside the walls? There was one important advantage to siting it there: when the abbey gates were locked at nightfall, having the chapel outside them meant that those in need of solace would still have somewhere to pray.

There was also the strange matter of the statue. Something — no, she corrected herself firmly, somebody — seemed quite determined that the figure belonged not in the book cupboard within the abbey but out there in the tree. Josse had claimed that the beautiful woman in the horned headdress was not the Virgin, for she was pregnant and made of black wood, indicating, he said, a black skin. Helewise was not so sure. The Virgin Mary had been pregnant, hadn’t she? The conception of her precious child might have been unorthodox but she had carried the baby and delivered him just like every other mother. Who could say what colour her skin had been? She was a woman of the hot southern lands, so might she not have been considerably darker than her usual depiction in paintings and statuary?

There was no doubting the power of the figure. Helewise was not entirely sure if she was right, but some very deep instinct told her that this power, although alarming, was good. Perhaps the statue was some earlier artist’s vision of the Mother of God. Perhaps he — or she — had been inspired by the Virgin in some earlier guise.

Helewise, quite shocked at the thought, dismissed it. Goodness, it was surely heretical! Somehow, though, standing there so close to the Great Forest, she could not make herself believe this. Without realizing it, she seemed to have walked up close to the tree where the statue had been found. It was now back in her room — Josse had fetched it first thing this morning — but she knew that it would soon return to the tree. That is where she wants to be, Helewise thought dreamily. Perhaps we should do as she wants and let her stay in her chosen spot. Perhaps we should build the chapel there and make a special place within it for her. As the concept waxed in her mind, she seemed to hear a voice saying, ‘Do it.’

Josse spent the first part of the morning with Meggie. Brother Erse the carpenter was busy making a series of carvings of the Apostles for the new chapel, and Meggie, intrigued at the way people came out of the wood, as she put it, wanted to try. She sat with Erse, and Josse watched as the monk solemnly handed her an offcut of oak, put a chisel and a light hammer in her hand and showed her how to make the first incisions.

It gave Josse pleasure to observe that his daughter seemed to have skill in her small hands. Her figure had none of the stylized grace and power of Erse’s saints, but then it was her first attempt and it was a very lifelike hound.

As the morning wore on, he knew he could no longer postpone the task that was waiting for him. If he was right and Piers had gone to the tower at World’s End with his young squire and then escaped, it seemed likely that two of the three men whom the Oleron guard had rowed away from the island that March night were Philippe de Loup and King Richard. All three men were hard on Piers’s trail. Which one was de Loup, the tall, fair one or the one described as short and lightly built? Josse had no way of knowing. The Chartres mason had referred to de Loup having followed two others to the city; had one of the men been Piers, in the company of some fellow traveller he had met on the long road from the Ile d’Oleron? Oh, but it all seemed to fit! De Loup and perhaps other Knights of Arcturus must have lost Piers’s trail after leaving Oleron and gone with the king to besiege Chalus, where the lure of treasure had proved more powerful for Richard than the prospect of trying to find Piers, but then the king had met his death, the treasure had vanished, and the Knights of Arcturus had returned to the urgent matter of finding and silencing the renegade.

I must speak to Piers again, Josse resolved. I need to ask him if I’m right. I must make him confirm — if, indeed, he knows — whether the king, de Loup and a third man followed him as he fled from Oleron.

Against his volition something else that the Oleron guard had said kept echoing over and over again in Josse’s head: Screams were heard coming from the tower, dreadful, horrifying, agonized screams… and through the arrow slits… there poured a brilliant, unearthly blue light that suddenly changed to blood red.

What were they doing up there? Did they snatch Piers’s young squire, bind him, tie him face down to the altar and then make Piers watch as de Loup stepped up to the dais? He recalled the splattered blood and the stained silver robe and his mind turned in horrified disgust from the irrevocable conclusion. Was it the lad whose screams rang out into the night? Was it his sacrificial death that turned the blue light blood red? Dear God, if so, then what a frightful end to a young life.

Abruptly he stood up, and wood shavings tumbled from his lap. Meggie looked enquiringly at him. ‘I have to go and speak to someone, sweetheart,’ he said, forcing a smile.

‘But I haven’t finished my fox!’

‘I thought it was a hound.’

‘It was but its tail’s too bushy so it’s a fox.’

Brother Erse grinned. ‘I’ve done the same myself, Sir Josse, when a face I was carving turned out more like one saint than another. I’ll watch over her,’ he added quietly. ‘If you’re not back by noon, I’ll take her along with me and get her something to eat.’

‘Thank you, Brother Erse. See you soon, Meggie.’

In the infirmary, he asked to see Piers but Sister Euphemia, hurrying to intercept him, said it was impossible. ‘He has a fever,’ she said. ‘We have done everything we can to cleanse that wound in his throat but still it has become foul.’

‘Will he live?’ Josse muttered.

‘I hope so.’ The infirmarer glanced over at the curtained recess where Piers lay. Her tone, Josse thought, did not sound very optimistic.

‘I have to speak to him,’ Josse said. ‘It’s very important.’

‘You’ll get no sense out of him today,’ Sister Euphemia said firmly. ‘He’s raving again. Something about some boy who died and he was to blame. It’s the fever, Sir Josse. Either that or a guilty conscience.’

‘Then I must-’

‘Not till I say so! Go away and leave us alone. If your man recovers, I’ll send for you.’

And with that Josse knew he had to be content.

He decided to go back into the forest. If he had been in his right mind last evening — and he was not sure he had been — then there had been someone following him as he returned from Joanna’s hut. Could it have been de Loup? Having tried and failed to kill Piers, was he hanging around waiting for the opportunity to try again? Why? Because, he answered himself, Piers is horrified by the Knights of Arcturus and, far from becoming one of the thirteen, he may well betray them. Perhaps he had already done so.

Josse diverted from his path and, going up to the little room by the gate where the porteress kept watch, he collected his sword and his dagger. If he was going to come face to face with the sinister Philippe de Loup, he did not wish to do so unarmed.