Simon Beaufort - A Head for Poisoning

Joan watched him. “We are not,” she said firmly. “Enide has just blocked the door, that is all. Give it a push with your shoulder, Henry.”

Henry did as he was told, but the door was stuck fast. Geoffrey inspected it, and then gave it a solid kick at waist level. It moved a little.

“A stone is blocking it,” said Henry, elbowing him out of the way. “Move. I can open it now.”

Geoffrey stood back and watched as Henry heaved and shoved at the door, accompanying his efforts with an impressive litany of curses and blasphemies. Geoffrey offered to help, but there was only enough room for one, and Henry was clearly intent on doing it himself.

“Making up for not firing your arrow at Drogo to save Geoff, are you?” asked Joan waspishly.

Henry glared, leaning his back against the door and shoving with all his might. “I could not be sure that I would not hit Geoffrey,” he grunted. “Then you would have been all over me for murder.”

“That would not usually stop you,” said Geoffrey.

“Well, things are different now,” muttered Henry. “I am lord of Goodrich; I can afford to be gracious.”

If not committing murder was Henry’s notion of being gracious, Geoffrey decided yet again that the sooner he was away from Goodrich, the better. He backed away from the door to give Henry more room.

“It will not budge,” said Henry. “You try.”

Geoffrey leaned his weight on the door, and pushed as hard as he could. It remained fast.

“This is useless,” said Henry, watching. “I need a lever.” Before Geoffrey could stop him, he had grabbed the torch and darted back up the stairs, leaving Joan and Geoffrey alone in the darkness.

The pitch-blackness in the cavern pressed down on Geoffrey. Somewhere, he heard a light patter as some sand fell from the roof. The soft stone through which the tunnel had been excavated was completely inappropriate for such a structure, and Geoffrey felt part of the wall crumble even as his outstretched hand brushed against it. And then there was a hiss and a crackle as yet another trickle of earth and pebbles dropped from the ceiling. He found he could not breathe deeply enough to draw air into his lungs, and he started to cough.

He began to walk blindly towards the stairs, hoping to catch up with Henry, but he had not gone far before his foot caught on the uneven floor and he went sprawling forwards onto his knees.

“Geoff? Where are you?” came Joan’s voice. He felt her hand on his shoulder. “Do not try to chase after Henry. He will not be long.”

“We are trapped in the dark,” said Geoffrey tightly. “And the dust is choking me.”

“There is no dust,” said Joan reasonably. “And we are not trapped. We will be out soon, and we can always go back up the stairs to Godric’s chamber, anyway.”

Geoffrey swallowed, and tried to bring his panic under control. “I know.”

“I understand your dislike of enclosed spaces,” said Joan sympathetically. “You wrote about it in your letters.”

“My letters to Enide,” said Geoffrey, still coughing. “Or rather my letters to some scribe, who was doubtless enjoying himself thoroughly at my expense. Still, at least I know it was not Norbert. That man could not pen a decent letter to save his life.”

“Actually, they were letters to me,” said Joan in the darkness. “You addressed them to Enide, but she lost interest in writing to you within a year of you leaving-especially after her accident. Dictating a letter takes a long time, and she was too active and too impatient to sit so long at one task. She usually left them lying around in our room, and I took them to Olivier to read.”

“So my letters were to Olivier?” asked Geoffrey, horrified. “Wonderful!”

“It was wonderful for me,” said Joan quietly. “It gave me an excuse to see him, and we enjoyed the business of composing letters to you together. He wanted me to tell you that it was us and not Enide when we first started to write to you, but I was afraid that if I did, you might not write again, and then I would have lost two things I had come to care about-my reason for spending so much time with Olivier, and writing to you.”

“No wonder Olivier knew that I had been transferred to Tancred’s service, but my brothers did not,” said Geoffrey, recalling his surprise when the small knight had mentioned it when they had first met.

Joan nodded. “He has followed the career of a fellow knight with great interest.”

“And it was not Enide who was considering becoming a nun,” Geoffrey went on, remembering another subject in the letters. “It was you. And it was not me you were telling-it was Olivier, so that he would make up his mind and marry you.”

Joan sighed softly. “It did not work-I think that ploy was too subtle for him. But I felt that I came to know you much better after you had left than I had when you were here. And then, when Enide died-or we thought she did-it was too late to be honest. We had to stop writing, even though we longed to continue.”

“But it was all based on deceit!” objected Geoffrey. “You are right-I might not have written back to you had I known what you had done.”

He was startled to hear a soft intake of breath that sounded like a sob. He reached out in the dark, but she moved away from his hand. He scratched around for something to say to break the uncomfortable silence that followed.

“I wrote to you for twenty years. Did you love Olivier all that time?”

Her voice was unsteady when she spoke. “I fell in love the first time I saw him, but you see how he is. He would never have gathered the courage to ask me to be his wife. In the end, when I was almost resigned to remaining a maiden all my life, Walter took your manor at Rwirdin so that the Earl of Shrewsbury would become interested enough to force him into action.”

“So, first you steal my letters intended for Enide, and then you steal my manor,” said Geoffrey, unimpressed. “All to secure Olivier for yourself.”

“It was worth it,” said Joan, sounding defiant. “I might have lost you now, but I gained Olivier in the process. He might not look much, but he is the most gentle, charming man I have ever met, and quite unlike all the other pigs that call themselves knights-including you. You can keep your paltry manor! I do not need it now. I have what I really want.”

Geoffrey recalled the tender words about the lover he had assumed was Enide’s. So, it was Joan’s, and the astonishing object of her affections was the cowardly Olivier, a man so feeble that he had taken years and years to secure his wife. Geoffrey recanted that thought almost immediately: Joan was a formidable woman, and perhaps Olivier had done well in eluding her amorous clutches for so long.

Geoffrey recalled how he had so cleverly deduced that the lover in the letters was Adrian, the parish priest, written of with such loving care by Enide. But that had been no more than a lucky guess, inspired by Adrian’s clear infatuation with Enide when he spoke of her. Geoffrey’s assumption that Enide had declined to mention his name because Adrian was parish priest could not have been more wrong: all Joan’s words of affection and devotion had not been to Geoffrey at all but to Olivier.

A few particles of sand dropped from the ceiling and landed near him, making him jump violently. He felt sweat breaking out on his forehead and the small of his back. He started to cough again when dust swirled into his face. Then Joan moved next to him, slapping him vigorously on the back.

“Easy now,” she said, gruff in her attempt at comfort. “Move this way a little, away from the dust. You have no cause to fear this cave, Geoff. It has been here for nigh on thirty years, and has not collapsed yet. Henry will not be long.”