The Fifth Knight(19)

In spite of the fire, the hair rose on the back of Palmer’s neck. With Fitzurse’s blue gaze still fixed on him, he heard the unmistakable clink of someone loosen a sword from its sheath. “Sorry, my lord, sorry.” Palmer plastered a wide grin on his face and held his glass aloft. “The Knaresborough wine is far too good. It loosens my tongue and makes it wag like a fool.”

“Don’t need wine for that, Palmer,” said le Bret.

Laughter broke the tension.

To Palmer’s relief, Fitzurse joined in, then looked in his goblet. “I’ve run dry again, de Morville.”

As de Morville reached for a jug and filled Fitzurse’s vessel, Palmer steadied his breathing. Forcurse the drink, it had pushed him to try and find out when he’d get his payment. Worse, it had made him prate out the questions he’d had since the murder in Canterbury. But he shouldn’t bother with them. Fitzurse was in charge, and Fitzurse held the purse strings. Asking questions wouldn’t bring Palmer his money any sooner. He had to remember that.

♦ ♦ ♦

The darkness pressed against and around Theodosia, seemed to suck the air from her prison and make it hard to breathe. She opened her eyes as wide as she could, as if such action would let in some light. But the blackness remained impenetrable, with tiny flashes of light the cruel invention of her own mind.

The dank stone and soggy straw on which she sat chilled her to constant shivering. Her feet had lost all sensation, and damp crawled through her skirts to soak her skin. A rusted iron collar fastened tight around her neck, so heavy she could hardly keep her head up, and chafing her neck raw with every slight movement.

A thick chain attached the collar to a stout column of wood embedded in the filthy cobbled floor. That had been her last sight as de Morville’s guards had walked out, before they slammed the door shut and cut her vision as sure as if they’d pierced her eyes. Trying to rise to her feet to explore her surroundings by feel, she’d found the chain was too short and she could at best kneel.

Trapped on the floor, she had tried to rejoice in the torment of complete darkness, embrace it in prayer. A dungeon is the same as a cell. It is a solitary place, far from temptations. I can serve God in its harshness. I can be private with Him in here and see His bright face more clearly.

She’d called to God for hours in this foul place, with its stale, dank air and sour stench of rotting straw. But He hadn’t come. She’d been cast into the darkness like the Bible had warned all sinners would.

She swallowed down the hard lump of misery in her throat as she adjusted her position on the floor, back and shoulders knotted in pain. She was still alone in here, alone for when those terrible men came for her, and come for her they would. It could be in a minute, it could be in days. But all she could do was wait, was listen out, for those metal boots on stone, for the bang at the door, for the swords, the knives.

Her chest heaved as she fought for air. She had to bring her mind elsewhere, take it away from this place. Otherwise she would lose her reason. She fumbled with numb fingers for her crucifix, tucked into the top of her woolen undergarments.

The familiar embellished metal was warm from her flesh, as it had been from Mama’s skin the day she’d hung it round her neck. Mama’s parting gift as she’d left her daughter, left Canterbury. Mama. Her noble, holy mama.

The murdering knights sought her too. Fitzurse’s questions to Becket in the cathedral. I can’t find the anchoress, I can’t find her mother. But you will tell me.

But Becket did not tell them, and they killed him. Now they would get her, Theodosia, to tell them. She would bring death to Mama’s door as surely as she had to her lord Thomas’s. Hot tears ran down her cheeks and splashed onto her clasped hands. How could she do that to Mama?

Not Mama. Brother Edward had admonished her in confession. Sister Amélie. Not to be spoken of. Ever.

She scrubbed at her face with her fingers, gulped the tears back. “Stop it.” Theodosia’s command to herself in the sightless cell was angry, fierce. “Stop it now. You’re not a child anymore. You are a woman of God, an anchoress.”

But how could she claim such things? She had disobeyed, rushed in to the sight of men. Called forth the evil of murder.

Her teachings from Aelred flooded back. “From sight comes all the misery that there now is and ever yet was and ever shall be.”

With a low moan of despair at her foolishness, she bowed her head against the rough collar. God had been with her in here all along. By removing her sight, He was trying to show her where she had gone so wrong, to remind her of her true vocation of staying hidden from the world.