The Long Sword(137)
‘The lady brought us six knights and is eager to go to Jerusalem,’ I said.
‘Going to Jerusalem …’ mused Fra Ricardo. In Venice, the phrase ‘going to Jerusalem’ suggested the accomplishment of an impossible task – or perhaps living in a dream world.
‘The count had me beaten,’ I said.
Fra Ricardo pursed his lips. ‘Very well, William,’ he said. ‘The legate wishes to see you.’
Tired in spirit and injured in body, I went to see the legate. He was sitting in his own scriptorium, at a table covered in scrolls. Sister Marie sat by him on a stool.
He looked up and smiled warmly. ‘My son,’ he said. He rose and I knelt, and he blessed me.
Then he scared me by sending Sister Marie from the room.
‘William,’ he said. ‘For as long as I have known you, your name has been paired with this woman’s. This Emile d’Herblay.’
I looked away.
‘Fra Peter has told me about the count.’ Father Pierre’s eyes were kind. But not deceived. ‘I forbid you to avenge yourself on him.’
I might have choked.
‘You, my son, have sinned against him – and his marriage.’ His eyes bored into mine. ‘I’m told he is a bad man. Does that justify your actions?’
‘He serves your enemy!’ I said.
Father Pierre shook his head impatiently. ‘I have no enemies,’ he said. ‘I serve only Christ. I am not important enough to have enemies.’
‘Robert of Geneva seeks to destroy you and d’Herblay is his tool!’ I said, with some heat.
‘His death would suit you very well,’ Father Pierre said. ‘It is easy to rationalise sin, is it not? I tell you, my well-beloved William – if you kill this man, I will send you away.’
I looked at the floor, the magnificent parquetry floor.
‘I will obey,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Yes. And now,’ he took my hand, ‘I must give my thanks for saving us in Genoa.’
‘Sabraham saved us,’ I said with some asperity. Nothing is worse than to have one’s sins known.
‘Sabraham says that, but for you, we would all have died. I have thanked him anyway. William, saving you from the tree was one of the best days work I’ve ever done.’ He met my eye again, and though he smiled, his eyes were as hard as any killers. ‘Don’t make me send you away.’
A few days after, when the Hungarian horse dealers came to the camp at Mestre to sell warhorses to the men who’d wintered over, I took a barge to the mainland with my friends. I was past needing the convent, but I was utterly unwilling to leave Emile, and I loved it there, to be honest. I played chess with the abbess, who had less use for men than any woman I ever met but seemed nonetheless to like me, and I was swimming with Fra Andrea, and swimming better than I ever had before. And I was learning to enjoy children. I will not fill this annal with tales of parenting, but I spent any time that was allowed with the three of them, and as the spring improved, that became hours every day. Nor did I confine myself to Edouard. Emile’s other children were, I discovered, no less entertaining, nor could the three be separated easily, and as I played with them, I thought of d’Herblay. He was at Mestre, and I was not to kill him.
What a tangle.
At any rate, we went to the camp at Mestre, and after a day with the horse thieves, I chose a fine big bay of indeterminate ancestry. He had been well trained, and that was his greatest selling point. He lacked Jacques’ great heart – and I admit, I walked the lines the first morning, hoping against hope that Jacques had come to Mestre. After all, we had the greatest accumulation of men-at-arms in Europe that spring. Hawkwood, defeated at Cascina, had nonetheless held Pisa together. Pisa had a new tyrant, Lord Agnello, who sounded at least as brutal as the della Scala lord of Verona. All over the rest of Tuscany and Lombardy, the Pope’s Italian war with Milan dwindled away and contracts ended, and the market was flooded with out-of-work men-at-arms and soldiers. Many turned brigand and many came trudging across the late spring roads to the terra firma of Venice, looking for work.