The Long Sword(20)

            Her head turned. ‘That’s much better,’ she admitted. ‘I thought we liked each other. Remember the auberge at Chateauneuf ? Last year?’

            I smiled. ‘With Juan?’

            ‘One of my best days. Give me your present, monsieur.’ She raised her head and put her hand to her back, and for a moment she was a much older woman. Remember that noble girls live longer, keep their looks longer, because they do not work from dawn to dark.

            She went and whispered to the fat owner, and he shrugged. ‘Don’t come back too pious to help a customer,’ he said, but he waved.

            I paused and gave him a Florentine silver coin; it was bigger than most and unclipped. He took it with some respect.

            I took her to the Hospital, where the gatekeeper looked at me as if I had grown an additional head. ‘You cannot bring a slattern into the Hospital!’ he said.

            Chance had caused us to reverse positions, as men will when they argue, so that I was looking back down the street out the gate, and there was ginger beard.

            Before I could cajole or intimidate the gatekeeper, Father Pierre appeared mounted on a mule, with Fra Peter Mortimer and Fra Juan di Heredia at his side. He didn’t smile at me, but he smiled at Anne.

            ‘Ah, Daughter,’ he said, and he dismounted clumsily.

            She burst into tears. I don’t think she said a word.

            He whispered to her, and she sank to her knees.

            He made the sign of the cross on her and when he looked at me, his mouth twitched. His eyes cut me like knives.

            I couldn’t meet his eyes long, and I raised her and took her home.

            In the doorway of the inn, she stopped and smiled at the ground. ‘I really prefer not to think of you as a customer.’ Then she lifted her eyes and they met mine. ‘But really …’

            I put the cross around her neck. There was a pause, and I decided to kiss her neck.

            She frowned, and then slipped away. ‘Do you know that man?’ she asked. She pointed out the door of inn.

            Ginger beard saw her out-thrust arm – and bolted.

            I shrugged. ‘He followed me here.’

            She sighed. ‘Some footpad. Friend of the men you killed, perhaps?’ She kissed me, but it was sisterly. ‘I love your priest. He is everything people say he is. Go follow him. Be careful, mon cher. They mean him harm, the rich fucks, Geneva and his people.’

            That’s how I left her.

            I left the medical book at the Hospital with instructions that it should go to my sister.



            We climbed into the Alps, headed once more for Turin, and I had days to consider meeting Richard Musard, to fence with my comrades on the road, to joust, to share cups of wine – and to think of Emile.

            I had, in addition to plain lechery, been repeatedly unfaithful to her; all very well when she was distant and thought dead, but a stain on my chivalry now that I knew her to be alive. I thought about her a great deal, because I knew it was possible that I would meet her at the Green Count’s court. And because of Anne’s barb. My ‘lady’.

            I had a number of reasons to be dissatisfied with myself. I pondered the twists and turns of the Bourc’s attack on us, and the only conclusion I could draw is that, despite my best efforts, I had been afraid. And despite Fra Peter’s exhortation, I was sure I should have killed him.

            In fact, I thought a great deal about the two thieves I’d killed, desperate men. They had looked to me like brigands, and two of them at least had borne the stamp of men-at-arms by the way they moved, their strength.