My bruised and weeping squire Thomas cut my bonds and, under Reuben’s direction, he made a rough pad from the altar cloth and strapped it tightly over the wound in my chest. The gag had been removed and I was free to speak, but, convinced that I had only moments left to live, I kept repeating to Reuben the same phrase over and over: ‘You must get word to Goody – you must tell her how I love her. Tell her I am sorry …’ But my breath was short and I could feel puffs of wet air seeping through the bloody bandage on my chest every time I tried to utter a word.
‘Shush, shush, now, Alan! Be quiet and save your strength,’ Reuben said to me, as he felt for the pulse in my neck. I could feel his cool hand on my skin, and the throbbing of my vein under his fingers. Reuben was frowning, looking at me oddly, almost with a kind of awe.
When the last wounded Knight of Our Lady had been dispatched, Little John came across to me. His blue eyes in that ruddy face stared into mine, and for once he didn’t make a crude jest. ‘We must go now, Alan,’ he said. ‘You grip on tight to my neck. I shall carry you.’
‘What about Hanno?’ My breath hissed in my throat. Little John looked at my friend, sprawled in the chair next to mine, and he said: ‘The canons will give him a decent burial.’ And then he leaned forward and scooped me up in his arms, as if I was no heavier than a child’s doll.
We left the same way that Little John, Thomas and the d’Alles had entered: through the ruin of the window, the glittering shards crunching under their boots.
I was laid in the bed of a straw-filled wagon, and I saw Little John and my friends donning the robes of monks once more, five anonymous clerics and their wagon among the hundreds that streamed about the Abbey in the last few hours before Vespers and the closing of the gates.
And then I passed into oblivion.
I awoke to Robin’s long, handsome face, and a look of infinite concern in his grey eyes. I was in a narrow bed, in a small white-washed room, a cell of some kind. It was night-time and cold, and the room was lit by a single candle. But I knew somehow that it was not the same night as the fight in the chapel; I knew that I had been there for many days. I had a raging thirst, and a crushing ache along the whole of the left-hand side of my chest; a full bladder too.
‘I’m not dead,’ I said wonderingly. And then I said it again. ‘I’m not dead – am I?’
‘No,’ said Robin with a half-laugh. ‘You are not dead; and I sometimes think that you must be indestructible.’
‘Why am I not dead?’
‘Somebody stands a very good guard over you: God, the Devil, one of your myriad saints, the Blessed Virgin Mary …’
‘Not her.’
‘No, not her,’ Robin agreed.
‘You do. You stand guard over me.’
‘Well, I try to,’ he said, the candlelight turning his eyes to silver. ‘I cannot for the life of me say why: you are seldom grateful, you are far too wilful; you will not obey even the simplest of orders from your lord – I told you to leave these people alone, but would you ever listen—’
‘They told you to tell me to leave them alone.’
He said nothing.
‘How long have you known that it was Brother Michel who ordered my father’s death?’ I asked. ‘How long have you known that he was the Master, the “man you cannot refuse”?’
Silence.
‘And why did you never tell me?’
Another pause.
‘We will talk about it in the morning,’ said Robin finally. ‘You are not going anywhere for a while; and neither am I. Here,’ he lifted a clay cup from the table beside the bed, ‘Reuben says I am to make sure that you drink all of this.’
And he cupped my neck and helped me to drink. Then he gave me water and, without a shred of embarrassment, he helped me to relieve myself into a chamber pot below the bed. These simple actions exhausted me, and I fell back into the cot, barely able to keep my eyes open. My chest was a jagged cage of fire, but I could feel whatever it was that Reuben had prepared for me to drink beginning to soothe and ease my pains, spreading its soft, supple fingers, kneading the pain away around my whole body.
‘Where am I?’ I asked Robin as he picked up the candle and prepared to leave.
‘In the Hotel-Dieu, on the Île de la Cité,’ Robin replied with more than a suggestion of a twinkle in his eye. ‘We are guests of the venerable Bishop Maurice de Sully.’
‘Situs inversus viscerum,’ said Reuben, relishing the three Latin words. ‘Your insides are the wrong way around, Alan. And for that reason you are breathing today, and no other. You have perfectly normal heart, lungs, liver and lights, they are just on the opposite side of the body from most other people. You heart is on the right-hand side of the body, not the left as usual. I should have known in Cyprus three years ago when I removed that crossbow bolt from your right side, and couldn’t find your liver. This is the second time your life has been saved by your condition.’