‘I am pleased that you will not be arrayed among the English knights who will oppose us when war does come, Sir Alan,’ said the Seigneur, with a wry grin. And I was glad too. Reuben had told me that I must rest for a good long time, to allow my body, and particularly my lungs, to fully recover. My wind was bad, and I knew that I would not be fit for campaigning this season, and for the first time in my life I felt a strange reluctance to don mail and ride into battle ever again. I was going home to England and to Goody. And that pleased me a very great deal.
It took us two weeks, Thomas and I, to ride to Calais, for we travelled slowly, making sure that we stayed somewhere warm every night for the sake of my lungs – a safe conduct from Bishop de Sully easing our path and commanding the finest hospitality at any religious house we visited. Matthew the student accompanied us on this journey. Since the death of Master Fulk, he and his friends had found other teachers, and we had enjoyed one more evening at the sign of the Cock before my departure, a brief affair, it must be said, for I was soon exhausted by the young men’s high spirits and begged off early to go to bed. Matthew had told me he had tired of Paris and wished to travel back to England, to Oxford, where he had heard there was a renowned new teacher of Philosophy that he wanted to study under. I believe, in truth, that he owed a good deal of money to some very unpleasant people in Paris, but I was content for Matthew to come with us on our journey north. He provided some youthful company for Thomas, for I was a morose and irritable companion. Even a few hours in the saddle wearied me, and though we three rode out each morning at dawn, by noon, as often as not, I had travelled as far as I wished to for one day. We lingered at Beauvais, Amiens and St Pol-sur-Ternoise, for a full day’s rest. At Calais, it took another three days to find a ship that would take us to Dover. But, at the beginning of April, the year of Our Lord eleven hundred and ninety-five, I was once again on English soil. We travelled up to London, and I paid a visit to the Temple on the western outskirts of the city, and redeemed my silver from the knights there when I presented the letter from the Paris Temple. My silver was delivered to me in small white linen sacks no bigger than my fist but each marked with a neat red cross on the side. The clerks at the Temple seemed to take it as a matter of course that I should walk into their precincts with a piece of parchment, and walk out with more than two pounds of bright metal. It was a marvellous system, to be sure, but I was glad once again to have specie about my person and – once I had unpacked it from the linen sacks, counted it and packed it into my broad leather money belt – to feel its comforting weight on my hips.
We bade farewell to Matthew at St Albans, and while he took the road west to Aylesbury and on to Oxford, Thomas and I headed north. A week after that and Thomas and I rode through the open wooden gates of Westbury, in the county of Nottinghamshire, and I slipped out of the saddle and into the arms of my beloved.
Chapter Twenty
I had not seen Godifa, my betrothed, my fiery blonde darling, for almost a full year. And I found that she had changed a good deal in that time: I had left her a coltish girl, and returned to find her a beautiful full-grown woman. While I could still span her waist with my big hands, her hips and breasts had blossomed into soft curves. I took her into my arms and we kissed for a long, long while, our tongues intertwining like mating snakes, with a passion that made my head whirl and nearly cost me my self-control – I had it in my mind to drag her into her chamber and allow my lust free rein. But I did not: Goody was yet a maiden, and I’d sworn that she would be one until our wedding night.
I broke our honey-sweet embrace, held her in my arms, gazed into her lovely violet eyes. ‘Welcome home, my sweet love,’ she said, and I kissed her once more, briefly, on her soft lips before releasing her.
‘The weary warrior is home from the battlefield,’ said a warm voice with just a hint of Wales in its tones. It was my old friend Father Tuck, beaming at me from a round red-weathered face beneath the iron-grey smear of his tonsure.
I embraced him too, and then the tall, chestnut-haired woman standing beside him. Marie-Anne, Countess of Locksley, had put on a little weight, though she was still a lovely woman, and the reason for that slight increase in girth lay sleeping in her arms. ‘This is Miles,’ she said, filled with pride, and I peered at the bundle at her breast and saw a pair of unmistakable silver-grey eyes staring out at me with ferocious interest from a chubby pink face.
Beyond Marie-Anne and her baby, I saw the tall figure of Baldwin, my steward, standing by the door of the hall. He nodded a respectful greeting at me, but did not move; he was resting his hands on the shoulders of a dark-haired boy, who stood immediately in front of him: it was Hugh, Robin’s eldest son. And he stared at me without recognition, but with the curious gaze of any five-year-old.