The Seigneur d’Alle’s face mottled with anger: ‘Again? God damn this cold-blooded, womanish game!’ And with a blow of his arm, he swept the board off the table, sending it crashing to the floor, the pieces skittering away across the wooden surface. One of the hounds lifted its refined, pointed head, gazed at me for a minute out of deeply stupid eyes, then went back to sleep.
‘Father,’ said the handsome young man, in a warning tone, ‘we have company!’
The Seigneur swung his large head round towards me: under a mop of brown hair, his face was ruddy, pouched and touched here and there by whitish, faded scars. He glared at me angrily, then rose from his chair, turned and stood facing me, his hands resting easily on his hips. He was a big man, taller than me, with broad shoulders and long legs, and while he was dressed in costly finery, a gold embroidered tunic and a black sable-lined mantle, and not equipped as if for the battlefield, I could tell from a glance that he was a fighter. This was no city-dwelling lordling with soft hands and mild manners – this was a seasoned French knight, a man of blood and iron. He seemed familiar, the resemblance with my father being apparent – but he also reminded me just a little of my beloved sovereign, King Richard. Not in looks, but in his belligerent masterfulness and total confidence.
‘My lord,’ I began, after making my bow, ‘I am Sir Alan Dale, the son of Henri d’Alle – I am your nephew.’
‘Are you now?’ said the Seigneur. ‘Are you indeed?’ There was a slight, uncomfortable pause while he stared at me. ‘And what is it that you want with me – nephew?’
I was taken aback; I had assumed that my ties of kinship, the fact that we shared the same blood, would be enough to guarantee some civility. Evidently, I was wrong.
‘What he wants,’ said the younger man, getting up from his seat and coming around the table to approach me, ‘is a dry towel.’ The young man, who was clearly the Seigneur’s son, looked beyond me to the servant hovering by the door of the solar. ‘Gaston, be so good as to fetch this gentleman a clean, dry towel. Immediately!’
Turning his gaze back to me, the fair-haired young man said: ‘I am Roland d’Alle. Perhaps you and your man would care for a glass of wine to warm your hearts on this miserable day?’ He smiled, but only with half of his face, and I saw then that the left-hand side of his head, which had previously been turned away from me, was disfigured by a large red mark, raw and ugly, a recent burn for sure, only partially healed – what had once been a remarkably good-looking face was now quite disfigured by that wound.
‘I asked you – Sir Alan, is it? – what you wanted here,’ said the Seigneur, his voice brusque, like a man accustomed to giving orders and having them instantly obeyed. ‘So – what do you want? You pop up out of nowhere and claim to be a long-lost relative; what could you possibly want, I wonder? Could it be that you are hoping for a little advance to tide you over in a difficult time?’ His tone was very close to a sneer; and I bristled. This was the second occasion in my two days in Paris that strangers I had met had assumed that I had come to beg money. I peered down at my shabby, damp and travel-worn clothes. And then looked back up into my uncle’s brick-red face. I could feel the stirrings of a raw anger that I’d hoped so much to keep suppressed.
‘I do not come seeking anything from you, my lord, least of all money,’ I said coldly. ‘All I require is some information. I wish to know about my late father, your brother Henri d’Alle. Who was wrongly accused of theft, and hounded from Paris, abandoned by his family’ – I gave that word its due weight – ‘and, once outcast by the Church, lived in poverty in England until his death at the hands of an unknown enemy.’
‘You seem to think you possess all the facts,’ growled the Seigneur. ‘What more do you wish to know?’
‘I wish to know why you did not help him.’
‘That is no God-damned business of yours.’
‘My father, my family, my business,’ I said, struggling to keep my temper; fighting the growing urge to step over to my uncle and knock him to the floor.
‘And I have no more information about your father and his relations with my family that I care to give you,’ the Seigneur said. ‘Now, I will ask you—’
‘He was a fool,’ said a new voice, a woman’s voice, and I turned towards the door to see a servant carrying a tray of wine cups and a slim, elegant shape in a long green fur-trimmed silk robe offering me a large white linen towel. Thomas was already scrubbing at his damp head with a similar item.