Now Harry stands, further north than he’s ever been, by a shabby tent in a churned-up field on the Scottish borders, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. His skin burns with shame and sorrow under its coating of dust from the road. Inside the tent, nothing has been touched. Spare swords, a change of clothes, a patched wool cloak. Sir Simon’s little psalter lies open on the travelling chest to Psalm 23, his favourite. It is as if Sir Simon will walk back in at any moment, grumbling about the ache in his bones and passing off his shield to Harry.
But he won’t.
He’s gone.
Harry’s mother is gone, too, falling to the wasting sickness just as Sir Simon was preparing to leave for Scotland. Harry feels torn in half, as if his life is nothing but a process of rushing from coffin to coffin, always a little too late to be any use. First his mother, then Sir Simon, as close to a father as Harry has ever known.
His real father, Sir Owen, is gone so long ago in the weeds of Bannockburn that his existence seems no more real than Sir Galahad’s: a perfect shadow, and a set of ghostly footsteps for good young boys to follow.
And Harry stands alone in the midst of a camp seething in celebration of great victory, while he has only a pageant of ashes to share.
The first sign of trouble had been the day before they were set to leave for Scotland, when Annie’s little cousin came clattering hellbent through the gates of Sir Simon’s hall on the old plough-horse, crying for Harry to get back to Dartington as soon as possible, that his mother was dying.
The fields and hedgerows were lush with midsummer’s rude vigour as Harry dashed down the lanes towards home. Every corner of the Devon landscape burst forth with life.
Every corner but one.
The apples bowed the gnarled branches of their trees, yet his mother could not eat. Honeysuckle lay heavy on the vine, its perfume almost stifling in the hot July air, and yet his mother could not smell. The gorse bloomed brash in the hedgerows, and the rose rambled wild down the lanes. And yet in the darkness of the solar, Joan de Lyon wasted away on her pallet, never to walk the lanes she loved again. She was a frail skeleton in summer, where she had been quick and strong through April’s rains. And Harry fidgeted restlessly by her sickbed for five long days, praying to a God that had no answers for him.
He broke, finally, when his mother grabbed his hand in her trembling, birdlike fingers, looked at him with glassy blue eyes, and called him by his father’s name.
‘He’s not here,’ Harry whispered, kissing the sun-freckles that dotted the back of her hand. ‘Try to rest,’ he said. He’ll see you soon, he didn’t say.
And then Harry walked out into the stables to cry all his terror and loneliness and impotence into the flank of his palfrey. It was the first time he allowed himself to fall apart. To show weakness, even if it was to nobody else than a little bay mare.
Lady de Lyon, polite to the last, chose that moment to slip quietly from the bonds of this earth. Mustn’t cause a fuss.
Harry knew his mother was no more as soon as he slunk back into the room. Her mouth and eyes were open, as if startled to finally receive welcome into the Hereafter after wandering its borders for so long. Her skin had faded to a strange yellow-grey. It was like some spirit, some fae, had stolen his mother away, taken this bright, witty, elegant ball of life, and left only sculpted tallow in her place.
It wasn’t her.
And Harry didn’t cry.
Her body was interred in the little Dartington churchyard next to the stone which marked only her husband’s spirit, and their child rode north again, to catch up to the war.
When a man has had great wounds done to him, the urge to wound in return is an unbearable thing. Harry knew that blood and steel might not soothe the empty place in his heart, but he was sure as hell going to give it a try. Better the brash noise of battle than the quiet, pitying silences of Dartington Manor. The manor that was his now, its fate resting in Harry’s shaking, too-young hands.
That, also, was why Harry spurred his horse towards the Great North Road: a reason that hid in every poor country noble’s heart, if almost never on their lips. There was glory across the border in Scotland, and fortune to be won that would help his small manor survive. There was the chance of moving out from Sir Simon’s shadow and becoming a knight on his own. Harry was young for it – only nineteen; they had been setting out north on his birthday, he and Sir Simon – but others had been knighted younger.
There was also the small matter of getting even against the Scottish barbarians for his father’s death. Blood for blood, sorrow for sorrow.
And the manor’s problems left for another day. He couldn’t have missed the taut expressions of the household servants when he announced he’d be leaving straight after the funeral. Harry knew that riding off to war wasn’t a form of cowardice, but it certainly felt like one.
Sir Owen de Lyon had died at Bannockburn a fortnight before Harry was born, another casualty of Scottish steel, and Harry had promised vengeance to his empty grave in Dartington Church every Easter. Lady Joan would shake her fair
