‘Alan,’ said Goody sharply. ‘Behave yourself! This is Roger of Chichester, a very good friend of mine. He is merely paying me the courtesy of a friendly visit to wish me joy of the season.’
I growled at him under my breath, and gave him my nastiest, most dangerous glare. But I managed to keep my mouth shut.
‘A pleasure to have made your acquaintance… sir,’ said this presumptuous little popinjay. ‘I regret that I do not have the honour of your name.’
‘This is Alan of Westbury,’ said Goody, her face flushed, her lovely violet eyes kindled with sparks of anger, ‘and he is behaving today like an overbearing, ill-mannered lout.’
‘Ah, well, then, ah, I will leave you in peace, ah, and I bid you God speed, ah, until we meet again…’ stammered this over-dressed love-puppy.
‘I doubt very much we will meet again,’ I said shortly. ‘God be with you!’ And I turned away from him rudely and began to fiddle with the clasp on my damp riding cloak. I heard rather than saw Goody usher this silly lad over to the hall door, and send him gracefully on his way, and then she came back over to me by the fire.
‘What is the matter with you? Why were you so unpleasant to dear Roger?’ asked Goody when she returned. ‘There was no need for that sort of rudeness. You have quite upset him.’
‘I don’t care — and I don’t care for him. Who is he, anyway?’
‘I have just introduced you: he is Roger, Lord Chichester’s eldest son and heir. What’s more, he is, as I have said, a good friend of mine.’ She was beginning to sound very angry; there was a rasp in her voice that I had heard before. Foolishly I ignored it.
‘He was holding your hand: in future, I don’t want him alone with you in this house.’ I realized that I too had raised my voice.
‘This is not your house; nor yet is it your hand. And I will spend my time with whomever I wish.’ Goody was nearly snarling now, her blue eyes flaring brightly at me like a wildcat’s.
‘I forbid you to see him!’
‘What did you say?’ She was very nearly spitting the words, and her voice was quite as loud as mine.
Rashly, I repeated myself: ‘I forbid you to speak to this “dear Roger” person again.’
Goody’s face was white as a lily except for two points of vivid red on each cheekbone. She said coldly, and slowly, her voice now chillingly calm: ‘I will speak to whomever I like, whenever I like; and you will find, sir, that I will not speak to those who do not respect my rights and wishes.’
And with that she spun on her heel and marched off towards the end of the hall and the stairs up to her private quarters.
I found myself with a raised forefinger, pointing at her departing back, and uttering the words: ‘Well, I shall speak to whomever I wish too, ha-ha, and see how you like…’ But by then she was gone.
For the next few weeks, Goody refused to talk to me at all. It was as if the fire of her love for me had been totally extinguished, as if a barrel of snow had been poured on to a hearth, suddenly blotting the blaze and replacing it with an icy white mound.
I was rather taken aback by her sudden change of attitude: the day after the argument I had tried to apologize to her when our paths crossed in the upstairs corridor. It had been a silly argument, I said, faults on both sides, and I was sure we could each forgive the other for our hasty words. She cut me dead. And, after that, she refused to even remain in the same room with me. Whenever I entered the hall, she found an excuse to leave; if I entered a chamber she was in she would stalk out leaving an invisible chill in the air.
At first I was bewildered by her rejection of me, and then, after a whole week of icy silence, I was secretly rather impressed by her strength of will. She was punishing me, I knew, and she was relentless. But after two weeks, I began to grow annoyed. I spoke to Marie-Anne about the matter, and she urged me to apologize again to Goody.
‘You have no rights over her, Alan; not yet. She is not betrothed to you, nor married. And she has always been a very independent girl. Why do you not go to her and beg her forgiveness.’
‘But it is not my fault, this stupid rift. She was flirting with this Roger fellow. What was I supposed to do? Encourage them? Show them to a comfortable bedchamber? Bring them some warmed blankets?’
‘You have nothing to fear from Roger. He is not… he is not a threat to you and Goody. If you love her, why not apologize again? It cannot possibly hurt anyone.’
But I could not bear to humble myself before her only to incur her icy scorn. And so we went on as before, ignoring each other day after day, trapped in a frigid howling silence. I lost myself in exercise and self-indulgence: beginning Thomas’s training to be a knight with sword lessons, and long hours on the back of a horse; and occasionally going drinking with Bernard to his favourite places of ‘low entertainment’. His advice, predictably, was to get myself a plump whore and forget about Goody entirely. But I could not — and staying in Wakefield Inn and catching fleeting glimpses of my love, seeing her white indifferent face, was sheer bloody torture. Almost as bad as the hot irons, I thought. Indeed, I would gladly have undergone a night of torment in some stinking dungeon if it meant that my bond with Goody could be healed. I couldn’t sleep; I couldn’t eat. My head was filled with thoughts of sorrow, pain and death from sun-up to bedtime.
And then things took a turn for the worse. I was in an eating house on Bankside, a place that served food all day and all night for the men from the ships who came to eat there when they had finished unloading cargoes at odd hours, when Bernard joined me.
He was not in good form. For once he was sober, and his happy, boozy face was grey and tired. But he tried his hardest to make light of the grave news he bore.
‘There has been a little setback with the King,’ he told me. ‘Did I not warn you that the greed of princes was limitless? It seems that King Philip of France and Prince John have joined forces and made a counter-offer for King Richard’s person.’
‘What?’ I felt as if I had been smacked in the face with an open hand. ‘What kind of counter-offer?’
‘You know that Prince John is in Paris now, and looks set to stay there at Philip’s court?’
I nodded — it was common knowledge: now that King Richard’s release was supposedly imminent, Prince John had fled to the protection of his French allies, skulking away and leaving his loyal followers in England to hold his captured castles for him.
‘Well, I overheard Walter de Coutances telling the Queen that Philip and John had sent a letter to Germany offering the Emperor a further eighty thousand marks to keep Richard in prison until Michaelmas. And I understand that the Emperor is extremely tempted to accept it.’
It was a massive blow for our cause, perhaps a mortal one: but a part of me could see that it was a clever move, too, on John’s part. The Emperor would keep the hundred thousand he had already been paid by Queen Eleanor, but delay releasing Richard until the end of September, eight months hence, which was the close of the campaigning season. In the cold, wet months between September and March, by common custom, very little fighting took place between warring knights. It gave Philip and John, in effect, a whole year’s grace to capture more of Richard’s castles both here and in Normandy and to shore up their support against him. And when it came to Michaelmas… Well, who knew what would happen between now and then? Richard might die in captivity, or be assassinated by Prince John’s agents. Or another year in prison might be bought for yet more perfidious silver.
I had thought that my soul was at an all-time low already, with the freezing of my love affair with Goody. But at this news I realized that there was yet further for my spirits to fall.
After my old music teacher’s announcement, we ate a joyless meal at the Bankside food-shop, sunk in gloom and having little to say to each other over our stale pasties and sour wine. Bernard left without even getting drunk.
The next morning, I was awoken from my slumbers by the sound of high-pitched screaming. It was a servant, one of the kitchen maids whose task it was to set the fires before daybreak. She was standing at the opened gate of Wakefield Inn and pointing to a rickety structure, a makeshift gamekeeper’s gibbet that had been erected before the portal at some point during the night. It was a simple affair, and at first I thought it was some sort of joke: a crosspiece made from a long crooked hazel bough, about the width and length of a spear shaft, supported at either end by two tripods of hazel wands. And from the crosspiece were hanging a dozen miserable animal shapes.
As I walked closer to the gibbet I could see that the two shapes in the centre were larger than the rest: they were a puppy, a newborn floppy-eared rascal that belonged to one of Marie-Anne’s dogs — and Goody’s ginger kitten, her Christmastide gift from me. Both had been eviscerated, their entrails dangling around their pathetic little furry legs, and strung up by the neck with twine to the crossbar. On either side of the puppy and the kitten hung
