could keep the dogs heeled. There's some ham in the kitchen. Would you like some ham, Thomas?'
'No, sir.'
'I do hate winter.' Sir Giles stared into the fire, which now blazed huge in his wide hearth. The hall had smoke blackened beams supporting the huge expanse of thatch. At one end a carved timber screen hid the kitchens while the private rooms were at the other end, though since his wife had died Sir Giles no longer used the small chambers, but lived, ate and slept beside the hall fire. 'I reckon this'll be my last winter, Thomas.'
'I hope not, sir.'
'Hope what you damned well like, but I won't last it through. Not when the ice comes. A man can't keep warm these days, Thomas. It bites into you, the cold does, bites into your marrow and I don't like it. Your father never liked it either.' He was staring at Thomas now. 'Your father always said you'd go away. Not to Oxford. He knew you didn't like that. Like whipping a destrier between the shafts, he used to say. He knew you'd run off and be a soldier. He always said you had wild blood in you.' Sir Giles smiled, remembering. 'But he also said you'd come home one day. He said you'd come back to show him what a fine fellow you'd become.'
Thomas blinked back tears. Had his father really said that? 'I came back this time,' he said, 'to ask you a question, sir. The same question, I think, that the French priest wanted to ask you.'
'Questions!' Sir Giles grumbled. 'I never did like questions. They need answers, see? Of course you want some ham! What do you mean, no? Gooden? Ask your daughter to unwrap that ham, will you?'
Sir Giles heaved himself to his feet and shuffled across the hall to a great chest of dark, polished oak. He raised the lid and, groaning with the effort of bending over, began to rummage through the clothes and boots that were jumbled inside. 'I find now, Thomas,' he went on, 'that I don't need questions. I sit in the manor court every second week and I know whether they're guilty or innocent the moment they're fetched into the hall!
Mind you, we have to pretend otherwise, don't we? Now, where is it? Ah!' He found whatever he sought and brought it back to the table. 'There, Thomas, damn your question and that's your answer.' He pushed the bundle across the table. It was a small object wrapped in ancient sacking. Thomas had an absurd premonition that this was the Grail itself and was ridiculously disappointed when he discovered the bundle contained a book. The book's front cover was a soft leather flap, four or five times larger than the pages, which could be used to wrap the volume that, when Thomas opened it, proved to be written in his father's hand. However, being by his father, nothing in it was straightforward. Thomas leafed through the pages swiftly, discovering notes written in Latin; Greek and a strange script which he thought must be Hebrew. He turned back to the first page where only three words were written and, reading them, felt his blood run cold. 'Calix mews inebrians.'
'Is it your answer?' Sir Giles asked.
'Yes, sir.'
Sir Giles peered at the first page. 'It's Latin that, isn't it?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Thought it was. I looked, of course, but couldn't make head nor tail of it and I didn't like to ask Sir John,' — Sir John was the priest of St Peter's in Dorchester — 'or that lawyer fellow, what's his name? The one who dribbles when he gets excited. He speaks Latin, or he says he does. What does it mean?'
' “My cup makes me drunk”,' Thomas said.
“'My cup makes me drunk”!' Sir Giles thought that was splendidly funny. 'Aye, your father's wits were well off the wind. A good man, a good man, but dear me! “My cup makes me drunk”!'
'It's from one of the psalms,' Thomas said, turning to the second page, which was written in the script he thought was Hebrew, though there was something odd about it. One of the recurrent symbols looked like a human eye and Thomas had never seen that in a Hebrew script before though, in all honesty, he had seen little Hebrew. 'It's from the psalm, sir,' he went on, 'that begins by saying God is our shepherd.'
'He's not my shepherd,' Sir Giles grumbled. 'I'm not some damned sheep.'
'Nor me, sir,' Robbie declared.
'I did hear' — Sir Giles looked at Robbie — that the King of Scotland was taken prisoner.'
'He was, sir?' Robbie asked innocently.
'Probably nonsense,' Sir Giles replied, then he began telling a long tale about meeting a bearded Scotsman in London, and Thomas ignored the story to look through the pages of his father's book. He felt a kind of strange disappointment because the book suggested that the search for the Grail was justified. He wanted someone to tell him it was nonsense, to release him from the cup's thrall, but his father had taken it seriously enough to write this book. But his father, Thomas reminded himself, had been mad. Mary, Gooden's daughter, brought in the ham. Thomas had known Mary since they were both children playing in puddles and he smiled a greeting at her, then saw that Robbie was gazing at her as though she was an apparition from heaven. She had dark long hair and a full mouth and Thomas was sure Robbie would be discovering more than a few rivals in Down Mapperley. He waited until Mary had gone, then held up the book.
'Did my father ever talk to you about this, sir?'
'He talked of everything,' Sir Giles said. 'Talked like a woman, he did. Never stopped!
I was your father's friend, Thomas, but I was never much of a man for religion. If he talked of it too much, I fell asleep. He liked that.' Sir Giles paused to cut a slice of ham.
'But your father was mad.'
'You think this is madness, sir?' Thomas held up the book again.
'Your father was mad for God, but he was no fool. I never knew a man with so much common sense and I miss it. I miss the advice.'
'Does that girl work here?' Robbie asked, gesturing at the screen behind which Mary had disappeared.
'All her life,' Sir Giles said. 'You remember Mary, Thomas?'
'I tried to drown her when we were both children,' Thomas said. He turned the pages of his father's book again though he had no time now to tease any meanings from the tangled words. 'You do know what this is, sir, don't you?'
Sir Giles paused, then nodded. 'I know, Thomas, that many men want what your father claims to have possessed.'
'So he did make that claim?'
Another pause. 'He hinted at it,' Sir Giles said heavily,
'and I don't envy you.'
'Me?'
'Because he gave me that book, Thomas, and he said that if anything happened to him I was to keep it until you were old enough and man enough to take up the task. That's what he said.' Sir Giles stared at Thomas and saw his old friend's son flinch. 'But if the two of you want to stay for a while,' he said, 'then you'd be welcome. Jake Churchill needs help. He tells me he's never seen so many fox cubs and if we don't kill some of the bastards then there'll be some rare massacres among the lambs next year.'
Thomas glanced at Robbie. Their task was to find de Taillebourg and avenge the deaths of Eleanor, Father Hobbe and Robbie's brother, but it was unlikely, he thought, that the Dominican would come back here. Robbie, however, plainly wanted to stay: Mary Gooden had seen to that. And Thomas was tired. He did not know where to seek the priest and so the chance to stay in this hall was welcome. It would be an opportunity to study the book and thus follow his father down the long, tortuous path of the Grail.
'We'll stay, sir,' Thomas said.
For a while.
It was the first time that Thomas had ever lived like a lord. Not a great lord, perhaps, not as an earl or a duke with scores of men to command, but still in privilege, ensconced in the manor — even if the manor was a thatched timber hall with a beaten earth floor —
the davs his to wile away as other people did life's hard work of cutting firewood, drawing water, milking cows, churning butter, pounding dough and washing clothes. Robbie was more used to it, but reckoned life was much easier in Dorset. 'Back home,' he said,
'there's always some damn English raiders coming over the hill to steal your cattle or take your grain.'
'Whereas you,' Thomas said, 'would never dream of riding south and stealing from the English.'
'Why would I even think of such a thing?' Robbie asked, grinning. So, as winter closed down on the land, they hunted Sir Giles Marriott's acres to make the fields safe for the lambing season and to bring back venison to Sir Giles's table; they drank in the Dorchester taverns and laughed at the mummers who came for the winter fair.
