‘Well, Sir Alan,’ he continued, ‘I have no doubt that His Grace will wish to hear about this matter in full from you personally. And I am sure that he will do his utmost to help you in your quest to find the real thief. I will speak to the Bishop this very evening and I will urge him to find the time to see you; but he is an extremely busy man, as I’m sure you must know, with a great many calls on his good nature. So I think the best thing might be for you to tell me where you are lodging and I will have a servant bring you a message when His Grace is at liberty to attend to this. Would that be acceptable to you?’
I nodded, and he smiled, and I felt a wave of relief flow through me, now that this godly man had shouldered my burdens.
‘It may take a few days, I’m afraid,’ said Brother Michel, as he ushered us out of the chamber, ‘but I pray it will be no more than a week or so. Be patient, be strong, and trust in God that we may bring this matter to a happy conclusion.’ And he gave me another smile before he left us in the care of the hall servants.
As I walked back over to the cathedral, flanked by Thomas and Hanno, to say an extra prayer for the soul of my father, I was satisfied that Brother Michel would champion my cause to the Bishop. Between us, through reasonable discussion, and with God’s help, we would unravel the mystery of the Heribert theft and exonerate the memory of Henry d’Alle, once and for all.
The call that I paid on my uncle Thibault, Seigneur d’Alle, was far less satisfactory than the encounter with Brother Michel. His house on the Rue St-Denis, next to the church of St Opportune, was a very grand edifice of timber and brick, three storeys high and set back a little from the road. It reeked of money. Thomas and I banged on the big front door in the middle of a violent rainstorm the afternoon of the day after my meeting with Brother Michel. We were admitted, well soaked by the downpour, by a richly dressed servant and shown upstairs to a solar on the second floor.
The Lord of Alle, my uncle Thibault, was playing chess with a much younger and very handsome fair-haired man when I was ushered, dripping, into the opulent room. A pair of long hounds snoozed by the fire at the end of the room. The men were seated at a table in the centre, hunched over the board. I saw that the board was inlaid with squares of ivory and ebony, and that the pieces were decorated with tiny jewels. As I came in, the younger man moved a piece and said: ‘There, I have you, Father; your king is dead!’
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.
This was the Lady of Alle, I assumed, and the first thing I absorbed about her was that she was truly, incandescently beautiful; even approaching her forties, as she must have been, she stole the living breath from my lungs: raven hair peeking from under a neat white coif, deep green eyes, pale, almost translucent skin, a swelling bosom above the waist of a sixteen-year-old. From half a dozen yards away I caught a waft of her perfume: something floral yet creamy — she even smelled utterly delicious. I found my anger at her boorish husband washing away as I drank her in, like a thirsty man downing a full jug drawn from an icy well. She kissed me on the cheek, a cool, brief touch of her lips that made the hair on my arms stand up, and said: ‘Good day, nephew, I am Adele — what a pleasure it is to finally meet you.’
And I found myself seated at the table, with the Seigneur and Roland and this heavenly creature in human form, while the servant poured wine for us all.
The rain rattled against the closed shutters of the solar, and brought me back into the world. When I had taken a sip of the wine, I turned to Adele and, trying to control my fluttering belly, I said: ‘Why did you call my father a fool?’
‘I’m afraid he was a fool. He could have come to us at Alle, and lived with us, after the… the incident. We could have found a way,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we could have found a way for all of us to live together. There was no need for him to run off to England like that-’
‘ You are the fool,’ the Seigneur d’Alle interrupted his wife brutally — and I glared at my host, hating him for his rudeness to the lady. The Seigneur completely ignored my look and continued: ‘After what had passed, there was no earthly way that I would have allowed Henri within a mile of the castle. And you know why!’
What sort of brother was he, this Thibault, this Seigneur d’Alle, to condemn a member of his own family for a trifling misdemeanour — without even ascertaining whether the accusation were true or not?
I got to my feet, and put my hand on my hilt. ‘I do not believe my father was a thief,’ I said. ‘By my sword, I say that he was innocent and wrongly blamed for this crime. And I have vowed that I will find the real culprit, and I will fight any man who says that Henri d’Alle was a thief — any man!’ And I looked at Roland for a moment, and then locked my gaze with the Seigneur. He stared back at me, his blue eyes unwavering — but I saw a mocking
