“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. What kind of creep is your brother anyway? Jo told us she had always liked him.”
Nick stood up abruptly. He walked to the edge of the terrace and stood looking out into the darkness. Far away in the valley car headlights showed for a moment on the main road as two tiny silent pinpoints of light, then as the road wound out of sight they disappeared.
“I think he is in love with Jo,” he said softly.
“Then why would he want you to kill her, for God’s sake?”
He shrugged. There was a long silence. “I’ve always worshipped Sam,” he said at last. “But now I realize that he hates me. I expect he always has.”
Ann stood up. She went and stood beside him. “That’s tough.”
“Yes.” His voice was bleak. For a moment he said nothing more, then out of the silence he said, “Please, don’t regress her anymore, Ann.”
“If I don’t she will do it on her own, Nick, spontaneously. The need to know what happens next is too strong in her. She can’t fight it. Maybe that is something your brother has implanted in her. I don’t know. But if Jo is going to regress with this violence it is much better that it happens in reasonably controlled conditions among friends than out in the streets or somewhere on the mountainside.” She could see his face clearly in the starlight. “Are you afraid to see her as Matilda again in case it prompts you to try to hurt her?” she asked at last.
“I suppose I am.”
“There is no need.” She hesitated for a moment, then plunged on. “We had planned for another regression this evening. If Jo still wants to do it, Nick, I think we should. I think it’s doubly important, now that you’re here.”
The ride through the hills was exhilarating. Matilda sat her white Arab mare, feeling the creature’s grace and speed as it danced ahead of the more solid horses of her kinsmen Adam de Porter and Lord Ferrers. In spite of the fear that lurked at the back of her mind and the need for haste as they rode down the tracks softened by spring rain and everywhere budding with new green, she felt a strange, optimistic lightness of heart.
By the time they rode into Gloucester, though, her mood had changed. A damp white mist clung over the river, swirling up the narrow streets of the town and hiding the tower of the cathedral. The joyous spring day had been extinguished by a damp, cold evening, and her fear had returned fourfold. She and she alone must face the king and beg him to reinstate William in his favor.
William’s fall had been sudden and unexplained. Only two days after John had left Bramber after Will’s wedding, messengers came from the royal exchequer, abruptly demanding repayment of all the money that William owed the king.
“Christ’s bones, how does he think I can pay?” William had fumed, waving the parchment under Giles’s nose. “And why now? Why does he want the money now? He made no mention of it at the wedding! He seemed pleased to be there.”
“Can you really owe the king so much, Father?” Giles had at last managed to take the parchment from his father’s flailing hand. “How could you let your debts mount so?” His solemn face was anxious.
William rounded on him. “There isn’t a nobleman in the kingdom who doesn’t owe money to the king! Fees, fines, reliefs, taxes! Good God above, how could any of us pay so much? He knows he’ll get it all in the end, or if he doesn’t, his heirs will, from mine. Apart from anything else, I have had two lots of marriage relief to pay in six months-a thousand pounds each! That’s what your brothers’ wives cost me!”
Giles was reading the parchment slowly, his anger tracing the figures methodically down the page. “It says here, Father, that you still haven’t paid any of the relief for your Honor of Limerick after Uncle Philip died. That dates back five years.”
“Five years!” William exploded. “Some of the bastards haven’t paid for fifty years! Why does John suddenly pick on me? What about some of his precious earls?”
“Have you displeased him at all, Father?” Giles looked up, his green eyes scanning his father’s face seriously.
“Of course not.” William smacked the palm of his hand with the rolled parchment. His jaw was working with agitation. “God damn it, Giles”-for a moment he forgot his son’s exalted calling-“he came to Will’s wedding. He gave him rubies and emeralds for a wedding gift. Would he have done that if I had displeased him?” He strode back and forth across the floor excitedly.
“Perhaps it is merely routine demand from the exchequer. The king may not even have realized from whom he was ordering the money.” Giles hesitated. “I suppose our mother…?”
“Oh, yes!” William whirled around. “Your mother! She might well have something to do with it! She was antagonizing the king deliberately. I’ve seen it coming. If she’s said something else to make him angry…”
“No, Father.” Giles’s cool voice cut across William’s outburst. “I was going to suggest you ask Mother whether the Welsh lands might not produce some of the money to pay off a little of the debt. She is renowned, in the March, you know, for her husbandry.” He smiled. “She is your best steward, Father. I don’t think sometimes you realize how hard she works.”
William snorted. “Well, if she’s hoarding my money-”
“Not hoarding, Father. She takes a pride in her herds and her lands. She loves the Welsh hills. I hear people speak of her with awe and respect and love.” Seeing his father’s expression, he hastily changed the subject. “I am sure you can have this demand postponed, Father, if you go to see the king again. Why not ask him directly? Take him a gift-a new book for his library is a sure way to win his favor back, you know that as well as I do. Wait on him as soon as you can.”
William looked hopefully at his son, a little reassured by Giles’s calm words. The demand had worried him. A year earlier he would have laughed it off and stuffed the parchment away among a hundred others in his own chancery office, confident in the king’s total goodwill. Nothing obvious had happened to shake his confidence and yet there was something, an uneasy feeling gnawed at the back of his mind, a suspicion that the king was not quite as friendly as before; a hint here and there among his friends that he should tread warily. Nothing had been said; nothing done. But William had felt a sudden chill hover over him.
Matilda was appalled when she saw the size of William’s debt. “Have you paid nothing to the king since his coronation?” She scanned the parchment and looked up from William to Giles to Will, who was leaning by the chancery window, his arms folded, a worried frown on his face; behind them the scribe and William’s clerk sat at the high desk, their pens at the ready. Why? Why the sudden demand after all these years? She had a vision of John’s face in the chapel and she closed her eyes, trying to steady the sudden irrational wave of fear that had filled her and the thought that the demand might not be unconnected with the fact that the king had seen her hand in that of Richard de Clare.
“We must pay something at once, William.” She beckoned her own steward, who was waiting with an armload of rolled parchments. Then she stopped. “I thought you were told originally to pay the taxes for Limerick to the Dublin exchequer. Why does Westminster suddenly want them?”
William shrugged. His shoulders drooped a little.
She gave an exasperated sigh. “Here.” She pulled a parchment from her steward’s hands and scrutinized it closely. “I can find about seven hundred marks. Those will be sent to the exchequer straight away. See to it,” she directed William’s steward, who bowed and began to scribble as she felt for the keys at her girdle. “It is lucky, William, that we had so good a year in the March. I was able to sell cattle and there is money in the coffers.” Giving one of the keys to her steward, she directed him to fetch the gold. “It is not safe to be so much in the king’s debt, William.” She put her hand on his arm gently. “We must pay it off.”
William laughed. The whole episode had frightened and annoyed him, and his family’s reaction to the size of his debt had first worried and then irritated him irrationally, but now that some money was to be returned, and so easily, he felt completely happy again. “That’ll be enough for the king,” he replied, shaking off her hand. “I’ll have a word with him. I’m sure it’s all a mistake.”
But it was not a mistake. The king had, it appeared, every intention of holding William to the repayment of his debts. He accepted the carefully chosen, exquisitely illuminated volume of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
