There was an older woman seated on a cushioned bench against the wall, withdrawn from the gaggle of girls. She had a book in her lap, but the light was dimming towards evening, and she had ceased to read. The empress would need a few literate ladies about her, and this one seemed to be an essential member of her retinue. Her, too, he remembered from Coventry. Aunt and niece, they had told him, the only gentlewomen Maud had brought with her into that stark male assembly. She looked up at him now, and knew him. She smiled, and made a slight gesture of her hand that was clearly an invitation to join her.
“Yves Hugonin? It is you? Oh, how good to see you here, alive and well. And free! I had heard you were lost to us. Most of us knew nothing of that outrage until after we reached Gloucester.”
She was perfectly composed, indeed he could not imagine her calm ever being broken; and yet he was dazzled for an instant by the widening and warming of her eyes when she had recognized him. She had the illusionless eyes of middle age, experienced, lined, proof against most surprises, and yet in that one flash of glad astonishment they had a lustre and depth that shook him to the heart. It had mattered to her deeply, that even after the empress’s protection extended to him at Coventry, he should again be put in peril of his life. It mattered to her now that he came thus unexpectedly back to Gloucester, free and unharmed.
“Come, sit! You may as well, waiting for audience here is a weary business. I am so glad,” she said, “to see you alive and well. When you left Coventry with us, and no one tried to prevent, I thought that trouble was safely over, and no one would dare accuse you of any wrong deed again. It was very ill fortune that ever you fell under such suspicion. But her Grace stood firm for your right, and I thought that would be the end of it. And then that assault… We never heard until next day. How did you escape him? And he so bitter against you, we feared for you.”
“I did not escape him,” said Yves honestly, and felt boyishly diminished by having to admit it. It would have been very satisfying to have broken out of La Musarderie by his own ingenuity and daring. But then he would not even have known that Brother Cadfael was there within, nor could he have been certain that Olivier was held there, and he would not have stated his resolve and laid down his challenge to return for him in arms. That was of more importance than his own self-esteem. “I was set free by Philip FitzRobert. Dismissed, indeed! He acquits me of any part in de Soulis’s death, and so has no more use for me.”
“The more credit to him,” said Jovetta de Mentors. “He has cooled and come to reason.” Yves did not say that Philip had had some encouragement along the road to reason. Even so, it was credit to him indeed, that he had acknowledged his change of heart, and acted upon it.
“He did believe I had done murder,” said Yves, doing his enemy justice, though still with some resentment and reluctance. “And he valued de Soulis. But I have other quarrels with him that will not be so easily settled.” He looked earnestly at the pale profile beside him, tall brow under braided silver hair, straight, fine nose and elegantly strong line of the jaw, and above all the firm, full, sensitive way her lips folded together over her silences, containing in dignified reticence whatever she had learned in her more than fifty years of life. “You never believed me a murderer?” he asked, and himself was startled to find how he ached for the right answer.
She turned to him fully, wide-eyed and grave. “No,” she said, “never!”
The door to the audience chamber opened, and the girl Isabeau came out with a swirl of brocaded skirts and held it open. “Her Grace will receive you now.” And she mouthed at him silently: “I am dismissed. They are talking high strategy. Go in to her, and tread softly.”
There were four people in the room he entered, besides two clerks who were just gathering up the tools of their trade, and the scattering of leaves of vellum spread across the large table. Wherever the empress moved her dwelling there would be charters to draw up and witness, sweets of property and title to dole out to buy favour, minor rewards to be presented to the deserving, and minor bribes to those who might be most useful in future, the inevitable fruits of faction and contention. King Stephen’s clerks were occupied with much the same labour. But these had finished their work for this day, and having cleared the table of all signs of their profession, went out by a further door, and quietly closed it behind them.
The empress had pushed back her large, armed stool to allow the clerks to circle the table freely. She sat silent, with her hands on the broad, carved arms of her seat, not gripping, simply laid along the brocaded tissue, for once at rest. Her rich and lustrous dark hair was plaited into two long braids over her shoulders, intertwined with cords of gold thread, and lay upon the breast of her purple bliaut stirring and quivering to her long, relaxed breathing as though it had a life of its own. She looked a little tired, and a little as though she had recently been out of temper, but was beginning to put by the vexations of business and emerge from her darker mood. Behind her sombre magnificence the wall was draped with hangings, and the benches adorned with cushions and rich coverings. She had brought her own furnishings with her to create this audience room, the largest and lightest the abbey could provide.
The three who at the moment composed her closest council had risen from the table when the last charter was ready for copying and witnessing, and moved some paces apart after a long session. Beside one darkening window King David of Scotland stood, drawing in the chilling air, half turned away from his imperial niece. He had been at her side through most of the years of this long warfare, with staunch family loyalty, but also with a shrewd eye on his own and his nation’s fortunes.
Contention in England was no bad news to a monarch whose chief aim was to gain a stranglehold on Northumbria, and push his own frontier as far south as the Tees. Able, elderly and taciturn, a big man and still handsome for all the grey in his hair and beard, he stood stretching his wide shoulders after too long of sitting forward over tedious parchments and challenging maps, and did not turn his head to see what further petitioner had been admitted so late in the day.
The other two hovered, one on either side of the empress; Humphrey de Bohun, her steward, and John FitzGilbert, her marshall. Younger men both, the props of her personal household, while her more spectacular paladins paraded their feats of arms in the brighter light of celebrity. Yves had seen something of these two during his few weeks in the empress’s entourage, and respected them both as practical men with whom their fellowmen could deal with confidence. They turned on him preoccupied but welcoming faces now. Maud, for her part, took a long moment to recall the circumstances in which he had come to absent himself, and did so with a sudden sharp frown, as though he had been to blame for causing her considerable trouble.
Yves advanced a few paces, and made her a deep reverence.
“Madam, I am returned to my duty, and not without news. May I speak freely?”
“I do remember,” she said slowly, and shook off her abstraction. “We have known nothing of you since we lost you, late in the evening, on the road through the forest near Deerhurst. I am glad to see you alive and safe. We wrote that capture down to FitzRobert’s account. Was it so? And where have you been in his hold, and how did you break free?” She grew animated, but not, he thought, greatly concerned. The misuse of one squire, even his death, would not have added very much to the score she already held against Philip FitzRobert. Her eyes had begun to burn up in small, erect flames at the mention of his name.
“Madam, I was taken to La Musarderie, in Greenhamsted, the castle he took from the Musards a few months back. I cannot claim to have broken free by any effort of mine, he has loosed me of his own will. He truly believed I
