to do, as well as I can.”
“I have no fault to find with the matter or the manner,” said Hugh. “Where next do you go? Though I hope you will not go for a day or two, I would know you better, and we have a great deal to talk over, you and I.”
“From here north-east to Stafford, Derby, Nottingham, and back by the eastern parts. Some will come to terms, as some lords have done already. Some will hold to their own king, like you. And some will do as they have done before, go back and forth like a weather-cock with the wind, and put up their price at every change. No matter, we have done with that now.”
He leaned forward over the table, setting his wine-cup aside. “I had-I have-another errand of my own, and I should be glad to stay with you a few days, until I have found what I’m seeking, or made certain it is not here to be found. Your mention of this flood of pilgrims for the feast gives me a morsel of hope. A man who wills to be lost could find cover among so many, all strangers to one another. I am looking for a young man called Luc Meverel. He has not, to your knowledge, made his way here?”
“Not by that name,” said Hugh, interested and curious. “But a man who willed to be lost might choose to doff his own name. What’s your need of him?”
“Not mine. It’s a lady who wants him back. You may not have got word, this far north,” said Oliver, “of everything that happened in Winchester during the council. There was a death there that came all too near to me. Did you hear of it? King Stephen’s queen sent her clerk there with a bold challenge to the legate’s authority, and the man was attacked for his audacity in the street by night, and got off with his life only at the cost of another life.”
“We have indeed heard of it,” said Hugh with kindling interest. “Abbot Radulfus was there at the council, and brought back a full report. A knight by the name of Rainald Bossard, who came to the clerk’s aid when he was set upon. One of those in the service of Laurence d’Angers, so we heard.”
“Who is my lord, also.”
“By your good service to his kin at Bromfield that was plain enough. I thought of you when the abbot spoke of d’Angers, though I had no name for you then. Then this man Bossard was well known to you?”
“Through a year of service in Palestine, and the voyage home together. A good man he was, and a good friend to me, and struck down in defending his honest opponent. I was not with him that night, I wish I had been, he might yet be alive. But he had only one or two of his own people, not in arms. There were five or six set on the clerk, it was a wretched business, confused and in the dark. The murderer got clean away, and has never been traced. Rainald’s wife… Juliana… I did not know her until we came with our lord to Winchester, Rainald’s chief manor is nearby. I have learned,” said Olivier very gravely, “to hold her in the highest regard. She was her lord’s true match, and no one could say more or better of any lady.”
“There is an heir?” asked Hugh. “A man grown, or still a child?”
“No, they never had children. Rainald was nearly fifty, she cannot be many years younger. And very beautiful,” said Olivier with solemn consideration, as one attempting not to praise, but to explain. “Now she’s widowed she’ll have a hard fight on her hands to evade being married off again-for she’ll want no other after Rainald. She has manors of her own to bestow. They had thought of the inheritance, the two of them together, that’s why they took into their household this young man Luc Meverel, only a year ago. He is a distant cousin of Dame Juliana, twenty- four or twenty-five years old, I suppose, and landless. They meant to make him their heir.”
He fell silent for some minutes, frowning past the guttering candles, his chin in his palm. Hugh studied him, and waited. It was a face worth studying, clean-boned, olive-skinned, fiercely beautiful, even with the golden, falcon’s eyes thus hooded. The blue-black hair that clustered thickly about his head, clasping like folded wings, shot sullen bluish lights back from the candle’s waverings. Daoud, born in Antioch, son of an English crusading soldier in Robert of Normandy’s following, somehow blown across the world in the service of an Angevin baron, to fetch up here almost more Norman than the Normans… The world, thought Hugh, is not so great, after all, but a man born to venture may bestride it.
“I have been three times in that household,” said Olivier, “but I never knowingly set eyes on this Luc Meverel. All I know of him is what others have said, but among the others I take my choice which voice to believe. There is no one, man or woman, in that manor but agrees he was utterly devoted to Dame Juliana. But as to the manner of his devotion… There are many who say he loved her far too well, by no means after the fashion of a son. Again, some say he was equally loyal to Rainald, but their voices are growing fainter now. Luc was one of those with his lord when Rainald was stabbed to death in the street. And two days later he vanished from his place, and has not been seen since.”
“Now I begin to see,” said Hugh, drawing in cautious breath. “Have they gone so far as to say this man slew his lord in order to gain his lady?”
“It is being said now, since his flight. Who began the whisper there’s no telling, but by this time it’s grown into a bellow.”
“Then why should he run from the prize for which he had played? It makes poor sense. If he had stayed there need have been no such whispers.”
“Ah, but I think there would have been, whether he went or stayed. There were those who grudged him his fortune, and would have welcomed any means of damaging him. They are finding two good reasons, now, why he should break and run. The first, pure guilt and remorse, too late to save any one of the three of them. The second, fear-fear that someone had got wind of his act, and meant to fetch out the truth at all costs. Either way, a man might break and take to his heels. What you kill for may seem even less attainable,” said Olivier with rueful shrewdness, “once you have killed.”
“But you have not yet told me,” said Hugh, “what the lady says of him. Hers is surely a voice that should be heeded.”
“She says that such a vile suspicion is impossible. She did, she does, value her young cousin, but not in the way of love, nor will she have it that he has ever entertained such thoughts of her. She says he would have died for his lord, and that it is his lord’s death which has driven him away, sick with grief, a little mad-who knows how deluded and haunted? For he was there that night, he saw Rainald die. She is sure of him. She wants him found and brought back to her. She looks upon him as a son, and now more than ever she needs him.”
“And it’s for her sake you’re seeking him. But why look for him here, northwards? He may have gone south, west, across the sea by the Kentish ports. Why to the north?”
“Because we have just one word of him since he was lost from his place, and that was going north on the road to Newbury. I came by that same way, by Abingdon and Oxford, and I have enquired for him everywhere, a young man travelling alone. But I can only seek him by his own name, for I know no other for him. As you say, who knows what he may be calling himself now!”
