Helewise stared at her. ‘How can you be so sure?’ she cried sharply. ‘She’s only a girl, Tiphaine! She could be-’ Horrible images flashed before her eyes, but with an effort she shut them off. Tiphaine was trying to comfort her, she realized, and she had just shouted at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘It’s just that I’m so desperate to accept she’s all right but I don’t know if I can believe you.’
Tiphaine went on looking at her. Then she said, ‘You can, my lady,’ and turned to set out the wooden bowls for supper.
They sat down close by the hearth to eat their supper. It had grown much colder once darkness had fallen, and the warmth was welcome. Helewise was quite pleased with her bean stew, which was greatly improved, she thought, by the addition of some of Meggie’s dried herbs. She tried to eat slowly — if she ate beans quickly her stomach tended to bloat — but she was too hungry, and she wolfed down her bowlful. Beside her, Tiphaine ate her stew mechanically, her thoughts clearly elsewhere, occasionally emitting a grunt of satisfaction.
‘I’d have thought we would have had a visit from Meggie before now,’ Helewise ventured, trying to suppress a belch. Her pleasure in the taste of the herbs had brought the girl to mind.
‘She’ll return here when she’s ready,’ Tiphaine said calmly. Then, her eyes narrowing, she added softly, ‘She’ll be on the little girl’s trail, like as not.’
Helewise spun round to look at her. ‘How do you know that?’ she demanded.
Tiphaine looked up from mopping her bowl with a piece of bread, her expression registering surprise at Helewise’s sharp question. ‘Stands to reason,’ she replied, swallowing a mouthful. ‘Joanna knew how to follow a person’s footsteps across many miles. Meggie’s her daughter. I expect Ninian can do it too, since he’s her son. They’ve both inherited many of her gifts, so why would that not be one of them?’
Helewise was torn between a sudden glow, because she was sure Tiphaine was right, and a stab of pain.
Josse had loved and lost Joanna, and he did not often speak her name. To have Tiphaine refer to her so readily and easily, as if she had just stepped out of the hut and it was not ten years and more since she had gone, was a shock, and not entirely a pleasant one.
Helewise had to admit that she did not much care to hear Joanna’s name.
She commanded herself not to be so selfish. What Tiphaine had just said was good. It gave them hope. ‘You really think they can do it, Tiphaine? You believe that we’ll get Rosamund safely back?’
Tiphaine reached for more bread and nodded. ‘Aye.’
Her assent, Helewise reflected with a private smile, could have been to either of the questions. It was probably to both.
She bent down to pick up the jar of small beer that Tilly had lugged across the forest that morning and, filling two mugs, handed one to Tiphaine. Raising her own, she said, ‘To Rosamund, wherever she is. May God keep her safe.’
There was a muttered Amen and the sound of Tiphaine slurping up her beer.
Helewise had hoped that Josse might have called in before nightfall and, even better, might have stayed in the hut overnight, but she had not really expected him to. As she lay up on the sleeping platform, drifting into sleep, she pictured Josse’s face. In her imagination, he was standing on the edge of the clearing outside the hut and he turned to look at her. There was just sufficient light to see his face, and his expression as he met her eyes brought a smile to her face.
She would go to look for him in the morning, if he did not turn up at the hut first. She had to tell him that the identity of the dead man was now known. It would, she reflected drowsily, give her a fine excuse to seek him out.
Ninian had gone to settle the horses for the night. The saddles and bridles were safely concealed back in the sleeping place, and he had fashioned rope head-collars and tethered the horses to the trunk of an alder. They would have hobbled them and set them to wander, but they were both afraid the animals might be seen.
That must not happen.
He checked once again to make sure the knots were firm and then dipped under the low branches of the pine trees where he and his sister were going to spend the night.
Meggie looked up at him. She had lit a small fire, contained within a circle of stones from the shallows of the river. ‘All well?’ she asked softly.
‘Yes.’ He lay down on his blanket and gave a deep sigh.
Meggie watched him. She could tell how tired he was. She was wrapped up warmly in her cloak and blanket, leaning comfortably back against her saddle. ‘Go to sleep,’ she said. ‘You look as if you can’t keep your eyes open any longer.’
He yawned widely. ‘Very well. Call me when it’s my turn to watch.’
‘I will.’ She smiled at him, but he had already shut his eyes. He turned on his side, away from her, and wound his cloak around him. He would get a decent sleep before his turn came, she reflected, since she felt wide awake, despite her bodily fatigue. Her mind was racing, refusing to shut off. It was no use fighting it, and so she let her thoughts roam back over the hours and the miles since she had set out from the House in the Woods.
She had been surprised at the ease with which she had picked up Rosamund’s scent. Well, she corrected herself, it was not exactly a scent, because that implied that it was something you could detect with your sense of smell. It was more a sort of feeling, a certain knowledge that Rosamund had stood just there. Meggie remembered how it had felt to stand with her eyes shut absorbing Rosamund’s essence, concentrating so intently on the strange sensation that she had barely registered her father and Gus coming up behind her. She had believed that was going to be all she could manage, but then she had realized there was more. She found the direction in which Rosamund had set off and, once she became used to interpreting what her senses were telling her, it was relatively easy to follow where Rosamund and her abductor had gone. Provided she went quickly — she had a strong suspicion that this weird effect would not be long lasting — there was a chance that Rosamund might be found.
Meggie had barely heard the others agonizing over where Rosamund could be and how they would set about finding her. She had volunteered the small amount of information she had — Helewise, she had noticed, had been watching her keenly, as if she’d known Meggie’s thoughts were not entirely on the discussion — but in the privacy of her own head she had been struck with wonder at her newly-discovered gift and longing to begin testing it. As soon as her father and Helewise had set off for Tonbridge, she had slipped away from the house and almost instantly she had discovered Rosamund’s trail. Already, the essence had been fading; she’d known that she was going to have to hurry.
She had also understood that she needed a horse. She waited until her father returned, riding Alfred and leading Helewise’s mare, and as soon as she could she went into the stables and tacked up Daisy, apologizing to the mare for having to take her out again so soon. For a desperate few moments she had not been able to locate the bridle; it had been on Will’s workbench, waiting for him to mend a fraying stitch. Typical of tidy-minded, painstaking Will, the strong needle and the thick thread were on the bench beside the saddle, and Meggie had quickly done the repair. It was not as neat a job as Will would have done, but the stitching would hold.
She made herself ignore her guilt over setting out without telling her father. It was an unbreakable house rule, imposed on them all from Josse himself to the smallest child of Tilly and Gus: always let someone know where you’re going and when you expect to be back. It was quite right and made total sense, living as they did in the depths of the wildwood and in the middle of hard times, when there were desperate men about who would attack and harm you for the price of your boots.
I’m sorry, dear, dear Father, she said to him silently as she led Daisy away, looking over her shoulder all the time in case someone spotted her. I know you’ll worry, because, although you try to hide it, you get twitchy even when I stay over at the hut for a few days, and it’s pretty safe there.
She knew she had to go alone. The presence of anybody else — even someone she loved as profoundly as she loved her father — would have altered the balance and might have obliterated that small, clear voice that seemed to be calling out to her: Follow me. Follow me.
She had ridden on for all the rest of that day, sometimes quickly, when there was only one obvious direction to take and she did not have to keep dismounting to check that she had not gone wrong, and sometimes agonizingly slowly. Once, out to the west of Hawkenlye Abbey, she had become confused by many sets of hoof prints and boot prints and it had taken her almost till dusk to find the trail again. By then it had faded so much that it was barely detectable…
The awareness that she was cold broke across her thoughts. She reached out to poke the fire, and the
