And then there was Joanna.
He dreamed about her often. But he had not consciously thought about her for some time other than the fleeting images that he always tried to suppress whenever he saw the Abbess riding that beautiful golden mare. For Honey had been Joanna’s horse and she had left the mare in the Abbey’s keeping when she went away. Josse sometimes had the impression that people knew about Joanna but refrained from telling him; there had been one or two hints to that effect and Sister Tiphaine had once muttered that he wasn’t to worry about the lass, she was doing all right, whatever that meant. Sister Tiphaine, it was widely rumoured, had dealings with the strange and elusive Forest Folk, that self-contained band who appeared like the sunrise and vanished like the morning mist. Did that mean that the Forest Folk had taken Joanna in? Or merely that they knew where she was — how she was — and somehow contrived to pass word on to the Hawkenlye herbalist? Josse had no way of finding out; Sister Tiphaine had never said anything further and Josse wondered if perhaps the duty of obedience that she owed to her Abbess made her keep any knowledge she might have had strictly to herself. Sister Tiphaine might, as they often said, have one foot in the pagan past but her loyalty to the Abbess was, Josse guessed, born out of respect and quite possibly love and therefore unbreakable. The Church — and so it followed, went the reasoning, also the woman who ordered the comings and goings of Hawkenlye Abbey — would seriously disapprove of a nun even thinking about pagan forest dwellers, never mind having clandestine dealings with them, and so if indeed it were true that Sister Tiphaine had mysterious ways of contacting them, she was not going to boast about the fact and she would probably do her utmost to make sure her superior did not know.
Now as he tramped along the forest tracks he wondered if he could find his way to wherever it was that Joanna lived. If, that was, she were still there …
Then he decided simultaneously that there was no possibility of his finding her hiding place and that he wasn’t really sure he wanted to anyway. Squaring his shoulders, he reminded himself what he was doing out there and turned his full concentration to the search for Walter Bell.
It was hard to judge the time when deep inside the forest, for the thickly growing branches and endless network of almost leafless twigs above made it difficult to get a proper idea of the sun’s position. But, judging from the way in which the light was starting to fade, it must have been quite late in the day when Josse finally turned for home.
He was coming to the conclusion that Brother Saul was right: only the animals were at present living in that corner of the Great Forest. He found many traces of the brothers’ passage and he noted, impressed, just how carefully they had searched. My day has been a waste of time, he thought; I should have taken Saul’s word for it and done something more fruitful than obeying my own proud voice telling me to go and check because I know the forest better than the lay brothers. Well, I’ll just have to-
He heard something.
He stopped stock-still, hardly breathing, ears straining.
Nothing.
He began to walk cautiously on. The path just there circled a shallow dell bordered on its steeper slopes by thick brambles and overshadowed by a large beech tree whose roots curled out from the dell’s banked side. There were a few coppery leaves still adhering to the beech’s branches and the ground in the dell was thick with beech mast.
I have disturbed some small creature picking through the beech mast, Josse told himself. Even so small a noise sounds loud in this uncanny silence.
Bracing his shoulders — his hand on the hilt of his sword for good measure — he walked on.
He had gone no more than a dozen paces when a voice just behind him called, ‘Sir Josse!’
Whipping round, drawing his sword, he would have lunged towards his assailant except that the man made no move to attack. Instead he spread his arms to indicate that he held no weapon and, in a voice just tinged with amusement, said, ‘No need for your sword! I am not your enemy.’
It was Leofgar.
Pushing his sword back down into its scabbard, Josse let out his breath and felt his fast heartbeat gradually return to normal. ‘Leofgar,’ he said, ‘oh, that glad I am to see you.’
Then, without thinking about it, he put his arms around the younger man and gave him a hearty embrace. Returning it, Leofgar laughed shortly. ‘I did not expect this sort of a greeting from my mother’s good friend,’ he observed as Josse let him go.
Josse shrugged. ‘You have worried her gravely, I’ll not deny it. But you’ve come back, so I would guess that whatever went wrong to make you run off as you did must either have been put right or cannot have been too serious in the first place?’ He tried to make the remark a statement and not a question, but he did not think he had succeeded.
Leofgar shook his head. ‘Oh, Sir Josse, I wish that were true! But I must first say that I have not come back, if by that you mean that I am on my way to the Abbey to give a full explanation of my actions.’
‘Then why are you here?’ Josse spoke more gruffly than he had intended; to see the happy outcome that he had envisaged for the Abbess disappear without so much as a farewell was hard to bear.
‘I have to talk to you.’
‘To me?’
‘Yes, don’t sound so surprised.’ The note of amusement was back. ‘My mother trusts you absolutely. Here I am, in dire need of a reliable confidant and adviser, so what better, I thought to myself, than to hide away in some place where the great Sir Josse d’Acquin is bound to come looking?’
‘You can’t have known I would search the forest!’
‘I admit I was downcast when the lay brothers made their hunt — very thorough they were too, let me tell you, and one of them almost found me. He would have done had I not climbed up a very large old yew tree and hidden till he had gone. But still I believed that you would come, for I judge you to be a man who is not satisfied until he has seen for himself.’
‘You judge right,’ Josse muttered. ‘Yet it was a dubious plan, for all that.’
Leofgar shrugged. ‘Dubious or not, it was the only plan I had.’
Suddenly Josse thought of something. ‘You have not forced your wife and child to share your vigil, have you?’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s cold, man, and-’
‘Of course not.’ Leofgar’s tone was almost scathing, as if to say, you cannot believe I would do such a thing! ‘They are safe in a warm and welcoming refuge.’
Josse studied him. He was well wrapped-up against the weather and he looked clean and, although his face was anxious, he did not have the pinched, shrivelled look of someone who had spent any length of time starving out in the cold. ‘You too have been staying in this refuge,’ he said.
‘I have. My days I have spent here, waiting for you. By night I return to my hiding place.’ His eyes fixed to Josse’s, he said with a smile, ‘And do not try to follow me, Sir Josse. I ask for your word on this.’
Josse hesitated and then said reluctantly, ‘You have it. I shall not follow you.’
Leofgar laughed. ‘The promise was not to try to follow me,’ he corrected. ‘A man should not boast of his own abilities but I doubt that you could pick up my trail if I did not want you to. You missed me in the dell there and I believe that I took you by surprise when I spoke your name just now?’
‘Aye,’ Josse acknowledged. ‘You merge well with the woodland, Leofgar.’
‘I learned when young how to use the cover of the forest,’ he said. ‘So would you have done if you’d had to live with a gang of boys all bigger than you who were intent on giving you a hiding for every real or imagined misdemeanour.’
Josse guessed he must be speaking of the household where he had lived while he learned the duties of page and squire. ‘You were not happy in the place where your mother put you?’