For a moment I stood unmoving, quite taken aback at how easy it had been. Then I saw Goda flap her hand about and I realized she was searching for something to throw at me. I spun on my heel and hurried away to heat up the water and find the wash cloth.
The sooner I was out of the house, the better. Goda clearly didn’t know yet about my forbidden excursion last night. If she had noticed my pallor and the dark circles that must surely be under my eyes — very unlikely, as the only person whose well-being concerned her was herself — she did not comment. By the time she found out what I’d been up to, I wanted to be well away from Icklingham. That morning, my sister received the swiftest, most obliging attention I had ever given her.
Even that failed to make her smile.
I had arranged to meet Romain and Sibert as dusk fell, under a spinney of beech trees that stood beside the road that led east out of Icklingham. I hurried through the rest of my appointed tasks for Goda and then, as befitted someone on an urgent healing mission, I set off north-westwards on the road to Aelf Fen.
I walked through the neat strips of land for a couple of miles or more. Many people were out that fine morning tending their land and several of them straightened up as I passed to smile and nod a greeting. One of Goda’s neighbours was trying to turn his plough at the end of a field, cursing and swearing because the shoe was deep in a rut. He looked up, saw me and, smiling wryly, apologized for his language. Returning his smile, I hurried on. I crossed a stream and passed through a narrow belt of woodland where, I noticed, several of the villagers had left wrapped bundles of food for the midday meal in the shade of the trees. On the other side of the copse there was a patch of rough ground where a few goats were tethered. I looked around carefully but could see nobody watching me. I walked quickly across the wiry grass. Then, sure that at last I was out of sight of interested eyes, I doubled back and, keeping to the cover of trees and hedgerows, made my way to the meeting point. It was just after noon; I had several hours to wait.
Crouching there deep in my hiding place with nothing to do but think was the last thing I wanted as it gave me the chance to reflect on my decision. With hindsight, it seemed to me that I had been incredibly reckless. Romain and Sibert had told me next to nothing about this extraordinary mission and I had no idea where we were going, other than to the coast, or why, except that I was to help them search for something. Did this thing belong to one of them and was it something they had carelessly lost? Or — and this seemed far more likely — was it someone else’s property that they were plotting to steal? Surely that was right, or why else was this whole business shadowed so deeply in secrecy? Why else were we forced to travel by night?
Yet again I reminded myself that if we were caught we would find ourselves in very serious trouble. For one thing, people just didn’t set off across the country unless they really had to and even then, as Romain had implied and I very well knew, people of our lowly status could not go anywhere unless the lord of the manor said they could. There was also the ticklish question of theft, a crime which carried the most severe penalty of death by hanging if you were lucky or by some longer drawn-out and, invariably, extremely painful alternative process if you were not.
I forced my mind away from that dreadful thought and made myself try to be more positive. We might not be caught. And how often did a girl like me get the chance to do something risky and exciting?
Then, my spirits rising as excitement once again coursed through me, I reflected that I had been recruited because I had a particular talent for finding what was lost or hidden. Therefore this object, whatever it was, could hardly be in some great lord’s manor house, because that surely did not count as lost. No; it seemed far more likely that the object was something Romain and Sibert knew about but of whose precise location they were unaware. What had Romain said, exactly? I strained my memory to bring his words to mind. I know the rough location where the search must be carried out and Sibert knows about the object of the search. Yes. It appeared I was right. It also sounded, I thought optimistically, as if this object were hidden out in the wilds, where the possibility of being apprehended and accused of theft would be unlikely.
In this way I persuaded myself that I had made the right decision.
Thinking about what Romain had said had brought his face vividly to mind. I saw the wide smile, the well-cut, glossy hair, the expensive clothes under the worn and shabby travelling cloak which had certainly seen better days and which, I realized, he must be wearing to disguise the fact that he came from a stratum of society that could afford to spend a lot of money on good clothes.
He was a rich man. By my standards and those of my family, he was incredibly rich. He had talked at length to me on our first meeting. Now he had sought me out, danced with me, been on the point of kissing me (my fertile imagination had already taken a firm hold on that scene at the feast) and he had asked for my help. A man like him had appealed to a girl like me, so very far beneath him, because I had a unique talent (silently I spared a moment to bless Sibert, for surely it had been he who had told Romain of my gift). I was virtually certain that I could bend this promising situation to my own advantage and have Romain falling in love with me before our week in close proximity was out. How grateful he would be when I found his treasure for him! In my mind’s eye I saw him fall on his knees at my feet, take my hands in his and cover them with sweet little kisses. ‘Lassair,’ he would say, ‘my clever, precious girl, you have made one dream come true and now I beg that you will indulge my second wish by agreeing to become my wife.’
Yes, I knew I had been rash in agreeing to be a part of Romain’s mission. But I also knew that, given how I felt about him, there had never been the slightest chance whatsoever that I would refuse.
I made a soft pillow out of Elfritha’s shawl, put it on top of my small pack and, my fatigue catching up with me despite my tense excitement, went to sleep.
As darkness fell, Romain and Sibert made their careful way to the place where they had arranged to meet the girl. Romain was rigid with tension and the long wait for the relative safety of night had all but undone him. He and Sibert had slept in the clearing on the fringe of Icklingham — not that Romain had managed more than a light doze, and that had been interrupted by frightening, anxious dreams — and in the morning Sibert had gone foraging, returning with a pail of milk, rye bread and a large linen-wrapped package that turned out to be a spice loaf. Sibert admitted he had filched it from the remains of last night’s feast. Someone, Romain thought wryly, would be missing a carefully set-aside treat.
He had passed the daylight hours in obsessively checking through his plans. On occasions he came very close to panic. What did he think he was doing? Not only had he embarked on this brash, foolish errand but he had compounded the folly by involving two other people, one little more than a child and the other a youth whose introspective silences seemed, to the increasingly nervous Romain, nothing short of ominous.
But I cannot do this without them! he reasoned with himself. Sibert knew more than any living man concerning this thing they sought and Romain needed his instinctive awareness of both its nature and that of the man who made it. In addition, Sibert was familiar with the area that they must search and, equally important, the long and potentially hazardous journey across the higher ground to the coast. Sibert, as Romain well knew, had made the trip several times, although not recently. It was unlikely that anyone in Aelf Fen was aware just how often, since he had grown towards manhood, Sibert had managed to slip away and brood over what he had lost. Or, to be strictly accurate, what had been lost to him, since he had had no more of a hand in his own dispossession than Romain had in his.