He loved Jeanne, but how could she love him, if she were to discover that he had been so false to her?
Hearing a step behind him, he turned and saw his wife entering. ‘Jeanne.’
‘I wanted to know if I might help you to prepare for your journey.’
He saw, with a stab in his heart, that she had been crying. ‘My dearest, my Jeanne, I will not be gone for long,’ he said.
‘Of course not, Husband,’ she said. ‘I shall wait your return. And I shall always hold my love for you deep in my heart.’
He thrust the sword back into the scabbard and began to bind the belt about his waist. Unaccountably, her ignorance of his behaviour, and her sweet acceptance of his treatment of her made him feel a sudden anger, as though she was being unreasonable in the face of his own offence.
‘Sir, have I upset you?’
Her voice, so low, so level and yet so brittle, as though she was about to break down into tears of despair, made him glance at her again, and this time his anger was washed away by his guilt, but also his recollection of his love for her. ‘Oh Jeanne, Jeanne, come here!’
He put his arms about her and buried his face in her shoulder, eyes squeezed tight shut, and muttered, ‘Jeanne, don’t worry. There’s just something … I need to think about it, that’s all. I am not another Liddinstone, Jeanne.’
She stiffened to hear the name of her first husband, but then she seemed to melt into his embrace, and he felt her arms reciprocate his hug. ‘Come home soon, Husband. I will miss you.’
‘I know,’ he whispered, hardly trusting his voice.
‘I love you,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t leave me.’
He felt his treachery like a blade in his throat.
‘What is it, Joel?’
He was still sitting in his great chair staring at the fire when his wife Maud entered, and he didn’t hear her at first.
‘Hmm?’ he grunted, then smiled. ‘Oh, it’s you. I was miles away.’
‘So I saw,’ she chuckled. She was a contented woman. Although their marriage had not been blessed with children, she and Joel had been together for almost six and thirty years now, and while she was feeling her age at all of four and fifty, and he no longer looked like the fresh-faced joiner she had married so many years ago, her affection for him had only deepened over the years. He saw to her needs, providing her with money and clothing, and in return she saw to it that his household was managed well and that his table was always overflowing with food.
‘Miles away? Leagues, more likely, Husband,’ she murmured. She was carrying a handful of scented herbs for their mattress, but catching sight of his expression again, she paused, then set them down on the table. ‘What is it?’
‘Henry. It’s such a shock.’
‘The market’s full of the news of it. He was found in St Edward’s Chapel, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes. Look, I didn’t tell you this, but Mabilla came here and accused me of killing him.’
‘What! That’s ridiculous!’
‘Of course,’ he said.
But there was something in his voice that made her look more closely at him. ‘You wouldn’t have hurt him, would you?’ she asked slowly.
‘My dear, of course not!’ he said more emphatically, and he smiled into her eyes, but when she returned his smile, she saw a blankness there, a space where once there would have been conviction, and she was suddenly aware of a sense of fear.
Thomas had taken Sara straight to her house, carrying her in his arms like a child. She weighed scarcely more than a girl. She clung to him while she sobbed, her face buried deep in his throat.
‘I don’t know what to do! I can’t continue like this!’
‘I’m so sorry about him …’
They had found Elias’s body very close to Sara. The child’s arm had been outstretched, as though in his final moment he was reaching out towards her. Thomas had tried to cover the little face, but he was too late and he heard her give a sudden intake of breath, then the low, animal moaning as she shook her head from side to side in frantic denial of this latest horror.
‘Sara, I’m so sorry,’ was all he had been able to say. The boy’s arm was snapped cleanly in two places, and the blood dripped like a viscous oil from the second gash above his elbow where the bones were thrust through the thin sheath of flesh. Yet there was no mark of suffocation about his face, and no sign of pain or anguish, just a terrible vacancy in his dead eyes.
In the end it took Thomas and two other men from the street to pull the young woman away from her trampled child, Thomas himself carrying Elias’s slack form off to the Cathedral.
They were most kind in there. Janekyn Beyvyn; the porter at the gate, directed them to a priestly-looking canon, and Thomas recognised the Almoner. This fellow took Sara to a house nearby, in which a midwife lived, and she drew Sara indoors immediately, to give her comfort and a soothing draught. That was last afternoon, and now Thomas was taking her home again after the funeral.
‘You have no family here?’
‘None,’ she whispered. Her voice was rough and raw from weeping, and Thomas found his own breast spasm as though he was about to weep at any moment. He felt appalling guilt that she should have been reduced to this.
When he first saw her, only a fortnight ago, she had been a beautiful young woman. And then came the miserable accident that took her man away from her, reducing her status to that of a widow, and depriving her two sons of a father. The fact that there was no money in Saul’s purse when he died meant she had to rely on the alms given by the Priory. Her son’s death was a direct consequence of Thomas’s negligence in killing her husband. This woman’s misery was entirely his responsibility.
They reached the house and he kicked the door wide. Sara moved hardly at all in his arms, and he set her down on a stool while he unrolled her palliasse and spread blankets over it to make her bed. Then he took her up and placed her gently upon it.
‘Where is my son?’ she asked pathetically. ‘Where is Dan?’
‘He’s down the way,’ Thomas said, putting his sore palms under his armpits. ‘I sent a man here last evening to find him and see to his safety. He should be all right. Now, I am going to leave you a while and find a little food for you. All you need do is wait here.’
She looked at him. Her eyes were red, her mouth a vivid gash, and her whole manner that of a woman who had lost everything. ‘Just send me my son … my only boy.’
Thomas nodded, then fled.
First he went to the woman’s hut where Dan had been installed. He saw that the boy was well and fed, then hurried to the market, buying pies and wine with the few pennies he possessed. When he arrived back, the same woman who had last thrown him from the place was there again, but this time she was less severe, telling him her name was Jen and even smiling once or twice.
‘Thank you for helping her,’ she said in a low tone when Sara seemed to have fallen asleep with the exhaustion of despair. ‘Sara will need all the help she can get after the last two weeks.’
‘I’ll do anything I can,’ Thomas said. ‘But … I don’t know what I can do to help. I can try to bring food and drink …’
‘That’ll do for a start.’
‘She told me she has no family here. I thought her accent was strange. Is there no one?’
‘No. You know what it’s like for these workers on great buildings. Saul was a good mason, and he followed his master from one church or cathedral to another. This was the latest of the great buildings he’d worked on. Their families are somewhere else. I don’t know where.’
‘So she has no one she can rely on?’
‘No one.’
Thomas nodded, staring at the woman on the bed for a long moment. He would do anything to bring the smile back to her face. That lovely, radiant smile: the one he had erased for ever, just as his rock had wiped away her husband’s face.
William stood in the entranceway of the tavern, leaning on his old staff.