The open space around it was neat and tidy, just as presumably she had left it, although he noticed that the herb beds badly needed weeding and many of the shrubs were showing riotous growth. He went over to the door of the hut, unfastened the complicated knot in the rope that kept it closed and went inside. He was instantly hit with her presence, for the little room was redolent with the scent of sweet herbs and hay.
It was warm; the sun outside was hot. Feeling drowsy, he climbed up on to the sleeping platform and closed his eyes. It was as if she were beside him. He could smell the delicate floral scent that seemed to cloud around her; he could feel her cool, firm flesh. ‘Joanna,’ he whispered, ‘where are you?’
There was no answer.
He must have slipped into a light sleep for suddenly she was there with him, lying behind him and cuddled up against his back; she felt so solid that he knew she was real. But I’m dreaming, he thought, confused. Then he stopped trying to work it out and simply relaxed against her. ‘Joanna,’ he said again, and he thought he heard her say, ‘I love you, Josse. I always will.’
He awoke to darkness and he was shivering with cold. Hurrying out of the hut — without her, it was not a place he wanted to be — he realized that in fact the sun had not yet quite set. He carefully closed the door and retied the rope. Then, still under the influence of his vivid dream, he made his stumbling, bemused way back to the abbey.
He was not sure when he first knew he was being followed; in his present condition, he realized that his senses were very far from their usual sharp state and it proved quite difficult to make himself attentive. He moved on, trying to be quiet, and the unseen shadow came after him.
It was a huge relief at last to see the open space beyond the last of the trees. He emerged from the forest on to the patch of ground beneath Meggie’s oak tree and automatically looked up at the place where the figure had been. It was back there once more.
From the darkness behind him he thought he heard someone take a soft breath. There was the faint crack of a snapped twig and a whistling sound that could have been a sword stealthily drawn from its scabbard.
It was too much. Josse broke out of whatever spell held him there and ran as fast as he could for the abbey gates.
Eleven
The abbey was no longer the calm refuge that it was designed to be. Several times a day, ox carts came slowly down the track, heavily laden with sandstone blocks from small local quarries and huge loads of timber. The stonemasons had set up their workplace close to the apron where Martin wished to site the new chapel, and within the abbey walls the air was full of dust and noise.
Helewise recognized that Martin had chosen a sensible place for his masons to prepare the stone, but a petulant voice in her head kept demanding, ‘Why is he working just there, as if he would emphasize that it is the only place for the queen’s chapel?’
She would have liked to talk it over with Josse, but the poor man had worries enough. He had come running to find her yesterday evening, red in the face, out of breath and, unusually for him, frightened. ‘It’s back in that damned tree!’ he said, instantly apologizing for the profanity. She had not believed him — it was twilight, after all, and his eyes could be playing tricks — but the figure was gone from the cupboard in the wall.
This morning, just before the midday office, Helewise went out to look once more at the site on the forest fringe. She tried to ignore the stonemasons, the carters and the shouts of the men engaged in unloading the carts, and looked beyond them to the small area of flat land in front of the trees. Would it be so very bad to have the chapel outside the walls? There was one important advantage to siting it there: when the abbey gates were locked at nightfall, having the chapel outside them meant that those in need of solace would still have somewhere to pray.
There was also the strange matter of the statue. Something — no, she corrected herself firmly, somebody — seemed quite determined that the figure belonged not in the book cupboard within the abbey but out there in the tree. Josse had claimed that the beautiful woman in the horned headdress was not the Virgin, for she was pregnant and made of black wood, indicating, he said, a black skin. Helewise was not so sure. The Virgin Mary had been pregnant, hadn’t she? The conception of her precious child might have been unorthodox but she had carried the baby and delivered him just like every other mother. Who could say what colour her skin had been? She was a woman of the hot southern lands, so might she not have been considerably darker than her usual depiction in paintings and statuary?
There was no doubting the power of the figure. Helewise was not entirely sure if she was right, but some very deep instinct told her that this power, although alarming, was good. Perhaps the statue was some earlier artist’s vision of the Mother of God. Perhaps he — or she — had been inspired by the Virgin in some earlier guise.
Helewise, quite shocked at the thought, dismissed it. Goodness, it was surely heretical! Somehow, though, standing there so close to the Great Forest, she could not make herself believe this. Without realizing it, she seemed to have walked up close to the tree where the statue had been found. It was now back in her room — Josse had fetched it first thing this morning — but she knew that it would soon return to the tree. That is where she wants to be, Helewise thought dreamily. Perhaps we should do as she wants and let her stay in her chosen spot. Perhaps we should build the chapel there and make a special place within it for her. As the concept waxed in her mind, she seemed to hear a voice saying, ‘Do it.’
Josse spent the first part of the morning with Meggie. Brother Erse the carpenter was busy making a series of carvings of the Apostles for the new chapel, and Meggie, intrigued at the way people came out of the wood, as she put it, wanted to try. She sat with Erse, and Josse watched as the monk solemnly handed her an offcut of oak, put a chisel and a light hammer in her hand and showed her how to make the first incisions.
It gave Josse pleasure to observe that his daughter seemed to have skill in her small hands. Her figure had none of the stylized grace and power of Erse’s saints, but then it was her first attempt and it was a very lifelike hound.
As the morning wore on, he knew he could no longer postpone the task that was waiting for him. If he was right and Piers had gone to the tower at World’s End with his young squire and then escaped, it seemed likely that two of the three men whom the Oleron guard had rowed away from the island that March night were Philippe de Loup and King Richard. All three men were hard on Piers’s trail. Which one was de Loup, the tall, fair one or the one described as short and lightly built? Josse had no way of knowing. The Chartres mason had referred to de Loup having followed two others to the city; had one of the men been Piers, in the company of some fellow traveller he had met on the long road from the Ile d’Oleron? Oh, but it all seemed to fit! De Loup and perhaps other Knights of Arcturus must have lost Piers’s trail after leaving Oleron and gone with the king to besiege Chalus, where the lure of treasure had proved more powerful for Richard than the prospect of trying to find Piers, but then the king had met his death, the treasure had vanished, and the Knights of Arcturus had returned to the urgent matter of finding and silencing the renegade.
I must speak to Piers again, Josse resolved. I need to ask him if I’m right. I must make him confirm — if, indeed, he knows — whether the king, de Loup and a third man followed him as he fled from Oleron.
Against his volition something else that the Oleron guard had said kept echoing over and over again in Josse’s head: Screams were heard coming from the tower, dreadful, horrifying, agonized screams… and through the arrow slits… there poured a brilliant, unearthly blue light that suddenly changed to blood red.