Then he remembered. It had not originally been his suggestion; it had come from Gervase. Relief flooded him, accompanied by a sinking of the heart. The place that Gervase had mentioned was a very long way away.
‘I think I do know,’ he said softly. He gave his brother a rueful grin and told him.
He had not expected such a reaction. Yves’s face paled, his eyes expressed his shock and he breathed, ‘But he can’t go there!’
And he told Josse why.
Josse leapt to his feet. ‘I must go and get him back! I must leave now — there’s no time to waste!’
Yves grabbed his sleeve and pulled him down again. ‘You can’t go after him, Josse! You won’t find him — it’s just impossible. Go home. Take Helewise and return to England. Only God can protect him now.’
Josse barely heard. He was filled with just one desire: he had to talk to Helewise, and it would not wait. As soon as he decently could, he detached himself from his brother’s anxious presence and went to find her.
In the morning, Josse found he simply could not set out for the coast before at least trying to find a trace of Ninian. Helewise, looking at him out of anxious, loving eyes, agreed that they would follow the road south for just one day. As she pointed out, if they failed to pick up his trail very soon, then there was little hope they would stumble across it later.
They said their goodbyes to the family. Yves, who had a little knowledge of the south-east of England, promised that he would come to find them back at the House in the Woods. In a bleak leave-taking, it was the one consolation.
They rode south all day. They stopped soon after dark in a small town, and Josse found lodgings for them in the house of the priest. He was happy to offer them hospitality in exchange for news of the outside world and, when he discovered they came from England, he was overjoyed.
It was late in the evening, and the priest was more than a little drunk when he revealed the one item out of the ordinary run of small town life that had recently happened. A body had been found on the road leading south out of the town, stone dead. The body bore grave wounds, one of them swollen with suppuration. A fine horse had been grazing nearby.
Josse’s fuddled brain instantly cleared. ‘Who was this person? Man or woman?’
The priest, clearly gratified at having such an interested response, elaborated. ‘A man, in his twenties, with brown hair and a square-jawed face. He was well dressed, and his horse was most handsome: black, with a star-shaped mark on his brow.’
There seemed nothing else to do but turn for home, although it took half a day of Helewise’s most eloquent reasoning to persuade Josse of that painful fact. ‘Ninian is gone, Josse,’ she said, aching for the pain she saw in his eyes, ‘and although we know where he is heading, it is far away. Yves has told us what is happening there and-’
‘There’s danger there!’ he interrupted. ‘We must stop him, catch him before he gets there and-’
‘Josse, he has many days’ start on us!’ she interrupted in her turn. ‘How are we to find him in all of the vast heart of this land? By some wonderful chance we found this place, and we can return with the huge blessing of knowing that, with Olivier de Brionne’s death, the greatest danger to Ninian no longer exists.’
‘There’s no need for him to be a fugitive now!’ Josse cried. ‘He can come home!’
Home. The word undermined her, and for a moment she could not speak. Then, reaching for his hand and folding it between both of her own, she said softly, ‘He will come home, Josse. But not through any action of ours.’
He pulled his hand away. ‘You go back if you like,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ll go after him on my own.’
His words cut right into her heart. Tears filled her eyes, and surreptitiously she wiped them away. When she could trust her voice she said, ‘Your daughter, your son and all who love you have already borne the pain of seeing Ninian ride away. Will you put on them the further burden of knowing you have hared off after him because that action, risky and futile though it is, is easier for you than gathering your courage and your resolve and going home?’
There was silence for a long time. She heard the echoes of her own words and noticed absently that she had addressed him in exactly the same tone as when she had been abbess of Hawkenlye. It was agonizing but no surprise, then, when eventually he gave a deep sigh and said, ‘You are right, my lady, as usually you are. We will go back.’
That night they stayed in a dirty, run-down inn where the fleas jumping on the soiled mattresses forced them both to sleep on the floor.
Lying awake, closely wrapped in her cloak and both her blankets, Helewise tried to get comfortable. She knew Josse was awake, not more than an arm’s length away, but there was a distance between them that had nothing to do with their physical presence. She wept, the tears silently running down her face and into the high collar of her gown. I love him, she thought, and I believe that I have lost him.
Would it have made any difference if she had behaved differently since going to live in the House in the Woods? Of course it would, the sensible part of her answered. They would still have had today’s devastating argument, and she would still have persuaded him, for she knew she had employed unfair tactics by reminding him of his family and, once she had done so, there had only been one possible outcome. But oh, if they had already taken that great step that she knew they both wanted, and become man and wife in law and in body as they already were in heart and spirit, then she knew in her very bones that, argue as they might, this night they would have lain in each other’s arms and made it up.
She heard his voice again in her mind. You are right, my lady, as you usually are. Dear God, if he had added abbess after my lady, the two of them could have been back in her little room at the abbey, disputing hotly from their accustomed positions either side of the large oak table that had always divided them.
Was she still abbess, then? In her soul, was she still a nun? She turned over, trying to pad her cloak under her hip bone. Deliberately, she made herself go back over the long and painful months and years between her first doubts and her final decision. It was not that she no longer loved God and wished with all her heart to serve him; it was that she had lost her faith in the church which men had built in his name.
She thought now of what Yves had told them of the horrors in the south. It was the ultimate persuasion, had she needed it, that she had been right.
She felt drowsy at last. She stretched out a hand to Josse’s broad back, stopping just short of touching him. In a couple of days, they would cross the narrow seas back to England. She knew what she must do: she must reinforce as often as she could that they’d had to go back; that to go on after Ninian would have been useless and might well have cost both of them their lives. She must say, every day, he is young, he is strong, he is resourceful. And, more often than any of those phrases, he will come back.
Sending all the love that was in her heart out to this big, strong man of hers, Helewise closed her eyes and drifted into sleep.
NINETEEN
Ninian had reached his destination. He was a very long way from Acquin, and it was virtually impossible that Josse and Helewise would have found him, no matter how long and hard they searched. He was not at the address that Gervase de Gifford had given him. Nobody lived there now. The house, the street, even the town, had disappeared; burned and gone, along with most of the fifteen thousand who once had lived there, on the feast day of St Mary Magdalene more than a year before Ninian arrived.
Ninian stood looking down on what had once been Beziers. He found himself in the middle of a holy war.
The crushing disappointment of discovering that the place he had been heading for all those hundreds of miles was no safe haven but the burnt-out wreck of a town had rendered him all but catatonic. He had the sense to get out of the open and under cover in the remains of an outhouse but, once he felt reasonably safe, he gave himself up to his exhaustion and his grief and eventually fell asleep. By morning, however, he had made up his mind. He had come here to find someone, and find her he would.