“So this is the famous trait-” He stopped himself and smiled grimly. “Tracker,” he amended.
“Indeed,” said Crispin stiffly. “And you are Edward Harper, pensioner.”
“As you see me,” he said, spreading out his hands. His clothes were not new but were a good weave and fairly expensive cloth. But they were well worn and bespoke his current status as pensioner, using only that which he needed to live. Crispin admired his willingness to live a simple life, to even tend a garden, for surely this man was a gentleman before his retirement.
“I am aggrieved you had to lie to me, young Jack,” Harper said. “I liked your visits.”
“Oh sir!” Jack dropped to one knee. “If I could have spared you I would have done so. I had no wish to lie to you. You seemed a right honorable gentleman.”
“Arise, young squire. You need pay no homage to an old man. These simple furrows are now my lands with only crows for retinue.”
Jack rose and dusted off his new stockings.
“It is clear you know of me, Master Harper,” said Crispin. “Why did you not give the game away sooner?”
“I only just discovered. And it is an interesting game. For instance, am I given to understand that the poet Geoffrey Chaucer is imprisoned within these walls … for murder?”
Something squeezed inside Crispin’s chest. He must see Geoffrey again today, though he had little in the way of good news to offer him. “This is true,” he said carefully. “But it is not my doing. I do not believe him guilty.”
“Truly?” Harper’s eyes lit, eyes a cloudy blue like ancient ice. “Then perhaps I was in error about you, Master Guest. I thought perhaps you did it for vengeance.”
“Master Chaucer is Master Crispin’s old friend, good sir,” said Jack. “He’s trying to free him.”
“Do you know Geoffrey Chaucer?” asked Crispin.
“Yes. I met him on several occasions.” Harper thought for a moment, nodded his head, and then gestured toward his door. “Will you come in and take refreshment?”
With this shift in mood, Crispin took the offer gratefully. He ducked under the low lintel and looked around. Small, humble. What he expected. A pile of books and parchments lay on a table under the window.
“When young Jack here told me your name it sounded familiar, so I researched it. I wondered why such a boy would work for you … and be proud of it.”
Crispin fingered the parchments. He recalled similar papers from his past as a knight. “You were a herald, sir.”
“Indeed.” He placed his hand on his breast and bowed slightly. The crescents of his fingernails were black with dirt.
Jack looked from one man to the other. “I don’t understand, Master Crispin. I know of heralds but I do not know their calling.”
But it was Harper who stepped forward. He proffered a parchment and unfolded it. “These drawings are the shields and blazons of our noble peerage. These books and parchments are my Ordinaries of Arms. I have kept a tally over the years, marking down as many as I could and writing also their ancestral lineage.”
“Why?”
“Because, young Jack, when a knight competes at tournament it must be established from whence he comes; that he has a right to compete. Likewise, should he die in battle, he must be identified and this is achieved through his colors and blazon. Or if a man wishes to marry a woman they must not be too closely related, and these trees help me to see that.”
Jack studied the carefully wrought pictures of shields with awe. “Then these are the noble souls of England?”
“And France and Flanders and a few other places.”
Jack’s face was scored with admiration. “Then you found my master in these pages.”
Silently, Harper took another parchment, unfolded it, and laid it over the others on the table. Crispin peered down and followed the old man’s gnarled finger as it climbed the page over shield after shield, finally coming to rest on one shield; one half blue, the other half yellow. A red dragon was set in its center; a dragon looking back over its winged spine and bearing no claws. Above the shield was a drawing of a great helm flanked by a red mantle and crowned with a swan. “And here is Guest. Shield per pale Or and Azure, a dragon passant reguardent unarmed, Gules. I see there were four children: Henry, Robert, Joan … and Crispin, this last the only surviving issue. The parents Henry and Johanna.”
Crispin stared with prickly eyes at the stark recital of his past, little better than a headstone, just as silent and just as cold.
Jack turned to look at him. “You had two brothers and a sister, sir? I never knew.”
“Yes. They died when I was quite young. I barely remember them.” He didn’t know why he said that. It wasn’t exactly the truth. But it seemed to ease some of the hurt from Jack’s features.
“I had a sister, too,” said Jack without emotion. He leaned over the parchment. “Your father was a knight. A baron.”
“Yes.”
“Your mother-” Jack counted on his fingers, his mouth working it out silently, “died when you were six.”
“Yes.”
“And your father not long after-”
“This is all very interesting, Jack, but not to the point.” He stepped back from the table. His hand trembled and to stop it he rested it on his knife hilt. Family. It had been important once, but now … He was the last. The only survivor. And he was a failure, for the name would die with him. Stripped from court, the colors of his shield were gone from the public rolls. His father, once so proud a knight who served a king, would be forgotten except on some dry bit of parchment read by an old pensioner, while his mother was no more than the memory of a horrific fall down a staircase witnessed by her terrified son, that “surviving child.” What would she have said to him now, he wondered? Would she have hung her head in shame as these other families had done, those who had killed Becket? Was he any better than they were?
“You have filled this lad’s head with nonsense of a curse,” he growled. “From where does such foolishness arise?”
“It is not foolishness. I found evidence of such a curse in the priory’s archives when I was helping the good brothers organize their records. Many strange incidents are recounted.”
“Murder?”
“No. This is the most extreme circumstance yet.”
“Master Harper,” Jack interrupted, “there is a third descendant amongst the pilgrims. The nun’s priest, Father Gelfridus Le Breton!”
“Bless me! You don’t say?”
“No, he doesn’t.” Crispin leaned over the table and pressed his hands to the parchment. He felt their dry stiffness crinkle under his palms. “It is nonsense at best, a coincidence of names at worst.”
“Then why are you here seeking me out?”
Crispin tore his eyes from the old man’s and stared down at the drawings again, scanned the long dead names of his family that he had scarce thought of in so many years, and sighed. “Because in myth there is often a grain of truth and I need to know all I can.”
Harper studied Crispin. “I expected a more foolish and impetuous man,” he said. “I did not expect such a thoughtful and careful gentleman.”
“I am that, Master Harper. At least, I am now.”
“Suus Pessimus Hostilis indeed. ‘His Own Worst Enemy.’ Perhaps at one time.”
“That’s what I told him!” said Jack, grinning madly.
But Crispin’s mind was suddenly elsewhere. When he turned to Jack he was filled with excited anticipation. “Jack, go get the sword.”
“The sword?” But the gears finally rotated in Jack’s mind and he snapped his fingers. “The sword! Oh, Master! You are ten times the man I will ever be!” Off he ran. His steps could be heard slapping the stone cloister walk until they slowly disappeared in the distance.
Harper pored through his parchments and finally went to his books. “Le Breton, Le Breton…” He flipped pages and found what he wanted. “Would you not call this an extraordinary coincidence now, Master Guest?”