The sheriff straightened. His hand fell to his sword hilt and the fingers drummed. “Then you give me no alternative.” He motioned to the guards. “Crispin Guest, I hereby arrest you in the name of the king.”
23
Crispin stumbled after the guards. Each took an arm to drag him down the passageway. That son of a whore. The sheriff was the king’s tool, after all. But Crispin assumed he had more character than that. Wynchecombe hadn’t the stomach to stand up to Richard. Few men did and lived, he supposed.
The guards lugged Crispin a long way and tossed him into an empty cell. He rolled once along the straw-cluttered floor before righting himself. They said nothing and closed the door. He heard the key scrape in the lock, then their footsteps receded down the long passageway.
He sat on the floor, which seemed the most convenient, and gingerly palmed his head and then his chin. His head throbbed and ached. Feeling woozy, he stared at the blackened maw of the empty fireplace and willed it to ignite. When that failed, he laid back against the wall, the cold stone chilling his back.
“Why do I seem always to be on the wrong side of the king?”
He closed his eyes. It made the room seem less slanted.
The air thickened with the stench of frightened men. The last occupant of the room left behind his own odor of fear, marking the cell with a distinct haze of despair. Crispin tried to ignore it. No telling how long the sheriff would leave him here. When Crispin had been imprisoned for treason, he had languished in his cell for five months.
He allowed his heart its drumroll for several minutes before taking a deep breath. He was done with fear. Hadn’t he suffered enough humiliation? If they wanted to kill him then it was years overdue.
Bracing his back against the wall, he inched upward. “I’ll stand, thank you,” he said to the shadows. “I will die indeed before I ever give Richard the satisfaction of defeating me.”
“Ah, Lord Crispin,” came the voice from outside the door.
Crispin stiffened. He felt a curse rumble up from his throat.
Keys clattered and dug into the lock, dropping the pins into place. The door creaked and hung ajar, spilling a swath of irregular light across Crispin’s chest. The guard Malvyn stood in the doorway and blocked the rest of the torch’s flame.
“So,” Malvyn said, fat arms crossing over his chest, “you were never going to be a prisoner in here again, were you? You know, you weren’t very polite to me a few hours ago.”
Crispin managed a grin. “You’re not going to hold that against me, are you?”
Malvyn scowled and eyed him up and down. “You’re a high-and-mighty bastard, aren’t you? Born into court society, eh? Title, riches. Where are they now? Who will help you now?” He stepped into the room. His footsteps made a hollow sound. “Do you remember the fun we had eight years ago?” He took a short whip from his belt. “You never once cried out, did you? Let’s see if we can’t change that.”
Malvyn raised the whip but never brought it down. Crispin kicked it out of his hand and it skidded across the room.
Standing half a foot taller than the gaoler, Crispin straightened. “I tolerated a great deal then. I don’t now.” He slammed his boot down on Malvyn’s foot. The gaoler howled in pain and bent toward the floor. He never got there. Crispin’s fist reached his jaw first. The punch met flesh and tooth, tearing the former and cracking the latter.
Malvyn lost his balance. Crispin lunged at him for more—until spear butts jabbed his chest and stopped his progress.
He stumbled back and looked up at two guards. They raised their spears, but he lifted his open hands and backed away from the door. They hauled out the barely conscious Malvyn and ticked their heads. “He’ll make certain you get a beating for that, Master Crispin,” said one of the men.
Crispin rubbed his scraped knuckles and smiled. “Yes, but it was worth it.”
The sound of Malvyn’s heels scraping against the floor and the door closing for the second time filled his ears before all fell silent again. The profound stillness echoed throughout the chamber and rumbled down the passage.
Crispin listened to the silence for a long time. He remembered it well. He used to hum to himself to keep the quiet at bay, all the songs he knew. He tried now to think of a song to hum, but he did not much feel like singing.
As the time crawled by, he felt more and more alone. How much time had passed? He wasn’t certain. Only an arrow slit of a window allowed him to measure the sunlight. But with heavy cloud cover, even that was an uncertain sundial.
In the utter quiet, his thoughts caught up to him. He slid down the wall and sat. He scowled, thinking of the king; scowled further thinking of Wynchecombe; then lost the scowl completely when his mind lighted on Philippa.
Resting his throbbing head against the stone, he closed his eyes. “Philippa,” he whispered, liking the sound of it in the empty chamber. She should be quite safe with Gilbert and Eleanor. It surprised him that he missed her. Women passed through his life like the seasons, and though he knew he was susceptible to a woman in peril, he did not consider himself a fool where they were concerned. “Well,” he admitted with a lonesome chuckle, “not too much a fool.”
He remembered he still had her portrait and jammed his hand into the purse. The light was poor but he cupped the portrait in his hand and gazed at it. Her face peered back at him with a mischievous expression that seemed to say she had a secret.
He frowned and lowered the portrait to his lap. Too many secrets.
The fact that she was a chambermaid—no, worse, a scullion—should have struck down any emotions and concern. What he was, what he was born to, was in the blood. He couldn’t change. He didn’t want to.
“I don’t like to fall in love,” he said. The hollow sound of his lone voice gave poignancy to his assertion. “But I—” He shook his head. “It’s no good. There’s no place for her. Hell, there’s no place for me in my useless life!”
His dizzy brain ran through the memories—of jousts and duels, of all-out combat. He had been alive then. Worth something. “What am I now?” he asked the portrait. “The Tracker. What the hell is that?” He’d cobbled the vocation himself from shards of his former knighthood tied with the string of concocted peasant chivalry. Little better than a mummer in a play mouthing verse written by another, a minstrel strumming an instrument. No more real than the tattered honor that he struggled to believe he still possessed.
“My ‘true image’ indeed! If I owned a shred of my true self I should have fallen on my sword years ago. If I had a sword. Is it cowardice that keeps me alive?”
He glanced at the portrait before tossing it across the room. “She is truer than I. At least she knows what she is.”
He heard his own voice and touched his tender head. “What’s the matter with me? Must be a fever. Indeed, I do not feel well.”
He rocked his head in his hands for a time before raising his face. A chill breeze breathed over him from the window, feeling surprisingly refreshing to his beaded forehead.
The tiny portrait lay facedown among the straw. A crescent edge of frame gleamed. “I will not entertain the possibility,” he said to it. “I will not!” He glared at it, almost waiting for a response. The silence overwhelmed again, fell away with an echoed cry somewhere down the passageway, and welled again like something solid, encasing him in its shell. He stared again at the little portrait until a crack in the mortar of his defenses crumbled, only a little, and he crawled across the floor to recover the little painting and cradled it again in his palm. She still smiled at him. “You do not care about your past.” He shook his head, partly in wonder, partly in self-loathing. “How is it done?”