‘Are you going to render me senseless, as you have done that poor child who sleeps so deeply in the next hut?’ Josse demanded. He had intended his voice to sound strong and threatening, but to his consternation, he sounded as feeble as if he had been abed with a fever for a week.
‘No,’ said the man. ‘I have already done enough. And she lies sleeping until we manage to reach agreement upon her fate.’ He frowned briefly, as if that disagreement were a continuing and pressing anxiety. ‘This is to be your prison, Josse d’Acquin.’
‘Why do you have to imprison me?’ That was better — he thought he sounded a little more menacing now. Perhaps the effects of that foul smoke lessened as soon as you stopped breathing it in. He fervently hoped so.
‘You have far too much curiosity,’ the man answered with a faint grin. ‘We are a private people. We obey our chieftain’s dictates and keep to ourselves.’
‘But you are so few!’ Josse protested. ‘How do you breed? Do you take wives from your own kin?’
It was a devastating accusation and Josse half expected that the man would find some way to punish him for his audacity in having made it. But instead he merely said mildly, ‘We have enough people to avoid incest. In the past it has sometimes occurred that half-brothers and sisters have mated, but that has not happened in many years.’
‘You broke the church’s strict prohibition when you did that!’ Josse cried, horrified.
The man murmured, ‘Not our church. The gods we serve are wider minded and comprehend that sometimes necessity makes demands that cannot be ignored.’
The gods we serve. Aye, thought Josse, it seems I was right. ‘You are pagan,’ he said. He did not frame it as a question.
‘Of course,’ said the man. ‘We came to these shores with the religion of our forefathers and we have held fast to our gods.’ With a weird light in his strange eyes, he added softly, ‘We shall be rewarded for our loyalty.’
‘This is why you choose a life of isolation?’ Josse asked. ‘So that you may continue to worship as you see fit?’
‘In part, yes.’
‘But-’ Josse was not sure how the law of the land — or indeed of the church — stood on the subject of paganism. There were, of course, the persistent legends that spoke of the Norman kings maintaining a foot in the Old Religion, but what kings did was, in Josse’s experience, their own business and had little to do with what they permitted in their subjects. ‘Does your parish priest not condemn your practices?’ he finished lamely.
It was no great surprise when the man burst out laughing. ‘Oh, Josse, I had not expected such a naive question!’ he said, still chuckling. ‘In answer, yes, probably he does. But his condemnation is his own affair and has little bearing upon us.’
I am to be left here a prisoner, Josse thought. I must keep this man talking as long as I can.
He was not sure what purpose that would serve, but suddenly another question occurred to him.
‘You have a woman here, Aebba,’ he said. ‘She was serving woman to Galiena Ryemarsh — your Iduna — and was with her mistress and her master Ambrose at Hawkenlye Abbey. But I saw her in your hall.’
‘It was careless of her to allow herself to be seen,’ the man observed. ‘She was told not to go anywhere near you but I suppose that, like you, her curiosity overcame her. What of her?’
‘She is one of your people,’ Josse said. ‘Is she not?’
‘Yes. She was related to Iduna’s mother.’
‘And sent to Ryemarsh to watch over Galiena.’
‘Yes.’
‘But why did Galiena allow her to be a member of the Ryemarsh household?’ Josse demanded. ‘It was apparent that she did not like the woman!’
‘Iduna understood her obligations to her blood kin,’ the man said. ‘We sent Aebba to her with a tale of dire need — Aebba, we said, had lost her man and had young children depending on her, and so needed the small wage that Ambrose Ryemarsh paid her to send back to Saltwych for her family’s keep.’
‘So she knew that she came from here!’ Josse cried. ‘Galiena was aware of the identity of her true family.’
The man said slowly, ‘At first, no. But once she was wed to the lord Ambrose, it was necessary to inform her who she was and to tell her what she must do.’
‘To share Ambrose’s wealth with her family, you mean!’ Josse shouted. ‘But, as I said before, her family gave her away! Why was she obliged to do anything for your people?’
The man shrugged. ‘It was always a possibility that she would refuse to recognise the obligations that she owed to her blood kin,’ he said. ‘It has happened before,’ he added in a murmur.
Aye, Josse thought, the other woman he spoke of. But, his mind still firmly on Galiena, he said, ‘And what did she think of these plans that you had for her child? Did she agree to her and Ambrose’s son being pushed into a position of influence?’
‘She appeared to accept it, yes,’ the man replied calmly. ‘But, all the time that she did not conceive, it was a plan that remained hypothetical.’
Josse wondered suddenly if that was why Galiena had not become pregnant. She was a herbalist, they all said so, and so perhaps, knowing what her child’s destiny would be if her blood kin had their way, she had made sure he would never be born …
No, that could not be right. Because she had gone to Hawkenlye to ask for help in conceiving. And anyway she had already been carrying a baby when she died.
With a sense of defeat, Josse leant his back against the wooden wall of the hut and slowly sank down to a sitting position. He had done so much, he thought miserably, to trace Galiena. He had even found the very place where she had been born and discovered who her father was. But, despite all that, still he was no nearer to solving the mysteries of who had fathered her own child and who had poisoned her.
He put his face in his hands and rubbed hard at his eyes, which were still smarting from the smoke. But the silver-eyed man must have misinterpreted the gesture, for he said in a hypnotic voice, ‘Soon you will sleep, Josse d’Acquin. And sleep will bring dreams and oblivion.’
Peering through his fingers, Josse saw the man walk stealthily to the door, which he pushed closed behind him. There was the sound of a latch of some sort being dropped home.
And Josse heard the soft thump of the man’s footfalls as he strode away.
He found a spy hole in the plank wall and sat for some time breathing in the sweet air from outside. The swimming sensation cleared and his eyes, nose and throat, although still feeling red and raw, began to smart less.
After a time he stood up and went to try the door. It was firmly fastened. He had his short knife in his belt and, inserting the blade in the crack between door and frame, he eased it upwards until it encountered the latch. I believe, he thought with excitement, that I could get out of here.
But there seemed little point at present, for surely someone — the silver-eyed man — would instantly put him back inside again, possibly more firmly secured and perhaps even chained like the poor girl in the other hut was. No. It seemed better to wait for darkness. Or, if providence looked down kindly on him, a nice, thick, concealing blanket of mist.
In the meantime, the best he could do was to go on breathing in the mind-clearing fresh air in the hope that by the time he was called upon to anything more active, he would be fit and ready.
He could hear voices. There had been the sound of a fast horse arriving, then the rider had called out to someone in the settlement. A voice had answered — Josse thought it sounded like the silver-eyed man — and then there had been an exchange which finished with something about the hunters being engaged on the far side of some boggy ground and held there by the mist.