With an affectionate look at him, Isabella replied quietly, ‘Wait, Josse, and I shall explain.’
Ambrose, once again master in his hall, said loudly across the noise, ‘There is another tale to tell here, unless I am mistaken. We would hear it, Brice, if you please.’
‘It is Isabella’s tale primarily,’ Brice replied. ‘I will speak when asked but, for the main, let us listen to her.’
Isabella paused for a few moments, looking down at the floor. Then, raising her head and staring out through the open door towards the bright sunshine beyond, she began to speak. ‘I was married, as all of you except the Abbess know, to a fine man, Nicholas de Burghay. When our second child was but a baby, my husband was killed. Galiena’s family, by which I mean her adoptive family at Readingbrooke, took me in because Audra de Readingbrooke is my sister-in-law; Nicholas was her brother. Then Galiena met and married Ambrose, and here in his hall I first met Brice. We fell in love but there was a powerful reason why I could not agree to follow my heart and marry him.’
‘Roger,’ Brice interrupted. ‘Isabella’s boy,’ he explained to Helewise, who nodded.
But Isabella put her hand to his face and said gently, ‘No, my love. Roger was not the reason and my heart has pained me every time I have had to endure your sad puzzlement, for you believed me when I said he disliked you. In fact he does like you, very much.’
Brice’s face was a study. He looked, Helewise thought, hurt, bemused and, not very far beneath the surface, angry.
Isabella must have perceived the rising anger too for she hurried on. ‘Hear what I have to say, Brice, before you judge me. My refusal to wed you was out of fear for your safety, for I believe — no, I know — that Nicholas was murdered and I was terrified that, if my love for you were to be made public by our marriage, you would suffer the same fate.’
‘No, I cannot believe this!’ Brice, deeply disturbed, shook his head. ‘Nicholas was murdered? By whom?’
Again Isabella paused. Then she said, ‘You may have wondered how it was that I came to know so much about the community at Saltwych.’ She glanced at Brice, who shrugged and muttered something about having supposed that Galiena had told her.
Helewise, who had been wondering that very thing, waited for an answer.
‘But I knew little of the place until quite recently!’ Galiena protested. ‘It was Isabella who told me much of what I know!’
There was a tense silence. Then Ambrose said commandingly, ‘Isabella, if you please. Go on.’
She gave him an anguished look and then said, ‘Like Galiena, I too am a child of the clan at Saltwych. My mother was Aelle’s second cousin and she died giving birth to me. I do not know who my father was — there was some mystery about it and I was half-afraid to know the truth, even had it been offered to me.’ She tried to laugh, but it was a feeble attempt. ‘It has been known for close kin to marry and bear children, and I did not-’ She made herself stop. ‘I was raised in the community until I was almost seventeen and then they found a husband for me. They thought they had selected a man who was close to the powerful circles that rule our land, but they were wrong. I do not know how they came to make such a fundamental error — perhaps the source of their information was mistaken over the name. Anyway, as far as my people were concerned, I was married to the wrong man. It was never explained to me.’
‘And they were not pleased when the man whom they had chosen proved not to be the influential person they had believed him to be?’ Helewise put in softly.
Isabella spun round to look at her, wide blue-green eyes taking on a bright shine in the light streaming through the open door. ‘No, my lady. They were not.’ She hesitated, then, swallowing, voice cracking on the words, said, ‘Aelle killed him. They made it look like an accident — we were out hawking and, as we rode through a stretch of woodland, a heavy branch came crashing down out of a tree and knocked Nicholas from his horse. He suffered a grave wound to his head and it became inflamed and he died in torment.’
Josse said, after a short respectful pause, ‘Isabella, are you certain Aelle was responsible?’
She looked at him, tears in her eyes. ‘Oh, yes. I saw him, and he had other men from the settlement with him. He pretended to be there to help me but there was no reason, other than an attack on Nicholas, for him to be in that vicinity; normally he rarely leaves the marsh.’
‘But it could have been coincidence,’ Josse persisted. Helewise, watching him, wondered why he was pursuing the point.
‘No,’ Isabella said firmly. ‘There is something else: later, when Nicholas was buried and I was about to move in with the family at Readingbrooke, Aelle visited me. And he said they would find another husband for me who would better advance the cause of our blood kin.’
Josse sat back with a smile, increasing Helewise’s puzzlement. But Isabella, who had also noticed, gave a quick laugh and said, ‘Are you happy now, Josse? Now that you understand that I truly had a reason?’
And he said, ‘More than happy, Isabella. Thank you.’
There is a small mystery there, Helewise thought to herself, that I will pursue another time …
Brice, who no longer looked angry, said, ‘Isabella, my love, you should have told me this long ago! I would have done something, I could have-’ He stopped.
‘What would you have done?’ Isabella asked. ‘What happened to Nicholas could so easily have happened to you. In the case of an active man, a man who loves to hunt as much as you do, it is all too easy to feign a fatal accident.’ Then, holding one of his hands in both of hers, she said, ‘I did not want to be the cause of the death of another man I loved.’ Then, passionately, ‘I did not want to lose you too!’
At which Brice put both arms around her and hugged her to him as she wept.
When, after some moments, she moved a little distance away from Brice and, giving him a grateful smile, wiped her eyes, Josse said, ‘Was that why, Isabella, you tried to dissuade us from going down into the Saltwych settlement to rescue Galiena? Because you feared for Brice?’
‘I feared for you too!’ she said. ‘I knew what they are capable of; you did not. And I did not know the identity of the girl in the hut. I was sorry for her, of course I was, but I felt that for your sakes, we should leave well alone.’ She looked at Galiena, then back at Josse. ‘I am so glad,’ she added, ‘that you ignored me.’
‘Just how long,’ Helewise asked cautiously, ‘had you been watching the Saltwych settlement, Isabella? Days? Or was it weeks?’
Again, Isabella turned her remarkable eyes on to her. ‘You guess accurately, my lady,’ she said.
‘The Abbess does not guess, she reasons,’ Josse interrupted pontifically, and his tone broke the tension in the hall, allowing them all a moment of laughter.
‘It was a guess, really,’ Helewise admitted. ‘You gave the impression last night, Isabella, that you knew the place much better than Josse or Brice, which, of course, you have just explained to us by saying that you were born and brought up there. So it follows that you would have known of a good place to hide while you watched and listened to all that went on.’
‘Yes, I have been going there on and off since Nicholas died,’ Isabella said. ‘My family all know that I love to hunt alone which, as well as allowing secret meetings with Brice, also meant I could slip away and see what was happening at Saltwych. Try to hear, for example, if any plans were being laid for me.’ Looking across at Galiena, she said, ‘I am only sorry that I did not learn of the threat to you, dearest. Aebba must have slipped away from Ryemarsh the very night after you had announced your visit to Hawkenlye, in order to tell Aelle that the perfect opportunity had arisen to snatch you and substitute a woman who looked like you. Had I seen Aebba in the settlement then, I might have been suspicious. But I did not.’
There was a silence as they all considered the implications of that. Then Ambrose said, and from his tone Helewise thought he was giving a final summing-up of the discussion, ‘Well, that cannot be helped. Galiena is safe now, back where she belongs, and, with Aelle’s death, it appears that there is no longer a threat to Brice if he becomes Isabella’s husband. You do not think that his successor will carry on his policy of marrying selected girls of the kinfolk to important outsiders, Isabella?’