All around Justin, men were rolled up in blankets, sleeping peacefully, and he yearned to be one of them. With a sigh, he sat up and tugged on his boots. He followed Durand from the hall, the two of them threading their way through the sleepers, and up into the stairwell. He had not even asked where they were going; he’d find out soon enough.
It was John’s bedchamber, so lavishly furnished that he decided Petronilla must have given him her absent lord husband’s room. Which John was now sharing with his concubine. Too tired to marvel at the morals of the highborn, Justin looked around, then saw John sitting in the shadows beyond the light cast by the hearth. He was still dressed, a wine cup in his hand, a flagon at his feet. Two other flagons had already been discarded in the floor rushes.
“Sit down. But keep your voice low lest you awaken Ursula,” John said, gesturing toward the canopied bed. “I want you to tell me what you found out in Brittany.”
“I thought we were to do this in the morning, my lord.”
“I decided I did not want to wait.” John drained his cup, refilled it with an unsteady hand. “There is wine over there. Help yourself.”
Justin made one final try to get back to his bed in the great hall. “Durand is here, my lord. He must have already told you what we learned.”
“He did. But now I want to hear it from you.”
Durand shoved a drink into Justin’s hand, saying in a low voice, “Do what the man says or we’ll be trapped here all night.”
Justin did, dropping down onto the cushions scattered about the floor, and taking a long swallow of what turned out to be a very good Gascon wine. “We confronted the Lady Emma’s son at Laval,” he began.
The hearth flames had burned low and a distinct chill had crept into the chamber, but the men were warding it off with wine. Durand was sprawled out in the floor rushes, a wine cup balanced on his chest, which rose and fell so evenly that Justin suspected he slept. John remained in the shadows. He’d killed two more flagons, adding them to the other empties, stacked, one upon the other, like a funeral bier for wine gone but not forgotten.
This was such a fanciful thought that it occurred to Justin that he was not entirely sober. He’d been trying to limit his own wine intake, for John was the last man in Christendom with whom he’d want to get drunk. But he was bone-tired and there was something oddly lulling about the dying fire. If he stared into it long enough, he could make out all sorts of strange shapes, putting him in mind of summer days when he’d lain out in Cheshire meadows with Bennet and Molly, finding castles and ships under full sail and swans in the clouds floating over their heads.
“So... you truly do not think that swine Simon killed her?”
Justin started and glanced toward the sound of that voice. John remained well camouflaged in shadows, preferring the obscuring gloom to the warmth of the waning hearth. What had Claudine liked to call him—Prince of Darkness. To Justin, that seemed unusually profound, although he was not exactly sure why. He groped for this understanding but his thoughts were as elusive as minnows, impossible to catch.
“Wake up, man!” John tossed an empty flagon in his direction. “I asked you if you thought that hellspawn killed her.”
“I already told you, my lord,” Justin said testily, “that I do not. We did at first, but not now. Now I think it was that canon, though God knows why...”
“God knows why,” John repeated solemnly, and then laughed suddenly. “Indeed He does.” There was a clatter in the darkness as he fumbled for another flagon. “The last one,” he announced, in the grave tones of a man on a sinking ship, watching the spare boat drift out of reach. “I’d send you to the buttery for more, but I do not trust you to come back.”
“Send Durand,” Justin suggested, and John laughed again.
“Tell you what, I’ll share it with you,” he offered. “But you’ll have to wait till the room stops moving.”
“I do not want to share with you, my lord,” Justin said, slowly and distinctly, while the image of Claudine’s face formed behind his closed eyelids.
“All the more for me then.” John swore as he spilled some of the wine onto his tunic. “I loved her, you know,” he said softly, and Justin sat up straight, for a moment thinking he meant Claudine.
“She was my first love,” John said. “I was sixteen when she took me to her bed. It was a revelation...”
Justin thought that over. It did not seem very likely to him. “You are not saying she was the first woman you bedded, are you?”
“No, of course not.” John sounded mildly offended. “But she was the first one who showed me what sinning is like if it is done right. She taught me a lot, did that lady. She claimed that most men could pleasure a woman about as well as a dog could read.”
Justin laughed, for he could hear Arzhela saying exactly that. “She deserved better than Simon de Lusignan,” he said, not drunk enough to say that she’d deserved better than John, too.
“She always did say she had bad taste in men.” John sounded wryly amused, but he sounded sad, too, and Justin decided he’d definitely had too much to drink if he was starting to feel sorry for the queen’s son.
“To the Lady Arzhela,” he said, raising his wine cup high.
“To Arzhela,” John echoed, leaning out of the shadows to clink his cup against Justin’s. “Requiescat in pace. But not the whoreson who killed her, de Quincy. Not in this lifetime nor the next.”
The following day, Justin was suffering the aftereffects of their bizarre, drunken wake for Arzhela. It was some consolation that John was, too, but he was irked that Durand seemed to have been spared. The knight’s trencher was piled with pasties stuffed with trout and he was eating with gusto, whereas the mere sight of them was enough to chase away Justin’s appetite.
John was faring no better with his meal, and when a messenger arrived for him, he pushed away from the table with no noticeable regret. Justin made do with almond milk and bread, refusing to watch as Durand devoured yet another fish-filled pasty. Even Claudine’s good news—that she’d coaxed Petronilla into taking Yann into her household—did not raise his spirits all that much.
John soon returned, beckoning abruptly to Justin and Durand as he strode toward the stairwell. By the time they reached the solar abovestairs, he was pacing back and forth impatiently, a rolled parchment in his hand. “It seems,” he said, “that I’d have done better to keep you both here in Paris. For certes, it would have saved me a fair sum of money!”
“It is early in the day for riddles, my lord,” Durand said. “I assume yours has something to do with that letter you hold.”
“Indeed it does.” John brandished the parchment like a processional torch. “I’ve finally heard from the one man I’ve always been able to depend upon. The Breton got the last message I sent, thanks to Emma’s assistance. Not surprisingly, he took action straightaway, learning more in a fortnight than the two of you could in a twelvemonth. And,” John said, triumphantly, “he has obtained what you two could not—proof that it is a forgery!”
XX
March 1194
Paris, France
Petronilla’s great hall was a scene of superficial domestic tranquility. Most of the trestle tables had been taken down after supper. A fire burned in the central hearth. John was absent, having gone off soon after dusk to meet the Breton at the cemetery of the Holy Innocents. Petronilla and Claudine were listening to a harpist while chatting and doing the needlework that was the lot even of women of rank. Emma was reading. Her young knight Lionel was playing chess with a knight of Petronilla’s household. Rufus and Crispin were hunched over a game of queek, others occupied with merels, but most of the men in the hall were wagering on a raucous dicing game of raffle. Ursula was reclining in a cushioned window seat, idly petting the small lapdog that was a recent gift from John, apparently oblivious to the admiring male glances being cast her way. Morgan had disappeared after supper, but Justin and Durand were seated at a table, gazing gloomily into half-filled wine
cups, looking as frustrated as they felt.
They were not in John’s favor at the moment, as he’d made abundantly clear by not taking them as part of his escort that evening. Now that he no longer needed their services in proving his innocence, he’d felt free to berate them for their failure to prove the letter was a forgery, complaining that he’d paid Lupescar “enough to ransom the Pope,” and had got little to show for it. While he’d exercised enough restraint not to blame them for Arzhela’s death, they knew he did. Anger was an easier emotion to deal with than grief, and the hunt for scapegoats was a favorite pastime of the highborn.
Justin should have been pleased with the turn of events, for if John could produce proof of the conspiracy, he ought to be free, then, to return to England. But as much as he yearned to see Aline, as much as he detested being yoked to Durand, and as much as he’d disliked taking orders from John, he felt oddly unsettled and dissatisfied with this outcome. He knew John would do all in his power to find and punish Arzhela’s killer. He’d hoped, though, to play a part in that reckoning. He owed it to Arzhela.
Pushing his chair back from the table, he encountered resistance. He’d befriended one of Petronilla’s pampered greyhounds and as he glanced down, he expected to see its sleek brindle body stretched out behind him. But it was Yann, curled up in a ball like a cat, sound asleep. Justin looked pensively at the boy, who’d been trailing after him all day as faithfully as his absent dog, Shadow. Shadow was motivated by affection, though, Yann by fear. The Breton orphan was the proverbial fish out of water, stranded on unforgiving Parisian shores.
After making sure that Yann was sleeping, Justin said quietly, “I would to God I’d thought to leave the lad with the Earl of Chester at St James. The Welsh do not do well when they are uprooted from their native soil. I fear that the same may be true for the Bretons.”
“Well, you can always wed the Lady Claudine and adopt the boy.” But Durand’s mockery was habitual, not heartfelt; he had too much on his mind to enjoy tormenting Justin. “No man could be as good as the Breton claims to be. I know the stories told about him—that he comes and goes like a phantom in the night, that few men have even seen his face, that he is as elusive as a fox and twice as sly. Mayhap he did find proof positive that the letter is forged, but I’ll need to see it with my own eyes ere I’ll believe it.”
“It sounds as if your nose is out of joint, Durand,” Justin said, mildly amused. “For all we know, he has blood-kin at the Breton court, spying on his behalf. If he were able to tunnel under the walls whilst we had to assault the outer bailey, that would give him a huge advantage.”
Durand grunted. “No one knows for sure if he is even a Breton.”
“If he’s not, that would play havoc with my theory,” Justin conceded. “He might well be the bastard spawn of a Granville pirate, for all we know.”
The corner of Durand’s mouth twitched in what was almost a smile. “I’ve never laid eyes upon the whoreson. That is a select brotherhood. John has met him. So has the queen. I am not sure if Richard has. Emma did, years ago with her brother, the old king, who knew him well, mayhap the only one who did. We can probably add the French king to the list and the Counts of Toulouse and Champagne and Flanders. Our master spy travels in rarefied circles, does not care to deal with underlings.”
“Underlings like us.” Justin took a swallow and made a face, wondering how long it would take his taste for wine to return. “We are still confronted with two crimes, the plot against John and Lady Arzhela’s murder. The Breton may have found out who is behind the forgery, but what of her killing?”
“I thought Simon settled that with his grand dive over the table at Fougères. Damn, I wish I’d seen that!”
“Something about this still does not fit,” Justin insisted. “We assumed that Canon Robert is the killer because of Simon’s action. But why, then, did she say ‘Roparzh’ with her dying breath?”
Durand shrugged. “Mayhap she was no longer lucid. Mayhap she was back in time and Roparzh was the name of the squire who’d taken her maidenhead twenty-some years ago. Or a fond name for her second husband. Or her favorite dog.”
“No. I saw her eyes, you did not. She knew she was dying and she was trying very hard to tell me her killer’s identity. I am as sure of that as I’ve ever been of anything.”
Durand shrugged again. “So who is Roparzh? We’ve been over this again and again, de Quincy. We met no one at the Breton court with that name.”
Before Justin could respond, a small voice piped up behind his chair. “Yes, you did.”
They both swung about to stare down at Yann. “What do you mean, lad?”
Yann sat up, yawning. “I was half asleep, heard you talking...” His words trailed off, for he was becoming aware of their tension. “I was not eavesdropping on purpose!”
“That does not matter, Yann. You said we knew someone named Roparzh. Who?”
“That canon you were talking about,” Yann said warily, still not sure he wasn’t in trouble. “Robert and Roparzh... They are the same name.”
Durand let out his breath. “You are saying that Roparzh is Breton for Robert?”
Yann grinned, gaining enough confidence to add impishly, “No, Robert is French for Roparzh!”
There was a long silence as they took this in. “This still does not make sense,” Justin said slowly. “She was trying to tell me who her killer was. Why did she not say ‘Robert,’ then? Why the Breton form of his name? If she’d called him Robert, we’d have thought of the canon straightaway. Why Roparzh?”
“She was dying, de Quincy. She was Breton-born, so why would she not be thinking in Breton at the last?”
“I suppose it is possible,” Justin said, not convinced. “She was so intent upon telling me—what? If she used the name Roparzh, it must mean something.”
“Let me know if you figure it out.” Durand picked up his cup, saw that it was empty, and reached over to claim Justin’s. “I think I’ll stop torturing myself with riddles and go win some money at raffle.” But although he glanced across the hall toward the dice game, he did not move, no more able than Justin to let go.
Yann looked from one to the other, yearning to help. If only he’d not left the Lady alone. She’d paid with her life for his greed, for those few coins he’d filched from the sleeping poacher. “If the Lady called him Roparzh,” he ventured, “mayhap he was Breton.”
“No, lad,” Justin said, as kindly as he could. “He was from Toulouse, though that was likely a lie, too. But even if he were Breton-born, why would it matter? Why would Lady Arzhela have wanted me to know that?” He had no answer, and neither did Durand.
Rising, Justin coaxed Yann to his feet, and started to lead him toward a corner where he could sleep without fear of being stepped upon. He stopped almost at once, struck as if by lightning by an improbable idea. “Durand, this is going to sound crazed. Hear me out, though. What if Arzhela were trying to tell us that Robert was the Breton?”
“You said yourself it would not matter if he were Breton.”
“Not a Breton. The Breton.”
“That is preposterous!”
“Is it? Think about it. If Constance and her barons wanted to entrap John in a web not of his making, who better to do it than a legendary spy?”
“I’ll grant you that much. But we need more to go on than your sixth sense, de Quincy!”
“Why else would Arzhela have called him Roparzh? She was telling us his true identity. She was suspicious of him from the first, was convinced he was feigning illness at Vitré to avoid us. And she was right, Durand. But it was not you or me he was evading, it was Emma—Emma who could recognize him!”
They looked at each other and then turned as one, a perfectly coordinated movement in Emma’s direction. She glanced up, startled, as they bore down upon her, but once she understood what they wanted of her, she could not give them the certainty they craved. “I did meet him,” she confirmed. “But I do not remember anything that distincti
ve about him, nothing like a scar or red hair or even freckles. He was attractive in a subdued sort of way, and well spoken. His hair was brown, I think. He was neither uncommonly tall nor unusually short. In other words, he was a man who’d not call undue attention to himself, a useful attribute for a spy. You truly think this Canon Robert is the Breton?”
They could not blame her for sounding dubious. “We are exploring the possibility,” Durand said dryly. “Let us assume that you are right, de Quincy. Arzhela learns through pillow talk with her lover who Canon Robert really is. He then learns of Simon’s slip of the tongue. He knows that Arzhela has a past with John. So he kills her to keep her from telling John of his double-dealing. But then he has a new problem: Simon de Lusignan.”
“And not one he’d anticipated,” Justin said. “He did not realize that Simon truly cared about Arzhela. So now he has Simon set upon collecting a blood debt, awkward at best, dangerous at worst. We’ve been approaching this from the wrong end. Everyone assumed that Simon had broken out and then gone in search of Canon Robert. What if it were the other way around? If Canon Robert had come in the night to silence Simon?”
Durand nodded thoughtfully, accepting that premise. “So he enters the storeroom, intending to make sure Simon does not blurt out any inconvenient accusations on the morrow. But he finds that Simon is not as easy to kill as Arzhela; we can testify to that. They fight and... what then?”
“The toll collector said Simon had blood on his clothes. Let’s assume he was the one wounded. But he got away, stole a horse, and fled. I can understand that if he had the Breton on his tail. Once he had escaped, though, why did he not return and seek out the duchess for help? Why ride for Paris?”
Durand saw where Justin was going, for his thoughts were heading along that same sinister path. “John is here,” he said flatly, and Emma turned to stare at him in astonishment.