Music of the Distant Stars (35 page)

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Authors: Alys Clare

BOOK: Music of the Distant Stars
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I could bear no more. ‘They loved each other,’ I protested angrily. ‘It wasn’t lust, and their feelings for one another went far beyond the hungry passion of a moment. Sir Alain would not have abandoned her – he told my aunt and me what he planned to do, how he was going to set Ida up with the baby and—’
It was not a tactful or sensible thing to say to the woman before me, already dangerously unbalanced, who was to be Sir Alain’s unwilling wife. But I was beyond tact and sense.
Straight away she had her revenge. She spun round and, before I could duck, her left hand flew down in a vicious backhand swing and caught me on the cheek.
My left cheek, where I bear a scar like the new moon.
I had won that scar as I’d fought side by side with Rollo. I bent down low, my arms straining painfully, pretending to be more badly hurt than I was. I needed time . . . Briefly, I closed my eyes, my soul crying out to him, wherever he was.
I saw him. He was standing on a rocky outcrop, and he had a sword in his hand. He wore a heavy leather jerkin, open to the waist, and his shirt was stained with blood. He looked exuberant: whatever fight he had just been in, clearly he had won.
He was out there somewhere in the world, and in my bones and my blood I knew that a part of him was with me, just as a part of me went with him. Silently, I made a vow:
I will not die here before we have a chance to be together
.
I took several deep breaths.
Just as I opened my eyes to face her, I saw Fox. Well, I didn’t really see him; he was no more than a flash of red on the edge of my vision. I shut my eyes again and saw him clearly. He was standing by the table where Claude had laid out the contents of her sewing bag and, as if the part of me that was Fox had seen what I should have noticed for myself, I saw the object at which his twitching black nose was sniffing.
Claude raised her hands and launched herself at me. She clutched at my arms, but I was ready for her, and I wrestled myself out of her hard grip. The stool fell over, and I landed on my right arm, crushing it to the stone floor with my own weight. I stifled a cry of pain. Claude was beside herself, striking out blindly, trying to pin me down as I wriggled and twisted beneath her. I could not see the table, but I knew where it was. With a lurch I threw myself against it, and it toppled over.
I needed my searching hands on the floor beneath me, and I had no choice but to turn on to my back. She was on me, a cry of triumph roaring out of her wide open mouth as she landed on top of me. Praying to my guardian spirits that I would find what I sought before she killed me, I scrabbled with my fingers across the floor . . .
 . . . and the edge of my hand touched cold metal.
I grasped Claude’s small sewing knife and found the blade; it sliced into my thumb. Ignoring the pain, I grabbed the bone handle and pressed the blade against the linen strip that bound my wrists. I cut myself several times – the blade was very sharp – but the fabric gave way.
With my hands free, I levered myself off the ground and, lowering my head, butted Claude very hard in the stomach. She gave a grunt as the air was forced out of her body and slumped, winded, against the wall.
I hurled myself at the door, raised the heavy latch with bleeding hands and raced out into the corridor and down the steps. I flew out into the hall, crying, ‘Help! Help! Is anyone there? I need help!’
I heard running footsteps, and Bermund appeared through another doorway, two startled-looking women servants behind him.
There was no time for detailed explanations, and I just said, ‘It’s Lady Claude. She’s had a fit.’
One of the women caught sight of my hands and rushed towards me, her kind face full of sympathy. ‘She’s attacked you!’ she gasped. Then, with a scowl that I knew was not directed at me, she added, ‘I always thought it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt.’
‘Enough!’ barked Bermund. He was already halfway across the hall, racing off to Claude.
I had to warn him. ‘Be careful,’ I shouted. ‘She is not in her right mind.’
He paused, just for a moment, and looked back at me. He too, I realized, knew the true nature of Lady Claude de Seés. Was it only her equals who were so blind?
The servant with the kindly face had wrapped her apron round the worst cut, on the back of my left hand, and, thanking her, I said, ‘We should go with him.’
She looked very reluctant, but, brave soul that she was, she nodded. ‘Come along, Tilda,’ she said to the other woman, and the three of us hurried after Bermund.
My heart was pounding. Each beat was sending a huge throb of pain through the blow on my cheek; I could feel it swelling up, and briefly I put my hand to feel it. I wondered if she had broken the bone.
We reached the doorway to Claude’s sewing room. Bermund was standing there, so still that he might have been turned to stone. I rushed up to him, about to speak, to demand he go inside to help her, to restrain her . . . I did not know.
And I saw why he was so still.
She was sitting against the wall, her back resting on the Lust panel. The woman in the scarlet gown still lay there in her abandonment, her mouth open, her bodice splayed wide to show the pale breasts. Now, another patch of scarlet echoed the vivid gown; another gaping mouth parodied the woman’s arousal.
Below her, Claude de Seés lay with her head fallen back against the colourful wools of the panel. Her mouth was open, and her dead eyes, half-closed, stared accusingly out at us. There was a deep cut right beneath her chin, narrow where it began under her right ear, wide and bloody as it slashed down across her neck. In her left hand she held the knife from her sewing bag.
She had drawn it across her throat.
TWENTY-ONE
 
B
ermund had sent men out to find Lord Gilbert and, as soon as he came puffing and panting back to Lakehall and heard what had happened, he ordered one of the men to take me home. ‘You have had a dreadful shock,’ he said, looking anxiously at me, ‘and you are hurt.’
‘But you have to know what happened, what she did!’ I protested. ‘I’ve got to explain!’
He hushed me, kindly but firmly. ‘Bermund has already told me. He relayed to me all that you told him, and I will take what action is necessary.’ He sighed. ‘To think she has been living here, right here under my roof, with my wife and my children, all this time!’ He gave a shudder.
I said quickly, ‘I don’t believe you or your family were in any danger, my lord. Lady Claude’s madness was limited and—’ I stopped, suddenly seeing again her eyes narrowed in hate and terrible vengeance. I couldn’t prevent the violent shudder that ran through me.
He looked at me. ‘Don’t think about her now,’ he advised. ‘Go home, girl. If there are matters concerning her that I need to speak to you about later, I will send for you.’
I bowed my head. I wanted desperately to get away and was more than ready to obey his command. ‘Very well, my lord.’
I remembered then who was lying asleep in my aunt’s house. I think Lord Gilbert had forgotten, in which case it would not have occurred to him that I would have to break the news of Claude’s death to the man who had been going to marry her.
As I hurried away from Lakehall and headed for home, I wondered what he would say.
Of all the sad moments that followed on from what Claude had done, the worst was when I explained to Sir Alain de Villequier that his bride-to-be had murdered the woman he had loved.
He was awake when I opened the door and went into the house, and I told him straight away. His eyes registered his shock and his horror. Then, covering his face with his hands, he wept.
‘I was out looking for her, that morning when you came to the hall to tell Lord Gilbert you’d found her body,’ he sobbed. ‘We’d arranged to meet in our usual trysting place, but she didn’t come. I waited all night, and I thought Claude must have caught her slipping out and locked her back inside that damned sewing room.’
‘I thought she was locked in every night,’ I said. ‘How did she get out?’
He grinned briefly, the expression there and gone in a heartbeat. ‘She had a second key,’ he said. ‘She wheedled it out of old Bermund. She said it was in case she wanted to get on with her work when Claude wasn’t there. That night when she didn’t come out to meet me, I thought Claude must have discovered Ida’s key and confiscated it.’
Edild was watching him. I was very afraid she would try to stop him talking, convalescent as he was, but she said nothing.
‘When you took so long to answer Lord Gilbert’s summons that morning, you said you’d gone hunting,’ I reminded him. ‘I, for one, believed you.’
‘I
was
hunting,’ he said softly. ‘I was looking for Ida.’
My thoughts ran on. I remembered the day Ida was buried and saw in my mind’s eye the figures of Lord Gilbert, Lady Emma, Sir Alain and Lady Claude up on the low rise above the grave. ‘She was looking at you, when Ida was buried,’ I murmured. ‘Lady Claude, I mean. I was touched because I thought she was looking to you for the strength to get her through the ordeal of burying the girl who had been her seamstress.’ I knew different now; Claude, I had no doubt, had been watching Sir Alain like a hawk to see if he gave away his feelings for the dead girl.
‘Claude didn’t need anyone else’s strength,’ he said wearily. ‘She had more than enough of her own.’ Then, in a burst of passion, ‘I wish I’d realized that she was in the habit of sneaking out of Lakehall! I thought, just like everyone else did, that she locked herself away all day and every day working on her sewing, but she didn’t.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘She went out with Ida the day of Ida’s death, and she went out again to set the trip wire that Derman ran into. Then, when he had fallen in the water, she beat him over the head with a piece of wood and killed him.’ I thought of something. ‘
I
knew she used to slip out,’ I said quietly. ‘I was treating her, you know, for her headaches and her insomnia. One day when I went to see her she wasn’t there. Lady Emma was quite upset, because she’d invited Lady Claude to go on an outing with her and the children and she’d said no, and then she went out by herself.’
I felt Edild’s hand on my shoulder. ‘None of this was your fault, Lassair,’ she said firmly. ‘It was impossible for you to have realized the significance of Lady Claude’s absence.’
Perhaps it was. It didn’t stop me feeling guilty about it.
Silence fell. After a while I looked at Sir Alain and said, ‘What will you do?’
I have rarely seen anyone look so hopeless, so bleak. He gave a deep sigh and said, ‘I shall have to make my report for the king concerning the three deaths here.’ He looked at Edild, then back at me. ‘Unless you two have told anyone else, only the three of us know what Ida and I were to each other.’
‘Alberic knows,’ I said.
Sir Alain smiled grimly. ‘You can safely leave Alberic to me.’
Edild said thoughtfully, ‘You will keep the fact that Ida was pregnant with your child when she died a secret.’
He held her eyes. ‘I will. And you, will you do so too?’
‘Lassair and I are healers, and as such we are privy to many people’s secrets,’ she said. ‘We do not tell.’
His relief was evident. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘What will you give as Lady Claude’s reason for killing herself if you withhold the true one?’ I asked. It was forward of me, I dare say, but after what I had suffered at Claude’s hands, I felt I had a right to ask.
Evidently, he did too. ‘I shall explain discreetly, first to her mother and then to the king’s officials, that Claude’s frustrated desire to enter the convent finally overcame her, and she decided that life other than as a nun was not worth living.’
‘Won’t that make her mother feel very guilty?’ I asked. ‘It was she, after all, who proposed that one of her daughters should marry you.’
‘If it does, then she deserves it,’ he said harshly. ‘God knows, I have my own guilt to bear, over both Claude’s death and poor Geneviève’s withdrawal, but it was not I who made the sisters what they were.’
I thought he was letting himself off lightly, but I did not say so. I met Edild’s eye and guessed she was thinking the same.
I looked down at Sir Alain. His face was pale, and his eyes were closing. ‘He’s almost asleep,’ I whispered to Edild.
She nodded. ‘We will leave him to rest.’ She got up, and so did I. We stood over him for a few moments, watching as his breathing deepened.
He would go away and make his report to whoever it was waiting to receive it, I thought. He was our justiciar; he could reveal as much or as little as he wished. Three people were dead, two of them killed by the third, who had died by her own hand. Alain de Villequier could, if he so wished, attribute all three crimes to Claude’s extreme reaction to the thwarting of her ambitions to take the veil, a reaction that had driven her to insanity. He could, and he probably would. Because of who and what he was, no doubt he would be believed.
It wasn’t really fair. But that was the way life usually was.

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