I barely slept. I sat up high on the cot despite the good sheets and a finely woven blanket. My head rested against the walls and I curled my arms around my knees and stared into the dark.
' embers which cracked and sparked . . . '
Guy was such a strange man. Secretive? Without doubt.
I could have talked on my mother for the whole journey. To talk would have been to honour her. But Guy would not talk of his own mother at all. At one point I had chatted so much to him about Moncrieff and my memories of the place, it was many leagues before I realized he had said nothing – just sat quietly allowing my words to surround him, possibly even drown him. When I thought on it, I was surprised he hadn’t ordered me to desist in that cool, authoritative way of his. Already during our travels I had seen flashes of his temper.
He rode along without saying anything and then,
'He rode along without saying anything.'
‘And why are you interested?’
His thumbs stroked over and over across my knuckles.
I woke gently. Sometimes when one wakes, it’s as if ice has been dropped down one’s spine, but I woke as if I were wrapped in silk and wool. Warm, loose, remembering only the stroking of my knuckles. As I arched my body, I knew he had left me, but I felt no fear. Not immediately . . . and then, like the aforesaid ice, cold crept over me and my toes and fingers clenched, my mind recalling death: Wilfred’s, Harold’s, my mother’s. I sat up with a rush.
‘She’ll be dropping the next one afore I get back.’ Wilf answered my question as we trotted along what passed for a road between Tours and Le Mans.
‘You make it sound as if she’s a ewe popping a lamb,’ I laughed.
‘You must let me come with you. If an escort is to be found for my maidservant, then I am surely entitled to have a say in who they are.’
Guy shook his head, a barely-there movement. ‘It is not seemly . . .’
Montrachet’s skies certainly did not weep for me when we left. The blue that blinded one stretched as far as the eye could see and the white rock of southern Aquitaine intensified the glare. I did not weep either, but my handmaid, Marais, sniffed until I told her to desist.
To begin with, my name isn’t Prudence. I am called Ysabel. And I do not have brown hair. I am by nature blonde. I am from the family Moncrieff. My father was Baron Geoffrey of Moncrieff and my mother was Alaïs de Montrachet from Aquitaine. A cousin twice removed from Eleanor, the mighty queen, and who was the mother of our king, Richard the Lionheart.
‘Vasey and Gisborne arrived in Nottingham together, with papers from Prince John purportedly in the name of King Richard.
'Vasey and Gisborne arrived together . . .'
The abbey’s soaring barrel-vaulted roof and its handsome wooden pews should have sustained me but as I knelt for what seemed hours, my hands knotted together, no vestige of relief came. Only a biting cold that soon had me shivering. As well that I shiver, I thought. It approximated the incipient fear that was beginning to stir. How dangerous it would be to work in a house that would entertain the high-born of far and wide. Prudence, you place yourself in peril.
