Twenty minutes later, Nigel, who was actually an excellent player, found himself in checkmate.
“I should have accepted that extra knight,” he said slowly, staring at the arrangement of pieces on the board.
“Aye,” Hugh said gravely. He stood up. “You can share my parents’ bedroom off the solar with Bernard. He will show you the way. I will be going to bed myself once I make my evening rounds.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll see to Nigel’s comfort, lad,” Bernard said easily. “His men can sleep here in the hall with mine and yours.”
Hugh nodded and turned away from them, heading toward the door that led outside. He took his cloak from where it was hanging on a nail by the door, flung it around himself, and went out into the rain.
“Well?” Nigel said, turning to look at Bernard.
“Come upstairs,” the other man said, “and we can speak in private.”
3
When Hugh came back into the house, Nigel and Bernard were gone and the men who were to sleep in the hall were bedding down on the straw pallets that the servants had dragged out from their storage place behind the stairs. Hugh took the candle that had been placed next to the door for him and in silence crossed the mattress-strewn floor and mounted the stairs to the third level.
He felt a great rush of relief when he saw that there was no one in the solar. Bernard and Nigel Haslin had retired to bed; he would not have to face either of them again tonight.
He stood for a moment in the middle of the solar, looking around him by the flickering light of the wax candle he held in his hand.
How empty it was. How desolate. It had felt that way to him ever since Adela died. Even Ralf had not been able to completely fill the emptiness for him.
It still did not seem possible that they were gone, that he would never again feel Adela’s fingers on his cheek, never again hear Ralf’s deep, gruff voice…
Hugh shut his eyes, blotting out the sight of the room that had once been his home.
This had not been the place to which Ralf had brought him on that first night, of course. That had been the townhouse in Lincoln.
Hugh stood alone in the cold, empty solar, and it seemed that he could once again feel the touch of Ralf’s hand, heavy on his shoulder, as the sheriff had dragged his eight-year-old self out of the hiding place he had found against the bitter cold of a winter night. Hugh had struggled mightily, but even though he had learned many dirty tricks during his time on the road, Ralf had known most of those tricks himself. And Hugh had been but eight years of age and weak with hunger, no match for the big, strong Sheriff of Lincoln.
He had cursed Ralf, first in English and then in his native Norman French.
Later he had discovered that it was the French that had stopped Ralf from taking him to the castle, which had been his original intention. Instead, impulsively, the sheriff had taken Hugh home to his wife for the night, to get the boy off the frigid winter streets of Lincoln and to find out who he was.
Adela had taken one look at the filthy bundle of rags that was Hugh and immediately called for a hot bath. Stunned and speechless, Hugh had found himself being scoured and scrubbed and then dressed in the clean clothes that Adela had borrowed from one of the household boys. Then she had sat him in front of the fire and fed him the first hot meal that he had seen in over a month.
He had eaten ravenously.
When Ralf would have questioned him, Adela had told her husband fiercely to hold his tongue. Couldn’t he see that the boy was exhausted?
Then she had taken Hugh upstairs and tucked him into a warm, fur-covered bed in a room that he had all to himself. Before she left, she had bent and kissed him on the forehead.
“Never fret, my lamb,” she had said. “I won’t let any more harm befall you.”
And she never had.
Hugh would have died for Adela, but she had thwarted him by dying first. It was the worst memory of his life: he and Ralf, each of them sitting on either side of her bed, watching as the fever ate her away. She had slipped away in the night without a word to either of them.
He had been seventeen when she died.
Three years later, he had lost Ralf.
The seven months since Ralf’s death had been a torment to Hugh. Losing his foster parents had opened a great chasm of emptiness inside him that he was terrified to contemplate. Even during the years that he had lived with them, he had known deep down that he was balancing precariously on the edge of a precipice. But Adela had kept the terror away. At least, for most of the time she had.
Why can’t I remember?
It was not a question he often asked himself. He had always known that it was safer not to remember. For thirteen years he had been content to live as half a person with half a life. It had been enough that he was the son of Adela and Ralf.
But they were gone now. They had died and left him alone.
Who was he, really? Who had he been before Ralf had found him starving in the streets of Lincoln?
He remembered some of what had befallen him before he reached Lincoln. He remembered the traveling mummers who had wanted to use him in their show. He remembered what one of the men had tried to do to him and how he had escaped from their clutches.
But of the time before that-nothing.
Could what this Nigel had said possibly be true? Could I be this missing Hugh de Leon?
All of his inner self rose up to deny it.
Why am I so sure it isn’t true?
Why am I so afraid?
Is it because I saw my father being murdered? Is that why I lost my memory?
A drop of hot wax trickled down onto Hugh’s hand, bringing him back to his surroundings.
Slowly he walked into his bedroom and began to undress. He had told his bodyservant he wanted no help this night.
He pulled his jerkin off over his head, and bent to unbuckle his boots. As he stood next to the bed in his hose and beautifully embroidered shirt, he shuddered, and it was not with cold.
The bedroom next door was occupied this night, but not with the people he loved.
He stripped off the rest of his clothes and got into his solitary bed.
I don’t know how much more of this loneliness I can stand, he thought desperately as he burrowed his face into the embroidered pillow that Adela had made for him so lovingly.
Perhaps it won’t hurt to speak a little further with this Nigel Haslin on the morrow.
There was no chapel at Keal and consequently the household met for the first time in the hall. The first meal of the day was always a simple one of bread washed down with ale, and then everyone dispersed to their morning chores before they reassembled again at noon for dinner.
“I must be back in Lincoln by evening, lad,” Bernard said to Hugh as the three men sat over their ale cups at the high table.
Hugh had begun to pick up his cup, but now he set it back down again on the table. “Of course,” he said with careful courtesy. “It was good of you to come to see me, Bernard.”
The knight scowled. “I don’t want to leave you here alone again,” he said frankly. “It isn’t good for you.”
Bernard could almost see the shutters come down behind the boy’s light gray eyes.
“This is my home,” Hugh said.
“You may have another home,” Bernard said deliberately. “That is, if you can find the courage to fight for it.”
The boy’s finely cut nostrils quivered with an emotion that could have been either anger or amusement.
“You must be desperate to get me away if you have to resort to insulting me,” Hugh said.
It was amusement, Bernard realized.
“Listen to me, lad,” he said, gripping his ale cup in tense, hard fingers. “The evidence presented here by Nigel is too persuasive for you to turn your back upon. You may very well be who he thinks you to be. You owe it to yourself to pursue the matter further.”