Beside Hilde was a golden-haired girl with a rosebud mouth, a light veil of gauze shielding her features. Bascot had seen Conal lift the young woman out of an enclosed litter a short time earlier, then carry her and seat her tenderly beside his great-aunt. Bascot supposed the girl must be the goldsmith’s daughter, removed from the aura of secrecy in which her father had kept her and openly declared by Conal as the woman he loved. Hilde had welcomed her warmly, smiling and taking the girl’s hand in her own before looking around defiantly to see if any of her neighbours should dare seem critical of her approval. Conal’s mother, Sybil, and her two brothers, Magnus and Ailwin, were noticeable by their absence.
On the other side of Hilde was Gianni, the elderly lady’s hand resting familiarly on the boy’s shoulder as he clutched her silver-headed cane close in his arms. It pleased Bascot to see his servant thus, but he felt a strange sense of loss. It was as though the boy had deserted him.
Roger de Kyme came next in the parade of entrants. He was riding a black stallion with thick hindquarters. The animal was nervous and snorted at the close proximity of the crowd, ears twitching. Behind Roger rode his cousin, Alan, mounted on a wiry grey with a small head and alert eyes. Ivo de Rollos was there, too, watching with anxious eyes as his mother, Ermingard, handed him a ribbon with an air of puzzlement about what she was doing. All three received ribbons of yellow. It took nearly an hour for the rest to pass by and receive an identifying scrap of material.
During this time Bascot let his gaze roam over the crowd. It was a motley company, merchant alongside tinker, and prostitute standing cheek by jowl with clerk. He spotted Agnes, the alewife, in the crowd, her face white and subdued as she stood with her sister and family. Agnes had been released from gaol only that morning, Isobel’s confessed guilt the alewife’s warrant to freedom.
Nearby, and a small distance apart from the others, were Isaac and his brother Nathan. They were watching the line of combatants with hawk-eyed interest. There was no doubt that many of the entrants had borrowed the price of their fee from the moneylenders. The Jews would keep a sharp tally of who, among those pledged, emerged the victor or had the misfortune to be among the vanquished.
Across the field, Bascot saw the barber-surgeon who had attended Anselm’s wound after he had been attacked. The little man was wearing a gaudy gown of red and blue, his clean-shaven face gleaming and his grey locks carefully coiffed. On his arm was a woman that Bascot supposed must be his wife, a plump matron with a merry face and red cheeks. Near to them was the cobbler from whom Bascot had bought his boots, his horse-faced wife munching on a pasty while her son ogled the young girls in the throng. On the ground, under a tree, sat the mercenary captain, Roget, and the reluctant harlot, Gillie. They were sharing a flagon of wine and laughing. When Roget saw Bascot looking his way, he raised an arm and waved.
It was as the tourney marshal was lining up the two teams of combatants that Bascot heard his name spoken. Looking down, he saw William Scothern standing beside his mount. The clerk’s face was drawn and miserable. Slung on his shoulder was a bundle and he was crumpling a soft-crowned cap between ink-stained fingers.
“Sir Bascot, I come to beg your pardon for my sister.” The young secretarius’ demeanour was dejected, his voice a stammer so low that Bascot had to bend down from the saddle to hear him.
“It is not my pardon you must beg, nor yours to have the doing of it,” Bascot replied.
“I know that, sir,” Scothern replied, “but I feel I must do it anyway. If I had been more vigilant, less preoccupied with my work.. . and other things… perhaps my sister would not have done what she did.”
“That is between your own conscience and God,” Bascot said, not unkindly. “None but He can help her, or you, now.”
Scothern shook his head in misery. “Sir Philip has gone back to his manor. He did not ask me to accompany him and, even if he had, I would not have gone. There was a time that he told me he valued my loyalty. I thought he was speaking of my assistance in bringing his illegitimate son to Lincoln. But it seems he believed I knew that Isobel had warmed his bed, and appreciated my not letting it interfere with my devotion to his service.” The clerk’s face was a picture of misery. “How could he have thought me to be so base?”
The question embarrassed Bascot, and instead of attempting to answer it, he asked Scothern if he had been to see his sister.
Scothern nodded. “She is the same as ever, tight-lipped and contemptuous. I asked her what I was to tell our parents and she only replied that I could make up whatever lie my clerk’s brain deemed suitable.”
“Did you speak to her of what she had done?”
Again, Scothern nodded. “She took relish in telling me all the details. How she had told the alekeeper that Hugo was Lady Sybil’s illegitimate son by a secret lover and that the boy was threatening to expose her, demanding money for his silence. She said that she was acting for Lady Sybil. Wat believed the pair were to be found dead, apparently poisoned, to remove the threat from Isobel’s mistress. Poor fool, he believed her. Even when she made him get the harlot’s gown, he swallowed her tale.”
Scothern’s eyes filled with tears. “She told the alekeeper that it was to disguise the identity of Hugo’s wife, so that no one would know of the couple’s connection to Sybil, but she said to me that she did it as a jest. ‘All women are harlots, ’ she said to me. ‘Only men are free to enjoy their lust where they may. If a woman does it, she is named a bawd.’ She sickened me.”
Bascot felt sorry for the clerk. He had honoured his sister, believed her to be chaste. How hard it was to find that one so near to him in kinship could have such a divergence of spirit. Isobel had been right when she had said that she should have been born a man. Bascot had known many men-at-arms, and knights, that fought not for the exhilaration of battle or the glory of winning, but simply because they had a lust to spill blood. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, they were the most valued warriors, for they fought without honour or conscience and often dealt the stroke that decided the outcome of a fray.
As if echoing his thought, Scothern continued talking about his sister’s odious crimes, as though he could erase the memory by speaking of them aloud. “I asked her why she had stabbed the bodies after death. There had been no need to desecrate them so, I said. She laughed at me, said it had been a necessary practice, that she had needed to know how to deliver a knife-stroke for when she should kill Anselm. Her lover. A priest. Ah, how will God ever forgive her? She will end in hell, and there is none that can prevent it.”
Bascot sought to divert the young man’s anguish. “Where do you go now, William?” he asked.
“I will stay in Lincoln until the charge against my sister is heard,” Scothern replied. “After that, to my parent’s home, I suppose.” He looked up at Bascot with eyes red from weeping. “Do you think they will hang her?”
“You know the law as well as I, William,” Bascot replied, feeling a surge of pity. “She committed not one murder, but six, and all of those with prior intent. The best Isobel can hope for is the loss of a hand or foot and banishment.”
Scothern nodded, his eyes looking in the direction of the helmed and mailed figures of the knights that were massing in lines and hefting their lances at each end of the sward. “If I had done as Isobel had wanted, and taken up the sword instead of the pen, perhaps she would not be where she is today.”
There was no reply that Bascot could find to make. He could not say that the boy was suited to the task he had chosen and that his sister, God forgive her, had been suited to hers. As the marshal signalled for a warning trumpet to sound, the secretarius mumbled a farewell and turned away. The last Bascot saw of him was as he pushed his way through the crowd at the edge of the field, looking neither to one side nor the other, a forlorn and lonely figure.