Monsieur, my husband has done all in his power to destroy you. I think it is worth adding that short of physical violence he dares do nothing to me, as I am not only the mother of his children, but the holder of his purse strings. I have my own retainers, indeed, now I have my own household. And so it shall remain, this I promise you.
I send you this letter by means of the very good knight Fra Peter of London, in hopes that he will find you in good health — the way I imagine you every day — a true knight. Be all a knight should be, and if God so wills it, perhaps we will yet see a day.
But I will commit no more to this parchment. Nor will I say adieu. Only, let your deeds so shine before men that I will hear of them, and clap my hands together.
Emile d’Herblay
I read the letter five or six times. I remember trying to decide. . anything. It all went around like a meaningless whirl of words. She was alive.
Alive.
Apparently, I cared very much. I remember that letter the way I remember wounds I have taken — the shock of the pain, the shock of the blood.
I actually fell over. I was kneeling by the fire and I lost my balance and fell. I lay there as if I had taken a blow, and then, as I got to my feet, the heart-shaped scrap of parchment came out of the envelope and fluttered to the ground like a moth.
It was very small. On it, a fine hand had written, ‘Perhaps I will go on a pilgrimage.’ There was no signature.
Pilgrims, like crusades, went to the Holy Land by way of Venice. And Rhodes.
Fra Peter was standing a distance away.
I pushed the letter and the heart into my purse and went to him.
‘I will go on crusade,’ I said.
Fra Peter’s eyes twinkled in the firelight. ‘God works in mysterious ways,’ he said.
Epilogue
Sir William smiled his half-smile at Master Chaucer, who was leaning his elbows on the table. Froissart was awake — wide-eyed, scribbling notes on a wax tablet. John de Blake couldn’t take his eyes off his master. Aemilie had, at some point, acquired a stool and was asleep with her head against the wall.
‘You came back, I see,’ the knight said.
Chaucer grunted. ‘What choice did I have, with your archers raising the roof?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Worse than satyrs, and louder.’
‘Such a story!’ Froissart said.
Chaucer’s eyes met Gold’s across the table. ‘Some of it’s even true,’ he said. He said it with venom, but Gold threw back his head and laughed. He roared.
And Chaucer couldn’t help it. He laughed, too.