‘No.’ Gwenn was adamant. ‘He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t need it. And I’m not sure I do. It will only lead to more pain.’
‘But, Gwenn,’ Agnes began to protest, but Gwenn was having none of it, and changed the subject to the Stone Rose, and how she had come to fear it. When she had done, Agnes examined the statue Gwenn had placed on the scrubbed oak table and the gemstone lying in her hand, and for a moment Gwenn’s fear infected her.
‘I have decided it must be evil,’ Gwenn whispered. ‘Everyone who keeps the Stone Rose comes to grief. What do you think will happen to me if I keep it?’
Throwing off her fear, Agnes ladled out some common-sense advice. She told Gwenn she was being over-imaginative. She was suffering from delayed reaction to the crises she had gone through. ‘The Stone Rose is only a statue,’ Agnes said firmly, ‘and a statue – especially one which represents the Mother of Our Lord – could not possibly be evil.’
***
It was Holy Rood Day, and roughly a month since Ned had been killed. Gwenn had been at Sword Point for almost a week. Dancer needed exercising, and Gwenn had fallen easily into her old habit of riding at dawn. Ned had always ridden out with her at Kermaria, and she found herself thinking of him, but as the days passed, the pain of his loss, though still keen, grew less piercing.
The upper road from Richmond to St Agatha’s was lightly wooded, and Gwenn liked to ride that way, for at that time of day she usually had the road to herself. Agnes had reassured her she was perfectly safe on that path, for it snaked round the White Canons’ monastery at Easby – the nearest village to Sword Point – and no outlaw in his right mind ever attacked anyone so close to habitation. From the road, Gwenn could not see the abbey or St Agatha’s Church which the White Canons attended, for their pale stone walls lay beyond a shifting screen of beech, hazel and oak. The trees were trying on their September colours, and ambers and golds were beginning to blend in with the green. They would soon loose their leaves, but for another week or so the abbey would remain concealed. Squirrels leapt and darted among the trees, dropping cob-nut shells onto the road. Pigeons clattered in and out of elders, gorging themselves on the dark, shiny berries. Rooks cawed, and the wind carried the rich, damp scents of autumn.
That Holy Rood Day, Gwenn came upon a White Canon from Easby Abbey. He was a garrulous Englishman with a sun-burned face and an unmonkish pride in his French which bordered on boasting. On discovering Gwenn’s fluency in that tongue, the canon eagerly displayed his erudition and spoke at length about his business in Richmond.
Gwenn gave him half an ear, for she was wondering what Alan had been doing this past week. The lovemaking had enchanted her, it had been more sweet and tender than she could ever have imagined. And on their way north, they had made love often after that first, glorious time. Each time it had been different, each time Gwenn had been more and more certain of her feelings. She loved Alan. Not as a friend, not in the gentle, platonic way that she had loved Ned, but deeply, fiercely, passionately. She loved Alan as a woman loves her man. Alan had had as much pleasure out of their union as she had done, she knew he had. She prayed that he reciprocated her feelings and that in time, he would reveal his love for her. But a week had dragged by. What was he doing? Had she misread him?
The canon, Stephen by name, rattled on. ‘It is no private matter, as everyone knows. Sadly, we are in dispute with the castle over milling rights. I have here,’ Canon Stephen patted his chest, ‘a letter from the steward. We are to discuss his answer in chapter, but I fear the matter is far from resolved. If the villagers at Easby prefer the convenience of our mill to that at the castle, I fail to see why they should not use it.’
Gwenn made sympathetic noises, though she understood that the castle miller would not want to lose the revenues gained from grinding the villagers’ meal any more than the canons would. Whatever this canon might say, the row concerned revenues, not the villagers’ convenience.
Canon Stephen seemed to come to the conclusion that he ought not to be discussing the abbey’s business so freely, for he changed the subject, ‘You speak French well, my child.’
‘So I should. My father was French.’
‘And you are newly come from there?’
‘Aye, though I count myself Breton, not French. I lived in Brittany.’
It was then that the canon loosed his thunderbolt.
‘There’s much traffic these days between Richmond and the Continent,’ he said. ‘People arrive almost every day. Yesterday, while I was consulting with the steward, a horseman rode in. He’d ridden across England, having caught ship in Dieppe.’
Gwenn felt a frisson of fear. She hoped the monk was referring to Alan. ‘What was he like this horseman? Was he a little above medium height, with striking dark features, the son of the castle armourer?’
‘You mean Alan le Bret, Ivon’s lad? I remember Alan. He’s back is he?’
‘He rode in last week.’
‘No, I wasn’t talking about Alan,’ the canon said, blithely unaware of the effect his words were having on the girl keeping pace alongside. ‘But this fellow must be a friend of his, because he came up to me and asked me if I’d seen him. I’m afraid I misled him – I didn’t know Alan was back.’
‘What...what did the horseman look like?’
‘Fair as an angel and fierce as St Michael.’
‘Not...not like a Viking?’
‘Very like. Pardon me, are you feeling alright, my child? You’re white as milk.’
Murmuring disjointedly, Gwenn took abrupt leave of the astonished canon and galloped back to Sword Point.
***
Shutters darkened the large, ground-floor room of the farm cottage. Agnes was still abed.
When Gwenn tore in, out of breath and with her hair hanging in a tangle about her cheeks, Agnes sat up in alarm. ‘Gwenn? What’s amiss? You’re pale as marble.’
‘A horseman rode into the castle last night,’ Gwenn said, voice trembling. ‘He’s come straight from Normandy.’
Heaving up on her pillow, Agnes squinted through the gloom at her daughter-in-law. ‘He’s come, no doubt, with a letter from Duchess Constance.’
Agnes had been maid to Duchess Constance before the Duchess had married the King’s son, and now she was her pensioner.
Gwenn drew near to the bed and put both hands to her forehead, clenching her fists so the white bones in her knuckles showed. ‘No. No. I think not, he sounds like a mercenary I knew in Vannes. He must have heard about the statue – he wants the gem.’ Perspiration dampened her temples. ‘And to think I thought it was over. Oh, Agnes, I prayed we’d left all that behind us. I thought a new land would mean a fresh start. That statue will be our deaths, I know it will.’
Gwenn was only sixteen, but at that moment she looked sixty. She was Ned’s wife, and petite though she was, she was carrying his child. In Ned’s absence, it was Agnes’s place to offer her advice. Agnes thought quickly. ‘You could get rid of it.’
‘Rid of it?’ The great, brown eyes were blank.
‘Yes.’
‘But that would be...’ Gwenn trailed off, chewing a nail with desperate savagery.
‘Sacrilege?’ Agnes could see that her daughter-in-law was terrified. There were fine lines around her eyes and mouth that had not been there yesterday. Agnes pulled Gwenn’s finger from her mouth. ‘Don’t do that.’
Gwenn started, jumpy as a hare, and curled her fingers into a fist. ‘Sorry. But would getting rid of the Stone Rose really help? You said yourself – it’s only a statue. Can a statue of the Blessed Virgin harm anyone?’
‘Gwenn, in your heart you know the statue is not the problem. It’s the gemstone that’s attracting trouble.’
‘I’ve come to loathe the Stone Rose.’
‘I can see that. It’s associated with past miseries. But don’t let a lump of pink granite,’ Agnes allowed a sneer to enter her voice, for it would do Gwenn no harm to realise her icon could be mocked, ‘colour your life. It has become an obsession, and it’s blinding you to the real problem, which is the diamond.’ Agnes could not accept that in itself the Stone Rose was evil. But it was Gwenn’s belief that counted, and if Gwenn believed it evil, the statue had best be destroyed.