“He’ll inherit all the family wealth, you see. And he—well, he says he trusts me to help him run the house and the business, since I knew it so well. I think also he took a fancy to me.”
“I see. It makes sense.” His chest was tight. He forgot to breathe. “It’s practical. You will retain your riches and your home. You will not do better than Clarence Walcote.”
She faced him squarely. “I haven’t had any other offers.”
He didn’t mean to, but he looked at her. Her face was harder than before. He owed it to all her recent experiences.
She opened her mouth and her red lips snapped down on the words. “Why don’t you tell me not to marry Clarence?”
“Why would I do that?”
“You could make an offer yourself.”
He turned his face away.
“Have you no feelings about me at all?”
He felt her glare on his cheek. He stiffened. “Is it not enough I confessed that I loved you?”
She shook her head. “The Mandyllon made you say it. But it can’t make you act on it.”
“Women,” he grumbled under his breath. “They want it all and only on their terms.”
“What other terms are there?” She smiled briefly. “Why did you not kiss me when I first came in?” He said nothing. She turned her back on the fire to look at him. She stood that way a long time. “Of course,” she said, sobering, “the true reason you will not make an offer to me is because knights don’t marry chambermaids. Ain’t that it?”
“I’m not a knight.”
“Oh aye, you are. In here,” and she tapped her chest. “Always. It is your true self and you can’t shake it. I saw it when you took me to the Boar’s Tusk. You couldn’t stand for people to see you hold me. What would they think, after all?”
“That’s not true.”
“You call that man Gilbert Langton your friend, but you can barely stand to be there. Oh, it’s a fine place to drink, because that is the purpose of such a place. But it’s not because of Master Gilbert. It’s because you can hide there.”
He turned assassin’s eyes on her. “Are you finished?”
“I thought my life was wretched. But yours is far worse. You’ve chosen a lonely life, Crispin.”
His frown deepened. “Not chosen.”
“I’m not so certain.”
He made a furious sound and walked in a circle, holding out his arms. “Look around you!” he burst out. “This is no great manor, no palace.”
“I didn’t ask for one.”
“No? Then why consider Clarence?”
“Because he asked me.” Her blunt answer stilled his tongue. “If you don’t want me to marry Clarence, then say so now.”
“Or forever hold my peace? I’ve already told you. This is no fit place to bring a wife.”
She made a defeated nod. “It’s a shame,” she said. “You might have been happy. But truth to tell, I don’t think you want to be.”
She turned to go and almost reached the door when she stopped. She pulled a small pouch from her scrip and placed it with care on the table. “It’s your payment. What the sheriff took and what Nicholas owed you. It’s only fair. You did find the Mandyllon and you saved me from Mahmoud. That makes you paid in full now, doesn’t it?” Her fingers lingered on the little pouch and then drew away. Her hand slid across the table till it fell flat against her thigh. “I don’t need palaces,” she whispered, not looking at him. “Neither do you.”
She hesitated, waiting for him, but his lips pressed grimly together.
With a sigh, she pulled open the door and walked across the threshold. Crispin lifted his head in time to see the tail end of her train ripple over the floorboards.
The door hung open and he stared at the empty hole for a long time, not thinking, not feeling, until Jack’s head poked in. “Master, may I come in?”
Crispin answered by dropping heavily into the chair and laying his arm on the table. He stared past the little pouch.
Jack slid into the room and closed the door. He stood for a moment at the doorway before he moved toward the fire. Toying with a folded parchment, he looked up at Crispin and handed it to him. “A messenger came and delivered this for you.”
Crispin turned it over to look at the wax seal, but it bore no arms. He let it rest on his thigh.
“I couldn’t help but hear through the door—”
Crispin stared at the pouch on the table with jaw clenched.
“Master. Why don’t you go after her?”
Crispin’s jaw relaxed and he sighed, feeling the years on his shoulders. He reached forward and touched the pouch. “Because I can’t dispute anything she said.”
“You ain’t a mighty lord now. What difference does it make who you marry?”
“Because it matters, Jack. She was right. It matters to me and it always will. The veil has been drawn aside and I was forced to look into myself. I’m not certain I liked what I saw.”
“Can’t a body change?”
“No. At least—it may take a very long time.” They both fell silent. Crispin remembered the parchment in his hand. He rose, strode to the fire, and flicked his thumbnail under the wax seal. He unfolded it and read:His Majesty was pleased that his taxes are safe again. Rest assured he knows to whom the credit truly falls. Perhaps the king will not stay angry forever. I counsel patience, Crispin. But in the meantime, I caution you from coming to court again.
God keep you.
The letter was unsigned but Crispin recognized Lancaster’s hand. He read it over once more and lowered the paper.
With his free hand he drew Philippa’s portrait from his purse. He cradled it in his hand and gazed at it. He looked toward the fire. For a moment he thought about tossing the painting in. Let the flames consume it as they had the Mandyllon. He had thought that burning the cloth would remove the truth. But it was never easy escaping the truth for long.
He glanced at the letter and then the miniature portrait, ran his finger along its gold-leafed frame, and slowly slipped it back in his purse.
Afterword
Why “Medieval Noir”?
There is something about the dark, the seamier side of things that attracts me. This is realized in the precise prose and staccato dialogue of such specialists as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Dorothy B. Hughes. Their fiction centered on a different slice of reality, one of starkness, harsh lighting, deep shadows, manly men with their own code of honor. And of course the women. Always in danger or always dangerous.
It seemed to me a perfect fit to drop a hard-boiled detective in the middle ages, even though the notion of a “private detective” was still centuries away. While there seemed to be a plethora of monks and nuns in the field of medieval mystery, my goal was to offer something different. I wanted to bring something darker and edgier to the genre. Here is a period rife with intrigue, codes of honor, mysterious doings, and dim, shadowy light. It screamed for a detective more like Sam Spade than Brother Cadfael.
A note on some details: Sheriff Simon Wynchecombe was in reality one of two sheriffs of London at that time (who could make up a name like that?). I also embroiled poor Crispin in all the fractured politics of Richard II’s reign. Though there were historical instances—very few—of degraded and disseised (forcibly dispossessed) knights, they were either executed or banished and generally not thrown into the degree of poverty that Crispin was. The fact that he is so depleted from what defined him—his wealth and status—makes for an interesting and sympathetic character: King Richard murders him without actually killing him. The irony—for those students of English history—is that the same fate eventually befalls King Richard himself when, seventeen years later, he is forced to abdicate and is subsequently murdered.