The Winter King by Alys Clare Read Free Book Online

Abbess Caliste agreed. She smiled. ‘He will not thank those bright young men, for advertising the fact that they were bound for his manor, and thereby reminding us all of his existence.’
    Josse, barely registering her remark, grunted agreement. He was thinking; trying to piece together what he knew of Lord Robert Wimarc. The total did not amount to much. The old man was rarely seen outside his own stout walls, and was reputed to repel would-be visitors with total ruthlessness. Josse resolved to seek out Helewise and ask her if she could add to these sparse facts, since it had been she who had told him of the old man in the first place.
    He glanced up, to see that Abbess Caliste was watching him. The look in her eyes surprised him: he could have sworn she was nervous. Frightened, even. He had known her a long time and, although she bore a heavy burden, he had rarely known her to be distracted out of her usual serenity.
    He leaned towards her. ‘What is it?’ he whispered.
    She shook her head. ‘Oh, probably nothing.’ She managed a small laugh. ‘I should not listen to idle tongues with nothing better to do than spread alarming rumours!’
    He dropped his voice still further. ‘What rumours?’
    She frowned, began to speak, then stopped. Abruptly she got up, came right up to him and, leaning down to whisper right into his ear, breathed, ‘They do say that those who congregate with the de Clares in Tonbridge Castle are no great supporters of … of …’
    He put up a hand to stop her. ‘Do not speak it, my lady,’ he advised. ‘Safer that way, for both of us.’
    They went on to speak of mundane matters. But presently, as Josse took his leave, he caught a shadow of something in the abbess’s expression. He might have dismissed it, except that the same emotion was fighting to make itself felt within himself.
    Both of them were apprehensive, and the apprehension was deep enough that it bordered on fear.
    It was not easy, after that, to go on to see Brother Saul with the appropriately cheerful demeanour for visiting the sick. He was, however, much encouraged to find his old friend propped up in bed and clamouring to be allowed up and back to work.
    ‘I shouldn’t be lying here abed, Sir Josse,’ Saul said, fretfully pleating and re-pleating the fresh bed linen. ‘Not when there’s so much work to be done, and all too few hands to do it.’
    He was right, Josse knew. Another pernicious effect of the interdict was the absence of young men and women asking to enter the abbey as novice monks and nuns, or even, like Saul, as lay brethren. It was all too understandable, Josse reflected, but the abbey was suffering, nevertheless.
    It was not, however, the moment to further depress poor Saul with such morbid thoughts. ‘You’ll be far more use to the abbey if you do as you’re told and stay here till you are fully well,’ he assured his old friend. ‘I am sure it won’t be long now.’
    He was further reassured when the infirmarer, Sister Liese, confirmed that Saul truly was on the mend. ‘I’m only keeping him in here another day because I know full well he’ll go straight back to doing three men’s work,’ she whispered to Josse as he left, ‘and he’s not as young as he was.’
    Which of us is?
Josse thought as he went to fetch Alfred. Brother Saul could not be much older than Josse; did that mean people saw Josse, too, as being on the brink of old age?
    It was not a particularly welcome image.
    There was a sure-fire way of recalling the happy mood of the morning: on his way home, he would make a detour and go to visit his daughter.
    Meggie was enjoying a few precious days alone, in the little hut in the forest which had been her mother’s, and in which she had spent the first few years of her life.
    Although she missed Jehan all the time, nevertheless it was wonderful to be back within the hut’s four stout wooden walls. It was so full of memories – of her mother, of course, and, more recently, of