‘I’ve been trying to catch up with you since I saw you listening to the petitioners.’ He beamed. In a conspiratorial voice he added, ‘Come up to the next floor after tierce and wait at the top of the steps if you will.’

He drifted back into the crowd like a wraith.

**

Edmund and the guild of pages. She would listen to Edmund and see how she might help him against Fitzjohn. The least she could do was to counsel patience. His time as an esquire would soon be over. He would come of age. Then men like Fitzjohn would have no power over him. She would do what she could although she did not hold out much hope that Fitzjohn could be persuaded to treat Edmund more reasonably. He was not so different as at first appeared to his younger brother, Escrick Fitzjohn. Chips off the old block. As like their father John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, as made no difference.

She made her way up the spiral stair that led to the friar’s cell, thinking how the attendants were able to get in anywhere, they were so much part of the busy daily scene.

They could ask questions among the other members of the retinues. Find out who had been where and when. No-one bothered much about them. She had already seen Peterkin obtaining information for Fitzjohn in the kitchens. She did not doubt that he had been sent there on purpose now she had seen more of what went on.

They could certainly find out a few things for her too if she asked them. From the French pages, perhaps, who were here at the time of Maurice’s murder. And maybe it was even one of them who had issued what might have been a dare to Maurice. Maybe he was now in fear that he would be found out and accused of murder.

With the lavender-soaked cloth pressed to her face she made her way along the passage at the top of the steps until she came to the nail-studded door.

The stink of fox. That was what came suddenly to mind. But it was a gryphon that had brought death, not a fox.

**

The old monk was reading at his lectern, peering myopically with a polished glass that enlarged the letters on the page.

‘And so the mystery remains,’ he murmured, half to himself but audibly enough. ‘Like a book forever closed to us. So be it.’ He raised his glance and looked across the chamber. ‘We are told that so far everything in the treasury has been accounted for. Is that not good news, domina?’

‘If it was a dare to get inside the treasury then it is only to be expected that nothing was taken.’

‘And that is now your considered view?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You sound uncertain?’

‘It is a great sorrow to me that a young life should be thrown away on a dare.’

‘Ah, yes, mortality, that most transient of states, how lightly we hold it. It is like playing with a bird, sometimes it quickly flies away and is gone forever.’

He spoke in the tones of one who could not see himself in the role of the bird but only and always as the one with the power to play.

This was such a sudden insight into his character that it broke over her like shattering glass: his indifference to the death of a young man with his life before him. Maybe he did not know what it was to lose someone close to his heart.

Maurice must have kin, a mother wondering how her boy fared away from home, a father perhaps, sisters whose thoughts embraced him. She had seen his brother Elfric and his grief-stricken face and could not forget it.

She realised she was staring at Athanasius as she tried to understand the workings of his heart when she heard him saying, ‘…but our search for the pretty little dagger must still go on, of course.’

She gazed at him in confusion before she properly understood. ‘Yes,’ she replied belatedly, ‘I suppose it is a costly thing. Clement would not want to lose such an item as that.’

‘Quite so. You will do what you can to find it.’

**

He takes a lot on himself to be giving me orders, Hildegard grumbled to herself as she reached the fresh air outside his chamber. I’ve come across arrogance before, she thought bitterly, Hubert de Courcy for instance, but Athanasius is more deeply dyed in his own superiority, less given to self-doubts than Hubert.

It made her reconsider the old man’s role here. Was he simply a corrodian, living out his last days on a papal pension as she was led to believe?

Most corrodians offered something in return for their bed and board. If not money, then service. What did Athanasius offer?

**

Before keeping her meeting with Edmund she wanted to look in on the prisoners to find out if Peter was back from his visit to the office of the inquisition. The guards, she was pleased to note, had been reduced to one. It was the fellow on duty earlier. He was beginning to accept her, even though he put on a suspicious face when he examined the bread, cheese and flagon of wine she was carrying.

‘Go on in, then,’ he growled gesturing up the stairway.

Fearing what she would find she climbed the familiar steps and pushed open the door at the top. To her relief Peter was sitting up in the straw and seemed unharmed.

‘What did they do?’ she asked.

‘Gave me a thorough questioning but without any of the business with the finger nails. Mebbe they think I’m the soft one.’ He grinned. ‘That’s how I’m playing it. They’re getting nowt from me but stories.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘They think I’m an addle wit.’

John, still clearly in pain, asked, ‘So when do we get out of here, domina?’

‘I have a plan,’ she whispered with a glance towards the door. She was aware that the guard had followed her up. She put a finger to her lips.

The guard poked his head into the cell. ‘You lucky lads,’ he observed when he saw Hildegard pouring out two beakers of wine. ‘Better treatment than I get at home.’

Hildegard lifted her head. ‘Would you like to share a beaker with us, captain?’

He wasn’t a captain but he blossomed and sidled into the cell. One hand came out to take the clay pot. ‘Merci. A Dieu!’ He gulped it back in one as if fearing to be caught, and returned the empty pot.

‘You’re welcome,’ she told him. ‘I know I can trust you to look after these two poor fellows for me.’

He said something she translated along the lines of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,’ and leered in a way perhaps intended to be friendly.

After a moment or two he sidled out again.

‘This, what you just mentioned,’ murmured John with a glance towards the door. ‘What does it entail?’

‘Liberty. I can tell you no more. It depends on several factors. Trust me though.’

‘We need only to get out of the palace. We can find our own way after that.’

‘You’ll need to get out through the town walls as well. The quay lies only a short distance from the river gate to the North. If you make your way there you’ll be able to buy passage on a wine boat or some such. I’ll see what I can fix up.’

‘It’s how we get out of here that’s the problem. How many guards are on?’

‘Only the one now. They’re beginning to feel you’ll cause no more trouble.’

Peter growled something and John said, ‘Don’t fret, old son. Once we’re out of here we’re as good as home.’

‘How do you work that out?’

‘We’ll head up to Aquitaine, of course. Good old English soil. Then we’re home and dry.’

**

The young retainers, pages and esquires alike, were expected to bed down close to their lord to be on hand should he require anything, at any time of the night. Edmund and his guild, however, had their secret places where they could keep out of everyone’s notice, meet their fellows, or simply have some time when they were free from being at everybody’s beck and call.

One of these hidden places was in the lee of a buttress high up under the carved stone ceiling of the Great Audience Chamber.