King's Enemy by Ian Ross

Author:Ian Ross [Ross, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781399708920
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2024-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

‘You would scarcely imagine,’ Joane said as she rode, ‘that there was war anywhere in this land.’

Adam, walking beside the horse, could only agree. The broad track they were following crossed open countryside drenched in sunlight. Beyond the ditches and verges overgrown with cow parsley, smooth-limbed beech trees cast their shade along the hedgerows. On the far side, the land spread away in a herringbone pattern of strip fields, ripening wheat and barley, lush meadow and pasture. In the middle distance, a line of haymakers worked across the top of a meadow, their scythes whisking in unison. Their womenfolk came behind them, gathering and sheaving the last of the hay crop. The air was filled with sunlit pollen, birdsong, and the lazy drone of bees. Yes, Adam thought, it was hard to believe that this land had ever known conflict.

But war was out there, all the same. And they were journeying towards it.

Joane had told Adam all that she had learned during her month’s unwilling stay at Nottingham. King Henry, she had overheard, had gathered all his strength for the siege of Kenilworth. At every market cross the summons had been read: every loyal vassal and tenant was to come to Warwick, with horses and arms and all their power, ready to march against the fortress, to crush and subdue the king’s enemies and force peace upon England at last.

‘So he’ll be there already?’ Adam had asked.

‘Most likely, yes. With all the barons and knights of England, supposedly.’

‘So, then . . . where should we go?’

They had spent the previous day in a small village a few hours’ ride south of Nottingham, a cluster of thatched houses around a humped stone church, where Adam had paid for a room with a bed, stabling for his horse, and food and drink enough for a day and a night. Both he and Joane were too exhausted for gentility. He had given her the bed, and stretched himself across the threshold to sleep, his sword at his side. But they had not been disturbed, no riders had come from Nottingham hunting them, and nobody in the village seemed to care who they might be. It had been almost blissful. But Adam’s mind was troubled, and his heart too.

‘When you were de Grey’s guest . . .’ he had asked her, that first night.

‘His captive.’

‘When you were de Grey’s captive, did he . . . You were not mistreated, at all?’

‘No,’ Joane told him firmly. ‘I was held against my will, but not molested. Reginald de Grey is a crude and boorish man, but he’s still a knight. He treated me courteously enough.’

She was hiding something, Adam could tell. There was an evasiveness in her attitude, in the curt edge of her words. And after a month in the company of Nicholas D’Eyville and his men he had few illusions about the behaviour of knights. But he knew enough not to push further. Not yet. If she wanted to speak of what had happened, she would do so.

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