The Lark's Lament: A Fools' Guild Mystery by Alan Gordon

Author:Alan Gordon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Mystery & Detective, Thriller & Suspense, United States, Historical, Fiction, Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 0312354266
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2013-05-10T05:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

There are three degrees of bliss

And three abodes of the Blest,

And the lowest place is his

Who had saved a soul by jest

And a brother’s soul in sport …

But there do the Angels resort!

—RUDYARD KIPLING, “THE JESTER”

“Let me get this straight,” said Grelho when he returned from escorting my wife and apprentice. “You have traveled a hundred miles to track down an obscure song that may contain an obscure reference to an obscure someone who is probably dead because an obscure someone else killed another obscurity so he could splash some blood on some books.”

“Yes,” I said. “Although when you put it like that, it seems like a waste of time.”

“No, that’s fine,” he said, shrugging. “I just wanted to make sure you had a good reason for all of this. I still haven’t heard the song from either of you.”

I sang it to him, and he started nodding by the second line.

“I know that song,” he said when I finished. “‘The Lark’s Lament,’ I remember hearing it.”

“When and where?”

“When? Who knows? It was a long time ago, and there have been a lot of songs,” he said. “But where and who, that I can tell you. It was in a tavern near the Blancaria that has long since burned down, and the singer was—”

“Rafael de la Tour.”

“Well, yes,” he said, crestfallen. “You shouldn’t step on a fellow jester’s punch lines like that.”

“Tell me about him.”

“A simpleton, barely capable of keeping himself alive,” he said. “But with one amazing gift that made his fortune. He could hear a song once, then sing it forever, and with a better voice than any troubadour in the Guild, including Folquet and Peire Vidal. When all of our other entertaining was done, we would repair to this tavern and listen to him sing into the early morn. We would take visiting Guildmembers to hear him, and their mouths would hang open the entire time. Then one day he disappeared from Montpellier, and nobody knew what had happened until we heard about his death in Saragossa.”

“Did he leave town before Folquet did?”

He thought for a moment.

“I think it was a year or two after,” he said. “Folquet was last here in ’87. I remember being surprised that Rafael left the one place where he had enough of a reputation to keep himself in bread and wine, but I didn’t give it that much consideration.”

“Did he write ‘The Lark’s Lament’?”

“He wrote nothing,” said Grelho. “He was an idiot with a glorious voice. Troubadours would hire him to sing their work, and other people passed songs along to him. I taught him a few myself.”

“Who wrote it, then?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” he said. “It had a brief vogue, and then Rafael vanished, and the song vanished with him.”

“Any idea who the Lady Lark was?”

“None,” he said. “Sounds like a private name for someone by whoever wrote it, but that’s obvious. I never heard it used to describe anybody around here. Maybe there’s something in the second verse that could help you.

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