Escrick Fitzjohn and Athanasius had long since disappeared but some men-at-arms sauntered back, looking about as if they expected Hildegard to appear from out of the ground in front of them. Where was Escrick? Her ears strained to hear the sound of anyone clambering onto the roof but it was the intermittent shrieks of the hawks and the whine of the wind round the gargoyles that assaulted her ears without end.

It was desperately cold. Her teeth would not stop rattling. She pulled her hood over her face and breathed into it to get warm. If she could only stay up here long enough among the stone gryphons, the basilisks and the manticores, and all the other beasts of nightmare the masons had imagined, they might believe she had escaped from the palace altogether.

She could stay for as long as she did not need to eat or drink. Her scrip contained her usual small flask and a morsel of bread and cheese. They would last. Things were not so bad. When it was dark she would make a move. If only she could stop herself from looking down.

**

Time dragged. It gave her plenty of time to think about Escrick Fitzjohn. His strange pursuit of her was like an obsession. She was blamed for everything bad that had happened to him since they first met. His dreams of what he would do to her when she was in his power were made worse by the erotic attraction he seemed to feel for her. She shivered with a fear that was more than physical.

He had made a remark about the guild of pages that bothered her. We have them safe. What did he mean by that?

Were they imprisoned in the tower as the miners had been imprisoned? Would Sir John stand for that? It would be a gross insult to have his own body servants imprisoned by a foreign power. Maybe Escrick only meant that his brother held them?

She recalled the brutality Sir John had doled out to Edmund for the slightest misdemeanour. She remembered Edmund’s white rage and feared for what he might do if he found himself imprisoned. If he fought back he would be brutally restrained by the greater forces of Fitzjohn’s men-at-arms.

She thought of Bertram, so steady and sure with the practicality of a merchant’s son. Of little Elfric and his grief at his brother’s murder. Of Simon, the youngest, and his determination to keep up with the older boys. Of Peterkin. This was surely something he could not talk his way out of. She tried to reassure herself with the thought that they were not children. They would know how to behave to keep themselves safe. They were not ignorant striplings as Escrick imagined. They were apprentices for war.

King Richard was ten when he shouldered the burden of kingship, limited though the Council made his control. Richard’s own father had been fourteen when he commanded a battalion in the French war and led his men to victory against the odds at Crecy.

Richard himself had been fourteen when he led the rebels out to Mile End to avoid a massacre. A boy could marry at fifteen and take on the responsibilities of fatherhood, sign legal documents, own property. The guild was not made up of infants. They would find a way.

Her thoughts turned to Escrick again. He was the one who found Maurice in the treasury. Had killed him in cold blood. Had been forced to wait for Clement to view the body after the long night service and the end of lauds. Had been unable to take the knife from the fingers set in the grip of rigor mortis. It was Escrick who had gone to the mortuary a few hours later and when the hand relaxed had slipped the knife from Maurice’s dead grasp. His personal reward for a service rendered.

He was the stranger at le Coq d’or who had offered a jewelled dagger, in ignorance of its true secret, to the highest bidder. Taillefer had stolen it back and tried to make his escape and been killed under the bridge on the raft of debris that had built up against the bank and made a sort of fragile bridge of its own. He had not needed to go onto the bridge of St Benezet and had not fallen from it but tried to escape along the river bank onto the only refuge he could find.

And the Scottish nun? By then Escrick knew Hildegard was in Avignon and on his trail, tried to silence her and, in the darkness of the night, had made a dreadful blunder.

She wondered if, in fact, he realised that the jewelled dagger was more important to his master than the price of rubies. His heart would have stopped if he realised he had made another disastrous mistake by stealing it for merely personal gain.

She thought of the figure in white who had come out just now to say adieu to Fondi and his contingent.

It was Hubert de Courcy. Saying farewell to his ally, his fellow Clementist, the enemy of King Richard. Fondi. His job done. The supply of poison safely delivered. Now back on the road to Urbino.

Hubert. Her feelings got the better of her for a moment and tears flooded her eyes. Blinking them away she became more determined than ever to escape back to England. She would see Mr Medford. Show him the poison. Tell him every detail of what had taken place. The fight to save the king would continue. Woodstock must be defeated.

Night fell like a shroud over the palace. Hildegard felt colder than ever. A brief respite came when the wind dropped around midnight. Even so she could scarcely move by the time she decided to force her frozen limbs to life and risk climbing back inside the palace.

**

With her hood up and her dark cloak fastened by its usual silver pin, she looked like any other monastic coming from the night office in the chapel.

Conscious that her Cistercian habit of white stamyn might draw attention, she pushed its long sleeves out of sight and made herself less conspicuous by merging with the tail end of a group of black-robed Benedictines. When they filed along towards the guest wing she followed. Her first task was to find out what had happened to the guild of pages. Her second task would be to collect the phial of poison from her chamber. And her third task would be to find a horse and ride for England.

It was unfortunate that Hubert de Courcy and his two Cistercian brothers should be leaving the chapel at the same time as the Benedictines. They suddenly appeared from out of a side door and she could not avoid walking past them. Head down, she carried on after the others. When she came to the door leading into their dormitory she hesitated, hoping to slip away unnoticed, but when she turned to glance down the passage Hubert was standing at the end staring after her.

She swiftly bent down as if she had dropped something and when she stood up he had disappeared.

With a sideways glance into the dormitory she made her way to the end of the passage and descended a flight of steps. They led into one of the yards and keeping to the shadows she walked round the edge until she came to a door that seemed to lead back inside. Another flight of steps took her as she had hoped to the entrance to the wing where Sir Jack was staying.

All she had to do was to avoid coming face to face with him. With a vague idea that she might ask one of the kitcheners what had happened to the pages, on the assumption that the boys would have to be fed, she decided to try the kitchen first but before she could get inside she had to pass the porter in his lodge.

**

He was visible through the open door. A single cresset burned in a bracket on the wall behind him. He had a short sword lying on the bench where he was sitting but it was in a worn leather sheath and looked as if it had not been used for some time.

He was busily cleaning his nails with the tip of his meat knife. After a while he finished with that and began to sing a tune about a husband cheating on his wife. He thumped one fist on his knee to keep time. After a few verses he got bored with that and began to pick his teeth with the same knife he had used for his nails.