Order in Chaos Page 2

  The three dead men had apparently been pulling a handcart with them, and from the garbled commentary of the people around him, Tam gathered that it was when the guards, their suspicions aroused for some reason, had set out to search the cart and then attempted to seize one of the men that the trio broke and ran. Now, watching a handful of guards swarming over the high-piled contents of the handcart, Tam wondered idly what could have been in there that was worth dying for. He would never find out, because even as his curiosity stirred, the Corporal of the Guard ordered the cart to be taken into the guardhouse and searched there. Tam eyed the guards as they hauled it out of sight, then shifted his gaze to the swaggering figure of the harsh-voiced knight who had emerged from the tower and was now stalking about the open space where lay the three dead men.

  He was not a tall man, this knight, but his burnished half armor, worn over a suit of mail and topped by a domed metal helmet, enhanced his stature in the late-afternoon light, and the scapular-like King’s livery he wore, a narrow-fronted, dingy white surcoat edged with royal blue, the embroidered fleur-de-lis emblem of the royal house of Capet centered on the chest, added to the air of authority that set him apart from everyone else within sight.

  Gazing stolidly from his perch high on the driver’s bench, Tam Sinclair was not impressed by what he saw in the knight. He himself had been a soldier too long, had traveled too far and seen too many men in situations of dire, life-threatening peril, to be influenced by a mere show of outward finery. External trappings, he had learned long years before, too often had little bearing on the substance of what they adorned. The man he was looking at was a King’s knight, but in the driver’s eyes that in itself was no indicator of manhood or worth. People called the King of France Philip the Fair, because he was pleasant, almost flawless, to behold, but beauty, Tam knew as well as anyone, went only skin deep. No one who knew anything real about the puissant monarch would ever have considered referring to him as Philip the Just, or even the Compassionate. Philip Capet, the fourth of that name and grandson of the sainted King Louis IX, had shown himself, time and again, to be inhumanly self-centered, a cold and ambitious tyrant. And in Tam Sinclair’s eyes too many of the knights and familiars with whom the King surrounded himself were cut from the same cloth. This particular example of the breed had drawn his long sword slowly and ostentatiously and walked now with the bared blade bouncing gently against his right shoulder as he made his way towards the tall monk who stood isolated on the edge of the crowd, still stooped over the man who had died clutching his foot.

  “Ewan.” Tam spoke without raising his voice, his eyes focused on the knight’s movements. “There is a woman at the back of the cart. Go you and help her climb up here while everyone is watching the King’s captain there. But do it easily, as though she is one of us, and on the far side, where you won’t be as easily noticed. Hamish, sit you up here with me and pay no attention to Ewan or the woman.” Ewan jumped down from the wagon, and as Hamish moved up to take his place on the bench, Tam tipped his head, drawing the younger man’s attention to the tableau on his left. “I think yon monk’s in trouble, judging by the scowl on that other fellow’s face.” Hamish leaned forward to see, and watched closely.

  As the knight drew closer, the monk knelt slowly and stretched out a hand to lay his palm on the dead man’s skull, after which he remained motionless, his head bent, obviously praying for the soul of the departed. The knight kept walking until he was within two paces of the kneeling monk, and then he spoke again in his harsh, unpleasant voice. “That one is deep in Hell, priest, so you can stop praying for him.”

  The monk gave no sign of having heard, and the knight frowned, unused to being ignored. He jerked his right hand, flipping the long sword down from his shoulder, and extended his arm until the tip of his blade caught the point of the monk’s peaked cowl and pushed it back, exposing the scalp beneath the hood, the crown shaved bald in the square tonsure of the Dominican Order, the sides covered by thick, short-cropped, iron gray hair. As the knight’s arm extended farther, the monk’s chin was pushed up and tilted back by the pull of his cowl, showing him to be clean-shaven and pallid. The knight bent forward until their faces were level, and his voice was no quieter or gentler than it had been before, ringing harshly in the absolute hush that had fallen at his first words.

  “Listen to me, priest, when I speak to you, and answer when I bid you. Do you hear?” He drew back until he was once more standing erect, his sword point resting on the ground. “I know you.” The monk shook his head, mute, and the knight lifted his voice louder. “Don’t lie to me, priest! I never forget a face and I know you. I’ve seen you somewhere, before now. Where was it? Speak up.”

  The monk shook his head. “No, sir knight,” he brayed. His voice was surprisingly shrill for such a tall man. Shrill enough that Tam Sinclair, who had turned to see how young Ewan was faring with the task he had set him, shifted quickly in his seat to watch the interplay between the knight and the monk.

  “You are mistaken,” said the monk. “I am new come here and have never been in this part of the world before. My home is in the north, far from here, in Alsace, in the monastery of the blessed Saint Dominic, so unless you have been there recently you could not know me. And besides”—his eyes, blazing in the late-afternoon light, were a pale but lustrous blue that held more than a hint of fanaticism—“I would not forget a man such as you.”

  The knight frowned, hesitated, then swung the sword blade back up to rest on his shoulder again, his face registering distaste. “Aye, enough. Nor would I forget a voice such as yours. What is your purpose here in La Rochelle?”

  “God’s business, master knight. I bear messages for the Prior of the monastery of Saint Dominic within the gates.”

  The knight was already waving the annoying Dominican away, his altered demeanor indicating his reluctance to interfere with anything that concerned the Order of Saint Dominic, the Pope’s holy, hungry, and ever zealous Inquisitors. “Aye, well, move on and finish your task. You know where the monastery is?”

  “Yes, sir knight, I have instructions written here on how to proceed within the gates. Let me show you.”

  But as he began to reach into his robe the knight stepped back from him and waved him away again. “Go on with you. I don’t need to see. Go on, go on, away with you.”

  “Thank you, sir knight.” The tall monk bowed his head obsequiously and moved away towards the city gates, and his passage seemed to be the signal for a general admission. The crowd surged forward in an orderly manner as Ewan and the mysterious woman climbed in over the right side of the wagon, and the guards casually scanned the passing throng. Sinclair noticed, however, that they were questioning every woman who passed by, while allowing the men to pass unchallenged. He straightened up in his seat and kneaded his kidneys with his free hand.

  “Lads,” he said, speaking the Scots Gaelic in a normal, conversational voice, “you are now promoted to the nobility. For the next wee while, you will be my sons. Ewan, when you speak to any of these buffoons, make your Scotch voice thicken your French, as though you were more foreign than you are. Hamish, you speak only the Gaelic this day, no French at all. You are new arrived here in France with your mother, to join me and your brother, and have not had time to learn their tongue or their ways. Now shift into the back and let your mother sit here.” He turned casually and spoke to the woman behind them. “Mary, come here and sit by me. Throw back the hood from your face, unless you fear being recognized.”

  She pulled back the hood wordlessly, revealing a handsome, finely chiseled face with wide, startlingly bright, blue-gray eyes and long, well-combed dark hair. Sinclair nodded in approval as she took her place beside him, and he jogged the reins and set the wagon rolling slowly forward. “Now hold on tight and be careful. For the time being, you are my wife, Mary Sinclair, mother of my sons here, Ewan and Hamish. You are comely enough to make me both proud of you and protective of your virtue. And you speak no French. If any quest
ion you, and they will, look to me for answers and then speak in Scots. And try to sound like a household servant, not like the lady you are. They are looking for a lady, are they not?”

  The woman met his gaze squarely and nodded.

  “Hmm. Then try you not to give them one, or we’ll all hang. Come around the end of the bench there, but mind your step. Hamish, help her, and then stand behind her, at her shoulder. The two of you have the same eyes, thanks be to God, so be not shy about flashing them, both of you.”

  Sinclair reined in his team. “Right, then. Here we go. Here comes the popinjay who thinks himself a knight. Just be at ease, all of you, and let me do the talking.” He brought the wagon to a halt just short of where the guards stood waiting.

  The knight arrived just as the Corporal of the Guard stepped forward to challenge Tam, and he stood watching, making no attempt to interfere as the guardsman questioned Tam.

  “Your name?”

  “Tam Sinclair,” Tam responded truculently. He pronounced it the Scots way, Singclir, rather than the French San-Clerr.

  “What are you?” This with a ferocious frown in response to the alien name and its terse iteration.

  Sinclair responded in fluent gutter French that was thick with Scots intonations. “What d’you mean, what am I? I am a Scot, from Scotland. And I am also a carter, as you can see.”

  The frown grew deeper. “I meant, what are you doing here, fellow, in France?”

  Sinclair scratched gently at his jaw with the end of one finger and stared down at the guard for long moments before he shrugged his shoulders and spoke slowly and patiently, with great clarity, as though to a backward child. “I don’t know where you’ve spent your life, Corporal, but where I live, everyone knows that when it comes to the nobility, there’s no difference between Scotland and France, or anywhere else. Money and power know no boundaries. There is an alliance in force between the two realms, and it is ancient.

  “What am I doing here? I’m doing the same thing in France that hundreds of Frenchmen are doing in Scotland. I’m doing my master’s bidding, attending to his affairs. The St. Clair family holds lands and enterprises in both countries, and I am one of their factors. I go wherever I am sent. I do whatever I am told. Today I drive a cart.”

  The answer seemed to mollify the man, but he cast a sideways glance at his superior standing by. “And what is in your cart?”

  “Used iron, for the smelters within the walls. Old, rusty iron chains and broken swords to be melted down.”

  “Show me.”

  “Ewan, show the man.”

  Ewan went to the back of the wagon, where he lowered the tail gate and threw back the old sailcloth sheet that covered their load. The corporal looked, shifted some of the cargo around with a series of heavy, metallic clanks, and then walked back to the front of the cart, wiping his rust-stained fingers on his surcoat. Ewan remained on the ground beside him as the guard pointed up at the woman.

  “Who is she?”

  “My wife, mother to my two sons here.”

  “Your wife. How would I know that’s true?”

  “Why would I lie? Does she look like a harlot? If you have eyes in your head you’ll see the eyes in hers, and the eyes in my son beside her.”

  The guardsman looked as though he might take offense at the surliness of Sinclair’s tone, but then he eyed the massive shoulders of the man on the wagon and the set of his features and merely stepped closer so he could see the woman and the young man behind her. He looked carefully from one to the other, comparing their eyes.

  “Hmm. And who is this other one?” He indicated Ewan, still standing close by him.

  “My other son. Ask him. He speaks your language.”

  “And if I ask your … wife?”

  “Ask away. You’ll get nothing but a silly look. She can’t understand a word you say.”

  The corporal looked directly at the woman. “Tell me your name.”

  The woman turned, wide eyed, to look at Tam, who leaned back on the bench and said in Scots, “He wants to know your name, Wife.”

  She bent forward to look down at the corporal and the watching knight, glancing back at Tam uncertainly.

  “Tell him your name,” he repeated.

  “Mary. Mary Sinclair.” Her voice was high and thin, with the sing-song intonation of the Scots peasantry.

  “And where have you come from?” the corporal asked her.

  Again the helpless look at Tam, who responded, “This is stupid. The fool wants to know where you’re from. I told him you can’t speak his language, but it hasn’t sunk through his thick skull yet. Just tell him where we’re from.”

  Tam didn’t dare look at the watching knight, but he felt sure that the man was listening closely and understanding what they were saying. “Tell him, Mary. Where we’re from.”

  She looked back at the corporal and blinked. “Inverness,” she intoned. “Inverness in Scotland.”

  The guardsman stared at her for several more moments, then looked wordlessly at the white-and blue-coated knight, who finally stepped forward and gazed up at the woman and the young man standing beside her. He pursed his lips, his eyes narrowing as he looked from one to the other of them, and then he stepped back and flicked a hand in dismissal.

  “Move on,” the corporal said. “On your way.”

  NOT MANY MINUTES LATER, having passed through the city gates and out of direct sight from them in the rapidly gathering dusk, Tam stopped the wagon and turned to the woman in the back.

  “Where do you go from here, Lady?”

  “Not far. If your young man there will help me down, I can walk from here with ease. I have family here who will shelter me. What is your real name? I will send a reward, as token of my thanks, to the Templar commandery here, down by the harbor. You may claim it by presenting yourself there and giving them your name.”

  Sinclair shook his head. “Nay, Lady, I’ll take no money from you. The sound of your Scots voice has been reward enough, for I am long away from home. My name is as you heard it, Tam Sinclair, and I have no need of your coin. Go you now in peace, and quickly, for William de Nogaret has spies everywhere. And give thanks to God for having blessed you with those eyes of yours, my lady, for beside young Hamish’s here they saved our lives this day. Ewan, go with her. Carry her bag and make sure she comes to no harm, then make your way to where we are going. We’ll meet you there.”

  The woman stepped forward and laid a hand on Tam’s forearm. “God bless you then, Tam Sinclair, and keep you well. You have my gratitude and that of my entire family.”

  It was on the tip of Sinclair’s tongue to ask who that family might be, but something warned him not to, and he contented himself with nodding. “God bless you, too, my lady,” he murmured.

  She was a fine-looking woman, judging only by what he had seen of her face, and now as she made her way down from the cart with Ewan’s help, Tam watched her body move against the restrictions of what she was wearing and tried to visualize what she might look like without the bundled blanket that enfolded her. He stopped that, however, as soon as he realized what he was doing. Beauty apart, he told himself, the woman had courage and a quick mind and he was glad he had done what he had.

  He watched her go with Ewan until they were out of sight, and then he turned his team laboriously from the main thoroughfare into a darkening, deserted side street. He traveled halfway along the narrow thoroughfare before hauling on his reins again as the stooped Dominican monk from Alsace stepped out from a doorway in front of him. Young Hamish jumped down to the ground, where he was joined by three other men who had witnessed the killings in front of the city gates and had since walked at various distances behind the wagon. They gathered at the tail gate and began to rummage among the cargo there, displacing metal objects with much grunting and puffing. Sinclair thrust his whip into the receptacle by his right foot as the monk spoke to him, keeping his voice low so that the others would not hear him.

  “Who was that woma
n, Tam, and what were you thinking of? I saw Ewan helping her into your cart as I left the yard and could hardly believe my eyes. You know better than that.” There was no trace of shrillness in the monk’s voice now. It was deep and resonant.

  There came a grunt, a startled curse, and the scuffle of feet as a length of heavy chain slithered and clattered to the cobbles from the back of the wagon. Sinclair glanced that way and then turned back, his eyes sparkling and a small grin on his face.

  “What woman are you talking about? Oh, that woman. She was just someone in need of a wee bit o’ assistance. A Scots lass who spoke like me, and a lady, or I miss my guess.”

  “A lady, traveling alone?” The question was scornful. “No, I think not. I doubt she was alone at the first of it. I think those three poor whoresons killed out there were supposed to be her guards. She told me she was fleeing from de Nogaret’s men, and I believed her.”

  “From de Nogaret? That’s even worse. You put us all at risk, man.”

  “No, sir, I did not.” Tam lowered his shoulders and set his chin. “What would you have had me do, betray her to the popinjay knight and watch her hauled off to jail and who knows what else?”

  The other man sighed and straightened up from his hunched stoop, squaring broad shoulders that the stoop had effectively concealed. “No. No, Tam, I suppose not.” He fell silent for a short time, then asked, “What was her crime? I wonder. Not that de Nogaret would need one.” He looked about him. “Where is she now, then?”

  “On her way to join her family, somewhere in the city. I sent Ewan with her. She’ll be well enough now.”