LIV

 

 

IT WAS CLOSE to midnight when Gisburne and his squire stood upon the battlements of the White Tower, watching for whatever might come. John had been forewarned, and was secured within. There was little more they could do now but wait.

Gisburne leaned on the stone parapet and faced into the steady breeze, gazing towards the glinting water of the river.

Galfrid looked across at the two Tower guards upon the battlement, who had at least afforded them the courtesy of keeping their distance. “You haven’t yet asked what Ranulph Le Fort told me,” he said.

“You’ll tell me in your own time,” said Galfrid with a shrug. “If you need to.”

“I need to,” said Gisburne. “Want to. You deserve to know.”

Galfrid nodded slowly. “Was he able to fill the gaps in our knowledge?”

“Yes. And more.” Gisburne sighed. “It transpires that Ranulph was one of the men my father trusted most in the world. Everyone trusted Ranulph, it seems. Well, you’ve seen him... He’s a force to be reckoned with. And uncompromising. One of the reasons, I suspect, why he never became rich. So much did my father have faith in Ranulph, that he charged him with carrying out one of his last wishes – delivering a casket in the event of his death. To Ireland. To a woman named Liadan.”

“Liadan?” said Galfrid. “Is that...?”

“Yes,” said Gisburne. “The name upon the parchment. The one we could not read. Whether my father had obscured it deliberately, or through some impulse of which even he was not aware, we will never know. But Liadan was the widow of the chieftain Faelan Ua Dubhghail. It was my father Ua Dubhghail had been coming to kill that night – the night Ranulph intercepted and killed him, and lost his fingers. There was a word I occasionally heard my father mutter in his sleep. I never understood it. But now I do. I understand it all. It was Liadan’s name he uttered. The name of the woman he had met that first time in Ireland. Who he met again when he returned with John, when her jealous husband sought him out, out of revenge, or for fear that their love may be rekindled.”

Only when he spoke these words, the matters behind them being made more real, did Gisburne realise how hard it was to accept this truth – to face the fact of his own father’s infidelity. There was pain in pushing them out – but, like a bad wound, it felt good, and right, to get rid of the poison.

“She must have meant a good deal to him,” he continued, steadily. “Or perhaps he was wrestling with his guilt. Either way, he left her what little wealth he had left. Not much. Ranulph did not know what was in the casket – and being a man of trust, did not look. But it seemed that, alongside the small quantity of silver, it contained documents from the Irish expedition – including the third copy of the Milford Roll – and a letter to Liadan, penned by my father. Perhaps he hoped to make amends by it. If so, it did not have the desired effect. In fact, it was the spark that lit the inferno which now threatens to engulf us.” He turned his face away from the squire.

“My father did not think beyond Liadan being a widow. But she’d had the good to fortune to have remarried, and into a noble Irish household. Her husband discovered the letter, learned the truth. Liadan and her two sons were cast out – disgraced and disinherited. Ranulph later learned, to his horror, that Liadan had died by her own hand.” He sighed heavily once again, and bowed his head.

“And so to the final detail... The younger of Liadan’s two sons – thirteen in the year of John’s expedition – had been of prodigious size and strength. He looked, by all accounts, very different from his brother. There had always been cruel whispers about his parentage. When driven out, penniless, he had been forced to find a trade. He did so – as a blacksmith and tinsmith. That boy would now be twenty-one.” Gisburne paused, took a deep breath, then continued. “When my father went to Ireland the first time, for King Henry, it was the spring of the year 1171.”

Galfrid frowned at this information. “Spring of 1171. That would have been –”

Gisburne anticipated him. “Twenty-two years ago. Nine months before the boy’s birth.”

For a time, they stood in silence, then Gisburne spoke again. “Through all of this, as we have crept closer to this truth, there is one fundamental error that we have made. It has been with us right from the very start, nudging us off course.” He turned to Galfrid. “He’s not coming for John. He’s coming for me.”

 

 

GISBURNE TURNED BACK towards the river, and as he did so, a patch of pale white caught his eye. There, in the moonlight, he could make out the sail of a ship: Baylesford’s, leaving upon the tide. Somewhere on it was Ranulph Le Fort – and Mélisande. It was coming closer, sailing past them to the sea, and on to France. His heart was heavy at the sight of it. He would have done anything – paid any price – to have her with him now. But he knew it had been right to send her away, to safety. This was his fight alone. It had always been so.

It was, he now knew, the revenge of a son upon a son. What the Red Hand had always known was that wherever John was under threat, there would Gisburne be. He had known John would come to the Tower. He had known Gisburne would come to protect him. He had known too that Gisburne would torture himself almost to madness chasing the murdering phantom around the city. Gisburne had done everything the Red Hand had wanted – unwittingly, and unaware that he himself was the focus of all his hatred.

As Gisburne stared towards the steadily approaching ship, half in a dream, it seemed a weird light flickered. He blinked, thought he had imagined it. But there it was again, seemingly upon the ship itself. In a great burst, the whole sail seemed to light up, as if it somehow had the sun behind it. A shout went up from one of the guards upon the battlement. Then Gisburne saw the flames.

“Mélisande...” The name caught in his constricted throat.

Cries broke out on the shore far below. Bright with flame, but still with a head of speed from the brisk wind, the ship suddenly veered to port. He heard a great creak and a crack of timbers as it turned sharply towards the one weak point in the Tower’s outer curtain wall: the wide inlet that cut through from the river – a half-completed moat abandoned by Longchamp. There was a horrid familiarity about the scene now unfolding. This had been Gisburne’s point of entry to the Tower complex over a year earlier. And he, too, had set a ship afire.

The entire vessel shuddered as it smashed through the staves bristling the mouth of the inlet. Cries of alarm echoed all about the shore. Driving deep inland, the ship struck the bank, rose halfway up it with a great groan of timbers, and keeled to one side, flames leaping high into the night sky.

Gisburne stared, sick to his heart.

“It’s begun,” he said.