• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3139 0

the mind-cleansing horizons of sea and sky and now desert, and with the display in friend and foe alike of the compelling qualities of valor and joy and empathy. He may feel these have vanished. He is burdened, too, with something he cannot understand, a gift or a disability which teases his mind with unknown events, unknown places, thoughts that are not his. So far, his identity and his fortune have depended on the numerate skills of the marketplace. He does not know, nor do we, if he can face the new future—the conflict of person with person, kingdom with kingdom, faith with faith—with what he has now.

Judith Wilt

Boston, 1994

Part I

Open Season:

THE WAITING GAME

Chapter 1

HENRY HAD OFTEN considered killing his grandfather; there was so much of him, and Henry disliked all of it. Today the impulse came back quite strongly when, sticking his head upside down through the casement, he discovered the old man himself riding over the Kilmirren drawbridge. He could see his big hat, and the pennants, and the baggage-mules, and the men in half-armour to protect what was in all the boxes. They hadn’t sounded their trumpets, and below in the courtyard people were scampering in every direction, attempting to help with the horses or even running away. No one liked Henry’s grandfather.

Monseigneur Jourdain, the servants called him. It meant Chamberpot. His real name was Jordan de St Pol, vicomte de Ribérac, and all this castle of Kilmirren was his, and the yards and trees and bothies that Henry looked down on, and the good farmlands and villages just beyond that Henry’s father was supposed to look after. This was Monseigneur’s Scottish castle, which he came to examine most years. The rest of the time he stayed in France.

Usually, everybody knew when to expect him. The message would come, and his father would curse, and then there would be a week when everyone was in a bad temper, trying to put things to rights. Then on the day, his father would stand in the doorway with Henry, his only son, at his side, and they would both welcome the old man as if they meant it. Fat Father Jordan was how his father referred to him.

Today, there had been no warning, which was terrible. No one knew better than Henry just how terrible it actually was. Henry set aside the hawk he had been feeding and, whirling down from his room, shoved open the door to his father’s great chamber.

The bedcurtains were only half closed, so that he could see, with a pang of admiration and interest, what was happening behind them. Even now, in an emergency, he knew better than to interrupt. When it was finished (the signs were familiar) he said shrilly, ‘Father! Father! Monseigneur is here!’

The first face to appear was the lady’s. He had seen her before. She looked flushed, but didn’t giggle like Beth or conceal herself with the sheet like the other one. This lady frowned at him, certainly, but bent and picked up her robe like an ordinary person. Like all his father’s ladies, she was well set up as to the chest. Henry’s friends all mentioned that, and the servants. They, too, were proud of his father. Henry used to wonder, now and then, if his mother had been flat in front like himself. She had died when Henry was three, but he didn’t miss her. He didn’t know why people thought he ought to miss her. He said, ‘Father?’ again, in case he had gone back to sleep.

‘God’s blood and bones,’ said his father, and rolled over and pushed himself up.

Even angry, his father Simon was beautiful. Blond and blue-eyed and beautiful, and the finest jouster, the most splendid chevalier in the whole of Scotland. When Henry’s grandfather was dead, Henry’s father would be the lord of this castle and its grazing in the mid-west of Scotland. He would own his grandfather’s castle in France, and his ships and his mills and his vineyards. His father would be Simon de St Pol, vicomte de Ribérac, and Henry would be his sole son and heir, and a knight, with ladies to bounce with in bed. Flattish ladies, to be truthful, for preference.

God smote Henry then in the back. Henry