Numb with shock, Jeanette stared at her. ‘I do not believe you. He cannot be dead, for I would have felt it in here.’ She thumped her breast.
Margaret gave her a pitying look. ‘The news has come from reports sent to the King. Believe them, not me. This unfortunate interlude of yours will be forgotten. You shall be made ready for your marriage to William Montagu and you shall do your duty.’
‘Never!’ Jeanette bared her teeth.
Her mother sighed again. ‘You must accept that he is dead. I have had to deal with such news myself twice over and move on from it. How easy it would have been to stamp and scream that it wasn’t fair, and that the world should move as I wished, but when your father died I had a baby in my womb, and you and your brother to care for. I had duties and responsibilities to others that I could not forsake by throwing a childish fit. Now it is your turn. I did not make all the sacrifices in my life to watch my spoiled daughter wreck them with her selfish unseemliness. You will do your duty, or spend the rest of your life as a nun, and that is my last word.’ She rose and went to the door.
Jeanette clenched her fists. ‘I want Hawise back,’ she said. ‘I don’t want Agnes.’
Her mother turned. ‘If you cooperate and agree to this match you can have many things, daughter. Your maid, as many dogs and horses and clothes as you wish. In time you shall be the Countess of Salisbury with estates to govern and heirs to raise. Weigh that in the balance of your mind and change your face before next I see you.’
After her mother had gone, Jeanette crumpled to the floor, clutched her stomach, and curled up in a tight ball of misery. ‘You’re not dead, you’re not, you’re not!’ she wailed. ‘You can’t be, for I would have felt it!’ But a worm of doubt crept in, and she wondered if it was true. Had she been deluding herself all along? Why wasn’t Thomas here to help her? Why did he have to go on his stupid crusade? Emotion tore through her like a storm tide. Rage and grief and despair. She sobbed until she was ragged and deflated, her heart wrung out of all the fullness it had once held for life, for love, for Thomas. It was all as nothing.
16
A campaign tent somewhere in Prussia, February 1341
The pain was excruciating. Thomas writhed on his pallet, sweat-soaked, raging with fever. Dreams of demons and angels fighting over his soul had accosted him throughout the night and now he stood on the edge of hell’s pit, so close he could feel the flames searing his skin and biting at his injured eye socket. He thrashed, trying to escape the fiery, sulphurous stink of the shark-mouth and dripping yellow teeth.
Voices resonated inside his skull like shouts in a cavern. Someone was holding him down, telling him not to fight, that all was well, but he knew it wasn’t.
‘Help him, in the name of sweet Christ, do something!’ He recognised Otto’s voice, breaking with tears.
‘My son, it is in God’s hands now,’ came the answer, wearily patient.
If it was in God’s hands, then Thomas knew his transgressions were weights at his ankles, dragging him into the pit. He had seen enough Dooms in church paintings to know the fate of sinners.
Someone set a cup to his lips and dribbled cold liquid into his mouth. He choked and tried to fend them off, but his arms wouldn’t work. A cold compress covered his brows and eyes and his vision brightened with vivid colours while pain seared through him in ropes of lightning. He heard Jeanette screaming out to someone that he was not dead and saw her curled in a ball, inconsolable with grief.
‘I am not dead!’ he shouted. ‘I will come to you, through hell if I must.’
He fought to leave the bed, but hands held him fast like shackles and he had no strength to break free.
‘Do not dare die, you selfish whoreson,’ he heard Otto croak, and felt himself being grasped and shaken. ‘I refuse to bring home your horse with an empty saddle and tell our mother you’re never returning. I don’t want to face everyone who loves you with a box in my hands holding your embalmed heart. Have you not done enough to us already, you bastard?’
The demons pierced him with their claws, and his soul teetered on the edge. Otto was sobbing while Henry de la Haye murmured consoling platitudes. Thomas gathered every part of himself and made a final tremendous effort, throwing himself forward, screaming that he repented of everything and rejected Satan and all his works. He struck out, and suddenly there was a white sword in his hand and the devils drew back from him. The light returned, burning through his skull, and he reached into it. The left side was black and swirling with red heat and he could see nothing, but on the right, through stinging sweat, he made out a room with a fire, and people gathered around him. Other wounded men lay on pallets on the floor and he could hear their groans. Was this his deathbed? Perhaps they were waiting for their souls to be harvested – an unholy convoy. While he was trying to puzzle out his surroundings, oblivion descended on him in a snuffing black cloak.
He woke again to throbbing pain on the left side of his face, but the fire and the hallucinations had gone. Winter daylight cast the room in stark tints of blue and grey. Looking round, he could see nothing out of his left eye, but his right took in Otto, sitting at his bedside, head drooped in slumber, sandy hair lank and surcoat grimy. He tried to speak but all that emerged was a corvid croak.
Otto shot awake at the sound and leaned over him. ‘Thomas? Thank Christ!’
Thomas struggled to speak, feeling as though his throat was full of dust and feathers, and Otto roared for help. Moments later a priest arrived with Henry and John de la Salle on his heels.
The priest poured water and lifted Thomas’s head to drink. He was so weak he could barely swallow, but he still managed to drain the cup, and when the priest refilled it, he drank that too.
‘Thank God to see you return to the land of the living,’ Otto said, sleeving away tears. ‘I feared for your life. I was despairing of what I would say to mother of your demise.’
‘I heard you,’ Thomas said huskily. ‘You were standing with me at the gates of hell and I thought for sure that was where I was bound.’
‘We thought you were going to die. You have been sick with wound fever for five days.’
‘Wound fever?’ Thomas slowly put his thoughts together. To have wound fever he would have to be badly injured, and the only place he was aware of pain was his face. Raising his hand, he touched bandages on the left side, and a fleeting memory came to him of a moment of impact and a white-hot streak of sensation.
‘Scatter from a slingshot,’ Otto said. ‘You took off your helmet for a moment and down you went. Raoul de Brienne got the bastard, but you were off your guard.’
Thomas touched the bandage again. ‘How bad?’
Otto looked away for a moment and then back at Thomas. ‘We do not know yet, but likely you have lost the sight in your left eye.’
