Page 46 of The Captive Knight
Thibaud frowned and shook his shaggy white hair. “This is not the same. Your family lost everything a decade ago, you were barely a knight. But I lost nothing but pride after Crécy. I could have stayed in the king’s service.”
The knight was sinking into the tale, but Jehan’s belly couldn’t wait any longer. He brushed by Thibaud, saying, “Join me at table. Listening to one of your stories requires more than just wine.”
Thibaud’s hand curled around his arm. “This tale is best told in discretion, Sir Jehan.”
“These men-at-arms don’t care about—”
“I was not the only one wounded at Crécy.” Thibaud lowered his voice. “So was Aliénor’s father.”
As he spoke her name with that look in his eye, Jehan flinched. Whatever was on Thibaud’s mind, now he was sure it had to do with Aliénor.
“You’ll want to know this.” Thibaud released him and returned to the support of the gallery-pole. “It may explain how you found yourself the viscount’s prisoner, half-dead in the northwest tower.”
Jehan’s jaw tightened. “Speak your mind, Thibaud.”
“Aliénor’s father was found on the battlefield at Crécy bleeding from the head and all but dead. I found him myself. By the time we hauled him into the physics’ tent he’d been unconscious for God knows how many days.”
Jehan crossed his arms, waiting for the knight to get to the point.
“For a while, I thought we’d lost him.” Thibaud squinted off to some far place beyond the walls. “I dreaded telling my niece—Aliénor’s mother—of his death, should it happen. They were a love match, the two of them.”
The phrase struck him hard. He’d never considered if there even was such a thing, and now it resonated like the pluck of a violin string.
“But he woke up,” Thibaud continued, “and over the weeks I saw a different man emerge from the long sleep. He beat his horse when he struggled to climb on the saddle. He pulled a dagger on a man who’d done nothing but give him a sour look. He broke the wrist of a woman who delayed bringing him wine.”
Jehan remembered the viscount’s contorted face when the madman had killed his squire. The brutal and unrelenting attack had been like a starved wolf falling upon a wounded deer.
“The king as well as Count of Armagnac soon had enough of the viscount and his rages,” Thibaud continued. “The viscount was ordered away from court and back to his Gascon holdings, but I couldn’t bear to think of him returning in that condition to my unsuspecting niece. So I petitioned the king for leave. Then I bowed to and flattered the damn viscount as if he deserved my sword as protection. I lowered myself to being a mercenary for a man who could only function when he was in the fields, where murder was called war. And I did all this for one reason: To protect my niece and her family.”
“And you stayed long after she died,” he ventured, finally seeing the knot at the end of Thibaud’s winding yarn, “to protect her daughter.”
“As I still do.”
The knight nudged the pole with his shoulder to straightened up, his gray eyes so clear that Jehan could no longer pretend Thibaud didn’t know exactly what had happened in the upper room of the tower last night.
Between them the knowledge shimmered, the air growing thin.
The old knight said, “You will marry her of course.”
His heart squeezed as he lowered the cup. “I am betrothed to someone else.”
Thibaud’s hand went to his side where the hilt of his sword would have been, if Jehan hadn’t disarmed all of the viscount’s men and stored their weapons in a guarded shed. The knight’s narrow shoulders tightened and his lips went white, and for a moment Jehan saw him as he must have looked as a king’s man, hair flaring wild, ropy muscles flexing, senses blazing.
Jehan braced himself for a blow from Thibaud’s white-knuckled fist. He deserved such a punishment. But Aliénor deserved discretion, and a fight between he and Thibaud would raise questions.
“Challenge me if you will, Sir Thibaud,” Jehan said, squaring his stance. “But I won’t send away the woman I love.”
Surprise and confusion flittered across the knight’s face, followed by a deep rippling of his wrinkled brow.
Thibaud said, “So it’s love, is it?”
Jehan nodded and held his clear gray gaze. Thibaud’s anger seemed to seep out of him, like wine out of a punctured bladder-skin.
“Life has not treated Aliénor well,” Thibaud said, releasing a long, weary sigh. “If you truly love her, then I have to trust you will.”
***
Jehan found Aliénor in the small wooden chapel. She crouched before the altar. The long skirts of her kirtle pooled on the wooden floor, bathed in blue light pouring from the small stained glass window. As he entered and approached, she started to her feet. Only then did he notice the boy in rough weave sitting on the rise to the altar.
