to have him know …”
“That we know where the Pearl is,” Sedrick concluded brightly.
“Thy wit is unsurpassed,” Henry said, laughing dryly. “Now come, man, these are heavy thoughts to burden so tender a brain at such an hour and place as this. God’s truth,” he added, shivering as they started walking back along the path, “I will be happy to be quit of this place. I swear the shadows move and the fog has eyes.”
Sedrick crossed himself hastily, his hand falling to the hilt of his sword as the gnarled trunk of a fig tree took shape beside them. He too could have sworn he saw movement, but there was nothing there, only the moving, swirling banks of opaque mist.
Chapter 12
Ariel had dashed back to the pilgrim’s hall and made it into her pallet a scant few seconds before she heard the faint rasp of the door and the sound of stealthy feet seeking out their beds in the gloom. Her heart had pounded in her throat and her lips had curled between her teeth in an effort to counter the pain of a stubbed toe, and for the next hour she had lain there wide awake, her bladder throbbing while she replayed a bewildering array of thoughts, most of them centring around the exchange she had overheard between Henry and Sedrick.
What was this talk of a jewel—a pearl valuable enough to use as barter? Barter with whom? For what purpose? It had to be extremely valuable if the king possessed it … doubly, trebly so if it was worth the risk of all their lives to steal it.
And the thought of FitzRandwulf as a common thief, willing to travel so far to steal a pearl? It made no sense whatsoever. Not for any of them.
Henry, with his own modest successes on the tournament circuits, was neither so penniless nor so witless as to resort to such desperate measures as stealing from the crown. Wealth, in any form, had never been of prime consideration in any of Sedrick’s plans either. He was the marshal’s loyal liegeman and as long as he had ale to drink, food to fill his belly, a wench to bed, and heads to break, he was content.
FitzRandwulf’s capacity for avarice was unknown to her, but from what Ariel knew of his personal worth—admittedly not much more than what she had gleaned from Robin’s stories over the past few days—he was not suffering from a cringing poverty. He had estates in Touraine and the Aquitaine, possibly more in Lincolnshire that would have come to him through his mother. Would he kill for a pearl? Would he travel to England and risk all for the sake of stealing a polished bit of stone?
Moreover, had he not already admitted he was going to England because of a woman? Had he admitted it … or had he simply not disagreed with Ariel’s supposition? And if it was a woman luring him out of his lair in Normandy, was it a woman in possession of this mysterious pearl?
Ariel had barely sifted her way through these convoluted deductions when she heard Henry’s call to rise. Determined not to betray any knowledge of their conversation—and here, she at least had the satisfaction of knowing she had not imagined the whisperings and intrigues—she made her prayers and greeted their meal of ale and bread with her usual morning scowl. Knowing it would be expected of her, she made a point of inquiring where their choleric guide had taken himself, and of expressing her heartfelt opinion that they could do just as well without him.
They left the abbey when the sun was still a pale blot on the horizon. They took infrequent stops along the way and by noon had left the thickest tracts of forest well behind them. Fields began to look well tended, hemmed with stone fences and hedgerows. Haystacks were built up around the trunks of trees, so high only the topmost branches showed. Flocks of sheep dotted the hills and once a black and white dog ran along the road beside them, loudly protesting their trespass.
There were increasing signs of pedestrian traffic as well. Fresh cart tracks and footprints had been set in the mud by farmers hoping to find eager buyers in the city. Several times they passed men on foot who glared at them with wary eyes and closed mouths, but there were no overt signs of an army on the move, or of the burning and pillaging King