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  They were all so certain that Leicester intended to reprimand Gloucester for shielding Alphonse that they were considerably surprised when he merely acknowledged Alphonse’s and Barbara’s presence with courteous nods. Peter de Montfort, who was standing with his cousin, also smiled at them. Barbara and Alphonse glanced at each other behind Gloucester’s back. The looks questioned without words whether it was possible that Leicester had not even known of the orders concerning them.

  “I asked you to come, Gilbert,” Leicester said, pleasantly but with a kind of authority that implied Gloucester could not have refused, “because I thought it only right to tell you in person that the king has forbidden any tourney to be held at this time.”

  “But this is the best time of year for a tourney,” Gloucester protested, so bewildered by the unexpected tack that he answered the literal words rather than the meaning. “The crops are all harvested, there is yet no young growth in the fields to be trampled, everyone is idle and looking for entertainment…”

  “Yes, yes,” Leicester said as Gloucester faltered to silence. He sounded impatient, like an adult explaining something obvious to a child. “But do you not see that the gathering of a large crowd of idle armed men is the last thing we want when we are negotiating for the prince’s release? I cannot permit it.”

  “You cannot permit it?” Gloucester’s voice rose until it cracked.

  “Now—” Leicester began.

  “I thought you said the king had forbidden it,” Gloucester interrupted, his voice lower now and steady.

  “Do not act like a spoiled child, Gilbert,” Leicester said. “You may have your amusement another time—”

  “The king has a right to command me.” Gloucester’s face was now as red as his hair, but an unfortunately ugly clashing shade. “You, my lord, have not. I never heard or agreed that one of us was to be set above the other. I have deferred to you in the past because I felt you to be wise and impartial. No armed men under my command will prevent Edward’s release. I will have what you call ‘my amusement’ on Shrove Tuesday, the date set by agreement with your sons, and I will cry craven on any man party to that agreement who does not come.”

  “My sons will have no part of this tourney because that is my order and because they have more care for the peace and good management of this realm than you.” This time it was Leicester’s voice that was rough and angry.

  Gilbert laughed harshly, his mouth ugly with tension. “If you believe that, you are the only man in the realm who does. I will be at Dunstable on Shrove Tuesday—”

  “You will obey my order!” Leicester bellowed.

  “Simon!” Peter de Montfort protested, coming forward and gripping Leicester’s arm.

  Simultaneously, Alphonse had come closer and said in Gloucester’s ear, “A good jouster does not lose his temper. Anger leads only to a fall. Turn your back on him and walk away. He will look a helpless fool yelling after you.”

  As he spoke, Alphonse gripped Gloucester’s shoulder and tugged at it lightly. The young earl resisted for a moment, but on the last few words he turned smartly about and marched down the hall toward the door.

  Behind him Leicester shouted, “I warn you that you and any man who comes with you and disobeys the writ will be cast into a place where you will enjoy neither sun nor moon—”

  Barbara, who had been following close on the heels of her menfolk, looked back as Leicester’s voice stopped abruptly. She saw him drop his head as if ashamed and shake it when Peter de Montfort asked a question. The tightness in her throat and chest eased a trifle. She was not certain whether Peter had asked if he should go after Gloucester to apologize or if he should order them taken prisoner, but clearly Leicester had decided no action should be taken.

  Then she hurried on again, fearing to be left behind because Alphonse did not dare remove his attention from Gloucester to look for her. They found their horses in the courtyard, saddled as they had left them, ready for trouble—although they had not guessed the kind of trouble they would find—with Chacier and Gloucester’s master-at-arms alert at their heads. Without exchanging a word they mounted and rode out of the gate, through the middle bailey, and over the drawbridge across the moat.

  Only when they were on the road that led to Candlewick Street did Gloucester say, “I never knew what cowards Guy and Simon were. I was not surprised when they tried to strip my party of you, Alphonse. I was sure they thought that having you gave me an unfair advantage.” He smiled. “I was a little worried about that myself, and wondered if I should ask you not to take part in the melee.” Then he frowned again. “But to run whining to hide under their father’s gown to save themselves a few bruises…I would not have believed that.”

  “Nor should you,” Alphonse said. “Do not confuse vanity with fear. It is their pride that is tender, not their flesh. I think Guy and Simon would fight to the death without quailing or turning tail—but a tourney is not to the death, and they would have to live with the sneers over their defeat. Their fear of being laughed at, not any fear of being hurt, was the cause of telling Leicester.”

  Barbara was grateful to Alphonse for trying to quiet and warn Gloucester, who was still very angry at having his chance of revenge on the young Montforts for many petty slights snatched away. If Alphonse had not helped Peter de Montfort cut short the quarrel with Leicester, such bitter words could have been said as to throw Gloucester into the Royalist camp with no more ado. But if both men had lost their tempers enough to utter threats, Leicester could have had them all arrested right then.

  Gloucester’s high complexion still flew storm signals, and Alphonse was urging him to save the rest of what he had to say. Once on Candlewick Street, with its shop counters protruding into the road and crowds of buyers, hawkers, and walkers, they had to ride single file and would have needed to shout at each other to be heard.

  Barbara followed, thinking hard. She did not underestimate her husband or believe he wanted a true reconciliation between the two earls. Alphonse wanted to find for Gloucester a safer and less violent path to the prince’s party than an open quarrel with Leicester. She was shocked to discover the thought gave her a strong sense of satisfaction. That would never do. If Gloucester changed sides, active war would break out. She did not want that. She had better suggest that the blame for canceling the tourney did not lie altogether on the shoulders of the Montforts.

  As soon as they had reached Gilbert’s house and were in the large hall, before Alphonse or Gloucester could speak, Barbara asked, “Why are you so sure Simon or Guy told Leicester to stop the tourney?”

  Both men turned faces blank with surprise to her, Gloucester’s hand arrested in the act of pulling out his cloak pin.

  “You did not make any secret of the tourney,” she went on. “And anyone with a flicker of sense could see there would be trouble when armed men with grudges met. More than one must have told Leicester it was dangerous to allow a tourney at this time. Likely the fault was mostly mine for coming to court apurpose to tempt Simon and Guy into immoderate behavior while clinging to you for protection.” This time Barbara shook her head to silence loud exclamations of protest and continued, “What I did made the bad feeling between you apparent to all. I do not love either Guy or Simon de Montfort, but I know they are not cowards—except in one thing.”

  “And that?” Gloucester asked, his head cocked to the side as he finished pulling the pin from his cloak.

  “They are terrified of their father’s disapproval, not because they fear to be punished but because they are aware of his love—and aware they are unworthy.”

  Gloucester looked as though he had had a heavenly revelation, but he did not speak at once. He gestured for Barbara and Alphonse to come with him nearer the fire, swinging off his cloak and handing it blindly behind him. A servant caught it as he opened his hand.

  “It fits,” he muttered, “and it explains many things.”

  Barbara had pulled off her gloves and passed them to Clotilde, who had co
me running up. She rubbed her hands briskly together and held them out to the heat as the maid removed her cloak, but her eyes flicked from Gloucester’s thoughtful face to Alphonse’s. They stood in a small semicircle, Gloucester by his great chair, which had been placed before the high-leaping fire, Barbara beside the bench to the right of the chair, and Alphonse between them. Barbara noted that her husband wore his “court face”, his lips faintly curved in the hint of a smile, the whole expression alert and pleasant but totally unreadable.

  Then Gloucester laughed. “You are very clever, Barby,” he said, “but that does not amend the fact that Simon and Guy are nasty pieces of work and need a good lesson.”

  “But not at the cost of open defiance of the king’s writ forbidding the tourney,” Alphonse said. “All that can accomplish is to provide Leicester with a good excuse to lock you up.”

  Gloucester did not look at all startled by what Alphonse had said. Barbara realized the idea was not new to him. “I may have provided that already,” he said sourly.

  “Oh, no.” Alphonse shed his own cloak and walked past Barbara, stopping beside her but closer to the fire. When he turned to Gloucester again, his face was shadowed by the brightness behind him. “I am sure Leicester did not intend to provoke you. He will not use your natural response to his unfortunate manner as an excuse to arrest you. If he wanted to do that, he would have done it before we left his presence.”

  “I do not mean today’s quarrel.” Gloucester glanced at Alphonse and then looked away, into the fire. “You remember that before we left Worcester I gave Mortimer and his friends leave to delay their departure for Ireland by a month. I did not tell you before because it did not seem to matter, but Leicester took exception to my lenience. He accused me of taking his enemies under my protection.”

  “Well,” Alphonse said, “perhaps it might not be a bad idea to leave London…ah…quietly.”

  “But not to go to Dunstable,” Barbara put in.

  “I must go to Dunstable, Barby,” Gloucester said. “I will not hide like a scolded puppy. If the king’s writ is delivered there and the tourney forbidden in Henry’s name, I will not defy the writ. But this has nothing to do with you anymore. If there will be no tourney, then Alphonse’s purpose here is ended, and I think the time has come for you to leave the country—”

  “No!” The male and female voices, though different in pitch, sounded exactly the same note of determination.

  Gloucester looked from one to the other and laughed.

  “I am forbidden to leave anyway,” Barbara said.

  “And I am no puppy either, to be chased from my bitch by a bigger dog,” Alphonse added.

  “That is not in question,” Gloucester said. “Had Leicester known about either of those orders, he would not have greeted you as he did. Tomorrow I will write to Leicester to ask about having the prohibition against travel for Barby removed.”

  “No.” Barbara shook her head energetically, and the young earl vented an exasperated sigh.

  “This is not your stinking stew but mine,” Gloucester said. “I mixed it and cooked it. Why should you eat it?”

  “Oh, Gilbert—” Barbara began, but Alphonse cut her short gesturing with one hand and squeezing her shoulder with the other.

  “Wait, Barbe,” he said. “Gilbert’s idea is not such a bad one.”

  “I will not go off to France alone and leave you two here to brew up more trouble,” Barbara protested.

  “No, no.” Alphonse laughed. “We could not do without you, my love. What I was about to say is that if Gilbert uses that prohibition as an excuse to write to Leicester, he will learn at once whether a reasonable request will receive a reasonable answer. If it does, it would be stupid for Gilbert to annoy Leicester by rushing out of London, especially to Dunstable.”

  The reasonable request, sent off the morning of the next day, received no answer at all, which was puzzling. The lack of response might have been alarming rather than puzzling, but after dinner Gloucester received what could be looked on as a gesture of reconciliation from Leicester—a long report detailing the proposed exchange of property between the prince and himself. The exchange was designed to break Edward’s power in the west, so that he could not begin a new war, but at the same time not deprive the prince of a decent income.

  Gloucester looked at the parchments spread over the table in his bedchamber with some distaste and repressed his impulse to carry them out and show them to Alphonse. Although he knew the report had been sent to soothe him by implying he was important and must be included in the negotiations, he also regarded Leicester’s gesture as a warning. A significant portion of Gloucester’s own property was in the west. Once Leicester had control of what had been Edward’s lands, he would be in a far better position to suppress any rising against him. Gloucester sat and stared at the closely written sheets of parchment. Did he really want Leicester breathing down his neck in the Marches? Worse yet, he and Leicester’s sons were young—Leicester himself was not. When the earl was dead, the lands would go to his sons. Gloucester grimaced as he thought of having Simon or Guy as a neighbor.

  His glance lifted from the parchments at which he had been staring unseeingly and settled on his writing desk. Within it there lay a letter from Mortimer, which had come the day after the attempt to arrest and deport Alphonse. The letter was a request for another postponement of his departure for Ireland. Mortimer said his wife had fallen ill with strain and grief and he wished to stay until she was more settled. Gloucester knew quite well that Mortimer’s request was only a device to avoid exile; if he granted it, every other lord Marcher would also beg to stay in England. He had been about to write a curt refusal. Now…

  He thought again about Simon and Guy as neighbors in Wales and ground his teeth. Even if they did not attack him, they would almost certainly upset the delicate balance of the relationship he had maintained with the Welsh. Mortimer had been a good conduit to Llywelyn before Leicester had offered Llywelyn better terms to turn on his cousin. But Gloucester knew Llywelyn. That he accepted Leicester’s terms would not necessarily make Llywelyn Mortimer’s enemy. So if the situation changed—if power in the west shifted out of Leicester’s hands—Mortimer would be useful again to bargain with his cousin.

  The question was rapidly becoming, Gloucester thought, whether it was better to endure the rapacity of Leicester’s favorites or the king’s favorites. He pushed away the parchments, then pulled them closer but did not read from them. Whatever property was confiscated, whatever was “temporarily” placed in Leicester’s hands, only his sons and a few very close friends would profit. It had not been that way in the beginning. The Council had agreed to control the king’s extravagance and dismiss his favorites. The power and responsibility had been evenly distributed. Only since the battle of Lewes, since Leicester had taken and kept the king a virtual prisoner, had the earl, little by little, made himself all powerful.

  Again Gloucester suppressed an urge to talk over the subject with Alphonse, which reminded him that Barbara still did not have permission to leave the country and that she and Alphonse clearly intended to accompany him to Dunstable. It was stupid and unnecessary for them to do so, but Gloucester understood why they insisted. He had stood by them when they were in trouble, and now they intended to return the favor.

  Irritably, he reached for a clean sheet of parchment. He would think about Alphonse and Barbara later. Right now he had to decide what to write to Mortimer—and if he was not going to refuse Mortimer’s plea to remain at Wigmore, decide to whom he should entrust the letter. He did not want Leicester to intercept it because— He broke off the thought, rather relieved at not needing to complete it and delighted that the solution to both his problems had interrupted an idea too dangerous to formulate before he obtained more information. Alphonse could take his letter to Thomas at St. Briavels, and Thomas could send it on to Mortimer.

  He started to get up at once to explain his brilliant notion, then laughed aloud and sank back
in his seat. The letter had to be written first. Gloucester took a quill from the writing desk, fished around for the small, sharp knife that was always kept in it, and trimmed the quill, his lips pursed. If Alphonse was going to carry the letter to St. Briavels, there was no chance at all that it would be lost or taken from him. He would destroy it before he was captured, or Barby would destroy it for him. Thus it would be safe to write…what? It would be safe, but what did he want to say?

  The quill cut, Gloucester unstoppered the ink horn, dipped the point, and drew a short line on the bottom of the nearest piece of parchment to test it. Then he paused. Mortimer would see at once that the letter had not been written by a clerk. Would that make him read too much into anything that was said? A man did not trouble himself to write unless he wished to keep very secret what was written. Should he call his clerk? No. Gloucester smiled. To write in his own hand would solve the problem of what to say—he need say nothing that would commit him to any act. It would be sufficient to write good wishes for Mortimer’s well-doing. That plus the extension of Mortimer’s leave to remain in England for another month would be enough.

  He began to write, then stopped and smiled. And now he had his insurance that Alphonse would not refuse to go to St. Briavels. He could give Alphonse a word-of-mouth message for Thomas: to arrange a meeting between him and Mortimer during the early part of March. Alphonse would surely understand that he would not wish to commit that message either to writing or to a common messenger. And his clerk was old. It would be cruel to send him all the way to Wales in winter weather.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  For the first few weeks after she and Alphonse arrived at St. Briavels, Barbara enjoyed being the lady of the castle. Though the keep was in good order, many of the amenities provided by a woman were lacking. Thomas de Clare had no wife, and the widow of the old castellan had retired to a convent when Thomas took hold for his brother. Within a day of arriving, Barbara was hearing from Clotilde of menservants in rags because the cloth readied for their new clothes had never been cut or sewed, of wool carded and spun but not bleached or dyed because no one knew what its purpose should be, of waste and mismanagement of food because Thomas was often away and there was no one to say what part of a slaughtered animal should be served, what part salted or, if there was more soft curd than anyone wanted to eat, that the excess should be pressed into hard cheese.