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  Alphonse laughed, her protest having confirmed his guess that her agreement had been part of a design to circumvent his purpose. “Mortimer will confide to the abbot Guy’s lust for you,” he said, “giving that as your reason for seeking the protection of the Church. The brothers will not give you up to any but your father’s men.”

  While he spoke, Alphonse had slid one arm around her shoulders, his other hand was busy unloosening the belt of her bedgown. He was already aroused and turned so that his body was fully pressed against her and she could not mistake the hardness of his shaft. She had been untying his shirt strings, but she stopped and laid her hands flat on his chest as if to push him away. Alphonse was a little troubled by a renewal of the resistance she seemed to have abandoned, but his lips closed on hers, just as she said “My father’s men!” and he was relieved, assuming she did not understand the rest of the plan.

  Shock at hearing her father brought into the discussion first held Barbara immobile. In that instant she was convinced that the whole purpose in sending her away was to involve her father in the rebellion against Leicester.

  “You will be safe in Evesham as long as you wish to stay there,” Alphonse murmured, his mouth moving against hers, giving a sensual effect to the practical words. “You can send Bevis and Lewin to your father and ask that he send a troop to escort you. I cannot believe he will wish to be involved in fighting against the prince, so he will be able to spare a strong troop to take you safely to Framlingham, or wherever he is staying.”

  Almost as the suspicion about entrapping her father formed, she rejected it. There would be real danger for her if she were captured. Still, doubt mingled with the intense pleasure Alphonse’s kiss created. The movement of his mouth against hers as he explained made it very hard to think, but that very fact renewed her suspicion. Resentment got all muddled up with her need to draw Alphonse to the bed, where all doubts would be allayed as the emptiness in her was filled. The need, growing with his caress, fed the doubt, the doubt fed the need. For her own pride’s sake, to assure herself she was not totally enslaved, Barbara found the strength to ask, “When?”

  “I am not certain.” He bent his head and kissed her throat where the loosened bedgown had fallen away. “We must first get the horses to Thomas, and he must arrange that the prince be allowed to try them out where there is room to gallop—that is, beyond the walls of Hereford.” He nibbled at her throat again before he murmured, “Not less than a week or more than three weeks from now, because the prince’s birth date is in June.”

  Her arms were still braced against his chest but she did not push him away. She could not. Her bones felt like limp strings, but she managed to say, “I meant when must Bevis and Lewin leave Evesham?”

  “The sooner the better after you arrive there.”

  Barbara let her hands slide down her husband’s body, over his hips, down to his firm buttocks. If he did not mean to set the trap for her father at once, she could take what she wanted before beginning a quarrel. Doubt of her own motives made her resist a moment longer to make sure. “You mean,” she whispered, “you want me to send for my father’s troop after I arrive in Evesham?”

  “After…” Alphonse relaxed the guard he had been holding on himself while he made sure she would not send her men out too soon. Barbe would not deliberately betray the plan to free Prince Edward, but it was better if she could not do so by accident, and did not suspect his uneasiness. “Yes…after,” he whispered, his eyes half closed, one hand pulling her even tighter against him as he moved his hips.

  The very tip of his tongue made a little circle in the V where her collarbones met, and she sighed and reached for his belt.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Four days later, the opinions of each had become fixed. Alphonse was certain he had manipulated his wife into doing as he wished, and Barbara had resolved on going to Evesham, but not one yard farther. In part, her decision was influenced by the impossibility of remaining in Wigmore. Mortimer had left his keep the day after he returned with Alphonse. What he told his wife—or perhaps because he told her nothing—seemed to have turned her to stone. She avoided Barbara and Alphonse whenever she could and hardly squeezed a word between frozen lips when they were forced into proximity, as at meals. The austere guest house of an abbey would seem a high revel in comparison with the scarcely controlled fear and rage in Wigmore.

  Barbara could not face that reminder of what she was concealing from herself. Buried under layers of jealous fear that Alphonse simply wanted to be rid of her, of angry suspicion that he had become so caught up in the game of politics that he was willing to use his own wife as a pawn, of a kind of pleasure in being clever and independent enough to go her own way despite her love was her terror for him. To hide from herself the knowledge that he would fight for Edward, that he might be injured or killed or captured with the prince, she concentrated on her surface dissatisfactions.

  Several times Barbara thought longingly of doing just what Alphonse still believed she would do—seeking her father’s protection. Being a guest in Evesham might be better than living with Matilda de Mortimer, but the thought of going home to her father and to the loving support Joanna would give her was a glimpse of heaven denied. She refused to think about it, knowing if she consulted with Bevis and Lewin, they three could concoct a plan for getting her to Framlingham without casting doubts on Norfolk’s loyalty. The truth was she could not go so far away from where the fighting might be. She needed to be where a day’s hard ride would bring her to her husband if ill befell him.

  On May 26 a messenger on a lathered horse rode into Wigmore soon after dinner. By nones, Alphonse was lifting Barbara down from Frivole’s saddle in the courtyard of the guest houses in Wigmore Abbey. Out of deference to the porter, who was waiting to show Barbara to her quarters, he did not kiss her as he would have liked to do, only took her hand. Then the porter turned his back, and Alphonse lifted her hand to his mouth and gently touched the tips of her fingers with his tongue.

  “How I will miss you,” he murmured.

  “You could come with me,” Barbara said, closing her fingers around his hand.

  “You know I cannot,” he replied, frowning. “I have given my word.”

  Barbara opened her mouth to say “A word that can make you dead,” but she knew the protest was useless, and said instead, “I know.”

  “I will come for you as soon as I am freed from my promise,” he said. “When you are settled, write and tell me where you are.” He leaned closer and whispered so the monk could not hear, “Write to Gilbert. I will be with him or he will know where I am.” He raised her hand and kissed it again, then pulled loose. “God help me, I miss you already.”

  He turned away quickly, as if he must wrench himself free to make the parting briefer and thus less painful. It was a technique he had honed to perfection, but this time he was caught in his own snare. When he was mounted and looked back, Barbara was calmly walking away with the porter, not standing and waving or weeping or simply staring after him. Doubt stabbed deeply, presenting to him every likely and unlikely reason for her indifference, except the idea that she was not indifferent at all and had turned away to hide from him the tears streaking her face. Had the notion occurred to him, he would have dismissed it as ridiculous. To his mind there was no reason for Barbe to hide her fear and her tears, and thus her love.

  They were man and wife and had a right to love openly. To Alphonse that was one of the greatest joys of the married state. He had grown very tired of concealment, of lies, of the uneasiness of needing to look calmly into the eyes of cuckolded husbands. He did not need to vow he would seek no other woman. Not once since Barbe had agreed to be his wife had he desired any body but hers. So Alphonse was agonized because she had not watched him go, had not tried to cling to the sight of him—as he would have turned and turned again to cling to the sight of her—as long as possible. He suffered all the way to Weobly, where another message from Thomas, which drove personal
considerations from his mind, was waiting for him.

  “One of the horses sent by my brother has too hard a mouth,” Thomas wrote. “I will send a man to return it to you on Thursday. He will meet you west of Wydmarsh Gate where the land rises into little hills. Wear a white hat so that my man may know you. If you wave it, he will come to you at once and your business may be done quickly.”

  Thursday. That did not give them much time. Alphonse spent a minute wondering whether the early date for trying the horses and choosing one had been set to gratify Edward’s impatience to have a new horse or to make more difficult any plan of escape. In the next minute, he dismissed the question. He and Mortimer had devised the plan before the horses were delivered, but there was still much to do in a shorter time than expected. Parties had been leaving and returning to Weobly for a week, as if a nervous Mortimer was scouring the countryside. That did not change, except that the parties leaving were larger and those that returned had fewer men and horses and most of the men rode awkwardly.

  Alphonse went out of Weobly with a party that headed east after dinner on Wednesday, May 27. They traveled some distance, then turned sharply north into a little wood. There they waited for anyone who was following to take up their trail, but no one came to the edge of the wood or into it. When they were sure there were no watchers, they found a group of serfs mounted on farm horses and bade them ride back to Weobly manor. After the serfs were on the road going west, they turned east again within the wood and finally, before the wood ended, south. They crossed the road into another, smaller wood and left a man where he could see a good way up and down the road. Bearing southeast now, the party came out on hilly grazing land. Here they stopped while men who knew the area examined the small wooded copses and hidden valleys. They returned to report the land empty, except for a few shepherds, and rode away again prepared to watch through the night in case Thomas’s message was a trap. At dusk Alphonse, Chacier, and one other man rode south toward the top of the final rise. To the north of the broad slope they saw a boy seated on the ground beside a tethered horse. From his saddlebag Alphonse took a broad-brimmed white traveling hat and put it on. The boy stood up and waved.

  “No change,” the boy said as soon as Alphonse and his men had ridden close enough to hear ordinary speech.

  “Do you ride back?” Alphonse asked as he dismounted.

  “Now that you are here, no. If you had not come, I was to go back at dawn.”

  The boy’s face was alive with curiosity, but Alphonse said nothing to satisfy it. He unloosened his saddle roll, threw the boy a blanket, and pulled one around himself. Chacier and the man-at-arms also dismounted. Chacier took bread and cheese from his saddlebags, which he shared with his master and the boy. No one spoke at all, and after eating they all lay down. By the time full dark had blanketed the hill, the boy was asleep. Alphonse sat up and touched Chacier, who felt about until he found the small hollow he had marked while they ate. He pulled most of the grass from it. On the bare earth, he lit a little fire. The man-at-arms walked to the top of the hill and lay down where he could watch the road below without being seen.

  Through the night men came and went, reporting on the gathering of the troop that had left Weobly in small groups and made their way to a tiny copse, no more, really, than a windbreak, below the hill east of the road. In the quiet of midnight, Alphonse heard the bells ring for matins and by the time the faint peal for lauds came, together with the light of false dawn, Alphonse calculated that at least fifty men were in place. Then he ate more of the bread and cheese, washed it down, with a mild expression of despair at English taste, with a few swallows of ale, and lay down to sleep. Chacier woke him about an hour after tierce.

  “A party of five has just ridden into the meadow and dismounted,” he said softly.

  Dadais had already been moved as close to the top of the rise as he could be without showing up against the skyline. Chacier’s horse was well down the hillside, ready for the dash to warn the troop to block the road after the prince had passed. The boy and the man-at-arms were gone. Alphonse climbed to the top of the hill, crouched behind some low brush, and looked out. In the distance, he could make out the walls of Hereford. Just below was the road, snaking back toward those walls. On the left of the road was the mingled lush green, glittering wet, and tall brown stalks of rushes that marked marshland. To the right the marsh had filled in to form a wide, flat meadow. Between the meadow and the town was another of those little copses that dotted the countryside.

  The spot could not have been better chosen, Alphonse thought. Most of what took place in the meadow would be hidden from watchers on the walls, and any sounds they made would be blurred, too. In the time he had taken to get into position, one man, taller than the others—obviously the prince—had clearly tried one of the horses and found it wanting. He was thrusting the reins of the magnificent animal into the hands of a much smaller, slighter man—no doubt Thomas. The way their hands moved indicated that Thomas was protesting Edward’s decision and urging him to try the horse again. Edward gestured the animal away and moved to mount another.

  He rode the horse in a circle, guiding it with reins and knees to turn and lift. Then he seemed to call something to the waiting men and spurred the animal into a gallop. He rode madly to the edge of the meadow, turned, and rode back again just as the other four men started to mount to follow him. But he did not dismount immediately; he rode the horse back and forth until Alphonse, although he could not see it at that distance, knew the beast was tired and lathered with sweat. Alphonse settled down to wait. Edward had two more horses to wear out.

  By the time Edward dismounted from the fourth horse, Alphonse could see his four companions grouped together as if they were bored and paying little attention to him. Thomas approached, leading the animal the prince had first rejected. They seemed to have words, and Thomas turned away sharply as if angry. He mounted the rejected horse and Edward mounted the last untried animal. Both began to circle, as Edward had done with all the other horses. The other men hardly looked at what was taking place.

  Swallowing a burst of excitement, Alphonse flung himself into Dadais’s saddle and rode to the top of the hill. Edward promptly set spurs into his mount, which broke into a gallop. Thomas hesitated a moment, then followed suit. Alphonse started Dadais down the hill, waving his hat as Edward came to the edge of the meadow, where he had previously turned his horse to go back. This time he headed into the road instead, crouching low over the saddle, spurring and slapping the horse to wring more speed from it. A length behind, Thomas’s big black stallion thundered. The last thing Alphonse saw before he was too far down the hill for an overview was Edward’s three other companions mounting the exhausted horses left with them.

  Edward flew past, then Thomas. Alphonse turned Dadais into the road and fell in behind, intending to keep his armored body between the lightly clad escapees and their pursuers, if the pursuers ever caught up. He could hear shouts behind him, but only a few voices, faint with distance. That meant there had been no troop guarding the prince closer to the town. Even as he shook his head in disbelief at the credulity of Leicester, the voices behind him faded out entirely. Clearly they had seen the hopelessness of chasing Edward on exhausted horses and were riding back to Hereford to summon help.

  One patch of woods loomed up on Alphonse’s right. Beyond, on the other side of the road, was another. On the grass verge between the wood and the trees, Chacier waited, wearing a white hat. Edward rode on without slowing, Thomas behind him. As soon as they were past, Chacier started after them while Alphonse slowed Dadais to wait for the men who began to pour out of the wood. Five men rode south out of the copse. They would go along the north bank of the Wye until they could ford the river and continue south, laying a false trail. The rest of the troop blocked the road completely, riding slowly north. When the distance between the troop and the three was about a quarter of a mile, Chacier spurred his mount, which overtook Edward’s and Thomas’s tiring horses. A
lphonse watched Chacier take the lead, then turned to signal, and the first ten men rode off to the right, driving their horses up the hill as fast as they could go. At the top they would divide, five riding due east and five curving back as if to go around Hereford and head south.

  The main body of the troop continued on the road for another quarter of a mile. There a second signal sent another ten men left on a narrow track. Alphonse knew that was where Chacier had led Edward and Thomas. They would soon come to a branch of the Wye, which they would ford. At the ford, the men following them would form two parties. Eight would cross behind them, three would continue on along the south bank of the tributary west toward Wales.

  Alphonse pulled Dadais aside and the troop rode past him. He was relieved when the last man passed the track. To be too close might draw attention to it. But he wanted to be in sight so that the attention of the pursuers would focus on his troop rather than on the side path. He was just wondering whether to order the men to stop when shouts from the rear warned him that pursuers were finally coming.

  One wordless yell made the men pick up speed, as if they still hoped to get away. Alphonse glanced over his shoulder to make sure the oncoming men were gaining. A second shout brought the troop to a halt, the men putting on helmets and raising their shields as they brought their horses to face the pursuers, except for two who had been ordered to ride on as fast as they could. With any luck, someone in the oncoming troop would see them and believe Edward and Thomas had fled toward Leominster.

  Alphonse had just time enough to see the men from Hereford sweep past the track the prince had taken before he shouted a third time and gestured with his drawn sword. At the touch of the spur, Dadais leapt forward toward the lead man in the pursuing party, who suddenly screamed, “Traitor! Traitor!”

  Before he remembered that he carried a blank shield, wore no colors, and could not be recognized with his helmet on, Alphonse aimed a tremendous blow at the oncoming rider. Until Edward was safe and raising an army, he did not want his name associated with this venture. Then he saw the leader’s head was slightly turned. It was not he who was being called “traitor” but the two fleeing away up the road. Simultaneously, he recognized Henry de Montfort’s shield.