“Oh, no, Mrs Blakescroft,” the woman smiled. “I'm not on your side.” She caught her eyes, held them, said nothing more.
[Home]
Where There Is Smoke
Thirty or forty souls, mostly workmen and a handful of villagers, formed a knot of bodies at the bank of the Fosse. The volume and tone of their shouts, which knifed through the morning river-mist, made their agitation plain. They closed a tight circle around two men-at-arms wearing ravens on their livery, who looked uncertainly at each other and kept their hands on the pommels of their blades as they shouted for the mob to make space.
The Baroness Theresa Bramwood surveyed the mass of people warily as she followed her knight Sedgwin down the bank. Minutes ago she had been asleep in her tent, one of the rare moments of contentment that she had come to treasure since coming to Guilford. Then the broad-shouldered knight had started shouting for her through the canvas. Now she tried to will away the fog of sleep so she could confront this thing, whatever it was, in her dressing gown.
Sedgwin had declined to explain what had provided the stimulus for her rude awakening. He had simply claimed a lack of words. This in itself was nothing unusual — the knight was a man of few words — but it was also true that Sir Sedgwin had no sense of drama. He did not withhold information to create suspense; if anything, he was mute because he really could not put the situation into words. Which meant it required her attention, and quickly.
"Foster, Coop!" he shouted to the men-at-arms, gaining more attention from the men and women who were not quite assailing them. "Put those swords away."
"We haven't so much as shown steel, sir," the darker of the two, Coop, reported. His eyes didn't leave the half-circle of commoners surrounding him shoulder-to-shoulder.
"You lot, shove off," Sedgwin shouted at the people. At a discreet noise from the baroness, he amended his diction but not his tone: "Return to your business, goodfolk. This is a matter for the Baroness."
Prompted by the man's steely-eyed stare, the crowd slowly began to break up. They drifted away with the hesitant air of a child told to leave the room, who nonetheless intended to wait on the other side of the door. A handful needed a shout from Sedgwin to start moving their feet, but already the baroness could see, between their slow-to-move legs, what lay between the two men-at-arms.
She did not gasp; instead, she substituted a long intake of breath and staggered to a stop. "Is that...?"
Sedgwin looked down at the crumpled figured on the ground. "Near as I could tell," he said, nodding. He knelt beside the unmoving man where he sprawled in the mud and gingerly tipped the head to face his liege. The unconscious man had high, aristocratic cheekbones, a thin, sharp nose, and mud-grimed hair caught between white-gold and grey. "It's Eduard Camwright."
