There were footsteps on the staircase and the steward returned, this time with two servants. One of them was Osric, the other a boy I had not seen before, shorter and, it appeared, younger, with dark hair that was a tangle of curls.
‘He’ll be with us shortly,’ Wigod said, which surprised me a little, as I had thought he would have found the chaplain missing. But on the other hand I had been gone some while; he would have been able to return to the house long before me. I felt my heart begin to pound; at least I would have the chance to challenge him in person. I wanted an explanation.
The two boys saw to the fire, and soon it was burning fiercely again, though a chill had taken hold of my body and I realised I was still shivering. Osric went and came back in with two iron pails filled with water, which he suspended on the spit over the flames.
‘Bring me some food,’ I said to him.
He looked back at me with a blank expression on his face, and I recalled that he did not speak French. I looked to Wigod despairingly.
‘Breng him mete and drync,’ the steward said loudly. Osric grunted and hurried away through a door at the end of the hall.
‘Do you know why he attacked you?’ Wace asked.
I shrugged, though it was clear to me that whatever business the two churchmen had had, they had not meant it to be witnessed by anyone else. The two knights had to be in the pay of one of them. I couldn’t think of any other explanation which made sense.
‘He might have been drunk,’ I suggested, though I was fairly sure that he was not.
Wace frowned, his good eye narrowing, the other all but closing, so that if I hadn’t known better I might have thought he were winking at me. ‘Did you provoke him?’ he asked.
‘Provoke him?’ I choked off a laugh. ‘I didn’t even see him.’ That at least was true enough. ‘The first I knew of him was his knife at my throat—’
?lfwold emerged from upstairs and I broke off. I rose sharply from my stool – too sharply, for a sudden dizziness overtook me. My feet felt uncertain of their grounding and I had to put a hand out against one of the hall’s wooden pillars to steady myself.
The chaplain was dressed in the same tunic and trews he had worn on the road; his hair was loose and stuck up in tufts from his head. ‘What’s the matter?’ He looked at me and stopped, and he must have noticed my cheek for a look of concern spread over his face. ‘You’re wounded,’ he said.
‘I was attacked,’ I said flatly. ‘Tonight, by St Eadmund’s church.’ I watched him carefully, in case my mention of the place yielded a response, but his face did not so much as flicker.
‘Attacked?’ he asked.
I did not reply, still trying to determine from his expression whether there was anything he might be concealing, but I found nothing.
‘By another knight,’ put in Eudo.
The chaplain’s eyes opened wide. ‘Is this true?’
‘It’s what I said, isn’t it?’ I asked.
‘Do you know who it was? The name of his lord?’
I stared back at him, searching. Either he was able to control himself far better than most men, or truly it had not been him. ‘No,’ I said eventually.
‘How did this happen?’
Osric came back in, carrying in one hand a wooden platter with bread and some kind of meat, and in the other an iron pot with an arched handle, which he hung over the hearth. He placed the platter down beside the stool; my stomach gave a low rumble, but I ignored it for the moment.
‘How it happened isn’t important,’ I said. A flash of pain ran through my cheek, and I put my hand to it.
‘Are you still bleeding?’ ?lfwold asked as he approached.
‘It’s nothing,’ I replied, stepping away from the wooden post and sitting back down on the stool. ‘No more than a scratch.’ If it wasn’t ?lfwold I had seen earlier, then who was it? Who had hired those men?
‘It looks deep. Let me see it.’ He squatted down beside me, digging out a small cloth from his pocket and raising it slowly up to my cheek.
‘It’s nothing!’ I repeated, wrenching away from him and towards the hearth.
He drew back, and from the look of sheer confusion that crossed his face I knew that it could not have been him. Anger flared up inside me and I felt suddenly foolish. I had thought to accuse a priest, a man of God and the Church, who had helped me recover after my fever only three weeks before. The same priest who was chaplain and confessor to the man who was now my lord.
The hall fell silent but for the water bubbling on the hearth and the crackling of the logs beneath. I felt the eyes of the others upon me, and wondered what they must be thinking.