Chapter 17 #2
Nothing had been tidied, the aftermath of his fury still lying raw about the floor, like some forgotten battlefield claimed and then marched over by a conquering army.
Julian saw the destruction with new eyes, and he was ashamed.
A weaker woman than Sybilla Foxe would have been terrified by what he’d done, seeing what he was capable of.
Instead it had been she who had felt the need to defend herself.
The sight of jagged splinters of varnished wood rising haphazardly and threateningly, the dusty quilting exploded, chastised Julian.
This is the dangerous path you have made, he told himself. Tread carefully.
Julian stopped just inside the ruined door, while the ancient steward stepped matter-of-factly over the chaos to stand before Sybilla’s wide table, staring out the bank of windows over the glowing mist veiling the rising sun.
“Will you betray Madam to the king?” Graves asked musingly.
Julian bent down to pick up a burst embroidered pillow. He held it between his hands and then tossed it in the general vicinity of the bed. “I will take the evidence I have found to Edward. It is the duty I swore to undertake.”
“So that is a yes?”
“I am hoping that Lady Sybilla will place her trust in me to protect her.”
Graves looked over his shoulder, glancing at the floor. “As you demonstrated to her here?”
“No.” Julian sighed. “No, this was an exercise in very poor and rash judgment on my part. Uncharacteristically so, although I’m certain you don’t believe that.”
The ancient manservant neither denied nor confirmed. “What do you wish to know, Lord Griffin?” he asked in a resigned tone.
Julian regarded Graves’s slim, erect posture, his skeletal hands now clasped behind his back, the hair on his head like cobwebs. Perhaps even more so than Sybilla, Fallstowe’s steward was an enigma.
“Why is it that you only speak in questions, Graves?”
He sniffed. “How else is one ever to learn anything, my lord?”
Julian smiled and then, although he felt it was a further desecration to avail himself of Sybilla’s furnishings, he was fatigued of a sudden, so he dropped into an upholstered chair near the door.
He should have journeyed to his tower room to fetch his portfolio, but decided that it would have likely been a wasted trip.
He would get no revelatory answers from the fiercely loyal man—especially when the interview would need be conducted with dueling queries.
“Was Amicia Foxe of noble blood?”
“You don’t already know the answer to that question, my lord?”
“I do.” Julian sighed. “I believe I’ve worked through the mystery surrounding Amicia’s installation as Lady of Fallstowe so many years ago. Perhaps I was only trying you to see if you would tell me the truth.”
“But you truly desire knowledge about the lord’s betrayal at Lewes, do you not?”
Julian stilled. “Which lord? Morys Foxe or the king?”
Graves cocked his head. “Does it matter?”
“Not really, no.” Julian watched the still man closely, and drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. “Did Amicia Foxe commit treason by leading Simon de Montfort’s men to the king’s soldiers at Lewes?”
“Would you believe me if I told you the answer was no?”
“That’s impossible,” Julian spat. “All the evidence I have points to her. Witness accounts, descriptions, timing of events, opportunity, Amicia’s fondness for the de Montforts, her indebtedness to Simon himself.
Rumor is always based at least some small part of it on truth. It could be no one else.”
“Lord Griffin,” Graves began slowly, carefully, “what do you suppose would have been Lady Foxe’s fate had it been she who traveled in the dark of night to the barons’ camp, betrayed her king, and then was apprehended?”
Julian held his palm up. “De Montfort would have given her up, certainly. Her past would have been discovered. She would have been definitively outed. Stripped of her title, humiliated, likely put to a common traitor’s death.”
Graves nodded. “And after all that she had already risked, the great and awesome ruse that she had perpetrated, the spoils and respect she had won; after all that you have come to learn of her character to this point, do you think it likely that she would so blatantly and fearlessly wager her life—the lives of her entire family, Fallstowe itself—in such a brazen undertaking?”
“The evidence I have, Graves—it could be no one else.”
“Couldn’t it?”
Julian was becoming frustrated. He was getting no answers.
“Listen, old man—I have taken it apart piece by piece and then put it back together again, a hundred times—a thousand. A young, beautiful, raven-haired woman who was obviously known and trusted by de Montfort was seen at the enemy camp, seemingly instructing a small group of generals over a map. It is common knowledge that Amicia Foxe was Morys’s junior by a score of years, and tales of her handsomeness were widespread even at the time of their marriage.
That night, she was dressed in common garb and would have been taken as nothing more than a camp follower, save the one anomaly that set her apart from a common prostitute: the jeweled dagger she carried under her cloak.
She wielded it before a pair of soldiers who approached her as she was leaving the camp, supposedly offering to see her safely away.
But I presume it was more likely that they were seeking to enjoy her charms before battle.
Amicia did nothing more than brandish her weapon and warn them away with words, but both men reportedly died on the trail that night from mysterious internal injuries.
It marked the woman in the soldiers’ minds as a sorceress, and thus the legend was born. ”
Graves had nodded throughout Julian’s rapid-fire condensing of the facts he held.
“Let’s review, shall we? You say it was a handsome, young, dark-haired woman, carrying a jeweled dagger, on a desperate mission, who very swiftly and mysteriously dispatched a pair of ne’erdo-wells who threatened violation of her person? ”
Julian frowned. “Yes.”
“How young do you think Lady Foxe would have been at that time, Lord Griffin?”
“Do you mean Amicia?”
“Do I?”
Julian opened his mouth to insist that, yes, of course, that’s who he meant, but no words came to him. His heartbeat slowed, slowed, nearly stopped as the evidence towering above him tilted, swayed, and then came down around his heart.
He didn’t want to hear the next question Graves posed to him, quietly, emphatically.
“Have you not heard how closely Madam resembles her mother?”
Sybilla, on the night Julian arrived at Fallstowe, the jeweled dagger at her hip.
Her knowledge of warfare, the ways of the king, and her knack for thwarting him.
Her assertion that Julian could not save her, that she could not save herself. That Amicia was not a traitor.
The odd happenings in her bedchamber, the way she had seemingly thrown Julian against a wall without so much as touching him.
Are you a witch, Sybilla?
Perhaps I am.
Julian tried to shove his way through the roiling implications in his mind to reconcile the dates, the years past.
“She could have been no more than fifteen,” Julian managed to choke out. “No—no, that’s . . . it’s not possible.”
“Why?” Graves asked, and then turned to face Julian. “Why is it not possible that a girl, so desperate to please her mother—naively convinced that she would be aiding her father, her country—would not visit a family friend to give him assistance?”
“Sybilla . . .” Julian swallowed, all his grand ambition for bringing the truth to light before the king, in the faith that good would triumph, crumbling like a grand statue that was revealed to be formed from nothing more than old, dried mud. An illusion. A crude rendering of the truth.
Julian felt as though a crushing weight had descended upon his chest. “Sybilla is the traitor.”
So shocked by this remolding of facts was Julian that he didn’t notice Graves had come back across the room until the old steward was standing near the door.
“Is there anything else you wish to ask me at present, Lord Griffin?”
“No,” Julian said in a strangled voice, and then cleared his throat. “No, Graves, I think you have given me quite enough to think about.”
Graves stood there a moment longer before saying, in an unusually hesitant and sympathetic tone, “Loyalty can ofttimes be completely relative, wouldn’t you agree?”
Then he was gone from Sybilla’s chamber, leaving Julian staring dumbly at the destroyed room. At Sybilla Foxe’s destroyed life, dealt by Julian’s own hand.