Page 49 of Lord of the Forest

Lancelot increased his pace. He had no wish to be overheard by Walter. “Constable, would you do me the kindness of restraining my accuser as we walk? I’m having a private conversation.”

Ideally, Walter should be in chains, languishing, as he had, in a cell, until the doctor’s pronouncement had been made. But that was not, it appeared, how the law worked. How uncomplicated life in the forest had seemed compared to this!

“This is the physician’s house.” Sir Richard stopped in front of a high, jettied building with its own cobbled area in front and a potted bay tree on either side of the main door.

“You’d better wait outside.” Clemence still looked shaken, and he didn’t want her submitted to any further shocks. Especially if things didn’t turn out as he hoped.

“Nay! Send me not away.” She had that stubborn set to her chin with which he was now familiar.

As the door opened to reveal a middle-aged serving woman, Sir Richard suggested, “I’m certain a private chamber can be found where Mistress Clemence and her groom can change back. You have already aroused interest in Walden, sir, but if word gets out about her little trick, it will cause a sensation.”

Lancelot stood back, letting Clemence enter the house ahead of him. “Aye—why did you exchange clothes with Perkin?”

“I was afraid they would try you, and there’d be no one to speak up for you because Sir Kester and Master Hardy weren’t there. I didn’t think they’d let a woman in, so I decided to dress up as a man. And I was about to send Perkin off in all haste to fetch the gentlemen to your aid.”

It sounded like a good ploy, proper or no. The temptation to swing her up into his arms and show her his appreciation surged within him, but he remembered his audience and their sober purpose, and promised himself to do it later. Reluctantly, he let go of her hand and allowed her to be taken off into the depths of the house.

Doctor Attewell was a scholarly-looking man, with a velvet hat atop his skull cap, and wearing a dark batwing gown over the top of his doublet. Lancelot waited patiently while Sir Richard made the explanations. Walter, to his satisfaction, was made to wait in the passageway with the constable while he was escorted into a large-windowed room—presumably the physician’s surgery.

It contained more paraphernalia than he could ever have imagined one person might possess. Huge tin-glazed drug jars lined the lower shelves, which extended around three-quarters of the room. Above these were numerous jars and pots, such as he’d seen in Clemence’s stillroom at Clairbourne, and in one corner was an outlandish apparatus fashioned entirely of glass jars and bag-shaped vessels, erected above a charcoal-filled chafing dish. The man was not only a physician but an apothecary as well.

He was still gazing, fascinated, at all the trappings of the doctor’s art, when he was asked to remove his doublet and shirt and be seated on a stool before the window.

He obliged and was initially subjected to a probing inspection of his head, accompanied by a series of sharply indrawn breaths and tuts. This was followed by a detailed examination of his back through the medium of a large glass lens. The doctor traced a finger across his shoulders.

“You see these, Sir Richard? These are, I believe, wounds made by a knife, a series of shallow stabs as one might see on a soldier whose armor has been partially pierced. See, they have not gone deep enough, any of them, to be a killing blow.”

Sir Richard stepped closer. “Were you ever in a battle?”

“Nay. At least, not that I recall.”

“I’m surprised you recall anything,” the doctor retorted. “Considering that wound on your pate.”

“It might account for my loss of memory, might it not?” Lancelot glanced sideways and saw Sir Richard cup his chin in one hand as he pondered the physician’s words. Good. Anything that cast doubt on his guilt was welcome. He didn’t want to believe he could have killed Paris.

“So, how might I have come by such a wound?” he asked.

“As it is so neatly placed on the back of your skull, I would say it was done by a well-aimed blunt object, such as a club, or a tree branch.”

“Not a weapon as such?” Sir Richard sounded puzzled.

“If it were a polearm or an ax, it would have left a cleft, not a dent. And a stone, or uneven object, would have smashed the bone into more fragments around the wound.”

Lancelot’s mind was racing, and the tension tightened in his chest. “What might such a blow do to a man, sir, other than blot out parts of his memory?”

“It could kill him. I can only imagine you’re blessed with a thick skull, as befits your stature, or you would not be speaking to us now. In your case, I imagine you were rendered unconscious for a considerable time.”

Beads of sweat pricked Lancelot’s brow. “So, if I were in combat with my brother, Paris, and he hit me from behind, I could not have fought on and killed him.”

“Nay. Impossible.”

Sir Richard drummed his fingers on the oaken windowsill. “If there was a fight, you did not get your wounds from self-defense, as they would be on the front. It seems to me your brother must have attacked you, rendered you insensible, stabbed you numerous times in the back, and left you for dead. Then he fled the scene. You’re lucky to have survived.”

He was, indeed, lucky. But how could that scrawny, scholarly boy from the portrait have done such a thing, and for what reason? Paris was the heir to Emborough, not he. As the younger brother, Lancelot would have posed no threat.

He remembered the blood in his vision. Could it have been his own?

“What if there was a third party involved in this affray?” He reached for his shirt and twined it between his fingers. “What if my brother was murdered, and I stumbled on the scene, whereupon his attacker then assaulted me, lest I reveal his crime? This third person, who would not have expected me to survive the cowardly blows he dealt me, must have panicked when I resurfaced a few weeks ago. Afraid I would remember what I’d seen, he consequently tried to poison me. I can only think of one person who would benefit from my demise.”