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least?’
    ‘Because there are no estates left to manage.’
    I gasped and pulled my mare to a halt. ‘You say?’
    He sighed and I could see the story hurt him deeply.
    ‘My father went to the Crusade as a Templar knight. He … renounced his marriage and passed his p ossessions over to the knights. Admittedly he sought a guarantee that my mother and myself should be housed and some of the monies from the estate should go to our welfare but the Templars were so much bigger than my father and a year after he left for Jerusalem, my mother a nd I were turned off Gisborne. We sought to travel to Anjou to my mother’s family, but she caught an ague and died in a small priory near Great Harwich. As for my father, he is still alive I believe ; if you call the way he lives a life. Somewhere near Jerusalem, he leads the life of a leper… ’
    My breath sucked in. ‘Guy… ’
    ‘He may be aware of hi s wife’s death, I don’t know. The Knights Templar seemed to lose interest in him once they had our estates and once my father became a leper. So you see, I have nothing, Ys abel, and yet I am noble born. I am the son of a madman who believed he could secure a passage to Paradise if he joined the Knights Templar and fought in a Holy War and t hanks to him my mother died in ignominious circumstance s. My ow n future is what I make of it. I took employment where I could find it and because I am high born and educated, I have be en the steward for a number of nobles. Bu t I do not stay long with any. I leave whilst I am respected and liked and I work my way back up the chain.’
    I t seemed I could not stop him. Once he started, it was like a confessional and words flowed from him, drippin g in un-camouflaged bitterness. I found I hardly blamed him. It was a sad story and I was not a little afraid of the chill manner with which he told it .
    ‘I said to you once that status is power. T hu s I work my way to knighthood. Have no doubt – I shall be knighted and recognised an d shall have lands and wealth. And no one, not any single man, shall ever tak e from me what I see as mine.’
    We rode further and my heart sank just a little, for bitt erness is a hard nut to crack.
    ‘I would lay bets that this is not what yo u wished to hear, Lady Ysabel,’ he commented. ‘ But you now know with whom you travel. If it offends yo u, I apologise. But it is what I am.’
    I didn’t know how to respond. I had lost my mother but she died in comfort in the magn ificent Lady Chamber as they called her room at Moncrieff. I still had my father and he hadn’t disavowed himself of me , but not only that, Moncrieff was still our family demesnes. I had led a charmed and spoiled life in Aquitaine where my father’s wealth and that of my mother’s family meant I wanted for nothing, least of all status. How could I possibly understand what he felt? Every word he spoke had been underlined with wicked irony by church bells clanging on the wind from Le Mans, and I wondered if he had repudiated the Church altogether after being treated so falsely by men of God.
    ‘ Those bells are loud,’ I said to break the tension but he didn’t reply and so against my better judgement I pushed him further. ‘ Have you never wished to find your father?’
    ‘I know where he is. There is a leper order, the Order of Saint Lazarus outside Jerusalem. It’s an H ospitaller order run like the Knights Templar and they care for each other and others who have the illness.’
    ‘Then he is a man to be admired.’
    ‘He had no choice. He was a Templar and he was a leper. It was join the Order or d ie on the streets of Jerusalem. I fee l nothing but disgust for him. He killed my mother.’
    ‘You should forgive him, Guy. He will die a terrible death.’
    ‘He will have monks around him to hear his final conf ession and give him his rites. He does not need my forgiveness.’
    I felt to ask him anything else was to open wounds that he w as perhaps trying desperately to