I smiled despite myself.
“What will you do?” I asked.
“Get Geoffrey away from court.”
“How?”
“With subtlety, planning, and at least one lie so respectable it may wear a hat.”
“That sounds legal.”
“It is feudal politics. Legal is a matter of who survives long enough to write the record.”
I sank into the chair. My chair. The one with the embroidered cushion. The one someone had placed near his desk because I kept ending up there.
“What if he cannot leave?” I asked.
“Then I will send someone to fetch him.”
“Who?”
The Baron gave me a look.
I thought of Aldwin, lying somewhere north of Nottingham with his ruined leg, probably insulting surgeons and terrifying squires.
“Not Aldwin,” I said.
“Not unless his horse has learned to carry him while he argues from a stretcher.”
“That does sound possible.”
“With Aldwin, regrettably, many absurdities are possible.”
He stood and went to the wall where a map hung pinned between two shelves. It was not the clean, printed map my brain wanted. It was inked by hand, full of odd proportions and local certainties. Roads thickened where men used them often. Rivers curved with the confidence of people who had crossed them inbad weather. Villages appeared or vanished according to loyalty, usefulness, or whether the cartographer had been paid.
The Baron touched Marlborough with one finger. Then Thames and then the roads between.
“Geoffrey is right,” he said. “He needs a plausible errand.”
“What kind?”
“One that appears to serve the Crown without leaving him in its hand.”
“That sounds impossible.”
“Most useful things do.”
He was already thinking.
I could see it happen even as the grief and fear didn’t leave his face. By morning there would be letters. By noon there would be riders. By nightfall half a dozen men would be moving through the country on orders they only partly understood.
This was how the Baron loved his sons. Not with speeches but with logistics.
“I hate this,” I said. “I hate that the King can just take people in the night.”
The Baron looked at the map.
“So do I.”