The White Cross Read Online Free Page B

his mother. At the tent pole. Anywhere but at his bride – and you can tell he’s nervous by the way he’s shuffling his feet. But you’d think he would be pleased at least to see that I am not ill favoured. Not a gorgon or a whale?
    ‘Ladies, your presence honours us. I bid you welcome.’ His French is mannerly, voice deep and hoarse – but fumbling the words. And there it is, the smile, at last! Too quick to fade but still quite nice. I think his eyes are quite expressive when he isn’t frowning. His teeth are large, but not particularly clean…
    Good Lord, I feel as if I’m valuing a horse!
    My own smile’s small and closed, the one I’ve practiced to make dimples. He’s obviously embarrassed – ducks his ill-trimmed head at me and swallows; looking like a horse and smelling like a stable!
    Let’s not be silly, he was never going to be a Galahad. But young, I’m spared a man who’s old and rank. I know he will look better when his hair is razor-cut. As in the fable, he’ll improve when he is kissed and is persuaded to grow facial hair.
    A neat brown beard I think for Garon, not a silky black one.

CHAPTER TWO
    Some things stand out as clear as day. Others fade completely, or possibly were never very vivid in the first place? I wish I could remember everything about my first meeting with Elise. But oddly it’s the hardest thing to call to mind when I look back. Since then I’ve taxed my brain until it aches to find a memory that I can trust, and failed completely. The more I try the more it seems to slip away. Which isn’t a good start for all of this.
    As I look down from heaven on the story of my life and try to work out where it all went wrong, I think perhaps that I should start with what my father said when I was seven. Or come to it as quickly as I can.
    Or should I start with guilt? Because when I look down upon the world I used to share with her, to see myself as I was when I first met Elise – I am ashamed, no other word for it. I was so set on doing what I thought right. But where was judgement? Was it my fault I was such a self-regarding fool? Or is it another kind of folly to judge what I was then from where I’ve come to now. I mean, can any addle-pated youth of three-and-twenty expect to understand what drives him?
    It takes an effort to remember what was in your mind when you have changed it since. But when I try to make some sense of what I was and how I acted, I see that I was fated from the cradle to become a soldier.
    ‘You have to be the strongest man. D’ye hear me, Garon? The bravest and the best. It is expected of you even by the peasants.’
    ‘But how?’ my childish treble, ‘How must I do it, Father?’
    ‘We’ll send you to the sergeantry at Lewes to be trained, my boy, that’s how. A knight who isn’t skilled in arms can count for nothing in this world, remember that. It is your destiny to fight.’
    I think he only told me once, but I believe I have it word for word.
    My father died soon afterwards, before he’d time to teach me any of his skills, before I’d time to know him. I have so little of him even now. His voice in memory seems very loud, and the picture that I have of a red face behind a big moustache might be the real Sir Gervase or merely something from a child’s imagination. Because the truth is that I barely knew him. I only know that from that day his words rang in my memory like verses in a chanson: ‘A knight who isn’t skilled in arms can count for nothing in this world, remember that. It is your destiny to fight.’
    Looking back, I see there was no other path to follow. If I’d ever wanted more, or less, I can’t recall it. I needed life to mean something and found the meaning in my father’s words. To say mine was a simple mind would be to state the obvious.
    But boyhood? How should I recall it? At Lewes Fortress in a world removed from all the easy freedoms of the Haddertun domain I was set to cleaning harness, trotting at the heels of