“There’s a town in Normandy called Cherbourg. That’s where he came from.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I look so much like him, they thought I was a ghost.”
Mother sat down heavily on a stool. Jack felt guilty about having shocked her so badly, but he had not expected her to be so shaken by the news. She said: “What ... what are his people like?”
“His father’s dead, but his mother’s still alive. She was kind, once she was convinced I wasn’t the ghost of my father. His older brother is a carpenter with a wife and three children. My cousins.” He smiled. “Isn’t that nice? We’ve got relations.”
The thought seemed to upset her, and she looked distressed. “Oh, Jack, I’m so sorry I didn’t give you a normal upbringing.”
“I’m not,” he said lightly. He was embarrassed when his mother showed remorse: it was so out of character for her. “But I’m glad I met my cousins. Even if I never see them again, it’s good to know they’re there.”
She nodded sadly. “I understand.”
Jack took a deep breath. “They thought my father had drowned in a shipwreck twenty-four years ago. He was aboard a vessel called the White Ship which went down just out of Barfleur. Everyone was thought to have drowned. Obviously my father survived. But somehow they never knew that, because he never went back to Cherbourg.”
“He went to Kingsbridge,” she said.
“Butwhy?”
She sighed. “He clung to a barrel and was washed ashore near a castle,” she said. “He went to the castle to report the shipwreck. There were several powerful barons at the castle, and they showed great consternation when he turned up. They took him prisoner and brought him to England. After some weeks or months—he got rather confused—he ended up in Kingsbridge.”
“Did he say anything else about the wreck?”
“Only that the ship went down very fast, as if it had been holed.”
“It sounds as if they needed to keep him out of the way.”
She nodded. “And then, when they realized they couldn’t hold him prisoner forever, they killed him.”
Jack knelt in front of her and forced her to look at him. In a voice shaking with emotion he said: “But who werethey,Mother?”
“You’ve asked me that before.”
“And you’ve never told me.”
“Because I don’t want you to spend your life trying to avenge the death of your father!”
She was still treating him like a child, withholding information that might not be good for him, he felt. He tried to be calm and adult. “I’m going to spend my life building Kingsbridge Cathedral and making babies with Aliena. But I want to know why they hanged my father. And the only people who have the answer are the men who gave false testimony against him. So I have to know who they were.”
“At the time I didn’t know their names.”
He knew she was being evasive and it made him angry.“But you know now!”
“Yes, I do,” she said tearfully, and he realized that this was as painful for her as it was for him. “And I’ll tell you, because I can see you’ll never stop asking.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes.
He waited in suspense.
“There were three of them: a monk, a priest and a knight.”
Jack looked at her hard. “Their names.”
“You’re going to ask them why they lied under oath?”
“Yes.”
“And you expect them to tell you?”
