CHAPTER 43It was difficult to concentrate when my memory was again flooded with the past, particularly that past, that betrayal; so, forcefully, I shovelled my mind clear, and bent it instead to the problem of the bear brooch, and how it had found its way into Martin’s burned hand.
If Hereward himself had placed it there, how and when had he managed to do so in the midst of such a fight? Had he suspected the man who now lay asleep in the men’s guest-house, guarded in turns by the twins and the Siwards? Would Asselin’s story, when at last he told it, confirm whatever this brooch was meant to tell? Gilbert had ordered the questioning to wait for the morning, and weakly I had given in. So, after visiting Aediva, still isolated in the depths of her grief, I had come back to my own guest-house
