Blimey, turns out it's twelve and a half years since I read Jecks and his Sir Baldwin series. The last one I read, in the earliest days of this blog, King's Gold, post-dates this one, which is set in 1325, primarily in France, where Sir Baldwin and his friend Bailiff Simon Puttock, are part of Queen Isabella's security as she tries to negotiate a treaty with her brother, King Charles IV.
The stumbling block is that Charles and Isabella have not been on the best of terms since Isabella told her father Philip IV that the wives of Charles and another brother were promiscuous adulteresses, carrying on their debauches in the infamous Tour de Nesle. Both wives were put away. Charles's wife Blanche is still alive in 1325, a prisoner in the squalid Chateau Galliard, the marriage long since annulled. Charles is about to marry for the third time, a child bride who is also his first cousin.
Isabella has been likewise sidelined in England, because her husband has replaced Piers Gaveston with a new and more demanding lover, Hugh le Despenser. Despenser wants the mission to France to fail and Isabella to be discredited. Edward II's former friend and general, Roger Mortimer, is living in Parisian exile. He is actually not yet the Queen's lover.
As a former Templar, Baldwin himself is in danger in France, Philip IV being the king who destroyed the Temple and burned the leading Templars. Baldwin wasn't in France at the time but still has a price on his head. Meanwhile people in the retinue are dying: Enguerrand, Comte de Foix, is killed after an argument with Baldwin; his squire, Robert de Chatillon, is attacked and later murdered; an old soldier associated with Foix and Robert is killed in the first attack. Before any of this, the garrison at Chateau Galliard, the prison-keepers of the woman who would have been queen, has been wiped out, Blanche herself having disappeared. The garrison, moreover, comprised men hired by Robert de Chatillon on the orders of Comte Enguerrand.
The mystery is tantalizing and complex. The book, however, is too long and its structure too fractured. It would have been better to focus only on what Baldwin and Simon know, experience, or discover. It was enjoyable enough but, being so splintered, lacked grip.
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