1194, Oxford Castle, Oxford

‘Have I told you, Lady Rebecca … have I told you how beautiful your eyes are?’ John cooed from her lap. He looked up at her, a blissful smile stretched across his face. ‘Have I, my dear?’

Becks nodded and smiled down at him faintly. ‘One hundred and twenty-seven times, Sire,’ she replied matter-of-factly as she gently stroked his cheek.

He laughed. ‘You are so … so precise!’ He sat up suddenly and looked at her intently. ‘That is why, I think, I have fallen so in love with you. You are not like all the other women I have known … feather-headed moo-cows who think of nothing but poems and silly frivolities. You are …’ He frowned, struggling to find the right words. ‘You are so very different!’

She nodded slowly, carefully weighing up what was the most appropriate thing to say back to him.

She giggled shyly, a gesture she’d observed other women use all the time in response to flirtatious flattery. ‘I thank you for your kind words, Sire.’

He frowned. Mock serious. ‘Sire? Sire? You must call me John, my dear. Please. In fact I am yours to call whatever you wish!’

She nodded. ‘Then I shall call you John.’

He smiled dreamily and collapsed back, his head cradled in her lap once more. ‘I have never felt so content,’ he murmured, his eyes closing as she stroked his troubled brow. ‘Never in my miserable life, not even with so many things to vex me – troublesome barons, no money, unrest, troubles, troubles, troubles …’ He continued, she pretending to listen, nodding at what she calculated were the right moments, but the cognitive part of her mind was busy elsewhere.

[Mission time remaining: 588 hours 56 minutes]

Time was running out. Another three weeks and she would have to return to 2001. If frustration had been an emotion she could emulate, she supposed she’d be feeling it now. Just over five months of this, simulating love-play with the Earl of Cornwall and Gloucester. That first night he’d visited her room unannounced, expecting her to surrender herself to him … she had miscalculated the response and thrown him to the floor. That was the night, he later admitted, that he’d fallen head over heels – literally – in love with her.

At first, she’d been uncertain how effective and convincing her responses were going to be to his overtures, his poems, his breast-beating declarations of utter infatuation. But then one of the household maids had spotted her awkwardness and taken her to one side. An older woman, with a lifetime of experience to offer her, she listened intently. The maid gave Becks advice on how best to respond to all the things John was likely to say, how best to please him.

She’d wondered how exactly to translate the nugget of advice into a practical behavioural response strategy. Cross-referencing it with modern language idioms, she concluded the old lady meant: Play hard to get.

Which was the tactical solution she’d decided to adopt. And it appeared to have worked. John, to use another modern expression, ‘was like putty in her hands’. Like a fawning puppy. She understood that gave her some degree of leverage; that she could ask favours of John that no one else would dare to ask. But a part of her AI understood human behaviour enough to know that to ask him too much about the thing she wished to know more about was to invite his suspicion.

This thing, of course, was the Treyarch Confession.

In the last five months, she had chosen to raise the subject less than half a dozen times. On each occasion she’d only asked after ensuring John had consumed enough wine to render him insensibly drunk.

His rambling replies had yielded some useful information.

The Confession was something that his older brother, Richard, had come across as a much younger man, back when the sons of Henry II were all still boys and living at Beaumont Palace. It was apparent that John was not lying when he said he had no idea how the document found its way into the royal library, but that somehow his father had acquired it.

According to John, throughout his childhood he had memories of how his father guarded it carefully and read it frequently. It became an obsession of his older brother Richard, an obsession to find out what mysterious story was contained in this Confession. And one day, when he was merely twelve years of age, Richard finally discovered the Confession hidden carefully in his father’s library of scrolls, parchments and manuscripts.

And it changed him.

As John muttered on about love, in her lap, Becks replayed in her mind the audio file of the last occasion they’d spoken about the Confession. He’d been lying by the fire as it roared and crackled from a fresh log, his voice thick with drunkenness, his words slurred.

‘Overnight it seemed … Richard was utterly transformed. He was still an awful bully. But now … now he was a bully with a singular vision of destiny. He said he would take Father’s kingdom and make it an empire. That God had shown him the way he would do it. I know … I know this is why the stupid fool went to the Holy Land. As soon as Father and our oldest brother Geoffrey died and Richard became king … that’s the first thing he did – launch his bloody crusade.’

Becks heard her own voice. ‘God showed him the way he would do it?’

‘Yes … yes … it was in that wretched Confession, wasn’t it? The Grail story, you see? It was all in there. It was what turned him into the crazy man … what’s made him so, so very dangerous.’

‘Is the Confession still in the royal library?’

‘I … I … would not know, nor care to know. It … I suppose Richard would consider Oxford the safest place for it to be kept. But, please … enough of that madman, my dear … I’m getting stomach pains thinking about him.’

A pause. ‘You fear him?’

Another pause. A long one. Then finally …

‘I am terrified of him.’

‘Because he will blame you for losing the Grail?’

No sound except the crackle of flames on scorched wood. Becks, however, recalled his gesture, a silent nod of the head, his eyes wide with the look of a man considering his own imminent death.

‘I fear I will be a dead man on his return.’

She recalled the haunted look on his face. ‘Let me at least enjoy whatever time I have left … with you … and not speak his name again tonight?’