Simon flicked the reins, and his palfrey started picking her way down the road into the Vallia de Campesito. Mathieu clucked to his donkey and kept pace with him.
"Do you believe that you are committing a grave sin by being the Count de Gobignon?"
"My mother and Roland say no, but I do not think they are very good Christians. They are full of pagan ideas. I am Count Amalric's only male heir. And the blood of the house of Gobignon does flow in my veins. I am not the son of Count Amalric de Gobignon, but I am the grandson of his father, Count Stephen de Gobignon."
Friar Mathieu clapped his hand to his forehead. "I am lost in the tangle of bloodlines. What in heaven's name do you mean?"
Simon's entire body burned with shame as he thought how accursed his family would seem to anyone hearing this for the first time. The bastard son of a bastard son. The usurper of his half uncle's title. Tangled, indeed. Twisted was a better word for it.
In his agony he whispered the words. "Roland de Vency, my true father, is the bastard son of Count Stephen de Gobignon, sired by rape in Languedoc. Roland and Count Amalric were half brothers."
"God's mercy!" exclaimed Friar Mathieu. "But then you do have some claim by blood to the title. To whom else could it go?"
"I suppose the fiefdom could go to my oldest sister, Isabelle, and her husband. He is a landless knight, a vassal of the Count of Artois. My three sisters married far beneath their stations—because of what Count Amalric did."
Friar Mathieu sighed. "Would any great evil come of it, do you think, if you were to give up your estate?"
"My mother and father—my true father, Roland de Vency—would be exposed as adulterers. We would all be charged as criminals, for defrauding the kingdom and the rightful heirs, whoever they might be." He saw his mother kneeling with her head on a chopping block, and a chill of horror went through him.