Across the Channel, north of the luminous white cliffs that on moonlit nights warned sailors of the island’s south-eastern shore, a mourning bell tolled monotonously as if the town of Faversham itself moaned, ‘Dead. Dead. Dead.’
Citizens wore dark clothing, shops were closed, wooden shutters barred the autumnal sunlight. Outside the Abbey, black horses fretted against their trappings while they waited to draw the wagons of nobles and princes of the Church. Inside the house of God, bishops performed the ritual obsequies for King Stephen of England. They laid him to rest beside his wife and Crown Prince. Twenty years earlier this man had usurped a rich and prosperous realm. He was leaving it an impoverished shambles. Those who shed tears beside his sarcophagus did so mostly from self-pity; they had backed the wrong side in the civil war that followed the usurpation and now their fate – their castles, lands and honours – lay in the hands of Stephen’s conquerer, Henry, Duke of Normandy. The Crown Prince, Eustace, had died suddenly. The King had another son, William de Warrenne, but through force majeur and political cunning the Duke had manipulated Stephen to adopt him as heir to the throne.
Two grim-faced men in black, one taller, the other slightly older, but dressed with even greater opulence, walked side by side from the Abbey church. As they reached a covered wagon emblazoned with a double-headed eagle, a youth ran from the crowd to open the door for them. He wore the dull grey gown of a scribe but his face was of such beauty both men halted to survey him before they stepped into their richly upholstered vehicle. The older man, aged just under forty, tossed him a coin.
‘Who was that?’ the younger man asked.
‘I have no idea.’
‘But you’ll find out for me?’
His companion, Baron Richer de l’Aigle, raised an eyebrow. ‘Dear boy, if it’s in my power I’ll send him to you wrapped in samite.’ Their relationship was in a friendly phase.
The October day was already growing cool. When the men were seated they tucked rugs of pine martin fur around their laps. In deep voices they intoned, ‘The King is Dead!’ Their mimicry was of the Bishop of Winchester, Henry Blois, brother of the monarch and second richest man in England. Throughout the rites in Faversham, Winchester was notably lacrimal. ‘The King is dead! And so is my influence!’ the two moaned in unison. The older man slammed the carriage shutters down and they doubled over with hilarity.
‘Your reading of St Paul’s epistle was a masterstroke of dramatic art and fluid rhetoric. You didn’t stutter once. You were the cynosure of the congregation. How did you keep a straight face, Tom?’
‘Years of self-discipline. At Canterbury one learns a few tricks.’
‘Such horrifying restraint calls for a drink.’ Richer reached for a basket stowed on the opposite bench. Inside were potted meat, a cheese, fine bread, ripe grapes, honey cakes, apple juice and two small casks of wine. ‘This one is local.’
‘But the other is from Aquitaine? I’d like that.’ The young man inhaled. ‘Good nose. Bright colour. Tannin a little … too robust?’
‘Your appreciation of southern wine is fitting, my dear, given the creature we’ll soon be calling Queen. Have you met her?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I hear she has prejudices against men like us.’
His younger companion, Thomas, Archdeacon of Canterbury Cathedral, rested lustrous dark eyes on his friend. People sometimes gasped when he looked at their faces, as if an icon had turned its gaze on them. He was no ordinary man. But what was extraordinary about him was hard to determine. His stately demeanour? His lavish and original dress? His charm? His quick wit? His ability to become the centre of attention in any gathering? These all contributed, but they were outer symbols of something else, something that remained hidden. ‘He’s fascinating,’ people said, unsure of what they meant.
‘Riche, have you ever met a female immune to flattery?’
‘Famous beauties are. Our new Queen, they say, has skin as white as pearl, ruby lips and cheeks, eyes lovely as violets. And her robes are of an originality that causes marvel. She’ll have heard every lie men can invent when speaking to women.’
‘I’ll applaud her skill at chess. Or with a horse. Or the prettiness of her pet dog.’
‘I believe she prefers cats.’ The Baron repeated in a voice of doom, ‘The King is dead! Deaaaad!’
They laughed like schoolboys as they clinked cups of wine.
‘I hear our monarch-to-be is equally gorgeous. When he enters a hall it’s a flash of lightning. Everything around him is cast into shadow – although personally I don’t fancy red hair.’
‘Nor I. It was as bright as a carrot when he was a child. It’s the colour of buffed copper now. He’s military in bearing – broad chest, strong arms. Affable, witty, often unkempt in his dress. Low-hipped.’
‘I like low hips,’ Richer murmured.
‘But restless,’ his friend continued. ‘He never stops pacing about. You’d think he felt himself caged.’
‘He has his grandfather’s rage, they say.’
‘It runs in Viking blood. Had I not met him when he was nine years old—’
‘Nine years old? You began courting him then?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Thomas stared at his long fingers folded beneath the ruff of iridescent cock-tail feathers that decorated the sleeves of his robe. The same shimmering black-green plumage warmed his neck.
The Baron frowned. Years earlier Richer’s features had adapted to his name, Eagle. His prominent nose curved, his reddish-brown eyes were bright with rapaciousness and his mouth turned down at the corners as if a deep-seated cynicism possessed him. Tom’s hiding something. Aloud he said, ‘After two decades of anarchy do you imagine our new King, whose favour you have not been seeking since he was a child, will be able to right our capsized ship of state? He’s only twenty-one and lacks the training in kingcraft that a prince learns at his father’s knee.’
‘Since the day he was born his mother, the Empress, has trained him to rule.’
‘That gorgon! I know you and the Archbishop supported her claim to the throne. However, the mention of Empress Matilda makes me need another drink. You, Tom?’
Thomas made a moue. ‘Only to warm my stomach.’
‘Your famous cold stomach. I forget you suffer it because you always appear so glowing.’ Richer’s eye fixed on his companion as he grasped the Archdeacon’s knee. ‘Stop teasing me, bad boy! What’s your secret? What plum appointment in the new court have you wrangled for yourself?’ He loosened his hand to drift it up the Archdeacon’s thigh. ‘You can trust Richer,’ he murmured.
My heart still lurches, Thomas thought. In the sublime days of youth those words had opened the door to a world of careless rapture, all sumptuous, all glinting with silver and gold. The grandeur of Richer’s houses, his myriad servants, his stables of gallant horses, the mews for hunting birds, the packs of hounds, the peacocks loitering on garden paths. I returned from that first visit to my parents’ house in Cheapside feeling like a prisoner freed into the sweet air of day. I saw my destiny. I wouldn’t grow up a nobody, I’d be grand. Like Richer. Better still, even grander!
‘I’m recommended as Chancellor.’
The Eagle flung his head back and laughed.
Becket’s voice rose with indignation. ‘You consider me inappropriate?’
‘You are thin-skinned today, my darling. Inappropriate? You’ll be brilliant!’ You believe your dead mother will forgive you at last? Richer thought. Aloud he added, ‘The most ambitious man in England, Chancellor to the most ambitious prince in Europe! My mind turns in giddy circles. The idea came from?’
‘Our Archbishop Theobald. The tension between Church and Crown has barely been worse than under Stephen’s reign. Churches and abbeys looted for treasure. The Archbishop gaoled like a criminal. The rift needs healing. I’ll be Chancellor and Archdeacon.’
‘My dear Thomas didn’t put that into the mighty Theobald’s head by any chance?’
‘I did not!’
‘So Tom will pour the oil of atonement on the troubled waters that surge between Church and Crown. And rip more taxes from my class than any man alive. You brilliant creature! Let me kiss you.’
The Baron grabbed the Archdeacon’s jaw to draw their lips together. ‘I’ll never forget the moment I first saw you,’ he murmured. ‘God! Your eyes. You were a flower …’
They released each other’s mouths.
‘And you were a bee,’ Thomas whispered.
The kiss brought those days alive again.
Richer sighed. ‘What joy it was to teach you. How to mix in exalted company. How to ride. How to dress. How to hunt. How to mend the wing of an injured falcon. How to charm men of power. I turned you from a Londoner without rank into a youth of confident social deportment.’ I can do well out of you as Chancellor. ‘But to return to our sheep,’ he said, ‘or should I say, our ram? I hear our King-to-be is as a ram in springtime when it comes to the ladies. You’ve twirled our Archbishop around your finger, Tom. But our new King Henry? You’ve been planning this a whole year or more. Ever since Prince Eustace died and Stephen agreed to adopt Henry as his son and heir to the throne. You were at the Archbishop’s side when he negotiated the peace treaty. You would have drawn attention to yourself back then. You manipulate the second most powerful man in England. How do you propose to manipulate our King?’
The Archdeacon shifted, as if his seat were uncomfortable. Despite its padding, travelling by wagon was, in many ways, less comfortable than riding a horse if the weather were fine, but it was the only way two men could be certain of a meal in private. ‘You’re full of questions today, Riche.’
‘Tom, you’re almost the same age as his late father, who doted on him. Do you see yourself playing the adoring papa? You could easily do so. You’re adorable, yourself.’
His companion’s dark eyes crinkled at their edges. ‘To some, to some.’
‘To all who admire elegance, charm and wit. In Normandy, Anjou and Maine, father and son went whoring together. It was said there wasn’t a countess in their territories who resisted the charm of the Dukes, pere et fils.’ The Baron cocked an eyebrow.
‘I’d be ill.’ Thomas turned pale.
I’ve never seen you so uncertain of yourself, the Baron thought. Thomas had once admitted to Richer: ‘It’s my perpetual self-doubt, my morbid obsession; am I lovable?’
‘I think, at first, with such a dominating prince I must be …’ the Archdeacon hesitated. The word and the memories behind it rose with a bitterness that momentarily choked him. ‘Submissive.’
Richer gave a bark of laughter. ‘You! Submissive?’
‘You have no idea what it is to be born without rank, to know oneself to be disposable, to realise that unless one is constantly the cynosure, one can be tossed away. A nothing.’
‘I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Your talents, Tom. Consider your talents.’
Silence enveloped them.
The Eagle, who had now drunk five glasses of wine, allowed his memory to wander through a hall of glorious images. It was I who first made you die. I watched your face when you moaned you were dying. ‘Dear boy, nobody can pretend to be more submissive than you. I spent a fortune on you when you were, what? Fourteen? What did they call you when you worked in the city? Oily Tom. Since then your submissiveness has reduced the haughtiest of magnates to mewling kittens. They entertain you in their hunting lodges, they flatter you with invitations to banquets, give you gyrfalcons. Propose you as the Chancellor.’
Thomas flushed. ‘Hush, Richer! The post is not yet confirmed. Our new King may not accept me. His mother supports my case. Our Archbishop does. But his wife, as you say, is prejudiced against men like us.’ He paused. Outside it was already twilight. The question he’d been wanting to ask blurted itself out. ‘As someone who’s spent much time at court I want your advice. How do I charm the King?’
The Baron sat upright with surprise. Their vehicle slowed, then halted.
‘What’s wrong?’ Thomas asked in alarm.
‘Nothing. We need to stop for the wagon boy to light torches.’
When four torches, two in front, two at the rear, flamed into the dimming light, the boy knocked on their door. He held a rush lantern that his master took from him and hung from a hook in the ceiling. Its large candle was of the finest beeswax, giving fragrance but little smoke, casting a reassuring glow inside the cabin. The men could see each other more clearly in its light.
Richer turned slowly and for a time that seemed, to Thomas, to stretch to eternity stared into his face. He was searching for words that would not injure the all too-easily-injured feelings of his friend. Were he to speak his mind he would answer, ‘However high you rise at court, the King will regard you as a man he plucked from the gutter. But you have one great advantage – the mystique of kingship will cut Henry off from his subjects and he needs to appeal to the populace, to placate them. He’ll value the company of a servant of no rank who understands the common people’s troubles. He’ll be inclined to trust your judgment.’ Instead he answered, ‘It’s impossible to resist entirely the allure of majesty. Kings, no matter how casual they seem, are surrounded by sycophants. Men can’t help themselves in the presence of royalty; it sucks the blood from the marrow of one’s bones. If you behave not as a flattering courtier nor a hero-worshiping knight, but as a man of the city, full of effrontery, impudence and disdain, you’ll be …’ he glanced up at the rush light swaying gently above them, ‘a magic lantern for him. He’ll value you as the man who can connect him to the lives of the hoi polloi. In five years, Tom, you’ll be among the richest men in England.’
In the soft waves of light his companion grinned. ‘I may even find a way to ruin that vile Bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot. He spent years tormenting me when he was Archdeacon of Canterbury and I was only the most junior deacon.’
‘I’m sure you will!’ You’ll be even more vain and arrogant if you can strike down Foliot.
‘Let’s have another drink. So much to celebrate! So little time.’
The wagon lurched along the old Roman road to Canterbury where they would spend the night. London was too distant from Faversham to reach before darkness set in and with it the possibility of highway robbers. As twilight surrounded them Richer reopened the shutters.
In the fading light a dreary landscape of burnt-out fields and villages stretched in every direction. The civil war had ended fifteen months earlier but its scars were raw – hideous motte and bailey castles still poxed the hills – mounds of earth protecting a palisade with a wooden keep at its centre. By war’s end, few fought for a cause, for Stephen (the Usurper), or for the rebel commander, Henry FitzEmpress (the Rightful Heir). They fought because fighting had become their way of life. They burned the crops of other petty warlords who responded by slaughtering their sheep. The beneficiaries were murders of crows, black flocks that stabbed at the earth, jerking meat from where it rotted among weeds.
But now the countryside had fallen silent and there were few autumnal crops to be harvested. It was as if winter already gripped the land.
The travellers in the wagon ate the cheese and potted meat. The Baron drew out a bunch of bloomed grapes and two honey cakes. His companion accepted a third glass of wine, but remained deep in contemplation.
Already counting his silver, Richer thought. He poured himself another cup. His cheeks flushed and the savagery of his features softened with the happiness of drink. He ruminated. ‘Tell you what, Tom, I’ll make a wager. Two years from now, let’s say October 1156, you’ll be England’s Chancellor and you’ll have our King wrapped around your finger as tightly as that gold ring.’
The Archdeacon raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you wager?’
‘My château in Normandy.’
‘Henry burnt your castle at Bonsmoulins for stealing his destriers. I’d prefer a house in Essex.’
Richer’s hand shook a little as he poured himself another drink. ‘I own three. Which one?’ He knew already. It would be the manor to which a merchant of his acquaintance had one day brought his son, Thomas, a little nobody of fourteen, without table manners, wearing a beige woollen gown fit for a stable boy in the House of Aigle. Look at you now, fingers heavy with jewels, hated by the monks of Canterbury and most of the baronage from whom you’ve extracted wealth for the Church like a torturer pulling teeth. Half of it fallen into your own pocket.
‘You know which one.’ You offered to take me on a tour. You told my father we’d be gone two hours and you’d send me home with an escort. No other place on earth can evoke the magic of the innocent, violent anarchy I discovered in that house. My childhood ended that very afternoon when I wasn’t yet a man. I became a god!
Richer’s voice was flat. ‘That manor happens to be my wife’s favourite. If you win I’ll have to tell her I lost it playing chess. But if you lose …’
‘If I lose?’
Richer downed his cup and poured another. ‘My dear, you’ll find a way of reimbursing every penny of tithes you’ve ripped from my estates for Mother Church in the past five years.’
‘A hard bargain, Riche.’ Thomas’s face flushed with excitement. ‘How’ll we determine when I’ve won?’
The Baron pinched his cheek. ‘My little rebel. Give Tom a challenge, a line he should not cross …’
‘Your little rebel. You seem to forget I studied two years in Paris, that the Archbishop sent me to read law in Bologna, that I’ve been an emissary to Rome, that I can say without false modesty my knowledge of finance is equal to the best in London. Your little rebel, Riche, is no longer the merchant’s son of twenty years ago.’
‘The boys we were still love each other, don’t they?’
‘They do. Destiny forged them together.’ But I’ve outgrown you, Riche. Thomas’s features were as serene as the Virgin’s. He was contemplating his role at court and its many opportunities. ‘We’ve not settled the test for our wager,’ he prompted his soon-to-be ex-friend.
The Baron had finished the wine. He began singing to himself. He was out of tune and the words were indistinct. ‘You’re to be formally accepted into his sssamily … family. One of the royal familiares. Most frusted … trus-trusted friend. Bosom companion. Man who peeps … sleeps beside Henry.’
‘Only knights and barons have that honour.’
‘Become a Barry.’
Becket murmured, ‘A Baron.’ He thrust long, jewelled fingers into his companion’s lank hair, jerking Richer’s head backwards against the cushions. ‘Not just the manor. It’s tapestries, it’s plate, the peacocks. And that youth we saw outside the church.’ He thrust his tongue inside a wine-fumed mouth. As he withdrew he bit Richer’s lower lip.
‘You’ve made me bleed, you swine! You never know when to stop, Tom.’ Richer slurred, ‘The boy’s left Cheapside, but Cheapside won’t leave the boy.’
One day I’ll have revenge on you for that, Thomas decided.