Abbot Radulfus rode back into his abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul on the third day of June, escorted by his chaplain and secretary, Brother Vitalis, and welcomed home by all the fifty-three brothers, seven novices and six schoolboys of his house, as well as all the lay stewards and servants.
The abbot was a long, lean, hard man in his fifties, with a gaunt, ascetic face and a shrewd, scholar’s eye, so vigorous and able of body that he dismounted and went straight to preside at High Mass, before retiring to remove the stains of travel or take any refreshment after his long ride. Nor did he forget to offer the prayer he had enjoined upon his flock, for the repose of the soul of Rainald Bossard, slain in Winchester on the evening of Wednesday, the ninth day of April of this year of Our Lord 1141. Eight weeks dead, and half the length of England away, what meaning could Rainald Bossard have for this indifferent town of Shrewsbury, or the members of this far-distant Benedictine house?
Not until the next morning’s chapter would the household hear its abbot’s account of that momentous council held in the south to determine the future of England; but when Hugh Beringar waited upon Radulfus about mid-afternoon, and asked for audience, he was not kept waiting. Affairs demanded the close co-operation of the secular and the clerical powers, in defence of such order and law as survived in England.
The abbot’s private parlour in his lodging was as austere as its presiding father, plainly furnished, but with sunlight spilled across its flagged floor from two open lattices at this hour of the sun’s zenith, and a view of gracious greenery and glowing flowers in the small walled garden without. Quiverings of radiance flashed and vanished and recoiled and collided over the dark panelling within, from the new-budded life and fresh breeze and exuberant light outside. Hugh sat in shadow, and watched the abbot’s trenchant profile, clear, craggy and dark against a ground of shifting brightness.
“My allegiance is well known to you, Father,” said Hugh, admiring the stillness of the noble mask thus framed, “as yours is to me. But there is much that we share. Whatever you can tell me of what passed in Winchester, I do greatly need to know.”
“And I to understand,” said Radulfus, with a tight and rueful smile. “I went as summoned, by him who has a right to summon me, and I went knowing how matters then stood, the king a prisoner, the empress mistress of much of the south, and in due position to claim sovereignty by right of conquest. We knew, you and I both, what would be in debate down there. I can only give you my own account as I saw it. The first day that we gathered there, a Monday it was, the seventh of April, there was nothing done by way of business but the ceremonial of welcoming us all, and reading out—there were many of these!—the letters sent by way of excuse from those who remained absent. The empress had a lodging in the town then, though she made several moves about the region, to Reading and other places, while we debated. She did not attend. She has a measure of discretion.” His tone was dry. It was not clear whether he considered her measure of that commodity to be adequate or somewhat lacking. “The second day...” He fell silent, remembering what he had witnessed. Hugh waited attentively, not stirring.
“The second day, the eighth of April, the legate made his great speech...”
It was no effort to imagine him. Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester, papal legate, younger brother and hitherto partisan of King Stephen, impregnably ensconced in the chapter house of his own cathedral, secure master of the political pulse of England, the cleverest manipulator in the kingdom, and on his own chosen ground—and yet hounded on to the defensive, in so far as that could ever happen to so expert a practitioner. Hugh had never seen the man, never been near the region where he ruled, had only heard him described, and yet could see him now, presiding with imperious composure over his half-unwilling assembly. A difficult part he had to play, to extricate himself from his known allegiance to his brother, and yet preserve his face and his status and influence with those who had shared it. And with a tough, experienced woman narrowly observing his every word, and holding in reserve her own new powers to destroy or preserve, according to how he managed his ill-disciplined team in this heavy furrow.
“He spoke a tedious while,” said the abbot candidly, “but he is a very able speaker. He put us in mind that we were met together to try to salvage England from chaos and ruin. He spoke of the late King Henry’s time, when order and peace was kept throughout the land. And he reminded us how the old king, left without a son, commanded his barons to swear an oath of allegiance to his only remaining child, his daughter Maud the empress, now widowed, and wed again to the count of Anjou.”
And so those barons had done, almost all, not least this same Henry of Winchester. Hugh Beringar, who had never come to such a test until he was ready to choose for himself, curled a half-disdainful and half-commiserating lip, and nodded understanding. “His lordship had somewhat to explain away.”
The abbot refrained from indicating, by word or look, agreement with the implied criticism of his brother cleric. “He said that the long delay which might then have arisen from the empress’s being in Normandy had given rise to natural concern for the well-being of the state. An interim of uncertainty was dangerous. And thus, he said, his brother Count Stephen was accepted when he offered himself, and became king by consent. His own part in this acceptance he admitted. For he it was who pledged his word to God and men that King Stephen would honour and revere the Holy Church, and maintain the good and just laws of the land. In which undertaking, said Henry, the king has shamefully failed. To his great chagrin and grief he declared it, having been his brother’s guarantor to God.”
So that was the way round the humiliating change of course, thought Hugh. All was to be laid upon Stephen, who had so deceived his reverend brother and defaulted upon all his promises, that a man of God might well be driven to the end of his patience, and be brought to welcome a change of monarch with relief tempering his sorrow.
“In particular,” said Radulfus, “he recalled how the king had hounded certain of his bishops to their ruin and death.”
There was more than a grain of truth in that, though the only death in question, of Robert of Salisbury, had resulted naturally from old age, bitterness and despair, because his power was gone.
“Therefore, he said,” continued the abbot with chill deliberation, “the judgement of God had been manifested against the king, in delivering him up prisoner to his enemies. And he, devout in the service of the Holy Church, must choose between his devotion to his mortal brother and to his immortal father, and could not but bow to the edict of heaven. Therefore he had called us together, to ensure that a kingdom lopped of its head should not founder in utter ruin. And this very matter, he told the assembly, had been discussed most gravely on the day previous among the greater part of the clergy of England, who—he said!—had a prerogative surmounting others in the election and consecration of a king.”
There was something in the dry, measured voice that made Hugh prick up his ears. For this was a large and unprecedented claim, and by all the signs Abbot Radulfus found it more than suspect. The legate had his own face to save, and a well-oiled tongue with which to wind the protective mesh of words before it.
“Was there such a meeting? Were you present at such, Father?”
“There was a meeting,” said Radulfus, “not prolonged, and by no means very clear in its course. The greater part of the talking was done by the legate. The empress had her partisans there.” He said it sedately and tolerantly, but clearly he had not been one. “I do not recall that he then claimed this prerogative for us. Nor that there was ever a count taken.”
“Nor, as I guess, declared. It would not come to a numbering of heads or hands.” Too easy, then, to start a counter-count of one’s own, and confound the reckoning.
“He continued,” said Radulfus coolly and drily, “by saying that we had chosen as Lady of England the late king’s daughter, the inheritor of his nobility and his will to peace. As the sire was unequalled in merit in our times, so might his daughter flourish and bring peace, as he did, to this troubled country, where we now offer her—he said!—our whole-hearted fealty.”
So the legate had extricated himself as adroitly as possible from his predicament. But for all that, so resolute, courageous and vindictive a lady as the empress was going to look somewhat sidewise at a whole-hearted fealty which had already once been pledged to her, and turned its back nimbly under pressure, and might as nimbly do so again. If she was wise she would curb her resentment and take care to keep on the right side of the legate, as he was cautiously feeling his way to the right side of her; but she would not forget or forgive.
“And there was no man raised a word against it?” asked Hugh mildly.
“None. There was small opportunity, and even less inducement. And with that the bishop announced that he had invited a deputation from the city of London, and expected them to arrive that day, so that it was expedient we should adjourn our discussion until the morrow. Even so, the Londoners did not come until next day, and we met again somewhat later than on the days previous. Howbeit, they did come. With somewhat dour faces and stiff necks. They said that they represented the whole commune of London, into which many barons had also entered as members after Lincoln, and that they all, with no wish to challenge the legitimacy of our assembly, yet desired to put forward with one voice the request that the lord king should be set at liberty.”
“That was bold,” said Hugh with raised brows. “How did his lordship counter it? Was he put out of countenance?”
“I think he was shaken, but not disastrously, not then. He made a long speech—it is a way of keeping others silent, at least for a time—reproving the city for taking into its membership men who had abandoned their king in war, after leading him astray by their evil advice, so grossly that he forsook God and right, and was brought to the judgement of defeat and captivity, from which the prayers of those same false friends could not now reprieve him. These men do but flatter and favour you now, he said, for their own advantage.”
“If he meant the Flemings who ran from Lincoln,” Hugh allowed, “he told no more than truth there. But for what other end is the city ever flattered and wooed? What then? Had they the hardihood to stand their ground against him?”
“They were in some disarray as to what they should reply, and went apart to confer. And while there was quiet, a man suddenly stepped forward from among the clerks, and held out a parchment to Bishop Henry, asking him to read it aloud, so confidently that I wonder still he did not at once comply. Instead, he opened and began to read it in silence, and in a moment more he was thundering in a great rage that the thing was an insult to the reverend company present, its matter disgraceful, its witnesses attainted enemies of Holy Church, and not a word of it would he read aloud to us in so sacred a place as his chapter house. “Whereupon,” said the abbot grimly, “the clerk snatched it back from him, and himself read it aloud in a great voice, riding above the bishop when he tried to silence him. It was a plea from Stephen’s queen to all present, and to the legate in especial, own brother to the king, to return to fealty and restore the king to his own again from the base captivity into which traitors had betrayed him. And I, said the brave man who read, am a clerk in the service of Queen Matilda, and if any ask my name, it is Christian, and true Christian I am as any here, and true to my salt.”
“Brave, indeed!” said Hugh, and whistled softly. “But I doubt it did him little good.”
“The legate replied to him in a tirade, much as he had spoken already to us the day before, but in a great passion, and so intimidated the men from London that they drew in their horns, and grudgingly agreed to report the council’s election to their citizens, and support it as best they could. As for the man Christian, who had so angered Bishop Henry, he was attacked that same evening in the street, as he set out to return to the queen empty-handed. Four or five ruffians set on him in the dark, no one knows who, for they fled when one of the empress’s knights and his men came to the rescue and beat them off, crying shame to use murder as argument in any cause, and against an honest man who had done his part fearlessly in the open. The clerk got no worse than a few bruises. It was the knight who got the knife between his ribs from behind and into the heart. He died in the gutter of a Winchester street. A shame to us all, who claim to be making peace and bringing enemies into amity.”
By the shadowed anger of his face it had gone deep with him, the single wanton act that denied all pretences of good will and justice and conciliation. To strike at a man for being honestly of the opposite persuasion, and then to strike again at the fair-minded and chivalrous who sought to prevent the outrage—very ill omens, these, for the future of the legate’s peace.
“And no man taken for the killing?” demanded Hugh, frowning.
“No. They fled in the dark. If any creature knows name or hiding-place, he has spoken no word. Death is so common a matter now, even by stealth and treachery in the darkness, this will be forgotten with the rest. And the next day our council closed with sentence of excommunication against a great number of Stephen’s men, and the legate pronounced all men blessed who would bless the empress, and accursed those who cursed her. And so dismissed us,” said Radulfus. “But that we monastics were not dismissed, but kept to attend on him some weeks longer.”
“And the empress?”
“Withdrew to Oxford, while these long negotiations with the city of London went on, how and when she should be admitted within the gates, on what terms, what numbers she might bring in with her to Westminster. On all which points they have wrangled every step of the way. But in nine or ten days now she will be installed there, and soon thereafter crowned.” He lifted a long, muscular hand, and again let it fall into the lap of his habit. “So, at least, it seems. What more can I tell you of her?”
“I meant, rather,” said Hugh, “how is she bearing this slow recognition? How is she dealing with her newly converted barons? And how do they rub, one with another? It’s no easy matter to hold together the old and the new liegemen, and keep them from each other’s throats. A manor in dispute here and there, a few fields taken from one and given to another... I think you know the way of it, Father, as well as I.”
“I would not say she is a wise woman,” said Radulfus carefully. “She is all too well aware how many swore allegiance to her at her father’s order, and then swung to King Stephen, and now as nimbly skip back to her because she is in the ascendant. I can well understand she might take pleasure in pricking into the quick where she can, among these. It is not wise, but it is human. But that she should become lofty and cold to those who never wavered—for there are some,” said the abbot with respectful wonder, “who have been faithful throughout at their own great loss, and will not waver even now, whatever she may do. Great folly and great injustice to use them so highhandedly, who have been her right hand and her left all this while.”
You comfort me, thought Hugh, watching the lean, quiet face intently. The woman is out of her wits if she flouts even the like of Robert of Gloucester, now she feels herself so near the throne.
“She has greatly offended the bishop-legate,” said the abbot, “by refusing to allow Stephen’s son to receive the rights and titles of his father’s honours of Boulogne and Mortain, now that his father is a prisoner. It would have been only justice. But no, she would not suffer it. Bishop Henry quit her court for some while, it took her considerable pains to lure him back again.”
Better and better, thought Hugh, assessing his position with care. If she is stubborn enough to drive away even Henry, she can undo everything he and others do for her. Put the crown in her hands and she may, not so much drop it, as hurl it at someone against whom she has a score to settle. He set himself to extract every detail of her subsequent behaviour, and was cautiously encouraged. She had taken land from some who held it and given it to others. She had received her naturally bashful new adherents with arrogance, and reminded them ominously of their past hostility. Some she had even repulsed with anger, recalling old injuries. Candidates for a disputed crown should be more accommodatingly forgetful. Let her alone, and pray! She, if anyone, could bring about her own ruin.
At the end of a long hour he rose to take his leave, with a very fair picture in his mind of the possibilities he had to face. Even empresses may learn, and she might yet inveigle herself safely into Westminster and assume the crown. It would not do to underestimate William of Normandy’s grand-daughter and Henry the First’s daughter. Yet that very stock might come to wreck on its own unforgiving strength.
He was never afterwards sure why he turned back at the last moment to ask: “Father Abbot, this man Rainald Bossard, who died... A knight of the empress, you said. In whose following?”
All that he had learned he confided to Brother Cadfael in the hut in the herb-garden, trying out upon his friend’s unexcitable solidity his own impressions and doubts, like a man sharpening a scythe on a good memorial stone. Cadfael was fussing over a too-exuberant wine, and seemed not to be listening, but Hugh remained undeceived. His friend had a sharp ear cocked for every intonation, even turned a swift glance occasionally to confirm what his ear heard, and reckon up the double account.
“You’d best lean back, then,” said Cadfael finally, “and watch what will follow. You might also, I suppose, have a good man take a look at Bristol? He is the only hostage she has. With the king loosed, or Robert, or Brian Fitz-Count, or some other of sufficient note made prisoner to match him, you’d be on secure ground. God forgive me, why am I advising you, who have no prince in this world!” But he was none too sure about the truth of that, having had brief, remembered dealings with Stephen himself, and liked the man, even at his ill-advised worst, when he had slaughtered the garrison of Shrewsbury castle, to regret it as long as his ebullient memory kept nudging him with the outrage. By now, in his dungeon in Bristol, he might well have forgotten the uncharacteristic savagery.
“And do you know,” asked Hugh with deliberation, “whose man was this knight Rainald Bossard, left bleeding to death in the lanes of Winchester? He for whom your prayers have been demanded?”
Cadfael turned from his boisterously bubbling jar to narrow his eyes on his friend’s face. “The empress’s man is all we’ve been told. But I see you’re about to tell me more.”
“He was in the following of Laurence d’Angers.”
Cadfael straightened up with incautious haste, and grunted at the jolt to his ageing back. It was the name of a man neither of them had ever set eyes on, yet it started vivid memories for them both.
“Yes, that Laurence! A baron of Gloucestershire, and liegeman to the empress. One of the few who has not once turned his coat yet in this to-ing and fro-ing, and uncle to those two children you helped away from Bromfield to join him, when they went astray after the sack of Worcester. Do you still remember the cold of that winter? And the wind that scoured away hills of snow overnight and laid them down in fresh places before morning? I still feel it, clean through flesh and bone...”
There was nothing about that winter journey that Cadfael would ever forget. It was hardly a year and a half past, the attack on the city of Worcester, the flight of brother and sister northwards towards Shrewsbury, through the worst weather for many a year. Laurence d’Angers had been but a name in the business, as he was now in this. An adherent of the Empress Maud, he had been denied leave to enter King Stephen’s territory to search for his young kin, but he had sent a squire in secret to find and fetch them away. To have borne a hand in the escape of those three was something to remember lifelong. All three arose living before Cadfael’s mind’s eye, the boy Yves, thirteen years old then, ingenuous and gallant and endearing, jutting a stubborn Norman chin at danger, his elder sister Ermina, newly shaken into womanhood and resolutely shouldering the consequences of her own follies. And the third...
“I have often wondered,” said Hugh thoughtfully, “how they fared afterwards. I knew you would get them off safely, if I left it to you, but it was still a perilous road before them. I wonder if we shall ever get word. Some day the world will surely hear of Yves Hugonin.” At the thought of the boy he smiled with affectionate amusement. “And that dark lad who fetched them away, he who dressed like a woodsman and fought like a paladin... I fancy you knew more of him than ever I got to know.”
Cadfael smiled into the glow of the brazier and did not deny it. “So his lord is there in the empress’s train, is he? And this knight who was killed was in d’Angers’ service? That was a very ill thing, Hugh.”
“So Abbot Radulfus thinks,” said Hugh sombrely.
“In the dusk and in confusion—and all got clean away, even the one who used the knife. A foul thing, for surely that was no chance blow. The clerk Christian escaped out of their hands, yet one among them turned on the rescuer before he fled. It argues a deal of hate at being thwarted, to have ventured that last moment before running. And is it left so? And Winchester full of those who should most firmly stand for justice?”
“Why, some among them would surely have been well enough pleased if that bold clerk had spilled his blood in the gutter, as well as the knight. Some may well have set the hunt on him.”
“Well for the empress’s good name,” said Cadfael, “that there was one at least of her men stout enough to respect an honest opponent, and stand by him to the death. And shame if that death goes unpaid for.”
“Old friend,” said Hugh ruefully, rising to take his leave, “England has had to swallow many such a shame these last years. It grows customary to sigh and shrug and forget. At which, as I know, you are a very poor hand. And I have seen you overturn custom more than once, and been glad of it. But not even you can do much now for Rainald Bossard, bar praying for his soul. It is a very long way from here to Winchester.”
“It is not so far,” said Cadfael, as much to himself as to his friend, “not by many a mile, as it was an hour since.”
*
He went to Vespers, and to supper in the refectory, and thereafter to Collations and Compline, and all with one remembered face before his mind’s eye, so that he paid but fractured attention to the readings, and had difficulty in concentrating his thoughts on prayer. Though it might have been a kind of prayer he was offering throughout, in gratitude and praise and humility.
So suave, so young, so dark and vital a face, startling in its beauty when he had first seen it over the girl’s shoulder, the face of the young squire sent to bring away the Hugonin children to their uncle and guardian. A long, spare, wide-browed face, with a fine scimitar of a nose and a supple bow of a mouth, and the fierce, fearless, golden eyes of a hawk. A head capped closely with curving, blue-black hair, coiling crisply at his temples and clasping his cheeks like folded wings. So young and yet so formed a face, east and west at home in it, shaven clean like a Norman, olive-skinned like a Syrian, all his memories of the Holy Land in one human countenance. The favourite squire of Laurence d’Angers, come home with him from the Crusade. Olivier de Bretagne.
If his lord was there in the south with his following, in the empress’s retinue, where else would Olivier be? The abbot might even have rubbed shoulders with him, unbeknown, or seen him ride past at his lord’s elbow, and for one absent moment admired his beauty. Few such faces blaze out of the humble mass of our ordinariness, thought Cadfael, the finger of God cannot choose but mark them out for notice, and his officers here will be the first to recognise and own them.
And this Rainald Bossard who is dead, an honourable man doing right by an honourable opponent, was Olivier’s comrade, owning the same lord and pledged to the same service. His death will be grief to Olivier. Grief to Olivier is grief to me, a wrong done to Olivier is a wrong done to me. As far away as Winchester may be, here am I left mourning in that dark street where a man died for a generous act, in which, by the same token, he did not fail, for the clerk Christian lived on to return to his lady, the queen, with his errand faithfully done.
The gentle rustlings and stirrings of the dortoir sighed into silence outside the frail partitions of Cadfael’s cell long before he rose from his knees, and shook off his sandals. The little lamp by the night stairs cast only the faintest gleam across the beams of the roof, a ceiling of pearly grey above the darkness of his cell, his home now for—was it eighteen years or nineteen?—he had difficulty in recalling. It was as if a part of him, heart, mind, soul, whatever that essence might be, had not so much retired as come home to take seisin of a heritage here, his from his birth. And yet he remembered and acknowledged with gratitude and joy the years of his sojourning in the world, the lusty childhood and venturous youth, the taking of the Cross and the passion of the Crusade, the women he had known and loved, the years of his sea-faring off the coast of the Holy Kingdom of Jerusalem, all that pilgrimage that had led him here at last to his chosen retreat. None of it wasted, however foolish and amiss, nothing lost, nothing vain, all of it somehow fitting him to the narrow niche where now he served and rested. God had given him a sign, he had no need to regret anything, only to lay all open and own it his. For God’s viewing, not for man’s.
He lay quiet in the darkness, straight and still like a man coffined, but easy, with his arms lax at his sides, and his half-closed eyes dreaming on the vault above him, where the faint light played among the beams.
There was no lightning that night, only a consort of steady rolls of thunder both before and after Matins and Lauds, so unalarming that many among the brothers failed to notice them. Cadfael heard them as he rose, and as he returned to his rest. They seemed to him a reminder and a reassurance that Winchester had indeed moved nearer to Shrewsbury, and consoled him that his grievance was not overlooked, but noted in heaven, and he might look to have his part yet in collecting the debt due to Rainald Bossard. Upon which warranty, he fell asleep.