Masters of Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  To his credit, Carew’s father had done what he could for Godfrid, which in the end had been a great deal. Rather than give Godfrid directly to the Church, Carew’s father (also named Nicholas) taught both boys warfare, and then he’d arranged for Godfrid to serve in the household of another Marcher lord, though not the same one to whom he’d sent Carew. Godfrid had been knighted at the age of twenty-five, at which point his father had bought him a commission with the Templars.

  Unlike monks, the Templar order had no novices. A man came to the order as a knight already or joined as a sergeant and was never knighted. As Godfrid would never inherit land of his own, the Carew lands being under Marcher rule rather than Welsh, this was the best that could be hoped for. The very best.

  At the time of Godfrid’s acceptance into the Templar ranks, Carew had actually been jealous, thinking that nothing could be more noble than fighting for Christ in the Holy Land. His father had been unsympathetic, however, just as he’d been eight years earlier when Carew, at the age of nineteen, had begged to fight with King Edward in the ninth Crusade. Nicholas senior had refused permission, and by the time Carew was twenty-one, Edward was on his way home to be crowned king.

  At the time, Carew had cursed his father’s stubbornness. He had believed that, had he gone with Edward as Gilbert de Clare had done, he would have won honor and glory for the Carew name and improved his family’s fortunes and position with the crown of England.

  But in the end it had been Godfrid who’d gone to the Holy Land and won renown for himself. He’d been at the fall of Acre in 1291 and barely escaped with his life. He was battle scarred and respected among the Templars, and thus among soldiers throughout Christendom. Upon Godfrid’s return to England, it had been Carew, as the elder brother and the one who’d stayed behind, who’d made the first overtures to initiate an adult friendship between them. Godfrid had been open to him, if wary. Since then they’d met a dozen times more. Carew liked to think that the initial wariness in both of them had given way to genuine pleasure. What he didn’t know was if they were friends enough now for him to ask the kind of favor Lili had requested. As resolutely as any monks in Christendom, the Templars answered to God, not to David.

  As Carew stood in the foyer to his brother’s quarters, adjacent to the round Temple Church, which had been modeled after the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, he found his stomach clenching with uncharacteristic anxiety. He’d grown accustomed in the last few years to the day-to-day interactions with dignitaries from across Europe. He thought he’d grown out of the nerves that used to overwhelm him, and he laughed at himself to realize that it was a meeting with his brother that had made him more nervous than he’d been in years.

  As a Templar master, it was within Godfrid’s purview to make even important men within the royal court wait up to an hour to see him. The current Archbishop of Canterbury certainly would have, but after only a quarter of an hour, Godfrid appeared, striding towards Carew with bright eyes and a smile. His appearance was nearly the exact opposite of Carew’s: dark where Carew was light, stocky and muscled where Carew was tall and lanky.

  “Welcome brother!”

  The two men embraced.

  Then Godfrid frowned as he looked at Carew. “Nobody has provided you water to wash or offered refreshment?”

  Carew shook his head, which prompted Godfrid to turn on the hapless monk, who’d admitted Carew to the receiving room, and roundly chastise him for his neglect. “This is my brother and the Lord High Treasurer,” he said, naming Carew’s Office of State. The monk wore a black tunic with a red cross, indicating that he was a sergeant of the order. Godfrid wore the characteristic Templar white tunic with its red cross, which was specifically reserved for knights.

  Before Carew had come to Temple Church, he’d gone over some of the reports he’d received over the last few months about the Templar Order. While their losses in the Holy Land had been grievous, two years on, their numbers were once again approaching the four hundred knights and two thousand sergeants they’d had before the fall of Acre. He found it likely that this sergeant was one of the new recruits.

  Then Godfrid turned back to Carew and gestured that they should walk together. “I’m glad you have come. I have a letter from the Grand Master in Cyprus that I hope you will deliver to your king.”

  As Carew walked beside his brother, he marveled at the way the two of them not only looked different, but had turned out so differently too. Godfrid lived for war and, somehow, Carew had tied himself to a king who hated it and would move heaven and earth to avoid it if he could. Carew had fought battles, certainly, but not often and—despite his desire to travel to the Holy Land when he was nineteen—without conviction. It may have been that King Edward had sensed this lack of resolve, and this was part of the reason Carew hadn’t gained a higher standing at court like the Clares or the Bohuns.

  It wasn’t that Carew was weak or wasn’t known among his peers for his fighting skills. It was rather that—inside—he hated the accompanying dirt and the sweat, the long hours on horseback, and sleeping on the ground. Godfrid, on the other hand, appeared to revel in it all. Carew’s stomach twisted. If Carew had been a little more like Godfrid and a little less like himself, perhaps Clare wouldn’t have been able to run wild through King David’s domain.

  As he looked at his younger brother, Carew’s smile turned rueful. He’d become too fastidious in middle age, and he needed to curb that tendency if he expected to maintain favor with the king. In keeping with his predecessor, David despised the pomp and fashion of royal life and didn’t admire men who embraced it as much as Carew did.

  They reached Godfrid’s receiving room, and Godfrid immediately went around his desk to a cubby hole behind it to pull out a sealed letter, which he then handed to Carew.

  “Plans for the retaking of Jerusalem are continuing apace! To think we will have the return of Arthur on our side when we do it. We can’t lose.” Godfrid was referring to David, of course. The legend of Arthur, and David as the embodiment of everything he’d stood for, had taken on a life of its own. Whether English, Norman, or Welsh, the people of Britain had all been raised with the story and claimed King Arthur as their own. Godfrid was no exception.

  Carew took the letter his brother gave him, but he hesitated as he did so. When the two men were younger, this would have been the moment when Carew would smile gravely in order to imply superior knowledge and reassure Godfrid that he had everything well in hand.

  But today he didn’t, and he decided that it was time his brother knew how very much things had changed between them. Still with the letter in his hand, Carew grasped the top rail of a spindle chair near the unlit fireplace and walked with it to Godfrid’s desk. He flapped the hand that held the letter at Godfrid, and the older brother in him took over for just a moment. “Sit. I have something to tell you.” Carew himself sat in the chair he’d brought.

  His forehead furrowed, Godfrid obeyed Carew, sitting in his ornate chair behind the desk. It was clearly Godfrid’s usual chair, one worthy of the station of a Templar master. Carved and cushioned, it was in appearance more like a throne than a chair to work in, though work in it Godfrid did. The desk in front of him was piled with stacks of paper, each carefully arranged in rows, and even as Carew watched, his brother carefully aligned the papers in one of the piles more neatly.

  Carew himself had never mastered the art of orderliness in his business affairs, preferring to leave such things to his steward, and he was pleased to see that a certain level of haphazardness had been introduced to the room by a small stack of papers that had been tossed on the floor and cascaded across the wooden boards.

  There was no point in avoiding the issue at hand, since it was the whole reason he was here. “As much as I would like to give your letter to the king, I fear it is not possible right now.”

  “I know that he is in Aquitaine, meeting with the King of France about plans for the crusade,” Godfrid said, “but when he returns—”

  �
��That is what I must speak to you about,” Carew said, “and I don’t want to continue another moment as we have been if it gives you any misapprehension about why I’m here. I fear that unless we do something to aid the king—you and I do something, I mean—he may never return.”

  “What?” Godfrid leaned forward. “What has happened? Tell me quickly.”

  “As you yourself told us once, Gilbert de Clare may not be as he appears. We have indications that he plans to betray the king,” Carew said, all in a rush. “We are asking for the assistance of the Templars to aid King David if—or when—he seeks your assistance.”

  Godfrid’s eyes narrowed. “Who is we? Is this request from the Order of the Pendragon?”

  That was the Templar part of Godfrid speaking. While concerned about the danger to David, Godfrid knew as well as Carew that his obligations were first to his order, not to the king, no matter how much he personally might admire him. Fortunately for Carew—and in large part because of Carew’s own efforts—it was the crown of England that had developed a relationship with the Templars, not the Order of the Pendragon, a fact for which Carew was infinitely grateful now.

  “No.” Carew was anxious to get back to the more important issue. “No. This is coming from me, as Lord High Treasurer and adviser to the king. I fear to involve the Order of the Pendragon because Clare is a prominent member. I find it likely that he has been suppressing any information that might expose him for what he really is. Thus, I cannot turn to the Order for help because I do not know anyone within it I can trust.”

  Godfrid nodded, apparently willing to accept Carew’s assessment at face value. “Where is this betrayal supposed to occur?”

  “Aquitaine. As you probably know, Clare has made all the arrangements for the meeting between King David and the King of France.”

  “What could I possibly do to help from here?”

  “You could contact your brethren across the English Channel and warn them of the danger and to be on the lookout for David, who may be roaming Aquitaine without retainers, injured and in need. I know you have pigeons capable of the journey. Your ships sail from Portsmouth to La Rochelle daily.”

  Godfrid’s expression turned skeptical. “We brought you a warning about Clare over six months ago, and you dismissed it.”

  Carew hung his head. “I know. But we believe now that you were right.” And then, because Godfrid still looked skeptical, and even a little disgruntled, he took a chance that his brother’s initial reaction to the news of David’s peril indicated that his belief in the legend was more than skin deep. He looked into Godfrid’s eyes. “Last night Queen Lili dreamed that King David was shot with arrows and fell from the battlement of Chateau Niort into the river below.”

  Godfrid surged to his feet, scattering his neat piles of paper everywhere. “Why did you not say so before? The queen believes this dream was a true seeing?”

  “Yes.”

  Godfrid left the desk and paced to the window to look out at the busy London morning passing by. After a moment, he turned back to Carew. “I will do anything and everything within my power to aid the king. Since it is the Templar Order that brought the suspicions against Clare to you in the first place, my men will readily accept the possibility that circumstances have changed and that our information has been proven true.”

  “That is as much and more than I could have hoped for,” Carew said.

  Godfrid eyed Carew with pursed lips. “You cannot be unaware that we owe King David a debt.”

  “Do you?”

  Godfrid scoffed. “The knowledge that his physicians have brought to our infirmaries has transformed them from places men go to die to centers of healing. That reason alone would justify my aiding him.” He shook his head. “I only wish I’d given him, as I gave to you, the password that would allow him entrance into any Templar holding. Why didn’t I?”

  Carew found himself clearing his throat awkwardly. “You gave it to me, Godfrid, and that was enough. I knew at the time that to do so was a violation of your trust, but before the king sailed for Aquitaine, I passed it on to him.”

  Godfrid was silent a moment, and then he sat himself back into his chair and regarded his brother. “Under the circumstances, I forgive you.”

  Carew raised one shoulder in a half-shrug. “The decision to give it to him was impulsive, but I must tell you that even after I’d done it, I couldn’t regret it.”

  Godfrid grinned. “So you have the sight now too? I find having a Welsh brother far more interesting than the Norman one you used to be.”

  Chapter Eight

  13 June 1293

  Bridget

  Bridget and Peter stood together at a crossroads, gazing northwest towards Shrewsbury, even though there was nothing at all to see in the dark, the fog, and the rain, beyond the twenty feet the torch illumined. Bridget had always hated driving in fog. The only consolation here was that they moved so much slower on horseback that they never outran what they could see. A horse whickered in the distance from someone’s farm. Otherwise they were alone with the puddles.

  They had come a terribly long way—nearly a hundred miles of almost constant riding, a feat Bridget wouldn’t have thought possible before she took up the challenge that Lili’s seeing had laid out. They’d changed horses four times at David’s strongholds between London and here, wherever here was. That was the only thing that had allowed them to keep going through the last six hours of pouring rain and ferocious wind.

  “We should rest a minute,” Peter said. “We’re both exhausted.”

  “We don’t have time. It was bad enough that we stayed at Kenilworth for as long as we did.” Bridget said, a little more tartly than she meant to. She put out a hand to her husband. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I am tired. And I hurt everywhere.”

  “We rested because we could do nothing else. If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have made it this far. We still have miles to go. If we are too late, it won’t be because of a lack of trying.” Peter grimaced as he dismounted. “We’ll take ten minutes and then ride on. We have forty miles to go. If we get fresh horses at Bridgnorth, maybe we can reach Shrewsbury by four in the morning.”

  Bridget took in a breath, summoning patience. Peter was right. She’d spent these last months since their marriage working on getting him to tell her what he thought when he thought it, so it would be counterproductive to argue with him when he was actually doing what she wanted—just because she didn’t like what he was saying.

  They moved off the road, more in accord. And for all that the weather was miserable, Bridget found herself not minding it as much.

  “I can hear you smiling.” Peter said as he trudged along beside her, leading the horses and using the long torch as a walking stick. His other hand held his horse’s reins. “Why?”

  “I’m happy.” Bridget tucked her hand into his elbow, realizing as she did so that she missed touching him. The formality of the English court at Westminster had required that they keep their distance from one another outside of their bedchamber. It wasn’t like that at Shrewsbury, where people knew them and accepted their strange ways. London was like a different country—huge and foreign—and even the way they spoke English was different.

  Peter smiled too. “Any adventure with you is a good adventure. No offense to David, wherever he may be.”

  “He wouldn’t be offended,” Bridget said, “especially since it’s his fault we’re together—”

  A thundering of hooves sounded along the road behind them, intermingling with the drumming of the rain on their hoods. At first Bridget thought it was actual thunder, but then Peter motioned with the torch, hustling them through a gap in the stone wall to the south of the road. He dropped the torch on the ground and hastily suffocated the light with dirt.

  Then they stood stock still among the few trees that lined the wall between them and the road. The riders were carrying torches, many of them, without which Bridget couldn’t have seen her hand in front of her face. It was a compan
y of forty men at least.

  “Clare’s men.” Bridget recognized the chevrons of the Earl of Gloucester. “Lili was right.”

  Peter made a rumbling sound in the back of his throat. “It could be coincidence.”

  “You hate coincidences and don’t believe in them.”

  He gave a low laugh. “I’ve been taught not to trust them. Where there’s smoke, there’s often fire.”

  The riders passed by in a torrent of churned mud and pounding hooves. Only twenty yards down the road, they took a fork to the left instead of the right-hand one that Bridget and Peter would be taking to Shrewsbury.

  “Where are they going?” Now that the soldiers had passed, Bridget felt the fog and the darkness settling over them again. Peter felt for the torch and shook off the dirt. A lesser man might have had difficulty lighting it, but he’d become an expert in the year and a half he’d lived in the middle ages. She knew for a fact that he’d practiced. “Hereford. That road leads to Hereford.” Peter stabbed the end of their torch into the ground with angry force and lit it.

  Bridget tried to picture the maps of England and Wales that David put up on every wall space available. It was a standing joke among David’s friends, followers, and admirers that the king loves maps. “That means Humphrey de Bohun. Do they ride to him as friend or foe?”

  “That’s a lot of men to send to someone who’s your ally,” Peter started walking back to the road, “unless Clare is sending men to support Bohun’s takeover of this region.”

  A snake twisted in Bridget’s stomach. She was back to hating the fog and the rain, and her earlier joy was gone.

  Chapter Nine

  13 June 1293

  David

  “You must leave me behind, David,” Philip said. “You are the Duke of Aquitaine. You must take the horse and ride to La Rochelle. Then you can send men back to me.”

  “I wish you’d stop suggesting that.” David gazed at the abandoned barn and wondered if it was worth checking out. Last night had been clear with a bright moon, but this evening it was pouring rain, and they were soaked through—again—and darkness would engulf them at any moment. They weren’t as far north here as in England, but the sun would set within the half-hour, so they would run out of light soon. If he was to tend to Philip, he’d rather do it while he could still see something. He didn’t think fumbling around in the dark and the rain with a wounded man, pursuit or no pursuit, was a winning proposition. Not that this barn was going to be ideal. If the roof leaked, they might be better off continuing to walk.