Butter had a lubricating effect on Angela’s storytelling apparatus, and in the tale that unfolded, history, legend, conjecture, and wishful thinking vied for the spotlight.
“Local history has it that he discovered the crown jewels King John supposedly lost in quicksand out in the fens nearly a hundred years earlier. There’s a place not too far from here called Langar Manor that figures into the story—having been owned by all the major players; King John, Robert Tiptoft, and Roger le Scrope at one time or other.”
“As in Annabella Scrope?” said Jeremy Ash.
“One of her ancestors, yes. Annabella inherited the manor—during the reign of King Charles—through her father Emanuel Scrope, the last male of his line.
“Curious, don’t you think?” said Angela.
“Can we see this place?” Albert wanted to know.
“Which place?”
“Langar Manor.”
“Oh, well,” said Angela. “It’s not a manor as in manor house. It’s manor as in region, or area.”
“No building?” said Albert. This was beginning to become a pattern.
“Notper se, no. No castle or anything like that, if that’s what you mean. The only thing of any antiquity still in existence from that time is the abbey.”
“A church?” Albert asked hopefully. Churches in England tended to be very old, dating, as they did, from the days when English people believed in God.
“Yes. I can’t speak with any authority, but I seem to recollect it’s been rebuilt over the years.”
“But some of the old building—from this time,” said Albert, poking the table to indicate the time they’d been talking about, “is still there?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“I want to go there.”
“It’ll have to wait ‘til next week,” said Jeremy. “You’ve got that concert in Rotterdam.”
“Call Huffy and tell him I won’t be there,” Albert commanded; another thing that felt fuzzy on his tongue. “We’ll do it some other time. Today we’re going to Langar Abbey.”
Then a practical thought occurred to him. He looked at Angela. “Do we have a car?”
Newark Castle, Nottinghamshire, October 18th, 1216
Foss had had a bad experience with peaches as a child. Not so much the peaches themselves, as the larvae that inhabited the one he had stolen and, huddled in the darkened loft of a hay barn, eaten half of. Ever since, he maintained an aversion to their aroma; the same with which the King’s bedchamber was redolent, mixed with that of plums, sweat, ale, lavender, and vomit.
The king was dying and, in Foss’s experience, dying people—certain saints, perhaps, excepted—rarely made a positive contribution to the atmosphere. Partly for that reason, and partly to beat a hasty retreat should the King start flinging sharp objects in his direction, which he was known to do, the dwarf didn’t shut the door all the way.
“Your Majesty?” he said, just loud enough to be heard if the King was awake, but not so loud as to awaken him if not, nor so soft as to be accused of not making his presence known.
Jesters had to think this way.
The bedclothes moved; the King was alive. “Who’s there?”
“Foss, your Majesty.”
The name had an animating effect. John struggled to a lopsided sitting position. “Come here, you little piss.”
Foss took a few steps toward the bed.
“And close the door.”
Foss retreated toward the door and, hooking it with his heel, kicked it shut with a satisfactory thud. He went to the bedside, his eyes just below the level of the feather mattress, and waited.
The King’s eyes were liquidy and drifted about as if in search of something to focus on. With the exception of a tankard of ale that sat on a bedside table, all traces of food had been taken away. The vomit to which a sniff in the King’s vicinity testified had been cleaned up, but its memory was fresh. Having lived all his life so close to the ground, Foss had built a sort of olfactory immunity to life’s natural aromas, despite which he was nearly overcome by the perfume peculiar to the room. He took a little bundle of the King’s excess sheet in his hand, held it to his nose and continued to wait.
“Foss?” said the King at last. “Are you there?”
“Still here, your Majesty.”
“Majesty,” scoffed the King. “You think my majesty’s going to get me into heaven, my short subject?”
“You’re God’s chosen,” said Foss. “That makes you His fault. So, I guess He’ll have to take you in.”
John laughed and coughed and spat. “I feel like shite.”
“That would explain the smell,” said the jester. That’s the kind of thing he was expected to say, despite the fact that, at present, he wished he could say a few words of comfort. John wasn’t much loved, especially in this part of his kingdom. His reign had been, in his own words, ‘just one damn thing after another’. And now, judging from the smell, he was going to die at any minute, alone, on the run from his own subjects, his wife and children far away, probably, even now, being rounded up and imprisoned by those same enemies.
Imprisonment meant the Tower, and the Tower meant death.
Foss imagined all those little golden heads floating in the moat, thudding up against the Traitor’s Gate with the rising and falling of the tide. ‘Let us in! Let us out! Let us in! Let us out!’
He shivered.
John was avaricious and self-centered beyond the point of simple myopia; if he mourned the twenty seven hundred and forty-nine men, faithful soldiers all, who had, like his empty treasure wagon, been lost in the Wash, he was far too noble to mention it. But that’s the way it was with kings, wasn’t it? Things that might disturb the equanimity of a mere mortal were, to those of royal blood, events of which, from time-to-time, they needed reminding.
John had also been capable of occasional lapses into genuine nobility; theMagna Carta business, for instance. He’d been forced into it, admittedly, and recanted the document before the ink was dry, but there had been that moment, hadn’t there, when an angel had troubled the waters with at least the hope of healing?
As for war, the King was no coward, as many said he was. Though a small man, he gave every inch of himself in battle, his red head could always be seen bobbing at the head of the fray, but he was always fighting uphill, always on the low ground, and every time he gained a decent foothold the earth would give way beneath him. That was the work of the Fates. They hated him, preferring his brother, Richard, upon whom—though less deserving as both a monarch and a human being—they heaped their favor by the butcher’s bushel.
Except that he was dead.
Apart from Isabella—who for some inexplicable reason bore in her breast (and a lovely breast it was, Foss had often remarked) a genuine affection for her husband—John was not much loved and never had been, as far as Foss was aware, and he’d known the man since the cradle, having served as jester in the court of John’s father, Henry the Second.
The thought that followed—that the King would be unwise to anticipate an improvement in his situation in the afterlife—Foss kept to himself.
Not that John had gone out of his way to court the Lord’s favor or affection. Quite the contrary. Some of the comments he’d let slip over the years were so blasphemous that it made it likely he wasn’t a Believer at all. Disbelief, Foss reckoned, would be a hard argument to maintain in the presence of the Lord of Hosts.
“You don’t have that damn bird with you.”
“I left him bothering the horses.”
“What? Speak up!”
“I said I left Pike with the horses, your Majesty.”
“I hate that bird,” said God’s chosen King of England. “He knows too much.”
“He’s very discreet, is Pike, sire.”
“How did it go?” said the King after what might have been a little stroke, or just a nap preparatory to the arduous journey through the valley of the shadow of death.
“Just as you
wished, your Majesty. The thirteen executors have been notified, as you directed. As for the wagon, Magnus, it is at the bottom of the Wash, about twelve furlongs beyond Wisbeck.”
With wheezing effort, John propped himself up a bit closer to the vertical. “Completely gone?”
“Completely,” said Foss through the sheet.
“And Utique?”
“Burned. Apparently set fire by some local ne’er-do-well with incendiary proclivities. In other words, disposed according to your command, your Majesty.”
The exchange was interrupted by another coughing spell, at the end of which John gathered his sheets beneath his chin and leaned across the bed, so his face was more or less overlooking that of the dwarf, who looked at him with large eyes that could easily have been exchanged with those of a particularly obsequious dog. The king lowered his voice. “And everything else? All is done exactly to my designs.”
The royal breath was vile, and the knot of sheet Foss pressed to his nostrils was not proof against it. “Exactly, your Bajesty.”
“And no one suspects?”
“All who could do so are . . . are beyod the cares of this world, your Bajesty.”
John drew himself back to the middle of the bed and stared into a darkness only he could see. His eyes danced with the reflection of the candles that flickered on either side of his bed, but that was a reflection from without, there was none within. “Then I shall be joining them shortly. I don’t expect they’ll be pleased to see me.”
“Oh, they were good and faithful men, your Bajesty. You don’t deed to worry yourself about ruddig into theb where you’re going.”
Laughter seized the king like a fit and took a while to run its course.
“You know, little piss, when a King of Egypt died, his whole household would be killed, embalmed, and buried with him to serve him in the afterlife. I find that a commendable tradition.”
Foss was unperturbed. “Why add another to a long list of poor policies, your Majesty? Or do you fail to grasp the fact that such an arrangement would place me and Pike eternally in your presence, for I simply refuse to be sacrificed without him?”
John didn’t laugh this time. The shadows were drawing closer. “You have a point.”
In the brief apostrophe of silence that followed, the King inhaled and exhaled deeply a few times. “If I don’t survive this. . .”
“Heaven forbid,” said Foss, with a studious glance at his cuticles.
“At least the baron’s won’t get their hands on my treasure, either Magnus or Utique.”
“No, they won’t.”
“And you have seen to it that my son. . .?”
“Don’t fret yourself, your Majesty. In the unhappy event of your demise—heaven, as I say, forbid—the Bishop is under orders to acquaint the Queen with the facts.”
John whispered the name of the only woman ever to have conquered his heart. “Isabella.”
“That’s the one,” said Foss. He couldn’t resist.
“De Rode is with them?”
The likelihood that Ralph de Rode—already exhausted from endless hours of weary travel after the battle to snatch London from the Barons—had made it safely across two hundred miles of hostile country was remote in the extreme. Though hewas a man with an elevated fealty to duty that, coupled with a sense of Divine mission, made anything possible.
Still, Foss reasoned, in the absence of any surety, why not send his employer to hell with whatever succor might be gleaned from the thought that his son would succeed him to the throne. “You couldn’t have sent a more faithful servant, your Majesty.”
“Remarkable how many servants have revealed themselves faithful since Louis’ reversal of fortune,” John ruminated. “What news of Alexander?”
The Scottish King had, not a month gone, bent his knee to Prince Louis of France in return for assurances from that Pretender, that he could keep his kingdom when, if all went according to plan, John had either been defeated, beheaded, or fled into exile. “He’s being a pain in the ass, your Majesty. But Marshall will soon scratch it.”
Foss was accustomed to being neck-deep in lies, and, early on, had developed a facility for keeping track of them for, unlike many less-adept liars, he never, in his own mind, confused lies with the truth. Mention of William Marshall, renown ‘knight of knights’ would, he suspected, lend an air of verisimilitude to his impromptu account and, therefore, a balm of sorts.
The dwarf’s nasal cavity had nearly reached its capacity for insult, but the King didn’t seem ready to dispense with his company. So Foss stuffed the sheet a little further up his nose and waited to be spoken to, the one rule of courtly etiquette he was not permitted to breach.
“The workmen have been paid?” said John at last.
“A very pretty euphemism, your Majesty,” said Foss, who had personally supervised the poisoning of the trio of craftsmen who had been pressed into service to construct—to specifications over which John had huddled long hours with his chief architect; recently deceased due to an excess of some highwayman’s blade in his belly—an invisible place of concealment and certain mechanisms in the walls of Langar chapel. “You may take comfort in the knowledge that they’ll never complain of their wages.”
“And the letter?”
“Committed to memory,” said the dwarf, tapping his temple and allowing the King to make of the gesture what he would. “And, in the regrettable event something of a terminal nature were to happen to your diminutive servant,” Foss performed what might have been a bow, or merely a mild attack of gas, “the Bishop will, through a certain agent, come into possession of it. As for that holy relic, he has sworn upon his soul, and will see that a church courier personally puts it in the Queen’s hands, should the worst come to pass. Heaven, as I said earlier, forbid.”
“Good. Very good, my little piss,” said John as, amid a storm of hacking and expectoration, he gathered the energy to die. Foss waited.
Once again, with tremendous and, Foss thought, touching effort, the King inclined or collapsed in the direction of his retainer who thus found himself even more uncomfortably intimate with royal emanations. He dropped the sheet from his nostrils, lest he give offense.
“Am I excommunicated at present? His Holiness is so capricious with my soul, I can’t keep track.”
“Not last I heard,” said Foss. “It takes time for news of the Pope’s most recent infallible change of mind to reach us here at the fringes of his consideration. But this is not among the issues with which you need to concern yourself. As I indicated earlier, I believe your standing with the church is moot relative to your standing in heaven.”
John laughed and spit in the direction of an oaken bucket on the floor.
“You’ve done well,” said John.
The words, though foul on the air, were not without a certain sweetness in the ear. Foss had never, in forty-odd years of service, received a sincere compliment from his master, and was not altogether sure how he should respond. He bowed his head slightly, suspicion blooming from the froth of praise. “It is my pleasure to be of service, Majesty.”
“Just so,” said John quietly, thoughtfully. “Just so. Upon consideration,” he added, “I find those services far too valuable to do without in the next life.”
The words had an ominous ring to them. Foss looked up sharply at the same instant a tiny golden spark of alarm flashed from the blade in the King’s hand. Even had John been in his prime, though, Foss would have had a good chance of evading the attempt—so practiced was he, because of his size, at evading sudden and unexpected dangers. As it was, the King had, in the attempt, expended all the energies he’d reserved to present a dignified corpse to whomever should find it. The result was not dignified. Finding none of the anticipated resistance from the thrust—upon which he had relied to maintain equilibrium—the King was unbalanced and slid indecorously from his bed to the floor; a considerable distance, with a royal thud and an impromptu chorus of curses.
The King lo
oked up at his underling. “I must stop underestimating you.”
Foss reached down and retrieved the knife from the floor. “It’s common among those handicapped by surplus height, your Majesty, to look down upon those who must, of physical necessity, look up to them.” He put the knife on the bedside table.
Once again John’s eyes, briefly enlivened by the enactment of the last desperate act in his plan, dulled at its lack of fruition and began to loll again. “The idea was to leave no witnesses,” he said.
“I gathered as much. A wise stratagem. But you needn’t have worried, sire. I swore an oath to you many years ago.”
“One forgets the currency of oaths to people of your station.”
“Currency, yes,” said Foss. “Not to be confused with commodity.”
The walls of the bedchamber were paneled with ancient oak, made porous in the distant past by endless English winters and the burrows of worms seeking shelter from them. These orifi inhaled this fleeting moment pregnant with historical significance.
”I’m dying,” said the King at last, as if it was a condition he expected Foss to rectify.
“I’ve known others to make quicker work of it, your Majesty. Many at your hand. I commend their example. Less talk, more action. Another peach?”
“Surprises await,” said the King, and died with a grimmace on his lips, which Foss chose to interpret as a smile.
What greater reward for a jester?
Chapter Twelve
It struck Albert, as he watched her go about her work, that Deirdre Ponsenby–Blythe–Hamilton was as busy as her name. The flowers she had spent several minutes straightening drooped, as if in exhaustion, when she moved on. Albert could almost hear little horticultural sighs. Even the dust she flung her duster at startled a moment, bringing to mind a flock of microscopic pigeons, danced briefly in a wayward shaft of sunlight, and resettled in the same place.
A wonder occurred to Albert and it tilted his head to one side as he watched her activity; nothing seemed improved by her efforts. It was as if she was a very talkative ghost, who bustled through the atmosphere without making any discernible impression upon it.
Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3) Page 15
