“I beg your pardon, mother,” Geoffrey blurted, “but I need to know which is the child of Johanna’s body, Alice or Theoric Frelonde?”
“Why, Alice, of course. Theoric was born Godeswell in Suffolk.”
“But since Alice is Johanna’s only heir, Theoric took her name.”
“Yes.” The old woman nodded. “I never thought it was a love match—Alice needed someone to work the land, and since Theories people were merchants, he had no land. But he’s been properly respectful of them, for all his talk of selling up and buying land in Suffolk. First Johanna and now Alice will have none of that, though. The farm at Estursete’s belonged to the family since before the Conquest.”
For one short second, Geoffrey was elated by his own cleverness. Then his elation plunged into cold water and steamed away. “Has Alice been here today?”
“No, only Theoric. He said Alice was dreadfully upset about Johanna, so much so she insisted on walking beside the river where her brother died. He’s gone to fetch her for the funeral.”
“Oh, no. No.” Geoffrey grasped Edith’s shoulders. Her frail bones felt like kindling. “Send someone to the castle. Give the sergeant my respects and ask him to bring his men to Estursete. Now.”
“What?”
“Theoric killed Johanna. Finished killing her…” He shook his head. But Baldwin had never been as important as he believed himself to be. “If both Johanna and Alice are dead—if Alice dies without issue—then Theoric can sell the land. And Alice is pregnant. I don’t think she’s gone for a walk by the river at all.”
“Blessed Saint Peter,” gasped Edith. She brushed past Geoffrey and hobbled down the walk. “Blessed Saint Dunstan… You, boy! Come here! I have an errand for you!”
Geoffrey sprinted the other way, caroming off passersby, and burst out of the city onto the bridge. The fog was thinning into mist. The roofs of Estursete solidified from nothingness even as he looked. Black birds circled overhead, like letters incised on the pallid sky.
He ran faster, the air icy against his feverish face. What did his own ambitions matter when a living soul—two souls—were at risk? He could see the scene, Theories hand resting on Alice’s back, the smooth voice saying, “Look there, my dear, what’s that in the water?” Then a splash, and Theoric crying to the village that he’d found his wife’s body in the river, drowned just like her brother—of course she didn’t take her own life in despair over her mother’s death, not a good Christian woman like Alice.
Geoffrey burst into the smithy. “Smith. Come with me. Now.”
“What the… ?” But Wulfstan was curious enough to follow. So were several other villagers. Geoffrey could hear their laughter behind him—an archbishop’s clerk lurching clumsily through the mud was the best joke they’d seen in days. Normally, he’d cringe at the laughter, but not now.
A thin silvery mist hung over the river, veiling the tangled limbs of the willows. A path, yes, and there, the river rimmed with ice, the tips of the willow branches just etching the smooth surface of the water.
From the mist resolved the shapes of Alice and Theoric, standing on a bank above a still, dark pool. Even as Geoffrey inhaled to shout, the cold air burning his laboring lungs, Alice fell. Slowly, slowly, her coverchief waving like the wings of a butterfly, and Theories hand extended not to help her but to push.
Her body shattered the water. Droplets sparked in a sudden gleam of sun. “Theoric!” she shouted, but the name disappeared in a gulp. Theoric folded his arms and watched.
“God help us,” gasped Geoffrey, and leaped.
The water was so cold it scalded his skin. The current pulled him under. He was powerless against it. His sight blurred, fog above, fog below—water plants waving and—Alice, billowing cloth, staring eyes, and open mouth still screaming, silently now.
No, she’d been cruelly used, but her mortal life wasn’t yet over. Neither was his. And he had the strength of his youth, the stubbornness, the anger… Geoffrey thrust himself toward Alice. Grasping her cold white hand, he struggled toward the distant glow of the sky.
His ears thrummed hollowly. A searing pain filled his chest and throat. The day of wrath, he thought, might just as well be cold as hot, frost instead of flame. His foot touched something solid. He heaved himself upward and his head broke through into air and light.
He heard Theories voice, ragged now, shouting, “The Normans took my family’s land. I deserve my land. Back home in Suffolk, where it’s always been. I deserve land.”
Beside Geoffrey, Alice gasped and coughed. Wrapping his arm around her waist, he struck out for the bank. She was so slightly built it was hard to believe she’d soon be great with child. A child who would never know its father.
Wulfstan had Theories arms pinned behind his back. The man struggled and cursed but couldn’t break free. And here came the sergeant and his men, the now sober crowd of villagers parting before their weapons.
Geoffrey carried Alice out of the water and gave her up to the other women. Again the sun came out, warm against his icy skin, and the air he breathed seemed suddenly sweet.
BALDWIN BLINKED UP AT the clear blue sky like a mole. Gingerly, he stepped across the mucky cobblestones at the castle gate. “So it was Theoric?”
“Yes,” Geoffrey replied. “It was Theoric who took advantage of your weakness. I didn’t tell the sheriff about your assault on Johanna, but I shall certainly tell the archbishop.”
“And I’ll be lucky to spend the rest of my life in a monastery in the wilds of Yorkshire,” moaned Baldwin. “But better that than a dungeon. Thank you, Geoffrey.”
“I’m the archbishop’s man, aren’t I?” For now, Geoffrey added to himself. His knees were wobbling, for all that he’d dried himself at the sheriff’s fire waiting for Baldwin to be released. Impatiently, he urged the priest up Castle Street. A quiet daily round of prayer and devotion sounded very appealing just now. But even in a remote monastery there’d probably be those who had ambitions. Geoffrey was beginning to think that simply doing right was the greatest ambition of all.
And that’s probably what Johanna thought she was doing. “What did Johanna say to you, Baldwin? What did she foresee for the archbishop?”
Baldwin shook his head. “Swords rising and falling in the red light of the altar lamp like tongues of flame. The archbishop hewed to the pavement and his blood a red pool around him. A new and powerful saint elevated before the high altar.”
My God, Geoffrey thought, and he stumbled over the cobbles. But he forced a laugh. “There you are. She was mad, wasn’t she? Not a witch at all, but one of God’s most pitiable creatures.”
“Yes. Yes, I’m sure you’re right.”
Am I? Geoffrey asked himself. If Henry was capable of bringing charges against Thomas, his all-too-powerful followers, eager to court his favor, might… No. Surely Johanna’s vision was only symbolic.
They walked through the gates of the bishop’s palace and parted, Baldwin trudging toward the monks’ dormitory, Geoffrey to the archbishop’s chamber. Over the roof of the cathedral peeked the scaffolding around Prior Wibert’s new tower. Each man had to leave his legacy. And Theories legacy was a scaffold in the marketplace: an ugly and petty ending for a man who despite all his airs was just as ugly and petty.
Geoffrey found the archbishop alone, seated close beside his fireplace, a book open in his hands. He looked up from beneath his brows, and again Geoffrey felt small and weak in the heat of his scrutiny. “Well, then, Norwich, I hear you’ve acquitted yourself well.”
“Yes, my lord,” Geoffrey replied, and told the entire tale, concluding, “Theoric wanted the land. He thought he deserved it.”
“So it was all a matter of greed for property and position,” Thomas said. “But what is a man profited, if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?”
Had he found the truth Thomas wanted him to find? Geoffrey asked himself. Had the archbishop wanted to confront the king? Did he, too, feel himself carried away by currents beyon
d his control?
Truth seemed damnably elusive at the moment. “I wonder, my lord, if Theories crime was in not aiming high enough. How many noblemen have murdered their way into property and position and suffered nothing for their crimes?”
Thomas’s brows angled wryly upward. “Many.”
“The king’s mother and her cousin plunged England into war, contesting property and position. Why do men commit mortal sins to get what they think they deserve? Why do men go to such great lengths to serve their ambitions? Scripture tells us not to lay up treasures upon earth, where moth and rot corrupt and where thieves break through and steal, but to lay up treasures in heaven.”
“Not all men,” answered Thomas, “have keen enough eyesight to see heaven before them. Thank you, Geoffrey. Oh…”
Geoffrey stopped his turn toward the door and turned back, almost losing his balance. “Yes, my lord?”
“Why did Baldwin try to strangle Johanna?”
He’d prepared himself for that question. “She meant to warn you, my lord, that your debate with the king may in time prove dangerous. Baldwin felt she was speaking nonsense verging upon heresy.”
Thomas’s smile was thin but not humorless. “On the contrary. She appears to have been quite clever and articulate. A pity she died trying to warn me of something I already know. Thank you. You may go.”
But even truth was not as elusive as Thomas of London. Bowing, Geoffrey walked to the door, where he paused and glanced back over his shoulder.
Even though the room was dusky with shadow, Thomas himself sat in the circle of firelight, its rosy glow softening his stern, pale features. He gazed into the flames, but his eyes saw farther, beyond fire, beyond ice, to a place where fire and ice, dark and light, life and death themselves were as one.
With something between a chill and a thrill down his spine, Geoffrey shut the door and asked himself just how long before Johanna’s vision came to pass.
Author’s Note
In 1164 Thomas Becket was forced into exile in France. A few weeks after his return, on December 29, 1170, he was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by four of Henry V’s knights—including Hugh de Morville. None of them suffered any secular penalty. For almost four hundred years, until the reign of another Henry, the eighth, Thomas was England’s greatest saint.
A Horse for My Kingdom
Gillian Linscott
Author’s Note
Nobody kills a herald. No matter how hot the hatred or how fierce the fight, the herald is sacred. He goes from one army to the other to challenge, to parley, to arrange a truce or exchange of prisoners. Nobody—king, noble, or common soldier—raises a hand against him any more than they would against a priest. And yet at Mortimer’s Cross, not far from the border where England becomes Wales, on a freezing cold morning the day after Candlemas in 1461, Bluemantle, the herald, was killed. England got a new king that day at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, Edward, the fourth of that name, as anybody may read in the histories. But how and why Bluemantle died has not been told—until now.
Even in the muck and the cold, with night coming on and the enemy so close you could smell the wood smoke from their fires, men turned to watch as she went past. The ground was a paste of red-brown mud with a crust of frost over it just hard enough to take the start of a foot’s pressure then crack and sink you ankle-deep in ooze. Yet she walked so cleverly her feet were hardly mired. The winter sun was down level with the tree trunks, with no warmth in it, and the cold river curling round their camp smoked vapor into the colder air. When a man pissed, the heat went out of it in the time it took to splash against the toe of his boot. But she glowed in the cold air as if she’d found the trick of keeping her own private midsummer. Wherever she walked, there was metal whirring and clattering, swords and axes spluttering sparks on grindstones, scythes witter-wattering on whetstones. She only paused for a moment, curious, eyes wide. A man, feeling her sweet breath against the back of his neck, stopped what he was doing and turned, smiling. But before he could touch her, she moved on with that precise delicate walk, haunches swaying.
“Fine horse,” he said.
“Yuh.”
“What’s her name, then?”
“Flut.”
Fillette was the chestnut’s name to the young man who owned her, but for the more-or-less man-shaped clod of rags and mud that held the end of her halter rope, Flut did well enough. Some names are made to travel a long way. Names like Edward Plantagenet, Duke of York, and Earl of March. That one had to ring out tomorrow in the herald’s challenge across the frozen fields to where the enemy, Pembroke’s men, were waiting and beyond that to the palace at Westminster where the mad king lived. The name of the clod holding the end of the halter rope only had to travel the length of a small stable yard at the most. Because he went with the horse and if anybody called for him it was because they wanted her, he answered to his version of her name, Flut.
“Who does she belong to, then?”
“Master Thomas.”
Which pretty well exhausted the few words Flut knew. He and Fillette turned toward the corner of the field where their camp was, but before they’d taken more than a step or two they had to pull up to let a more important group pass in the opposite direction. At the center of it was a man riding a good bay, surrounded by four servants on foot. He rode like somebody with authority and wore a tabard quartered in Edward’s colors of blue and red embroidered in gold thread with lions and fleur-de-lys, with a blue mantle hanging from his shoulders and spread out over the horse’s hindquarters. He had no armor or helmet and carried no weapons apart from a short hunting dagger at his belt. His face was stern, giving nothing away. When they saw him, the men went quiet and the whirr of weapon sharpening stopped until he’d gone past. The man who’d admired Fillette spoke in an undertone.
“Been sent for, Bluemantle has. Edward wants to tell him what to say tomorrow.”
“Not much doubt about that, is there? Run back to King Henry and tell him to shift his arse and make way for young Edward.”
“He won’t put it like that.”
“That’s what he’ll mean, though.”
Somebody noticed Flut gaping after Bluemantle and explained.
“You never seen a herald, boyo? Nobody can’t start fighting until he says so.”
Flut’s gape shifted from middle distance to the man speaking.
“Wasting your breath explaining it to him,” somebody else said. “Stargazy, he is.”
“He’ll ride out there tomorrow, soon as it’s light, through those trees and over the field to where they are, then out comes their herald and they sling words at each other for a bit, then off we all go.”
The man flourished his pike. Flut and Fillette jumped backward and everybody laughed.
“Mares is no good for fighting,” someone said.
Fillette and Flut ambled on, moving at exactly the same pace. Fillette was eight summers old. Flut, if anybody had been interested enough to ask, could have worked out that he must be quite a bit older because he’d been almost a full-grown man when she was born, but his existence, such as it was, dated from the spring morning when she slid out of her mother’s womb onto a bed of dry bracken and he was told, “Lift her up boy. Get her round so the mare can lick at her.” At night, he was ordered to sleep in the stable to make sure the wolves from the hills didn’t come and get her. He couched in the bracken among the droppings and the sticky afterbirth, exchanging his smell for hers. It was a step up in life for him, who’d never slept between walls before. The dried peas and nuts the foal’s mother dropped while she was feeding and he snatched up before the rats could get them were the sweetest things he’d ever eaten. The milk he sucked from her teats when the foal had finished was the warmest thing that ever went down his throat. Since then, the only times he and Fillette had been apart was when the master took her out hunting, and even then he’d follow mile after mile in bare feet over rocks and through brambles to be there when the riders drew rein and
then attach himself to her bridle. He was as much a part of the horse as her tail and hooves.
THEIR BILLET WAS IN the far corner of the field because, apart from the beauty of Fillette, they were some of the least important in the whole of the army. The camp was arranged with Edward’s pavilion in the middle with his standard hanging from a lance outside, men coming and going all the time, straw packed into the mud around it to make the path easier, but mud still oozed through. Next to it was the tent of his second in command, Sir William Herbert, then of the other great men who’d brought forces of hundreds, archers, foot soldiers, their own armorers. The men were grouped round fires of logs dragged from the wooded slopes behind the camp, cooking mutton and venison in cauldrons, checking weapons. A stallion whinnied at the scent of Fillette. She and Flut stepped out faster, got back to the patch of muddy grass that had been home for three cold days of waiting.
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