Lord of Midnight

by Jo Beverley

  Renald had turned somber. She didn’t blame him. She knew he would hate what he had to do, and could only pray that he wouldn’t hate her for it. She would have liked to comfort and receive comfort from him, but she hadn’t seen him since late the day before. An ordeal was a holy rite. The participants must fast, pray, and take the host before asking God to stand in judgment.

  Her heart ached at the thought of how Renald had first come to Summerbourne. After a night of fasting, and a tragic duel, he’d made a long, storm-pounded journey to face the family of the man he’d killed. Why had she seen only harshness then? Why had she not seen the anguish?

  Her heart ached even more with worry. What if they were wrong? What if Eudo was innocent?

  She’d put that to Renald in the last words they’d spoken. “What if he’s innocent?”

  “He’s not. His guilt hangs around him like a stink.”

  “We can’t be sure. I’ll die if I’ve sent you to your death.”

  He’d held her close, even laughing. “Claire, if you don’t have faith in me, have faith in God. He will not kill an innocent man in a holy rite.”

  His faith shamed her. She sat in the stands, praying for the same certainty.

  She was hating this in simple terms, too. It had been bad enough watching a show fight. She did not want to witness a fight to the death. Anyone’s death.

  She was shaking by the time the men walked out into the open space. FitzRoger had taken the seat beside her, and he put a steadying hand over hers. She wished she could cuddle into him like a child, but she must keep her dignity for Renald’s sake.

  Men-at-arms stood around to form the rough circle. By the king’s order, no casual spectators were permitted at this trial.

  Renald was all wolf. Why had she forced him to this?

  But no. Eudo had forced this battle by maintaining his innocence. A plea of guilty might even have led to the mercy of exile, but he’d clung to innocence with the blank desperation of a drowning man.

  He was pale now, his eyes flickering as if seeking some escape. She ached for him, and for his family. But mostly she ached for what opposing such fear would mean to Renald. It would be like slaughtering the Michaelmas goose, without honor or dignity.

  Unless, of course, they were wrong and God strengthened Eudo’s arm.

  Once the men stood before the king, the crier stepped forward. “Hear ye, hear ye! Eudo, Lord Sheriff of Dorsetshire, sworn to uphold the king’s peace and law, stands here accused of the murder of his man, Gregory, and of one Ulric of Summerbourne, and of the attempted murder of the Lady Claire of Summerbourne, and of brigandry on the king’s highway. Eudo, Sheriff of Dorsetshire, how plead you?”

  “Not guilty.” But it came out hoarse.

  “Who stands to support this accusation?”

  “I, Lord Renald of Summerbourne,” said Renald firmly. “I claim the right both as Lord of Summerbourne and thus protector of the man Ulric, and as husband of Claire of Summerbourne, my right worthy lady.”

  “Do you both call upon God,” the crier demanded, “to use your bodies to prove justice and right?”

  “I do!”

  “I do!” But Eudo sounded merely hopeless. Surely, thought Claire, that was proof of his guilt.

  Merciful Christ, let it be over quickly.

  A priest came forward and gave both men a cross to kiss, then sprinkled them with holy water, chanting a blessing. Then the priest anointed them both with holy oil. Eudo began to shake.

  When the priest stepped back, the crier announced, “May God show the truth of your cause!” and the king raised his hand.

  The two men drew their swords and turned to face one another. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then Eudo slowly sagged to his knees, sword and shield sinking to the ground as if too heavy to be borne.

  Was it surrender, or a plea for mercy? There could be no mercy at this point.

  Renald swung his mighty sword and beheaded him.

  Just like that.

  Claire stared at the dismembered body, at the spreading pool of blood, then realized Renald had given his sword to Josce for cleaning and was coming to kneel before the king. FitzRoger had her hand tight in his. She suspected it was to stop her from flinging herself weeping into her husband’s arms.

  The king raised Renald and kissed him. “We thank you for your service in defense of justice in our realm.” Then he turned and left, his great lords following. FitzRoger raised Claire and led her to Renald, who was pushing back his coif and looking remarkably unaffected.

  “I definitely must get myself one of those swords,” said FitzRoger, passing Claire over. “I’ll escort the Lady Felice back to the keep. Walter of Daventry, you suggested?”

  “He’s big and in the king’s favor. He has children from his first marriage, but only girls. Felice would have the chance to provide the heir. And he’s fair but won’t put up with nonsense.”

  When FitzRoger had left with Felice, Renald wrapped a mailed arm around Claire and they followed. “I’m sorry you had to witness that, love.”

  She was shaking, but tried to match his tone. “At least it was quick.”

  “As I said once, I’m good at killing.”

  “Don’t!” But then she looked up at him. “You really don’t mind, do you?”

  He grimaced. “Should I pretend otherwise? I’d have honesty between us. Killing your father was wrenching, but Eudo was no loss to the earth. Such a string of venal crimes sickens me.”

  Something was bothering her. “Did he admit guilt at the end? Should he not have been offered mercy?”

  “Claire, once into the ordeal, the only legal mercy would have been maiming and the loss of all his rights. There’s justice in that, but no kindness.”

  Claire looked back to where Eudo’s men were taking away his body. She crossed herself. “God have mercy on his soul.”

  “Amen.” He stopped to look at her. “It’s a long day’s journey back to Summerbourne, wife, but I’d like to make it. I want to be there, with you, in peace and harmony.”

  “Oh yes, please!” She pulled a face. “For one thing, the queen’s demanding more riddles!”

  Summerbourne sat placidly under an opalescent evening sky, thatch dry after days of sun, work over for the day. All the same, people swarmed out to welcome their lord and lady home.

  The great gates stood open as they generally did, and so Claire, Renald, and their escort rode in to the dusty bailey, into a milling throng of animals and people.

  Lady Agnes was sitting outside enjoying the evening air. Her sharp eyes studied them, and then she smiled. Claire slid off her horse and went over. “Yes, everything has worked out well, Gran.”

  “Thought it would. What of Felice, then?”

  “She’s staying for a few days. We have hopes of a certain Lord Walter of Daventry, a mighty man of middle age and lusty appetites.”

  “I see. And Thomas?”

  “Sniffled a bit at parting, but seems to be having a wonderful time. In between beatings.”

  Lady Agnes chuckled. “And what happened to Eudo the Sheriff?”

  Claire told her the story, and her grandmother nodded. “Right and proper. So, with your mother at St. Frideswide’s, and Amice doubtless soon to join Felice, you’ve just me cluttering up the place.”

  Claire leaned down to kiss her. “What would I do without you, Gran? This is your home, and you’ll always have your place by the hearth.”

  She looked around and saw Renald over by the pigsties. She joined him in watching a litter of piglets chase around squealing. “I hope they won’t have to meet their fate so soon.”

  He turned to wink. “Perhaps I like suckling pig.”

  “Perhaps, my lord, you can be contented by merely suckling.”

  His brows rose. “Such sacrifice just for pigs?”

  She hooked a finger over his big belt and pulled him to her. “Who said anything about sacrifice?”

  He captured her hand and freed himself. “Wife, I thi
nk it’s time we established some decorum in Summerbourne. We will wait until nightfall. There must be plenty of work to be done after our absence, especially with Felice away for days.”

  “Oh, very well.” Claire looked around. “Let’s see. I believe I was intending to show you the middens …”

  “Ah. On the other hand”—he took her hand and drew her toward the manor house—”I suddenly see the virtues of a very early night.”

  Author’s Note

  The medieval mind was firm about justice. To them, God’s plan was for a peaceful world free of sin, and it was the duty of all God’s people to make it so. Wrongdoing required both reparation and punishment. Reparation was usually a payment of money to victims and their families, or to the king. Punishment was often designed to deter others, but to leave the sinner alive and able to repent. Hence the tendency to chop off hands, feet, and/or genitals.

  In a time when everyone knew everybody around them, catching criminals wasn’t a high art except in the rare case when a crime was committed by an outsider. For this reason, strangers were regarded with deep suspicion, and crimes of stealth, no matter who committed them, were punished most severely. “Murder” was reserved for a crime of stealth, and was punished more severely than a mere killing in a fight or feud.

  However, sometimes guilt wasn’t clear, and in these cases ordeal was used to settle the matter. Ordeal was by means of hot iron, cold water, or battle, and was a strict ritual administered by the Church. In fact, it almost became a sacrament along with baptism, marriage, and extreme unction.

  In ordeal by hot iron, the accused person had to grasp a red-hot rod and carry it a fixed distance. The burn was then bound and inspected in three days. If it was healing, God had shown that the person was innocent. If it had begun to fester, then the person was guilty.

  Rather preferable, perhaps, was ordeal by cold water. The accused was tied up and lowered into the water on a rope. If he sank, he was innocent. (No, he wasn’t left to drown, but hauled out still able to celebrate.) If he floated, he was guilty and dragged off for punishment.

  Ordeal by battle was much rarer, but it wasn’t reserved for nobles and knights. It was most often used when two people accused each other of crimes, or as a kind of civil prosecution when the law wasn’t clear. (This lingered as the duel, and in fact was still a possible judicial solution until 1819.)

  In ordeal by battle, or a court battle, the men fought to the death, no holds barred. The weapon was usually a stick, and it soon became a wrestling, gouging, stomping brawl. However, there are instances of more knightly duels with swords, and that is what I have shown in this book.

  As with the Brave Child Sebastian, there were stories of duels between children and mighty warriors, and actual cases where a weak man defeated a strong. It was even possible for a woman to challenge a man, in which case the man was buried up to his waist in the ground as a handicap.

  I recently attended a lecture on the risks of ordeal, and I’d like to share some of the points with you because I found them fascinating. Margaret Kerr, a barrister, has studied records of ordeals and found that remarkably few went against the accused. She speculates that ordeal was often used by the Church as a way of providing mercy in harsh times.

  Certainly William Rufus—the king before Henry Beauclerk—was not at all pleased when fifty men accused of breaking the Forest Laws were put to the ordeal of hot iron and all passed. In fact, his reaction to this was to decide that God was too easily persuaded to mercy by prayer. Since a king was much tougher minded, in future he would decide who was guilty and who was innocent.

  Perhaps this was another reason for that wayward arrow in the New Forest!

  The low rate of conviction led Ms. Kerr to investigate the techniques of hot iron and cold water. (Ordeal by battle doesn’t enter into this, because one of the two must lose.)

  She found that today, severe burns often don’t fester by three days, and can even look healed. The accused would only fail this test if the iron was too cool and gave only a second-degree burn.

  Ordeal by cold water is even more interesting. You may have noticed that earlier I referred to people being tested by cold water as male. That’s because this test was never done on women until the much later witch-hunting period. Men generally have a much lower ratio of body fat than women, and in modern studies it has been shown that a bound man rarely floats in cold water unless he’s notably fat.

  (Want to bet that those witch-hunters had this all figured out? Let’s talk about the persecution of women sometime.)

  A guilt factor can enter in, of course. With hot iron, moisture on the skin might make a difference, so a guilty person’s clammy hands might be disastrous.

  With water, a fit man can float if he has a lot of air in his lungs. Guilt might lead to panic, which might lead to sucking in extra air. In one case, an abbot was implicated in a crime and set to undergo the ordeal by cold water. He repeatedly checked himself out in a big tub of water to be sure he would sink. Every time, he did.

  Come the day, however, he floated. Presumably, panic caused him to suck in breath. Was his panic caused by guilt, and by his belief that God knew his secrets? We’ll never know.

  His panic is understandable, however, because he chose the ordeal. Anyone always had the option of confession, and the civil powers preferred this. The Church also approved, since it was the step to repentance and salvation. Therefore, the penalties for those who underwent an ordeal and failed were harsher than for those who confessed.

  There are a few interesting records of ordeal by cold water that describe the accused being trussed up with their knees to their chest. At first glance, this might seem harsher, but in fact it’s a sign that someone really wanted them to get off. It’s much more difficult to float like that, and almost impossible to take a deep breath of air.

  So how does this finagling mesh with the medieval interest in justice?

  Then as now, there was a sense of right and wrong that overrode the actual laws. If people didn’t see the crimes as wrong—as with violations of the Forest Laws—ordeal could get around the king’s laws.

  In addition, however, ordeal was doubtless often used in an honest sense—requesting God to clarify an uncertain case so that reparation and punishment could wipe the evil from the community.

  For many reasons, however, ordeal fell into disrepute. (Interestingly, one of the objections was religious. Some theologians thought it wrong for anyone to demand a service of God, as those undergoing ordeal did in demanding that God be their judge.) The jury system had always been around, and in 1215 ordeal by hot iron or cold water was forbidden by the Pope and judgment by one’s peers became the norm.

  As I said earlier, however, this didn’t affect trial by battle.

  I hope you enjoyed this story. If you missed it, the story of Imogen and FitzRoger is told in Dark Champion, published by Avon Books in 1993. He appears briefly in another novel, The Shattered Rose (Zebra, 1996) and the hero of that book is the crusader who brought back that stone from Jerusalem.

  I write historical romances set in three periods: the early medieval, the Georgian around 1760, and the Regency. My next novel from Topaz is set in 1814 and involves a plain, prosaic heroine; an eccentric, enigmatic earl; and a magical Irish statue that grants wishes—but always with a sting in the tail. Look for it on the shelves the end of this year.

  And speaking of magic, I hope you found a special collection called Faery Magic, out in January 1998. All the stories are set in the Regency, but in places where the real world intersects with the dark world of Faery. My story is called “The Lord of Elphindale.” Yes, I know I said that story would be in a 1996 collection, but this time there’s no mistake.

  Romance novels have a magic of their own, bringing love, light, and laughter into the world. Romance readers are wonderful people who believe in looking for solutions and working with others. Never let anyone denigrate romance books or readers and get away with it.

  I am alway
s pleased to hear from readers. Please write c/o my agent, Alice Harror Orr, 305 Madison Ave #1166, New York, NY 10165. I appreciate a SASE to help with the cost of a reply.

  Or e-mail me at wp823@freenet.victoria.bec.ca

  My web page is at WWW.sff.net/people/jobeverley.

  Dear Reader:

  I enjoy writing in the medieval period. I was born and raised in England near one of the country’s oldest churches and an excellent example of a castle, Lancaster Castle. When I went to university, my degree was in history, so it’s not surprising that I ended up writing historical romance, or that my first novel was a medieval one.

  The Middle Ages is a great setting for fiction because life was lived on the edge. Law and order were always precarious and often safety depended on a man’s strength and skill. As Renald says in Lord of Midnight, the peace-loving people needed wolves to protect them from the wolves. What’s more, the nobility were right at the heart of the fate of nations, whether they wanted to be or not.

  The situation of medieval women is interesting, too. They were vulnerable, which often put them under a man’s control, but they were respected for their skills and authority. No man wanted a stupid or useless wife. When he was fighting, she had to run his properties, which amounted to being a general, a financial officer, and running a boarding school, hospital, pharmacy, and clothing factory at the same time. There are some famous strong and powerful medieval women.

  I have written four medieval romances thus far, and in order of events they are: Lord of My Heart, The Shattered Rose, Dark Champion, and Lord of Midnight. To learn more about all my books please visit my Web site at www.jobev.com. Or, if you wish, you can write to me at: Jo Beverley, c/o Margaret Ruley, The Rotrosen Agency, 318 East 51st Street, New York, New York 10022. I appreciate a SASE if you want a reply.

  All best wishes, Jo

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  Lord of My Heart