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, Theoric’s 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 Theoric’s 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 Theoric’s 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 Theoric’s 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 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 Theoric’s 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 beyond his control?
Truth seemed damnably elusive at the moment. “I wonder, my lord, if Theoric’s 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 further, 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.
* * * * *
Postscript: 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 II’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.
Author’s Note
“Cold as Fire” first appeared in Murder Most Medieval, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, Cumberland House, 2000.
I was researching St. Thomas Becket’s life and times for a fantasy thriller, Lucifer’s Crown, so it seemed only economical to use him in this mystery story, too—except this story takes place in his first life, so to speak, whereas Lucifer’s Crown takes place in the year 2000, when he’s getting just a bit long in the (immortal) tooth.
I found a map of the medieval town and the names of some of Becket’s contemporaries in my reference material, as well as inspiration for the issues of secular and ecclesiastical law that underpin the story. Those issues have changed since his day, but matters of property and jurisdiction—not to mention greed and entitlement—are still very much with us.
I’ve visited Canterbury a couple of times, the second time the day before the Queen was to pay a visit to open a new visitor center. (Excuse me, that would be “centre”.) I hope she enjoyed all the beautiful flower arrangements as much as my husband and I did.
A ROSE WITH ALL ITS THORNS
Suffused with the arctic gleam of self-possession, Virginia clasped her hands in her lap and asked, “You’re sure you have the correct DNA?”
Wilhelm Wolfe wasn’t quite smiling back at her. His face was twisted into that expression of ghastly affability men use when confronting a competent woman. Theseus had probably looked like that at the point of the Amazon queen Hippolyta’s spear, Virginia told herself. A shame she hadn’t gone on and run him through, but that was Greek tragedy for you.
What had brought Virginia to Wolfe’s office was a Tudor tragedy. Whose participants would certainly have recognized the classical names, even as they made the deplorable mistake of ascribing contemporary motives to historical figures.
“Quite sure,” Wolfe replied. “We compared the DNA sample we retrieved from the excavations at the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London with a sample of the DNA from Thomas Boleyn’s tomb at Hever church. The DNA sequence is Ann’s, no doubt about it.”
“Then I’m ready for the procedure.” Virginia started to stand up.
Wolfe raised a cautious hand. “Ah, just one moment, Miss Follansbee.”
“Dr.” Virginia rolled her eyes. Of course Wolfe wouldn’t acknowledge someone so much younger than he was, and a woman to boot, as his equal.
“Dr.,” returned Wolfe, clearing his throat. “I really must ask just why you want the DNA of Ann Boleyn, hardly the happiest person in history.”
“That’s just the point, Dr. Wolfe.” Virginia sat back down and leaned forward, her pale blue eyes emitting the frostiest of glares. She’d learned how to use such glares the last few years. Only the strongest survived the jungles of Academe. “It’s his-story, isn’t it? Ann Boleyn was a prototypical victim of sexual harassment. Used, abused, and ultimately executed on trumped up charges by a megalomaniacal Henry VIII because she bore him a daughter, not the son he wanted.”
“I always thought it was ironic that the daughter he rejected turned out to be Elizabeth I.”
“More than ironic. More, even, than poetic justice. Divine retribution. Henry changed the history of Europe to serve his own ego, claiming he was acting according to the will of God. Typical, for a man to think his own desires are God’s.”
Wolfe’s expression stretched. He almost seemed to be holding back a laugh. Odd, how people’s physiological reactions to stress often resulted in laughter.
“But then,” Virginia went on, “it was an age when women were forced to act on men’s orders, not on their own desires. Ann’s crime was in challenging Henry’s image of himself. No wonder he explained away his infatuation by blaming her, saying she’d bewitched him. Now, of course, we realize women are a colonized race. It’s time for her-story to be told accurately. It’s time for a victim like Ann to have a second chance at living her own life on her own terms, not on a man’s.”
“You’ve made a study of her life, haven’t you?”
“Sixteenth century sexual politics was the subject of my PhD dissertation. I now have a publisher waiting for me to finish an expanded version concentrating on the martyrdom of Ann Boleyn. How better to research a subject than to see her life through her own eyes?”
“And,” Wolfe went on, “I believe you’re being considered for a tenured professorship in Women’s Studies at Northeastern Liberal Arts University? A truly seminal work would send you to the head of the list, wouldn’t it?”
Virginia raised her chin, visualizing it as the bow of a battleship. “‘A seminal work.’ Why not, ‘an ovular work’? You see what I’m up against, Dr. Wolfe. Even the English language is sexist. If I’m named to the professorship I’ll be in a position to serve womankind.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” Wolfe grinned, then hastily sobered.
He’d done a background check on her, hadn’t he? Well, what could you expect? He had to make sure he got his money. And the money was there, no problem. Virginia’s hands knotted together so fiercely her knuckles cracked.
She could still see her father sitting smugly behind his huge desk, its mahogany top a trackless waste of old-growth forest brought down to feed his ego. How excruciatingly embarrassing it was to be the recipient of a trust fund fattened by his investments: Pharmaceuticals such as Viagra and Propecia. Anheuser Busch. General Motors. And (Virginia cringed) the Dallas Cowboys football team. When she’d come into the money two years ago, at age twenty-three, she’d realized it was her moral duty to cleanse and redeem it.
Ann Boleyn. The feminist martyr. “I’m ready,” Virginia said again, and this time did stand up.
The door opened. Dr. Chimera glided into the room. He—she—it was even more objectionable in person than in photos. That sublime smile was just what you’d expect from a man who’d swallowed his wife’s independent existence as heedlessly as a gourmand swallowing an oyster.
Chimera waved one graceful hand toward the door. “This way, please, Miss Follansbee.”
“Dr,” Virginia said. Evoking the ghosts of her foremothers Emmeline Pankhurst and Susan B. Anthony, she walked toward her destiny.
* * * * *
It wasn’t that she was dreaming. It wasn’t that she was having nightmares. The images, the sensations, came so thick and fast Virginia felt the familiar narrative thread of Ann’s life and untimely death tangling and knotting in her hands.
She smelled open sewers and pomanders and her own mother’s perfume. She tasted M&Ms and fresh apples. She heard voices, hoarse male voices shouting and children laughing, crowds jeering and dry professorial tones fading into fall afternoons.
She remembered birthday parties and the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Spotlights, open fires, candles. Fever and chills. Insects biting. The pain of childbirth. Sweat-soaked sex. . . .
Those last two weren’t hers. Neither of them, not hers. Virginia realized she was hyperventilating, whimpering in her sleep. She bore down, gritting her teeth against any show of weakness, even to herself.
She was running through the hedge-maze at Hampton Court, her embroidered velvet dress twisting around her ankles, her athletic shoes thudding on the ground. A tourist guide spoke arch Oxbridge through a loudspeaker. Horses whinnied and weapons clashed in the tiltyard behind the wall. She turned this way and that and every way led to a dead end, but still the footsteps came on behind her. Until she reached the center and stopped, threw back her head, and laughed in a fierce joy and a fiercer madness.
A spring morning, sunlight gilding the ancient walls of the Tower, her heart hammering—at last at last—in resign
ation and relief mingled. The faces, eager faces, grim faces, were turned toward her. All the faces she’d wooed and won and lost again were here at the end.
The blindfold closed her eyes, erasing the walls and the watching faces. She heard a step behind her. A blow slammed her forward into nothingness. Her consciousness spattered into stars, drifted, fell, and coalesced again.
When, where, how? Memories of Virginia’s own life cascaded through her mind. Again she heard Wolfe’s condescending voice. And something deep in her mind sighed in comprehension.
She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. It was an ordinary plaster ceiling, with a couple of nails working their way loose and a cobweb trembling in one corner. Tentatively, like probing a sore tooth, she poked through her own head. The other awareness was there, a resonance below her own thoughts.
She hadn’t expected it to be like this. It wasn’t like reading a reference book, or watching a movie, or interacting with a web site. She felt.
She’d been sick the first time she crossed the Channel. It’d hurt falling off her bicycle and splitting open her knee. Warm mulled wine reminded her of Dr. Pepper. Henry’s large but delicate hands played with her body. . . . Yeah, she remembered Matt’s clumsy efforts, too, and what a waste of time and energy that had been.
Laughter bubbled through her mind, laughter with a tart edge. Something warm and bittersweet curled through her body, making her stretch like a cat. She rolled over on her side, nestled her cheek into the pillow, and went back to sleep.
* * * * *
The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth Page 8
