by Unknown
“I saw something there.”
“I am quite sure you saw many things.”
“I saw your cousin, Robert.”
Malory stiffened. “And what was he doing there?”
“He was meeting up with a man. I saw him but he did not see me. The fellow was someone I have seen before. Richard Humphrey, he was, one of Buckingham’s men.”
“I know him, a brigand, no better than shyte on your boot. Could you hear what they were saying?”
“Not a word, but I saw your cousin waving his right arm about as if he had a sword in his hand.”
Malory exhaled in sadness and anger. He could almost hear Robert, drunk on ale, sweating like a pig, bragging about finding King Arthur’s sword as he pantomimed brandishing Excalibur in his warm chubby hand.
#
Soon afterwards Malory rode south with a small entourage, leaving John Aleyn at Newbold Revel to be his eyes and ears at the estate and protect his interests. There was urgent political business at Parliament and urgent personal business at Winchester. As it happened there was a connection between the two enterprises in the form of William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester.
Waynflete, one of the most learned men in England, had met Malory a decade earlier in Windsor in a meeting arranged by Thomas Welles, a gentleman who managed Waynflete’s episcopal estates. Welles, an acquaintance of Malory, thought that Waynflete, then headmaster of Winchester College, would enjoy Malory’s company and he had been correct. Though not a scholar, Malory impressed Waynflete with his keen mind, political savvy and his righteous character, which the headmaster believed was a perfect embodiment of the best of the code of chivalry. Through Waynflete’s influence, Malory was named as a member of Parliament for Great Bedwyn, a wool town 80 miles from Newbold Revel, with a seat that Waynflete happened to control. A decade later the two men remained close, allied by a common desire to serve an increasingly unstable King Henry VI to their utmost.
Malory spent less under a fortnight in Westminster participating in a fractious parliamentary debate on allocating funds to assist in the defense of Bordeaux, one of the last French towns loyal to the English. Parliament was dismissed, however, following an explosive proposal by a loyalist that the duke of York be recognized as the heir to the throne after the king’s five childless years of marriage.
Malory, disgusted by Parliament’s inability to support the stranded English troops, happily left his rooms in Whitechapel for the journey to Winchester.
William Waynflete was a man of great physical as well as mental stature. He greeted his old friend Malory with a bear hug, almost lifting him off the ground, then treated him to a lavish feast accompanied by some of the finest wine Malory had tasted since his days in Paris.
Over a platter of venison chops they caught up on the intrigues between the Yorkists and the Crown until Waynflete changed the subject.
“You know, Thomas, I have a treat for you. I have secured the loan of the most important nonecclesiastical book in England. The Domesday Book. I petitioned the Crown to return it to its original home in Winchester on the occasion of the three-hundredth year since it was removed from the old royal treasury in the city on the orders of King Henry II and taken to Westminster Palace. It is being kept at the college for the tutors to study and the pupils to marvel at. Would you like to see it?”
“I would indeed, your grace. It would be a marvelous thing to behold.”
“Tomorrow then. Now, enough of my concerns. You said you wished my help with a matter.”
“I do, your grace. I seek a learned man who can read the ancient Cornish writing.”
“I sense you have a marvelous tale behind this request, Thomas, and I am most anxious to hear it.”
“It is a marvelous tale, your grace, and you shall be the only man beside myself who knows the full extent of it.”
#
The Domesday Book was on display within the Master’s Library at Winchester College. It was surely the most prodigious book Malory had ever seen, so great, in fact, he was dubious its pedestal could reliably bear its weight. After a small discourse on its history and import, the master of the college, William Yve, a rodentine fellow in an overly long robe once having belonged to a predecessor but never altered, assisted Malory in finding the section of his home shire and with a brief lesson on deciphering the black and red text.
“Did the scribes write in code?” Malory asked.
“Not code; they employed a method of shortening the words to fit more on each sheet. Otherwise the book would be even more unwieldy than it is.”
When the headmaster had finished the lesson he left Malory alone with the great book, informing him that the linguist the bishop had requested would be arriving before too long.
As Malory thumbed through the parchments, which were surprisingly supple for their antiquity, the words his friend Waynflete had uttered to him the previous night came back to him. “Keep your secret close, Thomas. If anyone with a black heart were to learn of your royal lineage and the clue you possess to the Grail carved upon that sword, then your life would surely be in grave danger. You may trust the abbot of Coombe Abbey but I have met him and I do not. The riches he has amassed are well beyond the needs of his community and a cleric who cares more for gold than for God rouses my suspicions. Find a better place to hide the sword: that is my advice.”
A notion began to take shape in Malory’s head.
The list of towns and villages of Warwickshire contained in the pages of the Domesday Book whet his memory of the haunts of his youth. Though the words before him were dry recitations and ledgers of commerce, many of the places evoked pleasant memories of wenching, drinking, fairs, and jousting.
One particular village caught his eye and he read and reread its account with fascination, committing the entry to memory. Shortly thereafter, a man entered and announced himself as John Harmar, the scholar commanded by the bishop to assist the visiting knight.
Harmar was young, with the smooth skin of a boy and no eyebrows. Malory surmised he was one of those rare hairless men who would survive better teaching school than soldiering among hirsute warriors.
“The bishop sent word you required a man with an aptitude in old Cornish,” Harmar said, his hands clasped at his waist.
“I do. I have a short passage I wish to understand.”
“May I see it?”
“I did not travel with the text. I can say it for you.” He spoke the words as slowly and carefully as he could.
Harmar furrowed his brow and sat at one of the library tables nearby. From his shoulder bag he removed a quire of blank parchment, a quill, and a small pot of ink.
“My lord, please say the words again.”
He wrote down what he heard and showed it to Malory and asked him if the words matched the ones he had seen. Malory thought there was a close resemblance.
“Can you make sense of it?” Malory asked.
“Indeed I can, my lord. It is a strange instruction, wholly obtuse to me but perhaps it will be meaningful to you.”
#
On his return to Newbold Revel Malory hardly had time to reunite with his wife when John Aleyn announced he had urgent business with his master. A spy at Coombe Abbey, a young monk who worked in the brewery and the son of Malory’s loyal butcher, reported that two days earlier he witnessed a meeting between the abbot and one of Buckingham’s men, who placed a heavy purse in his palm.
“He’s sold us out, John,” Malory said, his face drooping with the weariness of a traveler who had hoped for expected rest.
“There is more, my lord,” Aleyn said. “Word spreads that Buckingham has procured a warrant for your arrest. I had it best from a bailiff in the employ of Sheriff Mountfort.”
“A warrant? On what charges?” Malory bellowed.
“Diverse, I hear. Remember that skirmish last year with Buckingham in the Coombe woods? He claims you assaulted his men.”
“Me? It was he who was preparing an assault on the manor!”
“You are also to be charged with the theft of livestock from Coswold.”
“For the love of Christ! I delivered six cows to Giles Dowde and he never paid me for them. All I did was to reclaim my property.”
Aleyn hung his head. “And there is to be one other charge.”
“Go on …”
“They are saying you raped Joan Smyth.”
Malory collapsed onto a chair. He had saved her and in gratitude and lust she had slept with him. Now the foolish act was coming to haunt him. Rape! Was there a worse charge to sully the name of a knight of the realm?
A footman knocked and entered bearing a letter. “My lord, this arrived with a rider from Coombe Abbey.”
Malory seized the letter and ripped off the wax seal. When he had read it he tossed it upon the floor in disgust.
“It is from the abbot.” Malory grimaced. “He informs me that hearing I am an accused criminal, he took it upon himself to break into my chest. He suspects Buckingham will pay handsomely for it. He wants to know if I will pay more.”
“The bastard,” Aleyn spat.
“Where is my cousin?” Malory asked, pushing himself up from the chair.
“He left the estate while you were in the south.”
“By God, I will find him and I will kill him with my own hand. But more pressing matters first: saddle my horse and yours. We must be off to the abbey.”
Aleyn was cinching the saddle of Malory’s steed when men approached, riding hard. Aleyn swore and called furiously for his lord and when Malory appeared with a small coterie of household men he and Aleyn exchanged glances and fingered the hilts of their swords. Then Malory shook his head. It was pointless to die in battle over an arrest warrant. His mission was to live to find the Grail.
“Stand down, men,” Malory commanded. “Sheriff Mountfort is not our enemy. I will yield to him.”
Mountfort rode at the head of his column of sword-and pikemen, an elderly gentleman kitted out for battle, stiff in the saddle with the plaintive look of someone reluctantly doing his sworn duty.
The old man spoke from his horse. “Sir Thomas Malory, I arrest you in the name of the Crown for diverse serious charges relating to your conduct. You will leave your sword and dagger behind and come with me.”
Malory turned to Lady Malory, who was weeping at the doorway, hugged her and told her it was a trifle and promised her he would return in a paternoster while. Then he mounted his horse and sidled up to Mountfort, an old family friend.
“I am sorry,” the man said. “Buckingham is behind this.”
“Be assured, I do not fault you,” Malory replied.
“He wanted you to be taken to his castle at Maxstoke or the jail in Coventry but I am taking you to my house in Coleshill. You will be most comfortable there while you await your appearance at court.”
Malory thanked him and received permission to have a word with his man. He instructed John Aleyn to journey to Coombe Abbey and to inform the abbot that he was prepared to pay whatever he asked for the chest. Then he tugged at his horse’s reins and rode off with the sheriff as a prisoner.
#
Malory had visited the moated manor house at Coleshill many times and on this occasion Mountfort accorded him the same hospitality. His room was large and comfortable, a manservant attended him, and his first night he ate at the sheriff’s table while the sheriff’s own men camped rough beside the barn.
While the household slept Malory did not.
His door was unlocked and he only had to tiptoe down the corridor, past the sheriff’s own bedchamber and down the back stairs to the pantry. He slipped out a back door and crept around the house to a point farthest away from the barn.
The moat looked like a black void. He pulled off his boots and threw them across, unhappy with the thuds they made, but when no one sounded an alarm he slowly settled himself into the cold water and swam across with a quiet breaststroke. His boots retrieved, he made his way across a field into the forest.
A rider was coming. Malory crouched low behind a large tree and waited until the horse passed him by. By the light of the rider’s torch he saw it was friend, not foe.
“Here!” he whispered loudly.
John Aleyn turned the horse and smiled down at him.
“You said you’d be back in a paternoster while. Takes you a good while to say the Lord’s prayer, I see. I have a horse for you a short way from here.”
“Bless you, John. Let’s get the men assembled and ride to Coombe.”
#
After a tumultuous and sleepless night, Malory rode alone over wild countryside as far from the traveled roads and lanes as he could. The raid on Coombe Abbey had been swift and loud. In the dead of night, Malory’s men battered down the gates and doors of the monastery with wooden rams. Once inside they made their way to the abbot house where the abbot was rudely rousted from his bed and his toad of a prior was kicked in the arse a few times. Malory personally used a pry bar to thwart the lock on the abbot’s treasure chest and retrieved his own strongbox. He left it to his men to decide if they wanted any of the abbot’s loot and of course they did, helping themselves to gold and silver rings, bracelets and necklaces of coral, amber and jet. With a snort Malory reckoned that none of these pieces were essential to the service of God.
It was a fine morning and butterflies passed close by his face. He made good time to his destination, his iron chest wrapped in a blanket to stop it abrading the horse’s hindquarters. In Winchester, while immersed in the Domesday Book, a better hiding spot had come to his mind, wholly fitting the sword’s valiant history. In the French prose poems that Malory knew so well, King Arthur, mortally wounded in battle, bade his knight, Sir Griflet, to return Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake. Malory would do the same. He knew of a water source, a lovely place where he had frolicked and fished as a youth. It was broad but not so deep. The sword could lie undisturbed there until it was safe for him to reclaim it.
And when he arrived at the beautiful, isolated spot, full of wildlife but free of men, Malory wept, as Griflet must have done, when he flung the chest into the murky water.
#
Now he was in prison again—a proper prison this time, with iron bars and few comforts.
When Malory returned to Newbold Revel, Buckingham had been personally waiting for him with a party of two hundred armed men. Malory then was taken to the Priory of Nuneaton, a short distance from Buckingham’s Maxstoke Castle, where justices and jurymen were summoned by the duke to effect his indictment on the very charges that John Aleyn had heard were forthcoming.
After brief and stormy proceedings in which Lady Malory wept and Sir Thomas shouted his innocence, branding the charges as preposterous, Malory was taken to a disused nun’s cell converted for his benefit into a temporary jail. A key rattled in the door and in came Buckingham, fat and smug.
“I have you where I want you, Malory,” he said.
Malory stayed seated on the mattress. “And where is that, my lord?”
“At a disadvantage.”
“For the moment, perhaps. What is it you want? Surely these ridiculous charges were meant to serve some larger purpose.”
“I want something you have. I want it badly.”
“My manly physique? Perhaps you should ride more?”
“You are in no position to make jests. I want the sword. I want the Grail.”
“Through the ages many men have sought the Grail, Sir Humphrey. For them it has been a holy quest to honor the greatness of God. Yet I fear your interests are not so pure and spiritual.”
“My reasons are not for your ear. They are for me and my associates.”
“Your associates? Some unholy cabal, I should think.”
Buckingham ignored him. “If you tell me where you secreted the sword, the charges will be dropped. If you do not, you can expect to spend a very long time in prison serving at the pleasure of His Majesty.”
Malory shook his head and lay down facing the opposite
wall. “I will fight your charges and if I lose, I will serve my time in jail honorably. What I will never do is let you get your greasy hands on that noble relic.”
Malory was remanded to London to stand charges at a Crown Court and found himself in the custody of the Marshal of the King’s Bench and locked away in Marshalsea Prison. It was a rank, pitiless prison but as a knight Malory was afforded a level of accommodation not available to the general population. He had a room with a window and ample candles. Family and friends could visit freely and his good wife had already made the journey to London to see to his well-being. His servants from Newbold Revel had delivered a cart loaded with furnishings, plates, a cask of wine and, most importantly as far as he was concerned, ink, quills, parchment, and a crate of books, his collection of Arthurian tales.
As he settled into what would turn out to be almost two decades in prison for crimes he did not commit, Malory was visited in Marshalsea by his faithful ally, John Aleyn, who shed tears at the sight of his master in captivity.
“I am glad you came again, John.”
“I would change places with you, my lord.”
Malory went to the door and peered through the barred window. “They let you enter without a toady to accompany you inside.”
“I did as you said, my lord, and bought along a small cask of wine. They set upon it like flies to dung.”
Malory smiled. “I need you to be my eyes, my ears, and on occasion my voice to the world outside these prison walls. I want you to keep close to those who know Buckingham’s affairs and favor my plight. I want to know of his associates—not the usual ones at court, but others who might have an interest in the sword. I desperately need to know who these men are and what their intentions.”
“Surely no one can find the sword. You alone know where you hid it.”
“And that is why I can sleep peacefully at night, even in such a place as this. When my day of freedom arrives I will use the knowledge the sword holds to find a much greater treasure.”
