A Place Beyond Courage (21 page)
Accompanied by Benet and a serjeant John set out for the court. He had warned his men to be on their guard and to mind their own business as far as possible.
‘There was never this kind of trouble in the old King’s day,’ Benet muttered for the tenth time as they entered the High Street and turned towards the castle. He eased the leather lining of his hauberk around his throat.
‘Well, those days are unlikely to return, so best keep your sword girded and your eyes keen,’ John snapped.
They passed the lodging house that had been commandeered by the entourage belonging to Roger of Salisbury. John quickened his pace but as he drew level with the entrance, one of Meulan’s knights staggered from the hall into the street, lurched into John and fell at his feet, blood spurting from the severed stump of his right hand. From the interior of the lodging came the clash of weapons and the sound of men locked in combat. Swearing like a common footsoldier, John ripped off one of the wounded knight’s hose bindings and lashed it around the forearm, reducing the gush to a dribble.
Two more soldiers ran out of the door, one bleeding from a broken nose, the other with a huge tear in his quilted tunic through which the fleece stuffing poked like a cloud. Together they picked up the injured knight at John’s feet and dragged him away. Benet and the serjeant drew their swords. So did John, a dark stain marring the sleeve of his court tunic and his hands glistening with blood.
The fighting erupted out of the lodging and into the street with a vengeance. John recognised knights belonging to Waleran of Meulan, Alain of Brittany, and the Bishops of Salisbury and Ely. Damette had been right but he had not expected things to move with quite such immediacy. Swords clashed. No one was carrying a shield and the shriek of metal on metal was one that ripped up the spine and lodged between the teeth.
One of Salisbury’s knights saw John with his sword bare in his bloody hand and leaped on him with a howl of ‘Treacherous bastard!’
John hastily parried and parried again, his blade taking the punishment of what were intended to be killing blows. He turned his wrist, stepped and, with a hard twist and flick, sent his assailant’s weapon spinning out of his hand, then levelled his sword at the knight’s throat.
‘Now why should you call me that?’ John snarled.
‘You’re in league with them, aren’t you?’ panted the soldier, teeth bared. ‘You’re part of the plot to overthrow my lord the Bishop!’
‘I am part of nothing!’ John bit out. ‘What’s happening here?’
‘We were here first; it’s ours, bought and fairly paid for!’ The knight’s expression blazed with indignation.
‘This started as a quarrel over lodgings?’ John asked incredulously.
The knight curled his lip as if he thought John was calling him an idiot. ‘Yes,’ he sneered. ‘A quarrel over lodgings. Think that if it eases your conscience . . . my lord Marshal.’
‘So it’s not an argument over who gets the best house, the Bishop or the lay lords?’ asked Benet as he, John and the serjeant continued towards the palace.
‘No,’ John said grimly. ‘Roger of Salisbury and his family have been controlling too much for too long, and that includes who gets the best of everything. Also, they know too much.’
Benet said quietly, ‘So do we.’
John glanced at his knight. ‘The knowing in itself is not dangerous. It’s the failing to anticipate and act that is. You have to be several moves in front of your opponent if you want to survive.’
Benet wiped his palm across his lips. ‘Let’s hope you are then,’ he said.
The repercussions of the brawl at Roger of Salisbury’s lodging fanned out from the initial incident like ripples from a large boulder dropped into a pool from a height. John had not long arrived at the King’s hall when the men of Meulan and Brittany came complaining to Stephen that they had been set upon when they went to the Bishop’s lodgings to discuss the fair distribution of sleeping space in the town. They brought their wounded, including the knight who had fallen bleeding at John’s feet. Since John’s first rough and ready treatment, the wound had been cauterised and dipped in pitch. Whether or not the knight would live was in the hands of God. One of Meulan’s soldiers was already dead of a sword wound to the groin.
‘You have to show the Bishop of Salisbury that he is not above the law!’ snarled Waleran of Meulan in a voice full of righteous anger. ‘He must be brought to heel. Who knows how much he has stolen from the treasury over the years to build his castles, enrich himself and buy men in important positions at court?’ He stared around the gathering, his gaze resting longer than necessary on Brian FitzCount, Miles of Gloucester - and on John.
Stephen drew himself up. ‘It is indeed disgraceful behaviour. Marshal, have the Bishop of Salisbury brought to me to answer the complaint. And bring the Bishops of Ely and Lincoln too. Let them all answer to me for the violent behaviour of their men. I will not have my peace disturbed in this disgraceful manner.’
Stephen was not a good actor. There was nothing spontaneous about this. The emotion curling in the air like smoke was of triumph, not anger. John had no love for the overweening Bishop of Salisbury and his slew of hungry relatives, but there was a bad taste in his mouth. If a man as great as the chancellor could be brought down by the pack and torn to pieces, what chance did he stand? Bowing to the King, he set his hand to his sword hilt and strode out to perform his duty.
News of the order for the arrest had flown ahead. Roger of Salisbury and Alexander of Lincoln had been slow to act, refusing to believe the King would go so far as to command seizing them and their goods and thus both men were easily apprehended. Nigel of Ely, having a swifter awareness of his situation, had fled by the time John arrived at his lodging.
‘Do we give chase?’ Benet asked as John prowled around the Bishop’s chamber. Two travelling chests stood against the wall, one stuffed with fine silk vestments and gold-work. John eyed it with sour humour and ordered his serjeants to set the chest aside and guard it well. Aline could have her silks to clad her priests and it wouldn’t cost him a penny. And if he was giving it back to the Church, he wasn’t robbing from it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The King has Salisbury and Lincoln. The Bishop of Ely has too great a start and we’d only exhaust the horses to no good purpose.’
Benet eyed him sidelong. ‘But at least the King would know we had tried.’
John shrugged. ‘The King only knows what he wishes to know. Even if we set out on fast coursers, we would not catch up with the Bishop of Ely. Either Stephen will accept my decision as the right one, or he won’t. I do know I am not going to go chasing my tail halfway to Devizes today.’
‘What about all this?’ Benet gestured round at the chests, the household items, including the cauldron that was still simmering over the hearth, the bed hangings, the wall embroideries. More proof that Bishop Nigel was riding light. A glint of metal caught John’s eye where a jewelled cup had rolled under a bench. He retrieved it, studied the gems clawed in its base and looked impassively at Benet. ‘If the King only knows what he wishes to know,’ he said, ‘then his marshal only sees what he wishes to see.’
Sybilla supervised the draping of the tablecloth in the private chamber, checking to ensure the bleached, embroidered linen was unstained and properly arrayed with the corners even. Then she fetched the silver-gilt aquamanile from the sideboard. As a child, the water container had always fascinated her with its horse-shaped head and wonderfully worked whorls of mane. She had always thought it a pity that it only came out on special occasions and she had sworn to herself that when she had a household of her own, she would use such objects every day and take pleasure in them. Today wasn’t exactly special as such, but since her mother had left her in charge of arranging the solar for the return of her father and brothers from the royal camp at Devizes, she had taken liberties. After all, the return of the family menfolk safe from the battlefield was cause for celebration. They had received notice, her father’s heralds having set out at dawn while the baggage camp was making ready to march and her father and brothers were still talking to the King.
‘Is it true what they’re saying in the kitchens, mistress?’ Sybilla turned to the cook’s wife, Gytha, who had entered the chamber bearing a basket of spiced apple fritters that were a particular favourite of Lord Walter’s. Gytha had been Sybilla’s wet nurse and the affection between them still ran deep, defying - to an extent - conventions of rank. Sometimes Gytha would come to the private chamber and tell stories from her vast repertoire, and Sybilla loved to spend time in the kitchens and dairy. Knowing how to knead dough or fashion pastry might not be essential to her education, but her mother let her do it, reasoning that a wife who had a broad knowledge of what went on in the domestic quarters would be better qualified to run a household than one who shut herself away in the bower and learned little but stitchery.
‘I don’t know what they’re saying,’ Sybilla replied. ‘You probably know more than I do anyway. You hear all the best gossip.’
Gytha’s eyes twinkled amid the seams and wrinkles. ‘Suppose I do, young mistress, but the best gossip isn’t necessarily the truth.’ She set the platter down on a serving trestle. ‘They’re saying that the Bishop of Salisbury’s had all his powers taken away, except those ordained by the Church. Stripped o’ the lot.’ She raised and lowered her hands in emphasis. ‘All of it gone. Put his son in chains and threatened to hang him in front o’ his mother and the garrison at Devizes unless they surrendered. Not that I’m saying those Bishops didn’t need bringing down off their high horses - because they did.’
‘My father says that priests should lead by example.’ Sybilla repositioned the aquamanile.
‘Hah!’ Gytha snorted. ‘If folk followed the Bishop of Salisbury, we’d all be in a fine stew!’ Then she gave a bawdy chuckle.
Sybilla stifled a giggle. She probably shouldn’t know that a stew was another term for a brothel, but growing up with three brothers had considerably broadened her education. The Bishop of Salisbury had a concubine who dwelt in his castle at Devizes and with whom he sported in luxury when he wasn’t busy at the exchequer board raking in the coins or promoting his friends and relatives to high positions.
Gytha ran her tongue around her teeth. ‘They say they found four hundred thousand silver marks in the strong-boxes at Devizes - imagine such a sum!’
Sybilla couldn’t. She had sometimes seen the silver in their own coffers and witnessed manorial payments on rent days, but had never set eyes on a hundred marks in one place together, let alone four hundred thousand. ‘They were probably embroidering,’ she said. Her father’s heralds knew how to tell a good story at the kitchen door in exchange for bread.
‘Who knows?’ Gytha said, deliberately looking mysterious, not prepared to diminish the tale.
Through the open shutters, they heard shouts from the guards on watch and the horn blew to signal the arrival of the troops. Gytha sped back to the kitchens and Sybilla hurried to finish the solar preparations, plumping the cushions on the bench, placing a bowl of dried rose petals on the coffer. She sang as she worked for she loved creating comfort and order for the pleasure of herself and others. That Salisbury’s menfolk would take it for granted, she understood with resignation. The main thing was that it pleased her.
The troop had been riding hard and was sweaty, sun-roasted and floured with dust. Sybilla and her mother greeted the men with jugs of watered wine and cool, wet napkins. Her father’s forehead glowed like a beacon against his thinning silver hair. He was gasping in the heat and limping badly from his stiff joints, but the grin on his face was as broad as the sun as he eased down on the solar bench and mopped his face.
‘Is everything well, my lord?’ Sybilla’s mother asked, her tone demure but her eyes filled with avid curiosity.
Walter laughed. ‘If you’re the Bishop of Salisbury, Lincoln or Ely, then no, everything is not well, nor ever likely to be again.’ He told them in more detail what Gytha had told Sybilla.
‘Is it true about the four hundred thousand marks?’ Sybilla wanted to know.
Her father shook his head. ‘I don’t know about that, my chick. Certainly there were plenty of chests of silver and some fine jewels and plate. All in the King’s coffers now. Makes you wonder how Salisbury obtained it in the first place - not by any honest means, I warrant. He must have been milking the exchequer for years.’ He looked at his wife. ‘The King has put Devizes into the hands of a constable.’ He gave a smug grin. ‘The bishop’s palace at Salisbury has been given into my custody.’
A flush brightened her mother’s face and she leaned to kiss his ruddy cheek. ‘Oh, that’s wonderful news!’
His grin became a chuckle. ‘It’s good for the moment,’ he said, then sobered. ‘But times change, and we need to seize the luck when the wind blows it our way.’ He held out his arms for Sybilla to kiss him too. Patrick and William smiled and looked full of themselves.
‘The Bishop and his kin are not the only ones who have lost the King’s favour.’ Walter mopped his brow again. ‘I always knew the honeymoon would not last. It looks as if the King is beginning to regret giving Ludgershall and Marlborough to his marshal.’
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