The Pilgram of Hate (3 page)

Brother
Anselm the precentor, whose mind seldom left its neums and instruments for many
seconds together, looked up vaguely, awoke to the question, and stared,
wide-eyed. “The entire order of procession and office is ready,” he said, in
amiable surprise that anyone should feel it necessary to ask.

“And
Brother Denis, you have made all the preparations necessary for stocking your
halls to feed great numbers? For we shall surely need every cot and every dish
we can muster.”

Brother
Denis the hospitaller, accustomed to outer panics and secure ruler of his own
domain, testified calmly that he had made the fullest provision he considered
needful, and further, that he had reserves laid by to tap at need.

“There
will also be many sick persons to be tended, for that reason they come.”

Brother
Edmund the infirmarer, not waiting to be named, said crisply that he had taken
into account the probable need, and was prepared for the demands that might be
made on his beds and medicines. He mentioned also, being on his feet, that
Brother Cadfael had already provided stocks of all the remedies most likely to
be wanted, and stood ready to meet any other needs that should arise.

“That
is well,” said Prior Robert. “Now, Father Abbot has yet a special request to
make until he comes. He asks that prayers be made at every High Mass for the
repose of the soul of a good man, treacherously slain in Winchester as he
strove to keep the peace and reconcile faction with faction, in Christian
duty.”

For
a moment it seemed to Brother Cadfael, and perhaps to most of the others
present, that the death of one man, far away in the south, hardly rated so
solemn a mention and so signal a mark of respect, in a country where deaths had
been commonplace for so long, from the field of Lincoln strewn with bodies to
the sack of Worcester with its streets running blood, from the widespread
baronial slaughters by disaffected earls to the sordid village banditries where
law had broken down. Then he looked at it again, and with the abbot’s measuring
eyes. Here was a good man cut down in the very city where prelates and barons
were parleying over matters of peace and sovereignty, killed in trying to keep
one faction from the throat of the other. At the very feet, as it were, of the
bishop-legate. As black a sacrilege as if he had been butchered on the steps of
the altar. It was not one man’s death, it was a bitter symbol of the
abandonment of law and the rejection of hope and reconciliation. So Radulfus
had seen it, and so he recorded it in the offices of his house. There was a
solemn acknowledgement due to the dead man, a memorial lodged in heaven.

“We
are asked,” said Prior Robert, “to offer thanks for the just endeavour and
prayers for the soul of one Rainald Bossard, a knight in the service of the
Empress Maud.”

“One
of the enemy,” said a young novice doubtfully, talking it over in the cloisters
afterwards. So used were they, in this shire, to thinking of the king’s cause
as their own, since it had been his writ which had run here now in orderly
fashion for four years, and kept off the worst of the chaos that troubled so
much of England elsewhere.

“Not
so,” said Brother Paul, the master of the novices, gently chiding. “No good and
honourable man is an enemy, though he may take the opposing side in this
dissension.”

“The
fealty of this world is not for us, but we must bear it ever in mind as a true
value, as binding on those who owe it as our vows are on us. The claims of
these two cousins are both in some sort valid. It is no reproach to have kept
faith, whether with king or empress. And this was surely a worthy man, or
Father Abbot would not thus have recommended him to our prayers.”

Brother
Anselm, thoughtfully revolving the syllables of the name, and tapping the
resultant rhythm on the stone of the bench on which he sat, repeated to himself
softly: “Rainald Bossard, Rainald Bossard…”

The
repeated iambic stayed in Brother Cadfael’s ear and wormed its way into his
mind. A name that meant nothing yet to anyone here, had neither form nor face,
no age, no character; nothing but a name, which is either a soul without a body
or a body without a soul. It went with him into his cell in the dortoir, as he
made his last prayers and shook off his sandals before lying down to sleep. It
may even have kept a rhythm in his sleeping mind, without the need of a dream
to house it, for the first he knew of the thunderstorm was a silent
double-gleam of lightning that spelled out the same iambic, and caused him to
start awake with eyes still closed, and listen for the answering thunder. It
did not come for so long that he thought he had dreamed it, and then he heard
it, very distant, very quiet, and yet curiously ominous. Beyond his closed
eyelids the quiet lightnings flared and died, and the echoes answered so late
and so softly, from so far away…

As
far, perhaps, as that fabled city of Winchester, where momentous matters had
been decided, a place Cadfael had never seen, and probably never would see. A
threat from a town so distant could shake no foundations here, and no hearts,
any more than such far-off thunders could bring down the walls of Shrewsbury.
Yet the continuing murmur of disquiet was still in his ears as he fell asleep.

Chapter Two

ABBOT
RADULFUS RODE BACK into his abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul on the third
day of June, escorted by his chaplain and secretary, Brother Vitalis, and
welcomed home by all the fifty-three brothers, seven novices and six schoolboys
of his house, as well as all the lay stewards and servants.

The
abbot was a long, lean, hard man in his fifties, with a gaunt, ascetic face and
a shrewd, scholar’s eye, so vigorous and able of body that he dismounted and
went straight to preside at High Mass, before retiring to remove the stains of
travel or take any refreshment after his long ride. Nor did he forget to offer
the prayer he had enjoined upon his flock, for the repose of the soul of
Rainald Bossard, slain in Winchester on the evening of Wednesday, the ninth day
of April of this year of Our Lord 1141. Eight weeks dead, and half the length
of England away, what meaning could Rainald Bossard have for this indifferent
town of Shrewsbury, or the members of this far-distant Benedictine house?

Not
until the next morning’s chapter would the household hear its abbot’s account
of that momentous council held in the south to determine the future of England;
but when Hugh Beringar waited upon Radulfus about mid-afternoon, and asked for
audience, he was not kept waiting. Affairs demanded the close co-operation of
the secular and the clerical powers, in defence of such order and law as
survived in England.

The
abbot’s private parlour in his lodging was as austere as its presiding father,
plainly furnished, but with sunlight spilled across its flagged floor from two
open lattices at this hour of the sun’s zenith, and a view of gracious greenery
and glowing flowers in the small walled garden without. Quiverings of radiance
flashed and vanished and recoiled and collided over the dark panelling within,
from the new-budded life and fresh breeze and exuberant light outside. Hugh sat
in shadow, and watched the abbot’s trenchant profile, clear, craggy and dark
against a ground of shifting brightness.

“My
allegiance is well known to you, Father,” said Hugh, admiring the stillness of
the noble mask thus framed, “as yours is to me. But there is much that we
share. Whatever you can tell me of what passed in Winchester, I do greatly need
to know.”

“And
I to understand,” said Radulfus, with a tight and rueful smile. “I went as
summoned, by him who has a right to summon me, and I went knowing how matters
then stood, the king a prisoner, the empress mistress of much of the south, and
in due position to claim sovereignty by right of conquest. We knew, you and I
both, what would be in debate down there. I can only give you my own account as
I saw it. The first day that we gathered there, a Monday it was, the seventh of
April, there was nothing done by way of business but the ceremonial of welcoming
us all, and reading out—there were many of these!—the letters sent by way of
excuse from those who remained absent. The empress had a lodging in the town
then, though she made several moves about the region, to Reading and other
places, while we debated. She did not attend. She has a measure of discretion.”
His tone was dry. It was not clear whether he considered her measure of that
commodity to be adequate or somewhat lacking. “The second day…” He fell silent,
remembering what he had witnessed. Hugh waited attentively, not stirring.

“The
second day, the eighth of April, the legate made his great speech…”

It
was no effort to imagine him. Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester, papal
legate, younger brother and hitherto partisan of King Stephen, impregnably ensconced
in the chapter house of his own cathedral, secure master of the political pulse
of England, the cleverest manipulator in the kingdom, and on his own chosen
ground—and yet hounded on to the defensive, in so far as that could ever happen
to so expert a practitioner. Hugh had never seen the man, never been near the
region where he ruled, had only heard him described, and yet could see him now,
presiding with imperious composure over his half-unwilling assembly. A
difficult part he had to play, to extricate himself from his known allegiance
to his brother, and yet preserve his face and his status and influence with
those who had shared it. And with a tough, experienced woman narrowly observing
his every word, and holding in reserve her own new powers to destroy or
preserve, according to how he managed his ill-disciplined team in this heavy
furrow.

“He
spoke a tedious while,” said the abbot candidly, “but he is a very able
speaker. He put us in mind that we were met together to try to salvage England
from chaos and ruin. He spoke of the late King Henry’s time, when order and
peace was kept throughout the land. And he reminded us how the old king, left
without a son, commanded his barons to swear an oath of allegiance to his only
remaining child, his daughter Maud the empress, now widowed, and wed again to
the count of Anjou.”

And
so those barons had done, almost all, not least this same Henry of Winchester.
Hugh Beringar, who had never come to such a test until he was ready to choose
for himself, curled a half-disdainful and half-commiserating lip, and nodded
understanding. “His lordship had somewhat to explain away.”

The
abbot refrained from indicating, by word or look, agreement with the implied
criticism of his brother cleric. “He said that the long delay which might then
have arisen from the empress’s being in Normandy had given rise to natural
concern for the well-being of the state. An interim of uncertainty was
dangerous. And thus, he said, his brother Count Stephen was accepted when he
offered himself, and became king by consent. His own part in this acceptance he
admitted. For he it was who pledged his word to God and men that King Stephen
would honour and revere the Holy Church, and maintain the good and just laws of
the land. In which undertaking, said Henry, the king has shamefully failed. To
his great chagrin and grief he declared it, having been his brother’s guarantor
to God.”

So
that was the way round the humiliating change of course, thought Hugh. All was
to be laid upon Stephen, who had so deceived his reverend brother and defaulted
upon all his promises, that a man of God might well be driven to the end of his
patience, and be brought to welcome a change of monarch with relief tempering
his sorrow.

“In
particular,” said Radulfus, “he recalled how the king had hounded certain of
his bishops to their ruin and death.”

There
was more than a grain of truth in that, though the only death in question, of
Robert of Salisbury, had resulted naturally from old age, bitterness and
despair, because his power was gone.

“Therefore,
he said,” continued the abbot with chill deliberation, “the judgement of God
had been manifested against the king, in delivering him up prisoner to his
enemies. And he, devout in the service of the Holy Church, must choose between
his devotion to his mortal brother and to his immortal father, and could not
but bow to the edict of heaven. Therefore he had called us together, to ensure
that a kingdom lopped of its head should not founder in utter ruin. And this
very matter, he told the assembly, had been discussed most gravely on the day
previous among the greater part of the clergy of England, who—he said!—had a
prerogative surmounting others in the election and consecration of a king.”

There
was something in the dry, measured voice that made Hugh prick up his ears. For
this was a large and unprecedented claim, and by all the signs Abbot Radulfus
found it more than suspect. The legate had his own face to save, and a
well-oiled tongue with which to wind the protective mesh of words before it.

“Was
there such a meeting? Were you present at such, Father?”

“There
was a meeting,” said Radulfus, “not prolonged, and by no means very clear in
its course. The greater part of the talking was done by the legate. The empress
had her partisans there.” He said it sedately and tolerantly, but clearly he
had not been one. “I do not recall that he then claimed this prerogative for
us. Nor that there was ever a count taken.”