The Rose of the World (2 page)

Not that any of the king's subjects much wanted to help him. His record was not impressive. He had lost most of England's continental possessions, he had failed in his duel with the pope, and the country was poorly governed. Failure, however, cost as much – or more – than success, for taxes were extortionate already and constantly there were further demands. In addition, John was cruel, he had a reputation for avarice and everyone knew he was no true lover of God. Learned as he was in theology – hadn't he after all spent the formative years of his life with the monks at Fontevrault? – he only studied the great texts of the church so that he could argue points of doctrine with the clergy. Or so people said.

If the pope had hoped that expelling King John from the faith would encourage those with a grievance against him to rise up in rebellion, he was disappointed. The barons had their own reasons for muttering against the king, and these had little to do with the church. As for the mass of the population, they were far from falling into fear and despair at being deprived of the comfort of their church, as the pope had no doubt expected they would. In fact, to the dismay of the clergy, the people of England gave every impression of managing perfectly well. The clergy were beginning to fear that religion would lose its grip, and, indeed, many people were heard grumbling that they didn't see why they should go on having to pay tithes to a church that did absolutely nothing for them.

Nobody could bring their child to be christened, nobody could marry his or her sweetheart, nobody could bring their dead for Christian burial. Far from appearing horrified, the population just shrugged their shoulders and got on with their lives. It was said that people performed secret baptisms according to the old rights, buried their dead in ditches and under hedgerows, and – much as they had always done and always would – bedded each other regardless.

King John's response to the pope's drastic move was, initially, incandescent rage. Those who witnessed it said the king almost went mad, blaspheming against the pope and swearing by God's teeth to banish every last churchman from the realm. If any spy sent to England by the pope were to be discovered, the king would personally tear out the man's eyes, split his nose and pack him off back to Rome as a warning to the rest.

Once he was over his fury, however, John turned the pope's action against him to his own advantage. If the clergy were going to obey their master and cease to do their work, then John would seize their property. There was, after all, little point in a monastery or an abbey if those within were not permitted to support and succour the people. John's officials were dispatched all over England to act in his name, and sheriffs were appointed to administer the properties and, of course, to ensure that the revenues made their way to the king. Those in power in the church were summarily deposed, permitted to return to their posts only if they paid for it; the going rate for a prior was sixty marks.

The king was making a fortune . . .

Now, a year after the excommunication, King John's men had come to Hawkenlye Abbey. Abbess Caliste reflected that, had the abbey not been one of the favourite places of the king's late mother, Queen Eleanor, they'd have come a lot sooner. In the two and a half years since the interdict, Hawkenlye had been kept under observation – a very unsubtle observation at that – and Caliste had been forced to obey the instruction to close up the church and discontinue all services. Nothing specific had been said regarding the shelter down in the Vale, where Hawkenlye's monks and lay brothers administered the holy water from the miracle spring and looked after visiting pilgrims. Abbess Caliste, unshakeable in her conviction that in a time of such hardship people needed the comforts offered in the Vale even more urgently, had taken the decision that the brethren would continue as normal.

They were doing their best. Like the rest of the abbey, they were on short rations, for the new regulations meant that everything from corn to clothing had been seized and locked away in the king's name, doled out with a mean hand at intervals that came far too infrequently. The brethren had tightened their belts and were managing to live on virtually nothing, for this was the only way they could keep food back to give to those who crawled to them on the brink of starvation.

Caliste's disturbing thoughts got the better of her and, putting down her quill, she pictured Brother Saul. He was getting old now, but he still worked as hard as he had always done. He would, Caliste knew, be far too modest to realize it, but the other monks saw him as their unofficial leader, a link to the days when Abbess Helewise had sat in the chair now occupied by Caliste. Brother Saul had been one of Hawkenlye's rocks back then, and he still was.

Caliste's stomach gave a sudden growl. She was hungry, so hungry . . .

Resolutely, she put aside her poignant thoughts on old Saul and her own discomfort. Dipping her quill in the ink, she picked up the thread of what she had been writing.

The king's agents had just left the abbey. Their leader had issued his orders to her as she stood at the gates looking up at them. Since the nuns and monks of Hawkenlye were not called upon to do any work, he'd said, they could not rely on the king's generosity to maintain them in idleness.

The abbey's income was considerable, since Hawkenlye owned large tracts of good land as far afield as the north side of the Weald and the marshlands to the south east. Most importantly, it also had plenty of grazing land suitable for sheep. Sheep provided so much: parchment from their skins, cheese from their milk and, of course, their wool. English wool was in great demand, and Hawkenlye was earning its fair share of the new wealth. Under the current conditions, this wealth now belonged to the king. As his agents had just told the abbess, she was now commanded to record every penny that came in and went out – as if she had not been doing so already! – and keep her accounts ready for inspection at any time. A small amount –
of our own money!
she thought, fuming – would be paid out to the abbey each month.

Standing there, refusing to allow those haughty men on their fine horses to intimidate her, Caliste had raised her chin, looked their leader firmly in the eye and said, ‘How, pray, am I to feed my nuns, my monks and those who come to us for help?'

The man had glared at her, and then his face had twisted into an unpleasant sneer. ‘Your church is closed, Abbess Caliste,' he said. ‘Nobody will come here any more. As to you and your community . . .' He had looked round at the assembled monks and nuns, all of them thin, clad in broken sandals and patched, threadbare habits, and shivering in the chilly October air.

Leaving his sentence unfinished, he had turned back to Caliste and shrugged. Then he and his men had ridden away.

She looked down at her notes, trying yet again to reconcile the tiny allowance with the minimum she knew she needed to keep the abbey alive. It could not be done. Resisting the overriding urge to drop her head on her hands and howl – a waste of time
that
would be – she closed her eyes, folded her hands together and forced her weary, desperate mind to think.

So many people depended on her, one way or another. She had to find a way to help them. She sat up straight, squared her shoulders and went back to her calculations.

The House in the Woods had a new name: it was officially called Hawkenlye Manor. Few people referred to it in that way. The country people had long memories, and they did not like change. The House in the Woods had been good enough for their parents and their grandparents – probably their great-grandparents too – so why go altering it?

On that late October day, Josse was returning home after a long ride. His old horse Horace had finally died, at an age so advanced that Josse could no longer calculate it, and now he rode a lighter horse that his young son Geoffroi had insisted be called Alfred. Josse and his family had known Alfred from when he was newborn, for he was descended from a golden mare called Honey who had once belonged to Geoffroi's mother, Joanna. Alfred had inherited his grand-dam's golden coat, but his dark mane and the luxuriously long tail were all his own.

As was his intractable temperament; Josse had been riding him for two years now, but his manners still left quite a lot to be desired. Today's excursion had been to remind Alfred who was in control, and Josse was feeling sore and tired. He was also feeling maudlin, for almost without his volition he had found himself riding past the track in the forest that led off to the hut where Joanna had lived.

She had been gone for more than ten years now, but he still missed her. She was the mother of his two children, Meggie and Geoffroi, and also of his adopted son, Ninian. Her death – if, indeed, she really was dead – had left a hole in his life that had never been filled. That line of thought, too, made him sad.

Helewise had come to live at the House in the Woods. After waiting for her for so many years, finally she was there, under his very roof. She had arrived back in June –
Good Lord
, he thought,
was it only four months ago?
– and to begin with he had been so overjoyed that he had not noticed that all was not as he had hoped. She might have left the abbey, renounced her vows and become an ordinary woman, but the problem was – or so he saw it – that in her heart she was still a nun.

It's only to be expected, he told himself as he rode along. She wasn't just a nun, she was an abbess, and of a great foundation at that. Nobody can be expected to leave the religious life and all that it entailed behind in a few months!

It was some five years since Helewise had actually lived within the abbey. Soon after the death of Queen Eleanor back in 1202, Helewise had begun to implement the plans which had long been in her mind. She had quit Hawkenlye in stages, the first one being to stand down as abbess, witness the election and the installation of Caliste as her successor, and then go to live in the tiny little cell adjoining the new chapel on the edge of the forest. The chapel was dedicated to St Edmund and had been built on the orders of Eleanor in memory of Richard, the late king and her favourite son.

The pope's action against King John had effectively closed the abbey to outsiders, and although Josse knew full well that Hawkenlye had done its best to go on being a place of refuge, help and succour, the task had been all but impossible. The attention of the king and his agents had always hovered over the abbey – it was just too important a foundation to be overlooked – and many were of the opinion that John would have robbed the abbey of all its treasures had he not feared the wrath of his formidable mother. Dead she might be, but apparently it made no difference.

The keen glance of the king, however, had slid over St Edmund's Chapel and its little cell without pausing to look properly. Had he done so, he would have seen something quite surprising. The people, finding the church inside the abbey locked and barred, had quietly transferred their devotion to the chapel. Its door was always open, and there was usually a candle burning on its simple altar. Down in its hidden crypt it concealed a treasure known to very few, and it was perhaps the power of this secret that kept the chapel safe from those who wished it ill.

Whatever the truth of it, the people had a place where they could pray. Not only that, for the chapel had its own guardian, and she was a woman whose reputation went before her. She was always there for those in need, providing a smile, a kind word, a simple but nourishing plate of food, a warming drink; even, on occasions, a blanket on the floor for those too tired to make the journey home until morning. As the years passed, she also began to give remedies for the more common ailments, taught and helped in her work by both Tiphaine, the abbey's former herbalist, and Josse's daughter, Meggie.

In the summer, however, Helewise had implemented the second stage of her withdrawal from the abbey. The House in the Woods had grown in the decade since Josse had gone with his household to live in it, and there had been plenty of room for another resident. However, the sweet hopes that Josse had cherished of Helewise living in any sort of intimacy with him had been swiftly shattered. Quietly, she had explained what she needed: a small room readily accessible to visitors where she could receive and help those who came seeking her, with a little sleeping space leading off it. In effect, he had realized miserably, her desire was to reproduce her cell beside the chapel.

The trouble was, as Josse saw it, that the rest of the world still thought she was an abbess. Or, at least, the whole of the suffering, needy community in and around Hawkenlye did, which, as far as Josse was concerned, was the only part of the world that mattered.

It was all to do with the wretched interdict. Out in the forest, alone except for Alfred and unlikely to be overheard, Josse gave vent to his feelings and cursed the pope, the king, the interdict, the excommunication and everything else that was presently caused him distress.

The echoes of his angry shouts died away. Alfred twitched his ears sympathetically – he was growing on Josse, despite his stubborn nature – and Josse resumed his musings.

To cheer himself up he thought about the beloved people who would be waiting for him at home. His daughter Meggie, he knew, wasn't there. He had actually been quite close to her earlier that day, when he had ridden past the track leading to Joanna's hut. Meggie went over there quite often, and she kept both the tiny dwelling and its herb garden tidy and cared for. Sometimes she would not return for several days. Over the years, Josse had learned to curb his anxiety. She was, he knew, more than capable of taking care of herself and, just like her mother, she seemed to cherish the quiet, secret hut and its almost magical setting.

It was hardly surprising that even someone whose big feet were as firmly planted on the good earth as Josse's should sense the magic, even if he did not understand it. Joanna had been one of the Great Ones of the strange forest people, as had her mother Mag before her. Both Mag and Joanna had left much of their power within the hut and its little clearing, and now Meggie – who, according to her people's predictions, would be the greatest of them all – was adding to what they had so freely bestowed.