It was after he had made some twenty moves on the chessboard that Henri, aware of her angry looks, calmly turned his eyes towards her and remarked: “You should try to conceal your thoughts.”
“You have no idea what is in my mind,” she snapped, resuming her needlework, then, after a few cross passes of the needle, added: “You know nothing about me at all.”
Henri resumed his chess, his face lit by a faint half-smile. “You might be very surprised by how much I know about you,” he replied.
“Such as what?” she shot back.
For a few moments he said nothing. Then, very quietly, he said: “Such as that you were Barnikel’s lover. And that you helped him commit treason.”
For half a minute there was silence in the stone hall, broken only by the faint tap of a chess piece moving.
“What do you mean?”
Henri did not look up from the board. “Do you remember the night of the great fire? I’m sure you do. You spent the night before it with Barnikel.”
She gasped. “How do you know?”
“I had you followed,” he remarked mildly. “I had you followed for years.”
“Why?” Suddenly she felt very cold.
Henri shrugged. “Because you are my wife,” he replied, as though that answered everything.
Her mind went back to the evening of the fire. She frowned. “The night of the fire. Somebody grabbed me . . .”
“Of course.” He smiled. “I guessed you were running to Barnikel. It was too risky. You could have been arrested.” He paused. “Besides, it worked out perfectly. You couldn’t have set things up better.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It wasn’t a good idea for Ralph to get married.”
“Ralph? He died at St Paul’s.”
“I don’t think so. I think he encountered your friend Barnikel at the Tower.” Henri smiled. “My father often said that when I played chess, my strategy was indifferent but my tactics were good. He was right.” He paused. “You see, my dear wife, it was you who gave me the chance. When you were obviously about to warn Barnikel, it occurred to me, after my men stopped you, to send your message to warn Barnikel after all. So one of my men went. He said he came from you and told him to kill Ralph when he reached the Tower. Since Ralph disappeared, I feel sure he did.” The master tactician gently sighed. “Either Ralph would arrest your lover or your lover would kill Ralph. Either way, a neat move.”
“You killed Ralph.”
“No. I assume Barnikel did that.”
“You are the devil.”
“Perhaps. But please consider that if Ralph had married and had heirs, your own children’s inheritance would have been cut in half.”
“You should be arrested.”
“I committed no crime. Which is more, my dear, than I can say for you.”
She got up. She felt ill. She had to get out of that accursed hall.
Minutes later, she was walking down the hill to Ludgate, then out, across the Fleet, and past St Bride’s. She let the soft breeze from the river below brush her hair. She did not stop until she reached the old jetty at the Aldwych.
And as she sat on the ground and stared along the river, first round the curve to Westminster, and then along the stately stretch to the placid Tower, she thought of her rich children, and the passing of the years, and realized to her astonishment that she was not even angry any more.
That, she now saw, was for her personally the meaning of the Norman Conquest.
It would have surprised her, some minutes after she had gone, to see her husband.
He was still sitting at his chessboard, but having concluded his game, he had taken out a piece of parchment, which he was now studying carefully. It was the message his father had received just before he died. As he read it once again, Henri’s face was calm, but his lips had twisted into a faint half-smile.
The message announced that the Becket family of the Norman city of Caen were planning to move to London.
THE SAINT
1170
A June morning in the Palace of Westminster. In the long chamber beside the king’s great hall, all was quiet and orderly.
By the door a few courtiers murmured in hushed tones; in the centre, quill pens scratching softly upon parchment, ink supplied by the monks of Westminster Abbey, seven scribes were busy at their writing desks. From the far end, at the table where some of the most powerful men in England were sitting, came a curious clicking sound. They were moving the chequers.
How grave they looked. How awesome. The treasurer, the justiciar, the Bishop of Winchester, Master Thomas Brown and their clerks. Noblemen and sheriffs trembled before them.
Halfway down the chamber, with his back to the wall, stood a quiet young man with a very long nose. The men at the table knew him well. A promising clerk. But, why, on this warm June day, should his face be as white as a ghost’s?
His name was Pentecost Silversleeves.
They knew. They were looking at him. They all knew about the night before.
The Palace of Westminster. In the century since the Conquest, the small island of Thorney, now a kind of royal platform beside the Thames, had become magnificent. It was entirely surrounded by a wall. Several bridges crossed the Tyburn stream that flowed around it. The great Abbey of Edward the Confessor still dominated the place, but nowadays was accompanied, as though it had acquired a little sister, by the modest Norman church of St Margaret, which stood beside it to serve the local parish.
Westminster had also increased its dignity when, a few years previously, the Pope had canonized its founder, Edward the Confessor. Like France and several other countries, England now had a royal saint. His tomb, moved to the centre of the Abbey, had become a shrine, and Westminster was confirmed as the spiritual centre of the kingdom.
But perhaps the most obvious change had taken place by the riverbank, for here stood the great hall.
Westminster Hall, rebuilt by William Rufus, was one of the largest royal halls in Europe. Over eighty yards long, it needed two lines of central pillars to hold up its massive wooden roof. So large was it that under its high, Norman windows the king’s judges could hold three sessions simultaneously in different corners. Beside the great hall stood the courtyards, chambers and living quarters of the royal palace. Although the king himself was usually travelling around his huge domains, increasingly his administration was to be found in this one location. And of all its different offices, none was better known or more dreaded than the court now in progress.
“A hundred then.”
Master Thomas Brown spoke quietly. A clerk moved one of the chequers. The court proceeded imperviously while a sheriff sitting at one end of the table nodded nervously. After the throne, this table, known as the great Exchequer, was the most important piece of furniture in the kingdom.
It was a curious thing to look at. Ten feet long and five wide, it had a ledge four fingers high running round its edge, giving it the appearance of a gaming table. Covering its surface was the black cloth marked into squares by white lines that gave the court its name.
Depending on the square it occupied, a chequer might represent a thousand pounds, or ten, or even the humble silver penny that was a common labourer’s daily wage. The chequered cloth was, therefore, nothing more than a kind of abacus, a primitive manual computer on which the revenues and expenses of the kingdom could be reckoned and reviewed.
Every year, at the spring and autumn feasts of Easter and Michaelmas, the sheriffs of the counties of England came to the Exchequer to render their accounts.
First, in an outer chamber, the sacks of silver pennies they brought were tested for quality and counted. If good, twenty dozen pennies weighed a pound. Since the Normans called the English penny an esterlin, which transcribed into Latin became sterlingus, the unit of account had become known as the pound sterling.
Next, the sheriff was given a tally – a hazel stick cut with notches to mark the amounts he had paid in. To provide each
party with a record, the stick was then split lengthwise from just below the handle; the two tallies being known as the foil and counterfoil. Since the sheriff’s counterfoil, which established the amount to his credit, was always the longer piece, including the handle, it was also known as the stock.
In this manner, in the twelfth century, the terms Exchequer, sterling, counterfoil and stock entered the language of English finance.
Finally, after satisfying the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the great table, the sheriff’s transactions would be recorded by the scribes.
This was a slower, but all-important process. The scribes would begin by making a draft on tablets of waxed wood, which they scraped with a stylus. The drafts would then be fair-copied on to parchment.
Parchment was not merely plentiful at this time, it was cheap. True, the finest, unblemished vellum made from the scraped and stretched skins of calves was rare and highly prized, but vellum was only needed for such works of art as illustrated books. For ordinary documents, the supply of skins from cattle, sheep or even squirrel was almost unlimited. In England’s Exchequer, the cost of parchment was less than the ink. “And sheepskin parchment is best,” Master Thomas Brown would wisely declare, “because if anyone tries to tamper with the record, it almost always shows.”
There was, however, one feature of the English system of record-keeping that was peculiar to the island. Usually, parchment records were folded and made into books. When William the Conqueror had surveyed his new kingdom, it was into mighty volumes that his Domesday Book had been made up. In the generations following, however, for some reason English record-keepers had decided to preserve the Crown’s accounts rolled into cylinders instead, for which reason they became known not as books but as the Rolls, or, often, the Pipe Rolls.
The coins themselves were, at this date, still kept in the treasury – the thesaurus as the Latin clerks termed it – in King Alfred’s old capital of Winchester. But until conveyed there, they were stored in the chapel known as the Pyx in Westminster Abbey next door.
Such was the Exchequer.
Was he screaming? Was he shouting out the awful truth? He put his hand up to his mouth to make sure, then held his tongue between his teeth. The nightmare of the night before.
Pentecost Silversleeves was a very strange young man.
His biblical name, as it happened, was the least unusual thing about him, for in the religious revival that had swept London in recent generations it had become rather popular. His father, Henri’s grandson, now head of the Silversleeves family, would have preferred something Norman, but then a certain widowed aunt who had become a nun made it clear that she would provide a legacy for a son of that name. So Pentecost it was.
His looks were typical of his family: dark hair, a large, long nose, and mournful eyes. But nature had decided to deal Pentecost Silversleeves several particular blows. His shoulders sloped forwards; his hips were broader than his chest; his limbs were weak. As a boy, he had seldom been able to catch a ball thrown to him, and never in his life had he been able to hang by his arms. However, these physical shortcomings were compensated for by phenomenal mental gifts.
When Master Thomas Brown tested the young clerks – “Thirty-five knights must be paid five pence a day for sixty days. What is the total cost?” or “The county of Essex owes three hundred pounds. There are forty-seven knight’s fees. How much per knight?” – Silversleeves was forbidden to reply. He needed neither abacus nor writing tablets. He knew the answers instantly. He knew the entire contents of the Pipe Rolls, not because he had tried to memorize them, but because he had that kind of memory.
Such gifts should have made him a fine scholar, yet he had failed to excel. His parents had sent him first to the school at St Paul’s, then to another, then to the smaller school that had started at St Mary-le-Bow. At each he learned just enough to get by. Always his teachers complained: “It comes too easily to him, so he won’t really work.”
He had been sent to Paris. Here were the greatest scholars in Europe. Only recently, the famous Abélard had lectured, until his illicit affair with Héloïse had led to his castration and disgrace. Fellow Englishmen, like John of Salisbury, who had studied there had risen to high office and were today men of letters. It was a golden opportunity. A man who completed his studies in Paris was called, by courtesy, Magister – Master. Yet somehow young Silversleeves never completed his studies. He drifted briefly to Italy, then returned home. No one called him Master.
What did he know? He had mastered the basic trivium: grammar, meaning Latin, rhetoric and dialectic. Since the days of the Roman Empire, these had formed the foundation of the European educated class, the common language of which was still Latin. He had also studied the quadrivium of music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, which meant he knew a little Euclid and Pythagoras, could name the constellations, and believed that the sun and the planets revolved in a complex pattern around the Earth. His study of divinity allowed him to quote biblical texts, in Latin, to buttress any argument. He could expose a dozen half-forgotten heresies. He knew enough law to prove to an abbot what money he owed the king. In Italy, he had been to a lecture on anatomy. Plato and Aristotle were no strangers to him. In short, he knew only what was necessary, and no more.
But if not a magister, what was he? The answer to this was simple. He was a clerk, a man in holy orders.
This was not surprising. In a world where few could read, all education was in the Church’s hands. It was normal, therefore, for a young man who had finished his schooling to have his head shaved in a monk’s tonsure and be admitted to the minor orders.
Technically, young Silversleeves was a deacon. As such, he was free to marry, enter business, do as he pleased. Later, should it suit him, he could enter the higher orders. In the meantime, he could claim all the privileges of the Church.
As the Christian inheritor of the ancient Roman Empire, the Church’s influence and network throughout Europe was vast. And whether they were saintly or corrupt, scholars or scarcely able to get through the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, all society’s educated men had the Church to thank for their learning. Even if there were occasional schisms, even if at this moment the German emperor was trying to promote a rival claimant of his own for the Holy See, the fact remained that the Pope was the direct inheritor of St Peter. With an authority far older than theirs, he could admonish feudal kings. Bishops walked with the greatest nobles in the land. In a feudal society where it was hard to change classes, a clever man, even the son of a lowly serf, might still rise through the Church to the pinnacles of society – and at the same time, it was presumed, serve God as well.
There was one more element in this special relationship between the State and the educated class of churchmen. Centuries of donation meant that throughout Europe the Church was the greatest landowner. And though, a generation after the Conquest, most of the spare land in England had already been granted to feudal families, Church land was always available to provide huge incomes for the senior clergy of the day. If the king needed to reward his friends or servants, the solution was obvious:
“Let’s make him a bishop.”
In this way a curious but necessary system had developed. While certain bishoprics usually passed to men of impeccable piety and distinction, others often passed to great royal servants and statesmen. The present Bishop of Winchester was both a kinsman of the king and a statesman. Royal officials often held the sees of Salisbury, Ely and several others. Numerous officials had incomes from lesser offices – archdeaconries, canonries and rich livings. And at this moment, the Chancellor of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury were actually the same man, the king’s great servant, Thomas Becket.
Its own reformers might not approve of such practices, but on the whole the Church went along with it.
One day, perhaps, young Silversleeves too might become a bishop.
Why had he gone with them? Did he even like them?
No, but they were the young bloods of Lon
don – men from leading merchant families like his own. Once a month they went out. Black hoods. Daggers and swords. One time, over to the stews across the river. A whore at sword point. They made her give it to all of them for nothing. How she cursed! And the peasant they had found in the woods. They had taken him for such a ride in his cart. A moonlit night. The fellow was so frightened he thought he was bewitched. They drove him into a stream and left him there. How they’d enjoyed reliving that one.
There was no harm in it. All the young bloods were playing these pranks. It was just the fashion. Nobody took it too seriously. The more daring the better.
But why did he go along?
“You look like a woman,” they used to chant at school. They used to laugh at him. “And you act like one too.” That stupid song. He’d shown them. He went with the wildest gang now. No one got caught.
Until last night.
“We have to do something special.” That’s what Le Blond had said. “After all, it’s coronation day.”
Coronation day. A strange business that had been. Perhaps if it had not been so strange, he might not have gone out drinking with his friends afterwards. He might never have gone along.
They were all so drunk. How else could they have gone to the wrong house? Dear God. It wasn’t the baker at all. It was an armourer. A fellow with a coat of mail, strong as a blacksmith. What a fight he had put up. They were only going to steal the fellow’s shirt. Just a trophy.
Then the apprentice. That wide-eyed boy with a knife. And then . . . He could not bear to think of it. His hands were clenched. Try to relax.
Nobody had seen him. They had all run. The hue and cry had been raised. They’d scattered. Nobody could have seen him.
The coronation that had taken place in Westminster Abbey the previous day, 14 June 1170, had been remarkable for two reasons. The first was that the young man being crowned was not, in fact, the king.