Blood Moon (25 page)

Chapter 26

ANSWERS…

The
next time I opened my eyes I was in my own bed in Ixworth Hall. I knew I was dead because I had not been in that bed for thirty-five years. I was clearly in heaven now among my family and loved ones and in the surroundings that I cherished most. But I did not remember seeing Saint Peter at the gate or hearing the last trumpet announcing the end of the world when every soul is resurrected whole and incorrupt.

Then the door opened and in walked Oswald, my mother’s servant, looking just as corrupt as ever he did and carrying a tray of spiced ale. I knew then that I was not dead for I abhor spiced ale and wouldn’t have it in any heaven of my design.

‘Oswald?’

‘It is good to see you awake, Master Walter. Lady Isabel is below. She awaits you there if you are feeling better.’

I gawped stupidly at him for a moment before leaping out of bed - too fast, for I staggered and nearly collided with the wall. My head was still woozy though whether from Gil’s cider or from suffocation I could not say, but I recovered enough to pull open the door.

‘Master Walter, sir!’

I turned back impatiently. ‘What is it Oswald?’

‘If you are going to see my lady I should first put on my under-drawers. Really sir, I would.’

‘Ah, there you are, Walter. Did you sleep well?’

My mother was seated near the fire as I entered and standing behind her were Onethumb and Rosabel. There was a fourth person in the room I did not recognize, a monk judging by his attire, but I hardly noticed him as I dashed towards my friends.

‘Onethumb! Rosabel!’ I said touching them to make sure I was not dreaming. ‘You’re alive! You’re both alive! Hahahaha!’ I laughed deliriously.

‘Of course they’re alive,’ said my mother tapping her stick impatiently on the floor. ‘What did you think?’

‘But you were killed,’ I said to Onethumb. ‘I
saw
you murdered.’

‘Clearly not,’ sniffed my mother.

‘Let me feel your wound.’ I felt all over Onethumb’s head where I was sure the soldier’s sword had struck him. There was a bit of a bump and a break that looked as though it had healed.

I turned to my mother. ‘How long have I been here?’

‘Three days. Your boy here has a stronger constitution than you.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I frowned. ‘How did I get here?’

There was a hesitant pause before my mother answered. ‘How else? Geoffrey de Saye brought you.’

I reeled at her words. ‘Geoffrey de Saye, that brute brought me?’

‘Must you repeat my every word?’ she growled. ‘Yes, Geoffrey de Saye brought you
.’

‘But he tried to kill me – to suffocate me. He had his hand over my mouth -  thus.’ I demonstrated with my hand over my fist.

‘Only to shut you up. You were screaming like a demented banshee. Another minute and you’d have brought the king’s troops down on top of him.’

I
reeled. The king’s men. So close and yet so far. ‘Would that I had. The man is a murderer, a torturer, a liar…’

‘Yes, yes,
yes,’ she agreed.

‘And something else,’ I added
haughtily. ‘He’s a traitor. I know. I witnessed his treachery.’

I then began earnestly to describe the meeting in the abbey church and de Saye’s part in it. I listed all the nobles I could remember who were present including Cardinal Langton, but my voice trailed away before I finished.
I could see she was not moved by my revelation. She had her hand out for Onethumb to help her up from her seat.

‘Come over here,’ she said hobbling towards the table at the far end of the room.

On it was a large sheet of parchment that was covered in fine black script. The writing was very neat, very precise.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘It’s a charter. Drawn up by the barons of England for the king to sign. Those same barons you just named - and me.’

‘
You?
’

Was it possible? My own mother a conspirator? But I already knew the answer to that. Yes
, of course she was. She had never hidden her disdain for King John. It was all beginning to make sense. How else were de Saye’s soldiers able to disappear so easily the day of the king’s arrival and reappear so soon after his departure? They must have been using this place as a base-camp. An hour’s fast ride from Bury - it was ideally located. And the barons, too - they must have stayed here. And it explained why de Saye hadn’t had me arrested – something that had always mystified me. I’d thought it was just in order to humiliate me before my brother monks but I could see now there was more to it than that. Whatever de Saye’s personal opinion of me - and I was sure he still harboured a deep hatred for me and my family - he was not such a fool as to harm the son of such a useful ally. That’s why I survived. But there were other questions that were not explained.

‘Oh don’t look so shocked,’ said my mother
, eyeing me. ‘You knew - you must have known.’

I shook my head. ‘Not a thing.’

‘Then you’re an even bigger fool than I took you for. Even Joseph had an inkling.’

‘
He never said anything to me.’

‘Probably because he knew
you and that you’d disapprove.’ She looked askance at me. ‘You do disapprove, don’t you?’

Did I?
I didn’t reply.

‘The letter,’ I said quietly. ‘The one you had me take to Hugh Northwold. The letter that was no letter but a blank sheet of parchment.’

‘A necessary precaution,’ she sniffed. ‘Regrettable - but necessary.’

She looked at me expecting me to understand - but I didn’t.

‘Hugh is sympathetic to our cause,’ she explained, ‘but he would not join us. He would not betray us either. So it was better he was kept completely out of it. If he’d known about the meeting in the abbey he would have felt duty-bound to tell the king, whatever his sympathies, and withdrawn his candidacy for abbot of Saint Edmunds. We couldn’t let that happen. We need men like him in high places.’ 

‘And you thought I would go to him with what I knew. So
you had to discredit me in his eyes.’

She
had the good grace to look ashamed. ‘You have to understand - greater things are at stake than any one man’s sensibilities.’

‘I am not any man,
I am your son. Could you not have trusted me?’

‘Would you have joined us?’ she asked.

My king or my friends?

When I didn’t reply s
he smiled wryly and nodded. I looked down at the document on the table. It was quite a thing. I’d witnessed many a charter in my time but never one quite like this. It was written in Latin and in a very fine hand but my eyesight was not what it once was. Realising this, my mother brought out her own reading stone and laid it on top of the document. It magnified the letters four-fold so I could read them. Each line I saw contained a clause, each numbered.

‘See that one?’ she said pointing half way down the document. ‘That’s mine.’

‘You sponsored it?’ I asked.

I
wrote
it,’ she said proudly.

Why didn’t that surprise me?
‘What does it say?’

‘Read it
yourself. It is to do with the rights of widows to marry whom they please and not who the king dictates.’

‘But that’s absurd! No woman has ever had such a right. The king -’

‘The king!’ she snorted. ‘The king, the king - do you know what that little mongrel wanted me to do? Marry some Limousine low-life. Me, whose forebears came over with the Conqueror when the Angevin counts were still copulating with rabbits.’

‘So, it’s just an old woman’s petulance,’ I said dismissing the document with a wave of my hand.

‘Don’t be impertinent!’ she snapped. ‘Some of the finest minds in England worked on this.’

‘What of the rest of it?’

‘Legal matters.’

I nodded.
‘
Money
you mean.’

She shot me a look of anger. ‘No, I’ll tell you what it is. It is to do with the rights of every Englishman to live in freedom as his forefathers did. Rights they once had by natural law. Rights stolen from them by greedy and avaricious kings.’

‘
Every
Englishman did you say?’

‘Every Englishman - and
Englishwoman.’

‘Even the common folk?’

‘Well now, I don’t know about that,’ she smirked. ‘Let’s ask them, shall we?’ She stepped aside to reveal Onethumb and Rosabel standing meekly behind her.

Throughout our sniping my two friends had remained silent. Once again I’d forgotten they were there. I don’t know how seriously my mother would take their opinion, but if by suddenly thrusting them forward she expected to intimidate them, then she didn’t know my Rosabel. Onethumb could not speak - so Rosabel did for them both.

For a long moment she said nothing. But finally she did speak, and when she did I thought I could hear the voice of every English-born man and woman, high and low, throughout the world.

‘Kings come and kings go,’ she mused reflectively. ‘But it seems to me little changes when they do. We ordinary folk live and let-live, work and die and pay our dues
. Whoever governs over us, it’s all one to us.’

She fingered the corner of the document laid out on the table before her.

‘I don’t know what’s written here but whatever it is, will it feed my son? Will it give back the crops stolen from us when armies march across our fields, or rebuild the houses they torch?’ She turned to smile at Onethumb and gently stroked his cheek. ‘Will it restore my husband’s speech or his hand so he can caress me at night? If not, then I don’t see what it has to do with me.’

That’s my
prickly rosebud, I thought. If nothing else she managed to silence my mother - something I’ve never achieved. But while she was speaking another thought had struck me.

‘This project you are building - it is at a critical stage,’ I said to my mother. ‘One loose word now could pull it down – am I right?’

‘You won’t get the opportunity.’

‘I’ve done it once. Even your friend Geoffrey de Saye only just managed to stop me. And now that I know the full extent of your treachery I have an even greater incentive to alert the king. Who’s to say this time I won’t succeed?’

‘What do you want, Walter?’

I thought for a minute. ‘I
want you to include in your charter some easement for those living under the forest law.’

I was thinking, of course, of Gil and his friends. But if I thought I was going to make a contribution to the Great Matter I was sadly mistaken. My mother merely smiled smugly and waved her hand over the document like a conjurer performing a trick.

‘Your request is as by magic fulfilled.’

She placed the reading stone over another clause in the document. I leaned over to read it. Like everything else in the charter the clause was written principally to favour the barons who drafted it, but it did appear to offer some relief for those living under this malicious law - too late to help Gil and his friends, alas, for they had by force of circumstance committed too many
more “crimes” to be absolved. But it might ease the condition of others that come after them.

‘Your friend Geoffrey seems to have thought of everything,’ I acknowledged grudgingly. ‘But there is one other issue that we still have not addressed. The small matter of a murdered maid.’

My mother shook her head vehemently. ‘No, son Walter. He had had nothing to do with that. I have his oath on it.’

‘And the word of Geoffrey de Saye is to be believed?’

‘No. Brother Clementius’s here.’

For the first time I took notice of the anonymous monk who all the while had been standing quietly in the corner listening and saying nothing. I now turned to him with curiosity
, and as I did so a memory came to me.

‘
Dominic mentioned a brother was looking for me. I thought he meant one of Prior Herbert’s men, but he meant you didn’t he? What did you say your name was again?’