‘The king’s displeasure? But the king and Uncle Walter are good companions. I have seen them.’
‘No longer. Don’t forget that the king agonises over his son’s welfare, which he had entrusted to your uncle. Bishop Walter took the king’s son to France and was instructed to bring him home again – with the queen. In the event, your uncle left France in great haste, and left both queen and son behind. Now the bishop knows that he is not favoured. He has made his oath with the king, and would honour it: he is no coward, but even the bravest man can find himself confused when events conspire to baffle his best intentions.’
‘What do you mean? What does Uncle want to do?’
‘I think he wishes to return to the king to advise him. But while the king is so angry with him, he cannot. Instead he remains here, receiving messages instructing him to search every bale of cloth, every barrel of tar, to make certain that there is no secret correspondence.’
‘And you think he was ashamed of the instruction?’
‘No. I merely think he knows not how best to ingratiate himself into the king’s company. All the while he sits here restlessly, wanting to help and not knowing how to, the king can listen only to those others in his household whose motives are not so honourable. And it makes the bishop fretful and concerned for the king and for the realm.’
‘I see.’
‘And so, William, you and I must use our best efforts to ensure that your uncle is given every opportunity to rest from his affairs.
We must protect him from these dark moods of melancholy that must afflict him.’
‘I will do all I may to try to help him, then,’ William said, and gave a little grunt of relief. ‘You know, for the last week or so, I have been growing more and more alarmed. In my eyes, Uncle Walter has become ever more pale and weary-looking. It is a comfort to think that it is only the strain of these additional responsibilities.’
Simon stood outside his house and watched as his son ran about the pasture, trying to chase the last of the hens back to their little coop. There was a great deal of whooping and waving of arms, but the little lad, only approaching four years, was blithely unaware of his failure to bring the birds in. Simon chuckled to himself as his boy hurtled over the grass, stumbling and falling over and over, giggling gleefully as he did so, quickly collecting himself and chasing after the poultry again, only to tumble again.
‘He’ll muss up his tunic,’ came a glum voice.
‘Hugh, there are times when a lad has to be able to play,’ Simon said.
‘I know that. Used to play myself.’
Simon looked across at his servant. Hugh wore his customary expression of deep bitterness. ‘You don’t look as though you remember it,’ he said.
‘When I was growing up at Drewsteignton, I played.’
Simon grinned to himself. Hugh had been a shepherd for much of his youth, up on the steep hills about Drewsteignton, a quiet vill in the east of Dartmoor. It was an area Simon loved. The hills rose high, and a man could see across the broad Teign Valley from the heights, a good place to live, if exhausting to cross.
But Hugh had not been fortunate in recent years. He had been graced with a lovely woman who had agreed to give herself to him as wife some years before, and he had gone to live on a little plot of land towards Iddesleigh, but she had died with her son in a house fire. Afterwards Hugh had returned to Simon’s service
full-time. His face wore the scars of that loss even now. Simon too knew what it was to lose a loved one. He had lost his first son, also named Peter, to a foul malady – and that memory would never leave him. There was always that awareness, that little niggling fear, that this boy too might one day be taken away.
As his sister now had been.
He felt his face harden at the thought. His lovely child. It was one thing to give up a child to her lover when she decided to become married, but quite another to have her taken away like this.
‘Still, it’s not as good as playing merrils in a tavern,’ Hugh muttered, hitching up the hempen rope which he had bound about his waist as a belt. He hawked and spat, before lurching off in the direction of the house again.
‘Come on, Perkin,’ Simon called. Peter was always ‘Perkin’ to him now.
The little boy heard, but deliberately ignored him. He continued running about with the chickens. And then a great dog appeared. It ambled over towards him with its head on one side, and for a short moment Simon was shocked, for it was massive, and his thoughts of the last minutes made him see only the brute’s size and the potential danger it posed to Perkin. But then it lowered its enormous head and shook, before trotting to Perkin and nudging him, rubbing his head all over the boy, and Simon recognised it.
When Simon looked over to the east, along the road that led here from Sandford, he saw Baldwin sitting on his horse, his arm resting on his saddle’s bow, smiling a little nervously, as though fearing to be rejected.
The last of the accounts dealt with, Bishop Walter leaned back in his seat and motioned to the bottler as the clerks packed up their inkhorns and reeds and bowed their way from his presence.
There were times when being a prelate involved such profound disappointment that he wished he could give it up. He was sure
that his father, William, had never had such doubts. He and Mabel, Walter’s mother, lived quiet, unassuming lives near Cookbury, in the Hundred of Black Torrington, where they achieved much, but remained unimportant and obscure. Not for them the glories of fame, of knighthood or mercantile success. William Stapledon was comfortably off, with enough income to bring up their seven children, four sons and three daughters, without straining his resources. And he lived to see those children achieve some influence.
Richard, the next eldest in the family, was already a noted knight. He had been returned as knight of the shire in parliaments from York to Westminster, and had worked with Walter to create the magnificent Stapledon Hall at Oxford University. Robert and Thomas had both gone into the Church and had good livings from their positions, while the daughters, Douce, Joan and Mabel, were all fortunate to marry well.
Yes. William Stapledon had deserved his long life and peaceful death. Walter only wished he might have the same good fortune.
There was a knock at his door, and John de Padington, his nephew, peered around. ‘Your clerks said you wanted to speak with me?’
‘Yes. Can you go and see the gaoler and fetch to me the rector he is holding? It is time I spoke with the God-cursed idiot about his kidnap and rape. He should be pliant enough by now, but ask the gaoler to walk here with you.’
When the steward had gone, Walter looked down at his hands and sighed. Yes, he had done his best all through his life. No one could deny that he was one of the most hardworking diocesans Exeter had ever seen; in truth, he was notable amongst bishops throughout the realm. It was likely that no other bishop in Devon and Cornwall had managed to visit all the parishes, meet with all the priests, nuns and monks, and assess each and every one in such a large diocese.
He had not been satisfied with merely visiting, either. Only too aware of the huge benefits which had accrued to him as a result
of his own education, and because he had seen too many rural priests who were more or less incapable of their duties, too old, too deaf, too steeped in wine, to be able to provide properly for the cure of the souls in their parishes, he was dedicated to improving the quality of all the men of the cloth in his diocese. For that he sedulously studied all the young boys he met in houses up and down his area. Those who showed a precocious intelligence, he would discuss with their parents, and the ones who appeared most promising, he would bring back to Exeter or Ashburton, where he had created a small school, and see them properly educated. With luck, some of them would later make their way up to Oxford, to study at the college he had founded.
In the cathedral, he would be remembered as a patron. He had provided much of the money to ensure that the works continued to the glory of God, even if he would never himself see the finished result. That was a certainty – at the present rate of progress, it could not be completed until halfway through the century at the earliest. Although Walter II was already five-and-sixty, but felt as young as a man in his fortieth year, he knew that it was too much to hope that God would allow him to remain here for another four-and-twenty years. If He did, Walter would no doubt be a drooling, feeble-minded cretin like poor Father Joshua, who could do little more than swallow now when a spoon was held to his mouth.
The bishop was enormously fond of Joshua. When Walter had first arrived here in Exeter and became a canon, it was Father Joshua who had helped introduce him to all the other canons. The rude, the hypocritical, the naive and fawning – each had been described to him beforehand, and Joshua had been a kindly and humorous influence on him from that day onward. It was Joshua who had helped Walter when the Dominicans tried to prevent him from being installed as bishop, Joshua who had assisted with the founding of the school at Ashburton, Joshua who … It was hard to think of any facet of his life in recent years which had
not
been aided by Joshua. The old man had been a friend and ally for longer than the bishop could remember, and the idea that he was
now so befuddled and feeble was dreadful. The idea of continuing in his post without the support of the old man was appalling.
But continue he would. Bishop Walter was proud of his achievements as a bishop. And the work he had done for the king, of course.
That had all begun a long while ago now. He had been one of the many bishops who had worked to try to maintain the peace when the king first formed an unsuitable relationship, back in the early days of his reign, with that incomparable fool Piers Gaveston. The man was so acquisitive, it was a miracle that the king had a realm of any size left. Gaveston was captured and executed, and afterwards the kingdom fell into a sort of calm. Not true peace, though: it was a period of stagnation and fear, waiting for the next buffets of fate. And within a short space, they had struck.
‘Bishop? My lord?’
The words cut into his thoughts and Stapledon turned quickly to the door, startled. ‘John?’ It was the bane of his life, this accursed feeble eyesight he had developed. At first he had merely been unable to read documents even when quite close, which was why he had invested in the spectacles – but now even objects a short distance away were nearly impossible to discern.
‘Yes, it is me, my lord. I fear that there is ill news. The prisoner, the rector, has gone. And so has the gaoler.’
‘What do you mean, “gone”?’ the bishop asked testily.
‘One of the servants said that he saw them both walking up out of the Close days ago. The gaoler hasn’t been seen since, and no one seems to know where he could have gone.’
The bishop sighed heavily. ‘So that is it, then. The rector was taken to his brother, I suppose, and that means he will have been sent far away. He would scarcely take the risk that I might force my way into the castle and remove him.’
‘I fear so, my lord.’
‘Fetch Alured de Gydie to me. And send a message to the sheriff, demanding to know the whereabouts of his brother, on his oath. I will not be lied to.’
His steward hurried away, the door slamming behind him, and the bishop returned to his contemplation of the recent past.
It was not a pleasant review.
As soon as he had seen the clouds of dust disappearing towards the horizon, Richard de Folville had hurried back into the house. In the corner he had a large chest, and he threw it open, pulling aside the vestments and clothing within before finding the scarred leather baldric. Drawing it over his head and shoulders, gripping the sword’s sheath in his left hand, he ran from the cottage.
There was a low, woven fence to mark the extent of his garden, and he took this at a gallop, leaping over it and pelting on up the road in the wake of his brother and the men from Kirby Bellers. On and on he ran, his lungs beginning to ache as he went, ducking occasional twigs, avoiding the worst of the mud and ruts, but when he had run only a little more than a mile, there was nothing more in him. His legs burned with the unaccustomed exercise, and his lungs were choked. He had to stop and bend double, facing the ground, resting his hands on his thighs.
This was madness! How could he ever have hoped to catch men on horseback. He would have to forget this and return. Perhaps there would be news later. He only prayed that it would not be news that his brother was dead.
Dear God in heaven, the thought that his beloved elder brother could be captured, or even killed, was too appalling for words!
All Richard’s life, Eustace had been there to look after him. Admittedly, it was Eustace who had first beaten him, who had given him his first bloody nose, who had tripped him and sent him flying into a rock, which had cracked open Richard’s head; but like so many older brothers, he saw Richard as his own private property when it came to bullying or beating. If any others tried to hurt Richard, they soon learned to regret their presumption.
Eustace was not his only brother, of course. When their father, John de Folville, Lord of Ashby-Folville, Leicestershire and of
Teigh in Rutland, died sixteen years ago, their brother John took the estates. Even now he was a Commissioner of Array for the King. There were benefits to his positions, for it was he who had given Richard this church for his living.
Of the others, Laurence, Robert, Thomas and Walter, there was little else for them to do to make their living, other than turn to serving other lords. But then they found that their estates and livelihoods were under threat. It was alleged that they were all implicated in the Lords Marcher wars against Despenser. And if a man was prepared to set his face against the Despenser, he was thought to be rebelling against the king himself. Word went out: all the de Folvilles were to be found and captured. There were only two who were safe. Richard, and John, the present Lord of Ashby Folville.