Authors: Cassandra Clark
“Which he does rightly fear,” points out his host.
“Which he does, rightly,” agrees his guest with contempt. “So what does he say to me when I’m eventually called? First, he pretends he doesn’t know I’ve entered and he goes on sitting there on his velvet cushion—and will you believe this: with the crown between his hands. He was hunched forward, staring at it. Eventually I cough and he gives a little start and looks up. ‘Oh!’ he says in mock surprise. ‘You, coz, do you want something?’ ‘You summoned me, majesty,’ I say. He looks vague as if with something heavy on his mind. ‘I was looking at my crown,’ he says. Then—I tell you no lies—he lifts it so that the sunlight strikes the jewels—all that, a great blazing show—and he says, ‘So beautiful. My beautiful, bloody crown.’ Then he stands up and places it on his head! ‘You may go, coz,’ he says. ‘I forget why I summoned you.’ And he flicks his fingers and I’m dismissed! After all that waiting about! Can you beat it?”
His companions growl something that might be sympathy, and one of them stabs his knife into the haunch of venison and hacks some off. The guest, his story finished, fills his mouth and chews thoughtfully until his host says, “I gather, my lord, that your time in York was not entirely ill-spent, for I hear you purchased something of extraordinary power?”
“You hear wrong, sir. But at least I now know where I can lay my hands on it should the need arise.”
The guest gazes out over the tops of the trees that are just visible through the arrow slit. The forest stretches for many leagues to the horizon and beyond. Then come the northern marches and after that France’s great ally, the separate and turbulent kingdom of Scotland.
But in the opposite direction, before one reaches the great river that divides England north from south, lies a modest priory called Swyne.
Timeline
1338–1453 | Hundred Years’ War between England and France. |
1348–9 | Black Death kills nearly half the population of Europe. |
1377 | Richard of Bordeaux (son of the Black Prince and the Fair Maid of Kent) is crowned, aged ten, as King Richard II of England. |
1378 | Papal Schism. Two rival popes, one in Rome, one in Avignon, divide Europe. |
1381 | Social upheaval and the imposition of the third poll tax leads to the Peoples’ Revolt. It is brutally repressed. |
1382 | King Richard, now fifteen, marries Anne, sixteen, sister of the King of Bohemia. Wyclif’s “bible” appears in English. |
1383 | The Oxford free-thinkers are outlawed. The pope calls for excommunication. Flanders, essential for England’s wool trade, falls under the control of the count of Mâle in alliance with the duke of Burgundy. The Flemish weavers are put to the sword. |
A
LSO BY
C
ASSANDRA
C
LARK
Hangman Blind
The Red Velvet Turnshoe
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE LAW OF ANGELS.
Copyright © 2011 by Cassandra Clark. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Map is based on one of the series produced by John Speed in the early seventeenth century. Used by permission from Allison & Busby.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark, Cassandra.
The law of angels / Cassandra Clark. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-67455-7
1. Nuns—Fiction. 2. Artisans—Fiction. 3. Stained glass windows—Fiction. 4. Great Britain—History—Richard II, 1377–1399—Fiction. 5. Yorkshire (England)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6103.L3724L39 2011
823'.92—dc22
2010042313
First Edition: April 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-6065-6
First Minotaur Books eBook Edition: April 2011