There was a wooden bench in one of the cloister carrels and Rainald headed toward it now, making one of his usual jokes about “old bones.” Roger followed willingly and Rico dutifully. Taking pity on the boy, Roger concocted an interesting errand for him to run, and Rico was soon trotting across the grass toward the slype. Just before he disappeared into the passage, he suddenly did a handstand, for no other reason but the bliss of being ten years old and on his way to the stables on a mild September afternoon.
Both men exchanged a rueful smile, one that acknowledged the pure joys of childhood were distant memories, and thank God for it. “I thought,” Roger said, “that you named the lad Henry.” When Rainald confirmed that he had, the bishop looked puzzled. “Then why Rico?”
“Well, you saw him, dark as a Saracen, no? After he was born, I was joking that he looked as dusky as a Sicilian and we ought to christen him Enrico rather than Henry. The next I knew, his mother was calling him Rico and soon I was, too.”
Rainald’s eyes took on a fond, faraway look and Roger surprised himself by feeling a small dart of envy. He’d known when he’d taken his vows as a priest that he’d be forswearing those sinful pleasures that other men held most dear: carnal lust and good wine and bad company. He’d also be renouncing the Almighty’s blessings of marriage and fatherhood. He had never repented his choice, could not even envision a life not given over to God. But there were times when he wondered about that road not taken and the sons he’d never have.
“Speaking of sons,” he said, “I recently heard that Eleanor had young Richard invested as Count of Poitou this spring. I suppose that explains why she was absent from Hal’s coronation.”
“Well, she was also occupied with guarding the coast for Harry . . . as you ought to know, lad. She kept you from sailing from Dieppe, no?”
“So you heard about that, did you?” Roger could jest about it now, but at the time, he’d found no humor in his plight. Having learned that Henry planned to crown his son, Thomas Becket had instructed Roger to go at once to England with papal letters forbidding the coronation. At the same time, Henry had commanded Roger to return to England so that he could attend the coronation. Roger felt that he had no choice but to obey his archbishop, although painfully aware that if he thwarted Hal’s coronation, his cousin the king would never forgive him. There was a certain relief, therefore, in discovering that the Bishop of Lisieux had alerted the queen about his mission for Becket and she’d given orders that no ship in any Norman port was to give him passage.
“Did you also hear about the public brawl that Harry and I had upon his return to Normandy?”
Rainald shook his head, looking so expectant that Roger had to smile; few men savored gossip as much as his uncle. “Harry was on his way to Falaise and I rode out to meet him. He at once began to berate me for not attending Hal’s coronation. When I told him that the queen had forbidden me to sail, he cursed me all the more loudly for trying to lay the blame on her. By then, I was no less wroth than he, and I shouted back that he was fortunate I was not present at the coronation for I’d not have allowed it to take place. I also accused him of ingratitude, reminding him of how much my father had done to secure his crown and how little he had done for my brothers after gaining the throne.”
Rainald whistled admiringly, only half in jest. He did not consider himself a timid soul, but he knew he’d not have spoken up as boldly as Roger, not to the man who was his king as well as his nephew. “Do not stop now. What happened then?”
“Our quarrel was being conducted on horseback, out on the Falaise Road, so we had a large, interested audience. Some of the knights in the king’s household began to mutter amongst themselves and one man sought to curry favor with Harry by heaping abuse on me as an ingrate and traitor.”
Rainald let out a short bark of laughter. “I can well imagine Harry’s reaction to that!”
Roger grinned. “Yes . . . Harry damned near took the poor fool’s head off! Who was this miserable wretch, that he dared to insult the Bishop of Worcester and the king’s kinsman? Harry stopped in mid-harangue, as if hearing himself—fiercely defending the very man he’d been threatening but moments before—and then burst out laughing. As our eyes met, I could not help laughing, too, and no more needed to be said. We rode on into Falaise and dined together that noon. And after Harry met with the Holy Father’s envoys and agreed to their terms for making peace with the archbishop, he asked me to accompany him to Fréteval, which I did.”
“You were at Fréteval?” Rainald was delighted. “Word reached us in England, of course, about their accord, but an eyewitness account is more than I hoped for.”
“As you doubtless know, the agreement they reached is basically the same one that they were quarreling over at Montmartre. Harry agreed to allow Thomas to return to his diocese at Canterbury and to restore the episcopal estates and to permit Thomas to re-crown Hal, along with Louis’s daughter. Thomas in turn agreed to defer his claims for damages done to his lands during his exile and promised to render to Harry his love and honor and all the services which an archbishop could do for a king. Harry then promised to give Thomas the Kiss of Peace once they were in England, saying it was meaningless unless done of his own free will and not under compulsion, and Thomas accepted that.”
Roger paused. “All in all, the meeting between them was surprisingly cordial and amicable, with no eleventh hour ambushes by either side. Harry had made peace with Louis on the preceding day, and he seemed quite satisfied with the results of the Fréteval council. So, too, did Thomas and his clerks. As for the papal legates, they were overjoyed.”
Rainald’s first impulse was to take Roger’s account at face value. But Roger’s narration had been curiously flat, as sparse as a skeleton, devoid of all flesh and blood and marrow.
“Then why,” he asked with a sigh, “are you not better pleased by it? I should think that you, of all men, would thank God fasting for a reconciliation between Harry and Becket.”
“Yes . . . if only I could believe their differences had truly been resolved. But they were not, Uncle. They were merely ignored.”
“I do not follow you.”
“Not a mention was made of the Constitutions of Clarendon, and that was at the heart of their antagonism. The Fréteval agreement was riddled with such dangerous omissions and equivocations. Harry agreed that Thomas had the right to discipline the bishops who’d taken part in his son’s coronation, but what precisely does that mean? To Harry, that is likely to mean a slap on the wrist, a minor penalty. What if Thomas interprets those same ambiguous words much more harshly?
“Moreover, Harry will want the sentences of excommunication lifted from Geoffrey Ridel and his other men, and Thomas is already finding excuses to delay that action. And when Thomas demands an exact accounting of the moneys he claims he lost in revenues during his absence, how amenable is Harry going to be to that demand? No, Uncle, I very much fear that this was not so much a peace as a truce.”
Rainald sighed again, for he wanted to believe that Fréteval had been the final destination and not just one more stop along a very rocky road. And because he’d had a lifetime’s experience in exiling unpleasant thought to the peripheral regions of his brain, he managed to push Roger’s qualms into a cobwebbed corner where they could be disregarded.
“Who’s to say a young truce cannot mature into a full-grown peace?” he joked, and then opted for an abrupt change of subject. “Do you know why Harry is missing Maude’s Requiem Mass? He had no choice about her funeral, what with his war in Brittany, but I’d have hoped that he’d make time for this.”
Roger swung around on the bench to stare at him. “Jesú! You do not know, do you?”
Rainald did not like the sound of that. “Know what?” he asked warily. “About Harry’s illness. He was stricken with a tertian fever last month, and for a time, the doctors despaired of his life.”
Rainald’s jaw dropped. “I heard not a word of this! But I went to my estates in Cornwall after the coronation. How does he? Is he still ailing? Was it as serious as all that?”
“Yes, indeed, it was. He made out a deathbed will, confirming the partition of his domains amongst his sons, and a false report of his death even reached Paris, so grievous was his condition. I did not mean to alarm you unduly, Uncle, for he is on the mend now, although I daresay it will take another fortnight ere he recovers his strength.”
Rainald didn’t doubt it, for he’d had some experience of his own with the ague, and knew how debilitating those deadly chills and fever could be. “Where is he? I’ll want to depart after the morrow’s Mass for Maude. Is Eleanor with him?”
“He was taken ill at Domfront and he is not yet up to riding, so for once you can actually be certain of his whereabouts, at least until he is strong enough to stay in the saddle. And no, Eleanor is in Poitiers.”
Rainald wondered if that Clifford chit had been there, but decided it was not a tactful query to put to a priest. “God be praised,” he said, “for sparing his life. I could not envision our world without Harry. It would be like blotting out the sun.” Thinking then of the coronation, he said softly, “I’d just as soon Hal’s kingship remained an empty honor for some years to come.”
“
Deo volente,
” Roger said, no more than that, but there was something in his tone which told Rainald that in this, they were of the same mind.
UPON HIS RECOVERY, Henry and Eleanor made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Mary at Rocamadour at Quercy in her duchy of Aquitaine to give thanks. In late September, Thomas Becket joined him at Tours, arriving before the start of daily Mass, where the king would have been compelled to offer him the Kiss of Peace. One of the archbishop’s most bitter enemies, Rannulph de Broc, had boasted that he would kill Becket before he had eaten one whole loaf on English soil, and the archbishop was alarmed enough to want the extra assurance of the Kiss of Peace. But Henry was alerted to Becket’s early arrival, and annoyed by what he saw as the archbishop’s duplicity, he instructed the priest to celebrate the Mass for the Dead, in which the ritual kiss is omitted.
OCTOBER THAT YEAR was uncommonly warm and the trees were still green and full; only an occasional flare of crimson or saffron reminded men that the autumnal season was past due. The fourteenth dawned with a summer’s languor, the sky above Chaumont-sur-Loire a patchwork of bleached blue and fleecy white, the air very still, without even a hint of a breeze. Henry had just finished two days of meetings with the Count of Blois and intended to leave Chaumont on the morrow for his castle at Chinon. His plans for this humid, sultry Wednesday—to hear petitioners, hold an audience with the Archbishop of Tours, and go hunting for roe deer in the forest north of the River Loire—were disrupted by the unexpected arrival of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Henry was not pleased, for it was beginning to seem as if his peace with Becket would unravel even before the archbishop set foot again on English shores. He’d been vexed to learn that Becket’s clerks were boasting of a “glorious victory” and frustrated by the archbishop’s insistence upon collecting every last farthing of the revenues that had accrued during his exile. He’d made a genuine effort to be accommodating at Fréteval and felt that Thomas Becket was already taking advantage of his generosity. And so it was with a dangerous degree of resentment that he gave orders for the archbishop to be ushered into his presence.
The last time they’d met, it had been in anger, for they’d quarreled bitterly again after Henry’s refusal to give Becket the Kiss of Peace at Tours. But to Henry’s surprise, the archbishop made no mention of that unpleasant altercation. Their meeting was affable, even comfortable, almost as if their friendship had never been ruptured by events that Henry still did not fully understand. An exchange of courtesies flowed easily into more familiar conversation, and Henry found himself doing something utterly unanticipated: sharing a laugh with Thomas Becket.
He’d often wondered why Becket’s well of humor had gone dry as soon as the blessed pallium had been placed around his neck; God did not demand that His servants forswear laughter. They had left the stifling heat in the hall and were walking together in the gardens, trailed by attendants and several of Henry’s dogs. Henry studied the other man’s profile as they strolled, thinking that Thomas’s face was a testament to his adversities.
Becket was more than twelve years his elder, and this coming December would be his fiftieth. To Henry, he looked at least ten years older than that, hair gone silver-grey, dark eyes circled, furrows cut deeply into his brow. He’d been told that Thomas suffered from a painful inflammation of the jawbone and that he’d inflicted harsh penances upon himself during his years in exile, even immersion in the drains beneath Pontigny Abbey. Why? Why had he sought out such suffering? Why had he spurned their friendship and embraced the Church with a zealot’s fervor?
That was not a question Henry could ask. He had already done so, out on a wind-scourged field under the walls of Northampton, nigh on seven years ago. And it had gained him nothing but bloodied pride, no answer that explained the mysterious transformation of this man who had once been his most trusted friend. He took refuge, instead, in a heavy-handed joke, one that was more revealing than he realized.
“Why can you not do what I want, Thomas? For if you would, I’d entrust my realm and my soul to you! As Scriptures say, ‘All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.’ ” Remembering then that humor had become a foreign tongue for the archbishop, however fluent the chancellor had once been, Henry added hastily, “That is a jest, of course! I do not even demand that of my bedmates, after all.”
Henry was heartened when Becket smiled, for he’d been half-expecting a lecture on blasphemy, and as they continued along the garden path, he laid out his plans for the archbishop’s return from exile. They would meet at Rouen after Martinmas, and he would satisfy Becket’s creditors from the Royal Exchequer. He would then either conduct the archbishop himself to England or, if that was not possible, send the Archbishop of Rouen in his stead. As they had agreed upon at Fréteval, he would bestow the Kiss of Peace upon his arrival back on English soil.