Traitor's Codex

by Jeri Westerson

  ‘Geoffrey,’ he chuckled. ‘The two of you were thick as thieves. Have you seen anything of him at all?’

  ‘Not for many years, to my great regret.’

  ‘I am sorry. That is my fault, too.’

  Crispin said nothing. They both knew the truth of it.

  ‘But I digress,’ said John. ‘We were speaking of our lady loves.’

  ‘I’m afraid I had – out of my own stubbornness and arrogance – let mine slip through my fingers.’

  ‘The mother of that child?’

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘Ah, Crispin,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I am sorry for it. A woman who seems to know all one’s faults and builds up all one’s successes is more valuable than pearls. Katherine has been faithful to me for all these years. It is time to marry her. To marry for love. What a novel idea.’

  ‘Will the king allow it?’

  ‘He might.’

  ‘And the Beaufort children?’

  ‘I will plead that they be legitimized.’

  Crispin nodded. He would never be able to acknowledge his own son. All the world would know instead that Christopher was the rightful son of Clarence Walcote. It might not be as it should be, but it was the best they both could hope for.

  The door swung wide, and Jack Tucker blustered in, arms full of packages and baskets.

  John and Crispin rose to greet him.

  Jack stopped, gawking.

  ‘What did you stop for?’ cried the woman behind him. ‘Jack, you’re blocking the way.’

  Not knowing whether to cater to the duke or to his wife, Jack did nothing.

  ‘What’s amiss? Are you mad?’ Isabel Tucker pushed her way through, cradling the baby at her hip in one arm, and holding on to Little Crispin’s hand with the other. ‘Oh!’ She, too, stopped when she beheld the duke.

  ‘Madam,’ said the duke with a bow.

  Crispin took some of the packages from Jack’s arms. ‘Isabel, may I present the Duke of Lancaster?’

  ‘God blind me,’ she muttered as she dropped into a curtsey.

  ‘The pleasure is mine, Madam Tucker. Jack, this is quite a brood.’

  ‘Aye, sir. I mean, yes m’lord.’

  John approached Isabel and smiled at the baby. ‘May I?’ He put out his hands to take her.

  Stunned, she could do nothing but comply.

  John held her properly – Crispin expected he had done it before – and cooed appropriately into little Helen’s face. ‘You’re a pretty one. You’ll have beautiful red hair like your father, won’t you?’ Thankfully, she gurgled a smile instead of howling as she was wont to do.

  John turned toward the little boy at his feet, boldly staring up at him. ‘And who is this young man?’

  ‘His name is Little Crispin,’ she said with a shy turn of her cheek.

  John flicked an amused glance toward Crispin. ‘Is he now? Well, young man. What have you to say?’

  His ruddy cheeks plumped with a grin. ‘God’s blood!’ cried the boy clearly and at the top of his voice.

  Crispin knew he shouldn’t but he couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing.

  AFTERWORD

  The records show that Richard’s queen, Anne of Bohemia, died of plague or some sort of illness. She came from Bohemia (the kingdom of Prague) and met and married Richard when they were only fourteen. (By the way, they were only the fifth royal couple to wed in Westminster Abbey, and there wasn’t another one for 537 years!) She spoke no English but soon learned it. They were both young, and perhaps relied on each other – the two of them against the world – and soon grew very close. Richard was completely besotted with her. There is some disagreement among historians as to why they were childless. Either one or the other couldn’t produce a child, or Richard – who had become obsessed with his ancestor Edward the Confessor – chose to live a celibate life with his wife as Edward had. However, Richard was also obsessed with dynasty and the divine right of kings. It seems unlikely given his overall ideals about kingship that he would willingly choose not to procreate to continue his line. We’ll of course never know the truth of that.

  Richard did burn down – or cause to have burned down – his palace at Sheen, which had stood on that spot along the Thames since Henry II’s time in 1125. But the burning happened later than described. For the purposes of my drama I had him burn it down right away. For a long time, Richard refused to enter any room that Anne had lived in. Anne was a great intercessor, protecting the weak from the king’s wrath. She, as many a medieval queen did, supported hospitals for the poor and other charities. She was also able to curb Richard’s worse tendencies of revenge and unwise decisions. After she was gone, Richard made some very poor choices that soon proved disastrous for him.

  When he married again, his second wife, Isabella of Valois, was only seven years old at the time in 1396, and they never lived as husband and wife. She, of course, was widowed three years later.

  As for the Judas Gospel, it had, as many of the apocryphal gospels, a different voice from the four chosen gospels we know of today. There are other apocryphal gospels – the gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene, for instance. Its presence certainly made Crispin think about what it means to be a faithful Christian, when the most auspicious decision one could make in his day was whether to follow Lollard tenets or keep with the more orthodox teachings of the Catholic Church. Lollards did not believe that baptism and confession were necessary for salvation. They believed in the laity reading Scripture in their own language, and they considered asking intercession of saints and statues a form of idolatry – essentially, the beliefs that would eventually come to fruition in Henry VIII’s Reformation.

  The Judas Gospel or Codex does indeed exist. It is thought to have been created in the second century by Gnostic Christians, an early Christian sect that believed there is special knowledge that only few people possess of innate human divinity. The Judas Codex likely came from an earlier Greek version. Gnostic gospels were suppressed by early Christian fathers like the Greek cleric Irenaeus, who wrote his treatise Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies) in about CE 180. The only known copy of the Judas Codex (carbon-dated to CE 280) and written in Coptic, didn’t turn up until the 1970s, but through a series of intrigues good enough for a Crispin mystery, it finally turned up again in 1983.

  Julian of Norwich was a real person, though probably never left her anchorhold – her religious reclusive cell, into which she was likely literally bricked up – at St Julian’s Church in Norwich, where she lived most of her life as an anchoress. So it is all my fiction that compelled her to leave it and seek out Crispin. No one knows her real name. She was known as ‘Julian’ because of the church she was attached to. She held a great many reforming ideas about the faith and, though it often was against the orthodoxy, she became an important Christian mystic and theologian honored by the Anglican Church, though not beatified or canonized yet in the Catholic Church. There is, however, a movement to name her a ‘Doctor of the Church’, that is, saintly persons who have contributed to the understanding or revealing of theology or doctrine (‘doctor’ is Latin for ‘teacher’). Out of the thirty-six Catholic Doctors of the Church, only four are female: St Teresa of Ávila, Catherine of Siena, St Thérèse of Lisieux and St Hildegard of Bingen. Julian’s 1395 writings (written a year after she met Crispin, just saying) were collectively known as Revelations of Divine Love; this is the first published book in the English language to have been written by a woman.

  And finally, some of you might have found the name Sir Richard Whittington familiar. Have you ever heard of Dick Whittington and his cat? It was seventeenth-century folklore that told of how Whittington started out as a poor man but raised himself to wealth after he sold his cat to a rat-infested area. But none of it is true. He certainly wasn’t raised poor and no one knows if he ever owned a cat, but he did do great things for London, among them:

  He was Lord Sheriff, and served as Lord Mayor four times, and also as a member of Parliament


  He financed drainage systems in the poor areas of Billingsgate and Cripplegate

  He built a hospital for unwed mothers

  He created a public toilet with 128 seats!

  And added to the bulk of Greyfriars library

  Nevertheless, the story about him and his cat has outlived his good works, and was a favorite pantomime from the pre-Victorian era to today, getting the most performance time during Christmas. Who doesn’t like a good cat story?

  If you liked this book, please review it. More can be found about the Crispin Guest series on my website, JeriWesterson.com. Crispin will return in another mystery that will take him and Jack far from home in search of the mythical Sword Excalibur in Sword of Shadows.