The Law of Angels
Page 41
“I doubt whether even you or your brothers could have defended yourselves against those armed men. Unless you had been willing to take up arms yourselves.”
She turned to him quite fiercely but to her surprise he was smiling.
“You’re probably right. It’s the nature of the times that men of violence can wreak havoc with impunity.” He held her glance for a moment but then he hesitated again.
Many things lay unspoken between them and he seemed to be on the brink of laying them bare. She had a vision of the soaring pillars of Beverley Minster and the abbot’s confession during their night of vigil at the sanctuary of St. John last year. Her lips parted. She both desired him to speak and feared where it would lead them. His dark eyes seemed to reach into her soul. She put up a hand as if to ward off some unseen force.
His voice was soft. “It must have been an ordeal to face those men in the mayor’s chamber with their crossbows primed with naptha,” he murmured. “How did you manage to remain so calm?”
“I felt neither calm nor sure,” she told him, leaping at the chance to talk of something that would lead them away from danger. “The idea of Greek Fire came to me out of nowhere—or rather, it reminded me of the mage at the booths and how he kept talking, saying the most outrageous things, even when he suspected he was being targeted by cut-throats.”
Hubert smiled at her, watching her lips. “And that gave you courage?”
“I thought that if I kept talking it would give the porter time to fetch help. It was strange, though. As I spoke about my willingness to die for the right of ordinary people to be free from feudal bonds I—” She paused. “The massacre at the coast has shaped my views. They have a stronger focus now.”
“But what made those men-at-arms take you seriously?”
“As luck would have it a ribbon had come loose at the neck of my undershift. They seemed to think it was attached to a device that would unleash the fire.”
“Was it this one?”
He reached out and held a thread of twisted silk between his fingers.
She could have lowered her lips then and brushed them across his fingertips.
Moving hurriedly back she tucked the ribbon out of sight.
Noticing her expression he said more briskly, “All that’s by the by. I have had an idea, one that I hope will please you as much as it pleases me.”
Saying nothing more the abbot reached inside the scrip that lay beside him and took from it a parcel of documents. He held them out. “These are yours. They come with my blessing.”
Curious to see what it was, she took hold of a winding of new vellum and began to unroll it. It turned out to be the deeds to a vacant grange on the other side of the canal opposite the Abbey of Meaux.
And so one way of life ended.
And another began.
* * *
Meanwhile, the castle at Pickering, in the royal forest less than thirty miles away as the crow flies, has a visitor. The great hall is royally adorned. Three men are sitting on the high dais eating venison from a great silver platter. A constant stream of servants attends them. Musicians play in the gallery and down in the mesh the retinues of three households laugh and joke in amity.
The guest of honour is telling a story, outrage in his voice but also a tone of mockery as at some scandalous behaviour he, as a man of reason, is at his wit’s end to explain.
“So there I was,” he is saying, “summoned to Sheen. And on no account would he let me leave. That’s the reason I’m late. And then a detour to York, of course, avoiding the players by many devious and cunning excuses which my lord archbishop was too tactful to reveal for the pack of lies they were. But Sheen!” Despite his levity he frowns now. “God and St. Benet preserve us! Same as ever. The court monkeys nimbly jumping through the hoops. The lovely Anne being lovely. And he in his little chamber with the one door in and out for fear of assassins.”
“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.
ALSO BY CASSANDRA CLARK
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.
www.minotaurbooks.com
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
bsp;
Cassandra Clark, The Law of Angels