Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8)

by Sarah Woodbury

  I was already facing the greatest challenge of my reign so far in this confrontation with the papal legate, over what the pope saw as an excess of religious freedom in England. When I saw the legate, I needed to make sure that the only emotions that showed on my face were ones I wanted him to see.

  Then, as if the weather knew what a crappy day this had already been, the clouds let loose their rain. We all took a step back into the relative shelter of the alley wall. Within a minute, the bloody image across from me began to run, and I studied it morosely. Though the dark clouds mirrored my low mood, that mood hadn’t, in fact, begun this morning, but at the moment the Archbishop of Canterbury had asked me to travel to his seat.

  He’d done so because the papal legate, Cardinal Acquasparta, had fallen ill on the journey across the English Channel. Once he’d reached land, it had become clear that he wasn’t suffering from the usual seasickness. He’d managed to make it to Canterbury, but so far had been too ill to complete the journey to London, to the point of being bedridden and near death.

  I would have been happy to wait to meet him until he recovered. In fact, I’d been avoiding for months (if not years) what I was sure would be a disagreeable conversation. But a papal legate, and the pope’s concerns about my rule of England, could be put off for only so long.

  In addition to not wanting to talk about religious matters with Acquasparta, I was worried about the precedent it set. Delegations presented themselves to the King of England, not the other way around. I wasn’t normally one to stand on ceremony, but I was very aware of my precarious position. I didn’t want to appear as a supplicant, especially not to this pope, especially not when everybody (me included) knew my stance on the freedom of religion was so at odds with his.

  On the positive side, the papal legate hadn’t rejected my offer to have Aaron, my physician and friend, examine him to see if he could put him on the road to recovery. Aaron was Jewish, one of many members of his religion whom I’d welcomed into England, and a good doctor besides. To send him away because of his religion would have been cutting off the legate’s nose to spite his face. This bit of practical acceptance gave me hope that our meeting wouldn’t be as contentious as I’d initially feared.

  The time had come, however, to find out.

  Chapter Four

  Leaving the investigation of Lee to the experts, namely Darren, Peter, and Bevyn, I took Callum and Carew to ride the short distance with me to the Archbishop’s palace. We were accompanied by a portion of my usual entourage, led by Justin, deeming it unnecessary to descend on the Archbishop’s palace with more than thirty men.

  Those of us who would enter the Archbishop’s precincts weren’t armed either, and it was strange not to feel the familiar weight of my sword at my side. But John Peckham was a man of God, genuinely loathing war, and he had asked that we leave our weapons behind when we entered his domain. Though he was very frail now, the Archbishop of Canterbury was still the most powerful churchman in England, and I’d bowed to his request.

  With Lee on the loose, I hoped I wouldn’t regret my decision. Still, it was only a half-mile to the palace from the castle, and the route was as secure as Justin could make it. My hand-picked company of Welsh archers watched from the tops of buildings and the city walls. I was surrounded by those men of my own guard who could be spared from the task of hunting Lee, while the city’s regular garrison patrolled the streets. All in all, I thought both the attention to detail and security were impressive and had said as much to Justin.

  The rain had continued to fall as rain in England tended to do, and my horse picked his way through the muddy street. I kept to the exact middle, careful to avoid the wheel tracks where water had pooled. The roads weren’t cobbled, so the dirt had turned to mud, mixing with the muck created by ten thousand people living too closely together without modern sanitation. Up ahead, in fact, was a garbage collector, loading his cart with what looked like soiled straw from a barn.

  I gave the cart a wide birth and held my breath as I passed it. He was doing an important—if not crucial—job, though not one I would ever have wanted. Worse would have been a night soil collector with his cart; night soil being the medieval term for human waste.

  Many people lined the edges of the street and bowed to me, undeterred by the weather. Above me on both sides, windows opened, and spectators shouted, ‘The king! The king!’ as I passed. I lifted one hand to them briefly before using it to tuck my cloak and hood more tightly around myself. This wasn’t so much because I was cold, but because I wasn’t in the mood to smile right now and didn’t want my people to know it.

  Thomas Becket had been murdered in Canterbury, and it was because of that murder that Canterbury had become a place of pilgrimage as well as a thriving merchant town. It was near enough to the English Channel to be a waypoint for commerce between London and Europe, as well as a market fair for the whole region around it in eastern Kent. At one time, before the Norman conquest of England, Canterbury may have been bigger than London.

  The city itself, oval in shape and running from southwest to northeast, was protected by a town wall. It had been built initially by the Romans and then refortified by the Saxons when they came to Kent. Unfortunately, the walls hadn’t prevented the Vikings from sacking the city at least twice, nor the Normans from taking it when they came. Over the last hundred years, as peace had come to England, the walls had been allowed to fall into disrepair. Since I’d become king, I’d authorized Peckham to see to their improvement, and over the patter of the rain, I could hear the distant tapping of stone masons working.

  Although some businesses were located outside the walls—a meat market and a few houses—those same walls constrained Canterbury’s growth. Buildings were two or three stories high, pressed up against neighboring houses in groups of a half-dozen or so, with narrow alleys between the blocks. Canterbury Castle protected the southwestern part of the oval, with the castle walls forming part of the city’s defenses in that area. We were riding to the cathedral, which took up a whole sector in the northeastern part of the city.

  “We’re fortunate that the legate fell ill, you know,” Callum said from where he was riding on my right side.

  “How so?” I pushed back my hood and turned my head towards him. The wind was coming from behind us, so the rain pattered on the back of my head and shoulders, soaking my hair. But the rain was cooling my temper and felt cleansing after the sights and smells in the alley.

  “Whatever the outcome of this conversation you’re about to have with the legate and Peckham, it might be some time before he is able to get word back to Pope Boniface of the extent of your disagreement with him,” he said.

  “That’s supposed to cheer me up?” Yet even as I spoke, I laughed, glad that Callum had stirred me out of my melancholy. I was tired of it myself, which meant my advisers had probably been throwing up their hands in frustration with me. “You do realize that this meeting is probably going to end in my excommunication. The legate being ill is only putting off the inevitable.”

  Carew spoke from my other side. “You could reconsider your present course of action.”

  “I have considered it and reconsidered it,” I said, a hard edge returning momentarily to my voice. “You know my reasoning, and you also know why I will not back down from my stance on this issue.”

  Carew bowed his head, admitting defeat. “Yes, my lord.” Then he looked at me sideways and said, sounding more like himself, “You don’t have to be so cheerful about it.”

  I reached out a hand and clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t give up on me just yet.”

  “Never, sire,” Carew said.

  The issue before us was freedom of religion. To say I was in favor of it was to grossly understate the case. I’d been fighting a rearguard action for years against the prejudices of this time. Having talked my father into admitting the Jews into Wales back in 1284, I’d lifted all restrictions on their activities and fields of employment once I’d become King of Eng
land.

  Unlike previous kings—in England and in most countries on the Continent—I also didn’t require anything different from the Jewish community than from the Christian one in terms of behavior or distinguishing clothing. For example, Jews no longer had to wear a badge on the outside of their coats as King Edward had required.

  My position towards Jews had been taken quietly by Archbishop Peckham and the Church up until now. Even better, in the eight years since my father’s edict had welcomed Jews into Wales, I was even beginning to think that the level of distrust among the general populace had lessened. Canterbury—as well as London, York, and Chester—had become more diverse in recent years, as people from across Europe had come to take part in our prosperity. It was harder to be prejudiced against people who were your neighbors.

  Plus, it wasn’t just Jews whose lives had changed. Women could vote for representatives to Parliament now, as could people who didn’t own land. A Jewish man had even been elected by the Christian majority in Shrewsbury. Maybe I was fooling myself into thinking the culture here had changed. Maybe anti-Semitism remained just below the surface, and Canterbury could explode into violence tomorrow if the economy crashed. It had happened before. Still, even if I was naïve, the job of a king was to lead, and the decision to treat people of all faiths equally had been, quite frankly, one of the easier decisions I’d made.

  The real issue before me at this hour, however, wasn’t the status of Jews in England. It was heresy, which could be defined as beliefs that were at variance with Church doctrine or customs.

  I understood the Church’s problem—really, I did. Because there was only one church at this time, many heretics were setting up mini-churches inside the Catholic Church and declaring they had the real truth. It was like camping out in the middle of the nave during a priest’s sermon and telling everyone not to listen to the guy in the black robes near the altar.

  The pope was free to kick out people in his church who didn’t believe the doctrine. His house, his rules. I was cool with that part—but only as long as the people were free to make their own choice about it. They could believe … or leave.

  But as this was the Middle Ages, the choice tended to be more along the lines of believe … or die.

  Recent heresies had been laid at the feet of such diverse groups as the Cathars, with their dual gods and focus on sin, and the Waldensians, who preached poverty and strict adherence to the Bible. Both groups had taken root in southern France, and both insisted that the current Church was corrupt, a claim with which I couldn’t disagree.

  To counter these schismatic beliefs, the Papal Inquisition had been in full swing throughout this century, mostly in southern France and Italy. To be fair, its initial intent had been to provide a forum for accusations of heresy, as a counter to mobs of townspeople murdering fellow citizens without a trial. Particularly since the middle of this century, however, the tribunals had grown more powerful and harder to control—and I wanted no part of them in England.

  Nicholas IV, the previous pope, and I had come to an understanding on the matter out of necessity and pragmatism. He’d turned a blind eye to the fact that I was welcoming believers of every stripe into England, and I allowed him to catalog and tax the churches in England that were under his jurisdiction. I even snagged ten percent of his take.

  Unfortunately, Nicholas had died in April of this year, and the new pope, Boniface VIII, believed that all humans on the planet should be subject to him for their salvation. Heretics, then, were a big deal because, in his eyes, it wasn’t possible to separate yourself from the Church. Everyone was Catholic. Period. So, everyone had to believe what the Church told them to believe.

  In addition, he believed that his word was the final authority over not only the church but the state as well. While Carew may not have fully understood my position regarding freedom of religion, even if he accepted that I was willing to stake my throne on my belief in it, he was all for me standing up to the pope on matters of state. If I let the pope dictate national policy, even in small things, that was a slippery slope that neither I—nor my barons—wanted to go down. All of my barons could understand and support my refusal to accede to Boniface’s assertion that his word superseded mine in secular matters too.

  Mom had suggested that, having saved Dad’s life and changed history ten years ago, we had started moving further and further away from the historical trajectory that she knew. Most of the time I thought that could be a good thing, though not if the change meant I was about to get my head handed to me on a silver platter by the papal legate.

  Boniface had been in office for only a few months, but it was a difficult time for Christendom. He was under pressure from the rest of the clergy to increase the reach of the Church. Their power and wealth depended on his actions in the same way my barons’ power and wealth depended upon mine. A year ago, Acre had fallen to the Muslims, and with it had gone the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It was a painful loss for the Church.

  I couldn’t help feeling that the Pope’s focus had turned northward because he sought to compensate for the loss by tightening his control on the Christian nations in Europe. To send a legate to me at this early stage of his rule meant Pope Boniface was interested in testing the limits of his power—and mine.

  Chapter Five

  The Archbishop’s palace lay adjacent to Canterbury cathedral, and my company halted in front of the iron-barred gate, which resembled a portcullis, though without the murder holes above it through which to pour oil on attackers, or the sturdy drawbridge in front of it. I could see through the gate into the courtyard of the palace, which had a well in the center of it. The bucket hung suspended from its rope and was protected from the elements by a little roof with a bell on top.

  At our approach, the gate swung open, allowing us to halt in the shelter of the stone gatehouse. My horse stamped his feet and shook out his mane, and I leaned forward to pat his neck before dismounting.

  The Archbishop of York, John le Romeyn, was waiting for us in the porch, protected from the rain by an overhanging roof. Born illegitimate (to a churchman!), he had degrees from Oxford and the University of Paris, and in my few interactions with him, I’d found him to be a reasonable man. All things being equal, I wasn’t sorry to see him today. Like Peckham, he concerned himself mostly with the behavior of the priests, monks, and nuns within his purview, and was less concerned about the individual beliefs of the common folk.

  Though Romeyn started towards me, I gestured that he should stay where he was, calling out to him. “There’s no point in both of us getting wet.”

  A Welsh soldier took the bridle of my horse, even as the young monks who doubled as stable boys ran towards us from the shelter of the adjacent stable. It wasn’t large enough to house all thirty horses, but at least their gear could be removed and kept dry while I was speaking with Acquasparta.

  I set off across the courtyard, Callum and Carew in tow.

  “Sire.” Romeyn bowed when I reached him. “If it pleases you, Archbishop Peckham is prepared to receive you.”

  “Thank you, Romeyn.”

  My castle at Canterbury was one of the oldest in England, built by William I shortly after the Norman Conquest and later expanded by King Henry I. The main keep alone was over eighty feet high, with a foundation that was nearly a hundred feet wide on each side. And that was just the keep. The Archbishop’s palace was equally enormous, but it was less well fortified, which made it a more comfortable place to live. Men of the Church liked their luxuries. If nothing else, the palace had bigger windows because nobody was worried about trebuchet missiles coming through them.

  Once inside, I openly admired the decorations—the ornate tapestries on the walls, the carvings on the cornices, and the painted ceilings—rather than focusing on what lay ahead of me. It was better not to wind myself up about this meeting any more than I already had, because I didn’t know what Cardinal Acquasparta was going to say. Until I did, there wasn’t much point in speculating about it
. I was here. I would find out what he wanted in a minute.

  Carew paced beside Archbishop Romeyn, and Callum walked a little behind me to the left. It seemed to me that his breathing was coming more easily than mine.

  I was expecting to meet first with Peckham, since the whole reason I’d come to Canterbury in the first place was because Acquasparta was on his deathbed, but we entered the reception room to find both men drinking wine before a roaring fire. The legate was dressed in rich red robes, and I almost laughed at the contrast, since I had dripped water and left muddy boot prints all the way down the fine hallway behind me. Still, I’d dressed well underneath the black outer cloak that swathed me from head to foot. Serving temporarily as my squire, Carew helped me remove it to reveal a gold-embroidered mantle and blue tunic.

  Once I was clear of the threshold, Peckham moved towards me, his arm outstretched, and when he came within hailing distance, he bowed his head. “Sire! Thank you for coming. You honor us with your presence today.” I didn’t kiss Archbishop Peckham’s ring (nor he mine), as it wasn’t customary between us. We would see in a moment if Acquasparta thought it should have been.

  I allowed Peckham to gesture me towards the fireplace, at which point he introduced me to Acquasparta, who inclined his head in greeting. Acquasparta was a thin man in his fifties, tall, with a full head of dark hair and a patrician nose.

  I’d grown used to the pomp by now, and even if it didn’t come naturally to me, I’d learned to read meaning into every bent waist and bowed head. Acquasparta was showing me the proper amount of respect, and I extended an olive branch too, pretending I hadn’t noticed Acquasparta’s frown at my approach. He either didn’t like playing diplomat or was objecting to something more mundane, like my unavoidably muddy boots or my age. I was twenty-three. The word from Aaron was that Acquasparta thought I was a hothead.