The Disinherited. Hugh had heard the term before. It referred to the rebels whom King Henry had deprived of their lands.
“D’Eyvill burned Sheffield to the ground,” grunted de Lacy, “as well as God knows how many villages. Him and all his friends deserve a good hanging.”
“No,” Edward replied firmly. “I don’t want him dead. When I am King, I will need fighters like Sir John by my side.”
He turned his droop-lidded gaze on Hugh. “D'Eyvill and his ilk are wild dogs, Master Longsword. I must whip them to heel, yet be careful of their teeth.”
Edward laid his hand flat over the Midlands. “After our victory at Evesham last year, the surviving rebels north of the Trent holed up in Sherwood Forest and the Isle of Axholme. They spent the winter in these wild places. The Great North Road through Sherwood to York was unsafe to travel, unless you wanted an empty purse and a split throat. Sir John and his kin were chief among these highway robbers. I hoped they would be killed or taken at Chesterfield. Instead they escaped and went back to their old haunts.”
Hugh listened intently, though he was at a loss to know what all this had to do with him.
“I won't move against the rebels in the north until I know their strength,” Edward went on. “Sir John would like nothing more than a royal army to come blundering into the marshes at Axholme, to be drowned in the mud and slaughtered by his bog-soldiers. We must spy out the land.”
Edward smiled. It was a charming smile, and made Hugh's blood curdle in his veins.
“There are spies and spies,” said the Prince. “I have a great number of all kinds. That number has just been increased. By one.”
“Milord, I am a soldier,” Hugh protested. “I have no desire to creep about spying on folk. And I am a Londoner, with no knowledge of the north.”
Edward’s smile vanished. “You served at Chesterfield, did you not? The last I checked, that was in the north. That makes you practically a local. Henry, tell this honest man why he makes a perfect spy.”
De Lacy ticked the points off on his stubby fingers. “One: you look every inch a peasant, and are the fortunate owner of a forgettable face. Two: you are educated, and able to count swords and lances. Three: you are brave and good in a fight. Four: your father’s treachery to the Crown stands at odds with your own loyalty, but can be turned to our advantage. He died for Simon de Montfort, so the rebels will have no trouble accepting you as one of their own. Quite an impressive tally.”
Hugh listened to this with mounting dismay. His fate had clearly been decided long before he was summoned to Edward’s presence. He gasped as de Lacy gave him a hearty thump on the back.
Yet he had some fight left in him. “M… milord,” he ventured, “I was promised some reward for my good service.”
“You were,” agreed Edward, “and this is it. Your reward is to be taken into our employ. A great honour, don’t you agree?”
Hugh knew better than to argue.
6.
Steep Hill, Lincoln
Esther’s husband died in the morning and was buried in the afternoon. This was only proper, for the Torah required Jews to be buried within a day of death. The burial ceremony, held in the Jewish cemetery next to the synagogue at Jews’ Court, was a simple one. This was also proper and in accord with Jewish law.
In the evening, after she had dried her tears and gathered together the ragged shreds of her thoughts, Esther sat alone at the dining table of her house on Steep Hill and gazed at her husband’s empty chair. Several of her relatives had offered to stay and comfort her after the funeral, but she had politely refused. Esther wanted to be alone with her grief. Her memories.
The dining room had no windows. For reasons of privacy and security, there were no windows in any of the rooms on the ground floor of the house. The Jewish community in Lincoln was resented and feared by the Christians that lived all around them, and in recent years the seething atmosphere of hatred had often boiled over into violence.
Her late husband, Simon ben Aaron, had been a moneylender, one of the few professions open to Jews in England. There were a great many Christian clients on his books.
Esther pictured him shaking his head as he browsed through the swollen ledger of deeds and contracts. “Defaulters, every one of them,” he would say with a note of despair. “Happy to take my money and benefit from the so-called sin of usury. Sin! What hypocrites these Christian men are. Then they set up a great howling and threaten to tear me in pieces when I call in their debts.”
The ledger was in front of her now. As the widow of a moneylender, Esther had the right to take over her husband’s business. She was determined to do so and make a success of it. The defaulters may not have killed Simon – a winter chill had carried him off – but had threatened to do so often enough.
She pictured them in her mind’s eye, a gruesome array of sheriffs and barons and rich merchants, full of puffed-up arrogance and contempt for her race. Imagined them chortling and drinking toasts in mockery of the dead Jew, Simon of Lincoln, who would never call in his debts now.
Esther kneaded her forehead. It would be too easy to hate them. At this moment she hated the whole world, even God himself, for taking away her husband so young. She had to be calm, and insist on no more than her due.
She reached for a deed at random and held it up in front of her, squinting at the neat, precise Latin.
Bond, Ranulf of Skegby to Simon of Lincoln, a Jew: debt of nine marks, wherein he is bound by the Sheriff to pay Simon.
The deed was dated the Feast of St Michael, 1264. Simon had not received a penny of the nine marks owed. The interest on the debt after two years would be considerable. Ranulf or his heirs would pay, Esther decided, even if she had to seek redress at law.
Sighing, she laid down the deed and selected another.
Sir John d'Eyvill, knight, is bound to pay Simon of Lincoln, a Jew, £20 for his farms at Egmanton.
Sir John d'Eyvill. The name was familiar to her. Simon had repeated it often enough, accompanied by exclamations and curses. D'Eyvill was in debt to a great many Jews, and his debts had spiralled during the course of the recent wars. He was a poor manager of his finances, and shared the general dislike among Christians for honouring their commitments to Jewish moneylenders.
Esther recalled the man, a blustering, red-faced warlord who stank of sweat and horses. He was usually clad in mail, spattered with someone else’s blood, and spent his life galloping from one affray to another.
Simon had been mortally afraid of Sir John and his brutish kinsmen, often had nightmares in which they tortured him to death in their dungeons. Esther remembered how he used to wake up screaming, and her futile efforts to soothe him back to sleep.
She wiped a tear from her eye. There was no time to mourn. For the sake of her husband’s memory, she would break with tradition and start work at once.
Steep Hill was aptly named, a single street built on a steep gradient leading up to the entrance to Lincoln Cathedral. The castle was also nearby. These two great piles of stone loomed over the Jewish community, constant reminders of where the real power lay in England.
Esther’s house was near the bottom of the hill. The morning after her husband’s funeral found her toiling up the road, accompanied by her servant. Many of the friends and neighbours she encountered frowned at her or simply cut her dead. According to Jewish tradition, she should have stayed indoors and mourned Simon for a week. Even after that period, there were customary restrictions on a Jewish widow’s movements for another thirty days. Esther ignored the expressions of shock and disapproval, the muttered voices and dark looks.
Steep Hill was a wealthy district, lined with fine stone houses similar to her own. The wealth of the Jews was one reason they were so hated and resented by envious Christians. Esther often felt that she could sense the atmosphere of hatred, like a poisonous storm gathering in the skies above the town.
She walked past the synagogue known as Jew’s Court. An outraged Rabbi with a bea
rd down to his knees emerged from the doorway and spat curses at her. Esther ignored him and entered another stone building with an elaborately carved doorway, a slate roof, and Romanesque double-arch windows on the upper level.
Inside was a long hall with lines of desks on either side of the room. Clerks sat and consulted heavy ledgers, or scratched away with quills on lengths of parchment. She took a deep breath and approached one of the clerks, a pale and serious-looking young man in a dark blue gown.
“Esther,” he said, licking his finger and turning one of the pages of his ledger without looking up at her, “you should be at home. This is not right.”
His offhand manner irritated her. Yosef ben Mar Chiyya usually paid her every courtesy. Yet he was as strictly orthodox as they came, and tolerated no break with custom or decree.
Esther refused to acknowledge his rudeness. “I have come to confirm that I will be taking over my husband’s business,” she said. “I trust his affairs are in order here?”
Yosef’s eyes remained fixed on a row of accounts. “All is as it should be.”
“Good. I want to check through the copies of his deeds and contracts held in the Archa. This is my right.”
This made Yosef pause in his reading. Esther knew all about the Archa. It was a chest bound by three locks and seals and held in the strongroom of the bureau. Inside were copies of all the financial records involving the Jews of Lincoln. The one at Lincoln was one of many such chests held in bureaus all over England. They existed to prevent Christians destroying the official records of money owed to the Jews. A percentage of all Jewish earnings went to the King, which was one reason the archae were so heavily guarded.
The bureaus were run by teams of two Christian and two Jewish clerks of good reputation. Yosef, who thought much of his reputation, was one of the team employed at Lincoln.
“Your husband’s documents are indeed your own, or soon will be,” he said in a slow, deliberate tone, “and yes, you may look at the versions in the chest. Under supervision, of course. May I ask why? Do you fear we might have been robbed in the twenty-four hours since Simon’s funeral?”
“No,” Esther replied acidly, “but I mean to be thorough. My husband had a great many creditors, and was too frightened to chase most of them. They don’t frighten me.”
Yosef relaxed in his hard chair. He rubbed his eyes, tired and red-rimmed from too many hours squinting at crabbed handwriting.
“I don’t doubt it, Esther,” he said, mustering the ghost of a smile, “I don’t doubt it at all.”
7.
Kenilworth, Warwickshire
Roger Godberd stood on the battlements of the great keep and watched clouds of yellow dust drift across the land. They heralded the approach of the royal host, and were accompanied by the noise of a great army on the march. Trumpets, drums, the whinny of distant horses, steady tramp of thousands of marching feet.
His guts churned with fear. It was too late now to make his peace with the King and return to his farm in Swannington, buried away in the rural peace of Leicestershire.
Not that I would, he reminded himself. Even if he had the chance. Godberd was loyal to his Lord, the captive Earl of Derby, and would fight on until the Earl was a free man again.
Godberd and his family had suffered for their loyalty. Outlawed, disinherited and pursued by the king’s officers, forced to live like wild beasts in the forest. At last they came here, to Kenilworth, the last major rebel stronghold in England.
“I see their banners,” cried his younger brother, William, pointing at the forests to the south. Godberd looked, and saw the first bannerets of the royal vanguard ride into view. At such a distance they were tiny. The sun gleamed on bright mail and lance-heads as the riders trotted from the woods.
William’s beardless face was flushed with excitement. The boy was fierce, eager to taste blood. Their other brother, Geoffrey, was marauding about the forest of Charnwood at the head of a band of riders, poaching game and robbing travellers on the King’s highway.
The open plain south of Kenilworth’s massive barbican rapidly filled with horsemen. Behind them came an endless multitude of infantry, company after company, a marching forest of spears. The royalist host put Godberd in mind of an enormous serpent unfolding its length on the ground. His spirits plunged.
“We should be honoured, lad,” he remarked to William. “His Majesty has brought his entire host to greet us.”
His voice grated with the effort of sounding cheerful. It was true King Henry had brought all his power to Kenilworth. Thousands of horse and foot, mailed knights, mounted sergeants and esquires, Gascon crossbowmen and Welsh archers, Irish kerns, spear and knife-men levied from the shires, teams of workmen and engineers. For the next hour Godberd watched this vast host split into four divisions and surround the castle on the landward side. He noted their discipline, the lack of hurry and chaos among the royalist lines. They were confident, and had every right to be.
“Look!” cried William, leaning over the battlements. “The King! I see him, I see his standard!”
Godberd’s mouth dried. He had also spotted the great royal banner, and the figure on horseback under it. King Henry was in full armour, bareheaded, saddled on a grey destrier. At such a distance it was impossible to make out his features, but he rode well for an old man. Behind him clustered his household knights, magnificent in the Plantagenet livery, a moving sea of red and gold.
“I have fought this King for six years,” Godberd murmured, “and never seen him until now.”
And unlikely to get any closer, he added silently. He and his comrades were cooped up inside Kenilworth like rats in a trap. Most of them would die, killed by assault and bombardment, or else starved to death. The fortunate few who survived might have the privilege of grovelling at King Henry’s feet. Godberd, a lifelong soldier, preferred death to subjection.
He took some comfort from the strength of Kenilworth’s defences. The mighty central keep that he stood on was bolstered by four corner towers and walls twenty feet thick. The keep was part of the inner bailey, which boasted three smaller towers and a curtain wall ringed by a dry ditch. Another wall enclosed the outer bailey. To the south, a gigantic causeway linked the castle to the mainland. A gatehouse south of the outer wall led to the causeway, which was walled, and a further moat and strong barbican protected the entrance.
Godberd could only admire the skill of the engineers who built Kenilworth and the outer defences. The causeway had been built across the stream, damming it and forming a lake in the valley that protected the outer walls to south and west. Another man-made pool to the east and further ditches along the north side meant the castle was ringed by water on all sides. A direct assault by land was virtually impossible.
The King will not try anything so foolish.
Godberd saw long lines of ox-drawn carts and wagons, piled high with gear, lumber into position behind the army. He knew what they contained. Timber and building materials to construct engines of war, trebuchets and ballistas and siege towers.
Heavy footsteps clattered behind him. Godberd turned to see the unlovely features of Walter Devyas.
“Lord Hastings and the rest want to see you in the Great Hall,” grunted Devyas. He was tall and thickset, with a yellow, toad-like face, severely marked by the scars of a childhood pox. His black hair was receding and fell in greasy ringlets to his shoulders.
He and Godberd were allies rather than friends. Godberd appreciated Devyas’s abilities as a fighter, but otherwise found the man repellent: cruel, ignorant and thoroughly dull company.
“Does he?” Godberd replied. “Well, I must not keep their lordships waiting. You two stay here and watch the entertainment.”
He brushed past Devyas and clattered down the spiral stair leading to the hall. Godberd heard angry shouts echoing in the stairwell as he descended, and paused to collect his wits before stepping into the Great Hall.
The hall was a huge stone cavern with tall windows and a vaulted ce
iling. Sir Henry de Hastings, captain of the rebel garrison, stood at the head of a long table in the middle of the chamber. Two of his fellow knights stood nearby, swapping angry words with their chief. All the other furniture had been cleared away, and the walls were stacked with war-gear: swords, lances, shields, helms, coats of mail, all greased and polished in their racks.
Hastings looked up from the table as Godberd entered. He was a thin, sallow man, and put Godberd in mind of a starving wolf. His long-nosed face was flushed, which meant trouble. Hastings could be savage when roused. King Henry had recently sent an envoy to Kenilworth, demanding the surrender of the castle. Hastings chopped off the luckless envoy’s hand and sent him back to the King with the severed appendage hung round his neck.
The two other men at the table were Sir Simon de Pattishall and Sir John de la Ware, staunch Montfortians who had refused to submit to the crown after Evesham. Like every other man in the garrison, their lives and lands were now forfeit.
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