By Sylvian Hamilton (6 page)

The
shoemaker, primed with a quarter penny, delivered his information. He
had taken the man's boots in part exchange for a new pair. The old
were worn out, and no, he didn't have them any more, he'd reused the
salvageable leather, which was just common stuff. He didn't recognise
the workmanship; they weren't local boots. The man said his mule had
broken its leg at Newark, and he'd had to walk thereafter.

At
Newark, Bane found the farrier who'd bought the mule and still had
its harness. 'Not English work,' the farrier said, running a grimy
thumb along the stitches. 'Foreign, that is.'

'Any
idea where he came from?'

'No.
But I picked up the mule on the Doncaster road.'

At
Doncaster his luck seemed to run out until by sheer good chance he
sat at dice with the off-duty gate guards, one of whom remembered
winning two shillings from a traveller whose description was very
like the murdered man, and who had been a sore loser.

'Quite
a tasty little fight we ad,' the guard said cheerfully, 'till one of
me mates dropped a sack over im, and we bundled im into the lock-up
for the night. Went off next morning swearing murder.'

'Murder's
what he got,' said Bane. 'Where'd he come from, do you know?'

'York.'

York
was a big place, and Bane, asking about a tall man, probably foreign,
riding a grey mule, learned nothing for two days but then found a
blacksmith who had shod the mule. It had cast a shoe a mile or so
outside the city. The blacksmith was talkative and had a good memory.
The man had paid him with a Scottish coin and asked about the road
ahead. He was going to Doncaster.

'I
know where he went. I need to know where he came from,' Bane said.

'Dunno
where from, but he'd come through Durham,' said the blacksmith.
'Prayed at Saint Cuthbert's shrine, he told me so, for a safe
journey.'

'Saint
Cuthbert wasn't listening,' said Bane.

At
Durham he tracked him to a brothel, where a disgruntled whore
remembered him for his roughness and the false coin he gave her.

'A
foreigner,' Bane said. 'Welsh, Irish, or something.'

'Scottish,'
said the girl.

'Are
you sure?'

'My
mum was Scottish. Course I'm sure.'

'Did
he say where he'd come from?'

'He
said I wasn't a patch on the whores in Newcastle, and they charged
less for the pleasure of him,' she said, and spat. Bane gave her a
penny. 'It better be real.' She scowled.

'It
is, never fear. I'd give two more if you'd had his name.'

'Oh,
that. Grimmer, or Grimmon, or something like,' she said. 'Gimme my
tuppence.'

Newcastle
was cold, dark, foggy and reeked of fish. Its whorehouses were
nothing to write home about and its whores had seen better days, but
at the eighth establishment Bane struck lucky. His tall Scot with the
grey mule was remembered unlovingly. The man's name was Crimmon, and
he was from Berwick.

Wondering
if he was going to have to traipse right to the very top of Scotland,
Bane had set out for Berwick and now sat watching the town as it
yawned and got up in the morning. Scratching the bug bites from last
night's bed, he hoped to find a stable to sleep in tonight. Years of
experience had taught him that prized horseflesh lay cleaner and
sweeter than Christians. When the morning rush in and out of the
gates was over, he rode down and entered the town, asking for the
sheriff.

'Crimmon,
you say? That's all, just a name?'

'Just
a name. He rode a grey mule.'

'Why
are you looking for him, English? What's he done?'

'Got
himself murdered. The Prioress of Holystone thought his kin should
know.'

'That
was mighty kind of her, to send someone all this way.' 'It was her
Christian duty,' said Bane.

'Well,
I'll find out where he lived and tell his folks,' said the sheriff.
'You can go back home now, English; your Christian duty's done, and I
wouldn't hang about here if I was you. You're on the wrong side of
the border!'

Chapter
7

Straccan
had waited six days at Pontigny. The group of people hoping to see
the archbishop changed daily, some arriving, others leaving; a few
had even seen him. Nobles and peasants, monks and nuns, priests and
merchants, came and went. There were occasional messengers from Rome,
bringing papal encouragement for the exiled archbishop, and from King
Philip of France, stirring mud for all it was worth. It suited him
well to have England and the Church at each other's throats. The
archbishop's absence from his appointed place did not mean he was out
of touch. Far from it. A constant stream of representatives from
various English foundations poured in with complaints and problems,
asking his advice.

On
arrival, they gave their names and some stated their business to the
guest master of the great monastery at Pontigny, where Stephen
Langton, the latest in a long line of disaffected English churchmen,
passed the time while waiting to enter into the see the pope had
bestowed upon him, and King John so indignantly refused to hand over.
Then they waited to be summoned to the archbishop's presence.

Straccan
found himself in a small stuffy dormitory with three other would-be
visitors: a plump Paris merchant who whistled constantly and
tunelessly through his teeth; a silent grey-haired nobleman in rich
but soiled clothing who eyed the rest suspiciously and spoke to no
one, biting his nails all the time; and a shabby little Irish monk,
Brother Dermot, who carried a scroll from his prior and the gift, for
the archbishop, of a precious thumb-bone of Saint Brigid. This he
showed Straccan who eyed it with professional interest and made an
offer; whereupon Brother Dermot hastily wrapped it up again and
stowed it back in his bosom, abashed.

Straccan
sat and waited, stood and waited, walked about and waited, ate and
slept and rose again, and waited. The Paris merchant was summoned in
the middle of the night and departed, still whistling, to be seen no
more by the rest of them. Familiar faces in the courtyard disappeared
as the days passed, and new ones took their places. On the evening of
the sixth day, as the sky began to turn all shades of gold and the
shadows to grow long, a cloaked and hooded man red with the dust of
travel, rode in just as the gates were about to close for the night.
Dismounting, he handed his reins to a lay brother who appeared at a
trot from the porter's lodging. The guest master himself, a venerable
broad-bellied monk, appeared to lead this new arrival in at once.

'God's
bones,' cried the grey-haired nobleman, the nail-biter.

'Who
is he to be whisked in at once while we wait day after day?

‘
You,
Sir!' to the dusty traveller, 'When you see His Grace, tell him Lord
Beltrane waits on him still!' And he rushed forward, seized the man
by the shoulder and shook him furiously. Brother Dermot stuck out a
dirty sandalled foot and the nail-biter tripped, falling heavily.
Starting to rise, he grabbed at Dermot and pulled his dagger, but
Straccan's boot connected with his elbow and the knife went flying.

'Lord
Beltrane, whoever he is, needs a quiet place to recover himself,' he
said to the guest master. It was quite dark now and monks came
running with torches and lanterns. Light and shadow danced and
flickered on faces. Two monks led Lord Beltrane away. At Straccan's
words the dusty visitor swung around and reached towards him.

'Sir
Richard? Sir Richard Straccan?'

'Yes?'

'Richard!
It is you! I know your voice! Don't you know me?

See
...' He dragged his hood back. 'I am Sulpice de Malbuisson.'

'My
God,' said Straccan, staring at the thin bearded face with its
one-eyed eager stare. 'Jesus, Sulpice, is it really you? I thought
you were dead!'

'I
usually eat in the refectory with the rest of the community,' said
Stephen Langton. 'But when I have guests we can be private here.'
Straccan sat after supper with the archbishop and Sulpice de
Malbuisson. The young monk who waited on them cleared away the dishes
and crumbs and trimmed the candles. Langton leaned back in his chair
and gazed at Straccan.

'My
nephew has talked of you before, Sir Richard,' he said. 'He owes his
life to you, and I owe you much thanks. Sulpice and my brother are
all the kin left me. His mother –my sister—died when he
was very young, and his father died before he was born.'

'I
thought you were dead too, Richard,' Sulpice said. 'After you got me
back to the camp, they told me you had disappeared. Then we were all
bundled into wagons and taken to the ships. When I came to my senses
I asked for you but you were not aboard. I asked and searched at
Cyprus when we landed but you weren't on the other ship. Many of the
wounded had died on the voyage and been thrown overboard. Not all
their names were known. I have prayed for your soul ever since!'

'I'm
sure I'm the better for it.' Straccan smiled. 'I never made it to the
ships. I was still in the camp when the infidel raided it and I was
captured. I had a year in a galley until it was taken by a Spanish
vessel, a pilgrim ship that took me back to Acre.'

'What
then?'

'I
had no money to reward my rescuers, so they ... leased me you might
say, to a Jew in the town, a spice merchant. As a servant.'

'How
shameful,' said the archbishop, his face dark with anger, 'for a
Christian to sell another Christian to a Jew!'

'Oh,
it is often done, Your Grace. To a Jew, to a Saracen, to another
Christian, even. But I was lucky. Simeon was a good man.
Compassionate. He fed and clothed me, and when he found I could read
and write he used me as a clerk to write to his associates in France
and England. I had the good fortune to apprehend a thief in his
storeroom and Simeon rewarded me by paying my debt to the Spanish
captain.'

He
remembered vividly the brief murderous struggle in Simeon's storeroom
--he bore a welted scar across his ribs to remind him –the
heat, the overpowering scent of spices, the panting, grasping,
sweaty grappling with a body unseen in the darkness, the knife
scorching across his chest, then wrenched away, dropped and kicked
among the sacks. All the power of his galley-toughened muscles was
behind the fist he drove into the robber's belly. Lights and shrieks
as Simeon's men, hearing the fight, arrived with lamps. Himself
slipping down into the puddle of his own blood. The smell of blood
and cinnamon ...

'So
you lost the eye,' he said to Sulpice.

'The
arrow pinned eyelid to eyeball.' Sulpice frowned. 'They got the
arrowhead out but it went bad on the ship. It was all very nasty,
cautery and that, you know, but here I am and the other eye still
serves me. I don't remember how you got me away when we were
ambushed.'

'The
arrow hit you and you fell from your horse. I took a slash across the
collarbone but it wasn't too bad—it knocked me out of the
saddle, though, and I fell on you. We rolled down a sandbank. You
were dead to the world with the arrow sticking out of your eye
socket. I just dragged you. There were some rocks and a hollow behind
and beneath them. We tumbled into it; I remember praying there would
be no snakes. Nobody noticed. It was a nasty hot little fight up
above us. Our lot was wiped out. The Saracens cut their heads off and
dragged the bodies away behind their horses. When it grew dark and
you had come round, we started walking.'

Sulpice
turned to his uncle, smiling. 'He dragged and supported me twenty
miles,' he said. 'At the end, I kept passing out and he carried me
like a child, on his back.'

'We
propped each other along much of the way,' Straccan said.

'It
was only the last mile or two that you couldn't stagger.'

The
archbishop leaned forward, his elbows on the board and his chin in
his hands. 'Tell me, Sir Richard, what is your errand here?'

'I
want to buy one of your relics, Your Grace.'

'Which
one?'

'The
finger of Saint Thomas.'

Bane
reached Stirrup again a few days after Straccan's return.

'You're
thinner,' said Straccan as Bane hobbled into the central courtyard,
leading his limping horse.

'I've
got a blister the size of a duck egg,' grumbled Bane.