Sorrow Without End (22 page)

“As you wish, I shall tell your brother that his son died from the wounds of war, as he most certainly did,” she said. “Hanging you for killing the man on the road, however, is to punish you for an act you did not commit and one you did everything in your power to prevent. What reason can you give for this murder if you do not want your brother ever to learn what happened to his son in Outremer?”

“Yet his request is fair, my lady. The sheriff...” the crowner began.

“To accept it does not serve justice, Ralf. The murder of the soldier has been avenged. The man who killed him is dead. If your brother hears that the soldier’s killer was found but that he died soon after as the result of unspecified wounds, do you think the sheriff will care what happened to the body of the soldier’s killer, or even ask his name?”

“Any satisfactory tale will content him as long as his position in the shire remains secure. Nonetheless, do we not still face a murderer, my lady?”

“Murderer? Did you never turn your back on the battlefield when one comrade eased another out of misery when he screamed with unendurable wounds?”

Ralf nodded.

Eleanor turned to Walter. “You, sir, are a soldier. You understand what bravery is, even when mixed with fear or pain. Why do you then ask for cowardly death when the more courageous deed would be to live?”

“After killing my nephew, how can living be...” Walter suddenly fell silent.

“I think you see my meaning,” she replied. “You most certainly owe a very painful penance for your deeds. Return to Outremer as a Hospitaller monk, dedicate the rest of your life to the wounded, and pray daily for the soul of your nephew’s abused wife. Do you not owe this little to the woman who saved Maurice’s life, a soul who showed more understanding of God’s commandments than most mortals? Hell will wait for you, but, by living with the horror of your crimes while doing good for whatever time on earth God grants you, you may find He will grant some forgiveness.”

“Why should God listen to my prayers for her any more than He did for those on my nephew’s behalf?”

Eleanor closed her eyes, then took a deep breath. “You asked about His mercy. Do you not wonder why your nephew and the soldier left Acre at the same time? Do you not ask why your nephew found the man alone on a normally well-traveled road? Might you not ask whether God answered your prayers in His own way by letting your nephew avenge his wife’s slaughter? You question God’s mercy, only because you fail to see it.”

Walter turned pale, then silently raised his sword.

Ralf reached out to pull Eleanor to safety.

The man turned the weapon slowly around until the hilt pointed toward the trio. “I surrender my sword and myself to you, my lady, and request sanctuary at Tyndal’s altar. May I ask, however, that your monk accept this? My sword should be given to a man of God if I am to leave the world to serve Him.”

Chapter Forty-five

Winter had now come to Tyndal. Despite the sharp air that rushed to attack when Eleanor opened the wooden shutters in her private chambers, she stood her ground and looked out on the white morning. The night had left a light dusting of snow over the earth, and, for just this moment, the world looked as unblemished as Eden.

Although she shivered, she silently watched the black shapes of two birds darting against the gray sky. Then conceding victory to the pervasive chill, she closed the shutters and turned back to the blazing fire that brought cheer to her room.

Arthur, lord of kitchens, had curled himself into a tight circle near enough to the fire, one orange paw covering his eyes. Eleanor reached down and picked him up, settled herself into a chair, and lowered him gently onto her lap. He circled once, gave a great yawn, and went back to sleep.

“Do cats ever suffer heartache?” She shook her head. “Nay, I suspect God was more merciful to your kind than He was to mine.” As the fire crackled, she gently ran her fingers through his thick fur and laughed. “Indeed, good sir, I doubt you have ever been rejected in your courting. Tyndal is most blessed with your progeny.”

Leaning back into her chair, she pressed one hand against her eyes. The headaches she had suffered over the last two days were finally receding. Now she knew she should have listened to Sister Anne’s advice months ago and begun the regimen of feverfew for relief. This time the herb had reduced her suffering by at least a day. Would that the pain in her heart could be so easily lessened.

In the days after the murders were solved she had slept but little, spending the dark hours on her knees, begging God for respite and wisdom. Finally, she had struck her fists against the prie-dieu and shouted at Him, demanding that He give her understanding if He would not grant her peace. Must she wait for both, she asked, until her allotted years on earth were done?

It was the next night that she had finally fallen, exhausted, into such deep sleep that she had failed to awaken for the Night Offices. When she opened her eyes and looked with confusion at the weak light of morning, she wondered why no one had come for her. Sister Anne later explained that she had but could not rouse her. Since the sub-infirmarian had detected no malignant reason for this, she had left the prioress to her dreams, deciding that it was God’s will.

So it must have been, for although Eleanor could no longer remember the details of her dreams, she had felt a strange relief upon rising, as if one prayer had at last been answered. As she knelt at her prie-dieu that morning, to give thanks for another day of service, she knew with certainty that sending Thomas from Tyndal would be wrong. She must not sacrifice his peace for her sin, and she bowed her head in gratitude to God for keeping her from committing that selfish act. Of course, she had whispered, it should be she who suffered for her lust, not an innocent man, and she prayed that God, in His infinite mercy, would forgive her for even considering it. The ache in her woman’s heart might remain undiminished, but the soul of a prioress was at peace with God’s will.

Brother Matthew, however, had left. When the monastics learned that the relic he tried to buy was fake and tales spread from the inn about his lapse into carnal pleasures, he begged to go to another house. Although she disliked the man, Eleanor acknowledged that few would have so willingly saved an innocent man from unjust punishment at the cost of advancement and reputation. For that, Eleanor granted his plea and sent him to the abbess in Anjou. In her letter requesting his admission there, she praised his virtues but failed to mention his failures. Just the other day, she had heard a rumor that he had abandoned the Fontevrauldine Order for the Cistercian, asking specifically to be sent to a monastery without women.

Brother Andrew had been elected prior at Tyndal, a decision that greatly pleased her. Although she expected they would have their differences, she knew him to be a sensible man and one with whom she could work. After all, there was always ground for compromise amongst the reasonable when disagreements arose.

Would that all the world were as prudent as Brother Andrew, she sighed. No matter how hard mortals might try to emulate God’s wisdom, man’s imperfections could so easily taint judgement, turning innocence into guilt and guilty men into innocent ones. “We can never equal God’s most perfect justice,” she said aloud to the bright flames. “Yet we must always strive to do so.”

Even now she wondered if she had erred last autumn when she argued for Walter’s life and allowed this confessed murderer to live, making service and prayer his penance. How many times had she asked herself whether she had exceeded the bounds of mortal judgement and thus honored evil more than just mercy by granting him asylum? Had she sinned as well in suggesting that the killing of the soldier near her priory gates might even be God’s will?

Yet the crowner had concurred, albeit silently as he turned and left the man in the sanctuary. Although Walter was allowed forty days in the church at Tyndal, the crowner had sent a message the next day that trusted men could take him on a boat to the south where he could board a ship bound for Outremer. Knowing Ralf to be an honorable man, she had no reason to doubt him when he sent word that Walter was safely on his way. Daily thereafter, Eleanor had prayed that the man’s ship would survive the seasonal storms.

Had she sinned? In truth, she did not know. She believed Walter to be a good man, one who would keep his word to return to Outremer as he had promised. The hospitaller Order of Saint John would find him a most dedicated and humble monk, she thought, and surely God would smile on his constant prayers for the soul of his nephew’s wife. In truth, she would never forget the woman in her own.

As Walter had said, Eleanor did believe in a merciful God, although she had no doubt that His anger could be terrible. In her heart, she believed that He must have snatched the poor woman’s soul from the fires of Hell, if in truth it was ever there, and later returned her to the company of her husband, a man guilty only of love and human frailty before he fell into madness.

“Surely God would be merciful to a woman who showed mercy to one of His own,” she said aloud to the sleeping cat on her lap. “Surely.”

As for Sir Maurice, his father had eventually come to take his son’s bones, quickly stripped of flesh for preservation, back home for burial. There had been relief as well as tears in the man’s eyes. Perhaps he himself had feared that his son would return, mutilated in body or in soul. A dead son, martyred in the crusading cause, could be mourned with honor and without guilt. When told of his brother’s return to Outremer as a monk, he had simply nodded.

And the relic seller? She smiled as she thought of him. There was a knave, but not an evil man or unworthy of mercy. In exchange for his honest telling of what he had seen that rainy day on the road to Tyndal, she and Brother Andrew had told him that another visit to the shrine of Saint William in Norwich might be arranged. If the relic seller would agree to end his days with repentant deeds, they would assure the registrar of miracles that the fellow would most certainly be cured this time of his inclination toward strange dancing, not to mention sheep theft and the making of false relics.

Not being a fool, the former relic seller had agreed and thus became a lay brother in service to the saint who had cured him, a wise choice since a monastery meant decent food, a dry bed, and honorable labor. Eleanor thought that the young William of Norwich might understand since fakery and contrition must surely have existed in his day as well.

In all of this, Ralf had been most cooperative, yet subdued. Although she knew he loved justice more than he did either the law or those who most often administered it, she realized he had been very angry over the murder of the soldier and hated those who sold fake relics. Nonetheless, he had done all as she had wished it, then quickly left Tyndal. He had not come back since, even to congratulate Brother Andrew or to jest with Brother Thomas.

Eleanor understood at least one reason why the crowner had not returned to the priory. Knowing the grief of an impossible love, she wished she could comfort him in his pain, even if she could not comfort herself.

As for the sheriff, not one word had ever been heard from him on the matter of the crusader’s murder.

Arthur muttered deep in feline dreams. Eleanor caressed him, soothing her soft companion into gentler imaginings. As the exhaustion she often felt after her headaches began to lull her into a doze as well, she last remembered saying to the cat, “Ah, sweet sir, it is times like these that I do most miss my aunt at Amesbury.”

Author’s Notes

Although we live history in the brightness of the moment, we learn it by looking backward at its shadow.

Without hindsight, of course, we could never see the clear route history was taking at any given period. Yet by removing the unessential details, minimizing the seemingly promising paths that actually went nowhere, and deeming irrelevant all those daily things that got in the way of our ancestors seeing exactly where history might be taking them, we lose a tactile sense of the time. Perhaps that is one reason we fail to learn from their mistakes—or at least realize how difficult it was to make those right choices when the passions of the moment pointed in other directions.

Failure to clearly see where historical events are leading can be quite devastating, although ignorance can be benign as well in the short term. For England in 1271, the immediate future turned out to be relatively calm. Nevertheless, the coming years would not only bring a king who imposed much needed order on a lax legal system, but also one who brought tragedy to the Jews and the Welsh, and wars on all borders.

Those living in 1271 must have felt some unease about the future. We may know that Edward returned to England safely and reigned with a firmness much lacking under his father, and that there would be no more civil war. They did not. Simon de Montfort had not been forgotten either, and the range of his followers from peasant to prince suggests that issues raised by him could not be set aside without serious social consequences. One indication of this was the attempt to canonize de Montfort, although he had been twice excommunicated before his death. The number of miracles claimed by people from all classes at the burial site of his mutilated remains was significant. As Henry II discovered after the murder of Thomas Becket, not even kings may ignore the meaning behind such movements with impunity. Edward I wisely learned from his ancestor’s mistakes.

A change in kingship was clearly imminent. In late 1271, some believed that the current king was senile, and all should have suspected that his remaining time on earth would be short. At the time this book takes place, King Henry III had approximately one more year to live.

Like Queen Victoria, King Henry III enjoyed a long reign. He came to power in 1216 as a nine-year-old boy after the death of his father, King John. Fortunately, he had both capable and honorable men to rule for him. Thus he remained alive and king, despite a long minority and the de Montfort rebellion, until he died in 1272. Whatever opinion his subjects had of Henry, most had known no other monarch.

History has been unkind to Henry III. Even Dante placed him in Purgatory for having been too preoccupied with religiosity to pay adequate attention to governing his subjects. He has been condemned as a pale man, incompetent, and lacking in a certain vigor. Compared to his colorful grandfather (Henry II), his notorious father (John), and his more bellicose son (Edward I), he does rather fade from view. Perhaps that is unfortunate because his reign was not entirely lacking in merit; however, the complex political problems that have led historians to conclude he was less than successful as a monarch would, and have, required some lengthy books. For an understanding of those issues, I recommend those excellent studies.

On the other hand, we should not assume that Henry did not have his supporters at the time as well as his detractors. Few have ever accused him of being a cruel or vicious monarch. Even in his later years, unlike other rulers who suffered mental deterioration, Henry slipped only into gentleness. Thus it might not hurt to point out some personal things about the man in order to add some flesh and color to the figure on the coffin lid—while acknowledging that these do not, in any way, give the whole picture.

Henry was a most uxorious man. Unlike his father, a lusty fellow by any definition, Henry produced no known illegitimate issue, although having them was not always considered a bad thing for kings. Part of the reason for this marital fidelity was Henry’s strong religious bent. Another equally important reason was his wife. Eleanor of Provence, one of four remarkably intelligent and beautiful sisters of an equally well-endowed mother, married him when she was twelve and he was twenty-eight. Despite the standard ups and downs of the union, they both seemed to have considered it a very happy marriage.

At sixteen, she bore their first child. They had at least five known children and probably other unrecorded stillbirths and miscarriages. Despite the assumption that upper class parents didn’t have much to do with their offspring, there is strong evidence that Henry and Eleanor adored theirs. When their son, Edward, fell ill at a Cistercian abbey, Eleanor refused to leave him, despite the Order’s prohibition against women staying within their precincts. Henry made sure she was allowed to stay. When their deaf and mute little Katherine died at age four, both parents fell seriously ill from the strain of deep grieving.

Henry, despite his hot temper (a very Angevin trait), was also a rather merciful man. Unlike at least one of his ancestors, he seemed to have reconsidered his words and acts when he stopped chewing the rushes and cooled down. He was outraged, for example, when his sister, Eleanor, secretly married Simon de Montfort, but Henry soon welcomed them back to court when other kings might have imprisoned or even executed the offending pair. Some might say that Henry’s more compassionate act was not the wisest decision since his brother-in-law later paid him back with rebellion, but I’ll leave that interesting discussion to others for resolution.

The king also had a reputation for some leniency toward criminals. He was known to commute the sentences of those who illegally hunted the king’s deer. He did not seem awfully fond of putting people to death for relatively minor offences, and he gave substantial alms to prisoners as well as the poor in general. Matthew Paris wrote scathingly about his legal “laxity”, but not all would have agreed that it was worthy of so much contempt. As is true today, people have always had various opinions on what constitutes justice.

Henry was also known for his love of the arts, although his methods for getting the money to pay for his projects were often less than admirable. His dedication to the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey ranks as his most splendid achievement. An example of one of his more minor ones includes the remnant of a tiled pavement from Eleanor’s apartments, now in the British Museum.

Whatever his flaws as a king, he seems to have been a kind man who tried to practice some of the basic tenets of his faith. When he died, there was a brief flurry of miracle allegations at his tomb. His widow encouraged the stories. His son, Edward I, quickly put a stop to any such claims.

The Middle Ages had a plethora of alleged miracles, yet the medievals had a healthy skepticism about cures and relics. This did not mean they lacked faith, but they were as cognizant as we that clever scam artists are often just waiting to take in the innocent and gullible. They also shared our outrage when this happened.

Pilgrimage sites were staffed with people required to log in all alleged cures and determine their validity at the time claimed. Those who traveled from place to place to gain attention by dramatic cures were a known problem, and the more notorious were chased away whenever recognized.

The medievals were also aware that the newness of something had a special power to it, although they did not use our psychological language to explain why. Each site had records showing that the efficacy of cures diminished with some predictable regularity after the relic first arrived. To correct this trend, the religious knew that doing something dramatic helped to recover that power. A ceremonial moving of the relic was one such method. Over time, however, there was no question that cures declined, and recorded ones involved increasingly local populations. Thus income from the site dropped as well.

The other problem with having a relic was the need to guard it. Relic thieves were quite inventive in their ways of stealing bits of the enshrined saint. Yes, they did take bites of the holy object, filched molars, and even sucked dust into their mouths, all of which could later be sold as legitimate parts thereof. When whole saints were stolen, the thieves, usually from a place that wanted to become a shrine, often argued that the saint had wanted to move and thus their act was justified. (Ellis Peters dealt with a similar issue in
A Morbid Taste for Bones
.)

In addition to acceptably documented relics, there was an impressive number of body parts (including many of the same type from the same body), uncountable slivers of the True Cross, and gallons of blood from just about anyone of sacred note. The honest faithful passionately hated the fraudulence, but it was prevalent and many did find humor in this fakery. For the latter, I refer readers to Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
.

Illness in the Middle Ages was frightening. Some of the cures were even more so, and presumed causes of sickness may seem quite ignorant today. Swallowing crushed gemstones or chowing down on sheep lice no longer has wide appeal. The belief that a leper caught the disease because he had committed some especially horrible sin, like having sex with his wife during her menstruation, would seem bizarre to most today. The assumption that a child born with red hair was conceived during a woman’s monthly bleeding does, however, show an interesting logic.

On the other hand, what we accept as good medical practice in 2006 may turn out to be quite primitive by standards seven hundred years from now. Nor may we ignore that the medical breakthroughs we enjoy today evolved from discoveries made by those in the distant past. Despite resistance to new methods and ideas from the medical professions, religious leaders, and the general public, there have always been observant, thoughtful, and curious people who persisted until their insights became conventional wisdom.

Not all medieval theories about good health or the cause of illness were completely outlandish. Physicians regularly prescribed exercise and moderation in both eating and drinking to stay healthy, understanding that good health once lost was very difficult to recover. As a cause of illness, the effect of “bad air” was a major concern. Although most blithely tossed their nightly slops into the public street, they also wanted good drainage or at least an adequate number of pigs to clean it all up. The medievals might not have known about germs, but they knew there was some relationship between the smell of sewage and getting sick.

Hospitals were also rather advanced even though they were primarily intended for the poor. Although whole families (plus valuable animals) of the least affluent often lived in one room and shared sleeping accommodations, the sick in the larger hospitals were not only given a single bed but also regularly washed sheets. (The Savoy Hospital, during the reign of Henry VII, not only offered sheets and blankets but also a tapestry coverlet monogrammed with the Tudor rose.) A light but nourishing diet was provided for free, as well as night-lights and staff to help patients should they need to visit the latrines.

Much like today, medical care funding depended upon the priorities of the powerful. While Henry VII founded and supported some of the first hospitals for the temporarily ill poor, his son, Henry VIII, confiscated any hospital land if he fancied the location for personal use. Saint James’ Palace, for example, sits on land once dedicated to the cure of the sick.

Since dissection was discouraged by the Church (although autopsies were allowed in cases of violent death), Christian physicians and surgeons learned most about anatomy, technique, and viable treatments during wars. At the time covered by the first mysteries in this series, a crusade was being fought in the Holy Land; thus these doctors not only got their practical experience but were also exposed to the superior medical knowledge of the Muslim world.

Despite gaining much scientific, culinary, and philosophical enlightenment from people they called “infidels”, the Western world considered these wars less than successful because Jerusalem remained in Muslim hands. When Prince Edward arrived in Tunis full of fervor for the fray, he was horrified to discover that a treaty between the two archenemies had actually been signed. Despite his determination to fight on and ignore an act he considered almost blasphemous, he himself eventually offered a truce and left the Holy Land, unsuccessful, much impoverished, and barely alive. His Western contemporaries considered him a hero.

Although we obviously lack the vivid photos of a Matthew Brady for the crusades, the handwritten accounts are quite graphic. The memoirs of Anna Comnena (First Crusade), Villehardouin (Fourth Crusade), and Joinville (the life of Saint Louis up to his death in 1270) are some of the most famous from the Western perspective. Books from the Muslim point of view are harder to find for the general Western reader, although a few compilations and Ibn Al-Qalanisi’s account of the First Crusade are reasonably available. Of course, all these books contain descriptions, often idealized, of heroics. Nonetheless, the medievals did not sugarcoat the grimness or the atrocities, acts that we ourselves have utterly failed to eliminate despite four Geneva Conventions from 1864 through the current 1949 codification.

As for the mental and physical effects of any war on men, women and children, combatants or noncombatants, it is probably best to let those who went through the experience speak for themselves. There are a large number of firsthand accounts available, beginning at least with the ancient Greeks and most likely others of whom I am sadly ignorant. One very succinct summary, however, was given in 1880 during a speech at Columbus, Ohio, by William Tecumseh Sherman: “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.”