Even as she wrote the terrible words, part of her mind was busy trying to work out what she was going to do…
It was the eleventh year of King John’s reign and the second of the interdict imposed on England by Pope Innocent because of the king’s refusal to accept Innocent’s choice, Stephen Langton, as archbishop of Canterbury. Since then, church services had been suspended. Some of the clergy, braver — or, perhaps, like the Cistercians, more arrogant — than their fellow churchmen, had defied the interdict and were continuing their habitual daily rounds. The majority were not, and most of the bishops of England had fled to France. The interdict had not made the king submit to the pope and, a year ago, King John had been excommunicated. Now, if any good Christian helped or supported the king, that man stood in peril of losing his immortal soul.
Not that any of the king’s subjects much wanted to help him. His record was not impressive. He had lost most of England’s continental possessions, he had failed in his duel with the pope, and the country was poorly governed. Failure, however, cost as much — or more — than success, for taxes were extortionate already and constantly there were further demands. In addition, John was cruel, he had a reputation for avarice and everyone knew he was no true lover of God. Learned as he was in theology — hadn’t he after all spent the formative years of his life with the monks at Fontevrault? — he only studied the great texts of the church so that he could argue points of doctrine with the clergy. Or so people said.
If the pope had hoped that expelling King John from the faith would encourage those with a grievance against him to rise up in rebellion, he was disappointed. The barons had their own reasons for muttering against the king, and these had little to do with the church. As for the mass of the population, they were far from falling into fear and despair at being deprived of the comfort of their church, as the pope had no doubt expected they would. In fact, to the dismay of the clergy, the people of England gave every impression of managing perfectly well. The clergy were beginning to fear that religion would lose its grip, and, indeed, many people were heard grumbling that they didn’t see why they should go on having to pay tithes to a church that did absolutely nothing for them.
Nobody could bring their child to be christened, nobody could marry his or her sweetheart, nobody could bring their dead for Christian burial. Far from appearing horrified, the population just shrugged their shoulders and got on with their lives. It was said that people performed secret baptisms according to the old rights, buried their dead in ditches and under hedgerows, and — much as they had always done and always would — bedded each other regardless.
King John’s response to the pope’s drastic move was, initially, incandescent rage. Those who witnessed it said the king almost went mad, blaspheming against the pope and swearing by God’s teeth to banish every last churchman from the realm. If any spy sent to England by the pope were to be discovered, the king would personally tear out the man’s eyes, split his nose and pack him off back to Rome as a warning to the rest.
Once he was over his fury, however, John turned the pope’s action against him to his own advantage. If the clergy were going to obey their master and cease to do their work, then John would seize their property. There was, after all, little point in a monastery or an abbey if those within were not permitted to support and succour the people. John’s officials were dispatched all over England to act in his name, and sheriffs were appointed to administer the properties and, of course, to ensure that the revenues made their way to the king. Those in power in the church were summarily deposed, permitted to return to their posts only if they paid for it; the going rate for a prior was sixty marks.
The king was making a fortune…
Now, a year after the excommunication, King John’s men had come to Hawkenlye Abbey. Abbess Caliste reflected that, had the abbey not been one of the favourite places of the king’s late mother, Queen Eleanor, they’d have come a lot sooner. In the two and a half years since the interdict, Hawkenlye had been kept under observation — a very unsubtle observation at that — and Caliste had been forced to obey the instruction to close up the church and discontinue all services. Nothing specific had been said regarding the shelter down in the Vale, where Hawkenlye’s monks and lay brothers administered the holy water from the miracle spring and looked after visiting pilgrims. Abbess Caliste, unshakeable in her conviction that in a time of such hardship people needed the comforts offered in the Vale even more urgently, had taken the decision that the brethren would continue as normal.
They were doing their best. Like the rest of the abbey, they were on short rations, for the new regulations meant that everything from corn to clothing had been seized and locked away in the king’s name, doled out with a mean hand at intervals that came far too infrequently. The brethren had tightened their belts and were managing to live on virtually nothing, for this was the only way they could keep food back to give to those who crawled to them on the brink of starvation.
Caliste’s disturbing thoughts got the better of her and, putting down her quill, she pictured Brother Saul. He was getting old now, but he still worked as hard as he had always done. He would, Caliste knew, be far too modest to realize it, but the other monks saw him as their unofficial leader, a link to the days when Abbess Helewise had sat in the chair now occupied by Caliste. Brother Saul had been one of Hawkenlye’s rocks back then, and he still was.
Caliste’s stomach gave a sudden growl. She was hungry, so hungry…
Resolutely, she put aside her poignant thoughts on old Saul and her own discomfort. Dipping her quill in the ink, she picked up the thread of what she had been writing.
The king’s agents had just left the abbey. Their leader had issued his orders to her as she stood at the gates looking up at them. Since the nuns and monks of Hawkenlye were not called upon to do any work, he’d said, they could not rely on the king’s generosity to maintain them in idleness.
The abbey’s income was considerable, since Hawkenlye owned large tracts of good land as far afield as the north side of the Weald and the marshlands to the south east. Most importantly, it also had plenty of grazing land suitable for sheep. Sheep provided so much: parchment from their skins, cheese from their milk and, of course, their wool. English wool was in great demand, and Hawkenlye was earning its fair share of the new wealth. Under the current conditions, this wealth now belonged to the king. As his agents had just told the abbess, she was now commanded to record every penny that came in and went out — as if she had not been doing so already! — and keep her accounts ready for inspection at any time. A small amount — of our own money! she thought, fuming — would be paid out to the abbey each month.
Standing there, refusing to allow those haughty men on their fine horses to intimidate her, Caliste had raised her chin, looked their leader firmly in the eye and said, ‘How, pray, am I to feed my nuns, my monks and those who come to us for help?’
The man had glared at her, and then his face had twisted into an unpleasant sneer. ‘Your church is closed, Abbess Caliste,’ he said. ‘Nobody will come here any more. As to you and your community…’ He had looked round at the assembled monks and nuns, all of them thin, clad in broken sandals and patched, threadbare habits, and shivering in the chilly October air.
Leaving his sentence unfinished, he had turned back to Caliste and shrugged. Then he and his men had ridden away.
She looked down at her notes, trying yet again to reconcile the tiny allowance with the minimum she knew she needed to keep the abbey alive. It could not be done. Resisting the overriding urge to drop her head on her hands and howl — a waste of time that would be — she closed her eyes, folded her hands together and forced her weary, desperate mind to think.
So many people depended on her, one way or another. She had to find a way to help them. She sat up straight, squared her shoulders and went back to her calculations.
The House in the Woods had a new name: it was officially called Hawkenlye Manor. Few people referred to it in that way. The country people had long memories, and they did not like change. The House in the Woods had been good enough for their parents and their grandparents — probably their great-grandparents too — so why go altering it?
On that late October day, Josse was returning home after a long ride. His old horse Horace had finally died, at an age so advanced that Josse could no longer calculate it, and now he rode a lighter horse that his young son Geoffroi had insisted be called Alfred. Josse and his family had known Alfred from when he was newborn, for he was descended from a golden mare called Honey who had once belonged to Geoffroi’s mother, Joanna. Alfred had inherited his grand-dam’s golden coat, but his dark mane and the luxuriously long tail were all his own.
As was his intractable temperament; Josse had been riding him for two years now, but his manners still left quite a lot to be desired. Today’s excursion had been to remind Alfred who was in control, and Josse was feeling sore and tired. He was also feeling maudlin, for almost without his volition he had found himself riding past the
