will not! I’ll see you both in Hell first!”
Stephen caught his arm as he swung away, but Eustace jerked free, and within moments, he’d disappeared into the darkness beyond Stephen’s tent. Badly shaken, Stephen deemed it best not to follow; they both needed time to calm down before their healing could begin. It was a sensible decision, but one he would soon come to lament. For in the morning, he discovered that Eustace was gone. He had ridden off in the night, leaving Stephen with an anguished regret, that his son’s last words to him had been a curse.
The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Winchester negotiated a fortnight’s truce, under terms beneficial to Henry. Stephen and Henry agreed to lift the sieges of Wallingford and Crowmarsh. Stephen also consented to raze his castle at Crowmarsh, and Henry permitted its eighty-man garrison to march out, unharmed. But the preliminary efforts to end the war by mediation did not progress well. Eustace cast a long shadow.
Eustace soon made his presence felt in a far more ominous way. Gathering a large band of mercenaries, he rode north into Cambridgeshire, and began to pillage and rob. Whether he was simply venting his own fury and frustration or seeking to bait Henry into coming after him, no one knew for certain, possibly not even Eustace himself. But the skies over Cambridgeshire were once again darkening with smoke, as in the wretched days when Geoffrey de Mandeville had rampaged through that unhappy shire.
The monks of Bury St Edmunds knew that Eustace’s army was on the prowl and getting closer, for panicked refugees had been streaming into the monastery for days. Abbot Ording continued to hope, though, that his abbey would be spared, for St Edmund’s tomb was England’s most sacred shrine. Surely the king’s son would not allow his brutal hirelings to desecrate such holy ground? He’d held to that hope right up to the moment that a terrified lay brother stumbled into the Chapter House, crying out that Eustace’s men had been sighted on the Cantebrigge Road, heading for their abbey.
When Eustace rode into the abbey precincts, he found Abbot Ording waiting for him. Flanked by his prior and hospitaller, with the other brothers huddled a few steps behind, the abbot sought to ward off disaster with a wan welcoming smile. They were indeed honoured, he said, to have the Count of Boulogne as their guest again, and he’d already given orders to prepare his own quarters for the count’s comfort, just as he’d done at the count’s visit last year with his lord father, the king. Their cook was busy making a dinner sure to be to the count’s liking: fresh pike from their fish pond and a special delicacy, rabbit stew.
Eustace seemed taken aback, and the abbot prayed that their feeble defense-hospitality-would hold. Was it too much to hope for, that if Eustace was treated as a guest, he’d act like one? But this Eustace bore little resemblance to the privileged, unhappy youth the abbot remembered. Unkempt and almost gaunt, blue eyes bloodshot and suspicious, this was no pampered king’s son. The abbot had seen men like this before, men haunted and hunted, some of them brigands and bandits, others merely victims of bad luck, but all of them with nothing left to lose.
“Thank you, my lord abbot. I would be pleased to dine with you and your brethren.” But if Eustace had been surprised into civility, he had not been dissuaded from his purpose. “But first we have a matter of money to discuss. I am running short of funds to pay my troops. I am sure, though, that I can rely upon the generosity of your abbey.” He named a sum, then, that caused the monks to gasp.
The abbot had gone ashen. “My lord, that…that is a vast amount of money!”
Eustace smiled, chillingly. “You are too modest, my lord abbot. So prosperous an abbey could easily spare that much. In fact, I’d say it was a bargain, indeed, in view of what you’d be gaining-the favor of a future king.”
“My lord count, I swear that you’ve been misled. Even if our revenues were twice what they are, we would not be able to raise such a sum!”
A muscle twitched in Eustace’s cheek and his smile became a grimace. “Think you that I am some green, callow stripling, to be put off with soft words and honeyed lies? All know that you Black Monks have even more money than the Jews!”
“I entreat you-” the abbot began hoarsely, but his prior could no longer keep silent. Well past sixty, too old to be intimidated, he glowered at this intruder in their midst, his high, reedy voice cracking with indignation, not fear.
“There can be no greater crime than to steal from Almighty God. Look to your immortal soul, son of Stephen, ere it is too late!”
The prior might have lacked the majestic presence of an Abbot Bernard, but he did make an impressive sight, tonsured silver hair streaming down onto the somber black cowl of the Benedictine order, cobalt-blue eyes aiming at Eustace like arrows, a clenched fist upraised as if to invoke the Almighty’s intercession.
For a brief moment, Eustace looked at the aged monk, and then he turned in the saddle, saying to his men, “Take whatever we need, whatever you want.”
At first, the monks offered no resistance, watching in appalled silence as Eustace’s soldiers plundered and despoiled their abbey. The stables were hit first, and then the storehouses. Abbot Ording’s lodgings, too, were stripped bare. The guest hall, the monks’ dorters, the kitchen and bakehouse and buttery, even the infirmary-all were ransacked.
The looting soon spilled over into the town, and smoke began to stain the cloudless August sky. Somewhere a woman was screaming; Abbot Ording flinched away from the sound, groping for his rosary. This was his domain; the townspeople, too, were under his protection. And yet he could do nothing for them. His eyes blurred with tears and he sank to his knees in the dust, praying to St Edmund to protect his own.
When some of the soldiers emerged from the church, laden with chalices and expensive altar cloths and St Edmund’s special silver candlesticks, there were gasps of outrage from the monks. At sight of the pyx, holy receptacle for the Host, now tucked under a brigand’s arm, several of the younger monks could not contain their fury and rushed at the offender, only to be beaten down into the dirt by his comrades, for mercenaries rarely held monks in much esteem.
“Do not resist them!” the abbot cried. Crouching over one of his bruised and dazed monks, he pillowed a bleeding head in his lap, staring up at the king’s son, white-faced and accusing. “St Edmund will punish you for the evil you have done. You have sinned against him and against the Almighty, and for that, there can be no forgiveness.”
There was a time when Eustace would have been dismayed and alarmed by the abbot’s words. Now he did not care. What did God’s Curse matter when compared to the loss of a crown? “Tell your St Edmund to do his worst,” he said mockingly. His men laughed, impressed by his bravado, but the monks shuddered and Abbot Ording made the sign of the cross.
Stephen had easily captured the North Sea port town of Ipswich, and for the past ten days, he’d been besieging Hugh Bigod’s castle. The siege was faring well, but he was not. He sought to fill all his waking hours with enough activity to keep from thinking of his renegade son and crippled kingship, only to lie wakeful and wretched, night after endless night.
The Bishop of Winchester was no longer with him, having gone off to consult again with his erstwhile adversary the Archbishop of Canterbury. Stephen might have admired his brother’s newfound zeal for peacemaking, had he not known that any proposed peace plan must, of necessity, involve a repudiation of Eustace. But the others in his dwindling inner circle were here at Ipswich: the Earls of Arundel and Oxford; William Martel; his younger son, Will; and even William de Ypres, again exposing himself to the rigors of the road and the pity of others for Stephen’s sake. And yet never had Stephen felt so isolated, so utterly alone.
The blows had been coming in swift succession, giving him no time to recover his bearings. Eustace’s rebellious flight had been followed by the sudden death of one of the few men Stephen truly trusted, Simon de Senlis, Earl of Northampton. And as he mourned his old comrade-in-arms, word began to filter into Suffolk of Eustace’s outlaw raids, tales of crops burned in the fields and villages torched, culminating in last week’s outrage at Bury St Edmunds. Horrified and heartsick, Stephen refused to discuss his son’s marauding with any of his men, forcing them to join him in a conspiracy of silence, in which it was tacitly understood that as long as Eustace’s banditry was not acknowledged, nothing need be done about it. Before the others, Stephen stubbornly held his peace; alone in the night, he prayed for his son to come to his senses, and he grieved.
After occupying the town, Stephen had found lodgings at Holy Trinity, a small priory of Augustinian canons. He’d returned this Monday at dusk, after another long, tiring day at the siege site. Although he knew the others were waiting for him in the guest hall, he slumped down in a chair by the window; at times he found it hard to remember why it mattered whether he took this castle or not. He’d been told that Henry had gone north, that he
