What happened then?”
“Our quarrel was being conducted on horseback, out on the Falaise Road, so we had a large, interested audience. Some of the knights in the king’s household began to mutter amongst themselves and one man sought to curry favor with Harry by heaping abuse on me as an ingrate and traitor.”
Rainald let out a short bark of laughter. “I can well imagine Harry’s reaction to that!”
Roger grinned. “Yes… Harry damned near took the poor fool’s head off! Who was this miserable wretch, that he dared to insult the Bishop of Worcester and the king’s kinsman? Harry stopped in mid-harangue, as if hearing himself-fiercely defending the very man he’d been threatening but moments before-and then burst out laughing. As our eyes met, I could not help laughing, too, and no more needed to be said. We rode on into Falaise and dined together that noon. And after Harry met with the Holy Father’s envoys and agreed to their terms for making peace with the archbishop, he asked me to accompany him to Freteval, which I did.”
“You were at Freteval?” Rainald was delighted. “Word reached us in England, of course, about their accord, but an eyewitness account is more than I hoped for.”
“As you doubtless know, the agreement they reached is basically the same one that they were quarreling over at Montmartre. Harry agreed to allow Thomas to return to his diocese at Canterbury and to restore the episcopal estates and to permit Thomas to re-crown Hal, along with Louis’s daughter. Thomas in turn agreed to defer his claims for damages done to his lands during his exile and promised to render to Harry his love and honor and all the services which an archbishop could do for a king. Harry then promised to give Thomas the Kiss of Peace once they were in England, saying it was meaningless unless done of his own free will and not under compulsion, and Thomas accepted that.”
Roger paused. “All in all, the meeting between them was surprisingly cordial and amicable, with no eleventh hour ambushes by either side. Harry had made peace with Louis on the preceding day, and he seemed quite satisfied with the results of the Freteval council. So, too, did Thomas and his clerks. As for the papal legates, they were overjoyed.”
Rainald’s first impulse was to take Roger’s account at face value. But Roger’s narration had been curiously flat, as sparse as a skeleton, devoid of all flesh and blood and marrow.
“Then why,” he asked with a sigh, “are you not better pleased by it? I should think that you, of all men, would thank God fasting for a reconciliation between Harry and Becket.”
“Yes… if only I could believe their differences had truly been resolved. But they were not, Uncle. They were merely ignored.”
“I do not follow you.”
“Not a mention was made of the Constitutions of Clarendon, and that was at the heart of their antagonism. The Freteval agreement was riddled with such dangerous omissions and equivocations. Harry agreed that Thomas had the right to discipline the bishops who’d taken part in his son’s coronation, but what precisely does that mean? To Harry, that is likely to mean a slap on the wrist, a minor penalty. What if Thomas interprets those same ambiguous words much more harshly?
“Moreover, Harry will want the sentences of excommunication lifted from Geoffrey Ridel and his other men, and Thomas is already finding excuses to delay that action. And when Thomas demands an exact accounting of the moneys he claims he lost in revenues during his absence, how amenable is Harry going to be to that demand? No, Uncle, I very much fear that this was not so much a peace as a truce.”
Rainald sighed again, for he wanted to believe that Freteval had been the final destination and not just one more stop along a very rocky road. And because he’d had a lifetime’s experience in exiling unpleasant thought to the peripheral regions of his brain, he managed to push Roger’s qualms into a cobwebbed corner where they could be disregarded.
“Who’s to say a young truce cannot mature into a full-grown peace?” he joked, and then opted for an abrupt change of subject. “Do you know why Harry is missing Maude’s Requiem Mass? He had no choice about her funeral, what with his war in Brittany, but I’d have hoped that he’d make time for this.”
Roger swung around on the bench to stare at him. “Jesu! You do not know, do you?”
Rainald did not like the sound of that. “Know what?” he asked warily. “About Harry’s illness. He was stricken with a tertian fever last month, and for a time, the doctors despaired of his life.”
Rainald’s jaw dropped. “I heard not a word of this! But I went to my estates in Cornwall after the coronation. How does he? Is he still ailing? Was it as serious as all that?”
“Yes, indeed, it was. He made out a deathbed will, confirming the partition of his domains amongst his sons, and a false report of his death even reached Paris, so grievous was his condition. I did not mean to alarm you unduly, Uncle, for he is on the mend now, although I daresay it will take another fortnight ere he recovers his strength.”
Rainald didn’t doubt it, for he’d had some experience of his own with the ague, and knew how debilitating those deadly chills and fever could be. “Where is he? I’ll want to depart after the morrow’s Mass for Maude. Is Eleanor with him?”
“He was taken ill at Domfront and he is not yet up to riding, so for once you can actually be certain of his whereabouts, at least until he is strong enough to stay in the saddle. And no, Eleanor is in Poitiers.”
Rainald wondered if that Clifford chit had been there, but decided it was not a tactful query to put to a priest. “God be praised,” he said, “for sparing his life. I could not envision our world without Harry. It would be like blotting out the sun.” Thinking then of the coronation, he said softly, “I’d just as soon Hal’s kingship remained an empty honor for some years to come.”
“Deo volente,” Roger said, no more than that, but there was something in his tone which told Rainald that in this, they were of the same mind.
Upon his recovery, Henry and Eleanor made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Mary at Rocamadour at Quercy in her duchy of Aquitaine to give thanks. In late September, Thomas Becket joined him at Tours, arriving before the start of daily Mass, where the king would have been compelled to offer him the Kiss of Peace. One of the archbishop’s most bitter enemies, Rannulph de Broc, had boasted that he would kill Becket before he had eaten one whole loaf on English soil, and the archbishop was alarmed enough to want the extra assurance of the Kiss of Peace. But Henry was alerted to Becket’s early arrival, and annoyed by what he saw as the archbishop’s duplicity, he instructed the priest to celebrate the Mass for the Dead, in which the ritual kiss is omitted.
October that year was uncommonly warm and the trees were still green and full; only an occasional flare of crimson or saffron reminded men that the autumnal season was past due. The fourteenth dawned with a summer’s languor, the sky above Chaumont-sur-Loire a patchwork of bleached blue and fleecy white, the air very still, without even a hint of a breeze. Henry had just finished two days of meetings with the Count of Blois and intended to leave Chaumont on the morrow for his castle at Chinon. His plans for this humid, sultry Wednesday-to hear petitioners, hold an audience with the Archbishop of Tours, and go hunting for roe deer in the forest north of the River Loire- were disrupted by the unexpected arrival of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Henry was not pleased, for it was beginning to seem as if his peace with Becket would unravel even before the archbishop set foot again on English shores. He’d been vexed to learn that Becket’s clerks were boasting of a “glorious victory” and frustrated by the archbishop’s insistence upon collecting every last farthing of the revenues that had accrued during his exile. He’d made a genuine effort to be accommodating at Freteval and felt that Thomas Becket was already taking advantage of his generosity. And so it was with a dangerous degree of resentment that he gave orders for the archbishop to be ushered into his presence.
The last time they’d met, it had been in anger, for they’d quarreled bitterly again after Henry’s refusal to give Becket the Kiss of Peace at Tours. But to Henry’s surprise, the archbishop made no mention of that unpleasant altercation. Their meeting was affable, even comfortable, almost as if their friendship had never been ruptured by events that Henry still did not fully understand. An exchange of courtesies flowed easily into more familiar conversation, and Henry found himself doing something utterly unanticipated: sharing a laugh with Thomas Becket.
He’d often wondered why Becket’s well of humor had gone dry as soon as the blessed pallium had been placed around his neck; God did not demand that His servants forswear laughter. They had left the stifling heat in the hall and were walking together in the gardens, trailed by attendants and several of Henry’s dogs. Henry studied the other man’s profile as they strolled, thinking that Thomas’s face was a testament to his adversities.
