archbishop in exile, and Becket’s clerks smiled dutifully. But they kept casting uneasy glances toward the dean, and when the opportunity presented itself, two of them dropped back to walk beside him.
Milo knew them both: Gunter was one of the archbishop’s most devoted clerks and, Master William had long plied his medical skills in the highest circles of the English Church, first as physician to Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, and then to his successor, Thomas Becket. It was easy for the dean to guess what they wanted to ask and he saw no reason not to tell them.
“I was sent at the behest of the Count of Boulogne,” he said quietly. “He wanted to warn the archbishop that his enemies are awaiting him at Dover, with evil intent in mind.”
They showed no surprise, for this was only one of several warnings that Becket had received in recent weeks. Neither man bothered to ask Milo what the archbishop had replied, for they already knew that. He’d been saying to anyone who’d listen that nothing would stop him from returning to England, that if he died en route to Canterbury, they must promise to see to his burial in Christ Church Cathedral.
“We must convince Lord Thomas to put in at any port but Dover, then,” Gunter declared and veered off to suggest that to one of the most persuasive of Becket’s clerks, Alexander Llewelyn, his Welsh cross-bearer.
Master William remained at Milo’s side. His shoulders hunched against the wind, hands jammed into the side slits of his cloak, he was scuffing his feet in the sand, trampling shells underfoot as if they were the enemy. “You do not look,” Milo observed, “like a man eagerly anticipating a return to his homeland, Will.”
“I fear what awaits us,” the physician said with despairing honesty. “If Lord Thomas’s enemies are already plotting against him, what will they do once they hear of the excommunications?”
“What excommunications?” Milo asked sharply, and Master William looked about furtively, then deliberately slowed his pace so that they lagged behind the others.
“I might as well tell you, for all will know soon enough. The English king has acted with his usual guile, and upon learning of his bad faith, Lord Thomas fell into a great rage and… and did something I fear we may all regret.”
The Dean of Boulogne came to an abrupt halt. “God in Heaven, do not tell me he has excommunicated the king!”
Master William shook his head dolefully. “No… but this morning he sent a trusted servant to Dover with papal letters of censure for the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London and Salisbury.”
“Why would he do that? Has he lost his mind?”
“You must not be so quick to judge him,” Master William said defensively. “You do not yet know what the king did to provoke him. Despite his talk about peaceful cooperation, the king decided to fill the six vacant bishoprics ere Lord Thomas could be restored to power in England. York, London, and Salisbury had gathered at Dover, making ready to escort electors overseas to vote for the king’s nominees. But Lord Thomas learned of their duplicity ere they could sail for Normandy and acted to thwart them.”
Milo swore a most unclerical oath, stalked to the water’s edge and back again, mentally heaping curses in equal measure upon the heads of England’s king and archbishop. They were a matched pair, he thought angrily, prideful and obstinate and racing headlong into disaster. The worst of it, though, was the damage that had been done to the Holy Church by their infernal feuding. And, just as so many had long feared, there was no end in sight.
Henry, King of England, to his son, Henry the king, greetings. Know that Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, has made peace with me according to my will. I therefore command that he and all his men shall have peace. You are to see to it that the archbishop and all his men who left England for his sake shall have all their possessions as they had them three months before the archbishop departed from England. And you will cause to come before you the more important knights of the Honor of Saltwood, and by their oath, you will cause recognition to be made of what is held there in fee from the archbishopric of Canterbury… Witnessed by Rotrou, Archbishop of Rouen, at Chinon.
Earlier that day, the Archbishop of Canterbury had been welcomed joyfully into Southwark. He’d been escorted to his lodgings at the Bishop of Winchester’s manor by the canons of St Mary, followed by local priests and their parishioners. Hours later, church bells still pealed on both sides of the river, and the bankside crowds had yet to disperse, slowing William Fitz Stephen’s progress so that an early December dusk was already descending by the time he was allowed to pass through the great gate of Winchester Palace.
Fitz Stephen’s nerves were on edge, for he was not sure of his reception. He’d seen the archbishop only once in the past six years, a brief meeting at Fleury-sur-Loire. At the time, Thomas Becket had not indicated that he bore Fitz Stephen any grudge for failing to follow him into exile. But Fitz Stephen knew that others in the archbishop’s entourage were not as forgiving, and he feared that their rancor might have poisoned his lord’s good will.
He was not long in discovering that his qualms were well founded. He saw several familiar faces, but none greeted him, averting their eyes as if he were a moral leper, one infected with some dreadful malady of the soul. And no sooner had he entered the great hall when a known figure stepped into his path, barring his way.
“Master Fitz Stephen, as I live and breathe! Passing strange, your turning up here. I was reading Scriptures a few nights ago, Leviticus 26:36, if memory serves, and suddenly it was as if you were right there in the chamber with me.”
Fitz Stephen was not the biblical scholar that Herbert of Bosham was; the other man even had knowledge of Hebrew, a rarity in the most learned circles. But Fitz Stephen, subdeacon and lawyer, was well versed enough in the Scriptures to appreciate the insult. The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues.
His first instinct was to strike back with scriptural weapons of his own; Matthew was certainly apt, with its admonition to judge not, that ye be not judged. But that would be an exercise in futility, exactly what Herbert wanted him to do. Instead, he smiled blandly. “It is always good to be remembered.”
Herbert’s dark eyes glowed like embers. “You are not welcome here!”
“That is not for you to say.”
“You abandoned our lord in his hour of jeopardy and embraced his persecutor!”
“I made my peace with our lord king, as the archbishop himself did at Freteval!”
“A false peace, just as you are a false friend!”
“Could you say that more loudly, Master Herbert? I doubt that they could hear you across the river in London.”
At the intrusion of this new voice, both Herbert and Fitz Stephen swung toward the sound. Herbert scowled, for Becket’s Welsh cross-bearer was the only one of the archbishop’s clerks who could match him in rhetorical flourishes, boldness of speech, and pure lung power. While he acknowledged Alexander Llewelyn’s unwavering loyalty to their lord, a trait he found to be conspicuously rare amongst the Welsh, he was invariably perplexed by the other man’s drolleries and insouciance. He assumed now that this was a jest of some sort, although the humor of it escaped him, as humor always did.
“If you choose to consort with apostates, Master Llewelyn,” he said loftily, “that is your right. I, however, do not.” And he made a dignified departure, marred only by the hostile glare he flung over his shoulder at Fitz Stephen as he strode off.
“Why is it,” Alexander wondered, “that I always feel the urge to applaud after one of Herbert’s speeches?”
Fitz Stephen grinned, for that had been a standing joke between them, that Herbert of Bosham secretly yearned, not for a bishopric as most clerks did, but for the starring role in a troupe of players. His pleasure was sharp at this proof that their friendship had survived the vicissitudes of the past six years. “You do not blame me, then, for making peace with the king?”
“You did what you had to do,” Alexander said, accepting life’s inequities and anomalies with the fatalism of the true Celt. “My family is safely out of the king’s reach in Wales, but yours was in.. Gloucester-shire, was it not? Who could blame you for not wanting to see them banished from England? How are your sisters? And that brother of yours? They are well?”
“Yes, thank God Almighty, they are. Ralph has entered the king’s service, in fact.” Fitz Stephen hesitated, but his were the instincts of a lawyer; better to scout out the terrain first. “Sander… does the lord archbishop feel as you do? Or as Herbert does?”
Alexander gestured toward a window recess. “Let’s talk over there.” Once they were seated, he took his time in answering. Fitz Stephen was a patient man, though, content to wait.
