yelled for help. He thought he heard an answering shout, but he did not trust his own senses. His next cry brought another echo, though, louder this time.
“I am here! Over here!” He could hear running footsteps now, and then a huge, hulking figure was looming out of the mist, a giant with bare, muscled arms, hands like hams, a blackened, smudged face, and an axe dangling by his side, the ogre of Philippe’s boyhood night terrors. Shrinking back against the tree, he gasped, “Stay away from me! I am Philippe Capet, the king’s son! Keep away!”
Henry was back at Woodstock; it had always been one of his favorite manors and it gave him comfort to visit the nearby nunnery of Godstow, where he lavished largesse upon the priory and prayed for Rosamund’s soul. He’d held a council meeting that afternoon, a productive session in which they discussed a wide range of topics: the coming Christmas visit of the King of Scotland, the feasibility of issuing a new coinage, a report upon his recent judicial reform in which he’d divided the realm into four circuits, and the need to fill the justiciarship now that Richard de Lucy had resigned the post because of ill health. The council was done but Henry and a few others still lingered in the solar.
As all of them were men who stood high in Henry’s favor, the talk was more relaxed and informal; they’d been idly discussing the Lateran Council held in Rome that spring. One of the canons had banned “those abominable jousts and fairs, which are commonly called tournaments,” but Henry and his companions agreed that the Church prohibition would not likely be heeded. Nor did they expect the Lateran Council’s excommunication of routiers to discourage rulers from hiring them.
Henry candidly admitted that he’d continue to make use of routiers when the need arose. “Though it could be argued that routiers are actually more dangerous when they are not employed. My son Richard kept his routiers under tight rein, but once he came to England in June and they were no longer being paid, they sacked Bordeaux.”
Getting to his feet and beginning to pace, Henry stopped the others from rising, too, for Gilbert Foliot and the Bishop of Winchester were no longer young. “I received two interesting communications from the French court this week,” he said, and these men knew him well enough to understand that there was something highly unusual about those “interesting communications.”
“One came from the French king,” Henry continued, “and the other from…well, let’s just say a well-placed source at Louis’s court. Louis has had to postpone his son’s coronation. Philippe was hunting in the royal forest near Compiegne and somehow he became separated from his companions. He spent the night alone in the woods and was finally found the next morning by a charcoal burner. But my ‘source’ tells me that the charcoal burner must have had a fearsome visage for his appearance scared Philippe so badly that he took ill soon after his rescue.”
The men exchanged grins and several laughed outright. Henry shared their amusement; royal heirs were not supposed to be so delicate. “At that age, any of my hellions would have considered a night alone in the woods a grand adventure. But we know Philippe is as high-strung as a lass. The humor of his mishap soon soured, though, for within a day he was burning up with fever, and they are now fearing for his life.”
They were no longer laughing; if Philippe died, the repercussions would be felt throughout Christendom. Louis’s own health was said to be failing. If he died soon after his son, there could be a vicious struggle for his crown. His two sons-in-law, the Counts of Champagne and Blois, would be sure to make claims on behalf of their wives, his daughters with Eleanor, Marie and Alix. Some would look to Marguerite, too, even though she was a younger daughter, for there were bound to be French barons who would eagerly embrace the idea of having the easygoing, pleasure-loving Hal as their king, just as there were Poitevin lords who’d prefer Hal to his more martial brother, Richard.
“Marie is the eldest, of course,” Willem said thoughtfully, “but that might not count for much, what with her husband now in the Holy Land. My money would be on Thibault of Blois…unless you seriously back your son and the Lady Marguerite, my liege.”
Henry knew this was the question in all of their minds, but only Willem was bold enough to voice it. Thinking that Hal had yet to show he could rule one kingdom, much less two, he said, “You are getting the cart before the horse, Willem. Let’s not be so quick to bury Louis’s son. I said I’d heard from Louis as well as from my spy. He has been half out of his mind with fear.” Adding fairly, “As any father would be. But it seems that St Thomas came to him in a dream and told him that if he made a pilgrimage to Canterbury, Philippe would recover. Needless to say, when he suggested this to his council, they were greatly dismayed and dismissed it out of hand.”
Henry’s smile was sardonic. “My spy tells me they lectured Louis that it would be utter madness to enter the lion’s den of his own free will. The lion, I suppose, is me, which might be considered a perverse sort of compliment. Be that as it may, Philippe’s condition continued to worsen, and Thomas paid Louis two more nightly visits. After the third dream, he did what he ought to have done from the first-found a king’s backbone and told his council that he meant to make a Canterbury pilgrimage, their misgivings be damned. And so he has written to me, earnestly entreating me to issue a safe conduct so that he may come to England and pray for St Thomas to spare his son.”
There was a moment of astonished silence and, then, incredulous laughter. “For some reason,” Willem said dryly, “a verse of Scriptures comes to mind: He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it, ” and Hamelin gleefully recited a proverb to the effect that revenge was a dish best eaten cold.
Henry smiled. “I’ve always believed that the best way to deal with temptation was to yield to it. So it came as a surprise to discover that it is not actually that difficult to tell Satan to get behind me. An interesting lesson to learn so late in life, no?”
Hamelin’s mouth dropped open. “Harry, surely you are not saying that you might give Louis a safe conduct!”
“Yes, I am,” Henry said, and saw that Hamelin was not the only one to be gaping at him. He had not expected to have to defend his decision, but he said, with rare patience, “It is too easy to put myself into Louis’s shoes. If one of my sons were on his deathbed, I would bargain with Lucifer if I thought that would save him. It is not the French king that I am accommodating, Hamelin. It is a grieving father.”
On August 22, Louis landed at Dover, where Henry was waiting to welcome him and to escort him to Canterbury. It was the first time that a French monarch had ever set foot on English soil.
Henry led Willem into the cloisters of the cathedral. He’d sent Willem to France with the safe conduct, and this was the first time they’d had to talk since Willem had returned to England with Louis and the Count of Flanders. It was a beautiful evening, that twilight hour in which stars were just beginning to glimmer in the sky and the clouds still reflected the dying glow of the setting sun. Both men paused to breathe in the sweet clover-scented air, listening as a passing bell chimed somewhere in town, signaling that a parishioner had gone home to God. Henry came often to Canterbury in the years since he’d done penance at the archbishop’s tomb, and he was always surprised that this place, the scene of sacrilege and murder, could seem like such a peaceful haven, that the cathedral he’d entered in such despair and dread could now be soothing to his soul.
“I am on a rescue mission,” he confided to Willem. “Louis’s physicians begged me to coax him into ending his penance. They fear that he may become ill himself if he passes a second night fasting and praying. I promised to do what I could, for it would be rather awkward if he were to die whilst he was an honored guest of the English Crown.”
Willem agreed that Louis was too frail for severe mortification of the flesh, and for a moment, Henry remembered what he’d been told of Thomas Becket’s self-abasement in the last years of his life, baring his back thrice daily for scourging, wearing a lice-infested hairshirt and braies, spending hours on his knees or prone upon the stone floor as he offered up his prayers to the Almighty. Even now, five years after he and Thomas had made their peace in that shadowed, silent crypt, Henry found it difficult to reconcile the holy martyr with the worldly chancellor who’d been his friend.
“Ere I go chasing after Louis,” he said, “there is something I want to discuss with you, Willem. I learned this morning that the Count of Aumale died on Monday.”
It was never comforting to hear of the passing of a man who was close in age to them, and Willem instinctively sought to distance them from the dead count, saying, “He was not in the best of health, was he? I seem to recall that he was called Guillaume le Gros, at least behind his back!”
“He was on the stout side,” Henry allowed. “But it is not his sin of gluttony I want to talk about. He had no
