The Neighborhood Gargoyle...: A HANGING OFFENSE begins

This is the beginning of my novel, A Hanging Offense.

The year is 1381, the place is Saint Albans, England, an abbey town about twenty miles to the north of London. It is midsummer.

A Hanging Offense by Alan David Justice is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Chapter 1

Chanting filled the warm midnight air; men’s voices snaked up and down the scale. The men yawned as they sang. Yesterday’s services had been long and tiring, in celebration of the summer feast of Corpus Christi. Thomas could allow a little slackening.

Overhead towered stone upon stone, ten times the height of a man. It threw the massed voices back to the monks, enriched, strengthened, changed from mere song into prayer, though prayer frayed with fatigue and weakened by obligation.

Candles flickered with the singing, the united breath of some sixty monks in the choir of the great church. Beyond that glow, the church lay in darkness. Beyond that, in the dormitory, even the schoolboys were asleep.

Thomas saw movement in the shadows where there no one should be—a half a dozen intruders emerged into the circle of candle light. He froze in alarm, his hands upraised. The intruders were townfolk. Their faces were grim, their jaws set. He knew all of them.

The monks were following his direction better than he had thought. Their singing stuttered to a stop. Their bed-lined faces lifted toward him, open-mouthed with questions.

Father Abbot slipped from his place and strode out below the great tower above the crossing of the transept and the main body of the abbey church.

Prior John stepped out from the northern bank of monks and interposed himself between the intruders and the Abbot.

“Kneel before your betters,” he ordered, but the commoners stared past him toward the abbot.

Prior John fancied himself the abbot’s protector; all expected him to succeed when the time came. He bulled his way chest to chest with the interlopers, but they did not give way.

“Tyler and his rebels are in London, Father Abbot.” Richard of Wallingford—though all called him Dickon against his will and to his irritation—Dickon was a proper man, a burgess of the town, with wife and sons, and property held from the abbey. He came of good family. Even his voice was pleasing, a deep, rumbling bass. A man of business, who could be trusted when the alms needed replenishing, who would sometimes surprise Thomas with a book purchased in London, or even Paris. Wallingford was a brown man—brown hair, brown eyes, sun-browned skin, rich brown clothing.

“There is talk of their coming here,” Wallingford went on, “since the Abbey holds so many lands in Essex and Kent. We thought you should know.”

“And now we know, we thank you, and begone, Dickon.” Prior John, a man black in hair, habit, and behavior, turned his back upon the townsfolk.

“We are invited, Father Abbot, to London, to see what the rebels are about.” William Grindcob, nicknamed Cob, for his devilish ways, elbowed past Wallingford, aping Prior John. “Henceforth, we kneel to no man save the King.” Older than he appeared, he was the son of the man who once ran the Abbey’s mill at the crossing of the River Ver and Holywell Road. Young Will Grindcob had had the run of the monastery, had been the favorite of the monks and lay servants both. Even now, some thirty years and more after the plague that had taken his mother and father, yellow hair untroubled yet by gray spilled over his broad forehead, and freckles filled his face above a wide and easy grin. Thomas the Precentor had loved the boy. Women loved him too, too well, which had been the cause of his downfall. “It seems a good thing that we should know what’s doing on our doorstep.”

A woman elbowed to the fore, a child slung on her hip. “Someone should know what’s afoot.”

Thomas Precentor stepped back, into a shadow. His heart raced. Sweat trickled, itching, down his side. Deadly sin tickled his imagination. He willed it to disappear, but found himself instead willing to give it space in his soul. Joan, with hair and eyes and disposition dark as anger, haunted his nightmares, forced him to the confessor for absolution. She stood at Cob’s side, as if his equal. Thomas shuddered at the memories of his dreams. The sins of Eve shone from her dark eyes. Her skin, pale as linen, glowed in the candle light.

Prior John turned again in anger. “We’ll not have such argument here in choir. And she”—he pointed at Joan—“will not be part of any discussion.”

The Father Abbot held up a hand. “Let the brothers finish their prayers.”

“They’ll need them, before the week’s out,” Joan said.

“As do we all.” Father Abbot’s mild answer turned the wrath of the intruders, at least for the moment. He limped past them, hands folded inside the capacious sleeves of his habit. He reached the intersection of the transept with the south aisle, then turned.

“Brother Prior, see to the completion of the prayers. Brother Precentor, come along, and we shall understand what brings these God’s servants out in the middle of night.”

Thomas forced himself to pass Joan by. He followed his abbot, their soft night shoes scuffing the tiled floor. The harsher, crowded steps of the villeins trailed him. Their nearness made his shoulders twitch, but the black wool of his cowl hid his trembling from their eyes—even from the eyes of Joan. Thomas Precentor knew those dark eyes, those ripe, heavy lips. If such a thing as a succubus existed—if!—it would take the shape of Joan.

She had taken the golden man for herself. Thomas, years before, had thought to win the lad for Christ, to keep him within the monastery’s walls, safe from women, from the temptations that came to those outside. He’d almost succeeded. He had dazzled the youth William Grindcob with the glories of heaven and of history. It was done to protect him from his own beauty. All the monks had seen that youthful comeliness, but Thomas had acted, and had molded the tender stuff of the young orphan boy, made him kinsman to the monks, and given him a new family after his first had fallen to the plague.

Thomas remembered: the first time young William, still a child, and dressed like a miniature monk in a black woolen robe, had understood that the writings, the papers and vellums, scrolls and codices, carried the words of men long dead. William gave a cry of mixed awe and delight.

“They live!” His childish squeal rang in Thomas’ ears. “They speak.”

“They live,” Thomas agreed and took young William to the monks’ graveyard. They walked hand in hand from the scriptorium through the chapter house, where the brothers met every day for the reading of a chapter from the Rule of Saint Benedict, to the burial place. The graveyard nestled into the corner of the abbey church, south of the Lady Chapel and presbytery, where the sun could warm the graves and the bulk of the church protect them from the worst of wind and rain.

Thomas pointed at a grave he tended personally. “Matthew Paris died. He is buried there. I hold his office now. He was charged, as am I, with keeping the history.”

“But I hold him in my hands.” It was the most unalloyed pleasure to witness the realization written on William’s face. “He is dead, but he speaks.” The boy lifted the sheepskin pages to his face and took a deep breath, and in that instant, Thomas thought, I have him. I have him for God.

But God, or the devil, thought otherwise. When William grew, his eyes turned from the scriptorium to women. Thomas thought to warn William away, but his youth would not be cautioned. In his own maturity, Will—who now called himself Cob—still let his lusts rule him, as if he had learned nothing during his growing under Thomas’ tutelage.

Joan held a tenement from the Monastery through the right of her dead husband. As a widow, she could hold property. As a woman, she called something forth in Thomas that the cowl might have protected him from, had Christ had it in mind to be kinder.

In that house, which butted right up against the stone wall that separated the Monastery from the town, she lived as the wife of William Grindcob. Thomas ground his teeth. Both his tormentors walked behind him, the school master’s widow and the onetime cenobitic favorite.

Father Abbot led the unsanctified procession through the darkness of the long, cavernous nave and out the western door to the starlit night. Thomas’s place was to listen and remember. His observation, his understanding, would become the event for those who might read it in future. Truth rested in his hands.

Thomas held the post because he remembered everything. Brother monks, townsmen, even the crown, depended on the monastery to hold the past in memory, to know what had been before, so that they might know how to act in the present. Precedent provided safety in a world into which a plague might come, disappear no one knew where, and then come back again, only to vanish when it took a sufficiency of human life. A world governed by rank and position. A world that only tradition could steady.

Thomas trembled, then, when the interlopers, especially Will Grindcob and Richard of Wallingford, laid their proposal before the abbot. Wallingford spoke first, but Grindcob watched and listened.

“Father, someone must to London, to see what the rebels are about. There could be a danger to the abbey.”

Father Abbot gazed up into the star-shot western sky. One of the stars flared into momentary brightness and flew across the heavens.

“Do you think, my son, that I am completely foolish?” Only the trembling of his cowl betrayed his anger. “Do not pretend so much to innocence.”

A glance passed between Grindcob and Wallingford.

“What do you want of me?” the Abbot asked, his back still to the intruders, as if he denied their right to be within his demesne.

“Your warrant to go to London, to learn what may come of these troubles.” Wallingford took a single step closer to the abbot. Thomas almost interposed himself, but a sharp glance from Grindcob shamed him with fear. “Your grace, great events are afoot in England tonight. They can, perhaps, be guided. I doubt they can be stopped. There are some tens of thousands of folk gone to London out of Essex and Kent. They govern themselves. They have no lord or bishop at their head.”

No lord, no bishop. Thomas was dumbfounded. It was incomprehensible, as if someone had proposed a world where was no sun, where the earth would instead try to shine upon itself.

“And you want to send a delegation to a headless mob?”

“Before the mob comes here, your grace. This monastery has lands and tenants in the south and east. The mob’ll be knowing that.”

The abbot held his peace for a long, dark moment. He must have turned the argument over and over in his mind. Then a thought seemed to strike him. He turned to Will Grindcob.

“And you? You have long opposed us, my son.”

“Did I not perform my penance, father? I still have the stripes.” He made as if to bare his back. The abbot turned away. “The people asked me to speak for them.”

“What do they want?”

Grindcob hesitated before his answer. When it came, it seemed insufficient, even to him; his eyes turned inward with doubt. “Justice, my lord abbot. Freedom.”

The abbot was the dispenser of justice, and freedom was a heresy the townsfolk had claimed for many scores of years. But the Abbot merely turned his gaze upon Grindcob and answered, softly, “Those are large ideas, William. Larger than the people can contain.”

“With all respect, Father, where does the thought of freedom come from?” Grindcob’s insolence belied his smooth words. “Do you think we feel nothing?”

“Let me take counsel. You shall have your answer by morning.”

Grindcob the miller’s son cocked his head. “Too late by half.” He had taken over the direction of the parley. “We must to London by then.”

And with that, he gave himself away. There was an appointment, at the least, if not a breathing conspiracy. Perhaps he wanted them to see wheels spinning within Ezekiel’s wheel, and cast doubt on their own wisdom. It would be precisely the deed of a traitorous mind—of a mind corrupted by evil. Evil sowed discord. Evil destroyed reason, mocked the evidence of a man’s senses, and brought all into confusion.

“Within the hour, then.” The Abbot had spoken. The interview was ended. It was perhaps not wise of him to agree so easily.

Grindcob and Wallingford nodded their respect and led the others back the way they had come.

Father Abbot bade him wait until the end of Matins, then fetch Brother Prior and the other monks of his council to the parlor, where they could confer.

Thomas awaited the end of the service out of doors, listening. A steady whir of voices drifted down through Waxhouse Gate, one of the few openings in the double wall that protected monastery from town. The gate opened to the High Street. There, the shops of craftsmen intermingled with the inns for pilgrims. The men-at-arms who guarded the walls spared brief glances down at Thomas, assuring themselves that he belonged.

A trembling yellow-orange glow lifted above the double wall of earth and stone that kept the commons outside the abbey grounds. They had torches, then. Star- and moonlight would not suffice them.

Thomas had read, in the chronicles to which he added, of the townsfolk taking up against the abbey every so often, as if it were a cycle of nature, like the seasons. No such trouble had occurred in years, but the tenants of the saint were always arguing with their lord, the abbot.

This abbot, Thomas de la Mare—a cousin, it was said of the King’s admiral—firmly maintained the privileges of the Monastery of Alban against all who would lessen the dignity of their saint. Thomas the writer’s hand was crabbed with recording the minutiae of Thomas the abbot’s lawsuits and other battles with whomsoever might challenge the abbey’s right.

Saint Albans was, if not the richest, if not the eldest, the chiefest monastery of the realm. Its saint was the first of England, martyred back in Roman times. Father Abbot, on state occasions, led all other abbots—including imperious Westminster—in procession. Pride of place belonged to Alban. His power and wealth gave standing to his monks. His abbot must, to maintain that status, be a clever fighter in the ongoing melee that passed for government in young King Richard’s minority.

But the monks were few, the people many, and the glow of burning shone above the abbey wall.

Chapter 2

Cob had his doubts about the two Thomases. That Thomas abbot had chosen the other Thomas to be his witness for their meeting made a certain sense. It kept the prior out of sight and saved a cause of argument. Each of the townsmen owed him a debt of anger.

Dickon—Richard of Wallingford—had done well enough as spokesman thus far, but he would bear watching. The newest chapter of the old contest between abbey and town had now begun. Cob’s ally was related to a one-time abbot and namesake, another Richard of Wallingford. Some of the time, Cob trusted the burgess; some of the time he thought him too willing to listen to the claims of the monastery, the arguments of the lawyers.

The confrontation with the abbot was only the beginning. Cob had the taste of rebellion on his tongue. It was like poaching in the King’s forests—meaty and juicy as long as good luck held, quickly fatal if it failed. Worth the wager, though.

“What will you tell them?” Dickon asked as soon as they reached the Waxhouse Gate. Cob made no answer. He did not know himself.

The crowd had swelled while they had been inside the church. Now torches shone down Fishpool Street and through French Row to the market place.

It sounded like market day, too, with a constant din of talk, but markets were never held at night. Sellers of meat pies hawked their wares. Cob’s stomach growled at the rich smells. The lights in the windows of Saint Albans’ many inns glittered with candles and with the faces of the curious pilgrims. There would be more pilgrims, and not so pious, soon enough.

Cadyndon and John Barber pounced as soon as they saw him. “What did they say?”

Cob shook his head. No private words; the people waited, hungry for change.

All three men belonged to the Guild of Saint Alban. The abbot had begun it four years earlier. Cob, too, was a member, on a kind of sufferance after his excommunication and subsequent penance. He took part to be within the abbey, where he had grown up.

He shook his head. Too much of the past hung about him like cobwebs. Change was coming, and he meant to push it as far as it would go. He was not the man he would become, not a man who belonged to another.

Sudden decision shaped his words. “You tell them, Dickon. You were there.” It wasn’t his time yet. Not until he knew.

Wallingford gave him a look of surprise, then nodded. He knew himself not fully trusted. Cob pushed the burgess in front of him, up onto the platform by the cross that marked the center of Saint Alban’s town.

It took some time for the crowd to quiet. He found Joan again under the overhang of the Fleur-De-Lis, one of the pilgrims’ inns. He slipped behind her; she leaned back against him and he took comfort in the warmth of her flesh. The child slept on her hip, despite the noise and excitement. A dribble of drool had dried on his face.

Cadyndon and Barber arranged themselves before Wallingford at the stage like men-at-arms on guard. Joan cradled the child.

“Should he be here?” Cob asked. “I don’t expect trouble, but with all these people, you never know.”

“You worry like a grandmother.” Joan wiggled against him, teasing. He cupped her belly in his hand. This was perhaps the last quiet.

It was. A wave of movement poured across the small village square, from the direction of the abbey. Cob lifted up on his toes.

“What is it?” Worry strained Joan’s voice.

Half a dozen helmeted men, mailed as well, breasted the crowd from out the Waxhouse Gate. They had pikes, which they wielded like quarter-staves. Once out among the people, they hesitated, unsure now what to do.

Cob took Joan by the shoulders. “Into the alley and out of sight, love. It’s the abbot’s men.”

Joan nodded and slipped past him into the narrow space between the Fleur-De-Lis and the next inn. The path gave out to another lane four houses down the hill. She would be safe enough.

Dickon had just started to talk to the crowd, but he couldn’t compete against this new attraction. Cob waved to catch his attention, then pushed past through the press of people toward the soldiers. Cadyndon and Barber trailed in his wake, anxious for a fight.

The two waves met. The six men-at-arms hesitated when he confronted them. Torch light gleamed from their helms, one of which was askew, as if hurriedly put on. Cob stopped in front of their leader, a minor knight called William Croyser.

“Brother William, have you come to listen and learn?” The crowd fell silent as Cob met the soldiers. It might all turn to nought, depending on what happened here. “I think that Father Abbot did not send you out armed among your neighbors. At whose orders do you come?”

“Not your concern, is it?” Croyser growled. He called out, “This violates the curfew. You should all be in bed, resting for tomorrow’s labors.” His words were brave, but his eyes were anxious. He knew he and his men were outmanned and sent on a fool’s errand, likely by Prior John.

A shout from the platform pulled Cob’s gaze. Wallingford’s outstretched hand pointed to a spot atop the abbey wall. A monkish cowl swirled from sight, eclipsing the stars as it went. Several in the crowd threw bits of food at the spot. It was summer; the fruit was not yet fully ripe. The pears and quinces landed within the walls and were heard to bounce. The crowd, like a single living being, laughed and sighed.

“Tomorrow’s tasks will be done tonight, brother,” Cob said.

“We are told to end this revel,” the knight answered.

William Cadyndon spat at Croyser’s feet. “Let me kill him.”

The knight drove the butt of his pike down on Cadyndon’s foot. The man howled in pain. The crowd, which had ringed Cob and the armigers around, surged nearer, muttering their anger. The men at arms closed up and bid to move in a phalanx toward the platform. Barber shoved one aside to lift Cadyndon back to his feet and helped him limp away. A stone rang off one of the helmets; the soldier struck cried out.

It would end in riot before fairly beginning. The people wanted something to happen. It was good-humored, so far, but Cob knew from experience that their playfulness could turn to real mischief in an instant. There might not be enough fighters within the abbey walls to control the crowd at this moment, but enough could be raised by dawn.

He caught Croyser’s eye and shifted his gaze to the stage. The soldier gave a nod, imperceptible to anyone not looking for it. Cob wasn’t a big man, but he was powerful and compact. Those who got in his way, including limping Cadyndon, he picked up and moved.

Wallingford extended his hand and lifted Cob up above the crowd. Cob in turn put forth his hand to Croyser.

“Up here!” The movement of the troops had pulled the crowd with them. The six helmeted men had no place to retreat; they could only go forward, and forward meant up on the makeshift stage. Croyser took Cob’s hand and was snatched thereby up above the crowd. The two of them, plus Wallingford, plucked soldiers out of the hands of the throng.

Cob called down as he lifted a soldier up to the platform, “You can’t have this one tonight, men—I’ve got plans for him.” He gave a broad wink and a leer, which turned the disappointment down below into a joke.

While the near ones laughed—an act which didn’t add to the comfort of the men lifted up on the stage with him—Cob gauged the mood of the whole crowd.

Eyes glittered with excitement. People crowded the square; others, more sympathetic to the abbey, huddled behind closed doors. People shifted position, bumped into each other, schooled like fish, but all looked to him. The realization took him by surprise.

“Give us the soldiers, Cob!” William Eccleshall, one of the town rowdies, shouted.

“No!” He grinned as he spoke, but he meant the rebuke to be sharp. “The Prior only sent these men out to be an unwilling sacrifice, to goad you on to crimes. Look how many there are of you, and how few men he sent to control you. No one with the sense God gave a goose would expect anything out of that except the loss of six good men.”

Some in the crowd took his point; Eccleshall and his fellows still wanted at least to beat the soldiers.

“They have been used,” Cob cried. “They’re not the source of the troubles, any more than you are. If one of them takes the mill stone from your house, it’s not his hand that steals it—but Prior John’s. The abbey does the evil, not the men the abbey employs.”

The angry faces made it clear that they were not convinced. If he could turn the anger into something useful, he could perhaps—“You know I have no love for that place.” He pointed to the abbey.

“They did fair for you!” came a rough voice from the back of the crowd. A small gust of laughter swirled around the square. Cob grinned at them.

“I have as much reason for anger as you—more, even.” Two years before he’d been forced to accept the humiliation of parading naked through the abbey church, from one station of the cross to the next, to avoid being excommunicated by the abbot—the same abbot who was at this moment deciding how to answer his demand. The purpose then had been to humiliate him, to break his spirit, to prove the authority of the monastery over everything he owned and was.

No one could afford to be left excommunicate. Out of the common life. To be outside the pale, locked out at the foot of a city’s walls while storm and wolf and conflict rage, unprotected by family, friend, or kin.

Cob had taken the punishment, accepted the humiliation. But the abbot was wrong, the prior was wrong, the chapter, and all the monks were wrong if they believed him chastened.

“So we will wait a little time longer. They were sent to provoke us. We will not be so used.” Cob picked out John Barber. “Go into the Antelope and beg of his grace the innkeeper a bowl of wine for our guests.”

Barber turned to comply. Cob called him back.

“For our guests! Not for us. You’ll need a sober head in you before the night is out.”

Cob felt like a minstrel trying to juggle, dance, and sing all at once. He had the crowd to manage, the soldiers to protect, Wallingford to keep an eye on—who was off to the side, biding his time and looking unhappy; must fix that—while the abbot decided whether or not the monastery was to be burned down to the ground or whether he would in fact send a delegation to London. For if the abbot refused all cooperation, Cob would chase the monks and craftsmen and soldiers and grooms all out of the abbey and burn it down. There would be fighting.

Barber came out from the Antelope, the abbey’s overflow guesthouse, balancing cups of wine atop one another in a shaking pyramid. The crowd opened to let him through.

“I got one extra, for my troubles.”

Cob snatched at the cups and passed them to Croyser and his men. The extra, he took for himself.

“I drink to you, captain.”

Croyser slowly tilted his cup and spilled the wine on Cob’s feet. The people grumbled at his show of contempt and surged forward. Cob held up a hand and, thanks be to God, they stopped. He drained the cup in one draught.

“We are opponents, captain, not enemies. Take your men back within the walls, and tell your Prior that we disdain to harm you. None of this gathering is aimed at revenge.”

A voice from the crowd: “Like hell it isn’t!” Cob found the source—Walter from Kingsbury. Walter held a tenement in the ancient royal settlement that he claimed was directly from old King Edward. For years, he’d had a running battle with the Prior over who owed what to whom, and the whole vill was privy to it.

“Except,” Cob said, trying to turn the anger to laughter, “for old wild Walter. But brother Prior will understand, there’s no shutting his mouth. Let these men return from whence they came.”

It worked. His performance put grins on the faces in the crowd. Cob used the moment of relief and hustled the soldiers through the people and safe inside the Waxhouse Gate. More armed men looked down on him from the walls. Steel glinted above, reflecting the torchlight, but it would take more than the few score troops within the abbey to made a difference with the crowd he had assembled.

Dickon finally took his chance to speak. Cob hung about the edge of things. A pair of lips nuzzled his neck, tickling. He turned. Joan slipped under his arm. Her flesh warmed his soul. The child grumbled at her moving about, but stayed asleep.

“Will Dickon do well?” she asked.

Wallingford was the wealthiest of the town’s merchants. Cob knew him, and didn’t know him. Dickon had a merchant’s eye for self-protection. He was, for a man of business, honest enough. He kept his promises, but he constantly sought advantage.

Dickon bought and sold, but made nothing himself. Most men had a craft. They worked as cobblers, innkeepers, bakers. Cob himself was a scribe, and sometimes wrote out orders and inventories for Dickon.

Dickon, though, only used him for matters that didn’t matter. He kept his own accounts, and wrote his own letters. His goods were never the most expensive, nor the cheapest.

Dickon of Wallingford aspired to higher rank than that of merchant. Cob thought he wanted to become mayor, in a place that had no mayor, no council, no government of its own. Saint Albans was a manor belonging to the lord abbot. Its inhabitants all owed service to the abbey, as if they were serfs on a rural demesne.

“Will he do well?” Joan repeated, nudging him.

Cob shook his head; he had been woolgathering. “I hope,” he answered, yawning. It was past midnight, and, if things kept on, he might not sleep for days.

But the ambitious merchant droned out a list of complaints against the monastery of Saint Alban—the monopoly of the abbot’s court; the debt of work owed by every villein to the abbey; the right of the abbey to control commerce; its monopoly on the grinding of grain; the arrogance of the abbey’s bailiffs. Cob saw no problem with the list, except that was all it was. He felt his head tip forward, and caught himself just as his chin touched his chest.

“For God’s sake, Dickon, don’t put us to sleep!” At first Cob thought he had cried out, but it was Joan. She pushed Cob forward, and scores of eager hands aided hers, until Cob found himself at the foot of the platform. Dickon, unwillingly, extended his hand to help Cob up. His grip tightened, until the bones in Cob’s hand ground against each other inside his skin. Cob clenched his teeth in an effort to contain the pain.

Someone started a chant, his name, and it spread through the assembly like flame through tinder, over and over again, “Grind-cob, Grind-cob.”

“They will have you lead them,” Dickon said. Envy and disappointment soured his face. His grip closed even more tightly.

“I did not want this,” Cob answered.

“Didn’t you?” Dickon frowned in mock puzzlement. “Then why did your wife start the cry?” He released Cob’s hand and stepped down from the platform. Cob reached to pull him back, but failed.

He might have tried harder. They needed no dissension among their own. Not tonight.

Cob searched the crowd for the merchant, but it had swallowed him whole. Hundreds of voices lifted Cob’s name to the heavens. Cadyndon and Barber had grabbed torches and stood at his side to light him. A final glancing look for Dickon proved fruitless. Cob held up his hands. The chant swelled. He stood, arms high, until the people tired of yelling.

“Courage, friends. We are not alone in this revolt. All through the realm, others are rising. Tonight, a messenger came from London, to tell us of the tens of thousands of the commons gathered to make an end of serfdom. An end of the oppression of the many by the few.”

He paused for breath. The crowd waited in silence.

Waited for what? Cob looked up to the crenellations on the abbey wall. Shadowy figures, out of the glow of the torchlight, occulted the stars above.

“We are taught that God made three kinds of people on this earth—those who fight, those who pray, and those who work. But I tell you there is only one kind of person. When God made us, he appointed no one to lord it over another. When God gave man dominion over the earth, he did not give one man dominion over another.”

Movement on the wall caught his eye.

“Why do those who pray huddle behind their walls? Are they afraid of us? Look—they watch us even now, terrified that we might know our own strength—that we might become men who fight.”

Cob pointed. Heads turned to look. Someone threw a torch that arced high over the crowd and crushed itself against the stone. Sparks showered on the outskirts of his audience, and those singed brushed at their clothing and shouted protests.

“Keep your torches in your hands,” Cob shouted. “If we burn the abbey, we turn against ourselves.”

“They need burning,” a voice shouted. Several others cried their agreement. Cob stared into the flickering faces. One among them met his eyes and stared back, unafraid—John Byker.

“The abbey fills the heart of the town,” Cob shouted back, determined to keep control. “Would you put everyone within to the torch? If you burn it, what happens to the town? What traveler will come and lodge with us?”

He took a breath, surprised that they still listened. No more torches flew.

“When that flame hit the wall, who was harmed? The abbot? The prior? Whose flesh felt the flame?” He jumped off the platform and snatched a torch from Cadyndon. He brandished it and plunged into the crowd. People shrank away from the heat, opening a passage through the packed mass, until he stood before John Byker. The man’s narrow, rat-like face sneered back at him.

“Kill ’em all, I say.”

Cob put the burning torch close to the man’s face. He stood his ground. “The flame that burns the abbey burns you, John Byker.”

“A fair trade, to be rid of ‘em, I say.”

“If we win through at the end, I want to live to see it,” Cob argued. “Suicide’s a mortal sin.”

“Do you know what’s a mortal sin, sir-once-upon-a-monk? It’s a mortal sin for those fat and unrepentant monks to take a tithe of my earnings for their bellies, and the king another tax on my poor head. It’s a mortal sin that their woods have game that would feed my children, their streams fish, and I may take the long climb up the gallows stair if I poach a single, scrawny deer. I know all the wrongs they do us.”

Cob had no reply. A hoarse cry from the wall above saved him from having to answer.

“Richard of Wallingford and William Grindcob—the abbot will see you now.”

They had won the first skirmish. Cob grinned at John Byker, then shouted across the square. “Come, Dickon, we are called for.”

Chapter 3

Dickon of Wallingford. His nickname infuriated him, but he treasured the daily humiliation. Let him be Dickon in place of Richard; it never hurt to be underestimated by one’s adversaries—or by one’s allies.

Dickon was a town man. He bought and sold things, and had little knowledge of rural pursuits. He had never put a hand to the plow. He hunted and fished only to belong among the other men. He instead found value and moved it from one person who had too much to another who had not enough. Both would pay him for the transfer. He found this kind of busyness highly satisfactory.

He had watched Cob on the platform, saw him descend to confront the would-be arsonist. Their interests agreed thus far. Cob could bridge the gap between the burgesses and the rest of the people of Saint Alban’s town. He had a personal charm, a fascination that far exceeded anything Dickon could muster. It was that business with his excommunication—that, and what Cob had done to earn it, had caught the imagination of everyone in the town who wasn’t a servant of the abbey, and some who were.

Dickon stood out of the circle of torchlight when the call came. He should have been in that charmed circle. The people should have been looking toward him; he understood how the rising should go. The strain of resentment made his head ache, but he smiled and went with Cob back through the Waxhouse Gate and into the abbey grounds.

Men in armor, weapons at the ready, opened the heavy oaken doors long enough to admit the two men. The crowd pressed forward behind them, but Cob held them back with a grin and a wave. Dickon envied him that easy comfort with the commons. He would never have it.

The doors thudded shut. The troops closed ranks behind them. Steel rattled against steel, leather creaked against leather. More torches lighted the way through the narrow gate. The flames trembled with their movement.

They passed through a second door and onto a path. On the left lay the monastery’s vineyard. The favored dead of Saint Albans were buried in the laymen’s cemetery on the right; Dickon had hoped, once, to find himself there, safe within the arms of the church. Now, the prospects were slight.

Not a single doorway pierced the abbey church on this, the north side, which faced the town. Their armed escort, in an angry silence, marched them around to the east, through the monks’ separate graveyard, through the cloister, to the abbot’s parlor on the south side of the nave.

Grindcob spoke up. “They want to remind us of their strength. Don’t let them cow you.”

Dickon nodded without answering. He was no coward, but the graveyard journey reminded him of how many generations lay beneath the grass.

The parlor was paved with old mill stones, confiscated from the townsmen years before by an earlier abbot. The small stones, flat and round, each with a hole in the center and grooves radiating outward to carry the flour, were set in mortar to make the floor of the room where the abbots met with delegations from the town, a constant reminder of the relation between the monastery and its people.

Prior John waited for them. He and Grindcob met like flint and steel.

“Where is the abbot?” Grindcob demanded of the second-in-charge of the abbey.

“He feels a certain indisposition. He has asked me to convey the decision of the council.”

The council itself was arrayed behind the prior. All the senior monks, the office holders—the cellarer, who purchased the abbey’s supplies; the almoner, who oversaw the distribution of alms by the great gate; the precentor, Brother Thomas; the kitchener; the novice master; and all the others. It seemed to Dickon that, with all its offices and sub-offices, the abbey had no ordinary monks, whose only duty was to pray. Few of the brothers did more in the way of prayer than the monkish minimum. No wonder the country was in such a state when those who were to pray spent all their hours on acquiring lands, enforcing rents and feudal duties, and doing an honest man of business out of his income.

The millstones were just another irritant, but one that irked the people who paid the abbey’s mill to grind their grain. Dickon supposed that they could least afford the cost. If truth be told, the abbey mill ground finer flour than any hand mill, but he would be the last to say it in the hearing of the commons. It was a sore point. Grindcob, the son of a miller, eyed the molas underfoot with something surpassing professional interest.

“Brother John, your paving stones seem a little loose in their mortar.” Cob knelt and worried at a joint.

The Prior reddened with anger. Dickon stepped forward and raised Cob bodily from the floor.

“You sent for us?” Dickon asked. They would gain no advantage by antagonizing the Prior.

Cob wore that foolish grin on his, the one the people liked so well. He might have been half minstrel, the way he liked to put on a show.

“The abbot has decided that indeed a deputation should go from here to London.” Prior John cleared his throat. Usually, he spoke with more authority and less fear. He hawked again before his voice came back to him. “You did well to bring us warning of the troubles.”

John was being conciliatory, the first time in Dickon’s memory that the Prior had not been overbearing. Perhaps they could win.

“His grace suggests, and his council agrees, that perhaps it would be useful to send some of the servants of the abbey along, who are known, in both church and court. With so many people come to town, the authorities might want to be doubly sure of a stranger’s warrant.”

Dickon was about to agree, but Cob spoke more quickly.

“Fair enough. Let’s go.”

“They have not been notified. Some are still asleep—”

“If there’s any man still inside these walls asleep, take me to him,” Grindcob said. “I want to see who can rest while fortune’s wheel turns.”

“We shall need some mounts,” Dickon said. “Any you might lend us would be appreciated.”

Prior John knit his brow. “How many do you want to send to London?”

“Enough to matter; as you said, London is in turmoil,” Dickon said. “And time is short.”

“But they belong to our pilgrims.”

“We will return them,” Cob said wearily. “Do you take us for thieves?”

Prior John wisely left the question unanswered.

The servants of the abbey would ride, of course. To keep them under watch, the townfolk would likewise, at least as many as horses could be found for. The servants of the abbey met the town’s representatives at Romeland, the parcel of land outside the Great Gatehouse on the west.

Cob’s men organized the parceling out of the mounts—William Cadyndon and John the Barber, especially. No one knew where Cadyndon had come from years ago; he had established himself quickly in Saint Albans as a baker—and perhaps a secret miller, in contradiction of the abbey’s will. He certainly baked the finest bread in the town, both white wheat and brown barley. The abbey’s mill ground finely, but sometimes the purest white flour was seen in his shop. He often had breads baked in the French style.

John the Barber was another matter. Everyone knew John—everyone who had ever needed a tooth pulled or blood let. The old men, who could no longer work, frequented John Barber’s shop, where they swapped tales amongst themselves between bloodlettings, instead of doing some useful task.

Old Benedict, surnamed Spichfat, told the favorite. He resembled his namesake, being long in height and as slender as an eel. Wallingford thought him as slippery as one, too.

“Bring old Benedict,” Cob ordered Barber.

“What for?” Dickon asked.

“He is our memory.”

The horses, roused from sleep and excited by the crowd, stamped and fretted as they were parceled out.

Romeland was the green where the fair was held, where aliens could buy and sell, a neutral territory between the monastery and the town. To the east, adjoining the abbey church, was the church of Saint Andrew, where some of the townfolk worshipped. The gatehouse and abbey wall marked the northern boundary. South was Fishpool Street, which itself sloped southeast and down to the river, to Kingsbury, and the old Roman ruin of Verulamium.

The abbey’s people—led by Sir William Croyser, Cob noted—were ready soonest, their mounts being their own, by and large. The commons took longer to organize, but after an hour or so, the vanguard was ready. They turned out of Romeland, with Croyser, in light armor and flanked by two squires, in the lead.

Cob and Wallingford rode immediately behind the knight. Behind them ranged a ragtag mix of gentlemen and yeomen from the abbey’s employ and the people from the town. Their horses’ hooves thudded the hard-packed earth. Cob turned in his saddle and looked back. The abbey’s men and the town folk were mixed together. The moon shone down on a holiday group of travelers. Cob made certain old Benedict stayed with him. The skinny old man’s feet nearly dragged the ground.

They headed south, for Barnet, from whence the rebel messenger had come. Cob felt at ease with the troopers, surprisingly since he had expected greater opposition from the abbey. He had served in old King Edward’s army in France, as had many of the commons. Like them, he had been a bowman. The old king’s efforts had wasted away, and it was in part the debts of the wars that brought the hated poll tax into being. But the fact of having faced the common enemy when lives were at hazard made the soldiers and the commons nearer in heart than they might otherwise have been.

Those afoot were soon left behind. There were nothing near enough mounts for all who wanted to go. The vanguard of a hundred or so would rest their mounts in Barnet and give the others a chance to catch up.

They arrived in good time. A village perhaps a sixteenth the size of Saint Albans, Barnet was likewise a portion of the abbot’s demesne. It was the halfway point on the journey to London. All the night-time pilgrims knew people there. And the people of Barnet, those who hadn’t hurried to Saint Albans with the messenger, awaited them. The center of the vill was alight with torches. The pilgrims of the wee hours were met with bread and ale and questions.

Henry Frowyk stepped out from the waiting crowd and took Cob’s horse by the reins, a question in his eyes. Frowyk was a Barnet man; at his behest the messages from London had been sent on north to Saint Albans.

“So far, all is well,” Cob answered the unasked thought. “The abbot sends his servants with us, to learn what stew is cooking.”

“Warwick is here,” Henry warned. “And all his men.”

“Merde. Where?”

Frowyk led Cob to where the Count lay; Cadyndon, Barber, and Wallingford walked at his heels; at theirs two score of townsmen followed.

Even at this hour, the nobleman’s small court was awake. It occupied the parish church, a poor thing compared to the abbey that owned it, but the largest building in the village. Dozens of the abbey’s troops and followers crowded around outside, the ground chewed up with hooves and matted flat again by the feet of the commons. Something was afoot; those servants of the abbey already knew—had known, from the moment they set out from Saint Albans—that help was nearby. More communication went in and out of the monastery than Cob had thought. He pushed through the crowd, until he came up against Croyser, who blocked the church door.

“Who’s within?” Cob demanded.

“Not your concern, is it?” Croyser had his helm off. His hair was in sweaty disarray, his attitude toward Cob irritable. Cob’s followers mingled with the armed men. “Your betters are talking with each other.”

“We have no betters. When God made us, he made no gentlemen.”

“You’ll not go in.”

The two groups were unevenly matched. Croyser had been set on guard, like a dog left by his master to watch the house. Cob wanted inside, but Warwick’s company was the real danger. Unseen, they might have numbered in the hundreds, or might only be a score or two.

“Who’s within?” At least he could learn which of the servants of the abbey sought the ally. “If you don’t say, Sir William, we can simply wait and see who comes out.”

“Then do so.”

Croyser was too confident. If Cob pushed too hard, there would be a fight he’d likely lose. He turned to the others. “We’ll be a few moments later in London.”

Cob walked away, again through the crowd. He didn’t look back. No one could lead who doubted he would be followed. But he could listen for a shout or clash of arms, and, thanks be to God none came. Cadyndon or Barber or any of a score of others could lose patience and burst into premature violence.

The alehouse lay across the square from the church. The landlord had opened it to the thirsty pilgrims. Cob walked until he reached it, found a flagon, and sat down to wait outside its doors. Cadyndon, Barber and Wallingford crowded round. Rebellion was thirsty work.

“Why didn’t you demand entrance?” Barber spat a mouthful of thin ale onto the ground. “This is the worst swill I’ve ever tasted. Why did we walk meekly away? Warwick’s a friend to the abbot. He’ll reinforce the monastery, and we will have nothing for our pains.”

“You like blood too well, John Barber. You’ve seen too much of it in your work.”

“Blood’s nothing.” He took another swallow, and again spat it out.

“Unless it’s yours.”

“The real question is what the count will do.” Dickon stared at the church across the square.

Light spilled out from the windows. Shadows flickered, mirroring movement inside.

“They don’t know.” Cob sat bolt upright and spoke aloud without realizing it.

“Know what?” Barber asked.

“Who doesn’t know?” from Cadyndon.

Cob rose to his knees. “The Count of Warwick doesn’t know. Abbot Thomas doesn’t know. King-fucking-Richard and all his council don’t know.” He was on his feet now. “Who does know what we’re about?” Maybe it was the late hour. Perhaps the ale, or the midnight travel, the excitement of the rebellion at last, at last afoot, made him dizzy, made him prance like a Morris-dancer.

“That’s foolish.” Both Barber and Cadyndon stared at Cob as if he’d been possessed. Wallingford looked as if he’d tasted something rotten. “They all know—we’ve told them.”

Cob stopped his gamboling. It was too hard to talk and frisk about at the same time. “That’s it, you see. The abbot was as bereft of understanding as a stone, as uncomprehending as one of the pieces of flint in the abbey wall. He took in my words, and understood that it meant some hazard to him and to his church, but nothing touched him.” He turned to Dickon. “You were there—you saw, how when we spoke of justice and freedom he had nothing to say, no reaction at all. The words might as well have gone unspoken.”

Dickon’s face took on that look again, the look of discovering that what he just swallowed was, perhaps, something he shouldn’t have eaten after all.

“The end of unfair taxes, customary fees, tolls, and bond services—you might have told the abbot that, instead of all your high talk of freedom. You’ll have us all taken for heretics.”

Cadyndon and Barber grinned at Cob. The argument was to them no more than a wrestling match at fair time. They liked the battle more than the issue.

“When the church itself grows rich from its lands, then it’s just as well to be a heretic. Did Jesus Christ say ‘Blessed are the wealthy’? Did Saint Francis enjoin us to holy affluence?” Cob held up a hand as Dickon of Wallingford opened his mouth. “‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’ I didn’t make that up.”

“You read too much.”

“Blessed are the wealthy, for they shall—”

“Enough!” Dickon jumped to his feet. His shout caught the attention of the men at arms across the square.

Cob waved lazily at them, to say no trouble here, just friends arguing.

The door of the church banged open with a crash that echoed louder than Dickon’s shout. The Count of Warwick himself stamped out. A black-clad monk trailed after him. The troops at the door smartened up; the monk was one of theirs. From around behind the parish church, a company of soldiers thundered and clattered on horseback. The captain led an unridden, saddled mount, black, and carried a fine helmet not his own.

Warwick was every bit as aristocratic as his name implied. A barrel-chested man of more than five and a half feet tall, he made his charger’s back bend when he thrust himself into the saddle. He took reins and helm from the captain, then leaned down to address the monk who clutched at his stirrup in supplication.

“Shut your mouth, sir monk. My king shelters in the Tower of London. I go to his aid. You and your abbey must fend for yourselves.”

Warwick spurred his horse across the village green and pulled up short in front of the ale house. The charger’s hooves spattered dirt on Cob, Wallingford, Cadyndon, and Barber. The Count’s angry voice words sounded like ringing steel.

“Your faces and names are known, villeins. Your acts will be accounted. I charge you, take care what you do.”

Faced with the sweating fury of the Count, Cob, like the others, stood silent before his wrath. Warwick spurred his horse again and led his men southward, toward London.

Upwards of a hundred soldiers streamed out from behind the church to follow their count, too many, moving too quickly, to number with accuracy. The hooves of their horses beat upon the earth for long moments, then receded in the distance. The rebels were spared, for the nonce.

Cob released breath.

“Now they know,” Dickon said. “They know what’s at stake now.”

“And I know who told them,” Cob answered. He stared across the green. Light from the parish church spilled out the open door and illuminated the face of the pleading monk.

Thomas of Walsingham had managed to come along.