A Hanging Offense, Chapters 7-9

In which we discover that it's hard to tell the villains from the villeins without a program.

Chapter 7

    

     Thomas the monk stalked from Mary-le-Bow boiling with rage. The other servants of the Abbey followed him. Behind them, the sacrilege continued, but Thomas was powerless to halt it.

     William Croyser caught him up. He leaned down from his mount and his rough hand grabbed Thomas at the shoulder, but the raging monk shook it off.

     “Touch me not!”

     Again, Croyser interfered with his person. Thomas, trembling with anger, afire with the pain of betrayal, whirled on the knight high atop his horse. “Leave me alone!”

     “No, brother, I can not. Look around you.”

     Thomas would have had to stop in any case. The barricade they had passed earlier, when coming in the opposite direction, blocked their way. Armed apprentices still manned it.

     Like Pope Leo the Great before Rome, confronting the Huns, Thomas outraced his protectors. He had no more than two score, in any case, less than sufficient to attack the barricade with any hope of success.

     He came to a halt in front of a group of young men. He pointed at one.

     “You—speak with me. What are you doing here?”

     The boy—he could have been no more than fourteen, the same age as the King—spat on the ground. The gobbet landed at Thomas’ feet. Spittle splashed on his ankles. The boy glanced back at his friends. They jeered and urged him on. Their cries inflamed Thomas the more. He slapped the youthful face hard enough to leave a handprint on the beardless cheek.

     “You’ll have another if you don’t show respect.”

     The jeering stopped. The world turned on its edge and threatened to invert itself. The ’prentices snatched at their weapons. A few had swords; most had wooden staves. Only the drawn swords of the mounted knights kept them at bay.

     “What—will you cut down a priest of Christ for your pleasure?” Thomas’s rage towered. He ripped open his habit to expose his chest. “Here—strike here!” The thin drizzle of the morning’s rain bid fair to sizzle against the exposed flesh.

     Croyser caught up to him again, again he tried to snatch Thomas from danger. The monk windmilled his arms against his would-be rescuer. Thomas sprang forward, onto the barricade. He snatched up a table, grunting with effort, and heaved it to the ground, where it splintered with a crash. He flung an alehouse stool at the nearest of the apprentices. It missed and fell on the far side of the barrier. Spittle flew from his mouth as he worked to tear the obstacle apart. Blood flecked his hands. Furniture, bedding, everything that barred his progress he cleared away.

     The original apprentice eluded one of Croyser’s knights. Thomas saw his approach and heaved a cask of ale at his belly. The boy doubled over and fell backward, against the wall of a house. His eyes held the panic of one who would breathe, if only he could. The barrel leaked ale onto his clothing, darkening it like pale blood.

     “Have that to drink, you murdering bastard.” The others scattered before his rage, unmanned by his fury.

     Thomas the conqueror stood alone in the open way through the barricade. Broken crockery, splintered wood, torn bedding surrounded him. Of the youths who opposed them, only the ’prentice lying soaked in poor ale remained.

     Thomas ran to him. The child—not even the hint of a beard on his face—clutched at his ribs and heaved great choking sighs as he struggled to breathe.

     Croyser’s horse clopped to Thomas’s side. “Leave him, Brother,” the knight ordered. All the fight had gone out of Thomas. His thoughts were for the child. He shook off Croyser’s strong hand, but the knight would no longer be denied.

     “You’ve fought them off like a Viking, Thomas, but they will return, with reinforcements.”

     Croyser dismounted. He lifted Thomas away from the gasping youth, and placed him atop the palfrey. “He’ll be well enough once he gets his breath back.”

     Croyser mounted up behind. For the second time, Thomas allowed himself to be carried on another’s mount. Now, in the aftermath, he was dizzy with reaction. He had not fought since boyhood.

     “Where to now?” Croyser asked him. Thomas was unused to giving commands. He had vowed obedience so long ago that authority came on him like an ill-fitting garment, wearable but strange. He racked his mind for an answer. A place of safety for the loyal remnant who followed him.

     “Westminster. They will shelter us in the abbey.”

     They picked their way through London, swords drawn. The city emptied while they traveled, drawing the commons out like an ebb tide, in the opposite direction. They gave a prickly opposition to any who opposed their westwarding.

     The towers of old King Henry’s church rose slowly above the Thames, whose flow surged gray and brown down toward the sea. On the far shore, crowds moved like floating islands toward London Bridge, upstream.

     They fell in at the tail end of another group of pilgrims. Croyser negotiated permission to join; Thomas listened, tired beyond curiosity, and found that this second group of pilgrims contained the king and his council. Richard aimed to pray at Westminster, before going to confront the rebels at Mile End.

     He was a good boy, this King, grandson of old King Edward and son of the shipwrecked Black Prince, but only a child of fourteen. At the mercy of his council of regents, he could do little to stem the surging rebels. It was just as well that he would be shriven before meeting with them. History had snatched him too young onto his throne.

     The larger throng moved more quickly, with less opposition, than Thomas’ and Croyser’s small group. They gained Westminster quickly. The knights and retainers built a protective ring around the abbey, while the beardless King entered. Thomas, known to the court, followed without question through the door at the north transept, under the watchful eyes of a statue of the Virgin and Child. Above and beyond those two, in the tympanum above the door, Christ in majesty presided over the Last Judgment. It seemed that every marble eye—of the Judge, of the saints, of the damned—marked Thomas. The judgment of heaven was upon him, and of all those who went through the great door this morning.

     Richard, the King, paused, uncertain where to turn, after entering. Thomas pushed his way past his retainers, all of whom he knew from his times at court, to the boy’s side. He alone had no fear left; he had already confronted the violence of the mob.

     “My Lord.” He touched Richard’s sleeve. The smooth, slender face turned toward him, eyes wide and startled as a fawn. “Have no fear.” The King was jumpy, and no wonder.

     “Brother Thomas.” Richard’s voice cracked between the words, between manly tenor and boyish treble. Fear held him as strongly as it did Thomas. “Everything is falling apart. Not even is my mother safe in the Tower. Flames are everywhere.”

     “Then we must pray, my Lord.”

     Richard nodded. “I am here.”

     Thomas guided the boy to the left. “The Confessor, has he not ever been your friend?”

     The boy nodded. Thomas led him by the hand to the tiered shrine of Edward the Confessor, the king buried in Westminster just days after he completed building his share of it in the year of the Conquest. The shrine lay behind the great altar, in the main apse of the abbey.

     Together, monk and King knelt. Richard trembled, so that the prie-deux shook. Thomas was no more sure of himself. He still feared his own rage and terror. He had no idea whether the boy he had struck lived or died. He had hustled out of danger too quickly, but there was no safety in the realm, not when every hand was raised against the King and Church. He searched his mind for a proper prayer, and fell back on the words of the confession. If his King faced danger, he must go toward it confident of mercy at the end.

     Richard’s sins were few and minor, the simple crimes of a youth hemmed in by custom and the court. He harbored anger toward his advisors, the noblemen whose council caused the rebellion; he had some minor sins of the flesh; he cared somewhat too much for the finery due his station; he resented the wrath of the commons. Thomas absolved him, and made the rite as impressive as he could under their improvised circumstances.

     “What penance, Brother?” the King asked.

     Thomas was a monk of the great house of Saint Alban. God, the saint, and the realm were one. The only answer he could make came out of his mouth.

     “Take their cause for your own. Become their captain, their leader. And when they have obeyed you, as they must, send them to their homes, with charters in their hands and banners flying. Their numbers will be divided. Fall on them, then.”

    

*

     “My brother, my brother,” Henry said, “how little you understand. Truly the saint was right when he said I do that which I ought not to do and I do not do that which I ought. Or whatever it was he said.”

     Henry, of course, was drunk. Cob didn’t realize it until they were bobbing on the back of his horse toward Mile End. Henry’s bad leg always made him look drunk, anyway. Cob let him ramble.

     “The reason you’re here today is very simple: the government is falling apart. The Duke of Lancaster pulls a string here; the earl of so-and-so falls down over there. The commanders need more money for the war, but the country is poor. How to spread it fairly? Charge a fee for breathing. For having a heartbeat. For bearing a head on your shoulders. Your rudimentary mob, now, having no head, goes tax-free, which is why mobs are moving around the country with impunity, being, by definition, exempt. Your essential mob refuses to be taxed with even the need for good behavior, let alone for money. Not a farthing.

     “In Essex, payment was refused. I speak passively, for no one knows the first agent of refusal, may his name, ignorant as we are, be blessed. He probably had a beating for it. Refusal spread. The king’s officers were themselves beaten. Word returned to the court. Sterner measures were taken, justices of the peace sent out to deal with the refusal. Note, brother, how as yet we have no agents of the actions, how I suit my grammar to the degree of my ignorance.”

     Henry had been to the school of Saint Albans, years ahead of Cob. “We hear about some of these things,” Cob said, “even in tiny Saint Albans.”

     “Everyone has a villain—the chancellor, the archbishop, the duke—all but the young king himself. Ricardus secundus de conquestu, dei gratia rex Anglorum, Hiberniae, et Franciae. And how old is he? Fourteen? Fifteen? How can he stand against the Gaunts and Sudburys and all the others of the council of regents?”

     “We’ll soon see,” Cob answered. They had crested the last hill while Henry babbled on. On the meadow at Mile End, spread below like a tapestry, a carpet, lay the field of battle for the day.

     In the middle of the carpet was the village of Mile End itself, a tiny group of houses that made an island in a sea of men and women and horses. He had never seen so many people gathered before; England had not held so great a multitude, he thought.

     Cob stood in the saddle, and nearly upset Henry, to have a better look. His brother dismounted. Mile End made a natural bowl with the village at its center. Richard of Wallingford reined up alongside.

     “Look, Dickon.” Cob pointed to the people. They covered the ground like grass.

     The merchant caught his breath. “We could win.”

     “I hadn’t thought so, til now,” Cob said. The numbers were such that no army could stand against them. He had served in France, and knew the movement of thousands of men, and this gathering was greater. This was the army, in fact. The thousands of men at arms who had fought the French with him had largely been men like him. The English archers—commoners all—had beaten the French aristocracy. And here they were. “We could win indeed. What do we want?”

     But before Dickon could answer, Cob turned and gave orders for the men from Saint Albans to spread out along the ridge and look down at their allies, and learn how strong their rebellion was like to be. Cob was giddy with potentiality. Until now, he had been riding events as if he were trying to tame a colt to the saddle. All he had wanted was to stay on its back.

     But now, he understood what could be, the power loose in the land, a power heretofore checked by custom and law, isolation and religion. Never before had so many English gathered at their own calling.

     And to think, they were so behind the times in Saint Albans that he had almost missed it. The fatigue of an hour before dropped away in the exhilaration of realization.

     What kind of man could lead this multitude?

     “This is as far as I go.” Henry turned with his words back toward London’s walls. “Look out for the villains, villeins.” His limp was worse. Cob thought to retrieve his broken brother, but Dickon laid a hand on his arm.

     “Each man chooses for himself, Cob. He knows he could stay.”

     Cob looked back through the crowd from Saint Alban’s. Henry passed among them, limping, and disappeared. The others looked to him, awaiting his orders.

     Cob turned his attention forward, let his eyes trace the peripheries, and saw the jaws of the pincer take either side of his band. Far from having to enter Mile End, Mile End enveloped them and drew them down the hill into the center of things. It was like being gently eaten. There were soldiers among these rebels, captains who had learned their skills on the bloody fields of France.

     Walter Tyler himself stood forth from his tent at the bottom of the bowl as Cob and his men let themselves be carried by their captors. You could only be caught by something you wanted to avoid, Cob thought, and he cautioned his men not to fight, that they were among their friends, but the situation was touchy and it would be best not to give cause for offense.

     “William Grindcob and the Saint Albans men—welcome!” Tyler grew as they approached him, and kept growing for moments after they dismounted. It astonished Cob how tall and broad the man was. He felt antlike, childish, by comparison.

     There was the question of how to behave. If Tyler had been noble, it would have done for Cob to kneel, make some sign of obeisance.

     But not now, when they were acting as rebels; not here, where tens of thousand gathered to spite privilege.

     Instead, Cob slipped from his horse with as much grace as he could muster, strode forward, and put out his hand. It disappeared into Tyler’s grip, as if into a loaf of bread, but there was no doughiness in that callused, workaday hand. Nor was there a test in the handshake, as many would do, to see who was the stronger. Tyler knew his strength without putting others to the question. It was a good sign.

     Cob introduced his lieutenants; Tyler did the same. They treated as equals, although the Saint Albans men were enveloped in the larger company.

     “What do you want of us?” Tyler asked.

     “To swell your numbers for a day, then take back with us what you seek here.”

     “An end to serfdom, that would be.” Tyler grunted. “To bondage of any sort. An end to the head tax.”

     “Is that all?” Cob asked.

     “Scarcely. You need to learn a little of patience if you are to be a rebel. We seek an amnesty for all we do in furtherance of our goals; and we shall have one king over all the people, and no more of the nobility.”

     Cob’s eyes grew so wide he thought he might see heaven. No more of the aristocracy—it was an idea so full of wonder he could not grasp what the landscape might look like if it came to pass. He was out of his depth. He could pretend to stand as an equal to Walter Tyler and his Kentish rebels, but he had not been ready to fly so far from experience as they.

     No aristocracy. He turned the concept over and over in his thoughts.

     “What in its place?”

     “The commons.”

     The commons. Cob tried to envision a world without lordship. At first, it was inconceivable. Who would apportion goods, who judge between men?

     But who did these things now? In theory, the courts of justice at Saint Albans belonged to the abbot; but that worthy had not appeared at a court session in years. Instead, his bailiff took his place and meted out judgment. The bailiff was a man, no lord, a commoner raised above his station. Cob took that thought within and let it fester. Another question had occurred.

     “We were told the King was here.”

     “Not yet,” Tyler answered, “but we look for his coming.”

     “What of the church?”

     Another figure pushed through the press of people. An old man, with so many wrinkles that even his pate was furrowed like a plowed field. He wore the black of a priest.

     “From Saint Albans?” His voice betrayed none of his age. He did not question; he demanded knowledge. His voice rang; if any in the great crowd did not know from whence the newcomers had arrived, they did now.

     Cob nodded in reply. Speech had deserted him in the face of this priest.

     “I know the place.” The wrinkled head bobbed with anger. His eyes looked up into Cob’s, and righteous fury burned in them.

     “What of the church?” the priest said. “Burn it. You’ll give the monks all the more reason to pray, and their devotions will be the more sincere because of you. You might even save their souls.”

     Tyler laughed. The sound rode over the priest’s anger and lightened the fear Cob felt. “One new idea at a time, Brother John. First, let’s discover what they want from their church.”

     Brother John could be none other than John Ball, the preacher who crisscrossed England calling on the clergy to live up to their calling and the commons to take the government of their lives into their own hands. He had not preached in Saint Albans, but Cob knew of him nonetheless.

     “Waste no time,” Ball ordered. “The longer you give them to prepare, the greater will be their defense. Your abbot and prior will not give up their privilege without trying every means to deceive you. Trust nothing they say.”

     Ball turned on his heel and disappeared back into the tent. Cob looked to Tyler.

     “Our John is not one for compromise. His heart is as pure as a dagger’s thrust. Time in the prison of the Archbishop sharpens a man’s thoughts.”

     A shout lifted in the distance. Cob turned with everyone else, save John Ball who remained within his tent. The shout swept down the hill into the valley. Pennants and banners appeared on top of the hill to the southeast. The people there swirled like the flags in the morning breeze.

     “The King—the King is coming!”

     At the distance, Cob saw it all. Accompanied by his knights, his bodyguards, and by his nobles, Richard himself, atop a gray palfrey, crested the hill above Mile End.

     It took a courage Cob admired to come into such danger as the mob represented. His measure of the King rose. He must know himself threatened, yet here he came, still a youth of fourteen.

     The knights with him formed a ring around the royal person. They used their horses gently, it seemed, but with good effect. No one of the commons could come close to him.

     And yet, the knights were helped by the awe of the commons. Not a dozen of the multitude could have been in Richard’s presence before this day. Cob himself felt diminished, and after the initial shouting of the news of the boy-king’s arrival, a hush fell over the crowd.

     As one, they knelt. Here was the man who could make all right.

     All knelt, save Tyler. But the giant of a man himself must have been taken at least a little aback.

     “He’s got balls, I’ll give him that. Let’s see if he has any thoughts in that brave head of his.”

     Cob scrambled to his feet and ran after Tyler. The King’s party moved slowly down the hill. Tyler and Cob ran up full tilt. No one else from the commons had recovered himself yet sufficiently to match their headlong dash; the rest of the commons still knelt.

     Tyler slipped between two chargers. Cob, a pair of steps behind him, gave time for a knight to adjust his position; Cob’s head and shoulder ran into a ton of sweating horseflesh with a dull smack.

     “Here now, what do you think you’re doing?” The knight’s sword screed from its scabbard.

     “I’ll be taking that, sir knight.” Tyler reappeared on the far side of the horseman. He slipped the long weapon from the knight’s gauntleted hand and drove it deep into the soft earth.

     By now, though, other warriors moved toward the confrontation. The perimeter of knights contracted, but King Richard called to his men.

     “Suffer my children to come to me.”

     The clatter of armor died away. Every eye, for as far as Cob could see, peered in his direction. Tyler pulled the broadsword from the earth, wiped the clinging soil off on his tunic, and handed the weapon back to the knight from whom he’d taken it.

     Cob was in the presence of genius.

     Tyler refused to kneel in the royal presence. Instead, he walked right up to the King and held out his hand, as much to show no weapon ready as in greeting. Richard, boy that he was, went the gesture one better, holding out both hands empty.

     The boy-king was dressed carefully for the event. Perhaps his mother had some hand in it. A light-weight crown, bright gold openwork studded with pearls and rubies, adorned his head. His hair was of similar color, a strawberry blond combed to be mostly contained within the golden circlet and help hold it in place. Joan, back home in Saint Albans, would never forgive him if he forgot these details, revolt or no revolt. The royal eyes glowed periwinkle blue with the excitement of the moment. Young King Richard knew that this was the test of his reign. His cheeks glowed like red, ripe apples; otherwise, he was as pale as a September moon. His cloak was crimson, interlaced with gold. At his throat, an alabaster stag with a golden crown around its neck, held the cloak in place—the badge of the white hart.

     Cob’s knees quivered with the urge to bend, to throw himself to the ground in front of this splendid creature of a king, youthful though he was. Tyler, though, saw Cob’s weakness; the leader’s right arm steadied him and took the weight that might have caused Cob to make obeisance.

     “All of England is here, one might think,” the King said. His voice sounded in that middle between man and boy. He was afraid, Cob realized, and with reason. His fivescore knights meant nothing against the tens of thousands arrayed in the field. And yet, although afraid, young Richard seemed to know, by inborn knowledge, that he was the latest of a lineage of kings, and that knowledge strengthened him. His eyes, when they looked at Cob, saw him in a way he’d not been seen in his life.

     His noble guards watched him more than they watched the rebels. The question became who were they more afraid of—a rebel band or a king who might take it into his head to join the rebels. Their hard eyes watched every gesture; their hardened ears strained for every word, every breath, of young Richard’s. They hung on tenterhooks of fear.

     “Not quite everyone, your Grace,” Tyler said, “though we brought everyone as could come.”

     “Why?” The King made a simple question. It was a day for questions, Cob thought, questions that might have been asked years and years before. “What for?” the King said.

     Tyler launched into a speech, which, Cob believed, he must have been composing in his mind since it first became possible that he might front the King. The giant spoke of the poll tax; of the discontent of the commons over the symbols and rules of their feudal state; about the injustices of shire and town; the maladministration of the King’s justice. He had a list of complaints. When it was done, he waited for the royal answer.

     “Bow to us,” Richard said.

     Cob felt suddenly stupid.

     Tyler said, “Huh?”

     “Do not ‘huh’ your King. Bow. The nobles are watching. You have been gesturing and talking loudly and it is not fitting that a King should be lectured. Bow.”

     Cob risked a glance. Heretofore, all his attention had focused on the young King. Now, the ring of armed men from the royal party closed on the tiny grouping. One of them—a merchant, and a rich one, by his dress, loosened his sword in its scabbard. Cob did not know him—a wealthy Londoner, most likely. A chain of office hung round his neck—the mayor.

     “Bow,” he hissed to Tyler, and bent his own knees to touch them against the damp earth. Tyler followed his lead. King Richard touched each of them on the crown of their heads, near to an act of blessing.

     “Now, rise,” the King ordered.

     “Is this some game?” Tyler demanded.

     Cob’s knees felt the ghost of the damp, cold imprint of the soil.

     The lord mayor stopped.

     “No game, master Tyler,” the king said, ‘”except that it keeps them at bay and your head well attached to your shoulders. What would you have me grant you?”

     “An end to serfdom, my lord. To all kinds of lordship, saving your own. The particulars are written, here.” He dug within his tunic for a paper and handed it to the King. Richard tucked it in his belt, unread.

     “And you—” He looked again on Cob. “Who are you, and whence do you come?”

     Cob identified himself.

     “You rise against your abbot? To what end?”

     “A charter, sire, to give Saint Alban’s town what other towns have had for generations—the right to own their own affairs, under your grace.”

     “You shall have it.”

     Cob’s ears rang with the simple words; they were a trumpet, sounding triumph, simply for the asking. It was too good to be true. He stood and stepped back, unbelieving. The King’s eyes flitted to the periphery again.

     “Bow once more.”

     Cob did not have to risk a look. He touched his knees to the ground. The King’s own hand helped him and Tyler back up.

     “Our scribes shall write out such a charter for every town that wants one. We shall declare an amnesty, for all deeds done to this point of time in furtherance of your aims. But we warn you, Master Tyler and Master Grindcob, that our mercy extends thus far, and no further. You have the advantage of us.” Here, the King lifted his eyes past the ring of warriors to the tens of thousands who ringed them round. “We command you to our peace henceforth.”

                

Chapter 8

    

     Richard of Wallingford—Dickon—saw the bowing and scraping done atop the small hill above Mile End. A gap in the ring of defending men-at-arms had opened to allow sight. One of the tens of thousands of watchers, he wondered what words passed between the royal party and the two men of the commons, wondered at the kneeling, wondered what was next to come among the strange events.

     John Ball, the priest, emerged from his tent.

     “Lift me up, Dickon.”

     “Richard,” he complained automatically. He tore his gaze from the scene on the hill. The cleric’s eyes bore on him.

     “Yes, I mean you. You’re big enough.”

     Father John was tall, but gaunt from time in prison. Richard knelt once more. The bald old priest climbed on his shoulders; a dozen hands reached out from among Tyler’s company to steady him. Ball swatted them away. He kicked Dickon in the ribs, as a man spurs a horse.

     Taking the weight, Dickon rose, unwilling and furious at the humiliation. Someone offered a steadying hand to him, and he took it with gratitude. The priest’s bony arse dug into his shoulders.

     Now, though, Ball’s clutching hands blocked his vision. He had to hold onto the priest’s skinny shanks to keep the two of them from toppling over. Once again, the church was riding the backs of the commons, even if this representative was on the side of the rebels. Dickon was a merchant, yes, but not too dense to gather the meaning of the symbol.

     “What do you see?”

     “Hush, fool!” the priest cried. He stretched higher. His robe slid up the back of Dickon’s head from the effort and over his face. His thighs, wiry and rock hard from much walking of the length and breadth of the land to preach his own gospel, bore down on Dickon’s collar bones, until the merchant thought they would break. Dickon moved his feet to gain steadier purchase in the muddy ground, churned by a thousand feet. The old priest broke wind. Dickon choked and staggered.

     “Be still!” Ball slapped him on the crown of his head. In a louder voice he shouted to the assembled crowd. “They have stood again. Each vexillator hands his banner to Tyler. Tyler passes them to the man from Alban’s town.”

     That would be Cob. Dickon wished he could see for himself, but the priest’s robe obscured all.

     “The parley is ended,” Ball cried. “Tyler lives! He and the other fellow are coming this way. There is no pursuit. The King and his men have turned for London.”

     A ragged cheer rose up from the crowd, rippling slowly from the center. It moved in waves, following the reach of a human voice repeating what the priest had announced.

     “Let me down, you fool!” Ball again swatted Dickon’s head.

     Dickon tried to kneel, slowly, so as not to upset their precarious balance, but the dark stench under the robe had him reeling. He tumbled. The priest was snatched from his perch, but Dickon landed in the mud, face first.

     Legs bumped him. The general jubilation kept him from rising. He swiped the mud from his face, all the while jostled and pushed by the legs of the rejoicing mob. By the time he regained his footing, Cob stood before him, his face exultant with triumph, the hope of revolution writ plain thereon.

     “Success, Dickon! Success! We have everything!”

     Cob was wrapped in royal banners and pennants. Color floated around his face on the breeze, gilding it with victory. Mud caked Dickon’s face and hands.

     Cob offered a king’s banner to him. “Put this in your care, Dickon. It will take some time for the charters to be written. Scribes must come from Westminster, but it is done! We have won!”

     He danced in a little circle, leaning on the pole belonging to one of the banners. Cob was as happy as the queen of the May.

     Tyler smiled in all directions, too, and upon all faces. Cob was too busy rejoicing to notice what took place next. The King’s party was on the move. Jack Straw, the giant who ignited the flames at Highbury, emerged from the crowd, a ghost come into daylight. Tyler spoke with him. Straw smiled and nodded in agreement, then slipped into the crowd. Dickon tried to follow his progress through the June morning, but the multitude closed around him.

    

*

    

     Thomas of Walsingham lay too tired for sleep at the Tower in London. He had been given a chamber to share with Croyser and his knights when the King and his company went out to Mile End. Daylight spilled through the high window of their room in the curtain wall and fell on his face. The snores of the men-at-arms rattled at him. Even Croyser slept the sleep of men who grab rest when they can, but Thomas was too alert, too frightened. He slipped in and out of awareness, but could find no rest.

     His upset was too great. Thomas knew well enough what might come to pass. He rose from the unfamiliar bed. It was soft, in any case, for a monk used to sleeping hard. He made his way to the garde-robe in the curtain wall to relieve himself. Bodily functions continued, no matter what the circumstance.

     Between the Tower and the Thames, the mob was thin. Most had followed the royal party out to Mile End. Few of those remained in the Tower, save Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor, the queen mother, and Robert Hales, the treasurer of the realm, and their attendants. Most of the troops had gone to guard the King. It was thought safe, so he was told, for all eyes of the people’s would track the crown. Common wisdom held that the commons would be dazzled by royalty.

     Common wisdom erred. From the northwest, a party of men made for the Tower, several hundred. They carried banners and weapons. The King’s party was nowhere to be seen. Thomas watched in fascinated horror. The pack moved with a purpose not used by the small crowd gathered at the Tower’s gate. Those below were still and showed no agitation.

     Thomas waited for someone to sound the alarm. It was the middle of the afternoon. No one expected trouble at the Tower while the King was gone, but danger was riding, halfway between the horizon and the gate.

     Thomas ran back to the chamber. The half-dozen knights still slept. He knelt at Croyser’s side and shook the big man by the shoulder. The steel of his armor was warm to the touch.

     “Awake!”

     The knight’s eyes popped open. “What is it?”

     Thomas reported what he had seen. His noise roused the others. In an instant, the room filled with shouts and clanks.

     “To the archbishop.” Croyser’s command gave order to the noise. They swept Thomas along from their chamber in the wall down a flight of stone steps, into the bailey, and charged for the White Tower, where the court kept itself locked in.

     “There’s no watch, you say?” Croyser demanded of Thomas.

     “None.” He was panting, catching breath as he could. His sandaled feet slapped against the paving stones.

     They came up short against the locked and bolted door at the foot of the White Tower. Croyser beat the oaken door with the hilt of his sword. The sound echoed round the courtyard, bouncing from stone to stone. The tower ravens took flight in a flurry of beating wings, and disappeared into the sky. Thomas envied their flight. At least they could leave. Others were less fortunate.

     A page appeared at the door.

     “Sound the alarm!” Croyser ordered. The sight of his few soldiers frightened the page, who went running back into the tower. He left the door open.

     “This is not right,” Thomas said.

     “Everyone within. Bar the door.” Croyser led the miniscule charge up the narrow stairs. “Mind your step, monk.”

     In spite of the warning, Thomas tripped partway up the flight. The booted feet of Saint Alban’s fighters bruised his legs. Before he could raise a protest, they had passed. The sound of their footsteps vanished above.

     Thomas faced a choice. The rebels must be at the gates by now. There was nothing left but to pray. He climbed past the apartments of the queen mother and made his way to the chapel.

     Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, knelt before the altar, his back to Thomas. The monk panted for breath, winded by his climb and aching from his bruises. A hand fell on his shoulder, a dagger’s point touched his neck.

     “Do not move, sir monk.”

     Thomas froze like water in winter. Only the rise and fall of his breast betrayed him.

     The archbishop turned from his mass.

     “You may sheath your dagger, Master Perers.”

     The pressure of the dagger’s point lifted from Thomas’s throat.

     “What is it, Brother Thomas? Have they come?”

     “They approach the gates. Where are your guards?”

     “Only Master Perers remains. He, and these few others.” Archbishop Sudbury gestured to include those who accompanied him—men Thomas knew at least by sight and reputation—Robert Hales, the treasurer of the realm; John Legge, the king’s sergeant-at-arms; Brother William of Appleton, who advised the King’s council. But for John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, these held the power in the kingdom. And here they waited, unprotected, for the arrival of the mob.

     “Why are there only these few?” Thomas demanded. “It is wrong that you should be undefended.” The words were thick in his mouth, since he wanted nothing so much as to fly like the ravens. But there was no safety in the entire realm.

     “Wrong it may be,” Sudbury said. The archbishop’s voice trembled. He was more fearful than Thomas, but he fought to master himself. “For all that I want it to be otherwise, the single thing one learns in high position is to understand the difference between what should be and what is. I am ready, and, God willing, the end will be swift.”

     “I came with a group of knights,” Thomas offered.

     “We have sent them to the Queen,” Sudbury said. “She stands in greater need than we, and they are more likely to be able to protect her than us.”

     How could it be greater? Thomas wondered. Sudbury, though, had other thoughts.

     The archbishop went to a window which gave out towards the main gate of the bailey. Thomas followed. The other men continued their prayers, as if fatality were all they knew.

     Sudbury stank of fear. Down below, the besieging commons still camped before the gate.

     “When will they come?” Sudbury cried. “Good God, why are they waiting?”

     “For reinforcement,” Thomas said, “I suppose. Another company of men is fast approaching.”

     “I have confessed to the good brother,” Sudbury said, “and he to me. I stand ready, if only it were over. My conscience is empty of sin, but not of fear.”

     A shout from below. The main gate burst with a crash against the stone. People ran into the bailey.

     The reinforcements had appeared without giving warning. A knot tightened in Thomas’s belly. Sudbury sighed, as if with relief.

     “Tell what happens here, Thomas.” The archbishop’s voice cracked with fear, but he composed himself. Only an ignorant man, or a stupid, betrays no fear in fearful situation. Sudbury, though death’s terror was upon him, held his ground, while below, the shouts of the rebels coursed through the bailey and around the foundations of the buildings, growing louder and louder.

     “Judica me, deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta.” The drone from the archbishop’s throat caught at Thomas. “Give judgment for me, O God, and defend my cause against an unholy people.” Thomas’ chest ached, as if his heart would burst. Here stood the head of the church in England, praying for his soul’s salvation while the rabble circled below, looking for a way in.

     The world was on its head. Truly scripture was right when it said that the first should be last and the last first. Perhaps it was the end of the world.

     “You should go, Sir Richard, while you may.” The archbishop touched the young knight on the brow, making the sign of the cross.

     “I’ll not abandon you, my lord.” Richard Perers was the son of a knight local to Saint Albans.

     Thomas had a passing acquaintance with the family, who took up the art of the courtier as those of lower birth took up cobbling or carpentry.

     “Not while there is breath in my body.” Perers drew himself up and thrust his chest forward.

     “We are known, Master Perers, by the mob. You are not. Someone must escape and take word of what happens to us, that we may be avenged. That duty falls to you.”

     “But my lord—”

     “But me no buts.” A tear slipped down Sudbury’s cheek. “This is a last good act for me to do. Go to the queen, below. We all, save Brother Thomas, have had a hand in the rule the commons hates. She has not, and needs your defense. For me, I am ready.” The archbishop scraped the tear from his face. He took Perers’ hands in his own. “Give good report of me, lad. Now go.”

     Perers, being under obedience, nodded once, tight-lipped, then turned sharply and left the chamber.

     Thomas had to check his emotion. “You have saved the boy, your grace.”

     Sudbury nodded, teeth clenched, his mind on other things.

     A crash from below signaled that the barred door had been broken open.

     “They come, my lord.” Robert Hales spoke, who had heretofore been silent. He wore his chain of office still, a heavy weight of gold about his neck.

     “At last,” Sudbury said, in a whisper so soft that Thomas scarce could hear. He took a deep, shuddering breath, his fear writ large on his face. The sweat of terror beaded on his brow, and yet he made no move to hide, to run, to somehow flee his fate.

     Legget, Hales, and Appleton had eyes only for their archbishop. The head of England’s church, Thomas realized, was giving these men a practical lesson in death. His fear was as plain as the sun that shone down through the June sky, yet his courage was the greater.

     Cries from below revealed that the mob had found the chamber of the queen, the young King’s mother. Yet no female voice was heard, an indication that they might spare her life. It was out of the hands of the men in the chapel.

     The voices closed on them, growing louder along with the shuffle and clump of feet, the clangor of steel. Sudbury trembled, but remained before the stone altar, bathed in the light from the high, narrow windows. Hales, Appleton, and Legget followed his example. Thomas shrank, weaponless, into a shadow in the apse of the chapel.

     “It will be well, brothers,” the archbishop said. “Our fear is nearly ended.”

     They burst into the chapel like desecration on the march. A score of men, and at their head, one flaxen-haired scarecrow of a man, Jack Straw, despoiler of the manor at Highbury.

     There was no ceremony, no high speech.

     “Got you!” Jack Straw shouted at the Archbishop of Canterbury. His men fell on their victims, and snatched them from their sanctuary and down the long stair to the outside.

     One of his followers found Thomas hiding in the apse.

     “Jack—another priest!”

     Jack Straw turned. The fellow dragged Thomas to the pale leader.

     “The church-burner himself! Bring him along. He can be a witness to what follows.”

     Straw’s man, perhaps a blacksmith by trade for his strength, lifted Thomas to his shoulders as if he weighed no more than a child. Down and down they went, bouncing on the stairs, until, sore and nearly sick with the pounding on his belly, Thomas saw daylight at the foot of the White Tower.

     Thomas saw a vision of hell. Villeins ran everywhere. Upside down on the smith’s back, he twisted his head to see. The mob was an infestation within the royal precincts. Clots of people ran this way or that. A cheer rang out in one quarter, a groan of disappointment from another. None of it had meaning. Hell was purposeless, mere activity.

     The smith, though, had purpose. He followed the largest of the crowds down the path from the White Tower through the great gate, across the moat, then right and up Tower Hill. Throughout the hurried journey, Thomas bounced on the fellow’s shoulder and saw the world turned upside down. Much of what he saw was the smith’s hind end. The villein pushed through the press of people, shouting for others to make way.

     He was set upright, finally, bruised and frightened, in the midst of the mob, at Sudbury’s side. Still in his chasuble, which was torn, soiled, and stained with his own blood, the archbishop faced his captors. They all carried weapons now, stolen from the armory in the Tower.

     “What do you plan to do to us?” The voice that had preached from the pulpit at Canterbury rang out with force. No pleading from the primate of England. Thomas panted for breath. His belly ached from the pounding it had taken. He had to remember the courage Sudbury displayed, in case he survived long enough to spread the news. No matter that the proper course of things was inverted by the mob. No matter his own fate. He would remember, and tell.

     “What sins have I committed against you?” Sudbury demanded.

     The mob’s shouts drowned each other out in a cacophony of complaint. The crowd in London would have the blood of their victims, like the crowd before Pilate in Jerusalem.

     “If you harm us,” Sudbury shouted, with all the pride of a ruler, “you will be excommunicated. An interdict will be laid on the whole of England.”

     “And who gives a week-old shit for you or your interdict?” Jack Straw had caught up to the crowd. His voice rang above the archbishop’s. His pale head towered above all others.

     The mob shouted their agreement with Straw.

     “Fuck the pope in the arse!”

     “Send them all to hell—they can wait for us there!”

     The mob shouted and screamed and beat the ground with their feet. The roar made speech impossible. Jack Straw waved a hand at the smith who had carried Thomas from the chapel. The fellow snatched a sword from one of the rebels.

     Sudbury caught Thomas’s eye. He knew. There was nothing left him on this earth. Thomas, loose from the grip of the otherwise occupied smith, slipped to the archbishop’s side.

     “Bless me, father, for I have sinned,” Sudbury said. “It has been only hours since my last confession.” Sweat stood out on his face. His eyes were wild with terror. He clutched Thomas’s arm. “Even now, I hate them. Were it in my power, I would have them all killed. Help me to a good death.”

     Was there such a thing in the midst of a blood-crazed gathering so filled with hate? Thomas prayed for the strength to comfort the man who would soon be separated from his head.

     “Kneel, Simon, son.” Sudbury was a child, now, as fearful as an infant stricken with night terrors, and with reason. No more the proud archbishop, head of the church, counselor of kings. Thomas knelt with him, in spite of his own fear. He had the duty of a priest. Around them on all sides, the crowd beat the ground with pikes and sticks and hoes, shouted for their heads. But between the two of them, Thomas made a hood of silence. He knew, dimly, that he did not achieve this quiet by his own efforts, but there was no time to think about anything except the awful urgency of the moment.

     “Christ forgave those who put him on the cross. He is with us now. Take courage from him. He knows, and will take you in his arms in just a little while.”

     “I have sinned. I have done evil.”

     The crowd roared with impatience.

     “Ego te absolvo peccatorum tuorum.” Thomas made the sign of the cross on Sudbury’s forehead, his lips, and his chest. He fumbled in his robe and found the monstrance, with the priest’s host, that he had rescued from the fire in Highbury. He removed the host, broke off a piece, and placed it in the archbishop’s mouth. “Take, eat. This is my body given for you.” There was no time for anything more.

     Jack Straw himself jerked Thomas away from the archbishop. “Get on with it!”

     Sudbury still knelt. He slipped the chasuble down his back, so that it would not interfere with the stroke, and extended his neck.

     He spoke. “Father, for—”

     The blade bit into Sudbury’s neck. He screamed, a wounded animal. He lifted one hand to the wound, and steadied himself on the ground with the other. Then came words, broken and shocked—“This is the hand of God.”

     The next blow fell before his hand moved. Fingers flew through the air, but still Sudbury lived.

     It took eight strokes to kill the archbishop. Thomas watched each blow, listened in vain for any words from the stricken man, but none came. His final passion was silent.  Thomas went to each of the others—Hales, Legget, Appleton—and placed a bit of the host in each mouth, repeating the last words he had said to Sudbury.

     The mob tore him away and fell on the rest of its victims at the direction of Jack Straw. The giant leader of the rebels protected Thomas, until the deaths were finished, then sent him away.

                

Chapter 9

    

     Thomas glued himself to the horse’s back. The miles from Tower Hill to Saint Alban’s melted under his stolen mount’s hooves. He completed the journey of an entire night in less than half a day.

     His horse, a chestnut mare, was bathed in sweat and stumbling from exhaustion when he reached the base of Holywell Hill. Thomas urged her up the slope from the London Road to the martyr’s town. He had a tale of martyrdom himself to tell, warning to give. If the local rebels acted as their brothers in London—

     It didn’t bear thinking of.

     His mare stumbled and stopped. He kicked her flanks, but there was nothing left in the animal. He slid to the ground, still outside the boundaries of the abbey, but within the precincts of the town. His own flanks quivered with exhaustion. He smelled of horse, and worse. The blood of the executions stained his habit.

     Thomas was alone. He could only hope Sir William Croyser, the knight-protector of Saint Albans, was alive still, along with his small company. There was no knowing what was going on in London now. He left his winded horse, sorry that it would not find stabling in the abbey, but intent on reaching it himself.

     Thomas was alone. He had passed not a soul on his entry into the town. Holywell Hill, the route of blessed Alban to his martyrdom, now lined with houses and shops, stood empty of people. Winded himself, he had not realized their absence at first. Now, he stopped in the middle of the road and turned a full circle. Saint Albans was emptied.

     A thrill of fear might have run down his back had he not seen the events in Highbury and London. He was not the same man who had left the monastery.

     There were no signs of violence. The doors stood properly closed. No carts were abandoned in the street. Nothing was out of place, nothing disturbed, nothing left where it had been dropped. Instead of fear, Thomas found a cold, intellectual assessment taking place in his mind. Instead of fear, reason came into play.

     He looked ahead. Atop Holywell Hill, the abbey stood, unburned as yet. He must be the first to return from London. Thomas stopped climbing. The chill light of reason brightened the overcast day. He could not go strolling through the town. He had been gone; everyone would know where. They would hound him for news, and what could he tell, but that everywhere the commons ruled. Such news would only spur on those who heard it. He must not enter Saint Alban’s town openly. It was just as well that his mount had given out.

     He ducked between two houses, out of sight of the road above. Four gates penetrated the abbey walls. Three were in the town, but a third, down by the mill, might be unwatched with all the townfolk up above watching the monks. Thomas stole between the two houses and downhill out of sight from Holywell. He followed the bank of the River Ver to the mill where Cob’s father had made flour for the monks.

     The fourth gate was locked as tight as could be, but Thomas found no guard. In the fields to the southwest, no human figure moved. Saint German’s Chapel stood untenanted and still. The crops—clover in one field and early wheat in another—waved in the late morning breeze, under an azure sky. A northwest wind drove puffball clouds along a track and chilled the monk. The rain of the day before was ended. The gate was still locked.

     Thomas, however, knew of ways other than gates, as did all the monks. Some of the townfolk knew as well. And, of course, Cob knew, having grown up within the walls. No child with such an inquisitive nature and inborn energy could have remained ignorant for long.

     Still, no other human face found its way to his eyes. No one worked in the fields. No one labored at the mill race. The weather was fine, if a bit brisk. Everyone should be working.

     Thomas slipped into the grain mill. The great wheel was still. Water curled around the inert paddles; the sound reminded him of laughter. At least it had been locked in place. He slipped past the great millstones to the back door. He unlatched it, but still it did not budge. Locked on both sides. At least someone within the monastery had been thinking. It was rare enough that they did, himself included, or they might have seen the events of the last few days coming.

     But this chewing over past errors would not save him. He must enter.

     The wall around the abbey grounds was recently repaired, just a pair of years before. The repairs themselves resulted from the act which excommunicated Cob from the church.

     People had leased land from the abbey, along the boundary wall, which ran from Romeland west to the vineyard, then made an abrupt turn to the right and continued down Holywell Hill, from where Thomas had just come. In fact, some of those men who were leading the revolt had houses and shops which used the abbey’s stone wall for the back side of their buildings—Richard of Wallingford and John Barber. They had knocked holes in that wall, which gave them access to the abbey’s grounds, especially to the vineyard maintained by the Sacrist to produce wine for the Eucharist. In retaliation, the abbot had ordered another wall built. To prepare for this, two monks, John Bokedyne and John Tanner were sent to conduct a survey of the offending buildings.

     With their measuring rods, their plumb bobs, and their copious note taking, the two monks set out meticulously to account for every inch of encroachment. Thomas himself had noted each detail of the survey in the Deeds of the Abbots, for future generations; one of the things those generation would know was the pettiness of which the abbey was capable.

     By the time they reached the house where Cob was living, a crowd followed, loud in protest. The noise had awakened both Cob and his wife, Joan. The two Johns, Bokedyne and Tanner, had begun early in the day, hoping that morning tasks and sleepiness might protect them from the commons’ anger, but no such luck had attended them.

     Their boy had some childhood malady, it was said. In charity, Thomas supposed, Cob might have been up all the night with him. The noise of the complaining commons reached into their house and woke the infant.

     Cob ran from his house, eyes bleary and face contorted in rage. In all justice, he should have blamed the commons, for it was they who made the noise that woke his child. But instead, he attacked the two monks, John and John.

     John the lay brother held the pertica, the measuring pole, while John the priest, his eyes on his notes, wrote down the measurement. Neither could have seen Cob barrel from his door. The crowd of critics, rowdy enough til now, exploded in a roar of cruel laughter, for Cob bowled over both monks. He broke their tools, scattered their notes to the four winds, and pinned John the priest to the ground.

     Cob might have murdered the priest, and those in the unruly crowd urged him on. John the lay brother took to his heels. He ran to one of the unsanctioned holes in the abbey wall, a hole he had just catalogued as illegal, and threw himself through it into the sacrist’s vineyard. All the monks and servants of the abbey heard him squealing in his high voice, as if he were the one receiving the beating.

     John the lay brother’s bleating brought out the bailiff himself. He, of course, already knew of the attempt to measure the houses against the wall, and surmised the nature of the problem. He brought a force of a dozen grooms and squires out onto Holywell Hill. They fell on Cob, but not before he had beaten John the priest near to senseless in his rage.

     Cob’s wife Joan tried to intervene—before the bailiff arrived, it should be noted—but to no avail. One of the squires pushed her roughly away. The infant, squalling for all he was worth with sickness and terror, fell from her arms. Cob rounded on the squire, but another struck him on the head with the flat of his sword. The others fell on him and carried him off to the abbey’s prison in the gate house.

     If anywhere there was a secret opening into the abbey’s precincts, it would be through Cob’s house. Thomas crept into the garden behind the hovel. It pained him that his one-time protege had fallen to such poverty, but his attack on the two monks two years before deserved nothing less.

     Joan must have had a thumb as green as the green man’s. Beans, peas, and cucumbers vined up and over trellises. Carrots and beets poked green fronds above the well-tended rows. Thomas edged through the gate and toward the back end of the garden, where row upon row of verdant vines climbed the flint and brick wall belonging to the monastery. Behind the vines, a small shed leaned against the stones. He pushed aside a narrow door.

     A screaming burst of feathers and claws attacked him. He beat it away, but the cock was defending its flock and came at him with redoubled ferocity.

     “Who’s there?” a female voice demanded.

     Thomas was too busy with the rooster to answer. It flew at him, talons slashing against the sleeves of his habit. His own blood was added to that of the archbishop. He succeeded in grabbing the flailing bird by the throat. A violent spin of his wrist separated head from body. He flung the bloody head away and buried himself behind the vines.

     The hens clucked in panic. “Who’s there?” the voice demanded, closer this time. He recognized it as Joan’s. She had stayed behind to care for the child. There was no time. Thomas scrabbled against the stones, looking for the opening that must be there into the sacrist’s vineyard.

     Then he had it. He had been right. Cob’s garden gave out into the abbey grounds, as he knew it must.

     The opening was small, blocked with flint so that it would appear no more than a flaw in the wall from the other side. Joan reached the entrance to the chicken coop. He was nearly certain she had not seen him well enough to identify him. An edge of flint cut his face, then he was through. He piled stone upon stone in the hole he had emerged from. His hands stung from dozens of small cuts. As quickly as he piled bits of flint and brick into the hole, so quickly did Joan, on the other side, tear it away. Chickens squawked. Joan cursed.

     Thomas ran through the vineyard, dodging around the vines. In an instant he made it out of direct sight of the hole in the wall, but Joan would not be stayed by being within the sacred precincts. He ran deeper into the living spaces of the monastery.

     Thomas ran through the monks’ cemetery, around the chapter house, and through the cloister, the skits of his habit flapping behind him. The abbot, of course, did not live with the other monks, because of his obligations as head of the monastery. He must receive delegations, welcome visitors, and share his table with them, while the monks were more private. Father Abbot’s home lay against the south side of the nave of the great church, where it might catch the afternoon sun and keep an old man’s bones warm. Thomas stumbled against the back door, muddied and bloodied by what he had been through.

     “What noise is this?” Prior John’s voice boomed out from the abbot’s rooms.

     The door opened. Prior John loomed over him. Thomas sank down to his haunches, panting for breath.

     “You’re a mess,” the Prior said.

     Thomas let the harsh voice roll over him. He didn’t like John. Few of the monks did, and none of the commons. John should have been a lord; instead, he had to settle for the office of prior and hope, at the death of his superior, to become abbot some day. That election would give him entrance into the ranks of the lords, a seat in parliament’s upper house, and precedence over almost all the other churchmen of the realm. His ambition alone would make most dislike him.

     Now others gathered around, brought Thomas within the abbot’s parlor, sat him down on the best chair. The abbot himself called for the infirmarian to treat Thomas’s cuts and scrapes. Thomas found himself holding a glass of wine, heavy and red as the blood he had seen earlier in the day. It brought him to himself.

     Brother Arthur, the infirmarius, dabbed at his injuries with a cloth soaked in vinegar while Thomas told the of the things he had seen—the vast mobs, the murders of the archbishop on Tower Hill, the burning of Highbury. He left out his part in the firing of the chapel there, deeming it of no relevance to the dangers faced by the monks.

     “They will return soaked in blood, and desire more, your grace,” Thomas said.

     Father Abbot was silent. His council had been with him in the parlor, but the meeting turned from a council of war to a chapter of faults as soon as Thomas’s tale was done. Thomas had not eaten since the day before; the drink hit him hard, and made him sleepy. He drifted while the elder monks accused each other. Some argued for flight from the rebels. Others wanted to take up arms themselves, in aid of the few lay servants, stable grooms and laborers, who remained within the monastery. There was much shouting. Fear lay heavily on the men consecrated to God. The abbot merely listened, seated in a chair directly opposite to Thomas.

     “What do you think, brother?” The abbot’s spoke softly, but cut through the anxious Babel of voices. Not for nothing had he ruled the abbey of Saint Alban for the thirty-two years since the plague.

     Thomas’s eyes had half-closed. Comfort, wine, and hunger conspired against him. “I, your grace?”

     “You were there, while we all waited for news.” Father Abbot’s weary eyes stared at him. His hair, what his age and his tonsure left him, was tousled from sleeplessness. The wrinkles on his face had deepened since Thomas had last seen him.

     Thomas thought, for a long moment. The others, including Prior John, started up their talk again, but the abbot waved them to silence with a gesture so imperious that Thomas took heart.

     “I will run no further, my lord.” His decision surprised him. The rebels from Saint Albans would surely soon return, and no man knew what might happen then. They would have the taste of blood, even though none had been at the Tower, the mad rage for revenge that had overtaken the rebels in London. And if the archbishop of Canterbury could be murdered within the royal precincts, there was no place left that would be safe. Thomas said as much to the gathering.

     “I heard talk—rumor, really—that our rebels had a promise from Tyler of support, should they need it. He would bring a multitude from London, once that town was secure to them, and ‘shave the beards’ of the monks.” Thomas sighed. “How much truth is in it, I do not know. It is hard to know any thing for certain.”

     Prior John rubbed his ample neck. “‘Shave our beards.’ I do not think they mean barbering.”

     “From the time I spent with them, especially with Grindcob, I think that most of us will be safe. He went—” Here Thomas paused, unwilling to confess the sin of burning the chapel at Highbury. “He went some distance to protect me. I confess, it caught me by surprise. But it should not have done so. ‘Our’ rebels have lived by us cheek and jowl all their lives. If they mean us harm, it might have happened at any time. They have complaints, but I can not credit either Grindcob or Wallingford with the intention of murder.”

     Prior John argued. “I can credit it. Grindcob is a heretic, a blasphemer, a rebel not only against his betters, but against God Himself. I will not feel safe so long as he is free.”

     “What about rescue, Thomas?” the abbot asked.

     “Rescue?” a female voice shrilled, behind Thomas’s back. The sound made him shrink into himself. He turned—Joan.

     “My husband will see to your ‘rescue.’” She carried her distaff in her right hand.

     She moved past Thomas with scarcely a glance. He released a breath he had not known he was holding. Joan, thanks be to God, was not after him.

     “You—I’ll teach you to sneak in and around my house.” She raised her distaff over Prior John’s head. He reached to take it from her, but she rapped his knuckles with the wooden spinning stick; blood trickled from his fingers. Another blow smacked his skull before the monks could overcome their distaste and bring themselves to touch a woman.

     Joan shouted as they drove her out into the cloister. “You’re a pack of lying bastards—all of you!” A handful of servants, drawn by the shouting, surrounded her and carried her away. She still screamed imprecations until they had her out of earshot.

     “Filthy whore,” the prior said. The distaff had caught him squarely on the fingertips. Blood oozed from his fingernails. “That hurts.”

     It was the least amount of gore Thomas had seen all the day. John looked foolish, nursing his split fingers. “You’ll get over it. Better men than you have died today.”

     Thomas had never spoken so to the prior. It earned him an angry snarl, but Father Abbot intervened.

     “We shall have peace between ourselves,” he ordered. “We have weightier matters to consider. What response shall we have to our rebels?”

     That set off another round of argument. Thomas leaned back in the chair again.

     “The count of Warwick—” Prior John said, but Thomas interrupted.

     “The count has other problems. He will not come. We are alone.”

     “Our brother has grown since leaving us with the rebels,” the prior said. He gave the word a sarcastic twist. Still nursing his hurt hand, he paced back and forth across the width of the parlor, scattering lesser monks from his path. “I shall go to Tynemouth.”

     The abbot nodded. “I think so, too, John.”

     Thomas was relieved. Prior John was a focus for the villeins’ fury, a Sudbury. “As soon as may be, I think,” he said. “They feel much harm from you. You might well take some others along—our bailiff, and those brothers who assist him with the rents.”

     The abbot nodded again, almost as if he would fall asleep, or had the shaking disease. “I agree.” He named several of the brothers—the cellarer, whose eyes had been wide with fear since Thomas’s arrival from London; most of the abbot’s council; and the two monks Grindcob had beaten as a way of earning his excommunication some years before.”

     “There are not enough horses left in the town for all of us.” Prior John had forgotten his hurt hand.

     Thomas realized a new fact about the man. The prior’s eyes brightened at the thought of escape into the north, where the rebels had not been heard from.

     “Take what few we have,” the abbot said. “Some of you will travel on foot.” The cellarer looked glum. Prior John would certainly be mounted. Indeed, he left the parlor without so much as a glance at his traveling companions. The cellarer looked beseechingly at the abbot, who once again nodded his permission. The named monks darted out after the prior, doubtlessly hurrying to the stables to claim the few remaining horses. Only the abbot and Thomas remained.

     “We shall have our troubles without them, then,” Father Abbot said.

     “We shall be the better off, your grace.”

     “You have changed, Thomas. You are not the man who left us in the night.”

     Thomas yawned, and covered his mouth in embarassment.

     “You must sleep,” the abbot said. “You are no longer a young man, to be waking all the night and riding all the day.”

     Sleep would heal him, but not of what he had done and seen. The conflagration at Highbury, the eight blows struck at the neck of the archbishop—all would haunt the darkness behind closed eyes. His heart could not rest without shrift.

     “Bless me, father,” Thomas said, “for I have sinned.” He slipped from the best chair given him for his exhaustion to the floor. His knees scraped against the old mill stones. “It has been a day since my last confession, and I have done great sin.”

A Hanging Offense by Alan David Justice is licensed under a 

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

More to come. If you'd like to read the author's The Communion of the Saint, please see below and/or follow this link.

The historical novel, THE COMMUNION OF THE SAINT, is now available for $0.99 on the Kindle or in a DTB (that is, a dead tree book) at $19.95 from Amazon. Here's the book description:

Clio Griffin, an out-of-work academic with an attitude and a tendency toward sarcasm, travels to England to interview for a last-chance job-as the pet historian for an antiquarian group who hope to use her to build the reputation of the local saint-Alban, the first Christian martyr of Britain. No sooner does she arrive than the saint, dead for seventeen centuries, starts talking to her-out loud. The voice is hard enough for Clio to take; her mother, in her final illness, had lost touch with reality, and Clio fears the same fate. When the saint drags her unwilling into the past, to live the lives of people long dead, Clio fights to hold on to her reason. The story question: how does a modern, skeptical, rational person fit the irrational, the supernatural, into her life and still make some kind of sense of it all? The answer: not easily.

Here's part of a review from Julie D. of SFF audio (it refers to the Podiobooks.com audio version of the book):

Justice has an excellent grip on the portrayal of the modern mind when faith is brought up and he shows the gamut of reactions while also giving us a gripping story. We are pulled through the story by our own involvement and questions....This is a fascinating story about a thoroughly modern person who must come to grips with an ancient saint who is telling her that faith is real and she has a role in both receiving that faith and passing it on to others.

The Communion of the Saint