‘I know nothing about a ransom,’ Howell said stiffly, looking at the priest with an affronted expression as if the despicable idea had originated with him.
‘But there will be a demand of some sort, I’m certain,’ Josse said heatedly. ‘That will be what those devils are after, that and the terrible humiliation they impose on the King of England by walling him up inside one of their foul dungeons!’
‘Oh, it is not to be borne!’ wailed Hugh. ‘Dear God above, what are we to do? What is England to do?’
Josse, Hugh and Father Edgar all looked at Howell, who shrugged and, flushing, muttered, ‘Don’t ask me!’
There was a short silence as the four men reflected on the King’s fate. Then, turning to Father Edgar, Josse said, ‘I have an idea, Father, that this frightful action is in violation of the Truce of God?’
The priest nodded. ‘My thoughts run to the same conclusion,’ he agreed. ‘Will these wretches stop at nothing?’
‘What is this truce?’ Howell asked.
Father Edgar explained. ‘In essence, the Truce of God protects the person and property of a man whilst he is absent on crusade, and those who violate it run the grave risk of excommunication.’
‘Excommunication!’ someone — Howell or Hugh, Josse was not sure — breathed softly. Then there was utter, horrified silence as the men reflected on what that meant.
After some time, Hugh cleared his throat and said, ‘The Queen will take this hard, God bless her.’
‘Aye,’ Josse agreed.
‘She’s not so young as she was,’ Howell said lovingly. ‘It fair tears at my heart, to think of her spending her Christmas alone at Westminster with all her loved ones far away. And oh, how I feel for her, that she must bear this new burden.’
‘Old she may be,’ the priest put in, ‘but she still has her fortitude.’
‘She’ll be needing it,’ Hugh muttered.
It was interesting, Josse thought, how all of them knew without asking that when Hugh had referred to the Queen, he meant Queen Eleanor, the King’s mother, and not Berengaria, his wife. To be fair to Berengaria, she had not yet even set foot in the realm in which she was to reign as Richard’s queen, so it was no reflection on her that the people took little notice of her. Eleanor, determined that a suitable bride be found for her favourite son, had fetched Berengaria from her native Navarre and hurried out to the Mediterranean in pursuit of the crusading bridegroom. She had caught up with him in Sicily, where Berengaria had ceremonially been handed over, and the royal couple’s nuptials had subsequently been performed in Cyprus. Since then, Berengaria had been in Outremer with Richard; exactly where she was now was not certain. But she was not in England.
It was hardly surprising that Eleanor remained queen to the English; they had known her and loved her for almost forty years.
‘She’ll be suffering, aye, there can be no doubt of it,’ Hugh sighed.
‘She will take comfort, as always, in the help and the strong support of God,’ Father Edgar said gently. ‘He has seen her through many trials and will not desert her in this one.’
‘Amen,’ the others murmured.
But she knows what it is to be a prisoner, Josse thought. And, knowing Richard as she does, she will fully comprehend his suffering.
Poor soul.
Eleanor, Josse was recalling, had also borne the heavy burden of imprisonment. In her case, her captor had been her own husband, Henry II of England. Tiring at last of his wife’s tendency to plot against him with his own sons, the late King had had her shut away under close guard, mainly at Winchester, on and off for fifteen years.
Aye. Queen Eleanor would likely suffer along with anyone wrongly imprisoned. What she must be feeling on her beloved son’s account hardly bore thinking about.
Josse stirred from his reverie, realising that Howell was speaking once more.
‘. . said that she wanted to go and find him, straight away, like, only her sense of duty is such a force in her that she knew she couldn’t. Who would guard England and Richard’s throne if he were imprisoned and she went to fetch him home?’
‘Thank God for a Queen who knows her duty,’ Hugh said piously.
And, once more, the others all said, ‘Amen.’
There was not a great deal more talk that night. Howell had run fairly quickly to the end of his real news; what followed was mainly conjecture and speculation, and the latter became increasingly wild as the night went on.
In the end, the priest had tactfully suggested that the others join him in prayer, and then they had gone their separate ways to bed.
Josse woke to a bright day, with a weak but determined February sun sparking flashes of light off the frost.
He knew where he would go that day. He had been dreaming of Queen Eleanor, and it seemed that he witnessed her distress. Then he became aware of another figure, although it remained in the shadows and he could not identify it.
His waking mind, however, knew who it was.
He thought of that person now, of how her kind heart and the forbidden pride that remained in her loved and treasured the special relationship with the Queen. How she would welcome the Queen when she visited, cosset her, listen to her, tentatively and tactfully offer what comfort she felt the Queen would accept.
Ah yes, but she would be needed now! For, if Eleanor could make the time, then this was one place to which she would surely go.
As he took the first meal of the day with Hugh and the household, Josse announced that today he must depart. When Ysabel asked if he would return to New Winnowlands, his manor in Kent, he said no, not straight away.
‘I am bound for Hawkenlye Abbey,’ he explained.
Where, he added silently to himself, I shall seek out the Abbess Helewise and indulge myself in the pleasure of a very long talk with her.
2
Hawkenlye Abbey, serene and quiet under the hard, pale blue sky, did not at first glance look like a place in which wild and destructive emotions were running free. The stone walls stood stout, protecting those within in a strong embrace, yet, by day at least, the wooden gates were always open and admission was offered to those who came to lay their burdens, their sickness of mind, body or soul, on the Abbey’s patient and caring nuns and monks.
It was the winter season, and the trees whose branches protected the Abbey were bare. Nature was asleep and nothing grew; even the plants that thrived so well in the herb garden under Sister Tiphaine’s experienced hands were little more than dry twigs.
Behind the Abbey, its perpetual dark backdrop, the great Wealden Forest brooded. Here too the trees were skeletal, the majority of leafless deciduous specimens interspersed with a smaller number of yew, juniper and holly that broke up the uniform greyness of bare branches with dots and splashes of deep green. The forest was a forbidding place, a secret world of myth and rumour; some said that the faint tracks that wound through it, twisting this way and that, had been made by the Romans seeking iron ore. Some said they had been made by people far more ancient than that, people who, it was whispered, were barely human. .
Those who spent their lives within the Abbey’s protecting walls spared scarcely a thought for their silent neighbour. The life of prayer and of service was hard, and nuns whose days began in the darkness before dawn and ended, exhausting hours later, with a very welcome sleep on a straw mattress, had few free moments in which to ponder on the nature of who, or what, might be found within the forest. Most of Hawkenlye’s nuns and monks were content merely to accept that it was there and leave it at that.
Most of them.
The very few exceptions had the good sense to keep their thoughts — their wanderings — to themselves.
Totally in keeping with the Abbey’s air of serenity was the absorbed figure of Sister Phillipa. Despite the cold, she sat in the meagre shelter afforded by a secluded corner of the cloister where, with fingerless mittens on her hands, she was engaged in painting an illuminated manuscript.