Epic Historial Collection (250 page)

Philemon chipped in: “It would be a completely undignified proceeding, and there is no question of the prior submitting himself to it.”

Caris ignored him. “There should be one hundred and fifty pounds in gold in the nuns' reserves.”

“Out of the question,” said Godwyn.

Caris said: “Well, clearly the nuns will have to check the vaults anyway, now that the accusation has been made.” She looked at Cecilia, who nodded in agreement. “So, if the prior prefers not to be present, no doubt the archdeacon will be happy to attend as a witness.”

Lloyd looked as if he would have preferred not to get involved in this dispute, but it was hard for him to refuse to play the role of umpire, so he muttered: “If I can help both sides, of course…”

Caris's mind was racing on. “How did you open the chest?” she said. “Christopher Blacksmith made the lock, and he's too honest to give you a duplicate key and help you steal from us. You must have broken the box open, then repaired it somehow. What did you do, take off the hinge?” She saw Godwyn glance involuntarily at his subprior. “Ah,” Caris said triumphantly, “so
Philemon
took the hinge off. But the prior took the money, and gave it to Elfric.”

Cecilia said: “Enough speculation. Let's settle the matter. We'll all go to the treasury and open the box, and that will be an end to it.”

Godwyn said: “It wasn't stealing.”

Everyone stared at him. There was a shocked silence.

Cecilia said: “You're admitting it!”

“It wasn't stealing,” Godwyn repeated. “The money is being used for the benefit of the priory and the glory of God.”

Caris said: “It makes no difference. It wasn't your money!”

“It's God's money,” Godwyn said stubbornly.

Cecilia said: “It was left to the nunnery. You know that. You saw the will.”

“I know nothing of any will.”

“Of course you do. I gave it to you, to make a copy…” Cecilia tailed off.

Godwyn said again: “I know nothing of any will.”

Caris said: “He's destroyed it. He said he would make a copy, and put the original in the chest, in the treasury…but he destroyed it.”

Cecilia was staring openmouthed at Godwyn. “I should have known,” she said. “After what you tried to do to Caris—I should never have trusted you again. But I thought your soul might yet have been saved. I was so wrong.”

Caris said: “It's a good thing we made our own copy of the will, before handing it over.” She was inventing this in desperation.

Godwyn said: “A forgery, obviously.”

Caris said: “If the money was yours in the first place, you will have had no need to break open the casket to get it. So let's go and look. That will settle it one way or another.”

Philemon said: “The fact that the hinge has been tampered with proves nothing.”

“So I was right!” said Caris. “But how do you know about the hinge? Sister Beth has not opened the vault since the audit, and the box was fine then. You must have removed it from the vault yourself, if you know that it has been interfered with.”

Philemon looked bewildered, and had no answer.

Cecilia turned to Lloyd. “Archdeacon, you are the bishop's representative. I think it's your duty to order the prior to return this money to the nuns.”

Lloyd looked worried. He said to Godwyn: “Have you got any of the money left?”

Caris said furiously: “When you've caught a thief, you don't ask him whether he can afford to relinquish his ill-gotten gains!”

Godwyn said: “More than half has already been spent on the palace.”

“Building must stop immediately,” Caris said. “The men must be dismissed today, the building torn down and the materials sold. You have to return every penny. What you can't pay in cash, after the palace has been demolished, you must make up in land or other assets.”

“I refuse,” Godwyn said.

Cecilia addressed Lloyd again. “Archdeacon, please do your duty. You cannot allow one of the bishop's subordinates to steal from another, no matter that they both do God's work.”

Lloyd said: “I can't adjudicate a dispute such as this myself. It's too serious.”

Caris was speechless with fury and dismay at Lloyd's weakness.

Cecilia protested: “But you must!”

He looked trapped, but he shook his head stubbornly. “Accusations of theft, destruction of a will, a charge of forgery…This must go to the bishop himself!”

Cecilia said: “But Bishop Richard is on his way to France—and no one knows when he will be back. Meanwhile, Godwyn is spending the stolen money!”

“I can't help that, I'm afraid,” Lloyd said. “You must appeal to Richard.”

“Very well, then,” said Caris. Something in her tone made them all look at her. “In that case there's only one thing to do. We'll go and find our bishop.”

46

I
n July of 1346, King Edward III assembled the largest invasion fleet England had ever seen, almost a thousand ships, at Portsmouth. Contrary winds delayed the armada, but they finally set sail on July 11, their destination a secret.

Caris and Mair arrived in Portsmouth two days later, just missing Bishop Richard, who had sailed with the king.

They decided to follow the army to France.

It had not been easy to get approval even for the trip to Portsmouth. Mother Cecilia had invited the nuns in chapter to discuss the proposal, and some had felt that Caris would be in moral and physical danger. But nuns did leave their convents, not just on pilgrimages, but on business errands to London, Canterbury, and Rome. And the Kingsbridge sisters wanted their stolen money back.

However, Caris was not sure that she would have got permission to cross the Channel. Fortunately she was not able to ask.

She and Mair could not have followed the army immediately, even if they had known the king's destination, because every seaworthy vessel on the south coast of England had been commandeered for the invasion. So they fretted with impatience at a nunnery just outside Portsmouth and waited for news.

Caris learned later that King Edward and his army disembarked on a broad beach at St.-Vaast-la-Hogue, on the north coast of France near Barfleur. However, the fleet did not return immediately. Instead, the ships followed the coast eastward for two weeks, tracking the invading army as far as Caen. There they loaded their holds with booty: jewelry, expensive cloth, and gold and silver plate looted by Edward's army from the prosperous burgesses of Normandy. Then they returned.

One of the first back was the
Grace,
which was a cog—a broad-built cargo ship with rounded prow and stern. Her captain, a leather-faced salt called Rollo, was full of praise for the king. He had been paid at scarcity rates for his ship and his men, and he had gained a good share of the plunder himself. “Biggest army I've ever seen,” Rollo said with relish. He thought there were at least fifteen thousand men, about half of them archers, and probably five thousand horses. “You'll have your work cut out to catch up with them,” he said. “I'll take you to Caen, the last place I know them to have been, and you can pick up their trail there. Whatever direction they've taken, they'll be about a week ahead of you.”

Caris and Mair negotiated a price with Rollo then went aboard the
Grace
with two sturdy ponies, Blackie and Stamp. They could not travel any faster than the army's horses, but the army had to stop and fight every so often, Caris reasoned, and that should enable her to catch up.

When they reached the French side and sailed into the estuary of the Orne, early on a sunny August morning, Caris sniffed the breeze and noticed the unpleasant smell of old ashes. Studying the landscape on either side of the river, she saw that the farmland was black. It looked as if the crops had been burned in the fields. “Standard practice,” Rollo said. “What the army can't take must be destroyed, otherwise it could benefit the enemy.” As they neared the port of Caen, they passed the hulks of several burned-out ships, presumably fired for the same reason.

“No one knows the king's plan,” Rollo told them. “He may go south and advance on Paris, or swing northeast to Calais and hope to meet up there with his Flemish allies. But you'll be able to follow his trail. Just keep the blackened fields on either side of you.”

Before they disembarked, Rollo gave them a ham. “Thank you, but we've got some smoked fish and hard cheese in our saddlebags,” Caris said to him. “And we have money—we can buy anything else we need.”

“Money may not be much use to you,” the captain replied. “There may be nothing to buy. An army is like a plague of locusts, it strips the country bare. Take the ham.”

“You're very kind. Good-bye.”

“Pray for me, if you would, Sister. I've committed some heavy sins in my time.”

Caen was a city of several thousand houses. Like Kingsbridge, its two halves, Old Town and New Town, were divided by a river, the Odon, which was spanned by St. Peter's Bridge. On the riverbank near the bridge, a few fishermen were selling their catch. Caris asked the price of an eel. She found the answer difficult to understand: the fisherman spoke a dialect of French she had never heard. When at last she was able to make out what he was saying, the price took her breath away. Food was so scarce, she realized, that it was more precious than jewels. She was grateful for Rollo's generosity.

They had decided that if they were questioned they would say they were Irish nuns traveling to Rome. Now, however, as she and Mair rode away from the river, Caris wondered nervously whether local people would know from her accent that she was English.

There were not many local people to be seen. Broken-down doors and smashed shutters revealed empty houses. There was a ghostly hush—no vendors crying their wares, no children quarreling, no church bells. The only work being done was burial. The battle had taken place more than a week ago, but small groups of grim-faced men were still bringing corpses out of buildings and loading them onto carts. It looked as if the English army had simply massacred men, women and children. They passed a church where a huge pit had been dug in the churchyard, and saw the bodies being tipped into a mass grave, without coffins or even shrouds, while a priest intoned a continuous burial service. The stench was unspeakable.

A well-dressed man bowed to them and asked if they needed assistance. His proprietorial manner suggested that he was a leading citizen concerned to make sure no harm came to religious visitors. Caris declined his offer of help, noting that his Norman French was no different from that of a nobleman in England. Perhaps, she thought, the lower orders all had their different local dialects, while the ruling class spoke with an international accent.

The two nuns took the road east out of town, glad to leave the haunted streets behind. The countryside was deserted, too. The bitter taste of ash was always on Caris's tongue. Many of the fields and orchards on either side of the road had been fired. Every few miles they rode through a heap of charred ruins that had been a village. The peasants had either fled before the army or died in the conflagration, for there was little life: just the birds, the occasional pig or chicken overlooked by the army's foragers, and sometimes a dog, nosing through the debris in a bewildered way, trying to pick up the scent of its master in a pile of cold embers.

Their immediate destination was a nunnery half a day's ride from Caen. Whenever possible, they would spend the night at a religious house—nunnery, monastery, or hospital—as they had on the way from Kingsbridge to Portsmouth. They knew the names and locations of fifty-one such institutions between Caen and Paris. If they could find them, as they hurried in the scorched footprints of King Edward, their accommodation and food would be free and they would be safe from thieves—and, Mother Cecilia would add, from fleshly temptations such as strong drink and male company.

Cecilia's instincts were sharp, but she had not sensed that a different kind of temptation was in the air between Caris and Mair. Because of that, Caris had at first refused Mair's request to come with her. She was focused on moving fast, and she did not want to complicate her mission by entering into a passionate entanglement—or by refusing so to do. On the other hand, she needed someone courageous and resourceful as her companion. Now she was glad of her choice: of all the nuns, Mair was the only one with the guts to go chasing the English army through France.

She had planned to have a frank talk before they left, saying that there should be no physical affection between them while they were away. Apart from anything else, they could get into terrible trouble if they were seen. But somehow she had never got around to the frank talk. So here they were in France with the issue still hanging unmentioned, like an invisible third traveler riding between them on a silent horse.

They stopped at midday by a stream on the edge of a wood, where there was an unburned meadow for the ponies to graze. Caris cut slices from Rollo's ham, and Mair took from their baggage a loaf of stale bread from Portsmouth. They drank the water from the stream, though it had the taste of cinders.