‘Keep track of it and keep me informed.’
Walwayn, released at last, merely nodded and slid away. He did not ask if Hereford would inform the King; he thought it unlikely — all was rumour, though Walwayn could taste the truth of it. Hereford would wait until matters were firmer and there was advantage in it for himself, but Walwayn would have to be the one setting such an advantage. Until then, there was drink and women …
There were no women of any worth, Thweng noted, which accounted for the knights’ behaviour. There were serving trulls, who would be caught and tupped before the night was over, and a wet nurse sitting by the fire with someone’s babe, but no woman of quality to put a curb chain on the revels, for this was war and even if the entire court travelled with the King, the Queen and her women did not.
He dropped the fish and wiped his fingers on his tunic front; he thought the sweet taste was less to do with spices and cooking than incipient rot, which echoed the entire court as far as he was concerned.
He watched the great Sir Giles, scarred paladin of the first rank, his red jupon with its silver grail-cups stained with meat juice and his own piss, glowering at the fiery de Bohun nephew.
Young Henry’s uncle, finished with his clerk and his rank established like the big-ruffed wolf in a pack, returned to stabbing a finger at the younger Earl of Gloucester. No doubt pointing out that, as Constable of England and a veteran of the Scots wars, it should have been his right to command the Van alone and not in tandem with an inexperienced sprig of the de Clares. Politely and with due deference to rank, of course.
‘What say you, my liege lord?’ d’Argentan bellowed at the King. ‘A chivalric passage of arms on the morrow, to set the start of a glorious day?’
He spoiled the moment of it by belching and Thweng saw the droop of the royal eyelid. Bad idea to mention time to the King, he thought, since he was running out of it. They would be hard put to make it to within three leagues of Stirling by the Feast of St John the Baptist as it was and even then would have to leave all the foot and baggage behind. Delaying for a ‘passage of arms’ was not an option.
Sir Giles was too canny a court rat to argue the point, bowing graciously and then leering at Henry de Bohun. A hurrying wench, goosed by one of the Nevilles, clumsily dropped a torch and there was a furious moment of stamping, sparks and soot; a dog took the opportunity to filch Miles de Stapledon’s meat from his plate and he chased it round, bellowing and threatening until it gave up and dropped it.
Thweng, sweating in the leprous heat, looked at the mortrews and gristle on his plate, the nightlife fliers which seemed to congregate on it and wished he were somewhere else. Anywhere else.
The whole court was here, squeezed into the great ugly fortification of the Pele at Linlithgow, Longshanks’s unsubtle stake in the heart of Scotland. He had built it round a former royal residence and swallowed the church of St Michael as he did so, turning that holy place into a storehouse.
It had never been spacious or comfortable at the best of times, was less so now that the fleeing Scots had wrecked it as they had wrecked every other possible refuge and store, and so Hall struggled with Chamber.
The pantlers, cellarers, scullery and scalding house of Badlesmere’s stewardship fought for space with Chamberlain Despenser’s staff, who in turn elbowed with Charlton’s Office of the Privy Seal and ignored the growls of Brotherton’s Marshalsea, responsible for all the horses, carts and carriages that moved everyone. A hundred horses of them alone belonged to the King, forty of which were prime destriers.
I have two, Thweng thought moodily. Both of them cost a small manor apiece and the chances are that one or both will be ruined by the time this affair is over. He wished, again, that he was somewhere else.
For all the excitement and freedom this campaigning threw up, Edward also wanted to be somewhere else and would have been surprised to find that he and Sir Marmaduke Thweng were more alike than either of them imagined — they were both, at heart, country knights who preferred building a wall than coping with the backstabbing, fervid hothouse of intrigues that was the court.
It did not help that the clerics were carping on and on about the missing banners of Beverley and St Cuthbert and the grate of it was thrumming on Edward’s nerves; he could hear those two old farts, the Bishops Ely and Winchester, discussing it.
‘I am sure the Lord will overlook it,’ Bishop Sandale of Winchester said, but the fish-eyed stare he had back from John Hothum, Bishop of Ely, gave lie to it.
‘The Lord sees all,’ Hothum grunted, worrying at the remains of a bone. The weight of his ornate robes made sweat bead his brow — he did not need to wear them, but liked the trappings of his Treasury office; more than that, he liked people to see his power and none more so than the Chancellor Bishop of Ely.
‘It might still be possible to fetch the Beverley,’ Sandale offered hesitantly. ‘A fast rider …’
‘The Lord is not fooled.’
The voice was a thin rasp, like a nail on slate, the speaker swathed in black and white. Like a magpie, Edward thought sourly, looking at the Pope’s envoy, the Dominican Father Arnaud.
‘So the damage is done?’ he snapped and saw the Dominican’s tonsured head raise up, the fat little currant nose twitch like a coney. It was a plump, friendly, avuncular face and a lie; this was the Pope’s best Inquisitor and you had to tread carefully for he had flames in those blackcurrant eyes.
He had come with a party of Clement V’s Inquisitors — Dieudonné, Abbot of Lagny, and Sicard de Vaur, Canon of Narbonne — complete with finger-wag abjuration on how, despite there being no torture permitted under England’s Common Law, King Edward had better not interfere with the Church’s treatment of heretics. God willed it.
The combination of Pope and French King was too strong for Edward to oppose and he had been forced to relinquish the Templars he held into the grip of the Church. Now matters had changed and Edward was warmed by a secret smile he never allowed to get to his lips: Clement was dead and the cardinals couldn’t agree. There was no Pope. Sede vacante.
That will teach the Church to preach to me …
‘Do you preach so, Father Arnaud?’ he persisted, fired by the wine and moment. ‘As your late master did regarding heretics?’
‘The Holy See and the Inquisition have saved the lands of the west from heresies, my lord king,’ the Dominican replied. ‘I humbly offer that I have had a small part in this great work.’
‘You give yourself too little credit,’ Edward answered. ‘If you mean by “saved” that you have reduced the tax-paying tenants of France, you are correct. Though a little late for some, it seems, if you believe Grand Master de Molay was in league with the Devil.’
‘He was,’ Arnaud said, his voice rising. ‘And your lands are as palsied with such. Must be cleansed. God wills it.’
‘God forbid it,’ Edward snapped back, thinking what a sadistic child this new Inquisition was, a vicious dangerous toddler, petulant and prideful. Then he twisted his mouth in vicious smile. ‘I would concentrate on France, priest, where it seems a heretic’s curse can bring down king and Pope both.’
‘Of course,’ interrupted the smooth blandness of Sandale, sensing the banked fires rising in the Dominican, ‘His Grace the King is always cognizant of the decisions of the Pope regarding such matters. Even kings avow the necessity of bringing God’s Kingdom to fruition on earth.’
‘As your father acknowledged,’ Arnaud added to the King, smiling sweet as rot, ‘when he oathed himself to another Crusade. The holy places of Outremer must be returned to us.’
The implication of Edward taking on the role was clear and the King’s eye was jaundiced when he stared at Sandale; the Bishop wished the Dominican had taken a vow of silence.