London - Edward Rutherfurd [159]
But watching the young men as they were found guilty, and knowing what was to follow, he could not help feeling a pang of remorse. “They did a terrible thing,” he muttered. “But even so. Poor devils.”
Then he had seen Silversleeves.
He did not hurry, or make a scene. Carefully making his way through the throng, he came up to the long-nosed young man trying so uselessly to ignore him, sidled close until his beard was brushing Pentecost’s ear, and gently whispered: “You’re slime. You know that, don’t you?” He saw the scarlet blush start across the youth’s pale cheek. “You’re a murderer too, as much as them. But you’re worse. Because they’re going to die and you aren’t, Judas. You’re too much of a coward.” He saw Silversleeves stiffen. “Slime,” he whispered again, softly, then moved away.
Pentecost stayed to see the hanging. In a near daze, he forced himself, with fascinated horror, to watch as the three young men, all stripped, were led to the elms over whose high branches ropes were now tossed. He saw the nooses fitted, saw the three hauled up as the crowd cried out “Heave”, saw his friends’ beseeching faces contort and turn red, then purple, saw their bodies frantically kicking in the air, and saw one of their loincloths fall down pathetically. Then the three pale bodies hung limply, gyrating slowly in the faint breeze.
An hour later, when Silversleeves entered, the Exchequer court was hard at work. Normally by now the Easter session would be over, but with the extra business of the prince’s coronation there was still much to do. Grateful for something to take his mind off the executions, Pentecost made himself busy.
How quiet and normal it seemed, the scribes bent to their tablets, the faint click and murmur from the great table at the far end. Only gradually did he realize that the silence was unnatural. The scribes were studiously ignoring him. If he glanced towards them, the courtiers by the door looked awkward. He knew what it meant: it was embarrassment for a person who has just become an official outcast. He tried to take no notice, but after a while he went out. He walked about the Palace of Westminster for some time, his head bowed, trying to sort out the pictures that crowded into his mind.
His parents when he had told them. His mother, tall, pale, shocked, unable to comprehend that her son could do such a thing. His father, terrible in his silent anger, but effective in getting his son cleared. The trial. The bishop’s eyes. The bodies turning in the breeze. The silence in the Exchequer chamber.
He was finished as a cleric as long as Foliot lived, but what about the Exchequer? Was he really finished there too, all for one youthful indiscretion? It was too early to know. “Perhaps it will pass,” he murmured.
He had just come to this conclusion when, turning into a broad passage, he looked up to see two painters at work on a wall.
Many of the walls in the chambers around Westminster Hall were painted; this one consisted of a series of moral scenes from the lives of Old Testament kings and prophets. In the centre, half finished, was a single wheel.
The two painters were obviously father and son. Both were short with bandy legs, stubby hands, large round heads and solemn eyes. They gazed at him placidly as he paused to admire their work. “What is this wheel to be?” he asked.
“This is the wheel of fortune, sir,” the father replied.
“And what does that signify, fellow?”
“Why, sir, that a man may rise to fame and fortune, then just as quickly fall again. Or the other way round. It signifies that life is like a wheel, sir, always turning. And it teaches us to be humble, sir. For even when we are high, we may be brought low.”
Silversleeves nodded. Every literate man knew about the wheel of fortune. It was the Roman philosopher Boethius, much admired in contemporary schools, who, himself cast into prison after