London - Edward Rutherfurd [191]
Bent double with the shame and pain, he got up and left her, and shuffled like an old man to his cell.
Young David Bull completed his recovery at Bocton. He loved the old manor with its sweeping views and went for long walks round the woods and fields with his father. He read knightly tales with Ida who was at her best as mistress of the manor. Perhaps the spirits of his Bull ancestors passed on to him some of their own, solid strength. He had never known such contentment.
Nor it seemed had Ida and his father. The crisis of David’s illness, and Ida’s fury with poor Brother Michael had evidently drawn them together. As they discussed improvements to the old place, inspected the orchard or just sat on a bench in the sun, gazing over the Weald together, they seemed for the first time to have become man and wife. The subject of his father’s merchant outlook was no longer mentioned – unless it was implied when Ida promised to find David a noble wife – and this seemed to amuse the alderman rather than irritate him. And there was so much going on in the wider world that summer that the subject of the monastery was practically forgotten.
The trouble caused by treacherous Prince John seemed to have subsided. In July, the Archbishop of Rouen had concluded a peace between John and Longchamp. England was quiet again. And not only was the crusading King Richard alive and well, but reports in August announced he had married a beautiful princess who, surely, would give him the heir his loyal kingdom needed?
One day Silversleeves came from London to have a talk with the merchant, to which David listened with great interest.
“Was Richard wise to marry this princess?” Bull asked.
“On the whole,” Silversleeves replied, “I think so. She comes from Navarre, you see, which lies just south of his own Aquitaine, so by this alliance, Richard lessens the chance of the French king attacking him from that direction. I’d say it was a sound move.”
David was slightly puzzled by this. He was not a fool, but like his Saxon ancestors he liked things to be clear. Either a man was your friend or your enemy. He could not be both. “But surely,” he asked the Exchequer clerk, “King Richard and the King of France are sworn friends? They are brothers on crusade.”
Silversleeves smiled sadly. Given the vast Plantagenet empire running down France’s western flank, the kings of France and Plantagenet England could never be more than temporary friends. “He’s only Richard’s friend for the moment,” he replied.
David looked sad. “I’d die for King Richard,” he said bluntly. “Wouldn’t you?”
Silversleeves only hesitated a second before smiling and answering, “Of course. I am the king’s man.”
But, a few days later, as he was preparing to return to London, even this conversation was swept from the boy’s mind as another, truly miraculous piece of news arrived – proof, surely, that in this year of the Third Crusade God was sending a message of bright hope to the English and their valiant crusader king.
News had just come from the western abbey of Glastonbury that the monks had discovered the tomb and the remains of King Arthur and his Queen Guinevere in the ancient abbey grounds. Could any sign be clearer, or more wonderful, than that?
There was no more time. It was many years since Pentecost Silversleeves had experienced a state of panic, but now, on the afternoon of 5 October, he was near it. In his left hand was the urgent summons from his master and patron; in his right, another piece of parchment. Both were equally frightening. And both posed the awful question: which way should he jump? Still he hesitated.
The crisis had broken quite unexpectedly in mid-September, and because of it the Michaelmas session of the Exchequer had been moved fifty miles up the Thames to Oxford. But that quiet castle town, with its little community of scholars, brought no peace to Silversleeves now.
The cause of the wretched business was