Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [334]
Osmund pushed his way through the circle of courtiers, stepped forward boldly and turning to the king announced:
“But I was there too, Your Majesty, when Hugh de Godefroi went away to fight, and his father cursed him at the mill and forbade him to go.”
It was a lie. But sixty years of loyalty to the knight of Avonsford made him say the words with ease.
John Wilson gazed at him in stupefaction.
“You lie,” he cried.
But on Edward’s face there was a smile of relief. Of the two, he was more inclined to believe the old mason. Besides, he wanted to.
“Say no more about Godefroi,” he snapped. “What’s your proof about this farm?”
For a moment John Wilson was shaking so hard with rage that he could not speak. It was Cristina now who touched his arm and looked pleadingly at the king. Slowly recovering himself, Wilson then drew out a sealed document and handed it to the king for his inspection. Having done this, and glared at the mason, his face relaxed and he waited confidently. This would settle it.
He was hopelessly wrong.
For the document which supported his massive fabrication of fraud and revenge, the evidence which he thought was his masterpiece, was his one terrible mistake. Indeed, it was a pathetic miscalculation that no learned man would ever have made. But John Wilson, though he was persuasive and cunning, was also illiterate.
Edward read it slowly and as he did so, his brow began to clear. Seeing this, John and Cristina looked at each other with satisfaction; obviously the king was impressed. But when he began to chuckle, their look changed to uncertainty, and when a moment later he laughed out loud, they became confused. Finally, the king without a word handed it to one of his courtiers, and in a moment the man had doubled up with mirth.
For the forgery which John Wilson had paid a poor priest – one of the band of semi-employed vicars choral who roamed about Sarum – to inscribe, was so lamentable that it was ridiculous. The deed purporting to convey the Shockley farm to Aaron and then assign it to Wilson was couched in a grotesque mixture of French, dog Latin and English that no literate cleric, or even merchant, would ever have perpetrated. The forms of transfer were wrong, it was not properly stamped or witnessed – it could not conceivably have passed through the hands of the highly educated Jew, even as an illicit transfer. Only one thing was genuine, and this was the seal of the Jew which Wilson had picked up out of the dust on Fisherton Bridge the month before.
Now Edward stopped laughing, and turning on Wilson he roared:
“Your document is a fraud, you rogue. You’re a forger. You shall go to jail!”
“But it has the Jew’s seal,” Wilson cried in alarm. “It must be real.”
“Fool! Don’t you know, a seal proves nothing?”
Wilson’s face fell. It was the seal that had given him the idea. He had put his faith in it, for he had always heard that a sealed document was absolute proof in any dispute. The fact that only a few years before, the king’s court, in considering a case of forgery like this, had very properly ruled that a seal, which could easily be mislaid or stolen should no longer constitute proof of authenticity was something of which neither he nor the miserable priest he had employed had been aware. He was trapped. He turned to Cristina in dismay and she immediately gave the king her most winning and appealing smile. Edward took no notice whatever.
“How dare you waste the king’s time and make accusations against the king’s loyal servants!” he thundered. “You shall be punished for this. Call the guard.”
In a moment John Wilson found himself surrounded by men at arms.
“Hold him under lock and key until I return,” the king ordered. And when they pointed to Cristina he added: “And her too.”
It took several hours spent in hunting before his temper improved: not only because of the way his time had been wasted, but because, despite Osmund’s defences,