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By Root 1760 0

not say what it was about the dream that he feared, for she did not threaten him in any way. But at night, when she came to him, the fear possessed him totally, an irrational, hysterical, blind panic. Once as a boy he had waded into a pond that suddenly got deeper, and he had found himself below the surface and unable to breathe; and the overpowering need for air that had possessed him then was one of the indelible memories of his childhood; but this was ten times as bad. Trying to get away from his mother’s bloody face was like trying to sprint in quicksand. He would come awake as if he had been thrown across the room, violently shocked, sweating and moaning, his body taut with agony from the racked-up tension. Walter would be at his bedside with a candle—William slept in the hall, separated from the men by a screen, for there was no bedroom here. “You cried out, lord,” Walter would murmur. William would breathe hard, staring at the real bed and the real wall and the real Walter, while the power of the nightmare slowly faded to the point where he was no longer afraid; and then he would say: “It was nothing, a dream, go away.” But he would be frightened to go back to sleep. And the next day the men would look at him as if he were bewitched.

A few days after his conversation with Remigius, he was sitting in the same hard chair, by the same smoky fire, when Bishop Waleran walked in.

William was startled. He had heard horses, but he had assumed it was Walter, coming back from the mill. He did not know what to do when he saw the bishop. Waleran had always been arrogant and superior, and time and time again he had made William feel foolish, clumsy and coarse. It was humiliating that Waleran should see the humble surroundings in which he now lived.

William did not get up to greet his visitor. “What do you want?” he said curtly. He had no reason to be polite: he wanted Waleran to get out as soon as possible.

The bishop ignored his rudeness. “The sheriff is dead,” he said.

At first William did not see what he was getting at. “What’s that to me?”

“There will be a new sheriff.”

William was about to say So what? but he stopped himself. Waleran was concerned about who would be the new sheriff. And he had come to talk to William about it. That could only mean one thing, couldn’t it? Hope rose in his breast, but he suppressed it fiercely: where Waleran was involved, high hopes often ended in frustration and disappointment. He said: “Who have you got in mind?”

“You.”

It was the answer William had not dared to hope for. He wished he could believe in it. A clever and ruthless sheriff could be almost as important and influential as an earl or a bishop. This could be his way back to wealth and power. He forced himself to consider the snags. “Why would King Stephen appoint me?”

“You supported him against Duke Henry, and as a result you lost your earldom. I imagine he would like to recompense you.”

“Nobody ever does anything out of gratitude,” William said, repeating a saying of his mother’s.

Waleran said: “Stephen can’t be happy that the earl of Shiring is a man who fought against him. He might want his sheriff to be a countervailing force against Richard.”

Now that made more sense. William felt excited against his will. He began to believe that he might actually get out of this hole in the ground called Hamleigh village. He would have a respectable force of knights and men-at-arms again, instead of the pitiful handful he now supported. He would preside over the county court at Shiring, and frustrate Richard’s will. “The sheriff lives at Shiring Castle,” he said longingly.

“You’d be rich again,” Waleran added.

“Yes.” Properly exploited, the sheriffs post could be hugely profitable. William would make almost as much money as he had when he was earl. But he wondered why Waleran had mentioned it.

A moment later Waleran answered the question. “You would be able to finance the new church, after all.”

So that was it. Waleran never did anything without an ulterior motive. He wanted William to be sheriff so that William could build