A Dark Night Hidden (3 page)

‘No, it wasn’t the Rhine.’ Howell was scratching his head in an apparent effort to help his memory along. ‘What
was
it, now?’

‘The Danube,’ Father Edgar said quietly. ‘If you relate correctly what you were told and King Richard was indeed taken near to Vienna, then the river in question is undoubtedly the Danube.’

There were nods of satisfaction, quickly curtailed as the four men realised that knowing where the King was did not in fact do much to help him regain his freedom.

‘What do they
want
?’ Hugh burst out. ‘I mean, I know there were stories that King Richard didn’t always see eye to eye with the other captains of the West out there in Outremer, but to take him captive! As I say, why? What’s it
for
?’

‘Money,’ Father Edgar said. ‘I may be wrong, Howell, but I imagine there is – or there will be – a ransom demand.’

‘I know nothing about a ransom,’ Howell said stiffly, looking at the priest with an affronted expression as if the despicable idea had originated with him.

‘But there will be a demand of some sort, I’m certain,’ Josse said heatedly. ‘That will be what those devils are after, that and the terrible humiliation they impose on the King of England by walling him up inside one of their foul dungeons!’

‘Oh, it is not to be borne!’ wailed Hugh. ‘Dear God above, what are we to do? What is England to do?’

Josse, Hugh and Father Edgar all looked at Howell, who shrugged and, flushing, muttered, ‘Don’t ask me!’

There was a short silence as the four men reflected on the King’s fate. Then, turning to Father Edgar, Josse said, ‘I have an idea, Father, that this frightful action is in violation of the Truce of God?’

The priest nodded. ‘My thoughts run to the same conclusion,’ he agreed. ‘Will these wretches stop at nothing?’

‘What is this truce?’ Howell asked.

Father Edgar explained. ‘In essence, the Truce of God protects the person and property of a man whilst he is absent on crusade, and those who violate it run the grave risk of excommunication.’

‘Excommunication!’ someone – Howell or Hugh, Josse was not sure – breathed softly. Then there was utter, horrified silence as the men reflected on what that meant.

After some time, Hugh cleared his throat and said, ‘The Queen will take this hard, God bless her.’

‘Aye,’ Josse agreed.

‘She’s not so young as she was,’ Howell said lovingly. ‘It fair tears at my heart, to think of her spending her Christmas alone at Westminster with all her loved ones far away. And oh, how I feel for her, that she must bear this new burden.’

‘Old she may be,’ the priest put in, ‘but she still has her fortitude.’

‘She’ll be needing it,’ Hugh muttered.

It was interesting, Josse thought, how all of them knew without asking that when Hugh had referred to the Queen, he meant Queen Eleanor, the King’s mother, and not Berengaria, his wife. To be fair to Berengaria, she had not yet even set foot in the realm in which she was to reign as Richard’s queen, so it was no reflection on her that the people took little notice of her. Eleanor, determined that a suitable bride be found for her favourite son, had fetched Berengaria from her native Navarre and hurried out to the Mediterranean in pursuit of the crusading bridegroom. She had caught up with him in Sicily, where Berengaria had ceremonially been handed over, and the royal couple’s nuptials had subsequently been performed in Cyprus. Since then, Berengaria had been in Outremer with Richard; exactly where she was now was not certain. But she was not in England.

It was hardly surprising that Eleanor remained queen to the English; they had known her and loved her for almost forty years.

‘She’ll be suffering, aye, there can be no doubt of it,’ Hugh sighed.

‘She will take comfort, as always, in the help and the strong support of God,’ Father Edgar said gently. ‘He has seen her through many trials and will not desert her in this one.’

‘Amen,’ the others murmured.

But she knows what it is to be a prisoner, Josse thought. And, knowing Richard as she does, she will fully comprehend his suffering.

Poor soul.

Eleanor, Josse was recalling, had also borne the heavy burden of imprisonment. In her case, her captor had been her own husband, Henry II of England. Tiring at last of his wife’s tendency to plot against him with his own sons, the late King had had her shut away under close guard, mainly at Winchester, on and off for fifteen years.

Aye. Queen Eleanor would likely suffer along with anyone wrongly imprisoned. What she must be feeling on her beloved son’s account hardly bore thinking about.

Josse stirred from his reverie, realising that Howell was speaking once more.

‘ . . . said that she wanted to go and find him, straight away, like, only her sense of duty is such a force in her that she knew she couldn’t. Who would guard England and Richard’s throne if he were imprisoned and she went to fetch him home?’

‘Thank God for a Queen who knows her duty,’ Hugh said piously.

And, once more, the others all said, ‘Amen.’

There was not a great deal more talk that night. Howell had run fairly quickly to the end of his real news; what followed was mainly conjecture and speculation, and the latter became increasingly wild as the night went on.

In the end, the priest had tactfully suggested that the others join him in prayer, and then they had gone their separate ways to bed.

Josse woke to a bright day, with a weak but determined February sun sparking flashes of light off the frost.

He knew where he would go that day. He had been dreaming of Queen Eleanor, and it seemed that he witnessed her distress. Then he became aware of another figure, although it remained in the shadows and he could not identify it.

His waking mind, however, knew who it was.

He thought of that person now, of how her kind heart and the forbidden pride that remained in her loved and treasured the special relationship with the Queen. How she would welcome the Queen when she visited, cosset her, listen to her, tentatively and tactfully offer what comfort she felt the Queen would accept.

Ah yes, but she would be needed now! For, if Eleanor could make the time, then this was one place to which she would surely go.

As he took the first meal of the day with Hugh and the household, Josse announced that today he must depart. When Ysabel asked if he would return to New Winnowlands, his manor in Kent, he said no, not straight away.

‘I am bound for Hawkenlye Abbey,’ he explained.

Where, he added silently to himself, I shall seek out the Abbess Helewise and indulge myself in the pleasure of a very long talk with her.

Hawkenlye Abbey, serene and quiet under the hard, pale blue sky, did not at first glance look like a place in which wild and destructive emotions were running free. The stone walls stood stout, protecting those within in a strong embrace, yet, by day at least, the wooden gates were always open and admission was offered to those who came to lay their burdens, their sickness of mind, body or soul, on the Abbey’s patient and caring nuns and monks.

It was the winter season, and the trees whose branches protected the Abbey were bare. Nature was asleep and nothing grew; even the plants that thrived so well in the herb garden under Sister Tiphaine’s experienced hands were little more than dry twigs.

Behind the Abbey, its perpetual dark backdrop, the great Wealden Forest brooded. Here too the trees were skeletal, the majority of leafless deciduous specimens interspersed with a smaller number of yew, juniper and holly that broke up the uniform greyness of bare branches with dots and splashes of deep green. The forest was a forbidding place, a secret world of myth and rumour; some said that the faint tracks that wound through it, twisting this way and that, had been made by the Romans seeking iron ore. Some said they had been made by people far more ancient than that, people who, it was whispered, were barely human . . .

Those who spent their lives within the Abbey’s protecting walls spared scarcely a thought for their silent neighbour. The life of prayer and of service was hard, and nuns whose days began in the darkness before dawn and ended, exhausting hours later, with a very welcome sleep on a straw mattress, had few free moments in which to ponder on the nature of who, or what, might be found within the forest. Most of Hawkenlye’s nuns and monks were content merely to accept that it was
there
and leave it at that.

Most of them.

The very few exceptions had the good sense to keep their thoughts – their wanderings – to themselves.

Totally in keeping with the Abbey’s air of serenity was the absorbed figure of Sister Phillipa. Despite the cold, she sat in the meagre shelter afforded by a secluded corner of the cloister where, with fingerless mittens on her hands, she was engaged in painting an illuminated manuscript.

To be accurate, she was working on a practice piece. She had prepared an old scrap of parchment, a decent-sized cutting left over from someone else’s earlier work, on which that same someone had tried out pigments and styles of lettering. Sister Phillipa was doing her very best work, the letters bold, stylish and even, the tiny painting – of a bramble, showing leaf, blossom, berry and prickle – delicate yet vivid. She knew she was on trial and, if she passed, that she might very well be granted the great honour of producing a herbal.

More than that she had not been told and did not dare to ask. It was not her place, a nun who had but six months ago taken her perpetual vows and was hence one of the youngest of the fully professed, to question anything that the great Abbess Helewise said. Or, in this case, did not say. What did it matter, anyway? The wonderful thing for Sister Phillipa was that, after so long – only three years, perhaps, but it felt like a lifetime! – she was once again engaged on the work she loved. And for which – yes, it was boastful, prideful, and she would have to confess and do penance but, despite all that, it was the
truth
! – she had a rare talent.

She had become aware of that talent at a young age. Perhaps been made aware of it expressed it better, for, isolated little girl that she had been, she had unthinkingly assumed that every small child drew and painted with the fluency given to her. It had been her father – gentle, learned, head-in-the-clouds Gwydo – who had lovingly pointed out the error: ‘You’re an artist, Philly, and no mistake. You’ve inherited what skills I possess, and to those you add something very special that belongs just to you.’

He had taught her everything he knew. With no wife – Phillipa’s mother had died of the dreaded childbed fever a month after giving birth to her only child – his little daughter had been the sole recipient of his love. They had lived close in their little hut, father and daughter, each content in the other and in the beauty of the work at which both were so talented. Artist and visionary, Gwydo had tried to put his daydreams and his nightmares into his pictures. When pigment and parchment proved too small a vessel to contain his soaring imagination, he had been known to fling his materials against the wall of the hut in a fury that temporarily blinded him. Phillipa feared only for him when the ill humour took him; aware of the depths of his love for her, she knew him to be incapable of hurting her and so never feared for herself.

With growing dread, Phillipa had watched as Gwydo’s health began to fail. A lifetime of poverty – his work was beautiful beyond compare, but what use was that if nobody knew of it and presented themselves with purses full of gold to buy it? – and of sitting hunched and cold over his work while his concave stomach burned and rolled with hunger had undermined him. When sickness came to the village, Gwydo nursed his feverish daughter with a tenderness that spoke deeply of his love for her. Succumbing himself just as she was returning, thanks to him, to strength and health, he had little in reserve with which to combat the disease.

He died two days later.

Phillipa, shocked, grieving, weeping and shaking, had nobody in the world to turn to. Gwydo had been her life and, so far as the future was concerned, she had vaguely imagined continuing to work alongside him and taking over when he could no longer work. Now he was gone, there was no money and nothing, other than her and Gwydo’s materials, to sell. Since nobody in the village had any use for those, it looked as if Phillipa would starve.

They told her to go to Hawkenlye. Still deep in her mourning, she obeyed. Initially the nuns received her only as a patient, skilfully drawing her lost mind back as they healed her weak, half-starved body. The impulse to become one of them, to enter the Hawkenlye community as a postulant, had grown on her but slowly, at first dismissed as an emotional response that grew out of her gratitude. But then, praying with the sisters, lapping up the love and the care that they daily offered to her, she started to think it might be more than that. She understood – or thought she did – that their limitless devotion, pouring from them, used up yet constantly replenished, had a source: it came from God. After six months she had made up her mind and she entered the community the following week.

Postulants and novices were not allowed to do work of a specialist nature; before there could be any question of that, they had to learn what it was to be a nun. Phillipa did her share of cleaning, pot-scrubbing, bandage-washing, laundry, herb gathering, weeding, vegetable scraping and cooking. She also prayed, more frequently and at greater length than ever before, and as she did so, learned to love the peace and the power of the Abbey church and the presence of the Lord within it.

She took the first of her vows after a year, her perpetual vows two years after that. Then, at the interview with Abbess Helewise which all of the newly professed must face, she was asked that astonishing question: ‘At what, Sister Phillipa, are you best? Where, would you say, do your talents lie?’