Falconer and the Death of Kings (2 page)

It would be fully a week before William Falconer found himself back in Oxford. The snow lay heavily on the ground, hampering his journey back to his duties as regent master at the university. And he was to return alone. Saphira would not return with him. She had received a message from her son Menahem urgently requesting her presence in France to sort out a problem with the Le Veske wine business. As Jews, Saphira Le Veske and her son had a rather precarious existence in a Christian world. In England, Jews were supposed to deal only with the lending of money at interest, a business proscribed to Christians and therefore conveniently foisted on to the Jews. In France, matters were a little more relaxed, and when Saphira had taken over her dead husband’s finance house in Bordeaux, she had changed the emphasis of the business. Wine shipping became the undercurrent of transferring financial resources between England and France.

When her errant son had been finally convinced to take over the family business, Saphira had been able to concentrate on what had tied her to England recently. Master William Falconer. They had met, and, despite his vows of celibacy, she had made her home in Oxford. Now a simple problem with a ship’s captain in Honfleur had ruined everything. The letter demanded she take passage to France. She passed the message to William, who read it in silence. Glumly, he looked at Saphira, her glorious cap of red hair crowning her head like a fiery halo.

‘Can’t Menahem sort this out himself?’

Saphira pulled a face.

‘Don’t make this harder than it already is, William. You can see he says that he must stay in La Réole at present. And I am closer to Honfleur than he is.’

‘And a whole dangerous stretch of water stands in your way.’

Saphira tilted her head back and laughed out loud, the chimes of her voice echoing down the gloomy corridors of the palace.

‘You are being like a protective and overbearing husband.’

Falconer was getting angry without realizing it. Simply because Saphira spoke the truth, it did not make her chiding any more bearable. He returned truth for unpalatable truth.

‘And I am just a celibate teacher in holy orders who has no rights over you, I suppose.’

Now Saphira was seeing red.

‘Of course you have no
rights
over me, William.’

Suddenly, the natural chill of the room seemed to strike to Falconer’s heart. The woman was correct. He was a regent master of Oxford University in holy orders. He could not marry without losing his position and everything he had cherished for twenty years. True, each new bunch of students that had arrived in recent years seemed to annoy him more and more with their ignorance. But he still loved his role as their teacher and mentor, didn’t he? When Saphira had put in an appearance and diverted him from his daily tasks, he had managed to find a place for her. They met when they could, and were discreet about their amorous activities. What more could he offer?

He looked over at her as she began to pack her chest with her best dresses. She was worth every risk he took with the security of his post at the university. And their time away from Oxford over the last few weeks had been… exceptional. It had all come about because she had given Falconer a curiosity: a skystone with reputed healing powers. King Henry had got to know about it and had summoned Falconer to his court at Westminster. Falconer had persuaded Saphira to accompany him, and they had taken lodgings together. Perhaps that had been the problem. He thought maybe she now expected him to live with her permanently. Something that was an impossibility. Though she had said nothing more, and these thoughts had been all in his own mind, he found he was ever more annoyed with her. The trouble was he had already forgotten what the original argument was about. In fact, he got everything back to front.

‘Why can’t you just do as I say for once?’

Saphira looked at him, her emerald eyes shafting him like daggers. But she said nothing, merely sighing and returning to her packing. Falconer stormed out of the room in disgust. It was only when he was halfway down the gloomy corridor that led towards the king’s chamber that he began to feel like one of his own students after a prank had gone wrong. Foolish and contrite, but with no way back without being humiliated. He stood beside one of the tall candles that barely lit the passageway, picking at the runnels of wax, and groaned.

Sicily

Edward sat at the banqueting table, staring disconsolately at the lavish spread before him. His host, Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, had laid on an extravagant feast, served in the highest of modern style. Each person at the table had their own page standing behind each chair. After Edward had sat down, the page had placed the salt at his right hand and a trencher of dry bread at his left. Then a knife had appeared at his left elbow, along with a spoon wrapped in a linen cloth. Edward had disgraced himself. When the soup bowls had been served, he had raised his to his lips and drunk in the old manner. It was only when he looked around that he saw that everyone else, including Eleanor, was using the spoon to ladle the soup up to their lips. He had blushed, but no one professed to have noticed his mistake. Charles eventually clapped, and the servants brought cooked heron and crane. Then their host had thrown up his hands in delight at the arrival of the central feature of the table. It was greyish meat that Charles had proudly explained was porpoise. Edward’s stomach had heaved at the thought, but he had smiled politely, if a little wanly.

He had still not recovered fully from the attack of the Assassin months earlier. He had been close to death for days, as the poison had slowly entered his body. The places where the blade had entered his body had gradually turned black, and finally his physician had insisted that he must cut away the poisoned flesh. Edward had groaned and acquiesced. The pain had been excruciating, and he would have rather faced the slashes of a horde of attacking Mohammedans than the probing slices of the surgeon. He had been bound up, and laid in a daze on his bed for weeks.

‘Come, eat, Edward. You look somewhat pale.’

Charles’s loud and stentorian voice dragged him back to the present. But not soon enough to prevent a shudder of horror racking his body as he recalled the attack and the subsequent butchery perpetrated on his body. Eleanor, his wife who sat at his side, knew what was troubling him. She gently squeezed his arm – the one that still bore the scars of his surgeon’s work – and slid a bread trencher in front of him.

‘The crane is a delicious and delicate meat, darling. I will eat some too.’

She slid her hand from his arm and touched her belly. He wondered if she was pregnant again. God knows, she was often enough. Edward counted up the score in his head. In the last eighteen years, Eleanor had given him eight children. And five were already dead, including his eldest son and one-time heir, John. Little Joan had been born in Acre and was not yet a year old. Could she be with child again? The trouble was, she was irresistible. He touched her golden hair, neatly arranged under her fashionable snood. Soon enough he would see it loosened and spread across their pillow. His loins stirred, and he squirmed in his seat. Eleanor’s big blue eyes, at once all innocence and knowingness, stared at him. She could always read his mind, and pursed her full, red lips in mock disapproval of his errant thoughts. She pushed a serving of white meat at him.

‘Crane, my dear. And try one of these coffins.’

Edward blanched a little at being offered the hard, crusty pastry. He had only just heard of the death of his father, Henry, and the thought of coffins did not sit well with his stomach. He was not yet used to the idea of being the King of England himself. For all his life, his father had been the king. It was a given, an immovable star in his firmament. Now his father lay in a coffin, and Edward was king. The thought, and that of Eleanor naked on their bed later, made him feel a lot better. He smiled and took a piece of crane in his mouth from Eleanor’s slender fingers, kissing the tips as he did so.

TWO

Oxford

T
hat winter was a harsh one, with blizzards often cutting Oxford off from its surroundings. Many people, fearful of starving, moved from the frozen countryside into the shanty-town outskirts just below the walls. Some, like the recently widowed Sir Humphrey Segrim, stuck it out in their manor houses. Burning precious stocks of wood, Segrim brooded over the murder of his wife, Ann, and huddled deeper under his fur robes. He had never really got along with his wife. She had ideas that she was better than him – ideas put in her head by that master at the university. But now she was gone, he missed her company. He could not fault her dutiful nature as mistress of the house. Nor could he quite put out of his mind the suspicion that she had had an affair with William Falconer. When her body had been found with the man kneeling beside it, he had been sure that he had killed her. Falconer’s trial had been a farce, however, and the regent master had been exonerated. But Segrim still harboured doubts about the real killer. And they grew in his isolation at Botley Manor all through the winter and into the cold New Year.

The object of Sir Humphrey Segrim’s misgivings was having a cold, miserable winter of it too. The Christmas celebrations at the university had failed to cheer him up due to the continued absence of Saphira. Even the antics of the King of Misrule – the youngest clerk at the university elected for a brief few days of sovereignty – seemed cheerless. The new chancellor, William de Bosco, stoically bore his time in the stocks at Carfax, and carols mingled in the darkening streets each evening with love songs, and tales of Nebuchadnezzar, and Pyramus and Thisbe. But for William, holed up in his attic solar in Aristotle’s Hall, his acrimonious parting with Saphira rankled. More so, because he could not work out what he had said that was wrong. Whatever she thought, he could not give up his post as regent master, which he would have to do if he was to share his life openly with her. A master who married forfeited his degree. Yet all he had suggested was that she owed him some obligations. What was wrong in that? His fevered brain was cut in on by a sudden burst of singing from the main hall of the lodgings. Those students who had not gone home for Christmas, or who had been trapped by the snow in Oxford, were enjoying themselves around the communal fire below. Falconer listened to the words, sung off-key by Peter Mithian:

‘Make we merry in hall and bower

This time was born our Saviour.’

Irritated by the happiness inherent in the singing, he called out down the stairs to those below.

‘It is a week since Christmas, and the New Year is upon us. I want some peace, and you should be studying.’

The sudden silence was palpable, and Falconer immediately regretted his outburst. He was becoming just like one of those pompous and solemn masters he ridiculed in his schools every day. Glumly, he wrapped his blanket around him and stared at Balthazar in the corner of the room. The snowy-white barn owl stared back at him unblinkingly, then, with a silent flap of his wings, flew out of the window and into the darkness. Falconer hunched even lower into his blanket and muttered an imprecation.

‘Even you desert me, bird, and leave me to my misery.’

The Feast Day of St Peter of Canterbury, the Sixth Day of January 1273

It was the week following Falconer’s uncharacteristic outburst that he received a cryptic message from France. He was teaching his students in a chilly hall in Schools Lane that a small fire was failing to heat adequately. Falconer was pacing around the room, in part to keep warm, and throwing questions at the young men who sat on benches before him. Recently, the faces before him had become a uniform blur that had nothing to do with his short-sightedness. He was finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish one young clerk from another, and one year from another. He tried to rally his enthusiasm. The text being studied was Aristotle’s
Metaphysics
, and the boys were struggling. Falconer returned to basics and picked out one boy he did know.

‘Peter, tell us about Aquinas’s interpretation of Aristotle when it comes to natural law.’

The older Mithian brother grinned. He was on safe ground here.

‘Aquinas says that natural law is based on first principles and that the first precept of the law is that good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided.’

He turned to his fellow students in triumph. His teacher, however, was not so impressed. He knew the boy was reciting something he had learned by rote. So much teaching was done this way at the university, and it frustrated him. He threw out a challenge with more of Aquinas’s thinking.

‘He also says that the desires to live and to procreate are among the most basic human values.’

The young men giggled at the thought of procreation, a concept that was often on their minds. Especially after a night spent in a local tavern drinking ale. Then a steady voice spoke up from the shadows near the street door.

‘Aquinas also says that the goal of human existence is union and eternal fellowship with God.’

Under his breath, Falconer groaned. He knew that voice.

‘Brother John Pecham, come close to the fire and tell us about your work on optics.’

The Franciscan who stepped into the yellow candlelight of the schoolroom was a small and wiry man with a strict tonsure and an even stricter-looking face. Everything about him suggested cleanliness, and even the hem of his grey habit seemed untouched by the dirty slush outside the door. He shook his head at Falconer’s invitation, knowing he was being diverted from his religious teaching deliberately. Pecham was a deeply pious man, but he also subscribed to a belief in the value of experimental science. His field was that of optics and astronomy.

‘No, Master Falconer. Let us not stray from your main thesis. Your students are misled if they believe Aquinas advocated sexual activity for its own sake. He went on to say that…’

Falconer broke in on the Franciscan friar.

‘Alexander Aspall, tell Brother Pecham what Aquinas says about non-procreative sex.’