London (50 page)

But the true account of those years, though a little more complex, is even more interesting. And it took place, mostly, in London.

News travelled quickly wherever he went. Already that August morning a little crowd had gathered in a semicircle before the fine new gateway to await his coming. No one was more excited than the boy standing at the front.

David Bull looked much as his father Sampson had at thirteen: fair, broad-faced, with a ruddy complexion and bright blue eyes that were now shining with excitement.

Before him stood the gateway to the Temple. Of all the religious houses whose great walled compounds were arising throughout the city, none were more splendid than those of the two crusading orders. These military religious organizations serviced the logistical needs of the Holy War. To the north of Smithfield were the Knights of St John, who were responsible for the hospitals; here, on the slopes above the Thames, about halfway along the lane that ran westwards from St Bride’s to the Aldwych, lay the precincts of the powerful order that arranged the great convoys of money and supplies, the Knights Templar. Through the gateway could be seen their stout stone church, recently built and instantly recognizable because, like all Templar churches, it was not rectangular but round. And from this church, at any moment, the greatest hero in Christendom was going to emerge: King Richard the Lionheart.

In every age the warrior has been a hero. In recent decades, however, a subtle change had begun to permeate the world of the knight. The crusades had given him a religious calling; the new Continental pastime of jousting had added pageantry; now, from the warm, southern, French-speaking courts of Provence and Aquitaine had come a fashion for ballads and tales of courtly love, together with sophisticated manners new to the northern world. The perfect knight of this new dispensation was warrior, pilgrim and lover. He prayed to the Blessed Virgin, yet the lady in her bower was his Holy Grail. He jousted, and sang too. It was a heady mixture: religious, gallant, erotic. It was the dawn of the age of chivalry, whose fullest expression would be the tales of the legendary King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, now being translated for the first time from Latin and French into English.

And Richard the Lionheart was the new age’s champion.

Brought up in his mother’s cultivated court in Aquitaine, he could compose a lyric as well as any minstrel. He loved to joust and was a formidable warrior, siege expert and castle-builder. Even those closest to him, who knew he could be vain and cruel, acknowledged that he had unrivalled style and charm, as well as the gift of command. Soon, in response to the pleas of the Templars and others valiantly holding out against the Saracens in the Holy Land, he would depart upon that most sacred of all knightly adventures, the new crusade.

The crusade. Even the old jealousy between the King of France and the Plantagenets was to be shelved. The King of France and Richard were to crusade together as brothers. There was an added, mystic quality about the English king’s expedition, for it was said he was to carry the ancient sword of King Arthur, the magical Excalibur itself, upon his journey.

It was a time to rejoice. The old king’s last years had been sad. The outcry over Becket had increased until finally poor Henry had gone in penance to be publicly whipped at Canterbury. Becket had even been made a saint. Then Henry’s beloved mistress, the Fair Rosamund, had died. His wife and children had turned against him; two of his sons, including the heir, had died. But these sad times were over, and now heroic Richard had come to England to be crowned.

All London shared in the excitement. Looking past the Temple precincts to the River Thames beyond, David could see a flotilla of seagoing vessels that were to take an adventurous party of Londoners – not noblemen, but the sons of merchant families like his own – on the king’s crusade. No wonder, then, that everyone was anxious to catch sight of the hero.

Now the church door was opening. A cheer went up as, accompanied by only six knights, a tall, well-built figure in a cloak of blue and gold stepped quickly into the sunlight, which gleamed upon his golden hair. With a firm, athletic step he strode to his horse and, scarcely troubling to rest his foot on the squire who bent to help him mount, swung himself easily into the saddle and rode towards the gate.

David Bull was aware only of a hard, Plantagenet face. Until a tiny piece of magic occurred. Passing through the gateway, Richard the Lionheart briefly rested his gaze upon the little crowd. Seeing the boy, almost without thinking he looked straight into his eyes and smiled. Then, knowing full well that by this simple ruse the youth was now his for life, he clapped his heels to his horse, and rode away towards Westminster.

It was a full minute later that David Bull, gazing after him, murmured to himself: “I’m going with him. I must go on crusade.” Then, thinking of his father’s awful fury: “Uncle Michael will help me. He’ll speak to Father.”

Half an hour later an observer standing on London Bridge might have noticed a curiously dismal sight. A long-nosed man on a piebald palfrey was leading an elegantly mounted lady and two packhorses over the quiet waters of the Thames and into the city of London. The man was Pentecost Silversleeves. The lady was Ida, the widow of a knight, and despite herself she had just started to weep, which was not surprising, since she was about to be sold.

As she looked at the city before her, it seemed to Ida that the world had turned to stone. The great walled enclosure of London seemed like a vast prison. On the left, she could see the thickset stone fort by Ludgate. On the right, down by the waterside, the grey, square mass of the Tower, surly even in repose. All stone. Over the two low hills of London covered with houses loomed the dark, high, narrow line of Norman St Paul’s, dreary and forbidding. Even in the water beside her she noticed, as she glanced sideways over the wooden parapet, that they had started to build massive piers for a new bridge which, she rightly guessed, would also be made of stone. And now, as the horses’ hooves clip-clopped softly on the wooden bridge in the morning quiet, the sound of a striking bell came over the water with a solemn, sullen sound as though it, too, were made of stone, to summon stony hearts to stony prayer.

Ida was thirty-three. She was the daughter of a knight, the widow of a knight, and everything about her proclaimed her to be so. Below her stiff headdress her dark brown hair was fastened in a bun and covered by a wimple. Behind her veil was a long, handsome face. Beneath her broad-sleeved, trailing gown was a slim, pale body with small breasts and long legs. She had always known, modestly but definitively, that she was a lady. So why was it that no one, not even King Richard, seemed to care? For, on the king’s orders, this long-nosed clerk was taking her to be married to a vulgar merchant about whom she knew nothing except that his name was Sampson Bull.

“Can’t you tell me anything about him?” she had impatiently demanded of Silversleeves the day before.

After a little thought, he had only replied: “They say he has a very bad temper.”

How could they treat her this way? The reason was very simple. Thanks to the good management of his father, King Richard the Lionheart was one of the richest monarchs in Christendom – certainly far richer than his rival, the King of France. But a crusade was a costly business. When, two years before, the Pope had proclaimed the Third Crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslim ruler Saladin, King Henry II had levied a special tax, the Saladin tithe. But even that was not enough, and before his arrival King Richard had informed his Exchequer that it must raise all the cash it could.

Richard, as it happened, had hardly set foot in England before. “Frankly,” he told his inner circle, “England seems wet and dull. But,” he cheerfully added, “we love it for the huge income it yields us.”

In the summer of 1189, therefore, everything was for sale: sheriffdoms, trading privileges, tax exemptions. “If you can find me a buyer,” he remarked, “I’ll sell London itself.” Amongst the king’s assets were numerous heiresses and widows, who, through the accidents of feudal vassalage, were his to protect and to bestow as he saw fit. This meant that when cash was urgently needed, he could sell these aristocratic ladies to the highest bidders.

Silversleeves understood his new king’s needs perfectly. Ida was the seventh widow he had ferreted out and sold within the space of less than six weeks. He was proud of this transaction. Ida was poor. She brought no estate with her. If Pentecost had not known that the rich widower Bull was looking for a noble wife, Ida would probably have been unsaleable. Now, however, because her impending marriage would help pay for the Third Crusade, Pentecost could turn and, seeing her tears, coolly remark: “Never mind, madam. At least you’re being sold in a good cause.”

It was a short while later, as they passed into the West Cheap and rode down the line of gaily coloured stalls, that Ida received the final shock. Just before they drew level with the little Norman church of St Mary-le-Bow, Silversleeves turned to her and, indicating a group of merchants by the church door, remarked: “That’s him. The one in red.” And then Ida, seeing the coarse, red face and heavy-set frame of her future husband, fainted.

As the bystanders revived her, Pentecost watched idly, but his mind had already strayed from the luckless young widow. There were much more important things – urgent things – to occupy his thoughts, the chief of which was his own career.

On the surface, his prospects looked bright for the first time in twenty years. Not only was his old enemy King Henry at last removed from the scene, but something else quite wonderful and unexpected had occurred. He had found a patron.

William Longchamp was a self-made man. Tough, efficient, deeply ambitious, he had already risen high in the service of the Plantagenets and acquired great wealth. At the time he had met Silversleeves he was contemplating his next big move, and he needed a creature to serve him who would be entirely dependent on his good will.

It had always puzzled Pentecost that, however hard he tried, his superiors at the Exchequer had never seemed to trust him. When Longchamp had suddenly taken him up, therefore, he had been as much amazed as delighted. “If I serve him well,” he eagerly told his wife, “he could make us rich.” Not that he was poor. His father having died some years ago, Pentecost was in possession of a large fortune. But he also had a large and increasingly determined wife as well as three children who, though the eldest was only sixteen, were already anxiously enquiring about the size of their inheritance. The news he had heard the day before from his patron was thus exciting indeed. “Longchamp is going to be Chancellor of England,” he had told his family. “He’s having to pay the king a huge price for the office, but the deal’s as good as done.” His wife had kissed him. “And just think what he can do for us then,” the children had cried as they clapped their hands.

There was only one problem. Richard the Lionheart would be crowned in less than ten days. Soon afterwards, he would leave his kingdom to depart upon his heroic crusade to the Holy Land. But would he ever return? Many thought not. The mortality rate for crusaders was high. Whilst many died fighting, still more died of disease or accidents on the long and perilous journey to the East. And even if he lived, what would he be returning to? As Silversleeves considered this, he did not like it.

The situation in the Plantagenet empire was complex. There had been three candidates for King Henry’s vast inheritance: Richard, his brother John, and their nephew, Arthur. Richard had inherited the entire bulk of the empire, Arthur had been given the ancient land of Brittany, but John, dark and hard to know, had only received some rich estates, including parts of the west of England, in return for a promise to stay out of the island kingdom while his brother was away. Worse yet, from John’s point of view, was that if Richard died without a son, the whole empire was to pass not to him but to the boy Arthur.

It was dangerous. No question. An empty kingdom. A discontented brother. There were other factors, too, that needed taking into account. As Silversleeves ran these over in his mind, he decided he liked the situation even less.

But of one thing he was certain. Whatever treachery lay ahead, he was not going to be on the wrong side. The vision of the preferment he had once dreamed of was rising before his eyes. He was going to be careful. Very careful. “And,” he reassured his wife later that morning, “I shall do whatever I have to.”

It was early afternoon when Sister Mabel entered St Paul’s cathedral for her usual visit to her confessor. Today, for once, she had something to confess.

Ever since her vision years ago, Mabel had known that the Devil had plans for poor Brother Michael, and perhaps for her too. As for her, she had of course been aware of her friend as a man, but the monk’s austere ways had always set him apart. Now, however, when the serpent had come, he had been so cunning, and so quick, that he had caught her unawares.

It had been a Saturday morning, the day of the horse fair, and Smithfield was crowded. She and Brother Michael had walked round, admiring the horses in the pens, and were just making their way back to the hospital when suddenly there was a cry of alarm, followed by a woman’s scream. Turning to look, they saw a large, bay stallion careering through the scattering people. A second later he had broken into a gallop and was coming straight towards them. It did not take Brother Michael long to think. Throwing himself into the horse’s path, he caught the bridle. At first, the stallion ploughed on. Two other men joined him. There were more cries, confusion, a ripping sound. A few moments later, his cassock almost entirely ripped off, Brother Michael led the stallion back across Smithfield, grinning like a boy.

And then she realized she had never seen his body before. She had thought of him as tall and thin, but here, laughing merrily and casting the tattered cassock from him, was an athletic, well-built man as perfectly proportioned as any she had seen. With a recognition that hit her suddenly and almost physically, she murmured: “Lord God but he’s beautiful.”