“Perhaps not. I’ll look into their eyes when I ask them, and that may tell me all I need to know.”
“Even that may not be possible.”
“I want to try, Mother!”
She sighed. “The monk was the prior of Kingsbridge.”
“Philip!”
“No, not Philip. This was before Philip’s time. It was his predecessor, James.”
“But he’s dead.”
“I told you it might not be possible to question them.”
Jack narrowed his eyes. “Who were the others?”
“The knight was Percy Hamleigh, the earl of Shiring.”
“William’s father!”
“Yes.”
“He’s dead, too!”
“Yes.”
Jack had a terrible feeling that all three would turn out to be dead men, and the secret buried with their bones. “Who was the priest?” he said urgently.
“His name was Waleran Bigod. He’s now the bishop of Kingsbridge.”
Jack gave a sigh of profound satisfaction. “And he’s still alive,” he said.
Bishop Waleran’s castle was finished at Christmas. William Hamleigh and his mother rode to it on a fine morning early in the new year. They saw it from a distance, across the valley. It was at the highest point of the opposite ridge, overlooking the surrounding countryside with a forbidding regard.
As they crossed the valley they passed the old palace. It was now used as a storehouse for fleeces. Income from wool was paying for much of the new castle.
They trotted up the gentle slope on the far side of the valley and followed the road through a gap in the earth ramparts and across a deep dry moat to a gateway in a stone wall. With ramparts, a moatanda stone wall, this was a highly secure castle, superior to William’s own and to many of the king’s.
The inner courtyard was dominated by a massive square keep three stories high which dwarfed the stone church that stood alongside it. William helped his mother dismount. They left their knights to stable the horses and mounted the steps that led to the hall.
It was midday, and in the hall Waleran’s servants were preparing the table. Some of his archdeacons, deans, employees and hangers-on were standing around waiting for dinner. William and Regan waited while a steward went up to the bishop’s private quarters to announce their arrival.
William was burning inside with a fierce, agonizing jealousy. Aliena was in love, and the whole county knew it. She had given birth to a love child, and her husband had thrown her out of his house. With her baby in her arms, she had gone off to look for the man she loved, and had found him after searching half of Christendom. The story was being told and retold all over southern England. It made William sick with hatred every time he heard it. But he had thought of a way to get revenge.
They were taken up the stairs and shown into Waleran’s chamber. They found him sitting at a table with Baldwin, who was now an archdeacon. The two clerics were counting money on a checkered cloth, building the silver pennies into piles of twelve and moving them from black squares to white. Baldwin stood up and bowed to Lady Regan, then quickly put away the cloth and the coins.
Waleran got up from the table and went to the chair by the fire. He moved quickly, like a spider, and William felt the old familiar loathing. Nevertheless he resolved to be unctuous. He had heard recently of the dreadful death of the earl of Hereford, who had quarreled with the bishop of Hereford and died in a state of excommunication. His body had been buried in unconsecrated ground. When William imagined his own body lying in undefended earth, vulnerable to all the imps and monsters that inhabited the underworld, he shook with fright. He would never quarrel withhisbishop.
Waleran was as pale and thin as ever, and his black robes hung on him like laundry drying on a tree. He never seemed to change. William knew that he himself had changed. Food and wine were his principal pleasures, and each year he grew a little stouter, despite the active life he led, so that the expensive chain mail that had been made for him when he turned twenty-one had been replaced twice over in the succeeding seven years.
Waleran was just back from York. He had been away for almost half a year, and William politely asked him: “Did you have a successful trip?”
“No,” he replied. “Bishop Henry sent me there to attempt to resolve a four-year-old dispute over who is to be archbishop of York. I failed. The row goes on.”
The less said about that the better, William thought. He said: “While you’ve been away, there have been a lot of changes here. Especially at Kingsbridge.”
“At Kingsbridge?” Waleran was surprised. “I thought that problem had been solved once and for all.”
