Chapter 16
I
REMIGIUS WAS ARROGANT, even in penury. He entered the wooden manor house at Hamleigh village with his head held high, and looked down his long nose at the huge, roughhewn wooden crucks supporting the roof, the wattle-and-daub walls, and the chimneyless open fire in the middle of the beaten-earth floor.
William watched him walk in. I may be down on my luck, but I’m not as far down as you, he thought, noting the monk’s much-repaired sandals, the grubby robe, the unshaven chin and the unkempt hair. Remigius had never been a fat man but now he was thinner than ever. The haughty expression fixed on his face failed to conceal the lines of exhaustion or the purplish folds of defeat under his eyes. Remigius was not yet bowed, but he was very badly beaten.
“Bless you, my son,” he said to William.
William was not having any of that. “What do you want, Remigius?” he said, deliberately insulting the monk by not calling him “Father” or “Brother.”
Remigius flinched as if he had been struck. William guessed he had received a few taunts of that kind since he came down in the world. Remigius said: “The lands you gave to me as dean of the chapter at Shiring have been repossessed by Earl Richard.”
“I’m not surprised,” William replied. “Everything is to be returned to those who possessed it in the time of the old King Henry.”
“But that leaves me with no means of support.”
“You and a lot of other people,” William said carelessly. “You’ll have to go back to Kingsbridge.”
Remigius’s face paled with anger. “I can’t do that,” he said in a low voice.
“Why not?” said William, tormenting him.
“You know why not.”
“Would Philip say you shouldn’t prise secrets out of little girls? Does he think you betrayed him, by telling me where the outlaws’ hideout was? Would he be angry with you for becoming the dean of a church that was to take the place of his own cathedral? Well, then I suppose you can’t go back.”
“Give mesomething,”Remigius pleaded. “One village. A farm. A little church!”
“There are no rewards for losing, monk,” William said harshly. He was enjoying this. “In the world outside the monastery, nobody looks after you. The ducks swallow the worms, and the foxes kill the ducks, and the men shoot the foxes, and the devil hunts the men.”
Remigius’s voice sank to a whisper. “What am I to do?”
William smiled and said: “Beg.”
Remigius turned on his heel and left the house.
Still proud, William thought, but not for long. You’ll beg.
It pleased him to see someone who had fallen harder than he himself. He would never forget the excruciating agony of standing outside the gate of his own castle and being refused admittance. He had been suspicious when he heard that Richard and some of his men had left Winchester; then when the peace pact was announced his unease had turned to alarm, and he had taken his knights and men and ridden hard to Earlscastle. There was a skeleton force guarding the castle, so he expected to find Richard camped in the fields, laying siege. When all appeared peaceful he had been relieved, and berated himself for overreacting to Richard’s sudden disappearance.
When he got closer he saw that the drawbridge was up. He had reined in at the edge of the moat and shouted: “Open up for the earl!”
That was when Richard had appeared on the battlements and said: “The earl is inside.”
It was like the ground falling away from under William’s feet. He had always been afraid of Richard, always aware of him as a dangerous rival, but he had not felt himself especially vulnerable at this moment in time. He had thought the real danger would come when Stephen died and Henry came to the throne, which might be ten years away. Now, as he sat in a mean manor house brooding over his mistakes, he realized bitterly that Richard had in fact been very clever. He had slipped through a narrow gap. He could not be accused of breaching the king’s peace, as the war was still on. His claim to the earldom had been legitimized by the terms of the peace treaty. And Stephen, aging and tired and defeated, had no energy left for further battles.
Richard had magnanimously released those of William’s men-at-arms who wanted to continue in William’s service. Waldo One-eye had told William how the castle had been taken. The treachery of Elizabeth was maddening, but for William it was the part played by Aliena that was most humiliating. The helpless little girl he had raped and tormented and thrown out of her home all those years ago had come back and taken her revenge. Every time he thought of that his stomach burned with bitterness as if he had drunk vinegar.
His first inclination had been to fight Richard. William could have kept his army, lived off the country side, and extorted taxes and supplies from the peasants, fighting a running battle with his rival. But Richard held the castle, and he had time on his side, for William’s supporter Stephen was old and beaten, and Richard was backed by the young Duke Henry, who would eventually become the second King Henry.
So William had decided to cut his losses. He had retired to the village of Hamleigh and moved back into the manor house where he had been brought up. Hamleigh, and the villages surrounding it, had been granted to his father thirty years ago. It was a holding that had never been part of the earldom, so Richard had no claim to it.
William hoped that if he kept his head down Richard would be satisfied with the revenge he had already taken, and would leave him alone. So far it had worked. However, William hated the village of Hamleigh. He hated the small neat houses, the excitable ducks on the pond, the pale gray stone church, the apple-cheeked children, the broad-hipped women and the strong, resentful men. He hated it for being humble, plain and poor, and he hated it because it symbolized his family’s fall from power. He watched the plodding peasants begin the spring plowing, and estimated what his share of their crop would be that summer, and he found it meager. He went hunting in his few acres of forest and failed to start a single deer, and the forester said to him: “The boar is all you can hunt now, lord—the outlaws had the deer in the famine.” He held court in the great hall of the manor house, with the wind whistling through the holes in its wattle-and-daub walls; and he gave harsh judgments and imposed large fines and ruled according to his whim; but it brought him little satisfaction.
He had abandoned the building of the grand new church at Shiring, of course. He could not afford to build a stone house for himself, let alone a church. The builders had stopped work when he had stopped paying them, and what had happened to them he did not know: perhaps they had all gone back to Kingsbridge to work for Prior Philip.
But now he was having nightmares.
