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future?”
    When Henry nodded, Roger glanced toward the Bishop of Lisieux. He had no liking for the other man, but he did not deny that Arnulf was highly intelligent, well educated, and an accomplished diplomat. “That would be a beginning, my lord bishop.”
    Arnulf’s smile was both confident and complacent. “Indeed, it would,” he said and gestured toward a parchment sheet filled with scribbles, scratched out words, and ink splatters. “My lord king and I were discussing this very matter ere you arrived. There must be a way to satisfy the cardinals without making an explicit renunciation of the Constitutions. How does this sound? ‘The King of the English vows to abolish any new customs which have been introduced into his realm to the prejudice of the Church.’”
    Roger considered the wording. “Yes, that might do it.” Shooting his cousin a sharp look, he said, “This vow is acceptable to you, Harry?”
    “Of course. I do not see this as a controversial issue, for I am confident I have not introduced customs detrimental to the Church, for certes not knowingly,” Henry said blandly, and Roger sighed, for he’d expected as much. Fortunately, the papal legates would expect as much, too. They’d not be going into this blind. Remembering that he held a cup of claret, he took a swallow, warmed as much by a surge of optimism as by the wine. It was beginning to look as if both sides might win this war.
    Setting his cup down on the table next to Arnulf’s draft, he asked to be excused so that he could wash away the dust of the road. Henry let him reach the door before he asked the question Roger had hoped to avoid.
    “Do you not want to know what the cardinals told me about Becket’s killers?”
    Roger already knew the answer to that deceptively innocuous query. “It is my understanding that the killers are on their way to Rome to do penance for Thomas’s murder.”
    “Yes,” Henry said, “and what penance do you expect the Pope to impose?”
    “I would not know,” Roger said untruthfully, a lie that Henry pounced upon with zest.
    “What penance can he impose, Roger? To take the cross and journey to the Holy Land. Does that seem sufficient punishment to you for the murder of an archbishop?”
    Roger frowned, for Henry had just demonstrated the logical absurdity of the Church’s insistence upon disciplining their own. The Constitutions of Clarendon had been the result, not the cause, of the conflict between Henry and Becket. It had begun with Henry’s desire to make clerics subject to secular law. The Church had long claimed sole authority to judge the offenses of men in holy orders or the crimes committed against them. Even men who’d merely taken religious vows must be tried in ecclesiastical court, not the king’s court. No matter how heinous his transgression, a clerk was beyond the reach of royal justice, and the harshest penalty the Church could impose was degrading, depriving him of his orders.
    Henry had been outraged by these mild punishments, and he demanded that clerks convicted of serious crimes in an ecclesiastical court should then be stripped of the Church’s protection and handed over to his courts for sentencing. Roger still remembered the litany of horrific crimes Henry had assembled to bolster his argument: more than one hundred murders committed by clerics in the eight years since he’d become king, including the scandalous case in which an archdeacon poisoned the Archbishop of York and, as punishment, was deprived of his archdeaconry.
    Roger remembered, too, the case that sometimes troubled his dreams even now. A clerk in Worcestershire had raped a young girl and slain her father. When Henry insisted that the man be turned over to a royal court, Becket had ordered Roger, as Bishop-elect of Worcester, to imprison the man so he could not be seized by the king’s justices. Roger believed in the principle defended so passionately by Thomas Becket, that the clergy had Christ alone as