Dispensation of Death: (Knights Templar 23) Read Online Free PDF Page A

recover, and then Simon could ask for his old job back. Except Abbot Robert had not improved. One morning Simon had been called to his office to be told that the Abbot was dead, and that his own job was to be passed over to another.
    Since then, apart from a short journey to Exeter, he had managed to remain here in Lydford, and he had adapted to the slower, calmer pace of life again. He had learned to accept that his daughter was gone for ever. Where once he had been proud of his little Edith, now it was a source of pride and pain that his occasionally gauche and gawky daughter was grown into a seventeen-year-old woman with all the fire and beauty of his wife. She was a child no longer.
    His son had filled the gap. A more boisterous and careless boy could hardly be imagined. When Simon had left to take up the posting in Dartmouth, the child had been some twelve or eighteen months. Now the little monster was almost three, but he had a perpetual smile fixed to his face, and no matter what he got up to, people always looked on him with affection. Even when he got into the neighbour’s shed and opened the tap on her cider barrel, leaving it wide as he went out and emptying an entire nine gallons over their floor, the mistress was cold only towards Simon. For Perkin she reserved a special smile and a piece of sweetened bread.
    The last months had been very happy. The Puttocks had enjoyed a pleasant Christmas and Simon had been hoping to be left alone with his wife and family, preparing their land for the scattering of crops. It was unreasonable for the Abbey to demand his aid again. Especially since it would be one monk bickering with another.
    ‘Mistress asks you to come up to the house.’
    Simon started. He had been so deep in his gloomy ruminations that he hadn’t heard his servant Hugh arrive. ‘She said so?’
    ‘That’s what I said, isn’t it?’
    Hugh had recently been bereaved, and since then his nature, never better than truculent, had grown more aggressive. Simon understood him well, though, and merely nodded, sighing as he followed Hugh up the path back towards the house.
    So which was it? The Abbot who’d been elected, calling on Simon to offer some form of support? Or the one whom Simon despised and felt sure would ruin theAbbey, John de Courtenay, whose plans would inevitably involve Simon befriending the new Abbot again and then betraying him.
    Simon wanted nothing to do with either.

Lesser Hall, Thorney Island
    Sir Hugh le Despenser bit at his inner lip as the King stood and stamped his foot. The man’s tantrums were as extreme and irrational as any child’s. The difference was, that he was the anointed King of the Realm, and anyone who dared to make fun of him could have his head removed. Even Sir Hugh was cautious when Edward was having one of his fits of petulant rage.
    ‘The bastards
demand
, you say?’ Edward roared. ‘The bastards
demand
that I submit? I suppose they won’t be happy until I’ve passed them the keys to this island and the keys to my treasury as well!’
    Today his anger was not abnormal; indeed, since the shameful truce imposed on him by the French, it had grown ever more evident. Despenser remained seated. ‘Sire, since the King of France wishes only to reacquire all the lands of Guyenne at as little cost to his pocket as possible, it is scarcely to be wondered at.’
    ‘Do
not
think to lecture me!’ Edward bawled. Tall, fair, with the flowing hair of an angel and a manly beard, he was the epitome of a noble English knight. No one was better-looking than King Edward II, and he spent a lot of money ensuring that this remained the case, but his temper was that of a tyrant.
    Sir Hugh le Despenser shrugged. ‘What do you say, Stratford?’
    ‘As you know, these proposals were thrashed out with the aid of the Pope’s envoys, my Lord. If I have failed you, I apologise, but it was the best I felt I could achieve.’
    ‘Summarise them again for me,’ the King snapped, sulkily