The Pilgram of Hate Read Online Free PDF Page B

Henry quit her court for
some while, it took her considerable pains to lure him back again.”
    Better
and better, thought Hugh, assessing his position with care. If she is stubborn
enough to drive away even Henry, she can undo everything he and others do for
her. Put the crown in her hands and she may, not so much drop it, as hurl it at
someone against whom she has a score to settle. He set himself to extract every
detail of her subsequent behaviour, and was cautiously encouraged. She had
taken land from some who held it and given it to others. She had received her
naturally bashful new adherents with arrogance, and reminded them ominously of
their past hostility. Some she had even repulsed with anger, recalling old
injuries. Candidates for a disputed crown should be more accommodatingly
forgetful. Let her alone, and pray! She, if anyone, could bring about her own
ruin.
    At
the end of a long hour he rose to take his leave, with a very fair picture in
his mind of the possibilities he had to face. Even empresses may learn, and she
might yet inveigle herself safely into Westminster and assume the crown. It
would not do to underestimate William of Normandy’s grand-daughter and Henry
the First’s daughter. Yet that very stock might come to wreck on its own
unforgiving strength.
    He
was never afterwards sure why he turned back at the last moment to ask: “Father
Abbot, this man Rainald Bossard, who died… A knight of the empress, you said.
In whose following?”
     
    All
that he had learned he confided to Brother Cadfael in the hut in the
herb-garden, trying out upon his friend’s unexcitable solidity his own
impressions and doubts, like a man sharpening a scythe on a good memorial
stone. Cadfael was fussing over a too-exuberant wine, and seemed not to be
listening, but Hugh remained undeceived. His friend had a sharp ear cocked for
every intonation, even turned a swift glance occasionally to confirm what his
ear heard, and reckon up the double account.
    “You’d
best lean back, then,” said Cadfael finally, “and watch what will follow. You
might also, I suppose, have a good man take a look at Bristol? He is the only
hostage she has. With the king loosed, or Robert, or Brian Fitz-Count, or some
other of sufficient note made prisoner to match him, you’d be on secure ground.
God forgive me, why am I advising you, who have no prince in this world!” But
he was none too sure about the truth of that, having had brief, remembered
dealings with Stephen himself, and liked the man, even at his ill-advised
worst, when he had slaughtered the garrison of Shrewsbury castle, to regret it
as long as his ebullient memory kept nudging him with the outrage. By now, in
his dungeon in Bristol, he might well have forgotten the uncharacteristic
savagery.
    “And
do you know,” asked Hugh with deliberation, “whose man was this knight Rainald
Bossard, left bleeding to death in the lanes of Winchester? He for whom your
prayers have been demanded?”
    Cadfael
turned from his boisterously bubbling jar to narrow his eyes on his friend’s
face. “The empress’s man is all we’ve been told. But I see you’re about to tell
me more.”
    “He
was in the following of Laurence d’Angers.”
    Cadfael
straightened up with incautious haste, and grunted at the jolt to his ageing
back. It was the name of a man neither of them had ever set eyes on, yet it
started vivid memories for them both.
    “Yes,
that Laurence! A baron of Gloucestershire, and liegeman to the empress. One of
the few who has not once turned his coat yet in this to-ing and fro-ing, and
uncle to those two children you helped away from Bromfield to join him, when
they went astray after the sack of Worcester. Do you still remember the cold of
that winter? And the wind that scoured away hills of snow overnight and laid
them down in fresh places before morning? I still feel it, clean through flesh
and bone…”
    There
was