in danger, and it had something to do with her father, and with her unbidden dreams of dragons.
She considered her options. If it came to it, she could hide in the bivouac in the king’s forest, but that would only serve in an emergency. A better plan would be to stock it as a way-station, a place to launch a run for Coventry, or maybe Wales. If she ran, would she take the horrors of the dreams with her?
“What happened to you?” It was Alcera’s voice and it was coming from behind her. Elspeth jumped, startled and for some reason embarrassed, as though she had been caught doing something shameful. She turned to see the master seamstress walking along the path. The older woman turned into the yard, closing the distance between them quickly. “You look like you’ve been in a fight, Els. What happened?”
“I . . .” Elspeth started, but was interrupted. She was aware of deep blushing, ashamed again. The feeling of having been caught at wrongdoing filled her head. She couldn’t think clearly.
“She spilled some gruel last night by accident, Alcera.” Her father was speaking from the doorway, answering Alcera’s question before she could. “When she went to stand up after supper she tripped and fell. Spilled gruel all over herself. It’s not serious,” he said. “Isn’t that right, girl?” he said, looking for confirmation.
“I’ll be alright,” Elspeth said. “I slipped and fell. I caught my hand on the tripod and spilled everything. You should see the welts on my fingers.” She held out her hand for Alcera to see. “I was just coming out to the well for some more cold water.”
“Those welts look angry, Els,” said Alcera. She turned the hand over, opening the fingers gently for a better look. “You take the rest of the day to see to them. Be especially careful with the blisters because if they break, the sickness will get worse. We’ll look for you tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Alcera,” said Elspeth. “I’ll do that and see you tomorrow.”
“And keep off that leg,” said Alcera, as she continued her journey.
Elspeth limped inside and helped her father clean up the mess from the night before.
❧
After the death of Father Athanasius, the Church of St Cuthbert had a new priest whose preaching had caught the attention of both civic and diocesan officials because of its emphasis on the importance of duty, always a safe topic now that Thomas Aquinas was baptizing Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being and making it the basis for a just and ordered society. Human over animal. Husbands over wives. Parents over children. Civic authorities over private citizens. Church over state. Thus Aquinas asserted a fresh claim for the final authority of Holy Mother Church over all things.
Following the Eucharist, Father Thomas replaced the elements, and turned quietly and mounted the high pulpit to deliver his sermon, the movement of his robes causing a faint crackle as he climbed the steps. He was a tall, thin man with angular features and a nose that might have been broken in a fight. What always struck Constantine was Thomas’ fingers—they stuck out of his hands like sticks, with large knots where the joints would have been.
Thomas was both a priest and a brother of the monastery itself, where he had lived in cloistered seclusion since the day he had taken vows fourteen years past. He therefore answered to two ecclesiastical authorities—Prior Robert, who managed the affairs of the Monastery of St Cuthbert and St Chad, and Bishop Stefan, whose See at Coventry oversaw the whole of Warwickshire. While Prior Robert rightly supervised the business of the monastery and acted on its behalf in affairs of the world, there were rumors that Thomas chafed at the limits this imposed upon him, and had even chided Robert in private over any steps he might have taken that Thomas thought unwise or theologically lax. Robert, the rumors said, endured Thomas’ remonstrations with patience and good humor, and some of the monks thought privately that by doing so he better prepared his soul for heaven.
A simple man himself, Father Thomas was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the Church, and Christendom was for him the encompassing principle upon which the whole of life turned, ecclesial and secular and familial, so that the very concept of authority outside the life of faith was quite impossible for him to conceive.
Whatever his theological reasoning, and however troublesome for his fellow monks, Thomas assumed full autonomy within the monastery church, and therefore also over the spiritual life of its congregation. He wore his ecclesiastical authority like an oversized habit—he smothered himself in it. It was his brother monks who chaffed beneath it like a hair-shirt.
It was the final Sunday of June, and within the congregation—hosted by the monastery—there was a contingent of military men lately returned from the Holy Land. Father Thomas had chosen for his text St Paul’s wonderful admonition to the Romans to obey the civic authorities, thinking that in this one text he could elaborate a whole complex of ideas showing that obedience to authority was God’s right and only way.
As always, Father read out the text of scripture in Latin, Jerome’s Vulgate having served the needs of the devout for nearly a thousand years. Most of his sermon was in Latin, too, which left it unintelligible to the villagers and townspeople, but the old priest’s Latin was not fluent and in his great fervor for the gospel he occasionally lapsed into English. Thus the villagers heard the Word of God. The prayers, the hymnody, and the scriptures, all were sung or spoken in Latin, but then entangled within them were threads of exposition in English. Invariably these moments of enlightenment came when Father was in high fervor, so that they tended to be shouted rather than spoken, driven forward and made compelling, not by any inherent logic, but merely by ferocity and passion. As confused as this style of preaching could be, when the villagers listened intently they could sometimes make out the lines of the old priest’s thinking. Between these moments, when the priest returned to his Latin drone, they had ample time to ponder the ways of God and man. For those among them who were unlettered this was the closest they might come to hearing the very Word of God.
“‘Omnis anima potestatebus sublimioribus subdita sit non est enim botestas nisi a deo. . . Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God,’” Father said abruptly, “so it says in our text. But why is this so?” He raised a crooked stick finger and directed it out generally at the entire assemblage of villagers and townspeople and monks who sat before him. “It is because the heart of man is desperately wicked, an unreliable guide in matters spiritual and temporal. It is this wickedness, this terrible fallenness, that tears apart all that is sacred and holy. Because of this wickedness, God has ordained authorities among men—to control the appetites and discipline the passions . . . .” Then he lapsed again into Latin.
As Thomas droned on, Fletcher’s thoughts drifted to the sheriff and the order of the shire, and the battle with the Danes that had cost his father his fingers and thus also his trade as a huntsman. Surely his father had not paid this price in vain, but had paid it in the name of order. If the order of society was God’s great plan for Christendom, obedience was good and right, but not only, as the priest had said, because it controlled the human appetites, but more importantly because God was a God of order and because God had made society itself, with its inherent structure of king and nobleman, villein and servant and slave, each in his place.
Fletcher quietly patted Elspeth’s shoulder, indicating in that non-verbal language fathers share with daughters that the priest had made a good and important point. He whispered the name, “Meurig ap Gwynedd,” but Elspeth shrank back slightly, allowing his hand to slip unheeded to her back.
To Fletcher this line of reasoning made sense, not because as a father he wished to be obeyed, but because as a sergeant in the service of the sheriff he had seen first hand the misery caused by masterless men who did not wish to be accountable for
