Standard of Honor

FIVE

Sir Henry St. Clair sat spear-straight on his horse, looking down from a reviewing stand at the top of a high, sloping ramp. In front of him, stretching away on both sides, lay an enormous drilling field, its edges lost in distance. At his back, beyond the width of its protective moat, the high walls of the Castle of Baudelaire towered above him, cloaking him in a late-afternoon shadow that stretched far ahead of where he sat. The entire area to his right was given over to horses and horsemen, groups of knights and formations of mounted men-at-arms riding hither and yon, all of them deeply involved in their exercises. Henry was content to leave them to themselves. He was far more interested in what was happening in the left half of the field, where seemingly endless rows of crossbowmen, the closest of them almost directly below his reviewing stand, shot in aimed volleys at ranked targets far ahead of them. Farther away, beyond the concentrations of crossbowmen, he knew Richard’s English yeomen were working with their deadly longbows, but they were so far distant that St. Clair could barely see them and could only guess at their activities. Like the horsemen that afternoon, they claimed but little of his attention, for his focus was concentrated upon the crossbowmen, the sole reason for his unexpected return to Aquitaine in mid-August of the previous year. It was now the middle of June in the year of Our Lord 1190, and ten months had passed him by like a headlong, badly fractured dream.

The task facing him on his return to Poitiers had been formidable, and he had barely known where to begin. But in the first week after his arrival, he had sent out teams of recruiters from Poitiers to visit every one of Richard’s vassals in Aquitaine, Poitou, and Anjou and to stage demonstrations of their weapons’ potency. These recruiters performed in Tours, Angers, Nantes, Nevers, Bourges, Angoulême, and Limoges, along with another hundred villages and hamlets scattered between and among those, and they announced after every demonstration that Duke Richard was looking for volunteers to fill the ranks of his new, elite artillery corps. More than a thousand men came forward to Poitiers within the first month of that campaign, and Henry set his trained Angevin arbalesters to work immediately, teaching the newcomers. By that time, too, the first new weapons had begun to arrive from the manufactories in Poitiers and Tours, the former supplying arbalests and the latter more simple, light, and versatile crossbows, and once the production had begun, the capacity rose steadily.

Now, after ten months of hard, grinding work, Henry had twelve hundred new crossbowmen fully trained—three hundred of them on arbalests—and more than two thousand new men under arms in various stages of training. More than four hundred of the latter group had been sent to him by the King of France, Philip Augustus, who requested with great civility that Sir Henry consent to train, on Philip’s behalf, a cadre of men who could, in turn, return to teach more of their own in France.

All things considered, Henry felt the efforts he had expended had been more than worthwhile. Word had reached him that morning of Richard’s arrival in France the previous week, and the same missive had warned him that the Duke, now crowned King of England, could be expected to arrive in Baudelaire sometime in the afternoon of that same day. That knowledge had prompted Henry to arrange this mass gathering of his new troops.

It was this magnificent training field, Sir Henry knew, that had prompted the Duke to impose his entire army, a mere two weeks earlier, upon the hospitality and duty of the castle’s owner, Edouard de Balieul, Count of the surrounding lands of Baudelaire. St. Clair, who had delivered the tidings to Balieul, along with the King’s army at the same time, was wryly convinced that the Count must feel that he had little to be thankful for. But there was no place comparable to Baudelaire within a hundred miles and it was perfectly suited to Richard’s needs, lush with sweet drinking water for his troops and ample grazing for all the cattle and horses that the army required. Situated on the banks of the river Loire, close to the small town of Pouilly in Burgundy that supplied Sir Henry annually with his beloved golden wine, it also lay within forty miles—a three-day march—of Vézelay, the mustering point for all the various contingents assembling for the voyage to the Holy Land.

Satisfied that everything was as it ought to be, Sir Henry nudged his horse forward, starting it down the ramp to field level, then angling it left, to where a small, densely spaced group of grim-faced men were practicing with the heaviest arbalests, concentrating fiercely on the efforts required to arm the cumbersome weapons. They each held the body of the device firmly upright, one foot through the stirrup on the front end while they worked to turn the two-handed winch at the rear that pulled the heavy bowstring, against the enormous pressure of the steel bow, to its full lock. St. Clair sat watching them until the frowning instructor drilling them looked up, saw him sitting there, and slowly made his way to stand beside him.

“Master-at-Arms,” he said, his voice low, deep, and far different from the abusive howl he used to chivy and upbraid his students. “I hope you are pleased with all you have seen today.”

Sir Henry nodded back. “Well enough, Roger. What about you? Are your French students making progress?”

“That all depends on how you would define progress—” He raised a hand to hold Sir Henry’s attention, then raised his voice to its usual hectoring pitch. “You there, Bermond! Put your back into it, man. There’s no time to waste with those things. Too slow and you’ll be dead before you can pick it up again. You’re supposed to fire two shots each minute, not one shot every two!” The man he had shouted at now began working twice as hard, his arms churning at the winch handles. Sir Roger de Bohen turned back to his interrupted conversation. “That’s part of what I have to deal with. They think they’re being demeaned because they’re French, and they’re always muttering that our Angevins have an unfair advantage in having used these things for years, even though these particular fellows are just as raw and new to their weapons as the Frenchmen are.”

St. Clair smiled. “Come, Roger, that is not quite the whole truth. The Angevins have grown up seeing the weapons used all around them. They have at least a degree of familiarity with them. The French, on the other hand, have never laid eyes on a crossbow, much less the biggest crossbow of them all.”

Roger de Bohen and Henry St. Clair had known and respected each other for two decades, and spoke as friends. “You’re splitting hairs, Henry, and you’re wrong,” de Bohen said now, keeping his voice low to avoid being overheard. “These Frenchmen are feeling put upon because, even starting from scratch with no advantage on either side, they are nowhere close to being as good as the Angevins are, and at this rate it will take months to whip them into any kind of battle readiness.”

“But they will learn, will they not?”

“Aye, they’ll learn … Of course they will.” De Bohen shrugged and swung away, speaking back over his shoulder as he returned to his charges. “The question is, will they learn quickly enough?”

St. Clair watched him as the other returned to his task, and then he kneed his horse and pulled its head around until he was heading directly towards the far left side of the field, where the block formations of Richard’s English archers were firing massed volleys of arrows that fell on their target area like sheets of windblown rain. But even as he rode towards the English ranks, his mind was still with the crossbowmen behind him, and with the potential they offered of being able to lay down a heavy, defensive screen of missiles against the kind of attack that had destroyed the Christians at Hattin.

The English longbows could lay down amazing volleys from great distances, shooting in high arcs over hundreds of paces, but what St. Clair needed from his crossbowmen was an intermediate killing power to augment the longbows: shorter, but no less lethal, volleys fired straight out and kept on low trajectories. He had been working for months now on training solid, coordinated formations of short- and intermediaterange crossbows that would work in conjunction with smaller but much harder-hitting teams of arbalesters. These troops would be capable of generating sufficiently lethal interference to discourage any sustained attack by the vaunted Saracen light archers, and would therefore increase the odds in favor of the Christian infantry and knights in any confrontation. That, at least, was his theory, and Henry was well aware that he had pinned his reputation to its success.

The sound of distant cheering, far off to his left, attracted St. Clair’s attention, and as he turned to look for the cause, he heard one of the nearby English yeomen shouting the King’s name, so he nudged his horse forward to where he could watch Richard approach, and he wondered, as he had many times in recent months, at the sheer confidence and regal ability that radiated from the so-called English monarch who, despite having spent much of his boyhood in the country, had always disdained it, barely spoke the language of the people he now ruled, yet had captivated all the fighting men of that warlike land, inspiring spontaneous cheers whenever he rode by.

Today, as was his habit when mixing with his own soldiers, the King rode almost alone, refusing a formal escort and accompanied this time only by two knights, one on each side, and two squires riding behind them. One squire carried the royal sword, with its hilt of gold and its scabbard glinting with precious stones, while the other bore the King’s flat steel pot-helmet with the narrow golden coronet worked around its burnished rim. Richard was bare headed, his mailed cowl pushed off his head to hang down his back, leaving his long, red-golden hair to blow free in the breeze of his passage. He wore a magnificent cloak of crimson silk worked with gold thread, its sides thrown back over his shoulders on this occasion to reveal the white surcoat with the red cross of the Holy Warrior and not the standard of Saint George that he normally wore on the breast of his tunic—three elongated golden lions passant on a field of brilliant scarlet. Beneath the surcoat, he was armored in a full suit of gleaming mail, and his battle shield covered his left arm, its single black lion rampant facing left against a bright red field.

To his men, and to the world at large, Richard Plantagenet was every inch the warrior king, but Henry barely noticed him after the first, analytical look in which he gauged the monarch’s temper and judged it to be pleasant. Thereafter, his eyes remained fastened on the knight who rode at the King’s right shoulder, his own son, Sir André St. Clair. He had expected that André would be returning, as he was now working permanently as an interlocutor of some kind between the Fleet Master de Sablé and the King. It had been many months since Henry had last seen him, and his first thought, even from as far distant as they were from each other, was that the lad looked older—older and more mature, which was as it should be, and happily carefree, which was even better. He noted, too, that his son yet wore his own knightly mantle, bearing the device of St. Clair, which meant that whatever else had been occupying his time, André had not yet joined the ranks of the Temple Knights. For just a moment, St. Clair was overwhelmed with pride in his son, with anticipation of the simple pleasure of sitting with him, hearing his voice, listening to his opinions. He felt a lump swell up in his throat and swallowed it down gratefully. Then, schooling his face to show nothing, he spurred his horse forward.

Richard saw him coming and greeted him with a shout from a long way off. Although Henry could not make out the King’s words, he inferred from the broadness of Richard’s wave towards André that he was showing Henry his thoughtfulness in having brought his son along. Henry waved back, reined in his horse, and dismounted, acknowledging that he had been recognized and waiting until the King’s party reached him. When they did, he stepped forward and brought his clenched fist to his left breast in salute to his liege lord, but Richard was already staring off, over Henry’s head, his ever-shifting attention captured by something beyond the line of Henry’s vision. Henry stood waiting to be addressed, and for long moments nothing happened, but then Richard looked down and smiled at him.

“Henry St. Clair, old friend. Forgive my inattention and bad manners in seeming to ignore you, but I thought I saw someone I did not expect to see here.” His eyes flicked away again, then returned to Henry. “But that is neither here nor there. We have been in the saddle all day and stand in need of relaxation … that and stimulation.” He straightened his shield arm and worked with his other hand at freeing the clasp that held his cloak in place. “Tomkin! Take this, quickly.” As one of the young squires moved quickly to take the monarch’s shield and cloak from him, Richard continued speaking. “You look hale and hearty, Henry, and I hear tales from all directions that you have been doing sterling work here. There!” He finally rid himself of cloak and shield and stood up in his stirrups, pushing his elbows back and flexing his back muscles. “I recall I promised to tell about the coronation next time we two met … and no doubt you will be panting to hear all.” He looked about him at the expressions on the faces of the others in his small group and then laughed. “Well, my friend, if that is the case you can put your tongue back into your mouth. You were the fortunate one, to be far gone on that occasion. It was tedious, Henry, tedious. Was it not so, Sir André? Apart from the single instant when I felt that crown come down solidly upon my head, to be sure. That one moment made the entire thing memorable and worthwhile. But the remainder of the event was boring beyond belief, all muttered Latin amid solemn dirges sung in a sea of smelly, swirling incense.” His eyes moved away again, narrowing with interest.

“Damn me, it is Brian.” He glanced back at Henry, obviously impatient to be gone. “I must have words with my English captain, Brian of York, over yonder, my friend, so I pray you, bide you here with your son while I do so, or come with me if you so wish. This should not take long.” He jabbed his horse with his spurs, and Sir Henry turned his head to look at his son, who was watching him expectantly, flanked by the other knight who had come with him and the King. Henry judged the stranger to be almost his son’s age, perhaps a year or two older. He nodded courteously to the stranger and spoke to his son.

“Well, what think you? Shall we join the King?”

Sir André smiled and shrugged. For a moment, Henry thought he detected a tinge of something unexpected, almost a bitterness, in his son’s eyes, but when he looked more closely there was nothing there to be seen, and he thrust the thought aside.

“If he is going to fight afoot with the English soldiery,” André was saying, “as I suspect he is, we ought not to miss the spectacle, for I am told he does it rather well.” He bent forward in the saddle, reaching out towards Sir Henry, who grasped his hand warmly. “Good day to you, Father. Permit me to introduce Sir Bernard de Tremelay, who has accompanied us from Orléans.”

Sir Henry again nodded cordially to the newcomer. “De Tremelay, you say, from Orléans? Was there not a Master of the Temple once who had the same name and came from Orléans?”

“Sir Bernard de Tremelay.” The stranger nodded, smiling. “Your memory is excellent, Sir Henry. That was more than thirty years ago, and he was Master for barely a year. He was elder brother to my grandfather. I heard much about him in my youth, for he was highly regarded, but I never met the man. Shall we join the King?”

The three men prodded their mounts towards the place where the King and his two squires had dismounted in front of the small knot of kneeling English yeomen whom Henry had been watching earlier. By the time they arrived Richard was already rousing the kneeling men to their feet, laughing and slapping at the cumbersome padding the men wore.

“ … on your feet,” he was saying. “A fighting man need kneel to no other. A bending knee may indicate a pledge of fealty from time to time, but a bent knee that stays bent means subjugation, and I’ll have none of that in men who are my friends. Brian!” he called to the instructor, the only man among the English yeomen who was not swaddled in padding. “Pick me your three finest among this crew. No, wait. That would be … injudicious. I’ll pick my own three, and take my chances. You will supervise the fight.” He scanned the twelve astonished men in front of him, then raised a hand. “Now listen, all of you. I pick three of you, and we fight. Three single bouts, to a fall or a solid hit. Brian will judge.” He favored all of them with his dazzling grin, all flashing eyes and gleaming teeth. “But be warned, any man fool enough to hold back to spare my royal kingship and dignity will find himself digging latrines for the next two weeks. Is that clear? It had better be. I want to beat all three of you honestly and fairly because I am the better fighter. And if you can beat me, best me, knock me on my arse in the mire, then you had better do it, for I will not thank you for insulting me by holding back. And besides, I have a golden bezant for any man who knocks me down— three of them, if need be.” He looked from man to man again, meeting each one’s eye, then chose his opponents with three flicks of an index finger. “You, you, and you, let’s fight. Someone among the rest of you lend me a quarterstaff, and we’ll set about it.”

Word spread quickly, for the King’s behavior around his soldiers was well known, and even before he and his opponent faced each other for the first of the three bouts, a crowd had formed, encircling the fighters tightly so that the remaining nine yeomen of Brian of York’s group had to busy themselves forming a protective cordon, keeping the press back sufficiently far to afford the fighters room to move freely. But the nine of them were not sufficient to control the surging crowd. Those at the back of the throng jostled for a better view, pushing the people in front of them forward, and Sir Henry himself soon had to requisition additional “volunteers” to hold back the crowd.

The first bout began innocuously, both men circling to the left, easily balanced on the balls of their feet, their quarterstaffs held at the ready and their eyes intent upon each other. They were watching for the slightest hint of a coming attack, judging and interpreting every nuance of shifting balance, every flickering shade of expression. The yeoman, a tall, wide-shouldered young fellow called Will, whom St. Clair would have sworn to be less than twenty years old, had the enormous arms and wrists of a longbow archer, and he appeared to be unimpressed by the fact that he was face to face with his King in single combat. He was poised and cool and showed not the least sign of being intimidated as he moved easily in concert with Richard, gliding smoothly, knees lightly bent in readiness to spring.

Henry was not surprised that it was Richard who made the first move, lunging forward to his right, the staff in his hand suddenly transformed into a whirling blur of violent motion punctuated by hard-hitting, clattering blows that would have broken bones had they landed on anything other than his opponent’s weapon. They would certainly have forced most men to fall back and give ground, but the young yeoman stood firm and met the attack strongly, parrying and absorbing the flurry of blows easily and seemingly without effort, so that Richard soon stopped in mid-swing and sprang away, ending the clash and landing lightly poised on his toes. The younger man went after him immediately, giving him no time to rest, and for a space of whirling, rattling blows and stifled grunts it was Richard who went on the defensive, even yielding ground to the inexorable strength of young Will’s advance before he managed to regain the advantage by feinting ingeniously and almost disarming his opponent with a backhanded chop that forced the archer to spin nimbly away to his right. That spin, a miraculous recovery against an unforeseen blow, should have resulted in the end of the contest, for it exposed the archer’s back fatally to the huge blow that followed as the King swung around in a full pirouette, continuing the arc of his backhanded chop into a massive, sweeping downswing. But the young archer’s evasive move was so sure and swift that it carried him beyond Richard’s reach, and instead of striking him squarely between the shoulders, the tip of the King’s staff merely grazed the center of the heavy padding at Will’s back and glanced off, continuing downward to strike the ground hard and giving the young man an opportunity to recover and regain his poise.

After that, neither man seemed willing to take any risks, and for a while the action swayed back and forth as first one and then the other sought to take the initiative, but that state of affairs could not last long—not with Richard Plantagenet being watched and judged by his own men. He feinted right and then sprang to his left, slashing backhanded again in the hope of catching his opponent off guard. The archer was there to meet him and smashed the quarterstaff right out of the King’s hands, drawing a grunt of surprise, quickly followed by a howl of approval, from the watching crowd.

Disarmed and shaken as he was, Richard nonetheless gave his opponent no time to improve upon his advantage, but flung himself forward into a head-tucked, rolling tumble towards his fallen weapon, barely missing Will’s legs in his charging dive. The yeoman was forced to step aside as the King passed directly beneath his arms and snatched up the fallen quarterstaff in lunging to his feet. Sir Henry had to stifle a grunt and bite down on an admiring smile, for this action was pure Richard Plantagenet—the kind of spontaneous, unpredictable, and brilliant feat that made the man so beloved of his soldiers of all ranks; a move so unexpected and yet so sure and sudden that the King, re-armed, was back on the attack before anyone, including his opponent, could recover from their surprise. He cut young Will down with a heavy, powerful blow to his padded thigh that crushed the man’s protective padding and paralyzed his leg, sending him toppling sideways to his knees, hands flat on the ground, head hanging, with no other choice but to yield when the butt of Richard’s quarterstaff pressed down against the back of his neck.

The watching soldiery went wild with approval when Richard grinned and gallantly assisted his battered and vanquished adversary to his feet, making a great show of being out of breath and pushed almost to the limits of his strength. And yet, as he handed young Will from the fighting arena, he was already beckoning to the second man to step forth and face him.

This bout was far shorter and less exciting than the first, perhaps because Richard was flushed with victory and enthusiasm, or perhaps because the second yeoman was dismayed by what he had already seen. Whatever the reason, the second man crashed down solidly, flat on his back with both wits and breath driven out of him mere moments after the onset, having failed to anticipate or counter any one of a trio of blows that struck him within a brace of heartbeats and left him senseless.

The third man stepped forward slowly and judiciously, holding himself erect save only for very slightly bent knees that gave his posture the merest suggestion of a crouch. He held his quarterstaff across his chest with both hands and gazed at Richard through deep-set, almost slitted eyes. Richard, standing hipshot across from him, stared back calmly, his own quarterstaff gripped gently upright in one hand, its length resting against his shoulder. Sir Henry already knew the third man’s name was Hawkeye—he had heard it shouted by his friends—and looking now at the man’s expression he could understand whence the name had come. There was something of the raptor about this Hawkeye, with his low hairline coming to a point in the middle of his forehead, a great, narrow hook of a nose, and wide black pupils beneath straight, archless brows.

There was no questing for position between these two; they stood square to each other and breathed deeply, neither making any attempt to begin the joust, content for the time being to take each other’s measure, and as the moments passed a stillness fell over the watching crowd. Henry’s horse snuffled and stamped, rebelling against the bite of a fly, and he reined it in ruthlessly, willing it to be quiet and stand still. The two adversaries had not moved until then, but as though the horse’s stamping foot had been a signal, both men exploded into action, leaping towards each other across the space that separated them. From that moment on the air was filled with the hard, staccato rattle of wood against wood as they belabored each other hard and fast, each seeking to penetrate the impenetrable curtain of the other man’s defenses. And then, between one blow and the next, the man called Hawkeye leapt backward, away from the fight, landing in a crouch and flinging himself forward again immediately, catching his opponent in the very act of beginning to lunge after him. The concussion as their bodies met was almost palpable to Henry, but Hawkeye had the advantage of both momentum and surprise, and Richard went staggering backward, off balance. One heel landed awkwardly on the uneven surface, striking a half-buried stone, and unable to right himself, the King fell heavily, flat on his back and shoulders, his arms flying wide and the heavy quarterstaff tearing loose from his grasp.

It was Hawkeye’s victory, and not a single person watching doubted it, and yet, in the instant of that recognition, Hawkeye hesitated. It was barely for a moment, the merest flickering of an eye, but Henry saw it clearly and so did every other man there. For the briefest instant, the man called Hawkeye remembered the identity of the adversary he was about to defeat, and then he collected himself and leapt in for the kill. But he was already too late. In the instant that had elapsed by then, Richard, impossibly well conditioned to the doing of impossible things, had brought his knees up to his chest, rolling far back onto his shoulders and from there, with no break in his fluid movements, he had flipped forward again, kicking his powerful legs up, out, and down in a springing lunge while at the same time thrusting himself up straight-armed like a tumbling acrobat and powering his entire body back to a standing position. It was a prodigious feat of physical prowess, but he did not complete it, because before he could regain the point of balance, his rising body met Hawkeye’s coming forward, arms upraised for the killing stroke. And instantaneously accepting the reversal, Richard gripped the armor at Hawkeye’s neck with both hands, raised one foot, lodged it above the other man’s groin, and threw himself backward and down again, pulling the yeoman with him and then launching him onward with a powerful thrust from his bent leg, propelling him high over his head to land heavily and roll face down, unmoving.

There was neither sound nor movement among the group surrounding the circle. The only noises came from Richard himself as he came to his feet, then pulled himself up to his full height, swaying and looking down at Hawkeye’s inert body. Finally he waved a hand towards his downed opponent.

“Well, by God’s throat, have you all been stricken mute? Is he alive, or have I killed him?”

His words broke the spell that had held everyone, and in a moment people swarmed around the man on the ground. “He’s breathing,” someone shouted. “He’s alive! Here, be careful. Stand back and let him breathe.” And with that the noisy enthusiasm of the soldiers quickly returned to normal as they discussed the pros and contras and technical details of what they had seen.

High on his horse above all of them, Sir Henry St. Clair saw the unconscious man’s fingers twitch and then clench into a fist, and then he watched Richard stride forward and pick up not only the quarterstaff he himself had been using but the one belonging to Hawkeye as well, before he returned to stand looking down at the other man, his expression unreadable.

When the man called Hawkeye opened his eyes, he found himself at the center of a ring of well-wishers, with Richard of England himself kneeling at his side. The King smiled at him and spoke, but Hawkeye’s wits had not yet returned to him and he understood nothing of what the monarch said. Later, when he thought back on it, he knew that Richard had rewarded him with three gold bezants— more wealth than Hawkeye had ever held in his hand or would ever see again—but he remembered nothing of what had transpired. He knew only what his friends told him about the incident, and he took satisfaction in knowing that he had given the Plantagenet a good fight and had actually knocked him off his feet, flat on his back, in a bona fide fall. That was what had earned him one of the bezants. The other two had been added purely for the quality of the fight he had provided, according to his friends. And even so, Richard had gone further, in an act of unheard-of magnanimity, and presented the other two fighters with a silver mark apiece, in token of his gratitude for their loyalty and fellowship, he said.

Sir Henry St. Clair was familiar with the entire ritual from many years earlier, and the vagaries of whatever might happen on any individual occasion had long since lost any power to impress him. He invariably experienced, however, an unwilling, even grudging admiration for the sheer effrontery of Richard’s performances in ingratiating himself with his gullible followers. His blatant self-aggrandizement at such times never failed to take Henry’s breath away, and the veteran knight shook his head every time at the willful blindness of people in allowing themselves to be so shamelessly and openly manipulated.

But even as that thought came to his mind, he looked beyond the unfocused aura of the King’s presence and found himself being truly astonished by the expression on the face of his son, for there, where he would have expected to see tolerant amusement and even admiration for Richard’s flagrant mummery, Henry saw instead a faint frown. It was barely there at all, recognizable only to a man who had spent a lifetime fondly watching the face of his only son. What was the expression? Was it disdain, suspicion, disapproval, outright dislike? Henry decided that all of these applied.

He became aware then that he himself was frowning and must have looked troubled to anyone watching him, and so he quickly cleared his face of all expression. He casually swung his horse away, resisting the urge to look at his son again but determined to find out, at the first opportunity, what had so changed André’s opinion of his champion and savior, the Plantagenet King who had, at last report, been his hero.

THE CHAMBER ALLOCATED to Sir Henry St. Clair was comfortably appointed, as was only fitting for the quarters of the army’s Master-at-Arms. It was reasonably snug and secure from drafts, its floor made of carefully matched flagstones and strewn with fresh rushes save in the area surrounding the fireplace. Its high, bare walls were hung with heavy tapestries, and its furnishings were well and solidly constructed, the heavy oaken bed raised well clear of the floor. When Sir Henry swung open the door from outside and held it for André to enter ahead of him, he found his steward, Ector, already there, supervising the replenishing of the blazing fire in the brazier by one servant while keeping an admonitory eye on the laying of a table with food and drink by two others. As soon as he saw his master enter, Ector clapped his hands sharply, signaling his minions to finish their tasks immediately and remove themselves. When the door had closed behind them, he bowed to Sir Henry.

“Will there be anything else, my lord?”

Sir Henry shook his head, waving the steward away.

“Go to bed, Ector. I’ll have no more need of you this night.”

He watched the steward leave, then turned to where his son, having already removed his surcoat and sword belt and laid them across one end of the newly set table, was ignoring the food but sniffing appreciatively at the long-necked silver ewer containing his father’s favorite wine. Half smiling at André’s earnest preoccupation, Henry shrugged out of his own mantle and removed the belt that held his long sword, and hung them over a peg set high in the wall beside the door before he moved to sit in one of the two chairs flanking the fire.

“So tell me, then,” he asked without preamble, “what kind of falling out have you had with our liege lord, Richard? And do not even think about pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

This was the first time the two men had been alone together since Richard’s joust with the yeomen hours earlier, so the words, and the criticism they implied, caused André St. Clair to pause in the act of pouring the wine into two of the pewter goblets Ector’s men had left on the table. He turned to look warily at his father, one eyebrow quirking upward, then straightened up slowly, lowering the ewer’s bulbous base and replacing it carefully on the table. Then, in a movement clearly designed to give him time to think, he flexed his shoulders backward with a slow, exaggerated rolling motion and brought his elbows in close to his sides, raising his forearms in unison until his bent knuckles came together beneath his chin.

Sir Henry watched all of this intently, admiring the discipline that kept his son’s face so innocently empty of expression even while he must be wondering what had prompted the question and how much his father knew or had guessed. Henry was content to wait until his son should choose to respond, and sure enough, after scrutinizing his father for a count of ten, André dipped his head slightly sideways in what might have been the beginnings of a nod and returned to pouring the wine. He replaced the stopper in the ewer, set the flask down, then carried both cups to where his father sat by the fireside watching him. He handed one over wordlessly, then took the other fireside chair and looked down into the blazing heart of the brazier between them.

“Having been to England now, with all its chills and shivers, I find it strange that one should need a fire at night here in the summertime in the middle of France.”

“Aye, but the here you are referring to is not the middle of France. It is the middle of an old stone castle in west Burgundy, dark and damp and drafty and far removed from sunlight, winter or summer. It is always cold in here. And you are avoiding my question.”

“No, Father, I am not.” André looked up at his father. “I simply have not found the words yet to reply to it correctly.”

“How so? Can it be that difficult? We two are the only ones here, so you run no risk of being denounced for sedition or disloyalty, no matter what you say. You are at odds, in some way, with the King, that much I know simply from watching you. But Richard was pleasant with you when we met today, so whatever occurred between the two of you must have been minor. Otherwise you would probably be in prison in disgrace.”

“Aye, or even executed … True, Father. But bear in mind that you yourself warned me to keep my disapproval masked should I ever encounter anything to incur it.” He shrugged. “So I did. I encountered something … distasteful. Something I had not sought, nor thought to find.”

“Distasteful. No stronger than that?”

“No, not unless I dwell upon it, and I try not to do that, because when I do, my distaste increases to dislike.”

“Hmm. Tell me, then, about this distasteful episode.”

André’s expression hardened. “It was no episode, Father. It was far more than that. I have found distastefulness to be a constant in the man. A trait … a flaw I cannot bring myself to countenance.”

Staring at his son now, and seeing the cold, stern disapproval on his face, Sir Henry felt stirrings of chill gooseflesh raising the hairs on the back of his neck as he imagined the tenebrous, threat-filled specter of Richard’s notorious homosexuality looming behind André’s head and gesturing obscenely.

“Do you hate Jews, Father?”

“What?” So abruptly different was the question from what he had expected that its incongruity threw Henry off balance. “Do I—? No, I do not hate Jews.” But then he hesitated, before blurting, “What concern is that of yours? Why would you ask me such a thing?”

“Forgive me. Most people do hate them, I find. They call them Christ killers.” He frowned, and when he spoke again his voice was quieter. “Richard … Richard does not like Jews.”

Somewhere deep inside him, Henry felt relief unfolding like a blossom. “I see. And that is what you find distasteful?” He nodded gravely, not expecting a response from André. “Well, it’s hardly an unusual opinion, is it? But having said that, and taking your exalted opinion of the man into consideration, I suppose it is understandable that you might be disappointed, particularly if he makes no secret of his dislike. But Jew hating is something of a social pastime everywhere, not merely here in Anjou and Aquitaine but all throughout Christendom, sanctioned and often even fomented by the Church itself.” He paused, musing, then continued. “So I have to ask you this: do you find the pastime unequivocally distasteful everywhere you encounter it, or only in Richard’s behavior?”

“He is the King, Father. His behavior sets an example everywhere, for all his people. And in England, many of those people are Jews.”

“Ho, now!” His father held up his hand, “Rein yourself in, there. Many would argue strongly against that. You will find people aplenty ready to tell you loudly that Jews are Jews, no more and no less, irrespective of where they are. They live within the confines of their own strange religion and lead their secretive lives to their own ends, shunning the company of non-Jews but thriving through usurious commerce with Christian folk and neither owing nor offering allegiance to anyone or anything Christian. By those precepts, the Jews of England will remain forever Jews and will never be English, as their counterparts here will never be Angevin or Aquitainian or even French.”

André had been staring at his father, narrow eyed, while Sir Henry spoke, and now he nodded. “You could, you might argue that … but would you, Father? Do you believe it?”

Sir Henry flicked the question aside with a one-handed gesture. “That is neither here nor there, although in fact I do not believe it and have not for years. What we are dealing with here is you and your beliefs, since those appear to clash with your King’s. So let us deal with that.”

André looked away from his father’s gaze as he raised his cup and drank off almost half its contents. “Deal with that, you say. But I seem to be incapable of dealing with it sanely, at least for the time being.”

It was Henry’s turn now to turn aside and stare into the flames, collecting his thoughts before presenting them to his son’s judgment, but presently he rubbed the back of one finger gently against the end of his nose. “Have I ever told you about Karel?”

“Karel the Dalmatian, the Magyar. Your boyhood tutor.” André smiled. “Aye, you have, many times, but I have not heard you mention his name in years, not since I was a tadpole. I remember you saying often that there was far more to Karel than he ever chose to let people see.”

“Most people looked at him and saw the Outlander: the strange-looking fellow with bushy hair and narrow eyes and the thick-tongued way of speaking. They never thought to try to look beyond that front that he maintained. And that was all it was: a pretense, a mask held up in front of the real Karel to protect him from the attentions of those he considered fools.”

André tilted his head sideways, an expression of gentle amusement playing about his eyes. “I gather, then, he thought most people fools?”

“He did. And by his lights, he was correct, for Karel equated foolishness with frivolity, and most people prefer being frivolous to being serious all the time.

“He was a lawyer, you know, long before he ever thought to turn soldier. His family was wealthy and powerful in their own land, and some bishop there took note of the boy, recognizing his abilities even in childhood, and sent him off to Rome to be educated at the papal court. He had a mind for legal matters, it transpired, and he quickly made a name for himself, winning advancement to great heights, by his own admission years afterwards, at a very early age—” He broke off, hesitating, but still smiling that same whimsical smile. “I suspect now, although it is mere suspicion, unsupported by any evidence, that he may have been a priest or even a bishop by the time he was done, and I would not be surprised to learn he ranked even higher than both. But in any event, something went very badly wrong. Something he learned or experienced in Rome repulsed him, and his disgust was terminal. He walked away, left Rome and all it had meant to him, and cloaked himself in absolute obscurity, in the last place anyone would ever think to look for a cleric and a lawyer … or a bishop, for that matter. He took up arms as a mercenary.

“That was in 1133, in Germany. He entered into a contract to fight for a German nobleman, Conrad of Hohenstaufen, the man who later became King Conrad III. Karel served with Conrad’s armies for twelve years, then left for reasons of which I know nothing. He had entered Conrad’s service as a fugitive lawyer, and he emerged twelve years later as a highly regarded military officer, and that is when he came into my life. My father had met him years earlier, somewhere in Germany, and they had become friends—God alone knows how or why. Anyway, when he left his position with the German King, he came looking for my father and took a contract with him, as a mercenary, tasked to train the St. Clair men-at-arms in modern weapons craft. He did it very well, too, and when his contract expired, he stayed on in my father’s employ, charged with the primary task of educating me, albeit as a soldier, not as a cleric or a student. And for the next ten years, in his own unique and inimitable way, that is precisely what he did.”

André was leaning forward in his seat, listening closely. “He educated you, you mean, or he taught you to fight?”

His father shrugged with one shoulder. “Both, and at the same time, for there is no difference. Karel created no divisions in what he did. He saw no differences between learning how to fight and learning how to write. The tools we use for each might appear to be different, he used to say, but all of them are controlled by our minds, and it is our application of what our mind tells us that makes each of us different, makes one man better than the mass of his fellows, makes one in each group stand out head and shoulders above all others, no matter what the pursuit that they are following may be.”

André was wide eyed. “Your Karel sounds to me to have been a wondrous character.”

“I doubt I could have had a finer mentor or a better instructor. And you would have liked him, had you ever met him. But he died before you were born.”

“You have never told me any of this before.” There was a plaintive note to André’s voice.

“When you were a boy, you had tutors of your own and Karel was already dead. Why should I have wished to bore you with tales of a dead man? I fed you snippets of his wisdom from time to time, little things that I thought might amuse you.” Sir Henry paused again, his gaze unfocused, then went on. “You have to understand that no one ever questioned Karel’s teachings, or asked me what I was learning in my classes. No one cared, I see now, because my father could neither read nor write, but he could see me training in the arms yard every day and could tell at a glance that I was thriving and acquitting myself well. That was enough for him. My mother, on the other hand, was already sick of the palsy that would kill her by the time I was fourteen, so she had neither the strength nor the will to check into my learning. And there was no one else to care. But fortunately, I was never happier than when I was seated at Karel’s feet, learning of wonders. And as I grew older, he spoke to me more and more openly about what he believed, and about how he saw a man’s responsibilities—any man’s responsibilities—as laid out for him by God. He understood and talked about many aspects of God and godliness—righteousness and piety, things that the ruck of men, including most of the priests I knew, could never have imagined, let alone learned. And he had very strict beliefs and stern opinions concerning God and men and their relationship each to the other.”

“How did he die?”

“Of a pestilence, one that seemed to be everywhere that year. His death left a great hole in my life that would not be filled until I met and wed your mother. But I remember clearly that, on the very last occasion when I saw him well, we spoke of this very matter of Jews and how they are so hated everywhere.”

“Truly, Father?” André sounded slightly skeptical. “That was a very long time ago, and your memory might be playing tricks with you. I know mine does with me from time to time.”

His father eyed him sideways, one eyebrow rising in amusement. “Think you so? Well, it might be as you say, were I as old as you appear to think I am. But in this instance I know there is nothing faulty about my memory, because that last conversation became a very special one for me. I recalled it time and again, remembering every word of it because it was the last time we had ever spoken.

“Karel had never been able to come to terms with that widespread hatred of Jews, because it seemed to him to be at odds with everything he had come to believe as a boy. He had asked me why I thought the Jews were always blamed for everything that befell the Savior.” Henry smiled softly to himself. “And before I could come up with a single reason, he went on to point out that if we agree and believe that Jesus was born into our world to give up his life in expiation for our earthly sins, then we also ought to believe, logically, that everything that happened surrounding those events was part of the divine plan, and that, God being by His very nature omniscient, every eventuality of that planning had been foreseen and accounted for. Why then, he asked me again that last afternoon, were the Jews alone vilified for behaving as they did? Their God and ours were one and the same. Had He forsaken them to nurture us? Or were we to believe the Jews the only sinners among mankind, guilty by themselves, beyond all doubt, of creating the need for the Savior’s sacrifice? If that were so, was it only afterwards that all the other races, including the arrogant Romans, were turned into sinners, contaminated by the behavior of the Jews?”

Sir Henry shook his head now, as if bemused. “I must have been twelve years old, and I remember that even at that young age I was able to see through the stupidity underlying those questions. I remember mentally digging in my heels, too, and telling Karel what I thought, and then being astonished when he agreed with me.

“‘Of course it is nonsense,’ he said, and he gave my head a push, the way he did when he was pleased with me. ‘It is an insult to any person with the ability to think logically from one step to another. If the Jews had ever been the only sinners in the world, there would never have been any reason for Christianity to exist. The Jews believed they were already the chosen people, so all that would have been needed was for a Jewish Messiah to come down to earth and do whatever Jewish law demanded need be done. But that is not what happened. The message spread from Israel to all the countries of the world, which then became the Christian world. No one argues with that, do they? So tell me, young Henry St. Clair, what do you think is the real reason underlying all the nonsense about the Jews?’”

“Did you have an answer for him?”

Sir Henry raised an eyebrow. “Would you have offered one, had you been as old as you are today?”

André smiled and dipped his head, appearing to acknowledge his father’s point, although what he was actually thinking was that he could, indeed, have answered the question at great length and to Karel’s complete satisfaction. Instead, he merely nodded and asked, “So what did he say then?”

“I have never forgotten what he said. He said it was the priests—Karel was fond of blaming most things on the priests and on the Church in general—who promulgated the anti-Jewish filth to suit their own wishes at some time or another in the earliest days of the Church, some dire occasion when they needed to find a scapegoat to take people’s attention away from whatever they themselves were up to. Karel believed that firmly. The Jews had proved to be an easy target, he said, and the Church took note and marked it, so the guilt by association was never let go.”

A silence elapsed before André casually asked, “How do you feel about that, Father—the scapegoat explanation? Do you subscribe to the idea?”

Sir Henry had slipped down gradually in his seat since their conversation began and was stretched almost full length, his legs crossed at the ankles in front of the fire, his chin sunk on his breastbone. Now he sniffed and pulled himself up again before reaching for his cup on the floor.

“I think I always have subscribed to it.” He sipped his wine and grimaced. “Blech! My wine’s hot … too close to the fire.” He stood up and reached for André’s cup. “Give me that. The ewer should still be cold. One more before bed, eh?”

When he returned with replenished cups, André had thrown fresh logs on the fire and was watching the flames curl up around them. He accepted his fresh drink without looking up, and Henry sat back down and continued speaking as if there had been no interruption.

“I don’t doubt that the Jews have been made into scapegoats, but I can’t tell you why or when it happened. I can tell you, on the other hand, that it was not always that way. The Jews of Judea were always a contentious people, fighting among themselves long before Jesus came into the world, and they were always harshly, arrogantly intolerant of anyone who did not share their faith or revere their grim, implacable God. It is a matter of record that the Romans detested them for all the trouble and upheavals they caused. The Roman province of Judea was a tiny place, after all, in terms of the overall empire, but it fomented disruptions, civil, religious, and military, far beyond what should have been the scope of its capacities, and when its contumacious people finally rebelled to the extent of declaring war upon the Romans, the imperial authorities deemed the situation in Judea to be intolerable and destroyed the entire nest of them.

“They sent in the legions, who tore down the city of Jerusalem itself and stamped out resistance, as only the Romans could, wherever they found any signs of it. They laid siege to the mountain fortresses the Jewish insurgents held and destroyed them all, one by one, taking as much time, as many years, as that required. And since the religion of the people lay at the center of all their discontent, they destroyed the focus of that religion: they tore down the temple and put its priests to the sword. They were inexorable and utterly merciless because that was the Roman way. They killed or enslaved as many of the populace as they could capture, and generally made the province of Judea uninhabitable, so that the Jews could never trouble Rome again. But—” He sat up straighter, digging the tip of a little finger into one ear, then examining it critically before wiping his finger on his leg.

“But all of that was retribution for the sin of rebellion against Rome. It was punishment justly earned in Roman eyes. It contained nothing of the kind of mindless hatred that Christians show towards the Jews today.”

He sipped at his wine and rolled it around his tongue, savoring it for a while before adding, “The Jews gave us their One God, André. People tend to forget that. The God we worship came to us directly from the hands of the Jews. We should be grateful to them for that, for giving us our God. But no, we choose to shun them, when we are not abusing and persecuting them.

“Karel told me once that he had known several families of Jews throughout his travels, and he believed that they were ordinary people just like Christians, save that they believed differently about how their God expected them to behave. After all, Jesus was a Jew. No getting around that, Karel used to say. So where did the breakdown occur? When did the breakaway happen? When did it become perfectly acceptable for Jesus to have been a Jew all his life and for all eternity, for His Father to have been the God of Israel, and for Christian people to dream and speak of returning to Sion—which is Jerusalem—and to speak glowingly and lovingly of biblical Israel, yet hate all Jews? Where, he would ask—and he would ask anyone and everyone who showed the slightest interest in what he had to say—where was the logic in that?”

He glanced at his son, as though in the hope of hearing an answer, but when it was clear that none was forthcoming he went on, raising both hands almost apologetically and spreading his fingers wide to indicate that these thoughts were Karel’s and not necessarily his own.

“Well, his own answer to that unanswerable question was that the logic was priestly—‘sacerdotal’ was the word he used—and because of that, it was invisible and incomprehensible to ordinary men, since it lay in the repository of most of the other logic of priests everywhere: deep in the lightless tunnels of their rectums.” Sir Henry laughed aloud. “I used to love it when he said things like that. I was always afraid that some band of scandalized bishops might come leaping out of hiding and condemn the two of us for heinous and unforgivable behavior.

“He used to say—and he was insistent—that priests were seldom clever and even less often intelligent, but that most of them were cunning and all of them selfserving. The majority of priests, he held, those mediocrities who were destined never to be bishops or prelates or princes of the Church, owed their positions to being born as younger sons to parents who could not support them, which meant that, as young men, they had all faced the same limited choice: become a knight, or take the Church’s cloth. For all of them, and probably for a wide range of reasons, the thought of a military life with all its brutal hardships had been abhorrent, and so they had opted for the easier way, a life lacking in general hardship and supported by the contributions of others. They entered the priesthood.”

Henry sat up, gulped the wine remaining in his cup, then rose to his feet and crossed smoothly to the table, where he set the goblet down.

“And that, my son, is all that I can tell you about my peculiar beliefs regarding the treatment of Jews,” he said, turning his head to glance over to where André sat watching him. “Has anything I have said been of assistance to you in your dilemma over Richard’s behavior?”

“I have no dilemma, Father. I have a revulsion.”

Something that might have been a tic of annoyance flickered between Sir Henry’s brows. “That’s a strong word,” he said.

“And I don’t use it lightly,” André replied. “This is not simply anti-Jewish sentiment on Richard’s part, Father. I am talking about mindless and inhuman cruelty, inflicted for the sheer pleasure of doing so and observing the results.”

That caught Sir Henry by surprise. He looked keenly at his son, trying to read his face, but seeing nothing he could identify, he slowly made his way back to the fire. “Very well, then, tell me what you mean by that, because it is a very strong indictment. ‘Inhuman cruelty inflicted for the sheer pleasure of doing so and observing the results.’ I would expect to hear something utterly infamous in the way of charges to back such a statement up.”

“Well then, would you accept a report of the King’s guards being sent out into the streets to arrest any Jews they find and bring them back for the entertainment of the King’s guests at dinner? That in itself might not qualify as infamous, unless you consider that the entertainment consists of their being pinioned by men-at-arms and held erect while their teeth are pulled out with pliers … all their teeth.” The silence that followed seemed vast. André sat tensely, leaning forward in his chair and waiting for his father to respond.

“You saw this? You were there?”

“No, sir, I was not. It would appear that I have a happy knack of being absent on such occasions. But it has happened more than once, and I have been told of it each time by people who were present and whose word I trust.”

“What people?”

André shrugged. “The knight you met today, for one, Bernard de Tremelay.”

“You trust him, you say?”

“Implicitly, Father. I have known him now for eight months and he is become my closest friend, almost from the moment we first met.”

Sir Henry looked steadily at his son, one eyebrow rising slightly. “I find that strange … you tend not to make friends that quickly.”

“I know. But we liked each other from the outset, probably because of how we met, if truth be told. We were the only two young men in one particularly large and grave gathering of humorless graybeards, and I fear we found companionship in quiet laughter. He was the one who gave me the most detailed description of the abuse of one unfortunate Jew … the first one to suffer that way, I believe. I was away from London at the time, but Bernard told me all about it, in great and lurid detail, when I returned. He was sickened, and he sickened me, too, with the telling of it.”

“And you say Richard condones such things?”

André barked a sound that could have been the truncated start of a laugh. “Condones them? Better say foments them. Father, this is Richard’s notion of a wondrous way to keep his friends amused.” He looked away for a moment and then looked back to where his father stood thunderstruck. “As I understand it, the first occasion was almost accidental, one of those things that simply comes about unplanned. One of the Golden Clan made a comment to the effect that he was having trouble with a Jew to whom he owed money—”

“The Golden Clan? What does that mean?”

André frowned and shook his head. “Forgive me, Father, it is not something I would expect you to know about and certainly nothing you would ever approve of. The term is a pejorative, recently coined in England, a name used to indicate certain of King Richard’s cronies. The unnatural ones who have no use for women. They were originally called the Gilded Geldings, until someone pointed out that they were anything but gelded.”

“Quite. So what did this fellow say about the Jew?”

“Something about the fellow having his teeth in him. Whatever he said, it was evidently enough to spur Richard to shout, ‘Then let’s have the whoreson’s teeth out!’ and he sent his guards to arrest the Jew at his counting house and bring him back to the King’s Hall at Westminster. They pulled his teeth publicly that night, at dinner, apparently with such notable success that the entertainment has been repeated at random several more times, whenever the King or any of his guests feels bored. He simply sends his men out to find a Jew. Their Jewishness alone is condemnation enough to justify their so-called punishment.”

“God in Heaven!” Sir Henry’s jaw dropped and he groped for the back of his chair, then lowered himself back into his seat “That is …” His voice failed him; his mouth moved, but no words emerged until he stopped trying, swallowed, and shook his head slowly. “That is infamous. And no one has complained? What about the bishops?” He slashed his hand in dismissal as soon as he spoke. “No, that would be a waste of time and effort. They would do nothing, except perhaps to bray encouragement. But surely some of the nobles must have complained of such outrages.”

“Complained?” André St. Clair sounded as though he might either laugh or weep. “To whom should they complain, Father? To the King, about his own conduct? Would you dare that?” He held up a hand, palm outward, to silence a response. “Yes, you probably would, but what would you achieve? At best you would draw down his rage for offending him and his sensibilities. And at worst, what? Who knows? This is Richard Plantagenet … Besides, if you spoke out everyone would think you mad, to champion a Jew in any way. No one would have any sympathy for you, no matter what Richard did to you. You would stand alone, and you’d stand condemned.”

“As would you, were you to speak out.” Sir Henry’s voice was measured, filled with regret. “So, what are you to do now, my son? It seems clear you have no wish to continue as you are at present.”

André, however, demurred. “No, Father, that is not so, and that is what makes this choice so difficult for me. It may seem clear to you, as you say, that I have no wish to continue as I am, but it is far from clear to me. I have had many duties and responsibilities thrust upon me in past months, and few of them have stemmed from Richard. The truth is that much of my loyalty is now willingly committed to Robert de Sablé, and he, in turn, is bound to Richard and knows nothing about what we are speaking of tonight. The most frightening thing of all, perhaps, is that, in spite of all I know, I still see much in Richard to admire. The man is a phenomenon, both in his strengths and in his weaknesses. He is a mass of indivisible contradictions. Cruel and inhumanly unjust as he can be in this matter of the Jews, he possesses at the same time all the military virtues and the strengths that I admire and to which I aspire. And his people—all his people—appear to love him, from afar at least, in principle, be they in Normandy, England, Brittany, Aquitaine, Anjou, or at home in our own Poitou. All his allies in the gathering army look up to him and are proud to be numbered among his host, even Philip Augustus and the Count of Flanders. So I am still unable to decide what I must do, but I will not be quitting the army. Perhaps all I can hope to do is avoid attending any of the King’s dinners.” He rose and laid his drinking cup on the table.

“It is late. The fire is almost out again, and although I myself am not tired I have kept you too long from your bed. I’ll go and take the night air for a while and leave you to sleep. You have to be on parade at dawn and I do not, so I can be more dilatory in rising than you can … but I have much to think upon before I sleep this night.” André smiled lopsidedly, then embraced his father warmly. “Thank you, Father, for listening. Sleep well.”

Henry undressed slowly and climbed into bed, blowing out the last candle. He did not expect to find rest easily that night, after listening to his son, but he fell asleep almost instantly.