The Clerkenwell Tales, Peter Ackroyd [sight word readers txt] 📗

is the bliss of heaven. No holy oil will lift him there.” Clarice knew that the oil for the new king’s anointing had come from a miraculous phial which the Virgin Mary, in apparition, had given to Thomas Becket. It had been discovered by King Richard two years before, while he had been searching in the garderobe of the Tower for a necklace worn by King John. The nun knew this because Richard himself had told her so.

She had visited the broken king three days previously, in the company of Bridget. Richard had been informed of her prophecies concerning his deposition and death, and had asked to see her. When she was taken to him, however, she knew that he was not in his rightful mind. He was dressed in a white gown which touched his bare feet; on his head he wore a black skullcap, and he held out some papers as she approached him. “Be of good cheer, Dame Clarice,” he said. “Be of comfort. I am God’s fool.” He was sitting within a stone alcove, cut into one of the walls of his cell. “You prophesied my end, but you cannot prophesy my beginning.”

“Your grace?”

“You must get eight miles of moonlight and knit them in a bladder. You must take eight Welshmen’s songs, and hang them on a ladder. You must mingle the left foot of an eel with the creaking of a cart wheel. Is this more impossible than deposing a king? God’s anointed one?”

“To make a mirror bright, you must first cover it with black soap.”

“You are madder than me, maid. Or do you tell me that the holiness of the sanctified one will one day shine again?” He stood up, and then genuflected before Bridget. “How do you find me, nun?”

“I find that you are poor, sir.”

“Poverty is the eye-glass through which we see our friends.” He turned to Clarice. “I have come to love weeping. The tears trill down my cheeks. I am the fount of all waters. When do they crown this bug?”

“The thirteenth day of this month. The feast of St. Edward.”

“The feast of the good king who built the abbey. The stones shall smite and hurtle together. There will be a trembling of the earth.”

“If he is God’s foe, then –”

“The rain will fall upon the altars. That is my prophecy, nun.” He paced rapidly around the confines of his stone cell. There was another alcove, where he could sit, and from its slit window the Thames could just be seen. “Read my dream, and I will say that you are God’s fellow. I dreamed that a king made a great feast, and he had three kings at the feast, and these three kings ate but out of one gruel dish. They ate so much that their balls burst, and out of their balls came four and twenty oxen playing at the sword and buckler, and there were left alive only three white herrings. And these three herrings bled nine days and nine nights, as if they had been the remnants of horse shoes. What is this dream?”

Clarice was confounded, but kept her composure. “It passes my wit, sir.”

“And mine.” He still paced about, his bare feet upon the cold stone. “They say that you have scrolls, and that you are an enchanter.”

“They say untruth. The only scrolls I carry are prayers to God.”

He stared at her for a few moments, but she remained demure; as modesty demanded, she looked away. “Do you bind your breasts with lace, ma dame?” She did not answer, but made the sign of the cross. “You do not blush. You are deeper than a well, Sister Clarice. In ghost and in body.” They spoke a little more, and Richard informed them of the holy phial. “This feigned king is but a painted image,” he told them. “The oil upon him will smell rank. It will reek to heaven.” He sighed, and sat down once more in the stone alcove. “Delightable to me are ghostly songs, releasing my travails in this wretched life. Sing one for me.”

So in a clear, calm voice Clarice began to sing “Jesus, mercy! mercy, I cry.”

When they left him, singing to himself in his chamber, Clarice murmured to the second nun that “his death is shaped before him.”

In this prophecy, as in so many others, she was proved correct. She also told Bridget that, if an unhallowed king such as Bolingbroke came to rule, then others must hold the power until an anointed one returned to the throne. She did not say who those “others” might be. “What I have done,” she told her, “I have done for the sake of Holy Mother Church. If the rulers are unclean, then Mary must be queen. We will lead, and others will follow.”

Four months after the interview in the Tower, the unhappy Richard was starved to death in Pontefract Castle.

Between the day of this encounter in the Tower and the day of the coronation in the abbey, there had been reports circulating through the city of arrests and imprisonments. William Exmewe had been taken up for treason and forced to abjure the realm. In a solemn ceremony at Paul’s Cross he was dressed in a long white robe, his shoes were taken from him, and a large wooden crucifix placed in his hand. Roger of Ware, Bogo the summoner, and Martin the law clerk were among the crowd taunting him. It was ordained that he should walk barefoot to Dover carrying the cross before him.

Among the dignitaries on the scaffold were Sir Geoffrey de Calis and the Bishop of London; William Exmewe looked at them both, and then nodded at the knight almost imperceptibly. It was enough. Exmewe had fulfilled his destiny. Dominus had not been, and never would be, revealed to the world.

The sentence was then read out to him. “You, William Exmewe, cannot stray from the high road and you may not spend more than one night in the same