The Widow of Winchester (1st 10 pages, 1 1/2 chapters)

[Sam]

 

 

 

I

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1

Spring Last Year, 1277 -- Licoricia, an Old Woman, in her Home

 

Early afternoon. Wisps of a late snow were melting between the cobbles on Jewry Street, one of the few cobbled streets in Winchester. It made for less mud than the other streets, but there was still mud enough for all. Winchester was a wealthy market town, and Jewry Street was a wealthy street, or it had been not so many years ago. Not so now.

The last week of riots had burned themselves out. The street was quiet now, almost empty. Few people lived there any more. There were few Jews on Jewry Street, few left in all of Winchester, hardly worth the trouble of mobs rising to riot against them, but then, that’s the nature of mobs. Some of the Jews had fled the country, but not many—most couldn’t afford it, the king put too high a price on his Jews for them to leave the realm. Many had been killed—in the civil war more than a decade ago, many more in the coin clipping trials, in the riots, in King Edward’s orgies of execution. The king would have preferred to have seen them convert, or so he said, but of course, how can one ever trust them after that, how to trust a Jew who converted to a new faith, so it was only fitting that they be tried and executed, converted or not. A few Christians had moved into empty houses on the street. They didn’t have to be purchased—they were empty. No one talked about the whereabouts of the former owners, or the technicalities of buying and selling. The new owners simply took possession.

From somewhere, from nowhere, the clopping of three horses came down the street. They stopped in front of the big stone house set back from the street, the home of the widow Licoricia—an old woman, a money lender, a woman of some influence a long time ago.

Licoricia had lived in this house for many years. She raised four sons and a daughter here. She never knew her own parents, but she never lost her children. She was raised right here in town by Chera—financier, moneylender, who became the mother of the orphan Licoricia as a small girl. This house was the largest on the street, two stories, glass windows, three brick chimneys, gracefully set back from the street and towered over by tall trees—still bare of leaves this early in spring. A grand home at one time, with lights in the windows, people coming and going—now the whitewash faded and chipped, a few shingles clacking their demand to be repaired, the house shaded by years as well as trees. She lived here with Alice, her companion of many years, a servant girl elevated to sister by their years together.

Three men dismounted and tied their horses—men in hauberks covered by tunics, gray or brown or just covered by dirt, no one took notice, and in barrel helmets so no one could see a face, and they knocked on the door. Knights, mercenary soldiers—who could know, no one saw them. Not pounded, not to draw attention, just knocked lightly, in no hurry.

Inside there were only the two old women. Licoricia was in her seventies. She never really knew her actual age but the years were inscribed in the lines of her face. She paused her needlework and called, “Alice, can you see who is there?”

Alice was not quite so old as Licoricia, but old enough to have earned her stoop. She stopped sweeping, she worked so hard to keep the floors clean, just long enough to open the door a crack to peek out, just a crack. They had not had callers for a long while, and she had grown cautious since the riots.

She was no longer strong. The men did not have to push hard to let themselves in through the crack. They closed the door softly behind them, and drew their swords.

Alice’s eyes widened as she took in the sight of them—their barrel helmets, their hauberks and sooty tunics, drawing their longswords like the teeth of dragons—they had the look of monsters. She gathered her breath but she did not have time to scream.

Licoricia could only watch as Alice thudded to the wooden floor, as her eyes bulged wide with terror and her blood sprayed on the walls and spread pools on the wooden floor. Licoricia’s eyes widened and she felt her own heart fall to the floor with Alice.

She stood bolt upright, faced them, not tall but still straight. She brushed a crease from her skirt and then brushed her palms, and stepped forward. She thought, so this is how it ends…

She said, “Finally you are here...”

 

 

 

 

 

 

II

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 2

Today, Spring 1278 – Florent D’Egremont

1

Florent d'Egremont stands in file on the rocky hillside with the black robed monks of the Dominican priory, the obligatory audience at this grisly performance. The hillside just beyond Winchester’s northern wall, a short way from the Durn Gate, forms a natural amphitheater between the wall and the woods higher on the hill. The Gray Friars file to the left of the Black Friars, and some homeless mendicants straggle up to watch the spectacle as well, probably hoping to get a hot meal and maybe a bath at one of the monasteries later. A few patches of snow still dot the hillside where the spring grass struggles to surface.

Florent snarls inside, angry, revolted at the spectacle of the hangings, hangings and more hangings. He wants to turn away.

The Black Friars priory is not far away on the other side of the wall, where Florent serves as a lay cleric. He wears the cassock and cord to please the abbot, it’s little enough and doesn’t really keep Father John pleased anyway, but Florent keeps his sword and dagger with him as well. He is of the priory but not of the priory.

Bad enough, that first round of executions. That was last fall when the hillside was turning brown and cold winds were blowing eastward. It was just after King Edward issued an edict that usurers and coin clippers should be arrested, tried and executed. All over England, people heard the signal; they took Edward’s proclamation as an invitation to pillage the communities of Jews. 

When word reached Winchester, the strike of that flint ignited days of riots in the streets, mobs setting bonfires in the market and in front of the Jewish synagogue. Some of the houses on Jewry Street caught fire, but the fires failed to make any distinction between Jewish or Christian homes. The Jews who lived there on the street tried desperately to pass buckets of water through the mobs to the burning houses—most of whom on some other day might have helped pass buckets themselves. And since Christian homes were catching fire as well, cries arose that the Jews started the fires, as though it made any sense that the Jews would set fire to their own homes first.

That first day of riots, the bailiff stood on the auction block at the market, and the crier read charges against the accused, while the conservator of the peace danced around on his horse, trying to disperse the mobs. Deputies rounded up the accused, carpenters set up the gallows. Everyone stayed busy.

The accused were money lenders and coin clippers, Jews and Christians both, accused of lending money at usurious interest, or stealing the king’s own silver—and all silver coin belonged to the king—by snipping a bit off the edges of his coins. Some were guilty and some innocent—and so were some of the accusers—but few of the accused had a chance to prove their innocence. And so many more were Jews than Christians, even though there weren’t many more Jews than Christians in Winchester—in fact, far, far fewer.

The mobs and riots were the worst that first week, and the bailiff Roger Dunstaple had wasted no time in hanging the accused right there in the marketplace, right in the center of town, the trials could wait until after, as though exhibitions of hangings would quiet the rioters and quell the fires. Roger was a hulking beast of a man, and if there were ever a shard of love in his heart, he spared none of it for Jews. He directed the conservator of the peace and his deputies from the garrison to hang a dozen of them that first night.

It worked. As the hangings began, rioters cheered. They jeered at the convicted, flailing from their ropes. They threw rotting cabbages, eggs and stones at the dangling bodies. But as the limbs of the dying went limp, the rioters fell still. And the dead were left to hang for seven days.

Not all who watched were rioters. Many that first day, like Florent, were incidental observers, trapped by the mob. As the dying finished their task, the conservator rode through the crowd, separating them, sending them home.

The fires ebbed, the smoke blew away with the wind, the ashes settled. The city sulked.

Then it happened again, in the winter. A new round of accusations and arrests, and a new tempest of riots, lootings of homes and shops of the accused, fires. And another round of executions. But this time Roger was better prepared. Despite the frozen ground, carpenters had somehow set up gallows on the hillside outside of town. Only those most determined to watch the hangings made the trek to where Florent stood now. But Roger and Father John de Dureville, the abbot of Black Friars, and the abbots and priors of all the other monasteries, had set the time and place and given the order, so that all the rank and file of monks must line the hillside to watch the hangings. Florent guesses this act of witness might be supposed to give the weight of churchly righteousness to the spectacle—but he doesn’t feel righteous.

And now, with spring about to flower, a third round of accusations, arrests, riots, lootings. And a show trial—this time held right at the gallows on the hillside, as though to save time and trouble, and the executions immediately to follow. At least this time, the trials preceded the executions. Roger claims the riots are less and he has saved the city some damage. Maybe so, but Florent doubts if anyone is really doing any accounting for it.

Only a few townspeople gather to watch today, and of course the boys circle around to throw stones—by now, most townspeople would probably rather be plying their trades or at their hearths than standing too close to the rot they could sense being played out. And those few who do make it to the hillside are people Florent might want to avoid in other circumstances, like unwelcome encounters in the town’s darkest, narrowest alleys at night. The friars are here only at the abbot’s command, and he says the command comes from the bishop. So he says, but Florent is not convinced. He notices that neither Father John nor Bishop Nicholas are present.

Florent and the monks stand, fidgeting witnesses to the mass execution. Three at a time, three after three, all left hanging while the next three are hoisted up. As before, not all of them are Jews—but most are. Anger seethes low in Florent’s guts, it churns. It is not witnessing death—that is all too commonplace. A plague—that comes from God. No, this is the pointless repetition of death upon death, a plague sprung from the black places of men’s souls. It recalls the executions he had witnessed after battle during his time as a squire during the war now more than a decade past, when Lord Edward—now King Edward—had slaughtered so many of the barons and their warriors.

Florent has no sympathy for criminals if they break the laws of God or king, and of course he has no sympathy for Jews. Either way, they deserve justice and punishment, in this world or the next. He stands up for the laws of God and Church, without question, of course. But why are he and the monks his brothers forced to watch this punishment, time after time? Are they also being punished? Does their presence bring with it the weight of God’s acceptance of this sacrifice?

He scans the faces of those about to be hanged, the third batch today. He is jolted into a shock of recognition—a pair of eyes looks straight into him. It is Jankin the doctor. Not the tanner who nearly killed Florent’s tiny daughter with his phony potions and his incompetence, it’s the real physician who spent five days in his home at Kathleen’s bedside and saved her life. The scar on Florent’s cheek burns in that way that is all too familiar to him.

He forgets the revulsion evoked by the orgy of executions. He breaks ranks and rushes to the gallows, and cries out, “Free that man! Release him! He’s a physician. He saved my daughter’s life! I vouch for him, he never loaned a mark on interest in his life. I will put up my own life that he’s never clipped a silver coin.”

He calls up to him, “Jankin, Jankin!” As he scrambles to climb the ladder, he draws a dagger from his waist to cut the man’s noose, if he can just climb high enough. But Roger comes from behind, pulls him down the ladder by the rope cord around his cassock, and beats him as he falls to the ground.

The black robed Dominicans are now getting even more of a show. The boys in the crowd stop chucking stones at the hanging bodies to watch and point, and even the crows stop circling, and settle on their perches to see what will happen.

Florent jumps up to try again to climb the ladder and slice the rope when the conservator of the peace, a knight called Philip, pulls his horse up behind him and pulls him back by the scruff of the cassock. Roger takes advantage of the instant to pummel Florent, until the conservator grabs the back of Roger’s head and yanks him, leaving Roger howling on the ground and Philip with a fistful of hair.

Florent scrambles to his feet in time to see the executioner kick the ladder out from under the physician’s feet, but not fast enough to stop him. Jankin’s body jerks and dances like a macabre marionette. Florent struggles to grab his dangling legs and right the ladder. But the executioner blocks his way, the bailiff tackles him from behind, and they slam into the rabble.

By the time he is able to get up from under Roger’s stinking, hulking mass, it is too late. The physician’s dance is done. The crows hop from the branches to the gallows and squawk impatiently for their turn at the eyes of the hanging.

But it is not over. Roger is back on his feet and grabs Florent by the shoulders from behind, yanks him to the ground, and slams him over the head with a board broken from the gallows.

Now it is over.