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“And the significance of the solstices?”
Bertrand merely shrugged.
Thomas lapsed into thought, pacing slowly before Bertrand hunched miserably on his stool.
“What of this ancient book that Brother Wynkyn consulted? What did it contain?”
“I do not know.”
“Does it remain in the friary?”
“No. Wynkyn took it with him on his final journey north.”
“In Advent of the first year of pestilence.”
“Yes.” Bertrand hunched even further on the stool. Why hadn’t he destroyed those records earlier?
“And Wynkyn did not return from Nuremberg?”
“No. I presume he died of the pestilence.”
“And the book?”
“Wynkyn took it with him encased in an oaken casket. I presume it lies wherever Wynkyn bubbled out his last breath. Either that or it has been stolen.”
Thomas stopped his pacing, thinking deeply. In the past hour he’d found a solidity of purpose that had before been only a vague hope and yearning. Now he knew exactly what he had to do.
All thought of whores and naked flesh had fled his mind.
“I must retrace Wynkyn de Worde’s last route north,” Thomas said, and Bertrand blinked as if he were a prisoner suddenly and most unexpectedly given his freedom.
He would rid himself of this troublesome brother once and for all!
“I must find that casket,” Thomas said, “but I will need your aid.”
“Ask what you will,” said Bertrand, silently wishing that Thomas would just leave.
“I seek an audience with the pope.”
“What!”
Thomas looked Bertrand in the eye. “Boniface obviously knew something of what Brother Wynkyn did. What if his secret had also been shared with his successors? I must ask the Holy Father, and perhaps even enlist his aid.”
Thomas was prepared to work without it, but the backing of the pope would open many doors for him.
“Sweet Jesu, brother,” Bertrand said, “an audience with Urban? But—”
“Can it be arranged?”
Bertrand played with the frayed end of his belt, trying to purchase some time. Arrange an audience with the pope? Lord Christ Saviour! It could mean the end of his career!
“Brother Prior?”
Bertrand gave up, spreading his hands helplessly. “It will take some time, Brother Thomas, and even then it might prove impossible. Urban has only sat his throne some five days…and some say he may not sit it much longer.”
“What do you mean?” Thomas had spent so much time in prayer the past week that he’d not had the time or inclination to listen to gossip.
“You have not heard? Two days after the election, thirteen of the sixteen cardinals put themselves back on the road to Avignon.”
“Why?”
“When the cardinals met in conclave they were terrified that if they voted in a non-Roman the mob would slaughter them. Well, we all know that for the truth. But there are rumours of more. They say that the cardinals decided to elect Urban as pope on the clear understanding that he would resign within a month or so when the majority of the cardinals were safely back in Avignon. Once safe, the cardinals will declare the Roman conclave void because of interference from the mob and have a new election.”
Thomas fought the urge to swear. The college of cardinals had long had a law that if a papal election came under undue interference then it could be declared null and void.
And Urban’s election had indisputably come under “undue interference”.
This rumour had the smell of truth.
“That evil walks among us cannot be questioned,” Thomas said, “when the cardinals plot such treachery against the Church of Rome!”
“Do you still seek an audience with Urban?”
Thomas nodded. “It will do no harm.”
Bertrand folded his hands in resignation. “I will do what I can.”
VII (#ulink_59ae48d7-beac-51dc-9fce-ebd99a2cd5f2)
Wednesday in Easter Week
In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III
(21st April 1378)
—i—
During the seventy years that the popes had resided in Avignon, the papal palace adjoining St Peter’s Basilica had fallen into a state of disrepair. Gregory had not done much to restore it in the year he’d spent in Rome before his death—and many said that that was a clear indication he had not meant to remain permanently in Rome at all—and had only made them habitable.
Thus Urban did not meet petitioners in the great audience hall—half demolished over the past fifty years by Romans seeking foundation stones for their homes—but in a large chapel that ran between St Peter’s and the papal palace. It had taken Prior Bertrand a great deal of time and had caused him to call in a great many favours to engineer a place at the Thursday papal audience for himself and Brother Thomas, and even then he did not know if they would get a chance to actually address the pope.
But this was the best he could do, and so, after their noon meal, he and Brother Thomas made their way into the Leonine City.
The gates in the wall by the Castel St Angelo had been restored to their hangings, but were thrown open to the petitioners and pilgrims wending their way towards St Peter’s. The rising spring meant that the pilgrimage ways were reopening after the winter hiatus, and both Bertrand and Thomas had to push their way through the crowds thronging the streets leading to the Basilica.
Their robes granted them no favours. Rome was stacked to the rafters with clerics of all shapes, sizes and degrees, and a pair of Dominican friars were inconsequential compared to the hordes of bishops and archbishops, holy hermits, frenzied prophets of doom and wild-eyed nuns in the grip of some holy possession.
Thomas’ mouth thinned as he shouldered a way through for himself and the prior. Most of these hermits, prophets and hysterical nuns were but pretenders, their palms held open for coin, their voices shrieking that doom awaited if pilgrims weren’t prepared to part with their last groat for a blessing.
“Does the pope not issue orders to rid the streets of such as these?” he muttered as he and Bertrand were momentarily pinned against a brick wall by the pressing throng.
“Rome has always been cursed with such petitioners,” Bertrand replied. “Sometimes worse. When Boniface called the great Jubilee several years before he died, Rome was awash with over a million pilgrims…as with all the charlatans, whores, relic merchants and money lenders the pilgrim trade attracts.”
Thomas stared at Bertrand, forgetting for the moment the crowds about them. “A million pilgrims? Surely not!”
“’Tis true, my son. Some say the number was even greater.”
Thomas shook his head, unable to conceive of a million people. Rome’s population was normally about thirty thousand—and that was extraordinary enough in Christendom, where few towns had more than two thousand people. But a million?
“Jesu,” he whispered, “how was Rome not destroyed amid such a conflagration of people?”
“Rome has survived many things, Thomas. The corruption and madness of Roman emperors, invasions by barbarians and infidels, and the devilish machinations of kings. A squash of pilgrims would not worry it overmuch.”
But such a crowd, thought Thomas, and the sin it must have engendered.
“Come!” Bertrand said, seizing Thomas’ sleeve. “I see a way opening before us!”
They walked as quickly as possible up the steps leading to the entrance into the vast court that lay before St Peter’s: they would have to enter the papal presence via the Basilica itself. The steps were as crowded as the streets, and Thomas was appalled to see that the court itself was packed with the stalls of moneylenders and relic merchants.
“How can the pope allow this?” he said, waving a hand at the frenetic activity. “It is like the scene before the Temple of Jerusalem!”
“Money can make even popes tolerant of many evils,” said Bertrand, and hurried Thomas forward before the man thought to emulate Christ himself and start to overturn tables. Bertrand just wanted to get this over and done with and, whatever the result of the interview, to then hurry Thomas out of Rome with as much speed as he could.
Bertrand cared not that Thomas spoke with the authority of angels. Wynkyn de Worde had as well, and Bertrand had never stopped counting his blessings that the demented man had not returned from Nuremberg.
St Peter’s was relatively quiet after the hustle of the outer court and streets. The nave of the Basilica was crowded with pilgrims and penitents, but it was quiet save for the mumble of prayers, and most knelt in orderly ranks facing the altar of St Peter, or before one of the shrines that lined the aisles.
Bertrand and Thomas genuflected towards St Peter’s shrine, then moved up the right-hand aisle towards a small door two-thirds of the way along the north wall of the Basilica. It was well guarded, but Bertrand whispered his name and that of Thomas, and the guards allowed them through.
They found themselves in a small corridor, blessedly quiet after the turbulence of street and court, and Bertrand indicated a door at its end. “Through there. We’ll find ourselves at the rear of the chapel. Bow towards the pope, although he probably won’t see you, and then come to stand with me to the side. The papal secretaries have your name, and if the pope has time then he will—”
“If he has time?”
“Thomas, you are an unimportant man within the hierarchy of the Church. There will be others, many others, and of far more important rank, before you.”
“But not of more important mission,” Thomas mumbled.
“Do you think yourself Christ?” Bertrand hissed. “Do you think yourself to be announced as the saviour of Christendom?”
“I speak with the voice of—”
“You are still a humble man,” Bertrand said. “Do not forget that!”
The chamber was packed, but with a far more richly clothed and bejewelled crowd than that which thronged the streets.
Bertrand and Thomas entered silently and bowed to the figure of Urban seated—stiff in his robes and jewels—on the papal throne set on a small dais before the altar of the chapel.
He did not notice their entrance.
The two friars whispered their names to a clerk seated just inside the door, who wrote them down and then passed the paper to a messenger boy who took it to two richly-robed secretaries seated at a table to the pope’s left. Bertrand and Thomas then stood with a group of Benedictine monks halfway up the chapel by a shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary. From this vantage point both men could see and hear well.
There were three cardinals seated on the pope’s right. The remaining three, Thomas realised, and wondered why they had stayed when all the others had departed for Avignon. Urban, a bear-like man in his late fifties who wore his robes of office with obvious discomfort, sat fidgeting impatiently while one of the cardinals whispered earnestly to him.
“Ah! Bah!” Urban suddenly pronounced and, leaning back in his chair, spat a gob of phlegm to one side of his chair.
“I give that for King John’s proposition!” he said, and farted.
The shock in the chapel was palpable. Bodies stiffened and faces blanched.
Grinning, Urban reached for a jewelled goblet of wine on a side table. He downed it in four loud gulps, red wine running down one side of his chin, then slammed the goblet down.
“But, Holy Father,” the cardinal said, “the French king has proposed what is only just—”
“What your partners in intrigue have told him is just,” Urban said. “I doubt the old man could tell the difference between a woman’s breast and a donkey’s teat, let alone between what is just and what is not.”
The cardinal sat back, glancing at the other two. His fingers drummed on the arm of his chair, then stilled.
“No one doubts that our conclave was under undue influence,” he said.
Urban roared and leapt to his feet. “I will not resign!” he yelled.
Bertrand leaned towards Thomas and whispered in his ear: “I fear we have arrived at a most inopportune moment.”
Thomas said nothing, but his face was tight with anger. The cardinals had elected this peasant’s arse as pope?
Urban stepped down from the dais, strode over to a guard, wrenched a spear from the startled man’s grasp and stalked back to the three cardinals.
He threw the spear down at the feet of the cardinal who had been speaking to him.
The man’s face did not change expression.
“Even if the cardinals point a thousand spears at my throat I will not resign!” Urban shouted. “I am rightful pope, and I will not resign!”
“Then we have no choice,” the cardinal said, his face impassive. “The cardinals will meet in conclave in Avignon and they will declare the election held here in Rome to be null and void. They will then elect a rightful pope. You are—”
“Don’t think that you and your companions here,” Urban gestured towards the other two cardinals, “will be joining them. Instead I think you shall spend the next few months in sackcloth in some isolated monastery, living on bread and water and spending the hours of the day in prayer for the salvation of your souls.”
And still the expression on the cardinal’s face did not alter. “Your orders carry no weight. You can force myself and my colleagues into whatever prison you like, but know that you only stain your soul further by doing so. You are only a parody. A jest.”
Urban’s fists clenched, and Thomas could see that he was struggling for control. On the one hand, Thomas was furious that the cardinals had, indeed, been plotting to elect another Frenchman to the papal throne; on the other, he was appalled that God’s cause should be championed by this pig.
“A parody, my lord cardinal. How many of the princes of Europe will believe me a parody? How many would support another puppet of the French king taking the papal throne?”
All about the chapel men were turning to their neighbours and whispering furiously.
“Lord Christ Saviour!” Bertrand said softly. “If neither backs down, then both Urban and the rogue cardinals are going to turn this into a European war!”
The impassive cardinal suddenly lost all control. He stood up and made a foul gesture towards Urban.
