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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Clerk's Account
I set down these words in the fifty-third year of my life, in the reign of King Henry, the second of that name, in the year of Our Lord eleven hundred and seventy-six. My hand is not as steady as it once was. The winters in Somerset settle into the knuckles and the wrists, and some mornings I must warm my fingers over a candle before I can grip the quill. But I will write this, because no one else can, and because the dead deserve better than the stories that have already been told about them.
I am Hugh Penrose, the son of Walter Penrose, a wool merchant of Frome in the county of Somerset. My father was prosperous enough to send me to the cathedral school at Wells, and from there I found my way to the schools of Paris, where I studied the law — both canon and civil — for three years before my money ran out and my father's letters grew increasingly pointed about the cost. I returned to England in the year 1158, educated but not ordained, a clerk in minor orders who could read Latin and French and draft a legal document but who had no benefice, no patron, and no particular prospects.
What I had was a good hand. I do not say this with false modesty. My penmanship was excellent — clear, regular, swift — and in the world of royal and ecclesiastical administration, a good hand is worth more than a noble name. It was my hand that brought me to the attention of the Chancellor's household, and it was the Chancellor who changed the course of my life.
The Chancellor was Thomas Becket.
I must describe him as he was then, not as the painted saints in the cathedral windows show him now — gaunt, hollow-eyed, a sword bisecting his skull. That is the martyr. I knew the man. In 1160, when I entered his service, Thomas was the most magnificent figure in England after the king himself. He was tall, dark-haired, sharp-featured, with a long nose and quick, penetrating eyes that could make you feel, in the space of a single glance, that you were either the most important person in the room or the most contemptible. He dressed in silk and fur. His table was laid with silver. He kept hawks and hounds and rode to the hunt with the king as an equal. Foreign ambassadors mistook him for the king on more than one occasion, and Thomas did nothing to correct them.
He was the son of a London merchant — Norman stock, but trade, not land — and he had risen through the Church's administrative machinery with a speed that astonished everyone and surprised no one who knew him. He was brilliant, tireless, charming when he wished to be, and utterly ruthless in the service of whatever cause he had adopted. When I knew him first, that cause was the Crown. He served King Henry as Chancellor with a devotion that went beyond duty into something like love. They were inseparable — hunting together, dining together, arguing about law and theology and horseflesh with the easy intimacy of brothers.
I was one of perhaps thirty clerks in the Chancellor's household, and for the first year I did nothing more remarkable than copy writs and file correspondence. But Thomas noticed me. He noticed everyone — it was one of his gifts, or one of his weapons — and he discovered that I had studied law in Paris under Master Robert of Melun. This interested him. He began to use me for more delicate work: drafting legal arguments, summarizing disputes, preparing briefs for the royal courts. I was not his confidant. I was his instrument. But I was a well-used instrument, and I was grateful.
I admired him. Let me say that plainly, because what follows will make it seem otherwise. I admired Thomas Becket with the uncomplicated devotion of a young man who has found a master worthy of his talents. He was everything I was not — bold, worldly, magnificent — and he seemed to move through the world as though it had been arranged for his convenience. I wanted to be useful to him. I wanted him to know my name.
He did know my name. He called me Penrose, in his clipped, precise way, and sometimes he smiled when he said it, which made me absurdly happy.
This was the man. Remember him.
Because in the spring of 1162, everything changed.
