Priscilla Royal - Tyrant of the Mind

What a difference just a few years had made in both these women, Eleanor noted, as she chose to remain silent in the face of Isabelle’s ill temper. Like Juliana, Isabelle was not the light-hearted girl she remembered either, a child who spontaneously hugged her friends and loved to crowd into the lap of her husband’s first wife for the maternal affection that lady gave with as much abundance as if Isabelle had been her own child. As Eleanor recalled, the girl had been an orphan, not even distantly related to the Lavenhams. Sir Geoffrey’s elder brother had received her wardship from the king and enjoyed the income from her lands while she was yet a child. Since he had never married, he had given Isabelle, with a small allowance for maintenance, to Sir Geoffrey and his wife to rear. There she had had a loving home. Until now, it seemed. In truth, despite her air of self-satisfied superiority, Isabelle looked no happier than her old friend. What had happened to cause such estrangement? Was it really jealousy? Could it be, as Sir Geoffrey had suggested, that Juliana resented his remarriage? And why had Isabelle married the father rather than the son? What…

Harsh masculine laughter shattered Eleanor’s reflection. She looked up and saw Sir Geoffrey slam his goblet of wine down on the table. A burgundy stain spread across the white linen tablecloth.

Isabelle sat bolt upright, her face paled unevenly as she stared at her husband.

“Boy, you are a spineless whelp!” Sir Geoffrey snarled at his son.

“My lord…” Henry’s round face was crimson.

“ My lord ,” his father mimicked in a high-pitched voice. “ When you fathered me, you gave me balls, but I have since lost them. ” His voice dropped to a growling bass. “I cannot provide you with everything, boy. If you were a man, you’d get what you needed on your own.” He looked down from the high table to the benches filled with men of lower status and his lips twisted into a thin smile. “But why should I think him a man? He has never given me reason to assume such.” He nodded to his captive audience in the hall, then pointed to his son. “I fear his mother must have dreamed of Eve the night this one was conceived for she left me with a mincing cokenay instead of a son. Perhaps,” he continued, turning to Henry, “you had best ask my wife for advice on the whitening she uses on her face and give your braies to a man, for a cokenay has no use for men’s attire.” He gazed around the hall and smiled at the sporadic laughter that greeted his angry wit. “Perhaps I’ll see if I can find a man willing to be your husband amongst her many rejected admirers.” Then the look in his eyes turned hard. He bent down for something under the table. As he rose, he tossed the raw testicles of the now roasted boar into Henry’s lap. “Unless these can give you what you lack.”

With his face turned as white as the table covering, Henry threw his goblet at his father, missing his head by inches, then stormed out of the hall.

Sir Geoffrey pursed his mouth and fluttered his hands. “Oh, but you frightened me so! What shall I do? Cokenay ! You had best find Robert. Since you spurned the ones I offered, perhaps he can find balls to hang between your legs,” he shouted with a mocking laugh at his son’s retreating back, then lowering his voice, “although I doubt anyone could fill your lack.”

Isabelle grabbed her goblet, now refilled with wine, and gulped it dry. A rivulet of red slipped down her chin and dripped like a bloody tear onto her robe.

Juliana sat with head bowed, motionless, silent, her hands gripped together against her waist so tightly they looked bloodless.

Eleanor watched her father reach up and grasp his old friend’s arm, then gently pull him back into his chair and whisper in his ear.

Sir Geoffrey roared with laughter.

Thomas could not sleep. Eating with Father Anselm was distasteful enough but sharing quarters with the man was more than Thomas could take, now that he need not spend his nights in Richard’s chambers. Indeed, he had grown accustomed to some seclusion at Tyndal, where each monk had a small but separate place to sleep, but such lack of privacy here was the least of his problems. Father Anselm was not only foul-smelling, he snored, and, to make Thomas feel further cursed, the priest was a light sleeper.

“Going to the chapel to pray, brother?” Anselm’s head popped up the instant Thomas’ feet touched the rush-covered floor. “I’ll join you.”

Thomas rubbed his hand across his aching eyes in frustration. “Sleep on, good priest. My eyes will not close and I hoped to walk by myself in quiet contemplation until they became heavy again.”

Anselm was already standing and adjusting the cowl of his robe around his neck. “Lonely contemplation for a meat-eating man is dangerous. It might lead to sinful thoughts and…” he gestured in the direction of Thomas’ crotch, “solitary abuse. You need the discipline of company.” The minor adjustment of his attire completed, he reached over and grabbed Thomas by the arm with greater strength than such a spare frame would suggest he possessed. “Together, let us go to the chapel and pray!”

Thomas was too tired to argue further nor did he care to explain to Anselm the reasons he rarely suffered from the sin of Onan. “Very well,” he sighed and wearily headed for the door.

At least the priest chose not to speak on the way down the dimly lit passage to the stairs that led to the inner ward. Foul though it might be, only his breath whitened the darkness as they rounded the outside wall of the great hall to the chapel entrance. For this lack of talkativeness, Thomas raised his eyes heavenward in silent gratitude.

Later, after they had each slid to their knees, Thomas found himself admiring Anselm’s ability to ignore the freezing stone floor. He might find the body of his companion thoroughly repellent, but, as the castle priest plunged into a prayer as lengthy and ardent as a lover’s plea, he felt a brief twinge of jealousy. This man might actually have had a calling to his vocation. Thomas had not come willingly to the priesthood.

As he felt the chill of the floor seep through his woolen robe to numb his knees, he looked up at the carving of the twisted body of Jesus on the cross. The moving shadows from the flickering candles blackened the hollows between the jagged ribs but hid whatever expression the artist had carved upon the face. Thomas knew that there would be no individuality of features. They were irrelevant. The artist’s sole focus would be the message of the Crucifixion. Indeed, Thomas did not need to see the face. Both agony and hope would be there. That he knew. The pain was understandable, the hope expected, but surely there would have been a hint of gratitude as well, indeed a joy that it would all soon be over? He thought so. After all, hadn’t Thomas once looked upon death with some sense of eager anticipation?

He shivered, but the cause was not the icy floor. In a flash of memory, he was back in prison. He stifled a cry as he once again felt powerless, bound and naked, while the jailer, grunting like a pig in rut, clawed his buttocks apart and raped him on the rotting filth of that jail floor. Thomas bit into his lip to chase the image away, but the metallic taste only reminded him of the blood trickling between his legs after the jailer had left him.

Heresy or not, Thomas found himself wondering if the jailers had raped Jesus too. The Gospels had said naught of such a thing, recording only the beating and the crown of thorns. Indeed, had a rape occurred, he knew no one would have spoken of it.

When one man raped another, it might be the ultimate humiliation for the victim, yet it tainted the rapist as well. Such feats were not bragged about in taverns or even confessed in secret, except on a deathbed with the red maw of Hell opening before a man’s failing eyes. Nevertheless, Jesus might have been raped. After all, such an act of degradation could well have been deemed proper for a man who preached love in a time when others were fomenting rebellion and war.