First Chapter: The Blood of the Fifth Knight by E.M. Powell

Title: T he Blood of the Fifth Knight
Author: E.M. Powell
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Pages: 355
Genre: Historical Mystery/Thriller
Format: Paperback/Kindle/Audiobook

Purchase at AMAZON

England, 1176. King Henry II has imprisoned his rebellious Queen for her failed attempt to overthrow him. But with her conspirators still at large and a failed assassination attempt on his beautiful mistress, Rosamund Clifford, the King must take action to preserve his reign.

Desperate, Henry turns to the only man he trusts: a man whose skills have saved him once before. Sir Benedict Palmer answers the call, mistakenly believing that his family will remain safe while he attends to his King.

As Palmer races to secure his King’s throne, neither man senses the hand of a brilliant schemer, a mystery figure loyal to Henry’s traitorous Queen who will stop at nothing to see the King defeated.

The Blood of the Fifth Knight is an intricate medieval murder mystery and worthy sequel to E.M. Powell’s acclaimed historical thriller The Fifth Knight.

First Chapter:

Canterbury, Kent, England, 12 July 1174

A king’s flesh tore like any man’s. Sir Benedict Palmer knew it would, but still it shocked him to see it.

He stood among the many hundreds of pilgrims and gawkers that crammed the winding streets of Canterbury, watching the penitent King Henry make his tortured way towards the cathedral. The shouting crowds stood ten deep, twenty in places, pushing for a better view.

‘Can you see him?’ came the close whisper from Palmer’s wife, Theodosia.

He met her fear-filled grey eyes. ‘He’s nearly here’. Though Palmer could see with ease over the crowd, his small-boned Theodosia could not. Not yet, but very soon. And the sight would horrify her.

The broiling sun overhead lit the red that remained in Henry’s greying hair, and he wore the blackened ash mask of the sinner. The sweat on his face carried dark streaks of ash and a different red down his naked upper body. Blood stained the royal flesh, flesh white and soft as a turnip root. A line of sweating, black-robed monks followed him, scourges in hand, delivering this brutal public penance for the murder of the cathedral’s Archbishop, Thomas Becket.

Theodosia’s hand tightened on Palmer’s arm. He knew she had longed desperately for this day. Longed for it as much as she dreaded it.

Another crack echoed above the noisy mob, and the black coils of a scourge striped Henry’s bare chest and shoulders again. Folk gasped, women screamed. A group of white-robed monks raised their voices in a noisy hymn.

Theodosia gripped harder.

‘Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, istis Sanctis et omnibus Sanctis’. Henry continued to recite his penance, his thin voice cutting through the horde’s buzz.

‘Beg for forgiveness!’ yelled an unseen man. ‘Saint Thomas Becket is all forgiving!’

A new din of yells, whistles, and cries broke out.

‘By the glorious Queen of Heaven and the angels, repent!’ A hatchet-faced man flung up his hands.

‘Beg for the mercy of the Almighty!’ wailed a pockmarked priest.

‘Repent!’ A woman held tight to the cloak of her witless, drooling son, a cross shorn into his hair. ‘Repent now!’

All in this mob blamed Henry—blamed him as surely as if he had held the sword that had smashed Archbishop Thomas Becket’s skull on that freezing December night three and a half years ago. The night that Palmer and Theodosia had both witnessed, that had near cost them their lives too. The night that the cathedral had become Becket’s tomb, where his lifeblood had been splashed across its stone floor.

But today, the huge grey cathedral towers stood against a searing sun in a blue sky, marking Becket’s triumph from Henry’s martyr to a holy saint. Today, Henry the sinner stumbled low on the hot, brutal streets of Canterbury, begging for forgiveness from the man he’d had cut down, his own flesh shredded and torn. Already he looked as if he might fall.

‘A godly dead man is worth more than a living knave!’

Another rage-filled scream.

Palmer licked the salt of sweat from his top lip and held his reactions in check. The King was no knave, yet the world had to think so.

Palmer glanced down at his silent wife, fearing her collapse more than the King’s. The high buildings trapped the stink from the near-solid run-offs from the privies, as well as the noise and heat. He hadn’t wanted to come to witness this ugly spectacle, but she’d insisted.

They’d travelled for weeks from their distant village of Cloughbrook in Staffordshire. Weeks without much food, as they walked in a praying, singing throng of every kind of pilgrim, which grew with each day they neared Canterbury. Now they stood here as the sun climbed, fiercer by the hour, without the relief of shade or water. Fiercer still, the mood of those watching Henry’s agony. The fierceness of the righteous. Palmer knew it well.

And Theodosia stood beside him, with her stomach big, the baby she carried expected by autumn. But he needn’t worry about her fainting. Despite her heat-cracked lips and freckled skin, he saw the clamp of her jaw, the firm set of her gaze. She wouldn’t yield: she waited for her King. Yet her gaze flicked to their small red-haired son, edging forward through the knot of legs and skirts, curious to gape too.

‘Tom’. Her quick order brought him back to Palmer’s side.

Palmer laid a hand on the lad’s slender shoulder. ‘Stay with us, eh? Can’t have you getting lost’. Not much chance of that. Becket himself could come down from the clouds, and Theodosia would still have an eye on the boy.

There was a crack as another scourge met the royal flesh. The crowd let out a fresh roar, drowning Henry’s cry of anguish.

Hands, fists and staves pressed at Palmer’s back, tried to force past him to gape closer. He swung his son off his feet and plunked him on his shoulders as he held Theodosia to him with his other arm.

He turned to those behind him. ‘Stop your shoving, you hear me?’

A fat pilgrim with an even fatter wife glared at him. ‘You ignorant farmer’. With his breath a blast of tooth rot, the man’s face shone with rage and heat. ‘I can’t see past you and your—’ He caught the full force of Palmer’s look.

And shut his noise.

‘Benedict’. Theodosia pulled at his arm. ‘Not here. We are on a holy pilgrimage’.

Palmer gave the silenced man a final glare and turned back to see the King’s approach along the street. ‘You ignorant farmer’. Yes, he resembled one in his worn, patched clothes. He had to. If the pilgrim knew—knew who he really was, what he, Sir Benedict Palmer, had done: half those here would run screaming from him; the other half would tear him to pieces. No matter that King Henry knew the truth, that Henry would say Palmer’s actions had been justified. Henry himself was so close to losing his kingdom, losing his crown. Many said the King did this penance to make amends with God, before he lost power to Queen Eleanor and her ferocious sons, rising in rebellion against him. And all Palmer and Theodosia had been through would have been for nothing.

‘Make way for his Grace. Make way!’ Canterbury’s guards forced the watchers back with drawn swords.

Shoved aside too, Palmer took a half step to steady his stance.

Tom’s small hands clutched tightly at Palmer’s hair.

‘Alright, son?’

‘Yeh’.

His son’s high voice hardened his resolve. Forget knighthood, kingdoms, battles. The murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, the murder that Henry now did penance for. The murder that he, Sir Benedict Palmer, had been present at. What mattered now was to keep his family safe.

But if a king could fall, if a king could be swept aside, then where did that leave him?

* * *

Theodosia Palmer clung to her husband’s arm, her head pounding and her legs threatening to give way. Around her, the tightly packed, rough-clothed strangers robbed the air from her as their shouts of hate pulsed in her ears.

Hate for Henry, her King. Henry, her father. The father who had allowed her and Benedict to be together. The father who protected their secret and continued to keep them from harm. She shook her head to clear her faintness. She had to hold on. She had come this far.

The crowd had been firmly parted for the King’s approach by soldiers. Across the street on the other side, the sight of the waiting, accusing faces, distorted in their yelling, vicious hostility, wavered before her.

‘There’s the sinner!’ came the cry from the pilgrim behind her.

Then Henry drew level with her, half a dozen steps away.

Oh, Father. Theodosia’s free hand flew to her mouth. Sweet Jesus, have mercy on him.

With his eyes glazed in his agony, Henry’s head drooped forward, his jaw humiliatingly slack, as if his skull was too heavy to bear. The skin of his bare shoulders bore terrible injuries. Every step was a battle for him. He could have been Christ, her Lord, staggering along the street in Jerusalem to His crucifixion, carrying the sins of mankind.

And as Christ had shouldered the sins of mankind, so Henry carried the blame for a murder for which he was not responsible.

She was. Because of her, evil had sought out her Lord Becket and cut him down. Now Satan was regrouping, giving strength to those whose greatest wish was to see her father defeated and rotting in the ground too.

A monk slashed a scourge across Henry’s open flesh, tearing it anew.

Those watching gaped in horror, their shouts halted.

‘Have mercy!’ Henry’s scream rang out.

‘No mercy for sinners!’ came an unseen shout.

Few others took it up, the terrible shouts now murmurs of appalled disgust.

But she could allow this to continue no longer. She must atone for her sins in this battle. The murder of a man lay on her soul, the stain seeping into its depths. She had to step out and join the King’s penance. She would cry out her evil to all who stood here, share the burden with him.

Henry took a few more agonised steps.

She had to do it now, before she was too late. She went to push forward, past the raised weapon of a swordsman, to step out, accept the lashes as her father did.

The child within her kicked hard. So hard, it stopped her breath. She clutched at her swollen stomach, unable to move. All she could do was fight to fill her lungs with the stifling air. Slowly. Carefully. Nothing else.

As her chest relaxed, her sense returned. Her unborn child had called to her, preventing her from a step she should not take. Proclaiming her sin here would do far more wrong than carrying it with her. Her baby, this precious new life, might be harmed. Her son too. She could never, ever allow that to happen.

Then she was helpless to act, for there was nothing she could do. She balled her fists in frustration. Nothing? There was one thing.

Swallowing hard to wet her parched throat, she called out: ‘God bless you, sire. You know He will!’

Benedict’s sharp intake of breath met her words, as did murmurs of surprise from those watching.

Henry turned his head in her direction, and dozens of other curious pairs of eyes followed. Then he smiled.

The grief in Theodosia’s heart lessened. A little.

More stares and whispers came.

Henry’s gaze flicked to from her to Benedict, then to Tom on his father’s shoulders.

Benedict raised a hand. ‘The blessings of Saint Thomas Becket upon you, sire’.

His voice echoed clear and firm. His words drew the attention from her call. Nods from some present showed they approved, that the saint indeed had the power to forgive the humbled Henry.

Henry smiled once more as he pulled his wounded shoulders square, stepping towards the cathedral with new resolve.

A black-robed monk landed another stinging blow on the King’s injured torso, and the crowd bellowed again, their attention firmly back on him.

Then he was gone.

A few gazes still came their way.

‘It’s time we made for home’. Benedict drew her away through the throng, careful to keep hold of Tom. His voice stayed low, his dark eyes displeased. ‘What were you thinking of? You shouldn’t have called out like that’.

‘As did you’.

‘Only to stop folk paying mind to you’.

‘I had to do something. He is suffering so much, and it is our—’

Benedict cut her off. ‘Not here’. He shook his head. ‘It’s too risky’.

A fresh cry echoed up from the unseen Henry, along with a roar from the spectators.

Theodosia crossed herself. ‘Saint Veronica stepped from those lining the road to Calvary and wiped the face of Christ Himself. What I did was nothing, only a few words’.

Benedict’s scowl did not lift. ‘We don’t need words. We’ve faced evil. We defeated it. If we have to, we’ll defeat it again’.

‘But at the cost of our souls. We have never fully repented because we have kept it all a secret. How is that a—’ The child within her kicked hard again, stopping her words and her steps.

Halting with her, Benedict’s expression shifted from glower to concern. ‘Are you alright?’

Theodosia put a hand to her fitful stomach. Steady, little one. Mama has to breathe. ‘I am fine’. She kept her gaze on her husband’s face. ‘How is that a victory? Have we not lost what should be most important to us?’

‘We still have our lives and our freedom. Many that fought with us were not so lucky. That’s good enough for me’. Benedict moved his arm across her shoulders. ‘We need to leave Canterbury, get you rest and water. Otherwise you’ll stop the crowd again, this time by birthing my second child on the road’.

The promise of escape from the battering heat was too much to resist. Theodosia allowed him to lead her away.

As they rounded the cathedral walls, Tom cried out and pointed from his seat on Benedict’s shoulders. ‘Birds!’

Theodosia looked up to where black crows circled high above the cathedral, specks of black spoiling the perfect blue. The huge building blotted out the sunlight, casting a long, deep shadow in which they now stood.

Her overheated skin prickled in sudden, cold anxiety. She sought the words of her God. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil’.

But she still feared evil. It had found her once as an anchoress within those cathedral walls, could yet find her again. And worse, could find those she loved to the depths of her soul.