The Whyte Harte

by Paul Doherty

Genres: Historical Fiction; Historical Mysteries; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The suspicious death of the Richard II prompts an u nground movement known as the White Harte... The turbulent times of the 15th century are perfectly captured in Paul Doherty's gripping mystery, The White Harte. Perfect for fans of Ellis Peters and Susanna Gregory. Jankyn's narrative relates his own past, a past spent unwillingly under the tutelage of priests and friars in an Augustinian monastery; his rebellious flirtation with the heresy of Lollardism; and finally his becoming a thief, an accused traitor, and yeoman to Bishop Henry Beaufort, illegitimate grandson of 'The Black Prince', and half-brother to King Henry V. It is Beaufort who 'rescues' Jankyn from Newgate prison to serve as his investigator of the rumours that Richard II is not dead, but alive in Scotland, encouraging the small rebellions under the sign of the White Harte. It is up to Jankyn to discover the truth... What readers are saying about Paul Doherty: 'The plot and mystery slowly unfolds with unexpected twists and turns before finally being unravelled. An enthralling tale by Doherty at his best' '[You] lose yourself in the story' ' Five stars '

Release date: June 6, 2013

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 249

Sample

I have always been a liar. I must try hard to tell the truth. I have taken a vow to be honest but I find it difficult to keep a straight face, even as I write these words. Just think, Matthew Jankyn, Oxford scholar, soldier, veteran of Agincourt, confidant of kings and rebels! Well I know the truth. And what is that? Jankyn is a spy. Jankyn is a coward and, above all, Jankyn is a liar. I look back on my life and search hard for the truth. Jankyn amidst the mud, shit and corpses of Northern France. Jankyn in secret chambers, in shadows, in hamlets, in palaces. Jankyn in cold rooms, wet and dishevelled. Jankyn wrapped in silken sheets with soft-fleshed, white-skinned, perfumed girls. But, always, Jankyn the liar.

It was not always like this. I was a child once, innocent and quiet, smiling at all, and disapproving of no one. Perhaps that is when it started, not with a king who refused to die, but with a mother who died too early, too soon, buried and forgotten in a forlorn, derelict cemetery of Newport, a small village in Shropshire. I was born there. My father was well to do. An educated man of few words and no past. He worked for the Coate family. Lords of the manor, which included Newport, a host of other little villages and all the land in between them. A hard man my father. He drove my mother into an early grave, or so the village gossips muttered. He wanted sons and got them, but they only died, scraps of flesh baptised, shrouded and buried. Finally there was me, mewing weakly, the runt of the litter, only this time it was my mother who died. She never stopped bleeding after my birth, caught a fever and was dead within six months of my baptism. My father hired a wet nurse, who fed and raised me and noisily served him in bed. She was the only parent I had. My father neglected me, apart from a gruff word or the occasional kick or blow.

I grew up rather sickly, fully determined to win my father’s approval. I failed to do that. Instead, I was educated. I was thin and short but, in the words of the local priest, ‘The good God had given me a brain’. Silly bastard! What did he know? My father swindled him. As a steward, my father controlled the Coate estate and consequently the priest’s house and glebe. The church was my father’s meeting-place, not the sanctuary with its great oak altar and marble steps hidden by the chancel screen and rood loft. My father left the sanctuary alone and used the huge vaulting nave where he exercised his power and office of steward, sitting in his heavy carved chair behind a long polished bench. Here the villagers came to present their accounts at Michaelmas and midsummer. My father was stern but, in the main, fair. He only kept back a small portion of their rents for himself but the old priest was a different matter. My father did not like priests. I never knew why but when the villagers brought their tithes, my father always pocketed some of them. He also forced the fellow to provide me with the rudiments of education and I learnt avidly. I mastered Latin, a little Greek, courtly French and even some history, most of it wrong but at least it gave me some idea of a wider world and more exciting events. It also comforted me for the village children treated me as if I were some strange animal or marauding beast. They did not like me, with my shock of black hair, thin white face and clever green eyes which, they stupidly maintained, reminded them of a weasel rather than a boy. I had my revenge. I used to plot and follow them and when they broke into an orchard or tried to take fat carp or juicy perch from the manor pool, I would tell my father and listen gleefully to the details of their punishment. After all, I did them no wrong except try to make friends, only to be driven off.

On one occasion, in my twelfth or thirteenth summer, I fell into one of their traps. They encouraged a village wench, high-bosomed and wide-hipped, to look coyly at me during Sunday Mass. Even then, at that tender age, I found I responded quickly to any girl or woman who favoured me. This was the first time. The wench repeated the performance the following week and began to wait for me when I finished my lessons with the old mumbling priest. I remember her as if it were yesterday, standing in the sunlight of a summer day, wanting to talk to me or ask my help with some minor rustic problem. I responded. One evening, full of courage, I followed her into a cornfield, up along a hedge into a small copse at the top of a hill. I began to fondle and kiss her, desperately trying to push my hands up into her thick fustian skirt, but she laughed and teased me and I grew red-faced and strident as both my lust and my resentment grew. Suddenly the copse came alive with village children who laughed, pointing their dirty fingers at me and calling out rude names. I stood, white-faced, hands clenched, the scalding tears running down my face as the girl burst into peals of raucous mocking laughter while the children ran off, their cruel jibes and insults carried back on the soft evening breeze. Since then I have rarely cried or trusted any woman, except one, but that is another story.

In my fourteenth summer the priest informed my father that he had taught me all he could and I was packed off to the monastery school at the abbey of Lilleshall. Lilleshall was an Augustinian monastery about three miles from Newport. In my lonely expeditions into the countryside I had often seen its towering church soaring above the trees and watched the monks and lay brothers going about their business in the outlying granges or fields. I never dreamt I would spend some of my life there but that fool of a parish priest informed my father that I had completed the ‘Ars Minor’ of Donatius and it was time I moved on to greater things. My father listened, nodded his thanks, and within two weeks I was on my way to Lilleshall.

I was neither pleased nor sad to leave home, just indifferent. I sat behind my father on his huge chestnut horse which had seen better days as a destrier of Lord William Coate and been bought by my father at a low price, while all my possessions were loaded on to a sumpter pony. When we reached the abbey, my father had a few words with the novice-master, a thin, ascetic man with a hatchet face and steel-grey hair. He listened politely enough to my father’s words, accepted two clinking leather pouches, stared at me and muttered his thanks. My father did not say goodbye but gently tapped me on the shoulder and shoved me towards the waiting novice-master. I was then in my fourteenth summer and committed to spend four years at Lilleshall.

I may have moaned about my life in Newport but at least it was comfortable. My father had owned a two-storied building with a hall, parlour, kitchen and buttery over wide deep cellars. On the first floor were bedrooms with soft feathered mattresses, bolsters and thick woollen blankets. There was a garden containing a small orchard, pear and apple trees and rectangular flower beds, all ringed by a high wall. Let me put this right. My father looked after me. Food was never scarce, a sup of wine or almond milk in the morning, quince marmalade, fruit preserve, fresh cooked meat and warm baked bread, but Lilleshall was different. I was frightened by the huge, airless church, the stonework rising above me with no evident support, it always seemed as if it was about to crash about our heads. There was a tympanum above the entrance with Christ in judgement staring down at me, the saints held in one hand while on His left, grotesque devils with faces of monks and the bodies of women hurried the damned to the ever-flickering stone flames of Hell.

There were other boys in the abbey, some were scholars, others novices. We were all equally miserable. Everything I remember about the place was cold. The church, the library, the cloisters and the long, draughty dorter where we slept in wooden beds, made no more comfortable by thin straw mattresses which would have disgraced a peasant’s hovel. Our day was ruled by the dreary routine of the abbey, the horarium; up before dawn and down in our sandals and habits to the ice-cold church to sing Matins to a God who, if He had any sense, would have been fast asleep. The only warm places in the abbey were the calderium (or drying room) and the infirmary. I tried to feign sickness but the cold-hearted novice-master hunted me down and threw me out whether I was sick or not.

After Prime or morning prayers, we had watered ale and dry bread before the day’s tasks began. In spring and autumn it would mean hard labour in the outfields of the abbey, but usually it was cleaning the piggery or the lavatory. The novice-master always ensured that I was assigned to such tasks – the bastard. I can never really trust a monk since my four years at Lilleshall. The rest of the day, however, was spent in study and schooling broken by prayer and a meal of boiled cabbage or lettuce and old salt-pickled meat, garnished with onions, shallots or leeks. Our lessons took place in the library, a long, narrow room by the cloisters with desks at right angles with the walls so we had the light from the pointed horn-glazed windows. At first it was the basics; I was given a penner, a belt with its own ink-horn and a sheaf of pens, then taught how to clean parchment by rubbing the coarse vellum smoothly with a rounded pumice stone. After this we graduated to the trivium and quadrivium; the books being removed from their heavy wooden carved aumbries or cupboards and brought to be chained to our benches.

These books were my release. My escape. I read the writings of Jerome and the fathers. The Monologion of Anselm, the Policraticus of John of Salisbury. Yet, praised be God, there was more. Each heavy, leather-bound volume contained other words stitched into it. The revolutionary theories of Marsilius of Padua and the strange utterances of a Leicestershire priest, John Wycliffe, who taught that wicked priests or rulers should not be obeyed. I thought of the novice-master and the gaunt, severe prior and heartily agreed with Wycliffe whoever he was. I knew nothing of him then and so could not imagine how his teachings would bring me within an inch of the rope and a strangling death in St Giles market in London. But enough of this, I hurry on. At Lilleshall I was only concerned with surviving each brutal, cold day and books and study provided the escape.

I portrayed myself as an avid student to Brother Christopher, the dotard of a librarian who was only too willing to admit me to his sanctum. I combed each volume for material to read and valued the treasures I found. Legends about Arthur, portions of Boccaccio’s Decameron, and the sainted Chaucer, so recently dead. The Augustinians admired his writings and I greedily read The Astrolobe and, above all, The Patient Griselda. A tale about a saintly wife who, stupid bitch, allowed her husband to beat her. I remembered the girl at Newport and the hot, scalding tears her mockery had provoked and read the tale whenever I was tired or fatigued. My desire to study and the quick absorption of all I learnt commended me to the brothers who relaxed their discipline, though I was virtually shunned by my fellows for being too studious. I did not care, biting my lip when I was not invited to find the shinbone of an ox, to go skating on the frozen pond, or be involved in their raucous music when, on feast days, they relaxed with the gittern or rotte.

On these holy days we were given a rest from our duties and allowed to rest. The others, as I have said, played music, rolled dice, or went walking. I returned to the library to read and dream about a life of luxury or the coming meal. We ate well on feast days, mustard and brawn, fresh-spiced soups and herb-strewn pot-roasts with a cup of full-bodied wine and sliced, roasted apples. After such a meal I would return to my dreams of women, trying to remember the soft brownness of the girl in Newport or the smooth-limbed bodies of curving dancing girls which were drawn with resplendent colour and vigour in the corners and margins of some of the manuscripts I studied. The monks who had drawn them had added tails, scales, the heads of horses and the faces of monkeys. I did not care, for their bodies were still marble-white, smooth, and they fevered my imagination and plagued my dreams.

The days, months, seasons passed; all marked and registered by the horarium of the abbey and the liturgy of the church; the ‘Puer Natus’ sung on misty Christmas-day mornings, the ‘Resurrexit sicut dixit’ of Easter and the dirges for the dead in November. The outside world, my world, rarely intervened. My father sent me money, the occasional pound, and visited me once. But, even then, I knew, secretly realised that my youth was dead. The real world, the cruel, mouth-yawning, hungry world made itself felt. Ricardus Rex. King Richard II, blond-haired, blue-eyed, imperious and tyrannical, was, ironically, the first to disturb my life. Lilleshall was a quiet island in the swirling, blood-frothed politics of the time but the news came through in my first year at the abbey. Pedlars, messengers and chapmen brought us fragments of information which joined together and seeped into our lives. Richard the King was gone. He had travelled across the western ocean to Ireland to crush the wild tribes and, in his absence, Henry of Lancaster, his long-banished cousin, had returned like a thief breaking into an empty house. Henry landed in Yorkshire, bravely claiming that he had come to save his own inheritance but the barons, the powerful, silk-garbed earls had joined him and poured honeyed poison into his ear. How he, like his cousin, King Richard, was the grandson of the mighty King Edward III and so had a better claim to the throne, much better than the childless, childish Richard, or his weak cousin, Edmund, the Earl of March. Henry listened to them and claimed the throne of England. His troops, swollen on every side by the armies of the Percies, the great northern barons, poured south like some ravenous torrent and trapped the hapless Richard in Wales.

Henry’s army invaded the monastery for a few days, its cloistered stillness broken by their high northern voices and the clash of booted spurs. The abbey was full of them; knights in half-armour, their foam-flecked destriers grazed on the abbey lawns while their men-at-arms invaded the kitchen. I watched a group of the latter, short, burly men in steel-rimmed hats, boiled leather jackets with stout, brown leggings pushed into dusty battered boots. Their eyes were red-rimmed, cold and hostile, their unshaven faces cruel, though they moved with a swagger and pride I envied. I wished I was with them and, of course, failed to appreciate that one day I would be, in the most terrible of circumstances. Then they were gone, the quiet air still ringing with catcalls and their strong northern words which burred the air and stung your ear. They were hunting the King, who was fleeing like the Whyte Harte of his emblem, and they brought him to bay in the castle of Flint. Richard was handed over to his captors, hurried to London, deposed and hustled north to his secret death. The countryside was rife with rumours that perhaps the King, the Lord’s anointed, could not die and so Richard was free, riding a pale, bright stallion through the green, dark woods of England. Yet the rumours meant nothing to me. Strange! Like a swimmer I ignored the rising ripples which would later swamp me.

The new King, the brown-berried, bearded Henry IV, soon had troubles of his own which disturbed the life of the monastery. His problems began in Wales among the mist and tortuous politics of that mysterious, divided country. The Welsh Marcher barons, who supported Henry in his bid for the throne, now believed they could encroach on the rights of the Welsh princelings and annex their river meadows and rich valley lands. The greater predator amongst these was Grey of Ruthin who began his own private war against the Welsh lord, Owen Glendower, a spark which fanned up into a fierce blaze, for Glendower resisted, checked Grey and brought all Wales into open revolt against its English king.

The Welsh pushed the English back and followed them into the border counties of Hereford, Gloucester and Shropshire. Our prior had to levy troops and sent urgent requests for help against bands of marauding Welsh who ravaged the surrounding countryside, leaving columns of smoke which rose above the trees to hang in black clouds against the summer-blue sky. Yet the Welsh did not attack us and the King sent his own son, Prince Henry, to drive the rebels back up their valleys and into the forests or high mountains. However, Henry IV’s problems did not end there. Fresh rumours reached the abbey that the flaxen-haired Richard II, in costly robes of black velvet, riding a richly caparisoned sorrel, had been seen in countless places, always preceded by a smooth-skinned, pure white hart which bore a blazing cross between its antlers. Brother Christopher told me these were rumours spread by wandering friars who had always loved the former king and resented Henry’s usurpation.

Nevertheless, the rumours were rife and believed by the powerful Percy faction, led by their general, Hotspur. He now openly acknowledged that his former support of the usurper, Henry of Lancaster, was mistaken and vowed he would act to redress the wrong. He did, in the hot boiling summer of 1403. His troops once more marched south, hurrying to join up with Glendower, who would come out of Wales to join him. The Welsh prince never arrived and King Henry and his warlike heir trapped the rebels at Shrewsbury and utterly destroyed them. Hotspur was killed by an archer and his troops melted away like snow under the sun. The rebel leaders were dragged by the heels into Shrewsbury town and hanged like gutted pigs in the market place.

Some of the rebels brought the news to Lilleshall. I was working in the outfields the morning they came. At first they were simply puffballs of dust but, as they drew nearer, racing along the track which served as a road between the fields of golden corn, I could see they were defeated, harassed men. Their horses were blown and covered in heavy white lines of sweaty foam, their riders dishevelled, bloody and scarred. They stopped to draw water at the well to refresh their horses, shouting strident commands and looking fearfully back down the track. Then they were gone and, in a short while, their pursuers appeared, brusque, hard-faced men wearing the red, gold and blue of the royal livery. I think they caught their prey, for one of the lay brothers later reported seeing black-faced corpses swinging from elm trees outside the village of Donnington. So, King Henry was safe and the scene was now ready for me. I did not know it, I ignored the rumours that King Richard was still alive, his sacred white hart still padding softly through the green woods of England, ready to draw hundreds to their death.

In the January of 1404, a few months after King Henry’s victory at Shrewsbury, my father made one of his rare visits to the monastery. He came alone across the black, frost-hardened countryside and, for the first time ever, seemed pleased to see me. He sat slumped in the paved room of the guestmaster, warming numb fingers over a brazier, and smiled as I came in. I felt a twinge of compassion for he looked tired and worried but I did not ask how he was. It was too late. You cannot expect, can you, flames and warmth from dead coals?

‘Matthew,’ he murmured. ‘It is good to see you.’ He nodded towards the silent guestmaster. ‘I understand you are doing very well. In fact, the monks can no longer teach you and that is why I am here.’ He looked down and shuffled his feet. ‘I have,’ he almost whispered, ‘always done the best for you. Your mother would have wanted this.’ He looked at me beseechingly but I just stared back. After seventeen years he referred to her but still I gave no response. ‘You are,’ he rushed to continue, ‘to leave here in late summer and go to Exeter Hall at Oxford University.’ He smiled wearily. ‘My son,’ he exclaimed, ‘at Oxford!’ Then I did smile back. I was to be free of the abbey and far from my father. I knew what the theologians meant by heavenly bliss. Little did I know it was to mark my descent into hell.

The months passed. My father returned with money, robes, a horse, a sumpter pony and mouthfuls of advice. I ignored the latter and took the rest and was free of the abbey by August, making my way across the lush, summer-green freshness of the Cotswolds towards Oxford. It was a pleasant rural scene made all the more beautiful by a sense of complete freedom which sang like wine in my head. I stopped at a village with an ale-stake house and ate and drank what I wanted. Then I seduced the slattern who worked there, taking her time and again in a ruined, deserted byre which served as a stable. After that my blood cooled and I travelled more apprehensively as I crossed the main roads which stretched north. Once again there were troops trudging through the dust, spears and billhooks slung across their shoulders, their steel helmets doffed and their boiled leather jackets open to afford some relief from the hordes of flies and the heavy summer heat. Long rows, columns of foot and archers whilst behind them trundled carts piled high under barrels, stores and weapons. I asked one of the many outriders what was happening and he stared at me strangely. ‘Have you not heard?’ he asked, wiping sweat-grimed lips, greedily grabbing the water-bag I passed him. ‘No,’ I muttered. ‘I have been away.’ The rider rinsed out his mouth, spat and took another long drink. ‘It’s Northumberland. Percy again. Hotspur’s father. He’s returned from exile announcing that Richard II is free and should be restored to his throne. We are going north to kill him and, once and for all, we will finish this business.’ He handed back the water-bag, nodded and galloped off. I sat and waited for a gap in the column and crossed on my way.

Strange wasn’t it that even then the Whyte Harte made its appearance, crossing my path? I should have seen it as an omen but I was too stupid, too concerned with immediate affairs. I continued on my journey. I had been worried about the dangers of the road, from marauders and outlaws, but I went unscathed. Perhaps it was the presence of soldiers in the neighbourhood or the many scaffolds and gibbets I passed, each with its load of blackened, maggot-ridden corpses. On the fourth day after leaving Lilleshall I crossed the river into Oxford and made my way down the busy high road towards Carfax, then round into Broad Street and into the Turl where Exeter Hall stood, a three-storied house with a warren of rooms which served as my home for the next six years.

I suppose everyone knows Oxford as a place of learning. A peaceful island in the middle of the hurly-burly of the times. If you do, dismiss it as nonsense, the jabberings of people who really should know better. It is a dirty place. The city is built round nine colleges or halls with other buildings, churches and a myriad of ale-houses. The centre, Carfax, stank like a sewer because of the great runnel down its centre full of ordure, shit and animal corpses. Broad Street had piggeries with the swine rooting for food amongst the rubbish (ever since I saw a pig nosing at the swollen belly of a dead mongrel, I have never been able to eat bacon). Admittedly it was not all filth. Catte Street, full of scriveners and parchment sellers, was attractive with the house and shop fronts carved and sharply painted in white, pink and solid black. Nevertheless, the city was offensive and the university was no better. Exeter Hall, founded by Bishop Stapleton of Exeter, was a large building with a warren of rooms. On the floor level was a huge ha. . .