While the woman raged on. the archbishop, looking as if he bore the full weight of the world upon his frail shoulders, gave a pull to a bell rope. Rupen Ademian and three short but husky-looking women clothed in the habits of nuns entered from another room. It was a battle-royal, there in the little private parlor, and the nursing sisters and the furnishings all suffered for it, and at last Rupen put an end to it by cold-cocking the duchess and she was bound and easily borne away by the three women.
At a nod from the old man. Rupen opened the doors to the foyer of the suite and signaled the halberdiers to admit the seven agitated ladies of Krystal’s household to the thoroughly wrecked parlor.
Seemingly oblivious of the chaos of splintered furnishings, stained carpet, and smashed bric-a-brac amongst which he sat, the old archbishop said mildly, but in a tone that brooked no argument or questioning, authority implicit in his every soft word, “Ladies, even as I speak here, there are those abovestairs who are packing the clothing and effects of the Duke of Norfolk’s little son, in preparation for his imminent departure to a fosterage in Sussex. Without him to care for. Her Grace of Norfolk has entered a cloister for an indeterminate period of contemplation and a life of simplicity and prayer. All of her possessions are to be packed by you, and then servants will move them to a place of safe storage until she again is ready to enter the world of man. Sir Rupen Ademian here will be at your call should you need any assistance.
“With everything done here, I will make provision to return all of you and the other ladies to their homes or wherever else they may wish so go. Now leave me; Sir Rupen will join you presently.”
Rupen still started when someone called him Sir Rupen. When old Earl Howell ap Owain and his cavalcade had ridden up from London to formally knight Pete Fairley, Carey Carr. and Bud Webster, only a hint of a word from His Grace of York had been necessary in order for the gruff old warrior to give the buffet to Rupen as well, no questions asked. Rupen’s understandable objections had been answered by Hal.
“Shut up and go along with this, my friend. I’ll tell you why after it’s over. It’s necessary—leave it at that, for now.”
A few days later, he had said, “Look, Rupen, rank and birth are of much more importance to all classes of people in this world than they were in your world and time. I think that you. the man you are, could be quite useful to me in a great many respects and areas. But in order to serve most of my ends, you must be either a gentleman, a churchman, or a noble. Now, no one but the King can make you a noble, and I doubted that you cared much for holy orders, so the only thing for it was to make you a gentleman—a knight, as it turned out.
“That business of the earl was just too good an opportunity to let slip. Yes, I could’ve had some one of the local nobility knight you, but it wouldn’t’ve had been the same as having Earl Howell do it. You see, that old man—old, hell, he’s not as old as he looks, maybe two or three years your senior is all—he was King’s Champion of both Arthur II and Richard IV Tudor, the present king’s elder brother. He pled age and left court during the early days of the Regency, unable to stomach what was going on there, under Angela.
“Then when Arthur III Tudor raised his standard against the regent and Rome, Earl Howell raised and armed and mounted a squadron of heavy horse and led them to the King, putting them and himself at the lawfully coronated monarch’s disposal. Interdiction and excommunication be damned, he said then, England and Wales were Arthur’s rightful realm and he would be Arthur’s man so long as a single drop of blood lodged in his body.
“Since that day, he has taken part in almost every battle or fight or skirmish in which Arthur’s army has engaged. He it was who made the plans and commanded the famous ambuscade which virtually wiped out the regent’s fierce and fearsome mounted raiders, Monteleone’s Horse. Even better, he and his men that day slew Angela’s lover himself. Captain Monteleone, in combat, then so thoroughly abused and maimed his still-warm corpse that it had the appearance of having died under torture. After they had reclothed it, they had it delivered to the Tower by a party of friars, along with a letter stating that when questioned, Monteleone had admitted to being the real sire of Angela’s son that she still claimed was gotten upon her by her royal spouse, Richard IV.”
“I’ll bet that that created a merry old shitstorm.” commented Rupen. “Or was she smart enough to just stonewall it all, Hal?”
“She tried to, of course,” the old man replied, “between crying jags and screaming fits, but still that little bit of seventeenth-century propaganda cost her and her son quite a good deal of support, especially among the common people, the yeomanry, and the lesser gentry. Such folk continued to trickle in to fill out the army’s shattered ranks, even though they all knew that by so doing they were leaving their lands and families unprotected, that they were losing all hope of salvation by fighting for an excommunicant, that the army of Arthur had little gunpowder and no way to obtain more save by capture, and that a Crusade had been preached against them and hordes of Crusaders were already beginning to gather on the borders and in nearby oversea ports, awaiting but the necessary transport to descend upon the troubled land like some pitiless swarm of armored locusts.
“Early in the fifth year of the civil war—for that is what it all amounted to, with noble and common families split, likewise the small standing army, the few ships owned outright by the Crown either bumed or scuttled to prevent their falling into Arthur’s hands, some royal garrisons holding out for either Arthur or Angela and a few of them fence-sitting, refusing to commit themselves until they were certain just who stood the best chance of winning the ruinous conflict—a raid-in-force, launched to capture a large store of gunpowder, of which King Arthur’s force just then had almost none, developed into a full battle as both sides threw in additional units and ended in a pyrrhic victory for our arms in that while Angela’s forces then available within the kingdom were routed, with all of their cannon and their entire baggage train captured, not only were the losses of men and horses bitterly heavy in Arthur’s force, such gunpowder as was captured only barely replaced that which had been expended in obtaining it.
“You’ve of course seen the great camp, or what’s now left of it, out there to the southwest of York? Yes, well, that is where King Arthur and his army were encamped, he and his staff—who understood better than the bulk of the army just how little chance they and their much-reduced numbers had of winning against any of the four looming hosts of foreign Crusaders with little or no gunpowder—in the depths of despair.
“Then, of a day of blessed memory, a small party of horsemen came riding down the borderlands, led by an elderly but still vital knight of ancient lineage and famous personal achievements. Sir Francis Whyffler—he now is Duke of Northumberland, father-in-law of Emperor Egon and Royal Ambassador to that monarch’s court. In Sir Francis’s party were included Bass Foster, William Collier, and Bud Webster. They brought a brine-filled pickle cask containing the head of Sir David Scon, an infamous border never, in earnest of their tale of having routed his force of above two thousand Lowland Scots, but even more important, they brought a pack train loaded with gunpowder—a commodity just then and there more precious than gold dust.
“After some initial difficulties with some larcenous members of the royal staff. Sir Francis was at last able to meet with Earl Howell, who, after hearing his tale and testing the powder, conducted him directly to King Arthur.
“Now, as you no doubt know by now, Rupen, for the last five hundred years, in this world and time, the Church has held and savagely maintained a monopoly on the manufacture and sale of gunpowder, trying to keep the formulas for it secret and wreaking terrible vengeance upon any person or group of persons rash enough to formulate it on their own, without Church sanction. With this monopoly in full force, the Church not only made unbelievable amounts of profit from the sale of it, but also was able to control and manipulate rulers and states to a degree that the Mediaeval and Renaissance Church of our world never even dreamed of, and they had thus been able to keep most of the regions in their sphere of influence from effectively uniting into nations of any real size or strength, cynically preaching peace and brotherly love while fomenting an endless round of small wars and selling the wherewhital to conduct them.