The abbot caught himself beginning to move closer to the cage and hastily fell back a few paces, recalling that this pleasant-spoken man had, with only his bare hands, murdered a priest of God and at least seven other persons. “You are mad,” he replied. “Lunatics, like beasts of the fields, feel not the ravages of weather, everyone knows that. Heat afflicts them not, nor cold.”
With a rattling of chains, the madman shook his shaggy head and said, “Not so, good Father, there is no truth in that old, outmoded adage. And, in any case, I am not mad.”
“Ah, but you are, my son, my poor son.” Fergus assured the madman. “If anyone should know it is I, who heard you raving from the cell you inhabited in my order’s house night after night for years. Yes, my son, you are indeed mad, alas.” ” Have you any idea, Father, just who and what 1 am?” queried the madman.
Fergus nodded gravely. “I know that you are a Sassenach, most likely of noble birth, else the powerful men who send silver each year to defray the expenses of your care would not so do.”
“Then know you this truth, as well, Father,” said the madman, just as gravely, “I am William Collier, Earl of Sussex and loyal subject of the one and the only rightful King of England and Wales, Richard V. At great personal danger, I pretended loyalty to and liking for that disgusting thing, the Usurper who styles himself Arthur 111, but through mischance, I was found out. While spurring hard for the border, I made the error of seeking a night’s shelter, a sup of food, and a fresh mount at the hall of an old and trusted friend. My friend betrayed my trust and I was taken. But then, with me in custody, my captors thought more deeply on the matter and decided that’a mere killing were too mild a punishment for me.
“Father, though you may know it not, for it is somewhat of a secret, the usurper is a foul, godless, Satan-serving warlock, and right many of his demon spawn serve him. The leader of my captors was one such he-witch, and there, that cursed night, did he wreak his evil will upon me, ensorcelling me, laying upon me a foul curse of madness to encompass most of my waking life, with brief snatches of sanity interspersing to torture me further with the realization of what I had become.”
At the first mention of witchcraft, the old monk had crossed himself, an act he rapidly repeated each time any allusion to sorcery was made. Through lips become pale and tremulous, he half-whispered, “Och, my lord, I didnae ken!” His educated Latin was clear forgotten in his shock and horror at the revelations.
The man long supposed mad continued in a sad, wistful tone, “As for the howling of nights, Father, imagine how a man must feel when he awakens from dreams of the bygone days when he was a rich, respected peer, owning lands both broad and fair, living in comfort, faith, loyalty, and God-given peace with those he loved all about him; when such a man awakens shivering in cold, dark squalor, immured in a tiny, stone-walled cell, near naked and filthy, with no furnishings save a malodorous tick of straw and no companions save the vermin infesting his body, what then can such a man do but howl the long nights of torment away?”
Fergus had moved closer and closer as the sorry tale was spun. Now he was hard by the cage; extending a hand, he laid it upon the bony shoulder of the man he had thought mad and asked, “My poor, persecuted lord, what can I do to ease your unwarranted torment?”
“First of all, Father,” replied the caged man, “withdraw to a safer distance, for such is my curse that reason can depart in a bare twinkling and madness return, and I would not have your blood on my hands.
“I would like to be let out and unchained long enough to wash. Surely, with four monks and twoscore men about you can mount sufficient guard to restrain me should the unholy madness suddenly reafflict me the while.
“I will be in far more comfort can this cage be scoured and a foot or so of straw or dried grass placed within it. And cannot one of the brothers trim my beard and hair and pick out some of the lice? Even the lowly ass sometimes is curried. Pleasant, also, would it be to have a clean cassock and a blanket or woolen war tartan in which to wrap my body of cold nights.”
Three days after Bass Foster’s departure for Norwich on the heels of a stormy final meeting and “discussion” with his wife, the Archbishop of York made one of his excessively rare visits to that portion of his estates being currently used by former Captain Buddy Webster and, most recently, by the Duchess of Norfolk, her son, and her household. His grace made the journey in a horse litter slung between two huge shire horses, while his capacious coach trundled along behind, crowded with ten men and women he had had brought in from the Abbey of St. Olaf; the other four, who seemed to know one end of a horse from the other, rode along behind the coach on rounseys.
Arrived at long last at their destination, the archbishop had his “guests” ushered into two connecting suites of rooms on the second floor of the wing he had sent retainers ahead to clean and open for his use. After personally ordering cold food, ale, and water for washing for them, he sent for the eldest and apparently most sensible of the lot.
Rupen Ademian, for all his fifty-odd years, was still a thick-limbed, powerful, intensely vital man; his hands were big and square, his palms and blunt fingers hard with callus. He was rapidly balding in the scalp area, but his beard and flaring mustache were thick and blue-black and a little curly, and he grew more and denser body hair than any human being that the archbishop had seen in more than two hundred years.
Judging solely from brief earlier conversations with him, Harold of York had hopes for this elder of the two Ademians. Unlike his nephew, Rupen was open-minded, adaptable, and, though clearly no stranger to violence, not easily prone to wreaking it.
Harold had thought on the matter and had decided that quite probably the answer to this man’s easygoing nature and willingness to try new and different things, to do things in novel ways, or to rearrange his thinking modes to consider the possibility of the once-impossible derived of his background rather than of formal education, of which he had partaken but little.
Rupen had been born in Damascus, Syria, in 1920, of parents who had been prosperous farmers before Turks and Kurds butchered most of their kin, took their land and all that was on it, and transported them and millions more to Syria, then—in 1916—a Turkish province. That fraction of those who had been torn from out Armenia strong enough or lucky enough to make it to Syria alive had been simply abandoned there with only the pitiful bits and pieces of their previous lives to sustain them.
In 1923, Rupen’s family enjoyed the extreme good fortune of being one of the families chosen to go to America, sponsored and provided tickets by Armenians already resident in that Land of Promise. Arrived in New York, however, with almost no English or money, only train tickets, they had somehow wound up in Orange, Virginia, rather than the Midwest location to which they had been bound.
But it worked out well for the immigrants who had suffered so much for so long. Orange County, Virginia, breeds some of the finest horseflesh in the nation if not the world, and in addition to being an expert farrier, Rupen’s father knew horses and had a God-given “way” with them. So, once more, the little family began to prosper and grow in size, now safe from Turks and Kurds. They never grew wealthy, even after the family farrier supply and hardware business in Fredericksburg, Virginia, began to do as well as the horse-trading sideline, for Rupen’s parents squirreled away every spare dollar to bring over those relatives and friends who had survived the atrocious treatment to which the Armenians had been subjected.
In the depths of the Great Depression, Rupen’s father had mortgaged his business and even the small truck farm on which they then resided in order to invest in and keep operating a small local factory that just then gave employment to many of the selfsame immigrants his hard-earned dollars had brought to Virginia.
As the nation girded itself for the certain onslaught of a second worldwide war, that little factory, which had been making brass curtain rods, lamps, and the like, was visited by government men; shortly, adjoining land had been purchased with low-interest government loans which also were funding a rapid expansion and modernization of existing facilities, the road was widened and resurfaced to take frequent and very weighty traffic, and the railroad built a spur from the main line to the factory. Half a year before the Japanese, in support of their so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, tried to destroy the United States’ Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Fredericksburg Factory #1 of Ademian Enterprises, Incorporated, was already turning out brass shell casings under contract to the Department of Defense.