"Sharon K. Penman - Reckoning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Penman Sharon K)

EVESHAM ABBEY, ENGLAND
January 1271
1 HERB were no stars. The sky was the color of cinders, and shadows were
spilling out of every corner. Brother Damian was truly content with his lot in
life, but border winters were brutal, and he sometimes found it hard to
reconcile his monk's vow of poverty with his subversive yearning for a woolen
mantle luxuriously lined with fox fur. Folklore held that St Hilary's Day was
the coldest of the year, but he doubted that it could be as frigid as this
first Friday in January, a day that had begun in snow and was ending now in
this frozen twilight dusk, in swirling sleet and ice-edged gusting wind, sharp
as any blade.
He had reached the dubious shelter of the cloisters when a snowball grazed his
cheek, splattered against the nearest pillar. Damian stumbled, slipped on the
glazed walkway, and went down. His assailants rushed to his rescue and he was
soon encircled by dismayed young faces. With recognition, the boys' apologies
became less anxious, more heartfelt, for Damian was a favorite of theirs. They
often wished that he, rather than the dour Brother Gerald, was master of the
novices, as Damian was young enough himself to wink at their indiscretions,
understanding how bumpy was the road from country lad to reluctant scholar.
Now he scolded them roundly as they helped him to his feet and retrieved his
spilled candles, but his rebuke lacked sting; when he tallied up sins, he
found no room on the list for snowball fights.
His duty done, Damian felt free to jest about poor marksmanship before sending
them back to their studies. They crowded in, jockeying for position, warming
him with their grins, imploring him to tell them again of the great Earl Simon
and the battle of Evesham, fought within sight of the abbey's walls. Damian
was not deceived, as able as the next man to recognize a delaying tactic. But
it was a ploy he could never resist, and when they entreated him to tell the
story "just one more
time, for Jack," a freckle-faced newcomer to their ranks, he let himself be
persuaded.
Five years had passed since the Earl of Leicester had found violent death and
martyrdom on a bloody August morn, but his memory was still green. Evesham
cherished its own saint, caring naught that Simon de Montfort had not beenand
would likely never becanonized by the Church. No pope or cardinal would
antagonize the English Crown bj| sanctifying the Earl's rebellion as the holy
quest he'd believed it to be. f was the English peoplecraftsmen and widows and
village priests and shire gentrywho had declared him blessed, who flocked to
his grave in faithful numbers, who defied Church and King to do reverence to a
French-born rebel, who did not forget.
Evesham suffered from no dearth of de Montfort partisans. Some of the more
knowing of the boys had concluded that if every man who claimed to have fought
with the Earl that day had in fact done so, de Montfort would never have lost.
But Damian's de Montfort credentials were impeccable, for all knew he had
actually engaged the great Earl in conversation before the battle, that he had
then dared to make his way alone to Dover Castle, determined to give the
Earl's grieving widow an account of his last hours. Damian not only believed
in the de Montfort legend, he had lived it, and the boys listened raptly as he
shared with them his memories, his remembered pain.
So real was it still to Damian that as he spoke, the cold seemed to ebb away,