The Holy Thief
Ellis Peters
The Nineteenth Chronicle of Brother Cadfael
EBook Design Group v2 HTML February 07, 2003
CONTENTS
^
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Prologue
^ »
In the height of a hot summer, in late August of1144, Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, deferred to the heatof the sun, and made the final, fatal mistake of his long andopportunist career. He was engaged, at the time, in planning thedestruction by siege of one of the circle of improvised buteffective fortresses King Stephen had thrown up to contain andcompress the depredations of Geoffrey’s host of outlaws,rebels and predators in the Fen country. For more than a year, fromhis elusive bases in the Fens, Geoffrey had so devastated thecountryside as to ensure that not a field should be safely plantedor reaped, not a manor properly tended, not a man with anything ofvalue to lose should be left in possession of it, and not one whorefused to surrender it should be left with even a life to lose. Asthe king had wrested from him all his own relatively legitimatecastles and lands and titles, none too legally if the truth betold, so Geoffrey had set to work in defiance to do as much toevery man, poor or rich, who got in his way. For a year, from theborders of Huntingdon to Mildenhall in Suffolk and over much ofCambridgeshire, the Fens had become an enclosed robber kingdom inspite of King Stephen’s head, and though his hasty ring ofcastles had done something to prevent its further enlargement, ithad not hampered the earl’s movements greatly, or brought himto the battle he was expert at avoiding.