The Passionate Enemies Read Online Free

whom could the King turn,’ she asked, ‘but to you?’
    Henry decided that he would pay a visit to the man whose cleverness he respected more than that of anyone else in the kingdom, Roger, the Bishop of Salisbury. The journey wouldoffer the pleasures of the chase and he could savour once more the joys of the New Forest, that beloved hunting ground of many memories.
    Roger was a man of the world, a man of charm and tolerance in spite of the fact that he was a churchman. He had been discovered by Henry in Caen where he had called attention to himself by the speedy manner in which he could get through Mass. This had amused and pleased Henry and it had occurred to him that there was something more to the man than a small living in a remote spot warranted.
    He had offered Roger advancement which the priest had gratefully accepted and Roger had left his little Normandy town and come to England with the King. Advancement had rapidly followed, for Roger had shown himself to be a very astute statesman and although he had become Bishop of Salisbury he was more than a man of the Church. He was one of Henry’s chief ministers and during the King’s many absences in Normandy had played a leading part in the control of State affairs.
    Roger was also one of the richest and most influential men in the country; and it was with him that Henry decided to discuss the steps he would take to put his plan into action.
    The journey to Salisbury was pleasant, enlivened as it was by hunting on the way and stopping at the castles of his loyal subjects who did all they knew to cheer him. There was a banquet always awaiting him; and among the company he invariably found a beautiful lady to enchant him; so he forgot temporarily how ill life had served him and his irascibility scarcely showed itself.
    The New Forest was full of memories and the greatest of course was of that fateful day when his brother William, known as Rufus, had ridden out to the hunt in the full vigour of his health and had been carried back the next day a corpse in an old cart. Henry could still live through those emotions of twenty years ago.
    He could clearly see that battered body, bloody and mud-spattered with twigs and grasses caught up in it – parts of the forest which many said had killed him. How many men had Rufus commanded to lose their eyes, their ears, their noses because they had dared trap and steal one of the King’s deer.How many had cursed Rufus – and his father before him – because their homes had been taken from them and they left penniless because the King needed a great forest in which to follow the sport he loved. It was said that the spirits of those men haunted the forest and looked constantly for revenge.
    In that case he, Henry, should be wary, for although he had brought justice to the land and many praised him for it, he had done nothing to change the cruel forestry laws and the curses of the dead men would fall on him as they had on his dead brother and father. Strange that he, like them, cared nothing for this. The chase of wild animals was as much a passion with him as with other members of his family and nothing must stand in the way of it.
    He remembered that ride to Winchester when he had battled for his future and his crown had depended on the speed of his arrival there. He was the younger brother and there was an elder one – Robert, Duke of Normandy – and he had known that there were Normans in Normandy and in England, too, who would think that Robert had a greater claim to the throne than he had. By good fortune and the making of many promises – which alas he had found it impossible to keep – he had succeeded in taking the crown and keeping it for twenty years. Moreover he had taken Normandy from his brother who now languished in a Cardiff prison; he could say that since that fateful day in the New Forest, when Rufus had met a mysterious death, he had achieved a great deal.
    Never had he