The Tale of the English Templar

The Bishop of Porto watched Dom Pedro from his comfortable armchair by the fire. The rains had settled in again and the episcopal palace seemed to hold the damp cold. The river below was shrouded in clinging mist, and the shouts of the ferrymen and longshoremen came muffled through the shuttered windows. Dom Pedro clearly did not feel the cold, pacing back and forth like a caged leopard, gesturing expansively with his arms while he spoke with vibrant intensity.

“It is the second time in a year that she has miscarried my heir, Your Grace! The doctors assure me that she is perfectly healthy. There is no physical reason she should not carry a child to term. But twice in one year! If it is not her body that is at fault, then it can only be God’s will!”

The Bishop raised his eyebrows eloquently. It seemed to him that Dom Pedro was expecting too much of a seventeen year old girl. Nor did he approve of Dom Pedro’s indifference to his wife. It was all too obvious that only his heir mattered to the nobleman. With his elbows propped on the carved arms of the chair and his fingertips touching, as if forming the peaked roof of a cathedral with his hands, the Bishop considered his visitor as he paced savagely back and forth without an eye for his audience. The Bishop had known Dom Pedro most of his life, and he knew his reputation as an impulsive, passionate, restless man. He was doing his reputation full honour, and the Bishop was inclined to curb him.

Yet the Bishop was also a man of the world. It did not escape his notice that Dom Pedro’s amber velvet tunic was lined with sable and trimmed with fox. His collar and belt glimmered with topazes, and on his manicured hands he wore massive rings of almost incalculable value. Dom Pedro was wealthy as few men in Portugal were, and he did not seem to know what to do with his money. The Church could not afford to offend such a patron. “Why should it be God’s will that your young wife miscarries your children, Dom Pedro?” the Bishop asked slowly and probingly. Since Dom Pedro spoke of the dead infants as his heirs, he apparently harboured no doubts about his wife’s fidelity.

“Merciful Saviour!” Dom Pedro flung up his arms and turned to face the crucifix hanging prominently between the shuttered windows. “I have asked myself that question until I cannot sleep! I’m forty years of age, Your Grace! For twenty-three years I was married to a woman too ill to bear me children. I honoured her as was her right, though it was costing me year by year the chance of siring an heir, and I never brought another woman under her roof!”

The Bishop noted the careful wording: he had had his pleasures with other women, but discretely out of the sight and hearing of his stricken wife. What more could one ask of a young man married to a feeble woman whose bed he was, for health reasons, forbidden to share? He had undoubtedly confessed his infidelities to his confessor and received the necessary absolution, so the Bishop dismissed this understandingly. “You have nothing with which to reproach yourself, my son. Everyone knows you were a dutiful husband to Dona Christina.”

“Nor did I defile her memory by marrying immediately. I went instead to France...” Dom Pedro broke off, his dark brows pulled together fiercely. “It was a grave error. I begged forgiveness from Him a thousand times. I have given hundreds of gold marks for the repose of Preuthune’s soul.” He spun back towards the Bishop, his face flushed. “Your Grace, you need not tell me jousting is a vain and foolish enterprise. I have vowed never to enter the lists again. Never!” He crossed himself. “But I felt that was insufficient atonement. In my soul, I sensed I must do more.” He held his clenched fists to his breast. “Blinded by my shame and remorse as I was, I could not think clearly. I saw the boundless grief of parents whose son and heir I had killed. I thought that by marrying the victim’s sister I could help the family. I took her without dowry to compensate her grieving parents for their loss.”

The Bishop again raised his eyebrows. “You cannot still grief with gold, my son.”

Dom Pedro let out a moan and dropped his face in his hands. “I see that! Now! But you do not know the worst of it!” He tore at his hair, and the Bishop felt a tremor of disgust. Dom Pedro was overdoing it, the Bishop thought coolly.

As if Dom Pedro sensed that his dramatic gestures had not been well received, he lifted his head and ran his left hand over his hair and then his clipped beard, smoothing it down unnecessarily. “You have to understand the situation, Your Grace,” he stressed in a soft, tense voice. “Otherwise, you cannot judge what I have done and advise me how to regain His favour.”

“Then tell me the worst, my son.”

“When I... I offered to marry the Preuthune girl, she was already promised to the Church.”

The Bishop raised his eyebrows yet again, this time higher than before. “You mean her parents intended her for the Church?”

Dom Pedro swallowed and ran his hand through his hair. “No, she... She was already a novice.”

“A novice?”

“A Benedictine novice.”

“And you knew this?” the Bishop asked with hard, condemning eyes. He noted that Dom Pedro kept his own eyes averted and stroked his beard nervously.

“I... I did not know it when I first proposed marrying the girl to Madame de Preuthune. Madame de Preuthune mentioned something about the Church, but she also said it would be no problem. It was only later that I learned that the girl had taken initial vows...”

The Bishop did not believe a word. Dom Pedro had been perfectly aware of the facts, but he had wanted the girl. He must have wanted her very badly not to insist on any kind of dowry — no matter how great his remorse for killing her brother. No doubt his ‘generous’ offer to renounce any kind of dowry was the trick he used to overcome her parents’ scruples about breaking their contract with the Benedictines. The Bishop sighed.

“Don’t you see?” Dom Pedro asked, licking his lips. “It is because I took her away from the Church that God is angry with me. He is punishing me for stealing His bride. She will never bear me healthy children, will never give me the heir I need because she is His bride!”

The Bishop cleared his throat and squirmed in his chair. A bride of Christ was supposed to be chaste and pure, whereas Dom Pedro’s lady had had two miscarriages already. “She was intended to be Christ’s bride,” he corrected Dom Pedro reprovingly, as he started tapping his fingertips together. It was a silent and yet tense gesture. “You have sinned gravely, my son.” Dom Pedro crossed himself and bowed his head in humble acknowledgement. “Nor is the punishment you suffer disproportionate. What you did was little better than what the Moors do to captured nuns! You raped Christ’s pure and virgin intended bride — stole her from Him for ever by defiling her, destroying her purity, corrupting her flesh!”

Dom Pedro swallowed, and the palms of his icy hands sweated. He knew that the Bishop was right. Felicia was indeed corrupted now. Only recently she had tried to seduce him! She had sought to arouse his body for the sake of satisfying her own. Her shamelessness had appalled and repulsed him. It was the man’s part to feel and awaken desire. Felicia was no longer a good woman but as corrupt and repulsive as a common whore. He despised her and could not stomach the thought of ever sleeping with her again. He dreamt instead of sweet Lilita, whom he had met at court this autumn where she served as maid-in-waiting to Queen Isabella. Lilita came of a good Portuguese noble family. She would settle down to being a plump and happy mother interested only in her children. He could picture her with a dozen plump and happy children around her. She would remain innocent to the end of her days!

“What do you expect me to do, my son?” The Bishop brought Dom Pedro out of his thoughts.

“Help me! Advise me, Father!” Dom Pedro went down on his knees before the Bishop with his hands folded in supplication. “There must be some way of... of freeing both myself and His abducted bride from the hell that binds us together against His will.”

“Some way of dissolving your marriage, you mean?” The bishop wanted to make the request explicit. It was hardly unusual for a nobleman to seek him out because he wanted to set aside his wife.

“Yes. Is the marriage even valid, since she had taken initial vows?” Dom Pedro said hopefully.

“Canon law is not entirely clear on that point,” the Bishop decided conveniently as he pushed himself out of his chair and walked past the kneeling Dom Pedro to the window. He unlatched and flung open the shutter to gaze down on the fog crouching in the river valley. The Bishop of Porto knew that he would encourage Dom Pedro to petition the Pope for an annulment of his marriage. He knew that he would support the petition, but still he felt uncomfortable. It disturbed him that a devout and otherwise decent nobleman like Dom Pedro could be so overcome with passion for a girl that he would ignore her vows of chastity. It was surely the devil that made women so alluring. Always and again, women who led men into perdition.

With a sigh the Bishop acknowledged that he could not undo what had been done. The girl had been violated now. The best he could do was to make sure the Church was richly compensated for the loss it had suffered. Dom Pedro would pay a bride-price that even he would feel.