Read The Tolls of Death: (Knights Templar 17) for Free Online Page B

distaste.
    Look at these foul peasants! Standing in small groups, haggling over their bits of business – didn’t they realise that they were in God’s House? Tatty churls, breath reeking of garlic, unwashed armpits adding to the stench, their hosen soaked and foul with mud or worse, their faces grimy and hands all blackened and callused – they were hardly the sort of men Adam wanted in his church.
    He saw Serlo arrive, and watched him cross the floor to join his brother Alexander. What a pair they were! Alex was at least intelligent, which was more than you could say about Serlo. The latter was revered only for the strength in those great biceps. Men were naturally cautious about upsetting someone who could pick them up with one hand and toss them into the next field, but they should worry more about his brother, the suave, collected Constable of the Peace who appeared to own more than half of the vill. As usual, Alex greeted Serlo with a broad smile and clasp of his forearm, slapping him on the back. Then he introduced him to the group around him. No doubt discussing the hire of his oxen, Father Adam thought. The beasts would be in demand to haul the heavy carts laden with the crop, and Alexander possessed a near monopoly of them.
    Still, Alexander was the least of Adam’s problems. If the people of the vill were owned by him, Adam was owned by another man. And he was terrified.
    At two and thirty years, he was old enough to know the dangers and escape them, but his life had ever been a series of errors and misjudgements, and now he had made the worst mistake of his life … if it felt natural and
right
, that was surely only a proof of the depth of his fall. Once he had been a good, right-thinking man, devoted to the cure of the souls in his little parish, and never, not even once, had he been tempted by the pretty women of thevill. Now, though, he had lapsed. He was in love, and had even declared his love.
Oh, Christ in Heaven, save me
, he prayed.
    Love … yes, that is what he felt – and yet it was unreciprocated! That filled him with a yearning so intense, he would prefer death to this dreadful half-existence. What is more, the rural dean must soon hear of the affair. Oh, Christ in chains! That evil-minded old pig would be sure to come and haul Adam off to his court, and the priest would be lucky to escape a severe punishment.
    That in itself was not the worst of it, though. Punishment was one thing: it lasted a short period, and then life should return to normal. However, the rural dean might well ensure that he was taken away permanently, perhaps installed in a convent and left there to wither until he was a terrible old man, like the ancients he had seen during his time at Buckfast Abbey. The thought of ending up like them was petrifying. Holy Mother, the idea was enough to make his eyes prickle with tears.
    Damn them! Damn them all! He’d
not
be taken away again. Adam had been installed in that accursed monastery when he was little better than a child, and when he’d tried to escape, he’d been declared
apostate
and hunted down like a dog. Excommunicate, he had lived in perpetual terror, knowing that he might be found and returned some day.
    And then they’d caught him and back he’d gone. There he’d been forced to endure the snide remarks of all the other monks, their bitter jibes and the corporal punishment, the humiliation of lying prostrate before the altar, the grim effort of speaking the psalters, the fasting … so many punishments, and all wrong;
all wrong
!
    The Bishop had saved him. It was when he had visited the convent and the new Prior, God bless him, had spoken to him of the crimes committed by Adam and – so Adam shrewdly guessed – hinted that there was something not entirely right about hisposition here in the monastery. Later the Bishop had asked to meet Adam.
    He had been exhausted at the time after yet another fast day spent on his knees in the Lady Chapel, but then he told his