Thomas Becket Murdered in Cathedral

The refectory still smelled of stew and smoke when the shouting reached us from the cloister. I had been clearing trenchers with two brothers when the door slammed open and a boy from the gatehouse ran straight into the table. His face was white. Knights, he said. Four of them. They had ridden from Saltwood and were demanding the archbishop.

I dropped the cloth and followed the others into the passage. Vespers had already begun; the chant drifted thin through the nave doors. Someone had barred them from the inside. That lasted only until the archbishop himself gave the order to open. He stood on the steps above us, calm as if he had been waiting for this all week. The bar lifted. Cold air poured in with the four men.

They came in mail and helmets, swords already drawn. Fitzurse led, the bear’s head on his shield catching what little light the lamps gave. Tracy and Brito flanked him. Morville stayed a step behind, watching the doors. Their boots scraped on the stone. The monks who had been singing scattered toward the choir, robes flapping. I stayed where I was, half-hidden by a pillar, close enough to see the archbishop’s face.

He had come down the steps by then and stood near the altar of the blessed mother. The knights called out for the traitor. He answered without raising his voice. Here I am, not a traitor but a priest. The words carried. Fitzurse stepped forward and seized his cloak. The archbishop shook him off. No penance had been done, he said. He would not lift the excommunications.

Tracy swore and raised his sword. Grim, the clerk who had stayed at the archbishop’s side all through the exile, threw his arm across Becket’s chest. The blade came down across Grim’s forearm and bit deep. I heard the bone crack. Grim cried out and fell against the pillar, blood already soaking his sleeve. The archbishop did not move. He only turned his head slightly, as if to see where the blow had come from.

The next strikes came fast. Brito brought his sword down on the crown of the head. The sound was dull and wet. Becket dropped to his knees. Tracy struck again, higher this time, and the blade sheared through the tonsure into the bone. A third blow from Fitzurse opened the back of the skull. The body pitched forward onto the paving. One of them set a foot on the neck and ground the face into the stone.

I could not look away. The blood spread in a dark pool that reached the hem of my habit. Someone was shouting for the knights to stop. It might have been me. They did not. Brito struck once more at the fallen man, then kicked the body aside as if it were refuse. The four of them backed toward the door, swords still wet. Morville was the last to leave. He looked once at the monks pressed against the choir screen, then followed the others into the yard.

The cathedral was suddenly quiet except for the sound of Grim breathing through his teeth. Two brothers lifted him. Others came forward slowly, as if the floor might still be dangerous. One of them knelt by the archbishop and touched the shoulder. There was no response. The crown of the head was gone. What remained was a ruin of bone and hair.

We carried the body into the crypt that night because no one trusted the gates to hold if the knights returned. The stones were cold. We washed what we could and wrapped the rest in a clean cloth. Grim sat against the wall with his arm bound in strips torn from a surplice. He kept saying the archbishop had not flinched. I believed him. I had seen it.