It was a summary of the various accounts of Geoffrey de Mandeville’s twelfth-century death and burial, on which no two chroniclers seemed able to agree. His corpse had been gibbetted in Temple Church orchard, or he’d hidden in a tree that had broken and dropped him into a sacred well, or he’d simply been killed in battle up near Ramsey Abbey in Cambridgeshire. The litany of possible dooms ran through Saul’s head, adapting itself to the tune of ‘What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor’. Hanging off a tree in a leaden coffin; drowned in a well with a tree grown over it; arrow to the eye and
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