The Leopards of Normandy: Duke: Leopards of Normandy 2

by David Churchill

  And that was important, because Brutus had no intention of causing injury. Damn the duke’s command – that would be forgotten soon enough if William of Normandy was lying on the ground screaming in pain and crying out for his mummy.

  Brutus grabbed hold of William’s hand. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Whenever you’re ready.’

  The boy pushed. It felt no stronger to Brutus than a gentle breeze against his skin. He squeezed the duke’s fist, hard enough to hurt but not to harm. The pain alone was enough to beat most men. It distracted them, sapped their will, and then their arms gave way. One little shove should do it . . .

  William did not give way.

  He was hurting, he had to be, Brutus was sure of it. But he wasn’t letting it show.

  Brutus was impressed. The lad was tougher than he’d expected. He waited a bit longer, not trying any harder, just so that the duke could enjoy the shouts of encouragement from his people. He had already lasted longer than anyone but the blacksmith: they had good reason to be impressed.

  Now the time had come to end it. Brutus squeezed a little harder, feeling the bones in William’s hand being crushed together beneath his grip. He had been doing this for long enough to know that anyone he ever faced was in screaming agony at this point. Usually they would shout out in pain and beat their spare hand against the table to try and keep themselves from conceding.

  But still William was silent. Still his eyes were fixed on Brutus. The veins were standing out on his forehead. His face was flushed scarlet. His skin was lathered in sweat, but he wasn’t giving way.

  By now, the great hall was in uproar. It was clear to everyone that this was a real contest, a fight to the finish, and that somehow their boy, their duke, was matching the man-mountain. But it couldn’t go on much longer, surely . . . could it?

  Brutus pushed harder. He knew how strong he was. He knew that William was not remotely as physically powerful as him. By now the muscles in his arm must be pressed far beyond their limits. They would be screaming at him for release, they had to be.

  So all that was keeping the boy in the contest was willpower, a blunt refusal to surrender under any circumstances. Brutus suddenly understood that for all his own visible strength, for all his bulging muscles, he was facing someone with an invisible power that was greater than any he had ever encountered.

  Oh, he could still win the bout all right. He could crush Duke William’s hand like a rotten apple in his fist and rip his arm right off his shoulder. But it would take that before the boy would give in.

  So now what did he do? He could not injure the Duke of Normandy beyond repair. He was under orders not to fake his own defeat. That left just one alternative.

  Brutus let go of William’s hand, and as the boy slumped back on the wooden bench, flat out, completely spent, the strongman got up, towering over every other man in the hall. ‘Hear this, people of Normandy!’ he boomed. ‘I, Brutus the Great, am the strongest man alive. I have never in all my days been beaten. I was not beaten tonight. But neither could I beat the man I was wrestling. My lord, I salute you!’

  He gave a deep, respectful bow and held out his hand.

  Finding some last, hidden reserves of energy, William struggled to his feet and shook Brutus’s hand in a gesture of mutual respect.

  Barely aware of the hubbub around him or the slaps on the back from everyone he passed, aching in every fibre of his being, William staggered back to the high table. He looked at Ralph de Gacé. ‘Now I’ll go to bed,’ he said.

  7

  Winchester

  It was customary, indeed compulsory, for any powerful man who wished to benefit from the accession of a new king to present him with a gift to mark his coronation. Godwin may have muttered to his wife Gytha, ‘If we keep having new kings this often, I’m going to end up a pauper,’ but he and his family stood to gain an enormous amount from the reign of King Edward, and so his gift was suitably generous.

  It was a ship, just as he had given to Harthacnut, but this one was even more magnificent. The hull was twice as long and the golden dragon at the bow correspondingly larger, with a three-pronged tongue of red-painted flame blazing from its mouth, while a golden lion roared defiance from the stern. The sail was dyed purple, the colour of emperors and kings, and embroidered with Edward’s lineage, stretching back through his father and a line of kings to Alfred the Great himself. On it, too, were scenes from the great sea battles fought by the kings of England against those who would invade their country. ‘I’m hoping,’ said Godwin to Gytha, ‘that it may encourage him to go to sea himself if Magnus’s ships are ever sighted off our shores.’

  For her part, Gytha was assembling the trousseau that would form a part of Edith’s dowry when the time came for her to become Edward’s queen. Traders from Constantinople and the Arab-ruled lands of southern Spain furnished the Godwins with finely patterned carpets and hangings, while the fabric merchants of Flanders sold many a bolt of wool and linen from which the royal couple’s clothes and bedcovers would be made.

  Yet Edward was no ordinary king. He had little interest in display or finery. For all that he had spent his whole life craving his coronation, when the event took place at Winchester Cathedral almost a year after Harthacnut’s death, he seemed strangely uneasy on the throne. As the crown was placed upon his head and he held the jewel- and pearl-encrusted golden orb and sceptre that symbolised his kingship, he wore a look of discomfort rather than joy.

  Nor were his priorities those that Godwin had expected. Edward showed little interest in the news from Scandinavia, where Magnus of Norway had successfully claimed Denmark and given Sven Estridsson his own earldom in Jutland, thereby securing his loyalty, for now at any rate, and freeing Magnus for an assault on England that he could launch at any moment. He sanctioned the continuation of the warship-building programme that Harthacnut had begun, but he did so with an almost total lack of interest. His real concern was much more personal.

  ‘I want my mother brought low,’ he told a gathering of his three most powerful nobles: Godwin, Leofric and Siward of Northumbria, a dark, brooding presence as imposing as a mountain crag. ‘I want her titles, her money and her possessions taken from her. She must be banished from the palace, stuck in a convent or a hovel. Find me a way to destroy her.’

  It was not a new request. Ever since Edward’s coronation, his court had come to understand that the single biggest influence upon their new monarch’s thoughts, words and actions was his detestation of his mother, Emma. Week by week, month by month, the king brooded, doing nothing yet growing more bitter, until everyone around him became caught up in the poisonous atmosphere, waiting in scarcely bearable tension for the hatred to be turned into some kind of action.

  ‘Do you want her killed, sire?’ Godwin asked, again not for the first time. ‘It could be arranged if you did.’

  Godwin had no personal desire to harm a woman he had known for his entire adult life. He was just desperate to get Edward to do something, anything, to rid himself of his obsession, so that they could all get on with the proper business of ruling the kingdom of England.

  ‘No,’ Edward replied. ‘I want her kept alive. Let her grow old and grey, so that she has year after year of miserable poverty, stripped of all her possessions and power, knowing that I have done this to her.’

  Siward gave a contemptuous grunt. ‘Why the bloody hell are we still bothering with this when Magnus is on his way?’

  ‘I don’t need to give you my reasons, I just want you to obey my commands,’ Edward shot back. ‘But since you ask, it is very simple. My mother abandoned me.’

  ‘And your brother and sister,’ Godwin murmured, as if prompting Edward.

  ‘Yes, yes, and them too,’ the king said impatiently. ‘She chose to spread her legs for Canute rather than look after her own children, because she cared more for being a queen than being my mot
her. And then after all those years, when Canute was dead and we finally became useful to her, it was Alfred she loved, not I, and it’s Alfred she still mourns.’

  ‘You must be careful, sire,’ said Leofric. ‘Rightly or wrongly, the queen is very popular among the people. She has allies in the clergy, too. In Canute’s time she was famed for the generosity of her donations to cathedrals and monasteries. Those acts of charity haven’t been forgotten.’

  ‘Then I shall appoint new bishops and archbishops who don’t remember what happened in the past but care only for the present and the future.’

  Godwin had only half his mind engaged in Edward’s embittered ranting. For the most part, he was thinking about Emma. At one time or another he had been both her closest political friend and her most bitter enemy. What would he be now? He bore her no personal malice, and it hardly seemed fair that, having asked for her cooperation in bringing Edward to England in the first place, he would now help the king to bring her down. She would expect him to defend her, and she had every right to do so. But from Godwin’s point of view, fairness didn’t come into it. He dealt in expediency. His consistent, unflinching aim was to maintain his position and his family’s long-term legacy. At any one time, the king, whoever he might be, was the man best placed to help him achieve those goals, so Godwin’s first loyalty was to him. And all this talk about clergymen had given him an idea.

  ‘I think I can help you, sire,’ he said. ‘Her Majesty—’

  ‘Don’t call her that!’ Edward snapped.

  ‘Very well, your mother is close to Bishop Aelfwine, here in Winchester.’

  ‘Go on . . .’

  ‘One night, before your blessed return to England, I found them together in the palace treasury. No one else was present.’

  ‘Were they conspiring?’ Edward asked eagerly.

  ‘They were certainly engaged in, ah, intimate conversation.’

  ‘Intimate? Were they fornicating?’

  ‘They were fully dressed when I saw them. What had happened before, or might have happened if I had not intruded upon them, I can’t say.’

  ‘Is Winchester one of the dioceses to which my mother made donations?’

  ‘Yes, Your Majesty, she gave a magnificent cross to the New Minster. I think I’m right in saying that it contains at least fifteen pounds of gold and hundreds of pounds of silver. The jewels mounted upon it are worth a fortune in themselves.’

  The king looked far from impressed. ‘That sounds less like generosity than vainglorious profligacy, intended not to honour God Almighty but to burnish my mother’s reputation. It seems to me that this, ah, union between my promiscuous slut of a mother and a sinful, oath-breaking bishop affords me the opportunity to serve two ends at once, since I now have good reason to punish my mother and replace the bishop.’

  ‘You do, sire, but only if you have evidence to support your accusations,’ Leofric pointed out. ‘If you do not, you will succeed only in uniting the people and the clergy against you.’

  ‘Then get me the evidence,’ said the king.

  Winchester was the principal city of Wessex and thus in Godwin’s earldom. It fell to him, therefore, to find the evidence that would prove an illicit carnal union between Queen Emma and Bishop Aelfwine. He did not suppose for a single second that the two had ever been together when they were not fully dressed and standing or sitting at a suitably modest distance from one another. But that was not the point. He had a task to fulfil, and it was a matter of necessity and also personal pride that he should accomplish it.

  His first thought was to speak to Emma’s ladies-in-waiting, but it immediately struck him that this was almost certain to prove counter-productive: none of them were likely to betray their mistress, and all would immediately go to her and warn her what he was up to. Instead he went to the palace chamberlain and said that he wished to interview a number of servants, for reasons he was not at present at liberty to reveal.

  This was puzzling enough to the chamberlain, for men of Godwin’s stature did not normally trouble themselves with menials, and he was even more bemused when Godwin stressed that he particularly wanted to talk to anyone known for their surliness, discontent or treacherous personality.

  ‘But those are all faults,’ the chamberlain said.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Godwin replied. ‘For the task I have in mind, they are all virtues.’

  The chamberlain asked, as firmly as he dared, whether he might be allowed a few days before attending to the matter. St Andrew’s Day was approaching, one of the great days in the Christian calendar, and it was his job to make sure that the feast that marked the occasion was of properly regal standards. Every hour, carts were arriving at the palace gates laden with carcasses of oxen, sheep and pigs, chickens and geese by the score and eels by the barrel, along with sacks of flour and earthenware jars filled with honey, all bound for the palace storerooms and from there to the cooks’ fires.

  ‘The men and women I want will by their very nature contribute little to your work,’ Godwin observed. ‘Attend to it at once.’

  The chamberlain assumed that Godwin was looking for spies of some kind, but knew better than to question him any further. So it was that a stream of resentful, deceitful ne’er-do-wells made their slovenly way to the chamber where Godwin was conducting his interviews. Since none of them could be relied upon to be remotely discreet, Godwin reckoned he had a single day at most before word got back to Emma. In the end, however, he had not even had his lunch by the time he found what he wanted.

  Her name was Mildred. She was lank-haired and long-nosed, and her face was liberally scattered with pustules, several of which were bleeding and seeping from having been squeezed. So when she told Godwin that she had once been Emma’s personal maid, he refused to believe her and told her to stop telling such obvious lies.

  ‘Weren’t a lie!’ she protested. ‘They sent me to work for her when that Harefoot become king. I seen her with nothing on, seen her dirty hose an’ all.’

  ‘Where was she living when you were her maid, then?’

  ‘Not in her old chambers, that’s for sure. Harefoot’s ma . . . wossername?’

  ‘Elgiva.’

  ‘That’s the one . . . she kicked ’Er Majesty out of her old royal bedchamber, stuck her in a right hole.’

  That was true enough. Edward wasn’t the first to try humbling Emma. The first thing her old adversary Elgiva of Northampton had done when her boy Harold became king was to strip Emma of all the marks and privileges of royalty. Replacing her personal attendants and staff with this ugly, slovenly scullion would have given Elgiva particular satisfaction – as it would have pleased Emma, he knew, had their positions been reversed.

  ‘I see,’ Godwin said. ‘Let’s suppose you’re telling the truth. Answer me this: did you see anyone going to the chamber to visit Her Majesty, anyone unusual, I mean?’

  Mildred didn’t have to think. ‘Yeah, I did, and I told me dad and me mam about it soon as I next seen ’em. Just ask ’em, they’ll tell you.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘Why, I told ’em about that dirty old Bishop Aelfwine, going in and out of ’Er Majesty’s chamber at all hours of the night . . . and dressed up like a common priest, like he didn’t want to be recognised.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘It was twice. Once was quite soon after the real king died . . .’

  ‘You mean Canute?’

  ‘Yeah, when they was still all arguing about who was going to be king, though Harefoot was acting like he was already.’

  ‘And the second time?’

  ‘It was later, just before ’Er Majesty went away across the water.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘I told you. I saw the bishop. I could see he’d been doing summink he oughtn’t, ’cos ’e was coming out th
e chamber, like . . .’ She darted her head from left to right, like someone guilty checking to see if they had been spotted.

  ‘What was he wearing?’

  ‘He had a cloak on with a hood right up over his head.’

  ‘So how do you know it was him?’

  ‘He was holding a candle, wasn’t ’e? And I could see he wasn’t wearing no bishop’s clothes, just one of them brown things like what monks wear.’

  ‘And what time was this?’

  ‘Proper late it was. I know ’cos I’d taken ’Er Majesty a bowl of broth for her supper, but that was hours before I saw the bishop and I was just on me way to bed.’

  ‘And Her Majesty left the palace soon afterwards, you say?’

  ‘Yeah, wasn’t but a few days later. I go in one morning and – poof! – she was gone. Didn’t think she’d be coming back again neither, but she did.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Godwin. ‘That was very useful. You may go now, but before you do, mark this. If I hear any word, from anyone, about our conversation, I will assume you were the source of the gossip. And I will cut out your tongue and brand your face with a red-hot iron. Do you understand?’

  Mildred nodded frantically, then snivelled, ‘I won’t tell no one, not even me mam, I swear I won’t.’

  ‘Make sure you don’t, or you’ll never say another word as long as you live.’

  The girl left the room weeping piteously and shaking with fear, leaving Godwin pondering her evidence. From the timing of events it was clear to him what had happened. Aelfwine had been on her side in the battle with Harold and Elgiva. Doubtless he had run errands for her. The two of them had conspired in a way that might have amounted to treachery against Harold but was of no bearing at all so far as Edward was concerned. Godwin knew that. But he also knew that the tale Mildred had told sounded very much like a man visiting a woman’s chamber for an illicit assignation. And that was just what the king wanted to hear.