A Knight's Tale: Kenilworth

by Gabriella West

  “It’s Sir William Talbot. I have a letter for Lord Simon from Lady Eleanor.”

  There was a long pause, too long. The portcullis went up slowly, as if it was rusty. As I made to go in, a horse moved toward me. The ashen face of the rider was somehow familiar. With a pang, I realized it was Simon. He wore a dark cloak.

  I moved back automatically.

  “Stay back,” Simon said. “I don’t want you in the castle.”

  I wondered for a moment if he had gone mad.

  “Simon, it’s me,” I said.

  “Yes, I know.” His voice sounded muffled.

  “I brought a letter.” I was shivering now, and not because of the mist.

  I handed it to him. He took it and opened it, read for a few moments, and pocketed it.

  He handed me a thick packet stamped with a wax seal.

  “For my mother,” he said. “I wrote it when I got back. I wanted to put down my impressions while they were still fresh.” His face twisted. “I haven’t been able to rest, eat, or drink since I got back from Evesham. Whenever that was. Three days ago? I’m not sure.”

  I tucked the letter away.

  “It’s all right if you don’t want to tell me what happened,” I said gently.

  He shook his head.

  “I think you can see from my face that my father and Henry are dead.”

  His dull expression terrified me. “Simon, you must rest! Who’s looking after you in there?”

  “No one,” he said, smiling slightly. “Just the way I like it. I’m not letting you come in, Will.”

  “But I’ve come a long way.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I can see that you have.”

  “Did Tom make it?” I asked, quavering slightly.

  He shook his head slowly. “Neither Tom nor his father made it.”

  What had happened, as he wrote quite calmly in the letter, was that Edward’s forces had trapped Earl Simon’s troops at the town of Evesham. Edward had divided up his troops. A bunch of knights, including Mortimer, had blocked the bridge over the Avon so that Earl Simon could not escape that way. He was forced to fight against a much larger army advancing toward him with relentless speed. His only hope was when he viewed the Montfort banners approaching him at a distance, but a man called from a rooftop that it was a trick, that those banners were not carried by Simon and his men. Then he had realized he was doomed. All the same, his old friend Walter de Cantilupe had been there before the battle to hear confessions and absolve the Montfort side. The royalists waited grimly for him to finish and leave.

  Henry was killed first, Simon wrote. “Then it is time for us to die,” someone reported Montfort to have said when he heard. He had had a few bitter words for Henry and his brothers before the battle, and Simon had written them down too, as if for posterity.

  Because by the time Simon had reached Evesham, it had been too late. He had seen his father’s head paraded around on a spear.

  “When I looked closely, I saw something that might have been his body,” Simon said to me. “Of course, I looked for Henry. I looked until someone told me he was dead. And I would have brought his body back, but it was too dangerous. I had to trust that the priests would bury them.”

  He paused. “Oh, Will, they dismembered my father’s body. I heard they sent his head to Mortimer’s wife! His hands, his feet, his testicles, all hacked off. I wondered if they mutilated Henry too, but nobody told me. If it was safe enough to stay, I would have stayed there all day and howled.

  “Of course, I blamed myself,” he continued, as if I had spoken. I was struck dumb, staring at him in horror. “I let the knights go to Kenilworth that night. They were going stir-crazy at the castle. I didn’t think Edward would dare attack the town itself. But of course we were mostly naked when he swooped in.

  “I survived that ambush. You heard I swam the Great Mere? They would have taken me prisoner then if they could. But it was all for nothing. I’d rather have not survived. I know Father was waiting for me for a long time in July, to meet up with him with my men. He didn’t know why I was taking so long. I didn’t know myself. I just felt something awful was going to happen. No matter what I did, something awful would happen. So I dallied.”

  I put my hand on his arm. He was chill to the touch.

  “It sounds terrible, Simon. You must go in, then. I don’t want you to fall ill.” I glanced at the sky. Fat drops had begun to fall.

  “It’s heartless of me to send you away in this weather. I’m sorry. Let me at least get you a fresh horse.”

  “This one’s doing just fine. I’m used to him.”

  A groom appeared at my side with a flagon of warm wine. He was the same man who’d tended Simon’s horse in the stables once while we talked. I raised it to my lips gratefully. The man offered a flagon to Simon and seemed stunned when Simon reached out and took it.

  We drank in silence for a few moments, alone again. I rode over to the wall and touched it with my hand. The last time I’d touched it, it had been warm and glowing with the rays of the sun. Now it was damp and cool.

  “I will ask to enter one last time, Simon.”

  “And I will still answer no, Will.” He gave me a crooked smile. “It’s better this way. I need to grieve my brother by myself. And there’s a good chance you would get trapped here—if you stayed.” He gave a deep sigh, staring at me. “There’s nothing I would love more, you realize. But I can’t let myself.”

  “Don’t punish yourself,” I said in a low voice.

  “At least Mother is safe. Saving Father was always going to be more tricky.”

  “You could come back with me to Dover,” I offered.

  “I’m in no state to travel at the moment. When I can do it, I’ll make for France. It will take a few months, I suppose. You’ll probably get there before me.” He shrugged. “There will be some sort of life for me there, I suppose, or in Italy. I’d love to put my sword aside, but it’s really all I’ve got.”

  “I feel awful that I wasn’t at your side, a few days ago.”

  “I know you do.” He gazed at me, taking one last swallow of the wine. “Perhaps you’d have given me better advice than I gave myself.”

  “I don’t think you could have saved him. Even if you did get there on time.”

  “Father died fighting,” he said woodenly. “I don’t think he thought of me in those last moments. He wasn’t sentimental like that. He saw what he was up against. His own father died in battle. I think he might have seen him die.”

  “He was a brave man,” I said. My stomach was in a knot. I looked at Simon intently.

  “Shall I go, then?”

  It was raining gently on us now. His hair was plastered to his head. I could see he was having a hard time letting me go, and considered just bolting into the castle courtyard. What would he do then?

  He moved over to the shelter of the wall, gesturing to me. I steered my horse back against the wall so that our horses’ sides were touching. He clasped my hand, pulled me towards him, and kissed me gently on the lips. His lips were oddly warm.

  He had done it so the guards wouldn’t see, I realized. I gazed out towards the Great Mere. Three swans had started swimming across. They were all black.

  “The parents must have died,” I said dreamily. “The ones I saw when I first came to Kenilworth.”

  “Guy wasn’t killed,” Simon said suddenly. “He’s badly wounded, though, I heard. I don’t think Edward will kill him. He’s not that foul. It was Father that he wanted. Father was the threat.

  “Mother will arrange everything,” he continued, since I did not speak. “You’ll see. You’ll be on a boat to France with Stephen and Mother and Eleanor before you know it.”

  “And Christiana?” I asked.

  “Oh, Christiana, she won’t go... Mother will give her some land and a yearly pension. She’s good at that.”

  “Wilecok?” I asked. He smiled mirthlessly.

  “He’ll probably go with you to France. Mother l
oves him. Can’t say I ever did. He was the one who told you, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I said, staring at the drops of water rippling on the Great Mere. I looked up into his eyes. They looked human, anyway. Softer. Even, for a moment, tender.

  “Godspeed, then. I’ve saved you the trouble of telling Mother the whole story. The letter says it all.”

  While I was formulating a response, he nodded to me and moved back into the castle. I heard him say something to the guard on the other side. The portcullis then clanged shut.

  I shook my head at the suddenness of it, brushing my hand across my lips. The flagon was empty, so I tossed it down, not wanting to bring it back with me. It clanked faintly on the wet stone.

  I pulled the reins of my patient steed and began to make my way down the narrow path that would soon meet the road which would eventually lead back to Oxford, then Odiham and home.

  But I stopped when I reached the Cherwell. It was so peaceful there, and nobody would see me, and so, thinking of Tom, I slid off the horse and stood there, burying my face in his long neck, which he endured, even when I began heaving with great, raw sobs, thinking of Tom’s body lying there on the battlefield. I should have been with him, but it hadn’t worked out that way, and although I wasn’t to blame exactly, and I knew he was with his father, where he’d chosen to be, it still felt wrong and unfair on some deep level: that he wouldn’t be allowed to become a man and know happiness, and that I, somehow, had and would.

  Epilogue

  I felt more dead than alive when I got back, and was put to bed and fussed over, mostly by Stephen. It was his turn to help, he said, and I accepted that. He was a good healer.

  When she heard the news, Lady Eleanor disappeared for about a fortnight to her own chambers. When she emerged, she wore widow’s black. Since I was sick for much of this time, it didn’t affect me as much as the others.

  Poor little Eleanor was a distraction. Comforting her comforted Christiana, who was distraught herself. Lady Eleanor provided for her generously, as Simon had predicted, and Stephen and I jested with her about us being sent to a nunnery instead of her, to pray for her soul. She responded that she just couldn’t see herself in a French nunnery, much as she loved her mistress, and would miss us greatly.

  Bishop Walter de Cantilupe visited, in September, and he and Lady Eleanor sat and wept together. He would be dead by the end of the year, of a broken heart, some said.

  The King moved swiftly to take back one of Amaury’s clerical titles. Urged on by his mother, and indignant, he decided to leave the country with his young brother Richard and smuggled out a goodly sum of cash for her as well. Lady Eleanor spent the rest of her time in England negotiating the peaceful handover of Dover Castle.

  Stephen and I and the remaining members of Lady Eleanor’s small household left England at the end of October 1265, all of us watching the white cliffs recede in silence.

  Amaury would go on to study at the universities of Bologna and Padua and finally be properly ordained. Simon and Guy would escape England the next year and end up fighting under Charles of Anjou’s banner in Italy. (The younger brother of the King of France, he was a longtime admirer of Earl Simon.) Kenilworth was besieged and held out for a long time, but the castle fell to the King in October 1266. That was the end of the rebel cause. Some who had worked for Earl Simon were pardoned, like John de la Haye and even my old acquaintance Richard de Havering.

  The remains of Earl Simon had been buried under the altar at the abbey in Evesham. To the King’s disgust, people started to flock to his grave, and a cult grew up around him. It was said that miracles occurred when people prayed to him, or even spoke of him. The King had his body moved to an unmarked grave nearby. In a defensive letter to his brother-in-law, the King of France, he wrote of Simon de Montfort, “He was our enemy.”

  In a strange new country, I learned that it was possible to flourish after great pain. To survive, anyway, and feel with each movement of the seasons the life stirring within you.

  I saw us all slowly come alive again.

  END