‘I’m not surprised,’ Alyse said tartly. ‘You had a room at court, and your pick of the women. It’s a wonder you ever left the place.’
With a nonchalant gesture, he remarked, ‘The king advanced me and offered me a holding of my own. It seemed worth a look.’
Alyse smiled, aware that he had taken the reins of mockery. ‘You flatter me without restraint, my lord.’
Brien gazed at her for an instant, feigning ignorance. Then he leaned down and kissed her and murmured, ‘You know the truth of it. When the king gave me Wallingford, I accepted it with misgivings. But I did not then know that the castle contained a gentle-eyed young widow, a beautiful Saxon creature who kept well away from court. That was King Henry’s humour, to let me ride down here unaware and find you in residence.’
‘No,’ she replied quietly, ‘that was his kindness. I knew he would send someone for me to marry, and that I would have no choice in the matter. It could have been a monster. Why not? The trail was well worn before you arrived.’
Remembering the hard, carbuncled faces of those who had attended the Great Council, Brien acknowledged, as he had throughout the five years of his marriage, that good fortune had brushed against them both.
Alyse was his opposite in many ways. She was a high-born Saxon, a distant descendant of the English king, Edmund, whereas he was a bastard, and a Breton. She was a countrywoman, who had lived all her life within a day’s ride of Wallingford. For his part, Brien had visited most of Brittany, Normandy and England, travelled twice to Germany, once to Italy and once to Flanders, where he had almost died of some damp disease.
Alyse had been married at the age of fourteen, and widowed six years later. She had expected the king to send another husband without delay, but three years had passed before Henry’s favourite baron had ridden down, unsuspecting, from London. Such a delay was remarkable. Wallingford was of strategic importance for, with Oxford and Reading, it barred the eastern approaches to the capital. Yet none of the land-hungry barons who came to pay suit – and they came in droves, ten and twenty a year – were able to obtain the king’s permission to marry the Lady Alyse. At no time did King Henry admit that he had earmarked the young widow for his greyhaired favourite, but when Brien asked for her hand, the king looked at him with surprise and commented, ‘Well now, you can hardly take the house without its contents, can you?’
There were other differences. Until his marriage, Brien’s life had been spent in the service of the king, active service for the most part, sometimes as a warrior, often as a trusted emissary. He found little time to read, though he admitted later that if he had halved the time he had spent sweet-talking women, he might have been one of the best-read men at court.
So Alyse had encouraged him to study the chansons de geste, the epic poems that were so much in vogue, and give food and lodging and a few coins to the troubadours and jongleurs who wandered the country, armed with lutes and a good voice. The young couple could not afford a resident minstrel, but scarcely a month passed without some form of musical entertainment, and the summer evenings were enhanced by strident tales of heroism and plangent, soft-sung ballads, in which love was invariably unrequited until the final verse.
On a practical level, Brien taught his wife to be more inventive in bed. He tried not to think of her first husband, but he came to the ungenerous conclusion that the prior lord of Wallingford had lacked imagination, to say the least. However, as Brien responded to the love songs of Europe, so Alyse showed an equal willingness to learn. Yet neither the six-year union with her first husband, nor the five years she had so far spent with Brien, had produced any children.
A similar thought was in her head now as she asked, ‘Was Queen Adeliza at court?’
‘She was about,’ Brien said, ‘but she kept clear of the council. She has turned more and more to religion these days—’
‘So there is no change in her condition?’
‘She will never bear a child, the physicians are convinced of it.’
With some hesitation, Alyse ventured, ‘Perhaps it is the king, himself—’
‘—who is unable? I doubt that, my love, when he’s credited with nineteen bastards.’ He laid his wife’s arm over his own, her hand curled on his, their fingers intertwined, and they walked towards the drawbridge and the waiting Edgiva. As they reached the bridge, Alyse murmured, ‘Did you see the Empress Matilda?’ She had meant the question to sound casual, but the words had come out high and strained. She did not look at Brien, though she knew he had turned his head towards her.
Even before he spoke, she was nodding acceptance of his words. ‘No, I heard she was with her father in Normandy.’ He looked at her a moment longer, but she did not pursue the topic. One day, he knew, she would give expression to her feelings, and ask him about the rumours concerning King Henry’s legitimate daughter, heiress to the throne of England, and her most loyal supporter, Brien Fitz Count. One day she would ask him and, because he loved her, he would answer her with the truth.
* * *
Varan, constable of the castle, shared two things in common with Brien Fitz Count; unswerving loyalty to those he had chosen to serve – in this case his king and suzerain – and parents who had forgone all ceremony. Varan knew neither his father nor his mother, though both must have been physically strong, implacable by nature and of unsurpassed ugliness. Anyway, it was a fitting description of their offspring.
He had been many things in his life, this massive, flat-nosed Saxon, and on more than one occasion he had come close to the gallows. At the age of fourteen he had taken service as a mercenary and accompanied the first crusading army across Europe to the Bosporus, then on through Asia Minor to Palestine and the bloody capture of Jerusalem. He would have stayed on in the Holy Land but for the return home of his master, Alan Ironglove, Count of Brittany. He had entered Ironglove’s service because the count paid better than other leaders, but within the first six months of the campaign Varan had grown to respect the Breton above any of his peers. Before the crusaders had reached the borders of Serbia, the young mercenary was promoted to sergeant. Three weeks later he was offered a place in Ironglove’s permanent contingent.
As the only Saxon among forty coarse-tongued Bretons, Varan was required to prove his worth time and again. Eventually, goaded beyond endurance, he rounded on his tormentors and strangled one of them with a spare bow-string. Such a crime was punishable by death, but Ironglove showed uncharacteristic clemency towards his ill-featured recruit and reprieved him at the foot of the gallows. Instead, he laid a red-hot bar to the soles of Varan’s feet, then told him to follow the column barefoot, if he chose to. The branded man did so for a week, stumbling across the mountain wastes of Serbia. He moved with his mouth open, his breath rasping in his throat, each step driving blades of pain up through his body. The Bretons listened hard for his plea for mercy, or for the thud that would signify he had fallen. But whenever they glanced back he was there, sometimes on their heels, sometimes far behind, always hobbling forward, using his spear shaft as a crutch.
On the eighth morning when he opened his dust-swollen eyes he saw one of his companions standing over him, a hand on the bridle of a Spanish palfrey. The Breton recited, ‘Count Alan says he has no further need of your horse.’ It was not Varan’s mount, and they both knew it, but enough had been said. His punishment was over, and he had earned his reinstatement.
So, in 1099, having survived the battles and diseases, the rigours and deprivations of the crusade, the nineteen-year-old Saxon accompanied his master to Brittany and a further decade of fighting.
In late July 1100 a woman in Rennes sent word to Count Alan that she had given birth to a son. She asked the count if he would acknowledge it, or at least contribute towards its upkeep. He immediately took the boy from her, paid her for her trouble, then told his wife he was bringing his bastard son into the castle. The boy would be called Brien, and would be accorded the same treatment as their legitimate children. Brien would, of course
, inherit nothing, but if the infant grew to manhood, Ironglove would make some alternative provision for him.
On 2nd August, on the other side of the Channel, William Rufus, King of England, was killed in a hunting accident in the New Forest. Three days later his brother Henry seized the throne. When the news reached Brittany, Count Alan swore fealty to his longtime friend and set out to defend Henry’s Norman dominions. Varan rode with him. The journey was to last nineteen years, until Alan’s death. By then, Brien had become one of King Henry’s youngest knights, and been all but adopted by the monarch.
With the death of Count Alan, Varan was forced to look elsewhere for work. He thought of approaching Alan’s son. After all, Brien had spent his childhood under Varan’s watchful gaze and, even after the boy had entered Henry’s court, they had met from time to time. But the Saxon had been away from his own country too long. He was homesick, though he had never had a home in England, and he had almost forgotten his native tongue.
He reached Dover in the spring of 1120, a powerful, battle-scarred warrior, the veteran of a five-year crusade and the endless campaign in Normandy, a professional soldier skilled in the arts and techniques of warfare, a man who was as much at home in a conference chamber as in the fierce, horse-to-horse fighting of a Saracen ambush. He would not blame the English if they regarded him as something of a hero.
But his countrymen placed a different interpretation on Varan’s attributes. They saw a monster with a spatulate nose and a seamed face and heard him mouth a scarcely intelligible mixture of English and French. His forthright manner put them on the defensive and, if they answered him at all, it was in order to be rid of him. He was finding what thousands would find in later years on their return from other, more glorious crusades. The common soldier was only to be respected whilst he plied his trade. Away from the battlefield, he was a conjurer without tricks, a fish out of water. He was a reminder to others of what they might have dared; but he had no right to shame them, for he, too, had ceased to fight.
Angry and embittered, he took what work he could find; fletcher, harness-maker, quarryman. For three years he roamed England and Wales until, in the bitter winter of 1123, he was taken on as castle steward by a certain Roger d’Oilli, an important baron with holdings in Berkshire and at Oxford. The baron’s nod of approval laid the foundations for the one truly remarkable coincidence in Varan’s life, for Roger d’Oilli’s wife was a high-born Saxon lady named Alyse, and the castle was at Wallingford.
When Roger died three years later, Alyse looked to Varan for protection. She need not have worried, for he was devoted to her, and every would-be suitor who rapped at the gate had first to meet his critical gaze. Like his mistress, Varan found none of them worth their words; none, that is, until a young, grey-haired rider crossed the ford and announced without any trace of self-satisfaction that he had come on King Henry’s orders as the newly appointed Lord of Wallingford.
When that happened, when Varan stared down from the then wooden palisade and recognised the rider, he gave a roar that must have carried clear across the county and leapt down the steps and ran out to embrace Ironglove’s bastard.
It was a day neither of them would forget, least of all Brien Fitz Count, for when he had finished pounding shoulders with the old boar who had bullied him and encouraged him and been with him throughout his childhood, he went on into the castle and for the first time set eyes on the Lady Alyse…
* * *
Brien dealt with the counterfeiters that afternoon. Varan presented the evidence, all of it taken from their hideout, and arranged the exhibits on one of the long trestle tables in the ground-floor hall of the keep. Moving alongside the table, he pointed to each object in turn, explaining its function to his presiding overlord. Flemmed in by guards, the three counterfeiters – father, son and nephew – gazed impassively at the tools of their trade. Had they been brought before one of the town councillors they might have blustered, or even attempted to bribe the man. But it had been their misfortune to end up in front of Lord Fitz Count, and they awaited his verdict with dull resignation.
‘Moulds and dies,’ Varan indicated. ‘A cauldron for melting down the coins –’
‘How do you know that?’ Brien inquired. ‘Why not for boiling vegetables?’
‘It might have been, at one time. But if you scrape here, on the inside, you will find traces of silver. And no one sells silver-lined cooking pots.’ He illustrated his claim, and Brien nodded. ‘What’s in that sack?’
‘There is more than one way to cheat,’ the constable explained. ‘At the end of the table are the knives they use to shave the coins. The shavings go into the pot, while the coins, a little smaller than before, are passed on again. The sack contains lead plugs. You don’t shave the penny this time, but core it. You just cut a hole in the centre, replace the silver with lead, then pass it on again, like the others. I’d say five coins would make a sixth. But from the size of these plugs, our moneyers were unusually greedy. They’d probably get seven from five.’ He moved on again, held up a number of discs and explained that these were the most bald-faced forgeries of the lot. ‘They’re nothing more than lead coins, stamped in the usual way, HENRICUS and the king’s head, and the cutting cross on the other side.’ He came round the table and handed one of the pennies to Brien.
The baron said, ‘We are gullible, I admit, but surely none of us are going to mistake lead for silver.’
‘We would, sire, when these three have finished with it. They coat it. It looks real enough.’
Brien studied the cutting cross, the guideline along which every subject was allowed to halve or quarter the coin. The silver penny was the standard coin of the realm, but when hens cost half a penny each, and a measure of wine a quarter of a penny, it became necessary to divide the coin. So, following the line, it could be cut into half-pennies, or quarters, known as fourthings.
Brien tossed the counterfeit on to the table and turned towards the prisoners. ‘Do you deny all this? I’ll hear whatever you have to say.’ He waited, but none of them spoke. ‘Very well,’ he continued, ‘I assume you admit your guilt.’ Singling out the father, he said, ‘Do you remember what happened at Winchester about ten years ago? Some ninety or so moneyers were summoned there by the Chief Justiciar and asked to explain why they had allowed the country to become flooded with homemade coins. Whatever reasons they gave, they were not good enough, and all but three of them lost their right hands. It used to be the practice to nail the hands over the nearest smithy – sufficient warning to hopeful forgers. That’s no longer done, but I see no reason to amend the punishment. You grow rich, whilst with every mutilated coin this country becomes the poorer. Give it time, and you and your kind will possess the only coinage that’s worth its value. There are ways of making money, but yours is not one I accept.
‘As the father, and so the leader, you will lose your right hand. Your nephew, his left hand. Your son, because he is young enough to be in your sway, will be whipped out of the county. Your property is forfeit, though you may keep whatever clothes you have. Everything else will be sold, and the proceeds, together with your hoard of silver, will be sent to the mint in London. In that way we will at least ensure a fresh issue.’ He nodded at the guards, who herded the prisoners from the hall.
When they had gone, he asked Varan, ‘There’s no doubt, is there? They are all implicated.’
Sour with knowledge, the constable growled, ‘They’ve been in business for years, my lord.’
‘Then why was nothing done?’
‘They weren’t around here.’ He looked across the table at his master and added, ‘I’d say you were hoodwinked. You will not allow me to speak against such vermin before their trial, but if you did allow it I could have told you. The father is one of the three who kept his hands at Winchester.’
Chapter Two
The Heat of Winter
December 1135
Water dripped from the trees and from helmet nasals and fingertips. Men w
ho moved without looking winced as branches slapped them in the face. They opened their mouths to curse, then hurriedly stifled the words. No cursing today. And no shouting, or swordplay, or dice. No salacious stories. No mulled wine to keep out the chill. Just muttered exchanges and more waiting and the drip of water and the occasional surreptitious glance at the low stone building and at the priests and barons who ducked in and out.
The rain had turned the ground spongy underfoot, so the men moved awkwardly, their boots sinking into the compost of leaves and bracken. It seemed right that they should pick their way with care, heads bowed, as though with respect. And it was right that the rain coursed down their faces, for then they looked alike, the truly sorrowful and the insincere.
Many of them had been there, in the Normandy forest, for the past six days. When they had first arrived at the hunting lodge the ground had been covered with snow. But an unseasonal warm spell had dissolved the white carpet, and for the last three days it had rained without pause. The men had been patient enough until then, but most of them now shared a common, unspoken thought. They wanted the king to die, or get well, but to do so before his followers drowned on their feet.
On the sixth day of his illness, King Henry was visited by a deputation of his senior earls, among them his eldest illegitimate son, Robert of Gloucester. They had come to see for themselves if the king was as close to death as was rumoured and, if so, to hear him name his successor. Bulky as bears in their thick, fur-lined cloaks, the earls stooped as they entered the lodge, then sank to their knees around the candle-lit bed.
One glance was enough to reveal the hopelessness of Henry’s condition. Until a week ago, when he had gorged himself on the one thing his system could not absorb – lampreys cooked in wine and goat’s milk – he had been a stocky, well-fleshed man, unbowed by age. He had come to the Forest of Lyons to pursue his passion for hunting, and from the moment the hounds were let loose, he had ridden his barons to exhaustion. That night, in defiance of his physician’s advice, he had eaten the lampreys and gone to bed complaining of stomach cramp. By morning he was vomiting blood, and a messenger was sent the twenty miles to Rouen, to fetch Archbishop Hugh. He arrived in time to hear the king’s confession – twice, since most of what Henry said was inaudible.
The Villains of the Piece Page 2
