The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  Lanfranc’s eyes darkened but he pushed aside a tremor of anger. Always a trimmer, he never found it difficult to give a little here, appear flexible there. He took what he could, which was nearly always as much as he had hoped for, when the chance came.

  ‘Sire,’ he said, ‘my Lords. To me it seems everything is working out rather well.’ He shifted on the three-legged stool, tried to get comfortable. ‘First,’ he continued, ‘let’s take these barons. If they come over themselves, supply their own men and so forth, then once we’ve won, you’ll be obliged to give them land, they’ll end up even more powerful and with even more potential for being pains in the arses than they are now. But they are obliged to give you money in lieu of men. Collect their dues now. Use their gold to employ directly anyone with a horse and a suit of armour who wants to come. Go outside Normandy. Every second son from Lithuania to the Pyrenees will be ready to have a go, and many will come for nothing if you promise them land.’

  William slumped into his throne-like chair, pushed himself forward, big hands clasped in front of him.

  ‘It’ll take months to recruit a proper army from abroad.’

  ‘Fine,’ Lanfranc smiled, stooped sideways and pulled a roll of fine vellum from the flat leather bag he had brought with him. He undid the ribbon that tied the roll, spread the top sheet of lamb’s skin in front of him. It was covered with spidery black writing, done in haste, with blotches here and there, no ornamentation. His finger ran down a list, paused.

  ‘First. We’re in too much of a hurry. Even after we have beaten Harold’s army and dealt with the Godwinsons, there will be resistance. To put this down we must be sure we can feed ourselves and our troops and without relying on supplies from this side of the water. In short, the first advice I would give is that we postpone the invasion until the harvest is in. If we turn up before the end of July every barn in the country will be empty, and if we have to fight and destroy the fyrd, there’ll be no one to reap the corn . . .’

  William banged the table with his fists and grinned.

  ‘Let the bast . . . bulgars get in a full year’s supply of food first, then screw them! Why could none of you think of that?’ He turned back to the foreign, Lombard churchman. ‘So when do we make the crossing? September, October? By that time we might have men who can fight and ships that float the right way up. But gales, Lanfranc? What about gales? Don’t we get a lot of storms round then?’

  ‘End of September, beginning of October you usually get good spells of calm weather. The worst is over by the middle of September. Usually.’

  ‘You’re the Vicar. Speak to the Boss. Just make sure that when the time comes God doesn’t blow it. What next?’

  ‘My Lord, Tostig, Harold’s . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me who Tostig is. What does he want -- apart from Northumbria?’

  Chapter Forty-Three

  They took the Roman road along the crest of Portsdown towards Southampton. The hawthorn was almost out again, briars and honeysuckle in bud. Bluebells carpeted the woodlands; cowslips nodded in the sheltered folds of the downs. For a time they dismounted and walked, side by side. Edith Swan-Neck stooped to pick three cowslips. She undid the brooch that held his cloak on his shoulder to pin them to his jerkin, but he caught her thin wrist in his strong hands and bent his head over the flowers.

  ‘I’ve never noticed these red spots in them before,’ he said.

  ‘Fairy favours,’ she said. ‘In those freckles live their savours. Go on, smell.’ Then she took his elbow: ‘Listen. Cuckoo.’

  They walked on a bit. Rip came up and took their horses’ bridles; and all their train, men and women, hung back a little. Edith took his hand, spoke softly.

  ‘What actually did happen?’ she asked.

  ‘I didn’t fuck her, you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You had a spy beneath the bed?’

  She laughed again. ‘I wouldn’t be asking you what happened if I had. But go on, tell me. I want to know.’

  He thought back. The wedding had taken place in the big church in Oxford. Edwin and Morcar had wanted the Abbey but Harold had said no, we’ll save that for her coronation, once all this business is over. It was a ploy and they knew it. They’d stay on board knowing their sister could get pregnant, that she would be a proper Queen too. They suggested York, but Harold said no again. It was too far north. Even back in March he had not wanted to leave the south. He told Edith all about it.

  ‘It was cold. Remember March? Not a daffodil to be seen. And the poor thing was shivering until I made them cover her bridal dress with a proper fur cloak.’

  ‘Not just with the cold.’

  ‘No. She was terrified.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘They say she’s fourteen. I’d guess no more than twelve. Very thin. Mousey dark hair, not too clean. Too cold to give it a proper wash. She actually had a cold, nose streaming, sores on her lips. And spots on her forehead and cheeks.’

  ‘Come on. You’re going too far. I’m not jealous, you know?’

  ‘But you want to know.’

  ‘Yes. You’d want to, if you were me.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  They walked on in silence for a few steps until she squeezed his hand.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘But no one knows this except the poor thing herself, and me, and now you. And they had better not. If her brothers knew she was still a virgin the whole thing could fall apart.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I read to her. Until she fell asleep.’

  ‘You don’t read too well.’

  ‘It was stuff I knew by heart. Stories my mother told me.’

  ‘In Danish?’

  ‘Sort of half and half.’

  ‘What sort of stories?’

  ‘Fairy-stories, riddles. Some of the Irish ones you used to tell our kids. Battle of Maldon.’

  ‘That must have thrilled her.’

  ‘Sent her to sleep anyway.’

  Gytha, mother of the Godwinsons, was an old woman, as old as the century or nearly. Born a Dane, sister of Ulf, whose wife was Canute’s sister, she had been married to Godwin in 1018 shortly after Canute made Godwin an earl and one of his chief men in England. Thus her Danish lineage was not in itself royal, but she was a connection of Canute by marriage - a fact that made the English Danes revere her, and her sons too. Before Godwin died she had already withdrawn to a nunnery close to Cerne in Dorset, where, it was said, she became a priestess of the old religion. In her first years there she had studied with the old lady who had concocted the spurious ritual of betrothal which had been intended, for a matter of a few minutes at any rate, to give Edward the power to penetrate Gytha’s daughter Edith. But that was all well in the past, and actually eight years before Gytha herself turned up at Cerne.

  In 1066 she cultivated her garden, bred new types of fruit trees and roses by cross-fertilisation and grafting, and created the first herbaceous border since Roman times to flourish on a south-facing wall, with irises, giant daisies, acanthus, ashodel, carnations and pinks. And when the weather was cold or wet she retired to a small study where she laboured both with ancient books and even more by interviewing poets, minstrels, milk-maids and midwives to create a picture of an ancient religion that united the paganism of her Danish childhood with the remnants of Goddess worship that survived west of the Stour. In short, she was ideally suited to invent and weave a personal standard for Harold, a standard whose potency, he hoped, would ward off whatever was ill-omened about the gold dragon of Wessex.

  She was tall but stooped, heavily built, had scant white hair, and cheeks lined like a walnut shell. When Harold and his small train arrived, she was wearing a purple fur-trimmed robe and a huge floppy black velvet hat. Round her neck dangled a heavy silver necklace providing mounts for a selection of large polished gem-stones -- amethysts, topazes and garnets. It got in the w
ay and banged into things.

  She embraced Harold warmly and Edith Swan-Neck too; led them into an enclosed garden and made them sit at a table while mead and verjuice were sent for. A large late-flowering cherry filled most of the air above them; its clustered white blossoms, an almost orgasmic delight beneath the blue sky, fell, swirled when the breeze came, littered the grass.

  ‘White for Eastertide,’ Harold remarked. ‘Two weeks late.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Gytha. ‘Wearing white for Odin and the annual sacrifice of the king. Make the seed of the spring sowings germinate.’

  The mead and verjuice arrived. Gytha insisted they both drank some verjuice -- made from pressed crab-apples and vinegary in the first week of May as well as plain sour.

  ‘Good for your bladders and purifies the blood. So. Why have you bothered to call on me?’

  Harold explained about the battle standard -- how he felt Ironside’s dragon on its own was ill-omened, and, anyway, he wanted something a bit more personal. Had she any suggestions? Could she make one for him?

  Gytha threw up an arm and pointed dramatically above the low tiled roof through a small stand of willows that stood by the brook and at the holly-crowned down beyond.

  ‘The Fighting Man of Cerne,’ she cried. ‘I’ll copy that exactly, on a brilliant green ground for you. Eight feet by six. Why not?’

  Edith and Harold looked at each other.

  ‘All of it?’ Harold asked.

  ‘Of course! Figure of manhood. In every sense. Our lot will love it . . . and the Normans will hate it.’

  ‘It,’ remarked Edith slyly, and neither were in any doubt as to what she meant by ‘it’, ‘is a bit big.’

  Harold blushed.

  ‘How soon before it’s finished?’ he asked.

  ‘Soon enough. You won’t need it before Michaelmas.’

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Junipera popped a large translucent grape between her lushly painted lips. Beyond her head, red hair piled in coils and bound with a gold fillet, through cypresses and past the dark sweep of the theatre, Walt watched the eastern horizon darken to plum colour. His nose had stopped bleeding. ‘And then it all turned sour,’ she said. ‘Serve him right for meddling with the old religion.’

  ‘Poppycock,’ said Quint, stroking a last sliver of white mountain goat cheese on to a crust. ‘I’m sure the Fighting Man achieved all Gytha said it would. These things exist only in the mind you know, and if the image carried a potency for the Celts and simpler folk in his army then I’m sure they fought all the better for it.’

  ‘It is true,’ said Walt, ‘that it was within a week or so of his visit to Cerne that things began to go wrong.’

  Junipera smiled sweetly but with self-satisfaction.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘What was the first? Let me guess. That comet?’

  ‘No. That was already just about gone by then. It appeared on the twenty-fourth of April. Of course, a lot of people said it was ill-omened -- but Harold laughed it off: ill-omened, maybe, he said, but for whom?’

  ‘He was wrong,’ Junipera was insistent. ‘Such things always signify profound change. He was in place. William was not. William was the change.’

  ‘But the comet was everywhere,’ Quint interjected.

  ‘And there weren’t changes here? We’ll all be Moslems before the century is out because of them. Alp Arslan? William the Conqueror . . .?’

  ‘Don’t call him that!’

  There was agony in Walt’s voice.

  Junipera shrugged, eased another grape from its hold.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Not the comet. What then?’

  ‘Tostig turned up. On the Island. Bembridge, forty ships and a thousand men.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Alain asked, twanging the harp, but, young lad as he was, suddenly interested in a story that looked as if it might yet move to fighting and such like.

  ‘Not a lot,’ Walt went on.

  Leofwine, duly commissioned by Harold to do so, chased Tostig out of Bembridge and east along the coast as far as Sandwich which Tostig briefly occupied. He seized the shipping in the harbour and press-ganged sailors to sail them. Leofwine kept a watchful eye on him but did not engage him. Meanwhile Harold went on to London where, for the first time, he raised the fyrd, and, with a nucleus of housecarls, marched on Sandwich. Tostig, faced now with two armies as well as a fleet, sailed again, first up the River Burnham in Norfolk and then on to the Humber. He headed south and was heavily defeated by the militia of the ancient kingdom of Lindsey under Edwin of Mercia. He got clear and ran into Morcar on the Yorkshire coast, who finished off what his brother had started. Finally Tostig escaped north with only twelve small ships from his original fleet. He went on to Scotland, where he was welcomed by his old friend King Malcolm.

  By and large Harold, when he heard how the Mercians and Northumbrians had behaved, was well-pleased. Some of the doubt he felt for Edwin’s loyalty lifted, even though he knew both Edwin and Morcar had been fighting to keep Tostig from getting Northumbria back. Moreover his defences against invasion had proved reliable - the fleet had sailed and handled itself well; wherever the invading host landed it was met within a day or two by loyal troops.

  The summer wore on, June into July. Scurriers nipped to and fro across the Channel; there was no way, they said, that William could be ready to sail before the middle of July. During three days’ feasting at the beginning of August, Erica and Walt were married, then Walt returned to Portchester to continue training the newly recruited housecarls and the fyrd which Harold dared not disbandon. The scurriers revised the probable date when William would be ready to mid-August at the earliest. It was about then, in the first week of August, Walt declared, that the mood changed and some began to feel that things might not turn out as they had expected. There was talk again of the oaths Harold had taken on Holy Relics at Bayeux the year before.

  The harvest came in and Lanfranc’s strategy paid off. The fyrd, committed to serve for only two months without pay, and desperate to make sure that there would be food for the winter, became more and more discontented. They were laid off piecemeal to begin with, then more or less completely, but warned to return at a moment’s notice. And then the weather changed. A solid anticyclone with high pressure set in: weeks of fine weather, not a cloud in the sky and what wind there was from the north and north-east.

  ‘Isn’t all this a bit boring,’ Junipera asked.

  ‘But,’ Walt tried to ignore her, ‘a wind from the north may have kept William at bay, but it allowed Harald Hardrada to sail from Norway . . .’

  ‘Another Harold? How confusing!’

  ‘HarALD,’ said Walt. ‘King of Norway. You must have heard of him. He served your Emperor, and the Empress Zoe before that . . .’

  ‘Oh that Harald. I never knew he was King of Norway. My goodness, what a man. I saw him once. So handsome, that red-gold hair, and seven feet tall. I didn’t even know he’s still alive-’

  ‘He isn’t.’

  ‘But you said . . .’

  ‘What I’d like to know about,’ Quint interrupted, ‘is William and his army. How they were getting on all through this summer --’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ Walt was a touch petulant. ‘I wasn’t there, was I?’

  ‘But Taillefer does. You were in Normandy. Could you fill us in on that side of the story before Walt comes to his conclusion?’

  Taillefer leaned across the table, knife in one hand, pomegranate in the other.

  ‘They said the devil was in him, the devil was his father, and I can see what they meant -- assuming you believe in the devil . . .’

  ‘The devil exists, no doubt of that,’ Walt muttered grimly.

  ‘Every doubt in the world,’ said Quint, robustly. But tell us exactly why you are led to speak in such extreme terms about a man who was, after all, no more than a man.’

  ‘It’s difficult to put in words.’ Taillefer worked the knife across the hard rind of the fruit, then to
re it in half revealing two heart-shaped caskets filled with jelly-covered seeds. Using his teeth he tore out a mouthful and began to chew, sometimes crushing the seeds, sometimes spitting them out into his cupped left hand. Juice ran down his chin.

  ‘Treat that fruit with respect,’ Junipera interjected, ‘it has its place in the holiest of places.’

  ‘I know. I am hoping it will inspire me.’

  ‘What mumbo-jumbo is this?’ Quint expostulated tetchily.

  Taillefer and Junipera glanced at each other with expressionless meaning. Walt yawned. Too much wine.

  ‘There was always emptiness in his eyes which were dark. There was nothing behind them, no soul, no inner man. He was driven, but driven by things outside him. He had no desires of his own -- he always did what he thought was expected of him. Which, of course, is not to say he was in any way humble or obedient - not in the least. Put it like this - he always had to prove himself, and he set himself to achieve whatever others had said would achieve that end. Of course, they were never right, so he was always driven on and on. Was this attributable to his upbringing? Perhaps. A mother whose first born he was, the only child she bore to his father, a woman whose status as the daughter of a respectable tanner had been ruined, but who was never made the duchess she should have been. One can imagine: ‘Billy, whatever people say, you are a duke, a duke’s son, behave like one, get your due, make sure you have what is yours . . . and so on.’ Something like that, but something more.

  ‘In some ways he was like the living dead. As if possessed by a spirit that did not belong in his body, had come in from outside, from somewhere else. It even informed his ordinary movements, walking, drinking, eating. He walked jerkily, often with his head on one side but questing forward, with long strides, his hands clasped behind his back. Sometimes it seemed they had been bound there, that he had even asked to have them bound there to keep them out of mischief. Mischief? He could have used them to tear and eat the liver from a new-born baby if he felt it would say something about himself he wanted others to believe.