‘You saw?’
The dreamy boy was fully awake now. His face snapped shut. ‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘It’s time for dinner.’
Geoffrey turned and left the warm, pup-smelly kennel. I’ve lost him, he thought.
Matilda’s rule of family table was one conversation, and it was hers to begin. Everyone – the younger children, even the Duke – sat in silence until she spoke. Henry was late for dinner because he had to wash his face and hands and comb his hair before he was permitted to sit down. He embraced his younger brothers and sisters, ruffling the hair of his favourite, William. He and his father were unable to look each other in the eye.
‘Geoffrey told me about your dream,’ Matilda said. Henry did not notice the gentleness in her voice. His own face was stiff.
‘I’ll write to King David, asking if he’ll make me a knight,’ he replied.
‘I’ll arrange your training with the sword master,’ Geoffrey said.
His son ignored him.
‘I’m sure David will agree,’ Matilda added. The King of Scotland was her cousin.
Henry ignored her, too.
‘Nice to have you home, Henry,’ his brother Geoffrey said with a grin. Geoffrey the Younger had his father’s long fair hair, but a long horse-face and small, deep-set, snail-coloured eyes. Without much effort he could make them appear blank, and as he sat beside his elder brother, several yards from Matilda, Geoffrey the Younger took the opportunity to whisper, ‘Thought you were the Lion? Couldn’t fight your way out of a haystack. Shit head.’
‘Did you speak?’ Matilda asked sharply.
‘No, Mama,’ he replied.
Later, before supper, Henry found him practising archery near the palace orchard, punched him in the solar plexus and left him writhing on the ground.
That evening the summer light lasted for many hours but Henry went early to his apartment. The air throbbed with the urgent tinkling calls of frogs and the chirruping of crickets. While it was still twilight, the Duke entered his son’s bedchamber.
‘What do you want?’ Henry asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ his father said. He felt apprehensive. He wanted to say, forgive me, but knew that would undercut the value of the pain he’d been obliged to inflict.
They sat in silence.
Then Henry spoke. ‘Guillaume saved my life. I fell into a river wearing a hauberk. He rode in and saved me. But he wore a hauberk, too, and we both nearly drowned. His horse got us ashore.’
‘Guillaume …’ Geoffrey could not utter the words in his heart: Guillaume was conceived in love, and love’s sacrifices come easily to him, but you, Henry, were conceived in anger and struggle. You’ll spend your life yearning to find love. ‘Guillaume … will always protect you,’ the Duke said. ‘It was the one hope I had that you’d come home alive.’
He added, ‘By the way, what was that red cloth he was waving as you sailed upriver?’
‘It was some rag an old woman gave us.’
His father kissed his forehead. You poor child. Your enemies are not only the English King and his Crown Prince and all the court of France. Even the supernatural seems to fight you.
His mind had moved back fourteen years to the high summer of 1133 when he and Matilda set out from Le Mans to seek a blessing for their first child. He barely past boyhood himself; his older wife eager for reassurance that the dynasty they would found – loathe each other though they did – would flourish. The monk Matilda sought was Bernard of Clairvaux, a mystic, a holy man of great austerity, a leader of the reform movement in the Church.
Ten knights had ridden before and behind their carriage. A wetnurse held the baby. Geoffrey felt sullen, he recalled, because he wanted to be at home in the mews with the Nordic falcon he’d bought to celebrate the birth of his first legitimate son. A summer’s day spent trundling to and from the Abbey of the Trinity to speak to a lunatic was his idea of fatuity. Matilda had noted his surly look. ‘Why have you bothered to come?’ she’d demanded.
‘To ensure the old monster does no harm to my darling boy.’
‘How dare you! Father Bernard interpreted the dream of the embalmer’s daughter.’
Geoffrey had smirked a second time: his wife and all her Norman forebears and relations were obsessed by that dream of a girl long dead whom the Viking lord of Normandy had seen one day dancing bare-legged in a field. He’d summoned her to his bed in the castle of Falaise. There she dreamed her belly swelled until a huge tree burst out of it, leaping from Normandy to England, taking root in both countries, but then … Anyway, she’d given birth to a son, not a tree. The boy was called William the Bastard. In England his subjects were obliged to call him William the Conqueror.
Had Matilda come to visit him without her husband, Father Bernard would have invited her inside the abbey to his sparse private apartment. Not for him the luxury and fleshpots of Cluny whose Abbot Suger he despised. But he despised also Geoffrey’s father (now King of Jerusalem), and his other ancestors back to Foulques the Black and the witch, Melusine. He had left the couple waiting in a cloister. Its stone columns surrounded a courtyard of herbs and flowers, and as they’d waited, Geoffrey had plucked idly a sprig of yellow broom flower and threaded it into the band of his hat. A moment later the holy man appeared.
Geoffrey remembered the look on the thin, austere face as he stared at baby Henry. Aged six months, he was already large, lusty and red-haired. The monk’s expression registered puzzlement, surprise, shock, disgust and – Geoffrey had thought – for a moment it showed fear. Perhaps not fear: horror.
‘From the Devil he comes, and to the Devil he’ll return,’ the monk announced, and was off in a swirl of skirts, acolytes running at his heels.
Seated at his son’s bedside fourteen years later, Geoffrey thought ruefully of that day: the blessing Matilda had sought was a curse from which, it seemed, the boy would never be free. The acolytes had spread it from monastery to church to cathedral, until it was familiar to people in every province north of the Pyrenees. He kissed Henry’s forehead a second time. ‘I believe that old rag is a good luck charm, sent to you by the Lion himself.’
The look of hope in his son’s eyes made Geoffrey want to weep.
CHAPTER THREE
Henry’s training for knighthood began immediately after his inglorious return from Stephen’s court. A spy in the stables at Rouen brought news of it to Paris in less than a week.
Baron Estienne de Selors, the Seneschal of France, glared at his informant and stamped up and down, gnashing his teeth. The Baron was famous for gnashing, for he lived in a perpetual fury with almost everyone and everything. The descendant of a centurion who had invaded Gaul with Caesar, Selors was tall, flint-eyed, with greying hair and an abundance of nervous energy.
‘Learning swordsmanship, eh?’ he muttered. ‘I’ll get the whelp before he knows what a real sword is.’ He whacked himself on the thigh with glee before turning to the post-rider who had brought him the news. ‘You, wretch, get back to Rouen. You’re to watch day and night. Day and night, you understand? You don’t need to sleep. Only girls need sleep.’
The Seneschal sat down and drew a calendar on parchment. Two years, he figured. Two years to wait. After that, God willing, their Highnesses should have returned from carrying the cross to Outremer. He would persuade the King to seize back the Vexin and annihilate Normandy. Father and son. Louis Capet of France would be Duke of Normandy once more. To hell with the English: they’d lost Normandy to the Count of Anjou.
Sunshine, gale or teeming rain, six days a week Henry trained, from first light and often into the night.
He wrote to King David of Scotland asking for the honour of a knighthood from him. No answer came.
By the time he turned fifteen he could endure two days without food or sleep. He could walk silently through a forest carrying iron weapons. He mastered fighting using a sword in one hand and an axe in the other. If there was nothing else to drink, he could swallow his own urine.
He arrived for breakfast, linen shirt wet, his hair a copper helmet stuck to his head.
Before the evening meal he studied horsemanship. Henry had noticed the horse master seemed able to persuade a steed to do almost anything. ‘You know a secret,’ he said.
The horse master told him horses spoke to each other in a special language. He whispered of stallions taking a dislike to one of their number and abusing him. Of how the unpopular beast would become incompetent to cover a mare, or he’d dash himself into a fence.
The horse master lowered his voice further. For almost sixty years Mother Church had been back on the attack against paganism. ‘Sir, you won’t tell priestie?’
Henry promised.
‘Well, sir, the horse god has sent his creatures to help us humans,’ he murmured. ‘He orders them to give us what they have: strength, stamina, and in battle, courage. A horse’ll sacrifice his life for you, sir. He’ll let himself be ridden to death.’
The horse master was in his seventies, bow-legged, as desiccated as dried venison. He had been with the family since the days of the old Count of Anjou, Geoffrey’s father, and had ridden with him to Jerusalem when he became King.
‘There’s more,’ Henry persisted.
‘The priesties call this pagan,’ he whispered, ‘but you talk to a horse by making a picture in your head. Then you send the picture to the horse … Sir, I could be sent to hell for telling you this …’
The training continued and one night the horse master revealed more. ‘A horse will send you a picture, if he trusts you,’ he said. ‘He can see in almost an entire circle. Very useful, when there’s wicked men around. Saved your grandfather from a Saracen one night.’
Henry was grateful for the tuition and wrote a second letter to the King of Scotland.
This time he sent it by a different route, up the east coast of England, to Berwick. After two months he, Geoffrey and Matilda began to watch surreptitiously when larger ships loomed from the river mist and glided into the docks at Rouen. It was necessarily a sporadic watch-keeping, because the household packed up and moved every six weeks to another part of their demesne.
But wherever they were, at dawn on Sundays, Henry and his father rode out ‘to check on the vassals’ welfare’, as they described it to Matilda. And while his son enjoyed their weekly liaisons with the beauties of Normandy, Anjou and Maine, Geoffrey recognised that Henry found weapons and horses more fascinating than women – whereas he, at that age, had thought of nothing but the soft, secret parts of girls.
Several more times each week Geoffrey rode out wearing a fresh sprig of broom in the band of his hat.
Matilda racked her brains trying to discover where her husband got the money for the upkeep of these women and their bastards, but when she taxed the reeves and the treasurer they blinked at her as if she spoke bird language. It never occurred to her that Geoffrey had ordered the treasurer to alter the ledger books, entering his expenses on women and illegitimate children as ‘donation to Church’ or ‘new fence’. ‘Your mother spent so long in Germany learning rules, she doesn’t think of breaking them,’ Geoffrey said to Henry.
It was at Michaelmas in 1148, more than a year since Henry’s disastrous campaign in England and only five months to his sixteenth birthday, when a foreigner arrived at the Rouen castle gates. Through emphatic gestures he asked for an audience with the Duke. It was a hot autumn and the huge stranger, dressed in heavy woollen clothes, dripped with perspiration. Servants brought him wine, but he spat it on the floor.
Geoffrey invited him into the cool of the hall, trying French, Latin, German, Anjevin and the little English at his command, but the stranger kept shaking his head. That he was a warrior was obvious from his bearing. He appeared to be aged about twenty-five, with very long hair braided in many plaits, a dark beard that covered half his chest and a clever glint in his eyes. From his broad leather belt hung a double-headed axe, polished so it shone like silver. He pointed to himself, then to the north-west.
Matilda solved the riddle. She swept into the hall and announced, ‘He’s a Highlander. They’re cannibals.’
Henry found someone from Scotland working in the kitchen, a plump little woman and an excellent cook, especially of fish and honey cakes. As soon as she spoke to the Highlander in Gaelic he leaped with excitement and twirled. Plaits spun around his head, a river of words gushed from him. Two facts emerged: his name was Douglas and he carried a letter from King David. He produced it from inside his belt. Dismayingly, it was nothing but figures.
Henry said, ‘Ask him, what is the code.’
When he heard the question in Gaelic, Douglas rushed at Henry and swept him up as if he were a kitten. Through the cook he announced, ‘Write the numbers one to twenty-five. Write underneath the Latin alphabet. Write the numbers twenty-five to one. Write underneath the Latin alphabet. Every second letter.’
Henry began to decode. His heart thumped.
King David wrote:
David, by the grace of God, King of Scots, greetings to my dear kith and kin in Normandy. I calculate my nephew, Henry, will turn sixteen before Easter and I would deem it a pleasure if he would attend the celebration of Whit Sunday in our castle at Carlisle.
Henry felt as if his inner organs had slumped and could fall out his navel.
‘Nothing about knighting you,’ Matilda said. He glared at her.
Slowly, with concentration, he pieced more words together. The King continued:
Princes of the Church, earls and barons will join our festivities.
There was silence.
After a while Matilda said, ‘He’ll use the ceremony as cover for a war against Stephen. But he’s promising you nothing, Henry. He’ll only knight you if you make a good impression.’
Her son, seated at a writing table, unconsciously rubbed his hand against the dagger that all men of his family wore beneath their tunics. Suddenly he leaped up. His chair fell backwards. ‘I’ll make a good impression!’ he shouted.
The King finished with:
I have sent this invitation by seven messengers. I trust at least one will reach you, and that by him you will send your reply, written as I have written this.
‘Stephen and Eustace have the others,’ Henry muttered.
All had the same thought: some poor wretch’s eyes have already been burned out to persuade them to disclose the code.
‘Why don’t they celebrate Whit Sunday in Edinburgh?’ Eustace screamed when two of the intercepted letters were decrypted.
His father and his uncle, the Bishop of Winchester, thought it obvious why Carlisle had been chosen, and why that date: with Easter and the rites of Pentecost concluded, God’s Truce would be at an end and Carlisle, so close to the English border, was a convenient centre in which to muster rebels. ‘You realise, Father, that this time we must kill the FitzEmpress?’ the Crown Prince stated.
Stephen smoothed his silver hair and looked questioningly at his brother. The Bishop gazed out a window. He was a churchman of intelligence, shrewdness and an unnerving knowledge of people. He pressed his lips firmly together. Eustace, you will never inherit the throne if you do not kill the FitzEmpress, he thought. A chamberpot could tell you that. ‘There’ll be weeks of festivity – tournaments and banquets and all manner of lax behaviour,’ he said. ‘It occurs to me that a young man of sixteen may be distracted.’
‘By what?’ Eustace demanded. He accepted a cup of wine from his page, absentmindedly ruffling the child’s blond curls.
The Bishop felt uncomfortable. He disliked his nephew. As Stephen, by nature, was inclined to be kind but foolish, Eustace, by nature, was impatient and cruel. In his uncle’s view Eustace had none of the attributes of a king: not true courage, not the art of dissembling, not the inner strength to bear the hatred of others, not the honour of his word. He had only vanity, wrath and jealousy: the qualities of a courtier. As for the page, he was a limb of Satan, just eight years old but already beyond redemption. He struggled to rebuk
e himself: the Almighty can change a heart in the twinkling of an eye. But to date He had shown no intention of redeeming the child. ‘I’d like the boy to leave,’ he said.
Prince Eustace looked affronted, but waved him outside.
The plan the three men developed was elegantly simple. When they had concluded it Eustace asked if he could call his page back in. The older men nodded.
‘Well, Aelbad,’ Eustace said, ‘in Scotland you’ll be known as James. You’ll be honoured with the work we’ve planned for you.’
‘Sire?’ His voice sounded timid.
‘You are to become my eyes and ears in King David’s camp. How many languages do you speak?’
‘Ten, sire.’
‘Among them Gaelic?’
Aelbad dropped his gaze to his feet. ‘I can speak either as a Highlander or a Lowlander. Or in the way of the Welsh. Or the Irish. I know four Gaelic accents and vocabularies.’
The Prince rubbed his hands together and smiled at the Bishop. ‘You see, Uncle? We have the perfect spy.’
‘Can he read and write?’
Eustace hooted with laughter. Even King Stephen smiled. Aelbad smirked at the floor.
‘Dear Uncle, there’s not a scribe in Mother Church with a hand as fine as my Aelbad.’
The prelate rested his worldly gaze on the boy, nodding. ‘Indeed,’ he sighed. ‘His father was the most intelligent man I ever met. He had a great future before him. One of the greatest on earth.’
‘Don’t upset him, Uncle,’ Eustace said. ‘You, James, have a very great future waiting for you. Off you go. We have other matters to discuss.’
‘Sire,’ the child stalled, ‘will the violent brothers not recognise me?’
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