Henry pulled away, so abruptly that he stumbled. He wanted to run, but he stood his ground, for there was no escaping what he’d overheard. His mother was in danger and his father did not care.
Father and son were so intent upon each other that they’d not even realized Robert had joined them, not until he said quietly, “This is not about your wife, Geoffrey. It is about his mother.”
Geoffrey started to speak, stopped himself, and Henry seized his chance. “When you told me what happened at Winchester, Papa, you said Mama had lost her chance to be queen. You said that from now on, she was fighting for me. I ought to be there, then. I ought to be in England so men can see me. With Mama trapped, they need a reason to keep fighting. I can help Uncle Robert rescue her, I know I can.”
Geoffrey was silent for several moments, regarding the boy in thoughtful reappraisal. “I am not saying you are wrong, Henry. But I am saying it would be too dangerous.”
“Do you think Stephen would hurt me?” Henry challenged, and Geoffrey cursed himself for all the times he’d mocked Stephen’s soft heart in his son’s hearing.
“There are other dangers, Henry,” Robert pointed out. “Just getting to England would be hazardous, for November is a bad month to cross the Channel.”
Henry looked from his father to his uncle, back at his father again. “Yesterday I heard some of the castle servants talking about a funeral for one of the stable lads. He went skating last week on the pond in the village, but the ice was not thick enough and he drowned. I like to skate on the ice, too, Papa, have my own pair of bone skates. I could drown crossing the Channel as Uncle Robert fears…or I could drown back in Angers, if I was unlucky like that stable lad.”
Geoffrey’s mouth twitched. “God help me,” he said, “I’ve sired a lawyer! Henry…you go back to the hearth and get warm whilst your uncle and I talk about this.”
Seeing that further argument was futile, Henry reluctantly retreated, casting them several anxious looks over his shoulder. The two men watched him go, enemies suddenly allied in their concern for one small, stubborn boy. “If you’d not been so quick to start your sermon,” Geoffrey said, “I’d have told you that I’m willing to spare some men for Maude’s rescue. I can probably part with two hundred or so, more if you can wait.”
“I cannot,” Robert said tersely. “Every day brings Maude closer to capture. But what of the lad? You are going to let him go with me?”
“Am I that obvious? Yes…I am.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course not,” Geoffrey said, an edge creeping back into his voice. “Maude and I may not have agreed on much, but we do on this—that we cannot coddle the lad. So…I am trusting my son to you, Robert, and to Stephen.” Another smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “God pity him if Henry did fall into his hands, for that lad of mine would talk him into abdicating by sundown!”
“I’ll keep him safe,” Robert said. “I can promise you that.”
“No,” Geoffrey said, “you can only promise that you will try. Look at him over there, watching us like a hungry hawk, whilst pretending to play with those dogs of his. He is still so young…Come on, let’s tell him ere I change my mind.”
Henry had knelt to pet his dyrehunds. But he straightened up abruptly as they started toward him. “Well,” Geoffrey said, “I’d not advise a man to buy a horse sight unseen, so I suppose the same holds true for kingdoms. You’d best check out the wretched English weather for yourself, lad, make sure it is a realm you want to rule.”
Henry swallowed, his pulse quickening with an emotion that was not excitement and not fear, yet oddly akin to both. “I can go? Truly?” And when his father nodded, he swallowed again before saying, “Uncle Robert…we will be in time?”
“I do not know, lad,” Robert admitted. “I hope so.”
That was not the answer Henry had been expecting. He’d wanted reassurance, had gotten, instead, an uncompromising adult reply, honest and unnerving. He could not have articulated the awareness that came upon him now, but he sensed, however instinctively, that when he sailed for England, he’d be leaving the greater part of his childhood behind.
“I hope so, too,” he said, striving to match his uncle’s matter-of-fact tones. A moment later, though, he blurted out, “I want to take my dogs with me,” no longer sounding like a young king in the making, just a nine-year-old boy afraid for his mother.
THE wind was banging against the barricaded windows of the keep, the wooden shutters creaking and groaning under the onslaught. It sounded to Henry as if the storm were besieging Corfe, and having better luck than Uncle Robert was at Wareham. The chamber was dimly lit and cold; on awakening that morning, he’d found his washing laver iced over. In the three weeks that he’d been at Corfe, he’d come to hate it, trapped inside much of the time by the wretched weather. People were convinced this was going to be the worst winter in years, for there had already been three heavy snowfalls and it was only the second week in December. Not that Corfe had gotten much of the snow; it was too close to the sea. A few miles inland, the roads were drifted over, but at Corfe and Wareham, they’d been buffeted by wind-lashed sleet and freezing rain.
“Wolf! Lass!” That was all the encouragement his dogs needed. Piling onto the bed, they crowded Henry toward the edge, but he didn’t mind. The last time he’d opened the shutter, he’d looked out upon a sky clogged with leaden clouds, dusk at midday. His uncle was at Wareham, just four miles to the north, as he’d been most days since they’d forced a landing there. They’d taken the town, but the castle still held out, and that was why Henry was stranded at Corfe, waiting for Wareham to surrender.
He’d tried a few times to write to his father, but he’d not gotten very far, a smudged page or two blotched with ink smears and crossed-out words. It was not that he lacked for material to write about. The Channel crossing had been a rough one, and he was proud of the fact that he hadn’t gotten seasick like many of the men. Their original plan had been to land at Southampton, but some of the sailors balked, for that was their home port. So their fleet had come ashore at Wareham, and Henry had watched from a ship in the river harbor as the town was captured. In the weeks that followed, his uncle let him visit the siege whenever the weather permitted, as long as he kept well out of arrow range. No, he could have filled a dozen letters with what he’d seen and heard in the past month. But he was too troubled to write.
His uncle had explained to him that the besieged garrison had appealed to Stephen for aid, agreeing to surrender if he did not come to their rescue. The rules of war gave them that right. Henry understood that, or tried to. He understood, too, his uncle’s strategy: he was using the castle at Wareham as bait, hoping to draw Stephen away from Oxford. Such tactics had always worked in the past, for Stephen had rarely found the patience for a long siege; that was not his nature. So far, though, he had not taken the lure, and with each passing day, it seemed more and more likely that he was willing to sacrifice Wareham if it meant he gained a far greater prize—Maude.
When Henry had confronted his uncle with these fears, Robert had acknowledged their validity. But he’d explained, then, the grim truth—that the three hundred men with him were not enough to raise the siege at Oxford. He’d need a far greater force to expel Stephen’s army, sheltered behind the city’s walls and newly dug earthworks. Unless they could provoke Stephen into coming out to meet them, as he had at Lincoln, Oxford Castle seemed doomed, for certes.
After that stark revelation, Henry’s fears took a far darker turn. He’d spent a lot of his time at Corfe thinking of his mother, holding on to memories as elusive as the fireflies he chased every summer. It had been more than three years since he’d seen his mother. What if he did not recognize her? Even more unsettling was the thought that she might not recognize him; he’d been only six then and he was nigh on ten now. He fretted, too, about what she was enduring at Oxford. People were always interrupting conversations as he came by, but he already knew what they did not want hi
m to hear—that her food supplies must be running very low by now, for the siege was into its third month.
But after his uncle admitted that they could not just ride to the rescue the way he’d expected them to do, he could not bring himself to write to his father, who’d shrugged off his mother’s peril with the scornful words, “Whatever trouble she is in, she brought upon herself.” And each day when he awoke, his first conscious thought was always the same. Would it be today that the castle fell? Today that his mother was taken prisoner? His worry about recognition seemed a small care, indeed, when measured against the dread that he’d never see his mother again.
His dogs were rooting in the coverlets, for he’d eaten bread and jam in bed for breakfast and spilled enough crumbs to warrant their attention. Wolf gulped down the last morsel, then began to bark. The female dyrehund joined in, and a moment later Robert entered the chamber.
“Wareham Castle surrendered to me this morning,” he said, not sounding at all like a man who’d just gained a significant victory.
Henry scrambled down from the bed. “What will you do now?”
“What I’d hoped to avoid—lay siege to Oxford. We’ve got to muster as many men as we can, so I’ve summoned all our allies to meet me at Cirencester.”
“Will you take me with you to Cirencester?” Henry asked, and was very relieved when his uncle nodded. “Uncle Robert…you do not think we’ll be able to rescue Mama, do you?”
Robert debated the merits of a kind lie versus a cruel truth, but he waited too long to make up his mind, and his hesitation confirmed the worst of Henry’s fears. He turned away, knelt by the closest of his dogs, and buried his face in the dyrehund’s thick, silvery ruff. “If Stephen captures the castle, will he hurt my mother?”
“No,” Robert said swiftly, “he would not harm her. Not Stephen.”
Henry glanced up, eyes wide and very dark in the candle-lit shadows. “But he would not let her go,” he said, and Robert slowly shook his head.
“No, lad,” he admitted. “He would not let her go.”
27
Oxford Castle, England
December 1142
IT was snowing again. From his vantage point up on the castle battlements, Ranulf gazed out upon a frigid, frozen landscape of barren, foreboding beauty. Stephen had set up his quarters at the king’s house north of the city walls. Much of his army was billeted within the town, but he’d established an outer defensive perimeter, and at night it looked as if the city were ringed with flames. Now it was midday and the blowing snow hid the smoldering campfires. So much snow had fallen in December that it even covered up the uglier scars of the siege: the newly dug graves in the outer bailey, the churned-up, pitted earth where mangonel missiles had landed, the ruins of the stables, which had been ignited by a flaming arrow more than a month ago. The snow muffled sound, blurred vision, and transformed the familiar and known into another world altogether, one pristine and alien and eerily, deceptively tranquil.
Ranulf did not remain up on the battlements for long; the wind soon drove him to seek shelter inside. Not that it was so much warmer indoors. As their food supplies had dwindled, so, too, had their fuel. Their firewood had been consumed weeks ago. These days they kept fires burning only in the great hall and the kitchen, but even so, they’d slowly stripped the castle of most of its furniture. Stamping snow from his boots, Ranulf hastened toward the open hearth. Other men were taking their turns there, too, thawing out. Only the ailing had the privilege of staying put, and there were always a few blanket-clad figures crouching close to the flames, for their increasingly Spartan diet and the constant cold were taking an inevitable toll.
The faces around him were grim and pale and gaunt, for hunger had become the enemy lurking within, Stephen’s remorseless accomplice. They had not been as careful with food as they ought in the beginning, confident that aid would be forthcoming. By Martinmas, though, they were on strict rationing, and Maude had contributed greatly to the men’s morale by insisting that portions be shared equally; the highborn usually claimed more than their just due.
As the provisions in their larder were depleted, they’d killed the castle livestock, one by one, and then their horses. Ranulf had hated that. But they had no more grain to feed the animals, and less and less to feed themselves, so it mattered little whether he liked it or not. If the siege dragged on for another month, he might have to make a wrenching decision about his dyrehunds. So far he’d been sharing his own meagre allotment with them, and even if men thought it was foolishly sentimental of him, they kept their opinions to themselves, for he was a king’s son and the empress’s brother. But that could all change if the spectre of starvation became a real danger.
Moving reluctantly away from the hearth, Ranulf began to look for Hugh de Plucknet. It took a while, for it was hard to distinguish one bundled form from another. Eventually he found Hugh slouching morosely in a corner, playing a game of merels with Alexander de Bohun, the Angevin captain of Maude’s household knights. Alexander aligned his pieces in a row just as Ranulf joined them, and both he and Ranulf braced themselves for Hugh’s complaints; the hotheaded Breton was a notoriously poor loser. Now, though, he did not react at all, demonstrating anew how the siege was sapping their spirits.
They made room for Ranulf in the window seat, but no one bothered to talk; it expended too much energy and what was there to say? Beyond the castle walls, the world went on as usual, but they no longer seemed to have a part in it. Ranulf in particular found the isolation hard to endure; it was, he thought, like a foretaste of death, the smothering silence of the grave.
They’d had but one outside contact since the siege began. A daring archer had gotten himself admitted into the city, waited till dark, and then shot an arrow over the castle wall, with a letter from Brien Fitz Count wrapped around the shaft. Brien assured them that he’d sent for Robert. He’d had no luck luring Stephen out to do battle, but he’d been doing all he could to harass and harry Stephen’s occupying army, engaging in hit-and-run raids, disrupting Stephen’s supply barges as they paddled upriver past Wallingford. But Stephen ignored the challenges, and rerouted his supply trains overland.
And since then, nothing. October had yielded to November and then December. The snows came and the noose tightened. What, indeed, was there to talk about?
Alexander was too restless to sit for long and soon wandered off. Ranulf and Hugh were trying to muster up enough enthusiasm for another game of merels when Rob d’Oilly headed their way. Never the most articulate of men, he seemed even more tongue-tied then usual. “Did Maude tell you about our talk?” When Ranulf shook his head, Rob frowned and worried his thumbnail between his teeth. “I spoke to her last night. I told her that…that we ought to consider surrendering.”
Ranulf’s “No!” merged and echoed with Hugh’s equally impassioned protest, and Rob flushed. “I do not want it that way,” he insisted, “God knows I do not. But there comes a time when resistance for its own sake makes no sense. We’re past the point of hope, and are merely prolonging our own suffering. I understand if you do not want to hear that, but it must be said. And Maude knew that, too, for she did not argue.”
“She agreed with you? I do not believe that!”
“Well, she did not say it in so many words, Ranulf, but she listened to what I had to say and made no protest. If you want my opinion, I think she is losing heart for this struggle. Women are not meant for hardships and privation, after all. They despair more easily than men—”
“You’re raving! Maude is braver than any man I know!” Ranulf snapped, and Hugh chimed in, no less indignantly, arguing that Maude would starve ere she’d surrender.
“Then why is she acting so oddly? Why did she say nothing when I talked of surrender? And…and there is more, Ranulf. When I came to her chamber this morn, she was behaving in a most peculiar manner. She and Minna…they were sewing!”
Ranulf and Hugh exchanged astonished glances, and then both burst out laughing. “Good
God—sewing? That is indeed proof of madness!”
Rob bridled, his face getting even hotter. “Do not mock me till you’ve heard it all. The room was in utter disarray, the coverlets thrown on the floor, the bed stripped, coffers open as if they’d been searching for something. And there they were, sewing away in the midst of all this chaos, so intently you’d think they were getting paid by the stitch. And mind you, they were not mending old clothes, or even making new ones. They were cutting up and hemming bed sheets!”
“Sheets?” Ranulf said blankly. “Are you sure, Rob? What could they possibly make out of bed sheets?”
“That is what I’ve been trying to tell you.” Rob frowned again, lowered his voice, and said uneasily, “I’ve thought upon it and I can come up with only one answer—a burial shroud.”
RANULF did not share Rob’s anxiety about Maude’s emotional state; he knew their sister better than Rob. He was curious, though, about those mysterious bed sheets. But when he sought Maude out, she shrugged off his curiosity with a cryptic smile, saying she’d explain that evening, after Vespers.
The twilight service was held in the chapel adjoining St George’s Tower. It was well attended; most men found that their piety increased in direct proportion to the urgency of their need. Once it was over, Ranulf accompanied Maude and Minna across the snow-drifted bailey, back to Maude’s chamber in the upper story of the keep. There they found Alexander de Bohun, Hugh de Plucknet, William Marshal, and Adam of Ely, Maude’s clerk, awaiting her return. They were soon joined by William Defuble, another of Maude’s knights.
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