King of the Wood

by Valerie Anand

  On the whole, Fallowdene agreed, this was true. Richard did have a lot of sense – well, if you ignored the occasional oddity, like marrying Alice and making such a to-do over the peculiar flowers at the edge of his rye field. That was a funny idea to get in his noddle, if you like. Wasting good soil on flowers was crazy enough but these flowers! Whoever heard of autumn blooming crocuses?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Homesickness 1088

  Henry arrived at Westminster in the July, before the weather broke. In London, where the after-echoes of the rising still reverberated in the form of trials and enquiries and panicky petitions from those who like himself wished to change allegiance, the air was like a muffling blanket. His chartered ship sailed up a Thames which flatly reflected a sky like dull copper.

  They passed a ferry plying between the banks. A middle-aged burgher couple dozed in their seats while a young woman, their daughter perhaps, trailed a languid hand in the water. Henry and his companions whistled appreciatively and blew kisses. The companions could go no further because they only spoke French. Henry grinned at them in superior fashion and bawled a request for the young lady’s name and address. The ferry bounced in the wash from Henry’s vessel, the girl’s parents woke up, clutched at the gunwale and glared at him and the young lady shook her head but laughed. Henry’s brown eyes and square, tanned face were clearly a passport to female favour here as in Normandy and here he could not only make hello-darling signals; he knew the language, he could ask. England felt like home.

  But then, he had been born here and none of his brothers had.

  He had been born here and he was the son of an anointed king, England should have been his. The laughter went out of his face.

  The royal residence proved disturbing. Some aspects of England had changed. In his father’s day, the place had been richly appointed, certainly. The Conqueror had felt he owed it to his position to have gold and silver candlesticks about, fine hangings, murals, sweet herbs in the rushes. But now the fragrances were stronger and more exotic, there were… cut flowers? ... in a niche which Henry remembered as formerly occupied by a religious figurine, and the usher who came to lead the Seigneur Henri to his quarters was a staggering vision with curled brown hair sweeping sweetly from a centre parting to its owner’s shoulders, and a sky blue tunic which waved about its ankles. It was, however, indubitably male. The tunic fitted glove like over shoulders which had broadened since the garment was first acquired, and there was a fuzz of developing beard on its chin. ‘Mother of God,’ said one of Henry’s companion knights in a shaken whisper. The nostalgia which had seized Henry as he sailed up the Thames took flight squawking and perched at a safe distance.

  They followed the vision warily to a set of guest chambers, where he… it?… explained the system for summoning servants, assured Henry that his request for an audience would be conveyed to my lord king as soon as my lord king was out of his council meeting and asked languishingly if there were anything further the Seigneur or any of his knights required.

  ‘No, thank you!’ said Henry shortly, his nostalgia migrating altogether. The sense of unfairness, however, had increased. He would have done better for England than this. It was going to be hard to talk to Rufus in the necessary accents of persuasion and respect.

  It was also, as it turned out, useless.

  ‘No,’ said Rufus bluntly. ‘No terms. No land. Yes, I know we’re brothers. If we weren’t, you wouldn’t be having this audience in private. You’d have got your refusal in the open hall where everyone could hear. I respect our relationship more than you do. You and Curthose between you would have had me off my throne and sh… shoved into a dungeon if you’d had your way.’

  ‘I’m his tenant. I was in a difficult position.’

  ‘You were, weren’t you? Backed the wrong fighting cock altogether! Pity.’

  ‘I didn’t have much choice. You, if you remember, wanted the earth and the moon as rent for our mother’s estates though it would have been fair enough to let me have them on easy terms, considering the size of the estate you got from Father! I had to go to Curthose. And that made me his vassal. When the rebellion started, I had to be on his side.’

  ‘And why aren’t you still on it?’

  ‘Our brother Curthose,’ said Henry candidly, ‘is a lazy, vacillating, incompetent, smooth-tongued cretin…’

  ‘What a lot of words you know,’ said Rufus admiringly. ‘…I couldn’t make him get his army off its backside and into the field. Is there nothing I can say to make you reconsider? You’ve made your peace with others. You’ve come to terms with Gilbert Clare!’ He kept his voice down with great difficulty, throttling his anger. Rufus was the king and had all the advantages. ‘For the love of God, Rufus!’ he appealed, ‘I want to serve a better suzerain.’

  ‘I’m not related to Gilbert Clare. See here, Henry, I’m not prepared to be stabbed from behind by my own family, uncles or brothers or whatnot. It’s unknightly. I’ve thrown Uncle Odo out of England and all his worst supporters with him and you’re one of them. That you’re my brother makes you one of them, understand? And if dear brother Curthose has any sense, he’ll lock you up when you get back to Normandy, to teach you not to turn your coat. But back to Normandy you’re going.’

  Henry stared angrily at the brother who had once fought beside him in the upper room at L’Aigle, but who had now grown so far away from him, into this odd looking, tough and dangerous king.

  Odd-looking, Rufus unquestionably was. Like the rest of his court, he had adopted shoulder-length hair and long gowns for informal wear. Clad thus, his chunky swaggering body looked extraordinary, and the girlish hair on either side of his ears made a startling frame for his blunt, wind-reddened features. Like his friend FitzHamon, he had a trick of lowering his head and hunching his shoulders as though he were a bull about to charge. He did it when annoyed or defensive and it was a warning not to provoke him. He was doing it now. Henry read its significance.

  ‘Thank you for your hospitality,’ he said. ‘I won’t kneel to implore you further, Rufus. I wish you well.’ He turned to leave. Over his shoulder, he added: ‘You’re not married yet, or considering it? You need an heir, you know.’

  Rufus said, quietly but ominously: ‘Get out.’

  ‘Mother,’ said Ranulf Flambard reprovingly, ‘you’re a lady now. I’m the king’s Financial Adviser these days and I’ve hired this expensive London house and a legion of servants for you. Why don’t you take to embroidery for a pastime?

  You’ve been at it again, haven’t you?’ Flambard’s mother was small and spry. Her hair had once had the same coppery tinge as her son’s, and her bright eyes still matched his. She wore fine clothes with an air but the mesh of lines on her face witnessed a life in which clothes had not always been fine. ‘Time was,’ she said, ‘when you didn’t complain. Time was it kept you and your brothers in bread and shoes. Then I did it for pay. Now I do it for curiosity. Yes, I bin scrying. I sent the maids out; no one saw me.’ She picked up the earthenware bowl at which Flambard’s accusing finger was pointing, and tossed its contents out of the nearest window. ‘Water and a spoonful of lamp oil afloat on it,’ she said, ‘but it was good enough. Maids couldn’t see me but I saw you.’

  ‘Saw me? Doing what?’ Flambard, in some alarm, dropped into a seat. His disapproval was only half real. He was used to his mother’s strange gifts and knew she worshipped no demons. This skill came to her naturally. But it tended to reveal warnings. ‘I’ve done nothing I’m ashamed of lately,’ he said. ‘I’ve visited my wife but it’s others who call that disgraceful, not me.’

  ‘Tweren’t that. But I saw something I didn’t like the look of, all the same. Hounds running. I saw the pack all strung out, flowing like water and they wasn’t chasing a stag. They was after a man. Not you, but you’re in it somewhere. You’re going to make a mistake, son. You won’t pay for it; that’ll be the man the pack was after. But you’ll sorrow.’

  ‘I think,’ said Flambard, �
�that this is one of the times I decide not to believe in your abilities, Mother. I sent a barrel of red wine round to you yesterday. Let’s have some of it.’

  ***

  Withysham Abbey was pleasingly placed, in a few acres cleared from Andred Forest near its southern edge at the foot of the downs. The downs were to Sybil one of the few homelike things to be seen, a secret source of comfort in a life otherwise so miserable that she woke every morning with a leaden lump in her stomach, and on most nights sobbed herself to sleep.

  She dreaded the rising bell which started each remorseless day. She would open her eyes on the dorter she shared with the other little girls, stare at the stone walls and remember the cheerful chamber she and the other women at Fallowdene had used, with the soft fawn hangings covered in red and blue wool patterns. Her favourite toy, the stuffed animal her mother had made for her, which faintly resembled a fox and which Sybil called Woollypaws, was always on her bed then. They hadn’t let her bring Woollypaws with her. She imagined him lying neglected and that was the point at which, every morning, the tears would scald her eyes.

  Stiff inside with misery, she would stumble from bed to face another day of the Rule which like a great steel lattice imposed a rigid pattern on the abbey’s life. In case some resourceful small person should succeed in wriggling out to freedom between its bars, its spaces were covered with a fine mesh of little rules. One could hardly breathe or move, it seemed, without infringing one.

  She had learned very quickly not to speak or even whisper during the hours of prescribed silence. She had learned not to be late into church. Now she had found that she must not run on the way to church either, even to avoid the crime of lateness. In disgrace once more, she knelt on the stone ledge of a dorter window and gazed out northwards, not towards the downs but over the forest, although she could see little of it beyond some treetops which showed above the abbey’s encircling wall.

  She wanted to pray for release from this horrible place but it was no use to pray to Christ. The abbey was his and presumably he would favour it. In a way, Sybil thought resentfully, he could be said to have invented it.

  She might try praying to Herne. He wouldn’t favour a place where people put their hands over their ears at the mention of his name (she had been in trouble for mentioning it, twice).

  She didn’t know the proper way to pray to Herne so she would have to make do with the way she had been taught, the Christian way. She straightened her back and put her palms together beneath her chin. She shut her eyes.

  ‘Please, Herne Huntsman, lord of forest and field and sky, save me from this place. Let me go home. Please don’t mind if I’m praying to you the wrong way; I don’t know what the right way is. But I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Lightning’s Sudden Strike

  February 1090

  ‘Anarchy,’ said the lean bishop angrily. He looked instinctively towards the Archbishop of Canterbury’s seat, realised once more that it was vacant and fixed his eyes on the king instead. He banged the table with a palm-edge as if trying to dent it. ‘Sheer anarchy. There’s no other word for it. My parish priests, their parishioners throughout my diocese of Evreux, come to me begging for help. A man counts himself lucky to get a harvest in without a pair of private armies fighting out a feud across his corn, or his daughter married before some self-important lordling takes her husband’s due.’ He was fifty and had the authority which stems from a combination of years and position. He had been known as Cranelegs since his twenties because of his lankiness but it had long since ceased to be a personal comment and become simply a surname, and one held in respect at that. ‘One noblewoman comments adversely on another’s style of dress, and their husbands go to war. As ever, the innocent suffer. There is no law, no control at all. It’s a disgrace. Duke Robert Curthose…’

  ‘Is grossly incompetent,’ said another bishop, Howel of Le Mans. He was plump and pink-tinged once more now that he had recovered from the hideous February Channel crossing which was the measure of the deputation’s sense of urgency. He seemed flustered however as he added: ‘This dreadful state of affairs has only arisen through his lax, pleasure-loving ways. It’s an impossible situation, quite impossible. Lax and pleasure-loving…’he trailed off.

  ‘Meulan,’ said Rufus across the table to the Count of Meulan, who had accompanied the ecclesiastical deputation from Normandy, ‘what’s your view? You’re one of the few men I trust to come and go between here and Normandy without risk to my interests.’

  A glint in Meulan’s round bright eyes indicated appreciation of the compliment. But he said soberly: ‘Normandy is in chaos, that much is true. But whether all the trouble is due to the duke’s shortcomings, is another matter. Count Henry, as he now styles himself, and the lord of Belleme are concerned too.’ Belleme had been in England during the rebellion and had supported the wrong side. He had been ejected from England together with Henry ‘…they were both arrested when they got to Rouen but have since been released which in my opinion was an error,’ said Meulan now.

  ‘Another of Curthose’s mistakes,’ muttered Bishop Howel.

  ‘…and since then they’ve been in virtual partnership as robber barons,’ said Meulan. ‘That’s bred turmoil on its own. And then of course there is the matter of Maine. Bishop Howel can tell us more about that.’

  The plump bishop made an exasperated gesture. ‘I’d like to make it plain,’ he said, ‘that I am not in favour of the Maine secession. The leader of the insurgents, this Helias of La Fleche of whom we’ve all heard now, actually imprisoned me at one point, while a cousin of his was installed as independent head of the province. Mercifully, Helias is pious as well as headstrong and freed me in due course. I went at once to confer with my fellow bishops of Normandy and we are all of the view that Maine should continue to owe fealty to Normandy. Although that doesn’t necessarily imply,’ he added meaningly, ‘to her present duke.’

  ‘But for the moment,’ said Cranelegs, ‘Maine is claiming that from this year onwards, it is a state in its own right, owing allegiance to no one.’ His tone said: and if that isn’t enough to make you intervene in Normandy and clear up the unholy mess your brother is making, I’d like to know what is.

  Four seats away from Rufus, Flambard cleared his throat. ‘Flambard?’ Rufus said.

  ‘I understood that this Helias of La Fleche was represented in this deputation,’ Flambard observed. ‘But I’m not clear and I think a lot of us aren’t clear, who precisely he is. Nor do we know who his representatives are or what their purpose is today. Can we have the answers to these questions?’

  Cranelegs gave Bishop Howel what could only be called a malicious glance. ‘You’ll have to speak up sooner or later,’ he said, in the manner of one pointing out to a defaulting schoolboy that his sins have caught up with him.

  ‘Helias,’ said Howel with feeling, as the Council fastened its attention expectantly on him, ‘belongs to a leading Maine family and if he were the devil, he could talk his way into heaven. God preserve us all from such polished tongues. He launched this insurrection. He talked his cousin into taking control. And though he insists that the new Count of Maine should be his cousin and not himself because the cousin is his senior in the family – Helias is punctilious in these things – nonetheless, it is Helias who has the power. Yes, he is represented here and as for the name of his representative, he talked me into taking on the task. I was fresh out of prison and afraid of being sent back, to tell you the truth.’

  The young Lord de Warenne of Sussex, a good-natured man, said: ‘I feel sure we can understand that.’

  ‘If I were you,’ said FitzHamon cheerfully, ‘I’d just say your piece like a lesson and be done with it. We’ll forgive you.’

  ‘Yes, come on, we’re waiting.’ Rufus was impatient. Opposite him, an arched window showed a segment of sky where the wind was chasing away the heavy clouds which had hovered since dawn. They could hunt this aftern
oon.

  ‘I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since we left Normandy,’ said Bishop Howel and then recited, in a dismal monotone: ‘Helias does not wish to owe fealty to anyone, not to Normandy nor Anjou, but in particular he does not wish to owe it to Duke Robert Curthose. If Curthose were removed and replaced by someone else, he might – only might – be induced to come to some sort of… er… arrangement.’ He broke off, sweating with embarrassment. ‘I must reiterate, must reiterate that I personally disapprove as strongly as I possibly can of this abandonment of traditional allegiances, but…’

  Rufus, grinning, spoke into FitzHamon’s ear. FitzHamon chuckled, deep in his chest. Flambard beckoned a clerk from the administrative staff, who were waiting about in case they were needed, whispered to him and sent him up the table to the king. Rufus listened to the clerk, grinned again and said: ‘Tell Flambard we’re ahead of him.’

  A monk from the Norman abbey of Bee had taken up the argument. ‘Our abbot, Anselm, wishes that for the sake of the friendship between himself and your father, my lord of England, you could offer help in restoring order to Normandy.’ Like Cranelegs, the monk was eyeing Canterbury’s empty seat with regret. The Archbishop, those wistful eyes seemed to say, would have known what ought to be done.

  ‘We can’t intervene directly,’ said Rufus. ‘My vassals aren’t bound to follow me across water. My father promised when he crossed the Channel himself to come to England, that he wouldn’t create a precedent. I hold by his word.’ A number of baronial faces expressed approval and in some cases, relief. ‘But…’ said Rufus thoughtfully, and paused. Another grin, a smug small- boy expression of delight crossed his face. ‘But…what’s the point anyhow of shipping an army over the Channel when as likely as not we can find men on the other side of it? If things in Normandy are as bad as our friends here say, we should be able to make the Normans take it for us.’ He glanced at the window again. ‘Our target,’ he said, ‘would be the place that holds the Norman Treasury. Once we have Rouen, we have the duchy. However, we need time to consider. Meanwhile, we suggest that this meeting be adjourned. I seem to remember, gentlemen, that we promised you all some hunting today.’