by Tracey Warr
‘Well?’ Gruffudd recalled my attention. ‘Do you have a suggestion for us, Nest?’
I suppressed the feelings about Gerald that were beginning to form and focused instead on my brothers’ situation. I would return to thinking about Gerald’s deceit later. ‘It would be best to go north to the court of Gruffudd ap Cynan, the King of Gwynedd,’ I told them. ‘You would be out of reach there.’
‘Why not to Owain’s court?’ Gruffudd asked. ‘Powys is nearer. You could send him a letter asking for his patronage and care of our brother.’
‘No. I don’t trust Owain. Go to Gwynedd. I will have Amelina find you supplies. Her husband, Dyfnwal, has a boat at Llansteffan and he can take you past Pembroke Castle and up the coast. The Pembroke garrison know his boat and will not suspect him. I wish we could have time together, Hywel. Time to get to know one another, but if you have escaped without leave of the Norman lords, you should go immediately.’ I looked at him with tears in my eyes and his own eyes filled.
‘Your beauty was not overstated, my sister,’ he said softly.
My acquisition of two brothers, when for so long I thought I had no kin, should have been occasion for joy and yet all I could think was that now I had two causes for anxiety, for distress.
‘We will go north where there are yet more Welsh collaborators,’ Gruffudd said bitterly. ‘Gronwy ap Owain governs lands in Gwynedd on behalf of the Norman Earl of Chester, and Genllin ap Meirion Goch in Llyn acknowledges Chester as his overlord also.’
‘Gruffudd ap Cynan is independent still. He will welcome you, surely?’
Gruffudd pulled a bitter face as if he tasted sour milk. ‘Come, Hywel, we must shift from tree to tree, from rock to rock, we who should own this land. Your King Henry, Nest, gives me only a delay on top of another delay and promises like air. So much for your king’s fairness and my patience, sister. I’ve heard not a word of offer from him. He plays me for a fool. He thinks me powerless.’
‘King Henry is occupied in Normandy, Gruffudd. Give him a chance. I believe he will treat you fairly if you give him time.’ I swallowed. In truth, I was not sure that I believed my words, or Henry’s.
When Gerald returned to Pembroke, and then came to Carew a few days later, there was no indication that Hywel and Gruffudd had ever been here, and he said nothing of Hywel, although he must have heard about the escape from the Norman garrison at Carmarthen. I was furious with Gerald that he had known of Hywel’s existence, so close by, all this time and never told me. What else had he lied to me about?
The King returned from Normandy in July and summoned Gerald to meet him at Chester, where he had lately arrived with the young earl, Richard, and his new wife, Matilda de Blois, Henry’s niece. Since I was carrying a child, I decided not to make the journey. When Gerald returned, he told me that the King’s mistress, Sybil Corbet, had been married whilst he was at the court at Chester.
‘Married? To who?’
‘To Herbert FitzHerbert, the son of the King’s chamberlain.’
‘I hope she will be happy and that he treats her kindly.’
‘As far as I could see,’ Gerald said, ‘the King was still treating her kindly, despite the marriage.’
‘I see.’
He coloured. He was hardly in a position to speak with superiority on that matter. ‘What else occurred in Chester?’
‘There was a constant procession of Norman lords from across all of Wales conferring with the King, giving reports of their regions, as I did. I suppose it is a difficult thing for him to span such a kingdom, from Normandy, to England, to Wales. He must spread himself thinly and look for the holes in his armour.’ I wondered what report Gerald had given to the King concerning my brothers but did not ask. ‘Gruffudd ap Cynan was there,’ he added.
‘Gruffudd ap Cynan?’ I felt an immediate anxiety. Were my brothers threatened everywhere they went, hounded as outcasts?
‘I don’t know the details of the King’s business with him. It seemed amicable.’
A few weeks later we heard that Gruffudd ap Cynan had betrayed my brothers’ hideout in Llyn and had attempted to arrest them on behalf of King Henry. I wanted to exclaim at such perfidy but could not do so before Gerald. I suppressed my fury. ‘Have they been taken?’
Gerald looked at me, not missing my use of the word ‘they’ or its implication that I knew that Hywel was with Gruffudd.
‘No. They sought sanctuary in the church at Aberdaron. They escaped, and their whereabouts are not known. Your brothers are in open rebellion against King Henry now, Nest.’
‘Do you think Gruffudd had any other options? Gerald, you should have told me about Hywel,’ I said coldly.
He made no response to my remark concerning Hywel. ‘Gruffudd should have stayed in Ireland. It will come to grief.’
I looked into his face. ‘Gerald … will you speak for him if it comes to that?’
‘Yes, I will try,’ he said.
My heart sank not only at the thought of my brothers’ peril, but at the suspicion that my husband was lying to me. Suddenly, I felt that Gerald’s ambition for position within Henry’s regime would always take precedence over anything else, perhaps even over his affection for me.
Gerald was at Pembroke and I at Carew, as had become our pattern. Amelina looked around the door. ‘Your brother, Gruffudd, is below, Nest … with a lady.’
I raised my eyebrows but she shook her head. She did not know who the lady was. I stepped to the stairs to greet my brother and his companion.
The woman who turned from the fire was striking. She was a head taller than my brother and carried herself with great presence. Her hair was a thick, dark red cascade the colour and texture of a fox’s tail. ‘Lady Nest, thank you for receiving us.’ Her voice was loud, assured. Her eyes were a reddish-brown and her skin was pale and freckled.
‘Nest,’ Gruffudd beamed at me. ‘This is Gwenllian, my wife, Gwenllian ferch Gruffudd ap Cynan.’
‘Congratulations,’ I said greatly surprised. ‘We did not hear of your marriage. How wonderful, Gruffudd.’ I kissed him and the young woman. She was the daughter of the King of Gwynedd and my brother must have fared well in his negotiations there to have won such an alliance.
Gwenllian laughed. ‘The news is coming fast behind us, dear sister, and my father is not best pleased.’
‘Oh?’
‘We eloped,’ Gruffudd said. ‘Or that is the story to protect Gwenllian’s father.’
Gwenllian hurriedly put her fingers to his lips. ‘You trust her so far?’
‘I do.’ Gruffudd said. ‘My sister will not betray us.’ He looked at me steadily.
I did not condescend to voice an assurance. ‘Is Hywel well?’
‘He is.’
‘How has this come about? We heard that there was … enmity between you and King Gruffudd ap Cynan.’
Gwenllian and Gruffudd laughed. ‘That is what we put about,’ she said.
‘Gwenllian’s father gave us shelter as you said he would, Nest. I have raised and trained an army of good men with his support.’
I tried to keep the fear from my face.
‘The Norman King Henry required that Gwenllian’s father kill or detain me. Her father agreed to it, but we worked a trick between us.’
I looked at the floor. I could not believe that Henry would have ordered the killing of my brother but then it had been a long time. Perhaps I no longer knew him. Perhaps he no longer felt anything for me, no need to show mercy to my kin.
‘A trick? What trick?’
‘My father organised a fleet to smuggle us down the coast to Ystrad Tywi,’ Gwenllian said, ‘and he reported that he had attempted to take my husband but Gruffudd sought sanctuary in a church and then escaped.’
I looked between them, trying not to frown. They were a glamorous couple, and the dance of their hands upon each other’s arms and cheeks showed clearly enough that there was passion between them. They were enjoying their illicit status. I ordered refreshments for them.
‘We won’t stay long, Nest,’ my brother told me. ‘Your husband might see fit to hand us over, or keep us here against our will.’
I could not disagree. Gruffudd wed to a princess from Gwynedd would only strengthen my brother’s efforts to reclaim his kingdom.
‘Where will you go now?’
‘Best you don’t know, don’t you think?’ Gruffudd said, and I coloured at his implication.
‘Unlike the Anglo-Saxon thegns at Hastings, we have faced no single military calamity against the Normans and we possess the vital element of time,’ Gruffudd declared, and I could see how many would be inspired by him. ‘We have had time to withdraw, to submit, to calculate, to regroup. Now I am probing for the soft underbelly of the Norman position here.’
There is no soft underbelly! I wanted to shout at him, and yet, could he be right? Was there a possibility that he could be reinstalled as king here?
‘We Britons are forced from our lands,’ Gwenllian said, ‘first by Romans, then by Anglo-Saxons and now by these Normans and Flemings, squeezed into ever smaller, barren lands. It is time to stop the flood of usurpers, to turn the tide back and drive them all into the seas whence they came.’ Her expression was fierce and determined.
A part of me admired her, and another part of me trembled for the future, for Gruffudd and Gwenllian, for Gerald and my children. It was clear that Gruffudd’s new wife would not counsel him to compromise, to live a quiet, peaceable life.
‘We must act with the steel the valiant King Owain ap Cadwgan showed to his cousin, Madog ap Rhiryd,’ Gwenllian announced. Seeing my frown of incomprehension, she said, ‘Perhaps that news did not reach here before now. Owain took vengeance for the murder of his father, Cadwgan.’
I waited.
‘King Owain blinded and castrated his cousin,’ she said.
I said nothing.
‘Owain was a strong king and acted well.’ She stared into Gruffudd’s eyes.
21
The Spyloft
Benedicta and the lumbering entourage of the royal household arrived at the Abbey of Saint Albans in driving sleet. The ride from London in the bad weather had taken the best part of the day, and every part of her body was frozen numb. She slid clumsily from the saddle, barely able to feel her own hands, and ran across the cobbles to the shelter of a doorway at the side of the courtyard. She stamped her feet and hugged her arms to her chest, hoping she would be given warm lodgings. The guesthouse was no doubt bulging with all the visitors for the King’s Christmas Court and the consecration of the abbey, but as a member of the King’s household there was a chance that she would be lodged somewhere reasonably comfortable.
Sybil Corbet, the king’s mistress, who had lately borne him another daughter named Rohese, ran against Benedicta’s shoulder, barging under the shelter and giggling. Soon, Lady Elizabeth de Vermandois and her daughter Isabel de Beaumont, were also crowding with them under the eaves. They had arrived earlier than expected and the monks were tardy in their reception. Eventually, Haith succeeded in hammering on the right door and the King’s party were ushered into the dry warmth of the hall with the profuse apologies of Abbot Richard.
At the feast, Lady Elizabeth and William de Warenne were seated to one side of the King and Benedicta was seated next to Warenne. Elizabeth and Warenne did nothing to conceal their scandalous relationship. Their hands were constantly about one another. Twelve-year-old Prince William Adelin sat to the other side of his father and was entertained by their brazen adulterous behaviour, especially when Warenne went so far as to cup his hand to Elizabeth’s cheek. Lady Elizabeth’s elderly husband, Robert de Meulan, was suffering from very poor health and had entered a monastery earlier in the year. If Queen Matilda had been sitting with them, she would not have permitted such behaviour at her table, but she was very unwell after the cold ride from London and kept to her chamber.
The King was in a fine mood. He had extracted an oath of loyalty to his son from the Norman barons during his Easter court in Rouen. The French King, Louis, was still contrary nevertheless and had refused to accept the nomination of William Adelin as heir to Normandy, and continued to give his preference to William Clito. Benedicta’s ears pricked up when she heard Elizabeth and Warenne complaining to the King that Elizabeth’s daughter, Isabel, had been jilted by Amaury de Montfort who had married Richildis de Hainaut instead. Benedicta allowed herself the indulgence of a moment’s memory of her brief hours with Amaury and, in the privacy of her own mind, she wished him well in his new marriage.
‘Poor Isabel,’ said Henry, knitting his brows, clearly not particularly interested in her tale of woe. Isabel herself was not present. She kept to her chamber, Elizabeth said, suffering the grief of de Montfort’s ignoble treatment.
‘It shows de Montfort’s newfound allegiance to me is thin,’ Henry said. ‘De Hainaut is a family allied with Flanders, and with William Clito.’
‘Elizabeth’s girl,’ Warenne said, trying to keep the King’s mind on the track that he and Elizabeth were upon, ‘is as beautiful as her mother, and de Montfort has lost himself a jewel there.’
‘In truth?’ the King said, his interest rising, as it always did on the topic of women’s beauty. He was very probably, Benedicta considered, the world’s leading expert on the subject. ‘How old is the child?’ the King asked.
‘On the brink of marriageable age,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Isabel is fourteen.’
‘Ah.’ Benedicta watched Henry studying Elizabeth’s admittedly spectacularly beautiful face as if he had never noticed it before. ‘We should look about for a better match for her.’
‘Indeed, Sire.’
Benedicta craned her neck to look up at the decorated ceiling of the abbey. The whole building was of an unusual design, built primarily with old Roman bricks and tiles from the nearby ruins of Verulanium. The walls, the Abbot had told her, were seven feet thick, and the crossing tower, with its four great pillars, reached for the heavens at one hundred and forty-four feet high. She moved slowly up the aisle taking in the large wall paintings under each arch: Saint Christopher, and then many small altars for other saints. It was the largest abbey in all England. Benedicta knelt at a small shrine to Saint Évroult, and took the latest strip of parchment from Orderic from inside her habit. He had taken to sending her extracts from his writing on a regular basis. Her mouth moved silently with the words written there:
The omnipotent Creator prepares those born on Earth and profitably teaches them in many ways, so that they might not fasten the anchor of their hope in the sea of this fragile world, nor fatally cling to transitory delights or gains. We do not have here a lasting city, as the apostle said, but we seek the one to come.
She was disturbed by two women from the town who stood close to her gossiping about the sexual activities of one of their neighbours. With a sigh, Benedicta rose from her knees and moved up the aisle in search of a quieter place to pray. In her nun’s habit, she blended in with the many other religious men and women moving around and nobody took any notice of her. ‘This way, Sire.’ She recognised Warenne’s voice and saw that he and King Henry were moving towards the saint’s shrine. The two men were swathed in nondescript brown cloaks, as if in disguise. Benedicta’s curiousity was piqued, and she swivelled silently on the smooth grey flagstones, away from the pew she had been heading for, and instead followed them at a discreet distance. What were they up to?
‘Here.’ Warenne stood at the side of a doorway in a wooden panel, allowing the King to enter before him. Benedicta hesitated, not knowing where the doorway might take her, nor if she was allowed to go there, but when she saw two monks pass inside, she decided to risk it, pulling her hood closer around her face so as not to be recognised. She found herself in a narrow, wooden corridor. Everyone was facing in the same direction with their faces close to the wooden wall. The King and Warenne were at the far end of the corridor, and the two monks were lined up alongside them, peering at the wall. There were only men here, but in her habit and cloak, she w
as not easily distinguishable from the monks. Curious, she stepped to the panel to see what they were all looking at.
The wooden panel was pierced here and there with small spyholes looking into the shrine of the saint. She had come across such wooden structures in other churches. They were a kind of false wall with just enough space for a person to stand behind, enabling the monks to keep an eye on visiting pilgrims and ensure that nothing was stolen. Since many such shrines dripped with gold and silver, it was an understandable precaution. Here, where they all peered, Saint Alban’s shoulder blade was housed in a golden chest, raised up on an ornately carved stone base. The reliquary was draped with a rich red cloth and surrounded on all sides by tall candles. Whilst the two monks may have been keeping an eye on the relics, that was not the concern of the King and Warenne. There were only two people present in the shrine: Elizabeth de Vermandois and her daughter Isabel. Benedicta suspected that Lady Elizabeth was well aware of her audience, but the daughter was not.
Benedicta watched as Elizabeth stood behind the girl and took the hood back from her hair, arranging it neatly across her shoulders and then stepped to the side. The girl had her back to the wooden spyloft and all the peering eyes there received a very good view of the back of her head. Isabel’s hair was a wonderful cascade of light brown curls, decorated with twisting strands of tiny pearls and sapphires that glinted in the light of the hundreds of candles illuminating the golden, red-draped shrine. Benedicta heard a low grunt from the King and one of the monks turned to look at him briefly, understanding what it signified but not daring a reprimand to someone who appeared to be a nobleman. Elizabeth then took her daughter’s hand and very deliberately turned her sideways on to the spyholes, using the pretence of a bible studded with silver and jewels on a lectern that she wished Isabel to peruse. Isabel had a long slender neck, a small nose and neat ears. Her large eyes were the same unusual turquoise colour as her mother’s. Benedicta had seen enough and slid from the spyloft quickly before anyone should notice her there. She walked swiftly down the aisle, fingering the pilgrim badge on her cloak. It depicted the execution of Saint Alban. Elizabeth and Warenne appeared to be pandering the girl to the King without a care for the proximity of the sacred bones.
