‘You are right,’ he agreed soberly. ‘Neither of us can choose what we would do. But if you wish it, I will arrange somehow that we meet again.’
‘I do wish it.’ She clasped her hands together over the pommel of the saddle, ceasing in that moment to be a child and taking a step into womanhood.
And at the same moment he knew that Maud, for all her teasing, had been right. This girl had reached and touched him in a strange way, as if it was predestined that he, the English Atheling yet a Norman, should marry a descendant of Edmund Ironside, one of the line of Cerdic that every Englishman revered, yet one who was also a Scottish princess. It was a marriage that would fix his destiny without doubt.
Yet doubts there were. She was over-young to wed but her father must be thinking of espousals and he would also have to gain Red William’s consent to the proposition. If he waited it might be too late and he was not at all sure how he stood with Rufus.
Abruptly he asked, ‘Has your father spoken to you of any betrothal?’
She cast him a quick look and then lowered her gaze, her colour deepening. ‘No, my lord, not yet, but I am certain he would rather see me wed than become a bride of Holy Church.’
‘Well, thank God for that,’ he said. ‘You are very young, child, but don’t let anyone force you to a life you do not want.’ It was a queer thing to say. His own sisters had had no choice in the disposal of their lives, but he did not want to see this girl beside him unhappy, muffled in nun’s clothing when she needed a man to love her.
She had lifted her head a little, her chin thrust out. ‘If anyone tries, I will think of you.’
A silence fell, disturbed only by the rhythm of the horse’s hooves and the jingle of the harness. He pondered on her last words and the odd sense of understanding that had arisen between them. But when he spoke again it was to distract her with talk of horses and dogs.
They reached Winchester in the evening and he saw no more of her until two days later when she and her sister were to go on to the abbey at Romsey. He and Robert rode the short distance with them, meaning to hunt in the forest on their return, and as the girls were on horseback he was able to ride beside her. They talked of unimportant things until on the top of a rise they looked down to see the abbey church and the conventual buildings sprawled below them.
He glanced at her and seeing the expression on her face he said quickly, ‘It is not a prison, lady. You are only there to learn.’
She shivered a little in the cold morning air and drew her mantle close. His use of the adult form of address had not escaped her. ‘I will feel like a captive. And – I do not like my aunt.’
‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘but you are not entering as a novice. You will only be there until you reach womanhood.’
Her mare shook its head, breath vaporising, and she quietened the animal with a gentle but firm hand. ‘I felt a child when I left Scotland, but not now.’
‘I know. ’ He reached out to touch her hand lightly where it lay holding the reins. The other riders were moving down the hill now and for a brief moment he and she were alone. He saw tears well into her eyes.
‘You will not forget me?’
‘Forget you?’ He smiled and gave her hand a quick warm squeeze. ‘No, Eadgyth, I will not forget you. I have had to learn patience and so must you. Wait a little while and things may be very different for us.’
‘For us?’
‘Aye, for us. But you are cold. Come, we must catch up with the others.’ He saw her heightened colour giving her a rosy, glowing look that he thought enchanting. He said no more, but in the silence that followed he found himself wishing his mother were still alive for she, with her quick intuition, would have taken this girl to her heart and forwarded his cause – of that he was sure. But Queen Matilda lay in her tomb in her own abbey of Caen and he must fend for himself.
At the abbey the Prioress was waiting for her nieces. She was a tall, thin woman with a stem face and lips folded in a forbidding line. She offered wine to the royal brothers, looked her new charges up and down and told Eadgyth to tuck her hair beneath her hood. Both girls looked at once young and defenceless. After the freedom of the long weeks of journeying south the narrow walls of this guest parlour did indeed seem like the cage Eadgyth had dreaded and Henry had a swift desire to seize her by the hand and take her out of this place and back into the free air they had left. He looked across at her where she stood beside the Prioress and saw her eyes fixed on him, her fingers gripped together. Even if they would have spoken there was no need of words.
The lady Christina was a woman of sharp intelligence and she both saw and interpreted that look. ‘My lord Duke,’ she turned to Robert, ‘my nieces must be weary after their long journey from Scotland. You will forgive me if I see about settling them into their quarters. Pray take some more wine if you wish before leaving.’
Nothing could have been more pointed. Robert set down his cup and rose. ‘We had best be on our way. Your brother, madam, bid me say he will visit you tomorrow.’ He smiled at the girls and bade them goodbye, kissing them both soundly in his usual manner. Henry took Eadgyth’s chilled fingers in his and they clung to his own warm hand. He too bent to kiss her formally and found her mouth trembling.
He left her there, standing by her little sister, forlorn and lonely, and when the great gate of the abbey closed behind him determined to speak to Rufus immediately, to ask not only for Eadgyth but for the return of his mother’s lands to give him at least some place to be his own. But riding silently beside Robert, chewing the end of his whip, he viewed his prospects clearly and coolly and found little to encourage him.
‘What ails you, brother?’ Robert’s voice broke in on his thoughts. ‘You have not spoken since we left Romsey. Are you cast down by the loss of our two little birds?’
His words hit too near the mark and Henry turned the conversation aside with a joking remark about the manner of the Prioress Christina and her lack of similarity to her brother Edgar.
In the hall at supper he missed the wise and calming presence of Lanfranc. Although the old man had been dead for eighteen months Rufus had not yet appointed a successor to the see of Canterbury and was cheerfully collecting the revenues of the archbishopric himself. Bishop Walkelin was at the high table but Henry did not find him easy to talk to and Wulfstan, the aged Bishop of Worcester, was now near ninety years old and seldom left his own city. There was no one whose advice or support he could seek and looking round he found Rufus’ court very little to his taste. There were too many foppish young men with hair nearly down to their shoulders, a fashion he thought unmanly, and the newest fad seemed to be pointed shoes, the toes extended and turning upwards, an idea begun, he had heard, by the Count of Anjou.
‘Though why anyone should follow the eccentricities of a fellow with deformed feet, I do not know,’ he remarked to Ralph de Toeni.
Ralph laughed, scooping meat from his dish with his fingers and licking them noisily. ‘I don’t like them myself but I think I shall buy a pair for my marriage day. You will stay to see me to my bridal bed at the Christmas feast?’
‘I expect so,’ Henry said absently. He glanced across at the lady Alice, Ralph’s bride. She had obviously fallen in love with her future husband for she was looking at him now, her cheeks warm, her thin sallow face almost pretty for the love that lay there.
Would Eadgyth one day look at him like that? It mattered first and foremost that he should make a good marriage, but if love came with it, how much better. He looked along the table at Rufus, noisy, arrogant, unpredictable, greedy. How would Red William take his request? He felt a chill settle on him and turned to see if some careless serving man had left a door open to the winter night.
Herluin, coming later along the gallery above the new hall at Winchester where the King’s apartments lay, heard the sound of angry quarrelling and raised voices even through the closed doors of the solar. Seeing his brother seated astride a bench he paused beside him. “What in God’s name is
going on in there?’
Simon shrugged. ‘I suppose they are at each other’s throats again.’
‘Who?’
‘Our three royal lions. Did you think they would agree for long? I did not.’
Herluin sat down on the bench beside him. ‘What is it this time? There is nothing more they can take from my lord.’
‘Perhaps he asks for something they do not want to give. But I don’t know, I’m not in the King’s confidence.’
Herluin gave him a caustic look. ‘Are you not?’
His brother laughed, swaggering a little. ‘Not altogether. Some things he shares with me, but not all.’
‘Some things! ’ Herluin got up as if he could not bear to sit on the bench any longer. ‘Simon, I make one last appeal to you. Come back to Normandy – or if you do not want to go home, at least take service with the Duke, or Count Helias, or Robert of Flanders. Don’t stay here where . . .’
‘Yes?’ Simon queried provocatively. ‘Where what?’
Herluin looked down at him. Simon was a good fighting man, that he knew, he was strong and light on his feet, with good hands and well set legs, but there was now something about him that had not been there before, something in the way he lounged on the bench, long hair curling about his face, his body relaxed in an oddly sensual manner that turned Herluin sick. It did not seem possible that they had been reared together, that this was the brother he had left behind, a mere child, when he had gone to Italy nearly ten years before.
‘I must go,’ he said abruptly. ‘Your way is not my way. I only beg you not to bring grief or disgrace upon our parents.’
He walked away down the passage. In Henry’s small chamber he busied himself in tidying away the Prince’s hunting gear, a task that should have been done by Fulcher, but the boy was nowhere to be seen and anyway it gave him something to do. He was still scraping mud from a pair of hunting boots when the door opened and he saw his lord standing in the entrance, white faced, dark eyes blazing with that rage he had not seen since Conan’s death.
‘What is it?’ he asked urgently. ‘What is it?’
Henry slammed the door and set his back to it. He was shaking so that he could scarcely speak. ‘He is a devil – a devil, not fit to be a King. He will give me nothing, nothing! I think,’ he drew a deep shuddering breath, ‘I think he would have me sweeping out the stables if he could do it. And Robert too . . .’ tears of fury and frustration came into his eyes but he shook them aside, ‘Robert upholds him. I am banished again – not to set foot in England or Normandy. They deny me even my birthright. By the living God, my father cannot be resting in his grave when they do this to me.’
Herluin was standing still, an arrow in his hand. ‘I don’t understand. Why are you banished? What has happened? Yesterday . . .’
‘Yesterday is gone,’ Henry said between his teeth. ‘I asked – I asked for the Princess Eadgyth and for my mother’s lands again, and you’d have thought I’d asked for the kingdom and the dukedom as well. They said – I’ll not speak the things they said. Blasphemy, lies! But I am to be nothing, to have nothing, to go from them – I, their brother! ’
Herluin was looking at the arrow, balanced across his index finger. ‘Don’t you see my lord, it is because they fear you will one day have everything?’
Henry leaned against the door. He gave a sudden harsh laugh but there was no trace of amusement in the sound. ‘So my father said when he lay dying – an old man’s dream! But how should they fear me? They have left me no weapon to fight with, and that is the reality.’
‘Now, yes,’ Herluin said, ‘but a time will come . . .’ he paused, his eyes on the arrow and some half defined thought, some instinct stirred at the back of his mind. ‘A time will come as certain as an arrow reaching its mark.’ He did not know why he said it, nor why the arrow should seem important. He dropped it suddenly as if it burned him and looked at Henry. ‘My lord . . .’
Henry had both hands clenched hard. ‘Damn them to hell – a devil and a fool. My God! That two such men should rule.’
He flung himself down on the stool and with a wild gesture swept everything off the table, cups and horns and oddments all clattering to the floor. He set his head in his hands, his fingers in his hair. ‘Damn them, damn them, damn them!’
In the morning he rode out of Winchester, outwardly calm, his last few loyal men at his back. And this time not one of them asked him where they should go.
PART II
THE ROCK OF DOMFRONT
DECEMBER 1093-NOVEMBER 1100
CHAPTER 1
In the first cold grey days of Lent, 1093, the King of England fell sick, so sick that he thought himself to be dying. Fiery pains seized his chest and back, fever deepened the habitual ruddiness of his face, and he breathed with difficulty. Taken ill at his hunting lodge at Alverstone, his attendants bore him back to Gloucester where he might be more comfortable, and he lay now in his great bed in the castle there, surrounded by his friends and great men, by bishops and abbots.
They too thought him to be dying. ‘It is the wasting sickness,’ Robert Bloet said and Bishop John of Bath, a man learned in the art of medicine, agreed.
‘His lungs are affected with ill humours. I doubt if any of my remedies can heal him.’
Bishop Wulfstan, despite his ninety years, came slowly from Worcester, and at the King’s bedside, with John of Bath, Bishops Gundulf of Rochester and Geoffrey of Coutances, besought the King to make his peace with God. One matter weighed heavily upon them all. Since the death of Lanfranc nearly four years ago the see of Canterbury had been vacant, the Church in England without a leader. The King was receiving the moneys and dues of the archbishopric, robbing Holy Church, and more than one of them hinted that his mortal sickness was probably a direct divine punishment for that sin.
Rufus lay on his bed and groaned. ‘Are the priests praying for me? Do I not give gifts to abbeys and churches so that they should pray for my welfare? Tell them their prayers have done me no good . . .’ He felt ill and weak, and angry that he should be so – he who was never still for long, who could outride most of his court, who could be on the move from dawn until sunset and not tire. He remembered his father’s last illness, the painful dying, the necessity for repentance, for making at least good gestures on one’s deathbed. He had mocked at God and His priests, it was true, and now suddenly he was confronted with the prospect of meeting Him face to face. It terrified him. All he knew of death and hell and the last judgement came before him until he was trembling with terror and eager for once to listen to his ministers.
Pressing his face into the pillow he said, ‘Send for Anselm of Bec.’
The men about him exchanged significant glances.
Last summer Anselm had come to England at the request of Hugh the Wolf who had endowed a foundation at Chester and wished not only for the Abbot’s advice but for monks from Bec. Anselm crossed the channel and spent a night at Canterbury where the monks received him with joy, making no secret of their desire to see him their abbot as well as archbishop. He shook his head, smiled and blessed them, and journeyed on to Chester where the work of the monastery was set in hand, and then paid a visit to the King.
William had received him kindly and they had talked long together. Anselm, however, took it upon himself to reprove the King for his behaviour and for the standard of morals at his court. Rufus took this remarkably well – perhaps because his father had so highly honoured the Abbot of Bec – and turned the conversation with a laugh.
‘They tell stories about me,’ he had said. ‘I beg you, my lord, only to believe half of them.’ To which Anselm replied gravely that half would be enough to make him anxious for the state of the King’s soul.
Rufus remembered this anxiety now, lying sweating and shivering alternately on his bed. He drank the foul concoctions they gave him, submitted to being bled, but he felt no better and now thought only of Anselm’s coming.
The Abbot was still in England for the simple reason
that William had refused him permission to return to Normandy. Having the uneasy feeling he might be driven by public pressure to appoint a new archbishop, Rufus had to admit that no other man was so suitable, and he began to believe that Anselm’s presence at the time of his sickness could be no other than the jealous Hand of God pointing to what must be done.
‘May the devil protect me from holy men,’ he had once said to Flambard, but that defence had crumbled in the face of death, and he lay waiting for Anselm to come, restless, his sleep disturbed by unhappy dreams, his body aching with undefined pain.
Old Wulfstan knelt by the bed, his bearded face buried in his hands in prayer; John of Bath knelt beside him while Abbot Serlo of Gloucester sat by the other side of the bed, his lips moving constantly in silent prayer. Some of the barons stood near the door – Grandmesnil, FitzHamon, Earl Hugh, Roger of Montgomery, Robert de Marmion and others, while Flambard, arms stiffly folded, stood firmly at the end of the bed looking down at his master, one thought only in his head – that if this man died he could expect little preferment from anyone else.
Henry of the High Rock Page 20
