His wife lay upon her pillow, eyes closed. At the foot of the bed lay the cradle beside which the lying-in woman stood trembling. John Marshal crossed the small room in a stride and stood looking down at his son. The baby stared upwards at him, an expression of perfect equanimity upon his squashed features which somehow, in his father’s imagination, possessed some innate wisdom whilst reflecting his own ugliness. The impression was powerful and shocked the father; he looked then at his silent wife and at the lying-in woman, not fully comprehending what – if anything - was wrong.
‘What is it?’ he asked, thinking it some foolish woman’s concern.
‘Why, my Lord… I, er…I…’ The lying-in woman was plainly terrified.
‘For the love of God…’ Marshal began, exasperation in his voice. He half turned as Angharad ap Gwyn slipped into the room behind him and then swung round as the Lady Sybil called to him from the bed.
‘He bears the mark of the Devil, husband,’ she said wearily.
‘What?’ The Marshal frowned, then looked again at the boy who wrinkled his face and seemed about to cry. ‘For the love of Christ will someone enlighten me?’
‘He has a birth-mark, my lord,’ explained Angharad, moving forward and displacing the lying-in woman who was peremptorily waved out of the chamber by the Marshal.
‘Where? What manner of birth-mark…?’
‘It is blood-red and has the appearance of Satan,’ said the Lady Sybil.
‘Show me.’
The handmaid reached down and drew the boy from the cradle, uncovering his shoulder and presenting his father with the contentious marking.
‘Do you see the tail…Satan’s tail?’ asked the Lady Sybil from her bed, her eyes still closed.
‘We see a lion, my Lord,’ offered the handmaid placatingly, greatly daring but trespassing upon John Marshal’s liking for her.
For a long moment John Marshal stared at the evidence of Satanic intervention in the birth of his son. He knew, as did Angharad better than he, that the child had kicked in the womb with a fury that was unusual. So unusual had it been that it had convinced them all that a boy was on the way. He shot his eyes sideways at the maid.
‘What do you make of it?’ he asked quietly, aware that there were some who considered Angharad had inherited her mother’s second-sight. ‘He is unnaturally silent and, it seems to me, has a knowing look about him…’
‘I am still in your presence, my Lord,’ the Lady Sybil said with heavy sarcasm, opening her eyes. ‘The wench knows nothing of such things.’
‘I think him an old soul, my Lady,’ Angharad ventured, boldly addressing her mistress, though intending the information for her master.
‘You presume too much…’
‘No, no, the girl should be heard for she has some wisdom…’
‘Methinks ’tis a lion, my Lord,’ Angharad said hurriedly before drawing the cloth back over the child’s exposed shoulder and lowering him back into the cradle.
‘You have milk?’
‘Aye, my lord…’
‘John!’ The Lady Sybil had extended her right arm, her hand shaking, motioning her husband to come to her, her eyes blazing with anger. ‘I am not just your brood-mare, I am your wife!’
‘Of course you are, my love.’ Marshal moved beside his spouse and took her hand and she frowned up at him. ‘And what name shall we give him, this imp of Satan,’ he asked almost facetiously.
‘ ’Tis no laughing matter, my lord.’
‘I am not laughing. Do you not wish him to be baptised and saved in the love of Christ? Or shall I have him cast upon the midden without further ado, eh?’
‘Call him what you will,’ she responded peremptorily, turning towards Angharad who was gathering up the swabs used at the child’s birth and casting them into an iron bowl. ‘And you, you may have him taken at once to the wet-nurse…’
‘You will not suckle him?’ the Marshal asked. ‘You suckled our first-born…’
‘And you mis-liked my breasts thereafter.’
John Marshal sighed, well-knowing the uncongenial mood of a woman after child-birth. Turning to the handmaid he said, ‘do as my lady asks and tell the lying-in woman to await my pleasure below.’
Angharad bobbed her obedience and left the chamber. The Marshal turned back to his wife who had again closed her eyes, raising her cold hand to his lips. ‘He may come in useful, Sybil,’ he murmured, ‘so I shall call him William after your late brother. They said he was an imp and Angharad thinks the new-born an old soul. Perhaps,’ the Marshal added with a chuckle, ‘he has come back to us, sent from the fiery pit complete with a brand…’
He stopped abruptly as his wife squeezed his hand hard. ‘Do not jest over such matters,’ she hissed. ‘This is not a woman’s silly fancy! The child is marked…’ Her voice rose, ignoring the index finger he raised to his lips. ‘Marked, d’you hear? Have him removed from my presence. Have him baptised by all means but not here. Thereafter, keep him in ignorance, use him as you will. You already have an heir. He may, as you say, come in useful.’
Her husband nodded. ‘Very well; Angharad shall have the nurturing of him.’
And so, late in the afternoon of the day of his birth, the second son born to John the Marshal and the Lady Sybil, sister to Patrick, Earl of Salisbury, was baptised William by a priest who knew not then that he held in his arms a child marked by the Great Lucifer.
*
It was long after dark when the Marshal reeled to the palliasse laid at the foot of the French bed. The Lady Sybil breathed the breath of deep sleep and he lay for a while staring up into the darkness, aware that he had partaken of too much wine yet unready for slumber himself as his mind whirled. What was he to make of the day’s events? He had no doubt that the new-born boy possessed some quality he did not recall observing in his other children, and he had sired several, including one by his first wife, Adelina, whom he had set aside to cement a difficult alliance with Patrick of Salisbury amid the turbulence of a civil war. He belched quietly into the night, his hand clamped over his mouth to stifle the sound and feeling the appalling mess the molten lead falling from the roof of Wherwell Abbey had made of his visage some six years earlier. He had held off the pursuers of the Empress Mathilda after the disastrous siege of Winchester, packing her off riding astride like a man so that she did not compromise her escape and could ride like the wind with her small escort.
John Marshal had covered her departure by giving her pursuers grounds for thinking her mewed-up in the sanctuary of the nunnery at Wherwell where he and another knight pretended Mathilda’s defence. Unable to enter the church under the rules of sanctuary, King Stephen’s men set the place ablaze to smoke their quarry out and when they entered the blackened ruin they found only the charred body of John Marshal. In pursuit of Mathilda, they left him alone for a corpse; but he came round, hideously disfigured, half his face melted, his left eye a liqueous mess – but alive. He managed to stumble twenty-five miles to Marlborough, his fate forgotten in the humiliating accounts that spread throughout the countryside of the discomfited and proud Mathilda being compelled to ride astride like a man.
The fighting that had engulfed Wiltshire and its neighbouring counties died down after Winchester; John Marshal reached his accommodation with Patrick of Salisbury as he and the Earl sank their differences in a common desire to cling onto their lands and influence amid the catastrophic power-struggle between Stephen and ‘The Empress’. He was a grandson of William the Conqueror who had seized the throne in defiance of his oath to support the claim of Mathilda who, born the daughter of Henry I, was known as ‘the Empress’ from her marriage to Henri, the Holy Roman Emperor. He, however, had died and while Mathilda and her second husband, Count Geoffrey of Anjou, disputed Stephen’s claim to the Dukedom of Normandy by force of arms, Stephen busied himself consolidating his hold on England. It was a troublesome time for the Anglo-Norman nobles whose complex allegiances swayed like cornstalks in the wind. Matters had seemed settled
when, in February 1141, Stephen had been captured at Lincoln, but Stephen’s Queen rallied his forces and captured Mathilda’s brother. An exchange of high-born prisoners liberated Stephen, but in the mean-time Geoffrey of Anjou had completed his conquest Normandy, further blighting the questionable loyalty of those Anglo-Norman lords with lands in both Normandy and England and war flared-up again.
Such confusions had allowed the ambitious John, the King’s Marshal of Horse, to gain lands and power incrementally so that his marriage to Sybil of Salisbury found him, as he was fond of saying himself, ‘the cockerel atop the shit-heap,’ at least as far as Wiltshire and its surroundings were concerned.
John the Marshal was nothing if not a man on the make; he had taken his survival after the burning of Wherwell, in the wake of saving Mathilda, as a mark of God’s approval, rather than the all but incredible luck of a man of formidable physique. God’s approval was important to him, for he had played a dangerous game in transferring his allegiance from Stephen to Mathilda. Thus his marriage to Salisbury’s sister was a political alliance between himself and his more powerful local opponent, placing the two loudest cockerels triumphantly a-top the midden. And so he lay awake that night of his son William’s birth in the year of our Lord 1147, aware that God had sent him a second boy by Sybil, and one whom, it was quite likely, he could indeed make good use of.
The child seemed lusty enough and in that first exchange of glances the father had gulled himself, perceiving something of the future. Prescience or not, the Marshal believed something of the sort, if only to drive away the contagious idea that possessed the boy’s mother. John the Marshal had long lain under threat of excommunication for abjuring his oath to Stephen and preferred to think of his son’s naevus as he did of his own disfiguring in the fire at Wherwell, as the touch of God’s mystery rather than Satan’s mischief. The child had not been conceived in sin because his divorce from Adelina had been sanctioned by Holy law on the grounds of consanguinity. The priests he paid assured him so; as for the wrong wrought upon Adelina, he had expiated that long since and the lady bore him no ill-will.
The woman Angharad was right, he convinced himself, and Sybil – God forgive her in the aftermath of long labour – was mistaken. John the Marshal, inebriated and content, finally slept upon such a comfortable conclusion.
*
As if the happy thought flew from his sleeping brow like a dark shadow, it settled upon the head of his wife and she woke in the false dawn, alive to the tragedy that had overwhelmed her. She had few feelings for her husband beyond that of dynastic duty, aware that their union was one of policy and that her consent to the match brought peace to the neighbourhood of Marlborough town, to Cherhill and Wexcombe, the lordship of which brought under her husband’s hand the Courts of the Hundreds of Bedwyn and Kinwardstone. The Marshal’s writ now ran along the Vale of the Kennet to the head-waters of the Avon. There were other lands elsewhere, plus the fiefs and fees from three bishoprics: Exeter, Winchester and Worcester, to which those of the Abbot of Abingdon had to be added. But the price of such favour was no imp of Satan; the kicking boy she had born in her womb had mightier powers than those of a mere wight. She did not need to look into his knowing eyes, only to see their reflection in that single orb that shone in the ghastly face of his father. Something of greater portent, she thought, lurked there.
It had not been easy for Sybil of Salisbury to lie with such a man as John the Marshal. And yet…and yet… She could not deny that in John the Marshal a woman of her sensibilities did not perceive something fantastic, something powerful that went beyond mere ambition. And had not her handmaid Angharad told her something of the vision she had had when the Lady Sybil had discovered that she was again pregnant? Angharad’s visions were few and far between, but they were wrought out of a powerful magic. And while the Lady Sybil protested her repugnance for the Old Ways, there was no denying the uncanny accuracy of Angharad’s occasional predictions. She had foretold an outbreak of the plague in Marlborough, and that the Lady Sybil’s first-born would satisfy her Lord by being a boy. As for her second, the Welsh-woman had said that she had seen a dark figure, set upon a horse, who raised three crowns upon his sword-point as his charger trampled a score of corpses into the bloody mire beneath its hooves.
Angharad had not wanted to reveal all this, but the Lady Sybil insisted that if she had foreseen anything, she must reveal it. The gravid woman had chiefly in mind the child’s gender and her own survival, and what the handmaid told her had proved so much more detailed than the revelations about her first-born. Although Angharad argued that the meaning of such things was rarely clear or simple, the fore-telling seemed terrifying to the over-wrought mother. In the last weeks of her pregnancy the Lady Sybil’s mind had been plagued by anxious dreams, feelings of foreboding and unrest. Thus, in the exhaustion of post-natal reaction, she had seen in the birth-mark a confirmation of her worst apprehensions: her new-born boy bore the brand of the Devil. Now, as the daylight grew, she lay gently weeping while her snoring and hideously disfigured husband slept off his wine.
Below them the priest who had baptised the baby rose to the first office of the day. After his devotions, Nicholas de Sarum, as he styled himself, heard for the first time the tittle-tattle as the servants woke and spoke of the child with the birth-mark, the infant whose wrinkled brow he had the previous evening anointed with oil, baptised in the name of the Holy Trinity. Had he not noticed anything odd? he was asked by the girl who brought warm milk from the byre. Surely, she asked again, seeking guidance in her perplexity, one who bore Satan’s image could not be christened like any normal child?
And seeing in the faint mist that rose from the pannikins of milk that chilly morning the finger of Almighty God pointing the way and simultaneously wagging at him for his lack of faith, Nicholas de Sarum asserted that, yes indeed, the infant’s brow had been hot to his touch, that the water had sizzled upon the pink skin which had – despite appearances – the feel of old leather beneath his fingers…
Old leather was what came most to mind among the denizens of the castle of Hamstead Marshal when confronted by their Lord’s dreadful visage. There was indeed something diabolical about John the Marshal.
And had there been a smell? As of something…
Like brimstone? Oh, yes, yes, most emphatically there had been a smell…
And a steaming, like that from a hot iron plunged into water…?
And during the hours that followed Nicholas de Sarum, God forgive him in his enthusiasm for the Truth, imagined no end of subtle hints that the spirit of Lucifer lay within the boy-child. Consequently, by sunset, all wondered at the priest’s devotion in being able to hold so hot a thing and douse the dreadful spirit with the quenching of Holy Water. And all were profoundly grateful to him for warding off the evil that had threatened them. For that, at least according to Nicholas de Sarum, was what the sacrament of baptism had effected.
And when a sceptical Angharad pooh-poohed the story, saying the baby was no hotter than any other, the servants crossed themselves and muttered against her and her ancient and depraved notions. Of course to her pagan touch there was nothing noticeable, but such things were made manifest to a man of the piety of Nicholas de Sarum and had the Welsh handmaid not stood high in the favour of her Ladyship, they would have combined to denounce her as a witch.
And so William, son of John the Marshal and Sybil of Salisbury, entered a world that would ever and anon wonder if he were touched by God or the Devil.
Or even, being human, by both.
CHAPTER TWO: THE ANARCHY 1147 - 1153
Though few forgot it entirely, as the boy William grew and became a familiar sight running with his elder brother about the castle and the woods that lay beyond, his quiet disposition and good looks eroded the fear that his birth had engendered. He had his mother’s brown hair and eyes and, gradually, when the naevus was exposed to view, observers were inclined to give the boy the benefit of the doubt, saying that perhaps, after
all, it did indeed look more like a lion than Satan.
Fleet of mind, Nicholas de Sarum bent this perception to his will and the reinforcement of the True Faith: of course it did; it had been transformed by miraculous and Divine intervention at the instant of that hot baptismal moment. Truly the priest was a curer of souls!
Only William’s mother persisted in her rejection of her offspring and his existence continued to trouble her. Instead, she lavished her attention upon her other children: John, her first-born and the Marshal’s heir, and – in due course - two further sons, Anselm and Henry, along with three daughters. William was allowed to run wild; he seemed impervious to his mother’s neglect and revelled in his freedom, the apple of Angharad’s eye. An active, physical boy, as soon as he could toddle he showed interest in his older brother’s wooden sword and buckler, his bow and arrows. Once able to walk properly he would be found in the stables, or with the Marshal’s falconer, tending his father’s two fine peregrines and his mother’s little merlin tiercel, the first bird he took out hawking, the Lady Sybil affecting little interest in the sport. Such outings usually took place during the intermittent visits the Lady Sybil paid to Marlborough when William was left behind. On these occasions, though no more than four, he also did the rounds of the snares and traps set by his father’s retainers, with whom he became a favourite. They encouraged him, made him things, like a small bow with which, upon one oft talked-of occasion, he shot a dog fox through the neck.
Enjoying such liberty the growing William came reluctantly to the schooling the ardent Nicholas pressed upon him. That he was compelled to by the explicit order of the Lady Sybil was the extent to which his mother took an interest in William’s growing. As a consequence the priest had made William his life’s work, watching him for any sign of peccant behaviour, of tale-telling, or bullying the castle’s other children, of the slightest indication of cruelty towards any beast, of back-sliding or any manifestation of diabolical influence. At the slightest sign of demonic possession, the child was heavily lectured on the matter of honourable conduct and the Way of Christ. Seeing the boy’s active nature and knowing his probable future success would rely upon William’s martial abilities, Nicholas was worldly enough to encourage in the lad a sense of prowess, that fusion of skill and strength in the bearing of arms, to which he sought to add a strong moral sense grounded in duty, the only virtue consistent in a priest’s mind with the wielding of a sword. In the perfervid imagination of Nicholas de Sarum, young William FitzMarshal, bereft of any other career, might make a creditable crusader.
William Marshal Guardian of England- The Complete Series Page 2
