The Anarchy, page 1
The Anarchy
Conquest
Book III
Tracey Warr
Published by Meanda Books, 2023.
https://meandabooks.com
Copyright © 2023 by Tracey Warr
ISBN 978-1-7392425-8-9
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
First published in the UK by Impress Books, 2020.
Created with Vellum
In loving memory of Arthur Burton
Contents
Part I
1. Lost Upon the Tide
2. Three More Weddings
3. The Inky Clerk
4. Butchery
5. Kin
6. Missing
7. Desperate Measures
8. Gisulf’s Box
9. Reunion
10. Gold
11. Evasion
12. The Charter
Part II
13. The Crow
14. Miners
15. The Devil’s Eloquence
16. Sanctuary and Pardon
17. Crossing
18. Interrogation
19. Threshold
20. The Heir
21. The Beard
22. Flotsam and Jetsam
23. Snake in the Grass
24. Death of a Hound
25. Runaway Bride
Part III
26. Clemency
27. Suspicions
28. The Librarian
29. Circling
30. Disturbance
31. Henry FitzEmpress
32. Portents
Part IV
33. High Tide
34. Food for Wolves
35. Queen Gwenllian
36. Crug Mawr
37. The Princes of Deheubarth
38. The Norman Exodus
39. Exoneration
40. The Last Bastion
41. Landing
Epilogue: The Bees’ Book
Historical Note
Afterword
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Tracey Warr
I
1121–1123
O sea-bird, beautiful upon the tides,
White as the moon is when the night abides,
Or snow untouched, whose dustless splendour glows
Bright as a sunbeam and whose white wing throws
A glove of challenge on the salt sea-flood.
1
Lost Upon the Tide
‘Stephen de Marais and Nest ferch Rhys.’ The sound of my name had barely ceased to resonate around the courtyard walls of Cardigan Castle when Haith shouldered his way through the crowd to gape at me.
The prior pronounced a blessing on my unwanted marriage. The coupling of my name with de Marais’ sounded like a death knoll to my ears. I stared at Haith. It really was him. Alive. Not drowned. I gazed at him, bewildered, holding my breath for what became an uncomfortably long time. I breathed out and in. With the intake of new air, I swung from numbness to panic as I realised the full import of what was happening. Five minutes ago, we all thought Haith was long dead, drowned with the other three hundred souls who had gone down in the British Sea with The White Ship before Christmas. Five minutes ago, Haith was pushing his way through the crowd, hoping to find me, hoping to delight us all with his unexpected resurrection. Five minutes ago, I was unmarried.
Numb, I glanced back at the grey-haired prior. He stood on a platform raised above the heads of the crowd who were gathered before the chapel doors to witness my marriage and two other weddings. In his heavy robes, the prior perspired under the June sun. A rivulet of sweat made its way down from the end of his eyebrow, rolled forward a little along his cheekbone, meandered around the pockmarks of his cheek, and fingered at the edge of his mouth. He had pronounced me married to Stephen de Marais and it could not be unsaid. He mopped at his upper lip with the broad, brown sleeve of his habit and began to intone the next blessing. I returned my gaze to Haith as the prior blessed the marriages of Isabel de Beaumont and Gilbert de Clare, and Sybil de Neufmarché and Miles of Gloucester. Isabel was the king’s current mistress and was very conspicuously carrying his child. If the prior did not hurry up, he might find himself with a christening to perform as well as three marriages.
The muscles in Haith’s face clenched as he looked at me and worked to keep his expression bland. This marriage gaped raw between us, like the sudden slash in flesh at the thud of a butcher’s blade. A memory of my first encounter with Haith flickered in my mind’s eye. I was on a ferryboat on the Thames, eighteen, a wide-eyed girl attending court at Westminster for the first time. The boatman was about to push off from the pier when Haith yelled to wait for him. I had smiled at his funny Flemish accent. Haith was late rising from bed, as was his habit, and was a little dishevelled. He leaped into the boat and had to steady me, with a hand to my elbow, as the vessel rocked from his impact. I remembered the impression he made upon me: his height; his broad shoulders and long arms; his straight, butter-gold hair, cut in Flemish fashion at chin-level; his friendly, apologetic smile. Now, I am confronted with the man again, when I thought I had only memories left. He is not much changed. There are a few new grooves running the length of his cheeks where he has smiled too often and a few more silver strands in his yellow hair.
King Henry momentarily tore Haith’s attention from me. The king grabbed Haith’s shoulder and pulled him round to face him, enfolded him in a laughing embrace, pushed him out to arm’s length again, shook his head in disbelief. The king repeatedly gripped and squeezed Haith’s biceps, as if to check that he was no apparition. Looking at the two friends reunited, I was torn between sharing in Henry’s delight at Haith’s return, and my feelings of sour resentment toward the king.
With the three forced weddings performed today, King Henry renewed the Norman stranglehold on the south-west kingdom of Wales that had formerly belonged to my father. He ensured that I, the daughter of the last Welsh king of this region, would continue disempowered. King Henry did not want to run the risk that I could be used again as a symbol of right to the land by a Welsh or Norman challenger to the king’s own rule. The king’s ‘disposals’ of noblewomen, including me, were his ‘knitting’ of strategic marriages and alliances. Most kings rule through the sword and the law, but Henry has added the bed to his repertoire, and makes exhaustive work of it.
At last, the king realised that I was staring at him and at Haith. Henry gave me a shamefaced grin, somewhere between smile and grimace. He felt guilty because he had forced me to this unwelcome marriage to de Marais. He knew he should have allowed me to marry Haith when we asked for that favour last year. He owed me that, but now it is too late. Haith, the king’s best friend, is returned from the dead, and I am married to the wrong man. The king’s guilt can do us no good.
I dropped my new husband’s hand and hitched the skirts of my fine red gown above my boots to squelch across the mud of the bailey toward them. Growing nearer, I slowed my pace. Like a sleepwalker, I arrived, unsure how I had come there, blank as to what I might say or do. The king and Haith turned to face me. I dropped the embroidered flounces of my skirts to settle over my muddy boots and longed to touch my finger to the smile line on Haith’s cheek as I had used to. I clenched my fists at my sides.
‘Lady Nest.’ Haith’s voice was level and stirred more recent memories of the time when he had been my lover.
‘I am so glad that you live,’ I said, struggling to find my voice. My resolution evaporated and I could not resist reaching for his hand. The king relinquished him to me.
‘I am so glad that you live,’ I said again, more slowly. I could think of nothing else to say.
Haith was also at a loss for words. Expressions of distress flickered across his face and in his eyes, and he struggled to suppress them.
With a false brightness, I adapted the words of a poem he once gave to me: ‘O, sea-bird, lost upon the tide. You return to us!’ I turned my head aside, pretending to glance around the crowd to conceal my blurring tears and muffle the break in my voice.
‘What happened?’ King Henry asked. ‘How did you survive the wreck? We heard there was only one survivor – a butcher.’
I glanced back to Haith, quickly touching the tears from the corners of my eyes. He pulled his gaze from mine to answer the king. ‘I went onboard White Ship at harbour but decided disembark.’ So many years in the king’s employ, so many years at the Norman court, and he still speaks a garbled Norman French with a Flemish accent. He looked at me again and in that look is everything we cannot say now. Love. Regret. His pain that I am suddenly married to another man. Mine, that I am struggling with the shock that he lives after all, that I have found him, and, yet, I have so utterly lost him.
Haith and the king looked over my shoulder and I guessed that my new husband was hovering behind me, wanting to claim me. ‘Lady Nest?’ de Marais’ voice was hesitant. I gave no response and did not turn to him. I failed to prevent the contempt that I felt at the sound of de Marais’ voice from glinting in my eyes as I stared at the king. Reluctantly, I let go of Haith’s hand.
I took a deliberate breath again, and my voice was barely a whisper: ‘I am glad.’ I dipped my head to them and mo
I headed with determination toward the hall where Amelina confronted me. ‘He’s alive then,’ she said.
I sat on the bench next to her and tried to gather my wits, to recover from the shock of Haith’s return. Her hands moved toward me. She was thinking to give me comfort. I saw her read my face and stance and think better of her intention. If she held me, I would weep uncontrollably. She crossed her arms instead. ‘What now?’ she asked.
I twisted the ring on my finger that de Marais had just given to me. It was a fine ring: a thick gold filigree band with a broad, complex knot on its face. I took the ring off and placed it, with deliberation, on the table. I pushed it away from me, further across the table.
Amelina watched and pursed her lips. ‘We have to prepare you for the wedding feast,’ she said firmly, ignoring the implication of my action. ‘And the bedding,’ she added, in a quieter voice that was less sure of itself.
‘I cannot engage in this marriage now. Yet. I have to leave.’
Amelina pulled a face. ‘You can’t do that! De Marais will be incandescent if you leave. The king will be furious.’
‘I can’t go to Pembroke.’ I continued thinking aloud. ‘It is not mine anymore.’ The king had transferred Pembroke Castle, which had been my home for the last fifteen years, to Isabel and Gilbert. By marrying me to a mere constable, enmeshing me again in Norman intermarriage, and taking Pembroke away from me, the king sought to further subsume the claims of my royal Welsh lineage. ‘I can’t go to Carew. It is steeped in memories of Gerald.’ Gerald FitzWalter had been my first husband and the father of most of my children, apart from my oldest son who was the king’s, and my youngest, who was Haith’s.
‘Your sons would be shamed …’ Amelina attempted.
‘I can’t do it right now!’
‘The marriage should be consummated, Nest,’ she whispered gently. ‘In time …’
I interrupted the platitude that she was forming. ‘No.’
Her eyes were liquid with sympathy. She took my hand and tried to unfurl my fist, but I curled it again. I started to shake, and she could no longer resist pulling me into a hard embrace, squashing me against her breasts. The camomile scent of her light brown hair and her warmth enveloped me. My own cold tears were wet against her ear. I allowed myself a couple of gasping sobs and a few moments of comfort, and then forced her from me. I stood, pulling her to her feet. ‘I will go to Llansteffan.’ Ida, my companion and friend and Haith’s sister, was at Llansteffan and she could give me counsel. ‘Perhaps if I do not allow a consummation of the marriage, if I escape now, I can find a way out of it.’
‘You’re married. In front of witnesses. There’s no way out,’ Amelina stated. Seeing that the resolution on my face did not change, she tried a more feeble protest: ‘The renovations at Llansteffan are not finished. It is not fit for you.’
I ignored her words. ‘Ida needs to hear the news. She will be heart-glad that her brother is alive, after all.’
‘Does he know about her?’ Amelina asked, meaning did Haith know Ida had escaped her former life in a convent as the nun Benedicta and was living with me.
I shook my head. ‘I doubt he knows yet. I will go to Llansteffan,’ I repeated.
Amelina studied the set of my face. She had been my maid since we were both children and she could read me well. ‘We’d best go, then,’ she said, ‘before they realise what we are about.’
I acknowledged her grim smile with my own. ‘Yes, Amelina!’
‘I’ll meet you in the stables with your riding clothes.’
I watched her move hastily to climb the stairs to the upper bedchamber. If I lingered for any more time in the hall, de Marais would come looking for me. I took a deep breath, glanced at the discarded wedding ring on the table, and moved into the servant’s passageway, striding past the buttery and the pantry, stepping through a side door, and taking the back route to avoid being seen.
In the stables, I saddled our horses. Amelina was soon back. She stripped off my wedding finery and crammed the red gown, neck first, unceremoniously, into a saddle bag. It was odd to see her treat the gown in that way, when I was so used to seeing her carefully folding and husbanding all my possessions. The upended, squashed flounces of the red dress spilled from the top of the dusty saddlebag like a sea anemone pinched between brute fingers. ‘We must be quick. De Marais is asking where you are.’ She dropped my riding tunic over my head and had me swiftly booted and cloaked for the journey. Twilight was falling. ‘Will we ride through the night, without an escort?’ she asked, her eyes wide and anxious.
‘Yes. It’s the surest way for us to reach Llansteffan unhindered. I have a knife.’ I drew the blade from the scabbard at my waist to show her its long gleam in the dim, brown light of the stables. It screeched as I let it slide back into its sheath.
‘What then? When we reach Llansteffan.’
‘I will consider that when I get there. I want to stand on my own ground.’
2
Three More Weddings
Haith opened his eyes on the prince’s lividly pale face inches from his own in the water. Bubbles streamed frantically upwards from Haith’s mouth, but nothing came from the boy. He gathered the prince’s tunic in his fist and kicked, trying to raise them both to the surface, but the boy was a dead weight on Haith’s oxygen-starved limbs. The scissoring of his legs grew feeble and ineffective, and his chest was paralysed with pain. He raised his face, hoping for light, but the dark water stretched on and on above their heads. The bubbles from his own mouth slowed and stopped. Haith’s grasp on the prince failed, and he floated helpless against the boy’s unmoving chest, all power draining from his long, muscled limbs. Haith’s big hands floated aimlessly, like the slick fronds of seaweed in the current. The dead eyes of the prince opened, gelatinous, inky black and deep as the sea that would let neither of them go.
Haith sat up in the bed gulping for air, cold sweat pooling on his chest and the back of his neck. ‘By the Lord’s death!’ He looked around, disoriented by the strange room. The inn in Normandy, he told himself. He was here, and not in the cold, grey swell of the suffocating sea that was still so vivid from his dream. He reached for the beaker on the floor beside the creaking bed, but it was empty. Could he have saved Prince William from drowning if he had boarded The White Ship, instead of disembarking to follow Stephen de Blois? He swung his long legs from the bed and sat on the edge for a moment, pressing his fingertips to his eyelids, trying to dispel the horrid images of the drowned prince. Most likely, he could not have saved him. If Haith had been onboard that night when the ship foundered, he probably would have drowned with all the rest, all three hundred of those souls, including two of King Henry’s illegitimate children and his only legitimate male heir. The least Haith could do was lay his suspicions about the wreck to rest.
