The Drowned Court, page 1
The Drowned Court
Conquest
Book II
Tracey Warr
Published by Meanda Books, 2023.
https://meandabooks.com
Copyright © 2023 by Tracey Warr
ISBN 978-1-7392425-4-1
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 catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
First published in the UK by Impress Books 2017.
Created with Vellum
For Edward Warr and Maureen Warr
Contents
Part I
1. Perplexing Parchments
2. Resolved
3. A Conundrum
4. Cumberworlds
5. The Game of the Countess
6. The Water Wolf
7. Return to the Cloister
8. The Usefulness of a Garderobe
Part II
9. Discarded Women
10. The Ransom
11. Quandry
12. Fire and Ash
13. Helen of Wales
14. Blood and Wine
15. After Winter
16. Hunting Ground
17. Truce
18. Black-Clad Life
19. London
20. Three Kings
21. The Spyloft
22. Salt-Worn Lovers
23. New Quarry
Part III
24. Tithes
25. Mererid and Seithininn
26. A Murder of Crows
27. Marriage
28. On a Parapet
29. Shuttle Diplomacy
30. The Boy
Part IV
31. The New Broom
32. O Sea-Bird
Historical Note
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Tracey Warr
I
1107-1109
1
Perplexing Parchments
‘Read it to me one more time,’ Amelina said.
Yr wylan deg ar lanw dioer
Unlliw ag eiry neu wenlloer,
Dilwch yw dy degwch di,
Darn fel haul, dyrnfol, heli.
I delighted in the roll of the Welsh on my tongue, like the tide coming home again to the beach. I sighed at so many years of forcing my mouth into the alien shapes of Norman French. ‘O sea-bird, beautiful upon the tides.’ I translated the Welsh for Amelina.
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.
‘A gull,’ Amelina pronounced with satisfaction.
‘Obviously!’ I said, instantly regretting my exclamation as I watched her pleased expression dissipate. ‘But the question you must help me with, Amelina, is who placed this on my writing table.’ I tried to mollify her. ‘Who managed to get past all the castle guards and into my room?’
‘Perhaps that person was already here, Lady Nest. Perhaps it was Gerald.’ All her speeches to me for many weeks had been aimed at encouraging the tentative affection growing between me and my husband. The threads holding Gerald and I together were fragile still, and we were still weaving them carefully, warily, between us.
I shook my head. ‘It’s in Welsh.’
‘Gerald speaks Welsh.’
‘Not like this. The poem is sophisticated.’ My husband is a Norman. A sympathetic one, but a Norman, nonetheless.
‘Then he paid a bard to write it for him.’
I shook my head once more, smiling at her stubborn desire that such a romantic gesture should come from my husband. Gerald’s military strategies were often brilliant, unexpected, but in matters of the heart? No. He was straightforward in that regard. ‘He is not a romantic,’ I said. I picked up a pinch of aniseed spice from a bowl on the table and chewed thoughtfully on it.
‘The king?’ Amelina said hesitantly, always unwilling to bring his name up since the pain I had suffered at his abandonment. King Henry was capable of such a gesture, and he had given me many poems in our time together, but he did not send this. ‘It’s in Welsh. A Norman would send a poem in French.’ I shook my head again, trying to wipe away the warm memories of Henry. ‘Throws a glove of challenge on the salt sea-flood, Amelina.’
‘Owain ap Cadwgan,’ she exclaimed, bringing her fingers swiftly to her mouth as if to instantly silence it, as she voiced the name of the Welsh prince, the name that had been in both our minds since I first picked up the mysterious rolled parchment left on my desk.
‘Yes, it must be.’ I had been betrothed to Owain, long ago, before the Normans came and killed my father, stole our lands, stole me away to a Norman upbringing and the Norman court.
‘He broke into a Norman castle for you once before,’ she reminded me. ‘He could do it again.’
‘I can’t feel so pleased with that now, Amelina,’ I said sharply, making her expression fall again. ‘Now that I have Norman babies to protect.’
‘Will you tell Gerald, then? Have the soldiers make a search of the castle?’ She stood and moved behind me to brush my hair.
‘It’s too late for that. Whoever left this here is long gone.’ Keeping my head still for Amelina’s ministrations, I peered down to look once more at the poem, the stiff roll held open between my splayed thumb and fingers. Amelina finished braiding my black hair into two thick plaits. She swung them over the front of my shoulders and leant to pick up the garnet and gold hair jewels on my desk. I rolled the poem carefully and tied the blue silk ribbon back around it. If this was from Owain, it came too late. I had hankered for him once, when I was a child, a miserable hostage in a Norman stronghold. If Owain had rescued me from Cardiff Castle then, years ago, as he promised to do, my life would have been different. The chance of my being a happy Welsh wife, a Welsh queen, had vanished. My small sons were half-Norman and I was married to a Norman. I must negotiate amidst those complexities every day. ‘It’s too late,’ I said again to Amelina. ‘Owain can only mean trouble and pain now.’
She glanced at my face, then focused back on fitting the jewels to the ends of my plaits. She moved to the chest at the foot of my bed to find a head-veil.
‘But I can’t betray Owain to Gerald, either.’
Amelina was back with a fine, translucent veil in her hand. She grimaced sympathetically and tied the short veil in place around my head with an embroidered blue band.
‘Or make Gerald doubt his trust in me,’ I told her.
She frowned to show that she mirrored and fully understood these complications. ‘Ohhhh, and who-ooo was her true love?’ She trilled the refrain of a Breton love song from her homeland and smiled at me sardonically.
I ignored Amelina’s humour. ‘We will say nothing of this poem,’ I decided. ‘Owain cannot have been here himself. He paid somebody to bring this parchment into the castle, to leave it in my room.’ When I was a girl, I was naive enough to think that Owain was planning to rescue me for my sake, to help me, but I know better now. I was merely a symbol for all these men to fight over, as hounds squabble over a bone in the courtyard. ‘It’s a challenge to Gerald,’ I said, ‘and I will not deliver it.’
Amelina waggled her head from side to side. ‘But it is a beautiful poem of love too,’ she said eagerly.
‘I should burn it,’ I said, as I slid it into my jewelled casket and closed the lid.
* * *
Downstairs, at the hall table, my husband waited for me with more perplexing parchment: King Henry’s invitation. ‘What does he mean by it?’ Gerald asked.
I did not answer immediately. We both knew what Henry meant. I took my seat beside Gerald, carefully arranging the folds of my favourite blue wool gown around me. I suppressed a smile at the large ceramic plate centred on the long table before us. It showed two kissing birds, standing in water, and had come as a gift with the king’s invitation. I reached over and took Gerald’s hand, moving it away from the king’s letter, forcing open his palm, and pressing my own to his. He lifted our hands to his mouth and softly kissed the back of mine, his pale blue eyes upon me. I smoothed the fair curls from his forehead.
‘I am not invited,’ he said.
I shook my head. There had been no mention of Gerald in King Henry’s invitation to me to attend the betrothal in Cardiff of his eldest bastard son, Robert FitzRoy, and my foster-sister, Mabel FitzRobert. It was deliberate. Everything Henry did was deliberate.
‘He wants you to go alone.’
I nodded.
‘And you will go.’
‘I must,’ I said. ‘He commands it. He is our king.’
He dropped his gaze, and a muscle moved in his jaw. ‘He is king of you.’
‘Not anymore, Gerald,’ I whispered, bringing my mouth close to his ear. ‘You are my lord now. You will always be my lord.’
He swallowed. ‘He wants you to himself.’
‘Perhaps, but he will not have me. I must go for the sake of my foster-sister, Mabel.’
He nodded, not looking at me.
‘Please, Gerald, try to trust me. Trust us. I love you.’
He smiled an unconvinced smile at me. ‘I do. I do trust us, Nest.’ He touched the garnet
‘I will be perfectly safe travelling with Haith,’ I said. The king’s knight had arrived the previous evening. ‘I will leave Amelina here to take care of the children.’
Gerald looked surprised. ‘You will not take your son to the king?’
‘He does not command it.’ I tapped the king’s letter with the back of my hand. While my youngest son, William, who was one year old, was Gerald’s, my eldest two-year-old son, Henry, was the king’s son, but he only knew Gerald as his father. The fear that the king would demand I give little Henry up to him to be raised at court had been my first flinching response on reading the invitation. Yet the king’s letter made no mention of my boy and I had no intention of handing him over. If the king asked it of me, I would fight. I knew the king’s other mistresses had all been obliged to give up their children to the royal nursery, but now Gerald and I had left the court and were safely in Wales. Nothing would make me return little Henry to Westminster. If the king came here to Pembroke Castle with an army, I would hide my son with the Welsh rebels in the mountains. Little Henry was mine, and I was adamant that he would not go to the Norman court.
‘No.’ Gerald was thinking slowly. ‘But surely, Nest …’
I interrupted him. ‘I will not take little Henry to Cardiff. He stays here with us, with you. And you will never give him up if you wish to keep my love.’ I looked at him fiercely.
He gazed at me earnestly. I saw every day that Gerald loved little Henry as much as I did. ‘I give you my word, Nest,’ he said. I smiled. If Gerald gave me his word, my son had the best protection I could provide.
2
Resolved
There were very few roads in Wales and no other route to travel to Cardiff. I swayed in the saddle with the knight Haith at my side, enjoying the spring sun and tried not to think about how I was travelling the same road I had first taken after my family and household were massacred at Llansteffan. I had travelled this road to Cardiff Castle as an eight-year-old hostage of the Normans.
The first day of this journey, Haith and I were forced to ride hard to reach our overnight resting place at the small monastery of Llantwit, outside Neath, before twilight closed in around us. We left Pembroke later than planned since Haith, as was his habit, had overslept. Today, however, feeling guilt for yesterday, he was up with the lark and we left early, riding at a leisurely pace. We would reach Cardiff well before nightfall.
Haith had raised an eyebrow when he learned at Pembroke that I had no intention of bringing the king’s son with me to Cardiff, but he said nothing. Had Henry merely neglected to command it? He was never careless, although he might give that impression if it served him. Then did he leave my son with me as a gift, as an apology for abandoning me? I would learn his intentions soon enough, when I saw him. I tried to ignore my nervousness at the thought. ‘Is the king well?’ I asked Haith. He and Henry had been companions since childhood, and Haith was fiercely loyal to his friend and master.
‘Yes, lady. Now war is over in Normandy, king very fine.’
The Flemish inflections in Haith’s speech had never improved in all the years I had known him, in all the time he had been speaking French at Henry’s court. I sometimes thought he did it on purpose, to make himself appear a little silly, to conceal his intelligence. I sighed, thinking how the mere prospect of Henry, although he was miles away yet, immediately turned the air and all to intrigue and deceit.
Misinterpreting my sigh as a response to his mention of war, Haith said, ‘King’s brother is prisoner now in Salisbury. Queen visits him. Says he’s content.’
The road was pitted with holes and cracks from the recent winter freezings and my reply had to wait while I steered my horse carefully around one particularly large fissure. ‘Poor Robert.’
‘Maybe he is happier as comfortable prisoner than as duke,’ Haith suggested.
I glanced at Haith. The sun lit his thick blond hair, turning his head leonine. He was always trying to put a positive angle on everything the king did, even when there was nothing positive to make of Henry’s actions. ‘Maybe.’ No doubt that was also what Henry told himself about his brother, now that he had usurped him as duke of Normandy. ‘Will the queen be at Cardiff?’
‘No. She prefers no travel. Likes to stay in London with children.’
‘They are well, also? William and Maud?’ I referred to the royal children, the legitimate ones. Henry’s nursery in Westminster teemed with his other children too, the children of his legion of mistresses, of which I regretfully, stupidly, had been a member. His legitimate daughter, Maud, was five, and the heir, William, was three years old now. I had attended the queen at their births.
Haith beamed at me. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘And you, lady? You happy home in Wales? With husband?’ He glanced at me and looked away quickly. He knew my history, and it offended his decency, his kindness.
‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘I am very happy, Haith.’
‘Excellence,’ he said. We were riding past a copse thickly carpeted with new bluebells. Haith laughed, let go his reins and threw his long arms wide, as if about to embrace the arrival of spring, and I laughed with him. ‘Why not?’ he declared. ‘You should be. You should be happy, always.’
* * *
After two days on the road from Pembroke, I longed to take a moment of respite before having to confront the king and the court, but knew I could not have that comfort. We rode through a vast encampment of merchants, clustered in front of the long castle walls. They jostled one another, calling out their wares to us. I steered my horse through the gatehouse of Cardiff Castle and into the familiar bailey.
For nine years, I had lived with Lady Sybil Montgomery and her family of four daughters in that hall. There was the well where I had drawn water every day and plotted to send Amelina to the Welsh King Cadwgan and his son Owain, hoping for rescue from my Norman captors. There was the motte towering above us, where I had often climbed to reach the tower and look out across the land and sea, longing for my freedom. There was the path to the postern gate where I had waited one moonless night for my betrothed husband, Owain ap Cadwgan, who told me he would come for me, he would take me home to my own people. But he never came.
I shivered, remembering how I had waited for Owain in the dark, waited all night until the cockerel crowed for the rising sun.
‘Lady.’ Haith held out his hand to help me dismount.
I needed no directions. Every inch of this castle was engraved in my memory, in the habits of my muscles. I brushed dust from my skirts and walked slowly to the great doors of the hall, trying to collect myself. Despite the familiarity of the castle, it seemed changed, smaller, where once it had seemed vast to me, when I arrived here as a distraught child. The impression of change was also brought about by the great crowd crammed into the castle for the king’s court. Although his full retinue would not be here, many remaining at Westminster with the queen, there were hundreds of bustling people: servants, mews-men, hounds-men exercising their charges, stableboys, a scribe with a stack of wax slates in his hands, cooks’ assistants, water-carriers.
Inside the doors, the hall was no less crowded, but here were both the king’s formal court – his curia, and his domus – his personal household of chamberlains, stewards, butlers, scribes and marshals, all those with nearness to the king. It had been so long since I had been at court that, at first, I felt overwhelmed with this amorphous mass of chattering colours, furs and silks, unable to discern its individual shapes. The ostentation and luxury assaulted me after two years of relatively plain living with my husband at Pembroke Castle.
