The Anarchy, page 12
‘Is it … my aunt Nest and the Norman king, then?’ Cadell asked, opening one quizzical eye.
Gwenllian put a finger softly to his mouth and went on with her story. Cadell closed his eye again. ‘But in that whole year, Pwyll did not make love to Arawn’s wife, despite her enormous beauty.’
Gruffudd swung off the bed with a sudden humph! ‘There’s not much peace around here.’ He strode out to the hall in search of a beaker of wine. When he was gone, Gwenllian and Cadell settled back cosily. ‘One day, Pwyll sat on a mound and an extraordinarily beautiful woman rode past on a fast horse.’
‘You?’ asked Cadell.
Gwenllian smiled and continued. ‘Pwyll sent several of his best men on the fastest horses to catch her, but she was too swift for them. And so he set off to chase her himself but he, also, could not catch her, so he cried out, Won’t you wait for me, lady, and tell me who you are? Gladly, she said. I am Rhiannon and promised to a man I do not wish to marry. I would rather, Prince, marry you. Then we will compel it so, declared Pwyll. One year later, Rhiannon invited Pwyll to feast at the house of her father and while they were feasting, a rather ugly young man came in and asked Pwyll to grant him a favour. With pleasure, cried the ebullient Pwyll, whatever you ask. Oh, why did you say that? wailed Rhiannon, for the man was Gwawl, her former suitor, and, of course, he asked for her.’
‘Oh no,’ murmured Cadell, drowsily.
‘What can we do now? cried Pwyll. Rhiannon gave him a magic bag and instructions on how to use it. One year later, Pwyll visited the hall again where Rhiannon was seated next to Gwawl, whom she loathed. Pwyll was in disguise. Grant me a boon, he asked Gwawl. Fill my bag with food. The servants began to put food and then more and more food into the bag, but it did not fill up. Will your bag ever be full? asked Gwawl in dismay. If a nobleman stamps it down, it will, answered Pwyll. So Gwawl came and put his feet in the bag and stamped and he disappeared down, down into the bottomless, magical bag and Pwyll closed it tight shut over his head and now Pwyll could marry Rhiannon.’ The melodious flow of Gwenllian’s voice halted.
‘What about the rest?’ asked Cadell in an aggrieved tone.
‘Ssh.’ She smoothed his fair head down onto her shoulder, where his blond locks mixed with the dark red swathe of her hair. ‘I can tell you the rest another night. It has been a tiring day.’
‘Bravo, my lady! What a story!’
Gwenllian looked up, shocked at the stranger’s voice on the threshold of her private chamber. The travelling bard, Breri, stood there, leaning against the doorjamb.
‘This is insolence!’ Cadell exclaimed. He flipped back the quilt, intending to swing his legs from the bed, but Gwenllian stayed him.
‘Forgive me. I can never resist a well-told tale.’ Breri bowed. He turned and disappeared,
returning to the hall.
‘This Breri is silent on his feet, despite his bulk,’ Gwenllian said, looking at the absent space where the bard had stood on the threshold of her bedchamber.
Cadell had not heard him approach her door and did not know how long he had been standing there, listening to them.
11
Evasion
‘Are you writing to your sister, Haith?’
Haith looked up at Henry’s young queen, Adelisa. She was counting out a pile of fine blue wool cloaks that she intended to give out to the knights of the household as Christmas gifts. ‘I am,’ he told her. ‘Ida is comfortable and safe in your household at Winchester, and I thank you for that. I am looking forward to being reunited with her at Easter.’ Ida had written to Haith, at last, to tell him she had resided in Nest’s household for two years but was now under the protection of the king and queen.
Adelisa smiled mischievously. She knew his sister had absconded from a nunnery, was enjoying the subterfuge of concealing Ida, and was delighted to converse on the secret in her own language with Haith. He had to frequently remind himself that this blonde fourteen-year-old, who he was inclined to interact with as little more than a child, was, in fact, a queen and must be met with sober respect. Her personality did not make that easy since she was inclined to jokes and games and was insatiably curious about her new context in England. Haith had been travelling for the last few months with the king and queen. Adelisa accompanied Henry everywhere in their ardent wish that she would soon bear an heir to the throne. The king was constantly kind and caring with his youthful queen, but he was, nevertheless, old enough to be her father and had little time for frivolity or leisure. The king tasked Haith with keeping company with the queen.
Henry’s entourage had spent a full year on the road, with only brief stops everywhere. After reasserting his grip in Wales, Henry toured England, checking on his administrators and their exercise of his delegated authority. In the far north, the king had kept a weather eye on the aggressive tension building between the king and prince of Scotland, on the one hand, and the earl of Chester and his sons, Ranulf de Gernon and William de Roumare, on the other.
Adelisa unpinned the exquisite silver brooch from the neck of her dress and held it up to the pale sunlight coming through the window to study the fine craftsmanship. The king had given it to her during their visit to the Alston silver mines. The court had spent time in York, Durham, Carlisle, and then visited the silver mines at Alston, where Haith had joined them. King Henry was intrigued by the miners’ methods of extracting the ore, and, of course, mightily pleased with the great piles of it they had shown him. The queen’s brooch was shaped by two birds bending in a convolution toward one another, their beaks meeting in a kiss at the top of the circular brooch, and the plumage of their tails crossing at the bottom.
‘What were the silver mines like?’ Adelisa asked. ‘Were there piles of such glorious silver, like a dragon’s hoard?’ Her eyes glinted with curiosity, gleaming like the fine brooch twisting between her thumb and finger. She had not been allowed near the mines themselves where there were many dangerous engines in operation and where the miners were stripped to their breeches to cope with their sweaty labour.
‘No, my queen,’ Haith laughed. ‘I’m afraid it was no heap of glittering silver, more like a scene from the bowels of hell. It was hot, noisy, smoky, sweaty. It is not easy to extract such beauty from the rock,’ he gestured at her brooch.
‘Would you?’ she asked, holding the brooch out to him. He rose from the writing desk, pinched the brooch carefully between his thumb and finger and stooped to pin it back in place, near the neck of her gown, his large fingers fumbling at its delicate fastening mechanism.
‘How do they do it? Get the silver from the rock?’
Haith stepped back and assessed that he had got the brooch more or less straight. ‘There are shafts sunk into the ground and miners are lowered down on ropes to hack at the rock face that glitters with veins of ore. They name it galena.’
‘Galena,’ she tried it on her tongue. ‘It could be a beautiful name for a baby girl!’
Haith made no comment, knowing that any girl child that Adelisa birthed was likely to be named Matilda, after the king’s mother, and perhaps in memory, too, of the daughter he had lost to the sea in the wreck of The White Ship. ‘They bring up the glittering hunks of rock and must place it in a bloomery to separate the silver from the other parts of the ore.’
‘What is that?’
‘A bloomery? It’s a little like a bread oven or a kind of chimney. A fire is lit below, very, very hot. The ore goes in the top and when it is hot enough, buttons of silver will separate out and emerge below.’
‘I don’t see why I couldn’t witness it myself,’ she said, pouting a little.
‘It was intriguing, but it was not a pleasant place to be, lady. The miners laboured in extreme heat and wore little clothing. They were grimed all about their visage and hands and had the look of semi-naked demons!’
Adelisa clapped her hands in delight at his description. ‘Truly, Haith?’
‘It was terribly noisy, what with the constant hammering and crash of rocks, the gush and treadle of the waterwheels powering pleated bellows. There was such a racket it hurt the ears. The smell was very bad too.’
‘What did it smell like?’
‘I can’t describe it. Like no smells that we are used to on the surface of the earth. Some other smell from the depths of the earth that grated on the senses. There were the smells of the charcoal burning. The cupellation vessels they used for refining the silver are made from burned antlers or fish spines, the miners told me.’
Adelisa shook her head slowly in astonishment, her eyes wide.
‘They set fires against the rock face to heat the stone, then douse the fires with liquid, so that the stone fractures and the water hisses and steams. There were foetid vapours all around us, lady, and we had to retreat to a safe distance, holding our noses! Many of the senior miners were German and shouted in their language.’
‘You could understand them?’ Adelisa asked.
‘Some, yes. They called the bloomery the wolf-furnace, but I don’t know why.’
Adelisa’s face beamed her fascination.
After Alston, the court had been in York for St Nicholas’ Day and then moved south again for Christmas. The royal household had at last come to rest at Kingsbury Palace in Dunstable after the dizzying peregrinations of the last year, and Adelisa was immersing herself in organising a lavish Christmas celebration. King Henry was making plans for a new priory in Dunstable and the creation of a market for the town. With its position at the junction of two old Roman roads – Watling Street and the Icknield Way – the town was well suited for such developments. The king had been displeased to hear of robbers in the forests nearby and set about having the forest cleared and improving the poor state of the roads. Henry was ensconced now with a messenger from the count of Anjou, and Haith reflected that such a visitor was unlikely to leave Henry in a good mood. The count was undoubtedly insisting on the return of the dowry of his daughter Mahaut, who was the widow of Henry’s drowned son, Prince William. The king never enjoyed the act of giving up money or lands. Worst still, the count d’Anjou had betrothed his other daughter, Sybil, to Henry’s rival in Normandy, William Clito, which was a slap in the face to Henry. The king was secretly treating with the Vatican through the papal envoys to get that marriage annulled and would likely prevail, but it was more cash flowing in the wrong direction from the king’s coffers.
Christmas at Kingsbury was the lull before the storm, thought Haith. In the coming year, Henry would have to tackle the rebellion in Normandy and that would mean a lot of time away from England, for the king, and away from Wales and Nest, for Haith. The packing had already started up again around them. Haith explained to Adelisa that they would be moving first to Berkhamsted, then to Woodstock, where she would be able to see Henry’s menagerie of exotic animals (and, which he did not mention, where Haith had first met Nest). Then they would go on to Winchester. Haith lifted his hand from an inkwell that a servant wanted to wrap. Adelisa laughed at Haith’s observation that the servants had only just unpacked the last goblet and their fingers were still entwined in the packing straw when Henry gave the command to start packing for the next leg of their journey. The servant’s face, on the other hand, was tight. He was less amused by the continual packing and unpacking. The queen, at least, had gained a good sense of the English and Welsh parts of her husband’s kingdom from this peripatetic year.
Haith shivered and turned back to the fire. ‘Send the maid to build up the fire,’ he told the packers, and one left the room to find the girl. Haith returned to his letter to Ida. He wrote nothing in it about his discoveries concerning Amaury. He only told her of his trip to Fontevraud and asked Ida to reassure him of her welfare. It was strange, after all these years, to be addressing her by her birth name. He tried to produce a neutral letter and not to convey any of his extreme concerns about her, but a neutral letter between them was a cold letter and Ida would feel it so. Haith aimed to send reassurance that he did not disapprove of her course of action in leaving the convent. He scored through a few words and changed them for others. The letter was looking messy now and Ida would read into that too. He advised her, in the letter, that he would meet her in Winchester when the court arrived for Easter. Now that this meeting was imminent, Haith felt anxious about the conversation he must have with Ida concerning Amaury and Gisulf. He blotted the letter, folded it and handed it to a servant, and then moved to stand beside the queen, where she was looking out of the window. Kingsbury Palace stood on a steep chalk escarpment overlooking the river with a fine view of the surrounding snow-covered countryside and the swift-flowing river. ‘A perfect Christmas snow scene,’ the queen said, pressing her pink fingertips together beneath her chin and turning a glowing, smiling face to Haith.
* * *
The king’s entourage rode up the steep incline toward the royal residence at Winchester with guards lining the route with their long, pointed shields facing the royal party as they rode past. Once inside the courtyard, King Henry wasted no time on niceties, such as allowing his retinue of barons to find their rooms and unpack. They were all summoned to immediate council in the hall to discuss how to deal with the rebellion in Normandy. Haith’s warning after his visit to Pont Audemer had been the first signs and now there was no doubt that a rebellion was being led by Waleran de Meulan and Amaury de Montfort in favour of William Clito. Haith let himself down from the saddle, feeling the creak and stiffness of his ageing joints. He wanted a hot bath and beaker of ale, but the king’s patience did not allow for that.
‘The king!’ the usher shouted as the great doors parted before the royal party, and the people standing in the hall turned to face their lord. To Haith’s eye, the lords and ladies massed in the hall presented a tense welcome. Waleran’s twin, Robert de Beaumont, earl of Leicester, was one of the first to confront the approaching king and drop respectfully to his knee, proffering his loyalty. Such loyalty would have been hard-won since he must know his twin would be declared a traitor in this assembly. The twins were close and usually acted in concert, but most of Waleran’s lands were in Normandy, while most of de Beaumont’s holdings were in England. The earl, therefore, had little choice but to act against his brother in defence of his own interests.
Since the death of the king’s son, the younger members of the court had divided into factions focused around two rivals: Robert, earl of Gloucester, the king’s illegitimate son, and Stephen, count of Mortain, the king’s nephew. The enmity between the two men was no secret. King Henry had been married to Queen Adelisa for nearing two years and there was no sign of a child. The question of the succession was beginning to weigh upon them all, and not least upon the king himself. Haith clenched the muscles of his face to suppress any expression showing there, as he watched Stephen and Robert near race one another to get to the king first. Their trajectories brought them to Henry’s path at the same time, and Robert stepped back respectfully to allow Stephen to kiss the king’s hand. Robert might be the king’s son and Stephen simply his nephew, but Robert was illegitimate and had to cede way to Stephen’s more noble bloodline.
Henry waved the niceties away brusquely. He was never interested in the flattery of courtiers, but his grip on Robert’s arm as he raised him was one of real affection and respect. Henry briefly rested his forehead against Robert’s. ‘I am glad to see you, my son.’
Haith followed Henry as he cut a rapid swathe through the waiting members of court, registering among the crowd that the de Clares had come from Wales: Gilbert de Clare from Pembroke and Richard de Clare from Cardigan. Richard was accompanied by his young wife, Alice. Haith noted that Alice’s father, Ranulf Le Meschin, earl of Chester and his son Ranulf de Gernon and stepson William de Roumare were present. Neither of the Ranulfs nor de Roumare were happy with King Henry and their expressions were guarded. Ranulf was angry at the king’s arrangements for the northern territories since he had conceded a great number of holdings to the Scots, lands that the earl regarded as his. William de Roumare was also disappointed that the king had denied his petition for his mother’s Bolingbroke lands.
‘Any who have report of matters in Normandy, speak up!’ Henry called out, his voice ringing against the cold stone of the hall, and a series of lords gave reports on what could be gleaned on the present activities of the rebels. These reports were always a mixture of genuine information and information displayed to gain the king’s favour. When Henry wearied of the procession of courtiers jostling for attention, he held up a hand, brusquely interrupting the florid preface of one young lord. ‘That’s enough! The state of things is clear enough and will not be tolerated. I thank you all,’ he said, briefly glancing at the interrupted and crestfallen last speaker.
‘My lords Ranulf, earl of Chester, and Robert, earl of Gloucester, I call on you to go in haste to Normandy and make preparations for a campaign against these rebels. I will soon follow on your heels.’
That meant, Haith realised, he too would be going to Normandy very soon. The closed session of the barons was concluded, and the hall doors were opened to admit the other members of the court. Evening was falling and servants began to light the myriad lamps. Haith looked for Ida but did not see her and guessed she would be keeping from sight in the queen’s chambers. Across the crowded hall, he spotted de Pirou joining the retinue of Ranulf de Gernon. At last, Haith would have an opportunity to interrogate de Pirou. He was desperate to find proof positive that it was not Ida’s lover, Amaury de Montfort, who had caused the sinking of The White Ship. Haith moved toward de Gernon’s group, but the king beckoned him over. Haith kept an impatient eye on de Pirou as he listened to the king.
