Daughter of the Last King, page 13
part #1 of Conquest I Series
* * *
Almenêches Abbey, Normandy, Holy Day of the Immaculate Conception, 8 December 1096
Lazy, lazy Haith! Fifteen hours sleep indeed when seven hours will suffice you together with a plunging of your great yellow head in a basin of icy water. You must suffer my ampersands, for I am a great expert dauber & scriber now of manuscripts, I assure you. Thank you a thousand times for the gifts – the gum arabica &, though you joke on my sore fingers, thank you so much for the soothing unguent you sent to succour them. It smells so wonderful! Like an exotic place far away over miles & miles of sunlit sea. I dream of such a journey.
It is an excellent thing that so many great lords, including our own Duke Robert of Normandy, have heard the pope’s call to take the cross & regain the Holy City for Christendom. We are busy all the time receiving wives, sisters, daughters, small sons, treasuries into our keeping for safeguarding for those who go as crusaders. We should have peace now in Normandy for some time, do you think? We won’t know ourselves.
My duties for the abbey have changed again & wrought a great alteration for me. Perhaps sensing that my enclosure was weighing heavy on me, Abbess Emma saw fit to entrust me with the abbey’s business out in the world so I have been allowed out of the cloister & become a great traveller to compete even with you & your Henry.
The abbess was concerned about arrangements during Duke Robert’s absence. She had me travel to visit with Bishop Serlo at Séez to confirm the existing grants for our abbey & to arrange exemptions of some taxes. Don’t be alarmed. I was not alone. Matilda de Montgomery was my cheerful companion on the journey & we were guarded by the abbey’s lump of a gatekeeper with his gigantic sword. I confess I gloried in the charms of the countryside & could not get my fill of gawping at trees, streams & hills & the apple & pear trees. When we arrived in Séez, swarms of black-clad monks were issuing from the church. We found the bishop himself in the large garden in front of his palace, giving directions to his gardeners. He was helpful in our business & a congenial dinner companion. The following day, we continued our travels on to the abbey of Saint Evroul where some of the documents relating to our case had been lodged. At the abbey we were taken care of by a young deacon named Vitalis. I found him in the library surrounded by cartularies & charters up to his very ears because he has recently begun work on extending the history written by William de Jumièges, Deeds of the Norman Dukes. Vitalis told me he was born in England, near the Welsh border & christened with the name Orderic. His father was a chaplain in the service of the Montgomerys & his mother was an English woman. I found him excellent company & now I am returned to Almenêches, though I am of course glad to be home & surrounded by everything familiar, I am also feeling a little dull after my late adventures so send me news for I know you always have plenty. Nothing useful to report I’m afraid, although I listen at keyholes and door jambs at every opportunity (not many such). With affection & & & & & & & & & &, etc., Benedicta.
* * *
Soon after the king’s last campaign in Wales and its disastrous consequences for my poor lady and her tiny son, Sybil found she was carrying a child again, and she birthed a girl who she named Hawise. Her husband returned home briefly only once after the birth of his second daughter, simply with the intent it seemed of seeding himself another son. He stayed a mere week. ‘Too long,’ Sybil said glumly and was soon strolling around the castle again with a stomach several inches before her. It is her permanent condition. She has lately birthed this child and again it was a girl and named Cecile. Now Amelina and I have a motley collection of three little girls in our care: Mabel who is brown-haired, mischievous and confident; Hawise is black-haired and prone to sulkiness; and Cecile, the new baby, is fair-haired, like her mother.
Mabel and Hawise waddled around behind me as I did my morning chores, as if they were my brood of ducklings, and Cecile was slung securely on my back. I was showing Mabel and Hawise how to lift water from the well. It was a cold morning despite the advance of summer. We had been expecting the arrival of King William again. I looked up at the clatter of hooves and there he was looking down at us with his bi-coloured eyes, with FitzHamon at his side. ‘Lady Nest, little ladies,’ the king said pleasantly. We curtsied to him, the girls wobbling and looking nervously to me to check they were doing it correctly.
Seeing the king in person, I flinched at my resolve to marry him. After they had ridden past to the stables, I stepped toward the hall and caught sight of myself in a puddle and stared at the image as it wavered and blurred with the cold breeze crossing the bailey. Who was I? Who was that woman, considering marriage to a Norman, claiming herself Welsh. The black of my hair, the blue of my eyes, melted together, faltered treacherously on the trembling surface of the water.
9
Inaction
As we dressed for dinner Sybil told me, ‘Beware, Nest, the king’s usual patience and good humour are stretched at the moment.’ She had been exceptionally pleasant to me lately, after the suggestion that I might become William’s queen. I had been born and trained to be a king’s wife and determined to use my charm on him. If Sybil could tolerate marriage to FitzHamon, surely I could tolerate marriage to the king if it gave some control of my own life and perhaps the future of my lands. Amelina set out my finest clothes while shaking her head and assuring me I would be happier with Arnulf in my bed.
Sybil had ordered dresses made for us in the new bliaut style. The bright red wool was tight against my body from shoulders to hips and puckered with honeycomb smocking across my abdomen. The voluminous skirts of the dress swirled from my hips when I twisted and turned like the petals of a great blossom blowing around its own stem in the wind. The sleeves were tight to my elbows, then widened and draped to the floor. My long fingers were laced with rings that Sybil gave me as a birthday gift, my black hair was lustrous on my shoulders and glittered with a single red ribbon dotted with tiny garnets, that was woven into the top of my head and curled at the side of my face. Sybil perceived my efforts. ‘Don’t rush to embrace an old man, Nest,’ she told me. ‘It may not bring you what you hope for.’
I ignored her advice and at dinner I did my utmost to entrance the king yet, unlike the other men who could not take their eyes from me, he seemed to barely notice I existed. I smiled at the cross old man, asked him questions about his hawk and horse. He answered, but did not seem overly interested in anything I had to say. Despite his smile when he arrived, King William was indeed in an angry mood. I kept my breathing calmed as he told Lady Sybil he intended to kill every male inhabitant of the Welsh mountains.
The harshness of the king’s reprisals against the rebels the previous year had shocked Sybil. The Welsh successes in pushing back his Norman colonists were infuriating him. My countrymen, led by Cadwgan, had despoiled the town of Pembroke, and the Norman garrison near Carmarthen had been forced to withdraw. I imagined my father’s former llys standing broken with battering rams again. I thought of the scenes of happy meals I had shared there with my family, those halls now standing in ashes. My lands, Carew and Llansteffan, were fired, the people driven out from their homes and fields. The king’s knights and foot soldiers camped outside Cardiff Castle and the next morning King William and FitzHamon led them out in the direction of my homelands.
* * *
No news came through to us during their absence. I tried to settle to designing a tapestry I was working on with Amelina. We planned to use it to teach Mabel and Hawise to sew, but my mind kept wandering in anxiety to what was happening in Deheubarth, and my fingers stilled for long distracted stretches of time. ‘What will be, will be,’ Sybil told me, seeing my concern, and guessing at its cause.
To take my mind away from my worry, she allowed me to accompany her into town – my first time outside the castle walls for four years! We required needles and various spices that Sybil wanted to select herself for the kitchen. The wind knocked back my hood as we rode across the moat, accompanied by a small armed guard, and with Amelina leading a rouncie that would carry our shopping home. I gloried in my freedom, looking avidly at everything all around, slaking my starved eyes and stifled mind. We rode slowly up the narrow streets of the town. I pinched my nose closed as we passed a butcher slopping a glob of entrails into a bucket. We had to wait in a narrow alley as two of our escort dismounted to move aside some discarded barrels. Around the four sides of the marketplace, shops stood with their shutters open and goods displayed on external counters. Small boys were employed to keep an eye on the clientele and make sure nobody ran off with the wares. Sybil concluded her business with a mercer and was pointing out a decorated belt to me when a man came up behind us greeting the shopkeeper in Welsh, ‘Your braies and your balls be blessed, Gwyn!’ I stifled a laugh and shook my head at Sybil’s enquiring glance. The man’s face coloured scarlet when he saw there were ladies nearby.
It was the start of the Whitsuntide holiday when the labourers had a week without working and the festive spirit was building all about the town. Sybil and I sat on our palfreys behind a small crowd gathering at the foot of the steep main street. ‘What’s happening?’ Sybil asked a man standing next to her horse. The man looked up at her blankly, and I repeated her question in Welsh. ‘Cabbage race,’ he said, which left me no wiser. I repeated his words to Sybil, but then we were enlightened as a crowd of men and boys came hurtling down the hill, pursuing cabbages or trying to control them with their feet. Several tripped and fell. Others lost their cabbages to the crowd where they were quickly concealed under someone’s cloak, but one father and son made it to the bottom of the hill with their battered cabbage footed to and fro between them and were declared the winners. Sybil and I laughed at the spectacle. ‘I hope they feed those cabbages to the pigs now, rather than wasting them,’ she said.
Riding back into the confinement of the castle after this brief glimpse of elsewhere was hard, but I told myself it must be the beginning of more such freedoms. I was sixteen and could expect to be married very soon. While I still felt that I should be married to Owain, a Welsh prince and my betrothed husband, there had been no news from Cadwgan. I was impatient to be active in the world, so if I had to marry a Norman man, the king or Arnulf, at least I would gain that from the marriage.
* * *
The king and FitzHamon rode back into Cardiff less than five weeks later and I drew in a breath of relief at seeing the king’s long face. The campaign had been a disaster again, with the Welsh taking to the mountains, the terrain and rain defeating the Norman punitive force once more. The land loved us and not them. It hid us in its folds, waiting for when we could reclaim it from these foreigners. They would never conquer our land as they had conquered the lands of the Saxons. The king’s army, that rode into south-west Wales so shiny and strong, was now a chaotic jumble of exhausted, dirty men whose food and water supplies had run dry, who had seen friends shot in the back by invisible archers in the trees, who feared they might be the next to contract a lethal dysentery. The king and FitzHamon led the dispirited men back to Cardiff, and riding alongside them into the bailey came Arnulf, his own attire pristine as usual.
At dinner the king sulked, and FitzHamon tried to reassure him. ‘Peace here is brittle and short-lived but we will prevail.’ The king made no response.
‘I have a tale to cheer you, if you will hear it, sire?’ Arnulf said. It seemed that he, at least, had weathered the king’s displeasure against the Montgomerys.
‘Go on …’ said William.
Arnulf told how he had ordered Gerald FitzWalter to hold Pembroke on his behalf and shore up its defences. Pembroke, it transpired, was the only Norman fortification that had withstood the Welsh attacks. ‘Morale was low, and the situation was desperate,’ Arnulf said. ‘Gerald fooled the Welsh attackers into believing Pembroke Castle was well supplied and needed no reinforcements.’
‘What!’ spluttered the king, banging his goblet down on the table, making Sybil flinch.
‘Yes!’ Arnulf had to pause his story to control his laughter. He wiped his mouth with two fingers, smoothing his brown moustaches, first one side and then the other. ‘Gerald slipped out of the castle under cover of night from the great cave that lies underneath the castle and gives out onto the river.’
‘The Wogan,’ I said.
Arnulf turned to me and smiled. ‘Yes, Lady Nest, you know it, of course. The Wogan as it is named by the local people. Gerald slipped along the dark river and left a spurious letter, sire, where he knew it would be found and taken to the Welsh leaders. It convinced them their assaults on Pembroke Castle would be hopeless against such strength and they abandoned the siege!’
The king thumped on the table with the blunt end of his knife. ‘By the face of Lucca!’ he shouted and laughed with tears in his eyes. Even though it was a story against my countrymen, I felt some pride at Gerald’s ingenuity. Looking at the king’s wrinkled red face and hands and thinking of valiant Gerald’s curling blond hair and his kind pale blue eyes, my resolve to charm the old king faltered. I touched my hand to the unfamiliar couvrechef that I was wearing for the first time to cover my hair now that I was of marriageable age. It was a small square of cream linen that Amelina had tied on for me with my red ribbon studded with garnets, and matching my dress. I saw Arnulf watching me and dropped my hands back to my lap.
‘Now,’ Arnulf told the king, turning back to him, ‘Gerald is raiding the lands of the bishop of Saint David’s in Pebediog.’
‘Take care of that one, Arnulf. He is serving you well,’ the king said, recovering from his uproarious laughter. ‘Where’s he from?’
‘He is the younger son of your forester at Windsor, sire, Gerald FitzWalter.’
‘Well, I shall reward him for his initiative when I get the chance.’
Later I sat in Sybil’s chambers sewing and looked up to see Arnulf hovering in the doorway. ‘May I, sister?’ She smiled her assent, and he came and sat close to me where he could look at my needlework. ‘This is very fine work, Lady Nest.’
‘Thank you.’
Hawise clambered onto his knee, looking earnestly into his face. ‘Nest sings us beautiful songs in Welsh,’ she told him.
‘Indeed! Does she?’ he laughed. ‘Do you think she might sing us one now?’
‘No, no, lady!’ I protested, looking to Sybil, who arched her eyebrows.
‘Why not, Nest. Hawise is right. You have the voice of an angel and would do us all a kindness to sing for us.’
I blushed furiously. I did not want to sing in front of Arnulf, but Sybil said no more and looked at me with an expression that I knew meant she would not relent. I searched in my head for a short song, but in the end I found the one I knew the best, that I knew I could sing the best. I stood and Arnulf looked up at me, hugging Hawise to him. I sang a song for Calan Mai, the first of May. ‘Welcome, welcome, first of May, sweet May Day …’ When I finished, I slapped back down on my stool, looking at my knees. Arnulf, Sybil, Amelina and the girls clapped enthusiastically.
‘You were right, Hawise,’ Arnulf said, tickling her and making her giggle. ‘Lady Nest does sing beautifully.’
In the evening, I rose from the supper table to go to bed, taking a small candle with me to light me up the staircase and along the passageway. The king was accommodated in the guest room next to mine, which Sybil had furnished with all her best fabrics. I turned at the sound of footsteps behind me, thinking it was perhaps the king, but saw instead Arnulf close behind me. He was allotted a place in the hall to sleep, but perhaps he sought the garderobe. I frowned as he passed the door to that room and came on instead toward me. ‘Nest,’ he whispered softly in the gloom and took hold of my shoulder. ‘Thank you for that song today. A May Day song is a wooing song, is it not?’
‘No,’ I stuttered, suddenly worried by his proximity. ‘It was a song welcoming the spring.’
‘Ah, nevertheless, spring is a time for wooing, Nest.’ Gently he pushed my shoulder back against the wall. He took the candle from my hand and hooked it to the candle hook in the wall above my head. ‘Now I can see your face properly.’
‘My lord, pray let go of me.’
‘Of course,’ he said, instead, standing very close to me, and placing the tip of his little finger in the small indentation in my chin. ‘Won’t you smile for me and show me that other dimple?’
I tried to twist my shoulder and face away from him, but he gripped me, pinned me there. His body pushed hard against mine. My girl’s strength and willowy height were no match for him. Despite myself, I felt a thrill of pleasure pass swiftly through me at the warmth and weight of him.
‘I could make you very happy, Nest, if you will let me. Your eyes are like azure pools to drown in.’
I tried to be angry with him. Yes, drown, drown, I thought, your lungs heaving and flattened like empty pigs’ bladders. Gasp for air and find none. But as I looked into his dark brown eyes, heat spread prickling across my face and neck. I fought my body’s urge to respond to him. ‘Let me go! The king will be displeased!’
‘The king!’ Arnulf laughed. ‘Don’t imagine there is anything for you there, Nest. The king is more interested in me than he is in you, I can assure you.’ I was confused at his meaning, and seeing my confusion, he enlightened me. ‘Yes,’ he told me crudely, ‘he is more interested in my arse than in yours. So forget about him. You are ready for our marriage bed, Nest. I will be gentle and loving to you, I swear it.’ He leant toward me, intending to kiss me. My body reacted without my will, without my conscious intention. I opened my mouth and relaxed the struggle of my arms and thighs against his body. His face came close to mine, and his lips touched mine. I opened my mouth and felt his tongue slide into my mouth, filling it. A stab of desire coursed through me. I twisted my head away. A candle was coming down the passage, and Master Belmeis’ face emerged above it. Arnulf let go of me and took a step back.
