The Anarchy, page 31
‘Your friend, Sheriff Haith, would not let go the thread, would he? I knew the sheriff had Gisulf’s box and I could not allow him to use that letter against me. His stubborn tenacity nearly cost him his life.’
‘Were you involved in the murder of de Pirou?’
‘No, that was all de Gernon, covering his tracks.’
‘And Einon, at Llansteffan?’
‘The beard message? That was ingenious. I enjoyed that and used it myself a few times afterwards.’
I swallowed down my bile. ‘And the poisoned gloves?’ I asked.
He smiled and coughed on a gout of blood that leaked from the side of his mouth. ‘Nearly as good as the beard, no?’
I did not respond, and he could not see how his words painted horror on my face.
He began to cough more blood, and Amelina came over. ‘I’ll not give him aid,’ she said. ‘What is he saying to you? Don’t listen to it. Your brother is going, Nest. You had best go to him.’
I moved across and knelt beside my brother. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw a young priest arrive too late, and Amelina sweep her hand down over Breri’s dead eyelids.
* * *
My brother died an hour after his murderer. The men of his teulu acclaimed Anarawd as the new king of Deheubarth, their cries in honour of him subdued by their grief at the loss of Gruffudd, who had been a valiant opponent against the Normans when so many had capitulated and considered the kingdom lost. I kissed my nephew’s cheeks with my own still wet with tears for my brother, who had ruled his land for a mere year after a whole lifetime of struggle, after the terrible losses of his wife and sons. ‘Take care of yourself, Anarawd.’
‘We will be avenged upon Cadwaladr for father’s death,’ Anarawd said.
My heart sank. There had been so many generations of blood feuds among the royal families of Wales, and now my nephews were taking on vengeance against Prince Cadwaladr. I remembered how I had carried my own curse for vengeance for so many years on behalf of my father and brothers murdered by Normans. ‘No. Take care of yourself. You must live and rule Deheubarth to honour your father and mother. That is what you must do.’
Anarawd said nothing in response. I looked at them, Anarawd and Cadell, my nephews, no longer boys, shouldering the weight of their responsibilities. ‘I will take care of him, Aunt,’ Cadell reassured me. He would do his best, but I imagined how the weight of centuries of murder and treachery would oppose him.
41
Landing
The tide was out at Llansteffan and I thrilled as always at the sight of the broad sand-flats of the Twyi estuary. On the far bank, a number of dark figures rendered miniature by the distance moved around the ferry boat they had hauled out onto the sands and overturned. The boat plied back and forth across the river when the tide was up. Now, they must be performing essential maintenance work on its planks.
I dipped my stylus to add the momentous news to the pages of my book.
September 1139, Empress Maud and Robert, earl of Gloucester, have landed at Arundel and mean to contend with King Stephen for the throne that should rightly belong to Maud. The empress has been admitted to the castle by Queen Adelisa and they are under siege from King Stephen. My foster-sister, Mabel, countess of Gloucester, is also within the castle.
Mabel’s husband, Robert, had declared for his half-sister, the empress, the previous year, which had come as no surprise since relations between the earl and King Stephen had been growing worse with each day.
Stephen had led a disastrous campaign in Normandy, attempting to lay claim to Henry’s duchy. His ambitions ended in fiasco when fighting broke out between his Norman soldiers and the Flemish mercenaries in his pay. The king compounded his problems by alienating Earl Robert. Stephen was forced to an expensive truce with King Louis of France and left Waleran de Meulan in charge of defending Normandy against Geoffrey d’Anjou’s annual incursions on behalf of the empress. There was little doubt that d’Anjou would take Normandy in due course. The Norman barons were displeased at these failures, which threatened their own interests, and the initial glamour of Stephen’s crown dimmed with each wrong step and each loss and defection.
Since Earl Robert had declared for Maud, all England, Mabel wrote to me, waited for Henry’s daughter to arrive, ravage the forces of the usurper, and take her throne. Henry would be smiling, lying in his tomb at Reading Abbey. Rumours had run everywhere that Mabel’s husband was planning to invade on the empress’ behalf and frantic preparations had been made to defend King Stephen’s strongholds. The expectation of Maud’s imminent arrival seemed to go on and on, until all began to fear she would never, in fact, come, but those voices had been proved wrong. The empress was, at last, in England and she wanted her crown, first for herself, and then for her small son, Henry FitzEmpress. Rebels had been rising in her support all around England for the past year, which kept the Normans busy and out of Wales, and left us to make further inroads on our own gains.
Henry’s administrative machine ground to a halt and Stephen’s treasury struggled without the regular income wrung through the tax system by the sheriffs. More and more Normans withdrew from Wales, where they no longer had the promise of protection from Stephen’s court. Robert FitzMartin withdrew from Cardigan to Totnes and supported the empress. Miles of Gloucester declared for the empress and Brian FitzCount and most of south-west England were won to her side before she ever set foot on the pier at Arundel. Now that the empress had, at last, landed with Earl Robert in England, war would ensue against her cousin, and they would fight to take back the crown that Henry had willed to her.
I rode to visit Haith and Robert at Saint Clair’s. After our greetings, Robert left to go about his duties in the bailey. I placed my hand on top of Haith’s. ‘Do you continue your duties as sheriff of Pembroke, Haith?’
‘No. I’ve ceded the office to one of King Stephen’s cronies, but there’s not much sheriffing to do around here these days.’ The last vestiges of Norman administration in Deheubarth had collapsed, and it was this collapse that had spurred me to visit Haith.
‘I wondered if you might like to come and live with me, Haith,’ I said to him boldly. There was no point in beating coyly about the bush. We were too old for all that. Either he wanted to spend his days with me, or he did not. I knew my own mind. His eyes were warm and liquid and there I had my answer. He and I prepared to make a landing of our own – at Llansteffan.
* * *
I am lulled to sleep by the sea, and I do not hear the church bells under the water anymore. I am loath to stop writing, but I must. And I must place you, dear book, where no one will find you. I give you as an offering to this place where my harshest and my dearest memories have lived. Haith will be arriving in a few hours with his household and belongings and will move into my solar. Amelina has cleared some space for his possessions and now I must take care of things I do not want him or anyone else to ever see.
I can bring myself now to look out from the window of my chamber over this estuary and the beach where my brother Goronwy died. You never know how the past will turn out. Life does not really divide down those easy lines that everyone talks about, such as Norman and Welsh. It is so much more complicated than that. Blood is mixed in all of us, one way or another. Can we try to imagine a time in the future when our differences are dissolved forever in the rocking cradle of the sea? In my life I tried to hate, but in the end I had to love, several times over, and I am glad of that. I will hide this book that Henry gave me long ago. It has served its purpose. Its once smooth, blank pages are criss-crossed with lines, like my face. I closed the book, carefully keeping the stiff, loose leaves of Gerald’s chronicle and my drawn genealogies straight between its pages. I turned the book over and over several times in my hands. I hugged it to my chest, conjuring the faces in turn of everyone I had lost: my father, my brother Goronwy, then Gerald, Henry when I loved him, Queen Matilda, Faricius, Gwenllian, and, finally, Gruffudd. I took an undyed length of woollen cloth from my embroidery basket and wrapped it around and around my book until it was muffled and mummied.
I left my room and emerged from the shelter of the tower to cross the bailey, heading toward the gatehouse. The weather was changing, and I watched the rain approaching. Clouds blackened the sky like a pall of smoke. There was no wind and needles of rain fell straight down, soaking me, making me shiver. I paused at the great stone barbican to catch my breath and lifted my face upward toward where the portcullis mechanism winds up its heavy weight. There are bees buzzing there that have made a home in the masonry. Bees make a place, instead of destroying it like locusts. I do not want the people I know to read my journal when I die, to find it among my papers. There was a pole leaning against the wall, and I used it to poke my wrapped book deep into the hole, up there with the beehive. One day, someone will find it and read it, but not yet.
Epilogue: The Bees’ Book
The book lay waiting in a deep crevice in the crumbling castle wall after she had pushed it down with a long pole, where nobody would ever find it. On the pages of the book, her life whispered like wind in leaves, speaking the grammar of love, the vocabulary of resistance. Masonry bees moved into the crevice, pushing the book further down, expanding the hole in all directions to hold their seething golden corridors in the darkness. The book lay captive in the hive, bound in amber chains of honey, its fabric woven into the solidifying honeycomb. The filament touch of the wings and feet of bees brushed softly over it again and again like her eyelashes against her cheek as she closed her eyes to remember the scenes of her life, to write her story.
The book listened to the ceaseless zzzrs of the bees, the thick drip of honey, the wind caressing the old walls of the ruin, the sea far below lapping back and forth, over and over, the seabirds calling as they flung themselves recklessly at the air, grouped to be blown together upriver, riding the thermals. In the past, long ago, the book had listened to other sounds: the clatter of horses’ feet on cobbles, the shouts and laughter of men, women and children, groans of rope, chains and timbers as the portcullis was raised or the sudden rush and thud when it was lowered like a guillotine, swords clashing, arrows futtering, men screaming, calling out at the last for their mothers: ‘Mam!’ Those sounds were all long gone. Those voices had spilled their brief vivid lives into the vivid emerald lozenge of the bailey, leaving only a faint echo on the breeze, some impressions in the grass, beneath the grass, words scratched on parchment.
The bees went back and forth, their thighs loaded with pollen. They walked over each other and over the book like more black words let loose from the page to wander and find new homes in new sentences. The laughing children who had played around the castle well, running up and down the stairways, through the kitchens and stables, grew up to die in battle, in childbed, in sickbed, or released at last from the pangs of old age, their wishes, regrets and tears seeping into the soil. As time passed and the voices were silenced, the wall partly collapsed, chunks of stone tumbled to the ground and the bees angrily rebuilt their ramparts. The bees’ fine filigree wings turned to piles of fine dust. The long legs of spiders traversed the crevice, adding balled-up, sticky web. Slugs slid across the stone. No rain penetrated here. Occasionally clumps of snow thawed, but the icy drips were swallowed quickly by the thirsty stone and none seeped into the book sealed in its golden carapace. The book was wrapped more and more in layers of honeyed time and waited.
Historical Note
The fictional characters Nest ferch Rhys and Haith de Bruges in this book are based on real historical people who lived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Conquest trilogy draws on the known historical facts concerning the life of Nest. She was the daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr, king of Deheubarth in south-west Wales. Rhys was killed in battle by the Norman, Bernard de Neufmarché, in 1093. Nest was the mistress of the Norman king Henry I and had a son with him. She was married to Gerald FitzWalter, the Norman steward of Pembroke Castle. The Welsh prince, Owain of Powys, abducted her from Gerald for a while. After Gerald died, she was married to Stephen de Marais, the Norman constable of Cardigan Castle. The presentation in Conquest of how this sequence of events happened and how Nest coped with them is my imagining. Haith is based on Hait, who is documented as the sheriff of Pembroke in the 1130 pipe roll (Green, 1986). Hait is presumed, from his name, to have been Flemish. It is my invention to make him a close friend of King Henry. According to Nest’s grandson, Gerald of Wales, Hait was the father of one of Nest’s sons (named by him as William). Haith’s sister, Ida, and Nest’s maid, Amelina, are my inventions. It is not certain when Nest or Hait died. I like to think that Nest lived to see her foster-sons and nephews Cadell, Maredudd, and Rhys take Llansteffan Castle in 1146 and each, in turn, become king of Deheubarth.
It took the Normans over two hundred years to conquer Wales, unlike the one day in which they conquered England in the Battle of Hastings. Huw Pryce has discussed the notion of ‘Welsh’ as either ethnically or geographically defined (2008). He has considered the idea of a post-national identity, the eventual merging of Welsh and Norman through intermarriage, and the beneficial role of the Norman and Flemish immigrants in twelfth century Wales. In the Conquest series, I looked at the coming of the Normans to Wales from Nest’s Welsh point of view.
Gerda Lerner has pointed out that ‘men have defined their experience of history and left women out’ (cited in Richards, 2009, p. 158). In recent years, several historians (including Gwyneth Richards, Susan Johns, and Kari Maund) have set about rescuing Welsh noblewomen from the footnotes of history (as Richards puts it) and to do more than simply ‘add women and stir’ (Erler & Kowalski, 2003, p. 9). Richards has argued that historiography has had a male bias ‘which has hitherto rendered women more invisible than is warranted by the available sources’ (2009, p. 24). These relatively invisible women in the early middle ages are the territory of my historical fiction.
Some of the major events referred to in this novel, such as the sinking of The White Ship and the drowning of King Henry I’s heir, Prince William Adelin, are based on actual events. The main contemporaneous accounts of the wreck of The White Ship were written by Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury. Historians have been circumspect concerning the possibility of foul play in the wreck, as they must be, but I have taken fictional license and employed the suspicious circumstances of the wreck in my story. Stephen de Blois (who later became king of England) did disembark from the ship in the company of William de Roumare. Two Tironian monks also disembarked. A butcher named Bertold of Rouen was the only recorded survivor. William de Pirou was listed on the list of victims of the wreck but subsequently appeared twice at court before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. Beyond that, the ‘evidence’ discovered by Haith in this novel is my invention and Breri is a figure of my imagination.
After the loss of his son and heir, King Henry’s initial solution for the problem of the succession was that he and Queen Adelisa would have a son and, probably, that his illegitimate son Earl Robert of Gloucester would act as regent. When this hope faded, he focused on the aspiration that his daughter Maud would give him a grandson. Although the king’s nephew Stephen de Blois had extensive holdings in England and was married to a descendent of the English kings, there is no evidence that Henry considered him as a potential heir. Instead, iconoclastically, King Henry I attempted to put a woman, his daughter Maud, on the English throne. He did not get his barons in England, Wales, and Normandy to swear to support her as regent, but rather to support her as his heir. If Maud’s protracted bid to contest her cousin Stephen’s usurpation of the throne had been successful, she would have been the first woman to rule England, Wales, and Normandy in her own right.
It was very tempting to write about Maud herself, but in this book I wanted to stay focused on Nest and the Welsh events. There are a number of good fictional accounts of the extraordinary empress (see, for example, Elizabeth Chadwick’s Lady of the English).
The Dolaucothi Roman goldmine is an actual place. Medieval people were well aware of the Romans and their occupation of Britain. This was even more acute in the case of the Welsh who were descendants of the Britons who encountered the Romans, whereas the Anglo-Saxons arrived after the Roman withdrawal. Medieval people were surrounded by Roman ruins and the evidence of the occupation (walled Roman cities, villas, forts, Hadrian’s Wall, aqueducts, Roman baths, Roman roads). There were a number of medieval Welsh folktales and legends referring to the Romans (sometimes implying that they were an extinct race of giants), including the Dream of Macsen, based on a real Roman commander in Britain who was cast, in the story, as a Roman emperor. This story is referred to by Geoffrey of Monmouth and in The Mabinogion.
The crow that Haith operates in Chapter 13 was a real medieval engine of war. Jim Bradbury describes its operation at the siege of Ludlow in 1139, where Prince Henry of Scotland had to be rescued from ‘its clutches’: ‘This was an engine consisting of a sort of large fishing rod on a balance, with a hook on the end, which caught hold of the prince’. Bradbury’s source is a description of the siege by Henry of Huntingdon (1996, p. 66). Judith Green’s Henry I makes reference to it (p. 185), but in use by Waleran’s forces at Vatteville against the king. There are drawings that show the crow with a double grappling hook on the end, being used to break down a castle wall. It may have derived from a Roman marine engine of war known as the corvus.
England and Wales experienced thirty-five years of peace and prosperity during the reign of King Henry I. The king had to deal with sporadic rebellions in Normandy, especially after the death of his heir and toward the end of his life. However, after his death, there was constant warfare in England, Wales, and Normandy during the reign of King Stephen as he struggled against his cousin, Empress Maud, and her supporters. Some historians have dubbed Stephen’s reign ‘The Anarchy’, while others have argued that it was not as anarchic as some commentators claimed. Certainly, Stephen lost significant parts of the kingdom that King Henry I had ruled, including Normandy and large parts of Wales. The civil war between Stephen and Maud went on for nine years.
