Daughter of the Last King, page 4
part #1 of Conquest I Series
‘What then?’ asked Warwick.
‘I’m minded to jump ship from Curthose’s court in Normandy to Rufus’ here in England, to work alongside you. What do you think?’ Meulan said.
‘I would be overjoyed, brother. The Conqueror’s sons can find no condominium between them and their contentions threaten the gains of the Conquest. This divided kingdom where we are pulled and pushed between two warring lords is in nobody’s interest. They say every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation. But how would we protect our interests in Normandy and France if you were here?’
‘I can continue both for now. It will be a while before Curthose realises what I am about and by then we will have dealt with him.’
‘Dealt with him? It has come to that? What has caused this fracture between you?’
‘He threw me into prison unjustifiably over an argument concerning rights to Brionne and Bec, and I’d be mouldering there still if it hadn’t been for the skilful intercession of our father.’
‘You harbour a grudge from that?’
‘A grudge, yes, but a doubt also at the duke’s judgement and that doubt has grown since. The rebellion in England against King William and in Curthose’s favour in eighty-eight was a disaster. I’ve seen many instances of weakness in his rule in Normandy since.’
Warwick was silent for a few moments, his fingers steepled beneath his chin. ‘You think Rufus will gain the upper hand in Normandy as well as England?’
‘He’s been deliberately pursuing a policy of undermining Curthose’s rule in Normandy for the last few years. He is the superior commander in battle and has England’s wealth in his hands, whereas Curthose is permanently impecunious.’
‘Curthose is brave, successful on the battlefield. He’s proved that time and again.’
‘Yes, but it’s always a flash in a pan. There’s no following through with him.’
‘Rufus’ rule is not without its issues.’
Meulan raised his eyebrows and waited for his brother’s considered response.
‘The king shows no inclination to marry. At all. He has alienated the English churchmen beyond remedy. The country is well managed because of those who serve him, such as Flambard, FitzHamon and me, and not because of King William’s own wisdom. He’s only really happy in chain mail. He is aggression walking – when he’s well.’
‘Yes, this marries with my own observations and that’s why I persuaded Count Henry to accompany me here.’
I saw, even through the bald patch of my cloak, Benedicta, the avid interest with which Warwick leant forward at those words. ‘How far ahead are you looking, brother?’ Indeed, Benedicta, I had to force myself not to respond too by leaping up from my hide.
‘Far enough.’ Meulan allowed himself a small, grim smile. ‘Rufus has inherited his father’s belligerence, but none of his policy. Curthose is his mother’s son – too courteous and genial for his own good. Henry – now there are the qualities of the Conqueror melded together and breathing again.’
They rose from the trestle and strolled toward the door of the hall together. ‘Shouldn’t you be up and about your duties by now, Sir Haith?’ Meulan called back over his shoulder. I heard the brothers’ low laughter as they left and I fought free of my cloak. I went to wash my head under the spigot in the courtyard, sluicing off sleep but keeping all these words fixed and dry for Henry’s consumption.
At any rate, it has not come to any such serious thing as the throne of England for my Lord Henry and perhaps never will. King William, thinking himself about to die, took the step that Meulan and Warwick advised and appointed that famous Anselm de Bec as archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm is strongly urging the king to marry as soon as possible now he regains his strength day by day. The king assures his advisers he will do all they suggest, but that has not been his previous record. I’m not confident he will remember the fearful sweats of his sickness now he is in health again. If William does marry soon, he can get his own heirs for England so then Henry and I will be able to return to our less heavy responsibilities in Domfront, giving me the opportunity to visit with you before too long and look on your dear face, with those eyes that shine as brightly as your scoured pans.
Looking forward to your chronicle of Almenêches, fare thee as well as I fare, Benedicta, your loving brother Haith.
* * *
Almenêches Abbey, Normandy, Midsummer, St John’s Eve, June 1093
To my dearest brother, Sir Haith, from Benedicta, nun of Almenêches, with the affection of sisterly love, greetings and blessings. You must change your picture of me. I am no longer twirling pots and pans in the abbey kitchen. I am promoted to librarian and mistress of the scriptorium and furthermore, this has given me a better place to hide my copybook with your coded letters and copies of my letters to you. It is concealed within the wooden covers of the dullest, dustiest old text you can think of on algebra that is of absolutely no interest to anyone except moths and bugs. So it hides in plain sight in the library, under my sharp nose. Before proceeding to my chronicle, I must thank you, my giant of a ‘little’ brother, with the most enormous hug in imagination for your delightful gift of the arm-warmers. Though I am older and of course a great deal wiser than you, my head barely reaches your shoulder, so I must send you this imaginary hug low down at chest level and hope that your unkempt head, so far above, can take some notice. You cannot even begin to know how welcome those arm-warmers are in my new post since the library is a little chilly on the fingers, to say the least. But scarlet wool, Haith! For a nun. You are incorrigible. Yet you are right: they do remind me of mother, her marvellous bright weavings, and our old home in dear Bruges. Thank you so much!
I could not be inconspicuous with a pair of scarlet arm-warmers poking out of my habit, so I had to ask the abbess for permission to wear them. She was all kindness, admired their softness and colour, and the even greater gift, she said, of a kind brother. It is not God’s will, she told me, that her scriptorium mistress (yes, that is my new title, you oaf), that I should have frostbitten fingers. She does not know exactly who my brother is, of course, that you are in service to Count Henry. The abbey swarms with the abbess’ family, the Montgomerys, as it should, since their father was our first noble patron and is our benefactor still. I judged it best to be a little circumspect on your service to Count Henry, since the Montgomerys all hate him violently after he took the citadel of Domfront from the abbess’ brother, Bellême. I told her merely that you are a landless Flemish knight offering military service here and there to various lords and sending me news from the courts and households you pass through.
I thank God’s mercy King William has recovered and seen fit to appoint such a saintly man as Anselm as archbishop. And you have met him! I thank God also, that I am blessed with such a conduit of the greatest news of the realms of Normandy and England as yourself, to enliven my dull days here (though holy, of course). Tell me all about the archbishop, won’t you, in your next letter? I hear he is a very great man. I pray King William will heed counsel now from his religious men and take a wife. If only Duke Robert would follow suit here in Normandy, but I fear he has little concern for the present and future of his poor kingdom where there is constant warfare and suffering.
Do you really think your Lord Henry might be King William’s successor? I understood there was a mutual agreement between the two older brothers – that Duke Robert was William’s heir to England and vice versa, King William was Duke Robert’s heir to Normandy. Have they reneged on that truce already, or is it just the will of Meulan and Henry that it might change so? You write of Duke Robert and King William’s nicknames. Your Henry is nicknamed Beauclerc for his learning, I believe. A king must be a warrior as well as clever. I suppose Henry does have that capacity, from what I hear of his and your battle exploits in the Contentin? It would be a heavy thing to lift indeed if your lord should ascend to such greatness and responsibilities as the throne of England. How that would change your prospects and your sphere, Haith! If there is something I can do from my enclosed state here to help you both, I hope you will tell me so.
Each night after supper and before the service at Vespers, Abbess Emma and I talk a while, warming our toes before the good fire in her room. She was glad to hear the news of Anselm’s appointment. She tells me what she hears of Duke Robert from her brothers, Robert de Bellême and Roger de Montgomery, who are sometimes here at our visiting window talking with her. I contrive to walk past behind her when they come to the grille to catch a glimpse of those great men. Yes, before you tease me, I have said my penances for it! Her oldest brother Bellême is a distinguished and comely man, but rumour tells his soul is not as fair as his exterior. He seems the source of most of the trouble Duke Robert has to contend with in Normandy.
How strange that you and I, who are so dear to one another, find ourselves in two different camps – you holding tight and fast to your Henry, and me in a nest of Montgomerys. The abbess’ niece, Matilda de Montgomery, the daughter of another of her brothers, Philippe, recently entered the abbey as a novice. The night before her arrival, I applied grease to the hinges of our great bossed door since it had not been opened for over a year. Last time was when one of the oldest sisters died and her body was removed, so this was a more cheerful occasion. Abbess Emma produced her keys and unlocked the three locks, and two sisters hefted the door open, its wood creaking and protesting. All the sisters lined up to greet the new entrant – in silence, of course – but with kind gestures and eyes. The girl, Matilda, stepped in and startled when the great door banged shut behind her. I remember that moment for myself very well, when I entered the abbey just six years old, thinking I would never see you or the world again. I was so miserable at it I paled and threw up on the ground in front of all the nuns, and the abbess was so kind to me instead of beating me as I thought she might.
Come again soon to our visiting window, Haith. I am longing to see your leonine head framed there and be relieved of my tedium. Take great care of your lord and of yourself, with all the affection of my heart, fare well, Benedicta.
3
Becoming Norman
Through the glimpse of the outside afforded by the castle gateway, I watched Gerald FitzWalter’s troop cross the drawbridge and disappear into the early morning mist that was rising from the river and lingering in twisted, shifting swathes across the fields. Sybil’s voice rang out behind me, scolding. She gestured that I must come back into the hall. I moved past her with my eyes cast down, fixed on the mound of her belly.
The elderly man from dinner, the one with orange-grey hair, stood waiting for me at the trestle. Servants bustled around the hall, setting it to rights after the feast and departure of the men. Hounds wound around table legs, hoping to find a last scrap. Two maids, laughing, flung out a clean cloth between them to drape over the high table, disturbing dust motes suspended in the sunlight. A boy swept the dirty rushes into a pile. It was a familiar scene, but I did not belong here.
I turned to the tutor. Master Richard wore costly clothes, showy even for a clerk. His complexion and build, however, were the clerk’s: pale and feeble. ‘This way, Lady Nest,’ Master Richard gestured to the staircase, and I followed him up to the first floor and along the narrow passageway that went past the door to Lady Sybil’s chamber, then past my chamber, and then the empty guest room next to mine. On the other side of the passageway, opposite the guest room, we came to a studded wooden door opening into an extraordinary room.
Master Richard’s chamber was square with a large rectangular table in its midst. A fire cracked and spat in the hearth to the left of the doorway. Directly opposite the door, beyond the table, a glass vitrine sat on a narrow bench top and filled the length of the wall, beneath a large window. Inside the vitrine were hundreds of dry, pale brown insects of a type I did not know, like small crickets. A small arched opening to the right of the vitrine was roped off. Perhaps it was Master Richard’s own garderobe. Every other inch of wall space was lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of books, scrolls and piles of parchments.
Seeing me staring at the insect vitrine, Master Richard declared, ‘Say hello to my locusts. All the way from the Holy Land. I’m studying them.’
I tried not to grimace. They clambered over each other, seething behind the glass, but the most disquieting thing was that the glass was thick enough to almost entirely muffle the chirping racket that I knew they must be making. You could simply see the sound of them, and I heard it later in my dreams. Master Richard loved his locusts. Sometimes he would lift the lid a crack to feed them, and then their rustling and bowing would invade the room and they would trample across each other in a frenzy to devour their food.
Master Richard chuckled fondly, watching them as though he were mooning over a newborn baby. ‘If I were to let them out,’ he told me gleefully, ‘they would swarm and fly great distances, consuming all the green vegetation wherever they settle, stripping the fields and laying all to waste.’
They are like Normans then, I thought.
‘It’s also possible to eat them,’ he said. ‘Quite a delicacy.’ He stroked the glass top, stupidly licking his lips at his paramours. Above the tank, a window flooded the room with light and gave a view onto the top of the wooden palisade of the outer bailey and over that I could just glimpse the rolling green countryside beyond.
There were two chairs facing each other across the table. Richard took his seat with his back to the locusts and I sat opposite him, trying to ignore them. I trembled at the thought that he might crack the lid too wide one day and they would fly out in a brown clicking cloud and devour us in a thrice, leaving just our grinning skeletons here, the bones of our fingers turning the pages, the books now full of holes and lacy shreds.
With Master Richard, I learnt French, French history, a little Latin, and a little mathematics. Slowly and patiently, he taught me to read. He was a good teacher although I found his disquisitions on Carolingian and Capetians kings in France sometimes tiresome. His speech was constantly interspersed with ‘ers’, so that I had to quell my impatience for him to get to his point.
Master Richard had me copy out a genealogy of the Montgomery family. Sybil had five brothers and two of them, Robert de Bellême and Roger the Poitevin, had married heiresses who would each soon inherit a county in France, greatly enriching their husbands. Arnulf evidently had in mind to play the same trick by marrying me. I resolved to do what I could to resist such a marriage that would lend credence to Arnulf’s rule of my father’s kingdom and mitigate against the Welsh resistance to the Norman occupation. I saw on the genealogy that one of Sybil’s sisters had died in childbed and another was abbess of a nunnery in Normandy.
‘The girl is obsessed with genealogies,’ Master Richard told Lady Sybil in a humorous tone, thinking to make fun of me.
‘Yes, well, unlike you, Master Belmeis,’ Sybil responded in her usual acid fashion, ‘she has one.’
When Master Richard was busy elsewhere and left me alone with parchment and ink, I occupied myself with something more useful than Norman genealogies: drawing up a genealogy of the Welsh Royal Families. There was sad reading here when I contemplated it. The Normans were invading our bloodlines as well as our lands and there were few of us left to eject them. I thought sadly of how my mother used to keep a family chart rolled and wrapped under her bed, along with her large bible. She brought out the family chart ceremoniously whenever the occasion warranted, marking up new births, marriages and deaths. Even a death could be a delight to her because it gave the opportunity to make a new mark on the chart and remind us all of our lineage.
The chroniclers called my father the last king and wrote that with his death the kingdom of the Britons fell to the Normans, but my infant brother Gruffudd, concealed in Ireland, was the edling of Deheubarth, the rightful heir and there was a Welsh king in Powys still – Cadwgan. Master Richard, however, told me Cadwgan was a ‘client king’, not a real one, owing allegiance to the king of the English and my father had been the last independent king in Wales. I thought Cadwgan would look mightily askance at that interpretation. Seeing the mere handful of surviving Welsh royalty on the pedigree, I saw how fragile we were, how vital my marriage to Owain ap Cadwgan was. What could I do to bring it about?
* * *
Here I insert the first extract from the notes of Gerald FitzWalter, castellan of Pembroke Castle, my father’s former llys and now usurped by Arnulf de Montgomery.
* * *
from Gerald FitzWalter’s Day Book
* * *
Pembroke Castle, Michaelmas, September 1093
Up in the dark this morning with so much to do, the rain thrumming on the thatch and the waters rushing round the foot of the castle. The men on duty are coughing and cursing as I undertake my regular round on the battlement walkways at first light. The damp seeps into everything. My throat is perpetually sore and yet I love it here. My place, my first command. Everything I do here comes from my own efforts.
The rain began to clear with the first glimmers of dawn. Smoke rolls lazily from the hall’s smoke-hole, a pungent black bloom staining the pale sky. Looking out across the fields, I wonder every morning at the stolidity of cows, as they lie stoic in the drizzle. A boy in the courtyard below chases a goat escaped from its tether and slips round a corner on horse dung, swearing like a well-practised soldier. He’d best catch that goat before it gets into the cook’s vegetable patch or he won’t be able to sit down for a week. A loud squawking catches my attention. One of the castle cats has found a nest on the riverbank and runs past with a small bird protesting desperately in its mouth. Draggled pigeons crowd beneath the castle buttresses, where they have been sheltering from the rain. They coo and jerk their heads, oblivious to the fate of the cat’s catch.
