The Anarchy, page 5
Having dragged Berold far enough to be out of earshot, Haith dumped his burden and stood panting, the rope in his grip. ‘Be silent!’ Haith leant over the squirming sack and pricked his knife into what he thought must be the vicinity of Berold’s throat. The thrashing, trussed man went still. ‘No harm will come to you if you are silent and still. Good. Get to your feet. Try anything and I’ll slit your belly and you’ll see your own tripe.’ No doubt, Berold could hear the Flemish twang of Haith’s accent and would know the fearsome reputation of Flemish mercenaries. For once, Haith’s provenance told in his favour. The man lumbered to his feet, breathing noisily, and Haith pulled him further into the undergrowth, until they reached the clearing. Haith’s grazing horse looked up at their approach and skittered nervously at the sight of the sack with legs.
‘Sit! And remember, silent!’ Haith roped the seated man to a tree, knotting it brutally so that Berold grunted with the cut of the rope into his belly and forearms. Haith bent to slice a square opening in the sacking to reveal Berold’s eyes, nose and mouth. The butcher glared fury but tempered his expression at sight of the knife so close to his face.
Haith let Berold look for a moment at him, at the mossed trees surrounding them and the dark pond in the centre of the clearing, at the massive hound that obligingly bared his teeth in a vicious growl. Taking his time, Haith sauntered to the horse, poured a cup of ale from a bladder suspended from the saddle, and regarded the trussed butcher.
‘Do you know who I am, Berold?’
The man shook his head. ‘No, master, no. What have I done to offend you? Is it money you want?’ He looked confused, as well he might. Haith did not have the look of a bandit of the woods.
‘Not money, no Berold. Information. If you can give me satisfaction, I can let you go about your business and no harm done. I am a sheriff of Duke Henry, Berold.’
The man’s red, sweating face paled. ‘I mean no offence to you or the great duke, sir.’ No matter if it was king or duke, England or Normandy, Henry’s stern, unrelenting character toward wrongdoers was known everywhere.
‘Of course not. Do you know why I am here, asking you questions in this unfortunately rude manner, Berold?’
Berold looked all around him again, as far as his constraints would allow. It was evident escape was not an option and that some answer must be provided. ‘Perhaps it’s to do with that ship, is it?’
‘Ah, I see you are clever, Berold,’ Haith said pleasantly. He took a sip of his ale. Then he moved back to Berold swiftly, crouched and gripped the butcher’s chin through the sack, putting fear into his eyes. Haith tipped Berold’s head back a little, brought the beaker to Berold’s surprised mouth and allowed him a gulp of the ale. ‘Yes,’ Haith insisted quietly. ‘I need to know what happened that night, the night of the wreck of The White Ship and the drowning of the duke’s heir. It seems, by God’s providence, you were the only survivor of the tragedy, lucky Berold.’
‘Yes! I am a lucky man.’
‘You are, indeed.’ It went against Haith’s innate kindness to put fear into a man, but he knew he would get nothing from him without terror. He had considered pushing Berold’s head into the waters of the pond until he told the truth, but now that he had the man’s measure, he dared not loosen the butcher’s bonds. Haith was big, but Berold was bigger, and given a chance, might overpower him, although a lot of his size was lard, whereas Haith was lean, war-hardened muscle. ‘You see, I was there myself, Berold, on the ship.’
Berold nodded his head up and down, trying to appease his captor.
‘I saw two lords disembark,’ Haith recalled, as if he were telling a tale. ‘Count Stephen de Blois and Count William de Roumare and thought, given the rowdy passengers and crew, that they might have the right idea, so I followed them.’
Berold nodded enthusiastically again. ‘You had a lucky escape, sir, indeed! All those poor souls drowned in that cruel, grey sea – three hundred in all, they say.’
‘So they do.’ Haith drew an enormous serrated hunting knife from his hip and began to needlessly sharpen it on a whetstone. Berold watched him, his pallor growing and his eyes widening. A man of Berold’s profession would know that this was a particularly good instrument for cutting flesh.
‘Sir, do you mean to murder me after all that I survived the long night in the cold waters of the British Sea, clinging for dear life to a splintered spar? Don’t do it, sir! I did no harm. I’m just a poor butcher.’
‘Yes, you are. So, why is it that you were aboard that ship? A ship full of nobles and the sons and daughters of the duke?’
‘For provisioning,’ mumbled Berold.
‘Come, Berold. I don’t have time for lies. Let’s make a deal. For each lie you tell, I will cut off a sliver of your flesh. So, provisioning is it? That is one lie to begin with.’ Haith moved the knife swiftly toward Berold’s fat thigh.
‘No!’ the butcher screamed, his voice surprisingly high for such a large man. Haith arrested the movement of the knife, poising it dramatically with its tip touching Berold’s brown hose. ‘I’ll tell no lies, sir. There was a man that sent me onboard.’ Sweat was trickling unimpeded into Berold’s eyes and from the furrow beneath his nose into his mouth.
‘A man. That is not terribly informative, Berold.’ Haith carefully slit a long gash in Berold’s hose, close to his groin. He touched the tip of the knife against Berold’s exposed white skin.
‘No!’ Berold’s efforts to squirm away from the knife only caused his tight bindings to carve into his tender flesh. ‘I didn’t know his name, but I saw him in the company of the lord called Ranulf de Gernon.’
Haith concealed his surprise. He had been expecting Stephen de Blois’ name to be on Berold’s lips, not Ranulf’s. ‘You are sure of that?’
‘Yes, sure.’
‘What did he look like? This man.’
‘Very curly brown hair. Unusual scar cutting straight down through his left eyebrow, leaving it bald…’
‘De Pirou? Was his name William de Pirou?’ Haith asked. He recognised this description of the king’s dapifer. De Pirou and Haith had served together in battle in Normandy on several occasions. He had, himself, recently seen de Pirou in the company of Ranulf de Gernon at Henry’s court, and been suspicious since de Pirou was listed on the victim list of The White Ship and yet stood breathing and laughing at Westminster. Nobody else had noticed the discrepancy.
‘I never knew his name,’ Berold responded. ‘I saw him treacherously abandon me to the sea’s embrace when he took the raft, though.’
‘The raft?’
‘Yes, there were two small rafts onboard. We were supposed to scuttle one and escape in the other. The man – de Pirou you say – did scuttle one, but then he left without me. Left me there to drown.’ Berold was indignant and Haith tried to keep the contempt from his face. For whatever reason, in whatever way, these two men, perhaps acting on commands from Ranulf de Gernon then, had deliberately caused the drowning of so many young nobles of Henry’s court. It was unthinkable, and yet it had happened.
‘And why did the man get you onboard, Berold?’ Haith watched resistance crystallise on the butcher’s face and knew he would only get at this truth by actually hurting him. Swiftly, consciously avoiding any blood-letting that might be life-threatening, he pushed the tip of the knife into Berold’s soft groin and held it there for a few seconds, while Berold screamed. Haith withdrew the knife.
Berold panted and slumped against his ropes. ‘Please, please …’
‘Why, Berold? Or the knife goes in again, and deeper. Will you have me joint you like your carcasses on the stall back there?’ Haith held the bloodied knife in Berold’s line of vision.
Berold’s feet scrambled in the dirt, desperate to move away from the implement of his pain, but he was held fast and could go nowhere. ‘I repent of it. It was a dreadful thing. I owed money.’
‘I don’t need to hear your reasons, Berold. Focus. I just need an answer, quickly.’ Haith slowly wiped each side of the knife against Berold’s hose, high on his other thigh.
‘No! Please, master! Don’t! I was paid to drown a man.’
‘Drown a man!’ Haith exclaimed, incredulous. ‘And you drowned three hundred in error instead?’
‘No!’ Berold wailed. ‘That wasn’t my fault. The crew were dead drunk. The captain was drunk. That was part of the plan. To cover up our actions. We put barrels with heavily fortified ale and wine aboard. But the crew, those sots, drove the ship onto the rock and it foundered. That wasn’t the plan.’
‘Go on…’ Haith waved the knife before Berold’s wet face, slick with the butcher’s tears, snot and spittle.
‘I was paid to drown a man in a barrel of water and throw him overboard, like it was an accident at sea.’
‘What man?’
‘I don’t know who he was. That was de Pirou’s job. To point him out to me and get me alone with him.’
‘Well, and did you do it? How could you commit this murder on a ship with so many people on it?’
‘We had the barrel ready below-decks, concealed from the oarsmen by the freight and the horses. All the nobles were above-decks, swilling wine. De Pirou got our mark down to us on a pretence. I had him head-first in the barrel sharpish, kicking and twisting, and then he stopped. So it was accomplished. De Pirou was supposed to help me get him out of the barrel and sling him overboard, but then the pilot interrupted us.’ Berold’s account ended on a whine, as if he had been terribly wronged in this sorry tale.
‘And then what?’
‘I don’t know why the pilot was there. Came looking for wine, most likely. He took in the sight of the legs sticking out of the barrel, looked both of us full in the face, and then de Pirou stuck him.’
‘Killed him? The pilot?’
‘Yes.’
‘These legs, this man you murdered, Berold, tell me more. It was a young man?’ Haith asked, wondering if it had been Prince William, or Earl Richard of Chester, perhaps, who had met such a humiliating death. Could Earl Richard be the reason that Ranulf was implicated? Ranulf’s father had inherited the earldom of Chester after Richard’s death in the wreck.
‘No, not a young man.’
‘Most of those onboard were young, Berold. Was it the prince or an earl? Tell the truth!’ Haith warned him.
‘It is the truth!’ Berold wailed. ‘He was sixty or so, scrawny, a clerk, I’d say. It was an easy job.’
‘A clerk!’ Haith frowned. ‘The only clerk I know of onboard was Gisulf. Was that his name?’
Berold did his best, in his constrained position, to shake his head. ‘I didn’t know his name.’
‘Well, what then?’
‘The ship had no pilot,’ Berold moaned sulkily. ‘It struck the rock and the great ship was holed! Being so large and overloaded, it tipped so fast and horribly and we were all swimming or sinking. I thought rescue would come, for sure, from the shore or the king’s boat. They must have heard us all screaming.’
Yes, thought Haith, bitterly, such a course of events would explain why the ship had veered so far off course as soon as it had left the harbour. Those on the king’s ship and on shore, like himself, had, indeed, heard cries from the water, but assumed it to be a continuation of the celebrations of the prince’s party. It was a dark night, and it was only in the morning when shards of the shattered longboat, and then, eventually, bodies began to drift ashore that they understood what had happened in the dead of that moonless night.
‘I saw the prince on a raft later when I was in the sea, holding onto that spar for dear life,’ Berold volunteered. ‘I knew de Pirou had cut the lashings of the raft and the prince would soon be done for, in any case. I saw the raft go under with him. He was calling out to a woman who was in the water: “Mathilde, Mathilde!” And she was screaming to him, “Will! don’t leave me, Will!”’
Mathilde and Will. It had to be King Henry’s illegitimate daughter, Mathilde, countess of Perche, and his legitimate heir, William Adelin – the throne-worthy. King Henry was struggling to recover from the grievous blow, and Haith doubted he would ever truly succeed. So, Ranulf de Gernon, perhaps, had paid de Pirou to murder Gisulf, but the plan had gone hideously awry. Stephen de Blois had not been the culprit, then. Yet, it still made little sense.
‘Is that it? That was the whole plan?’
‘Yes,’ Berold was sobbing. The pain of his wound was throbbing now past the first shock of its infliction, but Haith noted it was not bleeding copiously. The butcher would survive it, unlike his drowned victims.
There was nothing more this butcher could tell. It was de Pirou that Haith needed to hunt down to discover Ranulf de Gernon’s motivation for murdering the royal clerk, Gisulf. He wiped his knife on the grass and sheathed it. Berold’s own conscience at being responsible for the deaths of three hundred people should mete out fair justice to him, and if it did not, then God would be his final judge. Haith stood and walked to his horse, checking the girth strap and stoppering his ale bladder, before mounting. The mastiff got reluctantly to his feet.
‘Sir? Sir?’
Haith turned his horse in the direction of Tiron Abbey. He would send a fast messenger to the king with news of the Beaumont sisters’ marriages when he reached Tiron. He planned to say nothing to Henry about his enquiries into The White Ship until he had the whole story.
Berold’s cries grew fainter as Haith spurred his horse on, keen to escape from the gross corruption of what he had heard. That those two men, Berold and de Pirou, should be the only survivors of such a horrible tragedy was more wicked than he could bear to think on.
5
Kin
The ride to the village of Caeo took several hours. Gruffudd was restricted to Caeo and its environs by order of King Henry after my brother’s rebellion seven years ago. I left Amelina and Ida at Cardigan with Robert and travelled east with four guards. The road inclined gently all the way, so that we were obliged to rest our horses on occasion, whenever we passed through a village. I noticed that the people all around were in great poverty and gazed with hatred at the Norman soldiers accompanying me until I spoke to them in Welsh. Then they softened and told me something of their tribulations. ‘You be the sister of the king,’ one old man gasped when I gave him my name. He doffed his cap and his wife made a clumsy attempt at a curtesy.
‘The king?’ I answered, a little confused at what he meant. ‘My father was King Rhys ap Tewdwr.’
‘Aye, and you be the sister of King Gruffudd ap Rhys.’
I smiled my agreement and did not show my consternation. King Henry would not be pleased if it should come to his ears that my brother was named king, whether Gruffudd encouraged it or not.
‘God bless him and his queen for their charities.’
I turned back to the elderly couple. It was the woman who had spoken. ‘You speak of Gwenllian ferch Gruffudd ap Cynan, I think?’ I named my sister-in-law.
‘Aye, my lady. They saved our children from starvation and I thank them in my prayers each morning and night for it.’
I had brought gifts of silver and food with me from Cardigan, as much as I could stuff into my saddlebags away from the watchful eye of my husband, thinking that my brother and his family would be suffering privation. If they were distributing largesse, what was the source of their wealth? I did not wish to linger in the village, causing too much wonder and gossip that might get about all over the place and would have to push on to find the answer to my question. Our horses were watered and rested, and we mounted again for the last leg of our journey. The road continued to rise through thriving woodlands as we approached the mountains. Ravens called from trees and rocks. Buzzards circled high ahead. Nearing the village of Caeo, I gazed at a vast mountain region that extended for miles to the north, looking for all the world like a petrified, storm-tossed sea of rock. Specks in the far distance were sheep and sure-footed ponies grazing on the rugged terrain. The village of Caeo was located at the confluence of Afon Annell and Nant Frena and was traversed by an old Roman road, now used by drovers. We had arrived on market day but as we rode slowly past the stalls, waiting for people and carts to get out of our way, I could see that the wares on display here were sparse compared to the opulence that I was used to seeing in the markets of the Norman-held towns.
A baker pointed out a large residence to us as the household of my brother and we rode into its yard. A fair-haired boy ran out to gape, alerted by the sound of our horses’ hooves on the cobbles. ‘I am looking for Gruffudd ap Rhys,’ I called out. The boy continued to stare open-mouthed at me. I repeated my request. ‘Gruffudd ap Rhys. Do you know where I might find him?’
One of my soldiers leant down and gripped the boy by the ear. ‘Answer the lady, boy!’
I heard the sound of a sword drawn from a scabbard by someone concealed from my view behind the horses’ great flanks. The sword whipped around and lay in threat against my soldier’s throat. ‘You will take your hands from my son,’ declared a quiet but commanding female voice and my man let go of the boy’s ear, sharpish.
I craned around the horses for a view of the red-haired woman who stood there.
‘Gwenllian?’ I queried.
‘Nest!’ she cocked her head in equal astonishment.
‘Lady,’ muttered my soldier, still at threat from her blade. She withdrew it from his neck.
I jumped from my horse and ran to clasp her in my arms, and she returned my embrace, laughing. I was delighted to see her. I held her face in my two hands, marvelling anew at the rich, dark red of her hair that swirled wild around her, uncovered by any head-veil. ‘Are you well? I see you are well. And this is your son?’
‘This is Cadell. Don’t you remember him?’
