There was an unseemly dash to the benches. Sigward led Matilda to the top and gave the signal for grace which Father Alors said at speed. Conversation lapsed. Sigward speared a dumpling and popped it into Matilda’s mouth. “This is a fen floater,” he said, “elsewhere they’re sinkers.” The ugly but heavenly smelling shape on one of the dishes was lamprey, the favoured half-eel, half-fish. “Nowhere better than in the Fens,” said Sigward. “You see…” but he decided to make a speech of it instead and thumped the table for attention.
“This Christmas,” he said to chewing faces, “we shall attend the king’s court and for the fourth, or even fifth time, I shall swear to uphold the cause of his daughter when he dies.”
There was teeth-sucking round the tables. As a potential ruler Matilda, Henry’s daughter, was three times disadvantaged. First, hardly anyone knew her; she had been sent away at the age of eight to marry a man of thirty-eight, the Holy Roman Emperor, and had spent the time lording it over Germans which had made her haughty and disagreeable. After the White Ship went down Henry had summoned her back and married her off again, this time to a fifteen-year-old – she was twenty-six – Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, who was her second disadvantage since Angevins were the Normans’ traditional enemies and spent their time slaying priests and eating raw meat. It had not been an easy marriage but it had at least produced a son, named Henry after his grandfather.
Thirdly, she was a woman.
“A pig in a poke we’ll be getting,” said Father Alors.
“A sow in a poke,” said Jodi.
Sigward waved a fat finger at them. “She has fourteen kings in her ancestry on her mother’s side, from Egbert King of the West Saxons to the Confessor himself, besides being a granddaughter of the Conqueror. And I have sworn to uphold her.” There was silence. “But it’s true that not everyone is satisfied with the succession and, indeed, we may be in for a time of Unrest.” He made it sound like an attack of indigestion. “And what do we desire for our dear ones in a time of Unrest?”
“Not Dungesey,” thought Matilda.
“We need a Safe Haven. A constant Food Supply and out there” – Sigward swung an expansive arm around the walls – “is the richest source of wildfowl, fish and, when it’s not flooded, pasture in the world. The Abbot of Ely demands a rent of three thousand eels from Wisbech and gets it. The Abbot of Ramsey feeds his pigs on wheat.”
He turned to Matilda and, as when they were alone, stopped being pompous. “I just wanted, my dear, for you to have a bolthole, somewhere to hide should trouble come, where you and our children will always be safe and hidden and have plenty to eat. I know it seems an odd little gift to you and it will take time to get used to its people – these are the true English and nobody is odder than they – but I shall feel happier that you have it.”
She tried to think of some favourable comment. “Well, it is certain nobody would ever find me here.”
His enormous face creased into delight. “Tomorrow we shall explore your island.”
But that night Matilda woke up in pain. Keeping her trunk and legs rigid she dug Sigward with her elbow. “Fetch a light.” When he came back she twitched off the covers. “Am I bleeding?”
“Yes.”
“Fetch Berte.”
As once before she lay in bed and heard him rushing down the stairs, shouting. She dare not move. She had always been healthy but now her body was out of control. “Sweet Mary, save me.” She could hardly get the words out for panting. “Dear God, Son of God, save me. Mother of God, save the child and me.”
Half the household came in but Matilda saw only her nurse. “Well?”
“It’s certainly a show,” said Berte, “but nothing else seems to be happening. One thing for sure, you don’t move from this place till that baby’s stuck firmer in its womb than it is now.”
“The Christmas court?” asked Sigward.
Berte shook her head. “The journey would bounce the baby out.”
* * *
Across the Channel in a hunting lodge at Lyon-le-Fôret somebody else had been feasting off lampreys, against doctors’ advice. “Always they made him sick and yet he loved them,” said a chronicler later. For once the doctors were right and Henry of England had taken his last mouthful of anything.
An archbishop, a bishop, three earls and two counts leaned over his bedside as he died to try and hear what he was saying. What he said or whether he said anything at all was about to cause the most vicious war in Christendom. Quite likely he was trying to wrench in breath, but even that will could not command the impossible.
Chapter 2
1135–1136
Matilda, the Empress, was as unprepared for her father’s death as anyone. When the news broke she proved how politically unreliable she was by being (a) far down in Normandy and (b) pregnant again.
Stephen of Blois was ready though. In the only completely perfected manoeuvre of his life he was across the Channel, hailed as king by the Londoners, had taken the royal treasury at Winchester and been crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. All this before Henry’s body had even reached England for burial.
After they’d got to know him people were to wonder how he’d been so efficient. Then they realised he had acted on the advice of his two supreme allies, his brother and his wife. Stephen’s wife Matilda – it was confusing that there were so many important Matildas around then – was not only the best general in his army but Countess of Boulogne which gave Stephen access to the most useful Channel ports. His brother was Henry, Bishop of Winchester, who was responsible for the ease with which the treasury fell into Stephen’s hands, and the cleverest plotter of the age.
Matilda of Boulogne had thrown, as it were, and Henry of Blois had caught.
And what of the oaths everybody – including the Archbishop of Canterbury – had taken to uphold the succession of Matilda Empress?
Stephen’s supporters said they’d been forced on them and didn’t count. Besides, they said, at his last moment Henry the First had changed his mind and nominated Stephen his heir. Here their pièce de résistance – literally their crowning argument – was Hugh Bigod, Henry’s seneschal, who swore on oath before the archbishop that Henry on his deathbed had disinherited the Empress and designated Stephen. (As the Bishop of Angers, one of the Empress’ supporters, was to say later: “How did he know? He wasn’t there.”)
But it was good enough for the archbishop who allowed himself to believe Bigod and anointed and crowned Stephen at Westminster Abbey on Sunday, December 22, 1135, though he dropped dead before the end of the year, which may have been a judgment on him.
Henry was still not buried. His body was at Rouen where parts of it were interred, the rest being cut up and salted for the voyage. The man who cut him up worked with his head wrapped in napkins to avoid the smell. He’d demanded a large sum for the job but, the chronicler said, “he had poor reason for rejoicing at his bargain since he met his death therefore. He was the last of many slain by Henry.”
There were three disgusting weeks before there was a favourable wind for England… “liquid matter oozed through the hides to be caught in vessels placed beneath the bier and carried away by servants fainting with disgust.” He was finally buried in Reading Abbey on January 4, 1136.
By then his nephew, Stephen, was King of England whether Henry had wanted it or not, whoever liked it or didn’t like it, because the mystical ceremony of anointment made him king, wrongfully perhaps but irrevocably.
Many didn’t like it. The first to declare rebellion was Baldwin de Redvers who attacked and occupied the new king’s castle at Exeter.
* * *
The latrines were filled in and re-sited every week. Every week the dung carts came for the manure from the stables and horse lines. Nevertheless after three months of continuous heat the siege around Exeter Castle had become so smelly that the stink of glue being brewed by the crossbowmen to laminate new bows was almost acceptable.
Now there was a new smell, a tiny
whiff, that came and went on the dawn not unpleasantly but faintly, a timid maiden of an aroma lifting up from the castle on a thermal from the River Exe far below. It reached the nose of the man with a bad back lying under an oak tree in the arbalists’ section.
Willem of Ghent was still half-asleep when the smell entered his dream, coming and going so subliminally fast that he was unable to grasp it, although he knew it was important. He sat up to sniff it again, cursed and lay back, forgetting everything in the pain that wrenched the left side of his lower back. This would have to be his last war.
“Bowman’s back” scourged the archer’s trade and none so much as the crossbowmen who lifted their own weight from a stoop every time they made ready to shoot. The priests said it was a curse on them for being crossbowmen in the first place.
Willem rolled sideways off his pile of bracken to ease on to all fours, the only way of getting off a bed without bending the spine. He looked round like a dog to see if he was being watched, but his company was asleep so, again without flexing his trunk, he walked his hands up the bark of the oak until he was upright. He spat. By the time the others were awake he had performed the morning’s requirements and could kneel with them without seeming difficulty to pray to St. Sebastian under the oak tree.
All over the camp mercenary sections, which were not allowed to cathedral services and to which no priest would administer, nevertheless prayed in their scores of languages. They communicated with each other in a form of dog Latin: to God they spoke in their own tongue.
“Et dimitte nobis debita nostris,” begged the clergy in the cathedral, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
“E pardune a nus les noz detes,” prayed the Normans.
“And forgif us our gultes,” said the English.
“Ende vergheef on onse sculden,” said Willem with his men to the image nailed on the tree. Jacopo had liberated it from some monks during the Sicilian campaign because they didn’t appreciate it. Really it was a bit of driftwood warped into the shape of agony and someone had exploited its lines and knots with paint to represent features and limbs. The quarrels which pierced the wooden body would each have caused fatal haemorrhaging and yet, as Willem knew, St. Sebastian hadn’t died of arrow wounds. He won a lot of money betting on how St. Sebastian died.
From the knoll where the trebuchet had been set up there came the first clatter and thud of the day as the business of lobbing boulders and decomposing animals into the castle bailey began.
Touching the knobbled feet of St. Sebastian for luck, Willem turned to face the castle which dominated his skyline and, at present, his life. The view still shocked him with its gaudiness. The red castle clashed with a forget-me-not sky; below, the Exe cut a winking, sapphire swathe through ochre sandbanks. Although he’d seen red earth before – iron in the soil around Ypres made it not dissimilar – he’d never seen it as it was here, splashed in squares between green and corn-yellow on the crazy Devon hills so steep that cattle grazed lopsided. Not that there were many cattle now.
As the camp woke up so did the flies, a more immediate enemy than the castle garrison, which within the hour would send every living thing into hand-slapping, ear-twitching, tail-swishing, skin-biting movement while only vegetation stood still. All day swallows flicked above the ground scooping them up, but their number remained limitless and unrelenting.
Willem’s men slouched into a line carrying their crossbows and ranged behind a straw wall which protected them from the castle’s fire. One or two slid their eyes, wondering why he didn’t join them, but Willem outstared them. He was the captain.
“At the loopholes.”
Each merlon on the castle’s crenellated top had a loophole and each of his men had a specific loophole to aim at; if he was on target his bolt went right through, with luck hitting a defender in the eye. If he missed the bolt hit the outside of the merlon and threw off a puff of red dust.
“Load.” Thirty backs stooped as thirty right feet went into the stirrup and sixty hands pulled back the hemp string until it could be slipped over the firing catch and thirty prods bent to breaking-point. Thirty crossbows lifted to an angle at the red-toothed pattern against the sky.
“Loose.” With a sound which reminded Willem of a man hawking and spitting, chwwt-pt, the bolts released at two hundred miles an hour and twenty-nine simultaneously disappeared. Only one bolt flirted in the still air with a tremor that widened into an irregular arc until it vacillated and, by pure mischance, hit something that moved across a crenel. Willem saw a barrel helm drop – a barrel helm, not the pot helmet of a man-at-arms.
Willem went down the line to a boy who was sucking the fingers of his left hand, moaning with pain and guilt. “Yes?”
The boy rocked back and forth but had the sense not to drop his bow. “I didn’t breathe properly, captain. I sucked in but I didn’t let it half out again.”
“And last night?”
“I was on the tiles last night, captain.”
“Was he,” muttered Jacopo on the boy’s right. “He invented it.”
“And?”
“And I was thinking of a woman, captain. You said the string always hits our fingers if we’re thinking of a woman when we shoot.”
“And?”
“And I’m sorry, captain.”
“And?”
“And you’re going to clout me, captain.”
It hurt Willem as much as the boy, who said: “Shall I try again, captain?”
“Stir the glue.” In this heat, with his hangover, the smell would be punishment. There was answering fire from the castle so Willem dismissed the men to cover. “But stay armed.” He and Jacopo ran for the oak tree and were sweating by the time they reached it.
“That boy’ll have to go back to being a page,” said Jacopo.
Willem quoted the bowman’s standby: “L’arc qui ne faut.” Death was the only archer who never missed.
“A good archer can go out whoring and still shoot next morning,” said Jacopo, who knew. “We have our reputation to consider.”
Willem grunted. They had a reputation and a contract with the king’s marshal to supply thirty crossbowmen for Stephen’s army. When old Paolo of Genoa had died they had been left with twenty-nine and Willem had promoted Alain of Arras from page to arbalist rather than take in an outsider.
The threat of demotion would be enough. Nobody in their senses would choose to return to that combination of body-servant, groom, cook and bolt-maker.
“I wonder how old Paolo is getting on,” said Jacopo. The old man had been a master-arbalist and loved by them all and they often wondered if he was still in Purgatory or now on his way to Paradise. They’d wanted him buried in the cathedral precincts, but the Exeter canons had refused to pollute their earth with a mercenary; eventually Henry of Blois had intervened and prevailed on his fellow-bishop to allow Paolo burial in the old cemetery against the Roman wall alongside the river.
“Will they be as reluctant to bury me? And where will it be?” Jacopo was suddenly overcome by Latin misery and fell down at the feet of St. Sebastian.
“Does it matter?”
“It didn’t,” said Jacopo, sitting up. “It’s beginning to.”
They heard the sound they’d been expecting. A horseman was cantering up the hill; as they’d also expected he was angry and his voice reached them before his horse. “Which of you filth shot that quarrel?”
Willem sat down beside Jacopo and the two arbalists leaned back in the scalloped camouflage of the oak’s shade, seeming to close their eyes as if bored – as indeed they were – by well-born knights who couldn’t tell the difference between a quarrel and a practice bolt. Their indifference was an aggressive gesture across the chasm of class. The knight hated the mercenaries because they fought for pay and not feudal duty. They hated him back because he was an amateur and when his forty days’ customary service were up he could, and probably would, go back to his manor and forget the war.
So Willem and J
acopo watched the prancing horse and rider under their lids and prepared to keep him simmering while behind him crossbows levelled at his cloak.
“What were we doing?” Jacopo was his most Calabrian. “Were we shooting at the enemy? Yes, we were. Mea culpa.”
“Not knights,” screamed the knight. “Men-at-arms only. You’re not to shoot knights at this stage.”
Jacopo nodded. “Men-at-arms only. We understand that now. Thank you for pointing it out.”
“But you’ve killed a knight.” He was young and they hadn’t seen him before; a new arrival. But they knew his type and temper. He could attack at any moment.
Willem opened his eyes. “Your father-in-law, was it?” That was the matter with the lad, with all the knights. They were so interrelated with the enemy they didn’t know which side they were on.
“What father-in-law? My father-in-law’s not in the castle.”
“Then what are you worrying about?”
But now Willem smelled again the trickle of smell from the castle and knew what it was. He stood up. “Piss off and play. We’ve got business.”
As the knight reached for his sword Jacopo coughed politely and shifted his gaze. The knight looked round and saw the crossbows. Self-preservation struggled with the need to save face and won, just. He yelled the knight’s eternal complaint against bowmen. “Cursed was the first archer; he was afraid and dared not approach.” The mercenaries had heard it before. He spurred his horse and, as he galloped off, swerved it so that its right shoulder hit the tripod over the fire and sent the glue in a hissing, translucent mess into the flames.
“Shall I shoot, captain?” yelled Alain and for a moment Willem was tempted. The knight had taken a better revenge than he knew; to make that glue they’d had to buy an ox at prohibitive price, slaughter it, cut out its heel tendons and soak them in lime and water for days. Hours had then been spent beating the tendons and pulling them into silky shreds to add to boiling fish glue until they had a fixative strong enough to hold together the laminated wood of the prod under drawing stress. He drew in a deep breath. “No.” Sooner or later there would be trouble between the barons’ men and the mercenaries, but he wouldn’t start it.
The Morning Gift Page 3