The Morning Gift

by The Morning Gift (retail) (epub)

  He told Jacopo: “Keep them on alert in case. I’m going to the cathedral. And tell the pages to get another ox.”

  On the other side of the city from the castle, the cathedral precincts were royal headquarters. Flustered canons tried to drive away the market stalls set up on their lawns but failed. Stephen was favourable to the townspeople – it was they who had warned him a rebellious garrison had taken over the castle – and was compensating them for their wrecked and burned houses by allowing them to grow rich on trade.

  The young knight who’d knocked over the glue was complaining to a crowd of silk-cloaked barons. A figure detached itself from the group and came towards Willem. “You are a wicked Flemish mercenary, Willem,” said William of Ypres, “a disgrace to chivalry. Come and have a drink.”

  Willem jerked his head towards the castle. “They’re cooking with wine in there. I’ve smelled it. Twice now.”

  A knight of inexperience would have questioned his sanity but Ypres was a good practical mercenary, the commander of all Stephen’s mercenaries. “Not just flavouring the gravy?”

  Willem shook his head. “They’re cooking beans in it.”

  “And you don’t waste wine on beans.”

  “Only if you’ve run out of water.”

  Ypres shouted to his squire: “The marksman.” He turned to Willem. “We’ll test it out. I thought it was an everlasting spring they had there.”

  “Not in this drought.”

  “We’ll have that drink while we’re waiting.”

  The mercenary captains had chosen an evacuated stone house just out of castle range as their tavern and put in it one of their own veterans, Rotrou, to run it. Its most salubrious period was now, in the morning, when it had been swept and fresh rushes laid, when the grooves of the whitewood tables were still damp from scrubbing, when sunshine came through the open shutters on to empty stools and benches and it smelled, not unpleasantly, of stale wine and basting chickens.

  Its only customer at the moment was Fenchel, the siege engineer, who sat at a table in the corner, drawing plans on a slate and crooning one of his interminable, and filthy, songs.

  Ypres ordered wine and installed himself in the window seat to watch for his archer. Willem carefully dragged up a high stool on which he could sit with his back straight.

  “Back bad?”

  “It’s all right.” His commander didn’t press the question, but neither did he believe the answer.

  “It’s my last war, Willem. And you?”

  “You can afford it. I’ll have to see.”

  Their lives formed a sort of St. Andrew’s cross, now meeting in the peculiar democracy of their trade, but starting from opposite beginnings and continuing to different ends. William of Ypres had used mercenary life as a means to an end. Willem of Ghent had grabbed it for a lifeline. Neither belonged to the third category of mercenary made up of men who liked killing and being paid for it.

  The morning light bleached the tan on the commander’s face, emphasising the grey among the bluish stubble on his chin, which, like his body, was thickening. He looked ruthless, but respectably ruthless, like a merchant. He’d been born near enough to great wealth to smell it; he was a bastard by a former Count of Flanders and a wool-carder. He’d missed the title by a whisker after his father died and had tried to grab it by force, missing again and being forced into exile to avoid reprisals. Stephen had given him refuge – one of the reasons Ypres fought for him – the other reason being that Stephen had made him Earl of Kent in all but title. And Ypres wasn’t a man to quibble over Kent’s title when he was receiving Kent’s revenues.

  The man perched opposite him was thinner, taller, younger and poorer; his had been a lower birth than Ypres’. In fact, in Flanders there was no lower condition than that of itinerant weaver, which was what Willem’s father had been, a “blue nail”, one of the hundreds who starved at the gates of the rich wool merchants waiting for the chance to work a sixteen-hour day for subsistence.

  Clogs scraped through the rushes and Rotrou loomed up with two mugs of wine slopping in his enormous and only hand – the other had been sliced off by a Saracen. They drank suspiciously.

  “Why don’t you keep this sheepwash in the cellar?” grumbled Willem.

  “You think that’s bad you should taste the ale,” said Rotrou. He paid no concession to the fact that he owed his living to their charity and they didn’t expect any; nobody could look after a mercenary except mercenaries, nobody but a mercenary understood mercenaries. They were only really comfortable in each other’s company.

  “I’ve had hot wars,” said Willem. “A cool war Stephen promised me. Two estates in Normandy and a moist, green war with cold wine.”

  “Is that why you joined him? I heard the Angevins had offered for you.”

  “They did, but it seemed to me Stephen was the only ruler who understands towns.”

  Ypres was puzzled. “You like towns?”

  “No.” He hated them. His mother and sister had died of malnutrition in a garret of one. He and his father had chased rats away from their corpses all night before they could be taken to the communal grave and nobody at all had noticed their passing. But Willem, who fitted into no social structure, had recognised a new force. Successful trading was giving towns an economic power which had nothing to do with the power of the lords who owned the countryside. Their traders and craftsmen were becoming rich and forming themselves into guilds so rigidly and democratically organised they could ensure security for their members and their members’ widows and orphans. They were demanding liberties and charters to conduct their own affairs. Stephen – and Willem had no other regard for the king – recognised this new liberty and fostered it, which was why the towns loved him.

  Willem liked new things. He liked Fenchel over in the corner designing a better and more powerful trebuchet, who wanted to build a cathedral with flying buttresses to support the spans.

  “I seen it, I seen it,” crooned Fenchel, licking his chalk, “I been in betwe-e-en it.”

  “Towns are the coming thing,” he said. “Stephen understands that.”

  Ypres did not; the only power he could envisage came from owning vassals and land and collecting rent and tithes. “You’d better tell me your side,” he said. “Was it a knight you killed?”

  “When this is over I shall invest in town trade,” said Willem. If his back continued as bad as this he was finished. This war had got to pay. Ypres could pay for the next round. “This morning? It was a knight, a mistake and a practice bolt. Untipped. Whoever it hit has a headache. But if he was dead, so what?”

  “Bad feeling. The garrison must sue for terms soon and certain quarters think at this stage there’s no need to shed noble blood.”

  “Stuff their terms,” said Willem of Ghent. He believed in unconditional surrender, especially from a castle low on water.

  “Sir,” said a voice through the window.

  “Fenchel,” called Ypres, “come and show this bowman of mine whereabouts in the castle we can start a fire.”

  Fenchel spat into the rushes and lumbered over. “Destruction,” he said, “that’s all I ever get, destruction. Giants built that castle and you bloody pygmies want to burn it down.” If they’d asked him to shore it up, he’d have complained.

  “We don’t want to burn it down, Fenchel,” said his commander, patiently. “We want to start a fire to see what they put it out with.”

  Fenchel spat on to his slate and wiped a section clean with his sleeve. In a few strokes he had drawn a plan of the castle; it was his business to form a clear picture of it from spies and guesswork. “We reckon we dropped a rock through their stable roof last Thursday,” he said, “and we reckon they’ve put their horses under thatch there.” He drew a cross in the south-east corner of a square.

  Peering in through the window the marksman said: “Range?”

  Fenchel pursed his lips. “Ninety-five paces, ninety-seven?”

  “There you are, then. Put a
fire arrow in that and we’ll smell what we shall smell.”

  “Consider it done,” said the archer, and they did; a bowman didn’t earn the title “marksman” for missing what he aimed at even when he couldn’t see his target and had to work out a trajectory which would take the arrow up over the castle wall and drop down to an exact point behind it. They didn’t even go and watch him but stayed at Rotrou’s and had another drink, only emerging when, from beyond the houses which hid the castle, came a mixture of neighing and of filling buckets. They sniffed and smelled burning with a fruity, alcoholic depth to it. They were putting out the fire with wine.

  To celebrate they went back in and had another drink. Then they bought the marksman a drink and Fenchel another, after which they began to sing. They were still singing when one of Ypres’ men put his head through the window and said: “The buggers are coming out to parley.”

  * * *

  The parley took place in the cathedral. Though the emissaries from the rebel castle were so desiccated by thirst they had trouble in enunciating, their words had juice. They would surrender on condition that their men keep their arms and that there should be no sack, no looting and no reprisals by Stephen’s army.

  Briefed by Willem and Ypres that the castle was out of water, Stephen’s brother, the fat, cultivated Henry, Bishop of Winchester, advised the king to hang them.

  The emissaries were sent back to think again and come back with an unconditional surrender. They did not return; instead they sent out more persuasive emissaries, the goldenhaired wife and sons of the rebel Baldwin de Redvers. They were in better condition than the original parleyers, but they drooped prettily and pleaded for their lives and property in sweet, cracking voices.

  Watching the proceedings, Willem saw the king look towards the altar and wonder what God and His Son would think of him if he hanged the rebels as his advisers were telling him to do.

  Stephen’s father had been one of the rare cowards of the First Crusade. He had escaped from an Antioch besieged by Saracens – he slid down a rope forever earning himself the nickname of “funambulus”, rope-trick man – and came home to the reproaches of his wife, Henry of England’s sister, and everyone else in Europe. Eventually he was persuaded to return and get himself decently killed but the disgrace had stained his family. Perhaps it was then that Stephen became self-conscious and lost the all-of-a-oneness of other princelings and began to wonder, and care, what God and his fellow-men thought of him.

  Somebody else in the cathedral was watching the king – Robert, Earl of Gloucester, the best of Henry the First’s many bastards. He stepped forward. “My lord,” he said, “can it justly be said that these people are traitors? They owed their fealty to their lord, Baldwin de Redvers, and should not be held responsible for his rebellion.”

  There was a silence. It was an argument which struck at the king’s authority. A long time ago, in the stormy years of Henry’s reign, two rebels had stood before him and his barons had put a similar argument on their behalf. Henry had said, “Rubbish.” All English and Normans were his lawful men, he’d said. “Let their eyes be put out,” he’d said. And their eyes had been put out and England had gained long years of peace through it.

  Willem, who respected Earl Robert as a commander, began to wonder whose side he was on. The earl had absented himself from Stephen’s coronation and people had wondered if he was going to stand out for the Empress, his half-sister, or even himself. When he’d finally turned up at the siege of Exeter to support Stephen, the king had received him with honour and relief. Maybe, thought Willem, the relief was premature.

  However, Stephen’s face cleared. He shrugged off Henry of Blois’ restraining hand. “My lord, they shall have God’s mercy and mine. Let them go free without punishment.”

  For the first time in their alliance, he had disregarded his brother’s advice. More important, he had allowed rebels to get away with it.

  It was his first mistake.

  Chapter 3

  1136

  For the first week of her immobilisation Matilda was so frightened of miscarriage that she kept her legs and muscles clenched to form a prison of rigor from which the baby should not escape.

  In her sleep the muscles would relax and she would dream she was in a soft, black, porous cave through which water containing tiny fish seeped away, and she would wake to go rigid once more.

  She insisted her household attend Dungesey Church daily to pray for her welfare. “If I lose my place with Sigward so do you,” she pointed out.

  She herself prayed unremittingly to the Virgin Mary, promising her that if she was good enough to see this baby safely born she, Matilda, would build her a church.

  “Where?” asked Father Alors, always practical.

  “Anywhere,” snapped Matilda.

  “This island could do with a new one. I’ve never seen such a ruin. And as for the cleric…” Father Alors was obsessed by the ignorance of the island’s cleric, Stunta. At first it was because the man preached in English. But other atrocities presented themselves every day.

  “He’s army mad,” screamed Father Alors. “He tells your people more about their military duty than their duty to God.” Outside Matilda’s window someone was bellowing commands followed by the whirr of arrows. “He’s making them practise their archery. Women as well.”

  “It’s his duty, isn’t it?” If the fyrd, the army of the common people, were mobilised it would be clerks like Stunta who led the parish levies to war.

  “It’s not his duty to tell them God prefers the yew to the ash bow. It’s not his job on the feast of St. Simon and St. Jude to instruct them to honour only the former since St. Jude was the one who betrayed Christ. Nor that in the Exodus the people of Israel were scattered because the tailboard of their cart broke and they all fell out.” He regarded with disfavour the heaving bedclothes. “If you’re laughing, my lady…”

  But it was no laughing matter when Father Alors discovered that Stunta had a wife. He erupted into Matilda’s chamber, raving in Latin and clutching what little hair he had.

  “A what?”

  “Focaria,” screamed Father Alors. “A concubine. She washes his clothes, cooks his food and doesn’t go home at nights. They have children.”

  The very next day Father Alors was despatched to the Abbey of Ramsey, under whose control Stunta was, to ask for his dismissal. He enjoyed his stay among the comforts of the abbey guest house but achieved no success. “There is no abbot,” he told Matilda on his return. “They are in the process of electing one. We must wait and hope that in the meantime the dolt gets stuck with one of his own arrows. Qui gladio percutet, gladio peribit.”

  Never in her fifteen years had Matilda kept still for so long and as the days progressed she became bored and petulant. When Adeliza or Ghislaine or Flore tried to sneak off, being as bored as she was, she would demand: “Where are you going?” Adeliza, easily dominated, and Flore, financially dependent, would sigh and return but Ghislaine, who had lands of her own, would proceed on and out. Eventually they devised a shift system where one remained with Matilda and the other two went off – “to keep an eye on your island, my dear.”

  It seemed to Matilda they weren’t so much keeping an eye on it as enjoying it. “What on earth do you find to do?” They told her of punting silently through reeds, of shooting arrows into a canopy of ducks, of hawks with a plethora of prey.

  A letter arrived from Sigward, and Father Alors, the only literate member of her household, came in to read it. “‘I pray daily for the health of my beloved wife and the safe delivery of our heir. I send her a cloak of marten against the cold since women have less heat in their bodies than men, and a medicine against abortion mixed by the new king’s own physician from a remedy of Soranus who attended Queen Cleopatra.’” Father Alors, who loathed gynaecological details, read this with some asperity and Matilda listened with the embarrassment that Sigward’s un-Normanlike concern for her always aroused.

  Sigward went on
to explain that he had overcome his scruples about his oath to support Matilda Empress and was supporting Stephen, “since all great men do the same”. Father Alors and Percy of Alleyn, who’d also come in to hear the letter, got into a lengthy argument over the ethics of Stephen’s coup. Matilda became impatient.

  “Such rubbish,” she said, “of course the Empress could not rule England and Normandy. It is for men to command, not women. Now go and tell Berte to hurry up with my dinner.”

  As the winter became wetter and colder messengers got through less and less frequently and Sigward, thinking it wise not to be absent from court just now, came not at all. Matilda, encoffined in her solar, felt herself neglected. She began to decline into a paralysis of torpor. Like a dog chained up too long she began to spend more and more time asleep. The only positive thing she did was put on weight.

  Berte refused to share the ladies’ alarm. “A baby’s like pastry,” she said, “it needs quiet to rise in a warm oven. When she’s ready to perk up, she’ll perk. She won’t sink won’t Matilda of Risle.”

  So with less guilt they began leaving her for longer and longer. Even her page and maid could sneak out of her room without reproof, as long as Berte didn’t catch them. For the first time in her life she was left alone.

  But Berte was right. Matilda’s nature, like Nature itself, could not endure a vacuum and in it began a relationship which was to be of permanent value to her. It grew in the stages of Genesis: out of darkness air, then water, then creatures, then people.

  At first it was exasperation at the wind that rattled the shutters. This sound kept bringing her back from accidie like a fish-hook. It kept on, sometimes with polite insistence, sometimes with the violence of a demon denied entry. After a particularly bad night Matilda sat up and shouted: “Will nobody take those shutters off?”