“I suppose you’d better show him in.”
The monk was small and common but had triumphant eyes. He spoke in careful Latin. “My lord, as an earnest of my loyalty to yourself should you grant my abbot’s request, I shall be happy to lead you to Ely.”
The king perked up. “Do you know the way?”
“My lord, these are my fens. I was born in them. I know the hidden causeway leading to Ely which the Conqueror used.” A traitor monk from Ely had shown it to the Conqueror, but Brother Daniel did not mention that. “I know many things which will be helpful to you.”
“You will be rewarded.” With his own hands the king poured wine and handed it to Brother Daniel, smiling.
* * *
“Do you mean to tell me,” shouted Matilda, “that we’ve endured your invasion and mess to be left with an unfinished keep?”
As always she cowed Fenchel, but the mercenary stood his ground. “It appears that the king needs my friend here to work on more important keeps. I shall go with him and later rejoin the king’s army and my men.”
The message from Ypres had been terse: “Crossbow reinstated.” The king’s need had overcome the king’s conscience.
“As far as I am concerned,” said Matilda, “you can go to Hell where you belong. What about my garderobe?”
“Oh Jesus,” muttered Fenchel. “Tell her she’s got a first storey and an undercroft. Tell her she can keep her stores in it. Tell her the shit-pipe’s corbelled up to the first storey. Tell her I’ll be back. Tell her goodbye, for Chrissake.”
“Ely will fall, my lady. Take care. Keep practising with the bow.”
“Get out.”
Outside Fenchel wiped his neck and the mercenary grinned: “That’s my lady.”
“Thank Christ she’s not mine,” said Fenchel. “I don’t know what you see in her.”
The mercenary didn’t either. The fact that he loved her was a constant surprise to him. She possessed no quality he admired, except courage. He didn’t love her because she was of the nobility or because she was beautiful, but because she was his completion. The way her hair grew out of her head, the way her mouth fitted over her teeth, the way she walked and talked and thought, made up a shape which fitted in every particular an empty space in his own soul. She was part of him if he never saw her again, which was likely, and if he never possessed her, which was likelier. He wasn’t going celibate on her account, but she was his lady. The place had been filled for better or worse and there was nothing he could do about it.
He made just one provision before he left the island. “If you ever need me for anything…” he said to Percy Alleyn, and the knight nodded.
* * *
On Edmund’s birthday Matilda despatched Father Alors and Percy of Alleyn to the Plantagenet court in Normandy. Alleyn was to size up the situation there and if, as her information went, Count Geoffrey was winning the duchy, Father Alors was to treat with him with a view to Edmund being brought up alongside Fitzempress in his household.
Edmund was young. Most young nobles didn’t go to the household of the lord who would see to their knightly training until they were seven. But the situation in England was getting out of hand, the war was almost on her own doorstep. It could move quickly. England was not safe. But if Count Geoffrey were to become Duke of Normandy and accept Edmund, the child’s Norman inheritance would at least be safeguarded. She would stay on in England and do her best to protect his lands over here. It was Edmund’s due that he be brought up in a princely household.
Percy of Alleyn returned, as he had left, on Turold’s ship, with a two-word recommendation: “Count Geoffrey.” The leaderless, quarrelling Normans could be no match for the Plantaganet. Father Alors had already begun the negotiations.
“Very well.” At least she could send with him the trusted household with whom he had grown up: Berte, Father Alors, Jodi and the others. Epona was to resume her Wealy existence on Dungesey. Percy of Alleyn would stay with her, Matilda.
She went with them to the coast to see them off. The anaemic silt made a limbo of non-colour which stretched into sea on which Turold’s ship looked insignificant, as if it would be sucked into nothingness. Edmund stood on Cradge’s sea-wall and for the first time said: “I don’t want to go.”
His hair had been washed and cut, he was dressed in calfskin with a gold and ruby brooch on his shoulder, his sword was of the finest steel in a scabbard of gold brocade. He should have looked a miniaturised adult, but the shaven neck showed a baby’s curve.
Matilda put her hand on his head. “Don’t make a scene.”
“I’m not going to cry.” A tear rolled down his face. The muscles of Matilda’s own face were so rigid she seemed stern. She might have disliked the boy. She took something from her belt and showed it to him.
“Look what Turold brought us.” It was a battered sprig of broom, its spikes and leaves so young they were still feathery. “It’s the plante genesta; Fitzempress’ father takes his name from it. When you’re safely arrived he’ll send me another. It’s a sign between us.”
He brightened: “Like a secret message?”
“Yes, and I shall come and see you as soon as I can.”
Turold shouted from the rowing boats in the creek: “The tide, lady.”
She thought: “If I kiss him I’ll be finished.” She blessed him and watched him stumble down to join the boat party. He became smaller and more vulnerable with every step. Fen pressed her head against Matilda’s knees and she gripped the dog’s scruff. “I’ve done my best for him, I can’t do more.” But she wanted to pelt jewels after him so that he moved in a rain of treasure and his mother’s love.
* * *
She couldn’t stay on Dungesey; its supplies and cesspit needed time to recover from accommodating Edmund’s household for so long. She must start overseeing her estates again; she would return quietly to her main residence at Hatfelde and see what was what.
As Matilda and her diminished household rode under the archway of Hatfelde’s gatehouse, a man was obstructing the other side of the arch with a scroll in his hand.
He stepped forward and a couple of men-at-arms, who were not her men-at-arms, ranged alongside him, and two more appeared behind her party so that it was trapped under the archway. The official began to read from the scroll in a high, thin voice: “‘To Matilda of Risle, late the wife of our beloved Sigward of Hatfelde.’” She saw against the light that he had a chain of office round his neck and was a tall, bony, bald man with the heavy lids of a reptile and was of punctilious and uncomfortable cleanliness. “‘Surrender to this, the king’s special clerk, the heir of the said Sigward that he may bring the said heir to me at Westminster…’” His fingers turned the king’s seal so that she could see it. “‘… or surrender yourself to explain why not. Signed by me in the presence of…’” The names of the witnesses came unhurriedly, Waleran of Meulan’s among them.
She thought: “Who betrayed me?”
“I am the said messenger, madam, Richard de Luci, and in the king’s name I order you to produce Edmund of Hatfelde.”
The tunnel echoed with the rasp of a sword leaving its scabbard and she clutched Alleyn’s arm just in time to stop him using it. She felt Alleyn take her hand and wipe his eyes with it as if it were linen. He would blame himself for not protecting her. “It’s not your fault,” she said. The mercenary. The mercenary had betrayed her.
“Do you produce the said heir, madam?”
She was all at once exhausted, but the game had to be played. “I paid the king one hundred marks some years ago for the wardship of my son,” she said.
“That agreement is no longer valid because of your treason. We have heard you have lately allied yourself to the enemies of the king. For the heir’s soul he must now be delivered to the king.”
She smiled with enjoyment. “The heir is out of the country and out of reach of the king.”
Richard de Luci was unperturbed. “Then, madam, you will be hostage for his beh
aviour towards the king, and for that of your knights and tenants.”
Chapter 7
1140–1141
Stephen’s hostages were part of his court, treated with as much honour as any other guest and almost as much freedom. They were seated at table in accordance with their rank, they took part in hunting and hawking, dancing and games, kept their own horses, dogs and servants.
Many of them were children who might well have been at court anyway since nearly all were noble and worthy to be brought up in the royal household. Certainly nobody was vulgar enough to mention that their presence kept their families loyal to Stephen.
The only suggestion they lived under threat came when one or other disappeared for a while. This happened when their family or a vassal opposed the king, at which the hostage was taken to the offending castle and paraded in chains with promises to hang him or her until the castle gave in – or didn’t.
The hostages returned from this experience sullen with humiliation but not fear. Everybody knew Stephen wouldn’t hang people of their station in life. As Peg of Grantley said to Matilda: “He hasn’t got the balls.”
Peg was a dreadful old woman, the bane of Matilda’s and Adeliza’s life with whom she shared a room. She had an unwashed, corpulent body, an even dirtier mind, chewed garlic for choice and suffered from flatulence. She was afraid of nobody, from the king downwards, and rejoiced in speaking her mind. Matilda seriously considered advising the king to hang her.
She and her grandson, William, were hostages for the good behaviour of Peg’s son, John the Marshal, who was in revolt in Marlborough Castle against the king. At one point during Matilda’s hostageship the little boy William actually was taken down to Marlborough, shown to his father standing on the castle walls, and a rope put about his neck. “We’ll hang him, marshal,” Baldwin Fitz Gilbert had shouted. John the Marshal had shouted back: “Then hang him. I’ve got the hammer and anvil to forge still better sons.”
When the child was returned to his grandmother and the story told, Peg had approved of her son’s sentiments. “Now he has got the balls.”
Matilda did not take her capture quietly; she still had money and connections and she used both to plead her cause. Her spokesman denied her alleged treason. Yes, she had visited the Empress in Normandy; it had been a social call and, anyway, had been made at the instigation of her father-in-law, Serlo de Luard. No alliance had been entered into. This was Matilda’s story in court and out. She told it so many times she indignantly believed it. Nobody else did.
It was sound economics for Stephen to dub Matilda a traitor; it meant he could take her lands into his own hands.
Although her estates were escheated, Matilda kept considerable personal wealth in a small chest of jewels. After her capture she had ordered Percy of Alleyn to lodge it with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, the most incorruptible order she could think of, at Clerkenwell, only to give up on presentation of her personal seal, which she kept hanging round her neck under her pelisse.
As the payments and bribes she had to make to further her case mounted it became obvious that some of the jewels must be sold. After a sleepless night, Matilda entrusted the transaction – and the seal – to her London tenant, Gervase of Holborn.
Her reservations were due to the fact that, as a merchant who was making a fortune out of the trading freedoms Stephen gave to his beloved Londoners, Gervase had admiration for the king. Nor did he owe the same feudal loyalty to Matilda which her landed tenants were oath-bound to give her.
But in his bourgeois way Gervase had a greater sentimental belief in the chivalry of the nobility than the nobility itself and was shocked by Matilda’s predicament. “A great lady like you,” he said, “accused of treason, practically put in chains. What can the king be thinking of?” Matilda was not practically in chains: she was being treated with liberality. However, she did not disabuse him.
Sympathetic and flattered by her need for his expertise, Gervase proved her greatest ally. He guarded her seal as fiercely as his own. He got a larger price for a smaller number of jewels than she would have believed possible and advised her on how to lay out the resulting monies. “Bribe the king’s physician?” Matilda had not conducted business like this before. Gervase of Holborn had.
“He has great influence and, please lady, it’s not a bribe. We are purchasing his goodwill.” They purchased a lot of goodwill, including that of the judges who were to hear Matilda’s case after Christmas. The more Gervase became involved, the harder he worked. He would even give up time to travel to wherever the court in its peripatetic progress round the country happened to be in order to report progress, or, more often, the lack of it. She in turn kept him up to date with wider events.
“The Earl of Chester has rebelled.” In the negotiations between Stephen and the King of Scotland, the earl, known familiarly as Ranulf Moustaches, had lost out. To keep the Scottish king from invading England on behalf of his niece, the Empress, Stephen had given him Carlisle. But Carlisle was Ranulf’s patrimony, his ancestral home, for which none of the king’s compensation could make up.
Ranulf had taken revenge. He sent his wife and his sister-in-law on a social visit to the castellan of Lincoln. After a decent interval he went to fetch them home again. Since he turned up unarmed and with only three companions, the gate guard let him in.
They knocked out the gate guard. They knocked out the castellan. They seized swords and axes off the walls and fought their way down to the postern where Ranulf’s half-brother, William de Roumare, was waiting with a force of armed men. In less than fifteen minutes they controlled the castle which controlled one of the most important towns in England.
Matilda’s lips twitched as she passed on the news. She thought it was funny. But Gervase was as horrified by Ranulf’s action against the king as he had been by the king’s action against Matilda. “What are we coming to? Let’s hope the king smashes the wicked man.”
With Gervase of Holborn in charge of her case, Matilda relaxed in the knowledge that her future was in the hands of God. For the first time in years there were no decisions she was forced to take. She’d had word from Father Alors – Edmund was safe and well-regarded in Fitzempress’ household. “And there’s one thing,” she told Adeliza, “with that damned Stephen gobbling up my revenues he’s not likely to give them all up again by marrying me off. I’m free as far as that goes.” And as the court moved to the Tower of London to prepare for Christmas she did feel surprisingly free, for a hostage.
Matilda had been touched by Adeliza’s insistence on accompanying her after her capture at Hatfelde. “There’s no need for you to suffer too. Go home to Normandy.” But for once Adeliza had been stubborn. “I’m coming with you, ’Tildy.”
They began to enjoy themselves. There was feasting every night while the cupboards in the hall and chambers were full of sweetmeats for those who couldn’t wait until then. The guests were walking showcases of jewels and fine cloth and crowds lined the streets to watch their excursions as they went to Smithfield for the horse-racing. There were parades of the Tower’s menagerie of cameleopards and elephants.
Stephen was at his best, giving expensive presents to guests and hostages, and bestowing largesse on the poor. Watching him showering silver pennies to the beggars on St. Lucy’s Day, Matilda saw he was completely happy, not just as the centre of adulation but because he was pursuing kingship as he saw it. If Stephen could have spent his reign lavishing infinite monies on infinite deserving subjects, he would have died content.
It was on the night after that the new man came. He arrived late to the table and walked to the king’s end to apologise. He stood out; in his own way he was beautiful. Though he was tall and well-built, his attraction lay not so much in his features, which were regular, as in his colouring; a fair skin tanned to apricot, blond hair, blue eyes and white, slightly backward-sloping teeth. It was the colouring of wholesomeness, of all honest and open things. Matilda would have believed anything he said as s
oon as he opened his mouth. He opened it: “My apologies, lord king. I was making sure my men are standing by in case you need them.”
Stephen smiled with affectionate patronage. “You need not be so solicitous. There’s unlikely to be trouble during the peace of our Lord’s birth.”
“I’m only a common soldier, lord,” said the newcomer. “I’m concerned for your safety, peace or no.”
There were grunts of approval in which Matilda nearly joined. The Normans liked to think of themselves as bluff, loyal subjects.
As the man walked back past Matilda their eyes met, and he smiled. “Who’s he?” she asked of Peg, who was sitting next to her.
“Eyes off,” said Peg. “He’s a mercenary.” Instantly Matilda’s interest faded as the man joined Jews, heretics, Saracens and commoners in Matilda’s category of untouchables. “A Fleming,” went on Peg. “Name’s Fitz Payn, though who Payn was, Christ knows. Commands a large force of brutes. Stephen finds him useful.”
“And he’s allowed to eat at the royal table?”
“Nowadays Stephen will eat with any scum who’ll provide a force for him. Fitz Payn’s not the only one at this table.”
The man was still looking in her direction so Matilda jerked her head to show her displeasure; she’d had enough of mercenaries.
However, their one brief eye-contact seemed to have set him on her trail. When she was practising with her crossbow in the butts, she heard his pleasant voice with its slight foreign guttural behind her: “That’s no weapon for a lady.” Immediately she walked away.
“That brute’s watching me,” she told Adeliza, who answered loyally: “Well, you’re a fascinating woman.” Matilda, who had little personal vanity, did not believe it. Fitz Payn was harassing her. She found herself riding knee-to-knee with him on a hunt. His hand would be suddenly on hers in a round dance. There were nights when Fen would get up and mutter at the door with her hackles up. She confided in the other lady hostages who shrugged: “It’s terrible. What can we do?”
The Morning Gift Page 14