by E. A. Haltom
“Yes, madame,” Gwendolyn replied coolly.
Eleanor grimaced, plainly disgusted with the actions of her youngest son although she still refused to condemn him publicly.
“Now that he has lost his wizard and given up the idea of obtaining Caliburn, he has abandoned his rebellion here in England. Penhallam is safe. Your gamble has been won.”
Gwendolyn stepped back between Nigel and William, suddenly wishing she could be far from the Tower, the Plantagenets, and everything to do with the court, schemes of war, control over men and their swords. She found herself grateful that Cornwall’s lands stretched so far to the west and were so infrequently visited by the court or its representatives.
Eleanor nodded to Hubert Walter, and he stepped forward and handed each of them a small purse of soft kid leather.
“This is a small amount in return for the sacrifices you have risked, but I’m sure you are aware that every penny is needed to purchase Richard’s return. Robert shall succeed to the title of Baron that was held by his father, and to the privilege of Restormel on behalf of Richard, King of England, in place of his brother, Walterus de Cardinham.” Eleanor held out her hand again and Walter de Coutances stepped forward, handing another scroll to the queen. “This is my writ, sealed by my own hand. As for Roslyn de Cardinham, her fate lies in the hands of Robert, her new lord. You should find her attitude toward you much improved upon your return.”
Gwendolyn nodded again, the news falling flat on her ears. Even personal victory over her sister-in-law felt petty next to the responsibility of the sword that she now carried. She took the scroll from Eleanor and added it to the one she carried already in her cloak.
Eleanor looked them over again with one last, aloof glance and announced curtly, “You have my leave.”
On a crisp November morning three days later, four horses carrying three unremarkable men-at-arms and two children passed through Newgate, heading west on the Watling Road out of London. They carried light provisions, the standard rough weapons of landless fighting men, and their horses, while well-fed and prancing lightly in the cool air, did not mark them as men of rank or exceptional wealth. A nondescript hound, black with flecks of gray around its muzzle, loped easily ahead of the group, a self-appointed leader. Upon closer look one might have found the red-headed rider, whose thick waves of hair stopped in a sharp edge just below his chin, more handsome than the others despite his deep auburn locks and the raffish scar across his cheek.
Gwendolyn looked to Michael, riding beside her on a stout pony, and smiled. He had nearly cried in her arms when he had first seen her in Mae’s tavern after she had shorn her long braid. But she would take no chances on her return trip to Penhallam. The sword was too precious. She could travel more easily and without threat of harassment if she took on the appearance of a man. And so she had handed her knife to Mae and asked her to do the honors. The effect had been immediate, and William had nodded with approval when he saw it. She had no idea what Robert would make of it when he saw her, but her first concern was safe passage to Penhallam. Her changed hair was only one of the reasons that she put Robert out of her mind for now. Her husband, gone for so long, waited for her now at Penhallam, as she had waited for him, and she could only assume that the years would have changed him as much as they had her. She wished that she looked forward to seeing him again, but she carried the news of Walter’s death, by her hand. She shuddered with a deep breath that failed to relax her thoughts; at least Walter’s treachery to the king had been well known.
Ella rode with Nigel on his horse, sitting in front of him in the saddle, and she kept up a steady stream of chatter and songs through most of the morning, frequently reaching her hands up to play with Nigel’s face or to make braids in his horse’s thick mane.
William pulled his warhorse alongside Gwendolyn and Bedwyr, looking straight ahead into the long shadows cast by the autumn morning sun.
“What will you do when we get back to Penhallam?” he asked.
She raised her eyebrows and sighed.
“I don’t know,” she finally answered, completely honest. “It’s a blank slate, now. The sword…” Her words trailed off.
William nodded, continued staring ahead.
“There was no good time to bring this up before,” he began, and she turned to regard him with a curious expression.
William cleared his throat and continued. “When I nearly died, while I slept in the surgeon’s tent, I dreamed.” He turned to face her and held her gaze.
She nodded slowly and turned from him, narrowing her eyes to look far out to the horizon, as if she could see into the future.
A little more than one hundred and fifty miles west and north of Gwendolyn and William, at the foot of a wide mountain in the kingdom of Deheubarth in South Wales, a woman pulled a heavy mantle about her shoulders and grunted at the bitterly cold wind that swept in from the north. White hair spilled over her shoulders like spun silk, and her eyes, sharp and lively, scanned the clouds above. A listless drizzle misted her cheeks like morning dew, and she smiled softly. She closed her eyes for a moment and stood still, face upturned, perfectly content. Slowly she opened her eyes, blinked the moisture from her lashes, and turned around to step inside the small hovel that she lived in, modest but well provisioned. A dung fire burned in the hearth, and the light and warmth were welcome to her old bones and failing eyes.
“Well, Mogh,” she said to no one in particular, in the ancient tongue of the people of Powys, “you were right after all. Looks like I’m going to have visitors.”
HISTORICAL NOTES
The story weaves through the events, people and places of southern England, autumn of 1193. The following characters in the story are based on actual individuals, and incorporate, to the extent reasonably confirmed, details of their lives (where they lived, who they married, how many children they had, where their loyalties laid, when they died). Where historical detail is not available; where events are known to have occurred but not how or why; where plausible details could be suggested that would have, for obvious reasons, been omitted from the historical record–into those gaps I have written my story. Characters that are not listed below are entirely the product of my imagination.
Baron Robert Fitz William
Robert de Cardinham
Walterus de Cardinham
Richard Fitz Neal
Geoffrey of Monmouth
John of Cornwall
William Marshal
John Marshal
Henry de la Pomerai
Henry II, King of England
Eleanor of Aquitaine
Prince John Plantagenet
Richard I, King of England
Walter de Coutances
Hubert Walter
Gerald of Wales
Richard Reynell
William d’Aubigni, Second Earl of Arundel
Matilda St. Hilary de Harcouet
William d’Aubigni, Third Earl of Arundel
History nerds such as myself may enjoy looking up these individuals to find dates and life events that are included in the story. For example, the Second Earl of Arundel, William d’Aubigni, and his wife, Matilda, are both recorded as having died on December 24, 1193. I found the date an intriguing coincidence—particularly given that it also happened to be the last day that Walter de Coutances held the office of Justiciar, as he was replaced by Hubert Walter on Christmas Day, 1193. The how and why of their deaths and the delay in recording them, as presented in the story, is entirely fictional. You will also note that there is no Edmund d’Aubigni listed above; the treacherous son is likewise my own creation. Nor is there any evidence that Walterus de Cardinham took the side of Prince John in his rebellion of 1193. And while Richard Fitz Neal was indeed Bishop of London in 1193, Nigel, his bastard son, is also purely fictional.
The foundations of Penhallam are still visible in Cornwall and can be visited by the public. Through the wonders of Google maps I was able to locate and view them remotely. I rel
ied heavily on Guy Beresford’s impeccably descriptive account of the excavation of Penhallam in the latter half of the last century, The Medieval Manor of Penhallam, Jacobstow, Cornwall. Mr. Beresford states in his introduction that the excavation finds have been presented to the Royal Institution of Cornwall at Truro. Perhaps one of the time-ravaged artifacts housed there was an everyday object of Robert de Cardinham himself.
Arundel Castle still stands and can also be visited by the public. The Earldom of Arundel is the oldest continuing earldom in English peerage, followed closely by the Earldom of Essex. The original Norman doorway to the keep is partially visible, offset from the battlements as described in the story. The historical reason for the offset design is unknown and thus open to speculation. This is one of the “gaps” that I have employed as a significant detail in the story.
The Battle of Crogen, where Gwendolyn’s father meets the Baron Fitz William in battle, is an historical event, as was the horrific treatment of the twenty-two prisoners captured by the defeated and humiliated King Henry II. I have suggested that her father was an intended twenty-third prisoner, and that his escape left only twenty-two prisoners for the historical record that we have today.
The song sung in the lonely night in the hall of Arundel is “Song from Chartivel,” by Marie de France (1155 – 1189), described by one source as the most popular female poet of the Middle Ages.
It is important to know that this period in English history saw a surge in scholarly achievement, an expansion and normalization of jurisprudence and governmental administration, a burst of artistic expression in verse, song and music to such a degree that several historians refer to the time as a sort of mini-Renaissance (for example, see A History of England, Edited by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Vol. 2, Early Medieval England, by M.T. Clanchy). The writings of Plato and Aristotle were newly re-discovered, and translations of these pagan, pre-Christian meditations on the nature and purpose of knowledge and wisdom, war and government, found their way to the academies and private libraries of the time. The church initially welcomed, then ultimately condemned, the ideas on the supremacy of reason put forth in these writings, and so began a battle for the intellects of men and women that continues to be waged by some of the religious leadership today. In any case, a series of catastrophes would fall upon the English (and Western Europe) in the coming centuries that would decimate the populace and set back by hundreds of years the social, economic, and political advancement that had shone with such bright promise during this time.
As a final note, it is true that there was, at this time, a popular Welsh nationalist legend prophesying the return of Arthur to rout out all non-Britons (and there were many by this time, and setting aside historical evidence that the Normans themselves were descended from clans of Britons that had fled to northern Gaul centuries back). There was also a deliberate campaign of propaganda by the Plantagenets to counter the prophecy, highlighted most notably by Richard the Lionheart’s sanctioning of Glastonbury Abbey’s claim to have discovered the tomb of Arthur and Guinevere upon the abbey’s grounds (which of course bore no relation to the abbey’s desperate need to raise funds to rebuild after a devastating fire). The Plantagenets found further assistance in the writings of Gerald of Wales and Geoffrey of Monmouth, to co-opt the legend and make Arthur their own.
I am embarrassed to admit that none of this was known to me at the time that I initially conjured my tale of a woman heir to King Arthur, living in England during the turmoil of Richard I’s reign, defending the land and its people from the gaping maws of a self-interested court and its never-ending wars. Happy coincidence followed happy coincidence as I began my research. And yet, the story that you have just read is actually the second iteration of this tale. The first, I confess, took more license than the genre will support with the historical facts of the time. Fans of this period would have spotted the inconsistencies immediately. So I dug quite a bit deeper into my research, and while I preserved the essential arc of the characters and the plot, in all other respects the story was completely rewritten. The geography of the tale was flipped, the politics of the time were brought into sharp relief, and fictional characters and locations were replaced by actual as much as possible. This is, I believe, a reverse engineering of the “proper” way to write historical fiction.
The legend of King Arthur, Merlin, Excalibur, and all of the many facets and tales that have grown up around it over the centuries presented a unique challenge in identifying the state of the legend as of late 1193. The legend has its birth in Welsh folklore and oral tradition, the original date of which is impossible to identify. From there, a handful of textual retellings, including Gildas and Bede, commit the tale to the historical record, in each case with additions to the legend. In the time period of our story, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s widely read Historia Regnum Britanniae includes an account of Arthur’s life, followed by his Vita Merlini. By 1190, Chretien de Troyes had written the first Arthurian romances, including mention of the Round Table, the quest for the grail, and Lancelot’s forbidden love for Guinevere. Although I mention de Troyes in the story, I treat his additions to the tale as purely fictional from the perspective of Gwendolyn and her contemporaries. It cannot be ignored that de Troyes’s chief patron was Eleanor of Aquitaine’s daughter, Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, and that his works must thus be considered part of the overall campaign to civilize and trivialize the tale of Arthur to mere courtly entertainment and romance. I have relied upon the excellent Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend to provide a snapshot of the state of the tale of Arthur in 1193, and as a base from which to draw “known” events from the legend, and to foreshadow, through Gwendolyn’s adventures, additions to the tale that would come in future versions, as if she were the forgotten historical basis for those new details. I also found Pendragon, by Steve Blake and Scott Lloyd, of invaluable assistance in illuminating the Welsh origins of the original Arthurian legend, including the absence of mention in the ancient texts of Uthyr as Arthur’s father.
And while Gwendolyn is the hero of our tale, the main character, ultimately, is Caliburn (only later known as Excalibur). My own addition to the legend is the following proposition: that Caliburn does indeed return to us, through the ages, to the hands of those humble, true, and courageous enough to wield it. And that it is the trials, tragedies, and victories of each episode that cause this legend to remain so compelling, over the passing of at least 1500 years of human history, and that continually provide new and relevant material for its retelling.
E. A. Haltom
Austin, Texas
Autumn, 2013
ABOUT
E. A. HALTOM
E. A. Haltom lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and children, and (at last count) one dog, four cats, and six chickens. She has enjoyed careers as a criminal prosecutor, a grocery clerk, a massage therapist, a technology lawyer, a mother, and most recently, a novelist. She has lived in, worked in, studied in, and/or traveled in Ireland, England, Scotland, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Kenya, Nepal, India, and Tibet, although it is the adventures of the heart that she has taken with her family that have brought her the highest joys—and the deepest sorrows. In her spare time she enjoys gardening and planning excursions with her family.