by Ken Follett
Elizabeth looked nervous. She said: "And then what?"
"When I give you the word, say you have surrendered the castle to the rightful earl, Richard. Then Richard's army will break cover and charge the castle. At that point Michael will realize what's happening. But his men will be in doubt about their loyalty--because you have told them to surrender, and called Richard the rightful earl--and the advance party will be inside to prevent anyone from closing the gates." The bell began to ring. Aliena's stomach knotted in fear. "We've run out of time. How do you feel?"
"Scared."
"Me too. Let's go."
They went down the stairs. The bell on the gatehouse tower was ringing as it had when Aliena was a carefree girl. Same bell, same sound, different Aliena, she thought. She knew it could be heard all across the fields, as far away as the edge of the forest. Richard would by now be saying the Paternoster slowly under his breath, to measure the time he had to wait before sending his advance party.
Aliena and Elizabeth walked from the keep across the internal drawbridge to the lower courtyard. Elizabeth was pale with fear, but her mouth was set in a determined line. Aliena smiled at her to give her courage, then pulled up her hood again. So far she had not seen anyone familiar, but she was a well-known face all over the county, and someone was sure to recognize her sooner or later. If Michael Armstrong were to find out who she was he might smell a rat, dimwitted though he undoubtedly was. Several people gave her curious glances, but no one spoke to her.
She and Elizabeth went to the middle of the lower courtyard. Because the ground sloped somewhat, Aliena could see over the heads of the crowd and through the main gate to the fields outside. The advance party should be breaking cover about now, but she could see no sign of them. Oh, God, I hope there's no snag, she thought fearfully.
Elizabeth would need something to stand on while she addressed the people. Aliena told a manservant to fetch a mounting block from the stable. While they were waiting, an elderly woman looked at Aliena and said: "Why, it's the Lady Aliena! How nice to see you!"
Aliena's heart sank. She recognized the woman as a cook who had worked at the castle before the coming of the Hamleighs. She forced a smile and said: "Hello, Tilly, how are you?"
Tilly nudged her neighbor. "Hey, it's the Lady Aliena come back after all these years. Are you going to be mistress again, lady?"
Aliena did not want that thought to occur to Michael Armstrong. She looked around anxiously. Happily, Michael was not within earshot. However, one of his men-at-arms had heard the exchange and was staring at Aliena with a furrowed brow. Aliena looked back at him with a simulated expression of unconcern. The man only had one eye--which no doubt was why he had been left behind here instead of going off to war with William--and it suddenly seemed funny to Aliena to be stared at by a man with one eye, and she had to choke back a laugh. She realized she was slightly hysterical.
The manservant came back with the mounting block. The bell ceased to toll. Aliena made herself calm as Elizabeth stood on the block and the crowd went quiet.
Elizabeth said: "King Stephen and Duke Henry have made peace."
She paused, and a cheer went up. Aliena was looking through the gateway. Now, Richard, she thought; now is the time, don't leave it too late!
Elizabeth smiled and let the people cheer for a while, then she went on: "Stephen is to remain king until he dies, then Henry will succeed him."
Aliena scrutinized the guards on the towers and over the gatehouse. They looked relaxed. Where was Richard?
Elizabeth said: "The peace treaty will bring many changes in our lives."
Aliena saw the guards stiffen. One of them raised his hand to shade his eyes and peered out over the fields, while another turned and looked down into the courtyard as if hoping to catch the eye of the captain. But Michael Armstrong was listening intently to Elizabeth.
"The present and future kings have agreed that all lands shall be returned to those who possessed them in the time of the old King Henry."
That caused a buzz of comment in the crowd, as people speculated whether this change would affect the earldom of Shiring. Aliena noticed Michael Armstrong looking thoughtful. Through the gateway she at last saw the horses of Richard's advance party. Hurry, she thought, hurry! But they were coming at a steady trot, so as not to alarm the guards.
Elizabeth was saying: "We must all give thanks to God for this peace treaty. We should pray that King Stephen will rule wisely in his declining years, and that the young duke will keep his peace until God takes Stephen away...." She was doing magnificently, but she was beginning to look troubled, as if she might be about to run out of things to say.
All the guards were looking outward, examining the approaching party. They had been told to expect such a group, and instructed to bring the leader to the countess immediately, so no action was required of them, but they were curious.
The one-eyed man turned around and looked through the gate, then turned back and stared at Aliena again, and she guessed he was frowning over the significance of her presence here and the approach of a troop of horsemen.
One of the guards on the battlements appeared to make a decision, and disappeared down a staircase.
The crowd was getting a little restless. Elizabeth was meandering magnificently, but they were impatient for hard news. She said: "This war started within a year of my birth, and like many young people up and down the kingdom I am looking forward to finding out what peace is like."
The guard from the battlements emerged from the base of a tower, walked briskly across the compound, and spoke to Michael Armstrong.
Through the gateway, Aliena could see that the horsemen were still a couple of hundred yards away. It was not close enough. She could have screamed in frustration. She would not be able to contain this situation much longer.
Michael Armstrong turned and looked through the gate, frowning. Then the one-eyed man pulled Michael's sleeve and said something, pointing at Aliena.
Aliena was afraid Michael would close the gates and raise the drawbridge before Richard could get in, but she did not know what she could do to prevent him. She wondered whether she had the nerve to throw herself at him before he could give the order. She still wore her dagger strapped to her left arm: she could even kill him. He turned away decisively. Aliena reached up and touched Elizabeth's elbow. "Stop Michael!" she hissed.
Elizabeth opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. She looked petrified by fear. Then her expression changed. She took a deep breath, tilted her head up, and spoke in a voice ringing with authority. "Michael Armstrong!"
Michael turned back.
This was the point of no return, Aliena realized. Richard was not quite close enough but she had run out of time. She said to Elizabeth: "Now! Tell them now!"
Elizabeth said: "I have surrendered this castle to the rightful earl of Shiring, Richard of Kingsbridge."
Michael stared unbelievingly at Elizabeth. "You can't do that!" he shouted.
Elizabeth said: "I command you all to lay down your weapons. There is to be no bloodshed."
Michael turned around and yelled: "Raise the drawbridge! Shut the gates!"
The men-at-arms rushed to do his bidding, but he had hesitated a moment too long. As the men reached the massive ironbound doors that would close the entrance arch, Richard's advance party clattered over the drawbridge and entered the compound. Most of Michael's men were not wearing armor and some of them did not even have their swords, and they scattered in front of the horsemen.
Elizabeth shouted: "Everyone keep calm. These messengers will confirm my orders."
There was a shout from the battlements: one of the guards cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled down: "Michael! Attack! We're being attacked! Scores of them!"
"Treachery!" Michael roared, and drew his sword. But two of Richard's men were on him instantly, their blades flashing. Blood gushed and he went down. Aliena looked away.
Some of Richard's men had taken po
ssession of the gatehouse and the winding room. Two of them made it to the battlements, and Michael's guards surrendered to them.
Through the gateway Aliena saw the main force galloping across the fields toward the castle, and her spirits rose like the sun.
Elizabeth shouted at the top of her voice: "This is a peaceful surrender. No one is going to be hurt, I promise you. Just stay where you are."
Everyone stood stock-still, listening to the thunder as Richard's army pounded closer. Michael's men-at-arms looked confused and uncertain, but none of them did anything: their leader had fallen, and their countess had told them to surrender. The castle servants were paralyzed by the rapidity of events.
Then Richard came through the gateway on his war-horse.
It was a great moment, and Aliena's heart swelled with pride. Richard was handsome, smiling, and triumphant. Aliena shouted: "The rightful earl!" The men entering the castle behind Richard took up the cry, and it was repeated by some of the crowd in the courtyard--most of them had no love for William. Richard rode around the compound at a slow walk, waving and acknowledging the cheers.
Aliena thought about all she had gone through for the sake of this moment. She was thirty-four years old and she had spent half of those years fighting for this. The whole of my adult life, she thought; that's what I gave. She remembered stuffing wool into sacks until her hands were red and swollen and bleeding. She recalled the faces she had seen on the road, greedy and cruel and lascivious faces of men who would have killed her if she had given the least sign of weakness. She thought of how she had hardened her heart against dear Jack, and married Alfred instead; and she thought of the months during which she had slept on the floor at the foot of his bed like a dog; and all because he had promised to pay for weapons and armor so that Richard could fight to win back this castle. "There it is, Father," she said aloud. Nobody heard her: they were cheering too loud. "This is what you wanted," she said to her dead father, and there was bitterness as well as triumph in her heart. "I promised you this, and I kept my promise. I took care of Richard, and he fought all these years, and now we're home again at last, and Richard is the earl. Now..." Her voice rose to a shout, but everyone was shouting, and no one noticed the tears rolling down her cheeks. "Now, Father, I've done with you, so go to your grave, and let me live in peace!"
Chapter 16
REMIGIUS WAS ARROGANT, even in penury. He entered the wooden manor house at Hamleigh village with his head held high, and looked down his long nose at the huge, roughhewn wooden crucks supporting the roof, the wattle-and-daub walls, and the chimneyless open fire in the middle of the beaten-earth floor.
William watched him walk in. I may be down on my luck, but I'm not as far down as you, he thought, noting the monk's much-repaired sandals, the grubby robe, the unshaven chin and the unkempt hair. Remigius had never been a fat man but now he was thinner than ever. The haughty expression fixed on his face failed to conceal the lines of exhaustion or the purplish folds of defeat under his eyes. Remigius was not yet bowed, but he was very badly beaten.
"Bless you, my son," he said to William.
William was not having any of that. "What do you want, Remigius?" he said, deliberately insulting the monk by not calling him "Father" or "Brother."
Remigius flinched as if he had been struck. William guessed he had received a few taunts of that kind since he came down in the world. Remigius said: "The lands you gave to me as dean of the chapter at Shiring have been repossessed by Earl Richard."
"I'm not surprised," William replied. "Everything is to be returned to those who possessed it in the time of the old King Henry."
"But that leaves me with no means of support."
"You and a lot of other people," William said carelessly. "You'll have to go back to Kingsbridge."
Remigius's face paled with anger. "I can't do that," he said in a low voice.
"Why not?" said William, tormenting him.
"You know why not."
"Would Philip say you shouldn't prise secrets out of little girls? Does he think you betrayed him, by telling me where the outlaws' hideout was? Would he be angry with you for becoming the dean of a church that was to take the place of his own cathedral? Well, then I suppose you can't go back."
"Give me something," Remigius pleaded. "One village. A farm. A little church!"
"There are no rewards for losing, monk," William said harshly. He was enjoying this. "In the world outside the monastery, nobody looks after you. The ducks swallow the worms, and the foxes kill the ducks, and the men shoot the foxes, and the devil hunts the men."
Remigius's voice sank to a whisper. "What am I to do?"
William smiled and said: "Beg."
Remigius turned on his heel and left the house.
Still proud, William thought, but not for long. You'll beg.
It pleased him to see someone who had fallen harder than he himself. He would never forget the excruciating agony of standing outside the gate of his own castle and being refused admittance. He had been suspicious when he heard that Richard and some of his men had left Winchester; then when the peace pact was announced his unease had turned to alarm, and he had taken his knights and men and ridden hard to Earlscastle. There was a skeleton force guarding the castle, so he expected to find Richard camped in the fields, laying siege. When all appeared peaceful he had been relieved, and berated himself for overreacting to Richard's sudden disappearance.
When he got closer he saw that the drawbridge was up. He had reined in at the edge of the moat and shouted: "Open up for the earl!"
That was when Richard had appeared on the battlements and said: "The earl is inside."
It was like the ground falling away from under William's feet. He had always been afraid of Richard, always aware of him as a dangerous rival, but he had not felt himself especially vulnerable at this moment in time. He had thought the real danger would come when Stephen died and Henry came to the throne, which might be ten years away. Now, as he sat in a mean manor house brooding over his mistakes, he realized bitterly that Richard had in fact been very clever. He had slipped through a narrow gap. He could not be accused of breaching the king's peace, as the war was still on. His claim to the earldom had been legitimized by the terms of the peace treaty. And Stephen, aging and tired and defeated, had no energy left for further battles.
Richard had magnanimously released those of William's men-at-arms who wanted to continue in William's service. Waldo One-eye had told William how the castle had been taken. The treachery of Elizabeth was maddening, but for William it was the part played by Aliena that was most humiliating. The helpless little girl he had raped and tormented and thrown out of her home all those years ago had come back and taken her revenge. Every time he thought of that his stomach burned with bitterness as if he had drunk vinegar.
His first inclination had been to fight Richard. William could have kept his army, lived off the countryside, and extorted taxes and supplies from the peasants, fighting a running battle with his rival. But Richard held the castle, and he had time on his side, for William's supporter Stephen was old and beaten, and Richard was backed by the young Duke Henry, who would eventually become the second King Henry.
So William had decided to cut his losses. He had retired to the village of Hamleigh and moved back into the manor house where he had been brought up. Hamleigh, and the villages surrounding it, had been granted to his father thirty years ago. It was a holding that had never been part of the earldom, so Richard had no claim to it.
William hoped that if he kept his head down Richard would be satisfied with the revenge he had already taken, and would leave him alone. So far it had worked. However, William hated the village of Hamleigh. He hated the small neat houses, the excitable ducks on the pond, the pale gray stone church, the apple-cheeked children, the broad-hipped women and the strong, resentful men. He hated it for being humble, plain and poor, and he hated it because it symbolized his family's fall from power. He watched the plodding peasants be
gin the spring plowing, and estimated what his share of their crop would be that summer, and he found it meager. He went hunting in his few acres of forest and failed to start a single deer, and the forester said to him: "The boar is all you can hunt now, lord--the outlaws had the deer in the famine." He held court in the great hall of the manor house, with the wind whistling through the holes in its wattle-and-daub walls; and he gave harsh judgments and imposed large fines and ruled according to his whim; but it brought him little satisfaction.
He had abandoned the building of the grand new church at Shiring, of course. He could not afford to build a stone house for himself, let alone a church. The builders had stopped work when he had stopped paying them, and what had happened to them he did not know: perhaps they had all gone back to Kingsbridge to work for Prior Philip.
But now he was having nightmares.
They were all the same. He saw his mother in the place of the dead. She was bleeding from her ears and eyes, and when she opened her mouth to speak, more blood came out. The sight filled him with mortal terror. In broad daylight he could not say what it was about the dream that he feared, for she did not threaten him in any way. But at night, when she came to him, the fear possessed him totally, an irrational, hysterical, blind panic. Once as a boy he had waded into a pond that suddenly got deeper, and he had found himself below the surface and unable to breathe; and the overpowering need for air that had possessed him then was one of the indelible memories of his childhood; but this was ten times as bad. Trying to get away from his mother's bloody face was like trying to sprint in quicksand. He would come awake as if he had been thrown across the room, violently shocked, sweating and moaning, his body taut with agony from the racked-up tension. Walter would be at his bedside with a candle--William slept in the hall, separated from the men by a screen, for there was no bedroom here. "You cried out, lord," Walter would murmur. William would breathe hard, staring at the real bed and the real wall and the real Walter, while the power of the nightmare slowly faded to the point where he was no longer afraid; and then he would say: "It was nothing, a dream, go away." But he would be frightened to go back to sleep. And the next day the men would look at him as if he were bewitched.