And with all that, he was unequalled as a military architect.
He told Sawale and the others, ‘This place will combine the old with the new. We’ll take advantage of all we know of our castles here and in England, and of what I’ve learned of those gigantic strongholds in the East. Krak des Chevaliers, Kerak of Moab, the harbour fortress at Acre… You should see them, messires, they’re worth the trip.
‘All castles are built to last, that’s implicit, but this one will outlast them all. In five hundred years from now, people will still visit Gaillard and wonder how it might be attacked.’ He nodded, and the trio nodded with him. They had no reason to disagree. They felt honoured to be involved in such an ambitious undertaking, and were content to measure and check. They had decided that, when the castle was finished, they would ask the king if they might chisel their names somewhere on the walls. Nothing too boastful; just to show that they had contributed towards it.
By the end of 1197, the island tower had been erected, Les Andelys fortified, the land between the loop of the Seine enclosed by a nine-hundred-foot-long semicircular wall. Two moveable barriers spanned the river, and work was in progress on the plateau.
With Marshal and des Roches holding the line in Touraine, and Robert Pernel in command at Rouen, the king spent less time with his army, and more with his architects. But he had left John as his deputy in Normandy, and the prince had neither the will nor the aptitude for the job. The Norman leaders appealed to Richard to entrust the construction to Sawale and the others, and prevent further French incursions along the border.
‘Our spies report that King Philip is preparing a three-fold assault. In the north, between Aumale and the sea; south of Freteval, and once more into Aquitaine. Des Roches and Marshal might hold him down there, but Prince John—’
‘What of him? He was willing enough the last time I saw him.’
Patiently, the barons told him that the last time was three months ago. ‘Since then, he has scarcely left his rooms. We don’t know what he’s waiting for, but it’s not a battle with the French. And, if we may say this, king, he has gathered around him many of his old cronies, Belcourt and the like.’
‘Watch your words,’ Richard warned them. ‘You sound as if you suspect him of something. Now, let me tell you, I know my brother, and I’ve seen how he’s changed these past three years. He’s found the courage that hitherto eluded him, the Plantagenet streak I always knew was there. God knows, you cannot expect from him the leadership you get from me. But we are stuck in the depths of another winter, and Philip will not move against us in the snow. At the first thaw, we’ll launch our own attacks. What do you think of it?’
‘Of what, king?’
‘The castle, man, the castle! Château Gaillard, that’s what I’ve called it.’ He laughed steam into the cold air. ‘I tell you, confreres, if Philip does overrun us, we can all move into Gaillard!’
But the humour was lost on them, and they would not leave until Richard had agreed to return to the army within a week. He was loath to do so, for like anyone who is having a house built, he took a proprietorial interest in every brick and beam.
* * *
He was on site, three days later, when a small French craft came downstream and moored against the eastern bank. Ice fringed the river, but it was still possible to make way in midstream.
King Richard’s bodyguard, composed almost exclusively of the men he had recruited at Nottingham, scrambled down to the bank, swords at the ready. But the craft only contained seven men, six of whom were sailors faced with the unenviable task of rowing the vessel back upstream to Paris. The seventh was a messenger from King Philip, with letters for the Lionheart.
Richard was perfunctory in his greeting, and made the man accompany him about the snow-swept site. Workmen toiled around them, their hands and faces whipped raw by the wind.
‘Memorize what you can,’ he told the messenger, ‘though it’s too soon for you to gauge the details. But you’re free to look. Tell King Philip it’s called Château Gaillard, and that he must come and see it for himself. I’ll personally conduct him around, and we’ll end the tour in the dungeons. They’re going to be over there, if you’re interested. Deep pits, dug from the rock. There’ll be no doors or windows, just a hole in the roof, to let down the prisoners and their food. And the rain, I suppose, to refresh them. Philip’s will be, let’s see… Oh, when the time comes, he can choose. What’s the matter? Why are your eyes streaming? Are you mourning him in advance?’
‘It’s the cold,’ the man stammered. ‘We will not need to attack you here. You will all perish from the cold.’
Richard clapped his own shoulders with his hands. ‘Must I give away other secrets? Behind you, down there, you see that hole? Sunken fires, Frenchman. And the trenches that criss-cross the yard? They’re to take the pipes. The fires will be kept burning throughout the winter, and the pipes will conduct the heat into the buildings. I’ve made a study of Roman fortifications, you see. One of them wrote a book, De Re Militari. And I’ve seen how the Arabs heat their palaces. Cold, you say? Surrender to me next year, and you’ll be warm enough, I promise you.’ He broke off to discuss something with Sawale and Henri, then returned to ask the shivering messenger the nature of his visit.
The man was too cold to reply, but merely produced a bundle of letters and thrust them at the king. Then he bowed and hurried away, his hands cupped over his mouth. Richard glared after him, surprised by his abrupt departure. The man was either ill-disciplined, or the letters did not require an answer.
He walked to the river wall, clambered on the five-foot-high parapet and stood there in the driving snow, peering down at the river. Beside him, workmen were lashing together bamboo poles to make scaffolding, while common labourers trudged across the plateau, dragging ashlar blocks and barrels of flint rubble that would be poured into the core of the walls. When it was finished, the surrounding wall would be thirty feet high, and between eight and twelve feet thick. It was as well that the labourers could neither read, nor write, nor count, for they might despair if they knew how many barrel-loads would be required, or how far they would have dragged the brick carts in the next twelve months.
The messenger stumbled aboard the vessel, and it was pushed out into the river. The current carried it several yards downstream before the six oarsmen managed to turn it and start the long pull back to Paris. Snow plastered Richard’s face, but he would not leave his vantage point until the craft had started along the southern arm of the loop. Then he jumped down from the wall, shouted encouragement at the workmen and strode towards the one completed building, the gate-tower that led to the causeway. Below the bridge, more labourers chipped at the rock, deepening the ditch that separated the prow section from the main body of the castle. Looking down from the gateway, Richard could see the men, stooped over, fifteen feet below. But he had stipulated that the ditch should be at least twenty feet deep and twice as wide, so they’d be busy all winter, picking at the rock.
He retired into one of the gate-tower chambers, purposely choosing one in which the fireplace was empty. He would drive his men hard, and expect them to work in any weather, but he would not be caught crouched before a blazing fire, a warm king in a frozen kingdom.
Although he was physically strong, and could deny the need for sleep and food or water, the wind-borne snow had turned his hands blue, and it took him a while to fumble his dagger from its scabbard and tear open the letters. As he did so, he noticed they were marked, precisely, Premiere, Deuxieme, Troisieme, and so he read them in that order.
The first was from King Philip.
After the initial, courteous greeting, Philip had written:
‘We have been enemies now for some time, Richard of England. It is not a happy state for us to be in. But, as you fear I shall advance into your lands, so I anticipate your desire to encompass mine. We have made our treaties, and they have been broken, I shall not say by whom.
‘But, once again we find oursel
ves at war. Would to God that it were otherwise, for I have always admired you, and wanted you as my friend.’
Richard wiped away the tears of winter from his eyes and reread the passage. Not a happy state? I have always admired you? Wanted you as my friend? This was incredible!
‘They are my own words,’ he growled. ‘This is what I told John. And where’s the gross and noisome beast, the belching monster who was told to mount a tusky boar? It’s not possible… It’s not possible…’
He shook his head with anger, and went back to the letter.
‘I knew, after you drove me from Freteval and made me wade the river, I knew you would find the box containing my personal papers. And I knew they would deepen your suspicion of me.’
But they didn’t, Richard thought. They confused me, for I could find no trace of an insult. It was not as John had. And nor is it now.
‘So,’ (the letter continued) ‘I have been careful to support the claim I am about to make. Regard it, too, with suspicion, King Richard, for it concerns your own brother.
‘You will think I am merely planting the seeds of fraternal discord. But not so. Nothing is further from my mind. You will believe what you wish, and I know I cannot dissuade you.
‘This then is my claim, as a king to a king.
‘Your brother, Prince John, is working against you. During the last year he has addressed several letters to me, but it is only necessary for me to include the last. He would have rejoined me in Paris, long ago. Indeed, he might never have left, had he not been convinced that you would take vengeance on his innocent wife. For myself, I find it hard to believe, but Prince John seems to believe it. Coeur-de- Lion, maltreating his brother’s wife.’
Richard leaned back against the wall. He needed time to think. John claimed this, and Philip swore that. John said Philip said. Philip said John said. And out of it all came a grotesque picture of Richard Lionheart, slavering after the King of France and abusing the Countess of Gloucester. It was a fantastic distortion, and if Philip thought he could turn the Plantagenets against each other— But he had to read on.
‘When John reached you at Lisieux, he told you some tale about how I would have had you killed in Durrenstein, or, failing that, have killed your queen. And you believed him, it seems, even as you now disbelieve me.
‘But does it not occur to you, Lionheart, that your brother sees death in every step? You, yourself, in that German prison… Queen Berengaria, in some sunny house in Aquitaine… The Countess Hadwisa, abandoned in England… John, I would say, has murder on the mind.
‘But, before you decide, read the Deuxieme, in which he speaks of you as a gross and rancid creature, akin to a tusky boar. Read how he says he cannot leave his wife, whom he does not love, to your vulgar mercies.
‘And then, as you surely will, condemn the letter as a forgery, the work of the cunning King Philip.
‘And when you’ve done that, read the Troisieme.’
And that’s where Philip ended, understanding Richard Lionheart far better than Richard understood himself.
* * *
Of course it would be a forgery! Did Philip think he could delude Richard of England? Philip, who would not even go near a horse, for fear it would kick, or buck, or fall on him? Philip, who hated all sports, and had probably tried to banish his own shadow! It was laughable. The rabbit confronting the lion.
It was not John who had coined the vile insults and passed them back to Philip. It was Philip all the time. Philip, who thought himself so clever. Philip Augustus? God, no. More like Philip Labyrinthus.
Nevertheless, Richard hunched in a comer of the unheated chamber and read the Deuxieme; John’s letter from Rouen that began, ‘You know I don’t love my wife…’
A forgery, Richard agreed, no doubt of it. A perfect forgery, to be sure, an exact copy of John’s spidery hand, but as false as the stone skittles at a fair. Throw the ball… Knock down the skittles… And what does the sportsman find? That the wooden ball bounces off painted stone, and that his penny’s in the alley-owner’s purse…
Of course it was a forgery!
Nevertheless, Richard hunched further into the corner and read the Troisieme.
This was John’s answer to Philip’s carefully worded questions. A series of answers that only John could have given. They told of John’s reunion with Richard at Lisieux, of the subsequent campaigns in Normandy and Touraine, of Richard’s cruelty towards the speechless Aimer of Chaluz and of a dozen other intimate occurrences that only Richard’s brother could have known. A spy could have known some of them. An Angevin could have known some of them. But only John could have known them all.
The spidery handwriting was identical in both letters.
They were not forgeries, for the Troisieme could not be a forgery, so neither could the Deuxieme.
What Philip had claimed was true. John had lied. Over this, and everything else. He had created the fiction of the sweaty, lovelorn boar. And he had maligned Hadwisa, and made an empty promise to marry Alais, and invented his fears about Durrenstein and Berengaria. And Robert Pernel? Yes, why not?
Stumbling blindly around the gate-tower chamber, the giant crumpled the letters in his hands. ‘Oh, God,’ he moaned, ‘has he never spoken the truth… Have I really been duped all these years by a— a boy in silly heels?’
He came down from the rock and rode along the river path to Rouen. His bodyguard chased after him, and the workmen hurried across the plateau, using whatever wood they could find to make fires. Nobody could say why the king had left in such a hurry, but his face had been frozen into a mask of murder. Somebody was in trouble, that much was clear.
* * *
Within a month, Prince John had been dispossessed of all his lands, titles, incomes and authorities. He had become hysterical in the face of Richard’s fury, retreated before the crumpled evidence, then fled when he saw the king’s hand slide towards his sword. Had Richard not been consumed by private rage, he would have locked the gates of Rouen, then dragged John to a gibbet in the square. As it was, he burst in upon his brother, confronted him with the letters, then went after him, as though to cut him down.
But John made good his escape, as perhaps Richard had intended, and again the people of Rouen said they had not seen Softsword going anywhere, step-by-step. He had vanished, as from Le Mans, from Tours, from Mortain, from England, from Paris and, once before, from Rouen. If it was true that the dowager Queen Eleanor could turn into a bat, and Richard into a lion, it was doubly true that John could reverse his cloak and become invisible.
‘I want him found,’ Richard said, and, breaking the habit of a lifetime, offered money for his capture.
* * *
He was quite the best sailor in the family, and stepped ashore at Dover as though alighting from a dray-cart. But his state of mind did not match his stomach. Throughout the voyage he had kept his travelling hood closed around his face, and pretended he was ignorant of the language. For all the sailors knew, he was a traveller from some distant country, huddled against a typical western winter. They had already been warned to keep watch for the arrogant, high-heeled Plantagenet, but there was nothing arrogant about the monkish foreigner in his water-logged slippers.
However, John was John, and not even the fear of death could suppress his vanity. He went ashore, shuffled up into the town and spent half the money in his purse on a saddled horse, a pair of riding boots and a bird’s bill cap. Half of what was left went on a night’s lodging in a second-rate tavern and on a meal for himself and the young woman he’d found loitering in the porch. By morning, his purse was a sack of leather, the last few coins divided between the industrious whore and the tavern-keeper, who had kept them supplied with wine.
Then, without a penny in his purse, the most wanted man in Europe set out for Gloucester and a reunion with his wife. Things had not gone as well as he’d have liked in France or Normandy, but he was sure Hadwisa would be pleased to see him again. After all, he was her husband, home from the
wars.
* * *
He announced himself to the guards, and they made him wait while they went in search of someone who would recognize him. He had been away so long that most of the garrison and household servants had never set eyes on him. They knew the king’s brother was Countess Hadwisa’s husband, and that his name hardly ever arose in conversation, but whatever else they’d learned about him had come from hearsay and rumour.
And now this thin, haunted-looking man, dressed incongruously in an old tunic and cloak, yet new cap and boots, turned up on the doorstep without an escort and without warning and claimed to be Prince John, lord of the manor. It bore checking.
Eventually, a cook and guard sergeant came forward, peered at him for a moment, then knelt in the snow. They had last seen him four years ago, but, by his appearance, it might have been fourteen. There was no trace of the strutting peacock, except in the narrow, bird’s bill cap, and even that was made ridiculous by the frightened face beneath. Yes, that was the thing about him now. He seemed dressed in fear.
Nevertheless, he was still Prince John, and men hurried to take his horse, to inform Hadwisa, to lead him into the building. He moved unsteadily in his unworn boots, and his hand went to his cap, his fingers curled around the peak. As he approached the great, fortified manor, he practised his most winning smile, that of the prodigal returned, chastened by his own foolishness. Richard had never been able to resist it, so why should Hadwisa?
He would tell her – well, first he would find out what she had heard – and then he would tell her he was home to stay. If she knew that Richard had disinherited him, she would also know that her own lands were unaffected. She was still Countess of Gloucester, and mistress of several smaller estates throughout the country. They would administer them together, John and Hadwisa, and he would prove to her, and to Richard and England, that he had learned his lesson. His irresponsibility was at an end. He was older and wiser now, and content to stay within bounds.
The Devil is Loose Page 22