A Pride of Kings (The Plantagenets Book 1)

by Juliet Dymoke

  ‘Well, Messire Marshal,’ he said in his grating voice, ‘I have set a ransom of a thousand marks on you – a fair enough sum for so doughty a fighter. When I can spare a man you may send a message to someone sufficiently interested in your welfare to pay for it.’

  William lay looking up at him. ‘I shall be worth nothing to you if my wound is not tended.’

  The Count gave his thigh a swift knowledgeable glance. He was a hard man who cared for nothing but his own person and his own land: if he gave homage to his overlord it was with the intent of keeping his word only when it suited him. At present it did not and he had a name for cruelty above the average, and not only towards his enemies. ‘You are too strong to die of a flesh wound,’ he retorted, ‘and if you are in some discomfort maybe your friends will be all the more eager to redeem you. If not –’ he gave an expressive shrug.

  William looked at him with disgust. ‘A man is not worthy of his knighthood who would ill-use an enemy to hasten his ransom. And my friends will pay nothing for my corpse.’ But who would pay such a sum for him? His uncle now lay dead and his brother John had a mean streak that would send him counting his silver and deciding he could not afford it even for a brother.

  He turned away to stare through the stone slit at the sunset sky outside, his mouth shut hard, and with a shrug the Count left him. But an hour later the kitchen maid came again and this time the bullying guard was not on duty and another man, rough but not unkind, turned his back while the girl brought a strip of clean linen from under her kirtle. What she lacked in skill she made up by her desire to help, and though William winced at her treatment as she washed and bound the wound, when she had finished he thanked her and asked if she had come at the Count’s command. She shook her head, blushing, and he leaned forward to kiss her thin cheek, thus causing the blush to deepen.

  That evening he was able to eat all the food. Slowly the inflammation subsided and a week later when the Count came again he seemed surprised to see the prisoner sitting up with his back against the wall. He repeated his demands and this time William asked him to send news of his captivity to his cousin of Tancarville, for although the Chamberlain was not a rich man he might be able to do something. Unfortunately, though he was not to know it, the messenger fell in with a party of drunken apprentices at an inn and after a rollicking night ended up stripped of purse and clothes and with a knife in his back. The Count’s letter was swept on to the fire with the rest of the debris the next morning.

  Slowly the summer days passed. His wound healed and William watched the golden dawns hoping each would bring a man riding from the north with a saddle bag containing the price of his release. But no one came and summer gave way to autumn and the darker days of winter. It grew bitterly cold in the tower where he was housed and they allowed him a small brazier and faggots of wood to keep himself warm, for he had nothing but his gambeson and his torn hose on his body. His gaoler in his surly way evinced a grudging admiration for his prisoner’s fortitude for some of the men below had talked of his prowess in arms, and occasionally the fellow brought him snippets of news.

  It seemed that Prince Henry had been allowed by his father to do homage to his suzerain, King Louis of France, for Normandy and Anjou, and that Prince Richard had been invested as Duke of Aquitaine. That would please the Queen, William thought, for it was obvious to all that Richard was her favourite child and it was her own province where lay her castle at Poitou that she loved most of all. William’s longing to be free, to be part of these events, increased in him; the clamour of youth to be out of prison, astride a horse in the open air, grew to such an extent that his mind began to play tricks on him. His gaoler told him evil tales of this place, of a forest maiden, Melusine, who married a Count of Anjou and was seen to turn into a serpent; of another Countess who refused to go to Mass and when forced into the chapel by her husband’s knights vanished when the Host was raised, and all that was left of her was the smell of brimstone. Truly the devil must know this place, William thought, and hastily crossed himself, but his sleep was disturbed and the winter wind outside made an eerie noise like the souls of the lost crying out in the darkness. Winter mists cloaked the world outside his window. He begged for a book, his cousin of Tancarville having seen that his education went beyond the use of weapons, and he was brought a volume of French poems filled with the ardour of love, the delight of youth in springtime, which did little for the peace of mind of a vigorous man of twenty-two locked in a room that he could cross in three strides. He tried to remember the tales sung by minstrels at Tancarville, of Roland and Oliver, of King Arthur and his castle of Joyouse Garde, of Galahad and the Holy Grail, but they only served to make his confinement more irksome. The Count decided to allow him out for some exercise and once a day his gaoler took him on to the castle walls where he could look out towards the north, over the stripped trees, the frozen water, the cold winter landscape. At Christmas he heard the distant sound of merrymaking, and wondered where King Henry and the princes were spending the festive season; he remembered the King’s words to him, that he might instruct the heir to the throne, and he cursed the greedy Count whose forays had sent the Earl of Salisbury to do battle with him.

  Even more he cursed him for not sending a second message after the first, which surely had never reached his cousin at Tancarville.

  Spring came, and the trees grew green again, and he became even more desperate, but at last, late one afternoon when he was sitting on his pallet watching a strip of sunlight patterning itself on the floor, there were steps outside, though it was not yet the supper hour.

  The door opened and Count Geoffrey stood there. ‘Well, Messire Marshal,’ he said, ‘you are free to go.’

  ‘To go?’ William repeated in a stunned voice. He got to his feet, aware of a sudden swift pounding of blood through his veins. ‘Who has paid my ransom?’

  ‘Queen Eleanor and you may thank God for her generosity. I was becoming weary with feeding and housing you – I was considering selling you as a slave to the Moors.’

  ‘Aye, my lord,’ William said with outward calm. ‘I did not look for mercy from you.’

  ‘Did you not?’ the Count queried in rather an odd voice. ‘Perhaps I am not thought a merciful man – yet I have not had you thrown into a deep hole where men do not see the light of day again.’

  To be free, to walk down the stair, out of this cursed turret, into the sunshine was so great a relief, so rich a joy that for a moment William, hardly hearing the Count’s words, did not know how to contain his emotion. It mattered nothing to him that they gave him an old spavined hack to ride, that they returned neither his horse nor his weapons – nothing mattered but freedom and he turned his back on the grim castle, seeing the hack’s head not to the north as he had dreamed of doing, but south towards Poitou, where they told him Queen Eleanor held her court.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘I am to be crowned,’ Prince Henry said. ‘William, do you hear? I am to be crowned King of England.’

  ‘So I have heard, my lord. Yet it seems to me that your father still sits on the throne . . .’

  ‘Of course he does,’ the prince retorted impatiently, ‘but don’t you see, it is to ensure that I am the undisputed heir? Richard and Geoffrey are greedy, both of them, and this will make them do homage to me.’ He laughed delightedly. ‘Oh, I shall be glad to see Richard bend the knee. He is so stiff and serious and it was not fair to make him Duke of Aquitaine before I was given my inheritance.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ William said. ‘My lord, do not hold your sword thus, you are not scything corn. Change your grip – so.’

  ‘Very well. William, you don’t seem to understand! I am to go to Westminster next month – to my coronation.’

  ‘I understand very well, but we came out here to practise sword-play, and it is well for a king to be proficient in all the knightly skills.’ But there was a faint smile on William’s face as he spoke. They were in a field behind Winchester Castle, where other lords wer
e either at the butts or throwing the spear. On the far side he could see his friend Will FitzHenry crossing swords with his half-brother. Prince Richard was now taller and more robust than his elder brother, but for all that William’s own particular pupil was no laggard and was learning fast.

  Since his release his fortunes had changed very much for the better. Queen Eleanor had received him graciously and furnished him not only with a better horse but with money for arms and clothes, and he had bent over her hand with a gratitude he was never to forget and which he could best repay by serving her sons. Soon after his arrival she had left her warm southern city where her subjects loved her as their Duchess, caring nothing that she was Queen of England and hating her husband as a stranger and an intruder. Now she was here in Winchester, preparing to attend the strange coronation, but William could see all was not well.

  The King had had a succession of mistresses, his latest being the daughter of Eudes of Porrhoet – Gilbert de Clare confided to William that his own sister, a girl of great beauty, had lately been the object of the King’s attention, but had had the wit to refuse him without bringing the family under his displeasure. Though the Queen accepted this situation as one not unnatural, nevertheless she was a proud woman and when a certain ugly rumour began to be whispered on the backstairs of the court, that the King was taking more than a fatherly interest in the French Princess Alice, his son’s betrothed, it was not hard to see that the love she had once felt for her much younger husband was dying a swift death.

  When William Marshal was made tutor in arms to her eldest son she had said, ‘Messire Marshal, I am glad to hear it. He may have need of your loyalty.’

  William was thinking of these words now as he paused, sword in hand, looking into the flushed face of the youth who stood before him. When Henry was crowned, when he had set his hands over his tutor’s, where then did loyalty lie? To which king?

  ‘Don’t look so troubled,’ Henry said. ‘My father has enough to do in Normandy. I shall have England for my portion and you will be one of my chief advisers. Won’t that please you?’

  ‘If you think your father will relinquish the government of this land to you, then you are mistaken,’ William answered frankly. ‘You are but fifteen, my lord.’

  ‘And a man,’ Henry flashed. He rubbed his hand over his chin as if to be sure there was a slight sandy stubble there. ‘If I were not he would not set the crown on my head. Stay by me, William – you gave your word.’

  ‘I did, and I will not go back on it. But I do not see how you can be crowned now – the Archbishop is in exile.’

  ‘Oh, Becket!’ Henry retorted with a touch of impatience. ‘Everyone is so concerned about him. Do you know, they even say he has begun to work miracles at Sens? Years ago when he was teaching me my letters, and a tiresome business it was, I liked him very well. He was not so stiff-necked then. But if he won’t obey my father, he can’t come back to England and what are we to do? Archbishop Roger of York will crown me – he has agreed. I shall choose the knights to bear my arms into the abbey. Will you carry my helm, William?’

  ‘You honour me, sir.’ The answer was formal, but William was nevertheless aware of pleasure, despite the misgivings. No one but the Archbishop of Canterbury had the right to crown a king, but it seemed as if Thomas Becket’s quarrel with King Henry would never be mended, and nothing could stop this latest scheme to flout him. William could see the possibility of results following from it as inevitably as the rings of water from a stone thrown into a pool, and in the short time since he had become part of this boy’s daily life he had grown to care deeply for him. Young Henry was eager to learn, a generous master to his household, easy-going and approachable, unstable perhaps beneath the charming surface, but he was, as William had just said, only fifteen. With this in mind he added, ‘You would do well to remember that even when I do so, when the crown is set on your head, we are both your father’s men still.’

  ‘Of course.’ In a gesture at once friendly and imperious the Prince laid a hand on his companion’s arm. ‘Dear William, you see trouble where there is none. God aid us, what’s amiss with Richard and Geoffrey?’

  William glanced across to where the two younger princes had been practising at the butts. Apparently some argument had blown up, for, discarding their bows, they were now rolling on the ground together, punching and scratching at each other. With an exclamation William strode across at the same time as Will FitzHenry appeared from the opposite direction. ‘Separate the cubs,’ he said curtly. ‘Enough, my lords, enough! Let be, I say.’ He leaned over and heaved Richard up and away from his brother while Will grasped Geoffrey who, with arms still flailing, was no match for his older half-brother.

  Panting and dishevelled Richard glared at William. ‘What did you interfere for? I wasn’t hurting him.’

  ‘You were,’ Geoffrey screeched. ‘You nearly broke my arm, curse you – and you promised me that bow.’

  ‘When you can shoot straight, which you can’t yet.’

  ‘I can – I can. Since you’ve become a duke you think you can do what you like, but you can’t! I’ll ask my father –’

  ‘Oh, run to him if you will. Mother can hold her own with him and she –’

  Geoffrey’s face was scarlet. ‘I hate you, Richard. You and mother are always scheming together –’

  ‘Be silent, both of you,’ Henry broke in. ‘You are like a pair of snarling wolf cubs.’

  Richard shook himself free of William’s hold, relaxed now that the scrap was ended. ‘This is none of your affair. If you think a crown on your head is going to entitle you to order Geoffrey and me –’

  ‘My lords!’ William broke in sharply. ‘It is not seemly that his grace’s heirs should brawl like common tavern lads.’

  ‘Is it not?’ Richard broke into harsh laughter. ‘Don’t you know we Angevins are born to fight each other, brother against brother, father against –’ he broke off, the laughter dying, and picking up his bow he turned his back on them all and strode off towards the postern gate, the sunlight turning his thick curling hair to a mass of gold.

  With a shrug, Geoffrey added, ‘He’s right, you know, but we can be friends when we choose. Only today I do not choose.’ Echoing Richard’s laugher, but more light-heartedly, Henry thrust an arm through Geoffrey’s, suggesting they visit the fletcher where he would buy him a finer bow and better arrows than Richard’s.

  The Earl of Leicester, who had been at the butts and seen the quarrel, came up in time to hear the last exchange. ‘What a brood! I fear our lord the King has reared trouble for himself.’

  ‘They are boys,’ William said. Time and wise counsel will make better men of them.’

  Robert de Beaumont raised one eyebrow. ‘Do you think so? We had best pray you are right, but I doubt it.’

  The coronation was a sumptuous affair. Archbishop Roger, well satisfied with himself since he had received the Pope’s reluctant approval, set the crown on young Henry’s red-gold head on the fourteenth day of June. It was whispered that the Pope had, at the insistence of Becket, sent a second letter cancelling his consent but whether this had ever been received no one knew for certain.

  The ceremony and the days of celebration that followed were magnificent: no expense was spared. The common folk who had lined the streets to see the handsome youth ride by were treated to great casks of wine and whole roasted oxen as a gift from their new King, and William, walking with three other knights behind him into the abbey, forgot for a moment his misgivings.

  In the months that followed the young King stayed in England, learning the business of kingship and attended by Archbishop Roger, the Earls of Leicester and Norfolk, and William was constantly at his side. Tidings came that the King and his exiled Archbishop had met at Fréteval, that there had been a reconciliation, albeit a chilly one, and that King Henry had given Becket permission to return home and in due course to crown the Young King a second time.

  Henry’s satisfaction at this was soon ch
anged, however, and William came into his room on a bitter day in December to find him striding up and down in a furious manner reminiscent of his father. ‘William!’ He seized his arm. ‘Have you heard –’

  ‘What, sire?’ William asked. ‘I have only just come from my chamber.’

  ‘The hall is always buzzing with gossips before ever I hear it,’ Henry retorted. ‘Do you know what Becket has had the impertinence to do? He has excommunicated Archbishop Roger here – for crowning me! How dared he? And he has ridden to Canterbury with bells ringing and people cheering, as if he ruled this land. Now he has sent a message that he is on his way to visit me, that he will come through London first, and my messenger says the common folk – stupid, gullible fellows – are coming out in their thousands to kiss his shabby robe and his muddy feet. I’ll not have it – I’ll not have it.’

  At the end of this impassioned speech, he paused for breath, his face flushed and angry. In contrast Archbishop Roger, who had sunk down on the stone window seat, raised a face grey with fear. He was shaken out of his usual complacency. The letter of excommunication was lying in his cupboard and with it a threat to lay all England under an interdict so that every church door would be shut and nailed, the faithful deprived of the sacraments, the dying departing this life unshriven. He did not know what to do, torn by loyalty to a stem master, this boy’s father, on the one hand and on the other, to his spiritual superior the Primate of all England supported now, it seemed, by Pope Alexander.

  ‘I think,’ he said at last, twisting the episcopal ring on his finger, ‘I think we must await the commands of your royal father.’

  A further blaze of anger shook the young Henry. ‘I am king here now and Becket, and all of you, shall know it.’ He flung himself down on the side of his bed, rich with red velvet hangings, the badge of his house embroidered there in silver, but the next moment he was up again, an imperious figure in long gown, embroidered sleeves trailing, a gold circlet on his head. ‘Call me a clerk. I will send a message to the Archbishop that he is to bide quietly at Canterbury and cause no more stir. I will not have him riding about my kingdom, causing trouble among ignorant folk.’