The White Ship

by Nicholas Salaman

  I felt a slight bump and there I was, dead on target, nuzzling up to the Quilleboeuf Rock which loomed like a mountain in the dark. It seemed I couldn’t miss it – which was good augury for the main event if it ever came. I tell you, I chucked the weighted buoy over the side as near as I could get to the rock, and rowed hell for leather for home. As I rowed, I could see the lovely buoy bobbing about gamely in the water only five feet from the rock, and looking for all the world like an innocent lobster pot marker, possibly too catch the very lobster I had spoken to a few days before. Everything was going to be all right.

  And thus, like a child who believes that if he shuts his eyes, he will be invisible, I laid my plans. No one saw me when I tied up at the jetty behind the big ships. No one noticed me enter the inn. I was just in time to catch a cup or two of wine and a kiss (nothing more) from Lisette before I went to bed. Job finished, all done and dusted.

  LXVIII

  The Duke arrived with his entourage on the twenty-fourth of November. It had been a dry week and we saw the dust rising from the hill long before the procession appeared, as the party marched down between the banks to the flat meadows that lay between the slope and the town. Then we saw the guard itself, and at the same time the sun came out; there must have been five hundred people at least, and they made a brave sight with their banners, and the glint of steel as lances and swords shimmered in the light.

  Trumpets sounded, and an answering call came from an advance party already in Barfleur. The soldiers finally marched into town and formed up on the square overlooking the jetty, staring out at the vessels that would take them to England. Another ship would appear on the flood tide today and moor on the jetty beside the White Ship. This was the Pelican from Honfleur – we knew that the Duke had chosen her because the Mayor of Honfleur had let it be known that he was upset: he did not understand why the Duke preferred to sail for England from Barfleur; it was something of a slur on the loyalty and efficiency of Honfleur as a port. If the Duke had to do such a thing, it at least rewarded Honfleur’s dedication and service if he sailed in a Honfleur vessel.

  The reason for the Duke’s choice of Barfleur was really quite simple. Barfleur was the nearest port to Southampton and saved an extra thirty minutes of sailing, and nobody wanted to spend longer at sea than they had to. However, the Duke never liked to cause unnecessary antagonism (though he did not mind in the least when it was necessary), and so he had instructed the mayor of Honfleur to send his best ship to take him home for Christmas.

  And so he made his entry into Barfleur with his soldiers and his courtiers and his hangers-on, with the clanking of metal and hoofing of steeds, with trumpets and hoarse commands and quartermasters scuttling about, the whole host smelling of dust, mud, horses, sweat and steel. He had with him trusted older friends – William de Tancarville, Comte Theobald of Blois, Othuer FitzCount, William Bigod, and Gisulf, his scribe – as well as two of his best captains, Gilbert of Exmes and Ralph the Red of Pont-Erchenfray, and his own Chaplain, Bishop Roger of Coutances. There were also some hundred elite archers, dark men redolent of yew and leather, from Wales (where they still castrate forfeited prisoners), and beefy, red-faced foot-soldiers from England.

  If anyone was going to drown the next day, it would not be this lot, so I felt I could look them in the eye. They seemed like hard men and pretty good, average ruffians. It was going to be a noisy night.

  The men fell out and were allotted sleeping quarters in the great hall of the town, and in certain barns set aside for the purpose. There was feasting because they were going home and Christmas was coming, and of course there was drinking too. Everyone was in a good mood because the Duke himself was smiling; it had been a successful season and much had been accomplished.

  The harbour was by now full of vessels bobbing and creaking at the quayside, riggings twittering in the southerly wind. The Pelican, a fine capacious vessel, rode easily at her moorings and was already being loaded with some of the Duke’s baggage and impedimenta, but the pride of all the fair vessels was the White Ship which floated like a swan and was the centre of general attention. I saw FitzStephen standing in a corner thinking he was unobserved, gloating over her like a father seeing his daughter dressed as a bride.

  This same day, I received a package from my lad at Haimo’s in Rouen setting out the sum owing by Prince William and his men for meat, and by Ralph the Red who was ever extravagant (in battle as in bed, it was said). This would give me legitimacy in the eyes of anyone, even the Duke himself, to come aboard whichever ship I chose. It was while I was walking by the jetty looking at the bustle of lading and the men coming and going, that I was prodded sharply in the back by someone coming at me from my unguarded quarter. I whirled round because you can never trust a place where soldiers are waiting. They are a raw and brutal breed and would as soon knife as look at you. But it was the Duke himself, large as life and twice as impressive. A couple of very large soldiers stood at a discreet distance behind him.

  He stood there, a man in the full flush of his maturity: four square; barbu as the French say; black and ruddy with too much campaigning in sun and rain; dangerous, with eyes that never stopped roving. No wonder he had had more children out of wedlock than any other King of England. He could spot a pretty girl a mile off and a traitor too, some said. To say I was disconcerted is to say too little.

  ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘I thought it was you. I never forget a face. And I don’t like yours. Latiner, isn’t it? Last time I saw you, you were taking up arms against me.’

  ‘I was defending your daughter, sire.’

  ‘You were encouraging her in her insurrection.’

  ‘Hardly that, sire. You had just as good as killed her children.’

  That brought him up short. I could see he was weighing up whether to have me arrested or just taken away and killed, but the truth of what I had said struck home. He rubbed his brow, looking suddenly more human.

  ‘It was a terrible thing,’ he muttered. ‘That fool of a Eustace. Who would have thought he would do a thing like that?’

  ‘I was their tutor. They did not deserve a fate like that. It was brave of them to die.’

  ‘It is done now, Latiner. We must move on. I pardon you for fighting against me, but what are you doing here? Hardly teaching Latin to the shipbuilders. Come on, man. The Duke must know everything.’

  His big, black beard with its red, whiskery ends wagged as he admonished me. His eyes flickered over me like a lizard’s tongue.

  ‘I am working for Haimo, butcher of Rouen. He is owed money, sire, by one of your generals and by the Prince. He has asked me to collect it from the paymaster.’

  ‘He arrives tomorrow, and sails with the Prince. You had better beard him then.’

  A secretary appeared and asked for the Duke’s signature – a confirmation charter for the Abbey of Cerisy had to be signed and sent off.

  ‘I must go,’ the Duke said to me. ‘Get your money tomorrow. Don’t let them fob you off. And thank you for looking after my grand-daughters, though I’m not sure I should thank you for looking after their mother…’

  I could hardly believe I had heard the last sentence. He appeared to be in an extraordinarily genial mood. He turned to go, then paused.

  ‘If you ever feel like coming to England,’ he said, ‘come and see me sometime. I am sure we could find you a manor or something.’

  For an absurd moment, I was grateful and rather tempted I could see myself with an English manor. I had heard that Sussex was very pleasant. Alice could come over. And then I thought: all this is going to change. And if the story gets out, and they catch me, I won’t just be hanged.

  LXIX

  There was revelry in the town that night, and I was glad that I was away from it all at the top of the house. I bolted the door, as I knew there would be those below looking for a place to sleep or bed a wench.

  Now the moment was so close at hand, I was concerned that I had had no word from Juliana and then, late at night, there
was a scrabbling outside and a sealed parchment was pushed under my door. I ran to it, of course, undid the bolt and looked out, ran down the stairs and peered around, but I could see no one I recognised. When I returned a captain had slipped into my room and was fornicating with the lovely barmaid, which was a great disappointment to me. I had thought she was made for better things. I hustled them out, still almost joined together like dogs, and read the manuscript at leisure.

  My dearest Bertold,

  I wonder if you realise how much I miss you and think about you. You are my very best man. There has been no other to come near – indeed I have had almost no other if you don’t count a nice tutor I had back in Abingdon where my mother lived. I have always had a weakness for tutors.

  I stopped reading for a moment. She wrote so exactly the way she talked, I felt she was with me again and that we were walking in the herb garden at Breteuil. I sniffed the parchment she wrote on and it smelt of her – rose, jasmine, candied orange, orris root, grani paradisii. I was in love again; realised indeed that I had never stopped loving her.

  What I want you to do is this – and I know you will not fail me, for mine is a good plan and I have spent months upon it, working out every detail. FitzStephen, who is not privy to the plan but owes me a favour, will arrange that Prince William and his party sail in the White Ship. There will be wine of course. There is always wine where William’s party goes. The first thing you must do is make sure there is a little cockle boat tied to the stern. That is what you will make your escape in. Do not forget this. I want you alive, not a pale corpse with your eyes pecked out by the crabs and your white body draped with bladderwrack.

  The King and his Court will leave harbour first, an hour or so before the Prince’s party.

  When you are on board William will want to race the King and get to Southampton before him, you must encourage him in that. It is the kind of young man he is, always on the dash, rather tedious, to be honest, and horribly spoilt.

  When you are on board, as I say, I want you to follow FitzStephen closely. Go where he goes, do what he does. He will be steering the ship unless there is some urgent reason why his attention is called for elsewhere, and we will not let that happen. It will be up to you to prompt the Prince to see that the ship takes the short cut, heading off the King who will be on the longer, safer course. You will make sure that the White Ship holds the course that takes her near the Quilleboeuf Rock whose acquaintance I hear you have made quite intimately, clever boy. When you are very near, and the passengers, by then, stupid with wine – they are not going to survive anyway, so why worry? – you will hit FitzStephen over the head, or tumble him over the side. Don’t be squeamish, he is going to die anyway. Take the tiller and steer straight into the rock. At the speed you will be travelling, it should be quite enough for the vessel to go down.

  However, as it sinks, you will be in your little boat, pulling away. Do not linger, Bertold, or think with pity on those who drown. They have reached their adult life and have been lucky – luckier than Marie and Philippine who never had that chance. And, after all, my father has killed more in battle than you will drown in a shipwreck.

  As I read on, the cold-blooded scheme to kill three hundred passengers and crew, which had seemed to me like a distant plan, a suggestion, a hypothesis – something that happened to other people – became disgustingly real. I heard the screams, the crash of stout wood on stone, the surge of water, the panic, the pandemonium. It horrified – it appalled – me. But I was caught up with this woman, and with Alice whom she held hostage, so what could I do? Tell the Duke that his daughter was plotting to murder his heir, his two other bastard sons and three bastard daughters, not to mention five of his best bastard generals and seven of his bastard barons? No thank you, master parson.

  Juliana had spies here, she had learned that from her father. The boat I thought I had seen in the darkness was doubtless not a phantasm. They had been watching me. I should have thought of that. Not that it mattered; I liked the feeling that she had master-minded everything. Although, now I thought about it, there was actually one other thing she hadn’t considered – or maybe had decided not to mention – and that was how was I going to row the dinghy to shore against the tide? I knew that the day and time for embarkation had been chosen to coincide with a late-evening high water and the tide about to flood. Was I too going to be swept out to sea along with all the flotsam? Well, I would have to cross that bridge when I came to it, or simply take refuge again on that bloody rock as the waters subsided. I comforted myself with the thought that such considerations were the least of my worries at the moment, though not much comfort it was.

  She concluded the note with a vague promise about a reward:

  Do this last thing for me, and I shall make sure you are never short of gold, honour or the love of one who holds your life more precious than her own.

  J

  No, I had to go ahead with her plan, and somehow find a way to circumvent it, but in such a way that Alice would be returned unscathed. Though I would always love Juliana, Alice was the woman who could make me happy. She never gave me hard things to do. She had her own mind, but she didn’t hold it against me. One thing I knew: Juliana would find out if I failed to carry out her orders, and kill Alice anyway.

  There was something else, which I discovered next morning when I woke up. Someone had slipped another note for me under the door. At first I thought it must be more instructions from Juliana, ever one to build a mountain and then put a molehill on top of it, but it was a scrap of a thing written in brown paint or ink and it looked as if it had been smuggled out of a dark place with great care and secrecy.

  It simply read: I am with child. A

  Oh my God! A little bastard, and I had always sworn I wouldn’t.

  There was a picture of a heart done in more brown paint, wherever that had come from, and then it struck me that it had been drawn in blood which, of course, dries brown. You may imagine what that extra ingredient did to the cook’s seething cauldron of emotions that I now experienced.

  I breakfasted on a dry crust, small beer and a thousand regrets. I heard that the Duke was up betimes and from the doorway of The Seabass, I could see that FitzStephen was too, poor man. Indeed they were both poor men – for one was to drown and the other was to have his fondest hope and cherished dream most cruelly removed from him and dissolved in water.

  I threw my crust at a seagull and went to the harbour to walk beside the shipwright as he led the Duke towards the jetty. It was my instruction to be close to the man, and I might as well start as I meant to go on. The nightmare was over. I had woken up and it was real.

  ‘Thank you, Master Shipwright,’ I heard the Duke say as I approached the group standing at the harbourside, mindful of instructions to stay close. ‘I do indeed recall that it was your father who supplied the ships to take my father to England for his conquest of the country. I believe he was rewarded with a manor or two in England for his pains.’

  I approached closer. My God, but the Duke was an impressive man; you could not help but admire him. No wonder he had bred all those bastards. He could instil fear, but at the same time, I believe it could also be a kind of love. All those bastards were not bred out of duty or fear. They were bred because the fine, and even the not-so-fine, Saxon ladies were in love with him. There is nothing so impressive as majesty when it is worn well, and this man knew how to wear it; it came naturally to him, as some men appear to advantage in sackcloth while others look lumpen in ermine. And the other thing about majesty is, the more you exercise it, the bigger it grows.

  I trembled even to be considering the breaking of this great man’s world.

  ‘He was rewarded indeed, sire,’ said FitzStephen, ‘the manors are still in my possession. They lie in the county called Berkshire, I believe. My uncle still lives there and manages the estate.’

  ‘But meanwhile you continue your calling here. Very good. I see you have a fine ship riding in the harbour here. The
y call it the White Ship. Ah,’ the Duke continued, observing my arrival, ‘you again, Latiner? You do seem to crop up everywhere, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sire. My own mother called me Too Much Too Soon.’

  ‘Ha,’ the King laughed, shortly.

  ‘A very fine ship,’ said FitzStephen, eagerly. ‘I have put everything I know into her. Come this way, if you please, sir.’

  He led us back a little from the jetty’s edge where we could have a better view of the whole vessel. FitzStephen then started to explain how he had started working on the ship well over a year before and what he had put into it. I had thought the Duke would be impatient, but he showed, as so often, a keen interest in minutiae, especially if they had a military usefulness.

  ‘Everything I know and more is in there,’ FitzStephen continued. ‘There are certain new contrivances that I have learned about in my travels to the Roman Sea and in voyages I have made to Sweden. Knees and beams passing through the planking give the hull strength, as do riveted and clenched fastenings. We have small decked areas fore and aft, castles as we call them now, which provide shelter below and indeed useful platforms for archers on top. And on the stern, as you will see, she does not have a steerboard or rudder of the Norse kind. For such a large ship, I have preferred a tiller and rudder attached to a stern post at the back. The steerboard is a clumsy thing in a big ship, and this ship is big, sire, but she handles like a thoroughbred. The Romans used tillers, sir, so do the Arabs, and we begin to see them now on heavy hulks. They are the way forward. A sternpost compromises the shape of the old Norse ship, it’s true. But we have taken certain measures so the White Ship runs through the sea like a sword. With a ship like this you could rule the seas. Would you like to come aboard, sire?’