Those who broke the boy: The Sons of Charlemagne Book One

by Richard Hathway

  Sally looked at me with a patience that suggested that she often had conversations like this with schoolboys. She was smiling throughout and even frowned a little in sympathy as if she felt my pain and was willing me to get through it.

  “You need Charlemagne’s family tree Hun? I can maybe help you with that. Have a seat here while I take a look.” Sally indicated a chair on the other side of her desk.

  “I’d rather sit on your lap baby!” shouted the voice. It was so loud in my head for a moment I was sure she must have heard it. I needed to get my head back in the game, forget that she was beautiful and concentrate on Charlemagne. I waited patiently while Sally flicked through a drawer of index cards, her sexy long fingers moving through before pausing on those of interest.

  “Lucky fucking cards.” Slithered the voice. A few minutes later Sally looked up.

  “I think I have what you need.”

  “Damn right you do baby!” grunted the voice. I really needed to keep him under control.

  “Thank you very much.” I managed feebly as I rose from the chair to follow her. She was even better standing up than she was sitting. I hadn’t finished growing yet and stood at five foot five inches. In her heels, Sally was easily five foot ten which put her substantial, bouncing breasts just below my eye level. I didn’t honestly think there was a better arse in the world than Mrs Wigram’s but there it was! The walk from the desk back to the medieval European history section was a very pleasant if torturous one.

  When we arrived, Sally ran a couple of fingers along a row of books, scanning the digits on the stickers on the spines. She landed on the one she had been looking for.

  “Here you are Hun, this one should get you started.” Lifting it from the shelf she turned and handed it to me. Our hands briefly touched as the book passed between us and I felt my face explode in the immediate heat of a blush. To her credit, Sally ignored it and kept smiling. “What school do you go to Hun?” she asked by way of helping me move on. “We don’t get many kids asking about Charlemagne. You must have a new teacher trying to make an impression, most history in schools is Romans, Henry the Eighth or World War Two.”

  “It’s not for school.”

  Oh my God why did I say that? Now she was going to ask more questions. An awkward kid in the middle of the day asking about stuff that isn’t for school was going to raise suspicions. She was going to see the school badge on my blazer and phone the school. I would end up with no information and a month’s worth of detention. I had fucked up. I dropped my shoulders in resignation and, as a frown of disappointment spread across my brow, I waited for her to deliver the news.

  “Well, I need a cigarette so how about you keep my secret and I’ll keep yours? If anyone asks I’ve been here helping you the whole time, what do you say Hun?”

  My frown turned upside down. “Absolutely.”

  I watched her leave, one last indulgence before I got to work, and when she disappeared past the end of the row of shelves I turned my attention to the book. It was a thin volume about European ruling families and dynasties. I sat down on a small stool I found a few feet further down the aisle and started turning pages. Only ten or so pages in I found what I needed. Sally had hit the jackpot and saved me so much time. I stared at the pull out double page that illustrated the family tree of Charlemagne’s sons. My heart skipped a few beats. I was a step closer.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  My joy quickly soured to despair. Looking at a family tree told me nothing. It gave me names but there was no context, no facts, no clues. I needed to find out about who these people were but there were so many of them. Charlemagne had left a tangled web of ancestry. He had at least twenty children with at least eight women. Even stripping out the girls I was left with his nine sons to investigate. From what I knew of the rules of kings I decided to concentrate on the oldest son, Pepin the Hunchback. The name didn’t exactly sing with the confidence of a capable leader but surely the eldest son always succeeds the king. I flicked to the index of the book to find the pages that related to Pepin the Hunchback. I couldn’t find any reference to him. There wasn’t a single mention of him in this book, it was just illustrations of family trees. I got off the stool and went back to the section of the shelves from which Sally had pulled the book I was looking at. I scanned the spines of the books until my gaze landed on a book called “The Father of Europe”. I remembered Mr Eveleigh calling Charlemagne that. I took the book from the shelf. The dark red cover had a coat of arms on it. I felt my heart stop for what felt like an hour. My mouth went dry and I began to shake. The shield was split vertically. On the left-hand side was a black eagle with red talons and beak on a yellow background. The right-hand side was a royal blue background with six yellow fleurs de lyes. I reached into my blazer pocket and pulled out the business card I had taken from the big house on Grove Road. I turned it in my hand and there it was, the exact same crest staring back at me. I felt my legs begin to buckle underneath me so, cradling the book like a baby, I went back to the stool and sat down. There in my hands was the proof that I was on the right track, a tangible link between the girl and her words “The Sons of Charlemagne”.

  I went straight to the index and ran my finger down the words. On the third page he was there, Pepin the Hunchback. There weren’t as many references to him as I would expect for the eldest son of the Carolingian emperor but I turned to the first page he was referenced in. Pepin the Hunchback was the son of Charlemagne and his first wife Himiltrude. However, he had been disowned by Charlemagne when he had married again and was removed from the line of succession. The book stated that he may have had Kyphosis, a convex curvature of the spine caused by arthritis but that this was debated amongst historians. He may not have been hunchbacked but nicknamed as such to further remove him, in the people’s eyes, from the noble line. Reading that reminded me of a joke I had heard Bob Monkhouse tell on TV once. “I think I’ve got a convex curvature of the upper sine. Call it a hunch.” I hadn’t understood it at the time but now gave a little chuckle to myself. Reading on I discovered that Pepin had lived at his father’s court even after his mother had been dismissed. He obviously harboured some ill feeling towards Charlemagne because he planned to revolt against the king in 792. The plot, put together by Pepin and a group of leading Frankish noblemen, was discovered and quashed before it began and the perpetrators sentenced to death. Pepin was spared by his father and exiled to the monastery of Prum in Lorraine. He died there in 811, three years prior to his father’s death. It was clear from my reading that Pepin the Hunchback would not have been privy to any royal plans or favours. His fate had been sealed when Charlemagne had married again and had sons of better physical stature by his new wife Hildegarde of the Vinzgau.

  Pepin was a dead end, albeit a curvy one, and I was beginning to realise that the business of succession in medieval courts was one fraught with danger and ill fortune. I went back to the family tree in the book Sally had found for me. I laid it out on the floor and folded the page out. Pepin was off to the left on a thin branch from Himiltrude. He had no children, he was a withered end, a distraction. I concentrated on the sons of Hildegarde and Charlemagne. By contrast the lineage of the Carolingian king flowed from her like a mighty oak, strong, virile branches growing in all directions. I disregarded the daughters and found four sons. The eldest of these was called Charles the Younger so seemed the obvious choice to investigate. The wasted effort on Pepin the Hunchback had already instilled caution in me however. I took my history exercise book from my rucksack and fumbled around in the bottom for a pen. I noted down all four sons. Charles the Younger had been followed by Carloman and then the twins Louis and Lothair. I spent the next twenty minutes flicking through “The Father of Europe” like a burglar rushing through a house trying to find the jewels. I was flinging information behind me as I tossed through the pages trying to get a picture of Charlemagne’s four sons. My list was reduced to three when I found that Lothair, twin of Louis, had died in infancy. My head was
beginning to hurt with all the information. It was all so confusing and seemed to be getting me no nearer to the girl at the window. I needed to cut down my workload. I sat back on the stool and closed my eyes. The quiet of the library enveloped me and I began to relax my body. I was listening to my breathing and chasing the shapes on my eyelids when I heard a voice.

  “You ok Hun? Need some help?” I opened my eyes to see Sally standing close by, her head tilted and frowning slightly.

  “I can’t do this,” I muttered, “I have no idea where to start, there’s so much information and I keep hitting dead ends.”

  “Well you need to fix the question you need answering, cut down the information a bit. What do you need to know?” She was smiling and somehow I felt buoyed again. I don’t know why but I trusted her.

  “I need to know about the sons of Charlemagne but he had five, well three that matter. I think one of them has a link with slavery, I know that seems stupid, I can’t explain it but maybe one of his sons did something that has carried on or something, oh I don’t know this is fucking stupid.”

  Sally put her hand on my shoulder and quietly shushed me. “If you think one of the three did something you need to figure out which one could have done something. History is littered with the sons of kings who held no power.”

  “But how do I do that without reading everything there is to read about them? I don’t have the time for that?” I didn’t mean to get angry with her and I think she recognised I was just frustrated with the weight of history.

  “He had three sons that you think are of interest?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you don’t need to know everything about them. You only need to know about Charlemagne. More specifically the death of Charlemagne.” It took a second but when I got it my eyes widened in realisation.

  “They can’t all be king! Only one of them can succeed Charlemagne and that one will be the one with the power! That’s brilliant, thank you!”

  “Not a problem Hun, happy hunting!” and with that Sally turned and disappeared around the end of an aisle. I picked up “The Father of Europe” and looked at the contents page. Chapter ten was entitled “The will of the king. Death and the Divisio Regnorum.” I eagerly thumbed through to the book to find it. What I read over the next hour confused me even more.

  In 806 Charlemagne set out his wishes for the Carolingian Empire after his death. His eldest three sons by Hildegarde of the Vinzgau would each take a piece of the kingdom to rule. Charlemagne did not see this as a breaking up of the empire but rather a division of labour. By being seen to not show preference to one son he may also have hoped to avoid civil war after his death. He had built a vast empire and certainly wouldn’t have wanted his legacy ruined by sibling rivalries.

  Charlemagne’s Divisio Regnorum of 806 was his attempt to see the continuation of his efforts. Louis the Pious, whose twin Lothair had died in infancy, was to have Aquitaine, Gascony, Provence and the west of Burgundy. Carloman, now confusingly renamed Pepin of Italy, was to have rule over Italy, part of Alamannia and Bavaria, except the northern territory of Nordgau. This was to be overseen by Charles the Younger along with Neustria, Saxony, Austasia, Frisia, part of Alamannia and most of Burgundy.

  Charlemagne was to rule for a further eight years before his death in 814. Unfortunately, by then two of his sons were dead. Pepin of Italy died in 810, followed two years later by Charles the Younger. This left Louis the Pious as sole heir to the crown of the Carolingian empire. With the death of Charlemagne came the decline of his empire. Louis was not his father. He had been schooled in how to run an empire, indeed he was a decent ruler of some accomplishment. He couldn’t live up to the legend though. The wheel of kings is always turning and as one falls from the top of the cycle, another one is there to take his place. The trick is not to be the one that follows the legend. Any politician, football manager, or guitarist in a band will tell you, don’t be the one that follows the one everyone loves. Be the one who follows him. The first successor will always suffer from not being the legend and as such any accomplishments will never measure up. Louis the Pious could have been a great ruler, a good ruler or a terrible ruler, it didn’t matter. He could never be a God like his father. As such he struggled to keep the empire together. He fought against his three sons, surviving a brief deposition in 833. After his death in 840 there raged a three-year civil war before the Treaty of Verdun of 843 settled the lands between them.

  Lothair I was granted the middle kingdom, comprising what we would recognise today as Northern Italy, Burgundy, Provence, Lorraine, Belgium and Holland. Louis the German was given the kingship of Saxony, the lands to the north and east of Italy as well as those to the east of the Rhine. Charles the Bald received Aquitaine and the lands to the west of the Rhine, making up most of modern day France.

  Through successive generations the borders changed as did the names. Lothair I’s sons, Lothair II and Charles of Provence split his kingdom and after Louis II died his uncles Charles the Bald and Louis the German split his lands between them. The two halves were united again under Louis the Younger, son of Louis the German, who took them from Charles the Bald’s grandson Louis III, who had succeeded Louis the Stammerer who ruled for just two years.

  My eyes hurt and my head was pounding. I was so confused and overwhelmed that all the information was beginning to merge together. How many Louis’s were there? Charles the what had ruled where and when? What the hell was Austrasia? Neustria? I had learned so little. I sat back and tried to think. What had I learned? I tried to strip out everything I didn’t know and focus on what I did. I knew that only Louis the Pious had survived his father. That cut my list of sons down to one. But then I also knew that he had three sons so if I followed a logical line of enquiry I needed to now look at them. If Louis the Pious was the sole remaining male heir then he had to be the son of Charlemagne that mattered. He had to be the one who had started whatever it was I was trying to uncover. If that was true, then one of his sons must have carried it on. I sighed and held my head in my hands. This was going to take forever. Sally appeared around the corner and, seeing me slumped on the floor, came and sat down next to me.

  “I’m wondering what it is you’re really doing here Hun? I may be crazy as a headless chicken but this seems like a big deal to you. I can see the burden of it sitting on your shoulders. Now we don’t know each other but maybe I can help you. I got my history degree from the university here but I grew up in New Orleans so I know a bit about slavery. So how about you tell me just what it is you’re looking for and maybe I can get you there quicker. How about it Hun?”

  I looked up at her and for a moment all I wanted to do was run. I felt like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. No that wasn’t right, I felt much less informed about my situation than that. I was falling down the rabbit’s hole like Alice, turning and tumbling through darkness with no knowledge of where I was going or what awaited me there. I couldn’t tell Sally what I was looking for, I had no idea myself. I didn’t know if they was anything to find. I only knew about the girl, the business card, the cover up of the crime. Was that enough to go on? Did I have a case to investigate or was it all in my head? Was I making leaps of logic that weren’t justified? In the absence of all the facts I might be constructing causation from correlation. Everywhere I looked was more confusing darkness, more enveloping fantastical thinking that made no sense. Would I, like Alice, land in a dangerous world that made no sense? I was certainly out of my depth but would I drown or find land? Could Sally really help me? Was it crazy to think that a beautiful woman from New Orleans that I found in a library in Bristol could be my Mad Hatter? It wouldn’t be the most unbelievable thing that had happened to me recently. I had no idea if I could trust her. I honestly had no idea what it was I would be trusting her with. So, I decided that if I was Alice I would trust my instinct like Alice. When all else fails trust yourself. I looked at Sally’s eyes, tried to see inside them, tried to know her in an inst
ant. Maybe because they were such pretty eyes, maybe I saw the dark flicker for the first time at that moment. Maybe it was because her eyes somehow shone with possibility, maybe because right there and then they were all I had. Whatever the reason I decided I trusted her. I decided not to run.

  “I saw a girl, a black girl, I saw her killed at the window of a house near mine. I saw the man who did it but I hid behind a hedge and he didn’t see me. She shouted The Sons of Charlemagne before she was killed. I phoned the police but they found nothing. I got ill and when I was better a week later I found out the police had been round to his house but they’d found nothing and they thought it was a hoax. I don’t know how they did it but they got rid of her. She was a slave, must have been a save, oh I don’t know, could have been a slave. It’s the only explanation that makes sense, except it doesn’t because slaves don’t exist anymore. I don’t know what I’m doing but I know what I saw and I can’t get her out of my head. I just want to know what happened, what The Sons of Charlemagne means. I need to find out what happened.”

  As if an entire other me had climbed from my shoulders I suddenly felt very light. The weight of it all had gone and, had there been a gentle breeze whisping past, I might well have been carried away on it like an errant crisp packet at a bus stop. A problem shared is a problem halved they say and that never rang more true than for me that day. It almost didn’t matter if Sally believed me. It didn’t matter if she laughed and pointed and said I was nuts. The act of speaking it had taken it from within me and given it form. It still sounded preposterous but it was real now. The power of dark thoughts always lies in their ability to have you keep them inside. I can’t possibly say that! What will people think? My God if people only knew what I thought sometimes they’d think I’m crazy wouldn’t they? I must be the only one that sometimes wonders if it would be fun to push the old lady over and steel her shopping. No-one else would think these horrible things, I am a terrible person. Dark thoughts are like abusers, they need you to think it’s your fault. They need you to believe that it’s better to keep the secret. The truth is that anything inside of you that screams to be kept in darkness should be exposed to the light. As Roosevelt said, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. In that moment, sat on a library floor with my fears laid before her, the soft underbelly of my vulnerabilities exposed to attack, I felt free of fear. What would be would be. A serenity came over me that not even his screaming and clawing inside me could disturb.