Seeking Jerusalem

by H A CULLEY

  He engaged a twelve year old orphan as a servant and set off for Grimsby. The boy had been a scullion in the kitchens at Edale and Waldo had offered him the chance to escape his life of drudgery when he went there to settle his affairs, prior to handing his four manors over to the toady that John had given them to. The orphan was called Erian, which meant ploughboy in the Saxon tongue.

  Waldo had only taken him with him because it would have looked suspicious if he hadn’t engaged a servant. He would probably have to abandon the boy at some stage, and he felt a pang of guilt about that, but Erian was a bright lad and he would probably survive somehow.

  The boy picked up what was required of him very quickly and Waldo acknowledged to himself that he was more of a help than Waldo had expected. After a few days he even wondered how on earth he would have managed without him.

  They stayed at taverns or at religious houses on the way from Nottingham to Grimsby and at supper Waldo would amuse himself by wondering which of his fellow travellers might be his shadows, but he never saw the same face twice and he concluded that they probably spent the night elsewhere and picked up their quarry again in the morning. Once or twice he felt certain he had a fleeting glimpse of someone behind them but when he stopped suddenly and peered at the back trail it was always empty.

  ‘Are we being followed, Sir Waldo?’ Erian asked after the third time this had happened.

  ‘Possibly. There are always robbers about. Keep your eyes skinned and let me know if you see anyone.’

  Erian kept a sharp lookout but didn’t see anyone and got bored with it after a while. He therefore missed the grey figure on a black rouncey who had tracked them from Nottingham. In fact there was only one, but Waldo wasn’t to know that.

  It wasn’t until they boarded ship at Grimsby heading for Antwerp that Waldo first saw the man. By then he was dressed as a priest and boarded the same ship quite openly. He kept his cowl up on deck so it was difficult for Waldo to see his face. However, the other passengers were so open and friendly that a priest who liked to keep himself to himself rather stood out. Waldo wasn’t absolutely certain that the priest was his man, but he wasn’t prepared to take any chances.

  On the second night out the wind got up and several of the passengers were sick. The stench down below was appalling so, leaving Erian asleep, Waldo went up on deck where the wind soon blew away any feeling of nausea. In fact, Waldo found the gale exhilarating. Then he noticed the supposed priest being sick over the side. It was dark and no-one was near him, so Waldo went over and put his left arm around his shoulder as if to comfort him and then, bracing himself against the deck, he moved his hand to the middle of the shoulder blades and pushed hard. The gunwale acted perfectly as a pivot against the man’s belly and he shot head first into the sea. Even if someone had been looking their way, it was over so quickly that they would have probably thought that their eyes had deceived them.

  Waldo held his breath for a moment but there was no sound other than the wind howling in the rigging and the flapping of canvass as the crew shortened sail. He kept his eyes open to see if anyone seemed unduly concerned by the priest’s disappearance but no-one did. When his absence was eventually noticed everyone assumed that he had fallen overboard by accident.

  When Waldo reached Antwerp, he took a room for three days and went out each day, leaving Erian behind, as if he had important business to transact. Then he booked passage on a fishing boat travelling back to Lowestoft after landing its catch at Antwerp, where the taxes were lower. On the way back Waldo learned a lot about fishing from the skipper, who owned three large fishing boats, and became interested. The man wanted to expand his fleet but he didn’t have the money to do so. By the time Waldo and Erian disembarked at the village of Lowestoft, Waldo had entered into partnership with the skipper and Erian had enlisted as a deckhand. As he said later to Waldo it was hard work, especially for a lad his age, but it was a lot better than scrubbing pots in a hot kitchen or turning a spit all day.

  His new partner invited Waldo to stay with him and his family until he found lodgings of his own. On arrival at their modest house, Waldo was introduced to the man’s family, but he only had eyes for the eldest daughter, Mary. She was sixteen and the loveliest girl Waldo had ever seen. He seat next to her at supper and was delighted to find that she was intelligent as well as being pretty.

  Later in his bedchamber he chided himself for being a fool. What would a vivacious young girl see in an older one-armed man? He couldn’t even trade on the fact that he had been a crusader to impress her. His old life had to remain a secret if we didn’t want Prince John’s agents to track him down.

  With Erian away at sea much of the time, Mary took it upon herself to look after him. Gradually Waldo dared to hope that Mary might be developing some feelings for him, but then decided that it was probably just pity.

  Then, one night after bringing him a fresh candle for the sconce in his room, she kissed him goodnight. It was only a chaste brush of the lips, but it was enough for Waldo. He wrapped his good arm around Mary’s slender waist, pulled her against him and kissed her properly. At first she tried to pull away, then she relaxed and responded to his kiss with passion.

  By the time that the news that King Richard was a prisoner in Austria reached Lowestoft, Waldo and Mary were newly married and he had settled down in Lowestoft, living as a reasonably wealthy merchant who owned twenty five per cent of the local fish market. Erian had been offered the job of running the modest house that Waldo had bought with the last of the money from Edale and, much as he loved the sea, the boy was astute enough to realise that the life of a deckhand was somewhat precarious. Most drowned before they reached the age of thirty.

  Prince John gnashed his teeth in rage when he heard nothing from his man and, as Waldo still hadn’t arrived in Dol six months after he set out, he realised that the man had given him the slip. His agents were on the lookout for a one handed knight but no-one thought of looking for a fish merchant instead.

  ~#~

  Three months after his return, Lord Tristan was sitting in the solar in Harbottle Castle talking to his wife, Alice of Kessingland, when his agitated steward came to see him. Tristan and Alice had wed seven weeks after his return to England. King Richard was now in the hands of Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, and a ransom of one hundred thousand marks had been agreed for Richard’s release. Queen Eleanor and William Marshal were raising this huge sum by levying a number of new taxes, one of which was on land holdings.

  ‘Where on earth are we going to find the coinage to pay this new charge on your estates, my lord?’ The steward shook his head in despair. ‘It will take three years’ income to pay it and we just haven’t got that kind of money anywhere. It will mean either seeking a loan from your uncle, Lord Edward de Cuille, or selling off some of the estate.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I think I know just where I can lay my hands on that amount of silver,’ Tristan replied, winking at his wife who knew about the money transferred from the New Temple in London to Edinburgh. He was very much in love with Alice and she was one of the few people he trusted implicitly. However, it didn’t do to let your steward know too much.

  Epilogue – 12th May 1219

  William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke and regent of England, knew he was dying. The previous day he had sent for the king - the eleven year old Henry III- together with his guardian, the Bishop of Winchester, the Papal Legate and the leading magnates in the country. He didn’t trust the bishop one inch and so he nominated the Papal Legate as regent in his place.

  William had ruled England since the death of King John at Newark two and a half years previously. William thought back over his life and couldn’t help but feel satisfied with what he had achieved. He had progressed from the young boy who King Stephen had so nearly hanged at Newbury over sixty years before to a successful tournament knight. In turn this had led to his appointment as military tutor to Henry, the Young King. Ever since then, he had served the kings of Englan
d faithfully - even John, though he found it difficult to remain loyal at times, especially after he had blinded and then murdered the fifteen year old Prince Arthur of Brittany.

  Marshal was the person who had persuaded John to sign the Magna Carta, but then that perfidious man had reneged on the charter. That had led to the Barons’ War and the invitation to Prince Louis, the Dauphin of France, to come to England to replace John as king. If John hadn’t died when he did the barons might well have crowned Louis. How Philip Augustus must have laughed at the thought that his son might take the throne of his old enemy, Richard the Lionheart.

  Richard was ever the warrior, eventually dying at the siege of a small, insignificant castle owned by the rebellious Viscount of Limoges. The king had been shot in the neck by a crossbow wielded by a twelve year old cook’s boy. Due to the incompetence of the surgeon, the wound had turned gangrenous and the king died on the sixth of April 1199. Before he did so, in a typical fit of generosity, the king forgave the boy and even gave him a purse of one hundred shillings. Not that it did the boy much good. When the king died some of his men took the boy and flayed him alive before hanging him.

  It was William Marshal’s leadership of England that had defeated Louis in the end, securing the throne for Henry III and the Plantagenet line. But John had done a great deal of damage before he died.

  He had rampaged through the north of England burning towns and replacing the barons with his own followers: men who supported John for venal gain. There wasn’t an honest man amongst them.

  William had always felt a particular affection for the de Cuille family after Guy had taken him under his wing at Newbury, so he was saddened by the fate of his grandson, Tristan. John had confiscated his barony giving it, including Redesdale and Harbottle Castle, to Gilbert d’Umfraville.

  Tristan had joined the Dauphin’s army but then had switched sides to support William Marshal and the young Henry III, like many another, when John died. The last William had heard of him, Tristan was living quietly at his wife’s manor on the East Coast near the fishing village of Lowestoft. William admired him for that. He could have ridden north into Scotland and claimed his inheritance as the eldest son of Edward, Baron of Craigmor. But that would have brought him into conflict with his younger brother David, who had been acknowledged as the heir in Scotland when Richard de Cuille had named Tristan to succeed him in Northumberland.

  Waldo Cuille knew of Tristan’s proximity, but the one time that they had encountered each other, which was at the fair in Lowestoft in 1217, Tristan hadn’t recognised the grey-bearded one-armed fish merchant.

  Roland FitzRichard had reached his majority and received the manor of Akeld in the year that Richard the Lionheart was killed. He had held it for just seventeen years before King John rampaged through the North during the Barons’ War. Roland had fled with his family across the Tweed into Scotland and taken service with the new king of Scots – the eighteen year old Alexander II.

  Bertram de Muschamp hadn’t been so lucky. He had been killed defending Wark when John burned the village to the ground. William supposed that Miles would have lost his manor of Byrness too when d’Umfraville took over Redesdale. He had heard rumours that outlaws were harassing the d’Umfraville lands and he wondered whether Miles had returned to the ways of his father, Robert of Locksley.

  William’s reminiscing became jumbled in his mind and slowly he drifted into unconsciousness.

  The next morning he awoke to find his whole family had gathered in his bedchamber. He and Isabel had had ten children, five boys and five girls. The girls had all married well and William dimly saw the Earls of Norfolk and Hertford amongst his sons-in-law. They were there to watch his investment as a Knight Templar; it was his dying wish that he should join the order and be buried in the Temple church in London.

  He died the following day, the fourteenth of May 1219, at the age of seventy two. The great love of his life, Isabel de Clare, died the following year aged forty eight, some said of grief, and was buried at Tintern Abbey. Each of their five sons became Earl of Pembroke in their turn but none managed to sire a son, so William’s line died out within a generation.

  Other books by H A Culley

  The Normans Series

  The Bastard’s Crown

  England in Anarchy

  Caging the Lyon

  Seeking Jerusalem

  Babylon Series

  Babylon – The Concubine’s Son

  Babylon – Dawn of Empire

  Individual Novels

  Magna Carta

  Robert the Bruce Trilogy

  The Path to the Throne

  The Winter King

  After Bannockburn (To be published in January 2015)

  About the Author

  H A Culley served in the Army for twenty four years during which time he had a variety of unusual jobs. These included commanding an Arab unit in the desert for three years and a tour as the military attaché in Beirut in the late seventies.

  After leaving the Army he became the business manager of a large independent school for twenty years before moving into marketing and fundraising. He has also been involved in two major historical projects and worked for an educational charity until recently. He is now retired but is still involved in the voluntary sector.

  He has given talks on historical subjects for several years and the research involved provided his inspiration for writing historical fiction.

  He has three adult children and lives near Holy Island in Northumberland with his wife and two Bernese Mountain Dogs.