The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  Meanwhile, ten paces away, Quint passed Walt his pack, his purse and his hat, did a handstand and walked on his hands.

  The magician riposted by cutting a cord in two places with a pair of shears. He pushed the three pieces into his mouth and pulled them out restored to one cord. Walt was put in mind of the Trinity in Unity, the Unity in Trinity. If a mountebank at a city gate could perform such a trick then probably God could too.

  The odd thing was someone else in the crowd took the same meaning, and hollered blasphemy. Well, perhaps not so odd. For seven hundred years the town had had a reputation for being pernickety about theological niceties. This was a thin, nasty looking man with eyes that looked two ways and was obviously known to the crowd because they jeered at him, calling him by name. He cursed them and ran off through the gate.

  Quint did a back flip, then a rolling series of hand-stands like a Catherine Wheel, ending in two aerial somersaults, landing with a thump in an attempt to do the splits. He was obviously jarred by the fall, even hurt. No one but Walt paid any attention, except a new arrival, a woman. Walt, running to his companion’s side to help him up, remarked her too. She was above-average height, had red hair, hennaed perhaps, piled high and held in place with a gold band and covered with an emerald-green silk scarf. Her neck was also circled with gold. She wore a peacock-blue cloak over a white shift, silky and pleated, and had gold slippers. For all her magnificence she was unattended, and Walt felt, as he dusted Quint down and enquired how he was, that her attention was covertly fixed on them both. He shuddered, but did not know why.

  Meanwhile the melancholy magician had performed three more illusions and was about to perform, he announced, his concluding trick after which he would walk amongst them with a bag into which, if they had enjoyed the show, and he very much hoped they had, he felt sure they would place a small token of their appreciation thus enabling him to eat that night and perhaps sleep safely too. Threatened thus the crowd, as crowds will, began to disperse. He ran amongst them, caught an old man by the sleeve, called out loudly so all turned after all to watch, plunged his hand down the old man’s back, his smock was quite loose at the neck, and pulled out ... a white dove, a beautiful white dove, which he threw in the air.

  ‘See,’ called the mountebank, ‘how this dove proceeds from the father. You are, are you not, a father?’

  ‘Grandfather, too,’ the old man replied proudly.

  Meanwhile the dove climbed into the sky in a graceful, spiralling flight, above the battlemented walls, so all who looked up (and some thereby had their purses filched or slit by a young boy who slipped through the crowd) expected it to pass from view.

  But suddenly it was coming down again, in a strange tumbling flight, dropping a foot or two at a time so it seemed it had been shot with an arrow then recovering, and then twisting and turning again, until it at last alighted . . .

  Beneath a slender palm, on a low bank or mound, a young girl sat, dark of hair but beautiful, hooded modestly and dressed in blue, and the dove alighted first at her feet, and then fluttered up into her lap where it cooed, cr-croo, cr-croo, and she fondled it and stroked his head. She seemed almost to push it into the pit of her stomach.

  Some cheered and clapped, and did indeed put money in the magician’s bag, but others sensed there was more here than met the eye and began quickly to move off in a variety of directions, though the grand lady, the one with red hair and a peacock-blue cloak was almost the last. And they were right to do so.

  Hooves thundered, dust swirled, four armed and armoured horsemen burst through the scattering throng. Two dismounted, pushed the reins of their mounts into their companions’ hands and seized the magician. Quint, with a great cry of anger, hurled himself on the back of one, fastened arms round his neck and tried to drag him down. One of the mounted men swung his horse round and drew his sword above Quint’s head. Walt leapt between them and took the blow, fortunately from the flat of the blade, right across his ear and cheek. Pain and a noise worse than thunder, bright lights, brighter than the sun, flashed in his head, then darkness came down like a soothing blanket.

  He came to, with the coolness of water from Quint’s gourd splashing about his face, but it was not Quint who held it. His eyes focused on black eyebrows that met above the nose of the pert face, now smiling but anxiously, of the girl in blue. His head was in the lap of the boy who had slit or picked the purses of the less wary in the crowd.

  ‘What happened?’ Walt asked, naturally enough. His head sang, the inside of his mouth raged, his cheek and ear smarted dreadfully, but he had suffered worse in the past, much worse.

  ‘Our Father,’ which art in heaven, Walt’s errant mind supplied, ‘is in the town jail. Your friend is with him.’

  It was the boy who spoke.

  ‘I followed them there,’ he went on. ‘It’s not far, just the other side of the gate.’

  ‘What will happen?’

  ‘They’ll be tried in the morning. Hopefully for disturbing the peace, assault on a constable, that sort of thing. But I’m afraid there’s talk of blasphemy.’

  ‘Daddy’s so silly’ his sister interjected, and there were tears in her voice. ‘He thinks it’s so clever what he does, and it always gets us into trouble.’

  With his arm round the boy’s shoulders and holding the girl’s hand, Walt and the two children walked away from the gate and back up the thoroughfare that led to it, past the vendors of quickly prepared food and stalls selling bread and fruit. Dusk was lengthening the shadows now and some of the stalls were lit with flaring torches or oil lamps. They seemed as busy as ever, with clouds of aromatic smoke swirling round those where food was cooked.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Walt asked, in English but spoken slowly.

  ‘To the inn where we have been staying. It’s quite comfortable. You can borrow Daddy’s bed for the night.’

  The children spoke in a mixture of English and Norman French, occasionally throwing in demotic Latin or Greek when they were at a loss for a word. In spite of the singing in his now swollen ear and the general noise and bustle of the street Walt found he could follow most of what they said. The girl’s name was Adeliza, the boy’s Alain; she was, Walt guessed, fourteen, he twelve

  They came to the inn. It was a two-storey building built of brick, plastered and painted white, with a gateway high enough to take a mounted man. Beyond lay a large courtyard, fifty paces by fifty paces with a well in the middle. Most of the ground floor was taken up with stabling, though half of one side was given over to a tavern with tables and benches where men, and a few women, prostitutes or dancing girls, were already drinking, singing, and shouting raucously.

  Alain checked their horse and mule were still safely stabled, watered and fed, while Adeliza led Walt up one of the staircases, along a short wooden veranda or balcony roofed with red tiles and through a narrow door into the room they were sharing with their father.

  It was small, with one raised bed of wooden planks, a straw-filled paillasse and a thread-bare blanket. There were two more paillasses on the floor. All this was lit from a tiny window, which had been left shuttered against the heat, but Adeliza pushed back the shutters as soon as they entered.

  Along one wall five large, strapped saddle-bags made of leather had been stacked and there was a small assortment of cast-off clothes and shoes scattered about the floor. Adeliza made Walt lie on the bed.

  ‘I’ll soon be back,’ she said, and smoothed his brow with a cool white hand.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To get water, and dressing for your wound.’

  ‘It’s not a wound. Just a graze.’

  ‘You can’t see it. It’s a wound, silly, believe me,’, and she squeezed his shoulder.

  When she was gone he ran his hand up his cheek and winced with pain when he came to his ear. The whole area was crusted with dry and drying blood. And, he now realized, at least four of his back teeth on that side were shattered. He swung his legs off the bed, thinking to f
ind a mirror or a polished surface that would serve for one. He felt a wave of dizziness and had to put his hand on the rough-cast wall to steady himself and lean forwards so his head was level with his chest. And then he saw it -- the gleam of mother of pearl, polished sandal-wood, inlaid gold and the light running up and down the twelve or so cat-gut strings. It had been part-hidden by one of the saddle bags against the wall, clearly visible from where he was now. He shifted the saddle-bag and looked at it.

  It was a harp. One of the largest he had ever seen, and instantly he knew he had seen it before, and knew, too, whom its owner was. The body, forming the sound box, was at least two feet long and swelled at the base to nine inches across. Its belly was a further nine inches deep. It was built like a ship of slats of seasoned hardwood, fastened to a hidden frame by copper or brass pins, the body or hull of it inlaid with mother- of-pearl and gold filigree. The beam, projecting almost two feet from the top, curved like a wave, was of some dark wood, highly polished and seemingly so hard that inlay was not possible, though of course it had been bored to take the pegs that tightened and tuned the strings.

  And now too he knew who the magician was whose blasphemous illusions had led to the arrest of Quint, and for him to a blow that might, had its perpetrator had a mind to it, have taken his head off. Three, four years since the first time he saw him? In the great hall at Rouen? No, Bayeux. Singing and playing at the end of a great feast in front of William Duke of Normandy and Harold Earl of Wessex. And what had he sung? Why, nothing less than the Chanson de Roland.

  But how could this be? On that later day, Saturday the fourteenth of October 1066, the man he was thinking of had been the first to fall, felled by the axes thrown from the shield-wall - Walt himself had seen him fall. Walt himself had thrown an axe. How could Taillefer, Sharp-iron, the minstrel, magician, jester and jongleur kept by Duke William and known throughout the West as the greatest entertainer of his time, be alive and busking for a living outside the wall of a city in Asia Minor nearly two years later?

  Walt’s head swam, he got back on the bed, rubbed his eyes and tried to remember not the singing warrior on Senlac Hill whose face was masked with blood but the man who had sung and played this harp in the great hall a year before the battle. He had been dark and thickset, certainly, but surely of more noble bearing? The face certainly less melancholic, those lines less deeply etched. He shook his head a little, not much, it hurt to do so. Certainly the harp had been the same. There could not in Christendom be two harps like that.

  And why had they been in Bayeux at all, Harold and his eight best housecarls, the inner guard, their prince’s last defence? Again Walt shook his head. There had been a reason, a good reason, the King’s command, or Harold’s business. But for the life of him he could not remember how it went.

  He slept, was briefly roused when Adeliza and Alain returned. Alain held his head while she sponged his face with oil and honey and then water, and gave him watered wine to drink. The King’s command? What King? Why Edward the Confessor, of course. It was because of him they’d gone to Normandy, he was almost sure. He slept again.

  PART II: The Confessor

  Chapter Eleven

  Early in 1065 Edward the Confessor was forced to recognize that the disease he had suffered from for a year or so, was soon to prove fatal. He tired easily, was forced to piss frequently and found that if he held on he would wet himself. His piss smelled of honey. His vision became blurred, his feet numb. Constantly he wanted to scratch himself. He suffered from terrible and unpredictable thirst. If he drank mead or ate honey all these symptoms worsened immediately; roots were as bad as fruit - parsnip, to which he was partial, and even cabbage stalks. He consulted his doctors. They knew of the condition, called it by the Greek words for honeyed urine, told him to eschew all sweet things, and, since the illness was now well-advanced, gave him six months to live.

  He was at Westminster when he heard the news, in the Great Hall he had caused to be erected between the river and the new abbey church he had ordered some fourteen years before. He went there whenever he could to supervise, or at any rate interfere with the erection of an abbey church he hoped would rival those being built in Normandy and Lorraine. It was to be a monument in stone to God, to the reformed Christian ideal as propounded by the monks of Cluny, and to his own holiness.

  A tall lean man, but at sixty stooped and grey, he left the upper chamber of the hall where the doctors had examined him, allowed a page to help him down the steps to the floor below, called a couple of young housecarls and a clerk to follow him, walked the length of the hall, acknowledging the obeisances of clerks, scribes, monks, sutlers and cooks, to the big door at the far end, and so out into the open air of a mellow March, filled, where they had not been trampled by the toings and froings of his court, with daffodils.

  He hardly needed the cloak he had thrown round his shoulders, for one of the blessings of his reign, or at least the last twelve years or so of it, had been a gentle warming of the climate, a succession of warm but damp winters and sunny but not over-heated summers. Many of the simpler folk believed this was due to his saintliness, and he did nothing to disabuse them. After all, in less miraculous respects he had served them well.

  He had settled disputes between the earls -- untutored, war-lords, really -- and between them and himself, appearing to give way rather than plunge the country into civil war. In his entire reign there had only been one Viking raid and his ships had seen them off before they could do much damage. He had employed Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex, whom he at first despised as an illiterate ruffian but whom he later learnt to respect, to subdue the Welsh, and he had kept the Scots from trespassing south of The Great Wall.

  But more than that he had encouraged agricultural improvements to feed a rising population; he appointed good justices and promulgated good laws, most of which left intact the ancient barbaric but homely customs of councils, moots and Witans. He realised that these, tedious though they were, gave to a feuding, clannish people, proud of their right to shape their own lives and take responsibility for their own actions and those of their closest kin and dependants, the illusion that, in most respects, they were free. As if anyone were ever free.

  All this he ruminated on with some satisfaction, plunged as he was into that mood of nostalgia and sadness which all of us must feel when told our time on earth is, if not over, then definitely rounded with a date. Of course one knows one will die -- but to be told when, while it does not, if it be not now, necessarily concentrate the mind, at least provokes the sort of mood he was now in. Thus abstracted he passed the stabling, the long huts where his personal body-guard lived, the bowers of the womenfolk in the largest of which his childless wife, Edith, was no doubt now spinning or copulating with her latest boy-toy.

  Unbidden the great gate opened: as they do - for kings.

  Edward stood for a moment on the threshold beneath the big beam above and looked out. To his left, a hundred yards or so away, the rounded east end of his abbey church rose above an improvised town of huts where the labourers lived, and more pleasant houses occupied by draughtsmen, stone masons and overseers. The building itself was shrouded in a net of wooden scaffolding and platforms up and down which men scurried like ants searching out aphids on a rose bush while others used hoists to raise ready-shaped blocks of stone to a height of seventy feet or more. For many years he had watched its growth with excited pleasure. Now it was with dread: for behind that eastern wall, and he now knew more or less when, he would be buried.

  Hopefully in years to come it would be known as the Chapel of St Edward the Confessor - but that seemed less of a consolation than perhaps it should have done. It dawned on him he would not be there to see it. Stumbling occasionally on the uneven ground but waving away the assistance of the men who followed him he turned instead to the river and walked to its bank.

  It was edged, save for where there were landing stages for ferrymen or muddy churned up places where cattle came down to drink,
with willow and alder -- already hung with catkins shedding yellow pollen in the breeze and furry pussy-willow buds which, where they caught the sun, glowed like pearls.

  The brown tide was in a racing ebb going with the current and knowing it would soon reveal brown mud-flats, oyster-catchers, dunlin and curlews whirled and mewed, waiting for the clams and worms that lay beneath. It had its inevitable effect and he had to hoist his tunic, lower the front of his leggings and piss into the stream.

  For the twenty-three years of his reign the turning seasons had brought in, more or less at their expected times, the blessed progression of green corn, hawthorn and the lark, swallows, hay and harvest of grain, bright autumn and the huntsmen’s horns. How he had loved to hunt through forests teeming with red and roe deer, beneath the bright red-gold of beeches and that more sombre gold of the oaks! And so to Christmas . . . suddenly he shuddered with presentiment. The seasons turned and on their back the Reaper rode.

  This would not do. The news, both good (an untroubled passage to paradise if he was the saint some said he was), and bad (considering certain proclivities he had thrown off long ago, and, with some embarrassment, confessed to and been absolved of), carried with it duties. He glanced across the swirling brown stream towards Lambeth. Smoke above Archbishop’s Stigand’s hall. Archbishop? Pluralist since he refused to relinquish Winchester, uncanonically married, refused the pallium by the Pope and excommunicated. Above all, English crony of English Godwinsons. No. Keep the news from him for as long as he could.

  He turned north. Partially hidden by the bend in the river he could still see at the end of the road they called Strand, just beyond the place where it crossed the river Fleet, a corner of the Roman walls of London, and above the tongue of land that came between, where the smaller town of Southwark lay, the smoky haze that always, whatever the weather, hung above it.