The King's Spies

by Simon Beaufort

  Geoffrey headed for the stables to prepare his horse, which Bellême had arranged to be fetched the previous night on the grounds that he thought Geoffrey might desert him if allowed to collect it himself. The knight had barely reached the door when there was a terrific screech of rage from one of the chambers on the tavern’s upper floor. Sensing trouble, he turned back.

  ‘Thief!’ The next thing Geoffrey knew was that Durand was tumbling down the stairs, followed by a very angry Emma. ‘He was in my chamber, after my holy relics.’

  Bellême started towards the squire with murderous intent, evidently thinking that a thief would make a perfectly suitable substitute for tables, cats and benches. He raised his sword.

  ‘No!’ squealed Durand in terror, on his knees with his hands clasped as he appealed to Bellême. ‘I was not stealing. I am here to meet my master, Geoffrey Mappestone. We became separated yesterday, and I have been looking for him ever since.’

  Bellême swung away from Durand and came towards Geoffrey, his eyes flat and blank, and his face lit with a savage light that Geoffrey thought was a long way from being human. He had seen a good deal of bloodlust on the Crusade, but none of it was as terrifying as Bellême’s. He drew his own sword and braced himself, hoping Bellême’s soldiers did not join the fight and make it an uneven one too quickly. Rescue came from an unexpected quarter.

  ‘It is all right,’ said Arnulf, striding forward and pressing his brother’s arm to make him lower his weapon. ‘The wretch is telling the truth. Geoffrey was looking for his squire last night when he met me. Doubtless he told the fool to meet him here, and he became confused about where to wait. Foolish oaf!’ He eyed Durand disparagingly.

  ‘Is this true?’ asked Bellême, advancing to the point where the knight could see that his eyes were abnormally bloodshot. His temper was only just under control.

  Geoffrey nodded. ‘Tancred has charged me to make him into a knight, although I think the task is beyond my abilities.’

  Bellême regarded the cowering Durand in astonishment, taking in his unmanly posture and flowing hair. Durand started to cry and real tears ran down his face. He was the most miserable, cowardly specimen Geoffrey had ever encountered, and he was heartily embarrassed to admit an acquaintance with him. He made up his mind to send him back to Tancred at the earliest opportunity.

  ‘A knight?’ asked Bellême in disbelief. ‘Him?’

  ‘Do you have any advice?’ asked Geoffrey unhappily. ‘I need all the help I can get.’

  Bellême’s face creased into a cold smile. ‘My advice would be to skewer him and tell Tancred he died in battle. Take him out of my sight. If I see him again, I shall do you the favour of killing him.’

  The journey to Arundel was one of the least pleasant Geoffrey had ever undertaken. Not only was the weather foul, with gusting sheets of rain in their faces the whole way, and their horses skidding in the long, snaking quagmire that represented one of England’s busiest highways, but Bellême had a temper to match. He refused to stop for anyone, and Geoffrey saw several peasants disappear under his hoofs as he rode. It seemed the more he thought about his sister’s misguided attempts to kill the King, the more angry he became, so his rage festered and threatened to consume him completely.

  Durand wept inconsolably, and Geoffrey soon grew tired of the snide comments from Bellême’s knights for his owning such a feeble squire. He began to wish Bellême had killed the man after all. He tried every tactic he knew to stop Durand’s weeping – threats, kindness, anger, sympathy – but nothing worked. He eventually discovered what Durand had been doing among Emma’s relics. The previous night, the squire had gone to the abbey instead of fetching food as Geoffrey had ordered, and more time passed than he intended. Loath to break the curfew, he spent the night there. The next day he learned Geoffrey had secured himself a place in Bellême’s retinue, and decided to wait for him at the inn. When he heard Bellême return in such a fury, he had fled upstairs in terror, where he had been caught trying to climb into the chest Emma said she used for storing her relics.

  ‘You tried to get inside a reliquary?’ asked Geoffrey, aghast. ‘I thought you respected holy things.’

  ‘I do, but it was the only open chest in the room, and I was frightened. The other one was locked.’

  ‘The other one?’ asked Geoffrey, most of his mind still on the fact that Durand might have put himself in serious danger by tampering with objects that were sacred. Only a fool risked the wrath of Heaven by dealing disrespectfully with items that had once belonged to saints.

  ‘The long, thin box. But it was too small for me, and it was locked anyway, so I had to opt for the other one.’

  ‘Long, thin box?’ echoed Geoffrey, his thoughts whirling. Was this the same chest he had seen being ferried around London on three separate occasions: once outside the Crusader’s Head after Hugh’s murder, once at All Hallows when Emma met Sybilla, and once near St Paul’s when Geoffrey had been going to visit the cathedral? How many of these long, thin boxes were there, and what did they contain? Could it be a weapon that would allow Greek Fire to be propelled at an enemy? If that were the case, then Emma was further along with her experiments than he had thought.

  ‘Yes, long and thin,’ snapped Durand, shattered nerves making him testy. ‘Locked.’

  ‘Were there any gaps that allowed you to see inside?’

  ‘I was too frightened to look,’ said Durand, dabbing his tear-reddened eyes with a piece of embroidered silk. ‘But it smelled nasty, like rotting clothes. I was terrified to the point of fainting!’

  ‘Keep your voice down!’ snapped Geoffrey, aware that Beaumais and several guards were finding Durand’s unmanly confessions very amusing. He supposed they had not seen many weeping squires, since it was unlikely Bellême would tolerate them for long.

  ‘I did not know the other chest contained holy things,’ said Durand hoarsely. ‘I just wanted to hide until the shouting and noise was over. I do not like arguments that involve breaking windows and smashing tables with swords. Unfortunately, Abbess Emma’s reliquary was not empty, and there was no room for me inside it, anyway.’

  ‘I imagine not,’ said Geoffrey. ‘She is hardly likely to tote an empty box on her travels. What was in it? Bones?’ He thought about Old Mabel and what Emma intended to do with her.

  ‘A couple of skulls,’ replied Durand with a tearful shudder. ‘Both recently dead, with hair and flesh still attached. One looked familiar. And a large pot of something black and smelly.’

  ‘Greek Fire?’ asked Geoffrey with quickening interest. ‘The stuff she made in All Hallows Church?’ He spoke in a low voice, so that Beaumais and the others would not hear.

  ‘Similar,’ said Durand, patting daintily at his nose with the silk. ‘But thicker and stickier. She must have boiled it down to concentrate it.’

  ‘Or perhaps it was not the same substance,’ mused Geoffrey. ‘I told you what she spilled in All Hallows was too runny. Perhaps what you saw was not what she made, but the real thing.’

  ‘It was not burning,’ said Durand helpfully.

  Geoffrey regarded him askance. ‘You only ignite it when you are ready to use it.’

  ‘Then perhaps the bowl I saw is the sum of her supplies,’ suggested Durand hopefully. ‘We have been regaled with rumours that she has cisterns of it, but perhaps she is limited to what Philip the Grammarian sent her from the Holy Land – a sample.’

  ‘I was under the impression that he sent her the formula, but perhaps you are right, and he sent her a pot of it instead. That would be good news for Henry. The Crusaders had samples, too, but no amount of analysing and experimenting helped us to reproduce it. It contains a secret compound that I believe is only available in the East.’

  Durand sniffed and drew a piece of scented linen from his scrip in which to blow his nose. Geoffrey saw Beaumais nudge Arnulf and point at him.

  ‘Do you know why Emma has those two skulls?’ asked Durand, dabbing his nose like a lady of some breeding.
Geoffrey heard Arnulf snigger.

  ‘Edred said she had been digging in his graveyard for the corpses of felons. You say the heads you saw were recently dead, so it seems likely they are the fruits of her grave-robbing.’

  ‘You have not answered my question,’ said Durand pettishly. ‘I asked if you knew why she has these skulls, and you have only told me where they came from.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Geoffrey, fighting down his irritation with the man. ‘Tell me, since you obviously think you have the answer.’

  ‘I do have the answer,’ said Durand with complete conviction. ‘They are to be joined to the headless body of Mabel de Bellême, Emma’s murdered mother!’

  Geoffrey regarded him uncertainly. ‘That is an unpleasant conclusion to have reached.’

  ‘Nevertheless, it is true. Old Mabel’s killers took her head and it was never recovered. Everyone knows that. So, until the real one appears, Emma is obliged to use ones stolen from graveyards.’

  Geoffrey started to laugh. ‘You have a lurid imagination …’

  ‘It is true! Emma wants the original head back, so she can reunite it with the body and use Old Mabel to get the Bellêmes what they want in this world. Their powers will increase a hundredfold once she succeeds. Until then, she is obliged to use different heads.’ Durand sounded completely convinced, and Geoffrey began to reconsider the possibility, despite his initial scepticism.

  ‘So, her chest is not a reliquary at all,’ he mused. ‘It is a repository for a pair of spare heads and a pot of Greek Fire.’

  He glanced behind him, to where a bouncing cart only just managed to keep pace with them. It was piled high with items the Bellêmes considered essential – including both the long, thin box and the ‘reliquary’ – and Geoffrey was faced with the sudden, nasty realization that the rest of Mabel de Bellême might be closer than he had thought. Durand said that the long box stank of rotting clothes, which was exactly how a pile of ancient bones in their grave clothes might smell.

  Durand’s assumptions seemed wild and improbable, but Geoffrey had an uncomfortable feeling that he had just answered one question that had been nagging at him for several days. He recalled Emma telling Sybilla at All Hallows that their mother was waiting ‘outside’, and Geoffrey had seen the abbess escorting the long, thin box towards the church before she had entered. He had questioned Sybilla about it, but she had been enigmatically vague. He saw that Emma had been speaking literally after all, and Old Mabel had indeed been nearby.

  And Old Mabel had been at the Crusader’s Head, too, he thought, present for the demonstration of Greek Fire. He himself had seen her spirited away after Hugh had been murdered. Then, later, she had been carried past St Paul’s Cathedral by two cloaked men. Mabel, it seemed, spent a lot of time travelling hither and thither. He grimaced, thinking it was distasteful to take ancestors from their graves and haul them around the civilized world in the hope that they might walk again.

  Meanwhile, Durand cast a fearful glance to where Bellême rode at the head of the cavalcade. ‘Do you think we will escape this horrible adventure alive?’

  Geoffrey smiled encouragingly. ‘We shall do our best.’

  But his best was evidently not good enough, because Durand began to weep afresh at the notion that he might accidentally encounter Bellême and be run through for exercise. Geoffrey knew this was not out of the question, but suggested Bellême might not be so antagonistic if Durand acted in a more manly way. Durand sobbed that he did not know how, dabbing his nose with his scented linen and shaking his golden curls in agitation.

  In the end, Geoffrey banished him to ride with the women, hoping to shame him into stopping his tears. Durand wrung his hands in gratitude, and Geoffrey watched him take a place behind Matilda, who regarded him with as much disgusted disdain as had Arnulf and Beaumais. Emma, who rode significantly close to the cart, simply scowled, so Durand dropped farther back, as unwilling to ride near Bellême’s sisters as he was to ride near Bellême himself.

  The ride was exhausting, and every step jarred Geoffrey’s sore shoulder so he longed to stop. The distance between Winchester and Arundel was about forty-five miles, and Bellême claimed he had once made the journey in three hours, but that day he was forced to ride more slowly or risk half his court travelling on foot after their mounts had either dropped dead beneath them or turned lame.

  They had left Winchester at about noon, and no one except Geoffrey seemed to find their escape suspiciously easy. They followed an ancient track across the South Downs through the village of Exton and over Old Winchester Hill, then on to Linchdown, through Cocking and Bignor, and finally following the path of the River Arun to Arundel itself, arrived just after the sun had set.

  Arundel, 5 March 1102

  Bellême flung the reins of his horse to a groom, and then strode across Arundel’s wide bailey towards a wooden hall-house. Geoffrey dismounted and looked around, handing his gloves to Durand, who was bedraggled and unhappy. Geoffrey saw Mabel, the largest of Sybilla’s four daughters, regarding his squire in disbelief, as if she could not imagine how a man could be so pathetic. Geoffrey ignored her, and began to assess his surroundings with the eye of a professional soldier.

  The stronghold was cleverly designed and the site well chosen, standing on a rocky spur that overlooked the river. In the centre was a motte, perhaps seventy feet high, topped by a substantial central tower, which was full of chambers, galleries and battlements for soldiers and archers to keep watch over the surrounding countryside. It was well guarded, and Geoffrey wondered how he would reach it with a lamp to pass his messages to Roger and Helbye.

  On either side of the motte were raised baileys, which were surrounded by ramparts and a wooden palisade topped with spikes. The palisade boasted several shooting platforms, and Geoffrey saw it would be difficult for an invading army to come close without exposing itself to a hail of missiles. He saw immediately why King Henry had assumed the confrontation between his troops and Bellême’s at Arundel would take the form of a siege: a frontal attack would be suicide.

  The baileys contained a number of buildings. The outer court had enclosures for animals and sheds for their fodder; the inner one was protected by an additional wall, and was dominated by the hall. This comprised a vaulted undercroft for storage, a large chamber on the first floor for communal meals and sleeping quarters, and some tiny rooms on a top floor for the Earl and his siblings.

  Geoffrey gave the reins of his horse to Durand and ordered him to make sure it was fed and cleaned before he retired for the night. Durand sniffed wetly, then, before Geoffrey fully understood what he was doing, the squire leapt on to it and thundered out of the gate into the darkness beyond. Durand had fled for his life.

  Geoffrey gaped in astonishment. He had not known his squire possessed the courage to mount so bold an escape from under Bellême’s nose. Bellême whirled around at the clatter of hoofs, but waved away offers by those willing to hunt Durand down. He was not worth the effort, and Bellême had more important matters to attend to. He gave Geoffrey a sharp glance, as though he thought the knight might have engineered the incident himself, and then turned away. Geoffrey wondered how long the squire would last on a spirited warhorse before he was thrown and killed. Or worse, as far as Geoffrey was concerned, whether he would damage the beast by riding it recklessly in the dark.

  Two men came to welcome Bellême to his stronghold. One was plump and smiling, with a tonsure barely visible in a mass of curly brown hair. He wore the robes of a Benedictine, and Geoffrey wondered whether all members of that order were fat, since he had not seen a slim one for some time. The monk was obviously a person of rank, because Bellême greeted him politely.

  The second man was a grim-faced knight with beetling eyebrows and a hawk-like nose. He was lean and tall, with deep-set eyes, and everything about him bespoke dourness. Although he wore the livery of Bellême’s house, his uniform contained less red and more black than anyone else’s. His hair was shorn to an uncompromis
ing shortness at the back and sides, and his gloves and cloak were cut in the military fashion – functional and with no regard to current popular style.

  ‘The fat fellow is Ralph d’Escures, Abbot of Sées,’ said Beaumais, seeing Geoffrey’s interest and coming to talk to him. ‘Sées is the mother house of Shrewsbury Abbey, so when Ralph is in England, he is obliged to pay homage to Bellême.’

  ‘Abbot Ralph,’ mused Geoffrey thoughtfully. ‘He was in Shrewsbury recently, because a monk called Petronus tried to deliver messages from him to Bishop Maurice just a week ago.’

  Beaumais nodded. ‘Petronus was murdered near Westminster. I went with Maurice to inspect the corpse and to help remove the messages from the man’s person.’

  ‘Did you?’ asked Geoffrey. He had wondered whether Petronus had carried missives other than the routine ones sent by Ralph to Maurice. Beaumais was a slippery sort of fellow, and Geoffrey wondered what his ‘help’ had entailed. ‘Did Petronus have any messages for you?’

  ‘Why would Abbot Ralph send anything to me?’ asked Beaumais in surprise, although that was not what Geoffrey had asked: his query had been a more general one, concerning whether Petronus had carried anything for him. He was not sure whether Beaumais’s misinterpretation had been deliberate, so decided to lie.

  ‘Petronus told me his pouch was full of missives for different people, not just ones for Maurice.’

  ‘Really?’ Beaumais’s voice was flat. ‘He should not have done. He was told to maintain secrecy.’

  ‘Is that why he was killed?’ asked Geoffrey, wondering whether Beaumais was aware that he had just admitted to knowing more about Petronus’s business than he should have done.

  ‘We do not know who killed him,’ said Beaumais. He sounded angry. ‘But we have our suspicions, and the King is at the top of the list.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Petronus carried important information,’ replied Beaumais shortly. ‘I had hoped to see an issue resolved when he arrived, and his death interfered with my plans.’