He had been told to include his own men in the escort, so Brian of Little Dene was with him when Odo… ‘we christened him the Fat Fox,’ said Richard afterwards, making them all laugh… astride the horse which Rufus had lent him, ‘because that half-starved clothes rail you rode out of Pevensey on will drop dead before we get halfway to Rochester’, went ahead to parley with the representatives who came out of Rochester Castle.
The parley lasted twenty minutes, out on the open no-man’s-land between castle and king. Then Odo put spurs to Rufus’ horse and in the midst of the men of Rochester, rode headlong for its gate.
‘Oh, well, I’m not surprised, are you?’ said Brian predictably. ‘What else would you expect?’
Rufus hadn’t expected it, apparently. ‘By the Face!’ bellowed the king, loudly enough to be heard by everyone within a fifty-yard radius. ‘By the Holy Face of Lucca, l' gave him rope! If he wants to make a noose of it, then so he shall.’
‘And that was the first time,’ Richard said, not immediately after his return from that campaign, but some years later, ‘that anyone ever heard him use that oath. It’s famous now. He’s made it his own. I believe his father the Conqueror used to swear by the Splendour of God and King Rufus wanted a private oath too. He always wanted to be like his father. The Face is the Italian carving of Christ’s countenance, of course. People were talking about it just then; it was one of the marvels of Christendom.’ Richard himself was slightly in his cups, showing off in a mild way because by then he was a friend of somebody close to the king. ‘The second time I heard the king use that oath…’
The second time was in a different context. That time it was an exclamation of satisfaction. News was coming out of besieged Rochester, concerning the conditions inside it. That year, 1088, was a sultry summer, with a heavy, hazy sky for days on end, and the waters of the Medway sluggish and coloured like lead. And there were flies…
As a child, Henry had been prone to tantrums. As a man, he found himself subject now and then to black rages whose force even surprised their owner because they seemed to be actually bigger than he was.
He had one such surge of fury at his father’s deathbed, when he learned that he was to inherit no land, only five thousand pounds’ weight of silver. He controlled himself because he could hardly rave at, let alone attack, the mass of immobilised pain which was his father. William had sensed his anger, though, and tried to soothe it. ‘Patience, Henry. Of all my living sons you’re the most like me.’ He said it huskily, because the corruption in his body was eating at his vocal cords, but nevertheless his tone carried conviction. ‘I’d gamble,’ whispered the Conqueror, ‘I’d put money on it – one day you’ll come into your own, and your own’ll be all your brothers have now. Meanwhile,’ William added, the hoarse voice changing timbre to some-thing down to earth and cynical, ‘take that sealed order there by your hand to Rouen Treasury and get your silver weighed out to you now. I wouldn’t give a penny for your chances once Rouen’s in Curthose’s hands.’
He knew, when he had had time to think, that he had no right to anger; Britnoth had told him long ago that younger sons must make their own way, even when they were born to the purple and their elders were not. He was better equipped than some. He had five thousand pounds of silver, a first class education, and the Conqueror for a father. What was he, if he couldn’t do something with all that?
Meanwhile, in order to live in any kind of comfort, he must give his allegiance to one or other of his brothers. He could lease land with that silver. Rufus showed signs of wishing to drive a hard bargain but the easygoing Curthose was willing enough to co-operate. He probably would have held on to Henry’s silver if he had got at the Treasury first, but had no taste for haggling. In company with a number of knights bachelor, his friends, Henry settled down to the life of a Norman gentleman, oscillating between his rented estate and Curthose’s court, and amused himself by wooing a couple of Curthose’s lesser mistresses away from him.
Life was not disagreeable. But the next black rage was only just round the corner and when it arrived, it was Curthose who provoked it.
‘There’s a messenger from England – from Bishop Odo,’ one of his friends said, ducking through the low door of Curthose’s Rouen menagerie, and curling up a fastidious nose at the smell. ‘The duke won’t see him. He’s asked for you instead.’
‘From Odo?’ Henry, who had been giving the keepers a hand in inveigling a panther into an inner den so that the outer lair could be cleaned, straightened up sharply from locking the cage. ‘In Rochester?’ His friend nodded. ‘I’ll see him in my chamber,’ Henry said.
The messenger was a drawn-faced man, roughly clad but with a bearing that suggested that normally he dressed better. He was sitting wearily on a stool but rose as Henry came in. He then took in Henry’s grubby appearance and rank aroma, and looked bewildered.
‘My apologies if I reek of leopard. I’ve been helping to look after one. I like them, handsome, sinuous, predatory beasts that they are,’ Henry said. ‘I’ve even called my horse Panther. You’re from Rochester? Is the siege over?’
‘No, sir. And I don’t mind the smell of leopard. It’s better than the stink I left behind in Rochester.’
‘Stink?’
‘You’ve had a little rain here, I’m told. There’s been no rain in England for weeks on weeks. In Rochester, the salt meat’s rotting in the barrels and the flour’s full of maggots and your uncle Odo’s men are taking turns to brush away the flies from one another so that they can eat even that. The flies are everywhere, on everything, great fat gorged buzzing things, and the bad food’s poisoning the men. When I left, eleven had died in the castle and more in the town. It only takes hours once it starts. Their bowels turn liquid and they clutch at their stomachs and twist and twist and nothing eases them. They call for water all the time but the water’s foul too and they only throw it up…’ Suddenly, startlingly, the memories roused by his own words made him retch. He stopped, a hand to his mouth.
‘You came to get help, is that it?’ Henry asked. ‘And Duke Robert hasn’t been able to see you?’
‘He won’t see me, sir. But I must give the message to someone of position, so I asked for you. I got out of Rochester by stealth, a rope down the walls after dark and I escaped down the river in a stolen boat. I drifted half a mile so as not to make a noise with the oars. I bought a passage on a merchant ship at the estuary mouth. All to get word to someone who might help! The castle’s being held for the duke, sir, but unless he sends aid…’ Henry seized his arm. It felt thin. ‘Come with me.’ The room into which Henry hustled the messenger without ceremony could have been lifted straight from Araby. The duke’s castle-cum-palace at Rouen had a marked Byzantine influence in its architecture, and this chamber, on the floor above the main hall, was the most exotic of all. It was wide and gracious; Sunlight, pouring through shapely windows, played on a high vaulted roof and elegant pillars of pale stone, and on a floor of polished boards strewn with rugs of spotted fawnskin. There were no tapestries but two carpets, brought from the infidel east, marvels of complex design and rich colour, hung on the walls instead. And in the midst of it all…
Under Henry’s hand, the messenger’s bony arm went hard as if in rigor. Henry’s own body clenched into an answering hardness.
He could not run amok here in the private quarters of the Duke of Normandy any more than at his father’s deathbed. If Duke Robert Curthose chose to lounge sybaritically on a divan, flat on his lazy stomach so that he could hang over his baby son’s cradle and croon nonsense to him, he was entitled to do so and he was entitled also to send urgent messengers about their business in order to wallow in fulsome paternity undisturbed. He was the duke.
And his mistress Biota, the baby’s mother, had the right, as long as it pleased her lover, to sit curled beside him sipping in refined fashion at a goblet of fruit juice while a well-fed and well-dressed jongleur twanged the latest lovesong on a lyre and the other child she had given C
urthose, the four-year-old Richie, sat on the floor learning backgammon from his nurse, with another pitcher of that same delectable fruit juice on the floor beside them.
In Rochester, Odo’s beleaguered garrison and the people trapped with them in the embattled town below waited vainly for relief and if the messenger spoke the truth, there wasn’t a man within those walls who would not have cut off his right hand for one single goblet of that clean-tasting juice.
No, he must not run amok but he wanted to. He wanted to tear down the carpets, empty the pitchers over them and over Curthose’s well-barbered head as well, to seize the jongleur’s lyre and smash it to bits, to hurl cradle and baby alike across the floor…
He dragged his companion forward. Curthose sat up, raising his eyebrows at the intrusion and began to ask the reason, waving the minstrel to silence. Henry got in first. ‘This man comes from Rochester and I think you should hear what he has to say!’
Curthose’s brows rose even higher but he closed his mouth. Henry prodded the messenger and the man drew in a nervous breath and went into his tale.
Curthose, to do him justice, listened. That, Henry thought, was one of his most infuriating characteristics. Curthose was never unreasonable. On the contrary, once backed into a corner, he would be all charm and fair dealing until such time as he had escaped from the corner. He heard the man out and signed for fruit juice to be offered to him. The messenger shook his head. I’ve taken an oath to drink only water until Rochester is free and at that I’m privileged. The water they’re drinking is no better than poison.’
‘You put it strongly,’ said Curthose, ‘though I can’t blame you. Sit down, man, you can hardly keep your feet, I can see. But tell me, what does my uncle hope I can do, at such short notice? I have a force in preparation but what it has to be prepared for is heavy fighting. I gather that my brother Rufus has ample support. I must have men and ships enough before I try to sail again. I sent a fleet earlier and it proved too small. That’s a mistake I don’t propose to repeat.’
‘The campaign on your behalf in England started last April and was planned in January,’ said Henry. ‘You were informed by a messenger from Bishop Odo on the last day of January…’
‘What a wonderful memory you have,’ said Curthose coldly.
‘How long do you need to mount an invasion? England would be yours now if you’d got to work promptly. You could have done far better, long ago, than a handful of leaky ships…’
‘My ships don’t leak, Henry.’
‘…with timid maidens at the helm…’
‘My captains aren’t timid and few of them are maidens,’ said Curthose with a grin. He dropped back onto an elbow and produced a coloured glass pendant on a thin chain, which he dangled over the baby’s cradle. The baby gurgled and clutched. ‘Look at him, grasping already. A proper little Norman lord. If conditions are as bad in Rochester as you say, my friend,’ he said to the messenger, ‘how did you get out?’
The messenger repeated his story, adding: ‘I’m a merchant by trade. I deal with the Rouen bullion merchants. I was picked because I’m used to travelling and obtaining passages. Please listen, sir. If Rochester isn’t relieved soon, the garrison will start cutting townspeople’s throats to save food and if it still isn’t relieved, they’ll be cutting throats to get food. That is, if the rotten meat hasn’t killed them all off first. My lord, in the name of all those I left behind, I implore you! Send help to Rochester.’
There was a pause. Biota (who was not a fool and furthermore was very attractive; Henry had not tried his luck with this one of Curthose’s mistresses but had considered it), slipped quietly from her divan and signed to the nurse to follow her out with the children. Richie, annoyed at having his game interrupted, and displaying all the capacity for rage for which the Norman ruling house was famous, yelled loudly, snatched up a wooden sword which was lying handy, and assaulted his nurse.
Henry found a sudden, if inadequate outlet for his own anger. Stepping forward, he administered a backhander which sent Richie head over heels. Richie sat up and roared. ‘Quiet, you’re not hurt!’ snapped Henry. Biota, running back to pick up her son, glared at him (‘yes, very attractive,’ said Henry’s libido in between the pulsebeats of his wrath) and hustled Richie, nurse and baby out of the room.
‘Really,’ said Curthose, ‘what disturbances you create, Henry. Have I refused to send help? I’ve every intention of sending it but not, I repeat, till the relief force is ready.’
‘And I repeat,’ Henry threw back at him, ‘that you’ve had more than six months to get it ready. How long do you think Rochester can wait?’
‘Oh, a call for help always exaggerates the urgency,’ said Curthose easily. ‘I know you’re hoping for pickings if I get rid of Rufus, but I’m not so sure I want to get rid of him. You’re very dirty,’ he added, ‘and you smell worse. What on earth have you been doing?’
Henry stood still, burning as if with fever. He was young, able, educated, and the Conqueror’s son. But to his indolent eldest brother, he was nothing, could not even be given credit for a sense of loyalty or obligation. The blow he had just given Richie, he longed to give to Curthose, through the medium of a well-honed blade and with his weight behind it. And all he was allowed to do was stand, and burn.
The messenger was watching him. The messenger had no knightly background; he was not a man with whom Henry would normally make friends. But their silent eye-to-eye communion now cut through that. They read each other’s minds and found themselves alike in their impotence and hopeless anger.
‘I was in the menagerie,’ he said to Curthose. ‘With the leopards. With your leave, I’ll go back to them. Sometimes I find animals better company than men.’
In Rochester, someone had cautiously, in Odo’s presence, uttered the phrase ‘negotiate for terms’. Odo, who had hitherto shouted down anyone who dared to mention such a thing, this time said nothing.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Argumentative Homecoming 1088
Richard of Fallowdene, Brian of Little Dene and their followers came over the down from the north and drew rein on the crest. Fallowdene lay calmly under a patchy sky. A trailing grey shower drifted across fields of ripening wheat and rye, and darkly massed woodland. From the little patch of shaggy roofs which betokened hall and cottages, blue hearthsmoke curled lazily. Richard let out a sigh of relief because it was all still there.
He knew that Odo’s ravaging had not come so far. But the illogical fear had still been with him, that he would return to find it like the homesteads he had seen in Kent, with fields burnt and buildings reduced to ash and rubble.
Brian, whose imagination did not work like that, said: ‘Shall we ride on?’ in a mildly surprised tone. They jogged on down the chalk track with Brian resuming a monologue, which the halt had interrupted, on the proper method of training men in the use of the crossbow. When the path forked, Richard said politely: ‘Come in for some food before you go home,’ but was relieved when the offer was courteously declined. Brian took the track for the south down and Little Dene, and Richard, with his own companions, rode for home without him.
As they passed the cottages, heads came round doors and there were calls of greeting. But when they came through the palisade gate, although the usual racket of barking dogs and cackling poultry greeted them, there seemed to be no people about. Puzzled, Richard pushed his reins into Gurth’s hand, and made for the hall door.
It was only latched and he went straight in. He found himself behind a row of female backs. Editha, Gunnor and the other hall women were standing clustered with their attention on something in front of them. He pushed through and an impassioned declaration, in his mother’s voice, that someone or other was a niminy piminy wantwit who’d be better off with fewer airs and graces and much more commonsense, went past his nose like one of Sir Brian’s beloved crossbow bolts. An unfamiliar voice, male and authoritative, replied that commonsense was beside the point. ‘I can’t believe, my lady, that you ap
prove your daughter’s behaviour!’
‘There you are!’ cried Alice’s voice in triumph. ‘Bah!’ said Wulfhild.
No one had noticed his arrival because they were all in here enjoying the quarrel. His eyes, adjusting to the dimness of the hall, took in several people who should rightly have been outside. They also picked out faces he did not know. For one startled moment, Richard thought that his home was full of strange men. Then he saw that there were only two, a dark-haired young one who was standing back, a spectator, and a soberly clad individual, a little older, who appeared to be in the centre of things and whom everyone was taking for granted.
This one formed part of the tableau in the middle of the floor. On one side of this stood his mother, a protective arm round a wet-eyed and hiccuping Sybil. Opposite her, head up and arms folded, was Alice. The sober young man was standing beside her, shoulder to shoulder. They must all have seen the door open but they were too absorbed in their wrangle to take in who had opened it. No one even glanced his way.
Alice, unfolding her arms, made a daft at Sybil who screamed and clutched at her mother. ‘I can’t believe this attitude, it’s shameful, shameful!’ Alice cried, almost stamping in frustration as Wulfhild thrust the child behind her. From this secure position, Sybil made a face at Alice.
‘What’s going on?’ demanded Richard, in the voice he used for ordering men up scaling ladders. Silence fell and heads turned. ‘Richard!’ Alice gasped and then she was in his arms and crying on his chest. Sybil, apparently in competition, burst into loud roars.
‘You’re safe home, God be praised!’ Wulfhild ex-claimed. The dark young man looked at him with interest but did not speak or approach.
The sober man said: ‘Sir Richard? It must be, of course. Welcome home, sir.’
‘I asked a question,’ said Richard, still in his campaign voice, managing to embrace Alice so that her tears were muffled in his shoulder. ‘I said: what’s going on? And who are you, sir? And who is he? He jerked his head towards the younger stranger.
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