King of the Wood

by Valerie Anand

  And that this time Alice had won.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Admitted Fear 1091-3

  Ralph des Aix was made a knight on a Scottish hillside, one week before Malcolm decided to go home and fight with his wife instead. ‘I called you a nursemaid once for trying to rescue me but I’m glad you didn’t let that stop you today,’ Rufus said, grinning. ‘All right, you can rise. You’re Sir Ralph now. Hear that?’ he boomed at the witnesses, who stood round clad in stained armour and dishevelled surcoats. Duke Curthose, who had campaigned on the Scottish border in his father’s day and was here to give Rufus the benefit of his local knowledge, was among them. So, smiling broadly, was Richard of Fallowdene. Ralph returned the smile. He was a knight like Richard now. A land grant, the traditional knight’s fee, must surely follow.

  Around them, the heather-grown hillside was littered with dead Scotsmen whose idea of where precisely the border lay differed from Rufus’ opinion. Two lay transfixed by the same shaft, like two chunks of meat on a skewer.

  In the evening, Rufus came, as he sometimes did, in search of Ralph instead of sending for him and said, gruffly and shyly: ‘Today was like the first time I saw you. You came riding down that hill, guiding your horse with your knees and using both hands for the bow. Those two Scots devils would have killed me but you got them both with one shaft. You were like a young god. Is that a new bow you’re making?’

  ‘Yes. I like doing it. I’ve had this length of yew by me since last winter.’ Ralph, sitting on the heather outside his tent, was still polishing the white sapwood back of the bow with steady, even strokes of an oiled cloth.

  ‘And always will, I expect, even though you’re now a knight. Still the same Ralph, eh? With still the same income, or lack of it. You’ll want your knight’s fee, won’t you? A bit of land you can let out or live on when you need a rest from my wandering court.’ Ralph nodded, lowering his eyes to hide the flash of joy he knew was in them. Rufus mustn’t think he was loved only for the sake of gain. That would harm Ralph, hurt Rufus and anyway wasn’t true. Or hurting Rufus would not matter, and it did.

  ‘I’ll see to it,’ said Rufus easily, ‘as soon as we’ve cleared Malcolm and his barbarians out of the way.’

  In seven days they had achieved that. Rufus and Curthose then fell out, in a quarrel which drove all other matters out of the fuming Rufus’ head.

  ‘Rufus says ’e ain’t done with Scotland.’ Croc had a knack of hearing the'news even before Ralph, for all his privy conversations in the royal tent, did. ‘The border still ain’t where ’e thinks it ought to be. But Curthose, ’e wants to start on Maine. And Rufus won’t go with ’im yet. Oh well, if they didn’t fall out over one thing, it’d be another. Put those two together and they’re like a cat and a dog in one basket.’

  By the time Malcolm was back in Inverness, Curthose was ill-temperedly en route for Normandy alone, and Rufus was on his way, sullenly, to celebrate Christmas in the south. And in Ralph’s mind, a gloomy suspicion had solidified into certainty.

  Rufus had made him a knight but he had completely forgotten the knight’s fee. Ralph was still landless.

  He could have reminded the king but he did not. He was deeper into Rufus’ court by now and he had learned who among the barons and the other knights shared Rufus’ tastes, and which of the squires and pages and hangers-on supplied them. With Rufus, he had attended some unrestrained parties. And he had heard lovers who thought themselves ill done by, nagging their partners. He did not want to hear his own voice raised in those aggrieved, shrill accents.

  He was a knight, a member now of a privileged brotherhood, occupying a more honourable place on the battlefield and riding a destrier. The latter was in itself an expense. His old Blue was both too aged and too lightly built for the task. He bought an unschooled horse with the proceeds of selling a couple of swords looted from Scottish corpses, and devoted the winter to training it. Supporting his new estate was a worry but for the time being, the honour must suffice him.

  But he would keep alert for opportunity. Richard had gone home and invited Ralph to visit him there. Rufus would have granted him a short leave, but he declined. He said to Richard that he did not think the lady Wulfhild liked him, and shook his head smilingly when Richard retorted that Fallowdene was his and he would invite whom he liked to stay there. But at heart he was afraid that the sight of Richard’s manor would rub his own homeless condition in too painfully, and also, he wished to stay close to the king. At any moment, a chance might come to serve his lord in such a way that the thought of reward would again occur to Rufus.

  All through the long second Scottish campaign of the following summer, it never happened. Rufus indeed was short-tempered and preoccupied. Couriers arrived, some from Anselm of Bee, who was said to be definitely coming to England that year, and one from Malcolm of Scotland. Ralph did not know what news or enquiries they brought, but he did know that they all made Rufus irritable for days afterwards. Like a good wife, Ralph comforted his lord and did not harass him with questions.

  The second campaign ended, more or less satisfactorily this time. Christmas came again. The spring followed, or so the calendar alleged, although the wet and stormy weather scarcely bore it out. Curthose sent renewed pleas for Rufus to help him against Maine and also against Henry who with a handful of friends was now trekking from castle to castle round the Franco-Norman border, staying in them as a cross between guests and auxiliary garrison, and making forays into Normandy to annoy its duke.

  Rufus hesitated, began to muster, heard of disturbances on the Welsh border and set off westwards instead.

  "E’s like an old stag pacing round and round ’is ’inds,’ said Croc, who was bored by campaigning and would sooner have been crouching in a thicket to watch his graceful, wary, beloved deer step across the path so that he could mark their daytime covert as they faded into it. ‘First Scotland, now Wales. ’E won’t leave England till they’re both quiet. It’ll be messy fighting in Wales. More ambushes and night raids than open battle.’

  Rufus, beckoning Ralph to ride with him as they started on the last few miles to the Bristol Channel, confirmed this. ‘It’s horrible terrain, Ralph. Armies can hide in those ravines. You can have a thousand men within bowshot and not know it. Aargh!’ He suddenly made a face and an angry noise and pulled up. ‘Holy Face, not again! Hold my horse.’ He threw the reins to Ralph, dismounted and plunged out of sight behind a clump of bushes.

  He was a long time. Ralph was debating whether to send or go after him, when Rufus finally reappeared. He looked angry. ‘Are you unwell, sir?’ Ralph asked. The king had kept them waiting before they set off that morning, he remembered.

  ‘I’m never unwell. I had the gripes this morning before we started and it’s just happened again, that’s all. If my cook’s been hanging the venison too long again, I’ll hang him,' said Rufus. ‘Oh Christ.' He bolted back into the bushes. Ralph in turn threw the reins in his charge to somebody else, got down and followed. He found the king crouched, hands to belly, shivering.

  ‘Id... don’t know what’s wrong with me. I was quite well last night. I… urgh… eugggh…!’

  Ralph held him as bowels and stomach alike emptied themselves. Against his fingers, Rufus’ skin was hot. Others were coming up, concerned. Someone had called for the royal physician and he arrived at a run. ‘You’re ill, my lord?’

  ‘I’m never ill!’ said Rufus defiantly. He was very ill indeed and knew it. The terror in his eyes confessed as much.

  ‘You are not going to die,’ Ralph said, over and over during the week or century he spent at the king’s bedside. They had got him to shelter. St. Peter’s Abbey at Gloucester had a good reputation for healing skills. ‘You are not going die. You’ve eaten something that didn’t agree with you, that’s all. Drink this. Let me sponge you.

  Let me steady you. Here’s the basin. Yes, I’m here. I won’t leave you. Hold on to me. You’re not going to die.’

  Day and night blurred
into one. He dozed occasionally on a truckle bed beside the king’s couch. Most of the time he kept vigil on a stool. Afterwards, whenever he recalled that week, memory always insisted on presenting him with a midnight picture: himself at the bedside gripping Rufus’ hot, dry hand; candlelight playing on the king’s sunken features, on the limewashed walls of the chamber, on the fingers of the monks who shared the vigil, telling beads; throwing into relief the deep lines on the face of Serlo, Abbot of Gloucester, who visited the king often, day or night, so deeply did he feel his responsibility.

  Rufus, drifting between flaccid rationality and semi-delirium, said the same things over and over. ‘Oh, God, I’m dying. Where am I going? I know I’m dying.’ And then, as his illness worsened: ‘Fetch Anselm. He’s in England. I know he is, I kept him here. I want Anselm. Fetch him.’

  ‘I’ve sent for Abbot Anselm,’ Serlo said. ‘He’s coming.’

  ‘I said fetch him! He won’t come otherwise. He’d have come for my father, not for me. No churchman’d come for me. Wouldn’t myself, in their place. Fetch Anselm! I’m dying, I tell you, it’s no good sending for him… fetch him, fetch him, I say…!’

  Ralph, who understood better than Serlo did the dark and ultimate horror of oblivion which hung before Rufus’ eyes, gripped his lord’s burning hand again, trying to transmit strength from himself, and for the thousandth time repeated: ‘You are not going to die!

  The Council members rode in. They came and went, speaking in hushed voices, anxious. On the eighth day, Anselm arrived.

  Serlo brought him in. Ralph, who had been half-drowsing on the stool which had become his home, roused himself. So this was Anselm, the Conqueror’s friend, who somehow or other in Rufus’s confused mind represented salvation. Why? Listening to the king’s reiterated demands that Anselm should be brought to him, Ralph had been puzzled by that. Guilt over Canterbury, perhaps? It was still empty and there had been pressure on Rufus to appoint someone to it. And Anselm had been named.

  The Abbot of Bee was outwardly frail, his silver tonsure thin as silk, his skin papery. But his blue eyes were sharp. He looked competent. He might know what to do. Ralph rose to greet him. ‘My lord of Bee. I am glad to see you.’

  Anselm nodded, acknowledging Ralph’s dedication without approving of Ralph whose identity, his cool glance made clear, he knew. He turned to Serlo. ‘What has been done for him? What precisely are his symptoms?’

  ‘High fever, loose bowels, nausea. He’s thirsty all the time. We give him water. It’s all he can hold, anyway. We’ve tried purges and ginger to cleanse his system, bleeding and feverfew brews to cool him but nothing works.’ Serlo’s face, habitually careworn, also now looked aggrieved. He was a man of medicine as much as a man of God and disliked being defeated. ‘We have a chain of prayer continuously in this room. I fear he harmed himself when he insisted on being brought here. It was twenty-five miles from where he first fell ill and he travelled the last ten in an ox-cart, delirious.’

  ‘He knows your abbey’s reputation. I can understand his wish to reach you,’ said Anselm.

  ‘We’d have gone to him! He had only to send for us. But he believes that every churchman in the land must wish him dead. I don’t know why he believes that, and it isn’t true. He maintains law and order in this realm and no one wants him harmed. We only wish for his own soul’s sake…’

  ‘Anselm,’ said the king’s voice from the bed, ‘is that Anselm?’

  The Abbot of Bee went quickly to his side. Rufus had been provided only an hour ago with clean sheets and a scoured basin, but the whole room smelt, of sickness and, unmistakably, of terror. Anselm knelt by the bed, murmured a short prayer, rose, crossed himself and looked down at the king. Rufus’s pupils were dilated so that his normally light eyes appeared dark. ‘I’m dying,’ he said, in a voice so near a moan that Ralph’s own guts twisted.

  ‘You’ve had no practice at being ill,’ said Anselm calmly. ‘You may not be as bad as you think. But if you’re right – death comes to us all and there’s nothing to fear. Have you confessed?’

  ‘No. Wanted to confess to you.’

  ‘By all means. But shouldn’t your regular spiritual advisor…?’

  ‘Flambard’s not here. Don’t want him now anyway.’ He was too weak to think out complex sentences. ‘Took his advice,’ Rufus explained. ‘Bad advice.’

  ‘He advised you badly? You did something you now regret?’ Anselm frowned at the bystanders. ‘Leave us.’

  ‘Let them stay. They know about it anyway,’ Rufus whispered. And then, confirming Ralph’s guess: ‘I’m talking about Canterbury.’

  It had been Rufus’ worst night yet. Anselm looked at the exhausted faces of the Council members, who had fetched him back to the king’s bedside in this predawn hour. Half a dozen times, said the physician, they had thought the king to be sinking into his last coma. The king thought it himself. His eyes were pleading with Anselm.

  Once, thought Anselm wretchedly, he had hoped cravenly that Rufus’ own unwillingness to appoint him to Canterbury might be his protection. Now Rufus himself was begging him to take up the cross, to be the ransom, for the sake of Rufus’ own soul.

  He had brought monks with him from Bee. It was one of these who now said: ‘My lord, if this is God’s will for you…’

  ‘It isn’t. It’s the will of these men here.’ Anselm regarded the haggard Council members sternly. ‘I am aware, my lords, that you have been working on the king since before Christmas – or I would have been allowed to leave England when I asked, and not kept here all through the winter. I have said it before and I say it again: indeed, as the king now says, it is wrong that Canterbury should have been kept vacant for the sake of its revenues. But I am not the man it needs. I was a friend to the king’s parents and will gladly be a friend to the king himself but not in this manner. Certainly the See should be filled. But there are many worthy bishops in England…’

  ‘The king will hear of no one but you,’ said one of the worthy bishops, a Council member. He drew Anselm aside. ‘And unless you relieve his mind by agreeing,’ he said in a low voice, ‘the doctors think there is no chance at all that he will live. If he dies, the whole land will be torn to pieces between his brothers. You are our one chance. He, is too ill to reason with.’

  ‘It’s true.’ FitzHamon had moved aside with them and was nodding over the bishop’s shoulder. Anselm looked at him thoughtfully. FitzHamon was a man he respected. He might have a face like the aftermath of a landslide, but he was honest and was in the process of founding what would one day be a magnificent abbey in the west country, at a place called Tewkesbury.

  ‘Anselm!’ Rufus called fretfully.

  Anselm walked slowly back to him. ‘I heard you call yourself my friend,’ Rufus whispered. He put out a hand and hot fingers closed weakly round the abbot’s wrist. ‘If you’re my friend, then what do you think you’re doing? If I die now, holding C… Canterbury, I’ll be damned, won’t I? So take it away from me, take it away! He tried excitedly to sit up. A physician came quickly to press him gently down again. ‘Take it away!’ Rufus cried, and thrust at the physician as if the man somehow represented the loathed Archbishopric. ‘Make him agree!’ Rufus, with his spare hand, made a feeble, but imperious gesture at the Council members ‘Kneel. I order you to kneel and b… beg him. Kneel, Serlo! And you, FitzHamon. Kneel, damn you all!’

  FitzHamon, taking control, nodded brusquely to the rest. ‘No!’ said Anselm in alarm, freeing himself and backing away. But already, bishops and barons were on their knees in a semicircle round him. The sickroom, lit red and yellow from brazier and candle, might have been a painting of purgatory with himself as a saint hearing the pleas of supplicants. His face was hot. One of the bishops said: ‘Please listen to the will of God.’ Another, more practical, muttered that it was harassing a dying man to go on arguing.

  ‘I can’t,' said Anselm desperately.

  Back in Bee, while he was still hesitating over whether or not to leave for
England, he had tried to face the thought that this might be required of him, had tried to say Thy will be done.

  But now that the moment was here, it was unbearable. If he let these men thrust him into Canterbury, he might never see his quiet room in Bee again. There would be no more contemplative peace, no more untroubled hours of study. The Archbishop of Canterbury lived in a political arena and for Rufus’ Archbishop it would be worse even than that, not merely political but gladiatorial. He preferred not to imagine what it would be like if Rufus died anyway and Curthose and Henry fought over England.

  He should not have left Bee. St. Benedict had said that monks should not travel out of their monasteries, that it was not to the advantage of their vocations. How wise St. Benedict had been. The eyes in the upturned circle of faces were driving him towards the unthinkable. They were like wolves closing in on a lamb. Unable to bear standing up in their midst any longer, he knelt down himself. ‘No, please. Really…’

  ‘Enough of this nonesense.’ FitzHamon’s craggy face and ox-like build were not wholly misleading. ‘The king gives the orders here.’ The wolves got to their feet, and pounced. Anselm was hauled up and dragged towards the bed. Someone had produced a pastoral crook – had they had the thing hidden in the bed curtains in readiness? – and was placing Rufus’ fingers round it. Someone else was making Anselm put out his own hand for it. He clenched his fist against it but FitzHamon, with an exasperated snort, seized his little finger and bent it back. Anselm cried out and his hand opened. The crook was thrust against his palm and his fingers were forcibly closed on it. A number of voices began to sing an impromtu Te Deum and he found himself being bodily picked up and lifted onto a set of shoulders which he recognised indignantly as belonging to his own monks. ‘Put me down! Where are you taking me?’

  ‘To the monastery church,’ said somebody. ‘You have to be invested.’