by Tracey Warr
‘I lived in horror with it, Nest. My whole life was formed that day. I killed a boy and fell in love with a girl and all was wrong and wonderful at the same time. No matter what I did, no matter what happened, I could not ever cease to love the girl.’ His hand reached feebly towards me but I could not touch him, could offer him no comfort.
I stood and walked from the room, barely conscious of my actions. I walked straight through the hall, out into the bailey, desperate for air, to turn my wet face up to the grey sky. My thighs thumped against the well and I leant on the well brim, my arms spread wide to either side of me. I stared down at the deep, black water.
Stones crunched behind me and Amelina placed her arm around my heaving shoulders for some minutes, waiting for me to find calm. ‘Can you forgive him, Nest? He needs you to forgive him.’
‘What about what I need?’ I whispered.
‘Nest, please.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I cannot forgive him that.’
I kept away from the chamber where Gerald fought for his life, sleeping instead in the hall, rolled in my cloak and furs, my arm around my hound, staring at the fire, remembering, recasting my whole life. Everything was lies.
I heard the servants and the men-at-arms whispering, no doubt telling each other that I was a heartless bitch to abandon their master in his desperate state. From the corner of my eye, I watched Amelina come and go, up and down the stairs to the chamber, with bowls of water and bloodied bandages, casting her eyes in my direction now and then and sighing. Once, she came over and stood above me, hands on her hips. ‘He’s getting better,’ she said. ‘He won’t die.’
I said nothing and she huffed and returned to her nursing.
After a week, Gerald’s wound was healed enough for him to coming limping down the stairs. Seeing him in the doorway, I instantly stood and left the hall. I ran to the stable, buckled the saddle on my horse with speed and rode past Haith, who stood open-mouthed at the castle portcullis, as I galloped out. I rode to Carew and busied myself spending time with Angharad and David. I could not face a conversation with Gerald about Goronwy. I tried to tell myself that he had lied because he loved me, but that only made me want to push the thought of him away further.
Amelina followed me a few days later with urgent news. ‘Nest, he’s taken a turn for the worse again. You must come, now, without delay.’
I shook my head. ‘I can’t speak to him.’
‘Nest, the wound has healed but he has some other sickness upon him now. I fear he will die, truly.’
I stared at the fire. It was a ruse. She had always favoured Gerald. Always persuaded me to him even when he had behaved so badly towards me over Henry. ‘No.’
‘Nest, please. Come for me, if not for him. My heart is breaking to see him die like this, with you unkind and cold to him.’
‘Die?’
‘I told you. It’s not the wound anymore. In his weakened state, he’s taken a sickness. He is coughing night and day. A great, racking cough it is. There’s blood in his mouth and he is thinned to bones. Truly, Nest, you must come. He tosses and turns, now chilled, now fevered, and speaks only your name and moans of his guilt.’
‘Then I must come.’ Nevertheless, I moved slowly, reluctantly.
At Pembroke, Amelina flung herself from her horse and ran into the hall. I followed her more slowly and felt a chill at the back of my neck at the hushed stares of the servants. I was moving towards the stairs to the chamber, when Amelina came running back down breathless. ‘He’s worse,’ she said, her voice tight, her face distraught. ‘The priest’s been. You’d best hurry.’
I climbed the stairs behind her to the chamber and saw that Amelina had spoken truly. Gerald was bone-thin and coughed violently over and over. I saw immediately that there was no hope for him but kept the knowledge from my face. I sat next to the bed but still could not bring myself to take his hand. He turned harrowed eyes upon me. This had always been between us, above Henry, above Owain. It was always Goronwy’s death and Gerald’s lies that had kept us at a distance from one another. I thought of my sweet brother and dropped my face into my hands weeping. I could not excuse Gerald for that killing.
‘Nest, please.’ He spoke to me as if the two weeks of my absence had not intervened. He knew my mind. Knew what I was thinking. ‘It was my first fight as a knight. I wanted to impress Arnulf and rise in the world, prove myself. But Nest, I have regretted that act my whole life, every minute since.’
Yes, I thought, bitterly, there was always ambition lurking in Gerald, in the way he wanted me, in the way he gave me to Henry.
‘I have suffered for it, Nest. I have paid for it. I made a grave error agreeing to “loan” you to the King because he could never really return you to me, could he? There was no truth in that notion.’
I looked up and saw Amelina looking at me across the bed, her eyes pleading with me. ‘I forgive you, Gerald,’ I said, my voice toneless.
Amelina glared at me from the side of the room where Gerald could not see her, shaking her head.
I cleared my throat. ‘There were good years, Gerald.’
‘You loved me sometimes.’
‘Yes. I loved you.’ I did not want our last words together to be words of rancour. There was a change in his face. He reached out his hand to me again and this time I took it. Pain and the struggle for breath contorted his features. ‘I’m here Gerald, I’m holding you,’ I said, salt tears spilling into my mouth. I watched the light dull and go out in his eyes. His eyes closed and would never open on me again. I fell over the bed, sobbing, remembering now, too late, how he had made my life bearable after the massacre of my family, during the early days of my time with the Normans. It was always the sight of his kind face that had given me hope, enabled me to carry on.
There seemed no liquid left anywhere in my body to summon up for more tears. Amelina’s weeping, too, had given way to silence. We looked at each other across Gerald’s body. ‘I can’t believe he’s gone,’ I whispered. ‘Twelve years we were wed.’ His dead face was a marble likeness of him, devoid of all his colour and vigour. A few more salty tears squeezed through my lashes and trickled to the corners of my mouth.
‘We have to prepare him, Nest,’ Amelina said, gently.
‘No. I will do it.’
‘We will do it together.’
‘No.’ I stood. ‘I want to be alone with him.’ I was too weary to say more.
She pressed her lips together, got up slowly and left the room.
Looking down at him, I marvelled at how quickly Gerald could cease to be the ingenious, humorous man I had loved and become instead this grey thing. I began to shake and stamped my foot at myself, taking myself in hand. Amelina returned with a bowl of water and cloths. ‘Why don’t we do it together?’ she said gently. ‘You will struggle to move him alone.’
Reluctantly, I saw that she was right. I pulled back the sheet from his poor body, all his strength emaciated so quickly to feebleness. I began to untie the laces on his nightgown, thinking of other times when I had done this in love, when the skin beneath had been silky and muscled, not cold and wasted as his limbs felt now.
‘I want to wash him alone.’
‘Very well. Call me when you need me then. I will bring a shroud.’
My mouth trembled at her word, ‘shroud’, but stolidly I dipped a cloth in the water, moving as if I were in a dream or under the sea. I worried at whether the water might be too cold for him. I washed him in long gentle strokes: along his arms, from his collar bones to his hips, along his legs. I washed his feet. I had always loved and laughed at his wide feet and their square toes. Memories of us laughing together, feeling ecstasy together, tumbled fast upon one another. I washed his hands that had touched me, lifted me from horses, passed me our newborn children in joy. ‘Cleanse him with the water of Christ’s side,’ I prayed. ‘He was a good man.’ On balance, I knew it was true, despite the weeks I had spent locked in loathing at his revelation about Goronwy. I remembered
everything he had loved me through: my affair with Henry, my abduction by Owain. His love had been true, unwavering, and deep as the ocean.
Amelina returned to help me roll the thing that had replaced my Gerald, back and forth into the cloth. We turned his body to and fro between us to get him first into a shift, and then into the shroud, as if we were dressing a child. How he would hate this, I thought, not to do something for himself. I looked with disbelief at his impassive face, felt the cold of his skin beneath my fingers. We tied the shroud at the neck and I couldn’t bear to see him so: trussed, his arms that had fought, that had held me, that had thrown our children into the air, useless now in his death sack. ‘I can’t!’ I collapsed onto a stool, closed my eyes as Amelina pulled the rest of the shroud around his head and face and closed it. How she could see what her hands were doing through the torrents of her loud tears I could not conceive.
23
New Quarry
‘Nest, I think you should go down to the bailey.’ Amelina’s voice was urgent. ‘The Welsh have arrived, and the de Clare household too, and it is looking ugly down there.’
Swiftly, I rolled the letter of condolence that I had received from Henry and stepped next to her to lean from the window, looking down on the many people dismounting and arriving. ‘Henry writes that he has created Haith Sheriff of Pembroke and places me and my children under his protection,’ I told Amelina and she smiled at this. One piece of good news. Haith had been my raft, keeping me afloat in a sea of overwhelming grief.
Gerald was to be buried today, and a truce was called between Normans and Welsh, enabling my brothers and Gwenllian to come to Pembroke to support me. My three boys had come from Cardigan with Lord de Clare’s son, Gilbert. In the courtyard, my sons had just dismounted and the grooms were leading their horses to the stable. Henry was eleven and the image of his father, the King; William was ten and Maurice nine. William looked like me whilst Maurice had Gerald’s looks and my gaze lingered on his face, on the way he stood, and I thought of how Gerald had looked when I had first seen him. My sons joined a group of other Normans standing in the courtyard who were gathering here to honour Gerald.
As Amelina had said, my brothers, Gruffudd and Hywel, were just riding through the gates, with Gwenllian and Maredudd ap Bleddyn, Owain’s uncle, who had taken on the rule of Powys. My brothers and Maredudd each had a small entourage of men with them. If Maredudd was inclined to seek a blood feud for his nephew’s death, it was Gerald’s sons, my sons, he must look to. On their part, the Norman lords of the castles that Gruffudd had attacked, had reason to seek redress in his blood. ‘I must get them all into the hall and disarmed.’
I ran to the stairs and then slowed my pace a little to pass sedately through the hall where Haith was speaking with a group of Flemish lords who had arrived the night before. In the courtyard, I hailed my brothers, sister-in-law, and King Maredudd in Welsh and saw that the grooms and servants hurried to their needs.
I turned to the Norman group, switching to French. ‘My sons, and my lords, you are welcome to Pembroke,’ I smiled at them all warmly, trying to take their attention from the black glances they were throwing at the Welshmen behind me. ‘Please, come into the hall.’ They would have preferred to continue facing off against the Welsh across the cobbles of the bailey but could not refuse my invitation. I felt relief as swordbelts clattered in a pile at the doorway. Haith nodded to me conspiratorially. We had previously discussed our strategy for handling our contentious guests today.
Bishop Bernard had come from Saint Davids to officiate at the burial, and Bishop Richard de Belmeis had made the long journey from London, so that we had been obliged to delay the burial to await his arrival. Now I knew so much more of Gerald’s association with de Belmeis in the betrayal of the Montgommerys, Bishop Richard’s presence made more sense, but in any case, he still held significant sway in Wales in Henry’s name and would not miss this opportunity to assess the situation and report back to the King. Bishop Roger of Salisbury who held the nearby castle of Kidwelly, had written kindly, telling me he could not be present (he was Henry’s main administrator in England and was busy there), but his castellan, Maurice of London, who also commanded the castle at Ogmore, had come in his stead.
My sons’ companion, Gilbert FitzGilbert de Clare, was doing his best, at sixteen years of age, to brazen out his youthful command of Cardigan. His father was sick and likely to die and his older brother Richard was in Normandy with the King. The other Norman lords here were Robert FitzMartin; Miles of Gloucester, who held Carmarthen Castle for his father; Richard FitzPons from Llandovery; and Mael de Neufmarché. I exchanged a few words with each of them.
‘I look forward to having you here for a few days,’ I said to my son, Henry. ‘I will go now to make your uncles welcome.’ William and Maurice shifted their feet uncomfortably, and I saw on Henry’s face that he did not like my reminder to him that Gruffudd and Hywel were his kin. When they were all seated, with beakers of wine, I returned to the courtyard and the Welsh.
‘We won’t enter,’ Gruffudd told me in the courtyard, before I could open my mouth to speak. ‘Or disarm.’
‘Gruffudd, please ….’
‘No. We are here, Nest. For you. And because we all knew and admired Gerald FitzWalter. He dealt fairly with us when he could. But I will not enter the hall of Pembroke until the castle is surrendered to me, its rightful king.’
Anxious that no Norman should hear him making that claim, I rapidly gave orders to the servants who were bustling everywhere at my heels. ‘Very well,’ I said to Gruffudd, ‘then I will send water and wine to you here.’ The servants began to set up trestles in the bailey to seat the Welsh, and I looked at the sky, grateful that there was no rain. Maredudd gave me kind, temperate words, and I was relieved to find him more like his brother, Cadwgan, and less like his nephew, Owain. I said nothing of condolence to him for Owain’s death. I could not put words of such hypocrisy into my mouth.
Gerald’s burial was an occasion for grief, for my kin to offer support and kindness to me, but it was also an occasion for the Normans and Welsh to size each other up, to consider what might happen now in the vacuum left behind by Gerald’s death. Gruffudd and Maredudd would see it as an opportunity. The de Clares and the Gloucesters would see it as an opportunity. And the King, I knew, would be thinking and planning, even though he was not here. He would act, through Haith, through his Norman lords.
The visitors – Norman, Welsh and Flemish – joined me at Gerald’s graveside. No one tried to lay hands on my brothers, but the Normans and the Welsh eyed one another harshly over my husband’s coffin. Angharad and Amelina with my three-year-old son, David, clinging to her hand, stood in the shelter of Dyfnwal’s arms. David was too young to comprehend that his father would never return to play with him. Angharad and Amelina wept loudly, and I was grateful that their tears reminded everyone how we were here to grieve for Gerald’s passing. My older sons stood to one side of me and my brothers and my sister Gwenllian on the other side. Hywel’s stump arm was an unavoidable reminder of the violent past between the Welsh and Normans standing gathered here. I screwed my wet eyes up at the unbidden thought of my brother Goronwy’s head rolling on the sand towards the surf on Llansteffan beach. At least my task of modulating the tensions between the visitors provided me with distraction from my grief, from thinking about how I had lost Gerald, how I had reason to hate Gerald.
As the priest intoned the words of the burial service, and I smelt the musty smell of the freshly dug earth, I forced myself to look around at the Normans edging Gerald’s grave. Henry would soon think of giving me in marriage to one of these men. I was still of childbearing age, and he would not allow me to become a powerful symbol in Deheubarth for a Welsh husband. Henry had given Sybil Montgommery, aged thirty, in marriage to a fifteen-year-old lord when she was widowed. He had married his eight-year-old daughter, Maud, to the thirty-year-old King of Germany. I knew I could not discount anyone, young or old, except the mar
ried men and my own kin, from the pool of possibilities. Robert FitzMartin and Richard FitzPons had both recently married, yet the death of a wife in childbed was an ever-present danger.
Miles of Gloucester and Maurice of London were unmarried. As was Mael de Neufmarché. I quailed at the idea of being forced to marry the son of my father’s murderer. Would Henry still feel any compassion for me in his decision? Gilbert FitzGilbert de Clare was a boy, a fledgling, to my thirty-five years. But I knew that would be no obstacle if Henry’s strategems led him in that direction. The older brother, Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, was unwed and was perhaps a more likely prospect. He would be more than pleased to have his rule in Cardigan extended into Pembroke, Carew and Llansteffan, and he had the ear of the King where they fought together now in Normandy. Looking round at them all, I had no doubt they would all have their bids already in with the King – their gifts and blandishments arrayed to net me. At least Henry could not give me to Richard de Belmeis now that he was a bishop. That was some great comfort.
I looked down at Gerald’s coffin, and my eyes and mind clouded with tears at the so absolute loss of our life together. By custom, it was my brother Gruffudd who should have disposal of me as a widow, but in reality I was still the Norman hostage I had been since I was eight years old, since my father was killed.
Part Three
1117–1120
24
Tithes
Angharad and I emerged from Pembroke Chapel after mass and she took a posy of small purple flowers from the basket on her arm. ‘What do you think of these, Mother?’