"No surprise to me. I never liked that family for all your trust in them, my lord. I grant you Robert was a great man, but the sons—and William was worst of all. A man who could stomach the de Caldoets as vassals—"
"Nay, Roger, do not put that on William. Hugh was hanged and Ralph driven out as soon as an excuse could be found to be rid of them. No man may drive a vassal off his land without reason, no matter how foul that vassal is, and you know it. Philip was all right too. A man cannot help dying. Besides, this discussion is neither here nor there. If Gloucester is done, they are done. William. I must say, has not turned against us. He will do what he can in the old way; he only will not fight. The troops of Gloucester lie still for want of a leader. I was almost tempted to tell Cain—I even approached him on leading them—but you know how he is about his oath of homage. He will keep it to the letter, and before I forced him to something so much against his heart and will, I bethought me that there was one among us almost as well suited to the task and who had never given a personal oath of fealty to King Stephen."
"Who?” Hereford snapped. “Who would the troops of Gloucester obey besides yourself or Lord Radnor? Chester is no man for a task with a steady purpose; Lincoln would use them only for personal gain; Norfolk—"
"What of Hereford?"
"Me?" The one word exploded out of the young man and was followed by a dead silence.
Gaunt rubbed his itching, burning hands against each other wishing vaguely that he was at home, where his daughter-by-marriage would hasten to make him comfortable. He pulled his mind back to the work in hand, his keen eyes following the young earl who had turned his back and paced away. Would he jump at it, Gaunt wondered? Hereford was so young, and this was a tremendous responsibility.
Then Gaunt's eyes narrowed; it was not Hereford who was young, it was he who was old. Hereford had been earl since sixteen, when his father had died in a hunting accident in 1143. He had later won his right to his position by staying alive and free at the disastrous battle of Faringdon. Hereford had won his name as a fighting man there too, helping to hold the walls as long as practical and, when the men of the castle decided to surrender, he and a small band of faithful troops had hacked their way through the entire opposing army so that he might bring his name at least out of that catastrophe uncaptured and unransomed. Nonetheless, Gaunt mistrusted Hereford's ability to maintain a fixed purpose over a long period, for his eyes, old in the experience of men, saw something haunted behind the usual madcap gaiety of his young friend.
Hereford had returned to where Gaunt stood, his eyes dark and his fine brows drawn together in a worried frown. "My lord, I cannot do it."
Gaunt prevented his mouth from dropping open with an effort and allowed an expression of contempt to creep over his usually wooden face. "Does that mean you are afraid to undertake the work, that you are incapable of doing so, or that you are unwilling to do so?"
Flushing bright red and biting at his mouth, Hereford swallowed hard. He had learned most painfully to repress the hot retorts that rose to his lips. "It means exactly what I said, no more, no less. I cannot undertake that burden." Hereford threw out an appealing hand. "Nay, Lord Gaunt, do not torture me. You know I would give the eyes out of my head and the soul out of my body to lead that force, but my lands cannot support the charges of such an army. I would be beggared and they would be starving in one short moon, and you know how that would end. They would take to raiding and I—I would be one more outlaw baron tearing the body of the land that gave him birth for no purpose. Radnor might do it if you allowed him to draw on your purse as well as his own, but I—" he swallowed his disappointment. "—I cannot do it."
Gaunt's face cleared as though by magic, and he began to laugh. "The boy grows into a man and considers before he leaps. Well done, Roger. But what sort of people have you been consorting with who would ask you to bear the burden of leading an army and in addition expect you to pay the costs of the force."
Hereford's eyes came alive with excitement. "People!" He gesticulated an impatient dismissal of the dealings he had had in the past two years. "But who—?"
"William of Gloucester is perfectly willing to bear the major cost so long as he is awarded the major portion of the spoils. To a limited extent Cain and I will help—not with the revenues from our own lands, that is not consistent with our oath to Stephen, and although I have come very close of late to being forsworn, I will not yet go so far. But Cain has three wardships now and what we do with the income from those lands, so long as it is to the eventual benefit of the child, is our own affair. If you provide for those men you yourself bring, no more will be asked of you—except to win the battles you engage in."
Forgotten were chilblained feet, cold, and discomfort. Roger of Hereford, poised in the quivering alertness so characteristic of him, laughed without merriment. "At least you may be sure I will not be there to be reproached if I do not. A man who does not win when given such a chance deserves to die."
Shaking his head, Gaunt replied, "I should not have said that. You will not always be a free agent, you know, Hereford. This early action will be part of a larger plan and there will be times when it will be necessary to take a calculated defeat."
"A larger plan? What plan can there be but to defeat Stephen and wrest the throne from him?"
Gaunt raised a hand. "Curb your tongue, Roger. Servants are not deaf-mutes. Can you not see they are setting up for dinner?"
Hereford’s eyes widened and he lowered his voice. "Are we not safe here? Devonshire is surely with us."
"Ay and nay. Personally, yes, but he has great interests and wide connections. Which is why he is not here to speak to you. Anyway it is never safe to trust another man's servants and not too safe to trust your own with everything. Just keep your voice down and watch carefully for any man who lingers overlong in our vicinity."
"Very well," Hereford replied impatiently, but in a still lower tone. "But what plan? Are we not to seat Henry on the throne?"
"Ay, in the long run, but to depose Stephen is not enough. All we will have is the same trouble over again except that we of the west will fight for the king and the south and east against him. That is senseless."
"I suppose worse might happen to Stephen than deposition."
"So you kill him. Eustace is a man now and has showed himself a fine fighter. Maud is no weaker or stupider than two years since. There is even a second son approaching manhood, and Constance may well give Eustace an heir. Will you slay them all?"
"If needful."
Gaunt laughed harshly. "Nay, Roger, your words are hard but I know you well. I might bring myself to it, but you and even my own son could not. The women would weep and thereby save themselves, and neither of you could bring yourselves to touch a hair on a babe's head. Men are soft these days."
Lord Hereford moved restlessly, kicking pettishly at a stool nearby. "Then what do we do, wait longer? Two long years have already—"
"No. Would I ask you to lead Gloucester's army if we planned to do nothing but wait? In the spring we will begin what was planned long ago. You will prick Stephen here, Hugh Bigod will raise Norfolk against him, Arundel in the south, King David in the north. Between this and that, he will have neither rest nor peace, and all our efforts together will be bent on taking Eustace."
"Eustace? Why not Stephen?"
"Because Stephen is the king. You know he is a brave man, no fear for himself could make him renounce the throne and, even if we could force him to do so, or if we stooped to infamy and killed him, Eustace might succeed him. Stephen, however, is brave only for himself. He is a man first and a king later—and that is why he is of no worth as a king. If we take the son and threaten him with that—the cub is precious to him as I have seen myself—then I think we will have him. Between the pain of constant fighting, rushing now north, now south, now east, now west, and the agony of losing that child, dearer than life to him, I think he will be glad to give us the crown for Henry and return to Blois. We will pa
y him well to leave us in peace. I do not think he has had much pleasure in his kingship. It will be worth his while to forswear the throne. The rest will be up to Henry."
Gaunt signed suddenly, remembering he was tired. He was always tired now, even in the morning, when he woke from a good night’s sleep. Damn Stephen and burn him. If only the plague would take that entire family, Gaunt thought with half his mind, he could lie down and rest. Threescore years and one was too old for these hard times. That was an age for peace, for sitting by the fire and watching your grandchildren—although as yet he had only one. The other half of the duke's brain considered Hereford, who had not yet replied to his reasoning.
The young man had walked toward the immense fire and held his hands out toward it, unconscious of the pain the heat caused him. The Earl of Gaunt's proposal had thrown him off balance and he had accepted it on the crest of an imaginative wave of enthusiasm in which he had envisioned himself at the head of Gloucester's armies sweeping Henry to the throne. The subsequent conversation had brought him back to earth with a thud. But Roger of Hereford, in the stage of flux between early manhood and full maturity, knew that he was still too excited to think clearly.
"Perhaps you are right," he said slowly. "I do not know. I cannot think just now. You and that son of yours could always talk rings around me. I only know that I like direct action best. These elaborate plans fall by their own weight, and so many men involved in separate action tend to think, each one, that his own merit is slighted. Such things often come to naught."
The old man shrugged. "You need not answer now. There is time enough. You should settle all personal matters first, Roger. It is not well to start a war with a divided mind. Some time before February we must all meet. If we can agree, then you should be ready to join Gloucester's forces by midFebruary. You will need at least a month to get to know your men, and I hope we can go into action after the early thaws and planting of March."
"Good,” Hereford repressed a sigh of relief. “I have personal matters to settle, it is true. If this affair had been urgent I could have set them aside a little longer, but—"
"Lady Elizabeth grows restless, eh?" Gaunt interrupted, glancing sidelong at Hereford who had blushed faintly and laughed. "You must be something very special. I had not thought that one could wait at all for anything."
Hereford moved away restlessly again. He had learned to control his expression, but the curse of his fair complexion was that his blood wrote his emotion in his face without his permission for all to see. The best he could do was to turn his back and hope the color would subside before he needed to face his companion.
"It is not so much that as my lands. Of course my mother sent me word of how matters went, and I know Radnor defended them well, but I would like to see with my own eyes what heart the land has. My men-at-arms too must come to know me again."
Gaunt laughed again and drew Hereford toward the table where dinner was laid. "Yes, yes, I know. There are reasons and reasons, and none of them ever is a woman. So it is with my own son also. That being the case and since I see that you feel there is no need for haste at all in the matter of Lady Elizabeth, perhaps we had better go right after we eat. If we can make Ilminster tonight, we may catch Gloucester at Bath tomorrow and possibly settle the manner in which you may draw funds for support of the men. Once that is securely agreed and provision that cannot be readily revoked made, all else will follow easily. You may then devote yourself to collecting Elizabeth of Chester's dowry and person with a mind undistracted by minor matters such as affairs of state."
Several days later in the magnificent solar of Chester Castle, Lady Elizabeth sat staring into the fire with her hands idle in her lap. The room was otherwise empty, but if anyone had seen her it would have been apparent that some decision of momentous weight was being considered, for Lady Elizabeth was never idle. In a sense she was not even idle now, or at least she was not quiet, although she appeared so. In spite of the fact that her head with its two lustrous black plaits, thick as a strong man's wrist, rested against the carved lions and lilies of the chair back, a tension emanated from her that gave an almost palpable effect in the room.
A log snapped, and golden-amber flame shot up anew. Elizabeth turned her face slightly from the fire and slowly closed and reopened her dazzled and dazzling eyes. The light played on the soft roundness of her cheek, showing her skin to be a smooth olive against which the long curled lashes of her eyes looked almost blue rather than black. Elizabeth Chester was a strikingly beautiful woman, her nose short and fine, her mouth naturally red and generous, but beyond every other beauty it was said that she could turn men to stone with her eyes.
Certainly those eyes were startling enough to stop short in mid-sentence anyone who did not know her, for they were not the soft dark brown or light blue or gray that ordinarily went with her dark complexion. As though lit from within, Elizabeth of Chester's eyes glowed with the same golden-amber as the flames leaping in the hearth. They could become hard and cold as topaz, those eyes, but they were always so clear and bright that a man felt as if he could look right into her soul through them.
Even her present trouble could not cloud their limpidity, and Elizabeth was deeply troubled. Almost a year ago her father had told her that he had received a proposal for her in marriage from the Earl of Hereford and that he had accepted it. The Earl of Chester had spoken glibly, defensively, and at great length expecting the worst, but Elizabeth had raised no protest, and Chester had allowed his voice to fade away while he examined his daughter's lovely face. She is pleased, he thought, pleased. Ten, twenty, fifty, he could not even remember how many negotiations for Elizabeth’s marriage had been started, and all had come to nothing.
Some Chester himself had turned down as unsuitable because, unlike many men, he loved his daughter devotedly and would not sell her where he thought she would not be happy. Some he had urged on her with every form of pressure he could devise, but Elizabeth was no ordinary meek woman of the time. She laughed in his face when he commanded her; she cursed him when he beat her; she spat at him when he threatened to starve her. In the end she had always won, for she could make his life a hell on earth.
When Elizabeth was upset, no clothes were washed or mended, few meals were served and those so poorly cooked they were inedible, and day and night she railed, her venomous tongue picking out and lacerating every sore spot on her father's conscience. For the past five years Chester had refrained from argument. He had mentioned any proposal and accepted her negative without question.
Only in part, however, was this acquiescence due to Elizabeth's behavior. After all, Chester had many places he could go away from his daughter. Mostly it was because Chester found Elizabeth increasingly useful to him in political affairs. Now it seemed that that usefulness was at an end. He had broken with King Stephen, and Queen Maud had dismissed Elizabeth from her retinue of ladies. Court circles were closed to her and she could no longer bring her father information or advice.
Hereford had every qualification for a good husband; he was young—younger than Elizabeth if it came to that—handsome, rich, brave, and heart and soul with Chester's cause. The lands Elizabeth had inherited from her mother lay closer to Hereford's domains than to Chester's, some of the castles to be ceded as Elizabeth's dowry being right on the border of Hereford's estates. Best of all, Elizabeth knew Lord Hereford well and liked him. Chester had gambled, accepted Hereford's offer, presented his acceptance as a fait accompli, and the gamble had paid off.
At that time Elizabeth had been almost as pleased as her father. The year before the proposal was tendered she had, as a matter of fact, laid snares to entrap Lord Hereford and had been chagrined because, although plainly interested in her person, the young earl loudly proclaimed that he would not marry. When, therefore, after a year of absence Hereford had written to her father offering very generous terms for her, she had been filled with triumph at her victory. Now she was not at all sure that she wanted the spoils of that victor
y, but it was too late to retreat.
Elizabeth of Chester had many faults, but dishonesty with herself was not one of them. This idle hour before the fire had been spent in an earnest inquiry into why she was so unhappy about Hereford's return. She knew that she liked him, indeed found him more attractive than any other man she had ever met; they laughed about the same things, enjoyed the same rough sports and unrefined jests. He was rich—at least as rich as her father—not that it mattered, for she believed she could have had Lord Radnor if she desired wealth. He would not be harsh to her; no man as soft to his mother and sisters as Lord Hereford would be really brutal to his wife.
What then? He was young, handsome, more than handsome, beautiful in a way that stirred her blood, virile— Elizabeth stopped her thoughts and closed her tawny eyes. Ay, she thought, there lies the pin in the cloth. Take it out and look at it. All of Roger of Hereford she would welcome gladly into her life—his fighting skill, his laughter, his principles—all but his passion.
Her knees trembled and she put her hands on them to stop the motion while a dark blush, which gave her complexion a fascinating violet-hued rosiness, covered her face and throat. It was true that her revulsion at the thought of complete physical contact had been a small part of her previous rejections, but it had never been the major reason. It was different with Roger anyway; she was not icily revolted or flatly indifferent; she hated Roger's passion because she responded to it. Every time he touched her she was driven so wild that she wanted to scream and strike, yet when he was near she could not resist placing every temptation in his way to make him touch her.
A year, how little she had thought of him in that year. She had spent much more time considering how to make him offer for her than in considering their relationship once he had done so.
"So here you are, Elizabeth. I have sent all over the castle for you. I thought you would like to read Roger's letter."
Knight's Honor Page 2