‘Job the Goldsmith,’ Maurice said suddenly, looking up at the sign hanging above a small house on the riders’ right with a small hammer pictured on it followed by two sets of script in English and Hebrew lettering. He pulled his horse into the side street and FitzStephen fell in behind him. For some reason both men fell silent as they walked their steeds through the smelly little thoroughfare. All that was audible was the thump of hooves and the tinkle of each man’s chainmail armour against steel weaponry.
Further into the Jewry there were more people. Most were Jews, FitzStephen could tell by the oddly pointed yellow and white hats which the men preferred to wear, and they looked up at the two warriors warily before scampering away. FitzStephen realised that he knew these streets, and he began to remember the ways and strange customs of the sons of Israel.
‘How many Jews are there in Gloucester?’ Maurice asked quietly as he watched a group of young men on the far side of the square climb to their feet when they saw the two Normans enter.
‘Three, perhaps four hundred?’ FitzStephen guessed, thinking back to the wedding he had attended in this very square twelve years before. ‘Certainly even when I was last here there were enough for the locals to be wary.’ Maurice hummed a response while FitzStephen ran his hand over his bare chin. All trace of the beard which he had grown during his imprisonment had been shaved off, and he had cropped short his blond hair in the old Norman style, admittedly more out of hygiene than style. The unusual haircut, shaved chin, and colourful surcoat marked FitzStephen out as a danger amongst the long-haired, bearded, and dull-clothed Englishmen and Welsh. Amongst the Jews, the alien looking Norman garnered the same reaction.
‘Now where?’ asked Maurice.
Caerloyw was the name which the Welsh gave Gloucester and it meant Bright City, but today there was no hint of why they had given the walled town this beautiful name. To FitzStephen the whole world seemed dark and suffocating as the tall buildings, sometimes as many as two or three storeys high, cast their shadows over the little street. But up ahead the pleasant, little sunlit square opened up before FitzStephen and he was able to compose himself. Jews were trading goods in their own style in every corner. Bizarre smells hit FitzStephen, foreign scents which he could not identify. Many of the people in the square stopped whatever they were doing and turned to look at the strangers in their midst. One woman screamed and lifted her son into her arms before running for cover in a house.
‘Lords,’ a voice said loudly from the brothers’ left. It belonged to a man who was surrounded by a large group of youths all dressed in similarly extravagant clothes and yellow caps which tapered to a high point. FitzStephen immediately felt a familiar dislike rise in his chest. Twelve years before, he had known the ratty-looking man with the protruding teeth and sharp nose. They had not been friends back then and he doubted that the mutual dislike they’d felt would have dissipated from the other man either. But FitzStephen’s face was shrouded in shadow from the surrounding buildings, and the man did not recognise him.
‘You are lost, perhaps?’ The Jew’s polite question covered an underlying threat that the two Normans were anything but welcome in this area of the city. Relations between the Christian and Jewish residents of Gloucester had never been poorer and young men on both sides sensed the unrest and patrolled the edges of their respective territories looking for trouble. Robert FitzStephen could see some of the young men fingering weapons hidden beneath their robes.
‘Shmuel ben Yossi,’ FitzStephen replied, stepping his horse out of the shadow, ‘it is nice to see that you are still the helpful boy that I remember.’
Shmuel’s lip curled in disgust as he revealed his face. The other men in his group sensed their leader’s mood and tensed excitedly, ready for a fight.
‘You,’ was all Shmuel could stammer.
‘Yes, me,’ FitzStephen replied evenly. His horse fussed below him. ‘But point me to your father’s house and we can reacquaint ourselves there rather than in the street.’
‘You are not welcome here,’ Shmuel snarled, ‘take your lies and go back the way you came. We want none of your sort of trouble.’
FitzStephen ignored the threat. ‘Your father’s house?’
Shmuel snarled, drawing a small knife from inside his sleeve, and charged forward just as his companions’ hands grabbed at his shoulder to stop him. Two men on horseback could easily have cut them all down.
‘You bastard,’ Shmuel wheezed as he slashed his knife back and forth at FitzStephen’s armoured leg, but far enough away to have no hope of injuring the Norman.
A single voice rang out above the clamour: ‘Robert, my friend, you have returned. And in better shape than last time I saw you.’ The voice belonged to Shmuel’s father, Yossi ben Ysaac. A philosopher, moneylender, doctor, and, twelve years before, an unlikely friend to a young and badly injured knight on the make called Robert FitzStephen. He had been brought to Yossi by Walter de Ridlesford when the war wounds contracted in battle on Mona had begun to fester and the blood poisoned. In the beginning FitzStephen had refused the Jew’s aid, which was so unlike the help he had received from the Hospital of St Sepulchre in Gloucester where prayer was the main remedy. As he worsened he had finally relented and the two had become close friends as his condition slowly improved under the Jew’s care. FitzStephen’s transgression with Yossi’s daughter-in-law had forced him to flee and had kept him away from the city for many years. Nevertheless, FitzStephen leapt down from his horse and pushed through Shmuel’s gang, landing a bear hug on the old man which left Yossi reeling backwards, laughing and scolding FitzStephen. Shmuel stared daggers into the Norman’s back. Ignored, Maurice kept his hand on the pommel of his sword and an eye on Yossi’s son.
‘Are you quite done with this effeminate show of happiness?’ Yossi told FitzStephen as he broke clear of his hug. ‘Might we rather go to my house and get some food?’ Still smiling, he turned towards his son. ‘Shmuel, you are not giving these men bother, are you?’
‘No, Father,’ he started through gritted teeth, ‘just reacquainting myself with an old friend.’
Yossi preferred to ignore his son’s sarcasm as he signalled to Maurice to follow him. ‘Good boy. Your mother and I will see you on the morrow.’
FitzStephen walked beside Yossi while Maurice rode, leading his brother’s rouncey alongside him. They left his son and his companions behind and walked through the square with people still watching the dangerous outsiders.
‘It has been some time, Robert,’ Yossi said after he had been introduced to Maurice.
‘Indeed it has,’ he replied. ‘I thought time healed all wounds,’ he said with a glance back over his shoulder at Shmuel.
‘Some wounds are deeper than others,’ the old moneylender told him with a sympathetic smile. They walked on in silence for a few paces and FitzStephen looked around, the smell of burning oak bark from the nearby tanneries strong and vaporous. He was surprised to find that many of the homes in the Jewry were grander than those of the rich burgesses in the west of Gloucester. Even more surprising was that Yossi’s new house dwarfed every other in the vicinity. It was by far the biggest on the street, more a fortress than a house, and blessed with a large walled courtyard in the front where many people continued their day’s work. FitzStephen felt a sudden surge of contempt and jealousy that Christians all over England experienced towards the Jews. They lived lavishly in these great mansions, buying up more and more land while Christians failed to meet their loans and lost their homes. To make matters worse, the moneylenders also had a stranglehold over the monastic houses to whom they had made loans for building work, including the recently built Benedictine house of Llanthony Secunda, just south of Gloucester. It was mortgaged up to neck like so many others, giving the Jews power over the Christians and put their immortal souls in jeopardy.
‘Welcome to my home,’ Yossi said as three servants ran out to take the horses. Their master did not take off his hat as he entered the building, but Maurice quick
ly swept his gambeson cap from his head. A body lay on a table in a room to the left of the entrance hall.
‘My brother,’ said Yossi, indicating to the corpse. ‘We are not permitted to bury him on Christian soil so we must take him to a Jewish plot of land in the shadow of the Tower of London.’ Yossi laughed suddenly. ‘I have been putting it off because it is a long trip and he is poor company now.’ His laugh faded out quickly with a slow shake of his head. ‘It is very sad,’ Yossi said after a moment’s silence. ‘You look trim, Robert, though a little pale, so I assume you have not come to me for medicine. You have never asked me for advice, so I assume you have come back to Gloucester for money.’
‘That and your upbeat company, Doctor,’ he teased.
‘Well, I am glad that you came to me rather than Miles le Riche. He is a very bad man, no morals at all,’ Yossi said seriously of another Jewish money-lender in Gloucester, shaking his head. ‘Like Aaron of Lincoln, if you don’t pay him on time he would chase you all the way to Ireland for the money,’ he said with a laugh. FitzStephen and Maurice both visibly baulked at the mention of the country across the sea and swapped hurried glances. ‘Ah-ha,’ Yossi said, ‘perhaps you believed your endeavour across in Ireland was a secret?’ Yossi arched his grey eyebrows in amusement. ‘Not with that king of yours shouting it from every roof top, I think.’
‘It was no secret, Doctor, but we had not realised that word had spread so far,’ Maurice said quietly.
‘King Henry has given his licence to help this Diarmait so what have you got to worry about?’ Yossi asked as the two men looked fretfully at each other, considering the news that their enterprise had spread far and wide. ‘Ah, I see,’ the doctor continued, ‘King Henry’s mind can be changeable of course. So I take it that you are in agreement with the Archbishop rather than the King in their great argument?’
‘An argument?’ FitzStephen asked and immediately regretted it as Yossi launched into a ten-minute description of how the former friends, Archbishop Thomas Becket and King Henry, had been in dispute about the supremacy of the State over the Church for nearly a decade. Eventually FitzStephen shrugged his shoulders in answer. As a knight on the March of Wales, London politics had never interested or affected him.
‘I’m not on bloody Henry’s side, so I am on the archbishop’s, I suppose,’ he said to shut Yossi up. During his imprisonment, FitzStephen had built up a firm hatred of Henry FitzEmpress; it was irrational, uncontrollable, and based solely on the King of England’s abandonment of him to his Welsh prison. His distrust of the Angevin king and his noblemen was all-consuming.
Yossi looked disappointed that FitzStephen had no better argument, but Maurice quickly intervened: ‘I believe that the King’s motivation for overcoming the power of the Church is honourable, perhaps misguided, but honourable. The Church is,’ he paused, ‘no longer simply interested in men’s eternal souls, they require power over their mortal lives too.’
‘And their pockets,’ FitzStephen added.
Yossi’s loud peal of laughter startled both Normans. ‘Ah ha, I see that you are a politician, Sir Maurice,’ he said, ‘and politics are but a short step from the noble art of philosophy which is where my heart truly lies. It is true! I am not just a simple usurer and doctor.’
FitzStephen groaned. He knew what was coming.
Ignoring him, Yossi beamed at Maurice. ‘Have you read any philosophy, Sir Maurice? No! Well we must remedy that now.’ He strode off through his home throwing a hand in the air to indicate that the two Normans should follow. ‘As well as philosophy, I also read astronomy and poetry, but my particular skill is in exegesis,’ he continued and rhymed off several of his interpretations of the Torah which had been well received in educated circles. The doctor pushed through a door and into a library filled with scrolls and parchment. ‘As an expert in usurious proclivities and various mercantile pursuits I have been able to procure many texts from around Europe for my library.’ He picked down a tightly bound scroll from a shelf with obvious reverence. ‘Surely you have heard of the Admirable Doctor, Sir Maurice?’ Yossi looked very dissatisfied when Maurice raised his shoulders and eyebrows to indicate his ignorance. ‘Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra,’ he said with deep respect. ‘Some uneducated men,’ his eyes flicked to FitzStephen, ‘call him Abenezra and he has written some of the greatest arguments and commentaries on the Torah. I helped a little during our time together in Dreux,’ he added quietly, perhaps hoping that Maurice would enquire after details of his assistance. He was let down but unfolded the scroll across a table in the centre of the dusty room anyway. ‘This is Yesod Mora Vesod Hatorah – The Foundation of Awe in your savage French tongue …’
‘We have important business, Yossi,’ FitzStephen reminded the bearded old man.
‘It will keep for a few moments, Robert.’
FitzStephen rolled his eyes and drifted out of the conversation between the two older men. Instead he studied an old map made by a Greek several centuries before. Ireland was but a blip on the corner of a Europe dominated by Italy, Spain, and France. But to FitzStephen the island meant much, much more than those great kingdoms – it was a second chance for success after his failure in Wales; somewhere he could prove that he was just as good as any man. Yossi’s map was old, obviously a copy of an earlier map and the work of a great mind. It was if the mapmaker was trying to bring together all the knowledge of world and what he thought of those far-flung places. Ireland looked like one of the particularly vicious pieces of flint that was sometimes found in the countryside. Long rivers punctured the island to its very core and he could see why the Norse and Danes had loved to raid the country and had finally settled there. Their longships could sail from every corner of the island and bring terror right to the interior. His eye quickly drifted to the south-east corner of the island between two mighty rivers. That was Diarmait’s tribal territory, the lands of the Uí Ceinnselaig, and though the map was made long before it had been founded, FitzStephen knew that the city of Waesfjord was in the utmost southern corner, closest to Wales. That was his target, his prize for helping Diarmait: rule of Waesfjord and two hundred thousand acres to divide between his brothers and cousins. Not for the first time since his departure from Pembroke, he thought of King Diarmait, already across the sea in Ireland. The exiled King of Laighin had sailed ahead to prepare the ground for FitzStephen’s invasion and had taken an unlikely ally in the figure of eighteen-year-old Tewdwr ap Rhys. FitzStephen was jealous, impatient, and angry at the possibility that the younger man, who he had trained to be a warrior, was again leading the life that he wanted.
‘Yossi, please,’ the Norman appealed to his host as an obviously bored Maurice listened politely to his argument about the Book of Joshua.
‘… how the trumpets could have brought down the walls of a city –’ The Doctor stopped when FitzStephen issued his urgent plea. ‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘You have found Ptolemy’s map, I see. So impatient to go to Ireland! Why? I cannot understand,’ he shook his head as he set down the scroll on a candle-lit table. ‘I have read that it rains incessantly, that the women fight in battle and look no different to their husbands.’
‘I don’t think that is true,’ the Norman said. His mind drifted to the lithe, red headed beauty that he had spotted as Diarmait left from the dock at Pembroke. It had only been a moment meeting of their eyes, but that last memory of Princess Aoife still haunted FitzStephen and he fancied that he could still see the charisma, energy, intelligence and courage dancing across her eyes as she held his gaze for just a split second before boarding the ship to Ireland. Since their conversations at Llandovery, he had not been in a position to talk to her but in his mind she was a confident and opinionated woman, free in ways that Norman women were not, and to think of her made his heart rise in his chest. ‘I had not heard that their women are any different to our own, Doctor,’ he said to the Jew.
‘Well, Pliny is not always to be believed,’ Yossi admitted as he sat down and pulled some fresh
sheets of parchment from a drawer. ‘But let us get down to business, Sir Robert. How much do you need?’ He picked up a quill, using his thumb to examine the quality of the tip.
FitzStephen swapped a glance with Maurice. ‘We have nearly four hundred troops, infantry, archers, and mixed cavalry, but some still need remounts,’ he shrugged. ‘We also have workers who need to be paid for building ships and weapons. Food, materials, medicine are all expensive, and we will need some silver for bribes.’
Maurice interrupted, ‘Mercenary Flemings are also rather more expensive than I would wish.’
FitzStephen shook his head at Maurice’s continued opposition to his engagement of the men from Rhos. He was one of the few Normans who respected the poorly treated immigrants from flooded Flanders.
‘But forty marks should cover the whole expedition,’ Maurice said. If he was expecting this huge figure to be met with surprise he was wrong.
‘Indeed, forty should cover it all,’ Yossi nodded at the sum. He scratched the amount into a column on the thick vellum. ‘And as collateral for the loan?’ he locked his eyes on FitzStephen.
He and Maurice looked at each other. They had only one thing to offer Yossi if their expedition was a failure.
‘Carew,’ Maurice said, ‘a thousand acres and Carew Castle.’ It was where David, William, and he had grown up, given to their father Gerald when he had married Princess Nest, his and FitzStephen’s late mother. Maurice bit down on his lip. ‘You will have a princess’ dowry as your warranty. Agreed?’
Yossi licked his lips. Carew was ten miles to the north of Pembroke and on the frontline of the Normans’ fight against the rebellious Welsh – not the safest bet in a country robbed of its greatest knights to follow FitzStephen’s banner to Ireland. On the other hand, he considered, there was always some rich Norman fool willing to part with his money for land no matter where. And if that failed he could always flog the estate to some Holy Order of monks. It was a property worth the risk, he decided. ‘Agreed,’ Yossi said. ‘It will take me a day to collect the money together. Will you eat with me tonight?’
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