‘You must go to Marlborough Castle at once,’ said Nicholas, rising to his feet.
‘No,’ said William sharply, taking the priest by surprise. ‘We must see these men are fed and lodged for the night,’ he commanded, indicating his escort who nodded their acknowledgement so that the sun sparkled on their helms and they dismounted. ‘I shall remain here until one or other of my parents returns.’
‘Then I shall send word…’
‘No, Nicholas, there is no need. Thy concern does thee credit and I have no reason to doubt it, but I have scant reason to love my father or my mother, it would seem.’
‘But it is your duty, boy, commanded by God…’ Nicholas began.
‘I am no longer a boy, Nicholas, but am girded knight…’
‘But that is impossible. By whom? Not by King Stephen?’
‘Aye, by King Stephen, and to pardon my Lord father as much as acknowledge the service I have rendered the King himself.’
‘But…’
‘Say no more, sir,’ William said. He had slid to the ground now and stood beside the priest. Putting his hand upon Nicholas’s shoulder, Nicholas realised that William was much grown, almost as tall as he was himself, the priest being increasingly stooped with age. He had, moreover, a commanding air that Nicholas found disturbingly full of sinful pride. As William smiled at him kindly, Nicholas de Sarum crossed himself. How old was he now? Seven? Or was it eight? Surely more than the six years that he counted upon his fingers. Yet this was no child. The boy seemed to have grown quickly to a premature manhood. In that instant his faith faltered; it seemed all his schooling had been undone by the time William had been away, and no man – least of all a priest – can countenance his life’s work unravelled. Just as he recalled the old assertion that William had been born Satan’s imp he saw kindness in the boy’s eyes and felt the gentle, almost affectionate pressure of William’s hand upon his own shoulder.
*
Word was carried to the Lady Sybil that her second son had returned to the place of his birth and she, mindful of his duty to her, responded by commanding he attend her. Confident of his obedience she and her daughters prepared for his arrival and wondered at his dilatoriness until it became clear he was not coming. Instead reports arrived that the boy had made himself master of the castle at Hamstead Marshal, that he was out hawking on a fine bay palfrey, defiant of his mother’s order. Worse, it seemed he was lording it over those few servants left in the castle, though in fact few objected to making up fires and cooking for the ‘little Lord’ whose easy manner enchanted them and was at such variance with either the peremptory commands of his ill-visaged father or his waspish mother, both of whom they had been free of for some weeks.
Sybil sent a message to her husband who was at the time still with Duke Henry accompanied by John, her beloved first-born, and John the Marshal came first to Marlborough and then, collecting his wife, went on to Hamstead Marshal. A mile from the castle he sent his heir on ahead, commanding William to appear submissively at the wooden gate in the company of Nicholas de Sarum. This proved to be a mistake, for brother John found William in the tilt-yard and scarcely recognised him. When John had delivered his father’s order, William laughed in his face and continued to hack at the straw target he had had erected, chopping it to pieces in an impressive display of strength. Affronted and angry, John returned to the approaching cavalcade full of confirmation of his sibling’s disobedience.
The instant he had gone William sheathed his small sword and raced to the hall where he threw the rope noose over a beam. Then he drew up his father’s carved chair and sat in it until his father’s shadow, thrown by the low winter sun of the late November afternoon, fell across the threshold.
‘What is the meaning of this disobedience?’ roared the outraged Marshal, the Lady Sybil and brother John now flanking him. Slowly and with a precociously theatrical deliberation, the lad rose, walked towards his father and went down upon one knee. It was a moment he had been savouring.
‘I have rendered thee knight’s service, father,’ he said in a clear voice for all capable of doing so to hear, ‘and am knighted for it by the King. The noose I return to you in token of my loyalty to you and of your fatherly love.’
The precocious irony was lost on a bewildered Marshal, whose one eye took some time to adjust to the dim hall after the autumnal sunshine outside. He looked up from his son’s bowed head and made out the frayed rope dangling above his recently vacated chair. When he again looked at his son he seemed shaken, uncertain that this boy of his was not indeed the Devil’s work, a thought that seemed to have simultaneously enlivened his equally shocked mother.
‘The whip is too good…’ she began, but William broke in, rising to his feet, so that the Lady Sybil realised how much he had grown.
‘Aye, Madam, you are right. The whip is too good for the William you sent away to his death, but I am no longer he. I am King Stephen’s man…’
‘He cannot be knight, father!’ expostulated brother John. ‘I am not yet girded nor dubbed…’
John the Marshal held up his hand for silence. ‘If what he says is true, you shall be, and soon enough,’ he said aside. Then turning again to William he addressed him in such a manner as to betray his own discomfiture. ‘Do you consider the insolence of your behaviour, sir. The disrespect to my Lady, your mother; to your elder brother…’ and here the Marshal got into his stride, ‘and to me boy!’ he roared, lunging forwards as if to catch William by his lug, but William dodged away then stood, his hand on his sword hilt. Both father and son stood confronting one another.
‘You would draw upon your father?’ gasped John the Marshal.
‘Touch me, my Lord, and I shall return to the King in whose company I have been these many months, aye, and intimate with him so that I do not fear what thou might do that I shall procure retribution. As it stands my return brings thee pardon…’
‘What?’ The Marshal was almost beside himself, but his wife laid a restraining hand upon his arm as he made again to seize his son.
‘The terms of peace bring pardon on all,’ she said icily. ‘No special powers are vested in you, boy.’
‘There is, besides pardon, favour, Madam,’ William responded, seemingly old far beyond his years.
‘By God’s blood the Devil does have his tongue!’ hissed the Marshal, but the person of Nicholas de Sarum insinuated himself and, hands raised, lulled them with the beatitude: ‘Blessed are the Peace-makers, my Lord…my Lady. It is fitting that the boy returns to obedience, but also that the God-given settlement in the Kingdom is reflected in every home throughout the land.’
There was a moment’s silence then the wind went out of the Marshal. ‘Damn you, priest,’ he growled. ‘Some of this is your doing…’ He looked again at his wayward son, drew in his breath and sought to regain his authority, saying severely: ‘you shall not again sleep under my roof, boy.’
‘I have not had that privilege these last many months, father, counting a stable comfortable enough…’ upon which utterance he walked towards the door where, to the astonishment of all, his father and mother made way for him.
‘God’s blood,’ hissed his father, astounded at the boy’s impudence. ‘What are we to do with him?’
*
That was the question that occupied the following months at Hamstead Marshal. The result of hours in the company of King Stephen, William’s attitude of cool effrontery was no mere precocity. The degree to which he had become the King’s intimate confidant, even though no more than a sounding board for the isolated and indecisive Stephen, was inconceivable to his parents, but it had sharpened the lad’s intellect and lent skill to his way with words. In the immediate aftermath of his exit, a raging John the Marshal had gone after him with a whip but had stayed his hand when William had indeed drawn his sword and stood his ground inside the stable, telling his father that if the whip touched him, he would inform the King and ensure his father was excluded from the goodwill and amnesty that s
urrounded the ending of the Anarchy.
For a long moment his father had stood looking at his son and felt the uncertainty of his age. Then, roaring mightily, he thrashed a wooden pillar in the stable, emerging into the tilt-yard and casting the whip from him into the mud where, within an hour, a providential and torrential downfall of rain washed away any sign of blood that might have resulted from the flogging he was supposed to have administered. That he had not touched his son remained between the two of them and, since he sent William with his mother to Marlborough soon afterwards, no-one saw the boy’s bare back was free of any bloody welts.
Of more immediate consequence was a revival of that old calumny that William enjoyed Satan’s favour, a pervading slander that further isolated the boy. At his grand-parent’s place he enjoyed only the company of Angharad, who naturally followed in the Lady Sybil’s train, and one of the Marshal’s men-at-arms set over him as a guard but with whom William exercised daily with sword and buckler. This individual, a man of middling years known only as Rolf, grew gradually to like the lad and, being skilled in his craft and nursing ambitions of his own, came to reject the accusations of Satanic possession through the intercession of Angharad, for whom he developed a greater attachment than to William.
‘It is only that he is clever,’ Lady Sybil’s handmaid insisted, ‘gifted even. In my own land such children are set aside as touched by the Old Ways. He will be great in his day, you mark my words.’
Rolf scoffed. ‘If you are right, we shall be lucky to see it. He is over-young…’
‘Yet you yourself say he is good with his sword, don’t you, fach,’ interrupted Angharad. ‘Quick, you said, quicker than any…’
‘Quicker than most, I said,’ corrected Rolf rubbing his chin and wondering if he could bed the woman. Then, thinking he was more likely to win her favour with a compliment to her darling, he admitted: ‘If he grows in stature as he seems to be doing, he will be formidable.’
Angharad stopped her darning and turned the word over. ‘Formidable,’ she said, liking the ring of the Norman-French adjective. ‘Aye, and mayhap parfait.’
*
After a month in his mother’s ‘care’ during which she had hardly spoken to the boy and saw him only at meal times when both sat at table silent, the Marshal summoned William back to Hamstead Marshal. The Lady Sybil had undertaken the task of guarding her troublesome son on the strict understanding that her husband resolved the problem of his future. The Marshal, much wrapped in his own affairs and those of the nation, had only made tentative arrangements and these were swept aside first by the retirement of Henry – some said in fear of his life – to Normandy, and then, in October of 1154 the death of the now enfeebled King Stephen. This event, though it released the Marshal from any lingering fear of Stephen’s retribution, introduced a new uncertainty as the young Duke Henry of Normandy returned from his self-imposed exile to be anointed and crowned King Henry II of England and married Eleanor of Aquitaine.
In an attempt to right his own affairs during this period of uncertainty the Marshal had sold one of his properties, Nettlecombe, in Somerset. The new owner, Hugh de Ralegh, insisted that the deeds of sale include the consent of the Marshal’s sons, John, William and their half-brothers Walter and Gilbert. To all except William, the youngest, came gifts of horses and gold marks; from henceforth the Marshal had decided that William should have nothing of the family’s lands, neither before nor after his death.
As if this displeased the Devil – it could not possibly have been God, the Marshal believed – it was from this moment that the Marshal’s fortunes declined. After a brief period at Henry’s Court and a tour of the Kingdom in the young monarch’s train, John the Marshal retired from the King’s presence, losing Marlborough Castle as a result of Henry’s repudiation of the older nobility. Aware of a growing interest in the prophecies of the Arthurian wizard Merlin at Court, a craze that verged on the foolish, the Marshal had sought to ingratiate himself with the King. Having in his household Angharad, whose infuriating Welsh habits of story-telling and divination he only half believed in, he nevertheless thought this might be turned to good account in the privacy of Hamstead Marshal, enabling him to stem the loss of influence. Had he not defended the Empress Mathilda and lost his looks and one eye in her service? That the King should cast him off seemed an insufferable injustice.
From what he took to be Angharad’s garbled nonsense, the Marshal was led to believe that Henry would again leave England to fight against Toulouse. From this campaign, the prophecies of Merlin said, he would never afterwards return to England. Armed with this ‘truth’ John the Marshal was rash enough to return to Court and bruit it abroad. As was intended, it eventually reached Henry’s ear, whereupon, far from pleasing the King, he flew into one of his famous rages, accusing the Marshal of treason. Happily for John the Marshal, a greater irritant supervened. Early in June 1162 Henry’s able Chancellor, Thomas Becket, had, upon the death of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, been ordained priest and then immediately afterwards Archbishop in Theobald’s place. Upon his assumption of the Holy Office, Becket began to defy the man he had up to then so faithfully served, opposing Henry’s policies so that the King instituted a campaign of counter opposition in which he found a ready ally in John the Marshal. Eager to restore his tattered reputation, the Marshal engaged in litigation against the Archbishop which was ultimately in the King’s interest. The upshot of this was a partial rehabilitation of the Marshal and the exile of Becket to France.
That same year the Marshal finally settled the fate of his second son by the Lady Sybil. For several years William had been kept at under the watchful and despairing eye of Nicholas de Sarum. For William these years held all the consolation of freedom, for the ageing priest could now do little with him and the head-strong boy insisted upon sleeping in the hayloft above his palfrey. The horse gave him licence to roam about the countryside, to hunt and hawk, the latter with a young peregrine of his own training in which he took much delight. In the tilt-yard he daily exercised against Rolf. Occasionally, when they visited Hamstead Marshal, he took-on his elder brother John, or his half-brothers, but William’s superior prowess with his weapons quickly dissuaded them from such regular humiliation.
Only once did John the Marshal speak to William and in such a way as suggested he had found a means by which to discomfit the boy’s declaration made that November afternoon of his return to Hamstead Marshal. Summoned into the castle’s hall, William found his father sat under the beam over which William had long ago so provocatively thrown the rope noose.
‘You once spoke of you being made knight by King Stephen,’ William’s father said matter-of-factly.
‘Aye, my Lord. For rendering service…’
‘The thing was an artifice, a flummery. The King was in his cups, no doubt.’
‘The King seemed sincere, my Lord.’
‘But you have not been in combat,’ his father said. ‘Such a dubbing, if there was any, is of no consequence.’
William considered his father’s argument a moment and then responded. ‘I was at the great tourney held during the parleying at Winchester, my Lord, besides being placed in a mangonel before my Lord’s castle at Newbury. I do not know how better to be in combat than to be used as a projectile.’
John the Marshal had stared at his son with incredulity and supressed anger. Christ in His mercy, was he so old that he might not best the boy? Where in the name of Heaven did a lad of such tender years learn to bandy words so cleverly but at the Devil’s teat? All he could do was stand and, in turning to the door to his quarters in the tower, throw over his shoulder the declamation that: ‘such a dubbing was meaningless. Thou art no knight for my service.’
In the aftermath of Becket’s exile, as John the Marshal lived in hope of a restoration of the young King’s favour, he found an answer to his wife’s long nurtured desire to be rid of the lad, a desire which the Marshal now shared. Having concluded arrangements, he instructed Nicholas
de Sarum to ready the boy for departure.
‘Whither dost thou send him, my Lord?’ the priest enquired.
‘To Tancarville where he may learn his manners or have sense knocked into his head… or his head knocked off,’ he added, as if this might prove the best outcome. ‘The Lord of Tancarville is cousin-german to my Lady,’ he explained before anticipating the priest’s next question. John the Marshal relieved Nicholas de Sarum of his burden. ‘You shall tarry here Nicholas. Your duty regarding the imp is done. No-one could have done it better and your patience and persistence is eternally to the credit of your immortal soul.’
‘My Lord is gracious.’
John the Marshal grunted in response. Why in God’s name had Stephen not avenged himself on the Marshal’s treachery by throwing the boy into Newbury Castle? Well, with Stephen dead, the priest ageing and his own limbs stiffening, it was all too late now. Whether or not the Devil was in young William, he could at least dispose of him at last. The boy was too quick witted and to full of pride to last long amid De Tancarville’s quarrelsome household. Someone would cut him down to size, one way or another. Men died in tournaments; not often, it was true, but the lowlier they were the more likely it was and, in the meanwhile, the boy’s obvious prowess might add a shred of lustre to John the Marshal’s fast fading laurels. Whatever happened, it ought not to be too difficult to dispose of an insolent boy.
And so William was sent to France, not into exile but into the service of Guillaume, the Lord of Tancarville, a man whose distant connections with the Lady Sybil’s family offered the best prospect of bringing up the errant and rebellious boy.
William left Hamstead Marshall riding on the palfrey Stephen had given him; with him went Rolf and a servant. The Lady Sybil was said to have wept at his departure, some saying these were tears of joy. Certainly William’s sisters shed tears, for they had found in William’s stubborn character something oddly admirable, but Rolf knew that the woman Angharad wept the most, both for him and the young man who sat his horse in the sunshine, his brown hair flopping about his handsome features and who never looked back as they descended the long hill and disappeared into the woods beyond.
William Marshal Guardian of England- The Complete Series Page 7