And then with a roar that reminded some with a shiver of the death cry of Earl Patrick of Salisbury, William hefted the stone and a cheer of unfeigned admiration went up from the rough crowd as the stone flew three yards beyond the best effort of their own champion.
‘By the balls of Belial,’ swore Guy de Lusignan admiringly, turning to FitzHugh, ‘happen you are right and he is kindred to the Devil. I have seen a man throw…but he bleeds!’
The effort had reopened William’s newly healed leg-wound and it haemorrhaged profusely, blood leaching through the rough hose which he now wore.
‘There my Lord Guy, God will not be mocked,’ snarled FitzHugh with satisfaction.
‘Help him to his palliasse!’ Guy de Lusignan ordered peremptorily, ignoring FitzHugh’s contemptible outburst. ‘By God, sir, he is our only chance of restoring us to our lands!’
‘You cannot treat with the King without my consent,’ expostulated FitzHugh. ‘By all the laws of war he is my prisoner…’
‘You over-reach yourself FitzHugh. You seized him when fighting within our mesnie. Now come, I would have conference with my brother.’
They found Geoffrey de Lusignan in his bivouac assessing the diminishing contents of the brothers’ war-chest. Sitting beside him on a branch of the tree from which the rough shelter was contrived was a large falcon. The bird was haggard, and bating frantically. It bore tattered jesses and one remaining silver bell.
‘What in the name of God…?’ began Guy de Lusignan as Geoffrey looked up at the intrusion.
‘I think, my brother,’ Geoffrey said with a slow smile, that our fortunes have turned and this,’ he indicated the unhappy raptor, ‘may be worth more than what little gold and silver remains to us.’
‘But from whence came it?
‘One of the men found her mantling her catch not an hour ago. She suffered him to approach and he, having some knowledge of the lore, caught hold of her jesses, though they are near eaten through…
‘Is that not a gyrfalcon?’ FitzHugh interrupted, with a frown, for all three men were thinking the same thing.
‘ ’Tis a rare enough variant to be the she-devil’s own.’
‘Would FitzMarshal know?’ Guy asked suddenly, turning upon FitzHugh, his mind bright with a possibility. FitzHugh shrugged. De Lusignan scoffed. ‘Bring him here!’
‘And raise him from his slumbers?’ FitzHugh asked with heavy sarcasm.
‘Aye, before I consign thee to thine.’
FitzHugh left the two brothers. ‘You think it possible that it is hers?’ Guy asked Geoffrey.
‘It is inconceivable that a bird of such quality escaped its master…or mistress…unaided. Who else might have had such a creature? This white variant comes, I believe from the farthest north. Our native birds are altogether of a greyer, barred plumage; this is a rare thing…’
‘And ’tis a rarer that it has fallen into our hands…’
‘Aye, but it has become too dependent upon its handlers to fly far…’ Geoffrey de Lusignan broke off as FitzHugh thrust William forward, under what passed for a tent flap.
‘Have you seen this bird before, FitzMarshal?’ Guy de Lusignan asked, noting the rough bandage that had been applied over a pledget and bound so that the prisoner’s bleeding had been staunched.
Geoffrey held up a lantern so that William could better observe the falcon, which bated again before recovering itself and settling, its feathers hackled and quivering.
‘I do not know,’ William replied, peeing at the bird. ‘Perhaps…’
‘Perhaps what?’ said FitzHugh.
‘You would wish me to say it was Queen Eleanor’s, would you not?’ William looked round at the three men. The reopening of his wound had left him weary. ‘That I cannot say for certain, but in truth it bears a strong resemblance to the bird.’
‘You may return to your rest,’ said Guy de Lusignan with a peremptory nod of satisfaction. ‘See to it FitzHugh,’ adding with heavy sarcasm, ‘after all, he is your prisoner.’ And once the two men had left he turned to regard the falcon. ‘Have we no hood?’
‘Aye, I have asked the man who found her to make one by morning.’
‘Good, And then we may send someone to Poitiers to offer it up to the Queen and open a negotiation for FitzMarshal.’
‘Think you she will take the bait, my brother?’
‘One or other of them, mayhap,’ responded Guy. ‘And let us send FitzHugh, for he is all eagerness and a devoted servant of God.’ And they chuckled over God’s good grace to them, crossing themselves piously.
And so it fell out that Queen Eleanor learned that her prized gyrfalcon and one William FitzMarshall both still lived. The latter fact ultimately proved FitzHugh wrong; Queen Eleanor had not forgotten the handsome face, so discomfited by her request that he should sing, nor had she forgotten that some inherent warlike instinct in the young man had saved her from the humiliation of capture by the treacherous Lusignan brothers. Under an arranged pledge and after formal redemption, William was brought to the Queen’s Court at Poitiers where, out of regard for the gallantry of FitzMarshal in her defence, Queen Eleanor provided for the proper treatment of William’s wound. Thanks to the skill of the Queen’s physician he slowly recovered, to join the Court of his benefactress.
*
‘Are you are fully recovered from your wound, Sir William?’ Estranged for the first time from her husband, the Queen was holding her Christmas Court at Fontevrault and although William had followed in her train and eaten at her board, this was the first time she had summoned him personally since the affair at Lusignan.
‘Aye Madam, perfectly, thanks to your favour and kindness.’ William made his obeisance as the Court dined on St Stephen’s Day.
‘Nay, sir, I am acquitted of a debt, though I mourn your kinsman’s death and pray daily for his soul.’ The Queen crossed herself.
‘Madam, I thank you for your kindness, I understand the monks of St Hilaire say Mass for his soul.’
Modestly Eleanor brushed this aside. ‘Didst see the manner of his end?’
‘But briefly, Madam, nothing but a glance amid the flurry of the mêlée.’ William did not mention the bull-roar of the Earl as he received his death-wound. ‘He was taken in the back whilst donning his hauberk, I was told.’
‘A most treacherous act.’
‘Perhaps, Madam, but ’twas war not tourney, alas…’
For some moments Eleanor regarded the young man in silence. He was indeed remarkably handsome and she sensed he possessed some qualities that might be of use to the House of Anjou. She would wait and watch. Good looking young men, she well knew, could prove fickle. In the mean time she would bind him to her.
‘I shall not ask you to sing again, Sir William,’ she said with a wry smile at the appearance of which he had the sense to bow his head in appreciation, ‘but I should welcome your sword at my command.’ She held out her hand for his kiss of loyalty.
Straightening up he replied in a low voice, unheard by the surrounding courtiers, ‘As are my body and soul, Madam.’
And as he retreated from the dais his eyes boldly held the Queen’s until he lowered his head again in a courtly bow.
‘A remarkable young man,’ Eleanor said to herself as she rested her right elbow upon the arm of her throne and raised her right hand to her shapely chin. ‘To be feared or trusted.’
But then, were they not all of that likeness?
*
William stood among the vast gathering in the Abbey Church of Edward the Confessor at Westminster, bearing the banner of Aquitaine and overwhelmed by the soaring music of the choir and the splendour of the occasion. Deeply respectful of his duty to God and his obligations as a Christian, he could not help himself in the contemplation of his surroundings and the change in his fortunes wrought in two years of warfare and service to Queen Eleanor and her consort, King Henry II of England. Their vast and conjoined possessions in France made Henry Curtmantle one of the most powerful princes in Euro
pe.
William’s change of luck had begun as soon as he had recovered from his wound when Queen Eleanor had rewarded the timely service he had rendered her hard by Lusignan castle. She had seen him lavishly re-horsed and re-harnessed, elevated to ride among her household knights and, while she kept her promise not to insist on his singing, often retained him close to her side when she ventured abroad, saying that he was her ‘talisman’.
After the death of Earl Patrick, King Henry ordered Guillaume de Tancarville to take his place and William thus found himself reunited and closer to his distant kinsman than formerly. For his part, De Tancarville took his own credit for the sudden change in the good fortune of his former protégé. The irony was not lost on William who was not suffered to kick his heels permanently at the Queen’s Court, but frequently ventured on campaign in the turbulent months of apparently ceaseless uprisings and rebellions that characterised the times.
Despite their vast powers, both Henry’s and Eleanor’s writ ran thin across their ancestral lands in France. Henry’s greed for an ever larger Angevin empire embroiled him in Brittany, whilst Aquitaine was a notoriously large and almost ungovernable province, divided as it was into numerous counties whose subsidiary feudal lords, such as the Lusignans of Poitou, strove to cut their obligations from their suzerains. Henry might subdue a county and extract renewed oaths of fealty from his vassals, only to have rebellion break out a few months later once he was engaged elsewhere. Such endless turmoil erupted in a seemingly interminable succession, helped by neither King Louis VII, nor the brood of wilful princely sons that Henry and Eleanor had produced.
As King of France, Louis’ power was very largely illusory without the obedience of his vassals, resting chiefly upon his status as an anointed King who ruled under God and the Pope. While the overlords of swathes of eastern and southern France owed direct loyalty to the French King, the actual domain of the French crown itself was smaller than his chief rival, Henry Curtmantle, consisting of the ‘Île de France,’ that parcel of land that encircled Paris, and territories extending south to Orleans and beyond. The chief instruments of Louis’ policy were therefore sworn alliances that reinforced feudal duty or foreign treaties, combined with an intricate web of marriages.
With Henry, Duke of Anjou, Aquitaine and Normandy, being his most wilfully difficult vassal, Louis played the growing feuds between Henry and his sons with some skill. Such machinations absorbed a great deal of the gossip that preoccupied the Court of Queen Eleanor, touching as it did the movements of their patroness and thus their own fortunes.
It was early in her service that William avoided any involvement in such debates. He saw them as fruitless, beyond his comprehension in their complexity and, essentially, none of his business. What he observed in two years in the Queen’s mesnie was an endless series of bad faith and broken promises by powerful men who made solemn oaths and broke them as lightly as Godfrey FitzHugh had killed the kitten. Having no claim on land of his own he felt a growing compassion for those lesser men and women whose paltry dwellings and possessions these squabbles compelled him to burn or carry off. Such a state of mind was, of course, subordinate to his military duty, and he did not shrink from hurting those constant rebels, the Lusignan brothers, by ravaging their countryside. However, it gave him little pleasure and hardened his attitude to disloyalty whilst strengthening his own sense of power residing in the proper hands. And for William the proper hands were those whom God anointed.
For this reason he felt a strange sense of destiny that day, the 14th June in the Year of Our Lord 1170, to be bearing the banner of Aquitaine in Westminster Abbey on the occasion of the crowning of the Young King Henry. This elaborate ceremony was designed by the fifteen year old youth’s father to ensure the succession to the English throne. Henry II earnestly wished to avoid the chaos of the Anarchy that had torn England apart before his own succession. He therefore followed the French practice of having his successor formally crowned amid the barony of England who, one-by-one, swore fealty to Prince Henry, henceforward to be known as ‘the Young King’.
At the age of five, this princeling had been married to Louis’ daughter Marguerite, issue from the French King’s second marriage, following the annulment of his first to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Marguerite was not present at the coronation, her own being promised upon another occasion, but the great event was the culmination of a central plan of Henry II’s own policy, mirroring that of Louis VII. For a few years of his boyhood the young Prince Henry had grown up in the household of his father’s then Court-favourite, Thomas Becket, and at the age of eight had been party to a gathering of the realm of England’s chief barons and senior churchmen to confirm the rights and privileges of the English Crown. Named the Constitutions of Clarendon after the location of this legislation, the contentious nature of its clauses became the primary cause of the rift between Henry and Becket once that statesman had been too swiftly elevated to Archbishop of Canterbury.
Indeed, the Young King’s coronation had been delayed by the falling-out with and exile of Becket and the death of many of the King’s courtiers lost at sea in a furious March gale as they crossed from Normandy. In the event Queen Eleanor and her retinue had embarked later in the year and the present ceremony was being conducted by Roger, Archbishop of York, assisted by six bishops, all of whom lay under the Pope’s most extreme sanction. To circumvent any interference from Rome or Becket over the liturgical irregularity of employing the junior archbishop, or from Paris over the absence of the Princess Marguerite, the south-coast ports had been closed after Eleanor and her Court arrived on English soil.
The echoes of the Kyrie faded away and William was swept-up in the utter grandeur of what he was witnessing. He had only recently set eyes upon King Henry, a man he knew to be of almost boundless energy who in his private life set little store by the forms of kingship, though he ruthlessly held his subjects to obedience. The sight of the short, russet-haired man with his thick-set physique and the leopards of Normandy emblazoned across his breast, gold-upon-red, seemed to confirm his own growing belief in his sense that an ordered realm depended upon duty and obligation: King Henry was every inch a monarch.
Nor had William’s many months in Queen Eleanor’s service done anything other than to add to this, for despite her being eleven years her husband’s senior, there was an ageless elegance in her and every aspect of her was regal when compared with every other woman William had ever known. This compelling nature of Eleanor’s demeanour made of her Court a glittering scene of accomplishment, both martially and intellectually, and although William had little time for the latter, he acknowledged the cleverness of those who gilded his great Lady’s itinerant household.
But if King Henry led a peripatetic life devoid of ostentation and his estranged wife was held throughout Europe to be the arbiter of taste and the emerging fashion for chivalry, it was the panoply of the Church that most bore down upon William that warm June day. He was beguiled by the soaring tracery of the Abbey Church, not yet finished in its building, but magnificent nonetheless, bright with banners, pennons, heraldic devices and glittering with ducal circlets and the jewels bedecking the principal ladies of the realm. At the altar the Archbishop and his attendant bishops and priests, gorgeously coped and mitred according to rank and precedence, their vestments reflecting the flickering candles, outshone all the temporal attendees but one: the young man at the centre of the Holy rite.
Henry, the Young King, surpassed both his parents and – or so it seemed to William in that revelatory moment – the great Princes of the Church of Christ. Tall, his head with its red-gold hair set upon a long and elegant neck, Henry’s skin was lightly freckled and he regarded the world with eyes of a striking and commanding blue. Transported by these splendours and touched to his soul by the significance of the sacraments of anointing and coronation, William was deeply moved as Roger of York raised the Young King and presented him to the Lords and Commons, joining with all his heart in the common oath of all
egiance and fealty that followed the individual submission and kissing of hands of the great barons of England.
And while the day would remain long in his memory for the numinous moment of monarchy that it enshrined, it would grow in importance as its significance as a further turning point in his own life became clear.
*
That evening, as the Court feasted in Westminster Hall, William found himself among a group of knights and their ladies who discussed the day’s events, their tongues loosened by wine. A knight known to William only as FitzHubert leaned over to him amid the hubbub and remarked with a tired smile:
‘You are silent, FitzMarshal. Have the day’s events stopped your tongue or merely given you pause for reflection?’
‘Pause, I think for wonder,’ William responded.
‘Aye, ’twas a noble sight to be sure, but I wish I saw in it some peaceful outcome.’
‘You don’t?’ quizzed William, mildly surprised at FitzHubert’s candour and noting the man’s Welsh accent. He recalled Angharad ap Gwyn who had the second sight and wondered if this ageing chevalier possessed a like gift.
FitzHubert shook his head. ‘You were not at Montmirail, I think, eh?’
‘No, I was on campaign in the Limousin.’
‘Ah, yes.’ FitzHubert put his goblet down on the board and turned to fully face William on the bench. ‘Well as you know the conference with King Louis settled this Young King of ours in the succession of the dukedom of Normandy and the county of Anjou, besides that of this our kingdom of England.’ FitzHubert made a small, slightly dismissive gesture with his hands then struck off remaining sons of Henry and Eleanor on his fingers one-by-one. ‘He settled Aquitaine upon the Lord Richard after the Queen’s death and to the Lord Geoffrey he gave over Brittany, securing these arrangements with Louis Capet on the assurance of true fealty and the promise of betrothal of the Lord Richard with the Lady Alice…’
‘She that is daughter to King Louis?’
William Marshal Guardian of England- The Complete Series Page 12