“Well . . . not very. But I suppose it could be argued that saints care only for the spiritual and not the corporeal.”
“Do you believe that?” Henry demanded and Ranulf shook his head, smiling.
“No, not really. I cannot answer your question, Harry, doubt that anyone can. I do know, though, that saints are not judged like ordinary men. That is, after all, what makes them saints.”
Henry drained the last of his wine, then looked up at Ranulf, his expression an odd one, at once skeptical and regretful. “Saint or not,” he conceded, “Thomas got the last word for certes.”
HEAVY RAINS and westerly winds continued to keep Henry at Pembroke. Another week went by. Roger departed, returning to Normandy to await the arrival of the papal legates. Rhys ap Gruffydd arrived and Henry agreed to an elaborate banquet, as much to banish boredom as to honor Rhys.
Seated at the high table with Henry, Rhys, Rainald, the Earls of Pembroke and Hertford, and the Bishop of St David’s, Ranulf drank the wine offered and ate the venison and fresh pike and pheasant, but he was not really enjoying himself. He missed Rhiannon, missed his children, missed Hywel and the life he’d lost at Trefriw. He was glad that he and his nephew had made peace; their breach was a wound that had never fully healed. Yet even his pleasure was diluted these days and left an aftertaste.
When the meal was done and the trestle tables cleared away for the entertainment, Henry signaled for silence. “Did you know, Uncle, that Hywel’s foster brother has written a tribute to him?”
Ranulf shook his head, glancing from Henry to Rhys, back to Henry again. The Welsh prince’s bard had come forward, claiming the center of attention and waiting until his audience quieted. “This elegy is not mine, although I wish it were. The poet is Peryf ap Cedifor, and he writes of what he saw, what he felt, what he lost at Pentraeth. Peryf agreed that I could sing his words, share his grief, and it is my great honor to present The Killing of Hywel.
While we were seven men alive, not three sevens
Challenged or routed us;
Now, alas, dauntless in battle,
Of that seven, three are left.
Ranulf balled his fists at his sides, grateful that Peryf was not the one performing his lament. Four brothers he’d lost at Pentraeth, and Hywel, brother in all but blood. He was no longer listening to the bard’s words, his eyes misting with tears. But then the tone changed, from mournful to embittered.
Because of the treachery brewed, unchristian Briton,
By Cristyn and her sons,
Let there be left alive in Môn
Not one of her blotched kindred!
Despite what good comes from holding land,
World is a treacherous dwelling:
Woe, to you, cruel Davydd,
To stab tall Hywel, hawk of war!
Only Ranulf, Rhys, and his men understood the elegy, as it had been recited in Welsh. But the hall had fallen silent, for there were haunting echoes of heartbreak in the pulsing plaint of the harp. Henry moved toward Ranulf, his eyes marking the tear tracks upon his uncle’s face. “I thought it would please you to honor Hywel. Was I wrong?”
“No . . . I’m glad you did. It would have pleased Hywel, too.” Ranulf mustered up a shadowy smile. “He always did have a liking for center stage.”
As Henry turned away in response to a query from the Earl of Pembroke, Ranulf took the opportunity to withdraw. He’d lost enough loved ones to know that even the greatest pain would eventually dull its edges. His grieving for Hywel no longer pressed against his chest like the heaviest of stones, no longer tore at his lungs with each constricted breath. If not fully tamed yet, the hurt was becoming accustomed to being handled; almost broken to the saddle, he thought, with a flicker of black humor that Hywel would have approved. It was the regret that he found hardest to live with. He sometimes pictured a wheel in his brain, spinning over and over in remorseless rhythm to those most tragic and futile of words: if only, what if.
It was then that he overheard it, a casual comment made by Rhys to one of his retainers. Peryf’s lament drew its strength from his sorrow, not his style, Rhys observed, adding that his poetry could not hold a candle to Hywel’s.
Noticing for the first time that Ranulf was within hearing range, the Welsh lord gave a half-humorous, half-embarrassed grimace. “You caught me out,” he conceded. “I did not mean to slight Peryf’s talent. It is just that I think Hywel was a better poet, one who’ll be remembered far longer than Peryf.”
“No offense taken,” Ranulf said. “I doubt that even Peryf would argue with your assessment. Hywel’s poetry will live on even after his memory fades.” And when he realized how much truth there was in that prediction, he found it gave him considerable solace. Hywel had made words soar higher than hawks, his songs celebrating his love of life, women, and Wales. That might be a legacy more lasting than even a kingship.
HENRY’S FLEET had assembled at The Cross, just downstream of the castle at the mouth of the River Pembroke. It was an impressive sight, for he’d required four hundred ships to transport thirty-five hundred men, five hundred knights, horses, and provisions. On this Saturday in mid-October, the waiting was finally over. With favorable winds at last, anchors were raised, shrouds tightened, sails unfurled, and the fleet got underway.
Ranulf and Rainald had bade Henry farewell, then mounted their horses to ride along the north shore so they could watch the ships enter the estuary. The sun was sinking in the west and the sky was a dusky copper, obscuring the horizon in a golden haze. The first stars had not yet appeared, but the absence of clouds promised a clear, moonlit night. The tranquillity of the scene was illusory, though, for sixty miles of open sea had to be navigated before the ships saw land again.
Waving frantically at the fleet’s flagship, Rainald shouted, “Go with God, Harry!” Much to his delight, a man in the bow waved back. “You think that is him?” He squinted, uncertain but hopeful. “By the Rood, it is! He’s got the lass with him, Ranulf. See her blue mantle?”
Ranulf swung around in the saddle. “ ‘The lass,’ ” he echoed. “You mean . . . Rosamund Clifford?”
“Well, with all due respect to Eleanor, I’d hardly refer to her as a lass, now, would I? Yes, I mean the little Clifford. You did not know he was taking her along?” When Ranulf shook his head, Rainald grinned, pleased to be the bearer of scandalous tidings. “Mind you, he does try to be discreet. He did not even sail with her on the same ship for Portsmouth. And he kept her hidden away at Pembroke, too. But he told me that she has a fear of the sea—sensible lass—so I suppose he thought it would be easier for her if they traveled together to Ireland. That is a longer voyage than a Channel crossing, after all.”
Ranulf said nothing and they sat their horses in silence as the ships were piloted from the river mouth into the estuary. The sunset was flaming out and in that fleeting, ephemeral interval between day and night, it seemed as if the world was afire, as if time itself was suspended until the last dying rays were submerged in the crimsoning waters of the sea. And then the moment was over, the spectacle ended, and darkness began to descend. Ranulf continued to watch, though, as long as the sails were still in sight.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I always look forward to doing my Author’s Note, as it is a way for me to speak directly to my readers. It also gives me an opportunity to invite readers backstage, so to speak, and acquaint them with some of the behind-the-scenes choices and tactics that go into a novel’s creation. In this case, I’d like to begin with an explanation. Time and Chance was originally supposed to be published several years ago, and I know the long delay has perplexed many of my readers. My own favorite query was a very succinct e-mail in which a reader asked simply, “Did Eleanor get lost in Aquitaine?” The truth is much more mundane; I was unlucky enough to be sidelined with an eighteen-month siege of mononucleosis. College students can shake it off in a few months, but it flattens aging baby boomers like a runaway steamroller, and not even Henry and Eleanor could make
any headway until it ran its course.
In writing Chance, I took an occasional small liberty with known facts, a common sin for writers of historical fiction. In the ambush scene in Chapter Three, I gave Ranulf credit for another man’s heroics; he was not the one who snatched up the fallen royal banner and forestalled a rout. This is as good a time as any to acknowledge that Ranulf is a rarity in one of my historical novels, a character who owes his existence solely to my imagination. As I explained to readers in When Christ and His Saints Slept, since King Henry I had at least twenty known illegitimate children, I figured one more couldn’t possibly hurt.
I took another liberty in sending Hywel to Toulouse with Ranulf and Henry, although not a large one; one of the chroniclers did report that a Welsh prince accompanied the king on his Toulouse campaign. The “cloak scene” that I dramatize in Chapter Ten is perhaps the best-known anecdote about Henry and Thomas Becket, related by a very reliable source, William Fitz Stephen. With apologies to Fitz Stephen, plot considerations forced me to move this incident from London to Normandy. And I embellished Henry’s meeting with King Louis at Montmirail in 1169. As far as we know, Henry did not present Louis’s young son Philippe with a pony. Philippe’s aversion to horses is well known, however, and so I did not see this scene as such a stretch. One final confession. In my Saints Afterword, I admitted that I’d failed to find a death date for Eleanor’s sister, Petronilla. I am very glad I red-flagged this there, as I later discovered a reference to her death in 1151! But because I’d allowed my fictional Petronilla to live on in Saints beyond her real-life counterpart’s demise, I saw no harm in extending her lifespan into Chance.
As many readers are familiar with the Salic Law barring women from the French line of succession, I think I should mention that it did not become operative in France until the fourteenth century. So a daughter of Louis VII could have inherited the French throne had he been unable to sire a son. Owain Gwynedd was the last Welsh ruler to call himself a king. I could not resist borrowing from Richard Coeur de Leon’s famous exchange with the French king, when Philippe boasted that he would take Chateau-Gaillard if its walls were made of iron, and Richard riposted that he’d hold it if its walls were made of butter; I give a similar statement to Henry’s half-brother Hamelin.
In view of all the controversy John managed to provoke during his lifetime and afterward, it is not surprising that even his birth date should be a source of dispute. Some readers of my novel Here Be Dragons might remember that John was born in 1167, a year later than his birth in Chance. According to Ralph of Diceto, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, John was born on Christmas Eve in 1166. The Abbott of Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, Robert of Torigni, gave John’s birth date as 1167 and this is the one most commonly reported. It is, however, in error. Henry and Eleanor were in different countries during the time when John would have had to be conceived, if John were, indeed, born in December 1167, and not even Eleanor’s most virulent enemies cast doubts upon John’s paternity. To complicate matters, I’ve come to doubt the accepted birthday for John as Christmas Eve. He was named after John the Evangelist and since the Apostle’s saint’s day was December 27, I think it is more likely that John was born on that date.
So many myths and legends have sprung up around Eleanor during her own lifetime and in the centuries following her death. That she presided at Poitiers over Courts of Love is one such legend, no longer given serious credence by most historians. Did she confront Rosamund Clifford at Woodstock? We know that she suddenly left Normandy and made a hazardous winter crossing of the Channel while in the late stages of pregnancy. We know that upon her arrival at Southampton, she traveled on to Oxford. We know that Oxford is but five miles from Woodstock, where Henry was keeping Rosamund Clifford. And we know that Eleanor then remained in England, a land she little loved, for over a year, not rejoining Henry in Normandy until December 1167. I leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions.
As always when writing of the Plantagenets, I must reassure readers that even the most improbable events actually occurred. The bitter quarrel between Henry II and Thomas Becket is possibly the best documented episode of the Middle Ages. We have no fewer than five eyewitness accounts of the archbishop’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral, and more than a dozen biographies written by Becket’s contemporaries, including letters and testimony by three of the men who knew him best: John of Salisbury, William Fitz Stephen, and Herbert of Bosham. So in many of the key confrontations between Henry and Thomas Becket—at Woodstock, Westminster, Clarendon, Northampton, Montmirail, Canterbury—I had the rare privilege of letting my characters speak for themselves.
SKP
August 2001
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I could never have completed Time and Chance without the help and support and encouragement of the following people: My family and friends, particularly Earle Kotila and Valerie LaMont. My agents, Molly Friedrich and Mic Cheetham. My editors at Penguin, Tom Weldson and Harriet Evans. Above all, my editor for twenty remarkable years, Marian Wood.
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