‘I know it is.’ The debt she owed this woman was only outweighed by her debt to God. She put out her hand to touch the abbess’ glove. ‘I’ll make it a second Fontevrault or, before God, I won’t come back.’
She had been shouting so that Abbess Matilda would hear her and heard her oath bounce off the surface of the river in reverberation.
The abbess nodded. ‘That’s right, “With your shield or on it” as the Spartan mothers used to say. And do remember some Irish; it would interest my nephew to hear it. That is, if the boy’s in. Can you see?’ They had reached the outskirts of Chinon and on the other side of their road from the river was a high cliff. On the top of it, as high again, rose a castle of blonde towers and walls assuming the shape of the spur on which it had been built. It seemed to lean over and dwarf the town below. From the roof of the highest tower flew a standard. Sister Boniface cricked her neck and managed to make out three red shapes on the flapping material – the red Plantagenet leopards. Only the Abbess Matilda, his aunt, could describe the King of England, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Maine, Touraine and Brittany, ruler of an empire, terror of non-conforming barons, arbiter of a new system of government and law, as ‘the boy’.
‘He’s in.’
They rode up the cobbled, zig-zagging road which led to the eastern fort of the castle, its one vulnerable point, passing through gates, by flanking towers, under barbicans, receiving few challenges from the sentries to whom the abbess was a familiar visitor. At last they reached the final portcullis. ‘Tell my lord Henry,’ said Matilda of Anjou in a voice which effortlessly reached the gatekeeper in his upper guardroom, ‘that the Abbess of Fontevrault is here with the Irish nun.’
* * *
At that moment, in a high room of the castle overlooking the Vienne, two men, a king and a cardinal, were disputing the ownership of Ireland. They sat on opposite sides of a table and both were getting cross, though the cardinal was concealing the fact better than the king. Ireland was represented by a piece of parchment to which was attached a great leaden seal, and they pushed it back and forth between them as they argued.
‘I tell you I don’t want it,’ said Henry II of England, ‘He’ll have to take it back.’
‘I’m afraid that’s impossible,’ said the papal legate, gently. The parchment, a papal bull, was on his side at the moment and now he eased it across the table to the king.
‘I don’t bloody want it.’ Again Ireland skidded back to the cardinal’s side.
‘It appears, my son, that you have it. Want it or not.’
‘Look,’ said Henry Fitzempress, ‘I’ve just won England after a war that lasted seventeen sodding years. I’m ruling an empire that stretches from Hadrian’s Wall to the sodding Pyrenees. I’ve got barons disputing every sodding step I take. What I don’t want is a floating bog full of warring, sodding tribesmen whose only agreement would be in telling me to fuck off out of it.’ Ireland, which had been pushed once again to his side, skidded back to the cardinal and the king got up from the table to prowl the room, as if looking for an escape.
‘As well he might,’ thought the cardinal, ‘I wouldn’t stay here myself if I didn’t have to.’ One had to be a very powerful king indeed to afford to receive distinguished guests like himself in a room as plain as this. It held the one table, two stools, an astrolabe, about six hundred scrolls, a stuffed owl, two live Norwegian falcons, two muddy dogs, a lot of straw, droppings and dust. The cardinal had seen better-kept kennels. For that matter, his own huntsmen were better dressed than this king. In his worn leathers, the young man looked like a huntsman himself. But this one commanded a pack of nations and was in the process of bringing most of them to heel. He was stocky, round-headed and had a bluff, open face with honest grey eyes and the cardinal didn’t trust him as far as he could throw him.
‘Besides,’ added Fitzempress, ‘my mummy advises me not to touch Ireland yet, and I always do what my mummy tells me. Have you met my mother?’
Impassively the cardinal said he’d had the honour of Empress Matilda’s acquaintance.
‘Strong-minded lady,’ said Fitzempress.
The cardinal agreed that she was. During the long and terrible war between Matilda and Stephen of Blois for the throne of England, the empress had managed to alienate practically everybody, including her own side and the English themselves. Luckily she had ceded her right to the country to her son whose exploits had won the English over because, peculiar people that they were, he had made them laugh. Nobody had ever, ever, been made to laugh by the empress.
‘But the old witch’s no fool,’ said Fitzempress, ‘and if she says Ireland’s a pitcher of eels, then that’s what it is. Whose bright idea was it to give it to me anyhow?’
The cardinal shifted his scarlet velvet robe away from a dog who was about to cock its leg on it. ‘I believe John of Salisbury engaged the Holy Father’s attention in the matter of Ireland.’
Fitzempress showed his teeth in what the cardinal hoped was a smile. ‘Couldn’t he think what else to get me for my birthday?’
‘He is your servant, my lord, and had your interest at heart. Ireland is too close to England for comfort, were it to be invaded by an outside power…’
‘I know where it is. And I still don’t want it. You tell that John of Salisbury to keep his nose out of my court for a while or I’ll cut it off. He’ll be lucky if that’s all I cut off. Sodding English clerics.’ Without appearing to do so, he watched the cardinal’s fingers drum on the table. How much insult the old boy was prepared to accept was an indication of how important this matter was to the Pope. ‘Who said the Pope could give Ireland away to people anyway?’
‘God,’ said the cardinal, glad to be on firm ground. ‘The ownership of all the world’s islands is vested in the See of St Peter.’
‘England too?’ asked Fitzempress, with interest, ‘I thought I owned England. There was this war, you see, lasting seventeen years and afterwards they gave it to me. I didn’t realise it was the Pope’s. I thought I’d won it.’
‘God and His Holiness are most happy that you reign there,’ said the cardinal, beginning to sweat.
‘That’s nice. Now then. About Ireland.’ Fitzempress sat down again. ‘The Pope thinks it’s an unguarded postern to England, does he? Well, he’s right. Adrian is a good Englishman himself. But what’s keeping him awake at nights? The thought of Ireland suddenly biting me in the arse? Or the fact that the Irish Church doesn’t follow the rule of Rome?’
‘My lord, they are a barbarous people,’ burst out the cardinal. ‘Shameful in their morals, wild in their rites. Their very lives are unclean; Christian in name, but pagan in fact. When worthy Irishmen like Malachy reproached them with their filth, they were reviled. They marry whom they please, even among the forbidden degrees, so that incest is rife. The sin of divorce is frequent among them…’
‘Shocking,’ interrupted Fitzempress, quietly.
And then, too late, the cardinal remembered that Eleanor of Aquitaine had been divorced from King Louis of France before she had married Henry Fitzempress. He began to sweat once more. He had been manipulated and he knew it, because against less clever opponents he was a considerable manipulator himself. Fitzempress beamed at him: ‘Want to begin again?’
The cardinal mopped his face.
‘So what we’ve got here,’ said Fitzempress, amiably, ‘is not a case of “Let’s-give-Ireland-to-poor-old-Henry-of-England-because-he-needs-it.” What we’ve got here is “Let’s-get-poor-old-Henry-of-England-to-beat-Ireland-into-submission-for-us-and-establish-the-Roman-Church-there.” Do I sum up correctly?’
‘My lord, I…’
‘Do I sum up correctly?’
‘Regard it as a crusade,’ said the cardinal in desperation, ‘from which both the Church and yourself may benefit.’
‘I don’t like crusades,’ said the King of England, ‘all you get from crusades is dead soldiers and the pox. And while you’re out of your own country, some bugger pinc
hes your throne.’
The enormity was ignored. Instead the cardinal produced from his robe a beautifully carved, small, ivory box. He opened it to reveal a gold ring on which was mounted a giant emerald. Fitzempress took it over to the window and let the sunlight play on it so that a beam glanced around the room like a green spirit. ‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘nice little bauble.’
‘I have been remiss, my lord,’ said the cardinal, ‘Forgive an old man’s memory. I should have given this to you before now. It is an earnest of His Holiness’ love for his favourite son in Christ.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Fitzempress, ‘because it would be a cheap price for Ireland.’ He threw the ring up in the air over his head and caught it behind his back, like a juggler.
‘Henry,’ said Cardinal Papato, ‘take the advice of a weary old man and don’t discount the Church. One of these days – not now, while you’re riding high – but one day, you are going to need her.’
Fitzempress looked at him carefully. ‘Do you think so?’
‘I think so.’
A young king grinned with affection and triumph at an old cardinal. ‘All right, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. When that day comes I’ll invade Ireland for you.’
‘Not before?’
‘Not before. And I keep the emerald.’
‘My son,’ said the papal legate, getting up, ‘remind me the next time I come to talk business with you to bring a longer spoon.’
There was a shout of laughter from the king and the two men walked out of the room, arm-in-arm.
But Henry Fitzempress didn’t win all the points. As they approached the Great Hall his chamberlain came up to him to announce: ‘My lord, the Abbess of Fontevrault is here with the Irish nun.’
‘My, my,’ said the cardinal, silkily, ‘There’s a coincidence.’
The king looked carefully unconcerned. ‘No doubt the queen has asked for her presence in order to give her a farewell gift or something. Eleanor is a patroness of Fontevrault after all. And no doubt you, my lord, will want to give the woman some final instructions.’
‘No doubt,’ said the cardinal.
‘Escort his Eminence to the queen,’ Fitzempress told his chamberlain. ‘My lord, excuse me for a short while. I have some petitioners to see.’
‘You are excused.’ But the cardinal hung on his heel to watch the king return to the dreary room they had just left, and remained long enough to see two young men come marching across the courtyard and follow the king up the stairs. He didn’t know who they were, but they didn’t look like petitioners.
Nor were they. The taller, Fulke de Saumur, was an Angevin aristocrat, a relative of the Plantagenets. The ancestry of the other, Sir John of Sawbridge, was as nondescript as his mousey-coloured hair, consisting only of an English innkeeper father who had sweated blood to equip his son with a horse when he sent him off to the civil war to fight on Henry’s side. All the two men had in common was intelligence, a commodity the king valued and exploited, whatever class it cropped up in. He’d spotted it in the young English soldier, had knighted him and attached him to a unit of his own devising whose duty was only to himself. Officially the men of this unit were a detachment of his household knights; to the few who knew of their existence they were ‘Fitzempress’ Ferrets.’ They were the king’s spies.
Out of habit the two Ferrets glanced up and down the corridor to see it was empty before they entered the king’s room and, once in, they locked the door behind them. ‘My lord?’
‘Lads,’ said Henry Plantagenet, smiling with a benificence that made them nervous, ‘confess I’m an indulgent employer. Here you are just back from the Holy Land with its harems and date palms, redolent with the perfumes of the East…’
‘And its dysentery,’ said Fulke.
‘We’ve only just got over the shits,’ complained Sir John of Sawbridge.
‘…and here am I preparing to send you off again to an even more mysterious corner of the world at my expense. Do I note a certain reluctance?’
‘No, my lord,’ said Fulke.
‘It is our honour to serve you, my lord,’ said John. You could joke with Henry up to a point, but no further. Anyway, he thought, it was indeed an honour to serve this genius of strategy and cunning, not to mention it being a heaven-sent way for a low-born Englishman like himself to achieve preferment and riches. Even while sweating it out in Outremer, with its heat and flies and its even hotter and annoying politics, he had blessed his luck in being plucked from obscurity by this king. As long as Fitzempress was in a position to do him good, John would serve him with all his soul.
‘That’s right. Your report from Syria was excellent. I want one just as percipient from this next assignment.’
‘And where’s that, my lord?’
‘Ireland.’
Fulke de Saumur hadn’t even heard of it. John at least knew of its existence, having once met an Irishman, but he placed it mentally in a remote part of a mist from which the other Celtic countries, Wales, Scotland and Brittany, occasionally emerged to cause everybody trouble but in which Ireland itself was lost. He was disappointed; wherever Ireland was it wasn’t in the political mainstream and therefore there would be little kudos from going there.
In the dust of the deep windowsill Henry Plantagenet’s forefinger drew a wavy line, the coast of Normandy. Above it he drew an old woman sitting on a pig. ‘That’s England.’ With the palm of his hand he made an indeterminate smudge to the left of the pig’s snout. ‘And that’s Ireland. At least, I think it is.’
‘That close to England?’ asked John interestedly, ‘I never knew.’
‘That close,’ said Fitzempress, ‘which is why it’s important. And not many people do know, not how big it is, not its potential, not anything. It’s a mystery you two are going to penetrate.’
‘Who rules it, my lord?’
Fitzempress clapped Sir John on the shoulder. ‘Now that’s an interesting question. At the moment I don’t think anybody does. One of these days I shall. The Pope’s just given it to me, hoping I’ll conquer it for him in the name of the Holy Roman Church, bless him. I’ve told him to sod off – I’m too busy and anyway I’m not expending my money and men to get him a cheap new parish. But the place is a vacuum, and the only bugger who’s going to fill it is me; I can’t afford to have some ambitious bastard flexing his muscles that close to my shore. So, unbeknownst to anybody, you two are going to find out about Ireland. Fulke, you’ll do a quick reconnaisance just to reassure me there’s no immediate danger. John, you’re to stay there until you can give me a detailed report for when I do invade – every petty lord, every weakness, every strength, ports, minerals, every wave of Irish bloody grass. Understand?’
‘Understood, my lord.’
The Plantagenet looked at his spy. ‘Come on, John. You’re going into mystery, ancient beauty, holiness. It’s supposed to be a wonderful country. You’ll love it.’
‘I’ll love it, my lord.’
‘Good. Now then, the only Irish princeling I have any contact with is called Dermot of Leinster. Leinster’s on the eastern side of Ireland, somewhere to the south, nearest to England. This Dermot seems to have more modern ideas than the rest of them and has sent me messages and presents of friendship. Wants to get in with me. My reading of the situation is that he thinks one day he might need my army to help him conquer the rest of his country.’
For a moment the joviality, the youth and the genius slipped out of Fitzempress’ face like washed soil to reveal the bare bones of the true nature beneath. They saw a conqueror. ‘Poor, dear Dermot,’ said the man who intended to rule Ireland.
Then he was back to normal. ‘So do a good job, young John, and I’ll have a nice, rich heiress waiting for you to marry when you come back.’
Affection for his king and a rush of warmth for this unknown, unsuspecting Ireland gushed enthusiasm through the veins of John of Sawbridge, son of an English innkeeper. ‘Pick a pretty one while you’re about it, my lord.’
/> ‘Greed. That’s what’s wrong with the world,’ said the King of England sadly, as he sent off his spies to prepare for the annexation of another part of it to himself. He didn’t tell them that he was arranging to get information about it from yet another source. Henry Plantagenet believed in counter-checking everybody.
* * *
Eleanor of Aquitaine had brought something new to the Plantagenet court, thought the Abbess of Fontevrault, as she hauled Sister Boniface through the crowd in the Great Hall of Chinon. In the days of the Empress Matilda it had been stern, filled with warlike barons and depressed by the chilly presence of the empress herself. Under her son it had lost its chill but retained a purely functional quality, though the function had widened to include every possible expert who could fill Fitzempress’ greedy brain with knowledge; philosophers, travellers, historians, astronomers, tacticians, physicians, inventors and mathematicians; many of these being Arabs. Left to the king, the court would have been exciting but comfortless, since the king rarely sat down, which meant that nobody else could either. He took his meals on the hoof – not that they were worth taking, since Fitzempress didn’t care what he ate and was consequently exploited by his cooks.
The first thing Eleanor had done was to sack his cooks and institute her own from Aquitaine, men who could not only tempt appetite but seduce it with the genius of their craft. ‘We’ll stay to dinner,’ the abbess told Sister Boniface.
Eleanor had provided chairs and divans on which her court could relax and gossip, she had hired painters from the East to decorate the walls of the many castles she and Henry owned and in which they stayed on their long, unending progress, not with improving religious illustrations, but with strange, exotic gardens and birds, which, she said – and Eleanor had been on crusade, one of the few women who had done so – were reminiscent of Eastern seraglios. She had put glass in the windows of the cold, northern castles, and fountains into the courtyards of the south; she had installed garde-robes in her solars in order that she and her ladies should not have to use chamberpots, which she regarded as a backward and insanitary custom. Music had come into the court with Eleanor, so that the abbess always associated her with the sound of a lute, and with it had come poetry, most of it in praise of Eleanor herself, and usually from some young man who was dying for love of her.
Daughter of Lir Page 3