Ann of Cambray (36 page)

‘I shall send word,’ he said. ‘Look for my seal that you know me.’

He dipped his head that they might set his helmet in place, a mask that hid all I must remember.

They brought up the black stallion, but he bade them let it go, gathered the reins, and vaulted into the saddle without touching stirrup. His flag bearer swung up on his own horse; the king’s messenger, well fed but still white-faced for weariness, still mud splattered, climbed upon his own. He wore full armour, too, carried the king’s crest as proof of his mission, but his face was drawn, and faint-hearted was his smile, as if he doubted his ability even to find the king’s court again.

The other men were already waiting. They knew Raoul never stayed about his parting. He raised his arm; they thundered across the bridge. I ran to the walk around the battlements where this morning we had stood and talked, and watched them move across the faint purple moors until they dipped from sight and were gone. But long after, I followed them in my mind’s eye that I should understand all that he had said, should remember rightly.

I live on borrowed time.

What good is life or youth or love that cannot withstand another man’s revenge? What means honour to a man dead? Who shall remember anything when time and death have faded it?

I have tried to explain before how Raoul did not reveal all his thoughts at once, although I think that day I had shaken him enough for him to show more than he meant. I do not speak now of plans, of strategy, but of his own self, his own identity. I had not known before, for example, that he had felt betrayed by women, that he came as slowly as I towards the idea of love. And although I have long known what honour was—a man’s oath is as a promise to God, not lightly made, not lightly broken, and death is better than dishonour—I had not known how he would choose when faced with a decision between honour and—what? Deep, harsh things lay beneath the abrupt words I had forced from him. I have thought them over many times since then; by shifts and starts have some of them become clear at last, part from what other men said later, part from what I could guess at myself. Let me put them in order for you here, although to do so I must take you to the world of the court and its high affairs, that world we had both, for a moment, thought to escape. But we were as trapped by it as anyone; no one escapes its hold on us.

Anything that the great do has some effect on everyone.
Now saw I what he meant. Now fell it with full force upon us.

As I look back from a long life, I see more clearly than he could then, although he guessed at it, how much the nature of our world has altered since. We live in an age of change. One day people will reflect on it and give it names of their own to explain and justify. You have but to look around you to see the changes for yourself: in church, in village, in castle keep. The way we think, the prayers we say, the rules we abide by, all these were new and strange to me, who has seen the changes harden into custom, law. Yet then I would not have thought them possible . . . And danger, you who live in settled times have forgotten what death and danger are, what civil war can destroy, that even when the war is over, private quarrels still rage on. Consider for a moment a traitor’s death. They hang you first, choking and gasping for breath, and cut you down alive and rip the bowels from you, geld you, burn your genitals before your living eyes before they hack you limb by limb. I have seen a man die thus. It is no death for any man, but, for a young one, vibrant with life, perhaps knowing himself beloved, knowing love for the first time . . .

Raoul kept his thoughts to himself but he must have guessed what name Henry would brand him with. He had not wished to speak of it, but sometime I would have to know . . .

Free of me, you keep your lands, avoid my fate.

I cannot marry you.

A traitor drags with him all his kin. Wife, children, family, all must share the consequence, if not the manner, of his death, to be burned out root and stem, cut off from lands and titles evermore.

What if a cause be half-lost, one need not fight the less.

He had half-guessed his fate perhaps since his return from France; certainly he knew it when he rode out from Sedgemont to await the landing of Henry of Anjou, when he saw how Stephen had lost heart and will. But if he anticipated what his loyalty would cost, he would not swerve from it. What man of honour could?

Would it please you to have me proved a coward, a man of no faith?

Long have I regretted my silence when he hurled that question at me.

Raoul knew he had been a marked man long before Wallingford, when those who would have avoided open battle nevertheless would have accepted him as the king’s champion to fight against Anjou, long before the Treaty of Westminster, which followed; long perhaps before Raoul had come back to England to inherit Sedgemont.

I have known these Angevins before.

Well, what he knew of them, they, too, would know of him. The struggle between the counts of Sieux, the counts of Anjou stretch back into an earlier history when, as descendants of those Norse bands who had invaded northern France, both had fought over the same territory there. Was it wise then to antagonise the heir of a family that had now grown so strong as to control almost all of those northern lands? Why had Raoul put himself in the forefront of the opposition to Henry of Anjou? And would Henry kill him when he came to power in England?

The first two questions I cannot answer. Judge the last for yourself. Number in your mind, if you dare not aloud, the names, in France and England both, whom Henry has destroyed. Remember, again if you dare, that archbishop slain at his own high altar at Canterbury, by that same Henry’s command. And once Becket and Henry had been friends . . .

Yet no man is all bad, and in Henry, as in others, good struggled sometimes to overcome evil as the sea may fret away at a black unyielding rock. But let Raoul speak to these last points in his own words; as afterwards I heard them, to tell you what befell when he left Cambray and came again to King Stephen’s court.

I have said I am no chronicler. I piece together what I can, as things were told to me, perhaps years later. The story of how he left and we met once more may seem strange to you, as improbable as the events themselves that followed hard upon that meeting . . . Yet, had not Stephen died and Henry become king, none of them would have happened; my tale would end here. I wish it had. But as one ripple moves, it sets the next to moving.

Anything that the great do has effect on everyone.

Now were we caught full centre in that widening circle. Nor can I tell you everyday occurrences, who said what, did which, to make a pattern that will please you. There are gaps in my knowledge when I was not there to see for myself. For facts you must rely upon those monkish texts which swear to the truth of all they write. But do not be surprised if some of the things I tell you never find the way into their accounts. Their idea of truth is as one-sided as mine. Except they never will admit it. Raoul’s journey east, for example. It is mentioned in several of those texts, since travellers about the king’s business could command royal entertainment along the way, and monasteries, bishops’ palaces, are noted for their hospitality. You can read for yourself where they stayed, how long, but why they were there, what they said, what they intended, no one will tell you that.

One chronicler records even what they ate, all sixteen courses, washed down with so many draughts of mead, cider, claret, and mulberry wine. A plenteous feast for men used to soldier’s fare. As the pious complaint which ends the description points out, little was left when they were done . . .

‘As locusts in the land of Egypt did they devour our sustenance . . .’

Another passage from this same source speaks only of the king’s messenger ‘reeling beneath the burden of disdain; wheresoever he passed people spat at him for hate . .

The poor man reeled, no doubt, for weariness. As for hate and anger, Raoul saw no one who spat at them, except the monks themselves, discreetly behind their long sleeves. Yet neither were people open-faced, joyful, glad to see them pass as in former days. Cautious, watchful, weary: those were the words he would have used to describe what he saw, and they were enough to trouble him, as if he journeyed through an exhausted land, too tired to concern itself about its fate.

They found the king at Dover. He had already abandoned his castle at London to his mercenaries, and had come to this small flea-infested town of hovels, dominated by its unkempt castle above the white cliffs. It in no way resembled the castle that later was to be built there, and why Stephen had chosen to go there was never explained, if he had a plan to await word of Anjou’s doings in France or to travel there himself, or merely to inspect this chiefest of his Channel defences (although, in truth, it was but a sorry imitation of defence).

But as Raoul and his men clattered up the narrow cobbled streets and under the portcullis at the gate, they could see again the evidence of disinterest all about them, the neglect. Raoul restrained himself that night from clouting the stable boys when they came at last reluctantly to take the horses, for, as he said, ‘I remembered your complaints, that all men vent their spleen upon their grooms. Yet they deserved worse, for the stables were filthy, saddles and gear rotting on the ground, not one horse there sound for riding, not one kept in training. I was not so restrained the next day. And everywhere we went, even passing through the guards, we noted sign of slackness: ill-kept weapons, ill-kept men, passwords ignored. The king’s own personal guard did not salute as they should, but slouched at their post. Great courts are not always so grand as you would think. And this was worse than most, although there may have been reason.’

He laughed. ‘It was the coldest place I nave ever known, not built like Cambray, but made to let in every sea wind, with a smell of fish that tainted even the most luxurious of feasts. We went straight to the king’s chambers. They were at least heated, so much so that those who attended upon him there either broiled within or froze without. King Stephen was sitting propped on cushions, wrapped in furs and robes, before a blazing fire. Yet even so he complained of the cold, and the hand he gave me was as cold as ice. Jesu, did I think him aged the year before? He was but fifty-and-eight, but his years sat heavily upon him so that he suddenly seemed shrunk beneath them, withered, that I had to hunt for the man whom I had known. He knew me at once. There was even a ghost of his former smile as he greeted me almost in his usual courteous fashion. Yet the contrast between this tired old man and the young Henry who would replace him had never seemed so obvious, not even a year ago.

‘ “Nay, lad,” Stephen said, in his easy way—I told you he was noted for his charm, “never kneel to me. These stones were made for horses. So, Raoul, we meet again as friends.”

‘ “My lord King,” I said, moved by his words, “we parted never as enemies, I trust.”

‘“God willing,” he said. “Good friends may have their outs but never come to enmity. Speak no more of that. And put the cares of border life behind you. Tell us more cheerful news.”

‘The gesture he made was a parody of his former self. I noticed how his accent had thickened as if, as concentration lessened, he had reverted to the speech of his childhood at Chartres. And there was something in his expression of his mother, that stern Adela, who had sent her husband to his death to atone for cowardice. I had not noticed the likeness before, and did so now perhaps because his eyes had sunk and stared out as hers used to beneath her heavy brows. Others noted the resemblance, who knew her well, a fiery woman, a daughter of that first duke, William of Normandy. They say of her that had she been a man, she would have been as great a warrior as her father and brother both. But perhaps it was only that Stephen suddenly spoke so much of her, how she had nurtured up her sons to make them famous, had trained Stephen for court life, his younger brother for the church, that he seemed to take on her looks. They say that dying men turn to the past for comfort, ignoring the present. But although he spoke so much of former times—of her, of his brothers, his wife, his sons — and moved restlessly as with pain, his mind was clear. That first night he was content to have me by his side as if to relive for us both what had been better days. He spoke of old battles he had fought as a young man newly come to the English court, after the death of the king’s son in the White Ship disaster. And then he spoke of all those battles of the early years of his reign, of the great battle of the Standard against the Scots in the earliest days when the Celts were routed within two hours; of the first battle of Lincoln three years later, a cold February day in 1141, when he had fought as a man possessed, on foot, laying about him like some Viking with his double-headed axe. But it was the other nobles who finished the tale, reminding him that, despite his heroic stand, he had been captured at the end, laid low by a coward’s stone thrown out of the crowd of men who ringed him round. That day had been the lowest ebb of his life. Yet the Empress Matilda had shown her true colours after, refusing to show any mercy to him, her defeated cousin, ignoring the rights of his lords and barons, refusing even to stand to greet her ally, the King of Scotland, because of self-pride, flaunting her victory to her own disgrace.

'Out of that defeat, Stephen had risen higher than before. "For see, my lord King,” they soothed him, when these details seemed to distress him, although I do not think they told him for malice, rather because they thought he would be pleased that they remembered, too, “although that treacherous stone cost you your freedom, the imprisonment did not last long. The citizens of London rose on your behalf, and drove the empress and her crew out of the city just as they were about to sit down to a victory feast. And at Winchester next, your own queen and wife besieged them round with so strong a hold that when they tried to make a dash for freedom, the empress’s half brother, Earl Robert of Gloucester, was captured himself and the army cut to pieces.”