I

I opened the huge oak door of the barn, stepped quickly inside, and looked back to check that no one was watching.

The only thing that moved was the barn-smell which danced in the dust as I shut out the early sunlight behind me.

If you are interested in smells (and who cannot be), I can tell you it was a complex one. It was a dark, fusty, slightly gingery odour in which you could distinguish hay, rust, damp, horse, old wood, fungus, mouse droppings, rats, axle grease, and (if you sniffed very carefully) sex – and oranges. Oranges? I questioned my sense of the faint aroma – rare in these parts – but put it aside, distracted by a further aromatic seasoning from the moat, stirred by the morning breeze.

The oranges should have alerted me. Everything else was as usual, but I was tired that morning. It seemed anyway that I was safe; there was nobody about, not even a groom or a scullion. Everyone was late rising after the revels of last night.

The barn was a huge wooden affair on the other side of the grassy bailey from the castle itself, over against the marshalsea where they kept the horses. It was one of the favourite places for those wishing to make what the French call the beast with two backs – though usually not before dinnertime. Normally, I would not have been there at all (well, only after dinner and then hardly ever), but it is almost impossible to find a quiet place in a castle. Everyone’s on top of you everywhere, even when you’re having a piss.

All I wanted, intensely, that morning was somewhere to snatch a bit of sleep. There had been this great Feast of Easter celebration the night before, rejoicing at the princely presence and of course Jesus’s Resurrection. After dinner, there was foolery, drollery, buffoonery, revelry and rudery.

You know how it is. The feasting went on late, there was too much wine, the Prince’s fool told too many good jokes, and what with one thing and another and little Marianne, one of the Comtesse’s maids, I didn’t get to sleep in my own bed until well past midnight, the hour when the Brothers at the abbey would be saying Matins. I had a bed in one of the knights’ wooden halls that had sprouted in the bailey next to the stone of the castle, but my father, the Comte, had developed a habit of summoning me at all hours just to see if I was behaving myself, or out of sheer malice. Last night was no problem because he was drunk and wouldn’t stir; but this morning it would be a different matter, and I knew he would be coming for me, rooting me out of bed and on parade before I was ready.

I had contrived to wake early because I knew that I still needed a good long sleep, undisturbed, somewhere my father wouldn’t immediately find me. That was the first essential, to keep out of his reach – because he’s a crusty old bugger, to be honest, especially after a night’s carousing. He thinks he can still carouse, but if you ask me he’s well past it, even if he has got a young wife. A man should stop carousing after forty and fix his mind on prayer and sweetmeats. Carousing is for younger men like myself – when we can get it.

So I had dragged on my clothes as soon as I woke, thought immediately of the barn as a suitable location, and sidled across the bailey, not for a moment imagining that I would stumble on a secret that, if divulged, would probably cost me my life. I entered, quiet as a harvest mouse in case a sneaking groom was skulking somewhere, and made my way towards the stacks of hay piled up like a house against the back wall.

Oranges! That was where it came from. The scent filled the corridor between the hay stacks. It was then that I heard them; a low whisper, a little cry. I crept nearer because there is a pleasure in secret discovery.

‘Darling,’ I heard a voice cry, a man’s voice. ‘Darling, darling.’

What I saw made me choke with surprise. It was the English Prince and he was embracing – I like to use that word because anything else would be gross and although I am a bastard, at least I am the bastard of a Comte – he was embracing the Comtesse, my father’s second wife, bastard daughter of the Duke who was also King Henry of England; the most beautiful woman you ever saw; blonde as an angel, middle to tall, with a skin the colour of late spring honey infused with a drop or two of very pale medlar jelly. Her mother had been a beauty before her, a lady called Ede, daughter of an English lord, it was said…

No, I have to tell you this in riper words, the situation is too strong for delicacy. The Prince William, known as ‘the Atheling’, in whom resided the hopes of all the English, son of King Henry and of the half-Scots, half-Saxon Queen Matilda, was fornicating with his half-sister, two years older than he was. He was fucking my stepmother and because this was not the sort of thing you do in public with your host’s wife, they had found a quiet place removed from the hubbub of the castle, just as I had done, to make the beast with eight legs, as we say in Normandy. Of course, I had noticed before now my stepmother’s predilection for the oils of orange that she used about her body, and here it was, heating up nicely.

I tell you, men have lost their lives for witnessing less. Do you think I gave a discreet cough and a ‘good morning, Prince’? The hell I did. I moved out so quietly God himself didn’t notice.

But perhaps I should explain myself and my life, which was precious to me at the time.