LXXIII

I had been convinced, when I’d thought about it before, that in the event of my survival, Alice would be waiting for me on the shore. I imagined that Juliana would have brought her to me in a gesture of gratitude – but Alice was not there. I did have the feeling, though, that she was waiting for me somewhere. I needed to get back and find her, and meet the bump that was my child. But I was barely alive.

Soon a congregation of lately arrived, rearguard soldiers and lords who had not sailed, along with local officials, started to gather about me like gulls, and surveyed my huddled figure as the fishermen debated what to do with me. Finally, they took me to the harbourmaster’s office and laid me upon the floor against a cupboard. I promised to reward my rescuers when I was sufficiently recovered. Someone produced a blanket. Someone else found some strong wine and tipped it down my throat.

Stephen of Mortain, the King’s nephew – a tall, pale-faced man whose drooping moustaches gave him a mournful expression – made the first move. He seemed to have recovered miraculously from his diarrhoea, and swooped upon me accusingly as I lay and shivered. I was the only survivor of the wreck and therefore, by implication, the perpetrator – a logical assumption which happened to be true. As I blurted out my tale, however, leaving out all mention of the fight with Pirou (he might have been Stephen’s man, and then where would I be?), it seemed that he changed his view. I had a perfect reason for being on board: money for my boss. I was clearly a simple fellow. I had survived because I was dressed in the uniform of my trade. The reason for the wreck was what I was gulping now – strong wine and too much of it. There was nothing for it, he said, but I must go to England and tell the King.

They allowed me to sleep most of the day, then at last they woke me up, and I crawled to my room at the inn for some respectable clothes. Lisette insisted that I have a bath, which was the best thing she could have done. My stiff, pale limbs unbent and regained some colour in the warm water. I changed into more respectable clothes, persuaded her with silver pennies to keep my room for me, had a huge supper, and then took a thick coat the landlord provided (not as warm as my sheepskin), and my own sullen carcass out onto the jetty to catch the evening boat for Southampton with Stephen and a couple of minor lords. He made me feel like a piece of questionable luggage.

Again, it was a clear, calm evening. They preferred to sail on such a night for the stars made navigation easier. Stephen and a couple of lords sailed with me. It was my first visit to England and we arrived, as dawn was breaking, in Southampton – not much of a place at that hour. We transferred to horses and by evening we were at the King’s palace in Winchester. A reaction to my previous night’s ordeal had set in and I was already dog-tired.

Half-dead though I was, I dreaded the confrontation with Henry, knowing he would be suspicious of me and my lone survival, and I was given little time to settle my story. I was ushered into a hall full of nervous-looking lords and courtiers, and I braced myself for a meeting that I knew could be disastrous. I was grateful that at that point Stephen resisted the suggestion of a lord called Robert d’Oilly who spoke in the slight quacking dialect they use here, so I only caught the gist of it – that I should report immediately to the King. I was dead on my feet. It seemed to me that we were all players in some kind of mummer’s charade in which we had our allotted and ludicrous parts.

‘It would surely be better,’ Stephen said, ‘if this terrible news were broken by someone he loves, but for whom his natural delicacy would mitigate any anger he might feel at this calamity.’

‘Terrible news, terrible news,’ said the courtiers.

Stephen, at least, spoke proper French, but he had ever a politician’s way of talking. We were in a parlement of birds, and he was the heron, always waiting.

‘Who then?’ quacked d’Oilly.

‘Who then?’ asked others, looking about dazedly like chickens. ‘Who then? Who then?’

You could see they were all scared of the King, as I was. I looked from one to another of these old birds with Norman names who lived in England – William de Mohun, Robert de Lacy, Bishop Roger of Salisbury, and so on – and I said to myself, we make better lords in Normandy. I was careful, however, to look subservient. I wanted to scatter corn for them.

‘Why not you?’ another wise owl asked Stephen. ‘You’re supposed to be his favourite.’

‘Not I! He would doubtless blame me for the whole affair. You tell him, Tancarville. You yourself have lost a son in the shipwreck.’

Poor man. I did not know young Tancarville, but perhaps I might have recognised him if he walked in now with seaweed in his hair.

‘No, no. I am already quite overcome. What about you, de Lacy?’

‘No, I fear I have almost lost my voice.’

‘William Bigod, now, he is a straight-talking man…’

‘But where is he?’

‘He’s drowned.’

‘Ah.’

At last Theobald, Comte de Blois, Stephen’s brother and a better general, an energetic cock-robin of a man, suggested a little boy, son of one of the courtiers. This child of six or seven years of age was, at times of ease and relaxation, a favourite of the King’s and made him smile. Surely Henry would not be angry with him!

The barons and courtiers, the whole lot of them, rose as one, swooped around the room, and settled on this proposal, which I thought disgusting and showed how low England had fallen. Tired though I was, I put my hand up and volunteered myself again, but they looked at me as though I were a sea-urchin.

The small boy, Robin – who reminded me, and perhaps the King, for a sad moment of Roger, the Castellan of Ivry’s little chaffinch – was briefed by me, by the barons and by Stephen himself, and was finally considered to have got the drift of the disaster. At first he thought it was a fine game, but as I told the story his eyes grew bigger and his mouth turned down.

‘Everybody dwowned?’ he asked. ‘Even the fine lady?’

‘Everybody. And the Prince too,’ I told him. ‘That is what you must tell the King. They went straight down. No one was saved except me, and I am a nobody.’

He didn’t want to do it, indeed his mother came and made a fuss, but the barons over-ruled her. They would have rolled the little fledgling along to the King with their beaks, and his mother as well, if they had thought it would help. It might have done too, because she was a good-looking woman.

When he had taken in what he could, and repeated his message to everyone’s satisfaction, he was ushered into the throne room, all by himself, where the King was at work, at a table, with a map of Normandy in front of him drawn up by the Brother Cartographer of Saint-Sulpice, a man with terrible piles. Comte Stephen kept the door ajar and we jostled for position behind him, squawking and muttering. The King was sitting at his table.

‘Ah, Robin,’ he said, ‘I am afraid I am too busy to talk at the moment. Come back a little later.’

But Robin did not go. The King was puzzled; a little impatient, as he can be.

‘I am busy, Robin. Come back later.’

Robin kept standing there. The King raised his voice.

‘Robin. Later.’

Robin burst into tears.

‘I am sorry, Robin, but really … What is the matter with you?’

Robin forgot his careful briefing and blurted everything out.

‘It is the White Ship, sire. She is wrecked. Prince William and your generals and your daughters, everyone is dwowned!’

At that point, the King folded his wings and fell forward in a fit. He had to be helped to a private room where he drank a great deal of strong wine and ate nothing, not even a lamprey. He kept to this room and spoke to no one, it was said, for a week. Some said he never smiled again.

The boy Robin had inadvertently saved me from the King’s questions, and the barons thereafter completely ignored my existence in that way they have – I had been given quarters near the scullions – so I took the opportunity of the King’s affliction, and returned to Normandy by stealth to find temporary accommodation in the Abbey of Saint-Sulpice.

I had seen Juliana’s revenge complete and a mighty king brought to his knees, and I felt disgusted with myself. I had been responsible for killing three hundred people, and I couldn’t even go to Confession because what priest these days could keep a confession like that to himself?