CHAPTER FOUR

 

The Sybaritic Duke 1088

 

 

In August, the stags’ antlers were fully grown and hardened, the velvet peeling off. The stag whom Helias of La Fleche had dubbed the Old One because he was not only old in years but possessed all the wisdom and cunning which were traditionally supposed to go with age, had sixteen points this year, ivory coloured dagger tips on horn branches stout as seasoned oak.

The Old One knew that the packs of two and four legged carnivores which from time to time infested his forest did not always hunt in the same way. But whether they were trying to drive him on to the arrows of marksmen in ambush, or flushing him into the open for a chase, his favourite method of self-protection was much the same. He made a younger stag take his place.

He had been flushed out this morning, his initial attempt to lie flat under a tangled bush while the beaters went past having been spoiled by the questing noses of unleashed hounds. Now, as he sped across a stretch of open heathland, he heard the horns and the baying behind him and knew they were on his scent.

But he was on familiar territory. He veered to his left, seeking lower ground and the shelter of the bushes in the valley. Plunging into them, following his own nose which was as sensitive as that of any hound, he veered again and came headlong into a dell where another buck was lying. The other came to his feet at once and lowered his head, but six points were no match for sixteen. The Old One charged him, his weapons making contact while the other’s were still hopelessly far away from doing any damage. The smaller stag wheeled and fled. The Old One turned at right angles to the line, made several mighty leaps which put an astonishing amount of ground behind him, arrived at the banks of a stream and began to wade upriver.

 

***

 

‘What on earth are you doing?’ the huntsman Michel panted, spurring up as Ralph des Aix was calling the hounds off the line. ‘What are you about, Ralph? There’s the stag; God’s Teeth, I can see him!’

‘It’s the wrong one,’ said Ralph. ‘That’s not the Old One, look at the slots! He’s put up a substitute; his own slots are half that size. If my lord wants a sixteen-point head above his seat in the hall, he won’t find it in this direction. We’ve got to make a back cast.’

‘The old devil!’ said Michel, meaning the Old One. ‘Well, it’s natural. If I thought a pack of hounds were on my trail, I expect I’d switch them on to someone else’s if I could. There’s a stream down there; we’d best try that way.’

They brought the Old One to bay at the foot of a hill, where recent rain had caused a landslip and made a sheer face for twenty feet. With the hill to guard his hindquarters, he used his antlers to account for three deerhounds before Helias rode up to despatch him with a single arrow. ‘Magnificent,’ Helias said, looking down on the spread of the antlers. ‘Almost a pity to kill him. He might have sprouted eighteen points next year, though I doubt it. They don’t very often.’

‘We’d have lost him but for Ralph here,’ said Michel, with a meaning look at his lord. ‘He spotted where the old fellow tried to set the pack off after another deer.’

‘Ah. Yes,’ said Helias. ‘Ride with me going home, Ralph, if you please. I want to talk to you.’

‘…Michel tells me,’ said Helias ‘that you intend to leave us.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Ralph uncomfortably, looking straight ahead between his horse’s ears.

‘May I ask why? You are free, of course. You have a right to go where you will. Michel says you have some idea of adventuring off to England. But I must point out that if it’s adventure you want, in due time you’ll get that with me. And if you’re off to seek your fortune; well, you’ll get advancement here in time. Michel will retire eventually from active work. You’d be in line for his post, and it carries a good rate of pay, and land.’

One could not say to a lord as good, as likeable, as Helias that ‘in due time’ seemed a long way off, nor express regret that one’s friend Michel, from whom one had learned so much, looked fit enough to hold his post for ten years yet. Fortunately, there was another reason which he could offer.

‘I badly want to go to England, sir. My father died recently…’

‘Did he? I didn’t know. I’m sorry.’

‘Yes, it was sudden.’ And had taken away some kind of foundation from under him. His father was dead and if he were to go back to Aix now, his brother Reggie would not fail to welcome him… but his brother would be Reginald of Aix, the master of the holding, whereas he, Ralph, would be no one except to his stepmother. ‘When I left home,’ he said, ‘my father asked me to let him know if I ever heard news of an old friend of his, someone who lives in England. I never did hear any news. Now I wish I’d tried harder to find out. And I thought, perhaps, I could go myself and look for this friend. Perhaps he might like to have the last news of my father, might like to know the friendship wasn’t forgotten. I’m not putting this clearly. I’ve got some savings. I can buy a passage and keep myself for a while.’

‘I know you’ve got savings. You’ve been training horses in your spare time, for other people.’ Ralph glanced round in surprise and Helias laughed. ‘Oh yes, I know. I know what goes on on my estate. I know what’s going on in your head, too. You’ve had bad news; it’s shaken you out of old habits. Suddenly you want to see new things, find out what’s on the other side of the horizon. The horizon of the English Channel, in your case. I’m not unsympathetic. I’ve always longed to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and although I would most truly like to see Bethlehem and Jerusalem, that’s not the whole of it. I’d like to see far countries, too. I’d be lying if I said that that wasn’t part of it. Perhaps in some ways I’m not unlike you.’

‘It won’t be quite a strange country. England, I mean. My father was English and I speak the language.’

‘I see. All right, Ralph. I won’t say any more. I’m sorry to lose you and so is Michel. It was he who asked me to talk to you. If you decide to stay in England, you shouldn’t have much difficulty in finding employment as a huntsman, with some new lord. Perhaps in a more senior position than you hold here.’ Tactfully, Helias pretended not to notice Ralph flush. ‘One thing, Ralph. Be careful whom you pick as a lord. Open-handedness is a virtue but sometimes it isn’t as open as it seems.’

‘I will be careful,’ said Ralph, after a pause. He did not quite understand the warning, but it seemed necessary to say something. Helias did not enlarge. In fact, he did not quite understand it either. He had spoken without intending to, as though prompted by some misty prescience. The boy was young in some ways for his twenty years, and he was setting out alone…

There were no forebodings in Ralph’s mind, however, the day he sailed for England on a trading vessel bound for Dover, carrying a flag to assure patrolling English ships of her pacific intentions. Shipping from the direction of Normandy was suspect just then.

He embarked on a sparkling morning, with a high heart. He was off to adventure and new places, off to find people who had known his father and a new lord who would give him the land which his father could not, for which Helias would have made him wait. Land which would be his, to which his brother would have no title.

The weather grew heavy and sticky before the voyage was over and the wind failed. The seamen had to get out the oars, and complained about it. But Ralph had no complaints. He was exceedingly happy, and confident.

On disembarking at Dover, he found lodging in an abbey and there asked advice on how to find a particular manor in Sussex. The brother whose business it was to buy provisions for the abbey, told him to try a merchant who was that year head of the Dover Merchants’ Guild. ‘Merchants are good sources of that kind of information. If they don’t know, they can tell you who will.’

Good luck was with him. There were several guild members dining in the merchant’s hall that day and one of them knew of Fallowdene, had even bought wool from it.

‘You take the Guildford road and at Guildford turn south for Chichester. But when you see the downs – that’s what we call the range of smooth, bare-looking hills just inland of the Sussex coast – rise in front of you, look for a track to your left. These are the landmarks…’

He made the ride with perfect ease, although the land was strange to him and although it was technically at war. He saw traces of Odo’s rebellion, signs of ravaging, once a group of refugees plodding wearily in search of shelter. But he himself was neither challenged nor delayed.

In after years, when he looked back on the strange affair that his life had been, it seemed to him that nothing in it was as strange as that; the ease with which he got to Fallowdene. It was as if it had been meant.

No one from Fallowdene died in Odo’s uprising, though the brothers Asa and Harold came home with scars of which they were inordinately proud.

Richard came through unscathed despite – as he said when he reached home and regaled them all with his story – of having been in the forefront of all the action. He rode at his leader de Warenne’s side as they chased the rebels across Kent, over blackened fields and past smoking farmhouses. He was one of those who actually laid hands on Gilbert Clare when he was taken. Gilbert Clare, now lord of Tonbridge, had demonstrated an adult version of his boyhood tendency to bite, abandoned the king and gone over to Odo. He was a catch and was sent to London to await trial, amid much satisfied rubbing of hands.

Odo, however, escaped to the sea and turned up next eighty miles away in Pevensey on the Sussex coast. Richard was in the force which cut across country as fast as their horses’ legs would go and then, for the next six weeks, besieged Pevensey.

The castle was holding out in the hope of relief, but relief never came. Once, a handful of ships flying Normandy’s leopards appeared at sea but Rufus had ships enough to discourage them. Richard, recounting to his family the history of that halfhearted invasion, said: ‘We had two and a half vessels to every ship the Normans had. I saw the Norman sails retreat over the horizon.’

He then mounted to accompany de Warenne as part of the escort to a herald, who sounded a trumpet outside the castle and called on its inmates to surrender.

In later life Richard acquired the nickname of De-brouillard, the Resourceful. But some people maintained that luck played at least as great a part in his successful career and his survival to the age of nearly eighty. The response to the herald’s summons was a swishing rain of arrows, one of which passed harmlessly and well-nigh miraculously between Richard’s saddle pommel and the coarse grey mane of his horse, to bury its point amid the chain links of the mail on de Warenne’s thigh.

Richard helped his leader back to camp and saw him taken away by litter to the priory where eventually he died, from blood-poisoning. Then he returned to his duty and was present when Pevensey, brought down at last by hunger, surrendered and its gaunt inmates marched out, and one of them asked the king quite candidly: ‘Before you hang us, can we have a square meal?’

They were not hanged. Richard heard Odo make peace with Rufus on their behalf and his own and was in the royal escort when Rufus and Odo set out together to Rochester, the last stronghold of the rising, to announce that the war was over.

He had been told to include his own men in the escort, so Brian of Little Dene was with him when Odo… ‘we christened him the Fat Fox,’ said Richard afterwards, making them all laugh… astride the horse which Rufus had lent him, ‘because that half-starved clothes rail you rode out of Pevensey on will drop dead before we get halfway to Rochester’, went ahead to parley with the representatives who came out of Rochester Castle.

The parley lasted twenty minutes, out on the open no-man’s-land between castle and king. Then Odo put spurs to Rufus’ horse and in the midst of the men of Rochester, rode headlong for its gate.

‘Oh, well, I’m not surprised, are you?’ said Brian predictably. ‘What else would you expect?’

Rufus hadn’t expected it, apparently. ‘By the Face!’ bellowed the king, loudly enough to be heard by everyone within a fifty-yard radius. ‘By the Holy Face of Lucca, l' gave him rope! If he wants to make a noose of it, then so he shall.’

‘And that was the first time,’ Richard said, not immediately after his return from that campaign, but some years later, ‘that anyone ever heard him use that oath. It’s famous now. He’s made it his own. I believe his father the Conqueror used to swear by the Splendour of God and King Rufus wanted a private oath too. He always wanted to be like his father. The Face is the Italian carving of Christ’s countenance, of course. People were talking about it just then; it was one of the marvels of Christendom.’ Richard himself was slightly in his cups, showing off in a mild way because by then he was a friend of somebody close to the king. ‘The second time I heard the king use that oath…’

The second time was in a different context. That time it was an exclamation of satisfaction. News was coming out of besieged Rochester, concerning the conditions inside it. That year, 1088, was a sultry summer, with a heavy, hazy sky for days on end, and the waters of the Medway sluggish and coloured like lead. And there were flies…

As a child, Henry had been prone to tantrums. As a man, he found himself subject now and then to black rages whose force even surprised their owner because they seemed to be actually bigger than he was.

He had one such surge of fury at his father’s deathbed, when he learned that he was to inherit no land, only five thousand pounds’ weight of silver. He controlled himself because he could hardly rave at, let alone attack, the mass of immobilised pain which was his father. William had sensed his anger, though, and tried to soothe it. ‘Patience, Henry. Of all my living sons you’re the most like me.’ He said it huskily, because the corruption in his body was eating at his vocal cords, but nevertheless his tone carried conviction. ‘I’d gamble,’ whispered the Conqueror, ‘I’d put money on it – one day you’ll come into your own, and your own’ll be all your brothers have now. Meanwhile,’ William added, the hoarse voice changing timbre to some-thing down to earth and cynical, ‘take that sealed order there by your hand to Rouen Treasury and get your silver weighed out to you now. I wouldn’t give a penny for your chances once Rouen’s in Curthose’s hands.’

He knew, when he had had time to think, that he had no right to anger; Britnoth had told him long ago that younger sons must make their own way, even when they were born to the purple and their elders were not. He was better equipped than some. He had five thousand pounds of silver, a first class education, and the Conqueror for a father. What was he, if he couldn’t do something with all that?

Meanwhile, in order to live in any kind of comfort, he must give his allegiance to one or other of his brothers. He could lease land with that silver. Rufus showed signs of wishing to drive a hard bargain but the easygoing Curthose was willing enough to co-operate. He probably would have held on to Henry’s silver if he had got at the Treasury first, but had no taste for haggling. In company with a number of knights bachelor, his friends, Henry settled down to the life of a Norman gentleman, oscillating between his rented estate and Curthose’s court, and amused himself by wooing a couple of Curthose’s lesser mistresses away from him.

Life was not disagreeable. But the next black rage was only just round the corner and when it arrived, it was Curthose who provoked it.

‘There’s a messenger from England – from Bishop Odo,’ one of his friends said, ducking through the low door of Curthose’s Rouen menagerie, and curling up a fastidious nose at the smell. ‘The duke won’t see him. He’s asked for you instead.’

‘From Odo?’ Henry, who had been giving the keepers a hand in inveigling a panther into an inner den so that the outer lair could be cleaned, straightened up sharply from locking the cage. ‘In Rochester?’ His friend nodded. ‘I’ll see him in my chamber,’ Henry said.

The messenger was a drawn-faced man, roughly clad but with a bearing that suggested that normally he dressed better. He was sitting wearily on a stool but rose as Henry came in. He then took in Henry’s grubby appearance and rank aroma, and looked bewildered.

‘My apologies if I reek of leopard. I’ve been helping to look after one. I like them, handsome, sinuous, predatory beasts that they are,’ Henry said. ‘I’ve even called my horse Panther. You’re from Rochester? Is the siege over?’

‘No, sir. And I don’t mind the smell of leopard. It’s better than the stink I left behind in Rochester.’

‘Stink?’

‘You’ve had a little rain here, I’m told. There’s been no rain in England for weeks on weeks. In Rochester, the salt meat’s rotting in the barrels and the flour’s full of maggots and your uncle Odo’s men are taking turns to brush away the flies from one another so that they can eat even that. The flies are everywhere, on everything, great fat gorged buzzing things, and the bad food’s poisoning the men. When I left, eleven had died in the castle and more in the town. It only takes hours once it starts. Their bowels turn liquid and they clutch at their stomachs and twist and twist and nothing eases them. They call for water all the time but the water’s foul too and they only throw it up…’ Suddenly, startlingly, the memories roused by his own words made him retch. He stopped, a hand to his mouth.

‘You came to get help, is that it?’ Henry asked. ‘And Duke Robert hasn’t been able to see you?’

‘He won’t see me, sir. But I must give the message to someone of position, so I asked for you. I got out of Rochester by stealth, a rope down the walls after dark and I escaped down the river in a stolen boat. I drifted half a mile so as not to make a noise with the oars. I bought a passage on a merchant ship at the estuary mouth. All to get word to someone who might help! The castle’s being held for the duke, sir, but unless he sends aid…’ Henry seized his arm. It felt thin. ‘Come with me.’ The room into which Henry hustled the messenger without ceremony could have been lifted straight from Araby. The duke’s castle-cum-palace at Rouen had a marked Byzantine influence in its architecture, and this chamber, on the floor above the main hall, was the most exotic of all. It was wide and gracious; Sunlight, pouring through shapely windows, played on a high vaulted roof and elegant pillars of pale stone, and on a floor of polished boards strewn with rugs of spotted fawnskin. There were no tapestries but two carpets, brought from the infidel east, marvels of complex design and rich colour, hung on the walls instead. And in the midst of it all…

Under Henry’s hand, the messenger’s bony arm went hard as if in rigor. Henry’s own body clenched into an answering hardness.

He could not run amok here in the private quarters of the Duke of Normandy any more than at his father’s deathbed. If Duke Robert Curthose chose to lounge sybaritically on a divan, flat on his lazy stomach so that he could hang over his baby son’s cradle and croon nonsense to him, he was entitled to do so and he was entitled also to send urgent messengers about their business in order to wallow in fulsome paternity undisturbed. He was the duke.

And his mistress Biota, the baby’s mother, had the right, as long as it pleased her lover, to sit curled beside him sipping in refined fashion at a goblet of fruit juice while a well-fed and well-dressed jongleur twanged the latest lovesong on a lyre and the other child she had given Curthose, the four-year-old Richie, sat on the floor learning backgammon from his nurse, with another pitcher of that same delectable fruit juice on the floor beside them.

In Rochester, Odo’s beleaguered garrison and the people trapped with them in the embattled town below waited vainly for relief and if the messenger spoke the truth, there wasn’t a man within those walls who would not have cut off his right hand for one single goblet of that clean-tasting juice.

No, he must not run amok but he wanted to. He wanted to tear down the carpets, empty the pitchers over them and over Curthose’s well-barbered head as well, to seize the jongleur’s lyre and smash it to bits, to hurl cradle and baby alike across the floor…

He dragged his companion forward. Curthose sat up, raising his eyebrows at the intrusion and began to ask the reason, waving the minstrel to silence. Henry got in first. ‘This man comes from Rochester and I think you should hear what he has to say!’

Curthose’s brows rose even higher but he closed his mouth. Henry prodded the messenger and the man drew in a nervous breath and went into his tale.

Curthose, to do him justice, listened. That, Henry thought, was one of his most infuriating characteristics. Curthose was never unreasonable. On the contrary, once backed into a corner, he would be all charm and fair dealing until such time as he had escaped from the corner. He heard the man out and signed for fruit juice to be offered to him. The messenger shook his head. I’ve taken an oath to drink only water until Rochester is free and at that I’m privileged. The water they’re drinking is no better than poison.’

‘You put it strongly,’ said Curthose, ‘though I can’t blame you. Sit down, man, you can hardly keep your feet, I can see. But tell me, what does my uncle hope I can do, at such short notice? I have a force in preparation but what it has to be prepared for is heavy fighting. I gather that my brother Rufus has ample support. I must have men and ships enough before I try to sail again. I sent a fleet earlier and it proved too small. That’s a mistake I don’t propose to repeat.’

‘The campaign on your behalf in England started last April and was planned in January,’ said Henry. ‘You were informed by a messenger from Bishop Odo on the last day of January…’

‘What a wonderful memory you have,’ said Curthose coldly.

‘How long do you need to mount an invasion? England would be yours now if you’d got to work promptly. You could have done far better, long ago, than a handful of leaky ships…’

‘My ships don’t leak, Henry.’

‘…with timid maidens at the helm…’

‘My captains aren’t timid and few of them are maidens,’ said Curthose with a grin. He dropped back onto an elbow and produced a coloured glass pendant on a thin chain, which he dangled over the baby’s cradle. The baby gurgled and clutched. ‘Look at him, grasping already. A proper little Norman lord. If conditions are as bad in Rochester as you say, my friend,’ he said to the messenger, ‘how did you get out?’

The messenger repeated his story, adding: ‘I’m a merchant by trade. I deal with the Rouen bullion merchants. I was picked because I’m used to travelling and obtaining passages. Please listen, sir. If Rochester isn’t relieved soon, the garrison will start cutting townspeople’s throats to save food and if it still isn’t relieved, they’ll be cutting throats to get food. That is, if the rotten meat hasn’t killed them all off first. My lord, in the name of all those I left behind, I implore you! Send help to Rochester.’

There was a pause. Biota (who was not a fool and furthermore was very attractive; Henry had not tried his luck with this one of Curthose’s mistresses but had considered it), slipped quietly from her divan and signed to the nurse to follow her out with the children. Richie, annoyed at having his game interrupted, and displaying all the capacity for rage for which the Norman ruling house was famous, yelled loudly, snatched up a wooden sword which was lying handy, and assaulted his nurse.

Henry found a sudden, if inadequate outlet for his own anger. Stepping forward, he administered a backhander which sent Richie head over heels. Richie sat up and roared. ‘Quiet, you’re not hurt!’ snapped Henry. Biota, running back to pick up her son, glared at him (‘yes, very attractive,’ said Henry’s libido in between the pulsebeats of his wrath) and hustled Richie, nurse and baby out of the room.

‘Really,’ said Curthose, ‘what disturbances you create, Henry. Have I refused to send help? I’ve every intention of sending it but not, I repeat, till the relief force is ready.’

‘And I repeat,’ Henry threw back at him, ‘that you’ve had more than six months to get it ready. How long do you think Rochester can wait?’

‘Oh, a call for help always exaggerates the urgency,’ said Curthose easily. ‘I know you’re hoping for pickings if I get rid of Rufus, but I’m not so sure I want to get rid of him. You’re very dirty,’ he added, ‘and you smell worse. What on earth have you been doing?’

Henry stood still, burning as if with fever. He was young, able, educated, and the Conqueror’s son. But to his indolent eldest brother, he was nothing, could not even be given credit for a sense of loyalty or obligation. The blow he had just given Richie, he longed to give to Curthose, through the medium of a well-honed blade and with his weight behind it. And all he was allowed to do was stand, and burn.

The messenger was watching him. The messenger had no knightly background; he was not a man with whom Henry would normally make friends. But their silent eye-to-eye communion now cut through that. They read each other’s minds and found themselves alike in their impotence and hopeless anger.

‘I was in the menagerie,’ he said to Curthose. ‘With the leopards. With your leave, I’ll go back to them. Sometimes I find animals better company than men.’

In Rochester, someone had cautiously, in Odo’s presence, uttered the phrase ‘negotiate for terms’. Odo, who had hitherto shouted down anyone who dared to mention such a thing, this time said nothing.