CHAPTER ONE

 

Private Crosses 1090-1

 

 

The monk who had answered Abbot Anselm’s jangling handbell had to flatten himself against the wall as the abbot’s departing guest strode out of his host’s office. The guest was a well-dressed young man with fiercely rowelled spurs on his boots, and a fiercely set expression on his face. He didn’t even see the cowled figure which effaced itself so hurriedly from his path.

The monk, having let him go by, tapped at the door, received the Deo Gratias, and went in. Anselm was sitting pensively at his desk. ‘Ah, Brother Bernhard. Did you see him?’

‘Benedicite, Father. The man who has just gone? Yes.’

‘You could hardly have missed him, I daresay. You may have noticed, Brother Bernhard, that it’s very difficult to be a Christian. One falls short often enough oneself and when it comes to preaching perfection to other men – how does one not sound patronising? Or hypocritical? I wanted to help that young man but the only advice I could possibly give him merely made him angry.’

Brother Bernhard refrained from committing the sin of curiosity verbally and hoped the abbot wouldn’t see that he was committing it with his eyes. He looked at the desk top, as a precaution.

Anselm however took pity on him. ‘He’s a devout youth, of a devout family. He and his sister recently made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. On the way, his sister was kidnapped. Her brother and the friends who were in the party found that she had been sold into slavery and man-aged to learn to whom – a Moorish noble in Spain. He refused to sell her back to them and her brother wants me to make representations to the Moorish authorities, or try to intercede with her buyer myself. He overestimates my influence, poor fellow. It really can’t be done. I tried to offer him comfort by pointing out that there are other aspects to these things. It has long been agreed within the church that Christians should not repine too much if they suffer enslavement for where better can a Christian soul cultivate humility? It is a way of taking up one’s cross. But he resented it.’

Brother Bernhard wanted to say: ‘I’m not surprised!’ but restrained himself.

‘He said some harsh things,’ Anselm admitted. His face, worn thin by abstemiousness and continual sentry- duty against his own human faults, rarely showed colour but there were two crimson spots on it now. They were already fading, however. Anselm had convicted himself of clumsiness but not of giving bad advice. ‘But I didn’t call you in simply to break off an unpleasant interview. I have a letter to dictate. It’s to that English earl who has invited me to England.’ Bernhard at once went over to the writing desk, which was always in readiness. ‘The usual salutations,’ said Anselm.

When the dictation was finished, Anselm glanced at his scribe, now putting the stopper back in his ink bottle, and rising, moved to the window. Beyond it were the hills which bordered this lonely Norman valley of Bee, far away from Normandy’s raucous and competitive heart in Rouen. ‘One of the disadvantages of knowing you all so well, my son, is that I can hear you thinking. Say it.’

‘My lord, I… we…’

‘We. You discuss such matters among yourselves, I know. You shouldn’t, but you do. You, plural, think…?

‘My lord, if this English earl wants your help so much in founding this monastery he speaks of, would it not be, well…?’

‘Courteous at the least to go?’ Anselm turned his back on the window. ‘Is that it? My son, there are plenty of prelates, even in England where the king seems determined to reduce their numbers, who can advise this ageing nobleman with the bloodthirsty past and the desire for repentance, on how to save his soul. He does not need me. One of the king’s friends, Robert FitzHamon, is at this moment planning to found a monastery too and has asked my advice, but found an exchange of letters sufficient. No. It is the English bishops who want me in England, for their own reasons. It is they who have urged this invitation. Listen to me, Brother Bernhard, and report what I say back to your brethren. The fact is that certain good but misguided people in England and, I fear, here in Bee, are campaigning to have me nominated as ... I find it difficult even to put this into words... as the new Archbishop of Canterbury.’ Colour reappeared in Anselm’s face. ‘It is improper even to admit that I know of the suggestion. But the time has come to stop these attempts to manoeuvre me into position, as it were. You know, Brother Bernhard – because you’ve taken the dictation – that I have written repeatedly to King Rufus telling him that it is his duty to appoint a new Archbishop. But you also know that I didn’t volunteer myself. I should be a disastrous choice. Archbishop of Canterbury? Archbishop of Catastrophe would be more accurate. It would be my duty to instruct the king in his moral obligations. I should shortly be even more unpopular with him than I was with that unhappy young man. King Rufus’ character being what it is, it wouldn’t be long, I feel sure, before he disliked me so much that I wouldn’t be able to function at all.

‘I could have worked with his father. Old King William committed many terrible deeds, but he knew they were terrible; he desired virtue even if he couldn’t attain it. But King Rufus, from all accounts, enjoys his sins. There is this about the practice of humility, Brother Bernhard. It is difficult but it can save you from still graver difficulties. It stops your eyes from ever getting bigger than your stomach.’

When Brother Bernhard had gone, Anselm turned back to the window. It was summer and above the window arch was the busy flicker of wings as the house martins came and went from their nestholes under the monastery’s eaves. Across the valley were the dense green woods full of shy wild creatures, living lives that were hard and- dangerous but innocent, Anselm thought, untroubled by mankind’s dreadful privilege of the knowledge of good and evil. Untroubled by guilt.

He hadn’t told Bernhard everything about the interview with the angry youth. He should not, he castigated himself now, no, really he should not have said to that poor boy, who would certainly never see his sister again, that she was to be envied in one respect, since she had seen the land where the feet of Christ had trodden.

‘Envied?’ the boy had said scornfully. ‘She’s beautiful. She’s trodden land herself by now. Trodden as in cock and hen and an infidel’s doing the treading. And please don’t offer me any more pious cant about taking up crosses,’ he added viciously. That was the point at which Anselm, shaking his head sadly, had rung for his scribe, whereupon the youth had spun round, with a swish of his cloak, and marched out.

And the boy had been right. For who was Anselm to talk of crosses, who had never been asked to carry one? He had entered his monastery in the hope of following his lord to Calvary but where had he found himself instead? Here in this serene valley, this orderly house of prayer and study and the mind-cleansing singing of the Office. It offered all that he desired. Where, in all this, was his cross? Did he want to refuse Canterbury truly out of humility, or because for him it would be the end of his life in Bee?

Watching the busy house martins, it seemed to him that their innocent domesticity and that of all creatures like them, birds, beasts or people, could only be defended by huge and secret sacrifices. Christ had shown the way and those who chose to follow Him must expect at His bidding to make their own.

What if this unwanted honour were His bidding to His servant, Anselm?

The first time that Ralph des Aix, lying in the darkness on his crackly straw pallet, saw a shaded taper move across the hall towards him and felt the furred, thickset body invade the privacy of his rugs, he was terrified.

He lay with pounding heart, conscious of the heat of the human furnace beside him, and wondered why he had been so blind, so naive. He should have expected this. Now that it was too late, he thought that some part of him had expected it. But Rufus’ extraordinary court with its mix of hardheaded political giants and decorative hangers-on had both bemused and excited him. So too had the unlooked for favour of a king. His instincts had warned him but he hadn’t listened.

Confusingly, he liked Rufus. Quite apart from the fact that of all men, a king was the one with the most land in his gift, Rufus was fun. De Warenne had been amiably dull. Helias was stimulating but he was pious, prone to preface remarks with phrases like: ‘With God’s help.’ On his first day as Rufus’ employee, Ralph had heard the king tell an abbot: ‘Leave God’s will out of it. Our will is the one that matters here.’ It was exhilarating.

Rufus’ gruff whisper spoke in his ear. ‘Don’t be afraid. I mean you no harm.’ The very words, thought Ralph wildly, that he himself had used when coaxing a nervous girl at La Fleche to leave her haymaking and let him repeat the delightful experience he had had for the first time just before he left home. Had he not been nearly paralysed between the dread of what was about to happen and the equal dread of what would happen instead if he sat up and shouted for help, he could have laughed. Then Rufus’ hand was on him. ‘Don’t be alarmed. Give me your hand. Ah. That’s nice. Is this nice too? Are these three moles that I can feel on your chest? They’re in a straight line, on a slant, like the belt of Orion. Oh my dear boy, you’re so finely made…’

In the event, there was less to fear that he had thought. If he could once accustom himself to the sheer unnaturalness of it all, he could manage. Discomfort could be borne, caresses made a technical skill. He could learn to receive them in turn, to throw his head back, close his eyes and shudder with pretended delight. Could learn to shut out of his mind the fact that the enquiring hand belonged to a man. Could learn to whisper answers to the lovetalk.

Could construct in his mind a barrier between the day and the night. Again and again, when morning came, he would look back on the events of the night with amazement and disbelief that the young man who figured in those amorous passages with King Rufus was himself. At the beginning, the amazement and disbelief were compounded by shame. On the very first morning, when they were all breaking their fast in the hall, Rufus having left him and gone to join his nobles, Ralph found himself scarcely able to meet the eyes of his fellows.

De Warenne was still at the court then and with him, among his knights, was Richard. They had been glad to meet again when Richard came to de Warenne’s household for his annual knight service, and had formed the habit of talking together during the informal breakfast hour. At dinner, Richard, as a knight, was always higher up the table but in the morning, people ate standing up, wandered about and spoke to whom they would.

On that first morning after Rufus had come to him, he observed Richard approaching, made believe not to have seen him, and went out of the hall. In the end, he supposed, if Rufus persisted with his attentions, it would become known and Richard would find out. But he wanted to conceal the truth from his friend as long as he could. Richard was too straightforward, too normal, surely, to understand this and Ralph had no words with which to explain. He was afraid of losing the friendship.

But as the days and nights passed, he grew hardened to his curious new position and could conduct himself by day as if nothing had happened. Before Richard went home, they were on easy terms again. Gossip there certainly was; Ralph could tell that by the remarkable degree of politeness with which even men of rank now addressed him. But if Richard had heard it, he gave no sign, and behaved as though Ralph’s new post on the royal hunt staff were the only change in Ralph’s life.

It was no honorary position. He worked by day with the king’s personal huntsman Croc, who was perfectly well aware of Ralph’s real function in the court; was, like everyone else, polite to the king’s new friend, but seemed to feel it his duty to keep this latest addition to his staff well occupied.

Croc was not a knight huntsman, most of whom lived in the districts where they had land, lending hounds and harbourers to the king when he visited the area. Croc was a plain man, half-English, well on in life, small and wiry with veins and muscles knotted round his bones like ivy round a tree. He spoke Anglo-French patois most of the time, and crudely, scattering misplaced aspirates with abandon, although he was quite capable of speaking correct French and in the king’s hearing, did so. He had been using the rough accent for so long that he had forgotten why he took to it but Ralph suspected that it was simply a means of refusing to lick the arses, in Croc’s own inelegant phrase, of the numerous noblemen with whom he spent so much time. The only one of them he actually admired was Rufus himself.

The king in turn seemed to like Croc and occasionally called him in to add his name when charters were being witnessed. Anyone who could write his name was eligible for that and Croc, surprisingly, was literate. He was in fact a failed monastic novice. ‘They chucked me out and I was thankful. Stuck inside they walls all day – bah!’ said Croc.

His business was to organise hunting for Rufus wherever the king chanced to be. ‘If we’re in a royal forest where there’s a Keeper of the Walk, or anywhere where there’s a Knight Huntsman handy, it’s easy,’ he told Ralph. ‘We just hand the job to them and make sure they do it right, which they don’t. Not ever. Always miles to go to find a stag or else they’ve let the chases get overgrown. You’ll see.’

But when Rufus’ vast and continually mobile court had made one of its landslide descents on a place outside forest jurisdiction and possessed of neither Knight Huntsman nor Keeper, Croc and his staff must themselves search for sign and question or bribe the locals to find the whereabouts of game. These occasions had their side benefits. Rufus’ court was bigger than his father’s and still growing. Feeding and housing it on its travels was a massive task usually achieved simply by commandeering what was needed along the way.

Local populations, therefore, on getting wind of its approach, were apt to remove portable goods and all edibles, including those on the hoof, into the nearest cellar, wood or similar hiding place. Royal gratuities could be earned, said Croc, by discovering such missing items and sequestering them for the king.

Ralph’s life became a strange, compartmented affair, divided between the forest glades where he and Croc searched for deer tracks, the descents on villages where as a king’s officer he searched out provisions, and the feverish hours with Rufus on Ralph’s pallet or, sometimes, in the king’s down bed.

It was in the forest, he knew, that he was truly at home. Forests had a thousand moods. A wood on a summer morning, bright with dew and haunted by birdsong, was a different world from the same wood in early November where the leaves were dying in the colours of flame and an immense dignity like the funeral pyre of a pagan king. Different again, as night from day or Heaven from Valhalla, was the winter forest, with the bare branches outlined black against the snow, and a cold orange sun slanting through. He was aware, in the forest, that what he felt was love, or near to it.

With Rufus, he did not know what he felt. Fear, excitement, admiration were all there, mingled with distaste, which was not only for the histrionics in Rufus’ bed. He made useful tips from, but found he loathed, the harrying of the villages. Too many of the houses reminded him of Aix. Yet when he was with Rufus, tenderness was also present. In some secret fashion which was not just physical, Rufus appeared to need comfort and Ralph found in himself an instinct to provide it.

It was a restless life. Rufus was for ever on the move and Ralph and Croc went with him. When he crossed the Channel to make peace with Curthose and sign the Treaty of Rouen which was to seal it, they went too. They were with him when war broke out again.

‘So we’re off to battle,’ Croc said as they loaded their belongings on to their shared pack mule. ‘Curt’ose and Rufus are settin’ off together in a state of brotherly love – first time in years – to put young ’Enry out on the street, pore little sod.’ He used the same tone of gloomy commiseration he would have employed when preparing to put down a deformed pup. In Croc’s eyes, the luckless Henry had no prospects, now or ever. ‘It’s rotten, when you think about it. They’ve cut him right out of the succession and carved up the lands he thought he’d got a life lease on, and no one paid the pore little bleeder back for that lease, neither. Just, “oh, it’s only young ’Enry; if I want to give Rufus some land in Normandy to buy him off leading any more of my burghers astray like Conan, I’ll give him ’Enry’s and hang on to mine.” That’s how Curt’ose thinks.’

Ralph had heard all the details already but not couched in Croc’s colourful language. Amused, he said: ‘Go on.’

‘They told him he can go to Brittany if he wants, or Italy, or the ’Oly Land or ’Ell. So he’s dug hisself into the toughest fortress on what he still reckons is his land. Mont St. Michel, it’s called. Ever ’eard of it, young Ralph?’

‘It’s where the Brittany coast and the Norman coast meet,’ said Ralph, ‘I think it’s a monastery. Funny place to conduct a war.’

‘Got a warlike abbot, though,’ said Croc thoughtfully. ‘I mind a bit about it now. You saying it’s a monastery brought it back. Been there once. It’s right in the middle of a ruddy great quicksand. Can’t blame him, ’Enry, I mean. He got Rouen back for the duke, bloody ungrateful it is if you arst me, treating him like that, even if he did shove old Curt’ose out of the way and grab all the glory. Reckon Curt’ose is jealous. Well, not for us to ’ave opinions, young Ralph.’ He tightened a girth and patted the mule. ‘We go where Rufus goes. That’s the way ’e is. Got to be fighting someone. If it’s not ’is uncle it’s ’is brother and if it’s not one brother then it’s t’other. Let’s ’ope it don’t take long. I’d sooner be after game than pushed into archers’ lines or sitting down round a castle. What do you do with it when you’ve taken it?’ asked Croc logically. ‘Can’t eat it.’

It took a very long time indeed.

Mont St. Michel was indeed surrounded by a ruddy great quicksand. It stood, a lonely semi-island, in the midst of a wide estuary into which not one but several rivers flowed. At high tide it was ringed by sea; at ebbtide the sands appeared, segmented by the rivers and passable only on paths invisible to the uninformed eye. Informed eyes were few and local and Henry had prudently herded most of them into the Mont with him. The place was certainly well designed by nature to hold off a siege and perhaps because of this, its abbot had for years had fantasies about doing just that and had kept the Mont well-victualled.

Since it was impossible to camp close to it, Curthose and Rufus contented themselves by placing camps at strategic points round the perimeter of the bay, occupying the town of Avranches to the north, and putting a blockade fleet at sea. ‘I’d let him stew in the Mont and not bother to besiege it,’ said Curthose, ‘only he’d be in Helias of Maine’s pocket before we could turn round. He’s tried to raise men from Maine already, only luckily we caught the messenger. We’ll just have to sit down outside St. Michel until he gives in.’

‘You can write this letter for me,’ said King Malcolm of Scotland to his wife. ‘You can be my secretary. That way it’ll come from both of us. You’d best write that it does. That sister o’ yourn will tak more notice, likely, of you than of me. Your sister,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘hates men.’

‘Oh, Malcolm. I’m sure that isn’t true. Christina was called to the life of religion and has taken a nun’s vows of celibacy but I am certain it wasn’t that she hated anyone. She loved Christ more, that’s all.’

‘I’m maybe sharper ower these matters than you are, lass. But never mind. As long as she doesna teach our Edith to hate men.’ He glanced down the hall, to where his ten-year-old daughter was trying to teach a young dog to jump through a hoop. Malcolm doted on Edith and did not care who knew it. He was not afraid of being laughed at because few people dared to laugh at Malcolm. To laugh at someone was to underestimate them, and of those who in the past had underestimated Malcolm, few remained alive.

‘Edith’s for a prince’s bed and board, one of these days,’ he said now to Margaret. ‘So write this. To Christina, Abbess of Romsey Abbey in the county of Hampshire in England, from Malcolm King of Scotland, Greeting. Then tell her that we’re pleased to know that she’s willing to tak charge of our Edith, and educate her in reading and writing and Latin and account-keeping and stitchery and all the things a royal lady should know, and that we’re sending Edith to her with the bearer of this letter.’ At the end of the hall, Edith broke off her game with the dog in order to sneeze. ‘Ye’re maybe right to want to send her south,’ Malcolm observed. ‘This climate’s ower sair on her. Be milder down there. But… now, mark ye put this in and put it clearly. There’s to be no misunderstandings. The girl is going to Romsey for her education only. She’s destined for marriage. She’s no’ to become a nun nor to wear a veil. She’s to keep that in mind and so’s your sister Christina. Make it very plain, my lass.’

The siege was boring. The besiegers spent much time literally sitting down outside Mont St. Michel, on folding camp furniture, burnishing helmets for lack of livelier occupation. Patrols were organised from time to time, which played a game of tag with the foraging parties Henry regularly despatched across the safe paths, in an attempt to dodge away inland to raid farms for fresh provisions.

As the boredom intensified, the antagonists developed a species of bond. Henry took to sending out little bands of knights who cantered up and down in front of the besiegers’ camps until someone rode out to fight them. The resultant trials of arms were half serious and half sporting, ‘and a nice distraction while that young bugger gets his foraging expeditions past us,’ said FitzHamon angrily. ‘There’s supposed to be a war on!’ In FitzHamon’s large, craggy face his mouth looked smaller than it really was, as though his facial muscles were not mobile enough to let it open wide. But now he managed it, and from the square dark aperture there issued a rumble of exasperated laughter. ‘All the king says is: “Charge the onlookers to watch, it’ll help with the siege expenses!” He’s ridden out to joust with the enemy himself, more than once!’ FitzHamon threw up his hands and made an indescribable noise. ‘Aaargh! The crosses I have to bear!’