II
JOHN BREKESPERE PEERED over the northern battlement of the White Tower and shuddered. The dizzying expanse of pallid stone stretched away beneath him, finally disappearing into an endless blank gloom – a channel of impenetrable black between the walls upon which he now stood guard, and the snow-capped edge of the outer wall floating in a sea of darkness beyond.
As he stared, and his eyes adjusted, he fancied he could just make out the ground of the inner ward far below, a dusting of light snow picking out its frozen ruts. He swayed, and drew back from the edge. He’d never been good with heights – a curious trait, given that he stood at least a foot taller than most men – yet somehow, the compulsion to subject himself to them had driven him to the edges of things throughout his whole life. It had been like that at Dover. Something – some morbid compulsion – had made him gawp over the dizzying brink of the white cliffs, even as his brain was screaming at him to back away. He’d stood there, toes on the crumbling edge, hair standing on end – or so it felt – swaying towards the yawning abyss, unable to banish the image of his great bulk cartwheeling down past cackling, shrieking birds, clothes whipped and tugged by the wind in a moment of tranquil suspension, before bursting like a sack of manure on the rocks below. He sometimes thought it must be the Devil taunting him with these desires, these terrifying pictures. Each time, he’d pull himself back – but the weird thrill of it haunted his nightmares.
These walls reminded him of those cliffs. He idly wondered if they had always been whitewashed like this, and whether the Conqueror had, in fact, meant to echo Dover.
As he stared out over the dim, barely perceptible lights of London, a bitter wind from the north shook his frosted beard and flung icy flecks against his face. One of the lights – ahead and some little way to the right, though weaker than the weakest star – was in all probability that of his own home. He briefly tried to identify it, as he had striven to do on countless other nights, knowing all the while that the attempt was futile. It was late, anyway; perhaps, by now, it was extinguished and his wife slept soundly there. He hoped this might be the case. They were so close, and yet he hadn’t seen her for so many weeks. As the wind buffeted his face from the direction in which she lay, its frozen pinpricks stinging the half-numb flesh, he was suddenly gripped by a familiar, terrible yearning, pulling at his innards like a physical pain. His rational mind struggled to subdue his rebellious heart – but no sooner had the feeling gone than part of him ached for its return.
It had been hard for her, coming from the Holy Land. Not that it hadn’t been hard for him, after the horrors of Hattin, after imprisonment, after the slow return to life. But he had been able to leave that behind – physically, at least – and had been granted a homecoming. She had left everything she knew for this land of soul-crushing winters and staring, suspicious, hate-filled eyes. Sosa was a Syriac Christian, as devout as any man or woman he had met. But when they looked at her here, he knew they saw only “Saracen” – whatever that meant. He wasn’t sure himself any more. These things seemed so simple at a distance; far less so when seen up close. It was, he noted, often the women who were the most spiteful towards her. Perhaps they had lost someone to the crusade. Still, he found he constantly tried to reassure her that their situation was otherwise, wanting her to see the best in his fellow countrymen – hoping, somehow, that plain old good cheer could yet carry them through it. She would smile, and put a hand to his face, and kiss his broad brow, the light glinting in her beautiful dark eyes, and tell him she was happy. Yet he could not quell the growing conviction that he, and this whole great kingdom of which he had told her so much, had failed her.
Another deep shudder racked his huge frame. He was chilled to the marrow, and he needed a piss. He stamped his feet in a hopeless attempt to coax his benumbed toes back to life, passed his spear from one hand to the other, flexing his frozen fingers, and tried to think of something else.
It was Longchamp who had kept them apart, Longchamp who was responsible for all their recent woes.
John Brekespere had been recruited to the Tower guard over a year ago by William Puintellus, Constable of the Tower, as a personal favour to a knight named Geoffrey of Launceston. Launceston had also fought at Hattin – if briefly – with the advance guard of Count Raymond of Tripoli. Raymond’s cavalry had charged through Saracen lines only to find themselves outside the fray, with the remainder of the Christian army encircled and overwhelmed. They had not returned to the battle.
It is said that the guilt of the survivor is the heaviest to bear. So it was with Launceston. From that day, wherever he could, he had sought to make amends by engineering advantages for veterans of Hattin who had gone through what he had not. John Brekespere did not know how Launceston had come to hear of him – perhaps those differences that made Sosa so stand out amongst the English had, for once, worked in their favour. Whatever it was, he did not tempt fate by questioning this stroke of luck.
Puintellus was a dour but supremely practical sort – lacking humour, but organised and fair-minded in his dealings with other men – ideally suited to the responsibilities with which he was charged. It was said he was more mason than soldier, but Brekespere liked and respected the constable. All the garrisoned guards did. It was Puintellus who had managed the building of the new walls, Puintellus who had maintained the security and daily life of the Tower – a complex enough task even without the logistical challenges of the building works.
Puintellus, however, was directly answerable to Longchamp. Norman by birth and upbringing, William Longchamp – Bishop of Ely, Lord Chancellor, Chief Justiciar – was the most powerful man in England. Personally appointed by King Richard to manage his realm – even though he knew little of its ways, cared even less, and spoke no English – Longchamp was monarch in all but name. Wherever he went in his diocese or the city of London, the people noted the vast retinue of servants and the menagerie of animals that accompanied him on his travels, and weighed the need for them against their crippling taxes. Where other, more subtle leaders would have sought to engender loyalties, Longchamp somehow succeeded in alienating entire populations, and inspired only resentment and hatred amongst the barons. To secure his position, he granted castles to his own relatives, and when faced with resistance from existing castellans, attempted to remove them by force of arms. It was Longchamp who was behind the project of improving and expanding the Tower’s defences. Though this undoubtedly had the approval of the absent King, Longchamp clearly saw within it an opportunity to secure his own position at the heart of the realm, and to these ends had put Puintellus and his men under the lash.
In their struggle against this scheming usurper, the barons had found an unlikely ally.
Prince John was little loved in England. Of late, however, he had unexpectedly redeemed himself by rallying an army in defence of the beleaguered castles in the north. Few doubted that the prince – humiliatingly sidelined by his brother Richard – had an agenda of his own, but for now anyone was preferable to Longchamp. “Better the Devil you know,” became a familiar truism.
John succeeded in halting Longchamp’s territorial ambitions. For a time, there existed an uneasy truce. Then, the Lord Chancellor went too far. Seeing a chance to discredit and eliminate another potential rival to his authority, Longchamp had had his brother-in-law, the castellan of Dover, arrest Geoffrey, Archbishop of York. The archbishop resisted, was besieged in St Martin’s Priory, then violently dragged from a place of sanctuary and flung into a cell on a trumped-up charge of treason. The fact that a holy place had been violated and the right of asylum rent asunder was an unsettling enough echo of Thomas Becket as it was – but this archbishop was also brother to Prince John and King Richard. It was all the excuse John needed to rid England of Longchamp for good.
What happened next burned hot in Brekespere’s memory.
It had been a bright, cold day in October and all was proceeding as normal – the familiar buzz, if anything, lightened in spirit by the arrival of the sun and its banishment of the fog of previous days. The masons continued the works on the new walls and towers. Surveyors and enginers continued to scratch their heads over the issue of the moat – one of Longchamp’s ongoing obsessions. Guards were changed, food was cooked and consumed, horses were stabled, groomed and shod. Everyone complained about the hours of work forced upon them. Nothing was out of the ordinary.
At the time the news broke, Brekespere was not on watch. He had just made the climb up to the west battlement of the keep to inform the duty guard that an inspection would be made later that morning (Puintellus liked to give the guards warning about surprise inspections, in spite of Longchamp’s wishes to the contrary – or perhaps because of them) when he had spied a single figure approaching the Tower at a run. News. There followed a commotion at the gatehouse. The man was admitted, but soon disappeared from view, having crossed the outer ward in haste, accompanied by a watchman and two guards. Moments later, the whole place was in an uproar, its orderly routines replaced by urgent cries and frantic preparations. Still aloft on the battlements, Brekespere had called out to those below. Their hasty, half-heard replies were disjointed, the story – perhaps already third or fourth hand – confused and contradictory, but the nub of it was clear. A great army was coming. Prince John was marching on London.
Brekespere’s guts lurched. Was it possible? Having restored Lincoln and taken the castles of Nottingham and Tickhill, had John’s successes made him hungry for greater glory, and had he now set his sights on the greatest prize in the kingdom? Brekespere broke into a heavy run towards the northwest tower. Before he could reach it he saw, out to the west, a great throng surging towards the Tower precinct along Eastcheap – its progress rapid but disordered, a colourful entourage at its head.
By the time he had emerged from the keep into the inner ward, it had become clear that this rabble was not the expected army – which, he also learned, was many times its size – but Longchamp, fleeing ahead of it. The Chancellor was seeking refuge in the Conqueror’s impregnable White Tower – the king’s tower, his tower – with his entire personal guard behind him. As Brekespere strode across the courtyard of the outer ward, his eyes searching frantically for Puintellus, the gates were flung wide, and in poured a great mob of puffing, sweating humanity. Longchamp had arrived.
Never was there a more graphic demonstration of the scale of the man’s vanity and the paucity of his wisdom. He had brought wagons laden with boxes, barrels, bolts of rich cloth, pieces of furniture and every kind of unnecessary thing, unidentifiable animals – some in cages, some cavorting on chains, often threatening to break free in the disordered crowd that swarmed after him. There were dogs in eager, darting packs, horses of all sorts – some laden, but many not – and more ladies and ladies’ maids, pages and stewards, cooks and servants, grooms and standard bearers than one would have thought to find attending anything less than an Emperor. Behind this, his army – mostly mercenaries from the Lowlands, judging by their looks – trudged in a surly, seemingly unending torrent, their austere demeanour an absurd contrast to the foppish opulence and gaudy colours of Longchamp’s entourage.
They flooded into the Tower precinct, crowding out the masons and labourers, crushing against the guards and each other, their hot bodies and rank, sweaty smell filling every corner of the keep until all were standing shoulder to shoulder with barely room to move.
And there was Longchamp himself. Defiant, enraged, he strode agitatedly back and forth, gaudily clad in what appeared to be some approximation of papal robes, with the ludicrous addition of a pair of baggy pantaloons in red and gold silk – a failed attempt to make him look like he had spent time in the Holy Land, although everyone knew he had been no further east than Paris. Flinging his arms about in fury, the gold adorning every finger flashing as he did so, he renounced John as a traitor in a language incomprehensible to most present, spit flying from his thin, pinched face as he did so. Evidently, he believed he could make a stand here. But it was a ridiculous gesture – one that everyone, right down to the humblest kitchen boy, could see was already doomed to failure.
And so it proved.
When John’s army surrounded the Tower, the prince did not squander his energies by battering walls that he already knew were unassailable, and which, in any case, might one day be his. He simply waited, knowing what all those inside – except, apparently, their master – had known from the start: that in a matter of very few days, life within would become unbearable.
Longchamp sent out appeals to the people of London. He ranted incoherently from the battlements, demanding that they rise up in his defence. Few can have understood his words – but they understood the man and his predicament well enough. As one, they folded their arms and stood back to let John do his worst. John, meanwhile, had a dinner table set up within sight of the battlements, and made sure Longchamp could see how well he ate and drank while conditions within the overstuffed castle grew steadily worse. By the fourth day, all resistance had collapsed, and Longchamp emerged, purple-faced, humiliated – forced to surrender the keys by his own men, subtly spurred on by Puintellus.
What became of Longchamp and his guard after that, Brekespere never knew. Nor did he discover what happened to those of his fellows who had been foolish enough to express loyalty for Longchamp. He was simply glad to have been one of the survivors. Within days, they were forgotten. A stain that had been scrubbed out. A kind of normality was restored – the surest sign of which was the return of the suspicion and resentment with which the Tower’s unexpected new master, Prince John, was regarded.
So, it was over. For now. Brekespere sighed a thick, cloudy breath, then turned and stared southwards, in the direction of the Thames. Between him and the opposite battlement overlooking the river, the twin pitched roofs of the White Tower stretched, several feet below the level of the parapet walkway. Beneath one of these – the left one, he thought – the prince now slept. He supposed he was grateful to their royal guest for ridding them of the weasel Longchamp. He just wished the prince himself would now bugger off so things could properly return to normal.
It suddenly struck him how much the roofs resembled coffins – huge, stone sarcophagi, built to contain giants, sunk side by side within the keep’s walls. They brought to mind a half-remembered story from his childhood – one his mother used to tell, of a pair of titans called Corineus and Gogmagog who slept beneath London and would rise up to protect the poor people of the city when their need was greatest. Looking back, she often told him tales of noble giants – a tactic, he now realised, to make him feel more comfortable with his own large stature, but also, perhaps, to inspire him to worthy deeds. He wondered whether she now looked down upon those deeds, and whether they seemed worthy enough.
As he gazed, lost in thought, a fine, powdery snow – too cold to stick – blew across the angled, grey stone, forming an uneven, constantly shifting layer. As fine as flour. Brekespere snorted at that. In the first half of his life he’d seen enough flour to last an eternity. He turned and let his eyes wander past the barely perceptible speckle of lights across North London to the deeper dark beyond.
Here, he knew – though all was now invisible – the mud and stench of the city gave way to a pleasant landscape of tilled fields, level meadows and pasture criss-crossed by streams. Beyond that, just visible during daylight, spread a vast forest, its copses teeming with stags, does, boars, and wild bulls. And somewhere out there, an arrow shot from the hamlet known as Isledon, was his father’s mill.
A pang of guilt pierced him, mixed with a stubborn defiance. Apart from the brief time when his mother had fallen into her final illness, he had not clapped eyes on the place since he had been a boy. In those childhood days, he had been known as John the Miller’s Son, or, occasionally, John Attemille. Life had seemed simple then. His older brother would one day take over stewardship of the mill, and Young John himself had no responsiblities other than to perform such daily tasks as his father required. To what lay beyond – to adulthood – he gave no thought, although roaring around the countryside, he entertained vague, happy dreams of adventure, inspired by the knights and men-at-arms he occasionally saw passing along the great north road – the main thoroughfare carrying his father’s flour into London. Armed with sticks, he and his brother would practise their fighting skills in the woods – until his size began to make the outcome a foregone conclusion, and his brother, increasingly resentful, gave up the good-natured sparring and took to belittling him in whatever ways he could.
One day, when he was fifteen, he had woken up to find his brother gone, and his father weeping. At no other time in his life was Brekespere to witness that, not even when his mother died. Young John never knew what had happened between his father and brother. His father never spoke of it. He simply became sullen and withdrawn, and immersed himself in the backbreaking toil as if it had become a form of self-punishment – now with Young John at his side. Gradually, daily routines changed. John’s responsibilities grew. Then, one day, months later, John looked about him and suddenly understood that his entire world had shifted. His brother was probably dead; he was the son now. The mill – which he had never expected, and never really wanted – would fall to him.
Work continued. His father’s mood brightened. Over time, Young John – gradually, grudgingly – came to accept his fate. A year after the disappearance, he had finally begun to embrace it, even regarding it as good fortune. A little older, and a little wiser, he now understood that this had brought him closer to his father than he had ever been – that, for the first time, his father had shown him the love and respect that he had not even realised was missing. The future, now, was set. It had a shape. He would take on his father’s occupation, and with it the name “Miller”.
Then the impossible happened. His brother came back. The boy who had run away to war returned a man – but he had not returned undamaged. He was nervous, with darting eyes, and prone to forced laughter, and although far humbler than John remembered, it was plain to see that it was not the humility of maturity, but the weak flickering of a ruined spirit, broken by suffering and terror. He had chased the adventure of which John had so long dreamed, and its realities had destroyed him.
His father did not hesitate. He forgave the errant son and reinstated him as heir to the mill, apparently without a second thought for the boy who had kept it going these past twenty months. It was, he said ecstatically, just like the gospel story. Young John, suddenly bereft of purpose – of everything he thought he had gained – could only nod stupidly. His mother looked upon the scene with a resigned but strangely melancholy look, which John could not fully interpret.
A week later, Young John met some soldiers upon the great north road, who told him King Henry was recruiting mercenaries. There was rebellion brewing amongst his barons, they said. John took the long-handled guisarme that his father used for lopping apples, and joined them.
When he went to London, they had called him John of Isledon. Then, as his travels took him further afield – far beyond where any had heard of that place – he became John O’London. He had fought against the king of Scotland under that name, until circumstances brought him up against several other Johns hailing from that city. Isledon and the mill all but forgotten, he fought in Normandy, Aquitaine and France and on into the Holy Land under an endless succession of nicknames, few of which pleased him.
“Brekespere” had been recent. It was acquired during a skirmish with some rabble on Old Fish Street in which – thanks to his prodigious strength and uncompromisingly robust tactics (he had fought with a quarterstave as a boy, and so liked to use every part of the pole) – he had managed to snap his favoured guisarme clean in two. But, at last, he had a name he actually liked, and whose use he would encourage. It made him sound like a soldier, at least. Certainly it was preferable to nickname he had suffered under during so much of his time in the Holy Land: “John Lyttel”.
He peered over the precipitous walls and shuddered again, shivering to his bones. He’d slope off to the dark corner by the northeast tower in a while and relieve his bladder. Nothing, he told himself, could possibly happen in those few moments.