These were very dark ages. Thus mused Henri de Turold as he stumbled through one of the very darkest bits and stubbed his toes on a beam of worm-ridden English oak. Cursing the ghastly country and its truly awful people to an eternity of pain, he hobbled on down the corridor.
‘But we’re emerging from the darkness, sire; these are modern times,’ learned men gabbled on all the time. To Henri’s way of thinking, emergence from the dark would be a lot quicker if he set fire to England and all the learned men in it.
It had to be said that Henri’s way of thinking was slow and laborious at the best of times. If anyone wanted goose feathers putting on their arrows, they would turn to Henri de Turold. If they wanted a decent conversation, they'd turn to the goose.
Yet the Norman made up for this absence of brain with a huge portion of good looks. Towering five foot nine if he was an inch, he had a chest like a barrel – the inside of one – and a stomach that couldn't muster the strength to reach his belt, let along hang over it. When he stood up straight his knees were so far apart that he didn’t so much mount a horse as overwhelm it.
His face was normally an example of Norman power and grandeur, having been hit very hard, many times, by horses’ hoofs. This had re-arranged his features into that pattern most favoured by the ladies of the Norman court. At this particular moment, however, his visage was contorted into a grimace of disdain that made him look almost English.
This strange moment of the night saw him stumbling through the very strange castle of his fellow Norman, and intellectual equal, Lord Robert Grosmal. Henri appreciated that Grosmal deserved the estate as reward for slaughtering the women and children of Hastings, but why had he filled it with darkness? England’s darkness might not be actually darker than anywhere else, but he always felt it was ignoring him at best, if not actively conspiring against him. Not like Norman darkness, which was friendly and welcoming and allowed you to get up to all sorts of things without being spotted.
To rid himself of this cursed gloom, Henri held a candle in front of him – one that seemed in league with the murk and strangely reluctant to help. It was admittedly a long, fat thing with a flame on top, but those were all the candle-like qualities it was prepared to accommodate.
The candle maker of Robert Grosmal had a reputation, and it wasn’t a good one. The thing guttered and spluttered and dropped about enough light to illuminate its own shaft, which, being made of something truly unspeakable, was best not illuminated at all. No one knew quite what it was the man did to a candle, but they all knew it was horrible. They were the only variety that could make a moth leave a room.
‘What the hell am I doing here?’ Henri mumbled for about the third time. Drips of almost sentient wax did their best to cling on to the life of the candle before dropping towards the floor, swerving strangely as they went and landing with a soft, hot splash on his naked toes.
Walking naked through the halls of this disgusting house in January was clearly mad – but so was walking anywhere naked in January. Normally de Turold took off no clothes at all between October and May, and even then was considered outlandishly hardy. His only splash of common sense was the floppy yellow cloth hat on his head. Perhaps this would postpone the moment he froze to death.
For earlier that evening his desires, long dormant or satisfied by killing things, had taken control of his body, and he was only obeying orders.
Over dinner the Lady Foella, a Saxon beauty of such distinction she almost looked French, had hinted that if he were to walk naked from his chamber to hers there might be a warm welcome for him...
Henri’s reverie was broken and dragged to the present by an odour, slinking out of the opening to Robert's new fangled garderobe. The Norman paused for a moment to consider his bowels, or rather they grabbed his attention by rattling like six squirrels in a sack of walnuts. Mindful of all the trouble he had been having down there lately, he decided to visit the facilities before descending, literally he hoped, on Lady Foella.
A testing clench of his muscles released a scent that would have made a pig of little discernment vomit, never mind a lady of refinement. The odour of ordure did brief battle with the scents drifting from the garderobe, but soon gave up an unequal battle and retired from the field. If Henri had been visiting a serving girl she could have been told to clean up afterwards, but Foella had class.
Nipping quickly into the room, he followed one of the garderobe night lights as its disgusting smoke seeped into the air. There were two planted on the stone paving by sides of two holes, badly knocked into the chamber floor. He could have sworn his candle flickered at the others, probably just the wind.
Above the holes, propped off the ground by lumps of wood, were two slabs of stone with matching holes, optimistically described as seats by Lord Robert. The candles burned in the room as a courtesy to light the way for visitors, or at least to stop them doing it on the floor by mistake.
Setting himself down on the nearest ice-trimmed hole, he prepared to let drop. He didn’t need to prepare long as his lower intestine wanted rid of its contents faster than Henri wanted to get at Lady Foella’s.
Henri put his own candle at a safe distance. Then he bent to move the other so the fumes would find some direction of travel other than up his nose. This candle had got firmly stuck to the floor by its own excreted wax, and so he gave it a tug. He frowned for a moment as below the noise of his own evacuation he could have sworn he heard something. One second later he was dead.