The Lion's Legacy (Conqueror Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  To dues for the castellan’s office 166. 13. 4

  To liveries 3. 16. 1/2

  Aid for the borough 15. 0. 0

  Aid for the burgesses by King’s writ 15. 0. 0

  Glancing over his shoulder Brien gave an exclamation of annoyance. ‘The King is over anxious for other men to spend their money. The burgesses grow fat on their relief from dues as it is.’

  Amauri laid down his pen. ‘I fear that he thinks he can better my lord of Salisbury’s system.’ He got up and set out the cup of wine his master took every night before retiring. If the lady Matilda had been at home Amauri de Beauprez would have left the wine and gone but tonight the ladies’ bower next to the chamber was silent and Brien was glad she was not here.

  ‘Well,’ he said, and flung himself down on the bed, his long legs crossed, ‘did you guess why the Earl chose to visit us?’

  ‘To tell you how he stood and find out your mind,’ Amauri said shrewdly and brought the cup to his lord. He was in fact Brien’s cousin, a small neat man, precise in his movements, his grey hair smooth, his face clean-shaven. He too came from Dol where his family were respectable traders in wines and spices and his mother had been sister to the girl who had attracted the attention of Count Alain Fergant so long ago.

  ‘You have obviously read his,’ Brien drained the cup. ‘It seems he is promised Cornwall.’

  Amauri raised one eyebrow. ‘In that case we shall have to look to our property there.’

  Brien gave him a dry smile. ‘I know his grasping ways well enough and with his loyalty bought by the King, Earl Robert will be surrounded by enemies when he comes back to Bristol.’ He did not say ‘if’, a nicety not lost on his cousin. ‘I wish I knew what plans Robert has made.’

  ‘It is a difficult situation,’ the steward said quietly. ‘There is the matter of the oath to King Stephen.’

  ‘I know, that is why I hoped this court would be at Winchester for I want to talk to Abbot Gilbert. Perhaps now that summer is come I will ride down to Gloucester.’ He sat up and swung his legs back to the ground. ‘I would not perjure my soul willingly, God knows, but I swore to the Lady Maud first.’ He glanced at his cousin and indicated the stool. ‘Sit down, Amauri, I must talk tonight – unless you are longing for your bed.’

  De Beauprez shook his head, smiling. ‘I can do with little sleep, my lord.’ His expression became grave again. ‘Which oath is it that you fear to break, the first or the second?’

  ‘That is the heart of it,’ Brien said sharply. ‘I and every other man in England swore to the Empress first and even if – as the earls and barons who are King’s men say – King Henry coerced the less willing into it, nevertheless we all swore. Will God forgive any of us for breaking that oath when we set our hands between Stephen’s?’

  ‘I do not see,’ de Beauprez said carefully, ‘what else you could have done when the Count of Boulogne had seized the treasury and the Archbishop had crowned him. If you had refused you would have lost Wallingford and all your other lands and be back in Brittany where, forgive me, you would not hold what you have here.’

  ‘Where I would be my father’s bastard and lord of nothing,’ Brien qualified the remark. ‘Aye I know, and I would have only my sword to offer the Empress for her service. At least now if she comes I have men and, as Alain reminded me, the strongest castle after London’s tower to put at her disposal. But,’ he paused for a moment watching the light of the candle flickering on the vaulted roof, ‘a broken oath is a sacrilege, or so the churchmen tell us, and I fear God, Amauri.’

  ‘My lord! You cannot avoid it – it is only a question of which oath is the more binding.’

  Brien straightened his back. He was tired tonight for he had been out since six this morning and ridden many miles visiting his tenants, but the Earl of Richmond’s arrival had brought to a head things that had been on his mind for so long that he must now resolve them. ‘Some men care nothing for their swearing but I – ’ Even as he spoke he was remembering the day thirteen years ago when he, when all the chief men in England had sworn to the Lady as King Henry’s true successor. He owed everything to the Lion of Justice for, as Amauri rightly said, he would have had nothing but perhaps a place in his other half-brother Conan’s ducal court in Brittany if King Henry had not brought him to England. He had been a lad of ten when his father died and it was Henry, strong, energetic, full of good humour and a genuine kindliness for children, who had set an arm about his shoulders and swept him away to England, treating him as a son, giving him an education far beyond that of most of his fellows, his companions the King’s own nephews, his teacher William of Corbeil. And then he had been sent to Paris to sit in the schools under the great Master Abelard and listen to his lectures on philosophy and theology. All this King Henry had done for him and crowned it by giving him an heiress for his wife, Matilda of Wallingford, grand-daughter of that Wigod who had served the Conqueror, with all her lands and riches, as well as making him a Constable of England.

  All this he owed to the Lion and he had taken that oath to the Lion’s daughter without the reservations he knew that other men entertained. Barely twenty years old then, he had set his hands between hers on that day, kneeling before her as she sat on her father’s throne, and looking up into her face, her charm, her power of drawing and holding men had captivated him. And because he was a single-minded man his devotion, once given, was not likely to be moved.

  He got up abruptly and began to pace the shadowed chamber.

  How, he wondered, had he come to take that second oath to Stephen? But he, with others who would have been loyal to the Lady, had been faced with a situation in which he had either to swear or to commit an act of open rebellion. Baldwin de Redvers, high-spirited and uncompromising, had taken the latter course and King Stephen, always an able soldier, had marched on Exeter, driven Baldwin from there to Corfe Castle, starved out the garrison and when Baldwin fled to Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight attacked him there and finally drove him out of the country and back to Normandy. Baldwin had lost everything but at least he had made a show of defiance and was now with the Empress in Le Mans. Yet had that been the best course?

  He was not sure and it was that uncertainty that had led him, and shortly afterwards his friend, Miles of Gloucester, and finally Earl Robert himself to take the oath to the crowned King. Robert had been in Normandy when Stephen seized the crown and he had told Brien when he eventually came back that the only way he could talk with their friends in England or make any plans on behalf of his sister had been for him to return openly and seem to favour his cousin.

  What Brien could not understand now was Robert’s long delay, more than a year, in initiating any sort of action on behalf of the Empress.

  He turned back to the silent Amauri. ‘If I knew what the Lady Maud wished – ’ he said.

  After a moment’s reflection Amauri asked, ‘Would the King give you permission to travel to Normandy? If you found some pretext for going, you could see the Empress and Earl Robert too. Count Geoffrey will soon be master there.’

  Brien laughed shortly. ‘Aye, Stephen’s efforts to keep the duchy two years ago were a disaster, so the field is clear for Geoffrey – that silly, cruel boy. No, I do not think Stephen would allow me to go – where else could I be going but into the arms of the Angevins? I must wait until Earl Robert sends me a message.’

  He stopped his pacing and sat down again. ‘I would lay my doubts.’ He smiled fleetingly at his cousin. ‘I think I will take my conscience to Abbot Gilbert.’

  De Beauprez nodded. ‘The Abbot is a wise man. My lord, you should sleep now. You have to ride early tomorrow. Who goes with you?’

  ‘Basset and Ingelric, and some twenty of the young knights.’ Brien stretched and yawned. ‘It must be past midnight. I have kept you from your bed, Amauri.’

  When his cousin had gone he closed the door, not waking his page Thurstin who lay on a pallet in the passage, on hand for his lord’s needs. Alone, he did not immediately und
ress but going to the table stared down at the open manuscript that Alain had so carelessly covered with the wet towel. The book, a collection of writings by scholars of the Paris schools had been sent to him by the Abbot of Clairvaux, Abbot Bernard who so disapproved of the richness and power of Cluny and its monks that he was at perpetual enmity with Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester.

  Some men said behind their hands that whoever sat on the throne of St. Peter, it was Bernard who was the ruling spirit of Christendom. Brien had met him once, a thin man crippled with rheumatism, his frame worn with the austerities he practised but with a mind passionately on fire for the faith of Christ and the purity of His Church – a genius who could sway others to his own viewpoint, a saint who could draw men by his own sheer holiness to share his hard and lonely way of life, who could not and would not compromise with evil when and where he saw it. At that brief meeting Bernard had been courteous and gentle, but he could be biting, flaying his enemies with his tongue. One of these was Master Peter Abelard, a fellow Breton, and Brien wondered how Brother Denis who had copied these writings had managed to slip in a paragraph by the man whom Bernard had condemned as a heretic. Then he remembered that Denis had once been sacristan at St. Gildas during the unhappy ten years when Abelard, mutilated and humiliated after the love affair which had set all Paris talking, had been Abbot there, seeking solace in the lonely monastery on the Breton coast. He thought of Abelard, not as the monk he was now, but as he remembered him – the great scholar and teacher, the demi-god of Parisian students. The man had been all passion and fire mingled with logic ice-cold as a hill stream, and in this quiet candle-lit room the words on the open page leapt up at Brien – ‘Jerusalem is the city…where waking the dreamer finds truth beyond dreaming…nor is the heart’s possessing less than the heart’s desire.’ There spoke Abelard the lover, he thought, seldom far beneath the surface of Abelard the scholar. They had never really made a churchman of Master Peter, despite his ardent faith which rose above dogma, above asceticism.

  Brien closed the book. Would he ever love like that? And if he did would it be love of God or of woman? He did not know. He had never been a lecher and did not over-indulge his natural instincts, neither had he given his heart to any woman, in fact he had reached his thirty-fourth year without anything having stirred him to any great depth or height of feeling. What were those words he had come across the other day?

  Harder is he than iron,

  Whom Beauty hath not stirred.

  Yet he did not think he was hard – perhaps he had not yet found that beauty which could draw response from him, and certainly not in the person of his wife. She was part of a formality as were morning Mass and the dinner hour and a night’s sleep. The only woman who ever occupied his mind was the Lady Maud and she as one set far above him to whom he had given his loyalty as he had given it to the old King, who held him on some rein the exact substance of which he had never tested. He considered it now, calmly, and could not see that it could ever be the thing that Abelard had experienced.

  He turned away to the small cross that stood on a low shelf in the corner of the room and knelt, palms together. He prayed thus every night, for William of Corbeil had taught him to give God His due, but again something eluded him – some fire that he saw in varying degrees and in varying forms in other men from Bernard to his farthest counterpart, Abelard. He wanted guidance, certainty, but none came.

  At length he crossed himself and rising, began to strip off his clothes. It was a hot night but the stone walls kept this room cool enough for sleep. Yet that too eluded him for a while. Alone and in the dark he thought not of God but of the Lady. Of his wife, missing from her place by his side, he thought not at all.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Great Council called for midsummer brought the nobles and knights of England crowding into Oxford so that every corner of the castle and all the houses in the town from the largest to the meanest were used as quarters. Wealthy citizens opened their doors to great men, hoping for favours, and the less pretentious welcomed the attendant retinues hoping merely for payment. Many of the ladies sought lodgings with the nuns at Godstow and brought gifts with them for the new convent so that though the tiny guest house overflowed the sisters were well pleased at the profit to be had from this inconvenience.

  Brien rode in with his men and left the Earl of Richmond at the gates while he sought quarters with his old friend Alcuin, chief burgess of the town. There he washed and changed into fresh clothes, a tunic embroidered with blue thread which his wife had worked herself, and a blue mantle fastened with a brooch of amethysts. Then, carrying his staff of office, and attended by Gilbert Basset and the latter’s younger son he made his way to the castle.

  Gilbert was near sixty and the most important of his vassals whose brother had been one of King Henry’s justiciars, a reliable man brought up in the old hard school of the Conqueror’s methods, given to few words. He had two sons, Ralph who was a clerk in Archbishop Theobald’s household, and Richard who had studied law in Paris and who was now an itinerant justice in the King’s service.

  ‘Holy God,’ Richard said as they entered the hall, ‘is everyone in England come?’

  His father grunted, surveying the mass of men moving in groups, the vivid colours of their tunics and mantles mingling with the equally vivid colours of the secular clergy and the sober black of the religious. ‘Curiosity brings them, my son.’

  ‘Or ambition,’ Richard suggested and glanced at their overlord, his grave face thoughtful. ‘What do you think, my lord? There has been no gathering like this since King Henry died.’

  ‘What I think,’ Brien answered, ‘is best not said here. I will pay my due to the King.’ He pushed his way through the noisy throng, greeting friends and acquaintances, nodding to Simon of Northampton, pausing for a word with the majestic Earl of Pembroke, Gilbert FitzGilbert of Clare, but passing Robert Marmion, whom he disliked, with the briefest of inclinations. The Earl of Chester pushed several men aside to join him. Ranulf aux Guernons was extravagantly clothed in scarlet, wearing many jewels as if to emphasise the fact that he was still, despite the loss of his northern lands to Scotland, the wealthiest baron in the kingdom. He hailed Brien, demanding in his rough voice if the lord of Wallingford knew when their wives proposed joining the court. Brien shook his head and Ranulf pulled at his long moustaches in annoyance, out of countenance with the world.

  Brien moved on. Geoffrey of Mandeville called out a noisy welcome while William de Mohun, his grim face for once wearing a pleasanter expression, clapped him on the shoulder as he passed, but the only man he paused to speak with was Robert D’Oyley, the castellan of Oxford Castle and a marriage connection of his wife’s.

  ‘Where is the King?’ Brien asked. ‘In the great chamber?’

  D’Oyley, dark and intense, said, ‘Aye and in a good humour but if there’s not bloodshed before the end of this council I’ll be surprised.’

  Brien glanced at him. ‘Whose blood? What great lord is feuding now?’

  ‘None that I know,’ D’Oyley shrugged. ‘But did you ever see so many armed retainers in one place without some folly starting a fight? That is all I meant. And,’ he added gloomily, ‘I’d be grateful if they’d not set my honour in disorder.’

  Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, smiling. ‘Seeing that all the Constables of England are here I doubt you need worry overmuch.’ But even as he spoke some words of his half-brother’s came into his mind and brought a sense of unease.

  In the King’s chamber, as D’Oyley had said, he found Stephen in good humour. The King was with his closest friends the Beaumont twins, William Martel the High Seneschal, and Aubrey de Vere the Chief Chamberlain. In his arms he held one of his daughters, Mary, a six-year-old with rosy cheeks and her father’s light brown curling hair and blue eyes, and as a page announced Brien he turned to greet him, still laughing at something the child had said.

  ‘Come in, my lord of Wallingford, come in. This little wench has us all
bewitched with her wit.’ He kissed her, his delight in her a parental intensification of his genuine love of all children. ‘There, my pretty one, you will have to ask my lord Brien here to teach you Latin for he is as good a scholar as any of the clerks in my household.’

  ‘I should like that,’ the child said and smiled shyly at the newcomer, ‘for William says Master Cuthbert beats him if he does not know his lesson.’

  Brien laughed. ‘I promise you, lady, I would not beat you.’

  The King set her down. ‘Off with you to your nurse and get your dinner – young stomachs need food for the body more than the mind at your age.’ And when she had gone he thrust his arm through the newcomer’s with an informality that was characteristic of him. ‘Tell me, Brien, is the Abbot of Abingdon come yet? I’ve a fine psalter, the cover set with jewels, which I’ve a mind he should have. I gave a similar one to my abbey at Furness – ’

  He talked on of his gifts to various foundations and of his Queen’s interest in Godstow, patently eager to please, his genuine piety and good nature uppermost. He was at his best thus, Brien thought, and wished he did not know Stephen too well to set any store by his words. Those very qualities laid the King, to his mind, at the mercy of the unscrupulous and God alone knew how many of those were at court, while behind him towered, in spirit if not in body today, the proud and ambitious figure of Henry of Blois.