Ann of Cambray (2 page)

In the year of Christendom 1135, Henry died in France. Stephen hastened to the Channel ports, came to England with the first following wind, and was crowned King of England in London town. Behind him came the Empress Matilda, belatedly calling upon her father’s feudal lords to honour their oath to her. This then was how the civil wars began. From being faced with no heir, England was suddenly cursed with two. Which one was better, I leave others to judge. Except this: better either one than both, better anything than civil war.

‘So child of war, of woe am I,’ says the Lady Ann, ‘child of death, born when King Henry’s peace was ended. Thus did my father’s grief and country’s grief become as one.’ Yet even then, Sedgemont and Cambray might have avoided the worst of the wars, although the rest of England sank beneath the burden of the fighting as fair lands run to weed when a farmer forgets his duty to the fields. For when King Henry saw fit to order that his feudal lords accept Matilda as queen after him, the Earl of Sedgemont was foremost of these nobles who would not be forsworn. He regarded the oath as ill conceived, the bad judgment of an old unhappy man. Although for love of his old friend he did not take sides against the king, Earl Raymond would not accept a woman as heir; and so a coolness grew between him and the king. Out of fear for his own heir, the earl sent his grandson, Raoul, then a child of six or seven, back to his lands in Sieux in France, the boy’s own parents having died of a bloody flux soon after his birth. Safe in Sieux, Lord Raoul was brought up away from the wars in England, but his grandfather, Earl Raymond, like the stout veteran he was, buckled on his harness again when the battles began and rode, westward, with Falk of Cambray at his side. Between them they held the boundary at peace and sided neither with Stephen nor with Matilda, who looked to raise an army from the west, where her half-brother, the Earl of Gloucester, held power, may have seen their neutrality as a threat to her. And I cannot deny, being Celt myself, that the western folk were overjoyed at the start of these wars. While battles raged, they hoped to overrun the border castles, yea, and spill into the eastern Norman parts as well. As things turned out, Sedgemont and Cambray were too strong for them and so kept them in check. So might things have continued, had not three misfortunes befallen, three blows of fate. We are come now to the year 1145. Remember that year also. The civil strife between Stephen and Matilda still raged unchecked, unsolved. In the early months of that year, the old Earl Raymond of Sedgemont died, full of age and wisdom. Hot upon his death, his grandson Lord Raoul came back from France to claim his inheritance, and despite our care, to cast in his lot with Stephen. And then upon us here at Cambray fell the darkest hour of all.

At this time will our tale begin. It is the forty-fifth year of the twelfth century after the birth of Christ. In that year was the young Lord Raoul confirmed as Lord of Sedgemont but was not made earl. He was then sixteen. Talisin of Cambray, had he lived, would have been eighteen. And the man who was to control us all, that Angevin Henry, son of Matilda, Henry of Anjou, was twelve.
Ora pro nobis.

Two last explanations the Lady Ann, womanlike, bids me append here. One is that she and I are no chroniclers, no writers of history. We were far removed from the great events of the times and further still from the great men who began them. In days of war, news comes slowly, often disjointedly, and Sedgemont and Cambray lie at the far edges of the kingdom, cut off from the king’s court. We can write only what we know. The second, although I blush to repeat it, is that she lays her trust in me, that I will not alter what she says, not changing anything so that foul deeds should seem more fair than is warranted. Indeed she fain must trust me since she has neither skill to read or write in our mutual Celtic tongue, and certainly knows nothing of that priestly one that they say today even knights can pen like a monk born. And to speak truth again, she says she has no liking for priests, for gossip-bearing and evil-mindedness, there are none better than churchmen, none more fitted to know sin, seeing that they deal in it as other men do business. Indeed, if she were closeted here with a priest, there would be those, no doubt, who would look askance and find fault for gossip. But we digress. Take up your quill, says the Lady Ann. Poet, scribe, write quickly, before this year too draws to its close and these last days of sun are gone. Soon all about us will be dark and cold, and no one will be left to speak for us or care if we speak at all. Let us go back to the day when first I came to Sedgemont, leaving behind me here at Cambray all I held most dear . . .

After the sad journey, coming across the drawbridge and under the portcullis of Sedgemont was like coming through a long tunnel, out of darkness into light. We had been journeying for more days than I like to recall, through mist and rain that had kept me penned with Gwendyth, my servant woman, in the litter. Had it been a normal journey, I might have ridden in front of one of the men-at-arms who escorted us, or, mounted on my own pony, gone ahead as I pleased. Now I could tell we had arrived somewhere at least, by the sudden steadier clatter of horses’ hooves and by the way the men stopped their chatter and rode still and silently as became their duty. I thrust my head under the heavy hide curtains that shielded the sides of the litter, ignoring Gwendyth’s tugs and protests. The night air was damp but the driving rain that had followed us all the way from the west had stopped; only a faint drizzle fell in the light of the flaring torches. Men wearing some sort of surcoats held them; others ran back and forth across the great inner bailey or courtyard; I saw pages peering and whistling at the entrance. The castle guards straightened and saluted against the walls. Then stable serfs sprang to the horses’ heads; the commander of my father’s men swung himself stiffly out of the saddle; the commander of the watch at Sedgemont began to walk as stiffly and proudly towards him. I realised then that this was the end of the journey, begun in so much sadness and haste, out of darkness into light.

The courtyard was large, twice as big, three times, as that at Cambray. The walls towered above us; I could not see the battlements, nor guess the size of the keep, whose wide stone steps ran down into the yard. But I took it all in, in gulps, as a child does who has been shut up too long, lurching across half a country. And for all its size, this was something I recognised, girl-child though I was—the heartland of a Norman castle, its working centre where its men are garrisoned, its blacksmiths and armourers hammer, where its serfs and peasants and animals bed down together. The acrid smell of the torches, the hiss of resin, the shouts and bustle of armed men, the snorting of horses and the clink of their harness—these were things I knew as well as any boy. They made me feel at home, and I remember even now how my heart gave a strange surge of expectation and fear. Curious and eager, I leaned out farther, half like to fall out altogether, to watch all that happened: the salute and greeting between the two captains, the slow tread of an elderly gentleman coming down the stairs from the Great Hall, the snapping to attention as he passed (surely that was the earl, I thought, knowing no better), the stir and excitement that our arrival had caused. I might have slipped right out in truth, for all Gwendyth’s tuggings, had not a young boy put out his hand to steady me, enabling Gwendyth to pull me back. I glared at them both.

‘Beg pardon, my lady.’ The boy backed in alarm, his clipped speech sounding strange to my ears, which was used to our softer western tongue.

‘Hist, hist, my lamb,’ said Gwendyth, hauling the curtains into place, trying to straighten my dishevelled hair, which hung red and lank with heat, and arranging my torn travelling robe. ‘Forbear now, hush now.’

I paid no heed to her grumbles, and would have been out of the litter in a flash had she given me a chance, which she did not. It was light at the end of a long darkness, after confusion and death.

‘Let be,’ I cried to her in our native tongue. ‘Did you see their armour? Even the guards wear byrnies of mail. And did you see their surcoats and their shields? They have pictures on
them, gold and red, was it birds?’ I
tried to break free again.

'And their horses? They were bigger than ours, but not as good as my father’s greys . . . How big is the castle, think you? Is that the earl himself who comes to greet us?’

‘Lady Ann,’ she said, hushing me, although there was no one there who would have understood our Celtic speech, ‘we have not come all this way to go tumbling about in the mire with the common soldiers. Look you, how far we have come, cooped up like hens for market (the only word of complaint she let drop), ‘and weather to rot men’s bones, God save us. You can bide awhile longer in patience, as is becoming. For we are here to seek refuge with your new liege lord and suzerain, Lord Raoul; the old earl being dead, God save his soul. Nor would it be meet for your overlord to come to seek you out, he being a great lord, and you his vassal and ward. That will be his seneschal, or chief officer, that elderly knight upon the stairs. Lord Raoul, being young and unwed, is seldom here at Sedgemont. And you must remember now, Lady Ann, that we must speak as the others do, so all may understand us. And not run behind the men-at-arms and stable boys as permitted by your brother, God rest his soul. And that you are heiress to all the lands of your father in Cambray, and that you hold them in gift and fee of Lord Raoul. . .’

It was not that she was speaking in Norman-French, with less skill than I, for I knew it well enough and spoke it with my father and the upper folk at Cambray, nor was it that she would betray the Celt in us by holding their speech to be of little worth, although I told her that too. It was the words themselves, bleak and uncompromising, that brought the darkness back again. For all its similarities, Sedgemont was not my home. And we were strangers, unwanted here. All around was confusion and death . . . death to brother, father, and all my childhood had known. I turned my back upon the seneschal, Sir Brian; I would not greet his lady wife, who followed to bid us welcome. I would not smile or curtsy to all those staring men. So came I to Sedgemont, and saw it for the first time, and the stable boy, Giles, who would have put his hand out to save me, and Sir Brian and his lady, Mildred. And finally, Lord Raoul himself, whom I disliked the most of all.

I will not count the early days at Sedgemont. They merged as one, into that darkness that followed the leaving of Cambray, the journey there, the horrors before. Sufficient to say it was the autumn of that terrible year. Dark for me, dark for England. Drear weather, poor harvest, rebellion, civil war — everywhere was death. Did it seem a dream or was it as real now as the day his companions brought my brother back, wrapped in his cloak, his arms trailing beneath as if they were too heavy to lift?

‘Drowned?’ said my father as they met in the courtyard at Cambray. He leaned over the side of his great grey horse and his face turned white under its open helmet. ‘Talisin, who swims like an otter?’ He slid forward from his horse. Colour never came back to him again; he was as if a dead man, crushed by grief. Although he sat for two days more with his sword across his knees at Talisin’s bier, he never moved or spoke, not even when I was sent to his side to tug and plead with him. So, they say, sat Henry the King when news came of his son’s drowning in the wreck of the White Ship. But the king lived on to speak and plan again. Although my father’s friends came for the burying, he said no word to them, did not move, and died at the second night with his sword naked in his hand. Nor did he plan for the daughter who still survived, but turned his face to the wall. Did he die of grief, of broken heart and broken hopes, that old soldier, come at last to lands and happiness, only to have them snatched away? Had he guessed something about my brother’s death that I was to learn years after? I only know I could not believe that Talisin was dead. He was as skilful as a seal in the rough waters of our coast. At times I used to go with him as he stripped upon the beach, as careless of me as a puppy underfoot. Clad in the breech clout he wore beneath his harness, he would run into the waves, no sport of Normans this, but of the old people, the sea folk of the first ages. Once I watched him and my father together. Both their bodies were white except where wind and sun had tanned them, but my father’s was seamed with old wounds like a gnarled tree. They were of a height, but my father was thicker, and beside him Talisin looked gangling, not yet grown into his strength. I slid among the sand dunes, ruining my clothes again, and made my way down to where they had left their cloaks. There I sat and waited, whilst behind me the men tended the horses, whistled and laughed among themselves. Talisin saw me although I crouched low. He turned to say something to my father, who I thought would shout at me to be gone. But this time he looked and laughed himself. His indulgence gave me courage. I ran towards Talisin, gathering up the skirts of my dress to skip over the waves. He took me by the hand and jumped me over; the green and brown dress billowed and sank beneath the rush of water like a piece of weed. I tore it off and let it float away. Naked and happy, I swam through the breakers, and he bore me on his back like the dolphins. And when he was done, he wrapped me in his red woollen cloak and set me on his horse and we rode back to Cambray together, Gwendyth clucking and fussing that I would be the death of her. Death. How could the sea have taken my brother and thrown him lifeless, empty, upon the shore? Where were his friends that they did not help him? Why did my father sit with drawn sword in the presence of his companions? Why would my father not speak to me?

‘Look, Father,’ Talisin had said that day as we rode back, ‘she rides as well as she swims. One day there will not be a horse she cannot straddle. We will never make a Norman lady out of her.’

‘The nuns will do it when I bid them,’ my father said in his sharp way, but Talisin had laughed again, making things smooth between us. ‘She is Celt, my lord, through and through. She is of the old race, with those dark eyes and that long red hair,’ he said, making my father look at me despite himself. How could he have sat so white and still at the bier and said not a word to me for all my beggings? What had I done that he could not endure me? And of those other men who had crowded round afterwards, which ones could be trusted, which were friendly, which wished me harm?