The Greatest Knight (45 page)

“For the King?” Isabelle raised her brow.

He looked wry. “It won’t do any harm for Richard to think so, but I had your father in mind. I knew him somewhat, and I liked him—although not as much as I love his daughter.”

“Flatterer,” she laughed. “Small wonder you rose so high at court.”

“But I never lie because lies will always find you out.” He captured one of her hands and kissed it.

Isabelle was facing the door, and the sleepy laughter froze on her face as her husband’s brother suddenly barged into the room, shoving two clerks and a steward out of his way. Alerted by his wife’s gasp, William hastily turned and then stared. His brother’s clothing was dusty from the road and he was wearing his hauberk. The expression on his face precipitated William off the bed and sent him reaching for his tunic.

“Longchamp is besieging Lincoln,” John said before William could ask what he was doing here. “De Camville has ridden straight to the Prince for aid and left his wife defending the castle against the bastard. The whoreson’s got footsoldiers, knights, serjeants, and a company of two score underminers. You can’t sit on your arse any more, brother, he has to be stopped.” He bared his teeth. “Prince John has seized Nottingham and Tickhill in retaliation, and if Longchamp does not retreat from Lincoln, he will visit him with a rod of iron. You’re a justiciar, what are you going to do?” Hectic colour blazed across his cheekbones.

William listened to the joyful squeals of his infant son; he felt the silent wideness of Isabelle’s stare. “Keep my wits about me,” he replied more calmly than he felt. “Contrary to what you think, myself and the other justiciars have not been sitting on our arses. Neither William Longchamp nor John will be permitted to start a civil war, I promise you that.”

“How will you stop them?” John demanded. “The Prince is recruiting mercenaries from his Glamorgan lands and men are flocking to his banner because they are sick of Longchamp’s rapacious ways.”

William waved his brother to a chair. “Sit,” he commanded. “A few moments on your own backside won’t make any difference to the outcome, and I can’t talk to you while you’re snarling like a baited bear.”

Still glowering, John threw himself into the chair, which creaked with the violence of his action. For the first time he acknowledged his sister-in-law, giving her a slightly shame-faced nod of the head. Isabelle returned the gesture graciously. Aware of the way his glance lingered on her exposed fair plaits and the fecund swell of her belly, she quietly veiled her hair and arranged her gown so that her pregnancy was less obvious. She was not in the least embarrassed, for this was her private chamber where she could dress with as little formality as she chose, but she could sense John’s discomfort; given the circumstances of his own marriage, this warm domestic scene must be like salt in a raw wound.

“I’ll fight under my lord’s banner if it comes to the crux, and with pride.” Challenge gleamed in John’s eyes. “My oath is to him. I’m his seneschal and his vassal. You’re his vassal too for Cartmel and the Leinster lands, brother. You might want to think about that.”

“I do, constantly,” William answered. “But I am also the King’s justiciar. I have duties and loyalties that lie beyond my personal desires and possessions.”

“Well, you’re going to have to decide one way or the other,” John said. “If you have any sense, you’ll join the Prince.”

William felt Isabelle’s involuntary twitch of movement beside him and he responded with a swift, surreptitious lift of his forefinger. “I will gladly speak with Lord John,” he said, “but I won’t be joining his battle lines. When I ride out of here, it will be to Walter of Coutances and the other justiciars. You might believe that we don’t know our brains from our buttocks, but I promise you that we do.”

John started to sneer but William silenced him with a raised hand. “Take my word for it…and you can pass that message to the Prince. The Archbishop of Rouen will repeat my stance when he speaks with him.”

John jerked to his feet. “I hope you know what you are doing,” he said curtly.

“And I you,” William retorted, then pushed one hand through his hair in an exasperated gesture. “Jesu, I don’t want to quarrel with you. For what it’s worth, should it come to the crux and, God forbid, Richard die on this crusade, I will support John as the next King of England—but only in those circumstances, no other.”

His brother nodded stiffly. “I don’t want to quarrel with you either. I’ll hold you to your word though.”

“You won’t need to. It’s given, that’s enough.”

The brothers embraced in a stilted fashion. Declining to remain to eat, John accepted travel rations for himself and his men and rode out of Caversham, his son accompanying him for several miles so that the pair could have at least some time together.

Awaiting Jack’s return, William made his own preparations to leave. “I have a suspicion that today really was the still before the storm,” he said to Isabelle.

She set her arms around his neck and kissed him. “But you and the other justiciars can hold the country steady,” she said, “especially with Walter of Coutances at the helm.”

“I pray so,” William said grimly. “The alternative does not bear thinking about.”

Thirty-eight

Caversham, Berkshire, October 1191

Richard Marshal’s entry into the world was a protracted struggle. Although he was positioned head down, the angle was difficult and he was a large baby. Labouring to deliver him, Isabelle realised that they both might die. She wasn’t ready to leave the world yet, but God’s will frequently took small notice of human desires. Battling anger, fear, and self-pity, she squeezed her prayer beads in her fists and trapped a cry behind gritted teeth as another pang tightened her womb. A midwife wiped Isabelle’s brow and murmured words of encouragement and exhorted her to direct her prayers to the wooden figurine of Saint Margaret, patron saint of labouring mothers. The image stood on a prie-dieu surrounded by lit candles. Twice they had burned down to the stub and been renewed.

As the contraction eased, Isabelle panted with relief. She wanted William here for her own reassurance, but was glad in a way too that he was absent, dealing with affairs related to chancellor Longchamp. She hadn’t seen her husband for half of the month that she had retired to her confinement in the solar chamber at Caversham, and only then in fleeting moments when he came to her between engagements to replenish himself. Perhaps she was never going to see him again; perhaps this was her death chamber. Unable to bear the dark, warm stuffiness of the room and the metallic stench of mortality, she spoke peremptorily to the women. “Open the shutters, I need to see the daylight.”

“But my lady, the cold air will be bad for you and the child. You will take a chill,” protested one of her maids.

“Open them!” Isabelle repeated. “I order you. If you do not, I will rise from this bed even as I am and do it myself!”

Lips pressed together, the maid unfastened the latches and pulled back the shutters to reveal arches of blustery grey daylight. Isabelle drew a lungful of cold, moist air. The next contraction gathered and tightened in her loins and as she bore down, she sensed a change in the pressure against her pelvic floor.

***

The wind had been behind William and his mesnie all the way from London, roaring in their ears, assisting the speed of their journey. Hoods pulled up and mantles fastened against the chill flurries of rain, they rode into Caversham shortly after noon.

William’s eyes were gritty with tiredness, but as always his spirits had lifted as he approached the manor which had fast become one of his favourites. It was close to London and to Wiltshire, convenient as a stopping point on his way to the ports of the Narrow Sea, yet despite being near the hub of activity, it was a tranquil haven too—somewhere he could relax his vigilance and let the weight slide from his shoulders.

As he dismounted from his blowing courser and tossed the reins to his groom, he noticed that despite the inclement weather, the shutters and casements were open at the upstairs chamber windows. While he was frowning over the detail, an agonised cry flew down to him from the aperture and froze him to the marrow.

He took the outer timber stairs to the hall two at a time, bursting in on the room like a Viking through a monastery door. Servants and retainers stared at him in shock as he strode towards the stairs leading off from the dais. Plainly having been told of his arrival, a flushed midwife was hastening down them to bar his way.

“The Countess Isabelle,” he said tersely, “she is all right? I heard a cry…”

The woman bobbed a curtsey. “Yes, my lord. The Countess is in travail and the labour has been hard, but there is hope…”

William blenched as her words filled him with fear. “What do you mean ‘there is hope’?” he snarled.

She trembled beneath his anger, but bravely held her ground. “The child is large and the head was in a difficult position, but the babe has turned of his own accord and my lady has good wide hips. With God’s help and if my lady’s strength holds up, all will yet be well.”

William shuddered. He had arrived in expectation of shedding his burdens, but instead he had to brace himself and shoulder new ones. The feeling of impotence was terrifying. There was nothing he could do for Isabelle, neither protect her nor take away her pain. The realisation of the potential cost had not really hit him before. When Will was born he had arrived home after the ordeal was over and to the sight of Isabelle tired but smiling with triumph. Perhaps she had cried out before, but he hadn’t been there to hear it.

“My lord, I should go back to attend to the Countess,” the midwife said, turning on the stair.

He swallowed and gestured. As she opened the door, another muffled scream attacked him. He had heard similar sounds before—in the aftermath of battle when wounded men bit down on rags and wedges of wood while their broken bones were set. Turning abruptly, he moved away from the stairs. His knights were arriving in the hall: stowing their baggage in their favourite corners; greeting wives and children, sweethearts and friends. Feeling a tug at the tunic at the back of his knee and turning, William found his son looking up at him out of wide dark eyes. “Horse,” the toddler said, waving his favourite wooden toy at his father and smiling with two neat rows of milk teeth.

William stooped and swung the child up in his arms. “Yes, horse,” he repeated, his throat tight. The nursemaid was close behind her charge, but he waved her away and bore the infant to a bench against the side of the room. The warm weight of him was a poignant comfort. William was also distracted by how much Will had changed and grown while he had been absent about the business of running England and trying to prevent a prince and a bishop from foundering the country. The baby limbs were still buttery and plump, but there were hints, like buds on a spring branch, of developing sinew and muscle. The toddler chattered to him, words pouring out, some meaningless, others making perfect sense and almost, but not quite, sentences. To hear him, to respond to him and receive response in turn, sent a throat-tightening pang through William.

In a pause between the babble, William thought he heard a sound from the room above and his shoulders tensed. A glance at the nurse, who was still hovering nearby, revealed that he had not imagined it, for her own glance had darted towards the stairs. Nausea churned his belly. He thought he was inured to anything that life could throw at him, but against the thought of Isabelle’s suffering he was defenceless. The sound came again, louder, filled with effort…then silence. William’s straining ears caught the faintest thread of a baby’s wail and it was the final goad that pitched him over the edge and destroyed the iron self-control that had carried him through a hundred tourneys unscathed, brought him to the Holy Land and back, and seen him rise to become co-justiciar of England. Thrusting his son into the nurse’s arms, he strode to the stairs, galloped up them, and hurtled into the chamber above the hall. Ignoring the dismayed gasps and cries of the women in the anteroom, he flurried aside the dividing curtain and strode into the bedchamber. Isabelle was half sitting, half lying on their bed, her shift pushed up exposing her belly, blood smearing her inner thighs and pooling the bedstraw beneath her. Her hair, sweat-darkened at her scalp, frizzed around her face, which was tear-streaked and shadowed with pain and exhaustion. If he had seen her as a beautiful Madonna at Striguil when Will was born, now he was witness to the reality of childbirth, every bit as bloody and merciless as a long day on the field of battle, with survival just as uncertain. She gasped his name, her eyes widening. On the far side of the bed, a woman was jiggling a towel-wrapped bundle in her arms and trying to shush the increasing strength and indignation of its wails.

The senior midwife drew herself up and addressed him as if he were a serf. “You should not be here,” she admonished. “It is not seemly…my lord.” She tried to turn him around, but William remained rooted to the spot.

“Seemly or not, I am here,” he answered the woman without removing his gaze from his wife. “Isabelle…” His throat worked.

Through her pain and exhaustion she found the ghost of a smile. “William, you great ox,” she croaked. “Take our second son and go and present him to the knights and his brother. We have an heir for the Longueville lands.”

Hearing how hoarse and dry her voice was, he didn’t want to think how much she had screamed in the hours up to the birth. A frowning midwife brought a drink to Isabelle and drew the coverlet over her thighs and the collapsed mound of her belly. The woman holding the baby came to William and placed the screaming bundle in his arms. He winced. “He certainly has lungs loud enough to command an army,” he said.

“I suppose his entry into the world was no less difficult for him than it was for me,” Isabelle replied, adding quickly as she saw her husband’s expression: “We may both have been mauled by the ordeal, but we’re alive. Go.” She made a shooing motion. “Let the midwives finish their work and allow me to rest awhile and we’ll talk.” A spark glimmered through her bruised exhaustion. “You’ve returned, so you must have news about Longchamp?”

It was her question more than anything else that reassured William about Isabelle. As she said, the birth had mauled her, but not enough to quench her inquisitive mind. The baby was all right too. Unlike Marguerite’s child, who had barely had the strength to draw breath, this particular scrap of humanity was bawling like a young bull. “Yes,” he said and finally found his smile. “And you’ll enjoy hearing it when you’re ready.”

***

It was the next morning before William settled down to telling Isabelle what had happened. The midwives had insisted that she was left in peace to eat, drink, and sleep and William had bedded down in the main hall with his men rather than disturb her again. Armed now with a breakfast of bread, cheese, and cider, he sat on the edge of their bed. The baby, having guzzled like a toper at Isabelle’s breast, was sleeping against her arm, a look of concentration on his little face. It was almost as if every aspect of his tiny existence had to be met with full dedication. Changing his swaddling was not going to be an enviable task.

“Longchamp,” William said as he broke bread and handed her a piece, “has been banished from England…but the manner of his going took even the most hardbitten of us by surprise.” He grinned broadly. “You know that he’s been as slippery as an eel—avoiding our demands that he face us and answer the accusations against him? When we finally brought him to bay at the Tower of London and he found he couldn’t wriggle off the hook, he gave his own brothers as hostages and promised to yield us his castles and authority. He swore also not to leave England until those castles had been taken into the possession of our castellans.” William paused for effect.

“Obviously he broke his promise,” Isabelle said.

William nodded. “He handed over the keys of the Tower and was escorted to Dover, which he’d been allowed to keep under his jurisdiction. He was still under oath not to leave England because he hadn’t handed over his other castles to the justiciars’ officials, but he decided to try and escape to Normandy anyway. He sent his servants to find a boat and disguised himself as a woman in a green dress and hood.”

Isabelle almost choked on her bread. “No!” The image of William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely and King Richard’s chancellor, robed in feminine apparel was a boggling image to conjure.

“It gets better!” William laughed, thoroughly enjoying himself at Longchamp’s expense. “Whilst ‘my lady’ was waiting by the shore for his servants to return, a fisherman mistook him for one of the town whores touting for custom and received the shock of his life when he groped between his ‘sweetheart’s’ legs. So did Longchamp, I hazard.”

Isabelle gave a yelp of laughter and then wished she hadn’t as her tender muscles cramped. “Jesu, Jesu!” she gasped, pressing her hand across her belly.

“Christ knows, that fisherman must have been desperate or short-sighted!” William guffawed. “He was beaten off by Longchamp’s servants, but then some women tried to speak to him and when he couldn’t answer their questions because he spoke no English, they pulled off his hood and the game was up.” William knuckled his eyes and strove for sobriety, but after relating such a farce it was difficult. “They turned on him then, spitting on him and stoning him with shingle from the beach. He was rescued by a couple of serjeants in the town, but locked in a cellar since they couldn’t trust him not to escape. He’s been released and sent on his way now that his castles are in our hands, but he has been made a complete laughing stock and of his own doing. It is no more than he justly deserves, but I cannot help feeling sorry for him.”

Isabelle didn’t feel compassion for the odious William Longchamp; only relief that he was no longer an imminent threat. “And what about Prince John?” she asked. “I suppose he is like a dog with two tails now?”

William cut a chunk of cheese. “Yes,” he said wryly. “The Prince is indeed delighted with the way matters have turned in his favour. He has been acknowledged Richard’s heir and the chief thorn in his side has been ridiculed and thrown out of England. Not that he has a free rein. We’ll be watching him. Richard is still the King, and John ignores that at his peril.” He twitched his shoulders. “Still, at least for now there is peace.” He finished his cider and wiped his mouth. “There’s good news for my brother too. He’s been appointed sheriff of Sussex to replace the loss of his position at York.”

“Is that a good thing?” Isabelle asked. She settled herself more comfortably against the feather bolsters and stifled a yawn.

“Better for him than York was. It’s closer to his heartlands and the office better suits his talents. He’s pleased, and I’m pleased for him.”

She knew that it was the closest he would come to saying that his brother’s capabilities were limited. “So am I.” She couldn’t prevent the next yawn. Her eyelids were beginning to feel like lead weights.