Time and Chance (86 page)

Waving frantically at the fleet’s flagship, Rainald shouted, “Go with God, Harry!” Much to his delight, a man in the bow waved back. “You think that is him?” He squinted, uncertain but hopeful. “By the Rood, it is! He’s got the lass with him, Ranulf. See her blue mantle?”

Ranulf swung around in the saddle. “ ‘The lass,’ ” he echoed. “You mean . . . Rosamund Clifford?”

“Well, with all due respect to Eleanor, I’d hardly refer to her as a lass, now, would I? Yes, I mean the little Clifford. You did not know he was taking her along?” When Ranulf shook his head, Rainald grinned, pleased to be the bearer of scandalous tidings. “Mind you, he does try to be discreet. He did not even sail with her on the same ship for Portsmouth. And he kept her hidden away at Pembroke, too. But he told me that she has a fear of the sea—sensible lass—so I suppose he thought it would be easier for her if they traveled together to Ireland. That is a longer voyage than a Channel crossing, after all.”

Ranulf said nothing and they sat their horses in silence as the ships were piloted from the river mouth into the estuary. The sunset was flaming out and in that fleeting, ephemeral interval between day and night, it seemed as if the world was afire, as if time itself was suspended until the last dying rays were submerged in the crimsoning waters of the sea. And then the moment was over, the spectacle ended, and darkness began to descend. Ranulf continued to watch, though, as long as the sails were still in sight.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I always look forward to doing my Author’s Note, as it is a way for me to speak directly to my readers. It also gives me an opportunity to invite readers backstage, so to speak, and acquaint them with some of the behind-the-scenes choices and tactics that go into a novel’s creation. In this case, I’d like to begin with an explanation.
Time and Chance
was originally supposed to be published several years ago, and I know the long delay has perplexed many of my readers. My own favorite query was a very succinct e-mail in which a reader asked simply, “Did Eleanor get lost in Aquitaine?” The truth is much more mundane; I was unlucky enough to be sidelined with an eighteen-month siege of mononucleosis. College students can shake it off in a few months, but it flattens aging baby boomers like a runaway steamroller, and not even Henry and Eleanor could make any headway until it ran its course.

In writing
Chance,
I took an occasional small liberty with known facts, a common sin for writers of historical fiction. In the ambush scene in Chapter Three, I gave Ranulf credit for another man’s heroics; he was not the one who snatched up the fallen royal banner and forestalled a rout. This is as good a time as any to acknowledge that Ranulf is a rarity in one of my historical novels, a character who owes his existence solely to my imagination. As I explained to readers in
When Christ and His Saints Slept,
since King Henry I had at least twenty known illegitimate children, I figured one more couldn’t possibly hurt.

I took another liberty in sending Hywel to Toulouse with Ranulf and Henry, although not a large one; one of the chroniclers did report that a Welsh prince accompanied the king on his Toulouse campaign. The “cloak scene” that I dramatize in Chapter Ten is perhaps the best-known anecdote about Henry and Thomas Becket, related by a very reliable source, William Fitz Stephen. With apologies to Fitz Stephen, plot considerations forced me to move this incident from London to Normandy. And I embellished Henry’s meeting with King Louis at Montmirail in 1169. As far as we know, Henry did not present Louis’s young son Philippe with a pony. Philippe’s aversion to horses is well known, however, and so I did not see this scene as such a stretch. One final confession. In my
Saints
Afterword, I admitted that I’d failed to find a death date for Eleanor’s sister, Petronilla. I am very glad I red-flagged this there, as I later discovered a reference to her death in 1151! But because I’d allowed my fictional Petronilla to live on in
Saints
beyond her real-life counterpart’s demise, I saw no harm in extending her lifespan into
Chance.

As many readers are familiar with the Salic Law barring women from the French line of succession, I think I should mention that it did not become operative in France until the fourteenth century. So a daughter of Louis VII could have inherited the French throne had he been unable to sire a son. Owain Gwynedd was the last Welsh ruler to call himself a king. I could not resist borrowing from Richard Coeur de Leon’s famous exchange with the French king, when Philippe boasted that he would take Chateau-Gaillard if its walls were made of iron, and Richard riposted that he’d hold it if its walls were made of butter; I give a similar statement to Henry’s half-brother Hamelin.

In view of all the controversy John managed to provoke during his lifetime and afterward, it is not surprising that even his birth date should be a source of dispute. Some readers of my novel
Here Be Dragons
might remember that John was born in 1167, a year later than his birth in
Chance
. According to Ralph of Diceto, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, John was born on Christmas Eve in 1166. The Abbott of Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, Robert of Torigni, gave John’s birth date as 1167 and this is the one most commonly reported. It is, however, in error. Henry and Eleanor were in different countries during the time when John would have had to be conceived, if John were, indeed, born in December 1167, and not even Eleanor’s most virulent enemies cast doubts upon John’s paternity. To complicate matters, I’ve come to doubt the accepted birthday for John as Christmas Eve. He was named after John the Evangelist and since the Apostle’s saint’s day was December 27, I think it is more likely that John was born on that date.

So many myths and legends have sprung up around Eleanor during her own lifetime and in the centuries following her death. That she presided at Poitiers over Courts of Love is one such legend, no longer given serious credence by most historians. Did she confront Rosamund Clifford at Woodstock? We know that she suddenly left Normandy and made a hazardous winter crossing of the Channel while in the late stages of pregnancy. We know that upon her arrival at Southampton, she traveled on to Oxford. We know that Oxford is but five miles from Woodstock, where Henry was keeping Rosamund Clifford. And we know that Eleanor then remained in England, a land she little loved, for over a year, not rejoining Henry in Normandy until December 1167. I leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions.

As always when writing of the Plantagenets, I must reassure readers that even the most improbable events actually occurred. The bitter quarrel between Henry II and Thomas Becket is possibly the best documented episode of the Middle Ages. We have no fewer than five eyewitness accounts of the archbishop’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral, and more than a dozen biographies written by Becket’s contemporaries, including letters and testimony by three of the men who knew him best: John of Salisbury, William Fitz Stephen, and Herbert of Bosham. So in many of the key confrontations between Henry and Thomas Becket—at Woodstock, Westminster, Clarendon, Northampton, Montmirail, Canterbury—I had the rare privilege of letting my characters speak for themselves.

 

SKP
August 2001

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I could never have completed
Time and Chance
without the help and support and encouragement of the following people: My family and friends, particularly Earle Kotila and Valerie LaMont. My agents, Molly Friedrich and Mic Cheetham. My editors at Penguin, Tom Weldson and Harriet Evans. Above all, my editor for twenty remarkable years, Marian Wood.