Conquest II Read online

  CONQUEST II

  The Drowned Court

  Tracey Warr

  For Edward Warr and Maureen Warr

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Map of Ireland, Wales and England and the coast of Normandy

  Map of Normandy and northern France

  Map of Wales

  Part One 1107–1109

  1. Perplexing Parchments

  2. Resolved

  3. A Conundrum

  4. Cumberworlds

  5. The Game of the Countess

  6. The Water Wolf

  7. Return to the Cloister

  8. The Usefulness of a Garderobe

  Part Two 1110–1116

  9. Discarded Women

  10. The Ransom

  11. Quandary

  12. Fire and Ash

  13. Helen of Wales

  14. Blood and Wine

  15. After Winter

  16. Hunting Ground

  17. Truce

  18. Black-clad Life

  19. London

  20. Three Kings

  21. The Spyloft

  22. Salt-worn Lovers

  23. New Quarry

  Part Three 1117–1120

  24. Tithes

  25. Mererid and Seithininn

  26. A Murder of Crows

  27. Marriage

  28. On a Parapet

  29. Shuttle Diplomacy

  30. The Boy

  Part Four 1121

  31. The New Broom

  32. O Sea-bird

  Genealogy of the Dukes of Normandy

  Genealogy of the Welsh Royal Families

  Historical Note

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Also available in the Conquest series

  Copyright

  Cast of Characters

  Main Characters

  Benedicta, a nun at Almenêches Abbey, Normandy; sister of the Flemish knight, Haith

  Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy; youngest son of William the Conqueror

  Nest ferch Rhys, wife of Gerald FitzWalter, the steward of Pembroke Castle; former mistress of King Henry; daughter of the deceased Welsh king of the south-west kingdom of Deheubarth

  Secondary Characters

  Adela, Countess of Blois, Meaux and Chartres; sister of King Henry; mother of Thibaut de Blois and Etienne de Blois

  Amaury de Montfort, lord in Normandy; nephew of the Count of Évreux; ally of King Louis of France and enemy of King Henry of England

  Amelina, Nest’s Breton maid

  Bertrade de Montfort, former queen of France; former countess of Anjou; sister of Amaury de Montfort

  Cadwgan, King of the Welsh kingdom of Powys

  Elizabeth de Vermandois, Countess of Leicester; wife of Robert de Meulan; mistress of William de Warenne

  Etienne de Blois, Count of Mortain; Countess Adela’s son and King Henry’s nephew

  Gerald FitzWalter, husband of Nest ferch Rhys; steward of Pembroke Castle

  Gruffudd ap Rhys, Nest’s brother; claimant to the former Welsh kingdom of Deheubarth, now ruled by the Norman king, Henry, under the stewardship of Gerald FitzWalter

  Haith, Flemish knight in the service of King Henry since childhood; brother of the nun, Benedicta

  Henry FitzRoy, Nest’s illegitimate son by King Henry

  Isabel de Beaumont, daughter of Elizabeth de Vermandois and Robert de Meulan

  Juliana, King Henry’s illegitimate daughter; married to Eustache de Breteuil

  Mahaut, daughter of Count Fulk d’Anjou

  Orderic Vitalis, a monk at the monastry of Ouches; a historian

  Owain ap Cadwgan, Prince of the Welsh kingdom of Powys

  Petronilla de Chemillé, Prioress and then Abbess of Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou

  Richard de Belmeis, Sheriff of Shropshire; formerly Nest’s tutor and clerk at Cardiff Castle for the Montgommery family, who were convicted of treason in 1102

  Robert de Bellême, Lord of Alençon and Bellême; head of the Montgommery family; dispossessed by King Henry of the earldom of Shrewsbury for treason

  Robert FitzRoy, King Henry’s illegitimate eldest son; betrothed to Nest’s foster-sister, Mabel FitzRobert

  William Adelin, heir to the English throne; son of King Henry and Queen Matilda

  William Clito, son of Robert, former Duke of Normandy; nephew of King Henry and Countess Adela; claimant to the Duchy of Normandy and others

  Map of Ireland, Wales and England

  Map of Ireland, Wales and England

  Map of Wales

  Part One

  1107–1109

  1

  Perplexing Parchments

  ‘Read it to me one more time,’ Amelina said.

  Yr wylan deg ar lanw, dioer

  Unlliw ag eiry neu wenlloer,

  Dilwch yw dy degwch di,

  Darn fal haul, dyrnfol heli.

  I delighted in the roll of the Welsh on my tongue, like the tide coming home again to the beach. I sighed at so many years of forcing my mouth into the alien shapes of Norman French. ‘O sea-bird, beautiful upon the tides.’ I translated the Welsh for Amelina.

  White as the moon is when the night abides,

  Or snow untouched, whose dustless splendour glows

  Bright as a sunbeam and whose white wing throws

  A glove of challenge on the salt sea-flood.

  ‘A gull,’ Amelina pronounced with satisfaction.

  ‘Obviously!’ I said, instantly regretting my exclamation as I watched her pleased expression dissipate. ‘But the question you must help me with, Amelina, is who placed this on my writing table?’ I tried to mollify her. ‘Who managed to get past all the castle guards and into my room?’

  ‘Perhaps that person was already here, Lady Nest. Perhaps it was Gerald.’ All her speeches to me for many weeks had been aimed at encouraging the tentative affection growing between myself and my husband. The threads holding Gerald and I together were fragile, and we were still weaving them carefully, warily, between us.

  I shook my head. ‘It’s in Welsh.’

  ‘Gerald speaks Welsh.’

  ‘Not like this. The poem is sophisticated.’ My husband is a Norman. A sympathetic one, but a Norman nonetheless.

  ‘Then he paid a bard to write it for him.’

  I shook my head once more, smiling at her stubborn desire that such a romantic gesture should come from my husband. Gerald’s military strategies were often brilliant, unexpected, but in matters of the heart? No, he was tiresomely straightforward in that regard. ‘He is not a romantic,’ I said. I picked up a pinch of aniseed spice from a bowl on the table and chewed thoughtfully on it.

  ‘The King?’ she said hesitantly, always unwilling to bring his name up since the pain I had suffered at his abandonment. King Henry was capable of such a gesture, and he had given me many poems in our time together, but he did not send this. ‘It’s in Welsh. A Norman would send a poem in French.’ I shook my head again, trying to wipe away the warm memories of Henry. ‘Throws a glove of challenge on the salt sea-flood, Amelina.’

  ‘Owain ap Cadwgan,’ she exclaimed, bringing her fingers swiftly to her mouth as if to instantly silence it, as she voiced the name of the Welsh prince; the name that had been in both of our minds since I first picked up the mysterious rolled parchment left on my desk.

  ‘Yes, it must be.’ I had been betrothed to Owain long ago, before the Normans came and killed my father, stole our lands, stole me away to a Norman upbringing and the Norman court.

  ‘He broke into a Norman castle for you once before,’ she reminded me. ‘He could do it again.’

  ‘I can’t feel so pleased with that now, Amelina,’ I said, sh
arply, making her expression fall again. ‘Now that I have Norman babies to protect.’

  ‘Will you tell Gerald, then? Have the soldiers make a search of the castle?’ She stood and moved behind me to brush my hair.

  ‘It’s too late for that. Whoever left this here is long gone.’ Keeping my head still for Amelina’s ministrations, I peered down to look once more at the poem, the stiff roll held open between my splayed thumb and fingers. Amelina finished braiding my black hair into two thick plaits. She swung them over the front of my shoulders and leant to pick up the garnet and gold hair jewels on my desk. I rolled the poem carefully and tied the silk ribbon back around it. If this was from Owain, it came too late. I had hankered for him once, when I was a child, a miserable hostage in a Norman stronghold. If Owain had rescued me from Cardiff Castle then, years ago, as he had promised to do, my life would have been different. I could have been a happy Welsh wife, a Welsh queen, but that chance had vanished. I was married to a Norman, to Gerald, and my small sons were half-Norman. I must negotiate amidst those complexities every day. ‘It’s too late,’ I said again to Amelina. ‘Owain can only mean trouble and pain now.’

  She glanced at my face, then focused back on fitting the jewels to the ends of my plaits. She moved to the chest at the foot of my bed to find a head veil.

  ‘But I can’t betray Owain to Gerald either.’

  Amelina was back with a fine, translucent veil in her hand. She grimaced sympathetically and tied the short veil in place around my head with an embroidered blue band.

  ‘Or make Gerald doubt his trust in me,’ I told her.

  She frowned to show that she mirrored and fully understood these complications. ‘Ohhhh, and who-ooo was her true love?’ She trilled the refrain of a Breton love song from her homeland and smiled at me sardonically.

  I ignored Amelina’s humour. ‘We will say nothing of this poem,’ I decided. ‘Owain cannot have been here himself. He paid somebody to bring this parchment into the castle, to leave it in my room.’ When I was a girl, I was naive enough to think that Owain was planning to rescue me for my sake, to help me, but I know better now. I was merely a symbol for all these men to fight over, as hounds squabble over a bone in the courtyard. ‘It’s a challenge to Gerald,’ I said, ‘and I will not deliver it.’

  Amelina waggled her head from side to side. ‘But it is a beautiful poem of love too,’ she said eagerly.

  ‘I should burn it,’ I said, as I slid it into my jewelled casket and closed the lid.

  Downstairs, at the hall table, my husband waited for me with more perplexing parchment: King Henry’s invitation. ‘What does he mean by it?’ Gerald asked.

  I did not answer immediately. We both knew what Henry meant. I took my seat beside Gerald, carefully arranging the folds of my favourite blue wool gown around me. I suppressed a smile at the ceramic plate centred on the long table before us. It showed two kissing birds standing in water, and had come as a gift with the King’s invitation. I reached over and took Gerald’s hand, moving it away from the King’s letter, forcing open his palm, and pressing my own to his. He lifted our hands to his mouth and softly kissed the back of mine, his pale blue eyes upon me. I smoothed the fair curls from his forehead.

  ‘I am not invited,’ he said.

  I shook my head. There had been no mention of Gerald in King Henry’s invitation to me to attend the betrothal of his eldest bastard son, Robert FitzRoy, and my foster-sister, Mabel Fitz- Robert, in Cardiff. It was deliberate. Everything Henry did was deliberate.

  ‘He wants you to go alone.’

  I nodded.

  ‘And you will go?’

  ‘I must,’ I said. ‘He commands it. He is our king.’

  He dropped his gaze and a muscle moved in his jaw. ‘He is King of you.’

  ‘Not anymore, Gerald,’ I whispered, bringing my mouth close to his ear. ‘You are my lord, now. You will always be my lord.’

  He swallowed. ‘He wants you to himself.’

  ‘Perhaps, but he will not have me. I must go for the sake of my foster-sister, Mabel.’

  He nodded, not looking at me.

  ‘Please Gerald, try to trust me. Trust us. I love you.’

  He smiled an unconvinced smile at me. ‘I do. I do trust us, Nest.’ He touched the garnet jewel at the end of my plait, slid his thumb up onto my hair.

  ‘I will be perfectly safe travelling with Haith,’ I said. The King’s knight had arrived the previous evening. ‘I will leave Amelina here to take care of the children.’

  Gerald looked surprised. ‘You will not take your son to the King?’

  ‘He does not command it.’ I tapped the King’s letter with the back of my hand. Whilst my youngest son, William, who was one year old, was Gerald’s, my eldest two-year-old son, Henry, was the King’s son, but he only knew Gerald as his father. The fear that the King would demand I give little Henry up to him to be raised at court had been my first flinching response on reading the invitation. Yet the King’s letter made no mention of my boy and I had no intention of handing him over. If the King asked it of me, I would fight. I knew the King’s other mistresses had all been obliged to give up their children to the royal nursery, but now Gerald and I had left the court, were safely in Wales, nothing would make me return little Henry to Westminster. If the King came here to Pembroke Castle with an army I would hide my son with the Welsh rebels in the mountains. Little Henry was mine and I was adamant that he would not go to the Norman court.

  ‘No.’ Gerald was thinking slowly. ‘But surely, Nest–’

  I interrupted him. ‘I will not take little Henry to Cardiff. He stays here with us, with you. And you will never give him up, if you wish to keep my love.’ I looked at him fiercely.

  He gazed at me earnestly. I saw every day that despite little Henry’s paternity, Gerald loved him almost as much as I did. ‘I give you my word, Nest,’ he said. I smiled to myself. If Gerald gave me his word my son had the best protection I could provide for him.

  2

  Resolved

  There were very few roads in Wales and no other route to travel to Cardiff. I swayed in the saddle with the knight Haith at my side, enjoying the spring sun, and tried not to think about how I was travelling the same road I had first taken after my family and household were massacred at Llansteffan. I had travelled this road to Cardiff Castle as an eight-year-old hostage of the Normans.

  The first day of this journey, Haith and I were forced to ride hard to reach our overnight resting place at the small monastery of Llantwit, outside Neath, before twilight closed in around us. We left Pembroke later than planned since Haith, as was his habit, had overslept. Today, however, feeling guilt for yesterday, he was up with the lark and we left early, riding at a leisurely pace. We would reach Cardiff well before nightfall.

  Haith had raised an eyebrow when he learned at Pembroke that I had no intention of bringing the King’s son with me to Cardiff, but he said nothing. Had Henry merely neglected to command it? He was never careless, although he might give that impression if it served him. Then did he leave my son with me as a gift, as an apology for abandoning me? I would learn his intentions soon enough, when I saw him. I tried to ignore my nervousness at the thought. ‘Is the King well?’ I asked Haith. He and Henry had been companions since childhood and Haith was fiercely loyal to his friend and master.

  ‘Yes, lady. Now war is over in Normandy, King very fine.’

  The Flemish inflections in Haith’s speech had never improved in all the years I had known him, in all the time he had been speaking French at Henry’s court. I sometimes thought he did it on purpose, to make himself appear a little silly, to conceal his intelligence. I sighed, thinking how the mere prospect of Henry, although he was miles away yet, immediately turned the air and all to intrigue and deceit.

  Misinterpreting my sigh as a response to his mention of war, Haith said, ‘King’s brother is prisoner now in Salisbury. Queen visits him. Says he’s content.’

  The road was pitted w
ith holes and cracks from the recent winter freezings and my reply had to wait while I steered my horse carefully around one particularly large fissure. ‘Poor Robert.’

  ‘Maybe he is happier as comfortable prisoner than as Duke,’ Haith suggested.

  I glanced at Haith. The sun lit his thick blond hair, turning his head leonine. He was always trying to put a positive angle on everything the King did, even when there was nothing positive to make of Henry’s actions. ‘Maybe.’ Undoubtedly that was also what Henry told himself about his brother, now that he had usurped him as Duke of Normandy. ‘Will the Queen be at Cardiff?’

  ‘No. She prefers no travel. Likes to stay in London with children.’

  ‘They are well, also? William and Maud?’ I referred to the royal children, the legitimate ones. Henry’s nursery in Westminster teemed with his other children too, the children of his legion of mistresses, of which I regretfully, stupidly, had been a member. His legitimate daughter, Maud, was five, and the heir, William, was three years old now. I had attended the Queen at their births.

  Haith beamed at me. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘And you, lady? You happy home in Wales? With husband?’ He glanced at me and looked away quickly. He knew my history and it offended his decency, his kindness.

  ‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘I am very happy, Haith.’

  ‘Excellence,’ he said. We were riding past a copse thickly carpeted with new bluebells. Haith laughed, let go his reins and threw his long arms wide, as if about to embrace the arrival of spring, and I laughed with him. ‘Why not?’ he declared. ‘You should be. You should be happy, always.’

  After two days on the road from Pembroke, I longed to take a moment of respite before having to confront the King and the court, but knew I could not have that comfort. We rode through a huge encampment of merchants clustered in front of the long castle walls. They jostled one another, calling out their wares to us. I steered my horse through the gatehouse of Cardiff Castle and into the familiar bailey.