Conquest II Read online

  There was the hall where I had lived with Lady Sybil Montgommery and her family of four daughters for nine years. There was the well where I had drawn water every day and plotted to send Amelina to the Welsh King Cadwgan and his son Owain, hoping for rescue from my Norman captors. There was the motte towering above us, where I had often climbed to reach the tower and look out across the land and sea, longing for my freedom. There was the path to the postern gate where I had waited one moonless night for my betrothed husband, Owain ap Cadwgan, who told me he would come for me, he would take me home to my own people. But he never came.

  I shivered, remembering how I had waited for Owain in the dark, waited all night until the cockerel crowed for the rising sun.

  ‘Lady.’ Haith held out his hand to help me dismount.

  I needed no directions. Every inch of this castle was engraved in my memory, in the habits of my muscles. I brushed dust from my skirts and walked slowly to the great doors of the hall, trying to collect myself. Despite the familiarity of the castle, it seemed changed, smaller, where once it had seemed vast to me, when I arrived here as a distraught child. The impression of change was also brought about by the great crowd crammed into the castle for the King’s court. Although his full retinue would not be here, many remaining at Westminster with the Queen, nevertheless there were hundreds of bustling people: servants, mewsmen, houndsmen exercising their charges, stableboys, a scribe with a stack of wax slates in his hands, cooks’ assistants, water carriers.

  Inside the doors, the hall was no less crowded, but here were both the King’s formal court – his curia, and his domus – his personal household of chamberlains, stewards, butlers, scribes and marshals, all those with nearness to the King. It had been so long since I had been at court that, at first, I felt overwhelmed with this amorphous mass of chattering colours, furs and silks, unable to discern its individual shapes. The ostentation and luxury assaulted me after two years of relatively plain living with my husband at Pembroke Castle.

  I looked around at bishops in their finest copes, chaplains and clerks, gloriously clad noblemen, ladies with small dogs and monkeys on fine chains. The King’s favoured hounds wound their way around human and table legs. Dishes and jugs clattered. Rowdy soldiers and young sons of the nobility receiving their education at the King’s court, those who formed his familia, his household knights clashed drinking horns and goblets, laughing loudly with each other. Orphaned heiresses, as I had once been, were bedecked with their best jewels, their hair loose and lustrous, hoping that either the King would favour them with a splendid (or kind) marriage, or turn his eye on them himself. The King had been away in Normandy for a considerable time and many people doubtless hoped to gain some satisfactory decisions from him. Despite the discomforts of travelling to Cardiff, as many as could get here were crammed into the castle. Each sat with their own agenda burning for the King’s attention, but politely camouflaged by a façade of mere leisure. Their tension was heightened by Henry’s strategies. He knew the art of manipulating hopes and fears.

  I took a deep breath and allowed myself to focus on the centre that all these people swirled around. Henry sat at the High Table with his eldest son, Robert FitzRoy, on his right-hand side, and my dear foster-sister, Mabel, on his left. Robert was sixteen years old and had grown into gangling manhood since I had last seen him. Mabel was not conventionally beautiful, but at fourteen, she had the benefits of youth. She had the looks of her father and mother, moon-faced and a little buck-toothed, but to me she was as beautiful as the sun. I could not suppress an enormous smile of affection as our eyes met. I sobered my expression and curtsied to the King, my neck bent, my eyes on the toes of my blue riding boots.

  ‘Lady Nest!’ His voice was warm, honeyed, and my body responded to it. I was angry already and I had not even looked him in the face yet.

  I rose from my curtsey and looked at him. His hair was blue-black, his dark eyes were avid, brimming with humour and intelligence. Remorse, apology, self-blame for his abandonment of me – those were alien concepts to him. I held his gaze. I was no longer a stupid, innocent girl. I had learned my lessons.

  ‘You are greatly welcome here, to your old home,’ he gestured to the hall, ‘for this very happy occasion.’ He gave me a formal welcome and I knew our real joust would come later.

  I glanced at Mabel again and saw she was happy enough. Robert FitzRoy would make her a good husband. Like me, he had been fostered with Mabel’s mother, Sybil de Montgommery, and he and Mabel knew each other well. ‘It is, indeed, a very happy occasion,’ I said. Mabel’s father, Robert FitzHamon, had recently died from an old battle injury. Her mother had failed to produce a male heir, so the King had concentrated FitzHamon’s vast patrimony, all of it, into Mabel as sole heiress, and given her to his illegitimate son.

  ‘You have had a long journey, Lady Nest. Please, take your ease. We look forward to conversing with you further, later today.’

  ‘Thank you, Sire.’ I curtsied again, swept my gaze along the table, saw the thinning orange-grey hair and smile of the one person I recognised: Richard de Belmeis, my old tutor. It was he who had betrayed the Montgommery family and now he benefitted greatly from their fall, since the King had made him Sheriff of Shropshire and of all the former Montgommery lands on the Welsh borders. I did not respond to his smile.

  ‘This way, my lady.’ A servant gestured to the stairs at the right side of the hall. Those stairs had been riddled with treacherous holes and rottings when I lived here as a child, but now they were in a good state of repair. I followed the servant up to the first floor, through the room that had been de Belmeis’ study and my schoolroom, relieved to find that the vitrine of locusts he had kept there was gone. The servant led me down the hall to the small chamber that had once been mine. My travelling chest was already at the foot of the bed.

  ‘You travel with no maidservant, my lady?’

  ‘No, my maid remained at home to take care of my children.’

  ‘Should I send a girl to you, my lady?’

  ‘No. It’s not necessary.’ I glanced at the jug of water and the clean linen on a small table close to the fire. ‘I will fend for myself.’ I needed some time alone and could not tolerate a stranger primping and probing at me, taking gossip about me back to the other servants and, in turn, to their mistresses and masters.

  The servant left me to look around at the bed and its hangings, which had not changed at all, at the same view from the small window, the crackling fire in the same hearth, the same aumbry on the wall with its shelves now empty. I pulled off the white leather gloves, which the King had given me as a gift years before, and set them on the table. I rarely had occasion to wear such finery now. Looking at them, I tried and failed to not remember those times. When Henry abandoned me, I had wanted to discard everything he had ever given me: the clothes, books, jewels and tapestries, but Amelina remonstrated with me, kept things secreted away where I could not see them, until the time when I could bear to encounter them again without erupting into a welter of misery and rage. She was right. It would have been profligate to throw away such things. I loosened my cape fastening, letting it drop from my shoulders onto the bed. I unpacked my fine glass beakers from their wrappings and placed them on the aumbry shelf where they had formerly stood, in my previous life here. I smiled to myself, delighted that they had survived the dangers of yet another journey and continued to bear witness to all the passing times of my life. There was a light tap on the door behind me. Was Henry here to test my resolve so soon? I turned to see Mabel in the doorway, and she rushed into my embrace. ‘I’m so glad to see you, Nest!’

  I kissed her face. ‘And I, you. But where is your mother?’

  Her eyes instantly welled with tears. ‘Gone,’ she said bleakly. ‘The King commanded my mother’s remarriage to Jean, Sire of Raimes, in Normandy. My mother says he is a very minor lord. She thought she would meet you today, but the King ….’ She sat on the bed, beside my discarded cloak, looking glum.
/>   Mabel’s grandfather, Roger de Montgommery, had been one of the most important nobles under Henry’s father, William the Conqueror. Mabel’s uncles, Hugh, and then Robert de Bellême, had been Earls of Shrewsbury, but the family was rebellious, arrogant, and Henry had brought them down spectacularly, five years ago. Henry attainted all the Montgommerys as traitors, and it was Richard de Belmeis, their erstwhile servant and my tutor, who had betrayed them, who provided the damning evidence. Mabel’s uncle, Robert de Bellême, lost the earldom and fled to his lands in Normandy.

  ‘Is there anything you need, Nest? Where is Amelina?’

  ‘I left her in Pembroke with my sons. She sends you her love. I know my way around my old home well enough to manage ably without her for a few days.’ I kissed her cheek. ‘I am so very pleased to be here, Mabel. To see you betrothed to Robert.’

  Smiling, she touched a fingertip to the vestige of a tear beneath one of her eyes, rose and left me to my memories.

  I hesitated at the top of the stairs that wound down to the hall, garnering my courage to face Henry. I held out my arm and twisted my wrist to and fro, admiring the repeating bird’s foot pattern that Amelina and I had embroidered in gold around the cuffs, neck and hem of my fine dark blue gown. We had been stitching for two weeks and the result was pleasing. I had sketched the imprint of the kite’s foot in the sand at Llansteffan and Amelina and I had then copied it in stitch. The kite was a magnificent regal bird, biding its time, hovering and soaring on high winds and I had adopted this claw-print as my emblem, my secret sign to myself of adherence to my Welsh heritage. I was wearing my best jewels, including the small silver cross that Gerald gifted to me. Looking down at my slippered foot held in the air, about to take the first step, I reminded myself: I am a royal Welsh princess and the wife of Sir Gerald FitzWalter, castellan of Pembroke Castle. That was who I would take serenely into the hall, into the King’s presence, to face all his court. I was not the King’s discarded mistress, abandoned pregnant without so much as a note. I was not her.

  Every step of those stairs was loaded with memories for me: hiding in the window embrasure set deep in the cold stone, overhearing the Montgommery family secrets, telling them to Gerald; one dark night, slipping surreptitously down these steps, and out to the postern gate, to wait for Owain ap Cadwgan who never came. I paused, half-way down, closed my eyes briefly, to dispel the memories and focus my mind on the present challenges instead. The sounds of the hall rose up to me: crockery clattering, a barely discernable lute drowned out by the buzz of voices, and a woman’s high-pitched laughter. I opened my arms wide and touched the two sides of the cold stone tower with my fingertips, as if bathing in the noise spiralling up the stairwell. In truth, I had grown a little bored with the humdrum days at Pembroke Castle. I smiled to myself and proceeded down.

  ‘Lady Nest!’ The King was standing close to the bottom of the staircase. Had he been waiting for me? He took my proferred hand, wrapping his other arm closely around my waist. I locked my body into a mute resistance, which he ignored as he pulled me into the crowd. ‘Here is the Vermandois!’ he exclaimed, coming to a halt before Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth had been my great friend in the years I spent at court, before I married and returned to Wales with Gerald. She looked a little different, grown into a woman in the three years since I had last seen her. She had been a child-bride, a mere eleven years old, married to Henry’s leading counsellor, Robert de Meulan, who was forty years older than she. Since she had slipped from child to wife so fast, so early, she retained child-like qualities as she grew into adulthood. So much had been foist upon her in disregard of her own desires that now she felt she could do whatever she liked. I had often feared the outcome of her recklessness. She took my hands, smiling warmly. Henry did not remove his arm from my waist. ‘I’m taking her,’ Elizabeth said to him defiantly. Elizabeth and the King were great friends, which in part explained her success in recklessness, yet they had never been lovers, which had always struck me as odd considering Elizabeth’s beauty and youth and Henry’s usual inclinations.

  ‘Of course!’ he said, pulling a comical face at us both. ‘For now, you are.’ He released my waist with a sly caress, and moved off to speak with William Warenne, Elizabeth’s lover, who smiled a greeting to me over Henry’s shoulder. Elizabeth swung my hands and I looked down at our clasped hands in disorientated surprise, too slowly processing my feelings at Henry’s sudden proximity and now his sudden absence again. He slipped so easily back into treating me with familiarity and instead of feeling angry at that, I was ashamed to find myself pleased at it.

  Elizabeth drew me to the edge of the hall and a cushioned window seat, where we could find a little quiet in the hubbub. ‘How are you, darling?’

  ‘Well. And you?’

  She rolled her exquisite, turquoise eyes dramatically, jerking her head in the direction of Warenne.

  ‘So, still?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And your husband?’

  ‘Meulan is over there.’

  I followed her gesture to look at her husband whose lined face and bent, pained posture spoke eloquently of his age and his years of solid service to the King.

  ‘He has not been well lately.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear it.’

  She plucked at the sleeve of my dress. ‘An unusual design, Nest,’ she said, studying the golden march of the bird’s foot around my cuff. ‘You have a whimsical dressmaker. Still, you look gorgeous!’ She leant closer. ‘You had a boy?’ she whispered.

  ‘I had two boys.’

  She shrugged. ‘Yes, but you had Henry’s boy.’

  I nodded, reluctant to speak of it. ‘This will be a fine marriage for Robert FitzRoy and Mabel FitzRobert.’

  She ignored my attempt to change the subject. ‘Does he look like Henry? Has the King told you what he will bestow upon him? Lands or title, I mean.’

  ‘No.’ I was shocked to recognise the avarice of the court in her expression, a craving that she and I had joked about when we perceived it together before. Unlike her, I had not arrived at the King’s court at Westminster as a child. I learned to swim there as an adult. I was saddened to see that what had been play for her was now hardened into endeavour. Seeing that I could not deflect her from the subject of my son, I used the pretence of another face I recognised in the crowd to move off. ‘Let’s speak more later,’ I called back to Elizabeth.

  ‘Lady Nest! How delightful to see you.’ The soft, smiling, young woman holding her hands to me in artless welcome presented a stark contrast to Elizabeth’s hard glint. How on earth did Sybil Corbet survive the court? Protected by the King, I supposed. Such a warm welcome, coming from one of Henry’s other mistresses could be taken as sarcasm, preparation for competitive verbal battle, but coming from Sybil, I knew it was sincere. She was slight despite having borne Henry several children. I knew from gossip that she was still his mistress and she was, as usual, pregnant. I had been at the birth of her first child and felt a real affection for her. Her simplicity was probably what appealed to Henry. It was a rarity amidst the self-seeking complexities of his court. Sybil made him laugh and relax and she was not inclined to jealousy. She was his respite from kingship. Henry was a loyal philanderer. He had kept Ansfride as his mistress for many years, but Sybil had come to Henry as a young girl and outlasted us all.

  Looking over Sybil’s shoulder, searching for the black head of the King, I was startled to recognise Bernard de Neufmarché and his wife Agnes. I had only met them once before, soon after I arrived at Cardiff as a child hostage, when I laid a curse on de Neufmarché, the murderer of my father and my half-brother, Cynan. I cursed that de Neufmarché should be hunted down by the Dogs of Annwn, who ran with the ghastly Wild Hunt. I cursed that the Dogs would gnaw voraciously on his innards. De Neufmarché was an aggressive Norman lord from the Conqueror’s generation. He was nearing old age now and his muscles were turning to lard. His grotesquely battle-scarred face looked as if it had bee
n cupped by the searing, fiery hand of a demon. Silently, I repeated the curse in my head and Sybil’s cheerful expression fell, seeing something horrid in mine. ‘What is it, Nest? You look as if you have seen a ghost.’

  ‘Yes. I have remembered ghosts and I see a ghost walking,’ I said in a fierce whisper, turning my gaze back to Sybil.

  Sybil dropped my hands. ‘Are you well?’

  I forced a smile to my face. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lady Nest.’

  I turned to confront de Neufmarché’s wife, Agnes, and was relieved to see she had only her two children with her, and her husband remained at a distance from me, on the other side of the hall.

  ‘Lady Agnes,’ I greeted her politely. ‘And your children?’

  ‘Yes, this is Mael,’ she said, introducing a dark-haired young man of fourteen or so, ‘and Sybille.’ I judged that her daughter was about six years of age. Agnes was half-Welsh and the granddaughter of the former king of all Wales, Gruffudd ap Llewellyn. She had been forced to the marriage with de Neufmarché and had made no bones about her bitterness when I met her years before. She was in her early thirties now. Judging by the raddled lines of her face and her overly thin frame, the marriage had not improved for her. I smiled to her children, but was saved from further discussion with Agnes by the start of the betrothal ceremony.

  I avoided Henry’s glances, focussing on Mabel and Robert as the bishop blessed them. Mabel’s pale brown hair was dressed with colourful threads and flowers. She wore a dusky pale red gown that suited her. Robert’s resemblance to the King was visible in his stocky build and dark hair. When the ceremony was over, there was no avoiding the King. He came straight for me. ‘My darling Nest,’ he said quietly, taking my hand.