Canterbury Papers (34 page)

William shook his head, smiling faintly as if I were a dim-witted child he would humor.

“No? Then let me guess again,” I continued, preferring the game I'd started to that intimate silence that had pervaded the room earlier. To complicate matters, William finally noticed when he passed me the dishes that I had to put them down in order to serve myself, since I have the use of only one hand. When he saw me place the cassoulet and begin to spoon out the beans, he quickly took the spoon from me. He served me himself, reaching across the table as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I could feel my color rising.

“Or … let me think. It is myself after all, isn't it? Both king and the abbot agreed you could have me. It will make less trouble if I am out of England. So you've decided to hold me here for a well-deserved ransom from my brother. No again? You are shaking your head. Then, if it isn't you and it isn't me, we must be fleeing because John is after one of our other knights.” I talked faster now, my words tumbling out. “How about Roland? Could John make him a pawn in a game with the French court? No, I think not. Not Roland. He's not important enough.”

“Please eat, Alaïs. You have not taken food all day.” William spoke quietly, making the echo of my mindless chatter sound even sillier.

I picked up my fork and began. The food was truly savory. The southern people create the best cooking on the Continent. Eleanor always said so. Eating distracted me for a moment, and I realized how my appetite had risen as a result of the day's ride. But then the silence created discomfort, and I began again.

“So it must be another person. I have it!” I produced my most brilliant smile, with some effort. “It must be young François. He of the red hair and the scholarly background and the actor's aspirations. François, the Body of the ‘Debate between the Body and the Soul.' John wants him for his court jester.”

William wasn't laughing now, only staring at me.

“What, William?” I joked, taking a draft of wine and returning my attention to my plate. “Why aren't you laughing? You don't want your young clerk to be considered more valuable than you as a prize? Then, perhaps, explain to me: Who is John laying traps for now?”

After a moment of his silence, I looked up from addressing the hare to find a strange expression settled over my companion's face. I removed my wounded hand from the table, where I had carelessly placed it, to my lap and watched him. My heart raced, as ever it did when I suspected he would confront me.

“I'm going to tell you something that may be difficult for you to accept. I would prefer to give you this information in the form of a story. I don't want you to ask any questions until I am finished. That's the only way I can do this. Is that agreeable to you?”

“That sort of introduction is hardly reassuring.”

“Will you stop sparring and let me tell this my way?” For the first time in this conversation, he voiced the impatience I read in his expression.

“All right,” I said, suddenly willing to pay any price to end the game.

William stopped twirling his wine goblet between his thumb and his forefinger. He placed his elbows on the table and his chin on his joined hands. His eyes locked with mine.

“Last evening I told you a story, about Henry's anger when I challenged him over his behavior toward you. I didn't tell you the complete story of those years.” William pushed his plate, still full, aside. “I didn't tell you what happened after we had the quarrel.”

“I remember. He struck you. You had a bloody tongue, but it was because you bit it in the course of the event.”

“So you
do
listen to me.” But no smile appeared. “There was more of consequence that happened.” A slight pause as he seemed to gather his forces. I was very still.

“About three days later, the king summoned me. He had decided on my punishment. I was to be the one to whom he would entrust his sacred errand.” A pause. A draft of wine, followed by a brief throat clearing.

“He wanted me to take a child—a special child—to a place he had arranged. For safekeeping.”

My heart began to throttle my ribs. I couldn't bring my hand from my lap to my goblet, though I longed for some wine.

“Of course the child was dead.” I said it more to reassure myself that the world was as I had known it these many years than from any certainty that what I said was true. “It should not have been so difficult.” I forced myself to speak, as if forcing my body through a narrow chink in a prison wall. “A small, inert bundle should not be so much to dispose of.” The picture of the little dead white dog at Sarum flashed before my eyes.

“No, the child was not dead.” He folded his hands on the table and leaned forward. I felt a vertigo. To keep my balance, I fastened on his large onyx ring glinting in the candlelight. Then my mind went blank, and it was with difficulty that I brought it back to the sound of William's voice, moving on inexorably, telling a story I could scarcely bear to hear.

“There were three of us, two knights and myself. Our errand was kept a secret from the rest of the court, except for only four of the king's counselors, who were sworn to secrecy.”

“Was William Marshal among them?” I heard myself ask it and then thought how odd that I should focus on that small piece. Would I feel betrayed if he had known all these years, or would I feel grateful?

William glanced down momentarily, then up. “I think you should ask
him
that question.” He had a worn look about the eyes, wrinkles at their sides I had not noticed earlier in the evening, as if the conversation itself and not the long ride were suddenly tiring him. “But you must know all four of Henry's chief ministers were absolutely trustworthy.”

“It's no matter now. So many seem to have known the information I should have had, and kept it from me.”

“Henry had many reasons for what he did.” William took a deep breath and spoke his next lines more slowly. “The safety of the realm was at stake. He also thought the babe would not be safe from his sons.”

“Oh, surely not Richard!” I exploded in spite of myself.

“Perhaps not Richard,” he said gently. “But John was certainly suspect. In spite of the fact that Henry loved him, he was not blind to John's deeply flawed character.”

“Yes, we've seen what John is capable of.”

“And remember, since the years in Poitiers, where Eleanor conspired against him with Louis and her sons, Henry never trusted any of them. He knew that your child could become a pawn of Louis as well as those of his own house.”

“Do you think he made the right decision?” I was speaking in a contained way. I'm certain I sounded like any woman of my station who could be having a casual conversation with a friend. My heartbeat was slowing, too, as if I had absorbed the news right into my blood and that blood was thickening it as we spoke.

Again that quick, downward look, so curious in a man of William's social skills and courage. It was almost a gesture of withdrawal, but then he corrected it, as before, with the direct stare right into the center of my eyes.

“Yes, best for the child, if not for you. And it was the child who was at risk, after all.” William seemed to breathe easier, as if things would be all right now. The moment for me to make a scene had passed. And it was that breath, exhaled ever so slightly, that undid my careful control.

“And you took the child where?” I asked, my voice elevating with each clipped word. “To Yorkshire to the sheep farmers, to have it raised on gruel and working the fields? My son? Whilst I was told he was dead?” Anger rose in me like fire, pushing me to my feet. I looked around for something, anything, to give vent to my rage. The wineglass came to hand, and I cast it against the hearth with all my strength. The shattering glass sounded like a hundred bells. I felt my anger—indeed, perhaps my whole spirit—splinter with that sound, and I sank back into my chair.

I tried to speak, but my voice emerged in globs, like clotted blood. I don't even know where the words came from.

“You fuck … fucking men! All of you! How co-could you do that to a … to a young girl…?”

He half stood and reached to put his hand on my arm, but I wrenched away from him.

“Don't touch me! Don't you dare to touch me, you bastard! You are a corps of bastards, you and the king and William Marshal and Richard and John—all of you!”

“Richard had nothing to do with this.” I heard the eminently reasonable voice, and I flung myself out of my chair and across the room to the bed, where I lay sobbing as if the world had split me in two. The child had lived, and no one had told me.

He sank back into his chair and neither spoke nor moved, which was a good thing. I could do neither myself. But through the pain and rage I was feeling, one thought struggled upward in me, one thought that ran counter to the anger I was feeling, one thought I knew I must grasp, but I could scarcely turn toward it: The child had lived.

William waited. After a bit I wore down, of course, as he knew I would. I raised myself up on one elbow, to see the fire burning low. He had not replenished it.

“Get out,” I said. It was not a very effective command, as my voice broke in the middle. “God's teeth! Get out before I kill you!”

“Alaïs.” He planted his fist on the table hard, and the dishes jumped. “Do you want to hear the rest of the story, or do you want to continue to have a temper tantrum like a child?”

I opened my mouth to scream, a release that would still my rage for one more moment.

Suddenly he was standing over the bed, grabbing my shoulders and hauling me upward, shaking me to the core. “I'm telling you the child lives, even now! Doesn't that mean anything to you? Can't you stop your idiot's wailing long enough to understand? You have a grown son!”

I nearly swooned as he threw me back against the heaped pillows of the bed. “So if you can stop behaving like a frantic child over something that happened all those years ago, maybe you can start to enjoy something that can happen today or, to be more exact”—now he was turning away, speaking over his shoulder as he moved back toward the fire—“tomorrow, since today seems to be nearly past.”

I said nothing, and he seemed to take encouragement from the silence.

“I'm going to finish the story, Alaïs.” He resumed speaking as he stood now, his back to the fire, his hands clasped behind him, still watching me. “Where do you think we took the child?”

I thought back over the past weeks and saw only the face that haunted me, picked at me. The face of the young secretary, the face I knew but could not place. And like lightning it struck me with full force as another image, that of a woman long dead, rose before me.

“Mathilda?” I said in a breath that still had a sob in it.

“Mathilda,” I repeated as I slowly sat up.

“Exactly,” he said, rocking back on his heels, his voice as pleased as if I had just guessed an important riddle and won a golden apple.

“You took him to Mathilda. She raised him in Anjou. Of course, he has her face. The very face of his grandmother stamped right on him, that diamond face, the auburn hair, the quick tongue. Even his mannerisms are like hers.” I thought of the way he'd used his hands when he talked that night during supper at the inn, his habit of tossing his head when he laughed. I did not add what we both knew: that his mannerisms might have been like mine instead, if I'd had him near me while he grew.

But no, not the face, never the face. He did not have my face. His was a face destined to be the Empress Mathilda's face. The delicate-boned but stern face of William the Conqueror's granddaughter, the German emperor Henry's child widow, the wife of Geoffrey of Anjou. The face of the mother-in-law Eleanor of Aquitaine could hardly bear to look on, the only woman whose presence could dominate a room even when Eleanor was in it. King Henry's mother's face.

Empress Mathilda, wife of Geoffrey of Anjou, who created a civil war that raged throughout England as she tried to wrest the crown from her cousin Stephen. That hard-as-an-awl expression now transformed into the artistic, scintillating, chameleonlike face of her grandson, my own child. François.

“But wasn't there scandal? What did people say? There was never a whisper across the Channel.” I had begun to hiccup lightly, but I managed to squeeze out my words as I looked up to William.

“Of course not. She put it about that the boy was a bastard of one of Henry's younger brothers.” He smiled. “They were such hellions, the only question asked was, where were the rest? Mathilda was elderly when he came to her, but indomitable. She oversaw his early education and, I believe, showed him much affection. More, perhaps, than she ever showed her own sons. In fact, it is said her last words were to ask after the child's well-being.”

I rolled off the bed and limped back to the table, sinking into the chair opposite where William had been sitting. He followed and stood across from me, the fire flickering behind him. His face now fell into a shadow.

“A story very much like your own. When William Marshal brought you to Rouen,” I said with incipient suspicion. “Are you…?”

“Don't let your imagination run off with you.” He shook his head, that habitual flicker of amusement flitting across his face. “I am no natural son of any important personage. Not even, I am sad to report, the natural son of William Marshal. Although I know some have said so. I was old enough to remember my life with my parents before they were killed.” He stopped for a moment then, resumed his chair across from me, watching me now all the time. His hands now resting on the table were linked, as if to keep them still, as mine had been earlier. His eyes seemed strangely bright.

“I came home from the fields to find my house burning and Henry's soldiers tearing through the village. If William Marshal had not seen me trying to rush into our flaming cottage and pulled me up on his horse as he cantered past, I would have died also.”