Lady of the English (39 page)

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knew he was out of his depth. When instructing the men on watch, he was firm and decisive, but he wondered if anyone guessed how much doubt lay beneath the surface.

The bitter evening chill seeped through his garments and he abandoned the wall walk, going to his chamber to write letters he knew might never arrive and documents that might never be read. Yet, while his mind was connected to the parchment through the flow of the ink, he felt control and stability settle upon him and the sense of dread retreated a little.

When the words began to blur on the page and his eyes to burn with the strain of staring, he sought his bed and curled up, drawing the blankets and furs around his ears. Inside his mind he was still writing, could still see the tip of the quill scratching over the parchment in line upon line of oak-gall ink. Defending his position, defending Matilda. The quill bit deeper and the ink, turning red, ran like blood from the blade of a sword. He tossed and turned, trapped in sweaty visions. He heard chanting, and saw a lone ship hoisting a sail against a carmine sky that might have presaged either dawn or sunset. Behind was loneliness; ahead lay solitude.

The sound of a fist pounding on wood jolted through his dream. At first he thought it was the clunk of the oars in the rowlocks, but it grew louder and suddenly his chamber door banged open. He shot upright, gasping, and fought to free himself from the sour sheet that had tangled around him as he fretted in his nightmare. He stared in bewilderment at Miles FitzWalter, who stood at his bedside clad in dark clothing, filthy with mud from head to toe.

“I heard you were in need of reinforcements,” Miles said with a broad grin, his teeth very white in his dirty face. “I think it is time to do something about those towers, don’t you?”

Brian staggered out of bed and clasped Miles in a hearty embrace, partly to make sure that he was not a figment of the dream. “I was praying you would come, but I did not know 307

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when or even how you’d achieve such a thing!” he said, his voice raw with relief.

“Hah! It takes more than a shallow king and a gaggle of piss-proud hangers-on to stop me!”

Brian scrabbled around, donning his crumpled tunic, raking his hands through his hair. He shouted for servants to bring food and wine, which Miles devoured with gusto.

“In plotting to bring me down, they have fomented their own ruin,” Miles said with a feral gleam in his eyes Brian’s spine tingled. Miles FitzWalter was like a deep, cold pool. The shallows at the edges were safe enough, but go any further and you risked drowning.

Miles dusted his hands. “My men are awaiting my signal outside. It was easier for just a few of us to sneak past their guards and reach you. I will need some pitch-soaked arrows and your best archers. You’ve got your Welshmen?”

Brian nodded and strove to gather his wits.

“Good.” Miles grasped Brian’s arm. “Put on your hauberk and summon your men. I’ll meet you in the hall.”

He strode from the room with a brisk air, leaving Brian opening and shutting his mouth.

ttt

In the bleak dark preceding the November dawn, Brian handed his stallion’s reins to a squire and studied the black outline of the right-hand watchtower he had been designated to take.

Miles was to deal with the left using the men he had brought with him. Brian’s stomach was queasy; the wine he had drunk earlier lay sour in his gut.

Miles gave him a fierce grin. “Good fortune,” he said.

“And you,” Brian replied hoarsely.

“It will be like a day out at a fair with the ladies after Worcester,” Miles said, and was gone like a wolf on the hunt: light, swift, and focused. A detail of Brian’s Welsh bowmen 308

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accompanied him, and several serjeants. Brian turned to those remaining with him: more serjeants, archers, and his own knights from the garrison. His breath was a pale vapour in the air and his chest shook on each exhalation. To the east the sky was a touch paler than it had been at the blackest part of the night.

“Now,” he said, swallowing. “Now or never.”

They loped across the marshy ground, crouching low.

Grapnels attached to rope ladders soared over the stakes of the outer palisade and men began to climb at speed. An alarm note blared on a hunting horn, summoning the defenders to arms.

Brian’s archers shot blazing arrows into the compound. Brian muttered a prayer under his breath and took his turn on the swaying grapnel ladder. His hands burned on the rope as he pulled himself upward, all the time fearing that he would be speared like meat on a skewer or crushed by a falling stone. And this was only the first obstacle. The main tower lay beyond.

He gained the top of the palisade, pulled himself over on to the walkway, and, with sword drawn, ran towards the gates.

A defender came at him with a hand axe. He avoided the downward chop of the blade and with a side-swipe, knocked his assailant off the palisade. The soldier struck the bailey floor with a solid thud and Brian suppressed a heave. The world had run mad, and this was hell.

In several places the palisade was burning. Brian caught a lungful of hot smoke and turned aside, coughing. Someone else came at him and he dodged and cut and struck and felt sick.

An arrow slammed into the side of his coif, spinning him to the ground. Blood filled his right eye.

“Sire!” William Boterel leaned over him. “Sire…”

“Take the men!” Brian gasped. “Get that gate open. We can’t lose the impetus! Go!”

Boterel did as he was bidden, leaving Brian to be attended by a serjeant. “Just a surface wound, sire,” the man said. “Arrow’s 309

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lodged in the mail. You’ll have a red stripe tomorrow, no worse.” He snapped off the shaft with a grunt. “Lucky though.”

Brian removed his helm and coif and gazed at the arrowhead, his vision blurred with blood. The serjeant produced a strip of bandage and used it to wipe Brian’s eye and stanch the wound.

He strove to his feet. The broken shaft and arrowhead on the walk reminded him of a snapped quill pen. Picking up his sword, he drew a shaken breath. He had to carry this through, and write his will in blood and fire, because how else was he going to be a leader of men, keep his word to Matilda, and give her a crown?

The thatch on the outbuilding roofs was ablaze and men fought amid swirls of smoke and stinging sparks. Brian strode among his soldiers, shouting encouragement, urging them on, and forcing himself forward. “For the empress!” he bellowed, wiping a fresh trickle of blood from his eye corner. “For the rightful queen of England!”

As dawn paled the eastern horizon, Brian and his men over-came the last resistance on the outer works and tore down the gates. Then it was on to the tower itself. No scaling here, just brushwood and pitch and flaming arrows. Some defenders tried to escape by ropes from the battlements and were shot down by Wallingford’s archers. Those who reached the ground were taken for ransom if wealthy enough. If not, they were stripped of their weapons, purses, and clothing and sent on their way in their underwear. Brian had the booty, such as it was, piled up outside the gates while the tower burned, surrounded by a ring of fiery palisade. His right temple throbbed as if a small drum was being beaten against his orbit and brow bone. He could only half see out of his right eye.

Facing the gateway, he watched Miles FitzWalter come towards him. The man’s surcoat and face were freckled with soot and blood, but his smile was incandescent.

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“Success!” he cried. “Stephen’s going to be too busy running hither and yon to return and rebuild these for a very long time, if ever.” He cocked his head and considered Brian’s injury.

“Close one,” he said.

Brian reached up to touch the clotted line at the side of his eye. “It was one of our own arrows,” he said. “Taken up and shot back.”

“Always the most dangerous.” Hands on hips, Miles turned in a slow circle and nodded with satisfaction. “A good night’s work. That, my lord, is how you run rings around your enemy.”

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Thirty-six

Gloucester Castle, Spring 1140

M atilda paced up and down her chamber in agitation.

“It is intolerable,” she snapped at Brian, who stood by the hearth looking wary. “I will not stand for this!”

He avoided her gaze. He had been at court since Christmas, working tirelessly on arguments supporting her right to be queen and her son’s right to inherit. Negotiations were about to take place in Winchester, brokered by Bishop Henry, the proposal being that Stephen would acknowledge Matilda’s claim to the crown in right of her descendants and grant her the rule of Normandy in her lifetime. Her son Henry would be brought to England and sworn in as heir to the throne.

The difficulty was that Stephen and Matilda were to be represented by intermediaries, and Stephen had appointed his wife to speak as his—a shrewd move that stole a march on the opposition.

She reached the end of the room and flung round. “Where is the right in allowing Stephen’s wife to negotiate on his behalf, while I may not speak?”

“It is the role of a queen to be a peacemaker,” Brian said.

“And Stephen has nominated her to represent him. We can do nothing about that.”

“Hah! With my ‘beloved’ cousin Maheut in charge, the LadyofEnglish.indd 312

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outcome is a foregone conclusion. You won’t prise her jaws off the throne.”

The atmosphere between them bristled with tension and was broken as Matilda exhaled on a hard breath and waved her arm in a gesture filled with angry dismissal. “If because of this

‘sacred tradition’ I am barred from attending in person, I expect you and my brother not to yield an inch of ground.”

He rubbed the pink scar at the side of his eye, legacy of the fight to take down the Crowmarsh siege towers that had threatened Wallingford. Miles had commended him at court as a fine compatriot in battle, but whenever the subject arose, Brian shrugged it off, and moved on to other things. “You can trust us, domina.”

“Can I?” Her tone was weary and sceptical. “I sometimes wonder if I have any trust left to give.”

ttt

Brian shifted his buttocks on the bench and folded his arms as he listened to Robert of Gloucester advancing proposals for a peace that would end the fighting. He knew Stephen’s party were unlikely to agree to them, but the suggestions were not outrageous and Robert’s eloquence lent weight and credibility to the argument.

Stephen’s queen, Maheut, was leaning forward in her seat with a pained expression on her face as if she was struggling to hear what Robert was saying, her attitude patronising and authoritative. Beside her, dwarfing her own chair, stood an empty throne as a reminder that, even without his presence, the king was a part of the process and would see and hear all.

Maheut was small and sturdy, with close-set shrewd eyes set beneath heavy, dark brows, her prim mouth concealing small, pearly teeth. Matilda often called her a terrier and the comparison was apt, but beyond his amusement at the analogy, Brian knew her tenacity was dangerous. She was utterly loyal 313

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to Stephen, and her brisk, motherly manner engendered loyalty in others. When with Stephen in public, she kept her eyes lowered and her mouth closed, cultivating the persona of a modest, submissive wife, but Brian suspected it was a different matter behind their bedchamber door.

The empress had no such maternal image to temper her own abrasive nature. If she thought a man was a fool, she said so to his face in front of others, and gave no quarter. She was tall, slender, beautiful, desirable—like a mistress, and while few men would ever strike their mothers, he knew many who would take a fist to a mistress, or leave her for another woman.

“You ask the impossible, my lord,” Maheut said to Robert.

“My husband is an anointed king, elected to his throne by the barons and bishops of England. He will neither share power with your sister the Countess of Anjou, nor acknowledge her claim.”

“She is the only surviving legitimate child of my father,”

Robert asserted calmly. “All swore to her before they ever swore to your husband. Moreover, she is the only claimant born of a reigning king and queen, and she is owed that respect and acknowledgement.”

“Her father absolved his barons of that vow on his deathbed,”

Maheut replied with equal firmness. “We could argue that point all week and get nowhere. We might concede the dower castles in Normandy that the Countess of Anjou was granted on her marriage, but the Countess would have to quit England, and all warfare in Normandy would have to cease forthwith.”

“You cannot grant what is already acknowledged as belonging to the empress,” Robert said. “My sister has a right to England’s crown and the coronet of Normandy. She will settle for rule in Normandy while her son grows to manhood, and in the fullness of time, he will inherit England. To that end, he will be brought here and the barons will swear him their allegiance.”

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Maheut sat back, hands gripping the finials of her chair.

“That is out of the question. One of the reasons men swore to my husband was that they knew him and his stock. England and Normandy have no wish to be ruled from Anjou by a woman who has spent her life in foreign courts and has no knowledge of our ways. If King Henry had wanted his daughter on the throne, he would have said so on his deathbed!”

“Likely he did and it went unreported,” Robert retorted.

“Oaths are bought and sold these days like cheeses at a market.