The Winter Crown (33 page)

‘She is well, sire. There were no difficulties at the birth.’

‘Good.’ He swallowed to try and clear the tightness in his throat. ‘Tell her I shall visit her when she is ready.’ He gently gave his daughter back to the woman and turned to receive the congratulations of the household. Ordering two tuns of the best wine to be broached to drink the baby’s health, he decided to defer his journey to Shrewsbury until the morrow and spend today at home in celebration.

Once everything was in hand, he sought solitude to have a quiet weep, releasing the heavy weight of emotion he had been holding back. Later, he visited Isabel and found her sitting up in bed, their swaddled daughter in her arms and her face radiant with joy. Going to her, he kissed her tenderly.

‘You do not mind that it is a girl?’ she said with trepidation.

Hamelin shook his head. ‘I care only that you are both well and whole. She will be a beauty like her mother; men will vie for her hand and her besotted father will think none of them worthy.’

Isabel gave a teary laugh. ‘I never thought to bear a child; she is precious to me, and I cherish her because she is such a great gift from God.’ Her hazel eyes were almost golden. ‘I am so pleased you stayed to see her.’

‘The Welsh are not going to run away,’ Hamelin said with a shrug. At the moment he barely cared about them. ‘I shall see to her baptism tomorrow before I leave. I would rather stay here, but needs must, and I hope to be home soon. When I return, we shall hold a great celebration for your churching.’

‘Just come back to us whole,’ she said, and stroked his face. ‘We will be waiting.’

In the morning Hamelin took his daughter to be baptised in the font of Acre’s castle chapel. Isabel, daughter of Hamelin the King’s brother, and forever a princess to her father. Riding out from Acre, his heart was overflowing.

The weather started out bright, but by the time Hamelin reached Shrewsbury four days later, the sky wore heavy swatches of grey cloud and he had to pull up his hood and bend his head against the driving rain.

Eventually, the light darkening towards a wet dusk, he splashed into the sludgy stable yard of Shrewsbury Castle and dismounted from Carbonel uttering a heartfelt groan. The palfrey’s head was hanging with weariness, and Hamelin felt the same. ‘See that he’s dried off properly and given plenty of dry bedding,’ he told the groom.

‘Sire.’

Hamelin wished the same for himself and grimaced. He did not know whether to rub his aching back or knees first. His men would have to find lodging in the town and somewhere to pitch the tents, but his harbinger had that in hand. For himself, there would be sleeping space in the castle, even if he had to bed down in the hall with a host of others.

A squire escorted him from the stables to the castle and they squelched along straw paths, half-buried in mud, before entering the keep. Henry was ensconced in a large chamber on the upper floor, the latter heaving with activity. By lamplight and candlelight, scribes worked frantically under the direction of Robert of Leicester and the new chancellor, Geoffrey Ridel, pieces of parchment piling up at their sides.

Henry sat at a trestle working through a sheaf of documents and talking to one of his shipmasters. Perched on a stool at his feet was an exquisite young woman, little more than a girl, with an apple-blossom flush on her cheek and flawless, creamy skin. A light veil did little to conceal her waist-length honey-brown braids. As Henry worked, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles. The latest mistress, Hamelin thought, but he was shocked by Henry’s blatant behaviour and the girl’s youth.

Henry glanced up and saw Hamelin. For an instant his lips remained on the girl’s hand before he raised his head. ‘Here at last,’ he said. ‘I expected you yesterday. Married life is slowing you down.’

Hamelin bowed. Water dripped from his wet hair where the hood had not protected him and trickled down his face. His feet felt clammy and cold inside his boots. ‘My apologies, sire. The Countess was in travail and I waited to see my daughter safely born and baptised. I thought you would not mind a day’s delay.’

‘You are becoming presumptuous for the sake of a girl-child,’ Henry said, but there was wintry amusement in his eyes. ‘Better if your wife had borne you a son.’

‘I do not mind,’ Hamelin said. ‘I am just pleased that both mother and child are in good health. We have named her Isabel and she is already a beauty.’

Henry snorted with affectionate scorn. ‘I would never have thought to see you so fond.’

‘Nor you, brother,’ Hamelin retorted pointedly.

Henry sent him a bright look filled with challenge. ‘You have not asked, but I will tell you. This delightful young lady is Rosamund, daughter of Walter de Clifford of Bronllys and Clifford Castle.’

Hamelin knew Walter de Clifford, although not well: a pragmatic marcher baron of stature and backbone. ‘My lady,’ he said. De Clifford would need that pragmatism now. Perhaps he was looking forward to seeing his family’s advancement through Henry’s attachment to his daughter.

‘Sire.’ Henry was still holding her hand, but she acknowledged Hamelin by inclining her head.

‘A rose of the world,’ Henry said, ‘but only for me.’

The pink in the girl’s cheeks deepened. She flicked him a shy but coquettish look to which Henry responded with a doting smile. ‘There are no thorns on her anywhere – or none that I have yet found.’

Embarrassment burned Hamelin’s face. He was long accustomed to Henry’s infidelities, but this was a step further. ‘I came to report the moment I arrived,’ he said stiffly, ‘but I can see you are busy with other matters. Do I have your leave to go and get dried out?’

‘As you will,’ Henry said with an insouciant wave. ‘We can talk later at dinner.’

When Hamelin returned to eat with Henry, he found him feeding the de Clifford girl from his own dish, holding morsels of chicken for her to bite daintily from his fingers. On Hamelin’s arrival, he dismissed her with a pat on the bottom, telling her to wait in his chamber, and as she left the room with a maid in tow, he gazed after her with lust and longing.

‘Are you mad?’ Hamelin said. ‘I know you have your casual mistresses, but how old is she, Henry? Dear God!’

‘Don’t go all sanctimonious on me,’ Henry snapped. ‘She brings innocence and freshness into my life; she has not been corrupted by the ways of the court. I know I will have the truth from her without any politicking behind my back. She brings me to life in ways you could not begin to understand.’

‘I do understand,’ Hamelin replied, standing his ground. ‘Isabel does that for me, but she is my wife and of an age and awareness. You cannot afford to flout this … this child as your paramour.’

Henry’s expression took on a stubborn cast. ‘She is probably the only person in my life who has not beggared or betrayed me in one way or another. She is mine and I look after what is mine.’

‘Have I ever beggared or betrayed you?’ Hamelin could not keep the anger and hurt from his voice.

‘You know I did not mean it like that.’

‘Sometimes you make it very difficult to do so.’

‘You are mine too,’ Henry said. ‘Stop scowling.’

‘What of Alienor?’

‘What of her?’ Henry gave an impatient shrug. ‘She is in Angers and she knows I take my comforts elsewhere when she is breeding. Our worlds do not mesh save in matters of state and business that concern us both.’ He leaned towards Hamelin to emphasise his point. ‘When you lack something in your life, you go out and find it. Rosamund is my finding and I will not hear a word said against her.’

Fixed by Henry’s bright stare, Hamelin felt a jolt of recognition. There was an expression on his brother’s face he had never seen before, and that expression was love.

Standing on top of the high sandstone rock, Hamelin filled his lungs with the cold, salty air. On his left the sun sparkled on the Dee Estuary, on the right the sea was a series of blue and grey pleats running to a horizon of scudding storm clouds.

Far from teaching the Welsh a lesson they would never forget, the campaign had been a disaster. Hamelin had never experienced such rain before and thought this was how it must have been at the start of the great flood. Streams had become raging torrents; rivers had burst their banks and raced more swiftly than galloping horses, surging with brown foam and swirling with vicious currents. He had seen men and baggage beasts swept to their deaths. There had been sudden landslides where supplies had disappeared down mud slippages into ravines. There was no escaping the constant rain and fires could not be lit to cook or to dry out saturated clothes and equipment. Men went hungry and sickened. Everyone had phlegmy coughs and aching lungs. Welsh snipers had attacked them all along the route, shooting arrows, setting traps, and melting away once damage was done, to become no more than wraiths in the forest.

The army had retreated to the Wirral peninsula to await their supply ships, which would aid them along the coast, but there was still no sign of them. The only glimmer of light in the whole boggy morass of this campaign was that it had finally stopped raining, and the sun was pleasantly warm on his body. He had heard mutterings among the men that God had turned against them because of the way Henry had treated his archbishop, and because the life he lived was one of sin and debauchery. There were times Hamelin thought it might be true.

Turning at a noise behind him, he was surprised to see the de Clifford girl emerging through the trees. When she saw him, she hesitated, but then folded her arms inside her cloak and continued, a determined set to her jaw.

‘Are you looking for the ships?’ she asked. ‘Henry says they should have been here by now.’

Hamelin was perturbed, almost shocked, that she should refer to his brother as casually as ‘Henry’. The fact that he had confided in her about the ships was unwise. For now her power was naive and uncalculating, but that would change. Henry indulged her far beyond wisdom.

‘They should,’ he said, ‘but we are at the mercy of winds and tide. Does my brother know you are wandering around unescorted?’

Rosamund returned a smile to his frown. ‘No, and he will scold me, but he is never angry for long.’ She slid him a mischievous look. ‘I shall say I was with you.’

Hamelin recoiled and she laughed. ‘He won’t be jealous, do not worry.’

‘I am not worried,’ he snapped, ‘but I wonder if you know the depths in which you are swimming.’

She sobered and gazed out over the water. ‘What choice do I have, my lord?’ Suddenly she was not a girl barely old enough to bleed, but a woman full grown. ‘My body has bought my family favour and given me a life beyond them and the nunnery at Godstow. I am fond of both, but this is a taste of a different feast and, while it is mine, I intend to enjoy it. The King is my dear lord. I please him – and he is good to me.’ She gave Hamelin a steady look. ‘That is all there is to it.’

Hamelin was nonplussed. This chit of a girl had just spoken to him as if she was a queen. ‘You are wrong,’ he said. ‘There is far more to it than whether or not you and the King please each other. There are matters of what is right and seemly. You are both treading a precarious path.’

Her cheeks grew pink. ‘Sire, I know that. But the King has chosen me, and I will tread that path for him and with him whatever the consequence.’

And, like a cat, would probably not lose her footing, Hamelin thought.

Suddenly she narrowed her eyes and pointed. ‘Look!’

Hamelin followed her finger and saw several long shapes the size of earwigs bisecting the sea and sky on the Dee side of the horizon. ‘The King’s ships,’ he said. ‘We should return to camp.’

Rosamund walked beside him, her eyes downcast and her manner demure. He supposed she must have acquired that from the nuns at Godstow, and it was incongruous when he thought of the way she behaved with Henry, leaning on him, letting him feed her lover’s titbits. She was lithe and dainty, no taller than his shoulder. She was nothing like Alienor; yet she possessed a hint of that same core of supple steel.

The ships, when they docked, proved to be only half the number Henry had expected, and many of the supplies they carried were salt-ruined and useless. The vessels had been blown off course, and when they tried to land at Anglesey to make repairs, they had been set upon and mauled by the locals. ‘A whole summer wasted!’ Henry raged. ‘An entire campaign scuppered. Why am I surrounded by dolts and incompetents who cannot do their duty?’

‘Sire, the weather was against us,’ one man was foolhardy enough to venture. ‘There was nothing we could do but run before the wind.’

‘I do not want your feeble excuses.’ Henry shoved away from the table against which he had been leaning and threw up his hands. ‘Time and again I have sailed in gales and storms and still made landfall ahead of time with all intact.’

Hamelin stood near the door flap of Henry’s great campaign tent, listening to him flay the shipmasters with his tongue. In their childhood Henry had often thrown spectacular tantrums where he would thrash on the floor, drumming his heels and screaming at the top of his lungs. Such an episode looked imminent now.

A young man arrived at the royal tent clutching a sealed parchment. Hamelin eyed John FitzJohn, who had recently succeeded to the position of royal marshal following his father’s death and was still settling into his new official role. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but whether those shoulders would bear the burden of his office remained to be seen.

‘News?’ Hamelin asked.

John FitzJohn eyed the raging King with trepidation. ‘Yes, sire. The Queen of France has given birth to a living male child.’

‘I see.’ Hamelin took pity on the discomforted young man. Bearers of bad news were frequently blamed for it and John FitzJohn was trying to establish his position at court. ‘I will deal with this,’ he said. ‘Go and see to your other duties.’

‘I am willing to do this, sire,’ the young marshal protested to his credit.

‘No, you are not, even while I know you will do your duty. Go.’ Hamelin gave him a dour smile. ‘I shall call in the favour another time.’

He waited until FitzJohn had gone, relief in his step, and then he approached the pacing Henry. ‘It is a night for bad news, brother,’ he said and handed him the letter. ‘Perhaps you should swallow it all at once.’