When Christ and His Saints Slept

26

Cerences, Normandy

November 1142

Winter came early that year to Normandy. Upon his arrival at Cerences, the latest Norman stronghold to yield to his father, Henry was delighted to find a dusting of snow upon the ground. He’d spent several hours collecting enough to build a snow fort and two days later, it remained intact out in the bailey, not yet melted. Although a blazing fire burned in the open hearth, the great hall still held a chill. Henry had a wax tablet propped up on his knees, and a bone stylus clutched in his fingers. He was supposed to be practicing his declensions of Latin nouns and adjectives, for he’d promised that his brief visits to his father’s sieges would not disrupt his studies, but he’d gotten no further than amicus magnus and amici magni.

He knew what came next-amico magno-but instead he scratched Bastebourg into the wax, followed by Trevieres, Villiers-Bocage, Briquessard, Aunay-sur-Odon, Plessis-Grimoult, Vire, Tinchebray, Teilleul, St Hilaire, Mortain, and Pontorson. He had just space enough to add Cerences. He’d not made a conscious effort to memorize his father’s conquests, but he’d followed the campaign so closely that he now knew the names of the captured castles as well as he did the names of the servants who tended to him back in Angers.

They were getting easier, these victories. Cerences had surrendered at once. Glancing across the hall, Henry studied his father and uncle as he should have been studying his Latin. He knew about their quarreling; all of Normandy knew. One more castle. It was always one more castle. They would triumph and then they would argue and his father would make Robert more promises, promises few thought he had any intention of keeping. Henry did not understand the rules about lying. His tutor said that lying was a grievous sin. But his father often joked that life without sinning was like food without salt, pure but tasteless. As far as Henry could figure, some lies were harmless, some were necessary, and some were unforgivable. But what if people could not agree which was which?

Men kept coming into the hall, seeking shelter from the frigid November wind. Some of them Henry knew from past visits to siege sites. Fulk and Hugh de Cleers were rarely far from his father’s side. But his uncle Helie was usually as far away from Geoffrey as he could get; men jested grimly that they could teach Cain and Abel about brotherly rivalry.

Tonight Helie was dicing with Henry’s cousin Philip. Philip’s family ties were tattered, too, these days; Henry hoped his father would never look at him the way he’d caught Robert looking at Philip, with disappointment too deep for words. Henry did not like Philip; he was moody and sarcastic and insisted upon calling Henry “Nine and Eight” after hearing Henry explain that he was nine years and eight months old. Henry didn’t mind being teased-his father teased him all the time-but he did mind being mocked; to his thinking, those eight months mattered.

He did like the man watching the dice game, one of his uncle’s knights. He’d been put off at first by Gilbert Fitz John’s odd appearance, for he had but one eyebrow and no eyelashes. But Gilbert never failed to smile at sight of Henry, he’d patiently answered Henry’s questions about the fire at Wherwell nunnery, and Henry no longer even noticed his scars.

Geoffrey was usually the focal point of all eyes; that was a role he relished. Tonight he was sharing center stage with a new arrival, a man unfamiliar to Henry, a tall, fair-haired lord with a loud laugh and a tendency to run roughshod over any conversation but his own. Men seemed willing to listen to Waleran Beaumont, though, for he’d just come from Paris and was well informed about the great scandal sweeping the French court.

Henry already knew about the scandal, for they’d been gossiping about little else back in Anjou. The Queen of France’s younger sister, Petronilla, had fallen in love with the Count of Vermandois. Count Raoul de Peronne was the French king’s cousin and his seneschal. He was fifty to her nineteen, an age that seemed vast indeed to Henry, but it was not the age difference that troubled people; it was not so uncommon for men to take much younger wives. The problem was that Raoul already had a wife. Petronilla would have him, though, wife or no, and she’d gotten her sister the queen on her side. Eleanor in turn had won over her husband, and to please her, King Louis set about finding a way to get rid of Raoul’s unwanted wife. The Bishop of Noyon, who happened to be Raoul’s brother, declared himself willing to dissolve the marriage on the grounds of consanguinity, and Louis found two other compliant bishops to go along with him. The marriage was invalidated, the countess and her children packed off to her uncle, and Petronilla and Raoul married before the ink was dry upon his annulment decree.

Unfortunately for the newly wedded pair, Raoul’s repudiated wife was not without allies of her own. Her uncle was none other than Count Theobald of Blois and Champagne, Stephen’s brother and long a thorn in the French king’s side. Theobald had promptly appealed to the Pope, and the verdict was now in. According to Waleran Beaumont, the papal legate had reaffirmed the validity of Raoul’s marriage, excommunicated the guilty lovers until Raoul agreed to take back his lawful wife, and suspended the three bishops who’d been so overly eager to please their king.

The news created a sensation, for it was sure to have dramatic repercussions. Yet none doubted the accuracy of Waleran’s account, for he was kin to the love-stricken count; Raoul de Peronne was his uncle. And when he added that the French king was so enraged by Theobald’s meddling that he was swearing upon Christ’s Cross to take a bloody vengeance upon the count’s lands in Champagne and Blois, none doubted that, either, for it would not be the first time Louis had gone to war on his wife’s behalf. Just a year ago, Louis had led an assault upon Toulouse, which Eleanor claimed through her grandmother. The claim was questionable, and the campaign so ill planned and poorly executed that it soon resulted in Louis’s ignominious retreat back to Paris, nursing a nasty wound to his pride.

It was clear to Henry that these men held the French king in no high esteem, and he tucked his newfound fact away for future reference: that a man ought not to love his wife overly well, for if he did, other men would laugh at him. The rules about men and women were just as confusing as the code about lying. Wives were supposed to obey their husbands, but not all of them did. Not his mother, for certes! But the French queen not only did as she pleased, she got her husband to do what she wanted, too. That was a trick his mother had never learned; Papa begrudged her so much as a smile. Henry wondered why the French king was so eager to do his wife’s bidding, and he found himself suddenly curious about Eleanor, this woman who seemed to play by her own rules and get away with it. Once he was old enough, that was what he meant to do, too.

The men were still joking about the scandal, but the festive mood ended abruptly when Waleran asked Geoffrey which castle would be assailed next. “Avranches,” Geoffrey said promptly. He did not look at Robert as he spoke, though, and Henry tensed, for he was learning to read storm signals in faces as well as cloud formations. Papa and Uncle Robert were on another one of their collision courses. He kept hoping that eventually Uncle Robert would wear Papa’s resistance down; either that or they’d run out of castles to besiege. But each time they clashed, he feared that their quarreling would flame out of control, end with his uncle’s giving up in disgust. And that must not happen. Papa had to agree. For Mama to ask for his help, her need must be dire.

He was watching them uneasily for signs that trouble was brewing when servants ushered a stranger into the hall. Henry had never seen anyone look so bedraggled; his face was reddened and chapped by the cold, his clothing torn and filthy. But he was no beggar, for as his mantle parted, Henry glimpsed a sword riding low on his hip. He sat up hastily, understanding the significance of what he’d just seen. This pitiful wretch was a courier, one bearing a message worth risking his life, health, and horse for.

Geoffrey had already pushed his chair back, getting to his feet. But the man never even glanced his way. Stumbling forward, he sank to his knees before Maude’s brother. Robert’s first, fervent hope was that this messenger was from Maude, for he was becoming more and more worried by the silence echoing across the Channel. The seal on the letter, though, was not hers.

“You come from Brien Fitz Count?” he said, and the man nodded numbly.

“I swore to him that I’d get to you as quick as I could, but my ship was caught in a gale and blown off course. We finally came ashore in Flanders. And then I did not know where you were campaigning-” He stopped, realizing he was rambling, putting off the moment of revelation. “The empress is in grave peril, my lord. Three days before Michaelmas, Stephen swooped down on Oxford, forced his way into the city, and lay siege to the castle.”

Robert stared at him, appalled, then tore the letter open and read rapidly. When he looked up, his face was flushed with outrage. “They left her? Miles and Baldwin de Redvers and the others…those fools just rode off and left her to fend for herself?”

The messenger nodded again, bleakly. “Stephen lured them off by raiding Cirencester, all but Ranulf Fitz Roy and my lord Brien at Wallingford. But he lacks the men to break the siege.”

Robert already knew that; Brien’s letter had been brutally honest about the gravity of the danger Maude was facing. “Michaelmas,” he said, and then, “Jesus God!” for that meant Maude had been under siege for six weeks. The castle could fall to Stephen any day now-if it had not already fallen. Swinging around, he pointed an accusing finger at Maude’s husband. “This is your fault, too! If not for your damnable delays and excuses, I’d have been back in England in time to keep this from happening!”

“And just what do you think we’ve been doing here-playing chess with real castles? We have been waging a campaign to conquer Normandy for my son, and I’d say that matters as much as your endless and futile skirmishings in England!”

Robert made an enormous effort to master himself, clenching his teeth until his jaw muscles ached. “How much time will you need to make ready?”

“More time than you can afford to spare. I am not about to break off this campaign and go chasing off to England on a misguided mercy mission. There are too many malcontents eager to take advantage of my absence,” Geoffrey said with a pointed glance in his brother Helie’s direction. “You’d best sail on your own, Robert, and I’ll join you when and if I am able.”

“If you are able?” Robert echoed scathingly, no longer bothering to mask his contempt. “Your wife is facing a lifetime’s confinement and you cannot even bestir yourself to ride a mile on her behalf? Just out of curiosity, is there anyone in Christendom whom you’d risk your selfish skin for-anyone at all?”

“Not for that bitch at Oxford,” Geoffrey snapped. “And spare me your self-righteous wrath. The last I heard, men pray to God for expiation of their sins, not to the Earl of Gloucester. If I must choose between Maude and my son, that is as easy a choice as any man ever made. Normandy is Henry’s legacy, and I am going to see that he gets it, which is more than I can say for Maude and her pitiful efforts to claim the English throne. You dropped the crown at her feet after Lincoln, and she had only to pick it up. But she threw it away, and I might forgive her for that-if it were not Henry’s crown, too. So whatever trouble she is in, she brought it upon herself, and not even you can deny it, not if you’re half as honest as you claim to be.”

“I’ll not deny that Maude made some serious mistakes. But she shows more honour and courage in a single day than you can hope to find in a lifetime!”

“You’ve overstayed your welcome, Brother-in-law,” Geoffrey said, and there was a quiet menace in his voice that was more daunting than threats or bluster. Robert did not look in the least daunted, though, and the men began to crowd in closer, some to intervene if need be, others to get a better view. But they soon moved aside, for Henry had shoved his way into their midst, using his elbows like weapons, kicking his uncle in the shins when Helie did not let him through. Helie let out a startled oath and grabbed for the boy, but Henry ducked under his outstretched arm and flung himself forward. Fists clenched at his sides, chin up, and head high, he stepped between his father and uncle, his defiant stance all the more poignant for the glimmer of blinked-back tears.

“You need not go, Papa,” he said tautly. “Let Uncle Robert take me.”

There were murmurings at that, pity and surprise and a few suppressed smiles. Helie, his ankle still smarting from Henry’s blow, laughed outright. “I can just see you, sprout,” he gibed, “toting a sword taller than you are!” and Geoffrey turned upon him in a fury.

“You are the last one in Christendom qualified to give my son lessons in manhood!” he snarled, and Helie gave an indignant gasp. But before he could retaliate, Henry urged again:

“Let me go, Papa.” It was not a demand, but neither was it an entreaty, and Geoffrey reached out, putting his arm around the boy’s rigid shoulders.

“Come over here, lad, where we can talk. The rest of you men find some other way to entertain yourselves,” he said sharply. Steering a resistant Henry toward the comparative privacy of a window seat, Geoffrey was uncertain what to say next; it wasn’t often he found himself so thoroughly discomfited. “You were not meant to hear what you did. We did not realize you were in the hall. I know you are confused, lad, but you’re too young to understand what can go wrong between a man and his wife-”

Henry pulled away, so abruptly that he stumbled. He wanted to run, but he stood his ground, for there was no escaping what he’d overheard. His mother was in danger and his father did not care.

Father and son were so intent upon each other that they’d not even realized Robert had joined them, not until he said quietly, “This is not about your wife, Geoffrey. It is about his mother.”

Geoffrey started to speak, stopped himself, and Henry seized his chance. “When you told me what happened at Winchester, Papa, you said Mama had lost her chance to be queen. You said that from now on, she was fighting for me. I ought to be there, then. I ought to be in England so men can see me. With Mama trapped, they need a reason to keep fighting. I can help Uncle Robert rescue her, I know I can.”

Geoffrey was silent for several moments, regarding the boy in thoughtful reappraisal. “I am not saying you are wrong, Henry. But I am saying it would be too dangerous.”

“Do you think Stephen would hurt me?” Henry challenged, and Geoffrey cursed himself for all the times he’d mocked Stephen’s soft heart in his son’s hearing.

“There are other dangers, Henry,” Robert pointed out. “Just getting to England would be hazardous, for November is a bad month to cross the Channel.”

Henry looked from his father to his uncle, back at his father again. “Yesterday I heard some of the castle servants talking about a funeral for one of the stable lads. He went skating last week on the pond in the village, but the ice was not thick enough and he drowned. I like to skate on the ice, too, Papa, have my own pair of bone skates. I could drown crossing the Channel as Uncle Robert fears…or I could drown back in Angers, if I was unlucky like that stable lad.”

Geoffrey’s mouth twitched. “God help me,” he said, “I’ve sired a lawyer! Henry…you go back to the hearth and get warm whilst your uncle and I talk about this.”

Seeing that further argument was futile, Henry reluctantly retreated, casting them several anxious looks over his shoulder. The two men watched him go, enemies suddenly allied in their concern for one small, stubborn boy. “If you’d not been so quick to start your sermon,” Geoffrey said, “I’d have told you that I’m willing to spare some men for Maude’s rescue. I can probably part with two hundred or so, more if you can wait.”

“I cannot,” Robert said tersely. “Every day brings Maude closer to capture. But what of the lad? You are going to let him go with me?”

“Am I that obvious? Yes…I am.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course not,” Geoffrey said, an edge creeping back into his voice. “Maude and I may not have agreed on much, but we do on this-that we cannot coddle the lad. So…I am trusting my son to you, Robert, and to Stephen.” Another smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “God pity him if Henry did fall into his hands, for that lad of mine would talk him into abdicating by sundown!”

“I’ll keep him safe,” Robert said. “I can promise you that.”

“No,” Geoffrey said, “you can only promise that you will try. Look at him over there, watching us like a hungry hawk, whilst pretending to play with those dogs of his. He is still so young…Come on, let’s tell him ere I change my mind.”

Henry had knelt to pet his dyrehunds. But he straightened up abruptly as they started toward him. “Well,” Geoffrey said, “I’d not advise a man to buy a horse sight unseen, so I suppose the same holds true for kingdoms. You’d best check out the wretched English weather for yourself, lad, make sure it is a realm you want to rule.”

Henry swallowed, his pulse quickening with an emotion that was not excitement and not fear, yet oddly akin to both. “I can go? Truly?” And when his father nodded, he swallowed again before saying, “Uncle Robert…we will be in time?”

“I do not know, lad,” Robert admitted. “I hope so.”

That was not the answer Henry had been expecting. He’d wanted reassurance, had gotten, instead, an uncompromising adult reply, honest and unnerving. He could not have articulated the awareness that came upon him now, but he sensed, however instinctively, that when he sailed for England, he’d be leaving the greater part of his childhood behind.

“I hope so, too,” he said, striving to match his uncle’s matter-of-fact tones. A moment later, though, he blurted out, “I want to take my dogs with me,” no longer sounding like a young king in the making, just a nine-year-old boy afraid for his mother.

The wind was banging against the barricaded windows of the keep, the wooden shutters creaking and groaning under the onslaught. It sounded to Henry as if the storm were besieging Corfe, and having better luck than Uncle Robert was at Wareham. The chamber was dimly lit and cold; on awakening that morning, he’d found his washing laver iced over. In the three weeks that he’d been at Corfe, he’d come to hate it, trapped inside much of the time by the wretched weather. People were convinced this was going to be the worst winter in years, for there had already been three heavy snowfalls and it was only the second week in December. Not that Corfe had gotten much of the snow; it was too close to the sea. A few miles inland, the roads were drifted over, but at Corfe and Wareham, they’d been buffeted by wind-lashed sleet and freezing rain.

“Wolf! Lass!” That was all the encouragement his dogs needed. Piling onto the bed, they crowded Henry toward the edge, but he didn’t mind. The last time he’d opened the shutter, he’d looked out upon a sky clogged with leaden clouds, dusk at midday. His uncle was at Wareham, just four miles to the north, as he’d been most days since they’d forced a landing there. They’d taken the town, but the castle still held out, and that was why Henry was stranded at Corfe, waiting for Wareham to surrender.

He’d tried a few times to write to his father, but he’d not gotten very far, a smudged page or two blotched with ink smears and crossed-out words. It was not that he lacked for material to write about. The Channel crossing had been a rough one, and he was proud of the fact that he hadn’t gotten seasick like many of the men. Their original plan had been to land at Southampton, but some of the sailors balked, for that was their home port. So their fleet had come ashore at Wareham, and Henry had watched from a ship in the river harbor as the town was captured. In the weeks that followed, his uncle let him visit the siege whenever the weather permitted, as long as he kept well out of arrow range. No, he could have filled a dozen letters with what he’d seen and heard in the past month. But he was too troubled to write.

His uncle had explained to him that the besieged garrison had appealed to Stephen for aid, agreeing to surrender if he did not come to their rescue. The rules of war gave them that right. Henry understood that, or tried to. He understood, too, his uncle’s strategy: he was using the castle at Wareham as bait, hoping to draw Stephen away from Oxford. Such tactics had always worked in the past, for Stephen had rarely found the patience for a long siege; that was not his nature. So far, though, he had not taken the lure, and with each passing day, it seemed more and more likely that he was willing to sacrifice Wareham if it meant he gained a far greater prize-Maude.

When Henry had confronted his uncle with these fears, Robert had acknowledged their validity. But he’d explained, then, the grim truth-that the three hundred men with him were not enough to raise the siege at Oxford. He’d need a far greater force to expel Stephen’s army, sheltered behind the city’s walls and newly dug earthworks. Unless they could provoke Stephen into coming out to meet them, as he had at Lincoln, Oxford Castle seemed doomed, for certes.

After that stark revelation, Henry’s fears took a far darker turn. He’d spent a lot of his time at Corfe thinking of his mother, holding on to memories as elusive as the fireflies he chased every summer. It had been more than three years since he’d seen his mother. What if he did not recognize her? Even more unsettling was the thought that she might not recognize him; he’d been only six then and he was nigh on ten now. He fretted, too, about what she was enduring at Oxford. People were always interrupting conversations as he came by, but he already knew what they did not want him to hear-that her food supplies must be running very low by now, for the siege was into its third month.

But after his uncle admitted that they could not just ride to the rescue the way he’d expected them to do, he could not bring himself to write to his father, who’d shrugged off his mother’s peril with the scornful words, “Whatever trouble she is in, she brought upon herself.” And each day when he awoke, his first conscious thought was always the same. Would it be today that the castle fell? Today that his mother was taken prisoner? His worry about recognition seemed a small care, indeed, when measured against the dread that he’d never see his mother again.

His dogs were rooting in the coverlets, for he’d eaten bread and jam in bed for breakfast and spilled enough crumbs to warrant their attention. Wolf gulped down the last morsel, then began to bark. The female dyrehund joined in, and a moment later Robert entered the chamber.

“Wareham Castle surrendered to me this morning,” he said, not sounding at all like a man who’d just gained a significant victory.

Henry scrambled down from the bed. “What will you do now?”

“What I’d hoped to avoid-lay siege to Oxford. We’ve got to muster as many men as we can, so I’ve summoned all our allies to meet me at Cirencester.”

“Will you take me with you to Cirencester?” Henry asked, and was very relieved when his uncle nodded. “Uncle Robert…you do not think we’ll be able to rescue Mama, do you?”

Robert debated the merits of a kind lie versus a cruel truth, but he waited too long to make up his mind, and his hesitation confirmed the worst of Henry’s fears. He turned away, knelt by the closest of his dogs, and buried his face in the dyrehund’s thick, silvery ruff. “If Stephen captures the castle, will he hurt my mother?”

“No,” Robert said swiftly, “he would not harm her. Not Stephen.”

Henry glanced up, eyes wide and very dark in the candle-lit shadows. “But he would not let her go,” he said, and Robert slowly shook his head.

“No, lad,” he admitted. “He would not let her go.”