William grinned. “I still have matters of my own baggage to attend to, or I’d oblige. As it is, we’ll set out at first light. I take it you can ride?”
Heloise wrinkled her nose. “Like a sack of flour, my lord, but it suffices.” Her tone suggested that even if she couldn’t ride she’d teach herself in a day just to be out of the Tower.
Chuckling, William decided that he was going to enjoy being her warden.
Isabelle watched Heloise lumber like an overgrown puppy round the chamber they shared. The lid of her travelling coffer was thrown back and she was tossing items of baggage to a maid for packing. Half these items had to be rescued off the floor for Heloise was terminally untidy. A wrinkled leg of hose came to light from its hiding place under the bed, stiff at the toes and in need of darning.
“I wondered where that had gone,” Heloise said, giving it an experimental sniff and then making a face.
Isabelle shook her head, torn between laughter and disgust. Her own portion of the chamber exuded an orderly tranquillity. “Well,” she said, “tell me what happened. Does he have planks for wits? Are you going to push him into a bog?”
Heloise rolled the hose into a cylinder and stuffed it down the side of the chest. “I don’t think so. Even if he doesn’t know Latin or ciphering, he’s just as sharp as Sir Ranulf. It’ll be hard running rings round him.” Heloise gave a mischievous giggle. “I might try though. He’s not like Sir Ranulf to purse his lips as if he’s an old woman. He likes to laugh.”
“You learned a lot about him in a short time,” Isabelle said peevishly.
Heloise rolled her eyes. “I did, but not from him. He jests and makes easy conversation, but it’s all on the surface. I spoke to Lord Ranulf’s steward and he said that William Marshal used to be the Young King’s tutor and that he’s recently returned from a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. He also said that he’s never been defeated in a tourney and that Queen Eleanor dotes on him.”
Isabelle sat down on her bed and stroked her hound’s silky silver ears. She felt green with jealousy and hated herself for it.
Heloise paused in gathering up her belongings. “I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly contrite. “You don’t want to hear me say things like that, do you? I wouldn’t in your place.”
Isabelle swallowed her envy and forced a smile. “Don’t be so foolish. If I’m out of sorts it’s because I wish I was going with you. Take your good fortune and squeeze every drop from it; that’s a command.”
Predictably Heloise rushed over to engulf Isabelle in a tearful bear hug. “I’ll have a scribe write to you with news,” she said. “And I’ll visit you if I can…but who knows, you might have left here by then.”
“Who knows,” Isabelle repeated bravely, thinking that even if she did, it wouldn’t be with an unbeaten tourney champion with a courtier’s burnish and an easy, smiling manner.
In the morning, Heloise left soon after dawn to begin her journey home to Kendal. Standing on the sward, Damask in her arms, Isabelle watched William Marshal boost Heloise into the saddle of a placid brown mare. Heloise said something to him that made him laugh as she gathered the reins and adjusted her seat. He fed the mare a piece of purple carrot off the palm of his hand and rubbed her nose. Gilded in pale sunshine, his garments immaculate, he might have stepped straight from a stained-glass window or the pages of a psalter. He slapped the mare’s neck and turning to his own black palfrey swung into the saddle as lightly as a youth. Heloise waved to Isabelle and with much kicking of her heels and flapping of her reins, managed, at last, to turn her mare. William Marshal looked across the sward to Isabelle, saluted her, and heeled the palfrey about. Biting her lip, Isabelle watched the party ride away. Then she turned and putting Damask down, walked her beneath the great, imprisoning walls. The lions were silent today and Isabelle’s eyes were so dry that they burned.
Twenty-seven
William came to Kendal in full summer, the sky deep blue with high feathers of cloud and the curlews calling over moor and pasture. A place of empty spaces, richer in sheep than in people, and those sheep providing a fine income from their fleeces. It was a landscape of lowering hills, lakes, and meres, fields divided by dry stone walls that had stood time out of mind. A beautiful, wind-cleaned world, and one so different to any William had encountered before that it overwhelmed him almost as much as the Holy Land had done. Here there was no harshness of sun, no desiccating heat, but there was the same sense of majesty, a brooding quality and the hint of a desolate harshness that was only a rainstorm away.
He explored his new responsibilities thoroughly, from the great lake of Windermere to the wide flat sands of Morecambe Bay. He visited the castles and priories and the forests, still populated by boar and wolf, creatures that had been hunted to the verge of extinction in the more populated south. Soaking up this new, strange landscape, he was exhilarated. After the tense and dangerous life he had led in the Young King’s entourage, his arduous pilgrimage and spiritual scouring, it was a relief to have naught but mundane administrative duties to attend to, and time to enter into a firmer peace with God.
Heloise accompanied him everywhere, for as her warden he was responsible for her safety and security. She dined with him most nights, and he enjoyed her company for she made him laugh and she was incorrigible. But he decided that he was not about to make her his wife, whatever King Henry had intended. She was an entertaining distraction, and her wellbeing and that of her lands was his responsibility, but she was not his future. At the back of William’s mind, Queen Eleanor’s words continued to haunt him and he often thought about Isabelle de Clare…and wondered.
They heard the news in the autumn that the King’s son Geoffrey had been killed in a tourney in Paris, trampled under the hooves of his stallion. William said prayers for his soul and kept vigil in memory of the little boy he remembered watching practise on the tilt ground at Argentan, and of the uneasy young man who had tried to play both sides in the disputes between his father and brothers and often fallen between two stools. He left a small daughter, Constance, and an unborn child growing in his wife’s womb. William thought of the life’s grace afforded himself; he had survived the tourneys, the bitter internal warring of the Angevin royal house, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He had the conviction that God had reserved him for a purpose, and although it was not William’s place to question, he did not believe that it was to wed Heloise of Kendal and dwell here in obscurity.
For almost two years, William tarried in the north. The leaves of his second autumn as lord of Kendal changed the trees from green to fìre-red and gold, and as the weather grew cold he topped the linen layers of summer with woollen tunics and heavy, fur-lined cloaks. The roars of rutting stags echoed through the woods and smoky mist drenched forest, moor, and pasture. News came that Jerusalem had fallen into Saracen hands and a rallying cry rippled through Christendom, calling for a new crusade. King Henry pledged to go, so did Philip of France, and Prince Richard also, but for the moment, they were travelling no further than words. William felt a pang of guilt, wondering if he should have remained in the Holy Land and pledged his sword to the Templars…but had he done so, he would now be a rotting corpse on the field of Hattin where the Saracen commander Saladin had led his troops to overwhelming victory. To assuage his feelings of guilt and restlessness, William began plans to found a priory on his lands at Cartmel and spent much time, thought, and prayer upon the creation of the establishment.
The business of administering the lands for which he had fallen responsible was largely a matter of common sense and putting capable men in positions that suited them. He enjoyed the tasks but they did not stretch him and he began to feel like a man with insufficient food on his plate to make a satisfying meal. It helped that he had the squires to train. They were lively, likeable lads, although it didn’t prevent them from being fiercely competitive with each other. His nephew was the sturdier of the two and better at wrestling and hand-fighting. Jean D’Earley was lighter on his feet and excellent at swordplay. He was a good rider too, although Jack, with his more robust build, was going to have the edge as a jouster.
Just before winter, William’s brother visited him on his way to Lancaster on business for Prince John. Alais had borne another daughter but the child had died at little more than a month old.
“Alais has taken it very hard,” John said morosely. “She says that it is God’s judgement on us for our sin of fornication outside wedlock and I cannot reason with her. She spends all her time shut away, weeping.”
“The Young Queen was like that for many months after she and Henry lost their son,” William said. “It is a wound that only time will close.”
John’s mouth turned down at the corners. “She refuses to lie with me lest she conceive again. She says that she will no longer be my whore…Jesu God, when she said that word…” He rubbed one hand over his face then looked at William, his gaze heavy with weariness. “Ach, I know why she spoke as she did. It’s not just the death of the child.”
William said nothing and waited, letting the moment ripen. He had suspected that there was more to it than grief for the death of a baby. When he had visited John and Alais at Hamstead before coming north, he had noticed small signs of strain between them. Looks, silent reproach, anxiety.
John sighed deeply. “Soon after our mother died, Adam de Port offered me his daughter Aline in marriage, and I said I would seriously consider the proposal.”
“Ah,” William said. That explained a great deal.
“The girl’s not yet of marriageable age, but soon will be. Her father has influence at court and the girl’s dowry is rich. I’d be an idiot not to accept the offer. I know our mother would have approved.”
