The White Ship

by Nicholas Salaman

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

For all fans of historical fiction and especially readers of Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth Based on a true story, this tale of passion and revenge brings the past vividly to life. Normandy in 1118 is a hotbed of malcontent barons kept in fragile order by their duke, Henry I, King of England. Fresh from early years in a monastery, Bertold - the bastard son of one of these barons - meets Juliana, a countess and daughter of the King. He falls in love, or lust (he isn?t sure), but sees that his chance could come with work in her small court. Soon, though, he finds himself caught up in a ruthless feud between Juliana and her father. Juliana's daughters are offered as hostages for a strategic castle, and even love is not enough to allay a tragedy that will change the course of history.

Release date: March 10, 2016

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 427

Sample

I

I opened the huge oak door of the barn, stepped quickly inside, and looked back to check that no one was watching.

The only thing that moved was the barn-smell which danced in the dust as I shut out the early sunlight behind me.

If you are interested in smells (and who cannot be), I can tell you it was a complex one. It was a dark, fusty, slightly gingery odour in which you could distinguish hay, rust, damp, horse, old wood, fungus, mouse droppings, rats, axle grease, and (if you sniffed very carefully) sex – and oranges. Oranges? I questioned my sense of the faint aroma – rare in these parts – but put it aside, distracted by a further aromatic seasoning from the moat, stirred by the morning breeze.

The oranges should have alerted me. Everything else was as usual, but I was tired that morning. It seemed anyway that I was safe; there was nobody about, not even a groom or a scullion. Everyone was late rising after the revels of last night.

The barn was a huge wooden affair on the other side of the grassy bailey from the castle itself, over against the marshalsea where they kept the horses. It was one of the favourite places for those wishing to make what the French call the beast with two backs – though usually not before dinnertime. Normally, I would not have been there at all (well, only after dinner and then hardly ever), but it is almost impossible to find a quiet place in a castle. Everyone’s on top of you everywhere, even when you’re having a piss.

All I wanted, intensely, that morning was somewhere to snatch a bit of sleep. There had been this great Feast of Easter celebration the night before, rejoicing at the princely presence and of course Jesus’s Resurrection. After dinner, there was foolery, drollery, buffoonery, revelry and rudery.

You know how it is. The feasting went on late, there was too much wine, the Prince’s fool told too many good jokes, and what with one thing and another and little Marianne, one of the Comtesse’s maids, I didn’t get to sleep in my own bed until well past midnight, the hour when the Brothers at the abbey would be saying Matins. I had a bed in one of the knights’ wooden halls that had sprouted in the bailey next to the stone of the castle, but my father, the Comte, had developed a habit of summoning me at all hours just to see if I was behaving myself, or out of sheer malice. Last night was no problem because he was drunk and wouldn’t stir; but this morning it would be a different matter, and I knew he would be coming for me, rooting me out of bed and on parade before I was ready.

I had contrived to wake early because I knew that I still needed a good long sleep, undisturbed, somewhere my father wouldn’t immediately find me. That was the first essential, to keep out of his reach – because he’s a crusty old bugger, to be honest, especially after a night’s carousing. He thinks he can still carouse, but if you ask me he’s well past it, even if he has got a young wife. A man should stop carousing after forty and fix his mind on prayer and sweetmeats. Carousing is for younger men like myself – when we can get it.

So I had dragged on my clothes as soon as I woke, thought immediately of the barn as a suitable location, and sidled across the bailey, not for a moment imagining that I would stumble on a secret that, if divulged, would probably cost me my life. I entered, quiet as a harvest mouse in case a sneaking groom was skulking somewhere, and made my way towards the stacks of hay piled up like a house against the back wall.

Oranges! That was where it came from. The scent filled the corridor between the hay stacks. It was then that I heard them; a low whisper, a little cry. I crept nearer because there is a pleasure in secret discovery.

‘Darling,’ I heard a voice cry, a man’s voice. ‘Darling, darling.’

What I saw made me choke with surprise. It was the English Prince and he was embracing – I like to use that word because anything else would be gross and although I am a bastard, at least I am the bastard of a Comte – he was embracing the Comtesse, my father’s second wife, bastard daughter of the Duke who was also King Henry of England; the most beautiful woman you ever saw; blonde as an angel, middle to tall, with a skin the colour of late spring honey infused with a drop or two of very pale medlar jelly. Her mother had been a beauty before her, a lady called Ede, daughter of an English lord, it was said…

No, I have to tell you this in riper words, the situation is too strong for delicacy. The Prince William, known as ‘the Atheling’, in whom resided the hopes of all the English, son of King Henry and of the half-Scots, half-Saxon Queen Matilda, was fornicating with his half-sister, two years older than he was. He was fucking my stepmother and because this was not the sort of thing you do in public with your host’s wife, they had found a quiet place removed from the hubbub of the castle, just as I had done, to make the beast with eight legs, as we say in Normandy. Of course, I had noticed before now my stepmother’s predilection for the oils of orange that she used about her body, and here it was, heating up nicely.

I tell you, men have lost their lives for witnessing less. Do you think I gave a discreet cough and a ‘good morning, Prince’? The hell I did. I moved out so quietly God himself didn’t notice.

But perhaps I should explain myself and my life, which was precious to me at the time.

II

I am the son of Rotrou, Lord of Mortagne and Comte de Perche, a small county but important because of its central position towards the southern end of the Duchy of Normandy. My name is Bertold. I am a good-looking bastard, though I say it myself, or I was in those days, but the emphasis is very much on bastard. I am illegitimate. I don’t mind making jokes about bastards, but I would rather you didn’t.

Duke Henry is master of Normandy, or most of it – the Normans are a troublesome lot. It is the season of spring, in the year of Our Lord 1118.

A fortnight or so before, on my twenty-first birthday, I had been summoned to my father’s castle. I had been in an abbey for eight years, learning Latin (it is the lingua franca of advancement) and other useful things, like avoiding the groping hands of certain monks. I had almost, but not quite, become accustomed to thinking that a monastic life was for me. It had its advantages, and there was no other comfortable alternative. I could become a soldier, but that was a desperate calling and I was ambitious. I wanted to turn my learning to some use; but what, and how?

The summons, which solved my problem, had surprised me. I had had no idea that the old Comte thought of me in any way at all, least of all remembered my birthday, since I was his bastard, not his legal son. It soon turned out that it was my dead mother’s husband, my stepfather, the castle cellarer, who had put him up to it. He had urged the Comte to summon me home. At Mortagne, the cellarer was more important than in many such places because here the butler was old and infirm, and leant on him heavily. My stepfather was, in fact, his deputy and aspired to that title, but he needed someone to help him with his duties, and thought he could use me and pay me nothing. He was a mean man and never forgot a debt of any kind, and he considered that I owed him something for having been given his shelter as a child. No wonder my mother had succumbed to the temporary advances of the Comte de Perche who – though he, God knows, was no great shakes – at least appreciated a beautiful woman.

On my return to the castle, I had found the place in a state of some excitement, as sometimes happens when Lent draws to a close and the girls and boys start looking at each other in that way they have. It was particularly the case this year, however, because William, son of Duke Henry, was due to arrive with his retinue on Easter Saturday. The sixteen-year-old Prince was accompanying his father for the first time at the start of the year’s campaigning in Normandy, knocking the barons’ heads together, but he had taken leave from his military duties to celebrate the feast of Easter with his half-sister, my little stepmother the Comtesse Matilda, my father’s bride of a couple of years. The Prince had been very close to her, apparently, when they were in England, but until today I had had no idea quite how close they had been.

The old Comte, my father, had married this Matilda, Duke Henry’s illegitimate daughter, when she was just sixteen because his first wife had died. The Comte was feeling cold in bed, and the Duke wanted an ally, so it suited them both. Admittedly the girl was a bastard but still a daughter of a Duke – a Duke who was also King of England. It was an honour of a kind, even though Henry has more bastards than any King of England before him, and that is saying something. I don’t blame him. If I were a king and a duke, I would have plenty myself, but somehow the same opportunities do not come my way. Lovely blonde Saxon girls are not two a penny in the county of Perche, where the local specialities are big handsome draught horses, sometimes dapple-grey, or thick-waisted Norman girls with hair like a rope-trick and a laugh like a saw-blade.

So it was a marriage of convenience, the Duke wanted powerful allies in Normandy, and the Comte de Perche, who was not universally popular – though who is in Normandy? – could bask in the ducal favour and all it entailed. Perche was useful to the Duke, who had given another beautiful daughter in marriage to the neighbouring Comte de Breteuil, a man with a face like a suet pudding whose favourite occupations were fighting and drink. The Comte de Breteuil and his Comtesse, half-sister to our Matilda, were also guests at Mortagne this Easter, on the occasion of the Prince, their half-brother’s, visit.

No one had asked either of the girls whether they wanted to be married to these Norman gargoyles. The Pope had now declared it sinful for anyone to force a girl to marry, but when you are a princess there are other considerations, and the Pope was always ready to listen to reason from a king. When I think of what it must be like to be married to the Comte de Breteuil or to my father, I am pleased to be an unimportant bastard. Not that I think bastards are unimportant, please don’t get that idea. As bastards go, I give a pretty good account of myself.

I am just under six foot tall (six foot on a good day). I have dark hair (with a Norman tendency to unruliness), clean features, a fresh face, clear, blue eye, and a ready smile. Too ready, my father – who values seriousness – would say, but I would rather disarm with a smile than fight. However, if it comes to fighting, then I am the man for it. In Normandy all the barons have their own little armies and love to use them. And one thing I learned at the monastery – well, I learned many things, but one thing I learned which may surprise you – was wrestling. I don’t want you to think of me as a pale shrimp of a clerk. The monks loved a wrestle, a useful art in those dangerous days, though they would not necessarily have liked the world to know it, and some of them were very proficient at it, but I was abbey champion. The other thing we were good at was music. The Abbot saw no contradiction in that. Mens sana in corpore sano was his creed – or one of them.

Back to the barn, then, and on with the bastard’s tale – a better one, you may find, than many a story told by a man born between lawful sheets.

III

I walked back across the bailey in some confusion; shocked, yes – not at the act of fucking, but at the enormous danger I had put myself in, and at them too. From what I had seen of him, I thought the Prince not a bad sort for an Englishman: arrogant of course; spoilt – that goes without saying – but you couldn’t blame him because the whole world treated him as if the sun rose out of his arse and never set. And as for the Comtesse, I had been half in love with her myself.

My concerns must have made me careless, because a voice boomed out:

‘You.’

I knew immediately that it was I who was being addressed. I really don’t think my father knew my name. ‘You’ was what he habitually called me.

I stopped and adopted a low, subservient, watchful expression. I had found that usually worked best with my father.

‘Where do you think you’re sneaking off to?’

It was a shame, really, being a bastard. For one thing, you weren’t called Comte like your father, you were called ‘bastard’ by your equals or ‘you’ by your father. You didn’t inherit the castle, or anything at all if you were unlucky or didn’t look appreciative when you were called ‘you’. There was no dignity in bastardy (unless you were called William the Conqueror). That’s why I say I am a nobody even though my father is a powerful man. I am nothing to him and nothing to the world, but quite a lot to myself, as you may have gathered.

Ever since I can remember I have had the peculiar sensation that I am an onlooker, not exactly part of the life that I am leading. It is like being accompanied always by your image in a glass that follows you everywhere. Perhaps other people feel like this. I do not know. There is nothing I can do about it. Once or twice, I feel I have been warned by my shadow self about something, and the warning has usually been right. Sometimes I seem to know things that I should not know and people look at me strangely, so I have learned to keep such things to myself. Someone is looking after me and, I tell you, we bastards can do with all the help we can get. Perhaps it is an angel and God really does look after us.

Of course, it depends whose bastard you are. Duke Henry or, as the English call him, King Henry, made many with those fair Saxon girls, sometimes high-born, sometimes little villeinesses. And, to be fair to him – which one should be because he has sharp ears and a long memory – he made sure that all his children married well, mostly (as I say) to powerful Norman barons whose allegiance or loyalty he wanted. That was why the daughter of his lovely blonde English mistress, Ede, had been made to marry the crabbed old Comte de Perche, my father.

My God, Matilda was a lovely girl: the sun seemed to have spun the strands of her hair. How she could endure mottled old father Perche was a mystery. He looked like one of his old dappled Percheron horses, only less shapely and bigger round the girth. But then it turned out she found comfort with her sweet half-brother; a bit of a prick maybe, but there was no doubt he loved her. I picked up a lot of gossip at the bottom of my lord’s table because I always kept my ears open, though the discovery of just how much sweet William loved his half-sister was my own. If I valued my life (which I did), I would have to keep it to myself, because princes – even princes as young and spoilt as William – have a long reach.

‘I was just going to put in some practice at the quintain.’

I knew my father approved of that kind of thing. The quintain was a sort of swivelling-iron device which presented you, as you approached, with a heavy image of a man with a helmet on. It swivelled towards you, and you were supposed to hit it with your mace in order to send it round again. Sometimes it had a sort of flailing attachment which sneaked round with an erratic motion and caught you on the head if you weren’t looking, very painful too. My father’s quintain had that attachment.

‘Don’t give me that shit, boy.’

Being a bastard was much better than being a serf, I suppose, never knowing where you stood and liable to be sold along with the fields you worked on. In fact, quite a lot of respectable people were bastards these days. Making them was an honourable trade long before the reign of King Henry, but he had made it more fashionable than before, almost de rigueur as you might say, among those at court.

‘It isn’t shit, sir.’

It is actually. I dislike all that hacking and hewing. My father’s fault, in point of fact. When my mother, who was a nice woman – a reeve’s daughter, nicely brought up – came to him to tell him she was with child, he told her, if I were a boy I would never be a knight. He wanted to punish her because her news made him feel inconvenienced, embarrassed, guilty or maybe he just had a bad hangover. At any rate, she was pleased because she didn’t want me to be a knight. She wanted me to be a priest. Priests had much better lives, were safer and better fed. My mother never wanted glory for me, only a soft bed, a full belly, and a nice little girl to cuddle, all of which a priest could have in those days.

The upshot was I was sent to an abbey to pray and learn Latin. It struck me as unfair that my father should expect me to be proficient with shield and mace on my return.

‘You are a disgrace to the Perches.’

‘Yes, sir. What would you like me to do, sir?’

‘Get out of my sight.’

Bastard children, if they are men, are called ‘fils’ or ‘son’ of whoever the lucky father might be: Fils Robert, or Fils William, or Fils Gerald, but the English, who find it hard to say ‘fils’, call them Fitz. Almost every other person you meet in England is called FitzSomething, I am told. It’s because the English drink so much – always have done, something to do with the weather – and the English women are promiscuous, the lot of them, as we have just seen (something to do with the weather). I met a Dane once and the only thing he would say about England was ‘English women have dirty feet’. So there you have it. Anyway, if we were in England, I would be called FitzRotrou because that is my father’s name.

‘I came to tell you how I was doing in the world, sir.’

But he had turned away to talk to his falconer. This was more like it. Perhaps I could get some shut-eye somewhere now.

My mother died of a fever when I was away at the monastery. She had caught a chill and had not looked after herself – as I would have made her do – but she was never one for being ill. Indeed she wasn’t ill for long, and she died before they could fetch me to say goodbye to her. My father had thought it wasn’t worth disturbing my education. She was a good mother and I was stricken with grief, but when you are fourteen years old and already half a man, nothing lasts for long, not even sorrow. I knew now that whatever life held for me, it was up to me to make it happen. I could depend on no one else. That is the bastard creed. Use or be used – and do both with a smile.

Mother had left me very little, only some old Norman silver. (Her father, the reeve, had a son to whom he had left his house and what little money he had.) But what she had done for me was to make me tall and well-featured, with eyes the colour of a speedwell flower (so they were described by the maid of my stepmother the Comtesse, and why argue?), and an expression that defaulted to a smile even when I didn’t feel like it. This smile disconcerted my enemies and enraptured my lovers. It was more valuable than money in many ways, though it was about to lead me into one hell of a lot of trouble.

The trouble showed itself as I slouched away from that encounter with my father, hugging the walls in case he should suddenly reappear. Hugging them so tight in fact that I almost bumped into someone coming from the opposite direction, someone who looked like a slightly more imperious version of my own father’s lovely Comtesse.

I was immediately assailed by her fragrance: rose, deep and passionate, a light touch of spice with something more troubling, the heart-quickening smell of wallflowers, with that appley-almondy smell of her skin …

I judged her to be some twenty-four years of age. She clutched at her bosom to draw breath. It struck me that she too had been anxious not to be seen.

‘My apologies!’ I gasped, thinking what a wonderful clutch that bosom made.

I had learned courtesy from my mother whose politeness had indeed, along with her beauty, so charmed the Comte my father that he had taken her into his bed, although alas she had not been able to teach him any. I had been furthered in the art of civilised conduct by an old Spanish Jew at my monastery, Saul Alfonsi. He had converted to Christianity and the monks called him Brother Paul because the apostle Paul was a Jew made good. His brother, a physician at court, had written Disciplina Clericalis drawing on the Mahomedan tradition of adab or courtesy.

‘One might almost have thought you did not want to be seen, coming round a corner like that,’ the beautiful girl remarked.

‘It is true,’ I said, feeling that honesty might be the most amusing course. ‘I was trying to escape my father.’

Now that I had a little time to compose my mind and observe the girl’s distinguishing features rather than her general impression, I saw that she was a tall young woman with a splendid head of red-gold hair, a fine full figure, green eyes and a flawlessly pale skin. That was how it struck me at the time, and I have not revised the impression since.

‘Your father? Who is he?’ she asked.

‘He is Comte Rotrou of Perche.’

She laughed.

‘There’s more to him than meets the eye,’ she said. ‘And your name?’

‘I am his bastard Bertold. May I ask who I had the honour of nearly knocking over?’

‘I am the Duke’s bastard daughter Juliana, Comtesse de Breteuil.’

I knew that the Duke was also the King of England, and another of the Duke’s daughters was here to visit her sister at the castle, but I had not listened properly to any details. There were many pretty women at dinner last night, but I must have been blind or drunk – or both – not to notice this lady. The King’s daughter! A phrase from the Psalms swam into my mind: ‘Kings’ daughters shall be among thy honourable women.’ Oh yes, indeed, she could be among my honourable women any time. I was a lusty scoundrel in those days.

‘We bastards must stick together,’ I said, rather cheekily.

It seemed to me in my impudence that this encounter might offer opportunities for Bertold’s advancement. I could see that the idea amused her.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘perhaps we should …’

There was the tiniest pause between ‘perhaps’ and ‘we should’, as I believe she intended. She was too much a lady to say anything more obvious, but I noticed it. All you want when you are young is a fuck and a furtherance. Better and better, Bertold.

She prepared to move on. I thought I could not let her go without some furthering; we must pick apples when we see them ripe and there was a smell of apples about her – and an airy spice, and the faint smell of a spark just after the flint has been struck.

‘When shall I see you again…?’ I started to blurt in a desperate manner that my old Jewish mentor at the monastery would have deplored.

‘Not so fast, my young Fitz. All in good time.’

She was almost gone, poised on that soft little bit of foot behind the toes.

‘Who were you hiding from?’ I asked.

‘My husband, of course.’

And then she walked on. I stood, deep in thought because I had met a wonderful girl who might just, conceivably, be the way ahead for a young man without prospects. The next moment, a bucket of water was poured over me. I looked round, somewhat irritated, not wanting to appear ridiculous in case the Comtesse should come back, and ready to put the blame roundly on my father because it was just the sort of thing he would do. But it was not the Comte, it was that prick of a son of his, Robert, the son and heir legitimate. Fifteen years old and already a complete arsehole.

‘Thought you were getting a bit hot,’ he smirked. ‘Thought you needed to cool down.’

‘I’m going to kill you,’ I said.

But he kept his distance and snivelled.

‘Bastard,’ he said. ‘You bastard. You touch me and I’ll tell my father. Anyway, you shouldn’t go talking like that to your betters. I can talk to a comtesse because I am going to be a comte. But you’re always going to be a bastard.’

I wasn’t going to take this, Comte or no Comte. I made a grab for Robert and he ran off like the cowardly little twerp he was, and I couldn’t be bothered to chase him. Instead I fixed my mind on Juliana. She was hardly older than me and I could sense that she liked me. She was a spirited girl that was for sure. She wasn’t going to hide from me the way she hid from her husband. But why was she hiding from him?

I watched the man in hall that evening and the reasons were all too clear. He was another boring old fart. He picked his nose, which is absolutely counter to the advice in Divina Clericalis which Brother Paul had shown me, and when this Comte belched he did not look up at the ceiling which everyone knows is the thing to do. He was simply beyond the bounds of custom and duty.

IV

I hope you will bear with me if I take you again for a little ride into my past, because it has some bearing on the extraordinary tale that I am going to unfold for you, and also because I have an affection for what has been. I am not the only one. Does it not say in Ecclesiastes 3.15: ‘For that which is past is now, and that which is to be hath already been, and God requireth that which is past’? It seems to me the past is the only thing that assures you that you really do exist. The present is all too self-consuming. It eats time and never gets any fatter.

I could recite nearly the whole of the Bible once, in Latin. When I was sent away to the monastery I wanted to go because I had an interest in medicine at the time, still have to some extent, and I had a mind to learn. I had heard that an abbey beyond L’Aigle on the road to Montreuil, about thirty miles from my home, was a place where the new teaching brought by the Jews from Spain had filtered through. It was the best place in Normandy for mathematics as well as doctoring and had a strong connection with the medical school in Montpellier. These were the weapons – mathematics and medicine, rather than the sword and the lance – that were going to make my fortune, and of course there was Latin to be learned, the language of scholars and men on the make. I was precocious in those days. Now my future is all behind me.

I was persistent enough to bring the Abbey of Saint-Sulpice to my mother’s attention. She brought it to my father’s, so in the end they sent me there, though my mother wept when I left, as did I. It was a hard place in many ways. The endless round of services – from Lauds starting before first light, to Matins at midnight, said as we kneeled in front of our beds in the dormitory – seemed designed to put a boy off a life of holiness rather than encourage it. Not that I was interested in a life of holiness at the time; the blood ran warm in those cold days.

The food for novices was anything the Brothers didn’t want to eat themselves, often gristle and slops. Later, I made friends with Brother Gilbert, the cook, who also came from my county of Perche and didn’t need bribing with a feel up my tunic. I don’t pretend to be perfect. I would have let him have a grope for a loaf and a slice of bacon. It isn’t so bad if you don’t make a habit of it. That is a monk joke. We used to have a number of those. The trouble with masturbation is that it can get out of hand. And so on, and so on.

The bone-chipping cold in my stone cell, the beatings when I transgressed or was idle, the advances of some of the too-friendly brothers (especially Brother Thomas), were all tribulations, but on the positive side, I was taught to read. And what made my stay at Saint-Sulpice even more useful than literacy and Latin, music and medicine, was the new mathematics.

The old Jew, who taught me good manners, had brought knowledge up from the south, and was also a mathematician. It was he who showed me the new numerals of the Arabs which he had learnt in Castile and which made the Roman numbers seem cumbersome and slow – and what’s more he taught me how to use them. Brother Paul made me put one set of the old Roman numbers on top of a lesser one, told me to take away the lesser from the larger, and then when I had juggled all those Vs and Xs and Cs and Ds and Ms, he showed how much simpler it was to do it with the new Arabic numbers. After that we did addition, and I discovered how to put the Arab numbers together to make a larger sum in half the time. And so on with multiplication and division. Multiplication I had previously found a graveyard littered with those Roman letters which passed for numbers. And division had been even worse.

Best of all, since I was acquiring a strong persuasion that the way to be happy was to be rich, Brother Paul showed me how these new numerals made tallying much easier. I could see a future in that.

‘Do not call it tallying, that is for peasants and those who still use the abacus,’ said the old Jew. ‘You keep these figures on a slate or, if you are rich, on vellum. You write everything down. One side of beef … three silver pennies. You must have a record of transactions if you are to control your trade and your life. And when you are rich don’t forget old Saul who taught you that.’

‘I shall not forget you, Brother,’ I told him, and I meant it.

My head was astir with the possibilities of these new numbers which were so strange and yet so simple compared with the old Roman way. He talked about using these new numbers in a science the Greeks know as geometry and in an even stranger invention of the Arabs, a science hardly known in this country, called al-gebra which in time he would show me.

That s