The Passionate Enemies Read online

  The King hesitated. ‘It brought me great good, as you know. Stephen. The King of France hates the match; therefore it must be good for me, must it not? Yet had I not made it she would be here and by the saints, Stephen, I would have trained her to rule this land and made her my heir.’

  ‘But as you so rightly say, sir, it is too late. She is the Empress.’

  ‘It is this solemn fact, Stephen, which has brought me to this decision.’

  Stephen was afraid to look at his uncle for fear he should betray his eagerness.

  It was coming now. He was certain of it. The King was going to tell him that, because he was the son of his favourite sister, his beloved nephew whom he regarded as his own son, who had fought gallantly at his side in Normandy, who had shown himself to be liked by the English and a young man malleable to the King’s will, he would name him his heir.

  This, thought Stephen, is the greatest moment of my life. Why should I not be King of England? Am I not the Conqueror’s grandson? Of the three sons who survived great William, Rufus was dead, Robert a prisoner in his brother Henry’s hands, and Henry was fifty-two without a male heir. So why should not the son of the Conqueror’s daughter take the coveted crown?

  It was almost as though fate was playing into his hands. Fate had married Matilda to the Emperor of Germany so that she could not be Queen of England (and how would the people react to a woman on the throne?). William, the King’s only son, had been drowned in the White Ship. And he, Stephen, had been sent at an early age to the English Court; he had won the King’s favour; he had a grace and charm of manner which had brought many to his side.

  This was his great moment. He could almost feel the crown on his head.

  Time seemed to slow down. So many thoughts pushed themselves into his mind with the rapidity of lightning.

  ‘Yes,’ said the King, speaking ponderously as though to give greater effect to his words, ‘I have given this matter much thought. It is not a step to take lightly. But I am no longer a young man, Stephen. I have lived through fifty-two winters. It is a goodly age, and although I am still in the full flush of my vigour I must perforce look facts in the face. A kingdom without an heir is a kingdom which breeds trouble. Long before I die the people must know that there is another to step into my shoes. I trust you, Stephen. You have proved yourself to be a good friend to me and this country.’

  Stephen could scarcely suppress his excitement.

  ‘My lord, I will serve you and this land with my life.’

  ‘I know it, Stephen. You are a good boy. If I had a wife and got her with child it would be a year before a son could be born. I should be fifty-three years of age, Stephen.’

  Stephen nodded safely. ‘How wise you are, sir. I have most admired your love of truth. You always looked it in the face and admitted to what you saw. Sir, it is a quality I most admire. I strive always to emulate it.’

  The King inclined his head.

  ‘So,’ he went on. ‘I have decided to marry again. Now . . . no waiting. By the saints, there is no time for dallying. I must get my bride to bed and with child without delay.’

  Stephen was speechless. For once he could not find the right words to say.

  The King did not seem to notice. ‘Yes, I shall marry at once. I must have a son. The Kingdom must have an heir. I trust you, Stephen. When my son is born you will swear on sacred bones to me that you will uphold him if I should die before he is of an age to defend himself. I know you would do so, but I shall need your oath . . . and that of all those who serve me. Yes, Stephen, I have come to this decision. There is nothing for me to do but take a wife.’

  Stephen bowed his head, still not speaking. How could he trust himself to do so when he had seen his hopes shattered, his greatest ambition shown to him as to be as nothing more than a dream.

  Stephen rode from Westminster to the Tower Royal, that magnificent palace which Henry had given him at the time of his marriage. In the Chepe the merchants recognized him and bowed their deference. He knew that they believed he could well become their king. Many a merchant’s daughter smiled at him from a window. Stephen’s liking for attractive girls was well known, and so courteous was he in his approach, so kindly even when the affaire was at an end, that his amatory adventures were regarded as a kingly pastime to be indulgently accepted rather than deplored.

  Past the wooden houses with their thatched roofs to the great stone fortress between the Chepe and Watling Street – a palace, a king’s residence but not to be the home of a king, he thought bitterly.

  In her solarium his wife was seated with her women working on a piece of needlework. She looked up with pleasure as he entered, so did the rest of her ladies, some of whom had at one time been on intimate terms with him.

  He gave no indication of the bitterness in his mind which the blow to his hopes had aroused. He waved to the ladies to be seated for they had all risen with the exception of his wife to curtsey.

  ‘Pray do not disturb the charming picture you make,’ he said, smiling, but his wife knew that something had disturbed him for she was well aware of his changing moods and she dismissed her women that she might be alone with her husband.

  ‘Stephen,’ she said, ‘you have had bad news.’

  ‘Have I betrayed it, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Only to me who know you so well,’ she answered.

  He sat down on the faldestol and leaned his head against her knee. She touched his luxuriant hair and was happy because in this disappointment, whatever it was, he had come to her.

  He was thinking: My meek Matilda. She is a good wife to me. I would that they had given her a different name though. Matilda! Small wonder that when I hear that name I must always think of that other Matilda. But she excited him not at all, this dear good little wife of his, and never had, even in the early days of their marriage.

  ‘You come from the King,’ said Matilda gently.

  ‘Ay, from the King.’

  ‘Stephen. He is not displeased with you!’

  ‘Nay. I am still his good nephew. He has told me that he intends to marry.’

  She was silent. She understood perfectly. Stephen had been disappointed of his hopes. Only she knew how he had longed for their fulfilment. She herself had regarded that state with apprehension, for if he were King of England she would be Queen and she knew that her nature was such as to shrink from such a position.

  Gently she stroked his hair. She said: ‘If he married, he might not get a son.’

  Stephen turned his head, took the hand which caressed him and looked up into her face. ‘It is what I tell myself. He is an old man. Yet he is lusty still.’

  ‘The Queen could not latterly get children by him.’

  ‘Nay,’ said Stephen gloomily, ‘but others could.’

  ‘Let us wait and see. It may well be that he will not get a child, and if he does not . . .’

  ‘If he does not,’ said Stephen, ‘who knows?’

  He was gay suddenly; he was convinced now that the King was too old to get sons. Stephen’s was an optimistic nature and he could always bring himself to believe what he wanted to happen.

  ‘He loves you dearly,’ said Matilda. ‘You are as a son to him.’

  ‘I should have the people with me,’ said Stephen. ‘But Matilda, if he does not get a son, and it seems likely that he may not, he will always hope to get one and he will not name his successor because he will go on telling himself that his successor will be his own son.’

  ‘He will realize in time. You know him well. He is a man who must have his affairs in order.’

  ‘But if he were to die suddenly as his predecessor did.’

  ‘Then Stephen . . . you would be there to take care of the future.’

  ‘A younger son of my mother! Why, my brother Theobald would come before me.’

  ‘The English would never have Theobald. You have been here so long, you have made yourself popular with the people. They would choose you, Stephen.’

  ‘Yes,’
he said, ‘the people would choose me.’ His expression clouded temporarily. ‘Oh, but Matilda, how I wish that he had not decided to marry. How much better if he had named me as his successor and taught me all the ways of kingship, which is what I have dreamed he would since William died.’

  ‘Be patient, Stephen.’

  He smiled at her. ‘I needs must. I am a lucky man. I have the King’s favour. I have my hopes; but my greatest treasure is the devotion of my loving wife.’

  Words, she thought, charming words. And before the day was out he would be sporting with his newest mistress and telling her she was the most important woman in his life. Life was hard for some women. She knew that good Matilda, her aunt for whom she had been named, had suffered in the same way as she did. The King had been affectionate towards his wife; indeed they were said to have been in love at the time of their marriage – the Queen certainly had been with the King – and she had to endure his faithlessness. Was it the fate of women?

  Perhaps a convent upbringing did not prepare one for the ways of men.

  She herself had spent her childhood in the Abbey of Bermondsey – the dear peaceful abbey where a young girl dreamed her dreams of romance, for she had known all her life that when the time came she would leave the sequestered life for that of marriage.

  Her mother had made this clear to her when she had told her of the unhappy childhood she had had with her sister the Queen, when they had been sent first to Rumsey and then to Wilton Abbey to be under the care of their tyrant aunt, Christina, the Abbess.

  She had visited the King’s Court with her mother on one or two occasions and there she had made the acquaintance not only of Stephen, her future husband, but of her cousins Williams, the heir to the throne, and his sister Matilda. She had thought Stephen charming from the moment she had seen him and had been so happy that he was to be her husband. She had not known then that the charm she had thought was especially for her was for everyone and it meant little except that Stephen had a gift with words and he liked to say what he thought would best please people – which was not necessarily what he meant.

  She would never forget that other Matilda – a little older than herself – forceful, handsome, demanding the attention of all the others. She had been rather glad when she had heard that Matilda had made a brilliant marriage and had gone to Germany to be an Empress. Even as a child she had had uneasy feelings that Stephen might have preferred the bold flamboyant Matilda to the self-effacing one.

  There had come the happy day when she had been betrothed to Stephen, to be followed by sad ones due to her mother’s death. The Countess of Boulogne had been well one day and dead the next, and strangely enough she had died in that Abbey of Bermondsey where Matilda had received her education. She was buried in the Abbey and Matilda had made many a pilgrimage to her mother’s grave.

  As for her father she had scarcely known him. He had been much older than her mother and it seemed to her that he was always away from home fighting with the crusades.

  But she had her husband – the handsome Stephen – and she should be happy, for even though she had learned that he was not the hero she had made of him in her dreams, he was still the most attractive man at Court and, if she did not attempt to interfere with his pleasures, the kindest of husbands.

  Now she set about soothing him, pointing out the chances against the King’s producing a son. She reminded him that the King’s daughter Matilda was safe in Germany.

  ‘To whom could the King turn,’ she asked, ‘but to you?’

  Henry decided that he would pay a visit to the man whose cleverness he respected more than that of anyone else in the kingdom, Roger, the Bishop of Salisbury. The journey would offer the pleasures of the chase and he could savour once more the joys of the New Forest, that beloved hunting ground of many memories.

  Roger was a man of the world, a man of charm and tolerance in spite of the fact that he was a churchman. He had been discovered by Henry in Caen where he had called attention to himself by the speedy manner in which he could get through Mass. This had amused and pleased Henry and it had occurred to him that there was something more to the man than a small living in a remote spot warranted.

  He had offered Roger advancement which the priest had gratefully accepted and Roger had left his little Normandy town and come to England with the King. Advancement had rapidly followed, for Roger had shown himself to be a very astute statesman and although he had become Bishop of Salisbury he was more than a man of the Church. He was one of Henry’s chief ministers and during the King’s many absences in Normandy had played a leading part in the control of State affairs.

  Roger was also one of the richest and most influential men in the country; and it was with him that Henry decided to discuss the steps he would take to put his plan into action.

  The journey to Salisbury was pleasant, enlivened as it was by hunting on the way and stopping at the castles of his loyal subjects who did all they knew to cheer him. There was a banquet always awaiting him; and among the company he invariably found a beautiful lady to enchant him; so he forgot temporarily how ill life had served him and his irascibility scarcely showed itself.

  The New Forest was full of memories and the greatest of course was of that fateful day when his brother William, known as Rufus, had ridden out to the hunt in the full vigour of his health and had been carried back the next day a corpse in an old cart. Henry could still live through those emotions of twenty years ago.

  He could clearly see that battered body, bloody and mud-spattered with twigs and grasses caught up in it – parts of the forest which many said had killed him. How many men had Rufus commanded to lose their eyes, their ears, their noses because they had dared trap and steal one of the King’s deer. How many had cursed Rufus – and his father before him – because their homes had been taken from them and they left penniless because the King needed a great forest in which to follow the sport he loved. It was said that the spirits of those men haunted the forest and looked constantly for revenge.

  In that case he, Henry, should be wary, for although he had brought justice to the land and many praised him for it, he had done nothing to change the cruel forestry laws and the curses of the dead men would fall on him as they had on his dead brother and father. Strange that he, like them, cared nothing for this. The chase of wild animals was as much a passion with him as with other members of his family and nothing must stand in the way of it.

  He remembered that ride to Winchester when he had battled for his future and his crown had depended on the speed of his arrival there. He was the younger brother and there was an elder one – Robert, Duke of Normandy – and he had known that there were Normans in Normandy and in England, too, who would think that Robert had a greater claim to the throne than he had. By good fortune and the making of many promises – which alas he had found it impossible to keep – he had succeeded in taking the crown and keeping it for twenty years. Moreover he had taken Normandy from his brother who now languished in a Cardiff prison; he could say that since that fateful day in the New Forest, when Rufus had met a mysterious death, he had achieved a great deal.

  Never had he felt so secure – although of course he must expect further trouble in Normandy – and then at the height of his triumph the White Ship had foundered and he had lost his son and heir.

  So here he was brought back to the melancholy fact which was after all the reason for his visit to the Bishop of Salisbury.

  Roger was waiting to greet him at his palace and at his side was Matilda of Ramsbury, Roger’s mistress. Matilda was a very beautiful woman and the King eyed her with approval. He did not blame Roger in the least for openly keeping such a mistress although there was a law that members of the clergy were not to marry and many who had done so before this law had been brought into force, had been excommunicated, driven out of their livings and forced to beg for their bread.

  This had caused the late Queen much distress and her pleading for the displaced clergy had irritated her hu
sband who could do nothing about the matter, for it was one of the conditions of his reconciliation with the Church. What had aroused the Queen’s indignation was the fact that rich and powerful churchmen like Roger openly kept their mistresses, flagrantly ignoring the demands of their calling; and Roger’s nephew Nigel, who had been made Bishop of Ely, was married and made no secret of it.

  Henry had never been able to make his wife understand the necessity for compromise. Matilda was too good; that had been her great failing. Well, now she was dead and here was another reason why he must consult with Roger without delay.

  ‘It does me good to see you, my friend,’ said the King, and kissing the beautiful Matilda warmly, he added: ‘And you too, my dear. I see that you have taken good care of my friend.’

  They went into the palace talking merrily and everyone was relieved to see the good mood of the King.

  There was a splendid banquet, for Roger lived in good style, and minstrels entertained them for a while but the Bishop was well aware that the King was impatient to talk seriously and so it was not long before he had carried him off to his private chamber.

  ‘Roger,’ said the King, ‘I am beset by my cares. You know full well how I have felt since the tragedy.’

  ‘Alas, my lord.’

  ‘I must get an heir. If my daughter Matilda were not in Germany I should make all swear fealty to her, but a woman, Roger! How would a woman fare?’

  ‘If any woman could rule a realm that woman would doubtless be the Empress, my lord. She showed great spirit and was indeed what one would expect a daughter of yours to be.’

  ‘The country needs a man. Why has God so forsaken me, Roger, by taking my only son?’

  ‘God works in a mysterious way,’ said Roger piously, remembering briefly that he was a member of the Church.

  ‘You think I should accept this Divine decision. You think I should appoint – say, my nephew, as my heir?’

  Stephen! thought Roger. God forbid. He knew that Stephen would not favour him. Certainly it must not be Stephen.

  ‘Nay, my lord, I don’t think you should despair.’