Elizabeth Chadwick (57 page)

“I’ve given the order to make camp in the castle courtyard,” Fulke said as she comforted a soldier who had taken a spear through the shoulder. “The fires will last until the morning at least.” His voice was flat and hard, the battle tension still shining in his eyes.

She nodded and swallowed. “There are two dead, but none mortally injured.”

“There would be none dead at all if you had not been taken with the folly of going to visit a wise woman,” he growled. “What in God’s name possessed you?”

“We needed things that I could not be sure of obtaining at Lambourn.”

“Things that were worth dying for?” he demanded icily, then cast his gaze around the battle site. “Yes, I suppose they were.”

“I was not to know the Welsh would come over the border,” she snapped, stung at his tone, but knowing he was right.

The soldier with the shoulder wound quietly rose to his feet and made himself scarce.

“You knew there was a likelihood. Christ, Clarice…I thought you more responsible!”

“Then you thought wrong. And it was for your sake that I went to see Mother Ranild at all.”

“For my sake?” His voice rose. “You think that going to see a cracked old hag will do something for me?”

“She’s not a cracked old hag! She’s a wise woman and I wanted her advice.”

“About me?”

Clarice avoided his gaze. “I wanted her to tell me how to help you through your grief.”

“God on the Cross, do you have to meddle in every part of my life!” he exploded. “First it was wine and a clean robe. Now it’s nursemaiding my head!” He pointed to his skull. “And your desperation to coddle me almost got us both killed, you foolish wench!”

“It was caring that sent me, not coddling, but you are right. I should not have gone!” Clarice blazed. It was not just the reflection of the flames that suffused her face with color. “And I’m not a wench!”

He swore through his teeth and stormed off toward the burning keep. She stood alone in the road. At the first sign of trouble, everyone had made themselves industrious elsewhere. Snow whirled down, the flakes as large as swan feathers now and falling rapidly. Clarice thought about mounting her mare and riding off, but it was no more than a thought. The heat of rage and chagrin might be sustaining her now, but she would need more than that to last the deep winter’s night. Besides, there were wounded to be cared for, and whatever Fulke thought about her nature, her sense of responsibility held her impulse in check.

Drawing her cloak tightly around her body, pulling up the fleece-lined hood, she turned through the snow-laden dusk to the red pyre that was Whittington.

***

The Welsh had been beaten back but they had accomplished their objective. There was no saving Whittington from being razed. Fulke narrowed his eyes against smoke and snow and kept vigil. He could not roll himself in his cloak like the other men and let the heat of destruction warm him through the night like a common bonfire.

He walked between the burning buildings and thought of the fight to gain this place. The struggle, the sacrifice, the determination and pride. Sparks showered as part of the hall caved in upon itself. He watched the golden specks dazzle away into the night, taking the opposite path to the falling snow. Here his younger children had been born. Here he had slept with Maude on a bare wooden floor and talked of the future. It was as if each spark was a memory fleeing into the night, never to be seen again, and suddenly he felt utterly bereft. All that would be left by morning were the charred black remnants of the structures, smoking gently, and nothing of his former life.

Suddenly he could not bear it. Everything was gone; he ought to be part of the fire too. Like a drunkard, he staggered toward the remnants of the great hall, drawing his sword as if to challenge an enemy in its red depths.

There was a movement to one side; he spun, the weapon raised and streaming with firelight. Then he lowered it. “Go away,” he said raggedly, and felt a pressure growing within him. “I do not want or need your company. Damn you, woman, leave me alone!”

Clarice ignored his command, putting herself between him and the fire. Her eyes were wide and dark, and her fists were clenched in the fabric of her mantle. “You want Maude,” she said gently. “You need Maude, I know that. I wish she were here too. I wish she could bolster my courage and tell me what to do because I am lost on my own. I wish she was at your side to comfort you, but she isn’t. She’s dead and in God’s keeping. Let her go.”

He saw his own hand swing the sword, saw the fear blaze in her eyes, but she stood her ground. The steel glittered an inch from her throat before he reversed his grip on the hilt and with a roar of anguish, hurled the weapon into the heart of the fire where he had been going to leap. And the storm broke, driving him to his knees in the snow as he wept for Maude, for himself, for all the wasted years, both past and future.

Clarice knelt with him and encircled him with her arms. Through the wrenching, tearing shudders of his grief, he felt the softer tremors of her crying, and on a distant level heard her whispering that it would be all right. Not the same, not unchanged, but all right.

Whittington Castle, Summer 1224

The quarried stone had traveled up the Severn to Shrewsbury, then by ox cart and pony pannier to the site of the new keep. From his saddle, Fulke watched the loads arriving and felt a strange mingling of pleasure and pain. His horse tossed its head and the bells attached to the scarlet ribbons plaited in its mane jingled musically.

The debris of the burned timber keep and stockade had been raked aside and a new keep with rounded gatehouse towers was rising on the site of the old fortress. Already the memory of the former building was fading. He could not picture the precise position of the kitchens or recall whether there had been five or six window embrasures down the length of the hall. But then how much did it matter except to the corner of his mind that yearned with nostalgia for a time that perhaps had not been as perfect as now it seemed?

The fire that had burned down the former keep had been like the fire of his marriage to Maude. So fierce it was an immolation, leaving naught but charred ruins beyond the white-hot glory. He would never experience that heart-searing conflagration again, and he was glad, for he knew that he would not survive it. But there were other paths of loving that grew out of a gentler caritas.

The soft clink of a mason’s hammer carried to his ears and the cheerful shouts of the craftsmen as they toiled. Many of them had come from work on the priory at Alberbury, now finished—in its first stages at least—with a chapel dedicated to St. Stephen as the final resting place of the FitzWarin family. As a place too, for other rituals.

On this thought, he tugged lightly on the rein and turned the horse in the fresh dew of the early summer morning. A little way back, Clarice was waiting for him, giving him time alone to collect his thoughts. There was a smile in her gray-gold eyes, the luminous flush of youth to her complexion. His heart, scarred and patched as it was, turned within him at the sight of her. If not love, if not lust, the emotions engendered ran as close as sun shadows.

It was a year and a half since Maude’s death. He still grieved; there would always be a hollow place within him, but it was no longer a yawning cavern. Yet he was wary, unable to put his complete trust in the sensation of almost fulfillment.

“By summer’s end, it will be habitable,” Clarice said. “And the truce with Llewelyn means that even if there is another war with Wales, Whittington will stand as a rock against the tide.”

“The amount it is costing, it had better.” He smiled at her optimism. It was what he needed to draw him out of his darkness. She was right, of course. He had made his peace with King Henry too and had received his authority to rebuild the border keeps of Alberbury and Whittington. He had also received several small gifts from the royal hand: a waiving of a fine; a present of venison; and, ironically, a beautiful inlaid chessboard with a casket of carved ivory pieces.

The Marshal family had granted him the right to hold a fair each year at Wantage in recompense for what had happened to Whittington because of his support for them. The previous June, Hawise had borne him a small granddaughter, with Maude’s silvery hair and green eyes. If not exactly his heart’s desire, he had what he needed.

“You are sure?” he said to Clarice for the third time that morning. “There is many a younger man who would be pleased to call you wife.”

Her expression lost some of its serenity. “What do I have to say to persuade you?” An exasperated note entered her voice. Reaching across the space between them, she laid her hand over his. “I know that with my dowry, I could have the pick of a dozen younger men. Indeed, you have paraded most of them before me on other occasions. I do not want them; I want you. And if you ask why, or say that you are old enough to be my father, I will hit you.” Her complexion flushed beneath the onslaught of her words. If he had learned to grieve at Whittington, she had learned to speak out.

“You have more understanding than a husband of my own years would ever have and you still have your strength. I have seen you at your best and at your worst, and I know that I can trust you.” She lowered her eyes. “I…I can never replace Maude, nor would I want to. She was everything to you and such love only comes once…but I would be your life companion now. Don’t shut me out or doubt me.”

He swallowed, moved by her words. “I do not doubt your integrity,” he said huskily, “but I have to justify my own by giving you the opportunity to change your mind.”

“Thrice given, and thrice refused,” she said, the smile returning to her eyes. “I will not change my mind.”

Capturing her hand, he turned it over in his and rubbed his thumb across her palm and fingers. In that she was like Maude, he thought. Once a notion entered her head, it was impossible to dislodge. “Well then,” he said, his own lips curving, even though his gaze was graver than hers, and perhaps a little sad. “If you are ready, let us go.”

In the early summer morning, the dew still wet on the grass, they left Whittington to the masons and took the road to Alberbury Priory and the waiting priest.

I first came across the story of Fulke FitzWarin in a book by Glyn Burgess entitled
Two
Medieval
Outlaws
. At the time I was researching Eustace the Monk for his role in
The
Marsh
King’s Daughter
, but reading Fulke’s story, I realized that here was a novel bursting to be written and I decided to make Fulke my next project.

So, how much of
The
Outlaw
Knight
is truth and how much is fiction? Rather like a plait, there are three strands to the story: the facts that are verifiable history; the facts that are massaged by the “tabloid journalist” skills of Fulke’s chronicler; and my own interpretation of the two with a seasoning of personal imagination.

Fulke FitzWarin was born somewhere around 1170 into a Shropshire family of obscure origins but high ambition. His father was known as Fulke “le Brun”—The Brown—suggesting that he was dark of hair and eye. Incidentally, Fulke’s brother Philip was known as “The Red,” thus I have given him auburn hair in the novel.

The tale about Fulke and Prince John quarreling over a game of chess may be apocryphal, but some scholars, notably J. Meisel in the book
Barons
of
the
Welsh
Frontier
, believe that it is probably true. What is certain is that from an early age John and Fulke had no fondness for each other. John did give Whittington Castle to Morys FitzRoger for the sum of fifty marks and rejected Fulke’s petition even though Fulke had been granted the right to have the castle in the Curia Regis court. Fulke turned outlaw as a result and for three years wreaked havoc up and down the borders until John pardoned him and restored his lands. Fulke seems to have had a powerful supporter in Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, who at one time was also the Justiciar, the Chancellor, and the papal legate. It was said by some that he wielded more influence than John himself. It seems very likely to me that Fulke’s connections with the Walter family began during his youth when the chronicle says he was a companion to Prince John. The Prince was being educated in the household of Ranulf de Glanville, whose nephews Hubert and Theobald Walter were. Although the evidence is circumstantial and cannot be proven, I also think it likely that Fulke was acquainted on a social basis with Maude Walter well before their marriage.

The union of Fulke and Maude is where Fulke’s unknown chronicler takes history into his own hands and, in the interests of a good story, shifts the timescale slightly. While Fulke’s marriage to Maude is not in dispute, it did not take place until after Fulke’s rebellion, whereas the chronicle puts their marriage during the period when Fulke was an outlaw. It is also the chronicler who supplies the details of Maude being lustfully pursued by King John and of enduring the perils of childbirth in the Welsh wilderness. The chronicler makes no mention of Maude having two children by Theobald Walter, but it seems likely that she did and that they were given into foster care when her first husband died. I have gone with the chronicle on this particular issue since taking the other option would have tangled the strands of the story to no purpose.

During the periods when Fulke was not doing anything spectacular, the chronicler keeps the readers enthralled by having his hero fight dragons and giants and embark on a Ulysses-like adventure. In the interests of maintaining reader belief, I have had to weave my way around some of the more improbable happenings or find my own interpretations!

Fulke was one of the barons involved in the Magna Carta rebellion, although there are no firm reasons for his support. He could have been driven by a natural taste for making trouble, or by the fact that he was deeply in debt to the Crown at that time. And perhaps old grievances still died hard.

While researching, I came across the strong possibility that Fulke’s third daughter Mabile had severe mental or physical disabilities. This detail is suggested by J. Meisel in
Barons
of
the
Welsh
Frontier
. Mabile never married and she did not enter the Church. One or the other would have been de rigueur for a noblewoman in the thirteenth century, but there is no evidence for either. There is, however, proof that Fulke gave the income of his richest manor to support her in his will, and his eldest son Fulke agreed to abide by the ruling.

Maude died in the early 1220s; the cause is not known. Fulke married again, this time to Clarice d’Auberville who, from the circumstantial evidence, I believe to be a relative of the de Glanville family and of Hubert and Theobald Walter. Either with her, or perhaps with Maude before she died, Fulke had another daughter, Eve. The chronicle says that Eve went on to marry Llewelyn the Great, Prince of North Wales as his second wife. This may or may not be true. Again, there is circumstantial evidence supplied by Eyton in his twelve-volume
The
Antiquities
of
Shropshire
. Hawise’s husband William Pantulf died in 1233 and Fulke took on the guardianship of his daughter and two small granddaughters.

Fulke outlived Clarice and was in his early nineties when he died. By all accounts, he was active until his mideighties when his eyesight failed and his son took the baronial responsibilities upon his shoulders. Fulke’s heir and namesake only outlived his father by about six years. He drowned in a stream at the battle of Lewes in 1264 while fighting on the royalist side against Simon de Montfort. For a time the Montforts took custody of Whittington and Fulke’s small grandson. The land was restored when King Henry regained control of the kingdom, but young Fulke, my Fulke’s grandson, did not come into his inheritance until 1273. The FitzWarin line continued until 1420 when the eleventh Fulke FitzWarin died without a son to succeed him.

After Llewelyn’s men burned Whittington to the ground, Fulke rebuilt the castle in stone. The gatehouse still stands today in testament to the events of more than seven hundred years ago. And if you are fortunate and go there, perhaps on a day in June as I have done, you may see a company of reenactors bringing a past reality to life.

For anyone wishing to read the truth and the myth of the story of Fulke FitzWarin, I can recommend Glyn Burgess’s
Two
Medieval
Outlaws
, published by Brewer (ISBN 0-85991-438-0) as an excellent starting point. For a more detailed examination of Fulke and his environment, I suggest J. Meisel’s
Barons
of
the
Welsh
Frontier: The Corbet, Pantulf and FitzWarin Families 1066–1272
published by the University of Nebraska Press. I also found R. W. Eyton’s
Antiquities
of
Shropshire
, published in twelve volumes by John Russel Smith 1854–60 very enlightening—but probably difficult to obtain. My local library had the collection, but in their rare books room and I was only allowed to read it under the strict supervision of the librarian!

I welcome comments and feedback on my novels. You can contact me via my website at:
www.elizabethchadwick.com
where there are also links for Facebook and Twitter and various other ways of connecting with me.