Kate Conway leaned forward in her seat, her pretty face the picture of bewilderment. “But, Rowan, if it isn’t a new forest, then what is the New Forest?”
“For one thing, it’s a thousand years old. In this country, I suppose that millennium-old things can be considered relatively new. It was the hunting preserve of William the Conqueror.”
“Him again!” snapped Alice MacKenzie. “I suppose he destroyed a few villages to make this wilderness?”
“There are rumors to that effect,” Rowan agreed. “And the preserve isn’t a forest in the usual sense of the word. It is simply a wilderness area, comprised of heath, bog, and woodland that was not to be farmed or built upon. It was a game preserve for the noblemen-and only for the noblemen. Poachers were hanged. In fact, a commoner could have his eyes put out just for disturbing the huntsmen at their sport.”
“Then how pleasant that the king should have been murdered there,” said Elizabeth, with a republican glint in her eye.
Rowan Rover beamed. “Yes, I thought you colonials would feel that way. It was not, alas, William the Conqueror who met with this poetic justice. It was his son and successor William the Red, or William Rufus, as they called him, in lieu, perhaps, of Junior.”
“Was he killed by a rebellious peasant?” asked Alice hopefully.
“No, it’s much more sinister than that. Are you at all familiar with the case?” They all shook their heads.
“We saw his grave in the cathedral this morning,” said Frances Coles.
“Interesting the way he ended up there,” said Rowan with a knowing smile. “Here’s what happened. On the evening of August second, in the year 1100, the red-haired King William II was finishing up a day’s hunting with his seven fellow sportsmen. Incidentally, the way the Normans hunted game is absurd.”
“Bow and arrow?” guessed Charles Warren.
“Yes, but they were complete idiots about it. For a stag hunt the band of archers would hide behind trees surrounding a clearing. When the beaters drove the deer forward into the clearing, all seven hunters would shoot wildly in the general direction of the other six.”
“That sounds more like Russian roulette than deer hunting,” said Charles Warren, shaking his head.
“It was madly dangerous. The wonder isn’t that the king was shot, but that anybody ever came out of such a hunting party alive.”
The group digested this information. Finally Martha Tabram said thoughtfully, “I suppose that such a system might be useful if you were interested in arranging a number of plausible accidents.”
“Yes, I thought of that,” said Rowan. “If the king was angry with any of his henchmen, he could arrange a hunting party and tell the other six not to aim at the deer. Anyhow, on that August evening, the stag got away, and it was the king who took an arrow in the heart.”
Kate Conway, the nurse, looked shocked. “Was he shot deliberately?”
“I’m rather fond of the official story,” Rowan said with a grin. “According to the other five hunters, the king’s companion Walter Tyrrel shot an arrow at the stag; it ricocheted off the animal’s back-and struck the king in the heart.”
Charles Warren burst out laughing. “What a line! Did anybody actually believe it?”
“I myself consider it on a par with Woody Allen’s joke about the man who committed suicide by shooting himself from a passing car. Walter Tyrrel was not charged with regicide. That does not, of course, mean that he wasn’t guilty. It may simply mean that influential people were glad it happened. The fascinating element about the accident is that as soon as Tyrrel had killed the king, the entire hunting party fled the New Forest without a backward glance.”
“What did they do with the king?” asked Kate, frowning at this medieval example of hit-and-run. “He would have gone into shock almost immediately.”
Rowan chuckled. “So did they, I expect. They left him right where he had fallen. Several hours later a peasant passing through the forest found the body abandoned in the clearing. He loaded it onto his cart and carried it the twenty miles to Winchester.”
“They left the king’s body unattended? That seems rather disrespectful of his companions,” said Elizabeth, whose royalist tendencies were never far from the surface.
“It suggests that their loyalties lay elsewhere,” Rowan agreed.
“Wasn’t the king a nice person?” asked Miriam Angel, who evidently pictured the late king as a Dark Ages version of Prince Charles. She drew her tweed jacket close around her, as if the chill of terrorism still lingered.
“Chroniclers of the time suggest that he was quite depraved,” the guide told her. “They mention vices that delicacy forbids them to enumerate.”
“French,” said Alice darkly.
Rowan Rover shook his head. “I don’t think sexual misconduct would have upset them much, no matter what his choice of partner: choirboys, sheep, whatever. Kings were entitled to their hobbies. Besides, in those days it was religion, not sex, that scandalized decent people.”
“Religion?” said Kate.
“They think he may have belonged to some sort of occult group. I’m not an authority on such matters, though. I think we can assume that he was not held in esteem by anyone. But when one is discussing the monarchy, personal popularity is only incidental, don’t you think?”
“Somebody wanted his job,” Emma Smith said, by way of translation.
Rowan Rover nodded sagely. “Almost certainly. And they may have had excellent reasons for wanting him off the throne. Students of detection will be interested to learn that the king was killed on Thursday evening; his body reached Winchester by cart on Friday morning. By Friday noon he was buried, and that afternoon, his younger brother Henry had seized the Treasury, and was making his way to London to be crowned himself. There was no funeral for William, by the way, and no masses were said for his soul. He was simply dumped in his grave without ceremony.”
“How very odd,” said Martha Tabram with her usual air of calm detachment. “Kings are divinely appointed, according to tradition. Surely the priests at Winchester would have been in awe of the royal person, dead or not, and would have felt obliged to give him some sort of Christian burial.”
“There are rumors,” said Rowan Rover in ominous tones. “Legend has it that the wooden arrow was never removed from William’s chest. Does that remind you of anything?”
“A wooden stake through the vampire’s heart!” cried Elizabeth.
“Something of the sort.” Trust the Yanks to know Bram Stoker better than the Venerable Bede, he thought. Rowan sneaked a look at his notes. “The coffin was opened in 1868-I’m not sure why-and a wooden shaft was found among the bones.”
“The arrow!” cried Frances Coles.
“But we still don’t know who wanted him killed,” said Kate, frowning.
“One doesn’t like to be suspicious,” said Elizabeth, who was always willing to give royalty the benefit of the doubt, “but did William’s successor seem like the sort of person who would have had his own brother killed in order to seize power for himself?”
Rowan Rover shrugged. “Henry the First? Well, he had his other brother’s eyes put out for trying to escape from house arrest.”
Alice MacKenzie nodded triumphantly. “Bad blood in that family! I’ll bet he wasn’t much of an improvement as monarch.”
“Thank God my relatives aren’t like that,” said Susan Cohen.
The guide paused for a moment with his mouth open. Finally he recovered enough to say, “As the Victorian lady said when she saw a production of Antony and Cleopatra: ‘How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen.’ ”
Elizabeth was still considering the list of suspects. “Did Walter Tyrrel get anything from the new king? Was he made Lord Chancellor, or archbishop, or anything?”