Just then he caught a murmured exchange between the castellan and one of the wounded. While he did not speak Breton, finding it to be as incomprehensible a language as Welsh, he was familiar with phrases and words, one of which was Bro-C’Hall and another roue. He thrust aside Guiomar’s letters and got to his feet, wanting to know what the castellan had to say about the King of France.
“My liege…”
Henry had not noticed the newcomer’s approach. He glanced over his shoulder and the man hastened to kneel at his feet. Clad in the black of the Benedictines, his monk’s habit stood out in this hall full of soldiers. As he raised his face, Henry felt a twinge of recognition. After a moment’s reflection, he had a name… Stephen of Rouen, one of the monks of Bec, a favorite of his mother’s. He started to smile, then saw the dusty, soiled condition of Stephen’s habit, saw, too, the monk’s reddened, sorrowful eyes.
Stephen’s voice was low-pitched, hard to hear above the din of the hall. “My lord king, I am heartsick to bring you such grievous news. Your lady mother… she is dead.”
The night was mild, starlit and still. A wind had sprung up within the last hour, cooling and damp against Henry’s skin. The air had a distinctive aroma that would ever after remind him of Morlaix: brine and seaweed from the harbor vying with the lingering smell of smoke and a heavy, sweet fragrance drifting from the gardens. He had not knowingly headed for the gardens, only realized that was where his wanderings had led him when he inhaled the scent of late-summer flowers. Aside from a crater in the center of the grassy mead, where a mangonel shot had dumped a large rock, and several smashed turf seats, the gardens appeared to have sustained little damage from the brief siege. Unless the moonlight was hiding unseen horrors, just as the perfume of blossom and herbs camouflaged the odors of blood and death.
He was still in the gardens when Hamelin came in search of him. Uneasy about invading his privacy, Hamelin was making as noisy an approach as possible, wanting to give Henry advance warning. His heart was beating uncomfortably fast, his stomach churning with anxiety. What could he possibly say that would ease Harry’s pain? And yet, how could he not try? If only the queen or Rainald or Ranulf were here! What a jest that he should be the one chosen by God to offer comfort when he’d likely be tripped up by his own tongue.
Henry had not turned, but a stiffening of his posture indicated he was aware of Hamelin’s presence. Hamelin rubbed his palms on the sides of his tunic, thinking that he’d faced the day’s siege with less apprehension. “Harry…” He cleared his throat, started again. “It’s been so long since you left the hall and I… I began to worry…”
“I wanted to be alone.” It was not until he’d spoken that Henry realized how brusque his words would sound. Hamelin did not deserve to be rebuffed like that. But he could think of no way to make amends; it was as if his brain had gone blank.
“I am sorry, Harry, so very sorry…”
When Hamelin’s stammering had at last trailed off into silence, Henry roused himself enough for a brief smile. “I know, Hamelin.”
“I grieve for her, too, Harry. She was a great lady, God’s Truth, and she-” Even to Hamelin, his sentiments sounded hollow, that he should be praising the woman who’d been wronged by his very birth, the woman whose loathing for his father was legend. Yet the Empress Maude had always treated him with civility, and more important, she’d not attempted to thwart his brother’s largesse.
Hamelin considered himself to have been blessed in his kinships. Geoffrey had acknowledged him from the first, generous with his affections and his bounty, and even after his untimely death, Hamelin had wanted for nothing. Henry had seen to that, taking on responsibility for Hamelin’s upkeep and education and even a title, making him welcome at court, and then giving a gift of such magnitude that three years later, Hamelin was still marveling at it. For Henry had made a marriage for him with a great heiress, Isabella de Warenne, who’d brought an earldom as her marriage portion.
Hamelin was not a fool and he understood that Henry had been prompted by more than family feeling. Isabella de Warenne would have been the wife of his brother Will if not for Thomas Becket’s intervention. Henry had made no secret of the fact that he blamed Becket for Will’s death, and Hamelin realized that in giving Isabella to him, Henry was sending Becket an unmistakable message, nothing less than a declaration of war. But all that mattered to Hamelin was the fact that he’d been raised to undreamed-of heights for one born a lord’s bastard. He did not even mind that people had begun to refer to him as Hamelin de Warenne, for his wife’s name was an illustrious one. Hamelin had always known how to appreciate what was important and what was not.
On this September evening, nothing was more important to him than tending to his brother’s wounds. But it was becoming painfully apparent that the kindest thing he could do for Henry was to let him be. “I’ll be in the hall if you have need of me,” he said and was rewarded with another one of those quick, obligatory smiles.
“I’ll be in soon,” Henry said. “Meanwhile, I’d like you to make sure the monk, Stephen of Rouen, is being well looked after. Then find my chaplain, tell him I want a Mass said on the morrow for my mother’s soul. There’s so much to be done, so many people to be told…”
Hamelin looked as if he’d been given a gift. “I’ll take care of it all, will get a scribe and start compiling a list straightaway.”
“Good lad.” Henry silently willed Hamelin to go away, waiting until he did. The moon’s light illuminated a pebbled path and Henry began to walk along it, his slow, measured steps echoing in the silence that had enfolded Morlaix like a shroud. It led him to the far end of the garden, where an oval pool reflected the glimmering of distant stars. It was too small to be a breeding pond. Henry supposed it could be a storage pond, and then he wondered why he should be thinking of fish stews instead of his mother, already laid to rest before the high altar in the abbey church of Bec-Hellouin.
He’d previously approved her choice of burial place, and they knew he’d not be able to halt a war in time to return for the funeral. Stephen of Rouen had described the service in great detail, assuming there would be comfort in knowing. The Mass had been conducted by the Archbishop of Rouen, well attended by princes of the Church and the monks of Bec. A laudatory epitaph would soon be inscribed on her tomb, and Stephen had dutifully copied it out for Henry. He would have to read it again, for all he could remember now were the lines:
Great by birth, greater by marriage, greatest in her offspring,
Here lies the daughter, wife, and mother of Henry.
Henry sank down on a turf seat by the water’s edge, trying to decide if his father would have been amused or offended by her final revenge, expunging him from her tombstone and her history. The monk had said she’d died on the tenth, Sunday last. For the life of him, he could recall little about that day. They’d been on the road, riding hard for Morlaix. Had he given her any thought at all that Sunday? Had he admitted, for even a heartbeat, just how enfeebled and ailing she was? Christ, why could he not remember?
As he moved, his boot crunched upon the gravel and pebbles, and he reached down, scooped up a handful of the stones, small and smooth and polished. When his father had died, he’d been but eighteen. He was four and thirty now, master of the greatest empire since the days of the Caesars. Old enough for certes to accept a mother’s loss. So why, then, did he feel so numbed, so utterly empty?