"We have all suffered a great loss in the queen," Rannulf said quietly, "and we all need her, my lord. I would not presume to try to comfort you in any way. Indeed, my own heart is too heavy to offer platitudes, and texts I know none."
"You were ever dear to her. She spoke well of you always."
Rannulf nodded. The queen had been a good friend to him when it was possible for her. In the last two years, certainly, she had countered Eustace's plans to discredit him when she could. Suddenly Rannulf realized that his moment of trial might not be, as he thought, over. If Eustace had not come with his father or had not yet arrived, he would have had no chance to poison Stephen's mind.
"Is your son not with you?" Rannulf asked as Stephen seemed about to sink into abstraction.
"Yes, he is here," the king replied resentfully. "I have been greatly deceived in him. He never loved her, nor me. He has no time to sit with me. All he thinks of is the campaign in France and he spends all day—the very day he received news of his mother's death was the same—talking of money and arms and men."
"Aye, and it is a better thing to do than to sit weeping in a corner."
Both men, who had just sat down, turned sharply toward the new voice that came from the doorway. In his first glance at Eustace's face, Rannulf saw that the king's judgment was, as usual, at fault. Eustace's red rimmed eyes told of tears shed through sleepless nights and the deep-etched lines on his young face of a bitterness even deeper than his grief.
"Are weak tears a fitting epitaph for a great woman? She did not simply die, I say. She was slain!"
"What?" Rannulf gasped, leaping to his feet.
"The Angevin killed her as surely as if he had come here and sunk a knife into her breast. I say my mother was murdered." Eustace's voice, beyond control, shook, and he stopped speaking and bit his lips.
Stephen dropped his head into his hands and began to sob again. "If anyone murdered her, I did. She labored harder in my cause than the meanest serf of my lands, and I gave her no rest. She was overworn. I saw she was overworn, but still I brought my troubles to her."
Eustace's face twisted with agony for he knew how much he had torn his mother's heart and destroyed her peace in the last two years. His guilt shrieked aloud in his mind, but he could give it no voice nor find relief in self-blame and confession as his father could.
"We all did our parts," he said thickly, "for she alone never failed. All of us failed her. The plans she made, the wisdom she taught us, we cast aside. Let us at least give her soul peace. Let us destroy the Angevin. Let that be our atonement for her years of struggle."
"Can you think of nothing but killing?" Stephen groaned. "Can you not mourn your own mother with decency?"
"It is not a matter of decency," Eustace shrieked. "I will be revenged on those who hurt her."
"Kill me then," Stephen screamed in reply. "I hurt her most. It is mine to say whether you will go to France. See who will give you aid without my word."
Rannulf walked to the window to be out of the way, his heart beating sickly. It was unbelievable that they should already be at each other's throats. As the shock of hearing a son so contest his father's will wore off, however, Rannulf's sickness began to abate. This quarrel was not born of hate but of love. Stephen did not want Eustace to go into danger in France.
True the love might be one-sided, but Eustace could not be planning any harm to his father if he intended to go to France. He knew how seldom an absent landlord succeeded peacefully to his estate, and, if he wished to rule England, he must expect his father to live until his return. Whatever Stephen's desires, Rannulf thought, Eustace had to go to France. For the country it was good, and for Rannulf personally it was salvation. Eustace was a bold and reckless fighter, as Rannulf knew. Without proper guidance, perhaps he would not return from France.
"Well, Soke, surely you have something to say to this. No doubt you, too, think me unfilial and counsel delay. It would well suit your secret purposes."
Rannulf turned slowly. "I have not, nor ever had, any secret purposes, Eustace. Pardon me, my liege, but I have ever spoken my mind honestly, and I must say I do not think your son unfilial or hasty. These are perilous times, perilous hours even, and the queen was ever one to set the general good over her own convenience."
"Then she is to be scorned and overlooked even in her death?" Stephen cried.
"Nay, my lord, she was never scorned nor overlooked, even by her enemies. All men respected her. No man to whom I have spoken felt there was aught amiss with summoning the council to sit after her obsequies."
"No doubt you spoke to some purpose, whether or not you call it secret," Eustace snapped, more infuriated by Rannulf's support than he would have been by his opposition. "I can guess what that purpose was. You would saddle me with land-hungry, gain-mad younger sons instead of giving me a true vassal's levy. Was not that your purpose, oh loyal friend?"
So someone had already sent news of the conference at Sleaford to Eustace. A spy set into the household? Leicester, Warwick, or Northampton? It made little difference since Rannulf had intended to bring the matter into open council. With the support of Leicester, Warwick, and Northampton, he hoped that concurrence in his suggestion could be obtained from the other major magnates of the country and from Stephen. Eustace would then have been forced to agree or take nothing. All that displeased Rannulf about the premature disclosure was that he needed to argue the pros and cons of the plan alone with a hostile and unreasonable young man and that the argument might make Stephen hostile too.
"There was never any secret about the matter," he began. "Nor do I believe it a drawback that young men who are, as you say, land-hungry and gain-mad should be employed in such an enterprise. In Normandy, that which makes them our scourge would change them into our blessing, for they would fight most earnestly to get from the Angevin what they cannot have here. Think, Eustace, it is a cheap price to pay for loyalty—someone else's land. Let them keep what they win. It is no loss to you."
"No loss except that of my army. Once their maws are filled they will drop away and I will be left naked."
"Not so," Rannulf said calmly. "When they have a little, they will fight for more. Even if it were true, however, you will sooner be left naked with an army of unwilling vassals whose hearts and minds are on their own lands across the narrow sea. They are bound to serve only forty days in an offensive war, as well you know. The hour their service is ended, they will leave you."
"Am I not defending their lands by fighting him who would take them away, even on a foreign shore?"
Rannulf laughed harshly. "You will never convince them of that, more especially as none, including myself, believe that Henry desires to strip us of our land even here. He—"
"Traitor! Will you announce before my father's face and in the teeth of his grief that you are—"
"Why not?" Stephen asked with biting bitterness. "None cares for me. That part of your mother's health I did not destroy by labor, you destroyed by raising dissension among the men she struggled to hold together. You will go to France and die there. I will die of grief. Why should Soke not look to the Angevin?"
It was so close to the truth that Rannulf turned pale. The quarrel continued to rage around him, but he could not speak because, the contents of his stomach were sour in his mouth and he dared not part his lips. It would be more honest to change his coat openly, to deny his sword-oath and turn rebel. And brand his sons as children of a turncoat?
Some could bear it, those who had been raised on talk of expediency, but his knew only the pride of honor. Better to damn his own soul than to destroy their spirit. It was not his choice anyway, Rannulf knew as he listened. Whether he helped or hindered, Eustace would bend his father to his will and go to France.
CHAPTER 10
The king sat upon the dais, his eyes red and his face blotched with weeping; his expression, however, was not one of grief but one of absolute fury. Three weeks had passed since Maud had been buried and the court had moved. from Feversham to London.
Three weeks had passed and those he had waited for had not arrived, neither at Feversham nor at London. For three interminable weeks his rage had mounted. It was not often that the good-natured Stephen developed a lasting, burning rage. When he did, however, he was lost to reason and the barons standing in the hall regarded him with caution and anxiety.
To a man, they knew what had caused his fury; their anxiety was stimulated only by the question of what he would do about it. They were not long in doubt for, without any preliminary other than a sharp gesture, the king's chancellor began to call the roll of the barons and name for each the days of service and number of armed knights owed the king for war.
The roll was long, every man present answering to his name and confirming or denying the terms mentioned. In
the present temper of the king, no man denied, although some grumbled softly and there was a good deal of shifting from foot to foot.
Eye met eye, and, as the chancellor's voice droned on, broken by the sharp answers, the mass separated imperceptibly, into groups, groups allied by blood, friendship, or homage ties as if the men were already on the field and were grouping their banners for battle.
What was most notable was not the unanimity of affirmative replies but the dead silence and growing tension each time the name of an absent baron was called. Ordinarily, more than half of such absences would be accounted for by a bellow from the crowd with explanations such as, "His wife was brought to bed, I am to answer for him," or "I passed him on the road, he will be here anon," or "There is sickness in his house," "He is on pilgrimage," "He is at war." Now there was nothing, only a hardening of bleak: countenances, a tightening of bonded groups, or an uneasy shifting of eyes.
"William, duke of Gloucester," the chancellor called.
"Reginald, earl of Cornwall."
There was no reply but a low gasp from an unidentified member of the listening crowd.
"Rannulf, earl of Chester."
"Roger, earl of Hereford."
"Traitors!" Stephen screamed, leaping to his feet and breaking the silence he had maintained up to that moment. "They are traitors and I will bear their treachery no longer. Hitherto I have sought peace with my barons, now they will taste war. Call up your men. I will ravage their lands and take their keeps. I will hang their bodies upon gibbets and set their heads upon stakes so that the world may know that the king of England may be scorned no longer."
A sigh fluttered through the room, but it was no sigh of pleasure. The blood and famine of 1149 would be renewed, and there was no certainty that the king would triumph, for the power of the rebel lords was a match for his. Beneath the sigh there was even a low growl of resentment. The barons were tired of the king's war, tired of the bloodletting that brought them nothing but more bloodletting.
A war of their own with a neighbor had sense; that might bring a new field, a new town, a new wood into their hands or gold into their purses. A war against a single rebel or a group of no particular power might bring some gain from sequestered and redistributed estates, but to fight against so large and powerful a group, to provoke them to unity by attacking them could bring nothing.
"What you say is true, my lord, but it is not the matter that we were summoned to discuss."
The harsh voice grated across the renewed, half-rebellious silence, and another sigh stirred the attentive men. Many eyes turned with approval to the stolid figure standing a little forward of the main grouping of men.
"You are angry," Rannulf continued, "and justly so. But let us settle whom we are to fight. No man can be in more than one place at one time. Are we to go to Normandy, or are we to make war here in England?"
Surprise alone had kept the king silent long enough for the earl of Soke to finish his speech. Now a roar of relief and approval so intense that it penetrated even Stephen's blind fury shook the black-smoked rafters of the room.
"Fool!" Leicester hissed, coming to stand beside Rannulf. "Why Eustace troubles himself to try to harm you, I do not know. You will destroy yourself without any man's help."
"I cannot permit this madness without a protest. If Eustace goes to France, there may yet be hope for all," Rannulf replied under the noise.
"Did you think I intended to permit it? There are other ways to manage Stephen. Could you not wait for the rage to pass?"
"And let him make such plans in full council so that Hereford and Cornwall would hear of them? Do you think Roger of Hereford will sit quietly waiting for us to come to attack him?"
Leicester ground his teeth, but what Rannulf said was true. Doubtless there were rebel spies among the assembled barons and a definite plan of attack might spark a new full-scale rebellion even if that plan were canceled later. The noise was dying down and Leicester stepped farther forward, bellowing for silence. The quick mind in the big, slow body rapidly revised plans in the few seconds before it was quiet enough to speak normally. In many ways, what Rannulf had done was the best possible thing for everyone but himself.
"My lord, I wish to add, to what the earl of Soke said, this piece of news. No insult was intended to you or to your late queen by the earl of Chester. He is sick unto death. You know how Hereford is bound to him by tie upon tie. Truly, let us settle the question of Normandy and let the council choose some trusty messenger of high degree to go to Hereford and the others and learn their minds before we commit an injustice."
There was an ugly light in Stephen's eyes, for the news was no news to him, but in dying Maud seemed to have bequeathed him some measure of her control and he answered quietly. "What need to ask the council to choose? Plainly the earl of Soke is best fitted for this work. We know his loyalty and all men respect his truth. Even Hereford will trust him. What say my barons to this?"