Edmund was so caught up in these pleasant reveries that the sudden burst of obscenity was particularly jarring. He blinked, found himself back in a congested hall that smelled of sweaty men, spilled ale, and muddy, dank hunting dogs, listening to a beet-red Earl of Gloucester call Roger de Mortimer a misbegotten son of a Welsh whore.
Whenever ale flowed freely, so did insults. But Gloucester had, in his blind rage, crossed the line. For a fleeting second, the faintest of smiles seemed to find de Mortimer’s mouth; it was gone so quickly that Edmund might have imagined it—had he not known de Mortimer so well. But the bait having been taken, de Mortimer need only play the role of a man wronged. Rising slowly and dramatically to his feet, he demanded satisfaction.
Edward had been lounging on the dais, paying little heed to the escalating hostility. He saw at once that this confrontation was partly his fault, for he ought to have headed it off before it got so close to bloodshed. Both men now had hands on sword hilts. The trouble was that he liked de Mortimer, was amused by the man’s lively malice, and he’d let him indulge that malice too long at Gloucester’s expense.
“I’ll not have us fighting amongst ourselves,” he said coldly. “That benefits no one but Llewelyn ap Gruffydd.”
Roger de Mortimer bowed to the royal will; he was always clever enough to know when to fish and when to cut bait. But Gloucester never made anything easy, for himself or anyone else. He continued to bluster, and Edmund hastily pushed his chair back, for he knew that Gloucester’s complaints would drone on until Edward lost all patience. There was no question who would win; Gloucester would eventually subside, sulking. But Edmund saw no reason to subject himself to it. Rising, he headed for the door.
The hall porch led into the tower chapel. As Edmund started down the nave, a young chaplain stepped from the shadows, shyly offering his assistance, and Edmund explained that he wanted to light candles for his dead. For Aveline, his young wife. For his lord father. For his sisters, who’d both died that past spring. Edmund had not been close to either one; they’d long ago made brilliant marriages—Margaret to Alexander, the Scots King, Beatrice to the Duke of Brittany—and left England for foreign shores. But their deaths had come as a shock, for they were only in their thirties. Of their father’s seven children, that left just him and Ned now, a sobering thought. He sighed, instructed the priest to pray, too, for Ned and Eleanora’s dead babies, for his cousin Hal, martyred at Viterbo, and, as an afterthought, for his aunt Nell. It occurred to him that mayhap he ought to include Llewelyn ap Gruffydd in his prayers, for Ned was now talking about the man as if he were the enemy, and Ned’s enemies did not prosper.
When Edmund returned to the hall, Gloucester was nowhere to be seen, although de Mortimer was still very much in evidence, trading affable insults with Reginald de Grey, the Justiciar of Chester. To Edmund’s jaundiced eye, he looked verily like a king holding court. That must mean that Ned was elsewhere, for if he was present, there could be no confusion as to who was King. One glance confirmed this, and John de Arenwey, Chester’s amiable Mayor, volunteered that the King’s Grace had been called away for an urgent message. That was enough to send Edmund hastening to his brother’s private chamber, for Eleanora had taken to her bed at Windsor Castle, awaiting the imminent birth of her ninth child.
Edward was alone, and there was something in his face that gave Edmund pause. “What is amiss?” he asked uneasily. “My God, Ned, Eleanora is not…?”
Edward shook his head. “My news was not from Windsor, but from France.”
The news was obviously unwelcome. It was not likely to come from the French court, for Philippe and Ned were allies, cousins, friends. Ned’s only complaint against the French King was that he had not pressed the hunt for Guy de Montfort with sufficient vigor. De Montfort…of course! Guy de Montfort must have gotten the Pope to lift his sentence of excommunication. What else could make Ned look so grim?
“Did de Montfort—” He got no further; the mere mention of the de Montfort name was enough to unleash a torrent of profanity, some of it quite colorful. He listened admiringly as Edward damned the de Montforts to Hell Everlasting, but he was brought up short by a sudden “double-dealing Welsh whoreson.”
“Ned?” With a quizzical smile. “You travel too fast for me. I thought we were in France with the de Montforts. How did we get back to Wales?”
Edward was not amused, was on the verge of rebuking him for his levity. But then he remembered; Edmund did not yet know. “Llewelyn ap Gruffydd was not content just to dally with treason. No, he must take it into his bed. You’ll not believe what he has dared to do, Edmund. He has revived the plight troth, has sworn to take de Montfort’s daughter as his wife.”
Edmund was always astonished by men willing to defy his brother. He could never decide if such men were brave beyond belief or simply crazed. “Ned, are you sure? That would be so foolhardy, so…”
He fumbled for the right word, and Edward supplied a chilling one. “So fatal. Yes, I am sure. I have my share of French spies, people well paid to keep a close watch upon Amaury de Montfort. The best of them got herself a place in Marguerite’s household. It has been a long wait, but it was worth it. Llewelyn and Ellen de Montfort plighted their troth last spring, and she is preparing to join him in Wales.”
Edmund was suddenly glad that he had not argued more persuasively on Llewelyn’s behalf. “Do you think it is true,” he wondered, “that all the Welsh are born half-mad? I do not suppose it would do any good to forbid the marriage?”
Edward had begun to pace. “God rot his worthless soul, he is not going to get away with this!”
“Ned, I know you mean that. But what can you do to prevent the marriage?”
Edward did not answer at once. “I do not know—yet,” he admitted. “But I will find a way.” He swung around then, turned burning blue eyes upon his brother. “This I can tell you for certes, Edmund. That marriage will never come to pass.”
12
The English Channel, Off the Coast of Cornwall
January 1276
When a sailor pointed out the distant Cornish cliffs, Amaury and Ellen hastened over to the rail to look, for it would be their last glimpse of land for a while. The master of the Holy Cross had warned them that once they headed north into the Atlantic, they’d no longer be shadowing the coast.
It had taken Amaury weeks to find the right ship. Because they would be sailing at the most dangerous time of year, he’d been determined to engage a cog. The cog was neither fast nor easy to maneuver. But it was almost impossible to capsize, and its high sides would make it difficult to be boarded at sea, a paramount concern in the pirate-infested waters of the Channel. Amaury might not be able to spare his sister the manifold miseries of a winter sea voyage, but he meant to do all that was humanly possible to see to her safety.
The Holy Cross was a French-owned merchant ship, based in Harfleur. Its master was French, too, but most of the eighteen-man crew were Bretons, for Brittany bred the world’s best sailors. They’d not been thrilled to learn that their ship had been engaged by a highborn lady; they knew from sour experience that no passengers were more demanding or difficult than the gentry.
Nor were they pleased that the trip would be such a long and arduous one, for the de Montforts dared not put in at an English port. They’d have to sail through the Channel, around the Cornish Peninsula, and up the Welsh coast to the small port of Pwllheli. It was true that they could then make a quick run over to Ireland, unload their cargo of honey, almonds, and wine for a goodly profit. But they could have made several Channel crossings in the time it would take them to convey this pampered English bride and her princeling priest brother to the Welsh lord at Pwllheli. And so it only confirmed all their qualms when they were trapped in Harfleur for a fortnight, awaiting favorable winds. This was not going to be a voyage they’d remember fondly, no, by God!
It had taken them almost five days to reach the western tip of Cornwall, for the weather was raw and blustery,
and for hours on end the cog seemed to make no headway at all, bobbing and tossing in the heavy swells like a child’s spinning top. Most of Ellen’s Welsh escort were soon violently ill, for they were a mountain race, deaf to the siren songs of the sea. The Holy Cross crew usually took malicious pleasure in the comic queasiness of landlubber passengers. But upon discovering that the stricken Welshmen spoke a language closely allied to their own Breton, they quickly thawed toward these Celtic kinsmen of theirs, and magnanimously forswore any rude gibes about feeding the fish.
If the crew was surprised by their unexpected camaraderie with Ellen’s Welshmen, they were even more surprised by Ellen herself. The aloof, haughty, spoiled Princess turned out to be a blissfully happy young woman, and, as her excitement manifested itself in a cheerful indifference to hardship and a flattering, heartfelt curiosity about the Holy Cross and the men who’d chosen such a high-risk life, she soon had the crew vying with one another to answer her questions, to show off their sea-faring skills, to see her smile.
Amaury was amused that the sailors were so smitten by Ellen, but his amusement was not shared by the Welshman to whom Llewelyn had entrusted his bride. Morgan ap Madog was so concerned lest Ellen be subjected to improper advances that he insisted upon dragging himself from his sickbed whenever Ellen left her cabin.
Amaury had long ago observed that his sister had a remarkable talent for evoking protective urges in the most unlikely of men. He wasn’t sure exactly how she did it, but he’d seen the results too often to doubt her witchery. Amaury could look upon his sister, see what others saw. He supposed that her delicate features, very fair skin, and slender, small-busted figure did convey a fragile image, conjuring up visions of Spanish lace and Venetian crystal, snowflakes and pasqueflowers. But Amaury knew what the others did not, that Ellen was much tougher, much more resilient than her would-be champions ever suspected.
He’d tried to enlighten the overly anxious Morgan, but the Welshman was very young and very conscientious and not immune himself to Ellen’s appeal. It was no surprise to Amaury now to see him clinging to the rail, resolutely ignoring the surging waves and his own surging stomach, bleary eyes fixed intently upon Ellen and Brian, the Breton helmsman.
Brian was not as young as Morgan. Lean and weathered, he looked to be a man in his middle years, most of them spent at sea. He was the one indispensable member of the crew, for it was his navigational skills that would get the Holy Cross into a safe harbor. Taking advantage of his privileged status as helmsman, he’d appointed himself Ellen’s personal paladin. Unfazed by Morgan’s baleful stare, he was gallantly escorting Ellen toward the ship’s stern. Whatever he meant to show her was apparently bolted to the deck near the tiller. As Ellen leaned over to take a closer look, Morgan squared his shoulders, prepared to abandon his death-grip on the rail.
Amaury grinned, thinking that he ought to commend the lad to Llewelyn; not many men would put duty above seasickness. But he was curious, too, as to what Brian was about. He’d taken a liking to the cocky little Breton, impressed in spite of himself by the helmsman’s wizardry.
If it was true that most men had five senses, Brian had a sixth, a sea sense. If the wind felt moist, Brian knew at once that it was coming from the southwest, if it was cold, from the north. He tracked the flight of seabirds with a cat’s hungry intensity, could tell when they were approaching an estuary by the changing flow and color of the water. He seemed to have memorized the entire coastline of Normandy and Brittany, a necessary skill for men who sailed from “view to view,” but one that still struck his passengers as downright miraculous. To Amaury’s amazement, Brian could even detect direction by the movement of the swells, and when he threw a sounding lead overboard, he was not only able to tell the depths of the ocean at that point, he could draw the most astonishing conclusions from the scooped-up contents. Just the day before, he’d explained that those grains of fine, pink-speckled sand meant that the Breton port of Ushant lay cloaked in clouds well off their larboard side.
Amaury knew that the Welsh claimed the legendary King Arthur as their own. After a few days at sea, though, he was ready to believe that the great sorceror, Merlin, must have been Breton-born, like Brian.
“Amaury, come and look!” Ellen whirled at sound of her brother’s footsteps. “This is the most wondrous device!”
Amaury dutifully looked as directed into the pail of water, but all he saw was what appeared to be a floating sliver of cork, skewered by a needle. “Well?”
“Watch,” Ellen said, and with a flick of her finger, sent the cork spinning. “There, do you see? The needle always points in the same direction. Brian says that if he rubs the needle against a lodestone, the needle will ever after seek out the polestar.”
By now, Amaury was fascinated, too. “Yes, I’ve heard of such sailing needles whilst I lived in Padua. They’ve been known for years, but few ships make use of them. They truly do point to the north, Brian?”
“Indeed, my lord. Many helmsmen fear to use them, lest men think they practice the Black Arts. But our master and I care naught for wagging tongues, for the fear of fools,” Brian said scornfully. “With yon sailing needle, we can find our way even in fog. By my lights, that is a godsend, not the Devil’s work!”
“I would think that—” Whatever Amaury meant to say was lost, for at that moment, the deck seemed to fall away from them. Ellen gasped and grabbed for Amaury, who caught the windlass for support. But Brian merely braced himself, rolled on the balls of his feet, and rode the swell out.
“When she pitches like that, your heart ends up in your throat and your stomach in your feet,” he said, sounding almost apologetic, as if he were somehow responsible for the vagaries of the winter weather. “But it is worth a bit of queasiness to keep the God-cursed pirates in port. They are not as likely to leave their lairs when the seas are this rough.” He wanted very much to reassure Ellen, but being honest to a compulsive degree, he felt obligated to add, “Of course weather like this does please the wreckers right well.”
Ellen’s smile was quizzical. “I’ve heard that when a ship goes aground in Cornish waters, the local people can strip it bare in just the blink of an eye. But why call them ‘wreckers’? That makes it sound so deliberate, as if they did more than take advantage of a ship’s misfortune.”
“They do, my lady. They’ve been known to walk a mule along the beach at night with a lantern tied to its saddle. Many a ship has mistaken that bobbing light for the lighthouse, followed it onto the rocks.”
Ellen paled and made the sign of the cross. “How truly wicked,” she said, and Brian nodded grimly, for he hated no men on earth as much as he did those who’d lure a ship to its doom.
“More wicked than you know, my lady. By the law of the sea, a ship that founders is not legally a wreck unless every man, woman, and child aboard perishes.” Turning, Brian pointed to the ship’s huge grey cat, comfortably curled up within a coil of rope. “If even Hotspur there survived, the ship and its cargo could not be plundered. So any poor soul who manages to make it ashore is as likely to get a dagger in the throat as he is to get a helping hand. No survivors; one way or another, the wreckers make bloody well sure of that.”
Ellen shivered, drew her mantle more closely about her. “A sailor’s lot is such a dangerous one, Brian. Do you never long for a life ashore, ground that does not move under your feet, your own hearth?”
“No,” he said simply, “this is all I know. The men of my village have been going to sea since before Noah launched his ark.”
The ship pitched again. As it sank down into a trough, a wall of water towered above their heads, and Amaury had to fight a sudden surge of queasiness. “Our father was one of the bravest men who ever drew breath. He spent a good portion of his life on the seas, for he sailed to the Holy Land, and as Governor of Gascony, he crossed the Channel as often as a Londoner might cross over the Thames to Southwark. But he often confessed that he never once set foot on shipboard without feeling his stomach lurch
. After one voyage from Wissant to Dover, when his ship was blown back into the harbor three times by ill winds, he told me that sailors ought not to be allowed to testify in court, for any man who freely chose a life at sea could not have his full wits about him!”
“Amaury!” But Ellen’s concern was needless. Far from being offended, Brian was vastly amused, laughing until he almost choked.
“Well, you need not fear for me,” he said, still chuckling, “for I was baptized on Whitsunday, and all know a babe so blessed cannot drown!”
At that, Alain, the Breton boatswain, looked up from the halyard he was mending, held the rope aloft in a sinister, suggestive loop. “He is right, my lady. If he drowned, he’d be cheating the hangman!”
That triggered an exchange of friendly insults. At least Amaury and Ellen assumed they were friendly; even Hugh, who had a genuine gift for languages, had mastered only a few words of Breton. They watched now as Brian swaggered across the deck, no less sure-footed than Hotspur, joining his comrades hunched in the shelter of the spare boat. Neither Amaury nor Ellen took much comfort in the sight of that small, frail craft. Instead of reassuring them that they had an escape available, it merely served to remind them how often ships were lost at sea—swallowed by storms or sea monsters, sunk when their cargoes suddenly shifted, blown upon the rocks and split asunder, prey to pirates and the doldrums, to God’s Wrath and the Devil’s whims.
Brian had apparently related Simon’s barbed jest, for the others had begun to laugh, too, casting glances their way. Ellen shook her head in exaggerated bemusement. “Men dare to chide women for our vanity, yet they take pride in the most peculiar things. If you want to flatter a man beyond all measure, just tell him that his courage borders upon craziness!”