Chapter 7: Charles the Good

“I have heard Charles tell of his pilgrimage as crusader to Jerusalem when he was a younger man, where he did battle with the Mohammadans,” Lady Elinor says as our horses plunge through the forest. “He tells oft that the Holy City offered him the Crown as King of Jerusalem, it was his for the taking. But he was humble and turned it down as he was already loyally sworn in his service to Count Baldwin.”

“I have heard that too, from my father who was caught up in that crusade as a young archer. That is where he first saw these short bows and desired to make them ever since.”

“Well, these two bows are not as pretty as the illuminated texts I have seen of mounted Moorish archers, but they make up for their plainness by their strength and accuracy.”

“My father is a master of his craft. I will have to put in many more years before I even match him.”

“But you will, Robin, of that I am sure. And match him in all his regard.”

We reach the end of the pine forest at a clearing leading to light birch woodland with thickets of gorse and broom providing good cover for deer and game birds, good hunting forest, unlike the dark lifeless pine realm we had just passed through. The new road we join runs left and right of us, skirting the edge of the dark wood. By the side of the road runs a stream, the bank cut away here, allowing us to ride down and water the three horses without dismounting. I cannot dismount anyway as I am holding the injured and still unconscious Valter. I pass my stoppered skin of well water to Lady Elinor to quench her thirst and, after, drink a mouthful myself.

“I have been to the hunting lodge twice before,” Lady Elinor admits, “but that was near ten years since and both times I rode with a party who knew the way and I merely followed the rest like a sheep would. But I think we go left here and follow the stream downstream to a large lake. The hunting lodge is on the west side of the lake.”

“So we are not far?”

“No, a few minutes away, I think, now that we are through the pine woods.”

She asks for another mouthful from my flask and when done passes it to back to me. Thus refreshed we rejoin the road and trot towards our goal.

“Tell me of the power of this Jewel that Gervaise desires from you?”

“Ah, the Cornflower Jewel, or glizennen in Breton. It be a huge brilliant blue diamond, as big as my fist. It is said to be the key to a kingdom, a ransom so large that it could buy the thrones of the entire world. The jewel was given by my father, the King of England, to his youngest legal daughter at the time, me, I know not why, he has never said that any of his daughters were his favourites. It was then and is now still held in trust by Rebecca, and formerly by her father Jacob, and his father Abraham before him when it was once held directly by the Bretons themselves.”

“It must be priceless.”

“Aye, it is. The jewel is said to have an ancient history, and come to Europe through Alexander the Great as war tribute from the Persian Empire and was said by them to originate from India or possibly an island close off the coast of India. It was part of the fabulous treasures of Queen Cleopatra of Egypt and given for safekeeping to her Roman lover, and lost somewhere in the peninsular of Iberia, when it was then part of the Roman Empire. It turned up in Gallacia, a Breton settlement in northern Iberia and there claimed by the forebears of Rufus the Red, a Breton commander at the Norman Conquest, who established Richmont in Yorkshire.”

“I have been to a tourney there, it be a rich estate.”

“Rufus passed it to The Conqueror when he was but Duke of Normandy and was to be inherited by the owners of certain estates in the province. It was said that the heathen Moors knew where it was held at one time and tried to steal it, but an angel appeared to the Chief of the Bretons and told him to hurry and claim it for the welfare of his tribe. The Jewel has been considered ever since to be rightfully Breton and was revered by the Bretons, including the Cornish and the Welch.”

“My Welch father says they share a near-common tongue.”

“These peoples, if united under the Jewel, could be the key to the Crown of England in any dispute of Succession over the Realm of England, Normandy, Breton and Wales. I have seen the Jewel and it is a beautiful thing to behold.”

“Where is it now?”

“Presumably in Rouen, only Rebecca knows its whereabouts. It was entrusted to Jacob’s father, Abraham, many many years ago by the Bretons when they ceded their lands to the protection of the Duke of Normandy, who was then William the Conqueror. I have only seen it but twice in my lifetime, which is more than most previous owners have seen it. Rebecca will tell no one where it is kept, but declares that she will never own it herself, only keeps it in trust for its true owner, me. That is why I feared she was taken by Gervaise and held until he could bring me to her and use me to force her to surrender it to him.”

“And you know not why Henry entrusted the Jewel to you, of all his many children?”

Lady Elinor is quiet for a while as we ride at a walking pace, before speaking again.

“My mother and I thought her husband and my father was merely a Norman knight of the King’s hunting party, calling himself Sir Henri, who was unhorsed and isolated from the rest of his men and lost in a violent storm before banging on my mother’s inn door in the middle of the night. The inn was the only place on the road he’d found where a light burned in the window. She took him in, bedraggled and close to exhaustion, having been thrown from his horse when lightning struck a tree nearby and he was hurt and feverish from the cold and wet.”

I nod, remembering with a smile how gracious and kind her mother was to me in my torment a few months earlier.

“She cared for him until his fever broke and within a few days Sir Henri was well enough to borrow one of the inn’s horses and ride back to the Royal hunting party. My mother never expected to ever see him or the horse he borrowed again, but she told me a week later he returned and repaid her his rent for the nights that he had stayed in her care. He wooed her, declaring that he’d fallen in love with her, but she resisted, being only recently widowed and insisted, if he intended to press his court, to be prepared to be betrothen unto her.”

“I know how stubborn and insistent she can be,” I chuckle.

“Sir Henri admitted that he was already married to another, in a loveless marriage arranged for family convenience and so my mother suggested the solution to their impasse was a marriage under the English common law of friedele, something he had not heard of before. The Normans imposed few laws of their own in England, happy to see the old Saxon laws enforced in the manorial courts and quarter session assizes. He rode away saying he would consider her offer to accept his hand.” She smiles, “My mother was no fool and could be stubborn.”

I smile too, remembering her gracious mother who insisted I sleep with her with my arms around her in her sickbed at night. She would bear truck with no other arrangement. She said it would give her some comfort in the absence of her only daughter, Elinor, the whereabouts of her she knew not as her health faded in the late winter cold snap, which had brought on a fearful fever. She guessed that my heart belonged to her daughter and to feel my beating heart through her final hours, she said, would bring some comfort to her, while testing my knightly resolve to forget The Lady and her affect on my heart to the utmost.

“A few days later,” Lady Elinor continues, “Sir Henri, as my mother knew him, rode up with another knight as witness and my parents were married in the porchway of the Pitstone Chapel, before all the villagers of the hamlet, celebrating with a bride ale in the inn that afternoon and evening. He brought a charter bearing the Great Seal of the King himself, declaring his bride to be now entitled the Lady of Pitstone. They were thus married and I was the result less than a year later. We saw Sir Henri regularly for a while but he would often disappear for several months at a time, ‘in service to the King’, he would always say.”