Rhiannon (33 page)

“Yes, I know that, but—but you are saying that the men never
change their minds. That is surely ridiculous—”

“Not at all,” Sybelle interrupted. “Naturally, it is the
part of the wife to make the marriage satisfying and interesting. If a woman
loses interest in her man, he will soon begin to look elsewhere. But men are
essentially simple creatures in matters of love. It is no burden to keep them
anxious and eager.”

Her lofty condescension made Rhiannon laugh. “I do not find
Simon very simple,” she confessed.

“That is because you are putting into him
your
thoughts and feelings,” Sybelle remarked with clear-eyed perspicacity. “He is
speaking the plain truth, and you will not hear it. Rhiannon, he has told me of
his women since I was a child. Never, not once, did he speak of love until he
spoke of you. There will be no other woman for Simon now. His honor is bound as
well as his heart.”

“I do not desire the grudging faith of honor,” Rhiannon said
hotly.

Sybelle
tsked
with irritation at her friend’s
obtuseness. “It will not be grudging unless you make it so by stupidity or
cruelty. Why do you think so ill of yourself? You are beautiful. You have a—a
strangeness that must entice any man. And Simon has already tasted all there is
to taste in women. He has chosen you out of knowledge, not out of ignorance.”

Rhiannon was silenced, bitterly regretting that she had let
herself be drawn into this talk. She knew what Sybelle said was true; Simon had
said the same thing and there was a basic logic in it that made disbelief
impossible. But it did not make Rhiannon happy. It only added guilt to her
desire, by tearing away a false cover from terrors she would not admit. And the
more fiercely guilt and desire drove her toward Simon, the more terror she
felt. All she knew was that the harder she loved, the more she would be hurt.
She could not bear to think about it.

Fortunately, there was more than enough going on to thrust
personal problems into the background. On the opening day of the council, the
Bishop of Salisbury returned to the attack, with the Bishop of London in
support. The king had gathered support also, but the king’s creatures shrank
into silence before Roger of London’s pale eyes. His was truly a martyr’s face,
marked by asceticism and denial, and the gorgeous robes that testified to the
majesty and magnificence of the Church covered a hair shirt, which rasped a
body torn by self-flagellation, unwashed and stinking to remind the mighty
Church prelate of his own mortality and sinfulness.

Only Winchester stood his ground, but elaborate explanations
and close reasoning failed before the single-minded flame of London’s faith.
What was Caesar’s was rendered to Caesar, but what was God’s belonged to His
Church.

“Sanctuary was violated,” the Bishop of London said firmly.
“No one denies this. Hubert de Burgh must be returned to the spot from which he
was seized in the condition in which he was taken.”

Twice Salisbury was nearly drawn into an argument that could
only lead to a victory for Winchester’s more adroit, more legalistic mind. Each
time London stopped him with a touch and repeated his statement. There was
something about Roger of London that shook the soul. Even in the violence of
his rage and frustration, Henry was weakening. He had crossed wills with Roger
of London before and had lost. He remembered that and had already begun to
wonder whether the contest was worthwhile. Sensing this, Winchester urged him
to say he would take the matter under advisement, thereby ending the audience.
Salisbury looked as if he were about to protest, but London stopped him again.

“Yes,” he said in his thin but carrying voice, “think about
it. Think whether it is worth imperiling your immortal soul to spite an old,
helpless, broken man.”

Since Henry was truly, if not intelligently, religious, that
might have won the case, if he had not been immediately distracted and
prevented from thinking it over. No sooner had the bishops been silenced than
the trouble with the barons began. By now, all had heard of the outcome of the
truce with Pembroke. If Henry had had any delusions about the indifference of
his other nobles to Richard Marshal’s loss, he was very quickly brought back to
reality.

The violation of that particular kind of agreement—the
formal yielding and return of a keep—struck in each man a responsive, personal
chord. Each saw the same kind of fate befalling him. It was common enough for
any baron to yield a keep into the king’s hands for a defined period of time
and for a particular purpose—for example, as a hostage for behavior, as a
surety for a debt, or for a special defensive or offensive purpose. Every man
now saw himself conceivably defrauded in the same way by the whim of the king.
Naturally, each remembered what had started this quarrel in the first
place—that Henry had, without trial or public reason, disseisined Gilbert
Bassett of Upavon.

The meeting grew so stormy that the bishops were moved to
intervene. Even Winchester pleaded for less heated discussion. Then, since it
was obvious that tempers were too furious for calm to be restored, the council
was dismissed to reconvene the following day.

The whole proceeding was thrashed out for the women in
Alinor’s solar. Rhiannon was stunned to see that Alinor, Joanna, and Gilliane
were even more excited than the men, even more adamant that tenure of land must
be inviolate above every other cause, every other good and evil. She and Simon
alone were relatively unmoved.

Both loved their homes—Simon, his four keeps, and Rhiannon
Angharad’s Hall. Both would fight to preserve them. But the fanatic devotion to
each stick, each shed, stalk of wheat, foot of ground, was not in them. Simon
hunted the forests around his keeps, but if he found other huntsmen in them, he
gaily asked them their luck and, if it was time for rest, would share his wine
and food. Kicva’s cattle grazed the pasturage that belonged by right to
Angharad’s Hall, but if there was enough grass, she had no objections to a
neighbor’s herd joining hers.

In times of scarcity, of course, attitudes were not so
friendly. Then Simon might order poachers killed, and Kicva might order the
slaughter of intruding cattle. That was understood by all, as it was understood
that a request for help in bad times must be honored if it was at all possible
to do so.

It was shocking to Rhiannon that these women, who loved
their men both passionately and devotedly, would send them out to fight for a
nearly worthless patch of wasteland if that patch was theirs. Alinor might
wince each time her husband’s breath caught or he coughed rackingly, but she
firmed her lips and set her jaw when Rhiannon asked questions. But it was
Sybelle who answered.

“It is because land is the basis of everything,” Sybelle
said. “On the land men live, and from land wealth comes. With men and wealth,
one has power. Without power, one is a helpless victim, at the mercy of anyone.
I will be the Lady of Roselynde. I will die. But Roselynde will remain, and my
sons’ and daughters’ sons and daughters will be free and strong because the
land is theirs.”

It was a very clear answer, but it meant little to Rhiannon,
and Simon grinned and drew her aside. “Now do you see why I thanked God that my
mother’s lands go to my sister and then to Sybelle? Oh, I do not mind fighting
for the land, but anything to do with it is given the same weight with them. If
a single field yields less one year than another, my mother is there asking
questions, looking at the soil, examining the seed grains. Better Sybelle than
I. I would rather eat chestnuts by the fire in winter than manchet bread, if to
get the bread I must labor all the rest of the year harder than the serfs.”

“I understand power,” Rhiannon replied, “but it seems a high
price to pay for it.”

Simon shrugged. “Not to them. You may not believe it, but
Sybelle takes
pleasure
in counting bushels of oats and barley and
accounting this year against last year. It is only that you and I are
different.”

That was true, and it made him that much more precious.
Rhiannon felt as if her whole being were a naked heart and that a pinprick on
Simon would stab her so deeply that she would bleed to death. Terrified, she
tried to withdraw into herself, to build a shell of uncaring, but Simon was the
greatest hindrance. He seemed to have taken warning from what she said in
Oxford about stroking and hinting of love; instead he was open-heartedly ready
to be friends again, to laugh together over their bond of sympathy in their
mutual lack of possessiveness.

Simon’s nature was optimistic. He saw in the events of the
next few days the culmination, both personal and political, that he desired.
Henry’s vassals would withdraw from him, the king would attack Pembroke with
largely mercenary troops, Llewelyn would join Pembroke, and their forces would
triumph. In any case, he saw that the council could not last long, which meant
he would soon be free to take Rhiannon home. He told himself that, either on
the way or once he had her in Wales, he would win her back.

Simon’s first expectation seemed in a fair way to be
satisfied. Henry used the urgent necessity of settling with his barons as an
excuse to avoid further discussion of the violation of sanctuary. This did not
rid him of the bishops, but it disclosed Roger of London’s delicate perception
of the rights and powers of the Church. Where he had demanded with burning eyes
in the matter of violation of sanctuary, he now pleaded softly, begging the
king to listen to and satisfy, if he could, the just demands of his barons.

Others were less moderate and less clear on the fact that a
violation of sanctuary was Church business, whereas the king’s relationship
with his barons was not. They pointed out that the custom of the land had been
violated, that those the king had outlawed and deprived of their property had
never been tried by their peers. This brought a sneering Winchester to his
feet. There were no peers in England, he said. They were all small men and not
like the great, independent nobles of France. Therefore, the king of England
had a right to banish or otherwise punish any person through the justiciaries
he appointed.

This offended everyone so much that the bishops began to
threaten to excommunicate all those who gave the king such evil advice. To
speak the truth, Henry was himself offended. He liked the notion of being
all-powerful, but he did not like the denigration of his men with respect to
those of his old enemy of France. In fact, Henry was so annoyed that
Winchester’s snobbery might have won the barons’ case for them had not the news
that Pembroke had taken back Usk arrived that very evening.

The king was nearly hysterical. What he had not been able to
do with a full army and siege train, Richard had accomplished in a few days
with a third of the men. Henry’s pride was lacerated. He would hear nothing
further on the rights or wrongs of the question and stormed into the hall on
the next day, demanding furiously that the bishops excommunicate Richard
Marshal for his crime. None was willing, and their spokesman was Roger of
London.

In the thin voice that pierced like a knife and was as
impervious as steel, Roger ripped away Henry’s pretensions. There was no sin,
he said, in a man’s taking back what was his own, what he had been deprived of
unjustly and dishonorably by a king who violated his own oath and word of
honor. More likely the Church would bless Pembroke than disown him, for he had
been true, letter and spirit, to what he swore on the relics of the saints.

The cheers that followed this statement were so prolonged
and so loud that the king was frightened out of his rage, at least temporarily.
He abandoned his notion then and there of ordering a levy. He did not expect,
nor even want, a positive response. He agreed now with Winchester that it was
hopeless to expect to govern a country where each little lordling set himself
up as the equal of the king. When the barons saw that the king had conquered
Pembroke, their strongest, they would be less quick to cheer when the monarch
was insulted. All murmurs against him would die. Then he would be able to be
gentle and merciful, and all would come to admire and to love him.

It was not easy to cling to this conviction in the face of
the roars of approval of London’s statement—cruel and inaccurate, Henry thought
it. No one would ever listen to his side, Henry thought. Resentment made him
determined to force them to his will, but he was not fool enough to demand
knight service at this moment. God knew what they would do; they might even
threaten to seize him. Moreover, those most faithful in the past, Ferrars, Ian
de Vipont, and his own cousin Geoffrey, were cheering. Henry rose and left.

But his troubles were not over. No sooner was it apparent
that the political meeting had reached an irreconcilable impasse than the
bishops returned to the attack on the question of the violation of sanctuary.
For another day or two Henry resisted, but his heart was not in it, and when
Roger of London’s thin voice fulled to a deeper bell tone and began to thunder
anathema, Henry began to think of ways to accomplish the same purpose without
imperiling himself. The turning point came when the specter of the martyrdom of
Thomas a Becket was raised.

“If Hubert de Burgh should die in prison,” London warned,
“you will be guilty of the murder of a man under the protection of the Church.
Remember that all your grandfather’s power was not enough to protect him.
Remember how, to save his soul, he walked naked and barefoot and knelt to be
beaten with rods in the full eye of all, crying
mea culpa
for his fault
and his offense.”

Henry shuddered. He was rather fond of going barefoot in his
shirt to do penance for this fault and that. There was a delicious sense of
contrition and uplift in it. But that was at
his
choice, and all who
were invited to attend were sympathetic and also uplifted by the purity and
humility of their king. What London was threatening was different. Henry knew
he would be an object of ridicule and shame, and he knew the Church must win,
for it was God’s special thing, and it would extract the harshest penalty.
There
had
to be another way.