Sharon Penman: When Christ and his Saints Slept

He paused again, and then set the boy back on his feet. “I know you do not understand what I am telling you, lad, but-”

“Yes, I do!” Stephen insisted, although all he truly understood was that his father was going away and for a long time. “Papa…promise me,” he said. “Promise me you’ll come back soon.” And he took comfort when his father readily promised him that he would, for he was too young to be troubled by the softly added words, “God Willing.”

STEPHEN convinced himself that his father would come back when his mother’s new baby was born, for he knew grown people made much ado about babies. But his brother was born and christened Henry and his father did not come.

That summer Henry was stricken with croup. Stephen was fond of Henry; he’d been delighted to have a brother younger than he was. Although he worried about Henry’s cough, it also occurred to him that the baby’s illness would likely bring their father home. But it was not to be. Henry got better; their father did not return.

Stephen’s faith did not falter, though. It would be Christmas for certes. It was not. His sixth birthday, then. Again he was disappointed. And then at Easter, they got the letter Stephen had been awaiting every day for the past thirteen months, the letter that said his father was finally coming home.

JULY was hot and dry in that year of God’s Grace, 1102. August brought no relief; the sky over Chartres was a glazed, brittle blue, and the roads leading into the city were clogged with pilgrims and choked with dust. It was midmorning, almost time for dinner. Stephen had gone down to the stables to see a recently whelped litter of greyhounds. Playing with the puppies raised his spirits somewhat, but he was still perturbed by his mother’s revelation, that she meant to send him to England, to live at the court of the king.

Seeing his distress, she’d impatiently assured him that he would not be going for a while yet, not until he was older. But he must set his mind to it, that his future lay in England. His elder two brothers would inherit their father’s titles, his little brother, Henry, would be pledged to the Church, and he, Stephen, would go to her brother Henry, the English king.

Stephen did not want to go so far away, to live with strangers. He let a puppy lick his hand, reminding himself that his father would be back soon, surely by summer’s end, and Papa would not let him be sent away. He felt better then and dropped to his knees in the straw beside the squirming balls of brindle and fawn fur. He lost all track of time, and was still in the stables when his mother came looking for him later that afternoon.

Stephen jumped to his feet in alarm, for he’d forgotten all about dinner. “I…I am sorry, Mama,” he stammered, but she did not seem to hear his flustered apology. Even in that dimmed light, he saw how pale she was. Her hands were clasped together, so tightly that her rings were being driven into her flesh, and her mouth was thinned and tautly set, as if to keep secrets from escaping. “Mama?” he said uneasily. “Mama?”

“God’s Will is not always to be understood,” she said abruptly, “but it must be accepted. So it is now, Stephen. A letter has come from the Holy Land. Your lord father is dead.”

Stephen stared at her, his eyes flickering from her face to the coral rosary entwined around her clutching fingers. “But…but Papa was coming home,” he said, “he promised…”

Adela blinked rapidly, looked away. All of her sons had gotten their father’s fair coloring, but only Stephen had been blessed-or cursed-with his obliging, generous nature, one utterly lacking in rancor or guile but lacking, too, in the steely self-discipline and single-minded tenacity that had enabled her father to conquer and then rule two turbulent domains, England and Normandy.

“Your father’s departure for home was delayed by bad weather,” she said, and managed to steady both her voice and her resolve by sheer force of will, for she must not show weakness now, not before the child. “He was still at Jaffa when King Baldwin of Jerusalem sought his aid in laying siege to Ramleh. But they were greatly outnumbered. Baldwin was one of the few to escape. Your father…he held fast and was slain.”

Stephen’s mouth had begun to quiver, his eyes to fill with tears, and Adela reached out swiftly, pulling him toward her. “No, Stephen,” she said. “You must not weep. He died a noble, proud death, in the service of Almighty God and a Christian king. Do not grieve for him, lad. Be thankful that he has atoned for his past sins and gained by his crusader’s death the surety of salvation, life everlasting in the Kingdom of Heaven.”

But it was your fault! Papa did not want to go, and you made him. If not for you, he would not be dead and gone away. The words were struggling to break free, burning Stephen’s throat, too hot to hold back. But he must, for those were words he dared not say aloud. To stop himself, he bit down on his tongue until he tasted blood, then stood rigid and mute in his mother’s embrace as she talked to him of honour and pride and Christian duty.

After a time, she grazed his cheek with one of her rare kisses and withdrew. Stephen retreated into the shadows, into an empty stall. Flinging himself down into the matted, trampled straw, he wept for his father, who’d died at Ramleh, alone and far from home.

Barfleur, Normandy November 1120

The ship strained at its moorings, like a horse eager to run. Berold stopped so abruptly that he almost collided with a passing sailor, for in all of his sixteen years, he’d never seen a sight so entrancing. The esneque seemed huge to him, at least eighty feet long, with a towering mast and a square sail striped in vertical bands of yellow and scarlet. The hull was as sleek as a swan and just as white, and brightly painted shields hung over the gunwales, protecting the oarsmen from flying spray. Above the mast flew several streaming pennants and a silver and red banner of St George. The harbor resembled a floating forest, so many masts were swaying and bobbing on the rising tide. More than twenty ships were taking on cargo and passengers, for the royal fleet of the English King Henry, first of that name since the Conquest, was making ready to sail. But Berold had eyes only for the White Ship.

“Smitten, are you, lad?” Startled, Berold spun around, found himself looking into eyes narrowed and creased from searching out distant horizons and squinting up at the sun. The sailor’s smile was toothless but friendly, for he’d recognized a kindred soul in this gangling youngster swaddled in a bedraggled sheepskin cloak. “Not that I blame you, for she’s a ripe beauty for certes, a seaworthy siren if ever I saw one.”

Berold was quick to return the sailor’s smile. “That she is. The talk in the tavern was all of the White Ship. Wait till I tell my brother that I saw the most celebrated ship in the English king’s fleet!”

“Did you hear how her master came to the king? His father, he said, had taken the king’s father to England when he sailed to claim a crown in God’s Year, 1066. He begged for the honour of conveying the king as his father had done. King Henry had already engaged a ship, but he was moved by the man’s appeal, and agreed to let his son, Lord William, sail on the White Ship. When word got out, all the other young lordlings clamored to sail on her, too. There-down on the quay-you can see them preening and strutting like so many peacocks. The dark one is the Earl of Chester, and yonder is the Lord Richard, one of the king’s bastards, and the youth in the red mantle is said to be a kinsman of the German emperor. The king’s favorite nephew, the Lord Stephen, is supposed to sail on her, too, but I do not see him yet…he’s one who’d be late for his own wake, doubtless snug in some wanton’s bed-”