Stewart Binns - Anarchy

I had no idea how long I had been there, but from my parched mouth and lips, and the severe pangs of my hunger, I assumed it had been several days. I could hear almost no noise – just the occasional sound of a door being slammed, or the faintest hint of human voices. I assumed I was in an oubliette, in the depths of Rouen’s palace.

Horrifyingly, I knew that Norman custom meant that oubliettes were reserved for those who would never again see the light of day.

It was soon obvious in my stone tomb that I was not going to be fed, or even given water. I was enduring a long, painful and suffocating death sentence.

I thought of my beloved, the Empress Matilda, who had become my Maud of St Cirq Lapopie, and of Eadmer, who had always been at my side and had stayed in Rouen, knowing his fate was unlikely to be any better than mine. I thought of my family heritage and how my forebears would have dealt with such adversity.

Death can only have been a day or two away. As I slowly descended into delirium, whatever clarity of thought I could muster focused on how much I had achieved and whether I had made any contribution to my family’s heritage.

To my shame, although I had enjoyed a brief but magical period of personal bliss with Maud – an adventure more enchanting than most men could dream of – I had fallen a long way short of continuing my family’s struggle. That was an ambition that could only be achieved by ensuring Maud’s succession – a hope that currently lay in ruins. Her succession required an heir – Geoffrey’s child, not mine! My worst fears had become a terrifying reality.

The walls of my oppressive space seemed to close in on me; I was constantly on the brink of the terrifying panic of claustrophobia. My chest heaved against the confined space, but it was a futile struggle. I prayed for death to end the agony. I reached for the Talisman, but it was not there – even in my role as its guardian, I had failed. Not only was I about to suffer an excruciating death, it was also going to be an ignominious one. When my breathless terror finally subsided into unconsciousness, it was a relief. My pain and my shame were over.

But the Angel of Death did not come – or, if he did, he took pity on me and gave me a reprieve. Consciousness suddenly returned and I sensed that I was being hauled upwards. My arms felt as if they were being pulled from their sockets. I could hear voices, but they were muffled; I could see people, but they were only dark shapes. Then I was being dragged along a hard floor and up stone steps.

I heard a series of barked orders.

‘Sluice him down! Feed him and get him dressed! He’s to see the King – make sure he doesn’t stink!’

The next time I opened my eyes, I felt less pain. I was no longer fettered, and I was lying on straw, fully clothed. The Talisman and my Venetian medallion were around my neck. I assumed water had been poured down my throat as the thirst that was previously unbearable was now tolerable. I could not move my arms, but the pain had been replaced by numbness. My head still throbbed – but no longer as if being smashed by a blacksmith’s hammer, but rather as if held firmly in a mason’s vice.

I was not in the oubliette any more. I was in a cell, in one of the castle’s many dungeons, but at least I was one level above the forgotten place. I was in a room that was not much larger than my stone coffin, but at least I could turn around. I was in Purgatory, rather than in Hell. Later that day, nourishment appeared through a small flap in the door: a bowl of thin stew that was more a watery grease than a broth of solid meat and vegetables, a piece of hard stale bread and a jug of filthy water. To my ravenous eyes, the stew looked like the finest chef’s soup. I ate as slowly as I could in an attempt to savour every mouthful and left not the smallest morsel. It gave me bucketing diarrhoea within minutes, but at least it was sustenance of sorts.

Two days later, I was dragged out of my cell, plunged into a butt of icy water and rubbed with vinegar, which burned my skin like the fires of Hades. I was covered in sores and assumed the vinegar was intended to remedy the infection, or kill whatever was biting me. These treatments continued for some time until my skin improved. I began to feel a little more comfortable, and the stew – although hardly a hearty diet – was at least putting a little flesh back on my bones.

The worst part of my captivity was the lack of human contact. When my skin improved, the vinegar regime stopped – and, with it, my only interaction with other people. The isolation gnawed at me, turning hours into years and weeks into an eternity. Although they were painful, I prayed for the vinegar treatments to return – at least then I saw my fellow man. Now my only glimpse of humanity was the fleeting digits of a right hand that slid my food into my cell every evening.

I had managed to create a pile of my own waste and keep it to a corner of my tiny world. But it loomed there like an ever-growing icon of my ultimate degradation, and it became a monument to my slowly decomposing existence.

The only thing that kept me alive was the thought that Matilda still needed me and that I could yet help guide England’s future. I assumed that Eadmer had met a dreadful end, and I shed tears for him every day. He had always been with me, and the fact that he was no longer by my side could mean only one thing. I was to blame of course – as he always said, I was constantly getting him into trouble.

I lost track of time. Using the buckle of my belt, I started to scratch the passing of the days on a tally on the wall of my cell – but as I had not begun doing so at the beginning of my confinement, I had no accurate idea how long I had been there. The one thing I was sure of was that I had gone into confinement at the end of 1129 and that I had experienced one more winter since. After many hours of calculating, which I turned into a giant chronological riddle in my imagination, I estimated that it was the spring of 1131 by the time the door of my cell opened for the first time in many months.

When it did, I was reluctant to move. I had become a part of the room; everything else beyond my cramped space had become alien to me, and I was petrified of facing the outside world. Inexplicably, I feared the warmth of sunlight, the glare of vibrant colours. I dreaded the thought of smells other than the stench of my own putrefaction and I feared tactile experiences beyond the feel of the cold stone slabs of my harsh domain.

An hour later, barely recognizable as a human being, I was prostrate on the floor of King Henry’s Great Hall. I felt like a prone midden rat, plucked from the cesspits of the city, displayed as one of the weekly count trapped by the vermin-catcher. The King, oblivious to my condition, cleared the room before addressing me as if I had just arrived at his court from a jolly hunt in the forest.

‘Harold of Hereford, it has been a while since I last had the pleasure of your company.’

I was unable to respond coherently. The King continued, as if nothing was amiss.

‘I think the last time was in Foxley Wood, when your duplicity was first revealed to me. Then you killed one of my men in Southwark, before abducting my daughter in Beauvais.’

I was able to lift myself on to my elbows only momentarily and then glance at the King before collapsing back to the floor.

‘You are a subversive, like the rest of your family. Your clan seduced my brother Robert, with its oaths about freedom and righteousness, and he is still paying the price for his calumny. But all your family are now dead – or locked in dungeons, like you and Robert. Your dreams about the rebirth of a Saxon England are gone forever. I will see to that, you have my word.’