Kitabı oku: «Hereward, the Last of the English», sayfa 17
CHAPTER XXI. – HOW IVO TAILLEBOIS MARCHED OUT OF SPALDING TOWN
A proud man was Ivo Taillebois, as he rode next morning out of Spalding town, with hawk on fist, and hound at heel, and a dozen men-at-arms at his back, who would, on due or undue cause shown, hunt men while he hunted game.
An adventurer from Anjou, brutal, ignorant, and profligate,—low-born, too (for his own men whispered, behind his back, that he was no more than his name hinted, a wood-cutter’s son), he still had his deserts. Valiant he was, cunning, and skilled in war. He and his troop of Angevine ruttiers had fought like tigers by William’s side, at Hastings; and he had been rewarded with many a manor, which had been Earl Algar’s, and should now have been Earl Edwin’s, or Morcar’s, or, it may be, Hereward’s own.
“A fat land and fair,” said he to himself; “and, after I have hanged a few more of these barbarians, a peaceful fief enough to hand down to the lawful heirs of my body, if I had one. I must marry. Blessed Virgin! this it is to serve and honor your gracious majesty, as I have always done according to my poor humility. Who would have thought that Ivo Taillebois would ever rise so high in life as to be looking out for a wife,—and that a lady, too?”
Then thought he over the peerless beauties of the Lady Lucia, Edwin and Morcar’s sister, almost as fair as that hapless aunt of hers,—first married (though that story is now denied) to the wild Griffin, Prince of Snowdon, and then to his conqueror, and (by complicity) murderer, Harold, the hapless king. Eddeva faira, Eddeva pulcra, stands her name in Domesday-book even now, known, even to her Norman conquerors, as the Beauty of her time, as Godiva, her mother, had been before her. Scarcely less beautiful was Lucia, as Ivo had seen her at William’s court, half captive and half guest: and he longed for her; love her he could not. “I have her father’s lands,” quoth he; “what more reasonable than to have the daughter, too? And have her I will, unless the Mamzer, in his present merciful and politic mood, makes a Countess of her, and marries her up to some Norman coxcomb with a long pedigree,—invented the year before last. If he does throw away his daughter on that Earl Edwin, in his fancy for petting and patting these savages into good humor, he is not likely to throw away Edwin’s sister on a Taillebois. Well, I must put a spoke in Edwin’s wheel. It will not be difficult to make him, or Morcar, or both of them, traitors. We must have a rebellion in these parts. I will talk about it to Gilbert of Ghent. We must make these savages desperate, and William furious, or he will be soon giving them back their lands, beside asking them to Court; and then, how are valiant knights, like us, who have won England for him, to be paid for their trouble? No, no. We must have a rebellion, and a confiscation, and then, when English lasses are going cheap, perhaps the Lady Lucia may fall to my share.”
And Ivo Taillebois kept his word; and without difficulty, for he had many to help him. To drive the English to desperation, and get a pretext for seizing their lands, was the game which the Normans played, and but too well.
As he rode out of Spalding town, a man was being hanged on the gallows there permanently provided.
That was so common a sight, that Ivo would not have stopped, had not a priest, who was comforting the criminal, ran forward, and almost thrown himself under the horse’s feet.
“Mercy, good my Lord, in the name of God and all his saints!”
Ivo went to ride on.
“Mercy!” and he laid hands on Ivo’s bridle. “If he took a few pike out of your mere, remember that the mere was his, and his father’s before him; and do not send a sorely tempted soul out of the world for a paltry pike.”
“And where am I to get fish for Lent, Sir Priest, if every rascal nets my waters, because his father did so before him? Take your hand off my bridle, or, par le splendeur Dex” (Ivo thought it fine to use King William’s favorite oath), “I will hew it off!”
The priest looked at him, with something of honest English fierceness in his eyes, and dropping the bridle, muttered to himself in Latin: “The bloodthirsty and deceitful man shall not live out half his days. Nevertheless my trust shall be in Thee, O Lord!”
“What art muttering, beast? Go home to thy wife” (wife was by no means the word which Ivo used) “and make the most of her, before I rout out thee and thy fellow-canons, and put in good monks from Normandy in the place of your drunken English swine. Hang him!” shouted he, as the by-standers fell on their knees before the tyrant, crouching in terror, every woman for her husband, every man for wife and daughter. “And hearken, you fen-frogs all. Who touches pike or eel, swimming or wading fowl, within these meres of mine, without my leave, I will hang him as I hanged this man,—as I hanged four brothers in a row on Wrokesham bridge but yesterday.”
“Go to Wrokesham bridge and see,” shouted a shrill cracked voice from behind the crowd.
All looked round; and more than one of Ivo’s men set up a yell, the hangman loudest of all.
“That’s he, the heron, again! Catch him! Stop him! Shoot him!”
But that was not so easy. As Ivo pushed his horse through the crowd, careless of whom he crushed, he saw a long lean figure flying through the air seven feet aloft, with his heels higher than his head, on the further side of a deep broad ditch; and on the nearer side of the same one of his best men lying stark, with a cloven skull.
“Go to Wrokesham!” shrieked the lean man, as he rose and showed a ridiculously long nose, neck, and legs,—a type still not uncommon in the fens,—a quilted leather coat, a double-bladed axe slung over his shoulder by a thong, a round shield at his back, and a pole three times as long as himself, which he dragged after him, like an unwieldy tail.
“The heron! the heron!” shouted the English.
“Follow him, men, heron or hawk!” shouted Ivo, galloping his horse up to the ditch, and stopping short at fifteen feet of water.
“Shoot, some one! Where are the bows gone?”
The heron was gone two hundred yards, running, in spite of his pole, at a wonderful pace, before a bow could be brought to bear. He seemed to expect an arrow; for he stopped, glanced his eye round, threw himself flat on his face, with his shield, not over his body, but over his bare legs; sprang up as the shaft stuck in the ground beside him, ran on, planted his pole in the next dike, and flew over it.
In a few minutes he was beyond pursuit; and Ivo turned, breathless with rage, to ask who he was.
“Alas, sir! he is the man who set free the four men at Wrokesham Bridge last night.”
“Set free! Are they not hanged and dead?”
“We—we dared not tell you. But he came upon us—”
“Single-handed, you cowards?”
“Sir, he is not a man, but a witch or a devil. He asked us what we did there. One of our men laughed at his long neck and legs, and called him heron. ‘Heron I am,’ says he, ‘and strike like a heron, right at the eyes’; and with that he cuts the man over the face with his axe, and laid him dead, and then another, and another.’
“Till you all ran away, villains!”
“We gave back a step,—no more. And he freed one of those four, and he again the rest; and then they all set on us, and went to hang us in their own stead.”
“When there were ten of you, I thought?”
“Sir, as we told you, he is no mortal man, but a fiend.”
“Beasts, fools! Well, I have hanged this one, at least!” growled Ivo, and then rode sullenly on.
“Who is this fellow?” cried he to the trembling English.
“Wulfric Raher, Wulfric the Heron, of Wrokesham in Norfolk.”
“Aha! And I hold a manor of his,” said Ivo to himself. “Look you, villains, this fellow is in league with you.”
A burst of abject denial followed. “Since the French,—since Sir Frederick, as they call him, drove him out of his Wrokesham lands, he wanders the country, as you see: to-day here, but Heaven only knows where he will be to-morrow.”
“And finds, of course, a friend everywhere. Now march!” And a string of threats and curses followed.
It was hard to see why Wulfric should not have found friends; as he was simply a small holder, or squire, driven out of house and land, and turned adrift on the wide world, for the offence of having fought in Harold’s army at the battle of Hastings. But to give him food or shelter was, in Norman eyes, an act of rebellion against the rightful King William; and Ivo rode on, boiling over with righteous indignation, along the narrow drove which led toward Deeping.
A pretty lass came along the drove, driving a few sheep before her, and spinning as she walked.
“Whose lass are you?” shouted Ivo.
“The Abbot of Crowland’s, please your lordship,” said she, trembling.
“Much too pretty to belong to monks. Chuck her up behind you, one of you.”
The shrieking and struggling girl was mounted behind a horseman and bound, and Ivo rode on.
A woman ran out of a turf-hut on the drove side, attracted by the girl’s cries. It was her mother.
“My lass! Give me my lass, for the love of St. Mary and all saints!” and she clung to Ivo’s bridle.
He struck her down, and rode on over her.
A man cutting sedges in a punt in the lode alongside looked up at the girl’s shrieks, and leapt on shore, scythe in hand.
“Father! father!” cried she.
“I’ll rid thee, lass, or die for it,” said he, as he sprang up the drove-dike and swept right and left at the horses’ legs.
The men recoiled. One horse went down, lamed for life; another staggered backwards into the further lode, and was drowned. But an arrow went through the brave serf’s heart, and Ivo rode on, cursing more bitterly than ever, and comforted himself by flying his hawks at a covey of patridges.
Soon a group came along the drove which promised fresh sport to the man-hunters: but as the foremost person came up, Ivo stopped in wonder at the shout of,—
“Ivo! Ivo Taillebois! Halt and have a care! The English are risen, and we are all dead men!”
The words were spoken in French; and in French Ivo answered, laughing,—
“Thou art not a dead man yet it seems, Sir Robert; art going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, that thou comest in this fashion? Or dost mean to return to Anjou as bare as thou camest out of it?”
For Sir Robert had, like Edgar in Shakespear’s Lear, “reserved himself a blanket, else had we all been shamed.”
But very little more did either he, his lady, and his three children wear, as they trudged along the drove, in even poorer case than that
Robert of Coningsby,
Who came out of Normandy,
With his wife Tiffany,
And his maid Maupas,
And his dog Hardigras.
“For the love of heaven and all chivalry, joke me no jokes, Sir Ivo, but give me and mine clothes and food! The barbarians rose on us last night,—with Azer, the ruffian who owned my lands, at their head, and drove us out into the night as we are, bidding us carry the news to you, for your turn would come next. There are forty or more of them in West Deeping now, and coming eastward, they say, to visit you, and, what is more than all, Hereward is come again.”
“Hereward?” cried Ivo, who knew that name well.
Whereon Sir Robert told him the terrible tragedy of Bourne.
“Mount the lady on a horse, and wrap her in my cloak. Get that dead villain’s clothes for Sir Robert as we go back. Put your horses’ heads about and ride for Spalding.”
“What shall we do with the lass?”
“We cannot be burdened with the jade. She has cost us two good horses already. Leave her in the road, bound as she is, and let us see if St. Guthlac her master will come and untie her.”
So they rode back. Coming from Deeping two hours after, Azer and his men found the girl on the road, dead.
“Another count in the long score,” quoth Azer. But when, in two hours more, they came to Spalding town, they found all the folk upon the street, shouting and praising the host of Heaven. There was not a Frenchman left in the town.
For when Ivo returned home, ere yet Sir Robert and his family were well clothed and fed, there galloped into Spalding from, the north Sir Ascelin, nephew and man of Thorold, would-be Abbot of Peterborough, and one of the garrison of Lincoln, which was then held by Hereward’s old friend, Gilbert of Ghent.
“Not bad news, I hope,” cried Ivo, as Ascelin clanked into the hall. “We have enough of our own. Here is all Kesteven, as the barbarians call it, risen, and they are murdering us right and left.”
“Worse news than that, Ivo Taillebois,” (“Sir,” or “Sieur,” Ascelin was loath to call him, being himself a man of family and fashion; and holding the nouveaux venus in deep contempt,)—“worse news than that: the North has risen again, and proclaimed Prince Edgar King.”
“A king of words! What care I, or you, as long as the Mamzer, God bless him! is a king of deeds?”
“They have done their deeds, though, too. Gospatrick and Marlesweyn are back out of Scotland. They attacked Robert de Comines [Footnote: Ancestor of the Comyns of Scotland.] at Durham, and burnt him in his own house. There was but one of his men got out of Durham to tell the news. And now they have marched on York; and all the chiefs, they say, have joined them,—Archill the Thane, and Edwin and Morcar, and Waltheof too, the young traitors.”
“Blessed Virgin!” cried Ivo, “thou art indeed gracious to thy most unworthy knight!”
“What do you mean?”
“You will see some day. Now, I will tell you but one word. When fools make hay, wise men can build ricks. This rebellion,—if it had not come of itself, I would have roused it. We wanted it, to cure William of this just and benevolent policy of his, which would have ended in sending us back to France as poor as we left it. Now, what am I expected to do? What says Gilbert of Ghent, the wise man of Lic—nic—what the pest do you call that outlandish place, which no civilized lips can pronounce?”
“Lic-nic-cole?” replied Ascelin, who, like the rest of the French, never could manage to say Lincoln. “He says, ‘March to me, and with me to join the king at York.’”
“Then he says well. These fat acres will be none the leaner, if I leave the English slaves to crop them for six months. Men! arm and horse Sir Robert of Deeping. Then arm and horse yourselves. We march north in half an hour, bag and baggage, scrip and scrippage. You are all bachelors, like me, and travel light. So off with you!—Sir Ascelin, you will eat and drink?”
“That will I.”
“Quick, then, butler! and after that pack up the Englishman’s plate-chest, which we inherited by right of fist,—the only plate and the only title-deeds I ever possessed.”
“Now, Sir Ascelin,”—as the three knights, the lady, and the poor children ate their fastest,—“listen to me. The art of war lies in this one nutshell,—to put the greatest number of men into one place at one time, and let all other places shift. To strike swiftly, and strike heavily. That is the rule of our liege lord, King William; and by it he will conquer England, or the world, if he will; and while he does that, he shall never say that Ivo Taillebois stayed at home to guard his own manors while he could join his king, and win all the manors of England once and for all.”
“Pardieu! whatever men may say of thy lineage or thy virtues, they cannot deny this,—that thou art a most wise and valiant captain.”
“That am I,” quoth Taillebois, too much pleased with the praise to care about being tutoyé by younger men. “As for my lineage, my lord the king has a fellow-feeling for upstarts; and the woodman’s grandson may very well serve the tanner’s. Now, men! is the litter ready for the lady and children? I am sorry to rattle you about thus, madame, but war has no courtesies; and march I must.”
And so the French went out of Spalding town.
“Don’t be in a hurry to thank your saints!” shouted Ivo to his victims. “I shall be back this day three months; and then you shall see a row of gibbets all the way from here to Deeping, and an Englishman hanging on every one.”
CHAPTER XXII. – HOW HEREWARD SAILED FOE ENGLAND ONCE AND FOR ALL
So Hereward fought the Viscount of Pinkney, who had the usual luck which befell those who crossed swords with him, and plotted meanwhile with Gyda and the Countess Judith. Abbot Egelsin sent them news from King Sweyn in Denmark; soon Judith and Tosti’s two sons went themselves to Sweyn, and helped the plot and the fitting out of the armament. News they had from England in plenty, by messengers from Queen Matilda to the sister who was intriguing to dethrone her husband, and by private messengers from Durham and from York.
Baldwin, the débonnaire marquis, had not lived to see this fruit of his long efforts to please everybody. He had gone to his rest the year before; and now there ruled in Bruges his son, Baldwin the Good, “Count Palatine,” as he styled himself, and his wife Richilda, the Lady of Hainault.
They probably cared as little for the success of their sister Matilda as they did for that of their sister Judith; and followed out—Baldwin at least—the great marquis’s plan of making Flanders a retreat for the fugitives of all the countries round.
At least, if (as seems) Sweyn’s fleet made the coast of Flanders its rendezvous and base of operations against King William, Baldwin offered no resistance.
So the messengers came, and the plots went on. Great was the delight of Hereward and the ladies when they heard of the taking of Durham and York; but bitter their surprise and rage when they heard that Gospatrick and the Confederates had proclaimed Edgar Atheling king.
“Fools! they will ruin all!” cried Gyda. “Do they expect Swend Ulfsson, who never moved a finger yet, unless he saw that it would pay him within the hour, to spend blood and treasure in putting that puppet boy upon the throne instead of himself?”
“Calm yourself, great Countess,” said Hereward, with a smile. “The man who puts him on the throne will find it very easy to take him off again when he needs.”
“Pish!” said Gyda. “He must put him on the throne first. And how will he do that? Will the men of the Danelagh, much less the Northumbrians, ever rally round an Atheling of Cerdic’s house? They are raising a Wessex army in Northumbria; a southern army in the north. There is no real loyalty there toward the Atheling, not even the tie of kin, as there would be to Swend. The boy is a mere stalking-horse, behind which each of these greedy chiefs expects to get back his own lands; and if they can get them back by any other means, well and good. Mark my words, Sir Hereward, that cunning Frenchman will treat with them one by one, and betray them one by one, till there is none left.”
How far Gyda was right will be seen hereafter. But a less practised diplomat than the great Countess might have speculated reasonably on such an event.
At least, let this be said, that when historians have complained of the treachery of King Swend Ulfsson and his Danes, they have forgotten certain broad and simple facts.
Swend sailed for England to take a kingdom which he believed to be his by right; which he had formerly demanded of William. When he arrived there, he found himself a mere cat’s-paw for recovering that kingdom for an incapable boy, whom he believed to have no right to the throne at all.
Then came darker news. As Ivo had foreseen, and as Ivo had done his best to bring about, William dashed on York, and drove out the Confederates with terrible slaughter; profaned the churches, plundered the town. Gospatrick and the earls retreated to Durham; the Atheling, more cautious, to Scotland.
Then came a strange story, worthy of the grown children who, in those old times, bore the hearts of boys with the ferocity and intellect of men.
A great fog fell on the Frenchmen as they struggled over the Durham moors. The doomed city was close beneath them; they heard Wear roaring in his wooded gorge. But a darkness, as of Egypt, lay upon them: “neither rose any from his place.”
Then the Frenchmen cried: “This darkness is from St. Cuthbert himself. We have invaded his holy soil. Who has not heard how none who offend St. Cuthbert ever went unpunished? how palsy, blindness, madness, fall on those who dare to violate his sanctuary?”
And the French turned and fled from before the face of St. Cuthbert; and William went down to Winchester angry and sad, and then went off to Gloucestershire; and hunted—for, whatever befell, he still would hunt—in the forest of Dean.
And still Swend and his Danes had not sailed; and Hereward walked to and fro in his house, impatiently, and bided his time.
In July, Baldwin died. Arnoul, the boy, was Count of Flanders, and Richilda, his sorceress-mother, ruled the land in his name. She began to oppress the Flemings; not those of French Flanders, round St. Omer, but those of Flemish Flanders, toward the north. They threatened to send for Robert the Frison to right them.
Hereward was perplexed. He was Robert the Frison’s friend, and old soldier. Richilda was Torfrida’s friend; so was, still more, the boy Arnoul; which party should he take? Neither, if he could help it. And he longed to be safe out of the land.
And at last his time came. Martin Lightfoot ran in, breathless, to tell how the sails of a mighty fleet were visible from the Dunes.
“Here?” cried Hereward. “What are the fools doing down here, wandering into the very jaws of the wolf? How will they land here? They were to have gone straight to the Lincolnshire coast. God grant this mistake be not the first of dozens!”
Hereward went into Torfrida’s bower.
“This is an evil business. The Danes are here, where they have no business, instead of being off Scheldtmouth, as I entreated them. But go we must, or be forever shamed. Now, true wife, are you ready? Dare you leave home and kin and friends, once and for all, to go, you know not whither, with one who may be a gory corpse by this day week?”
“I dare,” said she.
So they went down to Calais by night, with Torfrida’s mother, and all their jewels, and all they had in the world. And their housecarles went with them, forty men, tried and trained, who had vowed to follow Hereward round the world. And there were two long ships ready, and twenty good mariners in each. So when the Danes made the South Foreland the next morning, they were aware of two gallant ships bearing down on them, with a great white bear embroidered on their sails.
A proud man was Hereward that day, as he sailed into the midst of the Danish fleet, and up to the royal ships, and shouted: “I am Hereward the Berserker, and I come to take service under my rightful lord, Sweyn, king of England.”
“Come on board, then; we know you well, and right glad we are to have Hereward with us.”
And Hereward laid his ship’s bow upon the quarter of the royal ship (to lay alongside was impossible, for fear of breaking oars), and came on board.
“And thou art Hereward?” asked a tall and noble warrior.
“I am. And thou art Swend Ulfsson, the king?”
“I am Earl Osbiorn, his brother.”
“Then, where is the king?”
“He is in Denmark, and I command his fleet; and with me are Canute and Harold, Sweyn’s sons, and earls and bishops enough for all England.”
This was spoken in a somewhat haughty tone, in answer to the look of surprise and disappointment which Hereward had, unawares, allowed to pass over his face.
“Thou art better than none,” said Hereward. “Now, hearken, Osbiorn the Earl. Had Swend been here, I would have put my hand between his, and said in my own name, and that of all the men in Kesteven and the fens, Swend’s men we are, to live and die! But now, as it is, I say, for me and them, thy men we are, to live and die, as long as thou art true to us.”
“True to you I will be,” said Osbiorn.
“Be it so,” said Hereward. “True we shall be, whatever betide. Now, whither goes Earl Osbiorn, and all his great meinie?”
“We purpose to try Dover.”
“You will not take it. The Frenchman has strengthened it with one of his accursed keeps, and without battering-engines you may sit before it a month.”
“What if I asked you to go in thither yourself, and try the mettle and the luck which, they say, never failed Hereward yet?”
“I should say that it was a child’s trick to throw away against a paltry stone wall the life of a man who was ready to raise for you in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, five times as many men as you will lose in taking Dover.”
“Hereward is right,” said more than one Earl. “We shall need him in his own country.”
“If you are wise, to that country you yourselves will go. It is ready to receive you. This is ready to oppose you. You are attacking the Frenchman at his strongest point instead of his weakest. Did I not send again and again, entreating you to cross from Scheldtmouth to the Wash, and send me word that I might come and raise the Fen-men for you, and then we would all go north together?”
“I have heard, ere now,” said Earl Osbiorn, haughtily, “that Hereward, though he be a valiant Viking, is more fond of giving advice than of taking it.”
Hereward was about to answer very fiercely. If he had, no one would have thought any harm, in those plain-spoken times. But he was wise; and restrained himself, remembering that Torfrida was there, all but alone, in the midst of a fleet of savage men; and that beside, he had a great deed to do, and must do it as he could. So he answered,—
“Osbiorn the Earl has not, it seems, heard this of Hereward: that because he is accustomed to command, he is also accustomed to obey. What thou wilt do, do, and bid me do. He that quarrels with his captain cuts his own throat and his fellows’ too.”
“Wisely spoken!” said the earls; and Hereward went back to his ship.
“Torfrida,” said he, bitterly, “the game is lost before it is begun.”
“God forbid, my beloved! What words are these?”
“Swend—fool that he is with his over-caution,—always the same!—has let the prize slip from between his fingers. He has sent Osbiorn instead of himself.”
“But why is that so terrible a mistake?”
“We do not want a fleet of Vikings in England, to plunder the French and English alike. We want a king, a king, a king!” and Hereward stamped with rage. “And instead of a king, we have this Osbiorn,—all men know him, greedy and false and weak-headed. Here he is going to be beaten off at Dover; and then, I suppose, at the next port; and so forth, till the whole season is wasted, and the ships and men lost by driblets. Pray for us to God and his saints, Torfrida, you who are nearer to Heaven than I; for we never needed it more.”
And Osbiorn went in; tried to take Dover; and was beaten off with heavy loss.
Then the earls bade him take Hereward’s advice. But he would not.
So he went round the Foreland, and tried Sandwich,—as if, landing there, he would have been safe in marching on London, in the teeth of the élite of Normandy.
But he was beaten off there, with more loss. Then, too late, he took Hereward’s advice,—or, rather, half of it,—and sailed north; but only to commit more follies.
He dared not enter the Thames. He would not go on to the Wash; but he went into the Orwell, and attacked Ipswich, plundering right and left, instead of proclaiming King Sweyn, and calling the Danish folk around him. The Danish folk of Suffolk rose, and, like valiant men, beat him off; while Hereward lay outside the river mouth, his soul within him black with disappointment, rage, and shame. He would not go in. He would not fight against his own countrymen. He would not help to turn the whole plan into a marauding raid. And he told Earl Osbiorn so, so fiercely, that his life would have been in danger, had not the force of his arm been as much feared as the force of his name was needed.
At last they came to Yarmouth. Osbiorn would needs land there, and try Norwich.
Hereward was nigh desperate: but he hit upon a plan. Let Osbiorn do so, if he would. He himself would sail round to the Wash, raise the Fen-men, and march eastward at their head through Norfolk to meet him. Osbiorn himself could not refuse so rational a proposal. All the earls and bishops approved loudly; and away Hereward went to the Wash, his heart well-nigh broken, foreseeing nothing but evil.
