Geoffrey said with a pointed glance in his brother Helie’s direction. “You’d best sail on your own, Robert, and I’ll join you when and if I am able.”
“If you are able?” Robert echoed scathingly, no longer bothering to mask his contempt. “Your wife is facing a lifetime’s confinement and you cannot even bestir yourself to ride a mile on her behalf? Just out of curiosity, is there anyone in Christendom whom you’d risk your selfish skin for-anyone at all?”
“Not for that bitch at Oxford,” Geoffrey snapped. “And spare me your self-righteous wrath. The last I heard, men pray to God for expiation of their sins, not to the Earl of Gloucester. If I must choose between Maude and my son, that is as easy a choice as any man ever made. Normandy is Henry’s legacy, and I am going to see that he gets it, which is more than I can say for Maude and her pitiful efforts to claim the English throne. You dropped the crown at her feet after Lincoln, and she had only to pick it up. But she threw it away, and I might forgive her for that-if it were not Henry’s crown, too. So whatever trouble she is in, she brought it upon herself, and not even you can deny it, not if you’re half as honest as you claim to be.”
“I’ll not deny that Maude made some serious mistakes. But she shows more honour and courage in a single day than you can hope to find in a lifetime!”
“You’ve overstayed your welcome, Brother-in-law,” Geoffrey said, and there was a quiet menace in his voice that was more daunting than threats or bluster. Robert did not look in the least daunted, though, and the men began to crowd in closer, some to intervene if need be, others to get a better view. But they soon moved aside, for Henry had shoved his way into their midst, using his elbows like weapons, kicking his uncle in the shins when Helie did not let him through. Helie let out a startled oath and grabbed for the boy, but Henry ducked under his outstretched arm and flung himself forward. Fists clenched at his sides, chin up, and head high, he stepped between his father and uncle, his defiant stance all the more poignant for the glimmer of blinked-back tears.
“You need not go, Papa,” he said tautly. “Let Uncle Robert take me.”
There were murmurings at that, pity and surprise and a few suppressed smiles. Helie, his ankle still smarting from Henry’s blow, laughed outright. “I can just see you, sprout,” he gibed, “toting a sword taller than you are!” and Geoffrey turned upon him in a fury.
“You are the last one in Christendom qualified to give my son lessons in manhood!” he snarled, and Helie gave an indignant gasp. But before he could retaliate, Henry urged again:
“Let me go, Papa.” It was not a demand, but neither was it an entreaty, and Geoffrey reached out, putting his arm around the boy’s rigid shoulders.
“Come over here, lad, where we can talk. The rest of you men find some other way to entertain yourselves,” he said sharply. Steering a resistant Henry toward the comparative privacy of a window seat, Geoffrey was uncertain what to say next; it wasn’t often he found himself so thoroughly discomfited. “You were not meant to hear what you did. We did not realize you were in the hall. I know you are confused, lad, but you’re too young to understand what can go wrong between a man and his wife-”
Henry pulled away, so abruptly that he stumbled. He wanted to run, but he stood his ground, for there was no escaping what he’d overheard. His mother was in danger and his father did not care.
Father and son were so intent upon each other that they’d not even realized Robert had joined them, not until he said quietly, “This is not about your wife, Geoffrey. It is about his mother.”
Geoffrey started to speak, stopped himself, and Henry seized his chance. “When you told me what happened at Winchester, Papa, you said Mama had lost her chance to be queen. You said that from now on, she was fighting for me. I ought to be there, then. I ought to be in England so men can see me. With Mama trapped, they need a reason to keep fighting. I can help Uncle Robert rescue her, I know I can.”
Geoffrey was silent for several moments, regarding the boy in thoughtful reappraisal. “I am not saying you are wrong, Henry. But I am saying it would be too dangerous.”
“Do you think Stephen would hurt me?” Henry challenged, and Geoffrey cursed himself for all the times he’d mocked Stephen’s soft heart in his son’s hearing.
“There are other dangers, Henry,” Robert pointed out. “Just getting to England would be hazardous, for November is a bad month to cross the Channel.”
Henry looked from his father to his uncle, back at his father again. “Yesterday I heard some of the castle servants talking about a funeral for one of the stable lads. He went skating last week on the pond in the village, but the ice was not thick enough and he drowned. I like to skate on the ice, too, Papa, have my own pair of bone skates. I could drown crossing the Channel as Uncle Robert fears…or I could drown back in Angers, if I was unlucky like that stable lad.”
Geoffrey’s mouth twitched. “God help me,” he said, “I’ve sired a lawyer! Henry…you go back to the hearth and get warm whilst your uncle and I talk about this.”
Seeing that further argument was futile, Henry reluctantly retreated, casting them several anxious looks over his shoulder. The two men watched him go, enemies suddenly allied in their concern for one small, stubborn boy. “If you’d not been so quick to start your sermon,” Geoffrey said, “I’d have told you that I’m willing to spare some men for Maude’s rescue. I can probably part with two hundred or so, more if you can wait.”
“I cannot,” Robert said tersely. “Every day brings Maude closer to capture. But what of the lad? You are going to let him go with me?”
“Am I that obvious? Yes…I am.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course not,” Geoffrey said, an edge creeping back into his voice. “Maude and I may not have agreed on much, but we do on this-that we cannot coddle the lad. So…I am trusting my son to you, Robert, and to Stephen.” Another smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “God pity him if Henry did fall into his hands, for that lad of mine would talk him into abdicating by sundown!”
“I’ll keep him safe,” Robert said. “I can promise you that.”
“No,” Geoffrey said, “you can only promise that you will try. Look at him over there, watching us like a hungry hawk, whilst pretending to play with those dogs of his. He is still so young…Come on, let’s tell him ere I change my mind.”
Henry had knelt to pet his dyrehunds. But he straightened up abruptly as they started toward him. “Well,” Geoffrey said, “I’d not advise a man to buy a horse sight unseen, so I suppose the same holds true for kingdoms. You’d best check out the wretched English weather for yourself, lad, make sure it is a realm you want to rule.”
Henry swallowed, his pulse quickening with an emotion that was not excitement and not fear, yet oddly akin to both. “I can go? Truly?” And when his father nodded, he swallowed again before saying, “Uncle Robert…we will be in time?”
“I do not know, lad,” Robert admitted. “I hope so.”
That was not the answer Henry had been expecting. He’d wanted reassurance, had gotten, instead, an uncompromising adult reply, honest and unnerving. He could not have articulated the awareness that came upon him now, but he sensed, however instinctively, that when he sailed for England, he’d be leaving the greater part of his childhood behind.
“I hope so, too,” he said, striving to match his uncle’s matter-of-fact tones. A moment later, though, he blurted out, “I want to take my dogs with me,” no longer sounding like a young king in the making, just a nine- year-old boy afraid for his mother.
The wind was banging against the barricaded windows of the keep, the wooden shutters creaking and groaning under the onslaught. It sounded to Henry as if the storm were besieging Corfe, and having better luck than Uncle Robert was at Wareham. The chamber was dimly lit and cold; on awakening that morning, he’d found his washing laver iced over. In the three weeks that he’d been at Corfe, he’d come to hate it, trapped inside much of the time by the wretched weather. People were convinced this was going to be the worst winter in years, for there had already been three heavy snowfalls and it was only the second week in December. Not that Corfe had gotten much of the snow; it was too close to the sea. A few miles inland, the roads were drifted over, but at Corfe and Wareham, they’d been buffeted by wind-lashed sleet and freezing rain.
“Wolf! Lass!” That was all the encouragement his dogs needed. Piling onto the bed, they crowded Henry toward the edge, but he didn’t mind. The last time he’d opened the shutter, he’d looked out upon a sky clogged with leaden clouds, dusk at midday. His uncle was at Wareham, just four miles to the north, as he’d been most days since they’d forced a landing there. They’d taken the town, but the castle still held out, and that was why Henry was stranded at Corfe, waiting for Wareham to surrender.
He’d tried a few times to write to his father, but he’d not gotten very far, a smudged page or two blotched
