Page 120 of The Pillars of the Earth

Breakfast was hot gruel with salt. Aliena and Richard ate hungrily and wished there were bread to go with it. Aliena thought over what she would say to King Stephen. She felt sure that he had simply forgotten that the earl of Storing had two children. As soon as they appeared and reminded him, he would willingly make provision for them, she thought. However, in case he needed persuading she ought to have a few words ready. She would not insist that her father was innocent, she decided, for that would imply that the king’s judgment had been at fault, and he would be offended. Nor would she protest about Percy Hamleigh being made earl. Men of affairs hated to have past decisions disputed. “For better or worse, that’s been settled,” her father would say. No, she would simply point out that she and her brother were innocent, and ask the king to give them a knight’s estate, so that they could support themselves modestly, and Richard could prepare to become one of the king’s fighting men in a few years’ time. A small estate would enable her to take care of her father, when the king pleased to release him from jail. He was no longer a threat: he had no title, no followers and no money. She would remind the king that her father had faithfully served the old king, Henry, who had been Stephen’s uncle. She would not be forceful, just humbly firm, clear and simple.

After breakfast she asked a monk where she could wash her face. He looked startled: evidently it was an unusual request. However, monks were in favor of cleanliness, and he showed her an open conduit where clean cold water ran into the priory grounds, and warned her not to wash “indecently,” as he put it, in case one of the brothers should accidentally see her and thereby soil his soul. Monks did a lot of good but their attitudes could be irritating.

When she and Richard had washed the dirt of the road off their faces they left the priory and walked uphill along the High Street to the castle, which stood to one side of the West Gate. By coming early Aliena hoped to befriend or charm whoever was in charge of admitting petitioners, and ensure that she was not forgotten in the crowd of important people who would arrive later. However, the atmosphere within the castle walls was even quieter than she had hoped. Had King Stephen been here so long that few people needed to see him? She was not sure when he might have come. The king was normally at Winchester throughout Lent, she thought, but she was not sure when Lent had begun, for she had lost track of dates, living in the castle with Richard and Matthew and no priest.

There was a burly guard with a gray beard standing at the foot of the keep steps. Aliena made to walk past him, as she had when she came here with her father, but the guard lowered his spear across her path. She looked at him imperiously and said: “Yes?”

“And where do you think you’re going, my girl?” said the guard.

Aliena saw, with a sinking feeling, that he was the type of person who liked being a guard because it gave him the chance to stop people from going where they wanted to go. “We’re here to petition the king,” she said frostily. “Now let us pass.”

“You?” the guard said with a sneer. “Wearing a pair of clogs that my wife would be ashamed of? Clear off.”

“Get out of my way, guard,” said Aliena. “Every citizen has the right to petition the king.”

“But the poorer sort generally are not foolish enough to try to exercise that right—”

“We are not the poorer sort!” Aliena blazed. “I am the daughter of the earl of Shiring, and my brother is his son, so let us pass, or you’ll end up rotting in a dungeon.”

The guard looked a little less bumptious, but he said smugly: “You can’t petition the king, because he’s not here. He’s at Westminster, as you ought to know if you are who you say you are.”

Aliena was thunderstruck. “But why has he gone to Westminster? He should be here for Easter!”

The guard realized she was not a street urchin. “Easter court is at Westminster. It seems he’s not going to do everything exactly the same as the old king did, and why should he?”

He was right, of course, but the idea that a new king would follow a different timetable had never occurred to Aliena, who was too young to remember when Henry had been the new king. Despair washed over her. She had thought she knew what to do, and she had been so wrong. She felt like giving up.

She shook her head to dispel the sense of doom. This was a setback, not a defeat. Appealing to the king was not the only way to take care of her brother and herself. She had come to Winchester with two purposes, and the second was to find out what had happened to her father. He would know what she should do next.

“Whoishere, then?” she said to the guard. “There must be some royal officials. I just want to see my father.”

“There’s a clerk and a steward up there,” the guard replied. “Did you say the earl of Shiring was your father?”

“Yes.” Her heart missed a beat. “Do you know anything about him?”

“I know where he is.”

“Where?”

“In the jail right here at the castle.”

So close! “Where’s the jail?”

The guard jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Down the hill, past the chapel, opposite the main gate.” Excluding them from the keep had gratified his mean streak and now he was willing to be informative. “You’d better see the jailer. His name is Odo, and he’s got deep pockets.”

Aliena did not understand the remark about deep pockets but she was too agitated to clarify it. Until this moment her father had been in a vague, distant place called “prison,” but now, suddenly, he was right here in this very castle. She forgot all about appealing to the king. All she wanted to do was see Father. The thought that he was close by, ready to help her, made her feel the danger and uncertainty of the last few months more acutely. She wanted to run into his arms and hear him say: “It’s all right, now. Everything’s going to be all right.”

The keep stood on a rise in one corner of the compound. Aliena turned and looked down at the rest of the castle. It was a motley collection of stone and wood buildings enclosed by high walls. Down the hill, the guard had said; past the chapel—she spotted a neat stone building that looked like a chapel—and opposite the main gate. The main entrance was a gate in the outer wall, permitting the king to come into his castle without first having to enter the city. Opposite that entrance, close to the back wall that separated the castle from the city, was a small stone building that could be the jail.

Aliena and Richard hurried down the slope. Aliena wondered how he would be. Did they give people proper food in jail? Her father’s own prisoners had always got horsebread and pottage at Earlscastle, but she had heard that prisoners were sometimes ill-treated elsewhere. She hoped Father was all right.

Her heart was in her mouth as she crossed the compound. It was a big castle but it was crowded with buildings: kitchens, stables, and barracks. There were two chapels. Now that she knew the king was away, Aliena could see the signs of his absence, and she noted them distractedly as she wove her way toward the jail: stray pigs and sheep had wandered in from the suburbs just outside the gate and were rooting around in the rubbish tips, men-at-arms were lolling about with nothing to do but call out insolent remarks to passing women, and there was some kind of betting game going on in the porch of one of the chapels. The atmosphere of laxity bothered Aliena. She was afraid it might mean her father was not looked after properly. She began to dread what she might find.

The jail was a semi-derelict stone building that looked as if it might once have been a house for a royal official, a chancellor or bailiff of some kind, before it fell into disrepair. The upper story, which had once been the hall, was completely ruined, having lost most of its roof. Only the undercroft remained whole. Here there were no windows, just a big wooden door with iron studs. The door stood slightly ajar. As Aliena hesitated outside, a handsome middle-aged woman in a good-quality cloak passed her, opened the door and went in. Aliena and Richard followed her.

The gloomy interior smelled of old dirt and corruption. The undercroft had once been an open storeroom, but it had later been divided into small compartments by hastily built rubble walls. Somewhere in the depths of the building a man was moaning monotonously, like a monk chanting services alone in a church. The area just inside the door formed a small lobby, with a chair, a table and a fire in the middle of the floor. A big, stupid-looking man with a sword at his belt was lackadaisically sweeping the floor. He looked up and greeted the handsome woman. “Good morning, Meg.” She gave him a penny and disappeared into the gloom. He looked at Aliena and Richard. “What do you want?”

“I’m here to see my father,” Aliena said. “He is the earl of Shiring.”