Rosamond the fayre daughter of Walter lord Clifford, concubine to Henry II (poisoned by queen Elianor as some thought) dyed at Woodstocke where king Henry had made for her a house of wonderfull working, so that no man or woman might come to her, but he that was instructed by the king, or such as were right secret with him touching the matter. This house by some was named Labyrinthus… which was wrought like unto a knot in a garden, called a maze…
Walking was one of Kate’s passions. When she was at home at Bishop’s keep, the estate she had inherited from her Ardleigh aunts, she went out for a tramp through the lanes and footpaths almost every day, wearing sensible boots and an ankle-length walking skirt and carrying field glasses and a stout walking stick. She’d brought her walking gear to Blenheim and hoped to go out often, if only to escape from the uninhabitable palace.
How did Consuelo manage, she wondered with a shudder, living day after day in such a dispiriting place? She couldn’t endure it, she knew. Blenheim would suck all the life and creativity right out of her. Perhaps it was her American democratic spirit, but she knew she’d feel as if she were living in a vast imperial museum, full of relics of British conquest and domination, and she was its curator. Or a splendidly gilded jail, and she was both its jailor and its prisoner.
But the Park around the palace was lovely beyond words. This morning, the rising sun was a pale silver globe draped with ghostlike mists, and in the pearly light, Kate could see geese and ducks and swans sailing on the lake and hear them speaking to one another in low, comforting calls. However she might feel about the palace, she had fallen in love with the lake and woodlands and meadows, which seemed to change with each hour of the day, with the slightest change in the wind and weather. Early morning-before anyone but the staff was up and about, before the groundskeepers began their work-morning, for Kate, was the best time of all. Yesterday morning and the morning before, she had explored the East Park, the Cascades, and the Swiss Cottage, as well as the wilder, more sinister forests of High Park.
On this morning, Kate had risen just as the sun came up, dressed quietly, and set out in the company of her friend and coauthor, the intrepid, invisible, but very real Beryl Bardwell. Kate was carrying an artist’s folding stool, a sketchpad and pencils, and a notebook. She and Beryl had visited Rosamund’s Well on Tuesday afternoon-just a quick visit, to get the lay of the land and to give themselves something to think about. This morning, Kate wanted to sit in the grass below the spring, to sketch its setting and make notes, while Beryl wanted to dream about a time when there had been a pleasure garden and a cluster of buildings-the famous Rosamund’s Bower-on the hillside above, as well as a royal hunting lodge, which over the centuries had been altered and enlarged until it became a palace as stately and substantial as Blenheim was now.
It was all gone, of course, dissolved into the mists of time and remembered only in legend and the occasional desultory conversation, like last night’s table talk. Rosamund’s Bower and the grand palace had fallen into ruin, the sites had been razed, and the building stones used to construct the foundations of the Grand Bridge. But the bower and the palace were still there, in Kate’s and Beryl’s imaginations-and so much clearer now, after Kate had read one of the books she’d bought in the bookstore, The Early History of Woodstock Manor and its Environs.
According to the book, the Norman kings of England had first hunted in the forests of Oxfordshire some nine hundred years ago. It was probably Henry I, at the beginning of the twelfth century, who enclosed a park near the village of Woodstock, for he had kept a menagerie there: a lion, leopards, lynx, and camels, and even a porcupine-all exotic creatures never before seen in England. Perhaps, Kate thought with a little smile, the stone wall around the grounds had been built to keep the porcupine from wandering off.
Henry’s park, of course, was nothing at all like the open ornamental landscape that now existed. Then, there had been no lake, only the pretty little River Glyme winding through a marshy valley, its banks rising steeply on either side. The woodlands had provided venison for the royal table, sport for the royal household, and timber for royal buildings, while the river was dammed to create small fishponds, where pike, eel, and bream were impounded. No one could take fish or game or fell trees except by royal permission.
The second Henry came to the throne in 1154. At nineteen, he had married Eleanor of Aquitaine, a marriage between powerful political allies. Exceptionally beautiful, ambitious, and willful, Eleanor was the richest woman in the known world, the possessor of almost half the territory that is now France, and eleven years Henry’s senior. Her age hardly mattered at the time of their marriage, and in the course of the next thirteen years, Eleanor bore her husband five sons and three daughters.
But Henry took a number of mistresses, the most famous of whom was Rosamund de Clifford. She was very young, perhaps only fifteen. Henry had already begun to expand his father’s hunting lodge at Woodstock into a royal palace, and when he brought Rosamund there, he built her a house of her own: Rosamund’s Bower, it was called, a bower being a rural retreat. Historians disagreed about the truth of this story, but that hardly mattered to Beryl Bardwell, who was quite happy when historical ambiguity gave Kate’s imagination a freer rein.
What did matter was that the Rosamund legends had evolved over the centuries into a fascinating, if contradictory, literary tradition. In ballad and story, Rosamund’s Bower became a palatial establishment of stone and timber, with 150 doors, surrounded by a maze “so cunningly contrived with turnings round about, that none but with a clue of thread could enter in or out.” Some of the tales suggested that the king constructed the labyrinth to barricade the beautiful young girl against his jealous queen and against other rivals-one of whom, Roger of Salisbury, was said to have fallen so desperately in love with Rosamund that he tried to carry her off. Others hinted that Rosamund herself would have been glad enough to escape from the king, but she was now his captive, trapped in their sinful liaison (symbolized by the legendary labyrinth, of course).
In the legend, Henry’s Herculean efforts to defend his mistress ultimately failed. Eleanor visited the palace at Woodstock. When Henry came to her one morning, she saw that his spur had snagged a golden thread. Following the thread through the maze, Eleanor discovered Rosamund. Shortly thereafter, Rosamund was found dead. She had been poisoned.
Had the aging, vengeful Eleanor murdered her beautiful young rival? Or had Rosamund been killed by a treacherous servant, or even by the desperate Roger of Salisbury? Or had she-stricken with shame, sick with scandal and disgrace, realizing that she was imprisoned for life-killed herself?
Beryl, of course, found these questions deliciously enthralling, for the legends offered a wealth of story material for their novel, some of it wonderfully lurid and exactly the sort of mystery she loved. Kate herself was always more circumspect and tried to keep within the bounds of the believable. If history said that Eleanor had been in Henry’s prison at the time of Rosamund’s death and hence could not possibly have killed her, that settled the matter.
But Beryl was bolder, and insisted on holding open all the possibilities as long as possible. So what if the queen was shut up in jail? she argued. What makes you think she couldn’t have hired a killer to do the dirty deed for her?
To which Kate had no immediate answer. In such matters, Beryl was usually right, and Kate usually gave in. For now, at least, they would leave the questions open and see where the story took them.
By this time, Kate had arrived at the end of the bridge and was setting off along the narrow path that led down the hill to the left, in the direction of Rosamund’s Well. The grass was damp and slippery, and she had to scramble to keep her footing. But the soft gray light was exactly what she wanted, and when she reached the Well, she unfolded her stool, opened her sketchpad, and set to work.
The spring, she saw, issued out of an ancient, moss-covered stone wall and fell into a square pool, about twenty feet by twenty, set within a paved area. When an observer had described the site some two hundred years before, there had been three pools, and a seat built into the wall, as well as the ruins of an old building and much stone paving. Now, Kate and Beryl had to use their imaginations in order to see what might have been there in Rosamund’s time: a pleasant rustic bower, a paved courtyard, a pear orchard, a fragrant herb garden filled with birds and butterflies, and perhaps a series of bubbling waterfalls, where the waters of the spring danced down the rocky slope.
The mist swirled through the trees and over the lake, concealing Blenheim Palace on the opposite shore. Surrounded by the gray swirls, Kate could imagine herself carried back to Rosamund’s time, on a morning when two lovers stood in a pleasant garden beside a spring, absorbed in their passion and seeing nothing of the turmoil around them. For a moment, she was swept by Rosamund’s feelings-a tumble of delight, apprehension, and the reckless, headstrong abandonment that comes with passion. And Henry’s-his desire, his need, his concern for Rosamund’s well-being, his determination to keep what belonged to him. And Eleanor’s, as well. The older woman, losing her husband to a younger; the queen, in danger of losing her kingdom and her freedom; the jealous wife, filled with a hateful bitterness.
Beryl was right. All the elements were here, and more.
Compelling characters and a tantalizing setting, within a rich background of legend, tradition, and history. She had only to let her imagination go free, and she would be able to create a wonderfully powerful story, perhaps the best she had ever written.
But as Kate sat, lost in a misty vision of the past, her attention was caught by something very real and entirely unimaginary: a scrap of burnished gold silk snagged on a low holly bush in front of her. She leaned forward and picked it off, turning it over in her fingers. The silk was exactly the shade of the dress that Gladys Deacon had worn to dinner the night before.
For Kate, the sight of the scrap of silk evoked the scene at the dining table: Marlborough’s possessive hand on Gladys’s wrist, Gladys’s provocative smile, Lord Northcote’s angrily jealous glance, Consuelo’s sad mouth. And Gladys’s idea for a folly, “a sort of Gothic ruin,” she had said, “where people could go and pretend to be Rosamund and King Henry and fall madly in love.” And then another image flickered across the first, like a blurry double exposure, the ancient story of adulterous love, annihilating jealousies, and bitter rivalries, reenacted in the present. Gladys playing Rosamund, Marlborough as Henry, Consuelo as Eleanor, and Botsy Northcote as Roger of Salisbury.
And in her mind, she heard Beryl, speaking in an ominous whisper. Something awful has happened, Kate. There’s been a tragedy here, a death. I know it. I can feel it!
Kate shivered, for a moment overwhelmed with apprehension. But Beryl was often overly dramatic, and as she considered the situation, she could see no reason to imagine any sort of tragedy. Apart from the exchange of gesture and glance at the dinner table, and that silly business about the folly, the previous evening had been rather ordinary.
After dinner, they had adjourned to the Saloon. No one seemed to feel much like conversation, so Kate, Charles, Northcote, and Winston had played a hand of bridge. Pleading weariness and a return of her headache, Consuelo excused herself and went to bed. When she was gone, as if by a secret signal, Gladys and the Duke announced that they were going for a walk. A few moments later, Northcote flung down his cards, rose, and went to the window, where he stood for a while with his back to the room, smoking a cigarette and looking out at the moonlit garden. Then he, too, pled weariness and went off to bed.
“I’m not much for three-handed bridge,” Winston had said. “Charles, perhaps you and I could enjoy a cigar while you tell me what you think of those chapters I sent you.” So Charles and Winston had gone to the smoking room, and Kate had gone upstairs to her book. As evenings went, this one had been on the quiet side.
But what about Gladys and the Duke? Likely, Kate thought now, turning the golden scrap in her fingers, she had persuaded him to take her to the Well, after all. They could have rowed across the lake in one of the skiffs that were kept in the boathouse, then walked up to the spring, and Gladys had torn her dress on the bush. Kate’s mouth tightened. The silk scrap might not be the golden thread that Eleanor had followed to Rosamund, but there was a connection here, and it made Kate uncomfortable.
She opened her pencil case and put the scrap inside. Gladys would want to have it, so that the dress could be repaired. But she would approach her privately, Kate decided. The girl would certainly not want anyone to know where the scrap had been found, for fear of raising embarrassing questions.
Or would she? Gladys Deacon had struck Kate as the sort of young woman who preferred to be the center of everyone’s attention, to be at the eye of every storm-and if there was no storm, she was perfectly capable of creating one. She probably wouldn’t mind at all if she were publically confronted with the evidence of a moonlight tryst with the Duke, Rosamund to his Henry. She might even feel triumphant at the sadness in Consuelo’s eyes and the scarcely concealed jealous rage on Northcote’s face.
And with that in mind, Kate decided very firmly that Gladys Deacon should not have the opportunity to feel any sort of satisfaction. She would return the silk scrap privately, along with the suggestion that it was dangerous to play with people’s hearts. Gladys would laugh and pay no attention, but Kate would at least have made the effort.