Chapter Four
It was an apartment near Aldgate, adjacent to St. Botolph, comprising of the entire top floor of a three-storied manor home that had once belonged to the Earl of Lincoln.
The family lost the home to a debt they’d owed to the church, who turned around and sold it to a man from Paris who broke it up into apartments and sold each one for a princely sum.
Rotri de Wylde, Baron Dordon, had been given the apartment by his brother.
His older brother, Rhun, had inherited everything else, including the castles and the title and the vast army, but Rotri had come away with a small garrison castle, Dordon, and a dingy little apartment in London because his brother hadn’t wanted it.
At least that was what Rotri believed, even though his brother had insisted he simply wanted Rotri to have something that belonged to him.
But Rotri deserved so much more.
In his opinion, anyway.
He was an ambitious man, an intelligent man, and one that believed himself to be an astute political player even though the past several years had seen him support Simon de Montfort, who had been defeated in the battle for the English throne.
Rotri tried to make himself indispensable to Simon, more loyal than any of his other followers, but Simon seemed to think that Rotri wasn’t a man of integrity.
He seemed to think that all he was working toward were the rewards that could be given to him by a new king.
Simon had even gone so far as to voice that concern, but Rotri had denied it vehemently.
He only wanted to serve, he’d said, and he tried to make it sound as if he would be loyal no matter what the cost.
No matter if he never received any reward for his loyalty.
Rotri thought he’d been convincing enough, but Simon didn’t seem to think so and Rotri never received any gifts from Simon.
Once de Montfort had been killed, Rotri knew that was the end.
He would still have his small outpost castle at Dordon and he would still have his dingy apartment in London, although the apartment wasn’t entirely dingy.
It did have lovely, big windows that let in the light, but any fine furnishings had long been sold to keep Rotri and his son living in the manner to which they were accustomed.
The truth was that Rotri wasn’t completely destitute.
In his barony, there were several villages that he collected taxes from.
The land was good and the crops were usually abundant, so the money he received was a decent amount of coin.
The unfortunate fact was that both Rotri and his son simply liked to spend money and live well.
They spent it on fine wine or fine horses or even women.
Rotri’s wife died long ago and Rotri hadn’t seen a need to remarry considering he already had an heir, but he very much wanted that heir to marry well.
That was where his niece came in.
That was exactly why he was in London.
His lovely, intelligent niece was the heiress to one of the wealthiest earldoms in all of England.
The Tamworth earldom had made its money from mining coal and lead deposits because the entire area around Tamworth was full of valuable minerals.
In addition to the ore, there were also great forests of good English oak on Tamworth lands, and the wood had been harvested for decades for furniture and other things.
More money coming in.
But that was simply for the last few generations.
Before that, no one was quite sure where the earldom got its vast wealth—but there were rumors that a few ancestors were nothing short of pirates.
Since the de Wylde ancestors were descendent from Mercian kings, some thought that those kings had plundered other kingdoms and stolen their wealth, so there were many theories as to how and why the Tamworth earldom had become so wealthy.
Wealth that one solitary woman controlled.
Rotri had never seen such a travesty in his life.
A woman with that kind of money and that kind of control was an abomination.
That was the argument that Rotri used to several bishops, princes of the church that he hoped would see his point.
The Bishop of Nuneaton didn’t. The Bishop of Birmingham actually ordered him away.
However, the Bishop of Oxford took him seriously enough to send him to London with a letter of introduction to the Archbishop of Canterbury, but that meeting hadn’t happened yet.
And Rotri was going to remain in London until it did.
It never did any good to speak to the lesser priests, the ones who had no real power in this matter.
Since his son and Lady de Tosni were first cousins, Rotri needed a papal dispensation for a marriage with bloodlines that were this close.
The truth was that he was racing against the clock when it came to a marriage between his son and his niece because Rotri was a cunning man.
He knew that his niece was a hot commodity, and he further knew that the king thought so as well.
Henry had entered into the situation shortly after Robert de Tosni died.
That was when Rotri realized he would be fighting an uphill battle.
The king wanted Lady de Tosni, and Rotri had to know of the king’s plans so he could make his own.
He wasn’t beyond paying for information and certainly wasn’t beyond paying for a few spies.
There were always those close to men of power willing to divulge what they knew for a few coins, and Rotri had paid dearly for information from Westminster that told him Henry was trying to find Caledonia a strategic marriage.
But Caledonia, evidently, wasn’t so eager.
There was information that she was as elusive with the king as she was with her own uncle.
Caledonia had always been something of a free spirit, even a wanderer, who wasn’t content to remain at home.
There was news that she was spending a good deal of her time in the taverns and gambling dens of London.
A serving wench at a tavern on the eastern side of London had even told him that the lady was a devoted visitor to the most notorious guild in all of London, Gomorrah.
Rotri didn’t find that hard to believe.
He knew a little something about his niece.
He knew that she had virtually been ignored as a child because her father and mother focused all of their attention on her older brother.
Constantine de Wylde had been a stellar young man who received the finest education available.
By all accounts, he was of good character and would have made an excellent earl, but an ailment that settled in his lungs one winter destroyed all of that and he died before he’d had a chance to fulfill his destiny.
The loss had devastated his parents and both of them had passed away within a year of their son’s death.
That left their sole surviving child as the heiress to the great Tamworth empire.
The daughter that was an afterthought.
Caledonia had been formally educated and followed the path that all noble young women follow in their life.
She had been taught to dance, to paint, to speak more than one language, and everything else that a fine young lady should know.
But everyone knew that Caledonia de Wylde lived up to her name because she had a wild streak in her that no one could seem to tame.
Not the nuns who tutored her nor the fine households where she fostered.
Caledonia was bright and beautiful, but as wild as an untamed stallion.
She’d always had a penchant for parties and doing any number of things that well-bred young women simply did not do.
Her father, a strict and humorless man, had married her at a very early age to Robert de Tosni, hoping that her much older husband would be able to tame that wild streak.
Robert tried at first, but soon lost interest.
The Earl of Tamworth had been a good man, at least in the beginning.
He tried politeness and understanding with his young wife.
But his patience wasn’t endless, and within the first couple of years of their marriage, he realized that he wasn’t going to be able to control Caledonia, a woman full of life and vigor who liked to escape the castle to prowl the taverns in the surrounding villages.
He’d caught her gambling with his soldiers more than once, but the final straw was after the birth of their eldest daughter when she went into town, not even a week after the birth, to celebrate at one of the taverns without him.
After that, Robert decided that she was not to be trusted.
The young woman who had been ignored all of her young life went back to being ignored by her husband.
They had two more daughters, which was a miracle in itself because Caledonia didn’t particularly like to be bedded by her older husband, but he very much wanted a son and, surprisingly, she knew it was her duty to produce one.
Additionally, childbirth had proven very easy for her.
But two more daughters came, and no sons, and Robert was at his wits’ end.
His final stroke was perhaps the cruelest.
Robert employed his former nurse as a caretaker for his own children, and the woman had final say on how his daughters were raised.
Not even their own mother had any control.
Everything was given over to Madam Madonna and Caledonia was pushed out from the lives of her own children by that woman, whom Robert fully supported.
He had told Caledonia once that he would rather have his daughters raised by a nun than by a wild hare of a mother.
Rather than fight with him about it, Caledonia returned to her taverns and her gambling dens while her daughters were raised by a strict and loveless woman.