The Obscure Bastard (CK)

[Izulde]

He had inherited the county at 15 years old, following the death of his father, the only person who had ever loved him.

"Always remember that you are just as worthy as other men, my son."

Those were the last words, spoken with a clutched, frail hand and eyes that burned with fire for one final time, one last second before falling away into oblivion.

Words that haunted him ever since, not only for the memories they invoked; the dying father, the stern cleric, the indifferent Duke, the absent mother, but because his life had been a complete failure.

Youth and all the burgeoning promise and infinite possibility that the springly season of life provides passed in a muted blur. The summer of his prime, too, sped by in a train of forgotten and wasted days. Now 41 years old, Geoffroy de Rennes was at the age when men and women were called to the Lord.

And what would he have to say for himself at the Gates of Heaven? What great accomplishments, what happy hours could he point to?

Nothing, none and none. No to everything.

In truth, he might have had a happier life had he joined the Church, for his studies with the monks were so fruitful, his essays on religious matters so thought-provoking, that he'd strongly considered taking holy orders. After all, had not the old mosignor told him he was destined to be a bishop at the least, maybe even the red hat of a cardinal, if he wished it?

But then, Father Gormond was liver-spotted in the mind as well as the body. Senility robbed him of reason and made him forgot the most important thing about Geoffroy de Rennes, the painful, ineludable fact of the boy's existence.

That Geoffroy was a bastard.

No sanction from the Holy Mother Church celebrated his entrance into the world. His mother did not cry with ecstacy at him in his arms, nor would she have, even if she had lived through his birth. He was scorned, reviled for being born out of the sacrament of marriage and it was a prejudice and hatred he'd borne as his lifelong cross.

Only his father, his kind father, who always believed in his son and who told Geoffroy time after time that he was no bastard, but a child of love, a love so deep and powerful that only God Himself could understand it.

Father and mother both gone. His life a ruin.

Yes, he was Count of Rennes, but it was an empty title, for no people of quality were in his court, only ineffectual domestic servants. Rennes itself was almost as poor as Ireland, even though Geoffroy worked ceaselessly to make it prosperous.

In fact, he had not even the comfort of a wife, for no girl of respectable breeding would marry a bastard.

But everything changed this late December day.

For William, Duke of Normandy, a bastard himself, was now King of England by force of arms. One of the mightiest kingdoms of all the world, governed irrefutably by someone one else who was the issue of love.

And when he heard the news, Geoffroy felt a change come over him, a stirring of the limbs and a firing of the nerves unlike he'd never felt before. He was old, yes, but there was still time, a little window in which to declare to himself and all the world that he was a worthy man, bastard or no.

He needed to begin immediately, for at any hour, his father and mother and the host of angels could come for him.

The Kingdom of Heaven must wait, Geoffroy told himself, for I must prove myself on the Kingdom of Earth first.