Free Death at Blenheim Palace by Robin Paige Page B

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