The Morning Gift

by The Morning Gift (retail) (epub)

  “Hang him,” said Matilda.

  Sigward looked down on the man who was slouched almost unconscious with terror between two men-at-arms, and said nothing.

  “My lord,” said Matilda, “there is no need to send him to the seigneur’s court. Here we have the right of infangthief. Hang him.”

  “Judgment on Simnel will be postponed until tomorrow,” said Sigward.

  Over the dinner table that afternoon Matilda pursued the matter. “He should hang.”

  “The bailiff says he is adept at hunting truffles with pigs,” said Sigward. “I like truffles. It will be sufficient to cut off one of his hands – his left if he is right-handed; we must keep him useful.”

  “It is a kindness to villeins in the long run to show them what is permissible and what is not,” said Matilda, quoting a tenet of her father’s. “If Simnel gets away with it they will all think they can poach deer and then we shall have to hang more than one.”

  “Losing a hand isn’t getting away with it.”

  The whole table joined in the argument. Sigward’s face went purple and he stood up, slamming his fist into Matilda’s plate of stew so that her second-best silk, six-thread gown was bespattered with gravy. “It is not for women to take life but to give it,” his voice went down the table, stunning it into silence.

  Matilda stood up to swing her fist at him. “You…” She was going to yell “damned Saxon”, but Berte’s great forearm was jammed across her mouth and the other had slipped inside Matilda’s elbows to drag her backwards. She heard Berte say: “Get her keys,” as they fought their way up the steps to the solar and while Adeliza pinioned her feet Ghislaine unclipped Mainscourt’s keys from her belt. Seconds later she was in the solar, shouting all the dirty words she knew and clawing at the wrong side of a locked door.

  When Sigward came up later it was to find she had ripped one of the bedcovers in half and was asleep on top of it.

  Later that night Sigward had a nightmare. Matilda was woken to find his flesh moving involuntarily on his body like a scared horse’s and the bed damp with his sweat. She struggled through the bedcurtains and shouted at the servant who slept across the door to fetch water, a cloth and a lighted candle.

  “Wake up, my lord.”

  It was some time before he recognised her and the trembling stopped. “Send him away.”

  Matilda waved the servant back to his palliasse. “Tell me.”

  He told her in whispers. “I was in the impotency court, and the women had come to try and sexually arouse me, but they were hideous and I remained flaccid, so then the bishop – but he had horns – condemned me as ‘non vir homo’.”

  Matilda howled with laughter. “Is there such a court?”

  “There is,” said Sigward, “oh there is. You don’t know. It is a bishop’s court and the ladies who come to prove your potency are respectable matrons approved by the bishop.”

  Matilda laughed so loud that the servant stirred and Sigward hushed her, although he was beginning to smile himself. “God save us,” stuttered Matilda, “canonically approved matrons: what can they be like?”

  “These were awful.”

  He had never discussed his first wife and her allegations with Matilda and she suspected he thought she didn’t know about them. She poked her finger into his chest. “Well, you have no reason to fear that.”

  “I don’t, do I?” But before he went to sleep he said: “We will prove it to the world when you conceive.”

  It was the second time that he had referred to the fact that, nine months had gone by and her periods were still coming regularly; this time she was not angry and so was not protected from an involuntary sounding in her head. “Barren.” She lay awake as linked words advanced on her: “Barren: Repudiation: Landlessness: Shame: Commoner’s grave.” She heard the watchman walk his rounds, badgers snuffling and grunting round the midden, the pigeons shifting in the loft, a foal neighing in the pasture. Before dawn she got up, took the candle and stubbed her toe on the guard. “Get out of the way.”

  The man yawned: “Shall I come too, mistress?”

  “No.”

  The stones were painfully cold to her bare feet, but Normans were never diverted from a course by extremes of temperature. As she emerged into the chapel by the hole in its floor the candle transformed its moonlit calm into something risky, writhing a shadow on the cross, winking the eyes of the demons who were dragging sinners to Hell on the wall.

  Matilda knelt on a hassock to contemplate the stone Virgin Mary on the altar’s right. It was black and extremely old, almost featureless with a round ball of a head balanced on top of a bigger one with protuberances indicating breasts, belly and arms. Matilda was used to it and stared through it to the beautiful saint.

  “If you please, blessed Mother, make me pregnant.”

  In her heart of hearts Matilda loved but was puzzled by St. Mary. Matilda was orderly, a conformist who believed in the rewards and punishments of heavenly and earthly justice. The Virgin Mary was quirky and drove the Devil to exasperation by her refusal to stick to the rules.

  Matilda always pictured her with her diadem slightly awry, hair streaming out behind her, as she rushed through the mansions of Paradise to pester the Son with another request on behalf of her supplicants. Such supplicants – thieves, commoners, adulterers, debtors, whose only virtue was their worship of Mary. In what Matilda regarded as misguided enthusiasm for her admirers Mary had been known to support the feet of a thief so that he did not hang; once, when a nun had deserted her convent and run off with a clerk and many years later crawled back to her abbey, it was to find that her sisters hadn’t noticed her absence because the Virgin had covered up for her by taking her form all that time.

  “Why do God and Jesus always obey her?” Matilda had asked Father Alors. “These are sinners and should be punished.”

  Father Alors had sighed: “They do not obey her. They are greater than she and obey nobody. But God obeys His commandment: ‘Honour thy Father and Mother.’ She is Jesus’ mother and can only request: He, as her son, must comply with the commandment to honour His mother.”

  She was so… earthy. She would squirt her milk on the sores of a sick man to cure him. But at least she had milk. She was fertile and gave fertility. Matilda’s numb fingers laced. “Why don’t you help me?”

  But she knew. If Mary was everything feminine and life-giving, Matilda’s soul was a man’s. She had always suspected it; as a child she had longed to be a boy and shown more administrative capability than her brothers. The womanliness which had won Sigward on their wedding night was a pose. She was not pregnant because she was the wrong spirit in the wrong body. If she mended her ways and became more womanly she would find favour and conceive a baby. But womanliness meant irrationality and Matilda didn’t know how.

  The stone and living women stared at each other with incomprehension. Matilda dragged off a ring from one of her fingers and dropped it into the dip formed by the swell of the figure’s stomach, but the quiet of the chapel increased. Matilda began to shake. She made her last offer. “If I give you the poacher…” and the saint replied through the scream of a vixen in the fields.

  Matilda took up the candle and strode off to her room on feet she could no longer feel. “Not a deer left, of course,” she muttered crossly as she climbed into bed and jammed her feet against Sigward’s warm buttocks.

  “What? What?”

  “I have spoken to the Blessed Virgin: the poacher can live for me.”

  “Just a hand?”

  “Just an ear if you like,” said Matilda, “but just this once.”

  By the time they arrived back in England Matilda was pregnant and as a reward Sigward took her to receive seisin of Dungesey.

  * * *

  The land went flat as if collapsed by the Devil sucking out its innards. The party going down the last hill went on to a tabletop of vast horizons, aware of the unseen sea to the east, afraid their weight might tip the table and make it rush at t
hem. They dwindled from humans to beetles to ladybirds to ants, specks in the eye of God under a skyscape which altered natural laws. Skimming clouds became slow-moving in contrast with the distance they had to travel. A skein of birds formed a circle and wheeled it so that the earth spun.

  Anything of any height at all, an elm, the tower of a church, achieved significance against a skyline all its own.

  Foreshortened, crushed into squatness, they transferred to boats on water that changed shape. First it was orderly but unnatural, running straight between towpaths, the King’s Delph, a Roman road of water which led the eye to its distant, grey-green disappearing point.

  “Is this Fens?” asked Matilda. Barges carrying building stone and wheat travelled it with them, pleasing her sense of efficiency.

  “Part of it.”

  They had left their horses on the uplands; to Matilda it had seemed like dismemberment. Sigward said: “We have special horses for the Fens. On the whole one does not ride there.”

  “What does one do, then? How does one hunt?”

  “Boat,” shrugged Sigward, “on foot. You’ll see.”

  Matilda tried to imagine chasing a stag by boat and failed.

  “You won’t be hunting anyway, my lady,” chipped in Berte.

  “I shall if I feel like it.” But she didn’t feel like it; she felt sick. They travelled for miles hearing nothing but the hail of bargees and the cloop of moorhens until gradually came another sound like demons screaming in different keys, which became thunderous. “God save us,” shouted Father Alors. “What’s that?”

  They saw what it was as they emerged from the Delph on to the biggest lake in England, Whittlesey Mere, a vast, grey plane of water, eighteen thousand acres of it, from their view as shoreless as the sea. The noise was the call of birds which covered it. But even that clamour was as nothing to the volcano of sound which erupted at their arrival.

  The surface lifted upwards in sheets of grey and white bodies, duck, gull, swan, pelican, geese, until the boats were imprisoned in layered walls and ceilings, splashing droppings and calling in alarm. The humans covered their heads, as much to protect themselves from the noise as from the droppings.

  It was a phenomenon and at first they marvelled at it, but the oars dipped and lifted through minutes into monotonous hours and the passengers coped with boredom – they were used to boredom – by falling asleep. Matilda woke with her head on Sigward’s pillowy shoulder, her clothes dampened by moisture and her second-best boots up to their insteps in bilge. Water still dominated the eye, but it had changed its character again, becoming shallower, diffuse and sinuous. Now for the first time she saw carr, alder and buckthorn which covered such land as there was in a low, brown mass, edging their stream so that they moved down its tunnel, soundless except for the slip of water on the oars and the sob of hidden curlew. They talked to each other, voices echoing from boat to boat, to hide their intimidation.

  “Is this Fens?”

  “Part of it. The home of the true English.”

  “How did they find it?” Or their way in it once they’d found it. Even Sigward was using a local man to guide them. Until this moment she had never understood how Hereward and his fenmen had stood out so long against William the Conqueror; she saw now an army could dive into this place and disappear like water-rats, bobbing up to shoot from hidden positions. Her sympathy was with the Conqueror and his frustration at a fluid enemy.

  The tunnels spewed them out into washes like deltas where sedge emerged above brown water in spongy islands and the boats hissed on the roots of dead rushes, and again the sky took over and disturbed the Normans by its untrammelled freedom.

  Father Alors muttered St. Guthlac’s trials in this home of demons: “Save us from them, O Lord, with their great heads, long necks, lean, pale faces, stinking mouths and teeth like horses…”

  Whatever human activity the Fens permitted was finished for the winter except for here and there rows of bobbing backs along a line where creatures cleared a drainage ditch. The people in the boats were seen but not greeted, the bare elder boughs clacked secret signals, the water hid its fish. The whole landscape excluded them.

  Sigward said: “The Fens take the water of thirteen counties. It is England’s drain.”

  From Jodi’s boat came a scatological echo. “England’s pisspot.”

  A bank formed a dark bar against a sky that was losing light, and then gave way to a horizon of indeterminate greys against which a heron was walking. The heron was twice as tall as a man, and waded the water on scalene legs. Adeliza screamed. The heron had a man’s head.

  “No, no,” Sigward was saying, “it is a man but on stilts. They use stilts here and walk on paths under the water which they follow because on those they do not sink, nobody knows why. They call them roddons.”

  Matilda leaned over the boat side and was sick. Heron men stalking hidden paths completed the horror of this place. Since the journey started her island, which had been picturesque and conical in her mind, like Mont St. Michel, had diminished into what she knew must be the reality, a barely discernible mound rising out of this primaeval soup.

  And so it was. By the time their boats bumped against the wall of Dungesey’s hythe they were lit by flares but it wasn’t dark enough to hide Dungesey’s flatness and ugliness.

  Stupefied by fatigue and disappointment she was led to an open place surrounded by people at whom she did not look but who gave out an impression of lacking respect. From the corner of her eye she saw men whittling pieces of wood, others plaiting. Nearly all the women spun from handheld distaffs. One woman had a living, struggling duck under her arm and was plucking it. Matilda did not object to the cruelty but the creature’s squawking got on her nerves.

  Adeliza whimpered, Ghislaine sniffed, Sir Percy of Alleyn kept his hand to his sword hilt, as befitted Matilda’s champion, Father Alors prayed and Jodi remembered St. Guthlac. “Rough ears, wrinkled foreheads, stinking mouths, teeth like horses – those weren’t demons: those were the natives.”

  She had expected a noble-looking people. These English of the Fens had put up the only serious resistance to the Normans. She had expected a lot of things. She spoke over her shoulder: “My compliments to Steward Peter and that woman is to stop plucking that duck.” A proper steward would not have needed telling. Ghislaine spoke to the shadowy figure of the island’s steward who spoke to the woman, though not with the sharpness he should have. The duck was released and cantered off with its head outstretched and its nether parts obscenely bare. The woman took a distaff from her belt and began spinning instead.

  “Sparky little flower,” shouted Badda to Thurchel on the other side of the circle, and he shouted back: “She’ll verrylike give us a tidy amount of no good.” The words went over Matilda’s head in incomprehensible loops of sound, long-drawn-out vowels and guttural consonants which slid up and down the scale always ending higher than it began.

  “Where is Sigward?”

  He came down the yew avenue from the darkness, having put on his mail. He stepped forward into the circle to face her and raised his voice: “Can you all see, you English?” The magic of ritual began to work; the women’s movements slowed down and the men’s whittling quietened, but they would not willingly show interest. They grunted.

  With elaborate pantomime Sigward took off his right gauntlet and held it up. “See the War Glove. I give it to this lady.” Matilda felt the harsh weight slip on to her hand.

  “The Vestita Manus,” boomed Sigward. “Lady Matilda, do you swear to defend this land against all comers?” Matilda’s blood responded to ceremonial. “I do.”

  He took a small, bronze dagger from his belt and from one of the yew trees cut off a twig and brought it to Matilda who took it in her gauntleted hand. “The wood of Dungesey,” said Sigward. He knelt and drove the knife into the grass, jagging it round four corners to cut a turf. “The soil of Dungesey.”

  Peter the steward came forward with an earthenware cup. Sigward took
it and Matilda felt liquid trickle over her wrist and down into the gauntlet. “The water of Dungesey. Meadow, pasture, field, fen, marsh, turbary and sedge. All are yours.” He stepped back, snapped the cup in two, took the blade of the bronze knife in his left mailed hand and the hasp in his right and twisted it so that the blade broke. The two halves of cup and knife, now like no two others in the world, were put into Matilda’s hands.

  “Lady, this is your manor and these your people. English of Dungesey, this is your lady.”

  He made passes with his arms and walked away through the encircling peasants, leaving Matilda in the middle of them with her symbolic wreckage. The English louts stared at her and then turned away to the vat of ale which had been provided to drink the lady’s health.

  There were half-hearted congratulations from her household. Sigward rejoined them: “And what do you think of your morning gift?”

  “The flies are nice,” said Jodi. Matilda said nothing. She had given Sigward estates which a king could be proud of, she was carrying his baby; in return he had given her this.

  Sigward wheezed. “There are reasons. Reasons. Enter your hall, Lady of Dungesey, and you’ll see some of them.” They walked under shadowed archways up steps into an old-fashioned hall. Matilda was prepared to despise it, but that night her eye and everyone else’s went to the long table in its centre and stayed there.

  Rounded, gold-tan breasts shiny with basting, ribs of browned beef with the red juices welling out of them, bowls of stew the size of wheels with a herbal steam rising from dark gravy in which floated dumplings like snowballs, dishes of transparent jelly showing eels nestling inside, long silver fish sprinkled with parsley and roasted almonds, huge plaits of bread cut to show a milk-white interior – the table was a treasure chest of edible jewels.

  Normans knew a thing or two about food and here, although there were none of the peacock-tailed, swan-headed trimmings, was the best. Percy of Alleyn, usually a silent man, enumerated the poultry in ecstatic chant: “Capon, greylag, wigeon, teal, oriole, by God…”