From across the solar in the dark Ghislaine said: “We’ll freeze.”
“Take the poxy things down.”
They were taken down. There was little chance that the ladies in their nests of linen and fur would freeze, but it was a different matter for the servants on their thin straw mattresses. The maid’s chattering teeth irritated Matilda so she threw a cup at the sound which stopped it.
Soon everyone was asleep again, except Matilda; her exasperation had forced adrenalin through her body and made it wakeful. She considered waking them all up again but came to the conclusion that there was nothing they could do to lift her boredom. Dice with Flore, cat’s-cradle with Adeliza, chess with Ghislaine would be as wearying as doing nothing. Jodi, curled up in some niche out in the hall, had exhausted every joke, every antic, every story and song in his repertoire.
“Boredom is a sin against the Holy Ghost,” Father Alors would tell her. “Reflect on your sins and turn your mind to the eternal beauty of God.” Her sins were dreary now she had the chance to commit so few. She did not dare recite prayers for fear of finding God as boring as everything else.
The wind whipped from one window slit to another, slicing through the frowst built up by six bodies and chamberpots. It brought to Matilda’s nose smells which evoked her race memory. This wind had filled square sails, flipped the plaits of bearded, terrible men, invoked sea-dragons and uncouth gods. The Norse invader not so many generations back in Matilda’s ancestry was invigorated by it. It had screamed across fiords and grey, cold water but now some of its harshness was ameliorated by bending but resistant reeds, its salt diluted by fresh rivers, streams and a landscape which, in the end, had defeated even the Vikings.
With dawn came birds. Previously birds had meant only prey for her hawks, or stuffed and cooked. Now came the calls of a hundred wintering tribes, the advance and the retreat of the whooper swan’s whistling wingbeat. She heard a booming like someone blowing into a giant conch shell, the hoot of a long-eared owl on its way home and the tic-toc of a crake hiding in the rushes. She found herself curious about these solos over the undertone of reeds and wind.
All at once she was curious about many things. When she was alone later that day she hauled herself upright – and nearly toppled from the unaccustomed weight of her body since she’d last stood it up. She pulled up her nightrobe to consider her belly. There was a not-unpleasant sensation of popping inside it which made the skin of its swell move involuntarily. She nodded. The baby was alive and the danger of miscarriage past. She was pleased with her girth which promised, like Berte’s sex-divining portents, that it was a boy.
She looked out of her east window. She was fifteen feet or so up. Below her the ground sloped down to a wall in bad repair and went on until it met carr which lapped Dungesey on this side like a grey-green sea. Lakes, monsters, an army could be out there and you wouldn’t know.
“Godless,” thought Matilda, who always associated the Almighty with hills. Then she shifted her gaze and saw that seven-eighths of view was a sky through which God could see everything without hindrance. She felt exposed to His sight.
Her eye was brought down by a movement. Something parted the branches and a flat-bottomed boat emerged from the trees to ground on the mud. A man clambered out and unloaded some fishing creels and carried them up a path through apple trees out of her sight to the kitchens. Her island had a secret back door.
She lumbered off the bed and with some difficulty hauled herself on to a chest under the west window. This, being away from the prevailing wind, was larger than its opposite and had a single wooden mullion for her to hold on to.
Her hall was on the north-east point of the highest contour of the island and around the contour ran a ragged wall containing the hall itself, outbuildings, the church, barns, a well, stables and huts. Over the arched entrance of the main gate she could see the view beyond – something about it made her uneasy.
At first it looked normal enough, perhaps uglier than most village scenes because this was February in the Fens, a dirty tapestry of browns, greys, greens, leafless trees and black puddles under a pewter-coloured sky. Only an avenue of yew trees down the central green looked positive and smart.
There were sheep enfolded on the green, dunging it and firming it with their hooves for summer. Beyond them was the village. The English believed in togetherness; their huts were jumbled together and as plain as barns, except for little projections of thatch at each end of the roof-pole like animal ears. They gave the impression of a nest of fox-cubs. The only other patterning was functional; neat, stippled rounds which were the cut ends of reed bundles stacked in every garden alongside a honeycomb of peat bricks.
Dreary, normal… and something was wrong, disturbing her to the point of irritation. “Where,” she asked herself, “are the goats?” The goat was a symbol of poverty. It could live on very little and still provide milk and cheese. Every tenement Matilda had ever seen had its goat. But the green and gardens of Dungesey were goatless.
She looked back at the sheep. There were too many. By this time of year most manors had eaten their animals – there was usually insufficient fodder to see them through the winter anyway – but the black-faced, long-legged, deer-like sheep in these wattle pens made up a sizeable flock.
Angrily she searched for other signs of riches. There were horses in the stalls where the plough teams were kept. Horses. Horses that needed oats, not oxen that could live on hedge-clippings. One of the teams was hers, she knew, but the village was maintaining horses for its own.
It was as if she’d seen a beggar and glimpsed velvet and sable beneath his rags. “If the peasant lives rich,” her father had always said, “the lord is cheated.” None of his peasants had cheated him of his rightful rents and tithes. “And by God,” swore Matilda, “neither will mine.”
There was a flap of slippers on the boards and Matilda was scooped off the chest and put back to bed by an outraged Berte. “Never known the like… what about the baby… eat your comfrey.”
“I hate comfrey. Get my robe. I’m going out.”
“It’s good and gluey. You’re not.”
“I am.” Matilda’s tone pushed Berte back through her arguments to a last ditch stand of, “Don’t blame me when you miscarry, and eat your comfrey.”
Burping gelatinous greens, swaddled in Sigward’s marten cloak, Matilda was handed down the outside steps of her hall accompanied by a hastily gathered escort. Insulated by her newly acquired fat she found the air delightful. The buildings around her were dilapidated, though functional, and alien; the gargoyles beneath her roof, the stonework and woodwork had other traditions, other memories from any of hers. She ignored them for the moment and headed for the church which was a stone rectangle with a small, fat tower at its west end. The stripwork round its arched door was of interwoven vines, monsters and flat-faced heads. Matilda preferred smart Norman chevrons.
Inside it was dark. She crossed herself with water from a stone stoup at the door and went to the altar to pray: “If the child is a boy, dear Lord, I’ll do better for You than this.” She stood up. “Mind you,” she added carefully, “the boy must be healthy.” She made for the door and stopped again. “And so must I.”
Stunta the clerk emerged from the tower, stamping his feet as he marched up to her, his fists swinging up and down as if he were banging a drum. He was a big, red-faced man with cropped hair that stood up in a shock round his tonsure. “Recovered from the wounds, commander?”
At first Matilda assumed he was addressing Percy of Alleyn; once she’d understood his atrocious French she realised it was herself. All life was a battlefield to Stunta. She ignored him anyway; the man was a buffoon and a profligate.
“Must talk tactics, commander. Fortify the wall.”
Matilda stopped in the doorway. “Have you any idea,” she demanded of Percy of Alleyn, “what the man’s talking about?”
“He thinks there’s going to be a war, my lady, and that Dungesey should
be fortified.”
Stunta barged forward. “Smell it. Old soldiers can’t be fooled. Got to protect the little folk at home. David against Golgotha.”
Matilda took a deep breath. “Tell him to use his tactics on their souls: I shall care for their bodies.”
She hurried out and across the green to the village huts. Some ill-designed animals she supposed to be dogs got up and barked at her. She cut them dead too, chose a hut at random and stooped through its doorway under a great reeded roof.
Inside it resembled nothing so much as a clearing in a dark forest, and smelled like one. Its floor was deep in rushes and its stools tussocks of bleached grass. The walls were like crazy trees covered with baskets, bottles, containers all woven from rushes. A child with a bandaged foot was stirring the cauldron.
Matilda swept over to the crocks and lifted their lids, discovering one to be half-full of butter and another milk – she dipped in a finger – cow’s milk. There was more milk souring in a muslin bag slung from a beam to allow the whey to drip into a bowl. A shallow, circular tray contained two enormous wheels of white, wheaten bread. Matilda slammed back the lids. She had been right to be angry. If peasants could afford luxuries like these, especially in winter, they must be bilking their lord – in their case their lady.
She rounded on the child. “Where’s your father?” It not only didn’t answer, it didn’t blink. Matilda prodded its backside with her boot: “Where’s your father?” but concluded the child was deaf.
In fact, the child was trying to ignore her existence. Her skin was too white, her clothes too exotic and the sounds she made too incomprehensible to put her in the same category as the human beings he was used to. He decided she wasn’t there at all.
Outside, her entourage was about to complain of the cold, then saw her face, and didn’t. She marched them down a trackway between strip fields of dark, harrowed earth declining until the track was a causeway over swamp in which waders stalked on high, articulated legs and bobbed beaks like upholstery needles into the mud.
The sky tried to intimidate her with its immensity and press her down so that, though a tall woman, she felt her legs had become squat and that she waded rather than walked. It did not improve her temper.
The track bellied out to become the boarded floor of a quayside fronting a pool known as the Waits, a turn-around for barges using the sluggish little River Swallen which was Dungesey’s main connection to the fen waterways. Along its banks grew pollarded willows, like cloves stuck into rolls of bread. Birds were everywhere, dotting the grey sky, floating on the Swallen, scampering over it in take-offs and landings.
There were warehouses on the right of the landing stage, but the only human life apparent was a woman on the left bank dunking fleeces into a vat. Matilda filled her lungs with fenland air and expelled it: “Steward.”
A figure appeared in the sack hoist of a warehouse. “I’ll come down, my lady.”
“I’ll come up.” (“Trust your steward,” her father had said, “but know everything he knows.”) On the threshold she teetered against a smell of dried fish, salt, leather and an unknown stink which increased as she climbed the stairs to emerge into the loft. “God help us, what’s that?”
“Eh? Oh, it’s woad, my lady.” Steward Peter helped her to the sack hoist and fresh air, then lifted a cask lid to show her unwholesome weed jammed into it. “We send it to dyers in the uplands, my lady, in return for cloth. May I offer refreshment? Shall we descend?”
“You stay,” said Matilda. “You shall tell me many things. First, what does Dungesey mean?”
The question surprised them both; Matilda hadn’t realised how the ugliness of the name had bothered her.
“I don’t know, my lady. They won’t tell me.”
“They’ll tell me, by God.”
“The ‘ey’ means island,” said Steward Peter, helpfully.
“Illuminating.” The man was weak and would have to go. “Now then…”
There followed an inquisition so detailed that, when eventually he was released, Steward Peter felt disembowelled. First he had to prove she was not being cheated. He gave her details of the annual profit derived from the estate: it was considerably bigger than from many a larger one.
After that it was who paid her what. She made him give the name of every tenant, every villein, every rent, every customary right. “Half?” She got up and Steward Peter fell back. “You stand there, you liar, and tell me half these people are free tenants?”
Steward Peter picked himself up and wiped his neck. “It’s like that in East Anglia. They’ve managed to retain their freedom. A difficult people to understand…”
“I’ll understand them till their bones squeak. Get on with the rents.”
Downstairs her attendants shifted, coughed and became cold. Finally they sent back to the hall for soup; some was taken up to Matilda who ate it absent-mindedly, offering the steward none.
English names were ugly and anarchic. Kakkr, Pampi, Toki, Badda, Sulse, Shudda, Ulf, Impa, Wifil, Wyrm…
“Wyrm?”
“It means serpent. He pays you fifty sticks of eels a year…”
“How many eels to a stick?”
“Twenty-five.”
She did some calculation. “Do I need that many eels?”
“Usually not, so we commute it and make him pay eelsilver…”
“How much?”
“Four shillings, just as Kakkr – it means Humpnose – pays the same in fishsilver.”
As she absorbed the new phraseology she looked out of the sack hoist. The laundress had taken the fleeces out of the vat and was attaching them to a clothes-line lying on the grass where they formed yellow puddles. The fleeces had been dipped in urine to kill their grease. Probably the whole village had contributed the contents of its chamberpots to fill that vat. Now she clambered down the bank into a coracle, dragging the fleeces after her. Using her linen prop as a pole she punted herself across the river so that the fleeces followed her through the water to rinse them. She began to string them up between the willows to dry.
Matilda turned back to Steward Peter who was drawing her a map of Dungesey in the dust of a barrel top. He was drawing two maps. “Either it’s one shape or it isn’t.” But it wasn’t. In summer it was like a hat with a wide, ragged brim of cultivated land: in winter only the crown rose above water and swamp.
“Can’t we hold back the water? Then we could have a winter crop.”
They had tried. The Swallen’s two banks were kept in good repair, Crease Bank and the Driftway. But Driftway continued north-west to become Monks’ Bank, the property of the Abbey of Ramsey and the abbot left it in disrepair so that the waters of the Nene could seep through and find their way to form the Washes, the unusable winter swamp Matilda had seen from the Causeway.
It appeared there was little co-operation over dyking and embanking in the Fens. Each landowner cared only for where the water came from and not at all where it went. Drainage was designed to pour water on to the next parish. “I fear that Sutton, which is to our east and south, complains grievously of our drainage.”
“I shall speak to the Abbot of Ramsey,” promised Matilda, ignoring Sutton.
Like noxious vapours solidifying into form, shapes appeared at the ends of the two Swallen banks against an amethyst sky. The English of the Fens were coming home from their work of scouring the lodes, drains and streams of the weed and rush which choked them.
Children, women and men muttered to each other across the river like a thundercloud turned human, and just about as black. Their faces and clothes were lumpy with mud, weed streamed from their shoulders as if resurrected from burial, and with them came the smell of freshly dug graves, wet earth and rotting vegetation.
From the sack hoist Matilda could hear Adeliza whimpering and because even she felt intimidated she went down to confront them.
As they skirted the Waits and came closer their appearance lost no horror. Eyes stared at her through lumps of cl
ay. Beneath the mud on their boots gleamed some flaky substance as if their legs were swollen and silver with leprosy. Even the children on the mothers’ backs had weed sprouting from their fingers.
One man had a string over his shoulder which led to the neck of a dead heron dragging through the mud. The dirtying of its feathers offended Matilda’s soul. “Why is that man dragging that heron?”
“It’s magic, my lady,” Steward Peter hovered behind her, “they rub heron fat on their fishing tackle so it will catch more fish.”
“I dare say, but it’s getting dirty.”
Steward Peter turned to the horrors and addressed them in grunting, sliding sounds.
“Don’t they understand French? Why not?”
“I tried to make them, lady, but they never got the hang of it.”
“They will. What’s that man saying?”
Worriedly Steward Peter turned back to the English where a man was answering. An almost imperceptible tremor ran through the English but their faces remained blank.
“Well, what?”
“I asked why he was dragging the heron, my lady.” Steward Peter looked defeated. “He said he’d tried pushing it but it didn’t go.”
Matilda’s eyes narrowed. “Dismiss them.”
Furiously she watched them slouch off and caught sight of the steward’s haggard face as he watched them too. “He’s fond of them. That’s why they’ve broken him. He cares for them.”
When she went to bed that night Matilda was a new woman. So this was fenland. Out there in that foul and flabby quagmire were hidden meadows where Dungesey cattle grazed with cattle from other villages “horn under horn”. She took a last look from her window. The sun was setting suddenly fierce as if to make up for its previous weakness. The sky became momentous, giving clouds an oriental grandeur, blushing ducks’ backs and turning the Swallen to amber.
“Riches,” she said. “There are riches here.”
The Morning Gift Page 5