The Morning Gift

by The Morning Gift (retail) (epub)

  “Mary, Mother of God, help me.” She screamed at Pampi. “Help me.” He poled on as he had done for days. He did not understand what was happening to her because, as with the child in the hut, she was outside his scheme of things. Had she been a doe or a cow, a woman of his own kind, he would have known what to do. But she was not animal nor human, she was a lord. He would not be surprised if she spontaneously exploded.

  She was exploding. Somewhere ducks were laughing. Pampi kept on watching and poling. Delicately the Devil took the bottom of Matilda’s spine in his talons and tore it apart and up, like a wishbone. “Help me.”

  There were two Matildas now, a blind one that screamed and retched, and one inside the water’s surface which had enfolded her in a tunnel of lights and reflections. Beyond and around the tunnel was mass threatening to crush her. It came inwards, contracting the tunnel and forcing her downwards. Out of the blind Matilda’s lungs came an involuntary huff, a cross between a moan and a belch, universal to mammals in labour.

  It brought movement in the boat and around the poor, suffering outside Matilda carryings, unfoldings, croonings in a strange language. But the inner Matilda had lost interest. Lights in her tunnel flickered and she slipped down towards one that was constant. A contraction that rasped the outer Matilda pushed the inner one to the light’s edge.

  She was looking out on the Fens, but the Fens as she had never seen them and as no adult ever would see them because she was staring at them through unused eyes. It was spring and the river was laid into the turf like marquetry. A warm breeze twisted the willows so that the underside of their leaves showed white. She could smell catkins and small, pale daffodils.

  She was to hold on to the memory of it as “my vision”, though it contained none of the gaudy colours depicting the saints’ revelations on church walls. This landscape was of varying greens and without figures.

  Leaves uncrumpled from the bud in a raw freshness. Sunlight slipped down spiders’ webs, but of the spiders, birds, butterflies and animals there was no sign, although they were there, hiding with God in the arcades of vegetation. The place piped with joy. Trees whispered to one another: “Any moment now”; among the water-lily roots fish and eel-gods opened their mouths to expel bubbles which formed the sounds: “Any moment now”.

  The outer Matilda’s final contraction translated into the inner Matilda’s grief that the landscape was not for her. She delivered her child into it and went away.

  * * *

  “She’s where?” shrieked Berte.

  “It was the nearest hut to the hythe.” Steward Peter was apologetic. “He couldn’t carry them far.”

  Not usually a lissom mover Berte crossed the green in unnoticed strides. She barged her way into Pampi’s hut at the top of the slipway to the Washes. “Where is she? Where is it?” She teetered, unable to decide priorities. Her first love held and she homed to a pile of skins on which lay a flat, still Matilda.

  Berte felt her forehead and stomach and lifted her skirts to make sure she wasn’t haemorrhaging. She wasn’t. Berte whirled round.

  By the central fire lay a wicker tray on which a lump of dough was rising. Implanted into it, like a big sultana, was a naked baby boy curled up and asleep, still soapy and streaked with mucus. Berte’s thick finger rested on the white plastic surface of the dough and then on the tinted flesh of the child. Both were warm. The tiny, blunt nose breathed easily. The cord had been cleanly cut and tied with fishing line.

  Berte moaned, but mainly with frustration that none of the rituals had been observed. Father Alors had gone to the duck hunt. Berte tried to remember the emergency baptism and dipped her fingers into the cauldron over the fire and crossed the baby’s forehead. “Ego te baptizo,” she said awkwardly, “in nomine Patris, Filii et Spirituus Sancti.”

  When they were alone Pampi said to Wilberta: “Wonderful to me they have babies like anyone else, gal. Make as big a fuss and all.”

  “That was a hard birth, bor.” In all the time it had been in her hut Wilberta had not looked directly at the baby. Fenwomen tended their children for the first year but did not name nor show them love. Affection for a child which was as likely to die as to live was poor investment.

  Pampi, however, having delivered the child himself felt he was attached to it as surely as if the fishing line round its navel was tied to his. “That’ll be a lord and a half,” he said. “Proper little slodger. Proper little Fen slodger of a lord.”

  Wilberta grunted and picked up the dough on which the baby had lain, wiped it with her sleeve and took it to the communal bakery at Shudda’s to bake for supper.

  * * *

  When Matilda woke up it was in her own chamber to hear Berte rapping out commands. “You will live here and eat what I tell you…” Underneath her staccato Steward Peter was droning English translation.

  At the end of Matilda’s bed was a large and beautiful woman with Matilda’s baby suckling at one breast. Like an Iceni queen she was tall with red-gold hair, her skin was freckled and creamy. She threw out a calm so soporific she seemed to exude oil on troubled airwaves. Her blue eyes looked incuriously at Matilda and slowly lowered white eyelids and lashes in the longest blink Matilda had ever seen.

  “It’s a boy.” Berte dashed to the bedside. “Lusty and suckling like a piglet. That there’s a wet nurse. It’s a Wealy, the best I could do at short notice. But it’s healthy and has plenty of milk. Just had one itself.” She bustled away and dragged the Wealy woman’s gown away from her other breast for Matilda’s inspection. “See.”

  Now bare to the waist the Celtic woman lit up the chamber like a pollen-dusted lily. Steward Peter, being susceptible to Wealy beauty, banged his head against the wall. Berte squeezed an engorged coral-coloured nipple to produce a squirt of milk. “See.”

  It was the fashion among some high-born women to feed their own babies to avoid the pollution of low-bred milk, but Berte and Matilda had agreed this to be unnatural.

  Matilda looked at her son, his skin and hair almost dark against the wet nurse’s flesh. His chin rose and fell as he sucked and his tiny hand moved against the breast.

  A terrifying emotion rampaged through Matilda. She did not want to touch the child and felt no jealousy; what she wanted was for him always to be protected, as safe and contented as he was now. She could kill for that. Along with that ferocity was something else, a weightiness as if she’d been threaded like a bead on to an infinite necklace.

  “What happened to her baby?”

  Steward Peter said: “It died.”

  “There was a child in one of the huts some weeks ago with a bandaged foot. What happened to it?”

  “It was Ulsi’s boy,” said Steward Peter. “The wound turned putrid. It died.”

  Had the wet nurse’s child or Ulsi’s child stood in the way of her own son she would have mown them down, but they had been beads on the same necklace and she would rather, very much rather, that they had not been taken off. The chanciness of keeping a child breathing in and out brought menace into the room.

  “Send for Sigward,” she said.

  The message for Sigward arrived while he feasted at the king’s table at Winchester. He was already merry and sweating with the food and drink he’d had. As he hauled himself on to the tabletop to shout the news of his son’s birth to the company his face became purple.

  “Lord, Lord,” he screamed and whether he meant the king or God they never knew because as he said it his hands clutched at his upper arms and he fell down to die among the debris of food he’d loved too much.

  Chapter 4

  1136–1139

  Reckoning that he had a claim of some substance on it, Count Geoffrey of Anjou now invaded Normandy. He had, after all, married the Empress Matilda who was the true heir to it.

  And this was where Stephen made his second mistake. Bedevilled by proliferating rebellion in England, he left the Normans to oppose the Angevin invasion by themselves. The Normans were in disarray and in Count Geoffrey they w
ere facing a brilliant strategist.

  They fought him – all good Normans loathed an Angevin – but gradually they were forced further and further back.

  Which left the Anglo-Norman barons owning vast estates on both sides of the Channel in a difficult position. If they fought Geoffrey and were beaten by him they lost their Normandy estates. If they treated with Geoffrey, Stephen would hear of it and they would lose their English estates. It was not a situation that appealed to them.

  Of course, if the Empress left her husband to win Normandy and invaded England on her own behalf there might be possibilities in treating with both of them…

  * * *

  Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, was a venal old man, an immensely rich and powerful old man, once Henry’s viceroy of England and now Stephen’s, but at the moment he was an old man with the wheezes. He sat in his beautiful apartment at his castle of Devizes wrapped in ermine and with his green-veined feet in a silver bowl of mustard-water. A high, musical fluting came from his lungs every time he took breath and mingled with the hiss of apple logs in the wall fireplace and the snoring of the hounds stretched before it.

  Matilda of Risle irrupted into the room bringing with her noise, a dog, two ladies-in-waiting, a child and its wet nurse and a draught.

  “My lord uncle,” she shouted, “I am to be married again.”

  The bishop put one hand over his eye as if she’d shot him in it, the other extended so that she could kiss it. “Daughter in God,” he said, “you are welcobe.” It was a courteous, catarrhal lie. She wasn’t in the least welcome. He had kept her waiting to see him all day in the hope that she’d go away.

  The richness of the chamber reminded Matilda of the old man’s power and she moderated her voice. “My lord uncle” – she stressed the relationship although it was distant – “I am to be married again.”

  “I congratulate you.”

  “No, you don’t.” She brought herself again under control. “My lord, I purchased your goodwill to persuade the king to let me remain in my widowed state. I understood through Osmund” – she nodded virulently to a clerk who was writing away at a desk in the corner – “that the gift of my manor of Tatton would not be displeasing to your lordship and that in exchange you would make the king agree that I marry only when and whom I pleased.”

  “And didn’t I?”

  “It doesn’t look like it, does it?” howled Matilda. “I’m to be married at Lammas, to some novice monk. His father’s a protégé of the Beaumonts.”

  “Ah.” In the whistled exhalation of breath was Bishop Roger’s defeat and Matilda’s, but she didn’t hear it.

  Waleran of Meulan, her own second cousin, had betrayed her. When the king had summoned her to Westminster and told her that she, who was in his wardship as one of his tenants-in-chief, must marry again she had tracked Waleran down and demanded an explanation.

  Untouchable and handsome Waleran had said: “Cousin, allow me to know your best interest.” Her best interest, it appeared, lay with Vincent, son of Serlo de Luard, who had deserved advancement at Waleran’s hands. Matilda and her lands were that advancement.

  “But the land belongs to my lord.” Now that Sigward was dead her lord was a small, sucking baby nestling in the freckled arms of Epona, the Wealy woman.

  “All the more reason why it should be protected by a stepfather during its minority.” He had smiled kindly and in that smile she had seen herself as the Beaumonts saw her, something with no more significance than a skittle in the path of the golden, unstoppable globe that was the will of Waleran of Meulan and his twin.

  She had fought and threatened, but she had been frightened. Her last words: “I shall go to Bishop Roger,” had sounded in her own ears like a child’s: “I’ll tell my father of you.” Waleran had laughed.

  But she had been comforted on her arrival at Devizes by the solidity, newness and grandeur of the bishop’s castle. Roger was still viceroy of England as he had been for as long as anyone could remember. The country was enmeshed in the network of his spies.

  Beyond the castle it was spring, but in the bishop’s chamber it was autumn. It smelled of ink, old men, dogs and wintergreen. Light came in through thin, red linen covering the windows and turned the gilding on the beams and the candlelight to red-gold. The corbels on the ceiling were carved likenesses of the bishop’s fellow-administrators and their distorted, careworn features reproduced the living face of the man underneath. Henry of England had driven his servants hard.

  Bishop Roger wiped his dribbling nose on his ermine sleeve. “Why do you oppose this marriage?”

  She was amazed. She thought the reasons would be self-evident. This particular marriage would enhance neither her lands nor her prestige. She had achieved that rare period in a noblewoman’s life of holding power and she didn’t want to relinquish it. Women were perpetual minors, subject first to their fathers, then their husbands and, if they survived so long, to their sons. But she, as a widow with a small son, could look forward to a dozen or more years in which she could rule their estates herself.

  Besides, she had not found sex so wonderful that she wanted any more of it.

  She plucked a reason at random: “I don’t want another baby.”

  The bishop said mechanically: “It was given only to the Virgin to give birth without pain since she alone conceived without pleasure.”

  “Well, she conceived through her ear.” She’d always thought that vulgar of Mary: weasels conceived through their ears. It was irritating, too, the way men always assumed women found pleasure in copulation. “Anyway, this Vincent person has no lands to speak of.”

  “He is of good birth,” said the bishop calmly, “and if his father is a protégé of Waleran’s he is patronised by a powerful man. Anyone who can steal the Primacy of Canterbury from under Henry of Blois’ nose and give it to his own creature must be powerful indeed.” The bishop’s lips twitched slightly.

  It was still a cause célèbre. Everyone had assumed that when the archbishop died, Canterbury would go to Bishop Henry who had played so large a part in obtaining the throne for his brother. Certainly Henry of Blois had thought so. But one day when he was away from Westminster there had been a rushed but legal election in the king’s presence and Henry of Blois had returned to find that the new archbishop was an unknown, Theobald of Bee – a friend of Waleran of Meulan.

  It had been an amazing and dirty trick but those who did not like Henry of Blois had seen its comic side.

  “He’s not more powerful than you, my lord.” Matilda was becoming frightened again. “My lord, you can do anything.”

  “After all” – the bishop raised his shoulders to get some air into his concave chest – “it is no disgrace to rise from humble beginnings.” He himself had been a humble priest at Avranches who had first impressed King Henry by his ability to say mass quicker than anyone else.

  “Do you stop this marriage?” Matilda rose and her dog, Fen, rose beside her and snarled. “Do I take back Tatton or not?”

  The door of the chamber flung open and another angry woman, Maud of Ramsbury, came in followed by the king’s messenger. “I can tell you this much,” said Maud, “he’s not bloody going.”

  Stephen’s messenger was elegant and well-born. He looked round the beautiful room as if he had one like it at home. Matilda had not considered the bishop’s bare feet in their bowl to be ridiculous until this young man looked at them. Maud of Ramsbury also followed his eyes and shifted the bowl so that it slopped, jerking the bishop’s feet into her lap and towelling them on her gown.

  The message had as little respect as its bearer. “Stephen the King to his Bishop of Salisbury, greetings. We command that you, with Nigel, Bishop of Ely, Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, and Roger the Chancellor attend us in council in three days at Oxford.” The messenger went out. That was it.

  Only Roger’s breathing could be heard going faster. “Did we have intelligence of this council?”

  Osmund came from behind his desk. �
�No, my lord. And I don’t like it. Perhaps the king is beginning to listen to the Beaumonts’ accusations that you and your family are planning to support the Empress’ claim.”

  “How can he say that?” Maud was rubbing the bishop’s feet until they were pink and shouting at Osmund as if he and not the Beaumonts had spread the rumour. “Didn’t the bishop do more to help Stephen to the throne than that bloody Waleran did?”

  The bishop looked up at the anxious wooden faces on his ceiling. “Henry won’t forgive, even from the grave, that I betrayed his daughter. But how could we have a woman on the throne? Worse still, a woman under the influence of Anjou?”

  Maud sulked. “He’s not bloody going.”

  Everything about Maud of Ramsbury was coarse, from her big feet to her waist to her thick, grey hair worn loose like a maiden which, though she was unmarried, she assuredly was not. Matilda had always been surprised the bishop tolerated her. The mistresses of most great churchmen were beautiful, retiring and discreet. Maud was none of these things. Nobody had dislodged her from her position in Roger’s household partly because the old king had liked her, as he’d liked all unpretentious people, and partly because the bishop never gainsaid her. When she interrupted his councils and swore in his company he would stare into the middle distance, humming slightly. Now, in any case, she had outlived social disapproval and become an institution. “Old Maud.” The present chancellor, Roger the Poor, was her son by the bishop and there was a strong suspicion that Nigel and Alexander, the Bishops of Ely and Lincoln, known as “nephews”, were also their bastards.

  It was a peculiarity of their relationship that the bishop and Maud never directly spoke to each other in company, addressing their remarks to one another through a third party. Roger’s hand went to rest on Maud’s shoulder but his words were to Osmund. “I am disinclined for this journey, though I shall have to make it. I shall be about as fit at court as a colt in battle.”