The Morning Gift

by The Morning Gift (retail) (epub)

  He looked at the map, counting up her inheritance and dowry. “I’ll see.” Then she knew he would make a king. Another boy would have gained her support with an impulsive promise. Stephen would have made it – had made it, and broken it. To hold power over a petitioner by keeping him or her in suspense was the legacy from the Conqueror and Henry Beauclerk. Stephen still hadn’t learned it: this child had it in his bones. She looked at him with respect and resentment. “Then why should I help you?”

  “Because I’m going to win.”

  Boots were running up the passage, the door swung back until it hit the wall and a sergeant-at-arms came in with a soldier behind him. The sergeant was mopping his neck. “You haven’t half caused me bother,” he said, “and you won’t be no favourite with the master-at-arms, neither. That’s twice you’ve missed sword practice and you aren’t good enough yet to miss any.” He added as an afterthought: “My lord.” He spoke with a thick Angevin accent, but he had the authority which all good military instructors have over their pupils, princes or not. The leopards of Geoffrey Plantagenet were embroidered across his surcoat.

  He broke the spell. Like an enchanter the boy had made himself seem adult; now Matilda saw she had been discussing tactics with a child. He sucked in his breath and his face went a mulberry colour in ugly contrast to the carrot-red of his hair. “You humiliate me, you bugger…” He’d lost control. He charged the sergeant, arms whirling, shrieking language no boy of seven should have known. The sergeant sidestepped, picked the boy up by his belt and handed him to the soldier. “Get him down the tilt-yard.”

  They listened to the boy’s incoherent howls diminish into the distance until the echoes came back as the mewing of a demented cat. The sergeant looked abashed. “Sorry for that, my lady. Wants a bit of handling, does Fitzempress.”

  “He wants a smacked bottom.” She was disgusted at herself for taking a little boy so seriously.

  At that the sergeant looked concerned and stepped closer. “You mustn’t think he’s spoiled, lady. His temper’s wicked, we know, but it’s due to his brain working so fast – causes friction. We reckon that’s singed his hair for it were black when he was born.” He was still worried she’d got the wrong impression. “He’s not a bad swordsman really and there’s not a cowardly bone in his body. It’s just he reckons you can beat an opponent by thinking. Gets it from that old Vegetary he’s always reading. He reads, you know.” If the boy did it while sitting on thin air the sergeant couldn’t have worshipped him more.

  When the earl and Brien Fitz Count returned they brought a sharp message from the Empress: “We accept your personal goodwill, but you must prove it. We will not tolerate those who sit safely on their demesne and leave us to fight. Those who support us in England must remain in England. If they do not hold their lands for us they will not later hold them for themselves.”

  It committed the Empress to nothing. But then, Matilda wasn’t committed either: she could always withdraw her offer.

  Nevertheless, as she sailed back, she felt she had perched herself nicely on the fence and done good work for Edmund. Now she must watch to see which side triumphed – and not become pregnant.

  * * *

  At the gates of Haut-des-Puys she was met by her steward in an agony of divided loyalty. As Vincent’s health worsened Serlo was stripping the manor of its assets and giving them to the Abbey of Fécamp in return for its prayers. “Our best bull has gone, my lady, the mill is to grind Fécamp’s corn free of charge, the monks are pasturing their sheep on our land to the detriment of our flock.” Like all good stewards, he couldn’t bear the depredation of the estate in his care and out of which he lined his own pocket.

  Matilda was haring up the steps to the hall before he’d finished. In the doorway she collided with Serlo, about to hare down. She began shouting at him, too furious to realise he was in a fury of his own. Anger clashed with anger. Servants gathered in the courtyard to listen. It was Matilda who stopped first, some sense of what Serlo was yelling having permeated her brain. Serlo’s voice rang out alone. “…and I demand you dismiss that pale-haired trollop from your service.”

  “Adeliza?” There was only one blonde among Matilda’s ladies.

  “My son’s essential fluids must not be dissipated. They must be directed towards begetting a legitimate heir.”

  “Adeliza and Vincent?” She pushed past him and went straight to the solar where Adeliza fell on the floor before her and sobbed on to Matilda’s ankles. “Don’t send me home in shame. It’s so awful. I’ll die. It wasn’t my fault.”

  Matilda hoisted her up and sat her down rubbing her back. “Nobody shall send you away.” Adeliza had always reminded her of a primrose, innocent, gently scented and quick to become limp. She wouldn’t have her bullied by these men.

  With frequent explosions of distress the story took time. In Matilda’s absence Vincent had sought Adeliza’s company. “We were never alone, ’Tildy, I promise… he seemed so unwell and so sweet.”

  Sweet? It was time Adeliza was married; a pity the husbands chosen for her by her family kept dying before the marriage. “Go on.”

  On the night before last the other women had left the solar to go down to the hall and see a pedlar selling embroidery silks, leaving Adeliza and Vincent alone. “I had enough silks and am on my tapestry anyway…”

  “Get on.”

  She began to cry again and her account was so allusive Matilda had trouble piecing it together. Eventually Adeliza had heard Vincent’s breathing close behind her, heavier than usual. “He was muttering to himself from the Holy Book.”

  “Song of Solomon?”

  “How did you know?” She looked up. “It’s not funny.”

  “Get on.”

  Suddenly Vincent’s hand had plunged down the front of her dress. “The shock. I didn’t know he was like that…” She’d jerked away from him, tearing her dress and run screaming out of the room to bump straight into Serlo. “And he – I couldn’t believe it – he blamed me.”

  “He would.” Serlo’s usually practical mind had built an idealised picture of his son’s marriage. If he were to retain it he had to find a scapegoat. “Essential fluids,” thought Matilda angrily, “I could tell him what happens to his son’s essential fluids.”

  “Make it all right again, ’Tildy.”

  “I shall.”

  There was anger and hard words from both sides before the matter was settled, but Matilda was aided by the fact that essentially Serlo was a fair man. He had to recognise that Vincent was not just interested in Adeliza but was equally prepared to fumble any other blonde as well.

  There had been a dreadful change in Vincent since Matilda saw him last. As his health worsened his sexuality became rampant, as if the old Adam in him was looking for its last chance. He had no interest in society, ignoring Matilda and even his father. At table he sat in an invisible cubicle, muttering and praying as lust and fear of it warred in his head. Only the sight of a fair-haired woman, no matter of what age, size or beauty, evinced attention from him. It could be Adeliza, though she was now kept out of his way, or a servant or a villein’s wife glimpsed down the end of the room. He had found his type; Matilda thanked God her own hair was dark.

  “My lord, he is very ill,” Matilda said to Serlo. “He should go somewhere where he won’t be distracted like this. Fécamp perhaps.”

  Serlo refused to think of it. “He can still act the man.”

  Matilda doubted it. There was no more Song of Solomon. Quite often now Vincent didn’t come to bed until the early hours; she suspected him of roaming the sleeping castle looking for blondes. When he did come there was no attempt at intimacy; he would pull her out of bed to kneel beside him in penitential prayers so long that Matilda often fell asleep with her head against the side of the bed. Even so she was grateful for this form of contraception.

  Whether Serlo suspected what was going on in the nuptial chamber Matilda wasn’t sure. She thought not. When they met each day his e
yes would go to her waistline in case it should have swelled in the night. Time was running out, and he knew it.

  Ten days after they had moved on to the castle at Échappe, they were celebrating the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary when a page knelt by Matilda’s place at the top table and proffered a chalice. “With the compliments of the Lord Serlo, my lady.” In the chalice was a thick red liquid on the top of which swirled patterning of light pink. “What is it?”

  “Drink it.” Serlo was drunk. “It’s the blood of a she-hare mixed with its curdled milk. It causes conception. Drink it.”

  “I will not.”

  He was on his feet and behind her so fast she didn’t have time to knock the chalice out of the page’s hand. His arm came round her throat and forced her head back. She felt the metal click against her teeth. “Drink it.”

  She drank it. When she opened her eyes Serlo was back in his place and the hall was quiet. One hundred pairs of eyes were looking at her. She left the hall. In the dark passage outside she began to heave. Nearby was a large earthenware pot of lavender put to sweeten the air; she vomited into it and went on vomiting until she was afraid she was retching up her own blood. There was a whimper and her dog Fen put her nose into Matilda’s hand. Matilda slid down the wall to sit on the flags, put her arm round the bitch’s neck and wiped her face and eyes in her fur. “We won again.” She shook with the misery of the victory.

  Much later that night she woke up to find that a giant harvest moon was lighting the chamber and throwing a long shadow from the mullion of the window across the floor. The three-hour candle was guttering which meant it was about two in the morning. The air was still warm from the heat of the day and carried the smell of scythed wheat and barley. It was a beautiful night. Matilda lay tense, waiting for the breathing and shuffling step of her husband to come up the passage outside. He was beginning to frighten her. But there was silence.

  “Perhaps he’s out in the courtyard.” Perhaps some succubus had entered his body, perhaps he was sidling along the wall below or even climbing it like a fly. She didn’t want to look: she couldn’t bear not to.

  She got up and went to the window. Fen joined her, putting her spindly paws on the sill so that woman and bitch looked out together.

  Échappe was perched on the terrace of a hillside overlooking a tributary of the Seine; around and above it were irregular step fields flattened out of forest. The night was so replete with late summer that one more nightingale, one more scent of fruit and corn, one more pale flower, one more moth flying into the cresset down in the bailey, would have sent it into over-ripeness.

  The roofscape of thatch and tiles below her was given the uniform quality of soft metal by the moon, like breathed-on lead. The octagon of the dovecote, the saddle of the church, the well-head’s triangle and the beehives of the servant’s huts sent a mingling of geometric shadows on to the cobbles.

  The sound began deep in the register of the frogs by the river and climbed until it throbbed over the fields. The earth had cracked and was allowing Hell to seep out. Pain, triumph and guilt from one throat held Échappe and the moon taut as if the night might implode from the pressure of the noise. It cut off. But the air and those who’d heard it still quivered.

  Fen bared her teeth. Matilda ran to the door, not to find out what it was – she knew what it was – but to be among people.

  There were already frightened servants in the passage. Percy of Alleyn came running – he was always there when she needed him – and looked beyond her into the empty chamber. He bundled her in his cloak and together they went down the turret stair to the bailey, others joining them as they went. The bailey rattled with questions and the swearing of men who’d been frightened.

  Serlo was standing and glaring on the hall steps. Alleyn told him: “The Lord Vincent is not in his room.”

  The gates were unbarred and the watchman gave a torch to Serlo; almost the entire population of Échappe followed him into the fields, nobody wanted to be alone. The supernatural was loose.

  Something large and white scuttled beneath the overhang of a hedge. First one person saw it, then another. Serlo ordered two men-at-arms to fetch it. Their eyes rolled, but they obeyed him.

  Crickets stridulated in the stooks of corn which cast shadows over the dusty-white stubble; Matilda’s bare ankles were scratched from the stalks. She was conscious that eyes glanced at her, but she felt nothing.

  Between them the men-at-arms dragged a body with long hair which, like everything else that was yellow that night, was turned white. “Not Adeliza, I beg you,” prayed Matilda. But when Serlo’s hand jerked the head back by its hair the face was broad, with a snub nose, one of the hundreds of faces from this and other estates half-glimpsed from a window or as their owners curtsied to her passing. It might have been pretty but now terror had bared its teeth and dilated the nostrils. Serlo jerked his fist again. “Where is he?”

  The girl was beyond speech but her eyes instinctively went to the top of the field and there, behind a stook, they found Vincent on the ground with his robe up around his waist. He was on his back where the girl had pushed his body off hers. Despite his lack of trousers, death had returned his dignity. He looked calm, as if he were listening to the nightingales.

  Matilda watched Serlo take off his cloak and cover his son. She saw him take a dagger from his boot and advance on the girl.

  He must not kill her, she thought. It would make too much noise, and she was so tired. Besides, the girl was her property and Serlo had no right over that any longer. She signalled to Percy of Alleyn to stop him and Alleyn, respectfully but firmly, took the dagger away.

  “Who is she?” She was so deathly tired she could barely form the words.

  “The farrier’s daughter.”

  Matilda yawned. “She may have conceived,” she told Serlo. “A bastard is better than no son at all.”

  They took Vincent to Fécamp for burial. Serlo cried from the “Requiem aeternem dona eis” to the “Requiescat in pace.” Matilda prayed hard for the young corruptible who had now put on incorruption, and for herself who could feel nothing but relief that he had done so.

  Later she granted Serlo a final audience. Kindly, because he had no son to go back to and she had, she said: “The bull must be returned to Haut-des-Puys, and the abbey pay the rate for grinding its corn. However, in memory of my late lord, your son, Fécamp may pasture its sheep on the high slope in winter. And if the farrier’s daughter turns out to be pregnant you may accept her as my gift.”

  One must, after all, be generous to a defeated enemy, and she was a magnanimous woman, thanks be to God.

  Chapter 6

  1139–1140

  The Empress invaded England at the end of September and landed, as Matilda had suspected, at Arundel.

  Within days the Empress was surrounded. Her ally at Arundel, at whose invitation she had landed there, was her young stepmother, whom Henry the First had married in his dotage hoping still to breed a legitimate son. In a brilliantly fast move Stephen besieged Arundel, frightening the little stepmother who handed the Empress to him.

  The war was over. Or it would have been if Stephen hadn’t then let the Empress go and politely seen her escorted safely to Robert of Gloucester’s castle at Bristol.

  Why he did it nobody then or ever understood. Some say Henry of Blois persuaded him it would be better to have all his enemies isolated in the West Country – by this time nobody was sure whose side the Bishop of Winchester was on. Perhaps it was chivalry.

  The war was on again and Stephen’s chance of nipping it in the bud had gone for ever.

  * * *

  About the time that the Empress was crossing the Channel, Matilda of Risle and a small household were heading for England by the more dangerous route from Gravelines to the Wash. She had chosen her ship and shipmaster with care. Both had to be worthy to cope with the North Sea and the shipmaster had to be a man she could trust with a project she had in mind for the future.

&n
bsp; She chose well. Turold was an Anglo-Saxon equally at home on the Continent. He was both a trader and a smuggler and had allegiance to no one, especially not to those who put tolls on the cargoes of poor merchantmen. He respected nobody except Jesus, who had shown himself a super-sailor by treading the sea. But he warmed to Matilda when she indicated that she wished the authorities not to notice her arrival in England. “Don’t we all, my duck,” he said.

  By the end of the voyage the two of them were having long and curious discussions over an arrangement which would, when the time was right, involve passwords, money, secret messages and a fishing hamlet on the Wash rejoicing in the name of Cradge.

  It was there that he landed her and there, impatient as she was to see her son, Matilda spent time in other long and curious discussions with its people which again involved the exchange of monies and the arrangement of passwords, secret messages and cargo.

  The view from the “cradge”, the English for sea-wall, was of desolate stretches of silt and sea like ruled lines at the bottom of limitless parchment which folded at the horizon to sweep back in a way that made Matilda want to duck. The only windows in the Cradgers’ huts looked landwards and they spoke of the sea as of a capricious ruler. It held monsters, they told her, which came ashore to carry off children, and green-headed, fish-tailed mermen. She noticed that several of their children had web-fingers and toes. They served her party with a delicacy they called samphire which grew beyond the sea-wall and smelled of sulphur and made Adeliza sick.

  It was in a mood of self-congratulation that she finally stepped ashore on her morning gift of Dungesey to find that the king was building a castle on it.

  * * *

  “It’s not a castle, my lady,” said Willem of Ghent wearily for the fourth time, “it’s a tower on a motte surrounded by a bailey.”

  “But it sticks up,” screeched Matilda.

  “That’s towers all over,” Fenchel muttered so that only Willem of Ghent could hear him. Matilda made him nervous, not because she was in a rage – though indeed she was – but because he would have been as easy in the company of anthropophagi as he was in women of Matilda’s class.