The Morning Gift

by The Morning Gift (retail) (epub)

  She hated these artisans who waved the king’s warrant at her. She did not listen to their explanation that Dungesey’s was to be just one of a series of keeps overlooking the Fens. They were hounding her, Matilda, personally. She felt frightened and ridiculous, like a hare which leaps and doubles to throw off pursuit and has frozen into her forme only to hear the hunter say: “Peep-bo.”

  The mercenary understood her panic; the Fen people had talked to him; he shared sufficient of its people’s language to be understood and to understand. “If you wish to conceal your son here,” he said gently, “the king won’t hear of it from us. We are the king’s builders, not his informers.”

  That they knew her secret infuriated Matilda more. She picked up the nearest object, a candlestick, and threw it. Willem caught it and put it on the floor.

  “Elm,” muttered Fenchel, “tell her about the elm, for Chrissake.”

  “Lady,” Willem was placatory, “we’re bringing elm from the uplands for the supports, so we’ll only need to cut down half your pigwoods.”

  She caught the words “cut” and “pigwoods” and looked round for another missile. A stool came skidding at them. “I shall be ruined. Ruined.”

  Between the manor and Perecourt was now a huge and raw ditch from which the displaced earth was being rammed tight into a mound. The tower keep which would surmount this motte would rise above the height of the highest oaks providing a landmark for miles around. The secret island was being exposed.

  Piles of stone and rubble were everywhere. Men carried buckets of nails. Scaffolding was being erected. The noise of shouts and rattles was dominated by the piercing squeal of the treadmill gin which was taking blocks of stone to the site. Steward Peter was having a nervous breakdown and her English, pressed into service as labourers, were complaining they couldn’t get on with their embanking or mole-catching or whatever foul activity they indulged in at this time of year. And she had to pay for it.

  Percy of Alleyn had heard Matilda’s screaming and came into the hall, followed by Edmund. Willem of Ghent turned to him. “Tell her,” he said, “tell her I’m the king’s officer, not his nark. If she wants to stay here incognito with the boy it’s all right by me.”

  Edmund said: “Hello, Fenchel. Hello, Willem.”

  They grinned back at him. “Hello, my lord slodger.”

  Percy of Alleyn, as always, calmed Matilda down. In her distress at the invasion of her island she had barely noticed her son. He trotted over to her now and she hugged him. He looked extraordinarily healthy and was growing fast. He seemed on good terms with these brutes; one of the disadvantages in keeping him out of good society was that he would form unsuitable relationships with the lower orders.

  Now that she was free again, she supposed she could take him away, to Hatfelde maybe. She could treat with the king to see that she wasn’t married again, and this time ensure that he kept his word. But she was so tired.

  She collapsed into the great chair. The terrible time with Vincent had drained her. She had no energy to make plans. Anyway, it was nearly winter and the roads would be bad for travel.

  For the time being she would have to stay where she was.

  * * *

  Brien Fitz Count had been right. His castle at Wallingford was of strategic importance, straddling as it did the main lines of communication to southern England from the Midlands and holding the key to London. Having isolated the Empress in the West Country Stephen immediately marched on Wallingford and besieged it, building towers outside to pin down the garrison inside. Then he marched on Bristol. But while he was on his way and taking the castles of South Cerney, Malmesbury and Trowbridge, Miles of Gloucester circled his flank to relieve Wallingford and make threatening noises at London. Stephen’s army whipped round and started back. But before it could reach Wallingford Miles of Gloucester retreated and diverted Stephen by sacking Worcester and escaping again without fighting a battle.

  It was bull-baiting with the Empress’ smaller forces drawing the bull’s attention away from each other and then darting in again. While such tactics weakened Stephen they weren’t achieving anything definite for the Empress’ cause. Of course, the countryside around each disputed castle was being devastated, soldiers were raping the local women and peasants were starving, but nobody was getting anywhere. Which left most of England’s barons not knowing what to do and subsequently doing nothing at all.

  * * *

  Actually Matilda enjoyed that autumn and winter. The end of October was a St. Martin’s summer and she spent most of it out on the fens with Edmund to avoid the noise surrounding her hall, lulled by drifting water and Jodi’s lute. They picnicked under alders and watched sand-martins gather in the osier beds. Swallows flicked along the streams taking the gnats which danced above the surface. White cattle with black noses plodded along the skylines of the droves, some to be slaughtered, some heading for the higher pastures where, with luck, they would escape the winter flooding.

  She and Edmund picked cranberries from red stems arched above the moss. She spent one afternoon with her back against a warm wall of peat bricks staring down into one of the pits from which they had been dug. Water had seeped into it and as the sun slanted it became a rectangle of amber in which a stray reed was preserved like a gold pin.

  Fenchel was glad of her absence, but the mercenary from Ghent noted her departure each morning and made sure she was home safe each evening before he retired to his hut.

  Ten days after her arrival at Dungesey she sought out the two men on the site of the motte. “You.” She was addressing Fenchel. “Are you this monstrosity’s mason?”

  Fenchel’s bowed shoulders humped. Willem answered for him. “He is.”

  “Then you can build a necessarium into it. In a cupboard, with a chute. A garderobe like they have at Devizes.” She would turn some part of this cost to her advantage.

  To the mercenary’s surprise Fenchel did not protest. He was intrigued by the modernity of the idea. He produced a slate from under his apron and a piece of chalk from behind his ear. “It wouldn’t take much, Willem. There’d be a runnel down the motte to a cesspit in the ditch and the chute itself could be corbelled out…”

  “I do not wish for details.” Matilda’s voice cut through his calculations. “Do it.”

  Her youth and energy had come back; the sky and fens were full of game and the rivers full of fish. With Fen and a scratch pack of hounds she took her household hunting otter. On one glorious morning Fen ran down and tore the throat out of a young roe hind.

  Through her son she was led into commoners’ sport. At first she was distressed by the extent of Edmund’s familiarity with the islanders and their ways, but Percy of Alleyn reassured her. “They love him and he’s safe with them. Father Alors teaches him his table manners and catechism. I’m teaching him to master the sword and the horse. He’ll not be the worst for knowing extra.”

  Nevertheless she lectured the child when he wanted her to go eel-glaiving with him. “Never forget you are a great lord, my son, and should follow noble pursuits.”

  He said stolidly: “I know I’m a lord. I like the chase. But eel-glaiving’s fun.”

  And it was. There are many unpleasanter ways of spending a warm autumn afternoon than standing under the willows of Fleam Dyke watching the pools of a river for the smoke of disturbed mud and the wavering silver which is an eel. Epona, who had become part of the household, wielded her glaive with absent-minded expertise and awoke Matilda’s competitiveness. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. The twelve-foot ashpole with its flat leaves of serrated iron was heavy and the eel a slippery adversary. “If he gets his teeth in your finger he never lets go,” said her son, “even if you cut his head off. And there’s an eel king, isn’t there, ’Pony? If you catch him you make him pay you a bushel of silver to let him go. Eels are magic.” With the small glaive Pampi had made for him the boy was nearly as expert as Epona and only less successful because he wouldn’t keep still. At one point he fell in t
he river. When it transpired that he could swim Matilda was immediately relieved and then disapproving. River-bathing was unhealthy. She forbade him to do it again.

  On the whole she was pleased with her son. He had his father’s appetite without his father’s fatness, and his mother’s ability to grasp estate management. Also, Matilda discovered, he had sense of his own worth. The camaraderie with islanders and commoners was, she now saw, proprietorial. “Shudda will do it for me.” “I’ll take Pampi with me.” “I shan’t allow Vag (Badda’s son) to come: he’s too stupid.” They were his Fens and his people.

  His approach was different from Matilda’s who kept aloof from all commoners except Berte in the fear that serfs might “take advantage”. What advantage they would take she didn’t know but feared they would take it anyway. Edmund lessened the distance between the peasants and himself without decreasing his precedence. She supposed it was his Saxon blood. Although the islanders teased the child and called him “slodger”, an attitude and title she found offensive, they also indulged him. “It’s the English way,” Steward Peter told her.

  That afternoon Matilda managed to mangle one eel. She carried it home in triumph and made the cook put it in a pie.

  But if eel-glaiving was fun there was a purity about wildfowling which captivated Matilda for the rest of her life. They crouched in punts below the reeds between two voids of marsh and sky in a limbo from which it seemed they would never escape. It was a bit like grandmother’s footsteps; the dawn crept up with stealth, apparently unchanging and yet, every time you looked, adding one more transparency to the horizon behind the spikes of the rushes.

  A water-rail gave its cry which starts with a grunt and ends in a squeal like a pig’s – and woke up the sky. They came in strata, whooper swans highest, then pink-footed geese, then mallards, smew, golden-eye and pochard, menacing in their numbers and even more in their noise; not so much the honking, shrieking, fluting of their calls, but in the whiffling sound which is also sensation as air is shifted by hundreds of thousands of wings.

  The arrows whipping up were not shot in cruelty nor even, in Matilda’s case, for food but carried an invisible line by which the wingless, finless humans on their punts could overpower the magic of the birds and bring down to themselves some of their beauty.

  November was first warm and clear and then cold and clear. Fenchel and the mercenary took themselves off to prepare the site of another motte, this time at Burwell in the southern Fens. They gave careful instructions to the Dungesey labourers on the work to be done in their absence. The islanders listened, nodding. They realised the two men were carrying out their orders with as much humanity as possible – they had not used all the Dungesey men all the time, they had allowed the pigs to eat the acorns of Hogwood before felling half of it. Nevertheless as soon as Fenchel and Willem were out of sight the islanders downed tools and got on with their own neglected work. The tower on the motte stopped growing.

  Matilda, who disliked Fenchel and had contempt for the mercenary, was glad to see them go for several reasons – one of which was Berte.

  “You realise you are committing mortal sin,” Matilda told her. Somewhere back in Anjou Berte had a husband and grown-up children. “And God won’t only punish you for it but me as well; I’m responsible for you.”

  Berte was ashamed and furious. “That old fart of a priest’s been poking his nose.”

  “Never mind who told me.” Berte was right: Father Alors had discovered and informed on a liaison between Berte and Fenchel. “At your age.”

  “Just ’cause you don’t like it. If God hadn’t wanted us to do it he shouldn’t have given women a hole and men something to stick in it.”

  “You’re disgusting. Get out.”

  At the door Berte turned: “And you could do with a proper man and all.”

  “Back to Anjou you go,” hissed Matilda.

  Their quarrels, which averaged one a year, always ended with Matilda sacking and Berte packing. Both resolutions failed at that point and for a week neither would talk to the other until some household emergency came up which necessitated a strained exchange after which they both relaxed and forgot. Father Alors insisted that Berte do a bread-and-water penance for a week for her sin in sleeping with the mason, a diet which did her no harm. She sulked through it. She told the cook: “She never said nothing to that Wealy woman” – Berte was jealous of Edmund’s affection for Epona – “and she’s been through them masons like measles.”

  As frost and ice came in with December Fenchel and the mercenary returned to Dungesey for Christmas. Matilda was dismayed. In obedience to the king’s warrant she had to house and feed them, but although she knew the mason’s reason for coming back – she forbade Berte to have anything to do with him – she could not guess at the mercenary’s. She suspected he was a spy. “Discover his motives,” she told Alleyn. “Simulate friendship for the swine.”

  Alleyn did not have to simulate it; he had already overcome his prejudice against mercenaries when he’d found Willem of Ghent’s military expertise. The two of them had spent pleasant evenings in Fenchel’s mason’s lodge at the foot of the motte, swopping soldiers’ stories. He went down there now for another: “What news?”

  “The Bishop of Salisbury’s dead. Raving mad at the end, they say.”

  Fenchel grunted. “Poor old bugger. I can’t judge him as a bishop but he knew how to build.”

  “And we came through Ely on the way up. It looks as if Bishop Nigel’s out for revenge and will declare for the Empress. From the amount of stuff going in through the gates I’d say he was stocking for a siege.”

  Percy of Alleyn was disturbed. The war was getting too close to his lady for comfort. He looked for reassurance. “I thought nobody could ever get close enough to Ely to siege it. It’s never fallen through assault.”

  “It’s fallen through treachery often enough.”

  Christmas passed pleasantly, though on a smaller scale than Matilda was used to. Epiphany brought weather so cold that the rivers froze and put all travel out of the question.

  Somewhat against her will she was persuaded to attend the Festival of St. Wendreda at Ugg Mere. “To watch a lot of peasants skate?” she asked. Although St. Wendreda was not a saint with whom Matilda was personally acquainted she knew she was powerful in this area and celebrated in a peculiarly local way. Her bones had converted Canute to Christianity and were a cure for ague. Pampi had made Edmund a pair of ox-bone skates which the boy wanted to use in the races. Even Father Alors thought they ought to honour the saint and attend. But it was Adeliza, with uncharacteristic cunning, who clinched the matter. “The Abbot of Ramsey is bound to be there.”

  The darkness was so cold it was metallic and crackled. As they turned into the Nene a sheen came over the ice and one of the men drawing Matilda’s sledge began to whistle. At the rear the Wealas started to sing. Ducks, hoping the water had become fluid, landed, skidded, and took off again.

  The sun came up behind them and for a while the world turned delicious, the river acquiring the hue of crystallised pear; the bare trees were angelica and the sky was hung with plum and strips of apple peel.

  Her nose freezing over the top of her furs, Matilda looked with disfavour at her English stumping along ahead of her. They did not seem to possess festal costume as Norman peasants did; they merely put on something marginally cleaner than usual. She had seen prettier hounds on a winter’s day. She shouted, “Go faster,” in English (of necessity she was picking up their barbarous tongue) but they muttered reassuringly and kept their pace. Edmund, sitting between her and Fen, said: “We can’t tire out the skaters before the races, mother.”

  Matilda expelled a breath which steamed exasperation, but said nothing more.

  Though half the size of Whittlesey, Ugg Mere was enormous and across on its north shore the fishing hamlets showed up in untidy prickles of masts and trees. The south had no shore to speak of, just acres of marsh which disintegrated into the water of the mere a
nd popped up here and there in tiny islands. Usually it was bleak, its edges trampled by cattle coming to drink. Today each island had a bonfire burning in its centre round which stood a ring of people and around them, on the frozen water, swirled skaters warming up. Matilda was amazed at the numbers. The Fen population averaged two or three people each square mile, but today it was here. Hermits had left their bridges, monks and nuns had emerged from their communities to cheer on their fancied skaters, pedlars, ale-wives, mead-makers had come to sell their goods, villages had turned out en masse. The air steamed with the smell of roasting chestnuts and with the oxen and sheep turning on their spits dropping their fat into glowing charcoal. It was all very bucolic. Matilda could see no sign of Abbot Walter. “This,” she said to Adeliza, “will be a bore.”

  Three hours later the two of them, with Edmund holding their crossed hands, were skimming over ice screaming with joy, drunk on mead and exhilaration. Edmund had won the boys’ race. A shape she had been avoiding for weeks splintered the ice as it stamped towards her.

  “Request a war council, commander,” boomed Stunta.

  Matilda waved her free hand at him and zoomed off. “Later.”

  The race courses were winding and complex; it was difficult for the uninitiated to appreciate who was winning what, but it was apparent that the majority of winners were Ramsey men. Her son was upset about it. She felt vaguely that her Dungesey men could have done better.

  She caught a glimpse of Pampi in a group of men and heard him say: “It may be scientific, abbot, but we say it’s wholly cheating.” Matilda’s toes turned inwards and she stopped. A familiar voice came out of the group: “Well, I did wonder, but there’s nothing in the rules…” The peasants dispersed but the abbot, holding some skates in his hand, went on with his explanation to Matilda. “…antler horn is a harder substance than ox shin and makes a sharper edge.”