* * *
Matilda looked incredulously at the little woman who greeted her into Wallingford Castle. “Maud?” She recovered her manners. “My Lady Matilda.” But Maud did not repeat the my-Lady-Matilda joke; there was no joking left in her. The unborn baby she carried might have been a succubus taking the goodness from her bones; her mouth had fallen into puckered lines and the eyes which had been lively boot-buttons stared wearily at nothing.
When they were settled in the keep solar, Matilda asked: “Was the siege as bad as all that?”
It had been as bad as all that. Wallingford had been sieged on and off almost since the war started and in all that time Maud had commanded it. Every time the siege was lifted Brien Fitz Count had come back, impregnated his wife and then gone off to rejoin the Empress. Maud of Wallingford said none of this. She said: “It was an honour to serve the Empress.” She wasn’t joking. The health of poking fun at the Empress had drained out with the rest. To avoid hating the woman who took her husband away from her, Maud had become her acolyte too.
“I bet it wasn’t as bad as what I’ve been through, eh Adeliza?” and Matilda launched into her tale, ending with her usual: “But I did not consent.”
“I am sure you did not.” Maud was polite and vague. She hauled herself up. “If you’ll excuse me I’ll go and see to the sleeping arrangements.”
She went out and Matilda cried. She wanted Percy of Alleyn. She wanted Berte and Jodi. She wanted her son. She wanted her old life back and all the people in it who had made it safe.
Adeliza cradled her. “You’ve still got me, ’Tildy. ’Tildy.”
“Yes?”
“Let’s go to Normandy. Count Geoffrey nearly owns it now. He’ll welcome you. We can join all the others and everything will be like it used to.”
Matilda wiped her eyes. “You go if you want to. It’s time you were married. I’m staying here. Somebody’s got to protect Edmund’s lands in this mess.”
The solar, once a light-filled, fan-vaulted circle, a woman’s place, was full of war. Its windows had been bricked in to become arrow slits, ladies’ embroidery frames stood among clumps of spears. The cradle waiting for its occupant had rolls of rags in it for the bandaging of male wounds. Matilda sighed for the lost symmetry of things.
* * *
At Oxford, Gervase of Holborn was becoming uneasy. The court was disintegrating. Robert, Earl of Gloucester, had left it for Normandy to try and persuade Count Geoffrey Plantagenet to come to England and fight on his wife’s behalf.
The moment he’d gone the Empress’ supporters began to slip away. They weren’t defecting to Stephen, but Stephen was attacking from the south and threatening their homes and they had to defend them.
If the gaps they left were dangerous, so were the men who came to fill them. Mercenaries of all kinds began to make an appearance – and were received. The Empress was desperate. For the first time she was forced to employ men on whom, a few weeks earlier, she would not have wiped her boots. She did it with disdain, but it was a seller’s market; the mercenaries took her insults and upped their price.
Since the Empress was ashamed of these transactions, she conducted them in secret and Gervase had to bribe her chamberlain to keep tabs on what was going on. The chamberlain was eager to unburden himself: “I never thought I would see such things, never. She’s sent this German brute, Fitz Hildebrand, to recover the treasury at Winchester for her. He’s a known killer, you know. I never thought… and these scum don’t just want money, you know. They want estates – and they’re getting them. Her father would spin in his… and there’s another one down in the hall this minute. She keeps them waiting for the look of the thing, but she’ll employ him, don’t you worry. Oh yes. She wants this one to recapture Ibber. God knows what his price will be.”
“What’s this one’s name?”
“I don’t know their names,” said the chamberlain, pettishly. “They’re all Fitz something. And they’re all scoundrels.”
Gervase of Holborn walked as inconspicuously as he could into the hall to cast his eye over the petitioners who filled it. Almost at once he saw the tall, sweet-complexioned man talking engagingly to one of the Empress’ ladies and he knew what this particular mercenary’s price would be. He backed out as quietly as he could, then ran for the stables.
Fitz Payn watched him go and beckoned to his lieutenant.
The riders caught up with Gervase on a deserted part of the track leading to Wallingford alongside the Thames. The moment he heard the hoofbeats he knew he’d miscalculated; he should have taken a faster horse than his usual palfrey.
Even then he tried to outride them. He was terrified for himself, terrified for his lady. She must be warned. Frantically, as he rode, he tried to remember his sins to confess them to God. “Absolve me from them, whatever they were.”
They got him in the same way they’d got Percy of Alleyn. A stone hit his shoulder and toppled him off the horse. As he sprawled on the ground they put a spear through his heart, clean as a whistle, and threw his body into the river.
* * *
At Wallingford Maud’s captain of the guard entered the solar. “A messenger from Oxford, my lady.”
“Thanks be to God.” Matilda had received no news from Gervase for two days and had been preparing to ride back to Oxford to see what was wrong.
“Not for you, madam. For my lady. A marshal of the Empress’. With a Praecipe.” A command.
“Admit him.”
“I shall,” said the captain, “but not the crew with him.” He hadn’t guarded Wallingford all this time to let in any cut-throat who asked admittance.
But the marshal ushered into the chamber, though a stranger to them, was genuine enough and he carried a scroll bearing the Empress’ own seal.
He had the brusequeness of a man doing an unpleasant job as quickly as possible. “‘From Matilda the Empress to our best beloved Maud of Wallingford. I command that she deliver without delay the person of Matilda of Risle to this my marshal to be safely delivered to her husband Ralph Fitz Payn. Sealed by my hand. Witnessed at Oxford by the Earl of Norfolk.’”
It took time, but as it sank in that Fitz Payn was alive and that she had been sold to him again, this time by a fellow-woman, the particles which made up the soul of Matilda of Risle unstructured themselves. Memories, myths, scoldings, landscapes, loves, everything which had formed the invisible Matilda and given volition to the physical Matilda splintered away from each other. She watched as her body acted on its own like a decapitated hen and threw itself at Maud of Wallingford’s feet. “Don’t give me up.” A particle of her reason whizzed by and said: “Ridiculous. How futile.”
Maud of Wallingford was white and holding her stomach. “Please, please.”
Somebody else was sobbing. Matilda’s face felt the wet, smooth face of Adeliza as the girl hugged her. Another particle said: “Protect Adeliza. Protect Edmund.” To Adeliza she said: “Go to the Fens. Get a boat. Go to Edmund.”
The marshal saw the hysteria could get out of hand. He told the captain: “Help me take her down.”
The captain said reluctantly: “She’ll need her things. It’s getting bitter.”
“Send a maid. Bring the boxes to the gate.”
They pulled her up between them and took her to the door. Adeliza ran in front and tried to stop them but they pushed her down.
A passing particle of Matilda’s past said cheerily: “I shall fear no evil,” as they dragged her, screaming, down the stairs.
Chapter 10
1142
Ibber had been built and sited in the Conqueror’s time and, although it was comparatively small, its importance lay in its ability to control Thames traffic from and to Wallingford upriver.
It stood on one of the few sites where the Thames narrowed to run through steep hills. In wartime it could put a boom across. In peacetime a ferry ran from a quay at the bottom of its keep to a quay with a tollhouse on the other bank, from which a track led up to th
e Icknield Way. Before sieging Wallingford, Stephen had taken it; now the Empress, through her new servant, Fitz Payn, had taken it back.
From the north, the river side, the keep rose up the escarpment so that, looking up from a boat, it seemed to swirl and topple. But to a visitor approaching from the south the hill hid most of the keep’s height, so that Ibber looked a mere fortified manor surrounded by unsurprising walls.
For Matilda’s arrival they were less unsurprising. Corpses of its former garrison hung from the crenels like untidy bunting. Matilda saw them as mere background in the atrocity of existence.
Fitz Payn met her in the doorway of the hall, asking tenderly after her health. His complexion shone with his own health; warmth gathered round his russet cloak and the jewels which had recently adorned Ibber’s late castellan. “But where is your household, my dear? No ladies to attend you?” He was genuinely put out. As he swung her off her horse he called inside the hall and a blowsy, fair-haired woman came out. “This is Dyrika to look after you. A countrywoman of mine and good-hearted.” To Dyrika in Flemish he said: “See you attend her well, you cow.” Dyrika nodded amiably.
He kissed Matilda’s hand and, holding it high as if they were about to dance, led her into the hall. Its fifty or so occupants, mostly men, had been feasting. The women were noisy and indiscriminately affectionate, which had caused a quarrel down the end of the table. It stopped the moment Fitz Payn appeared.
The pockmarked man who had held Matilda’s ankles during the pseudo-wedding was Vladi, Fitz Payn’s lieutenant. He bowed, taking his cue from his commander. “Captain, we your loyal lads congratulate you on your nuptials.”
He pulled out chairs for them but when Fitz Payn saw that Matilda wouldn’t eat he got up at once. “She can’t wait.” The company hooted.
Alcoholic breath on the cold air made a bower through which the couple walked to the keep. Men tapped their rutting forearms and the women wished Matilda luck in sudden, shrill goodwill.
They went up the narrow circling stairs almost to the top. They entered a room where the dirt on the floor showed lighter squares, having been once a storeroom. Now it contained a large, ornate bed, a table and a chair. Its one beautiful feature was a long, narrow window overlooking the fifty-foot drop to the river. It let in the cold; the stone ledge outside gleamed with frost.
Dyrika was sentimental and excited. “I’ll show her the gong.” She opened an aumbry door to reveal a garderobe; the wind moaned up through the hole in the seat. “Wonderful what they think of.” Fitz Payn seemed as proud as if he’d installed it himself.
“And now, if you please, give me your seal. I shall relieve you of the management of your estates as a good husband should.” The seal would give him even quicker access to their profits than the Empress’ writ. But Matilda and Gervase had lodged it at Clerkenwell months before.
Fitz Payn’s face became sad. “Go down and search her luggage.” When Dyrika went he crossed to Matilda by the window and began to undress her. He unclasped her cloak and folded it neatly, then tackled the buttons of her pelisse, raising her stiff arms to pull her shift over her head. He loosened her hair, unhooked her shoes, rolled down her stockings. When she was naked he walked round her slowly. Her skin was almost green in the moonlight, goose-pimpled and puckered. Her eyes never left the river. “It’s not there, is it?” he said.
He dressed her again as meticulously, adjusting the garters so they were exactly level and combing her hair with his fingers before folding it into its crespin.
He went and lay down on the bed with his arms behind his head.
“We’ll get the Empress to send for Edmund,” he said.
Some particules of the invisible Matilda re-formed, though her very dullness saved her because she knew, if she knew anything, that the man got his sustenance from fear. He created it around him, then sucked on it, like snakes absorbing mice. Just as his fingers had searched her body, his mind scrabbled at hers to tear an entrance. She shut him out and kept watching the river.
She knew two things. She must not be afraid and she must stay alive. If she died he would have access to Edmund as the boy’s recognised stepfather. To stay alive she must not be afraid.
Outside it began to snow, flakes thickening into a hypnotic dance. Matilda watched the river and the mercenary watched Matilda.
About three o’clock in the morning her eyes grew small and her lids lowered. Then the obscenities began. Matilda’s eyelashes flickered up. Expletives heard only from men in temper crept in caressing sibilants across the room. Atrocities to the human body were crooned in lullabies to dissipate in the cold air beyond her window. The fetor of sound seemed to come not so much from the bed but to escape from the walls.
Fatigue sent her unconscious but the whispering went on.
In the morning he had gone and she was still slumped against the window, but a woollen rug had been wrapped round her to keep her warm.
* * *
Stephen’s generalship was surer now. His courage at Lincoln and his dignity in imprisonment had answered questions he’d wondered about all his life. Confident, he took his army through the Empress’ territory, capturing Cirencester, luring her barons from her side by attacking their castles. That done, he turned and made a lightning march on Oxford and was in the city before its weakened defences could stop him. He besieged the Empress in Oxford Castle.
Seeing her predicament her allies acted typically. The newer, paid supporters deserted her. In this anarchy was their chance to carve out kingdoms of their own owing allegiance to no one. Fitz Hildebrand took Winchester (and its former castellan’s wife) as his own. Fitz Payn refused to hand back Ibber, either to the Empress or Stephen.
Her old friends stayed loyal. The Earl of Gloucester came rushing back from Normandy and made a feint to draw Stephen away from Oxford. Brien Fitz Count with another army offered battle outside the city.
But Stephen didn’t make the mistake of Lincoln again. He didn’t budge. The snow was coming down and he was tucked up in a warm, well-provisioned city. As Ypres said: “Let the buggers freeze, my lord, while we starve the Empress out.”
At first the citizens of Oxford were panic-stricken at being in enemy hands, but Stephen, always good to the towns, ordered strict discipline among his troops. One occupying army is rarely worse or better than another; Oxford learned to live with the king’s as it had lived with the Empress’.
“What scared us,” said the landlord of the inn which Willem of Ghent had requisitioned, “what scared us really was that you was mercenaries.”
Jacopo was drinking with his eyes on the landlord’s daughter: “Really, my friend? We’re not so bad.”
“You’re not, I can see. But some we had were nasty. Murderers and such.”
Jacopo winked at the girl while her father wasn’t looking: “A lot of murders?”
“Couple of bad ones,” said the innkeeper. “Poor girls beaten to death.” He put his mouth to Jacopo’s ear and gave details. Jacopo grimaced; he was against wasting women. “Who did it?”
“We had our suspicions.” He told them to Jacopo who left his wine and the landlord’s daughter to burst in on his captain. “Willem, he was here.”
* * *
She must not be afraid; she must stay alive. She began to eat from the trays Dyrika brought to the room. The mercenary still hadn’t touched her, but her body wasn’t at all sure it wanted to stay healthy for the assaults his whisperings promised. She vomited. When she’d stopped she began eating again. She must not be afraid.
She had one resource. Years of kneeling and parrot recitation in church gave her now not the comfort of God – He had deserted her – but the comfort of words. “‘If I ascend up into Heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in Hell, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea…’”
The good-hearted Dyrika became worried and worked herself into sufficient indignation to brave Fitz Payn. “She’s still at the window a
nd she’s still muttering. You want to bring her down here a bit.” She lost her courage and cowered. “Only company, lord.”
When she looked up he was crying: “She has been used to a queen’s.”
She was allowed down under the guard of Dyrika and a close-faced archer called Craik. The company took her impassivity for pride and reacted by showing off, mocking her if Fitz Payn wasn’t around, even with occasional acts of kindness. She ignored them all.
She was tuned only to the awareness of Fitz Payn. Without looking at him she knew every move he made. She could sense his arrival and would tense seconds before he came into the room. There were nights when he didn’t come to the chamber but the whispering went on just the same.
For fresh air they let her sit in the herb garden which some d’Oilli had made between the inner and outer bailey. It was overgrown but there were sage bushes, and rosemary had grown almost into a tree. Along the north wall ran a hedge of japonica still spiked with the yellow quinces. It was a white, green and brittle garden. But it had peacocks.
The hens were bad-tempered with the cold and stuck their heads into the bushes but one morning one of the cocks displayed for her. It was not just his tail that was beautiful; the fish-scale feathers on his back overlapped in fans which were edged with gold, never one out of place. His neck was shot blue, white outlines round his eyes and a fragile crown.
“‘I stretch forth my hand unto thee; my soul thirsteth after thee as a thirsty land.’”
There was a crunch on the gravel behind her. “So you like peacocks?” Matilda’s hand dropped. “We shall have them on all our manors.”
The Morning Gift Page 17