Willem owed his life to the fact that the sides of the oubliette were thick with the faeces of years; instead of being slimy the cold had encrusted them. The friction against his tunic slowed him down just above the point where the oubliette curved steeply into the chute to become vertical.
He put out his feet and elbows to wedge himself. Luckily the oubliette was not wide – the bodies which went down it had been starved. He could hear the river and the crack of ice.
The pain in his left shoulder was paralysing. His back had been wrenched and the old shooting agony had returned, but he didn’t have time to worry about it. He turned his feet outwards to get a grip on the sides and push himself up, but the crust broke away and he travelled down until his feet hung over the drop and only his fingernails held him to the oubliette. He squirmed his legs until his calves and not his boots were lodged against the sides; the material of his trews was a better grip than leather.
He managed to get his elbows into the oubliette and heaved. The movement tore his sleeve and left the bare skin against the plastered stone. He convulsed his body and the pain huffed air out of his lungs, but he was back in the oubliette. He did it again, then again. The attrition on his elbow wore away the skin so that blood made it slippery. He had to manoeuvre the back of his arm against his jacket to wipe it away before he could move again. He lost track of time or why he was down here. He was absorbed in the terrain of the oubliette as if he were traversing mountains. There was no light coming from the grid above him. As he got higher he became aware of the distance he had to fall. “St. Sebastian give me grace and strength.”
On the fortieth or millionth heave something tickled his hair. One more convulsion got his fingers round bars of the grid. He waited until his own panting subsided and he could hear something, the grizzling of an unhappy small girl.
“Willem, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Willem. He broke my arm, Willem. I had to tell him.” Dyrika’s voice came from far away.
“Where are you?”
“Outside the door, Willem. I thought you were dead.” He visualised the door which had a squint for spying on the prisoners. Dyrika had her mouth to it.
“Can’t you get in?”
“It’s locked. There’s fighting, Willem. My arm hurts.”
He could hear the faint sounds of battle. “Listen, D’ika. I must have a light. If I have light I can live. Get a candle. Be very quick.” He heard her grizzling die away.
“My lady? Lift the grid.” He could hear her talking it over with someone. He couldn’t hang on much longer. He heard Matilda say: “Well, if you think so,” and the catches turn. It seemed the saddest thing in the world to dig his elbows back into the stone while the grid was lifted and he sobbed as he did it. One more heave and he was out. He lay with his head on Matilda’s shoes until a wobbling yellow light approached the door squint and came through in the form of a candle.
“My arm does hurt, Willem.”
He took the candle and kissed the hand that gave it. There was nothing he could do for her, the door was too secure. He carried the candle to the slit and stood it upright, then jumped for Matilda and pulled her against the wall. The candle flame went out as an arrow with a cord attached whistled in and clattered on the floor. He hauled it in until the cord gave way to rope, which he tied round Matilda’s waist. She was unresisting but looked at him with hauteur. “How dare you touch me.”
“Lady, you’re going down that hole if you like it and down it if you don’t. Either.”
“My dear,” said the Magdalene, “don’t worry about us. We can fly down.”
Matilda was lowered down the oubliette. Her skirts rode up and exposed her legs to the cold but protected her from the substance she was passing over. She hung on to the rope as she passed out of the chute and saw the keep wall and her own breath slide upwards.
Willem paid out the rope until it went slack. Jacopo’s voice called: “She’s down.” He went down himself, the contrast between the last time and this made it easy, though his shoulder and back were agony. At river-level Jacopo steadied his legs into the boat. Maulger rowed hard against the current while Jacopo used the rope now sagging from the slit window to pull them hand over hand to the quay and the tollhouse.
“Stopped to pick daisies, did you?” asked Willem. “You bloody near got me killed.”
Jacopo indicated the keep they were drawing away from; faint shouts and clashes of steel rose up over it and the escarpment. “That’s not us.”
“Who the hell is it, then?”
His entire band, less sentries, was in the tollhouse warming items of clothing round a fire like ladies’ maids. Willem grunted at them and they grunted back, overjoyed at having him safe.
“We don’t know who it is.” Jacopo took Matilda behind a screen made from a blanket; his voice came from behind it. “We think it must be Brien Fitz Count, trying to get the castle back.” He broke off to talk to Matilda as he helped her undress and put on clean clothes. “Up with that little arm, there’s a good girl. Upsy. It’s a good little force, whoever it is, and it was in position when we got here. Now, I’m not going to hurt you, I’m a doctor. They were in the woods waiting to attack and I didn’t like to say, ‘Excuse me, my good men, but we want to attack instead.’ For one thing – now the stockings, there’s a good girl – there were more of them than us.” They could hear Matilda muttering to her saints throughout.
He emerged. “Have you seen that woman’s body?” For once there was no innuendo.
“Fitz Payn. Can she travel?”
“Only if she has to. What about you?”
“She has to. She’s in danger from both sides now.”
His men had been seeing to Willem, washing his wound and bandaging it. Maulger said: “Could be worse,” which was his diagnosis of everything not actually fatal.
Willem’s new clothes, like Matilda’s, were of wool, layers of it, plus fur cap and double boots with suede inside and leather out. He put them on with finicky care; their lives would depend on keeping warm. He looked round at the component parts of his life, Calabrians, Genoese, English, Flemish, French, Normans, one Irish, a Scot, all meshing into his one perfect achievement. “I wouldn’t be going now, not with that bastard still alive, if I didn’t have to.”
“If Fitz Count leaves anything of him, we’ll finish him off,” promised Jacopo.
“Contract rules, Jacko.”
“Contract rules, captain.”
His men filled the last minutes with instructions.
“The barn’s six miles off. We left food there.”
“There’s a crossbow on your horse and another on hers.”
“If you can’t be good, be careful.”
They’d chosen them both white horses and white cloaks, a camouflage touch he hadn’t thought of. Matilda was almost collapsed by the time they got her on her horse: he didn’t feel so good himself.
“Well…” The river was too loud and the presence of the enemy too near for grandiloquent goodbyes even if they could have made them. He just took the leading rein of Matilda’s horse and left, heading for the Icknield Way and being lost to sight quickly in the whites and blues of the hill.
* * *
At Oxford Castle another Matilda, also disguised in white, was lowered down part of its wall. Two men with white coats over their mail met her at the bottom and hurried her through gates, posterns and arches. When they came to the river they helped her over the ice, wading through its snow. Fifty yards away on either side two of Stephen’s sentries stood stamping to keep warm, their heads steadfastly in the opposite direction. Nobody was sure afterwards whether they were bribed or sluggish with the cold.
The escapers were hoping to find outside Oxford some remnant of the army which had offered battle to Stephen, but the countryside was empty and quiet (Brien Fitz Count had gone off to quell Fitz Payn at Ibber). Therefore their nearest ally was at Abingdon, seven miles away across fields deep in snow. They couldn’t use the roads.
It was a tall order for a short woman, but faint-heartedness was not one of the Empress’ faults. Struggling, glaring at the snow which dared to impede her, she got there.
News of her escape spread all over England and then, despite the deep winter, to the rest of Christendom. Those who heard it, regardless of their allegiance, thought that by letting her slip through his fingers Stephen, though he might still win, no longer deserved to.
Chapter 11
1142–1143
The Icknield Way was really the Icknield Ways; not just one, but two, sometimes three, and occasionally several tracks meandering at different levels along the sixty miles of the chalk Chiltern ridge from the Thames basin to the flat lands of East Anglia.
It had been an ancient route before the Romans came and even before the Iceni whose name it commemorates. Along its south-western section, which Willem and Matilda were entering, were valleys in which lived a small, dark, narrow-headed people who had been in England before the arrival of the Iceni, and even they weren’t as old as the Icknield Way. They had been on William the Conqueror’s route to subdue England and were now suspicious and fearful, more likely to hide than welcome. At the onset of winter they hibernated inside their earthworks leaving the landscape to deer, hares and foxes whose tracks decorated the snow in aimless stitching.
Willem rode like a drunk, only able to focus straight ahead. But his Eurydice looked behind to the darkness she was leaving and saw part of it detach and follow her.
When they reached the barn Willem got them inside, horses as well, put Matilda on some straw, covered her, unsaddled the horses, lay down, covered himself and slept. Matilda slept less well. She heard shadows scrabbling outside whispering to be let in, so she woke the saints and they chattered to cover the sound.
On the next day Willem headed for the high track on the ridge where snow had been thinned by the wind and where the beech hangars allowed them to see but not be seen.
Loss of blood was making him weak and irritable. Matilda’s habit of looking constantly behind her as if someone was following them exasperated him.
He was not as concerned at Matilda’s mental state as another man might have been; he’d seen similar condition in soldiers who’d suffered unbearable anguish in war. She’d get over it. Nevertheless the saints were wearing travelling companions, mainly because they occupied all her attention. It was the saints who heaved off her boots at night, lit the fires, dug her latrines, provided her food and it was the saints she thanked for it. It was an eerie, lonely time for Willem and hard work for a man with a bad back and an arm that wasn’t healing well.
On the third night the only shelter they could find was a forester’s hut, so small he had to leave the horses outside. In his sleep his pain formed shapes and sounds, a blunt thudding in his shoulder and a flat drone in his lower spine pierced by shrill squealing. In the morning just lifting the bar from the door was difficult.
The horses had gone. Behind the windbreak he’d built for them were jumbled marks in the snow made by eight hooves and two feet.
“Shut up, for Christ’s sake.” Behind him Matilda had relapsed into manic chattering.
The woods were beautiful, the trunks of the beeches might have been sketched in charcoal and a man could be standing behind every one. He listened. The place echoed with desertion.
He took Matilda’s hand and backed with her to the hut where he’d stupidly left the door open. If someone had got inside and taken the crossbows… the crossbows were still there. He bolted the door while he got her ready for the walk ahead of them. She was shaking and talkative, though not to him. He had trouble fixing her cloak brooch – his left arm was almost useless. When she was ready he hung a crossbow and quiver over her head.
“Remember how to use this? Good girl. Of course you do.”
He had to arm himself the wrong way round because of his shoulder. He rolled up the thicker rugs and slung them round his neck and stuffed the flint and tinder fungus in his pocket. He looked with regret at the equipment they must leave.
After opening the door cautiously he listened for a long time, then ran, pulling Matilda after him. He ran to the edge of the trees and down the northern slope to the lower track. Matilda didn’t like being out in the open and his back yelped as she pulled against him. “He’ll see me,” she told the saints. But he didn’t dare stay in the woods where they could be jumped from any bush. He needed to see what was coming for them even if it meant being seen. Now they were on foot any travellers they encountered would consider them too poor to be worth noticing or robbing.
Nevertheless, as the ridge reared up to their right the exposure made him want to crouch, though at the same time they seemed to have become very small indeed, minute and impotent in an illimited expanse of white. If it was a peasant who’d stolen the horses he had no reason to kill them: if it was Fitz Payn, the bow was not his weapon.
Matilda walked with her face turned to the ridge and once she pointed, indicating some movement to her saints. Willem thought he saw something moving between the trees but his eyes were beginning to trick him. It could still have been a peasant who’d stolen the horses.
When they reached the flowers he knew it hadn’t been a peasant.
They looked like flowers from far off, a concentrated relief of anemone colours, blue, purple and red, in a heap in the snow. Nearer, they saw the flowers were steaming.
Nearer still they turned into guts, the anemone-coloured, glistening, contorted ropes of intestines.
They were out of a horse; Willem had seen things like them emerging from the belly wounds of horses in battle.
A line of footprints led up to and then away from the pile, those coming heavier than those going away. He had carried them in his arms to place his bouquet in Matilda’s path.
Matilda was quiet for once: she seemed puzzled. Willem took her hand and followed the footprints to a depression in the snow further on where the horse she had ridden away from Ibber had been slaughtered and eviscerated. What was left of it lay in a pandemonium of pink snow, its legs frozen in an ungainly kick, its yellow teeth exposed in a last shriek.
Other than the thin track which connected the carcase to its intestines, there were no footprints. Instead a wide scar started off untidily in the depression as if something had scrabbled to expose the blades of grass underneath, and then ploughed upwards towards the ridge, gaining width as it disappeared into the trees. He was still puzzling out this phenomenon when Matilda said clearly: “That is absolutely disgusting.”
He turned round to her. The sight of the animal had bypassed her madness to touch the horsewoman who had ridden more frequently than she had walked. For that moment she glanced up at Willem and she perceived him, not as some forked shape on the edge of a nightmare, but him, Willem. It was a moment of such contact that he said, “Hello.”
They were still facing each other when they heard the hill sighing and glanced up to see a huge ball of snow capering down the scar towards them. It was a childhood memory turned murderous. Sparks of ice flew from its surface. Willem took the full force of it on his bad shoulder and was thrown on to the carcase. Matilda fell as she jumped back and was covered with snow as the ball exploded over them both.
She got up, fiddling at her neck to dislodge ice slivers. Anger had refreshed her mind. She saw clearly the outline of the beeches on the ridge and the figure that stepped out of them to follow the snowball and finish them off.
In her old, mad mind he had grown superhuman; now in this landscape he looked small, and he staggered as he ran. He had been wounded. He called to her like a lover.
With her new clarity she saw him as disordered; put together wrongly in the still, metallic perfection around him. Her brothers had once tortured a beetle by sticking a needle into it, paralysing one side so that in moving it went in a circle. She looked from the running man to the man floundering in the snow. A right beetle and a wrong beetle.
“I’ll have to kill him,” she said.
The
Mother sighed: “Poor beetle.”
Willem was groping with his right hand for the crossbow, it was the wrong side and he got it tangled with the quiver. The man had a knife in his hand and was coming not for Willem but for Matilda. He tried to fit his feet into the stirrup and moaned as his back tore. Matilda watched him: “You stay still,” she said kindly. “I’ll do it.”
Her arm brought the bow over her head and in the same movement down, cocking it as he’d taught her. Back over her shoulder two fingers gripped a goose-feather flight. She was part of the meshing mechanism of the world, a cog which interlocked with others to turn the wheel. The man was close now. She could see him smile and the blood on his jacket from the horse. She raised the bow and heard a voice repeating orders it had given in a sweet fenland a sweet time ago.
“Aim.” She aimed at a patch of blood on the russet jacket.
“Breathe in.” She breathed in and remembered to let it half-out.
“Don’t think.” She stopped thinking.
“Loose.” The bolt hit Fitz Payn just below the throat and knocked him back out of Matilda’s vision. The universe was tidy again.
“Good shot,” said the Magdalene as she faded into transparency.
The Virgin’s blue cloak became grey: “Goodbye, my dear girl.”
“But I had to kill him. Don’t leave me. I had to.”
“Quite right,” whispered the snow. “And quite wrong.”
Two snowflakes touched her on each cheek. They had gone.
* * *
Five days later Matilda woke up in the nuns’ priory at Markyate two-thirds along the stretch of Ermine Street which ran from Dunstable to St. Albans.
Her face was cold from an open window opposite her bed through which she could see rooks circling over tops of elms down a slope. Her body was warm and clean under quilted covers which smelled of lavender and a warm brick wrapped in wool exuded heat to her feet.
Besides lavender and beeswax there was the indefinable aroma that identified a Saxon dwelling and had something to do with vegetables.
The Morning Gift Page 19