Two nuns ran towards him and curtsied in the snow. “My lord, my lord, we are so blessed that you have come, that you have found us worthy.”
Unacquainted with convent manners he supposed this enthusiastic courtesy was usual but it made him uncomfortable. With little pushes of their hands, as if they wanted to touch him but dared not, they urged him into the priory. “She is waiting for you.”
At the door of the church the sisterhood was assembled, each carrying a candle decorated with holly. The prioress sank to her knees. “My lord, my joy is unbounded. Will you say mass with us? Will you lead the procession?”
It would be nice to take communion again, but he wasn’t going to lead any procession. “Thank you, ma’am, but I’m just a common guest.”
Christina’s encircled eyes filled with understanding of his humility. “As it pleases my lord.”
A priest who was there to administer the host acted as crucifer and led the way, the nuns followed, chanting at the tops of their joyful voices, and Willem found himself bringing up the rear with Matilda. “What’s happening?”
She muttered back: “They think you’re the Christ come again.”
“Jesus!”
“Exactly.”
Neither derived much spiritual sustenance from the eucharist; they were too aware of the veneration exuded by the rest. The priest was in on the good news that Christ was in his congregation and his hands shook as he proffered the wine. At the anthem “Christ is born” every nun turned to look at Willem, nearly pushing him backwards by the blast of their singing. He began to panic.
As the priest led the procession out of the church, followed by Christina and the convent, the gaze of each one seemed to eat him up. He joined Matilda in the nave. “I can’t face this.”
They would never get away. She looked around: “See that window?”
He nodded. “I’ll meet you down by the road.”
Matilda went out singing and carefully shutting the door of the chapel behind her. The convent was assembled outside, facing her.
“Where is he?”
“He’s praying.” That would hold them for a bit. She kissed Christina’s hand. “Mother, I must leave now.” Christina nodded, her eyes on the door. Matilda looked at the rapt faces which ignored her. She could have wept for them. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
Outside the priory gates the world was its old, harsh, cold self. The snow enveloped her boots. She felt a revulsion of disgust which took in herself and the man waiting to meet her. She was only just recovering from the wounds received in a sexual assault from one mercenary and now she was about to go off with another. When he came up with her she looked at the transport. “Is that the best you could do?”
Willem wasn’t in a charitable mood either. His back hurt. “There weren’t any thoroughbreds going. Take it or leave it.”
They had found their modus vivendi. Reviling each other they set off up the long, steep hill to Caddington and the route back to the Icknield Way.
Into the Life of Christina was written the story of the mysterious pilgrim and of how the Son of God manifested Himself at Markyate Priory and disappeared back to Heaven while praying in its church.
Chapter 12
1143
The opposing armies were like mile-sized boots which advanced, circled, retreated and then went through the figure all over again. Their scuff-marks were left on the English landscape in flattened crops, burned houses and crushed people.
There was still one giant who had not yet joined the dance.
Geoffrey de Mandeville thought he had been clever. When the Empress had been on top he had won huge concessions from her. Now that Stephen was on top again he repeated the process and made himself one of the greatest barons in England.
He was powerful in East Anglia, where Stephen had few allies, and helped him contain Hugh Bigod, who was having another revolt all by himself, and where Bishop Nigel of Ely was holding out for the Empress after yet another revolt.
After Christmas Stephen held court at St. Albans and welcomed de Mandeville and other barons to it. When its business was over and everybody was leaving, de Mandeville was arrested by guards like a common criminal. He was accused of treachery and forced to surrender every castle he owned.
Stephen thought he had been clever by taking de Mandeville’s power into his own hands. But those who saw the arrest saw a demon enter into Geoffrey de Mandeville. They advised the king to kill him because hatred like his would last until either he or the king were dead.
Stephen would not; he was pleased with his trick. He let de Mandeville go, a madman.
* * *
If conditions had been perfect it would have taken them only a week to reach the east where the safest ports lay and where Willem hoped to get Matilda abroad. But conditions were appalling. It snowed almost continuously, sometimes in flurries, sometimes in storms so thick they were nearly suffocated and had to crawl under the mule for shelter. The hills had changed to sweeping downs and in daytime they kept to the cleared tops but before evening had to make horrific descents into the valleys to find somewhere to stay the night. Usually they were lucky in finding a priory or monastic rest house. Sometimes, though, they had to pay for the use of a barn to a villein as poor as themselves, and Willem’s money was running out.
They were struggling up a hill beyond Hitchin and the mule, who hated ascents, was holding back. Willem jerked its reins and hissed with pain. “For goodness sake,” shouted Matilda and floundered through the snow to take the bridle from him. She gave a pull and the mule responded; it was more afraid of her than of Willem. “The next time you go rescuing ladies in distress you might see you’re fit.”
Willem gritted his teeth: “Don’t flatter yourself there’d be a next time.”
He watched her small thick boots as they stumped through the snow. He would have liked to tell her she was the most courageous thing he’d ever seen but their communication was through insult. It gave their relationship an equality which overrode her consciousness of his inferiority and her indebtedness.
If they had anything serious to say it was said in the mornings. As the day proceeded they jeered at each other like an old married couple, but by the time night came she was tense and barely spoke, as if in their frequently cramped shelter even the intimacy of exchanged words would be dangerous.
Willem was worried about finding a shelter at all tonight. They had tried the lower road to Royston but had found it blocked and turned for clearer going on the upper way.
On their left the ground fell away into a seemingly endless vale of featureless white, ahead were more hills. Above and to their right was a hut among trees. Willem nodded at it: “We’ll have to sleep there.”
“No.” It reminded her of the night Fitz Payn had pursued them.
“If you want to go back, go. But Wenceslas and me are sleeping there.”
They would need a good fire. Willem put the sled in the hut for Matilda to sleep on and made up his own bed alongside it; the quarters were cramped. They saw to the mule, went off into the trees for their personal concerns, and came back to a dinner of goat-milk cheese and bread that Hitchin Priory had given them.
Willem said: “Do you ever wonder why I came looking for you?”
“I’m tired.” He was breaking the house rules, but he had things to tell her, now that she was physically and mentally stronger, which she had the right to know.
“It wasn’t for the sake of your bonny blue eyes. In the first place it was a promise to Alleyn.” For the first time he told her about the champion’s death at Lincoln. She had grieved for his death, now she wept for his murder.
“And in the second place I had a Christian duty to stop Fitz Payn killing you as well. He would have done, sooner or later, when he’d got as much out of you as he could. Wherever he went, women died. He was lunatic.”
She stared upwards where a hole in the roof showed hard-edged stars, shaken by relief. Fitz Payn’s assault had been a perversion of hat
red, not sex; not inspired by the fault of her own body. His hatred had been wholesale; he would have done the same to any woman, had done. Stupidly she found herself thinking: “It was nothing personal,” but it brought a blessed cleansing. In killing him she had avenged Alleyn and saved not only herself but an unknown sisterhood of victims.
In gratitude for her liberation she could have kissed the man beside her. She didn’t dare even say “thank you”. She could feel the flesh on her left arm which was nearest him stirring on the bone to touch his. Oh God, this was lust. This was what Christina had felt. “Disparagement has done this to me,” she thought. She had been so disparaged that she longed to commit a sin which would cut her off from God for ever, just when she needed Him.
She put a forefinger knuckle in her mouth and bit it. She rolled away until she was pressed against the wall.
In the darkness the mercenary lay on his back and cursed under his breath so that his blasphemies curled up like smoke through the hole in the roof.
In the morning they were still alive. As she rubbed blood back into her feet Matilda said: “My eyes are brown, you fool.”
“I know.”
At Royston they received the news that de Mandeville had revolted in the Fens. They could see in the distance a large patch of flames where Cambridge was burning.
The frightened, homeless refugees from Cambridge spoke of yelling madmen who had looted and burned their town, with a silent, more terrible madman at their head.
Every inn was doing the business of a lifetime and asking a price for food and bed which would clean out the mercenary’s purse. From the look of Matilda he decided it had to be paid. They had to wait for some time before they were served. The mercenary spent it asking questions. At last he said: “I thought we could cut across the Fens to the coast from here. But he’s attacking indiscriminately. We’ll skirt and keep to the uplands until we see what’s what.” He frowned. “We’ll have to slaughter the mule if we’re to eat.”
“We need him.”
“It’s the mule or you.”
A child was being sent up the communal stairs by its mother, who was drinking away her sorrows. As it climbed Matilda got a horrific glimpse not of naked little human legs, but a selection of pork chops. “Poor old Wenceslas.”
The mule was despatched to its Heavenly pasture that night. In return for some of the carcase the landlord allowed the mercenary to use the kitchen to turn it into stew. In the early hours, while everyone else was asleep, Willem worked. After a while there was a sound behind him. He didn’t turn. “Since you’re here, make yourself useful. Stir that pot.”
Matilda splashed an inexpert ladle in the pot and tasted: “It’s vile.”
The mercenary expired: “What do you want?”
“I’m not going to the coast. I’m going to Dungesey.”
He lifted her up and set her on the chopping block. “Look, I’ve got a manor outside Brabant. Nothing fancy. Two ploughs. Sheep, pigs. You can stay there until the war ends.”
“It’s never going to end.”
“I thought I saw the end of it once.” It had been after Lincoln. He hadn’t been able to get news either of Matilda or Fitz Payn and had gone to the Empress’ stronghold at Bristol in search of one or the other. (It was one advantage of being a mercenary that you could cross lines with your wares.)
Gloucester’s court had received him kindly and shown interest in the arbalists he was apparently offering for sale. “And this boy came up – I don’t suppose he was more than nine or ten – and questioned me about the crossbow. He was the Empress’ and Plantagenet’s son. He was…” Willem searched for a word to describe the effect Fitzempress had on him: “…special. Then his tutor dragged him off to learn Greek. And I thought: ‘Maybe England won’t accept his mother, and I don’t know as I blame it, but it might accept him.’ I thought: ‘If you were a racehorse, my lad, I’d back you.’”
“I’ve already backed him,” said Matilda. “I sent him my son. And I’m still going to Dungesey. I’m going to watch the English estates for Edmund.”
“A fat lot you’ll see of them from Dungesey.”
“I’ll see. And I’ll stay unmarried.”
He was cooking the wrong mule. “Go to bed.”
From then on they manhauled the sled, scouting villages before they entered them, keeping to uplands and cover. From the fires burning in the Fens they could tell de Mandeville was keeping pace with them.
Always obsessional, de Mandeville had become obsessed with destruction. His disease infected others, rootless, futureless men who joined him or rampaged off on their own. But wherever stores were taken, barns burned and women raped, the generic term for it was “de Mandeville”.
Taking a chance, Willem and Matilda slipped into a fenland which some base Midas had turned into metal, making the rushes brittle and the carr into intricate fretwork. They changed their pattern so that they travelled by night, lying up by day in what little warmth the sun gave. The only advantage of the cold was that quagmire iced over and they could set a straight course by the stars and ignore the twisting roddons and rivers.
Two nights later they reached the Nene five miles above the Swallen. Matilda was jubilant. Dungesey had grown in her mind as the ultimate haven. “Hurry up,” she told the mercenary, “we’re nearly at the Waits.”
“We’re not going in by the Waits. We’re going to sneak in from the side.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But that’s what we’re going to do.”
The sled went over the Swallen’s ice with the sound of expelled breath. Matilda felt the air warmer with every step she took. She was back in a place where she’d been happy: she could be happy again.
A white owl launched off from a willow on the bank, dislodging snow and flapping heavily along before rising over Crease Bank and disappearing. The mercenary slewed the sled into shadow by the Driftway and jerked his head upwards to show they should climb the bank to get a view. His instinct was telling him to be quiet. Matilda clicked her tongue with irritation as she followed him up.
The bank was slippery with frost and from the top he leaned down to help her. But they had gone to ludicrous lengths these last days to avoid touching each other, so Matilda ignored his hand and rushed the last few feet. The top of her head clunked hard against the side of his face. “Blast you, woman.” He hauled her and himself backwards.
Matilda’s skull smarted and she wanted to rub it, but her hands were clasped on his forearms as if they’d frozen there and through her mittens and his leather jacket she could feel muscle.
His cheekbone ached so that his eyes watered but he couldn’t wipe them because his hands were tight on her shoulders and he could feel their bones. “Christ.”
Wherever they were and for however long it was, it wasn’t Dungesey but somewhere hot and sweet and smelling of each other’s skin. But wherever it was it wasn’t far enough away to stop a bony finger prodding each of them in the shoulder nor a querulous voice saying: “There’s a sentry at the Waits. He’s having a warm in the barn but he’ll be out in a minute.”
The finger prodded again: “You going to get under cover or stand there kissing till he sees you?”
She felt the mercenary’s lips move against hers. “Sod it.”
Kakkr was standing beside them, hopping from one ancient foot to the other. It was cold again.
“What sentry?”
“Oh.” The old man’s head shook with fear and impatience. “You want to chat about it so’s he can shoot us? Or shall us get out of sight?”
They slid down the far side of the Driftway to the frozen Washes and crept along it to the back of the village while they got an explanation out of Kakkr. It took some time; what happened at Dungesey had been so overwhelming that he assumed they knew of it.
Four hours before, a rowing boat with six armed men in it had turned into the Swallen. Since de Mandeville came to the Fens the islanders had been keeping watch on the approaches, using t
he more reliable children as look-outs so that the adults could get on with their work. Wifil, Stunta and Maggi’s son, had spotted the boat and had run as fast as his ten-year-old legs would carry him to give warning. Luckily, it had been evening and the islanders had been gathered in only three places: the few of them who served the hall were in it with Steward Peter, the Wealas were in Wealyham and the others were in their huts in the village. The stories of what atrocities had taken place at Cambridge and other settlements had demanded withdrawal until they could see what manner of men these were. There had been just enough time because the boat party had stopped to ransack the storehouses at the Waits.
Wealas and villagers had picked up their children and run to Hogwood, later retreating into Nightlairs Fen. The servants had left the hall, run round its back and crawled through the drain which led under the north-east wall into Snailstream, through the apple tun and into Wulfholes.
However, Steward Peter, with typical Norman belief in the safety of bricks and stone, had decided to find shelter in the keep. He had taken just too long to reach his decision. “They caught him and that poor lady of yours as they run up the green,” said Kakkr.
“What lady of mine?” Matilda shook the old man. “What lady of mine?”
“That pale, weakly gal. They got her, anyways. And Steward Peter. They’re in the keep with them now.”
“Adeliza?” She began to tremble. “Adeliza’s still here?”
“Nowheres else to go. There in’t been no ships. Weather’s been wholly bad.” He turned to the mercenary. “They’re bastard drunk. Shouting they wanted gold, I could hear them from Hogwood.”
“But what about the village men? They could stop six.”
“There in’t no men, you duzzy fool. They’re gone.” He couldn’t believe they didn’t know about it.
“Gone where?”
“To the war. The king’s men came before Christmas and rounded them up and took them off to fight and build things.”
The Morning Gift Page 21