Matilda sighed and hauled herself to her feet. Before she emerged again on to the track she stood on tiptoe to look at where the keep showed against the blue sky above newly planted trees. To Matilda it dominated the Fens. However, there was no flag hanging from it which meant that the look-out, Kakkr, had spotted no intruder in the miles under his gaze. “Unless he’s fallen asleep.” She’d left him plenty to do, turning out rushlights. It took skill to skin the rush of three-quarters of its outer green and leave the pith supported by a spine of the remaining quarter. They couldn’t afford candles, but she’d grown fond of rushlight which burned with a strong, clear light.
She lived in a rush-patterned, rush-smelling world. Rushes provided Dungesey’s light, beehives, eel-traps, sun hats like the one she was wearing, cradles, belts, sandals, spoons and chair seats, matting and trays. Not until now had Matilda appreciated the labour required by the business of staying alive.
At first she had sulked, insisting that Epona act as her serving woman. Then her natural meddlesomeness had taken over; she’d been unable to bear watching the ship go down for want of her own hap’orth of tar. She’d listen to the other women bemoaning a job left undone and snap: “I’ll have to do it, then,” and in doing it became absorbed in a new skill. Each job done was a gain enabling more crops to grow, making the coming winter safer and warmer, so that her sense of achievement was almost greed.
“I’ll do this and this,” she’d say, “so that you can do that and that.” She became a miser with time, reluctant to let one minute go without squeezing it of usefulness. It gave her satisfaction that Kakkr was keeping watch and making rushlights, that while their mothers dug peat bricks their children were keeping watch and spinning wool. She was the island’s mole-catcher because Kakkr was too old to do the job as quickly as it might be done.
“Matilda the mole-catcher,” she moaned. “If the court could see me…” But the moles, in their way, were as dangerous to the island as de Mandeville. The tunnels of their runs weakened the banks, filling them with water in a flood. “They’ll hole across a bank,” said Kakkr, who admired them, “swim the dyke and hole the other bank like lightning buttered both sides.” The Driftway had only just contained the spring thaw; it must not give way and allow water to flood the Washes which had been planted with legumes to provide winter food. Matilda gloated over those rows of beans and peas as if they were emerald bracelets striping the black velvet peat.
That the island had suffered no more human incursions was not because the Fens had become less dangerous – with de Mandeville ensconsed at Ramsey, they had become very dangerous – but because of Maggi’s Good Idea.
It had come when Matilda, as usual, was hating the keep. “Might as well have Ely Cathedral balanced on our heads.”
Maggi’s little nose had twitched. “That old Conqueror couldn’t get to Ely, for all he could see it in the distance. Why should bandits get to us?”
“Because, you stupid female, they spot the keep from the Nene, and the Swallen leads out of the Nene straight to us.” But she watched Maggi expectantly; the clerk’s woman had become her invaluable, humorous, intelligent, responsible second-in-command.
“Right, commander, it does,” said Maggi. “But suppose they couldn’t find the Swallen?”
Matilda stared then clouted her lieutenant on the back. “Maggi, you’re not the fool you look,” which was the highest accolade one Fen English could give another.
They took Dungesey’s largest barge and jammed it crossways between Crease Bank and the Driftway at the entrance of the Swallen. Then, using Kakkr and every woman and child, they half-filled it with peat and poured in water until it settled nearly to the gunwales, the prow and stern wedging more firmly into the slope of the banks. After that they planted it with willow, elder and blackthorn.
Right away the trees had camouflaged the entrance, and now that weeds had also sprouted of their own accord the Nene flowed past an apparently continuous bank.
The approach to Dungesey was now by land or the tortuous, tunnelled streams which led to the back entrance at Wulfholes. The approach by land was almost impossible; drainage had suffered for lack of a male workforce and marsh was going back to quagmire and meadows to marsh. The back-door route by water could only be found by great luck or previous knowledge.
There were disadvantages; blocking the Swallen cut off their most navigable route to the rest of the Fens. But, since de Mandeville, there was no trade anyway. The blockade shut out friends as well as enemies, but most friends knew their way to the back door and Kakkr was watching out for those who didn’t. Every day the women expected their men to return and every day Matilda expected a message from Normandy via Cradge, but as yet neither had come.
Matilda killed another mole, reburied the trap, looked again at the keep and moved on. She came to the Stun which marked the boundary between her property and Ramsey’s. It was the only piece of stone for miles and piles of littered shells around it showed that blackbirds and thrushes came from far and wide to crack open snails on it.
Matilda took another cautious look round, bent, heaved the stone up and with effort staggered two short paces with it before being forced to let it drop. She did this every time she passed it, leaving square, yellow depressions in the grass behind her. By the time such things mattered – if they ever did – Dungesey would have gained several yards of land at the expense of Ramsey.
She remained doubled, panting, then creaked upright. She must be careful of her back.
Memories of the mercenary transfixed her.
She had made her confession. Ely, with commendable concern for the Fen souls which were without pastors since Ramsey was inoperative, had sent out peripatetic priests to take Easter communion on the islands and hear the sins of their inhabitants. One had arrived at Dungesey.
Alone with the priest after the other women had made confession, “though God knows,” Matilda thought fondly, “when they find time to sin,” she had asked forgiveness for killing one man and having carnal knowledge of another.
The priest had been indulgent over Fitz Payn, violent death having become commonplace, “for you were in great peril and thou mayest kill in order to stop a soul falling into worse sin”, but her night with the mercenary shocked him. “This foulness, and with an excommunicate?”
“I didn’t ask if he was excommunicated or not,” said Matilda wearily.
“But a carnal sin. Do you renounce the flesh? Are you penitent?”
She’d opened her mouth to say she was, but into her fingers came the memory of the skin over the corrugated muscle on the mercenary’s back. “It didn’t seem foulness.” If what she had experienced with her husbands was licit and the night with the mercenary sin, then something was wrong somewhere.
At last she said she was penitent just to be rid of the man. Her penance had been to live on bread and water for a year (which she had no intention of keeping) and to build a church one day (which she had). But the memory of a sin which didn’t seem like sin stayed with her.
In the summer fenland now Matilda looked at her hand and sighed. It was dirty and its nails were black and torn. A swallowtail with its wings hardly dry landed on her fingers, turning them into a plinth for an enamel of yellow, red, blue and black. Too fancy for a mole-catcher. She shook it off and went back to work.
She continued along Monks’ Bank which, though not her property, protected the north side of her Washes and was in worse repair than ever. As she turned to come back a flag ran up the keep. She dived into the milk parsley, brushing away the flies so that she could listen. A dragonfly zoomed by, iridescent and noisy. The scent of the umbellifers was so strong it was almost noise. Carefully she parted the heads, trying to make out the flag’s colour. Her eyes watered in the sunlight but at last she saw that it was blue, one of her old petticoats dyed with woad, signifying that the danger was water-borne. It was a single flag, which meant the Nene. Two would have meant the Fleam near the peat-digging.
She dashed
across the bank to hide under a willow and watch the water. The signalling system wasn’t flexible enough to tell her whether the threat was coming upstream or down, but she could swear nothing had passed her. Traffic had come to a standstill since de Mandeville.
The Nene had chosen today to be clear. A shaft of sun from between the willow branches pierced a pool below her and she could see a long, speckled trout resting in its warmth and puffs of sediment as a powter moved along the sludge of the river bottom.
She heard the unmistakable clunk and splash of a rower missing his stroke. The swear-words following were in English and though the voice was familiar she couldn’t place it. The prow of a rowing boat drifted into her view. Its oarsman was bent over, doing something to his right knee – or where his knee would have been if he’d had a right leg, which he hadn’t. Matilda got a glimpse of a raw, puckered stump end.
She would follow his progress downriver and, if he spotted the blockage across the Swallen, shoot him. The rower lifted his head.
Matilda swung herself down the bank. “Pampi.”
The man looked in her direction. “Art’noon, gal.” It was the common greeting to a fenwoman: he didn’t recognise her.
“Pampi, it’s me.” She couldn’t have believed she’d be so glad to see him, to have an able-bodied man back to help her – but Pampi wasn’t able-bodied any more.
“Commander?” He sculled to the bank. “You got any water?” She gave him what was left in her bottle and tied the boat’s painter to a branch.
“All right?” he asked.
She told him Wilberta was well and Dungesey still functioning. “What about you?”
There was a long silence. “Stunta won’t be back,” he told her. Nor would Toki nor Wyrm, all three killed in a battle early in the year far away in the west at a place called Wilton. Stephen’s army had been surprised by the Earl of Gloucester’s. A sword cut had severed Pampi’s leg. What had saved him initially, he reckoned, had been the intense cold. “Froze the bugger, see.” Since he was obviously dying nobody had bothered to take him prisoner. Later, when the camp women had discovered him obstinately refusing to die, they had taken him to the local barber who had sewn up and cauterised his stump.
“Don’t know why,” Pampi said with gloom. “No more use than squit now.”
The instinct which brought the eels back to their home rivers from the ocean had drawn him, hobbling on a crutch, from one side of England to the other; a journey so dreadful that he rebuffed Matilda’s questions until she grew angry at his self-pity. She rebuked him in good Fen English, the only English she could speak. “You duzzy ole vool, an you only got one leg you’ll onyways be useful to I.”
He grunted with amusement. “You’ve changed.”
“Everything’s changed.”
She got into the boat, which he’d stolen by night at Aldreth. He’d wedged a box against the stern so that his stump had purchase as he rowed, but the friction had rubbed its scabs off. When he reached for the oars she pushed him out of the way and took them herself; rowing was another skill she’d acquired.
They went past the barge blockade without Pampi noticing it, which pleased her, though a few yards further on he said: “In’t we come too far?” She sculled back and showed him Maggi’s idea. He couldn’t grasp the need for it. “What’ll the barges do now, then?”
“There aren’t any barges.”
She enlightened him as she feathered down the tunnels to Snailstream. When they grounded she made him sit in the boat while she ran to the hall for salves and a bandage for his stump, but he wouldn’t let her touch it. “I’m all right.”
“Looks it,” she shouted back. The base of the stump oozed blood and mucus and the holes left by the withered ligaments were not fully healed, but the barber had stitched the collops of skin round it into a neat, buffering edge. If he could survive the original amputation he could survive this.
When he’d hauled himself out of the boat – he refused help – she got back in to go and tell the women. It would be pleasing to give Wilberta, who knew everything, the surprise of her life. Less pleasing would be having to tell Maggi and Badda and Milly, Wyrm’s wife, that their men were dead. She particularly dreaded telling Maggi. Once she had thought commoners too insensitive for true grief: she knew better now. Maggi’s heart was loving and vulnerable and it beat for Stunta – though what she had seen in that military-mad old fool Matilda failed to understand.
The look-outs had done their job: from a distance the peat-diggings looked deserted. The peat bricks were in a long honeycombed wall through which sun and air could dry them. The ground from which they had been removed was a chessboard of black and green squares. Digging peat was a back-breaking business and the women had been at it for a week, but there could be no rest; tomorrow they would all have to harvest the barley in West Field, which was ripe, while the weather held.
The sedge rustled as if with mice and spewed forth women and children – the women clumping like trolls on the boards strapped to their feet to stop them ruining the peat. Rush fringes hung from their hat brims against flies and gnats.
“What’s doing, commander?” Under the fringe Maggi’s small face was distorted by heat, dirt, bites and anxiety. These women had suffered enough, she didn’t want them to suffer more.
She took in a deep breath. She was their lord: it was her duty to tell them.
* * *
In August Pampi rowed to Cradge to see if there was a message. He returned with three sprigs of broom: next trip Turold would be carrying three passengers for the Postern. He was working exclusively for Fitzempress now and making regular crossings between Gravelines and the Wash.
As the islanders were still using the hall as their dormitory for safety reasons, Matilda had the keep made ready for guests. “First time the bloody thing’s been useful.”
Three weeks later Wifil, on look-out, spotted a boat upriver on the Nene. He recognised the web-fingered boy from Cradge but not the three shabby monks with him. As the boat slid into the tunnel of Snailstream hidden crossbows levelled at it – it was not unknown for de Mandeville men to disguise themselves as monks. But a voice called out the password, “Plantagenet.” The crossbows lowered.
The youngest, shabbiest monk was Walter, ex-Abbot of Ramsey. Matilda was overjoyed. “Where have you been, my lord?” There had been no news of him since Brother Daniel had been made abbot by Stephen.
“Rome.” He had aged and shook with residual malaria from the marshes around Rome which were even more ague-ridden than the Fens. “I was persuaded I had done wrong in relinquishing my post as abbot.”
He ate and drank a little and let Epona dose him with St. Gregory’s cordial. “The Holy Father has ordered that Daniel be deposed and that I be reinstated as abbot. In his mercy he has overlooked my fault in giving away my responsibility.”
“He’s been deposed already,” said Matilda. “De Mandeville.”
“Ah yes, I’ve heard of de Mandeville.” To people whose world had been turned upside down by the man he seemed to speak the name lightly.
Gabbling, Matilda gave him a precis of de Mandeville atrocities, augmented by interruptions from Badda and Milly. “He’s sending out men to steal the harvests,” Matilda told him. “If it isn’t handed over he burns the island.” She couldn’t sleep at night for fear it would happen to Dungesey.
“It shall all be set right,” he kept saying. He didn’t understand, not until he’d been to Ramsey himself to seek admittance, and been refused. There he saw for himself the gibbets on the lawn by the gates, the whores and the soldiers who camped in front and the devastated island.
He was brought back to Matilda, weeping. “Did you see?” he kept saying. “There was blood on the walls. Ramsey is bleeding.”
In Matilda’s chamber when they were alone he recovered. “Now tell me about de Mandeville.”
She went through it again, but this time started further back, in the time before she, too, had grown up. “…and when Adel
iza died it was almost worse than anything had been. But the mercenary was… was good to me and made me sane before he went away.” She poured more wine, nervous at how much she’d told him. She became brisk. “And that’s how the Postern came about, and why I’m still here.”
The abbot reached for his cup. She was on the last halfbarrel; there would be no more. Moths came in through the window with the scents of a fenland summer night, singed their wings on the rushlight and rolled on the table, flapping.
“What’s it like to be in love?”
“Well, I don’t know.” Matilda was surprised and cross.
“It seems you do. Plato said that each man and woman was the half of a perfect whole, spending a lifetime to find the other half.”
“Who’s Plato?”
“And you have found yours in this mercenary.”
“Nonsense. I am a Norman lady. God wouldn’t do that to me.”
“Is there a God?”
“Eh?” This wasn’t embarrassing; it was frightening.
The ex-abbot shifted so that their faces were close. “There’s a toad in the Fens,” he said carefully, “which mews and clicks in summertime. Fenmen call it ‘the Squeaker’. I’ve dissected it. And it mews and clicks because parasite maggots are eating away its eyes and blocking its breathing while it still lives.”
“Yes?”
“It worried me, that toad – even in my innocence I would wonder about a God who created a chain of life in which one thing eats another. Today, at Ramsey, I saw it clearly. There is no God. We are animals grown haphazard to some natural law to prey on one another.”
The Morning Gift Page 24