He fell on the floor and began to sob again.
“Oh, for goodness sake,” said Matilda huffily. She yanked him up and popped him back on his stool. “Don’t you men understand anything? Of course there’s a God.” She wiped his nose on a cloth. “Blow.”
He blew. “How do you know?”
How could she put it? Because His Mother showed me how to hide my son and helped me through the worst experience of my life? Because I glimpsed Him in a damned crossbowman with a bad back? Because I can’t help it? She must be objective; he needed facts. “Have you ever tasted a blackberry on the last day of September?”
“I suppose so.”
“And it’s sweet. But have you ever tasted one on the first day of October? It’s sour. Awful. The Devil gets into blackberries on the last night of September. It’s always true. And if there’s a Devil there must be a God.” Everybody knew that.
The ex-abbot stared out on to years of labour and debt and discomfort and shame. “They were right with their rules and administration all along, weren’t they?”
“I expect so.”
As she watched him go through the courtyard she remembered a girl who’d fancied a spiritual romance with that man.
* * *
At the beginning of a blistering September de Mandeville laid siege to Burwell, one of Stephen’s castles in the southern Fens. It had been sited by Willem of Ghent and built by Fenchel, the engineer, and proved a difficult nut to crack.
Butterflies accompanied the warlord as he rode round his siege lines to the meadow opposite the north gate of the castle where his soldiers had been picking cranberries in the marsh. De Mandeville stopped and stared across at the castle which defied him with the same look with which he regarded a blue fenland sky or a man dying under torture. He had shown no emotion since the Pope had excommunicated him.
“All quiet, my lord,” said his sergeant, wiping his mouth. De Mandeville took off his helmet and exposed his glistening bald head. He was in full mail and smelled of hot metal. They remembered afterwards the question he asked: “What meadow is this?”
“Ramsey Lea, my lord; it belongs to Ramsey.”
“To me,” he said.
The arrow came from the castle three hundred yards away, wavering in the heat. It was nearly spent by the time it stuck into his forehead; he was pulling it out even as he fell from his horse.
They carried him away from the suffocating fens to his manor at Mildenhall where his son helped to carry him into the hall. “Eggs,” said the voice of de Mandeville. “Eggs. Eggs.”
“He keeps asking for eggs,” said the sergeant worriedly.
“Eggs,” said de Mandeville.
“…communication,” said his son. “Excommunication. Fetch the Abbot of Ramsey. Tell him he’s got his manor back but, oh Jesus, bring him quick.”
While he gathered his dispersed monks around him and dictated his letters asking for support, the abbot had made his home with Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk who, to everyone’s surprise, had remained loyal to the Empress.
He arrived at Mildenhall on September 15 and de Mandeville’s son threw himself at his feet. “Lift the Fiat, my lord. Save my father’s soul.”
They had made a bed for de Mandeville on the great table, but it would soon be a catafalque. The mount of green skin round the wound on his forehead lifted his eyebrows and stretched his lids so that he stared upwards in horror. “Eggs,” he whimpered. “Eggs. Eggs.”
“You see he is truly penitent, my lord,” said the son. “Lift the excommunication.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Abbot Walter, “but I can’t. Nobody who has laid violent hands on a cleric can be absolved by anyone except the Pope and in the Pope’s own presence.” He was putting on weight.
“But here is Ramsey.” The boy shoved rolled membranes that dangled seals into Walter’s hands. “All the charters, the tenancies.”
“Eggs, eggs,” begged de Mandeville.
Through the open door came the smell of pines and a blackbird’s song, but high in the black rafters of the hall the Devil was hovering to look down into the dying eyes that stared into his own.
De Mandeville’s wife rushed to a chest and tried to pull it towards the abbot. It didn’t move. She tried pushing. “We are empowered to offer you this chest, lord, full of gold for the poor.”
“They will be glad of it, but I cannot save your husband.”
The warlord on the table tried to lift his hand to cover the eyes which would not close. His wife pulled at Walter’s sleeve. “Just say the words, then, lord, even if they will not save him. Just let his death be peaceful before he faces damnation. I know he’s been wicked but our Lord was merciful to sinners – let him die in peace.”
The abbot picked her hand off his robe. “It would be breaking the rules, my dear. We’re in this mess because I broke them. I will stay and I will pray for him, but rules are rules.”
Ordure dripped down the Devil’s goatish haunches: they could smell it. They knew the Devil chuckled because the man on the table chuckled in helpless imitation. The abbot prayed steadily, but Satan came closer, his giantism making the hall pulse, reducing and constricting its occupants so that they crouched. The warlord tried to crawl off the table to get away from his diabolic creditor. They saw him attempt to close his popping eyes and clutch at his chest to ward off the talons from his soul, but in the end they heard it torn out of his body in a great suck of air.
The corpse could not receive Christian burial, of course, so it was sealed in a chest and lodged for a while in a cherry tree at Walton Abbey, but the monks’ dreams became disturbed by the screams of de Mandeville’s soul as it hopped and sizzled on Hell’s andiron and the coffin was transferred to an unblessed cave under the Temple in London where it lay for the rest of that reign and most of the next until all Ramsey’s tenants had been restored and huge sums paid to the abbey in compensation and the Pope lifted the excommunication.
The de Mandeville revolt was over. His men went back to wherever they had come from, taking women, harvests and valuables with them, leaving waste behind.
Abbot Walter and a handful of monks returned to the deserted abbey to find it stripped and fouled with rubbish, its fields unfilled and in the kitchens no food at all, not even, said Ramsey’s chronicler, “so much utensils as would suffice for the cooking of cabbages for a single meal”.
There was hardly time to draw breath before the Fens faced their next enemy.
Chapter 14
1145–1147
As if to make up for the summer, late autumn and winter were the wettest in years. Besides their own rain the Fens were deluged with the water from thirteen counties. It purled into rivers and neglected lodes until only the islands and highest embankments stood above its comfortless surface and water birds swam between willow branches in which land birds perched and wondered where to go next. All grazing was drowned and islanders shared their houses with cattle and went abroad in boats and shook their fists at the uplands where the water came from.
Dungesey fetched its harvest store from the hiding-places and Pampi and Matilda quarrelled about the best place to keep it out of the wet.
“Not the keep, you fool,” Matilda shouted. “It’s damp. It’ll get the mildew. It’ll be safe enough here in the undercroft.”
“What if that floods?” demanded Pampi. “That be damp enough for you?”
It was late and the island women were settling down for the night. The shutters on the north side of the hall kept unlatching and banging, letting in the driving rain. When they were shut again the wind moaned at the cracks. The children were fretful, babies cried and smoke from the fire gusted in the draught. “Not the keep,” said Matilda. “It’d be too much work getting it up there.” She still had a horror of the keep. “And raiders could find it there.”
“Pity the poor buggers who come raiding in this lot,” he grumbled. There were times when she loathed Pampi, the male who challenged her authority.
“Yo
u’re my vassal. You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I can do that’s sense,” he yelled back.
Down the bays of the hall the rush screens which partitioned off the sleeping quarters were going up. Quarrels between Pampi and Matilda were too frequent and too shortlived to be of interest but Maggi, as always, was at her elbow. “Better do it, commander. He’s not the fool he looks. And the wind’s in the north-west.”
She calmed Matilda who took a deep breath and tried to forget how tired she was, how damp and how constantly hemmed in by people and noise. Another shutter flew open and banged in time to the pounding in her head. She could taste salt on the wind.
“Is it another Flood?” She was suddenly nervous.
Kakkr, who was telling stories to his grandson by the fire, droned: “It’s the Mother coming back. There’s a full moon and she comes with it every seventh year. She comes back to her children every seventh year with the full moon.”
She was sick of this life, sick of their stupid faces. “Do as you like. I’m going to bed. Build another bloody Ark for all I care.”
The next morning the wind up in the Orkneys gusted at 125 miles an hour and coincided with a high tide, piling up accumulated water which became a rogue tide complying with no rules, no cycle, being a law to itself. It crashed against north-east Scotland, deflected and began to travel south, building up steadily as it moved down the coast until the North Sea became elevated. People struggling to keep upright in the wind on the cliffs watched swells the height of cathedrals sail past them.
On Dungesey the islanders began the job of moving the harvest to the keep. The wind nudged them off balance like a playful monster, catching the bales, whipping the string off a barley sack so that grain came out as if blown from a peashooter. The women’s hair streamed ahead of their faces like the haulms of rushes. The roof of Badda’s hut blew off and bowled in giant leaps across the green to crash into the yew trees.
Sulking in her chamber Matilda watched them work and stagger. Pampi was hobbling up on the ash peg-leg Kakkr had carved for him and which Wilberta had padded to the contours of his stump. “He’ll make it bleed again,” she thought, “serve him right.” There were still the peat bricks to take up, and the tinder and the ale and water casks. “Jesus and Mary, we could fix up Fenchel’s old hoist. If you want a job done properly you’ve always got to do it yourself.” She secured her cloak around her and went to see to it.
They worked until long after it was dark. Pampi wanted to continue and bring up the animals but Matilda said they were all too exhausted and, since this was manifestly true, he gave in.
The rogue tide moved majestically south. The wind sucked at it from the funnel of the Wash, aggravated by the traction of smaller winds over the vast stretches of shallow water, and the tide paused as if at an unexpected invitation. It accepted and turned.
A roaring which rose above the wind was the only warning before the people of the coast and silt fens were overwhelmed and the sky was taken over by the North Sea.
Five of the huts at Cradge were knocked off their stilts and their occupants drowned or battered to death. Furniture, humans and livestock were tugged along in the undertow to pile up in a mound in the lowest marshes and be found days later. Poultry drowned in their pens. The hermit Wilfram, at Upwell, was rescued by a boat floating in through the door of his hut, the only miracle of the night.
Matilda woke with reluctance and self-pity at persistent knocking. She crawled to the west window and looked out. For a moment she was back in time – the green and the courtyard glimmered as if with snow. Then she saw it was water. The knocking was the boats Pampi had stored against the steps, now floating and hitting the wall.
The flood had broken down the door of the hall’s undercroft; she could hear it slopping about beneath her floor. “The animals.” She ran out of the chamber, shouting.
The water was over waist-high so they used boats. Maggi, Epona and Matilda rowed to the byre. Epona and Matilda, the two tallest, got out and struggled to unbar the door and shove it inwards. The plough-horses had long ago been replaced by cheaper oxen which now stood with their necks upstretched, lowing. One calf was swimming but another had drowned and his head bobbed against his mother’s back. Sedge litter formed a scum on the water’s surface. The two women ducked under, came up and ducked again to find the headropes and undo them. The panicking animals swam out through the door, automatically making for the high ground of the keep.
That night Matilda discovered many things; that pigs are natural and humorous swimmers, that sheep drown with the weight of their own saturated wool, that the fenlanders made jokes in a crisis, that she could work till she dropped and then get up and work again.
A roof, not one of Dungesey’s, floated past with a dog balanced on one side and a pheasant on the other, both of them too wet and miserable to play predator and victim.
At long last they’d saved everything that could be saved and Matilda sank down in the dark keep in a jumbled mess of peat bricks, cooking pots, wet animals and humans. Her clothes squelched and hung heavy on her shoulders. She was cold. Maggi handed round some soggy bread.
Pampi came last, barely able to move, but carrying a squealing piglet by an ear and a leg. “Good thing we got the ale and rain-barrels up,” he said, “because for all we’re drowning in the bugger, there’ll be no water for drinking in the well.” Salt sea had pushed back fresh water and contaminated every well. “Stock won’t be able to drink.” All that trouble and they would lose them from thirst, anyway.
No stock, ruined embankments. The God who ill-wished her and everything she cared about had won. She could do no more. “It doesn’t matter.”
Kakkr was still on his feet looking out of the doorway at the flecked, moonlit water. “I said she’d come back.”
In Kakkr’s coffin-shaped head rested the island’s memory and the people revived as he gave them hope. They fed him his lines. “Kakkr’s so old he remembers Hereward the Wake,” teased Badda on cue.
“I liked his dad the best,” said Kakkr promptly. “But I’ve seen her come and go. I said she’d come back.”
“She could stay away for me.” Maggi was deathly tired.
“You don’t say that,” said Kakkr. “She’ll leave wealth behind when she go. I remember.” In spring the tidal silt would have so firmed and enriched the already-rich peat they’d be able to get crop after crop out of it.
Matilda’s face sagged in defeat as she closed her eyes. She didn’t know how they kept going, or why. She heard Pampi’s leg tap the ground beside her and the grunt as he lowered himself. He dug her in the ribs. “You ever thought what the name Dungesey means?”
Who cared any more? She rolled her head against the peat bricks and kept her eyes shut. The fenwomen were suddenly alert, hushing their children. Outside the waves flopped against the motte’s base and the stranded, lopsided cattle mooed with fright.
“Dynja,” said Kakkr. “Isle of the Dynja. Old word. Older nor I can remember. Anglish.”
She felt Pampi lean over her and opened her eyes to look into his face which was circled with black lines of unabsorbed peat that the water had washed against it. Seeing he’d got her attention, he sat back. “Dynja do mean the ‘Place of the Women’. This is the island of the women’s place.”
“I see.”
“More nor that,” he went on, “it means the place that belongs to the women. Certain times it gets a woman as lord. When there’s trouble.” She could tell from the silence and the way they weren’t looking at her that this was important to them all.
“Yes?”
“There was a woman lord when we had all that old squit with the Conqueror,” interjected Kakkr. “She comes and goes, like the Mother.”
“What it is,” said Pampi, and whatever it was made him more truculent than ever. “There’s trouble when the woman lord comes. We knew there was going to be bad times when Sigward seised us of you.”
So that was it. She was the crow
of disaster. She was Eve who had brought sin into the world. “There would be no ice in any place; there would be no windy weather, there would be no grief, there would be no terror, but for me.” She looked round at the soaking, shivering children, at Maggi trying to strike flint to the tinder with hands too cold to function. Tears came out of her eyes and made streaks down the black of her face. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m sorry for being a woman and bringing trouble on you all.”
Pampi considered. “That’s one way of looking on it, I suppose.”
“Is there another way?”
He shifted. “We’ve always reckoned as she was sent to see us through it.”
It was a gift, all they had. They shifted and grumbled so that they wouldn’t hear her sob.
* * *
They came through it, though the cattle died and the women had to harness themselves to the plough and the harrow before they could sow. When Maggi dropped from exhaustion, Matilda took her place and hauled with the rest.
But the rivers and the sky teemed with the food supply Sigward had once promised her. The barge blockade hid their front door from invaders. And in late spring the crops came up out of the earth as if they were being pushed. They had survived.
That spring Matilda sailed with Turold for Normandy and the Plantagenet court at Rouen, where Edmund was.
* * *
By coincidence, on the day she arrived Fitzempress sailed to England with his mercenaries in a miniature invasion force to harry Stephen from the south and take some of the royal army’s attention away from his mother and her hard-pressed allies.
Neither his mother nor his uncle, the Earl of Gloucester, had asked for his help while his father, Geoffrey of Anjou, had actually forbidden him to give it, but the boy sailed anyway.
To Matilda’s relief Fitzempress had left Edmund behind in Normandy as being too young still, but Edmund was inconsolable. “He’s only a bit older than me. He should have taken me. I’ve as much right to go as those rotten mercenaries. More.”
The Morning Gift Page 25