The mercenary shook his head. “It’s over. They’ve come to the end.”
“I’m j-just beginning. They’ll see.”
“Go and meet Stephen on the bridge. He’s ready to talk now. You’ll inherit.”
Fitzempress wiped a raindrop off the end of his nose and looked up. The whites of his eyes were capillaried with red. “Has this been arranged? It’s been arranged, you bastard, hasn’t it?”
“Eustace won’t be in on the negotiations. They’re keeping him away.”
“Who’s betrayed us?” Suddenly the “us” was Stephen and him. “The Beaumonts? You? Why didn’t the mercenaries advance? Whose money did you take this time, you fucking traitor?”
“Think, will you? It’s happened. They’ve all had enough. The archbishop and Henry of Blois have been working for it. De Luci’s organised the talk with Stephen. He’s king till he dies. You inherit.”
“De Luci’s a Stephen man.”
“He’s an England man.” Willem of Ghent took off his helmet and threw it on the ground. He grabbed the boy’s hair and shook him. “Do you want to fight all your life? Do you want a bankrupt bloody country?” He twisted his hand so that the boy’s head faced the river. “It’s over. You’re better than that.”
He let go because Fitzempress’ eyes had fixed on the wet, immobile ranks; he was coming out of it. The mercenary retrieved his helmet, walked over to a cart and pulled at its canvas so that a pool of water lying on top poured into his helmet. He sobbed, stopped himself and took the water back to Fitzempress. “Wash your face, for Christ’s sake.”
The Plantagenet said: “It would have been nice to win the war.”
“Win the country instead.”
Edmund brought up the horses and helped his prince to remount. When he was up Fitzempress leaned over and poked his captain of mercenaries in the chest. He smiled. “One thing, it’ll do you out of a job.”
* * *
On the other bank Eustace’s tantrum ended when he noticed that his father was missing. “Where’s the king? Treachery.” He rowelled the sides of his horse so that it screamed and reared, but two distinguished and heavy men, Robert the Earl of Leicester and William of Ypres, leaped for its bridle and pulled it back.
“Jacopo,” shouted Ypres. A ring of levelled crossbows formed round Eustace’s household knights. A voice with a Calabrian accent said: “It is upsetting to shoot members of one’s own side. Consider my feelings, dear gentlemen, and don’t move.”
So Eustace’s knights stood and watched a struggle between their prince and his father’s two main barons. At one point Eustace drew his sword but was disarmed and thrown to the ground where Ypres sat on his head and the Earl of Leicester on his legs until his hands could be bound and he was turned over, unrecognisable from mud. The Earl of Leicester wiped his face: “Listen to me, my lord. You have vast estates by hereditary right, you can enjoy them and be the greatest man in the country after the king – whoever that may be.”
Eustace wriggled his head round to look at the bridge where two figures, one tall and slim, one medium-sized and square, faced each other in conversation. He screamed.
“I wish you’d listen,” said the Earl of Leicester plaintively. “Opt for the attainable, not the impossible. We are but men.”
Ypres raised his rump and lowered it, knocking Eustace’s breath out of him. “Listen,” he said.
“You see,” said the Earl of Leicester, “among my estates is a manor called Pegg, near Malmesbury, which produces the finest medlars in Christendom. I am fond of medlars.”
“Pisspot,” roared Eustace, “treacherous, shithead nancy-boy.”
“After the siege of Malmesbury,” the earl went on, watching Ypres stuff a corner of his cloak into Eustace’s mouth, “there was no soul left alive at Pegg. Not steward, women, freemen, not serfs. Nobody.” He smiled down into Eustace’s eyes. He was still handsome but the skin of his neck and chin had begun to droop. “Do you understand?”
A gurgle came from Eustace’s throat: “War.”
The Earl of Leicester tut-tutted. “You miss the point, my dear. There won’t be tithes from Pegg for some years, or from thousands of other manors. Nor medlars. And I am fond of medlars.”
He glanced to the bridge where negotiations were being completed in mutually respectful bows. Even at this distance the naked, tortoise head of de Luci was recognisable.
They let Eustace up and he ran to meet his father. In the rain Stephen was as point-device as ever, though something had been washed out of him.
“What have you done, father? What have they made you give away?”
“Nothing, my son. I have given nothing away.”
“Then we can attack. The battle can start?”
Stephen looked at the sky as if it all depended on the weather. “Not today, dear boy.” He smiled at his son. “We could go and attack Hugh Bigod if you liked.”
Weightily, the two armies began to disperse. Boots sucked out of the mud and were emptied of water. Cloaks were squeezed and carts repacked. Greetings and vulgar exchanges on the weather began to be shouted back and forth between the two sides of the river.
A muddy figure and its household knights rode like a raincloud of their own towards the east. “Eustace won’t give up, you know,” said Ypres, watching it go.
“I know,” said the Earl of Leicester, “somebody’s going to have to kill that boy.”
* * *
Eustace and his knights rode out of the wet west into the blistering August of the east. Zig-zagging, they set fire to everything they passed; fields, villages, hayricks and trees exploded as if the air round Eustace was combustible. They were joined by other madmen. Those who saw them said the soul of de Mandeville had found a new body.
People began trying to kill Eustace. They bobbed out of bushes and shot at him with catapults. Women flapped their laundry at his horse. When arrows whizzed past Eustace’s nose as he went through the glades of Royston Forest, the captured culprits sulked and said they’d taken him for a stag. Branches cracked above his head, trees fell in front of him and behind him boulders rolled down slopes.
When he sacked and burned Cambridge, a Cambridge only just rebuilt after being sacked and burned by de Mandeville, arrows jumped at him like grasshoppers from the reeds of the Cam and Granta.
But Eustace stayed alive, though three horses died under him. With each escape from death he knew he was protected by God for some special purpose.
When he reached Pampisford he set fire to the fenland. Below its grasses lay peat which had become fibrous through three dry years.
It is a property of peat that, though it is slow-burning, it is sure-burning. Once it is in the right condition and catches alight it is consumed leaving slight, fine ash, and the only way to stop it burning is to take it apart fibre by fibre. Fire in dry peatland can smoulder for years, scorching the boots of those who tread it and turning great stretches into wasteland.
In August of 1153, the fire which shrivelled the upper layer of grass and sedge also caught hold of the peat below. It sent up a glow which could be seen as far north as the island of Dungesey.
* * *
Taking her last look at Dungesey from the steps of her hall, Matilda did not see the same island that had presented itself to her first view twenty years before.
It was high summer now and had been winter then; it was impoverished now in animals and people where then it had been rich. “But we should be able to buy sheep next year,” thought Matilda, “and get rid of those damned goats.”
She spoke over her shoulder: “Don’t let Shudda get away with anything. I have commuted half her rent, but the rest must be paid on time.”
“All right, commander.”
Between the untidy, lower branches of the yew trees Badda and Wilberta were sitting and spinning, the long-drawn up-ending sound of their vowels as they talked mixed with the call of wood pigeons. They were getting old.
“And I have commuted all of Pampi’s rents
and services, but he’s not to know that until I’ve gone.”
“All right, commander.”
“Abbot Walter will see that my lord Edmund honours my will’s dispositions. He is also making arrangements to have you taught French.”
“Have I got to, commander?”
She whipped round. “How can you be a proper steward if you don’t speak French? How can you teach the islanders?” Wifil had grown as big as Stunta, but he had Maggi’s brains; Matilda had spent more time and trouble on him teaching him manners and estate management than she had been able to spend on her own son. He would make a fine steward. She was vastly proud of him. She said: “You’re a great gowk.”
“All right, commander.”
Even on this day the thick Saxon walls kept out the heat. Light coming through the reed curtain over the door cast striped shadows which bridged over the table and the piles of tallies and keys upon it. She began picking up the keys and slipping them on a big iron hoop. “Kitchen aumbry, hall aumbry, weapon chest, clothes chest, undercroft…” When she’d finished she handed the ring to Wifil. “Look after it.”
“I ought to come along of you, commander.”
“What have we been talking about? Of course you can’t come.”
She left the hall quickly and, followed by Wine, went to the gates. She paused. So many things left undone. Fenchel’s lodge was still standing, useless, at the foot of the keep. She couldn’t think why she hadn’t pulled it down years ago. Now Milly was complaining that her daughter was doing naughty things in it with Badda’s son.
Badda and Wilberta emerged from under the yew and came to stand on either side of her, both carried their baskets and wore their stoutest boots. “There’s no need to jostle me,” she snapped at them, “you’re not coming.”
“That we are,” said Wilberta. Matilda spat with irritation. Why did the English never realise that she knew best? She changed her tack and tried reason. “How can I leave the island to a lot of men? It wasn’t men who saved the island from de Mandeville, was it? Wifil will need you.”
They went off grumbling and without saying goodbye. Wine pushed his nose against the back of her knees; he had none of Fen’s dignity but he was a good dog. “You’re not coming, either,” she told him.
She turned left, skirted the manor wall, crossed Upper Green and stooped to pass under the branches of Perecourt. The pears weren’t ripe yet. She went down the slope to Wealyham. As usual the huts were untidy. The only living things in the place were a goat tethered to the grass and Epona, who was sitting on a tussock of sedge, sucking a reed and staring at the goat.
Matilda joined her and the goat regarded them back out of its wicked yellow eyes. It was a billy, ancient and thin; it looked crossly unwell, but the fact that it was alive at all worried her.
“Are you sure you got the proportions right?”
The Wealy woman shrugged. The grey in her hair merely looked like bleaching of the red-gold, her skin was still freckled honey; only her hands showed wrinkles and, like Matilda’s, were ungainly with rheumatism. She was still as promiscuous in her soporific way as she’d always been and now she had proved herself an inefficient poisoner. “A fine doctress you turned out to be,” Matilda told her.
Epona nodded: “Not used to killing, I reckon.”
In an effort to find an instant poison they had been lacing the goat’s hay with toxic substances for two days; agrimony, opium, hemp, deadly and woody nightshades, laurel berries, yew berries, iron rust, henbane and dried foxglove; powdered toad in turn had gone down the goat’s throat and resulted only in the dreadful-smelling, interestingly coloured droppings which had emerged from its other end.
“You want to kill it, you’ll have to slit its throat,” said Epona.
“Who’d eat it?”
Their failure continued to munch. “What the hell can the assassin be using?” asked Matilda. “He’s killing people off like flies.” She stirred herself. “We’ll just have to do with what we’ve got.” In their experiments they had put into a phial the most colourless, scentless poisons. “Get ready.”
Matilda walked back along the fenline, past the yellowing carr of Wulfholes to Snailstream. She found Pampi on the other bank, testing the ground with his peg-leg. He had been down to the south-west on his duck punt.
“That Eustace is still at Bury St. Edmunds,” he told her. “It’s like de Mandeville and Ramsey all over again, wouldn’t like to take on that old St. Edmund myself.”
Ever since Edmund had died howling Christianity at the Danes in the ninth century, he had shown himself a terrible protector of his own; those who attacked his lands rarely lasted long. But to Matilda the Edmund under attack was not the saint but a small boy. The terror of the days when her son had been a vulnerable child had come back to her.
“It can’t go on into a second generation,” she said. “It must be stopped.”
“Fire’s still advancing,” said Pampi. “Got to Sutton now. They won’t be growing nothing for many a long year.” Usually Pampi felt the fiercest rivalry for Suttoners. “Dungesey’s milk is thicker nor Sutton cream,” he would say, but today he grieved for them. He looked up. “We taking the row boat?”
She braced herself. “Epona and I are taking it. You’re not coming.”
“Bloody am.”
God blast the English. “Look, if the fire keeps coming we’re going to have to cut the Nene bank and flood the turbaries. Will you leave that to Wifil?”
He sulked. “He wouldn’t know where.”
“Precisely. So you stay.”
She would take with her Epona and an army of dead, a champion, a steward, a merchant who’d never returned to his place of business, violated girls, women grown old before their time, and a dog with blood at its throat.
* * *
For most of the Nene’s length they encountered boats piled with furniture coming the other way as refugees escaped the fire. “Don’t go that way, my gals. Devil’s loose down south.”
Ely was outlined against a glow so vast it looked as if the sun was setting in the south. Dots of people formed strings around the base of the island to beat out the flames in the grass.
They turned into the Great Ouse and then up into the Lark. It was quieter here. “There’s your bittern,” said Epona, pointing at the bank. Matilda looked. “If I see a bittern, everything will turn out all right,” she thought. But her night-blind eyes could spot nothing but rushes. “If I don’t see a bittern everything will turn out all right.”
They rowed out of fens into heathland. They could smell pines and broom and only faintly the smitch of scorching. Mildenhall, where de Mandeville had died, was either asleep or dead itself.
The calluses on the palms of their hands stripped off and they left blood on the oars, but they kept on and eventually passed without challenge under the East Gate bridge of St. Edmund’s.
There was nobody about, but the abbey was barred and shut and the portcullis of the water-gate on their left was in place. The walls of the abbey shut out the moon and they rowed in total blackness along the Lark until they were out into flat meadow, where they disembarked, hid the boat then ran back to the shadow of the abbey’s outer wall.
The abbey itself formed the biggest part of Bury St. Edmund’s; the rest of the town was perched on the side of a hill facing it and between the two ran a street which served the abbey’s frontage.
Nobody was around, but a cock crowed and was answered. The east was beginning to lighten and the air held the expectation of movement.
Epona’s and Matilda’s hands met for a moment, then Matilda moved along the street, keeping close to the abbey wall, past the massive gates, past the square height of St. James’s Tower which rose on guard at the western end. The fish-basket she carried bobbed on her back and its lid tapped as she ran. She stopped to fumble behind her neck to fasten it, and looked towards the town.
It was deserted and doors swung open showing empty interiors. She studied the roofscape and chose a
house with a second storey which had a window from which she could overlook the abbey gates. She raced over the road and through the door.
A rough table and some stools had been broken and scattered. The cooking pot was gone, either taken by the occupants when they fled or stolen by Eustace’s men – cooking pots were valuable.
She climbed the ladder upstairs and emerged into a room which contained nothing at all; some of the plaster had come off the walls to show the lathes underneath. She went to the window and pushed open the shutters.
Below her was a cluttered complex of vegetable gardens, empty hutches and hen coops, wells, outhouses and the roofs of next door. She was within easy bowshot of the abbey gates; she might even have time to get away. Her view was obstructed by some flowers in clay pots which stood on the window-sill beam. She had lived so long among fenlanders she’d forgotten that there were commoners who liked flowers for decoration. The family of this house had been poor, but the woman of it had cultivated for her delight roses, geraniums – and marigolds.
Matilda smiled: “I knew you’d be here.”
She got herself organised, took bread, duck and a flask of ale out of her basket and finally her crossbow and a sheaf of quarrels. She had some difficulty in finding the right position; the window was small and if she stood up she couldn’t see to aim and if she knelt her head was below the sill. At last she arranged her basket so that she could sit on it and aim diagonally.
In the St. James’s Tower, John of Topsham was yawning and peering through the north arrow slit which gave the guard-room some of its light and air, and thought he saw a movement in the window down the street. He watched for a while but the window stayed still.
John of Topsham was a lazy man; he’d joined Eustace’s army because the discipline was slack and the loot was good, but he was nervous about being on the vengeful St. Edmund’s territory. Perhaps he’d check that window later. He turned round to strip the covers off his fellow-soldiers and their women. “Ups-a-daisy, you sluts, my beauties. Time for a soldier’s breakfast.”
The Morning Gift Page 28