“Anyway,” interrupted Osbert, “we couldn’t find you. We went right down by the river and walked around the house but it seemed to be empty. The big doors were locked but there was no sound and the stables were abandoned. We shouted for you but there was just the wind in the trees. And that odd rainbow. The most amazing rainbow I’ve ever seen.”
“Then we looked back up the hillside and saw someone standing at the top, looking down at us,” Walter hurried on. “So we went scrambling up and there was Vespasian, looking all grand with pearls and rubies on his cotte but so exhausted and sort of grey. I’d never seen him look so haggard.”
“He looked really ill,” said Osbert with reverence. “More ill than when he was half starving in London, or when he got that wound in his shoulder. Anyway, he was carrying you in his arms. And you looked even sicker than he did. We thought you must be dying. You were all bloody and unconscious.”
“He put you straight into my arms,” said Walter. “And he told me to carry you home. She’s injured, he said. Be careful of her. Just take her home.”
Osbert sighed. “Then he said he’d come soon and he’d be bringing Gerald with him. He went back down the hill without looking back. When we couldn’t see him anymore, we started walking through the forest, taking turns to carry you. You might be just a little thing, but you were heavy, I can tell you. We got you to drink a bit every day, but you couldn’t eat and you kept fainting again.”
“You haven’t eaten since Vespasian found you and told us to bring you back here,” said Walter, “and that’s days ago. So that’s why you have to eat now. If you die after all this, well, goodness knows what Vespasian would say to us.”
I smiled. I was amazed at myself for managing it. “And I was only gone about an hour before you saw Vespasian carrying me?” They nodded. “For me, it was weeks,” I told them. “Time is playing tricks and Vespasian’s part of it.”
Hugh grimaced. “Vespasian’s clever, but he’s not a magician.”
“Oh yes he is,” I said. “That’s absolutely exactly what he is.”
What none of them realised of course, and what I wondered at but did not mention, was the fact that I had come home in new clothes. Plain, serviceable, but totally new to me. I hated them and I did not know who they belonged to. I scrunched them away in a chest and changed into the pretty clothes Richard had once brought me from market.
It was some days before I felt strong enough to let the summer warmth slip me back into the lazy slumber of routine. I asked no more explanations of the boys and they asked no more of me. They assumed I had hit my head in the tumble and had fainted into a nightmare. I knew I could understand no more of the truth until Vespasian came back. I knew now that he would and I wondered whether he would bring Gerald back alive or dead.
I remained convalescing in Vespasian’s bed. Hugh hung a little cross on the bedpost above my pillow. I told him I was sorry I had lost his beloved cloak. He said he didn’t mind and Osbert said he could go into market and get me material to make another. Stephen repeated that one day he’d kill a wolf and make a cloak from the skin. I just smiled and said, let’s wait for Vespasian. That’s what we were all doing anyway.
Slowly, having no mirror and wanting none, I discovered some of the injuries that had been inflicted on me. I had been marked in strange ways. The broken wrist and burned hand which had been mended in Molly’s hospital, now hurt very little though the palm remained scarred and puckered and I had limited feeling in two finger tips. Other burns seemed more recent and were distinctly more painful. The stripes of wounds across my chest which Vespasian had bandaged were now just thin silver memories but they were newly crossed and hatched by deeper, newer marks. I recognised the unmistakable signs of lash and whip and knife across my breasts and shoulders.
Healing was already advanced and I was no longer bandaged. I traced the scars over my chest and ribs, down across the belly to the groin and on to my thighs. I saw the evidence of clear sadism and perversion, but had no memory of their infliction. I remembered finding myself on the filthy stone, chained and exposed like a slave. But my other memories were of dazzling light, cool water and chanting and I had felt nothing of the hideous things that had obviously been done to me. Even stranger, there was a tiny pattern of black lines resembling a dragon, tattooed onto the inner curve of my left breast. It was drawn very exactly, its wings unfurled and its mouth open; dark furrows imbedded into my most sensitive flesh. It was both repulsive and beautiful and it frightened me. It also throbbed with pain, a piercing stab often waking me in the night. Around the curves of the wings were puckered and minute blisters, as if the thing had been painted with fire, but I also discovered a soft greasy patina across my breast, as if it had afterwards been treated with ointment.
It was well past the Festival of Lugh when Vespasian finally came back, riding that thin brown horse of his. Gerald sat on the pummel in front of him.
Chapter Twenty Two
Gerald jumped from the saddle and ran over to us, all smiles and excited dimples. He was dressed in pale blue velvet like a young prince and his cloak was fur lined. Vespasian dismounted behind him and stood looking directly at me. I looked back without blinking. He looked magnificent.
I said, “So you let them have me in exchange for saving Gerald.”
He paused a moment and finally he said, “Yes.” Then he walked past me into the house and called for wine. The boys ran to obey him, just like old times, while Gerald swirled off his grand cloak and called Walter to help him look after the horse.
I followed Vespasian and stood in front of him while he stretched himself into his big chair in the main hall and began to pull off his boots. “Gerald’s your step-son. So you gave me to them for torture, because I don’t matter, and you made a pact to get him back.”
He frowned, just a twitch between the brows. “Yes,” he said again. “So it was.” He tossed his boots across the room. I was looming over him and he looked up at me. I thought that somewhere deep in the backs of his eyes there was the gentleness of pity, and a hint of smile.
“I’m amazed that I was worth such an exchange,” I persisted. “Just a half starved country brat to swap for a baron’s step-son.”
“You misjudge your own value,” he said softly. But now he was looking at me with less sympathy, as if suddenly aware of something. He said, even more softly, “You see, you were a virgin.”
“Were?” I would dearly have loved to slap him. Tilda wouldn’t let me. “Was? Not anymore?”
The smile had gone cold and contained more malice than pity. “Tell me, Tilda,” and his voice was hard as ice. “How is it you know I’m a baron?”
I paused for a moment. I shouldn’t have known. He’d told Molly, not Tilda. It was a dangerous game and Tilda was uncomfortable and confused. I looked back at Vespasian. “Molly told me,” I said. I swear I heard him smile as I turned sharply around and marched from the room.
It was impossible with the boys around to be private again with Vespasian. They were too excited, so I hardly spoke to him for days. The boys bounced about him like delighted puppies so proud to have their master back. Even the nightmare loss of dear Richard had drowned beneath new life and new excitement. Gerald had a lot to tell us and it was in the long evenings of late summer that we sat around the cooking hearth in the kitchen and told stories just as we had before. The smoke wisped up to the hole in the thatch and bustled around the high beams where we hung the bacon joints for drying and the bunches of herbs and nettles and the twigs of laurel for cooking and hazel to season for arrows. Vespasian lounged in his chair and the rest of us curled on cushions or stretched out on the matted straw.
Vespasian’s face was always in the shadow, as if he carried his own shadows with him. As Gerald and the others talked I doubted that Vespasian listened. He drifted in dream. But if there was any sudden noise, he was the first to snap alert.
Although I knew some of it, Gerald’s story amazed us all. “You’ll never believe it,” he
said, which was true at first. “Well, of course, I didn’t know myself. All these years and Vespasian never told me.”
The old man who had grabbed Gerald from our doorstep and carried him off into the forest, turned out to be a man of some importance. “I don’t know why he stole me away like that,” puzzled Gerald. “If he’d just come and explained himself, why, we’d have let him in, wouldn’t we?’
But Gerald remembered nothing of the journey to the strange house on the river. He had woken as if from a very deep dream, and found himself already wrapped in blankets in a soft narrow bed with a charcoal brazier beside him and a beautiful woman looking down at him.
“I wasn’t scared,” he lied. “I just wondered where I was. It was just so weird. Anyway, this woman bent down and kissed me on the forehead and she smelled of roses and lavender. That was just the beginning. It was the most exciting time of my whole life.”
“I don’t know why you came back,” said Hugh, rather sour, “if it was so amazing and good.”
“I came back to be with Vespasian,” said Gerald. “He’s my step-father and guardian. I don’t know why he never told me before. Why didn’t you, Vespasian?”
It took a moment before Vespasian looked down on him and acknowledged the query. “It was safer,” he said, soft voiced. “Safety in ignorance and to keep you with me and away from them. Now, go on with your chatter. I am not in the mood for questions.”
Gerald was slightly taken aback. “Safer? But they’re wonderful people. No one harmed me.” Vespasian ignored him so he turned back to us. “I don’t know all the story of course and maybe one day Vespasian’ll explain it to me. but I know I was the child of his wife’s first marriage.”
“Wife?” squeaked all the voices, except mine.
Gerald nodded, huge with importance. “My mother was Lady Ingrid and my father was the Baron of Tennaton. When I was just a baby my father was killed on the crusades and then my mother met Vespasian and married him. Well, I don’t think Vespasian really liked my mother’s kinfolk, so he and my mother went away together and took me with them.” He looked up for agreement and confirmation but Vespasian was once more lost in the scarlet flame-dreams and far away. Gerald carried on. “So we were in this huge house down on the river at the other side of this forest, and it used to be Vespasian’s house but my mother’s people live there now. I’m not sure why that is, but that’s what’s happened. I met my grandmother. She’s the beautiful woman who kissed me when I woke up. She’s married again too and he’s Arthur and quite old. I admit I didn’t like him much. He’s the one who came to this house and took me away. He and Vespasian seem to hate each other. Anyway, everyone else was wonderful.”
“So, where’s your mother? Where’s Vespasian’s wife?” whispered Stephen in awed anticipation, peeping up at Vespasian’s half closed lids. Mothers were every boy’s secret fantasy.
“She’s dead,” I said suddenly. “Arthur killed her. He killed your father too.”
“What a ridiculous thing to say. You can’t know that,” said Gerald, going pink and turning angrily to me. “My father died on crusade to the Holy Land. That’s what they said. Arthur’s a strange man, and I suppose I was a bit frightened of him to tell the truth, but he would never have killed my parents. Why would he? And why would my grandmother marry him if he did? And you couldn’t know anyway, Tilda. You’re just being mean. You don’t know the first thing about it.”
I suddenly felt all the intensity of Vespasian’s eyes on the back of my neck, but when I looked up at him he was still staring into the fire as if his thoughts remained absent. I turned back to Gerald.
“He killed Richard too,” I said. “Doesn’t anybody remember anything about Richard?” Again I felt Vespasian’s eyes piercing my mind but he didn’t say anything and I decided I had better not say anything more myself.
I often walked down to the silver pool in the forest where they had buried Richard. Vespasian had forbidden any of us to wander alone, so sometimes Stephen came with me and sometimes Walter. Once Hugh came, bringing a little wooden cross he’d carved. Gerald ignored me, still angry. Osbert avoided me too, as if scared of who I’d become and the things I said. I piled wild thyme and vervain on the grave’s piled earth and watched as gradually the ivy and moss grew over it and absorbed it back into the soft green undergrowth.
No one returned to the market, either the East Cheap or the West Cheap, but Gerald and Vespasian had brought two fat packed panniers back with them. They went, hidden beneath layered bay leaves, straight into the locked wooden chests, but sometimes Vespasian pulled something out and the gifts were always unexpected. He gave each of us long knives like short swords. They had handles carved and set with pearls or jet or crystals. Mine was all golden metal with a great lion’s head carved on top and a shaft so sharp that I was frightened to carry it with me, even in its worn leather scabbard. It was heavy, and made my wrist sore.
“It’s not real gold is it?” I stammered. “That would be worth a fortune. I wouldn’t dare carry it around.”
“Never leave the house without it,” Vespasian ordered me. “Especially when you go to the pool.” He spoke to me rarely these days and never in private.
“How do you know I go to the pool?”
“You go to visit Richard,” he said, “and I’ll not stop you. But you must never go alone and must always take the sword with you.” We were standing at the edges of the first trees that encroached upon the boundaries of the house. Vespasian was looking across my shoulder, as if he saw the pool and the grave mound, and not myself at all. “I’ve had reason to go there many times in the past,” he said, in a manner that surprised me. “It is a beautiful place. But it is also dangerous.”
He gave me more clothes too, which surprised me even more. The worn lilac tunic and white chemise which had once been my only garments, had been ruined by Vespasian himself when he had ripped them apart to bandage my wounds. I had no idea where those rags were now and now I loved to wear the cherry pink which Richard had given me, and which made me think of him. But Vespasian gave me other things. I had a camise so fine that it seemed like lace. I had a stola of turquoise, colour of a bird’s egg. There was an over-tunic of summer’s day blue with a hem all the way to the ground, like rich women wore. There were stockings of thin wool as soft as fur and little leather shoes with bows. To replace Hugh’s cloak, not so warm but far more beautiful, there was a sea blue palla lined in silky black velvet, a rich lady’s toy.
I loved my new finery but I didn’t thank Vespasian. I had never thanked him for rescuing me either, for I had first been his prisoner and I still did not know how much of my torture had come from him. So I looked at everything and then I went and put them all on in the tiny cupboard room where his framed bed stood against the dark wall, and where I still slept. When I walked out to show him, he had gone. He was outside teaching Gerald and Hugh how to wrestle.
We all had lessons. Things he had hardly bothered teaching us before, now became daily rituals. Riding, archery, sword fighting and other matters even more practical.
“I will not bother teaching you French,” said Vespasian one evening, to our general astonishment, “as even the king uses it less these days, both officially and in private. Nor will I teach you Latin,” he looked around at us, eyes half hidden under the heavy lids and sweep of dark lashes, “unless any of you contemplates a career in the Church?”
There were some stifled sniggers in the candle flicker. Even Hugh, who had once contemplated such a future, chortled as if he knew it could never happen.
“Cum magna calamitate civitatis et periculo vester? No? I thought not. Then I will limit your education to the more useful skills of self defence and basic manners. You all behave like wild piglets, which of course, is entirely my own fault. Now that is about to change.”
He made me a small bow and three arrows plumed in partridge feathers, gave me soft brown gloves to protect my fingers against the pluck of the string, and patiently taught me to cas
t straight and strong. Standing behind me with his body close to mine so that I felt the pull of his muscles against my shoulders, his arm around me and his hands on my hands, I learned to shoot nearly as far as his own huge bow could cast, a hundred arrows in every direction, each and every one then dutifully retrieved, until eventually I felt myself a master. I was an attentive student and I loved the soft thwang of the flight and the spring of the string against my right ear. I felt like a little soldier, a Joan of Arc, though it would be a long time before she was born. The practise also made my weak wrist strong again. “Nock and draw,” Vespasian commanded from just above my head. “Now, loose.” Only when I had shot a wood pigeon from the sky and saw it tumble sadly at my feet, was Vespasian satisfied.
The boys each learned to ride, much to the disdain of the horse. Aware that none of us could understand him, Vespasian, reminded of his Latin, muttered “Culus inadequate,” as each of the boys fell off with lesser or greater bruising and a lot of bad language. However, since we had only one horse and I was at the end of the line, I did not learn to ride until much, much later and under very different circumstances.
The other lessons were less exciting. They began with table manners “– wash your hands immediately before and immediately after, do not grab all the choicest pieces or blow all over hot food in a shared bowl. Put a clean napkin over your right shoulder and use it to wipe your mouth and your fingers. Do not use the back of your hand or your sleeve or the edge of the tablecloth (there are plenty of linen napkins folded in the kitchen chest), don’t slurp or drop half your food on the table or into the lap of your companion and do not pick your teeth with the point of your knife. Nor should you unearth wax from your ears, sneeze in anyone’s face, or cough over the wine.”
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