by Prue Batten
Guy refused to be drawn and I guessed straight away.
‘Oh my Lord, he won it in a game of chance, didn’t he?’ I slapped my palm on the pommel and swore. ‘Do you gamble like my father, Guy? Do you fritter away your hard-earned monies on paltry entertainments?’
His face barely moved, the master of inscrutability.
‘With what would I gamble? I am but a steward. Besides, the book may just save you, Ysabel, think on that.’
‘If my father hadn’t gambled at all, I wouldn’t be in the position of having to save myself.’
We lapsed into an uneasy silence and continued to the grassy outskirts of Walsocam where I had whispered ‘I know this place.’
‘I think we should seek a barn on the outskirts. There must be one somewhere amongst the steadings. And…’
Guy listened, no comment, no expression.
‘… I don’t think we should continue on horseback, we should take to the water. I know the fens well and I am familiar with backwaters that are secret and we can follow them to Moncrieff.’
His profound silence had the capacity to make me doubt my thoughts but then he shrugged.
‘As you wish, Lady Ysabel…’
Lady? Have I touched a nerve somewhere … how so?
‘But,’ he continued, ‘we shall have to leave the horses.’
‘Then we shall,’ I replied. ‘The money we lose is immaterial. Better to be secure on the water.’
Unkind Ysabel.
I knew it. He had paid for the mounts himself and I dismissed the fiscal loss as if it were nothing.
Unthinking.
We spent time circling Walsocam surreptiously, leading the horses, and eventually a barn, a pile of logs and daub with a roof, was revealed alongside a poor sort of dwelling. No smoke, light nor movement indicated habitation. ‘We must stay here,’ I said. ‘It’s empty.’
‘Does it not concern you that it may be an empty dwelling because of illness?’ Guy seemed reluctant.
‘If it were a contagion they would have burned it. No, it is empty for other reasons.’
Witchery, revolt, the family dying out, forced off; I cared not. To hide was paramount.
When did I become the decision-maker? When did it become right to reduce Gisborne to the position of a mere employee?
I knew I was behaving like a shrew, acting with fear lapping at my legs, but I could barely control it.
So much yet to lose.
We crept into the barn, our horses’ hooves muffled by the eons of grasses and leaves that were piled into the structure. We placed the animals in tumbled stalls that were laced with spider-webs and a search for feed revealed a stook of oaten hay, somewhat denuded of its goodness but not mouldy. Water of course was close by – a rivulet sluggishly pulsing behind the barn; a ubiquitous punt, elderly and careworn, pulled onto a sandy defile.
The sun had begun to slide as we finished watering the horses to return them to their stalls. In the muffled distance we could still hear the smithy at work and the occasional sound of a small community, voices light on the spasmodic breeze that rippled the rivulet.
We had secured the animals and were venturing out of the barn when Guy grabbed me back, holding me against the walls. He put his fingers to his lips and lifted two fingers to his eyes and then pointed out and I swiveled to peer through the crumbling walls. A punt drifted past with two men, the smell of a pile of eels drifting toward us. They were laughing as they poled away, unaware of the fugitives behind them.
I exhaled.
‘You see,’ I said. ‘It’s that easy to be noticed. I thank you for your quick wits.’
He nodded. ‘We need food. Stay here and I’ll search the dwelling.’
I let him go. I was tired and he was a man after all. Let him provide for me.
He was back in a short time with an insubstantial pile of goods.
‘A bit of wheaten flour but we need to pick out the weevils. Some stale ale fermented enough to blow the doors off the barn and some almost dry honey.’
‘Can we risk a fire?’
‘If we don’t, we starve.’
‘Then if we do it in the barn, the smoke won’t be noticeable.’ I said.
‘True.’
He had tipped the flour onto his cloak and was sifting through, lifting the tiny cream grubs and squashing them between thumb and forefinger.
‘Well then?’
‘Better to wait till night and light it outside. The smoke won’t be seen and if these folk are as superstitious as I suspect, they won’t go near the water in the dark. We have a lot to thank legend for.’
I guessed he was right, the likes of the waterwights held great sway in peasant minds.
I made up a mixture in a cracked earthenware flask. Some flour and a little sour ale to wet it, some scrapings of the honey crystals. I stirred it with a stick and when night had settled a dark cloth across the sky and eery threads of mist crept toward us from the water, Guy stroked a spark onto the neat pile of tinder. We built the fire and then let it burn to hot coals, placing a stone over them to heat and then dripping the mixture upon it and making flattish cakes. We flipped them with a piece of flint from the yard. They tasted of nothing but old flour, stale ale and a wistful memory of honey but they bulked our bellies and it was better than nothing.
We poured water on the coals, then some sand from the defile. On the morrow, Guy said we would spread it and it would look as if no one had been there. The horses we would turn loose – it would serve.
I hope.
In the barn I had just enough energy to yank my hood off and shake out tightly coiled hair. I ran my fingers through, pushed my head back and stretched it to each side.
Two hands slipped onto my shoulders and I froze, knowing with unerring instinct the hands that had loved me rested there. I stood so still, my breath held and then I rubbed the side of my head against his knuckles. He turned me round, tipped my chin and our lips met so lightly there was barely sensation. And again, and yet again.
His hands eased under the surcoat, lifting it, sliding it over my head and I watched as he pulled off his own. Our bodies touched.
We made love in silence again, not a word spoken, moving in a rhythm that was as driven by desperation as it was by affection. As if both of us needed to defray the tension of what approached, maybe even to hold it at bay. Afterward we lay in the damp and fusty hay, my eyes heavy, Guy’s body around mine like the sheath that protects a knife and I slept.
Much later the slightest movement woke me, as light as a mouse’s tread. I saw him leave and the word ‘trust’ grinned at me like some Devil’s sprite, taunting me, defying me. I dragged on my clothes, slid out the door following his shadow – a drifting shade in the dark. A guardian angel sat at my shoulder that night. Not once as he and I moved in our separate spaces, did I tread on twig or dry leaf. Not once did I startle a night creature into revealing my presence. In single file and far enough apart, we progressed into Walsocam and my heart crashed as loud as a thunderclap.
What draws you from our shared bed, Gisborne? Who?
The answer when it presented itself was so obvious I almost laughed with the bitterness of its revelation.
Halsham waited outside the inn.
The two cousins talked and money clinked in the night as a bag was passed over.
I didn’t wait. I reversed the way I had come, quickly passing dark dwellings as a lone cur barked, edging through sedge and reed, once disturbing a water fowl that clacked and flapped, but reaching the bank where lay the punts. With speed and as quiet as I had ever been in my life, I stepped in, pushing off with the pole and drifting into the slow current that would take me to my secret byways and to Moncrieff.
Without Guy of Gisborne.
Be calm. Think. My heart raced as the vessel humoured me, allowing me to slip along in the current, barely making a ripple. But the darkness suffocated. Swathes of giant grasses lined the banks like serried rows of pike-men in some army. Huge trees towered abo
ve the grasses and I fancied they resembled trebuchets. The air itself, hardly moving in the night, was moist and laden with the odour of mud and weed. As Walsocam drained into the rivulet there were other smells as well - excrement, the bloated remains of a butchered sheep, dead cats and rats.
But the current slipped me past and presently the air was sweeter, less of man and more of the watery fens. Nothing awoke to my passage and I pushed the pole into the mud and held it there to track my journey.
Landmarks, I need landmarks. Mary Mother, help me.
The shapes around me blended into the shadows of midnight as I swung myself in a circle.
River. Walsocam that way. Trees. Willows. Three oaks.
I could define the shape of the leaves as they leaned down over the rivulet and the occasional acorn dropped in the water with a subtle plop.
Three oaks!
I poled the punt toward the sentinel trees and pulled myself back and forth amongst the grasses, the noise a shifting, crackling sound.
There! There it is.
A disused opening to a channel that seemed deep and navigable but overgrown and unseen. This was the secret backwater – this was the way to Moncrieff.
I pushed through the reeds, allowing them to close over the punt, meshing fast like a portcullis slamming down. The darkness was total. So overgrown were the sedges they leaned right across my head. Spider-webs feathered across my face and I rubbed at them with the crook of my elbow. I hated spiders.
Don’t think on them, keep going. Breathe.
The water flowed sluggishly away toward Moncrieff and I realized if I sat down low in the punt the current could do the work. As long as I reached home before dawn.
Riding the roads, Guy and I would have taken a day to reach Moncrieff, but in full view of any who might look. By these discreet channels it would be safer but maybe longer and it could take an unknown time – I didn’t know what obstacles I might find. Fallen trees, mud, even worse, swathes now drained and used for water meadows. I only knew that I must get home before Guy.
Why?
I couldn’t answer my question beyond thinking on the gut reaction at watching that bag change hands. I closed my eyes. All I wanted to see was his face when he delighted in something – an anecdote he related, a book, even something I said.
His face when he said, ‘Ysabel...’
I hated him.
I grunted as the punt swung a little in the dark. My back and belly ached with a vengeance and I thought I detected a faint warmth between my legs with no cloth to staunch it.
Hope for a slow arrival of my courses until Cecilia meets me…
I blamed such discomfort on Gisborne. What he had put me through on this whole journey.
He? Was it not Papa’s actions that had reduced my life to a travesty?
I shook my head. This wretched voice of conscience tried repeatedly to gainsay me, to upset my conclusions and I would not listen. I travelled on through the tunnel. A water rat flopped from the bank, too close for comfort and occasioning a squeak from a tight throat. So much of sneaking rats and rats’ eyes reminded me of Halsham.
What of Guy? What does he remind me of?
A snake.
Remember the snake in the Garden of Eden, hissing its tempting words.
But a snake has black, gimlet eyes. Guy’s eyes seared like the blue of summer in Aquitaine.
Time snapped at me. All the while I was conscious of night flitting by and dawn approaching too rapidly. The current meandered and finally I could stand it no longer and stood with the pole to push myself on faster. We skimmed along and a feeling of success lightened my anxiety and just as I sighed with relief at the increased speed, the bow hit something and I crashed forward. My head collided with the gunwales as I went down and there was a brief pain and then nothing.
I opened my eyes to a paler dark, to the snipe of a lone bird somewhere and as I tried to sit up, aware of dawn beginning to break, blood trickled down my face, the bottom of the punt leering up at me. I sank onto stiff buttocks.
God, why? Mary Mother, tell Him!
I held my arm to whatever contusion was in my hair, feeling the egg-sized lump as I sopped the ooze and moaned.
Ysabel, cease your wailing and get moving. Watery sentiment is for later.
I hung my legs over the bow, feeling with cold toes to see what the punt had hit. A spit of sandy mud blocked the way and I trod forward to determine how much further the bank would prevent my passage. In the strengthening light, it was possible to see the channel stretched on, splitting to flow around an islet. I leaped back into the punt, poling in reverse and then heading for the left hand side; sliding into a space the width of my craft, poling, pushing, grasses dragging against me, light gaining, my breath puffing and blood dripping onto the tunic.
The current seemed to strengthen beyond the spit, almost as if it had its own agenda and I let the boat float on as I tried to staunch the bleeding. I had no care for the depth of the wound, nor anything other than the need to enter Moncrieff by my secret way before full daylight.
The marshes were tipped in pearl light and a dove-grey mist rose off the water, the colours blurred and the banks almost featureless. But the palate of the place, so lately in my thought as something of welcome, a tender memory, was now merely camouflage and subterfuge. I chafed to find the secret entrance to the tunnel that curled through the bulwark of home.
Then, drifting on the morning air, the sound of baying hounds followed by men shouting and then hooves, a dozen or so horses hammering the paths close by. A voice I didn’t know. ‘She’s at Saint Eadgyth’s. We’ll find her there.’
How can they know? Seriously, Ysabel. You wonder?
The water opened out into a broad sweep the colour of iron. The lake that my family had conceived by judicious building of weirs and walls pooled around the castle structure and I took a breath to make the last dash across the water – nothing to hide behind or under until I reached the rushes around the castle foundations.
I pushed away, kneeling low, using the pole as quietly as I could. I glanced up expecting to see soldiers pacing the battlements but it was as barren and bare of life as a graveyard. Not even the Moncrieff pennant flew and that thought delivered bile onto my tongue.
The punt slid against the wall, the sides scraping against the rock, the sound like someone drawing an axe over a stone. I pulled myself along until I reached a tumble of boulders I knew well and tugged at some draping reeds, dragging the punt deep into the undergrowth. I heard horses gallop across the drawbridge, heard nothing but shouts and only knew that before my heart stopped completely, I needed to get closer.
The punt was too much of a liability and I nudged it hard under the sedge so that it could rot there for eternity, and without care for anything other than reaching my home, I slid into the cold water.
My home? Betrayal.
I could still feel his hands on my shoulders. On my lips I could feel his… I spat out a small mouthful of river water as the grille that covered the secret entrance appeared to my right.
Dear God, have mercy.
I was almost there, almost to the grille and something whined past my ear from high up, feathers flashing past my cheek. My shoulder burned and a voice shouted.
‘Ere, what do you do?’
Another voice. ‘Thought I saw a big water rat.’
‘Halsham’ll have your guts for wasting arrows. Put up now and just keep watch. Save the arrows for when they’re needed.’
Thea’s little string bracelet hung limply from my wet wrist as I hauled the grille open just enough to pull up and slip over the ledge. I flopped like a half-dead pike onto the beaten earth floor that was the very foundation of Moncrieff.
Dear Lord.
Water dribbled down to the dirt, the stain of blood spreading across the shoulder – an arrow graze.
Better a graze than a piercing.
I could hear nothing in these bowels, nothing but a dripping silence and it suited me. M
oncrieff’s layout was tattooed on my heart and mind. I stepped from the chamber, looking to the left and to the …
A hand slid over my mouth, and I was pulled back hard against someone. They held tight, so that I could almost feel the bones of the fingers, my lips numb with the pressure.
A voice spoke, a disconcerting sound that raised goosebumps.
‘Ysabel,’ Gisborne whispered. ‘Why did you run away?’
I could smell his hand and struggled, squirming and pulling against him, realizing I could never call for help.
To whom? De Courcey’s men?
I tried to kick backward...
‘Stop it,’ he hissed. ‘Do you wish to reveal yourself?’ Every muscle in my body tightened with fury as he continued. ‘If I take my hand away, shall you be sensible?’
Sensible? I’ll kill you!
I breathed hard; irregular snorts like a cornered horse and then closing my eyes I nodded. The pressure of his hands eased and I whirled around.
‘You betrayed me, you betrayed me!’
His face glowered in the dawn shadows of the chamber, sarcasm slapping at the walls.
‘You say?’
‘You exchanged money with Halsham. I saw you.’
Mary Mother but the anger lay inside me like a cornered wolf. I wanted to bite, to scratch.
There beat one moment. An inexorable moment where the hand of Fate slid back and forth deciding to weight the proceedings one way or the other.
Finally, ‘You didn’t wait long enough to see me hand it back,’ he said.
Another moment and then I lifted my hands and slapped them so hard into his chest that the noise echoed around the chamber and I almost knocked him off balance.
‘What do you think I am, Gisborne? Some sort of fool? Why else would you meet your cousin but for money? You told him I approached Moncrieff. By the Blood of Christ, you traitor! Why else do they look for me this instant?’
‘They look for you,’ he snarled, ‘as they have ever done because they know you are in England, that you set sail from Calais, that you were dropped somewhere on the coast…’