The door had been barred. She was sure of it. He could not know whom she entertained or the intimate circumstances. She decided to brazen it out. The best defense was an offense. At least that had always been Roderick’s strategy.
“You should have knocked. I’m sure I was alone. My sons are always welcome. I needed to speak with you. I have some questions concerning the fire, or any activities you might have had that took you into the wool house prior to the fire.”
Was it her imagination or did Simpson fidget? If he’d lied about Alfred, now let him explain it.
“The fire?” Alfred looked puzzled, then his flush deepened. She recognized the color of his temper. “Surely you aren’t going to blame me! I was there only once, maybe twice to … to help John lay out the fleeces.”
“It’s just that someone saw you go in the morning of the fire, I thought you—”
“Thought I what? Started the fire? I’ll wager you didn’t ask Colin about his whereabouts.”
Another glance at Simpson showed him to be suddenly interested in the vaulted ceiling of the great hall, but he was listening, she was sure, gloating on every word. He made no attempt to hide his smirk.
“We shall discuss this in private, after the accounting,” she said.
Simpson stepped forward, handed the pages bound with leather lacings to Alfred, who handed them to Lady Kathryn. She perused them carefully enough to see that the balances were in line with last year’s harvest reckoning, which she had already studied in preparation.
“These seem to be in order.” She placed the account book on the table that separated her from her son and Simpson. “Well done, Alfred. Your supervision seems to have had an efficacious bearing on Simpson’s figures. This time there is no shortfall.”
This wiped the smirk from the overseer’s face.
“You may go now, Simpson. I will speak with my son in private.”
His bow was as abrupt as the slam of a coffin lid.
As his footfalls receded, Alfred maintained his businesslike posture, reluctant, Lady Kathryn thought, to relinquish his grown-up mantle.
“We are alone, now, Alfred. Don’t be so sullen. Come, give your mother a kiss to settle our quarrel.”
He made no move to render the requested kiss. If anything, his posture became more rigid. He reached into his doublet and drew out a parchment tied with a silk cord.
“I have a petition for my lady mother.”
There was about him a new reserve. She thought of Colin lying prostrate before the altar in Saint Margaret’s chapel, and stifled a sigh. Her boys would soon be men. Already, she could feel them slipping away.
She nodded sedately, determined not to undermine his newfound dignity. “You may present your request.”
He handed her the parchment. She recognized the seal. Sir Guy de Fontaigne. Curiosity mingled with unease.
“This is the seal of the sheriff,” she said. “I thought you said it was your petition.”
“The request is mine. In the absence of my father, Sir Guy stands as sponsor to me in my request.”
“I see,” she said, running her fingers quickly under the seal, breaking the wax. “You have made a formidable alliance.”
“An alliance formed by my father and in accordance with his wishes, as you will see.”
She scanned the contents, then riffled the pages frantically, reading incredulously. Dread pressed her into the chair. She wanted to go to him, wrap her arms around him, crush him against her bosom, but she feared she could not stand.
“Alfred, are you sure this is what you want?” was all that she could manage.
“It is what my father wanted for me. It is what I would have done if he had lived.”
“But is it what you want?”
“It is what I want. In the service of Sir Guy I will learn to be a knight like my father. I have already tried on my father’s mail. It fits me well. I shall take it with me and Sir Guy will provide me with a mount.” Then, stonily: “With your permission, of course.”
She felt suddenly old. The great hall loomed larger than ever around her. In the high expanse of the rafters a crow flew in under the eave and pecked at an abandoned wren’s nest. She examined the parchment again, Sir Guy’s scrawling signature, sharp and angular as the man himself, above the official seal of the high sheriff. She knew she could not refuse. Sir Guy would only petition the boy king and his regent John of Gaunt. They could turn her son against her, maybe declare Blackingham, even the part that was her dower lands, under Alfred’s control. She would be shunted off into some desolate abbey to eke out her life under the “protection” of the king. With only Colin to speak for her.
Christi Eleison.
No, she could not afford the enmity of Sir Guy de Fontaigne.
“I will miss you,” she said in a small voice.
“I’m sure you will find other company to take my place. You were glad enough of my absence before.”
“It is not the same. I knew you were close by. I could see you whenever I wanted.” She pointed to the accounting ledger. “Your absence was a necessary sacrifice for Blackingham.”
His only answer was a tightening of his jaw muscle, a firm-jutting jaw, Roderick’s jaw.
“You will come for the Yuletide feast? It is to be a birthday celebration for your brother and you.”
“If Sir Guy will give me leave.”
His young body stood before her at attention, rigid, unyielding. She knew if she put her arms around him, embraced him, he would remain so. She would not invite that kind of rejection. “Go with your mother’s blessing, then,” she said, her voice hardly above a whisper.
He bowed slightly, turned to leave.
“Not even a kiss, Alfred?”
He bent across the table that separated them, a mere brush of her cheek with his full lips. She had a flash of that same mouth, his infant bow-shaped mouth fastened on her breast, greedily sucking. So reluctant to let go then, so anxious now.
She resisted the urge to call him back as he strode toward the door. She had no power to order him. He had gone into the world and made other alliances. She would only make herself look foolish.
“Take one of the grooms with you to serve you. I will not have you go to the sheriff’s household in poverty. You will go a man. Have your father’s armor polished.”
He turned to her and for a moment she thought she saw in his eyes the boy who’d hidden his tears in her skirts when his father beat his sons “to toughen them.” But it must have been her imagination, for there was no mistaking the swagger in his walk when he saluted farewell from the doorway.
She had not asked him the other question that had been nagging for so long: where he was on the day the priest was murdered. Months had passed. It probably no longer mattered—except to her. She was already mourning the loss of her son, and a warning bell sounded in her mind. By entering into service with the sheriff, Alfred brought him into the circle of their affairs. And while she had never ridden to the hunt with a falcon on her wrist, she knew a predator when she saw one.
Kathryn sat for a long time in the silence of the great hall, pondering her double loss. Within the space of seven days, two of the three most important men in her life were absent from it. And the third was pulling away. Christi Eleison. Lord have mercy.
The crow sat still as well, perching on the ceiling rafters, its beak poised over the nest, as if waiting for the return of the wrens. The slant of afternoon sun pierced the narrow windows, turning its wings to giant shadows that hovered over Kathryn, small and alone in her great oak chair.
TWELVE
She knelt upon him and drew her dagger with broad bright blade to avenge her son, her only issue.
—BEOWULF
(8TH-CENTURY ANGLO-SAXON EPIC)
Upon rising from his bed, skins piled on the floor of hewn poplar (a dirt floor would not harden in the fens), the dwarf poked his banked fire into life, then went outside to relieve himself. Early morning: the smell of hope aborning, th
e world stretching, not yet fully awake. Here and there, a tentative peep penetrated the hush of nocturnal creatures, yawning into day sleep. He breathed deeply of the mist rising over the swamp. A young ghost of a sun struggled to form itself behind the fog. Half-Tom had seen enough such mornings to know that the sun would win. The day would emerge a fine one, a rare gift for mid-November—Martinmas, the Feast of Saint Martin, November. But Half-Tom kept no saints’ days. Neither did he go to church, not even to the splendid new Saint Peter Mancroft, the market church in Norwich, with its raucous bells. He reckoned his calendar by the changing phases of the moon.
With the notches he marked on a willow wand, he kept track of market days, not holy days. A glance at his notched wand showed the second Thursday in November, market day in Norwich. If he left now, there was still time to make it by noon, time to catch the tag end of the trading day. The signs augured a harsh winter; it might be his last chance until spring. He could treat himself to a pint or two. There would even be time for a visit to the holy woman. He thought about the long trek home at night. If need be, he could take shelter in some cotter’s haywain until the waxing moon came up. Then he could pick his way home across the white wetlands.
He went inside to get a flat cake and a dried fish for the journey. He’d built his one-room hut from a wind-bent poplar, thatched the roof with reeds from the Yare River. The hut was surprisingly tight, providing protection from the winter winds that swept out of the east. It provided sanctuary, too. His tormentors lacked the courage to follow him into the heart of the swamp. The muddy throat of the fens could swallow horse and rider in seconds, sucking its pleading victims beneath the sand.
The peaty fire, smoking on the hearthstone in the center of the room with its comfortable chair in front, argued against his journey. That chair fit his child’s stature perfectly, cleverly fashioned as it was from a curve in the tree where the wind-chiseled trunk looped back on itself. But there would be plenty of time during the long winter nights to sit in front of his fire, plenty of time for weaving his baskets—beehive, stoppered eel, fish kiddles, pole carriers—from the willow rods he’d cut in spring, stripped in summer. Plenty of time for dreaming, too. Time for singing to himself the songs he’d heard from the wandering minstrels who came to the monastery where he’d spent his childhood, songs of the heroic exploits of the mighty Beowulf.
In these winter reveries, Half-Tom’s own soul inhabited the great warrior. After he’d eaten his bit of dried fish and drunk his turnip broth, the dwarf would leap about the room challenging the flickering shadows with his willow-stick sword. In his imagination, Half-Tom was Beowulf. It was Half-Tom who swore fealty to the Lord Hrothgar, Half-Tom who wielded the flashing sword against the monster Grendel, Half-Tom who sighed with satisfaction when the dagger plunged into the yielding throat flesh of the huge sea troll. He could almost feel the hot spurt of blood. Did it smell like pig’s blood? It was Half-Tom, tall, a giant among men, and brave—the scops sang his fame—who tracked Grendel’s vengeful monster mother to her swamp lair. It was Half-Tom who “thrust at the throat, broke through the bone rings” of Grendel’s mother. It was Half-Tom who watched the steel of his sword melt in the poison of her blood.
In more thoughtful times (for when he was not dreaming wild and wondrous deeds from this other life, he had time for thinking), he spared a care, a bit of human understanding, for the monster. Had not the fickle hand of Wyrd given Grendel a craving for human flesh? Was the monster not, then, blameless? Did fate not make monsters of them all? Monsters did not make themselves. And then there was the mother, fierce in her vengeance, fierce in her love. He envied Grendel such a mother.
“Devil’s spawn,” some called Half-Tom, and “begotten of a goblin.” His soul had been abraded by such words until it was a polished brilliant, hard and gleaming. If God, never the devil—he knew this with certitude because the holy woman had assured him that the devil could not create—if God had left him unfinished, there had to be a reason.
“God hath made all that is made; and God loveth all that He hath made,” the anchoress had said. She had been so reassuring, so motherly in her affection, in her surety, that he’d come to believe it too.
He grabbed his trident-shaped eel spear and headed down to where the Yare spilled its shallow waters into an oxbow lake. With one thrust of a muscular forearm, he pinned a great pike through its gill to the shallow bottom, then heaved it, tail flailing and splashing, into a willow kiddle. A fine fish for his friend. A fine gift for the holy woman.
At the end of market day, after his second pint of third ale—he was not so rich as to afford first pouring—and after his visit to Julian of Norwich, Half-Tom didn’t head west into fen country and home, but north toward Aylsham. He had a message for the illuminator, his Hrothgar. This time, he would not give his message to a servant. He’d promised the holy woman that he would place the pages, carried inside his tunic, in the illuminator’s hands only.
It was out of his way, a longer journey than from the market home— twelve miles to Aylsham and then two more to Blackingham Manor, all in the opposite direction, and the light was fading. But it was the least he could do. He owed a great debt to the illuminator.
And Mother Julian had been kind to him, too. She understood his needs in the way of no other. She knew about his aching loneliness. What was more, she celebrated his smallness. The first time he went to see her, he’d poured out his bitterness against a God who’d made him half a man in a world that demanded giants. She’d looked at him with compassion in her eyes—so unaccustomed was he to it that he didn’t recognize it at first. She’d plucked a hazelnut from a bowl sitting on the window ledge between them.
She leaned forward, held it up before his eyes. “See this, Tom?”—for she seldom called him by the slur that was his name, given him by the monks who found him at their door. “It is a hazelnut. Our Lord showed me a little thing, no bigger than this, which seemed to lie in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What is this?’ ”
Here, she opened his callused palm and pressed the hazelnut into it, then continued. “Understanding came to me thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ A thing so small. All creation. A world no bigger than a hazelnut. Safe in Christ’s keeping hand. I wondered how long it could last. It seemed as though it might suddenly fade away to nothing; it was so small. And I was answered in my understanding; ‘It lasts, and ever shall last; for God loveth it. And even so hath everything being—by the love of God.’”
That had been three years ago, and the hazelnut Half-Tom carried in a fox-skin pouch strung around his neck was as firm and hard and round as when she’d first pressed it into his palm. Miracle enough for him. Let the rich abbots cradle their bones of saints in gem-encrusted reliquaries of hammered gold. This was the only holy relic he needed.
The sun set clear, but cold, as he trudged north, the road almost cleared of pilgrims now. Most had found their journey’s end in Norwich, and those few who had not, had sought shelter and would resume their pilgrimages on the morrow. It took a brave heart, or a fool, to be on the road after dark when the brigands and outlaws came out to claim their rights with daggers and garrotes. It was with considerable relief that he saw the last rays of the dying sun glinting off the redbrick face of Blackingham.
He eyed the huddle of outbuildings with a thought to shelter. His nose wrinkled as he passed the tan yard, where the fresh pelts of slain livestock cooked in vats of urine. After he’d delivered his package, he would bed down near the smithy, where the heat from the forge would linger into the cold night. From Aylsham on, the air had been heavy and pungent with smoke from the crofters and yeomen smoking their winter meats, the closer to Blackingham, the stronger the smell. Best to enter through the kitchen. As a messenger for a guest of the house, the cook would be bound to give him victuals. There would be an abundance of meat from the winter kills, maybe he could score a rich mutton stew or a pork pie.
As he approached the kitchen yard, last light picked out a dead tree, its gnarly oak fingers and twisted hollow trunk silhouetted against an indigo sky. A good bee tree, he thought with a sigh, but the honey would have been robbed in late September. There might be mead in the Blackingham kitchen. Sweet-spiced and heady, fermented from the honeycomb wash. Mead and a meat pie.
He patted the packet inside his jerkin and made resolutely for the kitchen door. But he was stopped dead in his tracks. A whisper from the region of the tree. Tuneless, and yet musical. Humming of the bees, perhaps, about to swarm. In November? He approached the tree to investigate. On the hill the heavy twilight softened to light-streaked lavender and the wind had died to that absolute stillness that sometimes comes when the day fades. He seemed to be alone beneath the tree; no other person—at least that he could see. Yet the formless tune grew stronger, more melodious. Angel song. Music such as only the Lord would hear in Paradise. The voice of the Holy Mother? A quaking terror began in his toes and swelled to his head, making it bob foolishly like a jester’s mannequin. He moved closer to the tree, drawn forward by the floating music that beckoned, undulating and soft, like a woman’s body, that forbidden fruit he’d never tasted except in his dreams (for it was only the overripe or the rotten that would be accessible to the likes of him— and he would have none of them).
His eyes scanned the purple twilight, searching the knoll and the tree. The sound seemed to come from the interior of the great oak trunk. He circled, like a deer approaching the verge of the forest. He touched the rough bark of the tree. Song, undoubtedly a woman’s voice, but younger, a girl’s perhaps, rose from the bowels of the tree. Not the Holy Virgin. Her voice would come from loftier heights, surely. A witch, then? Some evil spirit, possessing the tree? Half-Tom was not easily frightened. He’d seen predator and prey, witnessed the treacheries of field and fen and violent weather, encountered what he thought might have been the occasional fairy, or was it a dragonfly—who could ever say for sure? But even in the marvels that the dwarf encountered in his childlike acceptance of his natural world, trees did not sing. And this one was undoubtedly singing. In a woman’s voice, that in itself a cause for anxiety. He jerked back his hand, faster than from a hot griddle. Then he turned and fled toward the kitchen, as though the devil nipped at his tired heels.
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