by Alys Clare
Something struck me; I heard Granny’s voice, speaking of another Lassair. ‘My namesake was a child of the fire and the air,’ I said cautiously. ‘It’s in Granny’s story.’
Edild smiled. ‘I thought you would remember. Yes, Lassair’s web was very similar to yours – she too had Mercury placed in his own house of Gemini, the planet of love in the same air sign and the warrior god in Aries, most warlike sign of all.’
She fell silent, frowning as if in thought. Perhaps she was thinking, as I was, of the mysterious ancestress who had borne my name before me and I knew enough about her to understand that she cannot have had an easy life, to say the least. I hesitated, and then said in a small voice, ‘Will I be a mystery too? Will I disappear into the mist one day and nobody will know what’s happened to me?’
Edild have me a hug. ‘I doubt it,’ she said robustly. ‘You usually chatter so much that we’re left in no doubt whatsoever where you are and what you’re up to. Now, come and look at my model of the planets and I’ll tell you which of them influence which healing herbs and show you how to work out the best time for planting and harvesting.’
Later that day, while Edild was closeted with a young woman suffering from something that necessitated privacy while she removed her undergarments, I crept back to have another look at my fascinating but alarming web of destiny. My head was full of the morning’s lesson and I now knew what some of the symbols meant. There was the Sun, as Edild had said, in the sign of Gemini at the moment of my birth; there was the Moon, in distant, mysterious Aquarius; I had believed Aquarius the Water-Carrier to be a water sign (it seemed logical) until Edild put me right and said he was an air sign. There were Mercury and Venus, both also in Gemini; there were Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, in the fire signs of Aries and Sagittarius. All placed just as Edild had said.
And, apparently, very similar to their positions in the chart of Lassair the Sorceress, whose fate we do not know but who was strongly believed to be half elfish . . .
Oh!
I rolled up the chart and retied its ribbon. I did not want to know any more.
The Winter Solstice was upon us and, as my family has always done, we celebrated with a meal eaten as the light faded. As well as my immediate family, my uncle Alwyn, my aunts Edild and Alvela and my cousin Morcar were also there, which meant it was a crush but nobody minded. When we were all seated, my father blew out the lamp and we all sat in the darkness. Out of the silence came Granny’s voice, intoning that tonight was the longest night of the year and that tomorrow the dark began to give way to the light. This was the signal; my father struck a spark with his flint and lit a precious stump of candle, saved for this purpose, and from that one light we each lit little tallow lamps of our own until the flames shone out in a circle that illuminated our faces and showed that all of us were smiling.
It might be midwinter still, with many cold, hard days of frozen ground and driving rain ahead, but now that the Solstice was here, we knew that the year had turned and the Sun was coming back. On that frosty night, with the stars shining brilliantly in the sky, that was something to smile about.
A couple of months after Christmas, Goda sent word. She was pregnant, she was perpetually sick, her entire body had swollen up so that she could barely move and she needed me to go and look after her.
I protested as violently as I could, bringing to bear every argument from the necessity to continue my instruction with Edild to the well-known fact that Goda didn’t like me and it couldn’t possibly be good for a pregnant woman to be in the perpetual company of someone who was so far from being a kindred spirit. Nothing made a jot of difference. Goda had sent for me and I must do as my parents commanded and go to her.
In desperation I turned to Granny. Whatever anyone else said, if Granny decreed I did not have to go – if, for instance, she insisted that it was far more important for me to get on with my studies than to tend my ingrate of a sister – then I would be saved.
But Granny took me aside, put her thin arms round me in a sudden intense hug and said quietly, ‘It’ll be a sore trial and you’ll hate it. But you must go, child.’
I had tears in my eyes and angrily I brushed them away. I made it a rule never to let anything Goda did make me cry, or at least not when anyone was watching. ‘Why?’ I wailed. To my shame I sounded like a three-year-old whining against sense and reason for its own way.
Granny had broken away and now she gave me a little shake. She muttered something – it sounded like wait and see, but that did not seem to make any sense – and then she said brusquely, ‘We all have to do things we don’t like and it won’t be for ever.’
Then she turned aside and hurried away.
Even in the extremity of my despair, I did not suggest that Elfritha go in my place. Elfritha is a year and four months older than I am, as I have already said, and she wants to be a nun. She is also gentle, impractical – when she’s in the convent they’ll have to watch her to make sure she doesn’t spill swill buckets and absent-mindedly tear her clothing on brambles like she’s always doing with us because I’m sure people vowed to poverty aren’t allowed to be wasteful – and inclined to daydream. All of which qualities drive Goda to distraction so that she has always been even rougher with poor Elfritha than with me. Besides the fact that nobody in their right mind would ask Elfritha to look after a tetchy and uncomfortable pregnant woman, I love my second-eldest sister far too much to make her suffer as she undoubtedly would in Goda’s household.
Elfritha may be dreamy and unworldly but she is not lacking in intelligence. She must have realized that I was being forced to take on an unpleasant task because she wasn’t suited to it, and just before I left for Icklingham and my new (and I hoped purely temporary) abode, she sought me out and gave me a present.
‘What is it?’ I asked. She had wrapped it in a piece of old linen and bound it with twine so I couldn’t tell, although whatever it was felt soft and squidgy.
She smiled shyly. ‘It’s something to remind you of home and a sister who loves you.’ No possibility that I would have one of those where I was going, I thought. ‘Open it when you get there,’ Elfritha added quickly as I went to pull at the twine. ‘And’ – she leant in very close and spoke right into my ear – ‘thank you.’
I looked at her quickly and I saw that she had tears in her eyes.
Would they miss me? I wondered as I trudged the six miles from Aelf Fen to Icklingham on a sharp, cold morning a week later. My parents would, I supposed, even if only as another pair of hands to get through the extraordinary amount of work there was to do each day. I was sure my brothers and sister would too, since, with Goda gone and no longer a selfish, bossy and malicious presence in our lives, we seemed to appreciate each other all the more. Granny and Edild would miss me, of course.
Anyone else?
I was thinking, naturally, of Sibert. Since the wedding, my memories of and crush on Romain had faded considerably and once again it was Sibert whom I imagined walking, talking and sometimes fighting by my side as I slid into sleep at night. Well, it was understandable, Sibert being on hand, as it were, and Romain long gone. Not that I had in truth seen very much of Sibert during the autumn and winter. Once I had come across him in earnest conversation with Granny, although what they were talking about I never discovered since they clammed up as soon as they saw me and neither would say a word. Once he had fallen into step with me as I returned from checking on the sheep in their outhouse and we exchanged a few rather stiff comments. That was about it but all the same I wished, as I hunched up my pack and tried to blow warmth into my cold hands, that there had been the occasion to say goodbye.
Perhaps he would not even realize that I had gone.
Depressed, I put my head down, struggled against the wind – just to add to my misery, it was blowing hard out of the east, almost exactly the direction in which I was walking – and plodded on. All too soon, the huddle of small cottages, pens and outbuildings that was Icklingham came into sight.
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I strode up to Goda’s door – they had made quite sure I knew where to go – knocked and waited. As if she were deliberately making me stand out there in the cold, perhaps to indicate right from the outset just who was in charge around here, it was some moments before she answered. Then I heard her voice, its timbre rasping, its tone discontented and complaining.
‘Don’t loiter out there all day!’ called my sister. ‘I’ve just been sick, I’m shivering and I need a hot drink, oh, and you’d better clear up the mess. I missed the pot.’
My first two orders, before I’d even got through the door. It was without doubt a taste of things to come. With a secret sigh, I went in.
You could be forgiven for thinking that a woman not quite six months married to the man of her choice, in a decent enough little house and with a baby on the way, might have been happy; ecstatic, even. You don’t know my sister. It was hard to imagine why on earth she’d wanted to marry Cerdic, since now that she was his wife she spent all her time telling him how useless he was and how she’d been far better off at home. I couldn’t see how she reasoned that out. At home she had been made to do at least some of her share of the work (my mother can be a tough woman) and she had shared her cot and her tiny amount of privacy with Elfritha. Cerdic’s house might have consisted of just one small room (I slept in the lean-to with the placid and gentle-mannered family cow, an arrangement I would have chosen even had there been room for me in the house), but he was a skilled carpenter and had made it soundly so that it was wind-proof and, when the fire in the central hearth was well alight, really quite snug. He had built a low cot up against one wall and on it he and Goda had the luxury of two wool blankets, made for them by Cerdic’s mother, as well as a mattress stuffed with new straw. There was even a curtain fixed up to draw across in front of the bed if Goda so wished. Cerdic was not a poor man; a good carpenter always finds work. Like everyone else, he had to spend a part of each week working for the lord but he was eager and had an honest face, two qualities that ensured a regular stream of requests for his services.
Whatever he did, he was never going to be good enough for my sister and, poor man, he must have realized it. I wondered, with pity in my heart, just how soon after the wedding she had revealed her true self; how soon the now even more massive breasts had begun to pale in significance in the face of the bad temper, the selfishness, the foul mouth and the unerring aim with a wooden spoon or, in really bad moments, a clog. When I arrived, I noticed that Cerdic had a bruise on his left temple and I had a pretty good idea how he’d come by it.
When out in my lean-to I had unwrapped Elfritha’s present, I discovered that she’d woven for me a beautifully soft shawl of lamb’s wool, dyed in the lovely, subtle shades of green that she knows are my favourites. I was very glad that I had opened it in private, for Goda would have taken one look and demanded to be given it since, as she so often repeated, she was the pregnant one, she was the one suffering all this discomfort and misery and she was the one who needed spoiling. I vowed to make sure she never found out about my shawl. If this meant I could only snuggle into it in the lean-to, with no one but the friendly cow to appreciate how its colours made my eyes bright, it was a price worth paying.
I studied Goda subtly, trying to work out how far along she was in her pregnancy. When I had asked when the baby was due she was at first vague and then, when I protested that surely she must have some idea, violent. ‘Mind your own business!’ she screamed, only there was another word between own and business, one that I would have been thrashed for using. I could have pointed out that, since I had to look after her during her pregnancy, it was my business, but the bruise on Cerdic’s temple was still in evidence and I kept my mouth shut.
But I reckoned that, armed as I was with Edild’s instruction in the mystery of how women have babies, I could work it out for myself. The vastly swollen breasts and the sickness were, I believed, symptoms of the first three months, but I thought Goda was further along than that. Edild had demonstrated, using little drawings, how the baby in the womb gradually pushes upwards, so that a good midwife could judge from the height of the bulge how many months had passed since conception. I had to help my sister with her weekly wash – she complained, among many other things, that her condition caused her to sweat copiously – and, since she appeared to have left all modesty far behind her, she was in the habit of flinging off her clothes, lying back and ordering me to sponge her all over. Thus I was able not only to look at the big bump of baby but also run my hand over it and I calculated that she could be as much as six months pregnant.
It was now the end of March and she had wed Cerdic in late September. This baby must have been conceived virtually on their wedding night.
If not before.
I did not waste much time on the fact that my sister might have anticipated her wedding vows. If she had, she was far from being the only one. Possibly she had feared a last-minute defection in her husband-to-be, and letting him make love to her – perhaps encouraging him to – had been a way of ensuring he made an honest woman of her. Who knew? Who cared? No – what concerned me was when I might expect to be released from her household. If I was right and she was six months gone, my deliverance could come as early as June or the beginning of July. I could be home – and back at my lessons with Edild – soon after midsummer, with the rest of that bright, happy, outdoor season still ahead.
It was a lovely, heartening thought and it kept me going through the spring and early summer as inevitably, as Goda grew bigger, more cumbersome and more uncomfortable, matters went from bad to worse.
THREE
Romain de la Flèche’s well-dressed appearance, level gaze and ready smile gave the impression that he was an amiable young man with plenty of money and not a great deal to concern him beyond the cut of his cloak and keeping a shine on his boots. The impression, however, was, like much about Romain, carefully calculated. He maintained it because it was in his own best interests to disguise his true personality and the pressing concern that drove him, relentlessly now, and held him so tightly in its grasp.
As the days lengthened and it seemed that at long last spring was turning to summer, he watched in impotent rage and growing fear as the situation he most dreaded – and whose coming to pass he had at first only entertained in the most anxious of sleepless nights – unfolded before him. There was nothing he could do. His protests, had he dared to express them, would at best have been ignored and at worst earned him a hard cuff round the ear. He was eighteen now. It was not fair that he was still treated like a wayward child.
There was a way in which he might escape the potentially fateful consequences of what was inevitably going to happen. By pure chance he had learned something amazing. It was so amazing that, when as so often happened it slipped quietly into his mind, he found himself wondering if he was investing far too much hope on what must surely be no more than an old tale whispered in the dark. He forced himself to ignore his misgivings. There was, when all said and done, nothing else . . .
He had been so excited when he first heard about the amazing thing. To begin with, it had stirred his blood simply for its own sake and it was only later, when he realized that the bright future he had envisioned for himself was going to be blasted apart, that it had occurred to him how he might use his discovery to his own advantage.
He needed help, for if this thing in truth had substance and was not just a wonderful myth, he had to track it down. Disguising the growing urgency of his need with his usual charming smile and the mild, slightly puzzled manner which, as he well knew, made people believe he was slow-witted if not actually simple, he had asked some very careful questions. And, eventually, he found out where he must go and to whom he must speak.
He had made the journey – of some fifty miles across East Anglia, over farm land, scrubland and, on occasion, through the wild, desolate and dangerous parts of the region – the previous September. He had been at pains not to be observed, travelling under cover of d
arkness. For one thing, he had not sought permission for his pilgrimage. He could not have done, for when the inevitable questions as to the purpose of his journey had been asked he would have had no creditable answer other than the truthful one, and that was secret. For another thing, the Conqueror had just died and the whole country was uneasy. It was really no time to go off on a clandestine mission but, with the king’s death, time was running out and he no longer had a choice.
As he trudged through the darkness, thankful that at least the weather appeared to be on his side, he tried to take his mind off his many anxieties by speculating on what sort of a king the Conqueror’s son would be.
Normandy had gone to the eldest brother, Robert, and the second, Richard, was dead, killed while hunting in the New Forest. Henry, the fourth son, had, or so they said, been left a huge sum of money. With some difficulty, Romain turned his mind from the thrilling, tantalizing prospect of what he could have done with a huge sum of money. Life was so unfair . . .
England had been left to William, the third son.
So, William was to be king and not Robert. Well, it was what Romain had been led to expect. He moved in circles where such matters were a frequent topic of conversation and he was well aware that the Conqueror’s relationship with his plump and lazy eldest son had been tempestuous. The king had used a variety of nicknames for the boy, his favourites being Short-Boots and Fat-Legs, and this disparaging attitude had, as Robert frequently complained, robbed him of the respect that he felt was his due. His resentment of his powerful parent broke out into open rebellion. On one occasion bitter fighting ensued, in the course of which Robert personally inflicted a wound on the great Conqueror’s hand. Father and son were later reconciled but it seemed unlikely that, given his ruthless nature, the king either forgot or forgave. William the Conqueror had died from an injury sustained as he fought the French in the Vexin, that troubled and perpetually strife-torn area between Normandy and neighbouring France to the south-east. On his deathbed he dictated the necessary letter that nominated his namesake as his heir and, together with the royal seal, dispatched it to England.