‘You’re a very lucky young woman,’ she said as her ladies smiled and tittered. ‘Sir Wulfstan Wynstede has everything to recommend him – a knighthood for valour on the field of battle, a high position here at court and friendship with the Prince. He fulfils all the duties of scrivener and treasurer, without difficulty, and can mount and ride a horse, thanks to a strong right arm. And so handsome! Truly, he’ll feel no lack of a left arm when he claims you for his own!’
The ladies simpered and exchanged knowing glances. Lisette lowered her head to hide her face, and Wulfstan, also blushing to the roots of his hair, tried to escape to a meeting of the falconers, but found himself restrained by the fair company who would not let him go. The Princess laughed and clapped her hands.
‘And the best of it is, that tedious fellow André Demoins has suffered a very public put-down, which serves him right!’ she said gaily. ‘I know which man I would choose if I had not got the best husband – and lover – in the whole wide world!’
Her words were soon echoed around the palace, and it was no surprise when André Demoins discovered urgent messages to be passed between other European courts. He departed, smarting with humiliation and fury, and with no further words to anybody, much to the amusement of some of the menservants who were tired of his imperious manner and liked to see him made a figure of fun.
But what of the lady? After enduring the Princess’s affectionate teasing and the looks on the faces of the ladies, some amused, some frankly envious, Lisette now had to review her own situation. She had achieved her main objective, which was to humiliate Demoins, to ridicule his arrogant assumption that his advances would be welcomed. She had used Wulfstan as a means to achieving this end, but had not considered his own reaction to her fierce seduction when he had taken too much wine, nor had she expected to be overtaken by her own sudden surge of desire; she too had imbibed enough wine to override caution. Accustomed to rejecting the advances of unwanted admirers, she had taken no notice of Wulfstan up to now; in fact she had been quietly considering old Count d’Avour, the widowed father of Suzanne, who having introduced his daughter to the Princess to become a lady-in-waiting, had been invited to stay on at Bordeaux for a few weeks of high summer. He had noticed Lisette de l’Isle, but had no hopes of securing her hand, for being much older and inclined to put on weight, he feared to make a fool of himself.
‘Aren’t you being a little bashful, Wulfstan?’ The Prince’s eyes were twinkling. ‘God’s truth! You’ve made a conquest that many men must envy. We’ve all enjoyed the discomfiture of Demoins, but you’d better secure the lady Lisette without delay. She has other suitors out there, waiting to bed her!’
Wulfstan’s confusion increased as he realized that the Prince – and presumably the Princess and their retinues – did not realize that he had already fully claimed the lady’s honour.
‘It is for Lisette – for the lady to acknowledge that . . . er . . .’ Once again he was blushing, and the Prince laughed out loud. ‘Christ a’ mercy, boy, you’re a cold fish! You’ll lose her for sure, she’s not the sort to be trifled with. If you want her, say so, tell her you love her and take her – or else some bolder spirit will!’
Wulfstan could not let this misunderstanding continue. ‘I’m already betrothed, as well you know, my liege. I can’t pay court to . . . to the lady when my heart belongs to another.’
‘What? That virtuous little creature at Greneholt who won’t marry you for years, and only does what her canting old father tells her? Show some sense, Wulfstan, marry the beautiful de l’Isle, and be assured of a lifetime in my service. Don’t be a fool!’ There was a certain impatience in the Prince’s voice as well as amusement.
Wulfstan made no reply, so ashamed was he at his latest betrayal of Beulah.
‘Hah! I dare say when you go to claim her next midsummer, she’ll have taken the veil and be shut up in a convent, telling her beads. I’m serious, Wulfstan, that pious type of girl just isn’t cut out to be the wife of a soldier and a courtier.’
Wulfstan winced at the thought of Beulah in a convent, driven there by his treatment of her, but this time their betrothal really was over. He could not marry her after what had happened with another woman, again. And he would have to ask pardon of Lisette de l’Isle as soon as the opportunity arose.
The problem was that he was never alone with her. She was always with the ladies surrounding the Princess, in the dining hall, at Mass in the palace chapel, or out walking in the garden. If she saw him looking in her direction, she lowered her eyes and turned away, but there was a notable change in her demeanour; gone was the haughty disdain, the indifference with which she had dismissed him formerly. It was replaced by a questioning air of uncertainty, almost of shyness; was it embarrassment at the wordless intimacy they had shared? And at her urgent invitation? The conviction came to him that if he were to follow the Prince’s advice and propose marriage to her, and if she accepted, they would be congratulated on all sides; it would be a marriage approved by the Prince and Princess; they would make their home near to the palace and settle in Bordeaux for life, raising a family of bilingual children in a land of peace and plenty. It was an inviting prospect if Lisette was willing. Old Sir William Horst would not be sorry to see the betrothal ended, and perhaps in the course of time a more deserving man than himself would pay court to Beulah and win her. And so he went to the Princess to ask to speak with Mademoiselle de l’Isle in private.
‘Ah, most gladly, Sir Wulfstan,’ she said with her usual goodwill. ‘I have reason to believe that the lady would welcome such a meeting. I’m sure she will have much to tell you, if you will but ask her. Just be at the gate to the orchard after the midday repast, and she will be there alone and waiting for you. I pray for you both to come back to us with happy news!’
And so Wulfstan came face to face again with the woman he had possessed two days previously. He bowed and took her proffered hand, raising it to his lips.
‘Thank you for coming here, Mademoiselle,’ he said.
She raised her eyes to meet his, and he saw again that look of uncertainty, of mixed emotions. ‘The Princess said you wanted to speak with me, Sir Wulfstan.’
‘Forgive me, Mademoiselle, I am here to beg your pardon,’ he replied. ‘I had no right to take advantage of you as I did, and I regret it. I . . . er . . . I beg your pardon,’ he said again, and waited for her reply. There was a long pause before she replied.
‘You have no need to beg pardon, Sir Wulfstan,’ she said quietly. ‘If you do, I shall have to do likewise.’ And taking his hand lightly in hers she leaned over and kissed it. He drew a sharp intake of breath: the proud Mademoiselle de l’Isle had kissed his hand! He took her own right hand in his and pressed it to his lips, looking into her eyes, where he saw a question answered before it had been spoken. Enough had been said, and he drew her towards him. This, then, was to be his future instead of the marriage he would have had with Beulah, of whom he was now unworthy. If this beautiful woman was willing to take him as her husband, there was no earthly reason why he should not take her. Holding her within the circle of his arm, he kissed her lips and was assured of her response.
‘The Princess will not be disappointed, Lisette,’ he whispered.
But when they returned arm-in-arm to the Princess and her ladies, an urgent message awaited him.
‘There is a visitor for you, Wulfstan,’ she told him. ‘He says his name is Captain Brack, and he’s come all the way from England, across the Narrow Sea and the Bay of Biscay, and by his looks the news is not good. Shall I send for him at once, or will you see him in the Prince’s counting-house?’
Astounded and dismayed, he took leave of Lisette, choosing to see the man alone, and a manservant led him into the presence of Captain Brack, a dark-browed man with a short black beard and the air of a soldier. He looked vaguely familiar to Wulfstan, who could not remember his name or where he had seen him.
‘Greetings, Captain Brack, what’s brought you here?’
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br /> ‘Good day to you, Sir Wulfstan,’ replied the man. ‘I come from the Castle de Lusignan in Hampshire, where I’m in Sir Charles’s standing army.’
Wulfstan gasped. ‘Castle de Lusignan?’ he echoed. ‘Then you must bring grave news indeed. Do you speak of Sir Charles? Is he . . . is he dead?’
‘’Tis not Sir Charles, nor his father, sire, but it’s your own brother, Sir Oswald Wynstede. He went down to London last week on some errand or other, and on his return he fell from his horse and broke his neck.’ The man crossed himself.
‘Oh, my brother, my brother Oswald,’ gasped Wulfstan. ‘Tell me, Captain, who sent you here with this dire news – was it Lady Wynstede?’
‘No, sire, not her. I was sent on this perilous journey by the young Lady de Lusignan. She asked me to tell you and bid you, nay, beg you to come home. Lady Wynstede is helpless with grief, and relies on the bailiff to run the estate, a man by the name of Widget. He came to see my Lady Ethelreda, and she sent me on this caper. And the sooner we get back the better it’ll be, seein’ there’s no man to take Sir Oswald’s place. Here’s the letter my lady wrote for me to give to you.’
He handed over a folded sheet of parchment sealed with wax. Wulfstan broke the seal and opened a hastily scrawled letter from Ethelreda who had always been good with the alphabet and with numbers.
I call upon you Brother to take pity on the children left fatherless by Oswald’s death. I beg you to come back with Captain Brack. Ethelreda.
Wulfstan reread the scrawl in dismay. What was he to do? Did he have any choice? With Oswald dead and his eldest son – what was the boy’s name? – still a child, he was the obvious next of kin to cope with the changed circumstances. He made an effort to marshal his thoughts into some sort of order.
‘I will have to do as the lady requests. I’ll order meat and drink for you, Captain, and a bed for the night. As soon as you’ve rested and refreshed yourself and your horse, we shall set out together tomorrow.’
Great was the disappointment of the Princess on hearing the news, and the lady de l’Isle gave a cry of dismay. The Prince grimaced.
‘It’s a damnable nuisance, Wulfstan, and leaves me without my right hand, for Baldoc is slow and the two young scriveners are stupid. Get back as quickly as you can.’
Bidding farewell to the lady de l’Isle was not easy, for she too thought the haste was unnecessary. ‘No sooner do you say you love me than you leave me,’ she said reproachfully, tears in her green eyes. ‘Is a brother’s widow of more importance to you than your betrothed?’
He tried to explain that it was his duty to console and support his brother’s family in their time of grief, and promised to return as soon as he possibly could, but she refused to listen, and in the end he had to kiss her cool cheek, bow and leave her unconvinced.
Wulfstan and Brack set off across country to the northern coast where they boarded a flat-bottomed cog about to sail for Southampton. The sun was hot, and Wulfstan could have wished for a more congenial companion. Brack complained about being ordered by a woman to travel so far on what seemed to him an unnecessary errand. All men must die at some time, he said, and their families had to go on living and making the best of things. Wulfstan let him rant on, too anxious and too weary to argue with such a grumbling bear of a man.
When the Castle de Lusignan came in sight, standing on its rocky height and bathed in late afternoon sunshine, Wulfstan’s spirits lifted, and even more when he was met by his sister at the gate of the inner bailey; she had seen his approach, and now flung her arms around his neck.
‘Dear Brother, how good of you to come!’ she cried. ‘You must stay here tonight, and go down to the Hall in the morning, after you’ve rested.’
‘I think I should go this evening, Ethelreda,’ he said. ‘Enough time has been lost as it is, and I need to know exactly what I can do for my sister-in-law. Janet and I have always resented each other, and now I must show her that in trouble we can be friends.’
‘I hope you succeed better than I have done,’ she sighed. ‘She just sits and weeps all day, and Mrs Benn has to take care of the children and keep an eye on the house servants.’
‘Why did Oswald go to London?’ Wulfstan asked.
‘Why, to visit our nephew, young Aelfric Blagge,’ she said. ‘The boy’s only fifteen, but he’s enrolled at Lincoln’s Inn, training for the Law. It’s what his old grandfather Blagge wanted for him, and left him most of his capital to pay for it. Oswald just went to check he was happy and studying his books, not getting into bad company who’d spend his money for him, drinking and gambling. And then this happened – it’s such a tragedy. Anyway, Wulfstan, go to see what you can do for them all, and may you have better luck than I’ve had.’
A pall of melancholy hung over the Hall, and Wulfstan was sorry for the children who would never again see their father. The twin girls, Joanna and Lois, were twelve years old, and tried to comfort their brothers; the eldest boy, Denys, was not yet ten, and the two younger brothers, Elmete and Cedric, were pathetic in their bewilderment. Lady Janet Wynstede seemed unable to attend to them without bursting into tears. She greeted Wulfstan without warmth, saying that Dan Widget had no business to call on Lady Ethelreda without consulting her, and that Ethelreda should have asked her permission before sending for Wulfstan.
‘Widget’s a good enough bailiff, though his duties are out of doors with the grooms and farmhands,’ she said. ‘If you are needed anywhere, it is in my husband’s counting-house, a place I’ve never needed to enter.’
‘Then I shall do so today, Janet,’ he replied, putting on a smile to reassure her. ‘’Tis fortunate that I am well experienced in such work.’
She shrugged. ‘I never thought to see you again after you went off with all the nobility to Bordeaux. Oswald talked a lot about how you were a favourite of the Black Prince, his secretary and treasurer and heaven knows what else.’
‘Yes, and I have come to carry out those same duties for you, Janet,’ he told her, ‘and to do what I can to make life easier for you and my nephews and nieces.’
‘Denys will be his father’s heir, but is but a child,’ she said dully. ‘Oswald left instructions in his will as to how the estate should be divided among the others after I’ve gone – and I could wish that day to be soon.’ Her voice broke, and her eyes filled with tears again.
‘Your children have need of you, Janet,’ he said quietly, not knowing how best to comfort her, and sensing that she had not got over her former resentment of him. ‘I will get to work straight away.’
The counting-house at Ebbasterne Hall was a chaotic muddle of bills, expense accounts and receipts; no single book had been kept to record the incomings and outgoings.
‘I told Oswald time and again that he should have a treasurer in charge of money matters,’ said Janet miserably. ‘I’ve had to pay the servants their wages – Mrs Benn the cook, two kitchen maids, and the young nursemaid. And a washerwoman comes in every week. They take their wages readily enough, but need to be watched when they’re supposed to be working.’
‘Are all these servants likely to be kept on?’ asked Wulfstan in a businesslike tone, not wanting to stir up her grief yet again.
‘Well, yes, of course, if I can afford to pay them. And I hope you aren’t expecting to be paid for sorting all this out. It’s enough that you have bed and board while you’re here.’
Chilled by her words, Wulfstan assured her that he had no such expectations, and was willing to pay for his board if required.
‘I need to be back in Bordeaux before the summer’s end, so don’t want to tarry here for any longer than is necessary,’ he told her, ‘so the quicker I can get through these papers and get the Hall’s finances on a sound basis, the better it will be for us all.’
If only his duties had turned out to be as simple as that . . .
Fifteen
1362
August was nearly over. Wulfstan sat in the room known as the master’s counting-house, and
leaned forward, putting his hand over his face; a great burden of doubt and uncertainty lay upon his shoulders, and nothing would lift it, nothing gave him release.
It was not the formidable task he had accomplished in ten weeks at Ebbasterne Hall, his childhood home, that now weighed upon him so heavily; that had been a challenge, and he had risen to it, to the eventual admiration of his sister-in-law, the family at Castle de Lusignan and his other sister-in-law Maud Keepence at Blagge House. Oswald had clearly taken a laissez faire attitude to the administration of the estate, easygoing towards the tenants and peasant farmers who farmed their own strips of land in the Great Field, adjacent to the manor’s own fields of wheat and barley, the pasture for sheep and the edge of the forest where the pigs roamed and foraged. There were rents to be collected, and tithes to be paid to the Abbey; wool to be sold to the merchants who needed it ready for collection on specific dates; there were the stables for the horses who provided the only means of transport, the grooms and field labourers working under the supervision of bailiff Dan Widget, an excellent outdoor worker, but with scant knowledge of the alphabet.
Within doors he had gained the cooperation of Mrs Benn, a bustling woman with her own methods of housekeeping who watched the kitchen maids with a sharp eye and kept to a strict if somewhat unimaginative rota for cooking the daily fare; she also cared for the three little boys with the help of a nursery maid, Nell. Wulfstan was deeply touched when his nephew Denys, not yet ten years old, came to him with a solemn face, asking his Uncle Wulfstan to show him how to keep a book for recording the daily accounts of monies paid out and received. Wulfstan told him that he would learn these skills all in good time, and meanwhile his duty was to obey his sisters and help look after Elmete and Cedric who trailed around in sad bewilderment, looking for the father they had lost and the mother who spent much of the time closeted in her room. (But who would show the boy how to administer the estate, Wulfstan asked himself.)
Every Noble Knight Page 23