Fires of Winter

by Roberta Gellis

  I had my answer to that the next night. The queen had retired to her chamber and I was sadly allowing Edna to pack away the rich, red bedrobe I had made for Bruno. Audris had given me the cloth and silver and gold thread, and most of the work had been done at Jernaeve, but I had still needed to sew and embroider in every private minute I could snatch both at Ulle and on the road. Now twelfth night was over and I had given up hope that Bruno would come back when there was a knocking at the hall door and a minute later a grumpy door warden came and told me my husband wanted me and said I had leave to go with him.

  I do not remember if I thanked him. I know I forgot all about the robe Edna was still holding in her arms. So eager was I that it was a miracle that I remembered to snatch my cloak from the top of my chest before I ran. Nor did I pause at the door to ask Bruno if he wished to come in but threw myself right into his arms before I realized how unseemly was my behavior. He kissed me warmly but then lifted his head and laughed.

  “I feel that I hardly need to make the apology I had all ready,” he said, seeming unaware that I had begun to pull away and squeezing me tight against him.

  “What apology? What have you done?” I hardly knew my voice, it was so thin with the jealousy that had seized me by the throat and choked me, but Bruno did not seem to notice that either and laughed again.

  “I have found a room for us for the night—but it is in the whorehouse where our men are lodged.” One of our men was holding a torch nearby. I could see Bruno’s face—full of merriment, it was—and I know he could see mine, which I suspect was not so merry. I am not sure he realized I was angry; perhaps he thought I was shocked, for he went on, still merrily, “Now, now, Melusine, no one could suspect you of wishing to use the women and I am not likely to complain about your coupling with the man who took you there.”

  “You think that a fit place for me?” I cried, wrenching myself away from him.

  There was an instant’s pause, and then he said, “It is not a fit place for any woman but some have little choice.” He was no longer laughing. “I will make sure the way is cleared so that you need not see or speak to any of them.”

  I had forgotten that his mother was a whore, and when the flatness of his voice reminded me, I was so filled with horror and remorse that I could not speak or move.

  “I am sorry to have offended you,” he went on in that expressionless voice, “but I thought…no, it does not matter. It is not necessary to take you there. I can say briefly what must be said. I have been to Nottingham to tell the captains of the king’s mercenaries to make ready to march north the day after tomorrow. The king will—”

  “You are going to war?” I breathed. “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” A hint of a wry smile curled up one corner of his mouth. “If you still desire to be rid of me, Melusine, you can pray for it.” He hesitated, but I could force no sound out and the little smile disappeared. “I will knock and get the doorwarden to let you in.”

  Still unable to speak, I flung myself on him and held him away from the door. I could feel his head bend over me, but my face was buried and he could not see it. After a moment he said uncertainly, “We cannot stay out here in the cold much longer Melusine, and there is no place to go. Every hut and cot is filled. There are men sleeping between the horses’ feet in the stables. I—”

  “Let us go to—to where you have a chamber,” I said, shivering, but he did not move at once, and I forced myself away from him, and took his hand and started off.

  “You are going the wrong way,” he said gently, and drew me close, pulling up my hood and opening his cloak so he could put it around me atop mine.

  I was shaking with fear, not cold, but I dared say no more lest I begin to weep. A guard opened a small postern in the palace wall at Bruno’s order, and our way lighted by Cormi with the torch, we walked the few streets to the place in silence. Bruno stopped at the door of a house that looked to me exactly the same as any other and began to tell Cormi to go in and order any woman there out to the kitchen, but I cried, “No, no. I do not care about the women. You did not understand me.” So we went in, but I saw nothing—only a large chamber dimly lit by a lively fire in a hearth on the short wall near the far end. Perhaps there were shadows on the floor not far from the hearth, but I was still too wrapped in my misery to find the curiosity to look carefully. However, my first agony of terror was beginning to abate as I realized that Bruno might be leaving tomorrow but it was not possible for the fighting to begin the same day.

  Had we lingered a few minutes, I would have looked about more carefully, but Bruno pushed me gently toward a stair—a real wooden stair, not a ladder—going up to a loft. I was much surprised to see that this was not the open space I expected but was divided into small chambers. I think some were in use, but Bruno guided me quickly ahead down the narrow aisle to one at the far end. Here I was surprised again for it was brightly lit by four scented wax tapers in holders fixed to the walls, and it was warmed by a large brazier of charcoal standing in the far corner well away from the low bed that filled the space from the outer wall to the planks closing off the central aisle.

  “You will be warm soon,” Bruno said. “Come sit down on the bed. Do not fear; it is clean. I came here before I came for you and made them change it.”

  “It is not the place or the cold,” I whispered, letting him draw me down beside him. “I am afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  I turned and stared at him, but he looked surprised and honestly puzzled. “That I will be a widow, you fool!” I exclaimed, quite exasperated. “Did you not tell me that tomorrow you leave to fight in a war?”

  He burst out laughing, then pushed back the hood of my cloak, lifted my face, and kissed me hard, laughing again when I pushed him away. “But Melusine,” he folded my hands in his, “I have fought in many wars. There is nothing to fear for me. I am sorry I teased you about wanting to be rid of me. Truly, there is as little chance of it as of your doing me a hurt with this little toy I have for you.” Letting go of my hands, he threw off his cloak and fumbled in his purse, putting into my lax hand a tiny jeweled knife. “There, that is a keepsake to remember how ill was our beginning together, and these—” he put a small cloth-wrapped packet in my lap, “—are a very small mark of my gratitude for the joy you have given me.”

  I opened the packet and touched the earrings and the necklet, delicate and beautiful. “Oh, I forgot your gift,” I cried. “And now I cannot give it to you—and you will have no use for it if you must go to war.”

  “It is enough to know you remembered me,” Bruno said, stroking my hair.

  “But I should have brought it.” I began to weep; somehow I felt it was no disloyalty in me to weep for my thoughtlessness in forgetting to bring Bruno’s gift, whereas to weep for Bruno’s danger when I no longer wept for my dead—was that not very wrong? “It is a bedrobe,” I sobbed. “I saw you had none. That very first day when we were wed, when I should have been thinking of where to find a knife, I saw you had no bedrobe and wondered if I should make one for you.”

  “Melusine, do not weep. I cannot bear it.”

  He kissed my lips and then delicately licked the tears, first from one cheek and then the other. I began to tremble again, but not with cold or fear. Indeed, I sought his mouth again, and mine clung to it as he pulled out the pin that held my cloak and pushed it off my shoulders. I do not know how he rid me of the rest of my clothes or managed to take off his own for I gave him no help and must have hindered him by my unwillingness to let him go. I was ashamed, but I could not restrain myself. I needed to feel his body on mine, to hold him within me. As long as I could feel him, warm and strong, I did not need to fear being alone.

  Does fear make lust stronger? Not fear of being hurt or forced—that kills all desire—but fear of losing the joy coupling brings? For me, that night, it did. I tried to suppress the waves of pleasure that rose higher with each th
rust, but I could not. That final convulsion, which is akin to pain in its intensity, took me against my will. Bruno’s too, I think, because he stopped moving and tried to hold me still, groaning when I thrust against him in my frantic need.

  We were both still afterward, until I sighed and said, “I think you chose our lodging very well.”

  “I did not choose it. It was all I could get. I thought it more important that we be together than what particular place we were together in.”

  I felt Bruno stiffen as he spoke, and he began to lift himself off me but I held him tight. “I think so too,” I whispered in his ear. “I only meant that I do not think myself so much better than the other women here. I am as lustful—”

  Bruno squeezed me tight, then raised himself on his elbows so he could see my face and laughed aloud. “Silly girl! A whore is not lustful. Mostly they hate men and what they do. A few are indifferent. A few manage to keep alive some feeling for a special man or two, but even in those it is hard to wake any real response.” He bent his head down and kissed my forehead, my nose, and my lips, then laid his cheek against mine. “Melusine, there is very little pleasure for me in coupling with a whore, not much more than pissing in a pot. Lying with you—that is different. You have given me joy in many ways, but now I am talking about joy of my body that no whore with all her practiced tricks could give me. A trick is a trick, but you give me your own pleasure which doubles and redoubles mine.”

  And his pleasure doubled and redoubled mine too. We were both fast in a trap. I remembered how the queen had accused him of being ensorcelled. She had thought that his experience with women who sold themselves would armor him against me—but seemingly it was just the opposite. So I had a real weapon, as I had guessed in Ulle, but what did it matter? Tomorrow Bruno would ride away—

  “Teach me some tricks,” I cried. “Let us see if what I do to you makes me feel more strongly too.”

  My purpose was to wipe from my mind my terrible fear of loss. And for the hours of that short night—short to us although it was one of the longest nights of the year—I washed away that fear in a warm sea of pleasure, finding to my surprise that the tricks were not—except for touching with fingers and lips—what I did to Bruno, but what I tempted him to do to me. I slipped the loops of my earrings around my nipples and tangled my necklet in the hair between my thighs and danced and bade him undress me with his mouth.

  Less than half an hour before that he had sighed, “Enough, I must ride at dawn,” but my little game gave him such renewed life that he hurt me a little in his eagerness to take me. I was tired myself by then. I would not have wakened him and tempted him if he had not reminded me that this was all I would have—perhaps forever.

  Of course, I only remembered to tell Bruno that the queen had made me her scribe on our way back. He thought it as odd as I, but we were both half dead by then and not much interested in Maud’s notions. At the door of the queen’s hall I clung to him, and he kissed me a last time as passionately as if we had not been kissing until our lips were sore. Then the cold grey sky flushed red, and Bruno put me aside, closing the hands I stretched out to him on each other and telling me not to be a goose and that he would write to me so that I did not need to worry. That promise and my exhaustion saved me from the most acute agony when the men rode out. I was so sated and dazed with tiredness that even grief and fear were dulled.

  The only thing that really pierced the haze in my head was the fact that the queen was as sick with fear and grief as I would have been if I had not been numb. It was a strange, painful comfort, and in the months that followed while King Stephen took the keep at Leeds and went on to ravage Scotland until King David yielded up his son Henry of Huntingdon—this time as hostage, not guest—and then rode south to besiege Ludlow, it forged a bond between us because we were the only two who craved their missing menfolk in the same way.

  I do not mean there were not other ladies attending the queen who were worried about their male kin. Almost every lady had some relative in the king’s army, and I am sure the pain of a mother for her son is every bit as sharp as that of a woman for a husband she craves. It is as sharp, but it is different. Queen Maud and I were the only two who shed most of our tears in a bed in which one lay where there should be two.

  However, I did not shed nearly as many tears as I expected, nor did the terror long continue, which in the beginning came over me in waves so that I burst into a cold sweat and could not move. Maud noticed one of the worst of these; she stared at me, for I had dropped my bread and wine—we were breaking our fast the morning after Bruno had gone—and sunk down on the floor whimpering. I should have been ashamed to show such weakness, but I was too far gone to care who saw my misery, my whole world having narrowed to the knowledge that every person I loved and who loved me soon died. Then the queen had come and stooped above me, putting her hand hard on my shoulder so she hurt me and saying harshly, “You will be better soon. It is impossible to be so afraid for very long—and I have work for you.”

  I did not believe her, but she was right. I was soon so busy that I had little time to indulge my fears. Later I thought she might have spoken from her own experience, but I never dared ask. I discovered the real work of the scribe of the closet during the three days after the king rode north when the queen’s Household went to Dover. It was my duty to keep track of the queen’s possessions each time her Household moved. And we moved constantly—from Winchester to Dover; from Dover to Hastings; from Hastings back to Winchester; from Winchester to Windsor—staying only about three weeks in each place. Fortunately only necessary items were unpacked when we stopped and guested at keeps along the road and at each new place or I would not have had time to eat or sleep.

  The work was a poultice over my terror—fixing my mind on sheets and pillows, ewers and basins, chests and stools suppressed it—but in the night and other times too it could burst forth. It was Bruno’s first letter from Leeds, which reached me at Dover in a packet sent by Stephen to the queen, that cured the worst fear, leaving only my natural longing for him—for the pleasure he gave me, for the way he could make me laugh, for the way he talked to me. Maud had summoned me from the hall and handed me the folded parchment. Perhaps I should have gone away, but in my eagerness I only walked a few steps to the side before I began to read.

  Aside from some light words about taking care to keep the earrings and necklet he had given me packed away until he could try putting them on as he had taken them off—which made me blush despite knowing that no one but I could understand his meaning—Bruno’s letter was mostly full of small complaints about mislaid baggage and bad food and the fact that the king’s advisors kept Stephen back from the fighting, which also kept his fighting companions, the Knights of the Body, from engaging the enemy.

  That matter was not set apart in any way, not coupled with soothing phrases about not worrying. Because it was mingled in with all the other complaints I did not suspect it was only a lie to comfort me, as indeed it was, for Stephen and Bruno with him were in the thick of every fight—although it was true enough that the king’s advisors did not like it and tried to hold him back. But I did not discover the truth for more than two years because I did not suspect Bruno of such deviousness. At the time, as I felt a lifting of the heavy weight that had lain on my heart no matter how busy I was, I suddenly remembered how the queen had tried to hearten me, and I cried out to her, “Oh, madam, listen,” and read her those lines.

  Maud looked up from the writing she was studying and blinked, and I was appalled at my stupidity in intruding so unimportant a subject into her news, which must be about affairs of state. I began to stammer an apology and withdraw, but she rose from her chair and came to me and bade me show her the letter. She was so eager to see the words that promised safety for her husband she made a mistake and let me guess by the way her eyes went at once to the right place that she was not reading my letter for the first time, only reading mor
e carefully what she had let her eyes pass over too quickly before. For a minute I was angry, but then she looked up and smiled at me like dawn breaking.

  That was the first time I truly understood what Bruno had told me many times—that everything the queen did was for Stephen’s sake. I wondered then if she herself would rather have lived quietly on her own lands in Boulogne but yielded to Stephen’s need to have his own, greater estate. I could forgive her for prying if it was to increase the safety of one she loved. Would I not have done that for my own? I would, and gladly.

  Even though I understood, it troubled me and came back to my mind again and again over the next few days, each time I reread my letter for the comfort it gave me. I knew that Bruno had taken Cormi and Merwyn with him to act as messengers and had no need to send his letter in the king’s packet. At last I realized that Bruno had sent the letter in the king’s packet just so the queen should read it. That was a hint, I thought; he had left Fechin with me, but it would be most unwise to allow Maud to suspect I sent secrets with a private messenger—specially when I had no secrets any longer and it was my purpose to convince the queen that I would not be a traitor if my lands were restored. So the next time I had a chance to speak to her, I asked her if I could send a letter to Bruno when she wrote to the king.

  Permission was given immediately, and Maud suggested I write as soon as I could because she intended to send a messenger off within the next two days. Naturally I did as I was bidden, but knowing that another would read my letter made any intimacy in what I wrote impossible. I would not have written anything that could shame me in any case, but I could not even add little jests or reminders of pleasant moments. I felt that I was writing to a stranger, and the best I could produce was a tone of courtesy. I also wrote every bit of news I had: where we were, how we had traveled to get there, the gossip I had heard in the keeps where we stayed along the way, everything I saw, each rumor I heard, and what I guessed about Dover and Maud’s purpose for coming here. I was curious to know whether the queen would admit she was reading my letter by reprimanding me, scratch out what she preferred Bruno not to know, or let the letter go intact, knowing that all I wrote was harmless and desiring to let me believe, if I could, that my letter was sent unexamined.