Long-legged birds, redshanks and plovers, were picking their way over the gleaming sands, and sea-mews screaming above her head. The sky was hazing over, turning tarnished silver. If the stranger didn’t come back soon, she would just walk away. Where had he come from, anyway? She could make out no sign of a boat either seaward or along the shore, although the estuary had so many little creeks and bays, and the fen extended so far inland in places, that a half-hundred ships might hide there if they had their masts down and put in with muffled oars on a moon-dark night.
But here he was again, skidding down the dune beside her. And she wondered now how she could ever have mistaken him for Cudda’s after-walker, except that he too was fair and fine-boned. But this young man’s hair was ashy-fair, not flaxen, and it fell straight; and now that he was close again she could see he wasn’t so young as all that, years older than she had thought, somewhere in his early twenties though his beard was so slight; and that wind and weather had found the time to engrave delicate lines in the corners of his grey eyes. His cheekbones were wide and high, keeping the impress of his smile even after it had faded from his mouth.
But the smile was back now, illuminating his face from within, and Elfrun found a sudden sharp breathlessness afflicting her, a weakness of the knees which was a new sensation, together with a fierce longing to learn more about this stranger.
Of course she did. He was a welcome distraction – and she ignored the racing of her heart. A new face, someone who would talk to her of frivolities, anything to blot out the memory of Cudda’s peeled and blistering skin, the ravaged eye-socket, the bone.
She wanted him to tell her something new, something she had never heard before. She needed different pictures in her head.
He was shrugging the densely woven wicker pack from his shoulders.
‘I’m not buying,’ she said, and regretted the words as soon as she had blurted them out. If she wasn’t buying, why would he linger?
That radiant smile again. ‘But these are my credentials, lady. So you know not to set your hounds on me. And if not you’ – he shrugged easily – ‘maybe someone else might be interested?’ His eyes flickered past her, inland.
‘Not today. No one would be interested today. There’s – there’s been a death. An accident.’ She was trying to place him. His light voice had an accent which struck her as strange, but not as strange as that of the West Saxon hostages who had companioned the king last time he had come to hunt their woods and eat their stores. She fought the desire to press her cool hands to her hot cheeks. She was lord of Donmouth, was she? She could hear Abarhild, loud and clear. Time you behaved like it. ‘What’s your name, and who are your people?’
‘Tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.’ He looked up from his straps and buckles, his face expectant. ‘And I’m sorry for your troubles.’ He frowned at her. ‘I thought it was the wind, but now I can see you’ve been crying, haven’t you?’
Taken aback by his directness, Elfrun dashed furiously at her eyes with the back of her hand. She hadn’t meant to pass the time of day with this stranger, never mind let him know what was bothering her. ‘My name is Elfrun. My father is the lord of Donmouth.’
‘And this is Donmouth?’
‘Of course!’
‘I thought perhaps these might be your husband’s lands.’
‘I’m – I’m not married.’
He raised his hands. ‘I didn’t mean to pry. Sorry, Elfrun.’ Alvrun, he made it sound. ‘And Donmouth is a fine estate, no doubt? A splendid hall and a high seat? A church, rich in silver and gold?’
She nodded, too proud to put him right, thinking ruefully of the hall-treasures her father had taken with him, of the shabby little church still earthen-floored and wooden-walled and likely to stay that way, for all Fredegar’s disapproval. They would never build new, not with Ingeld as abbot, not while her father was gone. ‘And you? Your name?’
‘Finn. That’s what men call me.’
She nodded again.
‘Do you want to see?’ He was opening the lid of his pack. ‘I have some pretty things.’
‘I told you, I’m not buying.’
‘And maybe I’m not selling. But I’m proud of my wares. Come on, lady. Show courtesy to a poor wanderer.’ He laughed. ‘Now I’ve made you blush for your shabby welcome.’
She knew he spoke the truth, both about her treatment of him and her treacherous blood mounting in her cheeks. She could feel her face growing still warmer, despite the nipping, insistent wind. Nonetheless she moved closer, intrigued despite herself by the bundles and packets visible in the basket, eager for any distraction to wipe away even for a few moments the haunting presence of Cudda’s burned face.
‘Now...’ Finn the pedlar said. ‘Shall I show you some white furs? Silk ribbons from the court of the eastern Emperor? A little amber – some glass beads, nothing fine enough for you.’
Was he laughing at her? She was feeling grubby and shabby enough already, and she flinched at the mere sight of the silk ribbons. He offered a coil of them, but she thrust her hands behind her back, painfully aware of the charcoal smears and the way her rough skin and work-worn nails would snag on the gossamer stuff. The high silver haze was lifting and the day beginning to brighten, if not to warm. She shook her head at him.
‘No? Are you sure?’ He trailed a handful alluringly over his forearm. The ribbons slithered and shimmered enticingly, but she was more aware of the light dusting of golden hairs on the smooth brown skin of his arm, and the play of the muscle beneath.
‘No!’ More sharply than she had meant.
‘Have you ever smelt kanella?’
Frowning, she shook her head.
‘Cinnamon, you might call it?’
Again, bafflement.
He unscrewed the lid of a little wooden cylinder and she peered in. Scraps and curls of brown bark. She lifted her face to his, puzzled.
‘Pinch a little. Crush it. Rub it between your fingertips. Take a deep breath, through your nose.’
Sweet and yet acrid, the scent hit the back of her nose: heady and utterly foreign. She closed her eyes and breathed deep, as he had told her. From somewhere came bubbling up the familiar words of the wedding psalm, murra et gutta et cassia – and she must have spoken aloud, because Finn said, ‘What was that?’
‘The sweet scent of the spices, myrrh, aloes, and cassia, covers your royal robes,’ she said in English. She opened her eyes, still savouring the extraordinary smell, hardly seeing him. ‘You delight in the music of harps in palaces decorated with ivory...’ Her breath caught tight somewhere between her breastbone and her throat.
‘Beautiful,’ Finn the pedlar said. ‘Don’t stop.’
Elfrun could feel her face hotter than ever, and shook her head again. She should not be here alone with this unknown man; she should not be enjoying herself, not on the day that had also seen Cudda’s death. She had no idea why she was behaving like this. But she might be dead herself tomorrow.
Heaven knew the psalmist had enough to say about that. Like sheep they are laid in the grave, and death shall feed on them.
‘Beautiful,’ he said again. ‘Like you.’
She shook her head.
‘Not beautiful, you think? Then I have just the remedy, lady.’ He looked into her face and frowned. ‘Don’t make that mardy face.’
‘What face?’
‘I can read you fine well. You were thinking I might insult you with some ointment.’ But the thing he was unwrapping from a roll of sheepskin was no flask or jar. Something flat and metallic, highly polished, a disc a little larger than her hand, with a handle of welded loops. He passed it over and she took it with both hands, bemused again. Too many new things. She bent over and peered hard. Red enamel set into the greenish-goldish handle, and the flat surface of the disc finely incised with swirls and spirals of great beauty, some fields smooth, others minutely cross-hatched. Dents and scratches enough to show that it was an ancient thing, but not so many that they marr
ed the design.
‘Turn it over.’ He was refastening the buckles on his pack, not looking at her.
She did so, wondering. On the other side, the disc gleamed as though newly cast. Again barring a few scratches, the surface was perfectly smooth, shining as though the bronze were still molten.
‘Look into it.’
‘I am looking at it.’
‘Not at. Into.’ He lifted his hand. ‘Like this.’
She raised hers, mimicking his gesture, and gazed clearly at her own face for the first time in her life. She was startled beyond words. Where had the chill October gone? In the polished metal, a face was painted in the light of a warm summer evening, a rich golden glow. And that face, staring forthright and wide-eyed back at her... It reminded her of the Madonna picture in St Peter’s Minster in York, the one men said had come from the holy city of Constantinople, further even than Rome...
Only gradually did she realize she was looking at no icon but her own true self. The reflection was softened round the edges, but she could see her face clearly enough. Wide brown eyes, and strong brows, the shadowed hollows of eye-socket and cheekbone, strands of her chestnut hair escaping and softening her face, and a big smudge of charcoal across her broad forehead. She lifted her free hand with an exclamation and rubbed it away.
‘See?’ Finn the pedlar was close at her shoulder, but the mirror was too small to reflect both of them. ‘Now tell me you’re not beautiful.’ His voice was warm and teasing.
‘Do I really have so many freckles?’ She peered at the dusting that overlay the bridge of her nose and spilled across her cheekbones. No one had reminded Elfrun about the freckles since her mother’s death. Suddenly she felt a deep self-consciousness. ‘This is silly. Beyond silly.’ Sickened by her own vanity, she pushed the mirror back at him. ‘While we’re blethering on, poor Cudda’s lying dead back there.’
His face had grown sober again. ‘I am sorry.’ He reached out and took her hand confidently in his. She stared at him in disbelief as he pressed the handle of the mirror into her palm and folded her fingers about it. She shook her head violently, but he kept his hand firm-clasped round hers. ‘I’ll come by your hall again, maybe, on a luckier day. Your father and mother might like to see what I carry. You have a church, you said?’ She nodded, unable to speak, to correct him about her parents. ‘I’ll bring the things priests like, one of these days. Oil. Incense. I can get the vessels, too, given enough warning. Books, even.’ She nodded once more, still dumb, as he took his hand away. ‘Keep the mirror by you for a while. Think it over – though if you ask me, Alvrun, the man who made it had your face in his mind.’ He looked at the distant, restless horizon and frowned slightly. After a moment he said, ‘This day week. I’ll look for you here. Sunset.’
‘But—’
‘No buts. If you’re not here I won’t bear a grudge. We’ll meet again.’
He was smiling again, a smile that started with his eyes, and despite herself she could feel her face answering in kind, and though he had taken his hands away their warmth still lingered. ‘I—’ could never afford it, she was going to say, but he had already swung the pack up on to his shoulders and was loping away along the shoreline, waving a hand in farewell but never looking back. It felt as though he were taking something of hers with him, something beyond price.
29
The two motionless figures knelt side by side on the cold earthen floor of the dark church. Not so much as a single rushlight guttered on the altar.
‘I could have saved him,’ Abarhild said again. Her knees were agony. ‘I am disappointed in you.’
‘Domina.’ Fredegar’s voice gave nothing away.
‘Our people are not your cattle to put down at will.’
Outside, a patch of freshly turned soil lay a few yards from the minster’s south door. Ingeld had been startled at the request to admit the boy to the family lych-yard, and minded to refuse, but Fredegar had taken him to one side. Abarhild hadn’t been able to hear his muttered words but she had approved the priest’s dark frown, and his fierce, stabbing gestures from the boy’s swaddled corpse where it lay on its hurdle to the minster and back again. Her last-born child needed firm handling. Men – and women – deferred to him far too much. How would he ever grow into the good man she knew he could be?
‘You think Cudda would have been grateful for your cobbling him back together?’ Fredegar gazed up at the dim altar.
‘More grateful than he would be for you cutting his throat.’ She peered up at the priest’s hawklike profile, backlit from the little window high in the north wall.
‘You are wrong, there.’ He spoke to the stone cross carved in the wall above the altar. ‘His father knew it, and so do you, domina, in your heart. I’d seen that boy around the place, running with your grandson. He lived in his body, as the beasts do. Lose his health and he would have nothing left. If he had been able to speak, he would have begged for the knife.’
‘You play at being God.’
‘He is mercy as well as justice. I did what I hope to be God’s will. Father abbot knows it, too, for what that’s worth. And so does your granddaughter.’
The old lady rose to her feet with an audible creak. The silent slave-woman who had been waiting in the porch stepped forward and offered Abarhild an arm just as she staggered.
The priest said, ‘If anyone is to blame here it is that whelp Athulf.’ Grey-faced Athulf, who had watched the ceremonial from a sulky distance, never dismounting from his cobby little chestnut. As soon as the first spade-load of earth had slid over the shrouded body and the women had stopped their keening, he had tugged his reins around and forced his horse up the slope behind the church.
‘How is it Athulf’s fault?’ Abarhild turned to look at him, still at his devotions. ‘How? Cudda should have known better than to go near the forge fire in that state.’
Fredegar shook his head, but didn’t answer.
Abarhild hobbled away from the altar, dipping her fingers in the holy-water stoup by the door and crossing herself as she came out into the lengthening daylight. She was convinced she was right, and she also knew that she was alone in that belief. Elfrun had confessed as much.
‘He would have died in agony, Grandmother. It would have taken days... and if he had lived, what sort of life...?’
Such specious arguments.
Agony.
And what was so wrong with that?
God sent men agony to make them into something worth welcoming into Heaven. That boy would have been purified by pain as the prophet Isaiah had been cleansed by the seraph who brought a burning coal to cleanse his mouth of blasphemy. How fitting that the fire of the forge had been God’s tool. Cudda should have been left to live or die, and, if he had lived, to have learned to accept his lot. Used it to grow his soul in wisdom and acceptance of what God had willed for him.
She expected little of Ingeld, and in her secret heart she admitted as much. But Fredegar had been trained in a house that knew proper discipline: she hadn’t thought him capable of such weakness. She tightened her grip on her woman’s arm. Pain was good for men’s souls.
It had to be, else why would there be so much of it in the world?
She thought of Elfrun’s white, horrified face, watching the blood spurting from Cudda’s neck, soaking into the packed earth of the smithy floor while the boy had gurgled and choked his life away. She had always thought the best thing for that girl would be to take her out of this world of sorrow and put her away somewhere safe. Such a shame she had never made Radmer see sense about sending the child to that house of nuns, north at Hovingham. Elfrun would have made a fine abbess in the fullness of time, spared the pain that was the allotted fate of women.
Burying your children.
At the grave-edge Wynn stood with her parents, with the baby nestled in the crook of its mother’s arm and a couple of smaller children clinging to her skirts, though most of the rest of the mourners had long since peeled away, back to tending their
hearths and their hedges. Cuthred and his wife looked as though they were exchanging angry words. Wynn was glancing from one to the other, quick bird-like movements, her arms wrapped around her skinny body. As Abarhild watched, the girl turned her back on her mother and took her father’s arm. The gesture had something final and defiant about it. The woman watched her husband and daughter go with a look of disbelief before dropping her head and burying her face in the swaddling cloth of her infant. Her shoulders were shaking. Abarhild wondered whether she should go to her, offer such feeble comfort as she was capable of, but another woman was there before her, and the two walked slowly away.
Abarhild felt a sudden weary desire for her narrow pallet. Could not the world just have done, and let her go? God had made it, but men had marred it: a bitter, horrible place, and she wished that she and those she loved were safely out of it.
But in Radmer’s absence she could scarcely send the child to a nunnery. And these Northumbrian houses. Lax and ill disciplined, with little tradition of learning. Not that the men’s houses were much better. Abarhild thought wistfully of her own old home. Was there anyone still at Chelles who would remember her? Hilde, they had called her. The fresh-faced novice of some sixty years ago, that girl who had been taken away so suddenly. The white-washed building where the novices had slept, always clean and sweet and comfortable, and the sun always shining, always warm. She had always been warm in those days.
Abarhild shook her head and muttered below her breath, and her woman eyed her sideways.
Luda was waiting for her outside the door of her little pentice attached to the minster’s common hall, wax tablets clutched in his hand. He started speaking while she was still several yards away.
‘I need a decision about the hall cattle, lady. We haven’t the inkeep for half the ones I wanted to over-winter. The barley that should go to them we’ll be needing for ourselves, and we can’t leave the beasts to starve.’
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