Winter Siege

by Ariana Franklin

  What had she said? Something about a sour-faced bugger riding a bay? Looked at me like he wanted to kill me.

  He’d come back to do it. He’d wanted the quill case, wanted it so desperately he’d risked returning to Bedford Castle to find it.

  Vaguely, as if from another world, Gwil became aware of a change up at the castle. The tabor that had been tapping for the entertainment was combining with other drums in a call to arms.

  They’re mobilizing the military, he thought. We can catch him.

  But it wasn’t that. One of Stephen’s spies had brought wonderful news. The Empress was not too far away. At Oxford, and only a small force with her. Quick, quick, the tattoo blared, at last we can trap the bitch. Gather the army and ride. Ride. Now we have her.

  As Gwil and Wan carried Waterlily’s body in its sack up the castle approach, they were nearly run down by an outrush of riders led by the King, his cloak ballooning with the speed of his going. Prince Eustace’s horse passed so close that Wan stumbled in avoiding it, and the sack was upended into the gutter that drained the barbican of its effluent.

  The moment the castle gates opened the next morning, Gwil collected the mule from its pasture, lifted Penda on to it and jogged with both to Elstow convent where he paid the nuns to keep her in their guesthouse, allowing her neither in nor out until he came back for her. ‘And no visitors, neither.’

  By the mercy of God, in the castle’s turmoil caused by Stephen’s going, the girl had learned only that Waterlily was dead, and was ignorant of the circumstances. Believing it to have been a killing in the course of robbery, she went with Gwil meekly enough; she thought she was being punished, and deserved it. ‘I’m sorry, Gwil, ever so sorry. I was nasty to her. Sweet Mary, forgive me, I was so nasty to her.’

  She died for you, he thought. He said: ‘You got to learn charity, Pen.’

  ‘I will. I swear I will. Did they take her bracelets, Gwil? Was that it?’ Waterlily’s bangles had been a source of envy.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and left her.

  Pan and Wan managed to raise a hue and cry, but the castle occupants, as well as those without its walls, were too busy gathering supplies and men with which to augment King Stephen’s force at Oxford to institute a proper search for a man with blood on him. Nor was such a one found.

  Neither was the Sheriff of Bedfordshire in situ to investigate the killing; he was travelling his hundreds, raising the militias for the same purpose. Instead, his duty was carried out by one of his reeves, a man also harassed by other duties.

  Gwil, doggedly pursuing his own inquiries, found little that would substantiate what he knew to be the truth. The clerics who’d visited the castle that morning had arrived in the middle of preparations for the royal feast and gone more or less unnoticed in the hubbub. In effect, they’d been faceless.

  The chamberlain, when pressed, was vague. ‘They’d come to see the King. Wanted him to sign a charter. Or confirm some appointment or another. I don’t know. I was busy. A monk? No, no monk among them.’

  ‘Where did they come from?’

  ‘St Albans, I think. Yes, St Albans.’

  A groom who’d helped the clerics to dismount had noticed a strange smell emanating from one of their number that wasn’t just body odour. ‘Reeky, like a foreigner,’ he said, but could give no better description. ‘I was busy, and them God-botherers all look alike to me.’

  By the requirement of lex murdrum an inquest of sorts was held, but, apart from a prurient examination of Waterlily’s corpse, the local jurors didn’t exert themselves. The victim wasn’t one of their own; she’d been a wandering female performer who, by all reports, was of lax morals. Since she’d chosen to exhibit herself in public in scanty dress, the blame for her murder rested a good deal on herself at a time when men had lost all restraint. The words she asked for it were not actually spoken but they might as well have been. Their verdict was ‘murder by person or persons unknown’.

  The reeve, entering the finding in the sheriff’s rolls, shook his head. ‘There are too many such in these sad times.’

  Gwil, to his shame, said nothing. What could he say?

  Sir, the killer is a cleric from St Albans who visited this castle that morning.

  Oh yes, master foreigner, and what proof can you, another wandering performer, lay against a respectable ecclesiastic? A smell? Smells are not admitted as evidence in a court of law.

  Might as well shout at the moon.

  Also, he was bound by the fetter that was Penda. To tell the whole story, which might or might not nail guilt on the monk, would, of necessity, expose her to a memory she could not bear, let alone parading her in a world in which a raped female was a shamed female.

  Worse still, it would put her in danger. They were no longer pursuing the monk: the monk was hunting them. He would have realized by now that Waterlily wasn’t Penda, and what’s more, he had the resources now. No longer a monk, but a cleric connected to St Albans, one of the great abbey cathedrals of England, with a senior position in its hierarchy, else why had he been among those sent to petition the King?

  For the thousandth time, Gwil speculated on what the Greek letters on the quill-case parchment spelled out, making them so vital that a man was prepared to torture and kill for them. A guide to buried treasure? Proof that the monk was heir to a kingdom? Some naughtiness committed by the Pope that would put the Holy See in the monk’s power? Each guess became more and more unlikely.

  Pan and Wan had accepted the inquest’s finding – another weight of guilt on Gwil’s shoulders, though to have given them such clues to the identity of the perpetrator as he possessed would have left them as frustrated as himself, and with as little chance of being believed. Also, if the monk had realized, as he must, that he’d killed the wrong girl, he had also drawn the connection between Gwil and travelling performers, thereby putting Gwil and Penda at risk in Pan’s and Wan’s company, just as they would be at risk from the presence of Gwil and Penda.

  The death had aged both acrobats. Spiritless, they would try to build a new life abroad. Wan found the energy to say: ‘Come with us.’

  But the spell that had intertwined five of them for so many months had been broken by the loss of one. It was time to go it alone once more; for Gwil to grow a beard like a countryman crusader, to cut Penda’s hair more closely and hide it permanently under her cap, to dress anonymously. But first, Waterlily must be buried …

  It proved difficult. No parish priest was prepared to let her share the same ground as the dead in his churchyard. An immoral travelling performer who’d died unshriven and, quite probably, unbaptized? She must not pollute the corpses of the faithful.

  The sheriff’s reeve offered a plot in a scrubby unconsecrated patch of land in which suicides were interred, but be damned to that. In the end they took her coffin back to the convent at Elstow.

  The nuns, out of charity and at Pan’s pleading, allowed her a Christian grave, though they drew the line at marking it with the pagan appellation of ‘Waterlily’.

  ‘What name was she born with?’ Gwil was fashioning her cross.

  ‘Hild, if I remember,’ Wan said, and Pan nodded.

  ‘Hild of … where?’

  ‘London,’ said Pan, ‘just London. She never had no parents we knew of.’

  They lowered the slight coffin into its hole. A priest intoned the ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’ antiphon and, without conviction, a prayer that the soul of Hild of London would not suffer too long in Purgatory.

  The four stood a long while in silence, the only mourners, sleet from a grey sky wetting their faces. Then they picked up their packs and said goodbye to Waterlily and each other.

  ‘Where we going, Gwil?’ Penda asked.

  A pertinent question.

  The hunters had become the hunted; for the wolf was undoubtedly after them now and for the time being they must escape it, but fleeing abroad was more than Gwil was prepared to do.

  Downhearted, afraid for Pen
as he was, he couldn’t rid himself of the conviction that sooner or later they would be granted justice. The mills of God ground slowly – too bloody slowly – but they ground exceeding small. Hadn’t the Lord just supplied the clue of St Albans to the pile that would eventually uncover the bastard’s identity?

  Leave it to me for now, Gwil.

  ‘Going to bloody have to, aren’t I?’

  In the meantime …?

  ‘London, maybe,’ he told Penda. They could find employment and anonymity in a big city while they recouped and waited for God to work on their problem. ‘But we’re going by boat.’

  He wasn’t going to risk them being espied on a main road any more; for all he knew the monk could be employing agents to look out for them. River traffic was busy; nobody would notice a middle-aged uncle and his nephew among the teeming and various passengers of its shipping.

  So they followed the Ridgeway to lead them south and west until they could join the Thames below Oxford, well below the point where King Stephen was besieging the Empress.

  Then came a blizzard, buffeting them away from the riverbank by snow that left its towpath and stream deserted …

  Chapter Nine

  ONCE AGAIN, AT the description of the female acrobat’s death, the scribe had to go and douse his vitals in cold water. Her torture had been extreme, of course, but God’s just anger at unchaste women could be terrible. Look at the punishment He’d called down on Jezebel.

  And the abbot, oh dear, the abbot had sighed in telling the story of the murder like a man in grief for it. ‘May God and His saints give peace in Heaven for little Waterlily,’ he’d said, as if that was at all likely, and then smiled to himself. ‘Perhaps the Lord has a place for acrobats in Paradise as He undoubtedly has for Rahere the jester who built the church for St Bartholomew.’

  But not for a whore, the scribe thinks, and wonders if now is the time to take the manuscript to the bishop. And yet, and yet, he finds the adventures of these common sinners hideously involving. Can I myself remain pure while writing them down? Yes, if I armour my soul with prayer; the Lord be my strength and my shield against corruption.

  ‘What happened next, my lord?’ he asks, and is ashamed of the eagerness in his voice.

  ‘We are about to see threads that join all our protagonists begin to draw together, my son.’

  With difficulty, the abbot raises himself on his bed, his face taut with effort. ‘I must, I must be witness to the fortitude of the human spirit when it is confronted with pandemonium.’

  He reaches out a hand and the scribe passes him the phial of medicine that Brother Infirmarian has provided to ease his chest. He seems a little better for it, and his voice is stronger.

  ‘For, at this time, despite the fact that Stephen’s men are besieging the Empress at Oxford, the King is no nearer the victory he seeks. Indeed, it is further away. He may have the wife within his grasp, but the husband is triumphant. Superb warrior that he is, Geoffrey Plantagenet has finally conquered all Normandy and will soon be proclaimed its duke in the cathedral at Rouen. It is a disaster for Stephen because it is a disaster for his barons who now waver in his support. What are they to do? Those who have fought against the Empress will surely forfeit their lands in Normandy, yet, if they leave Stephen, he will take away their lands in England.’

  He gives a chuckle that makes him cough. ‘Take the case of Waleran de Meulan, the elder Beaumont twin. He may be Earl of Worcester in England, thanks to Stephen, but Meulan in Normandy is his patrimony; it is the inheritance of his ancestors, his very bones. No matter how many baronies the English king may confer on him, he is Waleran de Meulan, not Waleran of Worcester, and without that nomenclature few will know who he is; he won’t know who he is.’

  ‘He deserts, my lord?’

  ‘He deserts. He and his brother agree to do what we saw them discussing at the marriage feast of Maud of Kenniford. Between them they back both mounts in this two-horse race. He goes to Normandy and crawls to the Plantagenet in order to maintain his lands on that side of the Channel – which he does, incidentally – while twin Robert, no doubt loudly bewailing to the King his brother’s defection, keeps the English domains.’

  ‘Perfidy,’ sighs the scribe.

  ‘A perfidy that costs Stephen dearly for he had lavished much love and many riches on Waleran as he has on others whose support he has bought with them. Allies of the Empress feel encouraged and begin attacking strongly in the West in order to draw Stephen’s army away from the Empress at Oxford, but for once he refuses to be diverted.’ The abbot pauses and then adds: ‘Oh, and it has begun to snow …’

  Chapter Ten

  ‘IT’S SNOWING, GWIL,’ Penda wailed from several yards behind him. They had travelled a long way very quickly and, like the late-afternoon light, their energy was fading. He looked back at the forlorn figure trudging reluctantly behind him but dared not stop; if the weather was coming in, and by the looks of it it most certainly was, they needed to reach a town soon.

  He drove them on through the thickening snowfall until, by God’s mercy, they came across a charcoal-burner’s hut in a wood with a good supply of charcoal still in the kilns next to it, and settled down to wait out the blizzard. The wind came through a crack in one of the wattle-and-daub walls as well as the rackety door, and the hut’s shape was hideously reminiscent of the shack where they’d found Waterlily, but they would have to stay there or die. For one thing, the river was nearby and there was a possibility of blundering into it, thanks to snow that blinded by sticking its flakes on to one’s very eyelids.

  ‘Like old times, this is, Gwil,’ Penda said with forced brightness.

  It was something he’d noticed about her; she was more eager to please since Waterlily’s death, not so manipulative, less concerned with herself.

  She waggled her elbows like bird’s wings to shake the snow off her and, shivering, tipped the charcoal held in a scoop of her cloak into the central firepit. ‘Ain’t warm out there, bor.’

  ‘Ain’t warm in here.’ Gwil was battling to keep out the slicing draught by stuffing their empty packs into the wall crack. Snowflakes found their way through the roof but they’d need the hole in it to draw out the smoke when the fire was lit.

  ‘Lucky we came on it, though. What we got to eat?’

  There was a small cheese and a corner of ham along with a stale loaf he’d bought from a woman at Tiddington, and some ale she’d also sold him that she ought to have been prosecuted for.

  The charcoal was slow to catch fire without kindling; they had to separate some of its friable strands with clumsy hands and blow on the tinder’s spark from lips almost too cold to purse before it caught.

  By the time the fuel was glowing, Penda had begun to nod. Her cap had fallen off and he noticed that her hair, which seemed to grow like wildfire, would soon need cropping again; in repose, in fact increasingly these days, she looked more feminine. He frowned as he took off her wet boots and rubbed her feet; he worried about her more nowadays, the time was coming, and he knew it, when he wouldn’t be able to protect her any more. It was like trying to hold back the tide. He yawned and took off his cloak and laid it over them both, and sat, listening to the shrieking buffets of the wind against the hut’s northerly wall …

  Penda nudged him awake. ‘Somebody out there.’

  ‘Can’t be.’ Nevertheless he reached for his crossbow to cock it.

  Then he heard them; disjointed shouts of argument over the wind between two men.

  ‘A light, I tell you.’

  ‘… risk it.’

  ‘… have to.’

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘Got to let ’em in, Gwil.’

  ‘I know.’ To deny shelter to whatever flickering humanity was out in that howling waste was callousness they wouldn’t be able to live with.

  Nevertheless, he gestured for Pen to arm herself before going to the door. Snow had piled up against it and he had to push hard to get it open.

  At first
he couldn’t see them; their voices were very close but disembodied. Then the whiteness beyond the door resolved into three figures, equally white, like ghosts blown towards him by the wind. He crossed himself before stepping back to let them in.

  ‘Bless you, God bless you, good sir. Bit chilly out here.’

  Two men were supporting a woman between them. All three were crusted with snow, their eyes like gashes in a mask, though those of the man who hadn’t spoken – taller and older than the other – looked from Gwil’s bow to Penda’s, as his hand slid towards the hilt of his sword.

  Gwil put his bow down and reached for the semi-conscious woman to help prop her on the edge of the firepit. He was stopped. ‘Better leave her to us,’ the younger one said gently, ‘if you wouldn’t mind.’

  Between them, they removed her boots as Gwil had taken off Penda’s, rubbed her feet and face. She wore fine, doeskin gloves and those they left on. ‘S’pose there ain’t anything to eat and drink, is there?’

  Gwil handed over the remains of the ham and cheese – there hadn’t been much to start with – and one of the bottles. The taller man tasted the ale first, spat and said, ‘It’ll have to do,’ before pressing the spout to the woman’s mouth. ‘Take some of this, my lady.’ It was said in Norman French; his companion had used English.

  Their ghostliness wasn’t just from the snow; all three were enveloped in white sheets – satin, Gwil noticed – that stuck wetly to the cloaks underneath. Nor did the hiss as the men moved come only from ice spattering off them into the fire; they wore mail beneath their surcoats, excellent mail.

  Knights.

  ‘Did you come on horses?’ he asked in English.

  ‘Matter of fact, we’ve, er, had to walk quite a bit,’ the younger one said. ‘Well, slid mostly. Down the river, you know. It’s frozen over further up. Missed our way this last stretch. Saw your light.’

  Knights without horses; unheard of.