As usual, she was being watched.
“You take her back,” Gyltha snapped, standing beside Penda at their vantage point of the guest chamber window.
Penda sighed. It was a conversation they had had many times, and although she had tried to explain about the promise she had made to Rowley and the enormous pressure she felt to grant it, her words fell on deaf ears and Gyltha was as intransigent as ever.
“I don’t give a bugger about getting her married off,” was her response. “I just want her safe and she ain’t safe here.”
That morning it had started up again.
“Just give me ’til after the feast, Gylth, I’ll have another think then,” Penda said.
Unusually, Gyltha was quiet for a moment.
“After the feast then.” Her concession was reluctant. “But after that you take ’er back, understand? It’s bad for me nerves having ’er ’ere, not to mention me health.”
During the exchange, having forgotten about their surveillance temporarily, they had taken their eyes off Allie and were shocked when they turned back to see a figure striding purposefully across the garden toward her.
“Who’s that?” Gyltha asked in alarm. Penda leaned out of the window as far as she dared to get a better look, then gave a sigh of relief.
“Well it ain’t the murderer, you daft bugger,” she said, chuckling. “It’s Peter, can’t you see?”
“I don’t care who it is,” said Gyltha. “Fetch her in. It’s time she was getting ready besides.”
Chapter 33
It had been so long since Allie had dressed up—and never this elaborately since her days with Eleanor—that she had forgotten what a distressing process it was.
It was more like an ordeal during which she was forcibly bathed and scrubbed and set upon with brickbats until her skin burned; her hair was brushed, pulled and plaited until she was astonished she had any left, and then she was forced to stand for hours on end, or so it seemed, while Gyltha and Jodi dragged layer upon layer of shifts and underdresses over her upraised arms until she thought she was going to suffocate in all the material.
“There,” Gyltha said, standing back to admire her work, when, at last, they had finished.
“You look beautiful,” sighed Jodi with a tear in her eye.
“Like a princess,” said Hawise, holding up the shield they had borrowed from Sir Stephen so that Allie could admire her reflection in its polished surface.
Allie stood before it, turning slowly to see her transformation from every angle, and because even she had to admit that she did indeed look lovely, she was just about to apologize for the robust invective of earlier on, when the solar door opened.
“Ready?”
Penda stood on the threshold looking, against all expectations, if not pretty, exactly, more than passably elegant and most un-Penda-like. Gone were her moleskin cap and wolf-skin mantle, and in their place were a fine white silk wimple and elegant ermine cloak, pinned at the shoulder over a pristine bliaut in a beautiful crimson damask.
Gyltha’s mouth began to move in silent prayer, thanking whichever saint she had invoked for their kind intervention.
“That’s enough o’ that, thank you,” Penda said crisply, blushing to the shade of her bliaut with the unwelcome attention. “You ready, Allie?”
Chapter 34
A large crowd had assembled by the time they reached Dunstan, some, like them, alighting from carts and palanquins, others from horseback, and others still—the hems of their mantles and cloaks held high above the mud—trudging up the riverbank by torchlight, from the flotilla of barges and boats that had transported them there.
Lord Peverell stood in the great arched doorway of his castle greeting his guests with patient bows and handshakes until he caught sight of the Elsford party and, beaming with delight, came bounding over to them.
“Welcome,” he said, taking Allie’s hand, his large, soft brown eyes fixing hers with that expression—the one she had almost forgotten about, but not quite—that made her stomach feel as though a small bird had gotten trapped inside it.
“I’m delighted you could come,” he whispered. Allie was about to reply that so was she when a page, concerned about the queue forming behind them, chivvied them along to another courtyard, where enormous joints of meat sizzled on vast spits and botilers dressed in smart livery handed them cups of warm spiced wine, before they were encouraged through yet another archway into the great hall.
She had forgotten how glorious a room it was, or perhaps had been too distracted during her last visit to appreciate it properly, but this evening, brightly lit by the myriad flambeaux lining the walls, it had an almost cathedral-like grandeur about it. An intricately carved roof—as fine as any she had ever seen—reached to the heavens, and a series of arched windows of colored glass cast exquisite prisms of light onto freshly painted ashlar.
The Elsford contingent huddled together shyly at first, until Penda and Sir Stephen got their bearings, found people they knew and wandered off into the crowd, leaving Allie to amuse herself.
For a while she did so, watching the people around her; the men—mostly barons, bishops and abbots, judging by their attire—paraded like peacocks, barking one-sided conversations at one another, while ladies in fine dresses fluttered like butterflies around them, apparently oblivious to their attendant pages, who hovered at a distance carrying their ridiculous-looking lapdogs.
It was frivolity at its best. It amused her to think how much her mother would disapprove of the “courtly frivolity,” as she referred to it, and yet, there was something undeniably magical about it. Despite Adelia’s condemnation, or possibly because of it, Allie had developed a sneaking admiration for it during the time she had spent with Queen Eleanor. Not the banquets per se, perhaps—she had always been too young to attend those—but the courts of love Eleanor organized to entertain her ladies: Allie could still remember the rippling thrill of anticipation in the hall at Sarum before she called the court to order, when the troubadours sang and the minstrels recounted their tales of King Arthur and his knights, and the exquisitely dressed young women took their places on the dais—sometimes as many as sixty of them—ready to preside over the issues of the heart brought for their consideration by the young knights.
Most were too silly to remember, but one case in particular had stayed with her, that of a young knight asking the court to decide on whether or not true love could exist within marriage. She remembered how the ladies took longer than usual to come to their decision but in the end had ruled—rather wistfully, she noticed—that it could not, because marriage was a commercial contract uniting only lands and fortunes and not, alas, people in love.
“Self-indulgent nonsense,” Adelia had said when, some years later, Allie told her about it. “But at least they got the right verdict, I suppose.”
When she closed her eyes she could feel the magic of Sarum this evening and was enjoying it enormously until she opened them again and saw Sir William glaring at her over the heads of the crowd. She looked away quickly, relieved to find Penda by her side.
“You all right, bor?” she asked, sensing Allie’s discomfort.
“I think so,” Allie replied. “I was just wondering what on earth I could have done to offend Sir William so badly . . . Oh, don’t look now,” she added when Penda’s head swiveled to look for him. “I don’t want him to think—”
But Penda flapped her hand. “Don’t matter what ’e thinks,” she said. “Funny bugger, that one, if you ask me . . . Lord only knows what sets ’is maggots bitin’ but it ain’t nothin’ to do with you, I expect.”
Just then a trumpet sounded, summoning the guests to dine.
To their surprise they were shown to the high table—although Allie wished Penda hadn’t winked at her quite so blatantly as she was shown to a seat near Lord Peverell’s. In fact, she was still blushing with the mortification and trying not to catch her eye again when the stool beside her scraped back.
Sh
e looked up, and her heart sank when she saw Sir William and realized that she would have to prepare herself for a blighted evening.
Once the pages had done the rounds of the tables with the bowls and aquamaniles and all hands had been washed and dried, they sat silently for the priest’s blessing and another fanfare of trumpets announcing the arrival of the feast.
A succession of enormous platters, each requiring two men to carry it, was paraded through the hall: roasted peacocks displaying their tails still, litters of crispy baby pigs with apples in their mouths, a roasted bittern and a swan in full plumage resting on a bed of pastry painted green to resemble grass. Each was met with raucous cheers from the diners, except for Sir William—who never seemed to get enthusiastic about anything—and Allie, who had lost her appetite the moment he sat beside her. The loudest cheer in the room was the abbot of Aynsham’s, sitting opposite her, who was so distracted by the pageant that he didn’t notice Allie’s scrutiny, which he might otherwise have found distressing: the narrowed eyes, the forensic intensity of her gaze, the inclination of her head as she adopted the attitude necessary for the game she and Adelia had invented for the long, often excruciatingly dull banquets at Wolvercote.
At some point, when the tedium became eye-rollingly unbearable, they had each taken it in turns to point surreptitiously at one of their fellow diners with a challenge to the other to diagnose that person’s medical affliction. It was not a particularly useful excuse—and one which would infuriate Emma if she knew—but it amused them and helped to pass the time.
Unfortunately the abbot wasn’t an inspiring candidate and Allie came to his diagnosis swiftly. His skin color, too yellow for health, was probably the result of jaundice, and, judging by the way he was knocking back his mead, probably due to a liver affliction of some sort. The only question remaining was whether or not she could tell him without either offending him or exposing herself to accusations of witchcraft.
In the end she decided it was probably best not to, especially when she saw the unbridled delight in his piggy little eyes as the roasted swan on its grassy nest was put onto the table in front of him. After all, she thought, she could tell him and he might heed her advice, and might live longer as a result, but for a man with such apparently large appetites, it would certainly feel like it.
No, for people like the abbot, she decided, a shorter, happier, more indulgent life was preferable; besides, her diagnosis might be wrong and Penda loathed him.
She was still thinking about the abbot when the elderly nun beside her introduced herself.
“Sister Margaret,” she said, turning to Allie with a warm smile.
“Allie,” said Allie, relieved to have somebody to talk to, especially someone like Sister Margaret, whose ample bosom and crab apple cheeks made for a cozy antidote to the chilly proposition on her right.
“Have you been to one of these before?” Sister Margaret asked.
Allie shook her head.
“Oh, well . . . You have a treat in store in that case. He is a very generous host, is our young Lord Peverell.” She broke off and looked around furtively, then whispered: “Rather different from his father, who was a rather curmudgeonly old man, I’m afraid.”
Allie followed her gaze to the present Lord Peverell, who was talking to a young woman who, she noticed, had been monopolizing his attention since they sat down.
Feeling a sharp pang of disappointment, she turned back to Sister Margaret quickly.
“His hospitality certainly seems very lavish,” she said, hoping it didn’t show.
“Oh, indeed!” Sister Margaret beamed. “And bestowed with such charm . . . He really is quite, quite . . .” And Allie noticed that her cheeks were becoming ever more flushed as she spoke about him and that there was a rather wistful look in her rheumy eyes.
As the evening wore on the diners became increasingly lively, except, of course, for Sir William. Oh, he was courteous enough—Allie couldn’t fault him on that—performing his duties with politesse, passing her things when necessary, refilling her cup when it was empty, even putting her gravy-stained trencher on the wheelbarrow as it was trundled around to take the leftovers.
But he didn’t speak to her and showed no inclination to do so, and although she was no more enthusiastic about engaging with him, the ensuing silence made her uncomfortable.
When they finished eating she hoped to resume her conversation with Sister Margaret, only to find, when the time came, that she was talking to someone else.
She looked around, increasingly self-conscious as it dawned on her that the only people in the room who weren’t engaged in conversation were Sir William and herself. Apart from the fact that it was a boring state of affairs, she worried that were Lord Peverell to see her in such social isolation, he might assume that it was because she was too dull to be trifled with and would therefore think less of her.
Partly from a refusal to let that happen and partly because she didn’t think the evening could get any worse, she snatched up her cup, took a hefty swig of whatever liquid was in it—wine, mead, frankly it was all beginning to taste the same—and turned to Sir William.
“Sir William,” she said, addressing him rather more robustly than she had intended, which had the effect of startling them both. “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind telling me how Matilda—erm, Lord Peverell’s horse is . . . You might not remember but I treated her some weeks back when she picked up a thorn in her hoof.”
Sir William lowered his own cup slowly. The cool gaze he returned was disconcerting, but Allie managed to hold it and her nerve, and was rewarded for having done so when a rare flicker of uncertainty crossed his face.
“As far as I am aware, she fares very well,” he said. “I hear you know a great deal about horses.”
Allie nodded and took another swig from her cup. “Yes,” she said. “I certainly do.” Her immodesty was uncharacteristic, but she didn’t care. After all, she thought, raising her cup again, since he abhors me anyway, I might as well give him good cause.
Sir William turned away peevishly, signaling that, as far as he was concerned, the exchange had come to an end. Allie, however, had other ideas.
“I gather he brought her all the way back from the Holy Land,” she continued, surprised to see him turn back to her with a wistful expression and a willingness to continue the conversation.
“And me with them,” he said softly.
“You took the cross?” It came as a surprise, but in a strange way, it also made sense.
She had inherited Adelia’s contempt for Crusaders—with the obvious exceptions of the rare decent ones, like her father and now, of course, Lord Peverell—having heard too many atrocity stories about them not to be suspicious of the breed; the cold, brutal, arrogant killers . . . like Sir William. Coming from Salerno, one of the direct routes to the Holy Land, Adelia was well versed on Crusaders, witnessing at first hand the wickedness and brutality of the men who came through that city and created havoc in the name of God.
On the way out, she told Allie, they were insufferable pigs and twice as ignorant, as enthusiastic for God’s work as for disrupting the harmony in which the different creeds and races had lived together for centuries. And on the way back, they were embittered—only a few rewarded with the fortune or holy grace they had come for—diseased and impoverished.
“Yes,” Sir William said at last.
“I see,” said Allie, and was wondering what she was going to say next, when a group of musicians struck up in the gallery, prompting a mass exodus of diners into the garden in search of quiet places to relieve themselves. Sir William’s own relief at the interruption was palpable, and with a cursory nod, he rose quickly from his stool, leaving Allie, with no other companion, no ear for music and no inclination to dance, no alternative but to follow the crowd.
As they shuffled to the exit a large tapestry on the wall caught her eye. It was a depiction of the wheel of fortune in which Fortune, richly dressed and blindfolded, was se
ated on a claw-footed throne, one hand brandishing a sword, the other spinning her wheel—to which four figures in varying degrees of despondency were clinging.
I think you’re a pig, Allie muttered at her as she reflected on her own fortune, or, rather, lack of it this evening, wondering why it was that, so often, the things one most looked forward to turned out to be the most crushingly disappointing.
Chapter 35
If she had expected to find peace in the garden, a dark corner in which to hide and recover her equanimity, she was to be disappointed.
When she got there it was awash with micturating people, most of whom were completely unabashed that their modesty was compromised this evening by the light of a very bright moon.
Everywhere she looked there were men relieving themselves against tree trunks or women squatting in bushes like broody hens, all rowdy with too much drink, and when they weren’t pissing, or giggling, or shouting at the tops of their voices, they were tripping over their own feet like lumpen idiots.
She felt suddenly homesick, although not for Elsford but, for once, and probably for the first time since she had left it, for her real home . . . with her mother . . . in Wolvercote. She wished to be as far away from this strange land and its peculiar, indecorous people as she possibly could.
Perhaps it was the loftiness of this moral high ground, or perhaps it was all the mead she had drunk at supper, but the unexpected wave of homesickness was followed by an equally unexpected bout of nausea, and before she knew it, she was doubled up, vomiting onto the grass.
When it was over, she stood up and looked around, and when she was satisfied that most of the people in the immediate vicinity were too inebriated to have noticed her indiscretion, she set off back to the hall to find Penda, whom she would beg to take her home. But as she picked her way through the supine bodies on the lawn, the faint, distant whickering of a horse drifted through to her on the crystalline air and she changed her mind.
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