Death and the Maiden

by Samantha Norman

  “Just that what?”

  “I don’t know whether marriage will make me happy. I mean, for the first time I’m beginning to think it might, but how do I know? . . . For certain, that is?”

  She looked so lost all of a sudden that Adelia felt herself battling both an impulse to throw her arms around her, hold her close and never let her go . . . and a rare pang of self-doubt.

  For the first time ever Allie was asking her for a comfort she couldn’t give, and yet even as she withheld it, she was questioning her right to do so. Since she had been at Elsford, she had seen how independent Allie had become and had even begun to accept how divergent their lives would be: Allie would probably choose to marry, as everybody seemed to think she should, and in time, Adelia would come to terms with it. What troubled her was whether her own antipathy toward the institution was based on instinct or prejudice. Or, worse than that, perhaps, an instinct based on prejudice. After all, although she had always been secure in the knowledge it wasn’t right for her, could she really be so certain that it wouldn’t be for Allie?

  “That’s the trouble, darling,” she said, once again resisting the impulse to grab her up like a baby and clutch her to her bosom. “Nobody does . . . I mean, of course, I did, without a shadow of a doubt. I didn’t even want to marry your father, who, as you know, is the best of men, but, as he’s always at such pains to point out, things were very different for me. In many ways mine was an easier decision to make.”

  Allie nodded, looking so young and vulnerable that Adelia felt her heart wrench all over again.

  “I’m just so confused . . . ,” Allie began, looking on the verge of tears, when Jodi interrupted, bursting into the room red faced and breathing hard.

  “Come, mistress, quick if you please!” she cried, beckoning frantically to Adelia. “Lady Pen needs you. Says it’s urgent.”

  Allie and Adelia exchanged glances, then trotted after her into the hall to find Penda waiting for them with a face like thunder.

  She was sitting beside Sir Stephen on the dais and, as soon as she saw them, picked up a scroll and shook it at them.

  “Just got this from your Rowley!” she shrieked. “Tells me ’e’s coming back—with the bloody queen!”

  Adelia swallowed. “Oh dear!” was all she could think to say. “I’m so sorry.”

  She wasn’t, of course. She was delighted. It was exactly what she had wanted. Only Eleanor had influence enough to settle the rift between the warring bishops and to persuade the Pope to lift the interdict. And yet, she couldn’t help feeling sorry for Penda, too. Royal visits, however brief, were a terrible affliction, capable of bankrupting even the most affluent household: wells would be drunk dry; land destroyed; most, if not all, livestock slaughtered just to feed and water a vast and greedy retinue.

  “Perhaps she won’t stay long,” she offered weakly.

  “It’s the cesspits, you see,” said Sir Stephen, barely audibly above the awful growling sound Penda was making in the back of her throat. “They can’t take it, you know,” he added mournfully.

  “Never mind the bloody cesspits.” Penda turned on him, bashing the table with the sides of her fists, making him jump. “That’s the least o’ my worries. They can shit in their pants for all I care. What I want to know is ’ow I’m going to feed the buggers . . . in this weather!”

  “Do you know how many she’s bringing with her?” Adelia asked.

  Penda put her head in her hands. “Sixty,” she mumbled through her fingers. “Sixty of the bastards! Where am I going to put ’em?”

  Adelia shrugged. She didn’t know. Nobody did.

  “Oh, go!” Penda flapped her hand irritably at them. “Ain’t your fault, I suppose. I’ll just ’ave to think o’ something.”

  “You won’t tell her, will you?” Adelia asked when they were out of earshot.

  “Tell her what?”

  “That it was my idea to send for Eleanor.”

  “I didn’t know it was,” said Allie. “But I must say, although I’m sorry for Penda, it would be nice to see her again. Why do you want her here though?”

  “To get this bloody interdict lifted, of course. Unfortunately she is the only one who can do it.”

  She had mixed feelings about the queen. Apart from the fact that they were as different from one another as land is from water, she could never forgive her for the suffering she had caused Henry when she encouraged their sons to rebel against him.

  And yet, however bitterly she felt about that, she wasn’t able to indulge in the luxury of loathing her entirely, either.

  Like Rowley’s relationship with her, theirs had also been long and complicated, and even Adelia couldn’t ignore the woman’s considerable charm, or her courage, or, indeed, the strange affection that had been engendered in Adelia when she had saved Eleanor’s life.

  “But was it really her life you intended to save?” Rowley had asked many years later, when, in a rare moment of hubris, Adelia had brought it up. “Wasn’t it more the security of the realm you were saving?”

  The truth was that it was probably a little bit of both.

  When she responded to the call to prove Eleanor innocent of the murder of the fair Rosamund—Henry’s beloved whore—it had been out of concern for national security, not the queen’s neck.

  The prevailing fear was that if Eleanor was found guilty, Henry, mired in grief and full of hatred, might, in an unguarded moment, shout for her death—just as he had for Thomas à Becket’s. And if, under those circumstances, Eleanor was executed, as was likely, the princes would rise up against their father, prompting a civil war that would make the Anarchy look civilized in comparison.

  So in a sense, Rowley had been right, and yet it didn’t explain why, during the course of the investigation, Adelia had thrown herself instinctively and bodily between the queen and Rosamund’s grief-stricken, knife-wielding maid when she tried to kill her. Nor did it explain the peculiar bond that had developed between them when each had fostered the other’s daughter for a time, Adelia when she reluctantly agreed to accompany the princess Joanna to Italy for her wedding, Eleanor when she accepted Allie as her ward during Adelia’s absence. The fact that the care they had both extended to the girls went above and beyond the call of duty created an unspoken mutual debt of gratitude.

  . . . And jealousy, Adelia admitted reluctantly.

  Like the good mother she was and always strove to be, she hadn’t wanted Allie to suffer while she was away. Nevertheless, when she returned to discover that she had not only flourished in the meantime but grown deeply fond of Eleanor, too, she found it a little galling.

  She couldn’t help it, any more than she could help despising herself for feeling it, but for that alone she would never truly like her.

  Chapter 64

  The imminent arrival of the royal guest sent Elsford into a spin.

  Penda set about transforming the fallow lands of the demesne into a canvas village, clearing acres of snow to erect a forest of tents for all the royal servants, dogs and horses who might not otherwise find accommodation in the village rooms that Ulf and Sir Stephen had commandeered for them.

  The kitchen courtyard was turned into a low-level labyrinth of makeshift pens full of fodder for the interlopers: wildfowl, geese, swans, ducks and hundreds of larks in cages singing away cheerfully, oblivious to the fact that they were soon to be divested of their precious tongues.

  “If it carries on like this, there won’t be any animals left,” Allie lamented one morning when, once again, she was flattened against the wall to make way for yet another carcass as it was hauled into the kitchen. “Are you sure they’re going to eat all this?”

  Gyltha, who was directing the operations and enjoying herself immensely, nodded.

  “Don’t forget, me ol’ lover,” she said, “there’ll be a banquet an’ all. Pen sent the invitations this mornin’. Likes a bit o’ entertainment, does Eleanor.”

  To make room for the queen and all the ladies-in-wa
iting, Hawise—who was still not strong enough to go home yet but reluctant to miss the excitement—was moved to the guest chamber.

  “Now, missy,” Gyltha said as she and Jodi set out a palliasse for her in the corner of the room. “Prepare yourself, it’s going to be crowded in ’ere for a while and a good deal noisier than you’re used to—carousing buggers, them lot, if I remember right—and you won’t be spared much.”

  The guest chamber was directly above the hall, its floorboards notoriously flimsy. But Hawise told her that she didn’t care and, in fact, could hardly contain her excitement at the prospect of meeting the queen.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” said Gyltha, tucking the blankets around her. “You might not clap eyes on ’er at all for all I know, not ’less she comes lookin’ for you, which I doubt. An’ anyway, with your face the way it is at the moment, I don’t want you wanderin’ around the place frightenin’ the royal ’orses.”

  Hawise laughed. “Allie says I look much better now, and anyway, she’s promised to introduce me to her . . . Says she’ll bring her up the first chance she gets.”

  “Oh she did, did she!” said Gyltha. “Well don’t hold your breath. I think the queen might be a bit busy with other things.”

  But Hawise wasn’t listening. “When do you think she’ll arrive?”

  Gyltha shrugged. “God knows. You’ll just ’ave to wait and see like the rest of us.”

  They didn’t have to wait long.

  At around noon the next day Ulf struggled through the snow with the news that the royal cavalcade had been spotted near Ely that very morning.

  “Blessed Mary, Mother of God!” Penda shrieked, flinging on her cape and wimple in her rush to get to the gatehouse, where she found Geoffrey already peering through the squint.

  “Any sign?” she asked, elbowing him aside to have a look herself. Seeing nothing, she turned to him. “Did you remember to oil them bloody winches like I asked?”

  His slumped shoulders and diffident expression confirmed her suspicion that he had not.

  “Ah well. Too bloody late now,” she said, brightening suddenly as a thought occurred to her: “Perhaps it’s a good job you didn’t, because, now I come to think about it, if it can’t come down they can’t get in, can they?”

  But a moment later a herald’s trumpet sounded, announcing the arrival of the royal party, and when Geoffrey put his shoulder to the wheel, although it ground and screeched like the mills of hell, the drawbridge lowered.

  “Ah well, never mind,” Penda sighed as she stepped out onto it to meet the queen.

  Ever since news of the royal visit had broken, speculation had been rife—especially among the Elsford women—about how the encounter between their chatelaine and the queen might go. On the whole most people assumed that their very different sartorial styles would set them against one another from the start.

  “Be a bit like the Romans meetin’ the Gauls,” Gyltha said, to the amusement of the others.

  Less amused by the prospect herself, and to minimize the embarrassment she assumed would be inevitable, she spent most of that morning searching for Penda’s wolf pelts, which she was planning to confiscate. When she couldn’t find them, she decided, if only for the sake of her nerves, that she wouldn’t attend the reception, would stay away from the windows and, as a small courtesy to Penda, who, after all, couldn’t help looking the way she did, try her best to keep her mouth shut.

  On the drawbridge Penda looked up from her curtsy to a smile she hadn’t expected.

  She knew all about royal personages, or thought she did, having spent a considerable amount of time in the company of the empress Matilda, Eleanor’s mother-in-law, when they were besieged together during the Anarchy. Therefore her abiding memory was that, on the whole, they were a rather haughty breed, especially the women.

  Strangely enough, though, not this one, by the looks of things.

  This one, although as ethereally beautiful as the empress, despite her considerable age, was, unlike her, redeemed from chilly loftiness by an earthy sparkle in her wide green eyes that expressed a beguiling combination of humor and curiosity. The moment she saw it, Penda relaxed.

  “Lady Penda,” Eleanor said, her smile broadening as she watched her rise from her curtsy, recognizing, no doubt, a fellow independent spirit. “That, if I may say so, is a remarkably splendid cloak. How wise of you to choose such a robust garment in this weather.”

  Penda grinned and, to the astonishment of the onlookers, who were watching with trepidation, proceeded to take it off.

  “Got another one just like it, lady,” she said, draping it carefully around the otherwise elegantly ermine-clad royal shoulders. “This one’s yours, if you’d care for it; be a good deal warmer than that ol’ thing.”

  At the solar window, Gyltha, who had found herself drawn to the window by some strange compulsion, gasped and grabbed hold of Jodi.

  “Did you see that?” she said in a tone of pride combined with horror. “She’s only gone and given the queen her bloody cloak! And, look! She’s wearing it! Oh, God’s teeth, I’ll never hear the end.”

  They continued to watch in openmouthed amazement—and Jodi only through her fingers sometimes—as the royal procession, led by Eleanor, still wearing Penda’s wolf pelt, progressed through the gatehouse into the courtyard.

  Just before they disappeared from view Penda looked up at the window and waved.

  Chapter 65

  Eleanor’s arrival turned Elsford upside down with immediate effect.

  A procession of elegant ladies-in-waiting dismounted from equally elegant liveried horses and wafted into the hall, trailing clouds of silk and exotic scents like a caste of beautiful, bejeweled bees. Behind them, an army of servants bearing elaborately woven rugs, cushions, chairs and divans caused umbrage among the resident wolfhounds and bratchets, who found themselves unceremoniously ousted from their positions around the fire.

  Although the Elsford servants complained bitterly about the chaos the royal party brought, secretly they welcomed it, if only as a distraction from the terror still lurking in the marsh beyond.

  Over the last few days since Hawise’s return, they had grudgingly come to accept that the killer would probably never be found because no one with the resources to do so had any incentive to look for him now. The dreary pattern of their lives was set forever; no woman would ever feel safe alone again and the prevailing atmosphere of mistrust contaminating their community would remain unchanged.

  As the royal party made itself at home, Adelia stood in a corner of the hall feeling, as she so often did in the queen’s presence, dowdy and rather dull.

  Hoping not to catch anybody’s eye or to be noticed in any way, she was staring fixedly at the toe of her boot, ruing the appearance of a grubby ring-shaped stain on the top of it. Eleanor wouldn’t have had boots like that; in Eleanor’s world boots would barely be boots at all, but dainty little slippers of golden cloth, rather like—well, not unlike the ones that, at that very moment, had stepped into her field of vision . . .

  She looked up, horrified to discover that, in fact, they belonged to Eleanor, who happened to be standing in front of her.

  “Mistress Amelia!” she said, extending her hand from an exquisitely embroidered filigree sleeve that trailed almost to the top of Adelia’s grubby boot. “We are delighted to see you.”

  Oh, that smile, Adelia thought as her knees buckled into a curtsy, that warm golden glow that insisted you bask in it like a rapture and that was almost as off-putting as her inability to get her name right.

  Nevertheless, she took the hand and kissed it.

  “And Almeison?” Eleanor asked, looking around hopefully. “Rowley told me she would be here.”

  “She is, lady,” said Adelia, rising stiffly. “And if you’ll excuse me, I’ll . . . well, I’ll just go and fetch her for you.”

  As she scuttled to the door she bumped into Rowley coming the other way, wearing full bishop’s regalia and in the compa
ny of Jean-Luc, who was otherwise known as “the queen’s man”—although nobody quite knew what he did—and another man Adelia assumed was her chamberlain, all wearing the somber, satisfied expressions of men who had just concluded important business.

  She raised an eyebrow as she hurried past.

  “I’ll tell you later,” he mouthed over his shoulder.

  She found Allie in the guest chamber, where she was keeping Hawise company, and, with apologies to Hawise, chivvied her off to the hall, where they spent the rest of the day trailing around in Eleanor’s wake, eating and drinking far too much and fending off the amorous advances of the various young men in her entourage.

  “I’m too old for this,” Adelia hissed as one of them grabbed her hand and started to serenade her with a love song that, he told her, had been inspired only that very moment by her incomparable beauty. “It’s ridiculous!”

  Allie laughed. “It’s the fashion, Ma,” she whispered behind her hand. “Bear with it, they won’t be here much longer.” And then, disconcerted by the uncharacteristically wistful look in Adelia’s eye, she asked: “What are you looking at me like that for?”

  Adelia shook her head, reluctant to confess, even to herself, that she felt suddenly overcome by seeing her for the first time in Eleanor’s company, noting how easily she moved among just the sort of people who had always made her feel so awkward, and although she was hardly a stranger to royal company herself, somehow it had been different in Henry’s day, more fluid . . . more down-to-earth . . . more her. Allie’s assimilation among these people invoked a sense of pride but also regret; it was another reminder that one day, and before too long, her farouche, fierce, clever little girl would tear herself free of the cocoon of maternal love and spread her wings. In all probability she would marry this Lord Peverell, or someone of his ilk, become a lady of the manor with all the trappings of wealth, comfort and privilege that came with it and be, therefore, a whole world away from Adelia.