King of the Wood

by Valerie Anand

  ‘…it’s a girl. And healthy. Sweet Mary, what a voice.’

  ‘A girl?’ Alice moaned.

  ‘Nothing wrong with girls. I was one myself,’ said Wulfhild, flintily good-humoured now the struggle was over. There had been a bad few minutes when she thought the baby’s head wouldn’t pass the pelvis. Alice was too narrow. If Richard had left the choice of a bride to his mother, she’d have chosen better. But: ‘Where there’s a sound girl, a sound boy may follow. And even a girl can inherit a manor.’

  Romsey Abbey in the county of Hampshire, where Edith of Scotland had come for her education, in the care of her aunt, the Abbess Christina, was bigger than humble Withy- sham where Sybil of Fallowdene, also in the care of an aunt abbess, was reluctantly enduring hers.

  Romsey was wealthy too, which Withysham certainly was not. Lying amid gracious rolling country, it too was gracious, the work of the finest Norman masons grafted on to the fabric of the old English abbey, but so tastefully that one could hardly detect the join.

  And nowhere was the abbey lovelier than at its heart, where a cloistered walk encircled a garden in which grassy walks wound among beds of cultivated roses, and trellis tunnels, twined with climbing roses and starred, in June, with pale pink blooms, lay across the square garden in the sacred shape of the cross, thus consecrating, said Abbess Christina, these most beautiful of flowers to their creator.

  The roses were of several varieties. Beginning with the hedgerow dogrose and a few variants bred by her predecessors, Abbess Christina had coaxed a dozen more colours and patterns of bloom into being. Her flowers were famous; even King Rufus had heard of them and sent for plants. He liked flowers to adorn his halls, apparently.

  Edith loved the roses and the cloister walk and the warmth and gentleness of Hampshire after Scotland. Her health was better here; she caught fewer colds and shook them off more easily. She would have been ready to love the abbey altogether but it did have one serious drawback. Aunt Christina.

  She walked in the cloister on a blustery autumn day, watching the wind shake the rose bushes, feeling it stir her brown hair. She was in the company of several other girls, of ages from nine to sixteen, all of them destined to be nuns. Edith was not destined to be a nun, by order of her father, a state of affairs for which she regularly thanked God on her knees. She was not yet quite eleven but she was already physically mature. Christina, on learning this, had been overcome with horror and had ordered her niece into a three-day retreat, fasting, and insisted on praying with her for the blessing of a pure mind and for freedom from the lusts of the flesh.

  But Edith, in the rose-haunted days of the previous summer, with doves and cuckoos in the surrounding woods filling the air with a sound like a soft grey-blue cloud, had felt the first awakening within her of a yearning at once thrilling and slumberous, and knew that the thing which her aunt condemned as lust could have another name, and was her proper destiny.

  Even if her father had not forbidden it, she would never be a nun. Whatever Aunt Christina said or did.

  But her father was far away and her aunt was here. Because the day was cold, she and the other girls were all wrapped in thick mantles, but unlike the others, Edith wore no black veil over her head. The veil had a significance.

  And only yesterday, her aunt – since Edith had ignored several hints – had commanded her to wear one. Walking bareheaded, she was defying the abbess and though she walked boldly and openly as the daughter of the King of Scotland should, holding her head high, within herself, Edith was afraid.

  Christina sat in her office, going through the month’s accounts. They would soon be salting down meat for the winter and the annual consignment of salt for the purpose had arrived. But why on earth was it so much larger than last year’s? The quantity of meat would be the same. She must speak to the sister responsible.

  The order for vellum, on the other hand, erred in the opposite direction. They always needed more than they could make and to have enough was vital. Without it, the work of translating books of devotion and learning between English, French and Latin, and putting the result into exquisite illuminated volumes, would be hampered.

  It must not be hampered, since the preservation and perpetuation of learning was one of the things that abbeys were for. In a world racked with wars and struggles for power, the abbeys, the monasteries, were like fortresses housing between them a great treasure. Only within their walls could anyone hope to have the resources of time and energy to devote to scholarship – or even the space, come to that, to make a rose garden. In any house out in the world, it would have been dug up to grow cabbages, or turned into an enclosure for breaking colts.

  And only within monastic walls, too, could women find time or freedom to expand their minds or think about their souls. In the world, they were for ever doomed to household cares and an endless cycle of pregnancies at the behest of men who not only wouldn’t give them time to think but would for the most part bitterly resent it if they tried.

  Christina most heartily pitied her sister Margaret, forced into marriage with the Scottish king to please their brother Edgar. The three of them, Christina, Margaret and Edgar, were all that remained of the old English royal house. There had never been any real question of Edgar challenging the Norman house for the throne. He was far too ineffectual (‘Now, if only I’d been a man!’ Christina sometimes thought fiercely) and although the English didn’t like the Normans, they weren’t foolish enough to want Edgar in exchange. He had still needed asylum from the Normans, and had sought it from Malcolm, taking his sisters with him. And Malcolm had taken one look at Margaret and made her the price of his friendship, and the fact that Margaret, like Christina, greatly desired to become a nun meant nothing to him whatever, the unregenerate heathen! Christina, thinking of her sister’s fate, was apt to begin muttering to herself.

  So poor Margaret had been handed over, a living sacrifice, to be defiled and invaded by that northern savage.

  Christina sincerely believed that she herself regarded Malcolm with loathing. She would not have admitted, even in the face of death, that once the sweat and leather smell of Malcolm’s solid body had made her dizzy and that the glimpse of hair at the open neck of his tunic had set her imagining what he would look like naked and what that hard furred chest would feel like if one were pressed against it. She would have died by fire before she would have confessed, even to herself, that she hated him only because he had never looked at her, or that her present driving need to waken a sense of vocation in his daughter Edith, and win her for a nun against his wishes, was her ancient anger seeking revenge.

  The sound of young voices made her look up. The small arched window on her right overlooked the cloister and the rose garden. Edith was out there, with the other girls, just cutting across a corner of the garden. The shining brown plaits of her niece gleamed shamelessly amid the demure veiled heads of Edith’s companions. With an outraged exclamation, Christina flung down her quill pen, and gathering her dark skirts clear of her feet, swept out.

  She bore down on her quarry, striding across the grass by the quickest route, mouth and brow in straight lines across her face, hard-edged as a sword. Edith, seeing her, stopped short. Her knees felt shaky but she kept her back straight. Her father King Malcolm was afraid of nothing and she must be the same or she would not be worthy of him.

  ‘Where is your veil?

  ‘I can’t wear a veil, Mother Abbess.’ Edith always used the correct form of address. It was deliberate, Christina knew. Correct or not, it was a rejection of their relationship and it only made her angrier. ‘My father forbade it,’ said Edith, ‘in view of its meaning. It is only for nuns or novices.’.

  ‘This is England. Your father is not king here and if he were, he would still not give the orders inside my abbey. You are a woman now, Edith, and therefore subject to the temptations which beset womankind. It is time to armour yourself against them and to give grace a chance to enter your heart. To accept the veil and the state of mind t
hat comes with it, is one way of doing so. Did I or did I not, yesterday, order you to put on the veil?’

  Mutinous silence.

  ‘Did I?’ said Christina dangerously.

  ‘Yes. Mother Abbess,’ Edith muttered. Under Christina’s hard blue stare, her own eyes – which were grey-green, the colour of the sea, Scottish eyes, thought Christina, detesting them – fell.

  ‘And what did I say would happen to you if you persisted in arguing with me?’

  Edith made herself look up again. ‘It will make no difference. I can’t wear the veil. Because of what my father said.’

  ‘Because you are hard of heart, impious, unable to recognise a magnificent opportunity when it is put before you. I will give you one more chance, Edith. Go to your dorter and fetch the veil I gave you. Put it on. Then we will say no more about this foolish fit of defiance.’

  Edith stared at her feet again and neither moved nor answered.

  ‘Very well,’ said Christina, and shot out a hand to grasp Edith’s arm. She was only in her forties, but her fingers looked as if they belonged to a woman much older. They were, however, extremely strong. ‘Come with me,’ said Christina.

  The other girls, who had drawn back, sorry for Edith but too frightened to speak in her defence, followed slowly, in an awed cluster, exchanging a few whispers. In the abbey building, they gathered at the foot of the steps to the dorter, up which Christina had dragged her victim.

  They could hear it all. The most heartrending part was that they heard the whistle of Christina’s cane for so long before Edith shrieked. They turned to scatter as their abbess stormed down again but she saw them and spoke sharply, calling them back. ‘None of you are to go to the dorter or speak to her. She will come to the refectory, I hope, in a chastened state of mind and wearing her veil. You may speak to her then but not to express sympathy. And those of you who are crying had better dry your tears. They’re wasted. She brought her troubles on herself.’

  Edith came into the refectory at the end of the afternoon last of all, and all heads turned to see her enter. She was walking stiffly, her eyes red. But she was still holding her head high, and on it there was no veil.

  There were gasps, quickly checked, and furtive glances towards Christina.

  Abbess Christina, who was standing up, awaiting the last arrival before pronouncing grace, went rigid, from head to heels, a shuddering rigidity of anger which could be felt throughout the silent refectory.

  But she was a strategist. In thinking that had she been a man she could not have put up a better challenge to Norman William than her brother, she was quite right. She also knew a good deal about the ability of human beings to withstand agony once, twice, or three times and then break down at the fourth.

  ‘Still obstinate, I see,’ she said coolly. ‘Perhaps we need time to think, do we, Edith? We will let the matter rest for seven days. This time next week, Edith, I hope to see you wearing your veil in obedience to my orders, like all the others. If not – well, you will have the week in which to consider whether you wish your experience this afternoon to be repeated.’

  In the November of that year, 1091, after Rufus and Curthose in partnership had driven Malcolm back from England’s northern borders, the Scottish king arrived home in a bad temper and forthwith quarrelled with his wife.

  The subject of the quarrel was Edith.

  It was rare for Malcolm and Margaret to fall out. For one thing, he reverenced her. Malcolm had been reared to think that reading and writing and quoting from the Scriptures were all so difficult that only the most dedicated intellects could master them.

  Margaret could do them all and weave and bake and nurse sick children too. She was also the only person Malcolm had ever met, male or female, who actually lived according to Christ’s precepts, who really would whisk off an expensive beaver mantle and give it to a poor woman in the street on a cold day.

  On her side, Margaret somehow managed to include within her saintly standards of behaviour an apparently endless tenderness towards the crude, stocky warrior who had insisted on marrying her in the face of her longing for a nunnery. There were times, certainly, when she found marriage to Malcolm rather like walking a tightrope but mostly, by some miracle, she kept her balance.

  On this occasion, however, as she afterwards said to her confessor, she had been sufficiently weak, or sufficiently human, to fall off.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Malcolm, interrupting her attempts to reason with him. ‘That’s more than enough. A pity that clacketty-tongued sister o’ yourn never learned to mind on her own business. I said she could have the lassie to educate. I said I wanted her accomplished, like her mother. It’s an ornament in a wife, I said. But I also mind I said that a wife she should be and nothing else. One more letter from your sister in her southron abbey, bleating about vocations, and the girl comes home!’

  The Inverness fortress was stoutly built and furnished with gloomy magnificence, in which thick furs and velvet hangings in dark shades of red and green predominated. But at the moment it was wrapped in wind and nothing stopped the hearthsmoke from swirling out into the hall. Margaret coughed and strengthened her determination that Edith should not be recalled from her Hampshire Abbey and the milder climate of England. Besides, if Christina were right, it would be a grave sin to recall her. Somehow she must make Malcolm understand. She studied him gravely, her hands at rest in her lap. Margaret never stitched or spun while talking to her husband but gave him, always, her entire attention.

  ‘Malcolm, if Christina thinks that Edith may have a true calling, should we not listen? At least, will you not do as Christina asks and withdraw your objection to the wearing of the veil? So as to leave the child free to decide? My sister is a most learned and devout woman…’

  ‘Your sister is a dried-up old virgin who’d be the better of a good…’

  ‘Malcolm!’

  ‘All this talk of Edith having a calling; it’s nothing but notions in your sister’s mind. Sooner be like her than wed to me, eh, lassie? Envy her, do you? Wish your bonny bairns had never seen the light? Want to keep Edith from having any? Balls!’ said Malcolm. ‘Now take heed. I’ve more to say and I’d have said it sooner but you got in first with your yammering about vocations. I got another letter yesterday. You were at your Mass for All Souls so I got a clerk to read it to me. Well? Ye don’t ask who it’s from?’

  ‘Anselm, the Abbot of Bee. I saw his courier in the hall when I came back yesterday and asked who it was. In fact I spoke to him to make sure his lodgings were as they should be.’

  ‘Ye still think I’m a heathen who’ll lodge churchmen in the byre if ye don’t watch me? Instead o’ fussing over the messenger’s lodgings, why didn’t ye ask me what the message was?’

  ‘I knew that if it concerned me, you would tell me.’

  ‘Och, have ye no human curiosity, woman? Anselm had an idea to offer me. I’ve looked at many a lord for Edith but I hadna thocht of this. Anselm was gey sorry I’d been fighting with the English again though not as sorry as I am that I lost …Malcolm almost went off at a tangent but pulled himself back. and he’s got a sense of responsibility towards that English bugger’s soul and his succession. Funny,’ said Malcolm, off at another tangent, ‘how all you saintly folk spend so much time worrying over the state of other folks’ souls. He’s thinking to come to England next year and nae doot he’ll hae a try at converting their heathen king. He suggested…’

  ‘Edith and Rufus?’ said Margaret, and sat up very straight. ‘Ye’re sharp,’ said Malcolm admiringly. ‘Aye. Edith and

  Rufus.’

  ‘No, Malcolm!’

  ‘God in heaven, woman, why not? She’d be Queen of England!’

  ‘But Rufus is…you said the word yourself, just now.’ Margaret’s pale skin had turned deep rose. Malcolm’s expression became still more admiring.

  ‘Ye mean, he likes men more than women? Och, it happens. But as often or not the man can manage with a woman when he’s got a good
reason, like getting an heir.’

  ‘Malcolm, Edith is only a child. And delicately reared. To a young girl, even when the man is…is like other men, marriage can be…’

  ‘Was it so dreadful, then?’ enquired Malcolm. ‘Were my rough old embraces so little to your taste, my pretty violet? You came,’ said Malcolm lyrically, ‘the very first time, like the Hammer of Thor beating a swordblade.’

  ‘We’re talking of Edith, not me. And we’re talking of Rufus, not you. You can’t seriously…’

  ‘We can give her time to grow up. It needn’t happen tomorrow,’ said Malcolm easily. After this, Margaret would avoid his company for the rest of the day but he’d put it right in a quarter of an hour, come nightfall. ‘Once she’s grown,’ he said, ‘I’ve no fears for her, with Rufus or any other man. She’s my daughter, my lady. And what’s more, she’s yours.’

  In Withysham Abbey, Sybil’s aunt, the calm and dedicated Abbess Edgiva, neither desired nor recoiled from the estate of matrimony but was on the contrary quite content to train her niece as somebody’s future wife. Sybil, however, unaware of her good fortune (she had never heard of Romsey or Edith), escaped from Withysham on a cold autumn day, timing her departure with care. About midday, she decided, after their noon meal. She must begin her five-mile journey with something in her stomach and the heavier main meal would be too late. She did not want darkness to overtake her in the forest. She must go through the woods because once she was missed, people might look for her on the road. So, midday it must be, at about the time for singing the office of Sext.

  They always rested after the noon meal, and filed from the dorter to the church for Sext, under the eye of the nun in charge of the children, Sister Ermengarde, who was thin and sharp and convinced that baptism did a poor job of ejecting original sin from her charges. Christina would have found a kindred spirit in her.

  Halfway across the courtyard on her chosen day, Sybil left her place and said: ‘Sister Ermengarde, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go to the privy.’

  ‘Nonsense. You went before you got into line, like the others.’