King of the Wood

by Valerie Anand

  Christina smiled, folding her hands within her sleeves. Because she was truly sorry for the girl, she would not at this moment have attempted to put pressure on her, but in any case, she judged it unnecessary. ‘We are glad to see you safe, Edith. We will look after you. And no one will force you to do anything against your will.’

  Why get out the oars and exhaust yourself by rowing, when the current is already carrying the ship effortlessly towards its destination?

  ‘I may as well give in,’ said Edith to herself, taking her place with the others for the singing of Vespers, aware that she stood out from the rest because, in church, her hair was covered only by the linen headdress that women wore in the world. ‘Who is there to marry me now? I should only be an embarrassment to any lord who took me on. The poor man wouldn’t know which of my squabbling male relatives to support and they’d all expect him to help them, as though he were a bone, and they a pack of dogs.’

  To the Norman ruler of England she might still have value. Through her, he could unite his upstart house with the old ruling family of England. But Rufus had rejected her. He had other preferences.

  Yes, she might as well surrender. Christina’s present mood of patience and forbearance was unlikely to last. Edith knew her aunt too well. She would be subjected to force once more, this time with no father to come to her rescue. She had been defeated once already since his death. The Bishop of Salisbury had had the consideration not to say so to Christina, but he had brought Edith here virtually by force. Her goods had been packed on her behalf, and when she attempted to sit down in the hall and refuse to move, two of the bishop’s men had simply picked her up and carried her out to her horse, telling her to behave or they’d tie her feet to the stirrups.

  Vespers had begun. Edith, dispiritedly, opened and shut her mouth without actually singing, which was just now beyond her. It was chilly in the chapel but not yet devoid of daylight. The evenings were lengthening. Soon it would be spring again and then summer, with the roses bursting fragrantly out of bud, and the doves and cuckoos calling. Last year, at dusk, there had been nightingales. Did no one here except herself understand the language which the throbbing birdsong and the roses spoke or long for the wonderful, hidden thing at which they hinted?

  She glanced left and right and saw on the faces of the other nuns and novices no trace of the yearning and despair which filled her own heart and must, surely, be reflected on her countenance. Most were serious, a few anxious, some exalted. Those few faces which showed yearning were all turned towards the Rood which hung at the end of the chapel. They were content, it seemed, to have Him for a bridegroom and to desire only the inner certainty of His love.

  An earthy, practical voice, Malcolm’s legacy speaking in her blood, observed that life with Rufus would have been unlikely to contain much in the way of roses or nightingales.

  No, but it would have been life! Journeys, clothes, new people! Reality, not dreams. Action, not inaction. Conflict, not boredom! Rufus, who had been so shy, who had stammered when he spoke to her, and passed her message so faithfully on to her father, would not, she thought, have been wilfully unkind. Whatever marriage to him would have been like, it couldn’t have been worse than being in the power of Aunt Christina.

  And surely, somewhere in it all would have been, at least, the possibility of an occasional nightingale?

  Would have been. Would have been. It wouldn’t happen now. She would live and die, trapped here. She might as well save herself the pain of resistance, and give in. Perhaps, if she made up her mind to try, she too could turn the passions of the body into a desire of the spirit. If she tried very hard…

  But how, cried Edith to herself, can I shut out the song of the nightingale?

  PART IV

  IN WHICH A DOE IS BROUGHT TO BAY

  1094—1096 AD

  One Contagion 1094

  Two The Lammas Marriage 1094

  Three Flames August 1094

  Four The End of Childhood 1094

  Five Warnings 1094-6

  CHAPTER ONE

  Contagion 1094

  ‘Not far now,’ said Richard’s voice close beside him. ‘Over the top of the hill and we’ll be able to see it. Just hold on. Swithin…’

  ‘I’ve got him,’ said the man-at-arms from Ralph’s other side. There were just the two of them with Ralph now. Brian of Little Dene and some other Fallowdene men had been there but they had ridden on ahead. Ralph, however, could ride no faster than a walk. He nodded but did not speak because of the raw, dark-red pain in his throat and chest. Only willpower kept his aching body in the saddle. He supposed he would survive the rest of the journey. He had survived so long already that there seemed no particular reason to stop. The world had shrunk to the pain which he carried like an extra saddlebag, the sweats and shivers which ran through him like waves, the desire to drift ... he felt the movement of his horse, the steadying pressure of Swithin’s arm, the supporting thrust of pommel and cantle against his back and belly, as if they were being reported to him rather than experienced.

  He was drowsing again, when Richard exclaimed: ‘Hearthsmoke!’ He raised his heavy eyes and saw a white chalk track winding down into a valley. His swimming senses took in the fields that spread up the hillsides under a rolling grey sky, the habitations further down where there were trees, and he saw the hearthsmoke for himself, blowing about in an irritable, unsummery wind. It was many years since his first and hitherto his only visit to Fallowdene, but he recognised the place. A thought occurred to him. He whispered with difficulty: ‘Put me in the barn. I’ll bring the infection. Shouldn’t be near people.’

  Richard said grimly: ‘I think it’s a bit late to worry, in spite of the hearthsmoke. The hay should have been cut. I can only think of one reason why it hasn’t been. Come on!’

  The horses moved forward. For what seemed a new eternity, he rolled with his mount’s stride and the huddle of roofs below did not noticeably come nearer. But at last they were passing through the palisade gate, and the hall, its thatched eaves sweeping to the ground, was in front of them. The horses, blessedly, halted.

  Then Alice was there, running out with her sleeves rolled up and her hands covered in flour, crying Richard’s name and then simply crying, standing there and weeping as though something had given way inside her.

  Richard was down, embracing her. Swithin’s hands were reaching up. Ralph slid, or sagged, out of the saddle into them and was steadied to the ground. Richard had turned to help. He was being carried indoors. There was a pallet. He was lying down, still, quiet, no more jolting horse-movements. His clothes were being eased off. He was being given water to drink; someone was supporting his head. He was being allowed to lie back. He slept.

  Of old Dame Editha, who had been at Fallowdene since before Wulfhild came, all that could be seen was a shrivelled chalky face and a hump, oddly small, under the squirrel-skin rug. At rare intervals, she drew a grating breath. ‘It’s hard to believe,’ said Richard. Still unwashed after his journey, without as much as a mouthful of food inside him, he had come straight to the bedside. Alice stood beside him. He had left her pregnant. He hadn’t asked the outcome because he could see for himself that there was no child in this thin, pale woman whose grubby clothes hung on her so slackly. She should have been six months on by now. ‘Editha,’ he said. ‘It’s like the end of an era.’

  Wulfhild was sitting by the bed. ‘She’s had the last rites. I heard you come into the yard but I couldn’t leave her, not Editha. But she’s not the only one.’

  ‘I know. Alice has told me.’ He had scarcely taken it in. ‘All Swithin’s family?’ he said questioningly. ‘Gerda and Rollo and Swithin’s half-brothers? Asa and Crooked Elfrida?’

  ‘Yes. But not Maud, God be praised. I lit so many candles and prayed so hard, and I was heard,’ said Alice. ‘And Ufi’s all right. His wife’s gone but his son is pulling through. So is Oger Shepherd. Gunnor and Harold have got it but we think they may come through as well. They’re
in the hall. I got over it. But I lost…’

  ‘Twins,’ said Wulfhild harshly. ‘It was twins.’

  I had the plague,’ said Alice sharply. ‘It’s a miracle I survived both!

  Wulfhild turned away her head with a movement which said pity you did but she did not speak. Richard looked at his wife in horror. He was not an imaginative man but once in a while some incident or phrase would find its way to some sensitive place inside him. He knew, from seeing Ralph, how painful this disease was. Alice, miscarrying in that condition, must have been drowned in agony. But at the sight of his appalled face, she gave him her familiar, self-contained little smile and with a dispassionate courage that staggered him said: ‘Now you’re home, we can try again. I’d like to.’

  He said: ‘Alice!’ on a gasp of admiration and love and stood there looking at her through a long moment of silence and reaffirmation. Into that silence, tersely, Wulfhild said: ‘She’s gone.’

  They turned to Editha. The rough, intermittent breathing had ceased. The silence now had a new quality, the stillness which emanates from a habitation no longer tenanted.

  ‘Father Bruno’s over at Withysham. Their chaplain died. Bruno’s replacing him till a new man comes,’ said Alice. ‘He’ll be back tomorrow, though. He comes and goes between here and there. He can… can bury Editha. Thanks be to God, he’s stayed healthy himself.’

  ‘So’ve I. You don’t thank God for that, I notice,’ Wulfhild muttered.

  ‘Mother, you always were as tough as an old soldier,’ said Richard hastily. ‘Is the sickness at Withysham, then? How are Blanche and Sybil? Dear God, are they…?’

  ‘Blanche had it lightly and recovered,’ said Alice. ‘Tch. Sybil as far as I know is perfectly well and according to Father Bruno, all the little girls who aren’t ill either have been running wild with Sybil as their leader.’ She could not keep the disapproval out of her voice.

  Richard let out a sigh of relief. ‘We’re a strong family. We get that from you, Mother. Abbess Edgiva, your sister, is well too, I take it?’ Wulfhild nodded. ‘Good. Good. It’s bad enough but it could have been… they’re all dead over at Beechtrees; we came that way. They’re our nearest neighbour and when I found what I did find there, I thought… what about Little Dene? Brian came back ahead of us but we bypassed it ourselves. Have you seen him, or anyone from there?’

  Wulfhild was closing Editha’s eyes. Her own were dry but distant. He knew she was remembering times long past, before he was born. ‘It’s there as well, what do you expect? Bruno told us. He goes everywhere. I’ll say this for him, he’s tireless in his work even if he is a busybody. But we’ve no recent news. Brian hasn’t been here. All gone at Beechtrees, eh?’ Her face remembered the past again. The lord of Beechtrees had once tried to get possession of Fallowdene. ‘I won’t go so far as to say I’m sorry about that,’ said Wulfhild.

  Alice, who had tightened her mouth at the word busybody, said: ‘That was your friend Ralph des Aix you brought back with you, wasn’t it? He’s very ill, too.’

  ‘Ralph des Aix?’ Wulfhild turned from drawing the rug over Editha’s face. ‘You brought him back with you? How is it you’re here, anyway? Thought you were bound for Normandy. Time was you wouldn’t have had to go to wars overseas, but all that seems to be forgotten nowadays.’

  ‘I had to bring Ralph,’ Richard said. ‘It’s bringing you more trouble and I’m sorry, but it was that or leave him on the beach at Hastings. As to why I’m here, we didn’t sail. The old custom was upheld after all. Nobody sailed. The whole undertaking just dissolved into the air. There was a big muster at Hastings, reinforcements for Normandy. That man Flambard was there, the one who revalued all the land.

  ‘Someone’ll kill him for that one day,’ said Wulfhild, forgot about impressing Alice, and spat.

  ‘Well, they haven’t killed him yet. He was getting us all checked off on a great tally list, and collecting our forty days’ subsistence money into the common coffer, in the usual way. Then when all the money was in, he announced that the embarkation was off and we could all go home. Without the subsistence money.’

  ‘Clever,’ remarked Wulfhild sourly.

  ‘We didn’t think so. Ralph hadn’t a penny left. He couldn’t even find a lodging. There’s an odd thing,’ Richard said. ‘When we got to Hastings, there wasn’t a ship to be seen. I don’t think we were ever meant to sail. It was a revenue-raising trick from the start. Ralph said, before he got too ill to talk, that it was the sort of thing to expect from Flambard. He knows Flambard personally, as it happens.’

  ‘And the king too,’ said Wulfhild with a sniff. ‘We hear the gossip, even here. Ufi goes to Chichester to the Shire Court and gets news in plenty, and there were some minstrels round once, while you were away, singing the latest tales from London and Winchester and very interesting they were too. Knows the king very well indeed, your Sir Ralph des Aix, or so we gather. A regular close friend to King Rufus, isn’t he?’ It was hardly a question, and her disapproval of the answer came across to Richard like a blow.

  ‘He’s also a friend of mine,’ he said repressively. ‘I hope to God we can pull him through. And I expect him to be made welcome,’ he added, meeting his mother’s eyes warningly.

  ‘If we’re to pull any of them through, there’s work to do,’ said Alice. She turned towards the shape on the bed, crossed herself and stood a moment in silent prayer before moving to the door. ‘I was making bread. The ones who are getting better are very hungry.’

  ‘Mighty quick you were to seize Editha’s job, the minute she took to her bed,’ said Wulfhild.

  ‘Tch. The bread’s got to be made,’ said Alice shortly, and went out.

  Ralph tossed and coughed for three days and nights. But his slender olive-skinned body was strong. He was delirious only once. Then, certain gossip he had heard at Hastings, and the newly brusque attitude towards him of men who had once been carefully polite, came together with the last sermon he had heard preached by Father Ilger at Minstead. Lately, Ilger had taken to prophesying the end of the world, attributing this threatened disaster to the unregenerate sinfulness of mankind at large, with the superstitions of his own flock, and the latest news from the Holy Land about the heathen’s unchecked rampagings (‘Infidel prayers on the very site of Christ’s birth, and pilgrims kidnapped for slaves!’) in particular.

  He dreamed, improbably, that he and Rufus were fighting the infidel in a desert, only the sun was so hot and their throats so choked with sand that they could barely breathe or lift their swords. Then Rufus turned into an infidel himself and Walter Tirel, another infidel, joined him and Ralph was fighting them both. A sandstorm – he had never seen either a desert or a sandstorm but Father Ilger apparently had and had described them in one of his sermons – rose and he was lost in a hot, strangling darkness. He woke to find a priest with pale blue eyes and a high polished forehead tipping goats’ milk into his mouth and saying: ‘No, the world is not about to end. Drink this.’ He drank and slept again and this time did not dream.

  The next day his skin was cool and his throat and chest were easing. He managed to stagger groggily to the communal chamber pot and to take in what was happening around him.

  He was one of several ill people who occupied pallets at one end of the hall. Its normal life continued at the other. Food was brought by Richard’s wife Alice. She looked as frail as a dandelion seed, much more so than when he had first met her, but she worked all day and after dark too, tending the sick, feeding the poultry, baking and sewing. Her mother-in-law still bullied her, as Ralph remembered from the past, but these days Alice turned the edge of the older woman’s tongue by a calm courtesy and at times, Ralph thought with weak amusement, a deliberately deaf ear.

  On the third day, after sleeping late, he woke to find a household squabble in progress.

  ‘You and your stupid plants!’ Wulfhild was banging her stick on the floor to emphasise her words and there were angry tears in her remarkable, almond-shaped blue eyes. T
hey gave her face, and her anger, considerable potency. They had been the first thing about her that Ralph noticed when he came alone to Fallowdene and introduced himself. He had been admiring them, in fact, on the occasion only two days after that when he had suddenly seen from their expression that she did not like him. Their wrath, however, was this time directed at Richard. ‘Why did you not put that ground down to rye as I told you? Then this wouldn’t have happened. I told you, but no, you must leave it open because you’ll want it in the autumn for those silly crocuses and now what have we got? Hemlock, that’s what we’ve got! Five cows lost and their calves and haven’t we had trouble enough what with bad harvests and disease? Must you make more? This is your fault!’ She rounded on Alice. ‘You brought those daft plants here. Bad luck, that’s what you are, you useless mewling thing…’

  ‘Useless, am I? Dear saints, what would you call useful, I wonder? I work and work but nothing’s ever enough for you: what would be enough I can’t imagine! And I didn’t bring those plants here. It was arranged between my father and Richard and they knew what they were doing, I’ve no doubt.’

  ‘I certainly know what I’m doing. Let Alice alone, Mother. My daft plants as you call them will prove their worth one day.’

  ‘Like her? Five years and more, and just one girl child to show for it. Those plants should be dug up and burned.’

  ‘I had the choice originally between those plants and a mark of gold and I picked the plants because in the end they’ll be worth it, wait and see.’

  ‘A mark of gold!’ Wulfhild screeched. Ralph thought that Richard looked slightly shamefaced, as though wishing he hadn’t said that. It had clearly come as news to his mother. ‘You passed up a mark of gold for those… those…!’