Sapphire in the Snow - Award-Winning Medieval Historical Romance

by Townend, Carol

  ‘Baron, please, no!’ Beatrice pulled frantically at the mailed sleeve.

  The thin lips lifted, baring yellow teeth. ‘I will have an answer. Did you eat that food I saw you taking?’

  Walter gulped. His lips moved but no sound came out. His body hung limp as a corpse from the baron’s large fists. His eyes flashed his mistress a plea more eloquent than words.

  ‘Baron,’ Beatrice said, struggling for calm. She forced her hand to rest lightly on the mail-clad arm. ‘Please let me ask him. You’ve struck the wit from his mind with your strength.’ She achieved a passable smile. ‘If you would have an answer, let me try. He will answer me. Release him.’

  Her insides crawled as the Norman baron looked down at the small hand she had laid on his sleeve. His eyes slid up and lingered on her lips. He smiled. The brutish hands uncurled from around Walter’s neck.

  A heady fury shook her. Without a shadow of a doubt the baron had engineered the whole in order to wring a reaction from her. She loathed every fibre of his being.

  ‘Walter, I should like an answer,’ she said, voice tight with the effort it took to cloak her anger. ‘Did you take food from the store last night?’

  There was a grisly silence.

  ‘Walter?’ she said, more gently.

  Walter dipped his head in assent, his frightened eyes clinging to Beatrice’s as though they were a lifeline. He rubbed the red marks on his neck.

  ‘Why?’ Beatrice asked. ‘Were you hungry, Walter? Did you eat the food yourself?’

  Her manservant shook his head.

  ‘Guilty!’ the baron crowed. ‘Your dumb half-wit didn’t even need the food for himself. I told you he was a thief. I’ll wager he sold it for profit.’

  ‘You would think that,’ Beatrice murmured.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Nothing, my lord. I but thought aloud.’ She faced Walter. ‘Did you sell the food, Walter?’

  Walter shook his head.

  ‘Liar! I’ll have your right hand off for this,’ the baron said, face engorged.

  Walter snatched his hands from his neck and hid them behind his back. De Brionne let out a short laugh and moved like lightning, wrenching Walter’s right arm out and pinned in to the table. Walter whimpered.

  ‘No! Baron, you cannot maim him for so minor a transgression. Even you could not be so cruel!’ Beatrice cried, wondering at the twisted mind that would devise so cruel a game merely for his amusement.

  Black eyes narrowed. ‘Even I? Mistress, you honour me.’ He edged his sword part way from the scabbard.

  ‘He did not sell the food. You heard him,’ Beatrice said desperately. The blood was roaring in her ears. Walter’s face looked like that of an old man’s.

  Walter had seen the way his mistress had reacted when the baron had smiled at her. Mistress Beatrice did not like this Norman. Mistress Beatrice was afraid of him. And Mistress Beatrice was defending him, Walter, against this Norman lord.

  Walter judged the baron to be an evil man. Whenever the baron looked his way, Walter broke out in a cold sweat. This evil man enjoyed baiting his mistress. He took pleasure in it. Walter did not like that. Neither did he like the way the devil leered at his mistress. Walter was not sure whether the baron really intended to carry out his threat to maim him. But he did know that the monster was upsetting Mistress Beatrice. And Walter did not like that at all.

  Beatrice still pleaded. ‘Please, my lord, do not take his hand. Walter has suffered enough. You cannot do this.’

  ‘We...ell. If it means so much to you, my pretty.’ The baron affected hesitation. How he enjoyed watching the hope flare in her innocent hazel eyes. Such unguarded eyes – it was so easy to make them change. ‘I shall spare him. This time. But if I hear so much as a whisper of suspicion against him again, I will finish him. We can’t afford to support simpletons. It’s hard enough finding the food to satisfy my warriors, and they at least earn their keep.’ His sword clicked back into its sheath.

  ‘Thank you, my lord.’ Beatrice acknowledged briefly, curbing her tongue lest it utter an angry retort which would only serve to inflame the unpredictable baron again.

  The hall door slammed. It was Anne. She swirled towards them, her breath clouding the air. Walter scurried out of the baron’s reach under the pretext of closing out the cold. His face had lost its haggard look.

  ‘By Our Lady, it’s frosty out there!’ Anne flung a leather-bound book on the table and smiled at de Brionne.

  The baron returned Anne’s smile and Beatrice sucked in her breath. She stared, with dawning intelligence. She had never thought those obsidian eyes were capable of wearing such an expression. They were almost tender. The Norman never looked at her like that. A flash of understanding shocked her rigid. Could it be that Anne and the baron...that they were lovers?

  For those with eyes to see, there had been signs, little hints and glances. They had been right under her nose, but she had not understood their significance. Anne tripping down the gangplank at Pevensey and falling so neatly into de Brionne’s arms – she had fallen deliberately. Anne’s merry vivacity on the journey to Lindsey, and the rapid change of mood when they arrived here. Of course Anne had found it difficult to accept the Thane of Lindsey – for Anne already had a lover in Baron Philip de Brionne!

  Beatrice realised her jaw had dropped, and closed her mouth with a snap. In her mind, old ideas were shifting and new ones were forming. If that were true, it went part way to explaining the baron’s hostility towards the Anglo-Saxons. He did not want Anne to marry their lord any more than Anne did herself. Her brow puckered. There must be more to it than that. There had to be.

  Why should the baron torment her if he loved Anne? A ruse to disguise his true feelings? He could not love Anne and want Beatrice as well, could he? Beatrice had recognised desire in de Brionne’s face when he had kissed her. It was beyond her comprehension that a man should love one woman and desire another.

  ‘I’m to do a small penance for my sins.’ Anne was pouting charmingly at the man Beatrice now recognised to be her lover.

  De Brionne picked up the psalter Anna had cast on the table and idly turned a page or two.

  ‘What penance is that, Lady Anne?’ he enquired with careful courtesy. His formal mode of address gave nothing away.

  ‘I’m to read a few psalms, nothing too testing,’ Anne replied indifferently. ‘I don’t expect I’ll bother though.’

  ‘Anne!’ Beatrice was shocked.

  ‘What lovely initial letters.’ Anne placed white fingers on de Brionne’s and bent her head to look at the volume. ‘My lord, do let me see.’

  The baron did not withdraw his hand as he should, and Beatrice observed that his dark eyes rested on Anne’s head, not on the illuminated pages of the book.

  ‘Excuse me, I’ll see if the wounded men need anything,’ Beatrice muttered and rose to her feet.

  Neither Anne nor her companion looked up as she left the trestle table and moved across the hall.

  ***

  ‘Let me help you, mistress,’ Ella offered, taking a dressing from Beatrice.

  ‘My thanks, Ella.’

  ‘Thank you, Mistress Beatrice!’ Ella said fervently. Tears were sparkling in her eyes.

  ‘Ella?’ Beatrice gazed blankly at Ella over the recumbent form of the soldier they tended.

  ‘Thank you for helping Walter. He didn’t sell the food, mistress. He’s not a thief.’

  ‘What did he do with it then?’

  The maidservant’s face was torn with indecision.

  ‘I may be able to help,’ Beatrice said gently.

  ‘Mistress Beatrice, he found a little Saxon girl. The food was for her.’

  Beatrice stared. ‘What girl?’

  Ella shrugged. ‘Mistress, I don’t know. He found her last evening in the byre. The one hard by the chapel. He heard crying, went in, and there she was, hiding in the straw. He fetched me. There was blood on her gown, and it was torn. Mistress Beatrice, I hope we did right to help
her. She was that upset, we couldn’t not help her. Do you see?’

  Beatrice made a decision. ‘Come and help me draw clean water, Ella,’ she said loudly, so all could hear. ‘The well-handle is too stiff for me to turn on my own.’

  Ella followed her outside.

  The sun shone clear in a pale winter’s sky, but its rays were feeble and did not warm her. Cold air, sharp as a needle, pricked her cheeks.

  Two guards had been posted by the chapel and Beatrice caught herself looking their way, hoping to get a glimpse...but the grey walls reared up solid before her, there was no peering past them. Resolutely, she walked to the well. Shivering, she and Ella began wrestling with an iron well-handle that numbed fingers to the bone. Even the once muddy earth around the well was rock-hard.

  ‘I didn’t want to be overheard,’ Beatrice muttered.

  Ella grunted her understanding and heaved on the handle.

  ‘You saw this girl close to?’ Beatrice demanded. ‘Was she hurt?’

  ‘No, mistress. Though that’s what I thought when I first saw her gown. It was as if some beast of a man had...and with her being but a child I was that shocked. But no, that were the strangest thing. It wasn’t her blood. There’s not a mark on her.’ Ella hesitated, gritting her teeth in her efforts with the well-handle. ‘Will you see her?’

  ‘Where is she?’

  They cranked the handle round another turn.

  ‘Still in the byre, I should think, unless someone else has found her.’ Ella panted, and blew on her hands.

  The leather bucket had reached the top of the well-shaft. Small lumps of ice floated in the water. The girls abandoned their fight with the well-handle. Their breath hung in milky clouds above their heads.

  ‘Leave the bucket by the side there,’ Beatrice said. ‘Show me the girl. Quickly.’

  The byre was a small reed-thatched building nestling snugly behind the chapel. Icicles edged the top of the doorway.

  ‘She don’t speak our tongue, Mistress Beatrice.’

  Inside the byre, it was warm from the combined heat of the animals. The beasts stamped and shuffled as they entered, but Beatrice saw no trace of any Saxon girl. They were too late. She must have fled.

  Ella marched to a pile of hay in a corner and started shovelling it to one side, crooning softly in her native French dialect. ‘It is all right, me lass. Don’t be afraid. It’s only Ella come to see you’re alright.’

  There was a little flurry of movement, a whisper of protest, and Beatrice found herself looking down at a small and frightened girl who cowered in the corner with such fear in her eyes that Beatrice winced. Yet there was something about this girl...

  ‘She won’t understand our French,’ Ella warned.

  A strange lightness had stolen over Beatrice. ‘Is your name Hilda?’ Beatrice spoke softly in Latin. The girl’s wide eyes swivelled from Ella to Beatrice. ‘I won’t hurt you,’ Beatrice persisted. ‘Please try and understand. Are you the Hilda that Edmund spoke of?’

  At the mention of Edmund’s name some of the tension left the small body.

  ‘I’m sure you understand me. Are you Hilda? I want to help you.’ Beatrice hunkered down to the child’s level and held out her hand in a gesture of friendship.

  The girl must have seen about ten or twelve summers. Her clothes were the best quality, though her overdress had been badly torn at the hem, and there was indeed blood on the garment as Ella had already observed. The child had light brown hair and grey-blue eyes, and it was these that drew Beatrice’s attention. They bore a strong resemblance to those of another Saxon, a resemblance that was becoming more and more marked as the terror in them diminished. They were wary now, and Beatrice harboured no more doubts as to the girl’s identity.

  ‘You’re Hilda!’ she exclaimed. ‘I know it. You look like him. And I recognise the fabric of your robe. A piece of that cloth was used to bandage Edmund. You used it to staunch his wound in the chapel.’

  The Saxon girl scowled back in stubborn silence.

  ‘You saw me in the chapel!’ Beatrice realised. ‘It was you whom I heard leave when I was binding him up. You left the door swinging. You know you can trust me. You saw me help Edmund, didn’t you?’

  The girl glared at Beatrice, silent and belligerent. All at once her thin shoulders slumped. ‘Aye. You helped my brother, Edmund,’ the child replied in stilted Latin. ‘And for that reason alone I will trust you a little. I have been taught there is not much trust to be found in a Norman.’

  The bitterness in Hilda’s voice was oddly at variance with her youthful features. But a child grew up fast in this harsh world, or it did not grow up at all.

  She stiffened her back, and raised her chin a notch. ‘I am Hilda, younger sister of Aiden, Thane of Lindsey and half-sister to Edmund.’ Her voice broke on her dead brother’s name.

  ‘What’s she saying, mistress?’ Ella demanded. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She’s the sister of the Saxon lord my cousin was to have married. The one Baron de Brionne killed yesterday morning.’

  Ella sucked in her breath and stared at Hilda with pity in her eyes.

  ‘Hilda, it is best that you remain hidden for now,’ Beatrice said. ‘Edmund has claimed sanctuary and is safe. But if de Brionne learns you are here, it will give him a lever to use against your brother. Do you understand?’

  The girl’s eyes grew suspicious. ‘You will not bring the Norman baron here?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, I swear.’

  Hilda’s chin inched up. ‘You will tell my brother I am here. Discreetly, of course.’

  Beatrice smiled to herself. Hilda of Lindsey worded requests like orders. Already she had regained the easy imperiousness of one who took for granted the respect and deference due her high birth. All nervousness had gone. She was every inch the daughter of a proud and noble house.

  ‘Naturally I will inform your brother as soon as I can,’ Beatrice said, smiling. ‘And I will send Ella back with food for you. Come, you’d better get back into your hiding place till the times mend.’

  Beatrice hustled the girl into her nest in the straw, and hurried back into the yard with Ella at her heels. Maid and mistress picked up the pail. They had staggered halfway across the yard with it, when Anne hailed them from the hall doorway.

  ‘You took long enough filling that,’ she said.

  ‘Have you tried that well-handle, Anne?’

  Anne lifted her shoulders and gave an idle smile.

  ‘I thought not. It’s rusty and very stiff.’ Beatrice rubbed her hands together.

  ‘Come to the fire. Warm yourself,’ Anne suggested. ‘Ella knows how to finish that job. Don’t you, Ella?’

  ‘Aye, my lady.’

  Ella heaved the bucket and lurched through the door towards the wounded men. Beatrice made a movement as if to help her, but Anne caught her arm.

  ‘I would talk with you, Beatrice. Come and warm yourself by the fire, you’re frozen.’ She pushed Beatrice towards the blaze and lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘Why didn’t you tell me what you were up to yesterday? I would have helped you if I had known.’

  Beatrice turned a blank face on her cousin.

  ‘Beatrice, don’t look like that. You know what I’m referring to.’

  ‘Cousin?’

  ‘The Saxon in the chapel,’ Anne hissed over the crackling logs. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you knew he was there? He’s Aiden’s bastard brother, isn’t he?’

  ‘Don’t use such words, Anne, it’s not fitting,’ Beatrice protested.

  ‘Lord, Beatrice, you’re as pompous as a prelate. I didn’t mean it badly.’

  ‘How did you mean it, then?’ Beatrice asked, nettled.

  ‘In a literal sense. He was born out of wedlock.’

  ‘That makes it better, does it?’

  Anne sighed and sat down on a three-legged stool in front of the fire. ‘Beatrice, be reasonable. What has got into you? Edmund is base-born. The bastard son of the old lord, Thane Hereward
of Lindsey. I know, you see. Hereward was Aiden’s father too. Edmund and Aiden were half-brothers. Edmund is the elder, but his mother was never Hereward’s wife. She was married off to the estate steward soon after Edmund was born.’

  Beatrice rubbed her forehead. ‘Hilda must be his half-sister. Aye, that must be right,’ she muttered.

  Anne frowned. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Nothing. Anne, how do you know all this? You never exchanged more than a word with any Saxon.’

  Anne had the grace to blush. ‘It is marked down in the Latin psalter that Father Ralph lent me for my penance,’ she said. ‘The family genealogies are written in the front. Look.’ Gracefully, Anne rose and collected the book from the trestle. She pointed.

  There it was. Neatly scripted. Beatrice made out Hereward, the old thane, his wife Judith and their two children, Aiden and Hilda. There were birth dates by each name.

  There was another date by Hereward’s name. Beatrice assumed it to be the date on which he had died.

  ‘There’s a new date to mark down next to Aiden’s name now,’ she murmured before she had time to curb her wretched tongue.

  Edmund’s name jumped out of the creamy parchment at her. It was entered in a different, bolder hand, together with a date.

  ‘He must be twenty-two,’ Anne pointed out unnecessarily, for Beatrice had just calculated that for herself. According to the psalter he was a year older than Aiden.

  Beatrice ran a fingertip over Edmund’s written name only to flush crimson when she noticed Anne’s sharp eyes on her. She shut the book with a crack.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about your wounded warrior?’ Anne asked, teasingly.

  Beatrice glanced round the smoky hall.

  ‘No one can hear,’ Anne assured her.

  ‘He’s not my warrior,’ Beatrice said. ‘I didn’t tell you because...because I thought you wished all Saxons to the Devil. I feared you would betray him. I didn’t want the baron to kill him as he killed the thane.’

  Anne raised a trembling hand to her brow. ‘I did not wish for Aiden’s death,’ she said. ‘But Philip was jealous of me – so jealous. He couldn’t help himself.’