The man addressed the woman in rapid French and her elegant eyebrows rose to meet the fluted edges of her immaculate wimple. She answered him briefly, but with a bubble of laughter in her voice. Ailith wished that it were possible just to vanish from sight. She was painfully aware of every stalk of straw, every smear of dung on her working kittle and tattered apron. These people were quite obviously the new Norman neighbours, and what must they think?
The young woman addressed Ailith in English, heavily accented but understandable. 'I see you have a problem. My hens also have strayed before. Let my husband's men catch them for you.' Turning in her saddle, she issued a command in Norman to two youths who had just jumped down from a laden baggage wain to stretch their legs.
'Thank you,' Ailith muttered with chagrin as the young men set about the pursuit and capture of the wayward birds, succeeding with insulting ease. Alaric was fetched in high dudgeon from the top of the dung heap and presented to her with a cheeky flourish by the younger of the two youths. Ailith tucked the rooster under her arm, her broad freckled face as red as fire.
The man leaned over his saddle to address her. He too spoke English. 'Perhaps you will ask your master and mistress to call on us?' he said with a warm, wide smile. 'We would like to meet and be friends with our neighbours.'
Ailith swallowed. Her shame was so deep that she knew she would never be able to hold her head above it again. 'I am the mistress,' she said stiffly.
The Norman stared her up and down, nonplussed. Then his mouth twitched and he quickly raised his hand to cough.
His wife stepped courageously into the breach. 'We should not have jumped so swiftly to conclusions,' she soothed. 'It is only natural to go about household tasks in old clothes if you are not expecting to meet anyone.'
Ailith only felt worse. The man's face was dusky with suppressed laughter.
Please, you will still come?' Anxiously the woman extended her hand.
'I will speak to my husband,' Ailith replied, raising her chin a notch, but refusing to look at either of them. 'Thank you for your help.' And then she fled, certain that she could hear the sound of their laughter in pursuit.
Goldwin did nothing to soothe her mortification by guffawing loudly when later she told him what had happened.
Ailith ceased combing out her thick, slightly coarse hair and glared at him. He was reclining on their bed in the sleeping loft, a cup of mead in his hand. 'It is not funny,' she snapped. 'They want us to call on them!'
'Yes, I know.' Goldwin's voice was husky with laughter. 'You were still shutting up the hens when the Norman came to the forge to introduce himself. He said that you had been very embarrassed and he was sorry if he had offended you. He was also insistent that we dine with them soon.' His eyes sparkled.
'Goldwin, I can't!'
'Nor can you skulk indoors for the rest of your life in the hopes of avoiding them.' Laughing, he refilled his mead cup. 'They seem decent enough people, for Normans. His name's Aubert de Remy and he's hoping to make a fortune selling wine to the English court being as King Edward's so fond.'
As Goldwin spoke, Ailith's initial panic faded into dismay. She resumed combing her hair, tuning her mind to the orderliness of the strokes. Goldwin was right. She could not hide from her neighbours indefinitely. It would be best to make a jest of the whole incident. Laughter was supposed to break down barriers of reserve and suspicion — but she would rather that the laughter was not at her expense. 'Did you meet his wife?' she asked casually.
'No, she was busy with her maids, but he told me that her name was Felice and that her old nurse was English, so she speaks the tongue quite well.'
'She is very beautiful.' Ailith put down her comb and removed her grey woollen gown. Conscientiously she folded the garment over the end of her clothing pole. What she really wanted to do was throw it on the floor and burst into tears. Her expression screened from Goldwin by her unruly hair, she plucked at the stray stalks of straw still embedded in the dress.
Goldwin set his mead cup on the floor and left the bed. She felt his rough hands upon her shoulders, his breath animal-warm at her throat. 'I have all the beauty I need here,' he murmured, turning her in his arms until she was facing him. 'Come to bed; take me on the white lightning to Valhalla.'
Despite herself, Ailith smiled at his blandishments. He obviously desired her – if the growl of playful lust in his voice was not evidence enough, then the hard bulge in his braies certainly was. Even above her need to love and be loved, was Ailith's compulsion to be needed. Garlanding her arms around his neck, she pressed herself against him, and felt the power surge in her loins as he softly groaned her name.
As their passion mounted, she discarded the thought of the Norman neighbours in the same way she had discarded her clothes. Tomorrow she would clad herself again with both, but for the moment they had no place in her world. She was a Valkyrie riding the storm.
CHAPTER 2
Ailith's brother Aldred took a hearty bite out of a roasted chicken thigh and complimented his sister on the excellent flavour of the meat. 'Better than anything we get served at court, eh, Lyulph?'
A younger man, less broad in the shoulder, brushed crumbs from his luxuriant corn-coloured beard and nodded vigorously, his mouth bulging with bread and meat.
Ailith laughed with pleasure at their praise and their vast appetites. To watch them eating now made keeping hens worthwhile, whatever her earlier thoughts on the matter. It was wonderful to see her great, blond brothers in their finery. Her hall seemed almost too small to contain them. Aldred's red wool tunic was banded with silk braid, and around Lyulph's throat was a heavy silver cross and a necklace of amber and garnet beads. Their strong, axe-wielders' hands were bare of rings which might foul a blow in a moment of crisis, but both men's wrists were adorned with gold and silver bracelets, gifts from Harold Godwinson, the man they served.
'What do you get at court then?' asked Goldwin, and stretched his legs in contentment towards the enormous Yule log burning upon two iron props in the firepit. His mead cup rested lightly on his gilded belt buckle and his own tunic was fine tonight, bordered with Ailith's skilful embroidery.
Aldred snorted rudely. 'Custards and curds for King Edward's ailing belly. Chicken blancmange and sops in wine.'
'Oh come now, I don't believe that!'
'Well, not all the time,' Aldred grudgingly conceded. 'But most of the food is mashed up and smothered in fancy sauces.'
'It's the Norman fashion, a murrain on the bastard,' Lyulph sneered, his brilliant blue eyes full of contempt. 'When Earl Harold's on his own estates, we get to eat decent, English fare.'
Ailith exchanged a wry, pleading glance with Goldwin. Responding, he valiantly sought to close the crack before it could become a chasm. 'So the King still sickens?' he enquired.
Aldred wiped his lips and smoothed down his moustaches between forefinger and thumb. 'Daily,' he said to Goldwin. 'He's not attending the consecration of his precious abbey tomorrow because he's too weak. Our lord Earl will wear the crown before Candlemas, mark what I say.'
Goldwin tactfully guided Aldred and Lyulph into talking about Earl Harold, and then conducted them from the table to the forge to show them the armour he was making for the lord of Wessex. They were much impressed by the helm and the almost completed hauberk.
'The Normans often use archers,' Lyulph said, fingering the triple-linked rivets. 'Will this stop an arrow?'
'Not at close range, but at medium- and long-distance, yes, depending on angle, of course.' Goldwin looked sharply at the two young men. 'Are you expecting to be fighting Normans then?' He added wryly, 'Other than the usual?'
Aldred plucked a hunting knife from Goldwin's workbench and examined the blade. 'Oh yes,' he said, his voice soft and bitter. 'Normans, Flemings, Brabants, the dross of all Europe.'
Goldwin frowned a question.
'Is it not obvious?' Aldred tossed the knife end over end and caught it deftly by the wooden haft. 'Even if Earl Harold is named k
ing on Edward's death, he will have to fight for the right to sit on the throne.'
Goldwin began to feel queasy and wished he had a clearer head. As well as the gift of the Yule log, Ailith's brothers had brought a keg of sweet, strong mead. The honey brew was Goldwin's particular weakness and he had consumed more than was wise. But then wisdom was not usually a prerequisite of Yuletide feasting. He tried with limited success to focus his mind. 'Duke William of Normandy, you mean?'
Aldred's face reddened and he stabbed the point of the dagger viciously into Goldwin's workbench. 'The whoreson says that Edward promised him the crown fifteen years ago… but it was never Edward's to promise. The High Witan decide who shall be king!'
'What if the High Witan decide upon Duke William?' It was a facetious question, but Goldwin was annoyed at Aldred's cavalier treatment of a very fine langseax, not to mention his bench. Carefully he eased the weapon out of the wood.
'The counsellors back Harold,' Aldred said shortly. 'They don't want a Norman backside on our throne.'
Lyulph, ever Aldred's shadow, growled assent. At only twenty years old he was the youngest member of Earl Harold's bodyguard, but his fighting abilities were as precocious as his luxuriant tawny beard.
Goldwin shook his head. 'Surely invading England will be too great an undertaking for the Norman Duke?'
Aldred jutted his fierce jaw. He was big-boned, with a fighting man's loose-knit grace. Like Ailith's, his eyes were a clear, deep blue, but more closely set with downward corner creases. 'Perhaps it will be so, but if not, I'll be waiting on the shoreline to kiss him welcome with my axe!' Aldred had been sitting on Goldwin's bench, but now he rose, and fishing in the pouch at his belt, brought out a fistful of silver pennies.
'I want you to fashion me a new axe,' he said intensely, 'and I want you to inscribe Duke William's name on the blade.' He banged the silver down on the bench in punctuation. Several coins rolled to the edge and spilled over, landing hard and gleaming on the beaten earth floor.
Goldwin stared at the coins, his queasiness becoming the cold squeeze of fear. 'God save us, Aldred, you truly want me to do this?'
'I do. Is there enough silver here to pay for your work, or do you want more?'
'Nay, I don't want any at all!' Goldwin fanned his hands back and forth in denial.
'I want to pay.' Aldred narrowed his eyes. 'I must pay. It will make the charm more binding.'
Lyulph jerked open his own pouch and spilled yet more silver onto Goldwin's bench. 'Make me one too, the same!'
Goldwin could not refuse his own wife's kin, but he had a real feeling of dread as he scooped up the coins, still warm from their touch, and put them in his pouch. He had made Aldred and Lyulph weapons before. Their mail shirts were of his fabrication, and the superb swords they wore at their hips. He was no stranger to fashioning the terrible Danish war axe, both two- and one-handed varieties. And frequently he had set inscriptions into the steel, or along the polished wood of the haft. Names, talismans, they were all familiar to him. But in some way he did not yet understand, this was different and made him afraid. Never before had he felt the winter cold in his own forge.
When they returned to the hall, by unspoken agreement none of them said anything to Ailith about what had happened in the workshop, but there was a constraint to their feasting now, an undercurrent of tension that she could not fail to miss. She did not ask any outright questions, because conversations that took place in the forge were always men's business, but nevertheless she was concerned and curious.
It was beyond dusk, but still early when Aldred and Lyulph took their leave, declining Ailith's plea that they stay the night.
'We're on duty at dawn,' Aldred said, hugging her close.
She felt the taut power of muscle beneath his Yuletide finery. There was a hardness in his face that she had never noticed before. Perhaps all warriors became that way, tough and unyielding like the rawhide bands rimming their shields. It was a disquieting thought to take into the New Year and as she embraced her brothers, she felt as if she were bidding farewell to more than just the old season.
She watched them ride away in the direction of the royal palace, watched until the last gleam of harness and horsehide had disappeared into the night, and the sound of hoof and voice could no longer be heard. Over her head a distant pinpoint of light blazed an arc across the sky. 'Look, Goldwin!' she cried, pointing.
He stared sombrely upwards, his eyes quenched of light. 'I have a premonition,' he said softly, 'that tonight I have grasped the tail of a falling star.'
Ailith was frightened by his tone and the strange look on his face. 'Goldwin?' She touched his sleeve for reassurance.
A shiver rippled through him, as if he was trying to shake off the fey mood that seemed to have gripped the night. Laying his hand upon hers, he turned to look at her, a half-smile curving his moustache. 'Too much mead,' he said ruefully. 'You know it always makes me weep. Did you make a wish?'
Ailith nodded and followed him back into the house. 'For both of us,' she said as he barred the door, his motion a little too forceful as he shut out the world. And Ailith, her hand upon her flat belly, wondered if she had wished for the right thing.
CHAPTER 3
In the sleeping loft of the rented London house, Felice de Remy spoke to her maid. 'The amber beads and brooch,' she instructed the woman. 'They go best with this gown.'
'Yes, Madame.'
Felice smoothed her palms down her overtunic of blue-green wool, seeking reassurance from the rich, heavy cloth. It fell in pleated folds to shin-level and was hemmed by a border of gold braid. Her undergown was of tawny linen, its edges skimming the toggle fastenings of her soft leather shoes.
The maid returned with a string of polished amber beads and a round brooch also set with lumps of amber. The jewellery had been a wedding gift from Aubert and he liked her to wear them whenever they had guests.
Her maid arranged the beads and secured Felice's yellow silk wimple with the brooch. It was a colour that few women could wear well, but Felice, with her warm complexion and glowing brown eyes, was one of the fortunate.
'You look lovely, Madame, fit to dine with King Edward himself!'
'Why thank you, Bertile!' Felice laughed, while wondering dubiously if she ought to have dressed less elaborately. Fit to dine with the King was perhaps not fit to receive their Saxon neighbours, especially after that first, impromptu meeting across a midden heap. Would the wife think that she was being mocked?
Felice had glimpsed the husband on several occasions. He was square and stocky with brown hair and a darker beard, his garments filthy from the forge. Aubert said that he was a master armourer and had crafted weapons for the great Earl of Wessex himself. Many times during the past three days Felice had stood at her doorway hoping to catch a glimpse of the armourer's wife and perhaps speak to her, but the young woman seemed to have gone to ground.
Descending from the sleeping loft, Felice gazed around the hall with a critical eye. The new rushes on the floor had been scattered with dried herbs — lavender, rosemary and marjoram — that yielded up their scent as they were trodden upon. She had dressed the bare walls with embroideries in bright colours on pale linen backgrounds, and the room was illuminated by expensive beeswax candles. Her best napery was laid upon the dining trestle, and instead of the usual eating bowls of polished wood, she had brought out her precious set of glazed earthenware dishes. An appetising smell wafted from the cooking pot suspended over the firepit, which was being assiduously tended by an elderly serving woman.
Outside, she heard the thud of hooves in the yard and her husband's voice chivvying one of the serving lads. Moments later, Aubert flung into the house, his stride choppy and energetic, his mobile, ugly features pulled into a deep frown.
Felice took his heavy winter cloak and woven Phrygian cap. Aubert kissed her briefly on the cheek, then pushing his stubby fingers through his frizzy grey curls, strode to the flagon which had been filled in anticipation of their
guests. Pouring himself a full measure of wine, he took a long drink.
Felice hung his cloak and hat on a wall peg, her movements fluid and calm, although her stomach was churning with anxiety. 'Does your business not go well?'
Aubert de Remy raised and lowered his bushy, prolific brows. 'Well enough,' he said gruffly. 'I've an order of wine from Leofwin Godwinson, Earl Harold's brother. It is just that the negotiating went hard.'
Felice nodded and smiled. She knew that he was lying, that the source of his frown was something else, but she had no intention of pressing him. That his concerns extended into clandestine regions beyond the mere selling of wine she had long since realised, but for her own well-being, she had never sought to know too much.
'Something smells good.' Aubert hung his nose over the cauldron.
'It's coney ragout.'
His eyes narrowed with gluttonous joy. 'I shall soon be as fat as Martinmas hog!' He laid a rueful hand upon his belt where the merest suggestion of a paunch was confined by the gilded leather.
Laughing, Felice tortured him further by telling him the other courses she had organised.
'Stop it, stop it!' Aubert groaned. 'You will be the death of me!'
She started to ask him if she should take his remark as an insult or a compliment, but was forestalled by the arrival of their guests – the armourer Goldwin, and Ailith his wife.
The young woman stood proudly on the threshold beside her husband, her head carried high, her manner almost defiant. She was easily as tall as Aubert, and of generous proportions. From beneath a veil of blue silk, two fat, corn-blonde plaits snaked the length of her short, rose wool overtunic. The undertunic was the same blue as the veil and enhanced the colour of her eyes. She wore a beautiful necklace of polished glass beads and a silver cross upon a cord. A set of housewife's keys jangled importantly from the tooled belt at her waist. Suddenly Felice was very glad that she had gone to the trouble of dressing elaborately herself.
The Conquest Page 2