A Silver Mirror

by Roberta Gellis

  She did not need to worry. Although Alphonse wakened later than usual because the room was so dark, he realized morning had come. Hearing the rain, he decided there was no need to hurry. He thought lazily that it was most fortunate that he had gathered sense enough before he left to tell the prince he would follow Barbara if he learned she had left with Norfolk’s men. Time was no problem. Then he tickled her awake and into playful passion again. Relaxed and happy, they slept again, to be startled awake by Clotilde’s voice just beyond the curtain.

  “My lord, my lady,” she was whispering urgently, “two men have just come in with news that an army is marching toward the ford.”

  Alphonse leapt out of bed, pulled on his bedrobe, and ran down the stair. Barbara jumped out the other side, caught up the shift, which lay near the bed, and pulled it on, then used the pot while Clotilde brought her other clothes. She was fastening the last laces when Alphonse came up again with Chacier on his heels. Alphonse’s eyes were blazing bright.

  “I cannot believe our good fortune,” he said, ripping off the bedrobe and yanking on the shirt Clotilde was holding. “The men who brought the news are merchants from Chipping Norton who were overtaken on the road by foreriders of the army. Most of their goods were seized—all they got were promises to pay—and they are somewhat bitter now that the relief of coming away with their skins in one piece is wearing off. They were eager to talk.”

  Alphonse was silent a moment as Chacier slid his arming tunic over his head. Barbara came forward to fasten it while Chacier readied his hauberk.

  “Barbe,” he continued, “it is the army Simon de Montfort was ordered to bring to his father. I cannot believe he has idled away two weeks coming from Winchester to this place. Edward did not seem to think he should take longer than four days from there to Worcester.”

  Barbara nodded. “It is no more than thirty-five leagues. A man can go ten leagues a day if he must.”

  She stepped back as Chacier brought his master’s armor and Alphonse bent forward into it, arms outstretched, then straightened and wriggled his head through the neck opening. “The prince has been racking his brain to discover what clever device Leicester and Simon were planning to use against him, when he was not blaming the men he left along the northern Severn for somehow allowing Simon and his army to sneak past.”

  Chacier had pulled the hauberk straight and smoothed the places where the links had caught against each other to form little ridges. Barbara brought Alphonse’s sword and belt from the chest atop which they lay. She looked down at the buckle as she fastened the belt, trying to remember which of them had put it on the chest, and when. All she remembered was the thump when Alphonse loosened it and it fell to the floor. Then his hand was under her chin, lifting her face.

  “They are going to Kenilworth, Barbe. The merchants are sure of it.” He bent and kissed her eyes shut. “Do not look at me as if I were leaving you forever. I will only be gone a day or two. You know I must tell Edward about this…” His voice faded uncertainly, and Barbara’s eyes fluttered open. She hoped her misery was causing him to reconsider, but he was not looking at her. “Do you know how far it is from Kenilworth to Worcester?” he asked eagerly, his mind plainly on considerations that had nothing to do with her.

  Barbara lost all impulse to weep. Disappointment and fear were both replaced with a sharp urge to kick her husband where it would do the most good. Her restraint owed nothing to affection. It was dictated largely by her fear that, armed as he was, he would only feel enough to make him laugh at her. Men! Nothing was more important to them than playing at war and politics.

  “Less than ten leagues,” Barbara snapped, stepping back out of his reach.

  “Marvelous woman!” he exclaimed, wondering suddenly if she really knew all these distances. Such knowledge was most unusual in a woman. Perhaps she just did not wish to confess ignorance. He could not say that aloud, but he could ask admiringly, “How do you know these things?”

  “You would also know them if you had spent ten years traveling all over the country with the queen,” Barbara replied waspishly. “One must know how long a journey will take to send a maid or man ahead to be sure of a good place in the queen’s chamber or good lodging or a bath to be ready before the great dinner. Or simply to fill one’s head with something other than gossip. There was a time when we often went to Kenilworth, and Worcester is a royal city and the next natural stopping place.”

  While they were talking, Chacier and Clotilde had stuffed bedrobes and clothes into the baskets and strapped them closed. Alphonse looked around at the faint grunt his servant uttered as he lifted two baskets to his shoulder and started for the stairs.

  “I will escort you back to Evesham,” he said to Barbara. “I would really like to send you on east, but there is too much danger of stragglers from the army. I think you will be safe in the abbey.”

  “I will be safe enough,” Barbara said, still barely restraining herself from kicking her single-minded mate. “There is no need for you to escort me and delay your news to the prince by another hour or more. There is a shorter route between Stratford and Worcester. I told you of it yesterday. Go out the west gate on the road to Alcester, then west again, and you will come to Worcester. You cannot miss the way.”

  “Beloved!”

  Alphonse caught her in his arms and hugged her so hard the rings of his mail hurt her. He was too involved in his own calculations about how soon the prince could move his men to hear the sarcasm in her voice. All that came through to him were the words, so he believed that despite her original prejudice toward Leicester’s cause she was now as eager for Edward’s success as he. More marvelous yet, for he had had no time to explain, she understood how precious time was. Even a few hours might make the difference between catching Simon’s army outside of Kenilworth and having a good chance of defeating and dispersing them or having them disappear within the great fortress. Edward simply did not have enough men to besiege Kenilworth and fight Leicester. One reason the prince had not yet moved to attack the father was his fear that the son would come up behind him and catch him between two armies.

  “I will send Chacier with you, too,” Alphonse said, after a grateful kiss.

  “There is no need,” Barbara said, pushing him away. “You may need Chacier, and I will be going in exactly the opposite direction from Simon’s army and away from where he must know the prince to be also. No one will be interested in a woman and her maid traveling with a small guard. Go, go quickly. You do not have a moment to waste.”

  “There is no other woman alive your equal!” Alphonse exclaimed fervently, taking every word she said at face value. He kissed her hard once more and was out of the room and down the steps before Barbara had raised her hand to straighten her fillet and cap.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Barbara did not begin to weep until she was safe again in the same chamber of the abbey’s guest house she had left only a day earlier. Fury had sustained her over the first part of the return journey, a fury intensified by the miserable weather. She had replayed the parting scene between herself and her husband many times, finding more elegant and more cutting things to say to him each time. She had replayed the scene once too often, until she realized that nothing “clever” she said could have penetrated Alphonse’s mind. She would have had to slap him or, better, hit him with a war ax to fix his attention on her. Then she had begun to laugh over the way Alphonse had misunderstood her. He was not usually obtuse—far the contrary—but his mind had been so fixed on the need for speed in returning to Worcester that he had believed what she said and had been quite sincere in calling her wonderful.

  Despite the constant drizzle through which Barbara and her escort rode, they had been able to maintain a much faster pace returning to Evesham than going to Stratford. Having twice been over the road, every turn and hill was familiar. When Lewin called a warning to his lady to ride on the verge because great ruts were hidden by mud, Barbara realized they were passing through th
e village of Offensham and would soon be at the abbey.

  Still amused by the way her mind and Alphonse’s had been so far apart, she thrust all thought of him away while she decided what to say to the abbot about coming back to the guest house. If armies were moving about, even if they were not too close, she had to warn the abbot of it, but it was better in these times and this place not to claim connection with either party. Thus when the abbot granted the interview she requested, she told him that the way east had been blocked by an army on the move north, toward Kenilworth, and that her husband had felt it necessary to return to his duty.

  The abbot thanked her heartily—but did not, she noted, ask to what duty Alphonse had returned. She later learned from another visitor, who had been in the courtyard and had seen the messengers going out, that the abbot had sent word to those at distant farms and into the hills to the shepherds to protect the flocks and themselves as well as they could. After the village had been warned, the gates of the abbey were closed, although it was not yet dark, and the brothers gathered to sing a special mass. From the back of the church, Barbara listened to the abbot pray for the safety and well-doing of all men and ask God, out of His mercy and in the face of their wild and sinful natures, to infuse the contenders in this war with a desire for peace and reconciliation.

  That prayer seemed so hopeless to Barbara, especially after what Alphonse had said about the darkening of the prince’s spirit that she fled to her chamber and, at last, yielded to fear. She cried herself to sleep and woke the next morning drenched with new tears, believing herself a widow. Unable to bear the thought of Clotilde’s attempts to comfort her, she put on the riding dress, which the maid had cleaned, and fled to the mute and merry companionship of Frivole.

  The mare had already been carefully groomed, her legs and belly brushed free of mud and her flanks gleaming. For want of something more sensible to do, Barbara sought in the saddlebags for the ribbons used to decorate the animal for great celebrations and began to braid them into the mare’s mane. First the sight of the gay colors brought new tears to her eyes, but then the sun came out and made her more hopeful. Young Simon de Montfort was not the great military leader his father was. Perhaps his men would be disorganized and not prepared for battle. If Simon were taken prisoner and his army disbanded, with little hope of other help might not Leicester be brought to consider terms?

  The lift in spirits made her able to break her fast. She spent the morning braiding the mare’s tail—with Frivole a ticklish and dangerous job that allowed no wandering of the mind. The mare tended to lash out with her heels unexpectedly just to see her groomer jump. She would then turn her head and raise her lip, producing an expression so like a human sneer that Barbara suspected she kicked not because she was hurt or startled but with malice aforethought.

  Bevis and Lewin, who had often attended Barbara when she served the queen, had seen this battle with Frivole before and came to enjoy the show, however, they were also clearly puzzled to see her decking Frivole as if for celebration. So, to prevent them from thinking her completely mad, after dinner she gave the afternoon to rehearsing the mare in the fancy steps and rearings and bowings she had used in court processions in happier days. She collected quite an audience, nearly all the abbey guests who were only too glad to while away dull hours and forget the danger that might be abroad in the countryside.

  That danger was not acute, however. During the evening meal the abbot sent word to his guests that the lay brothers who had gone out to give warning had seen no armies or armed men, not even troops of foragers, in the area. Instead of cheering Barbara, who knew whatever action took place would be much farther north, that news only reminded her of her fear. She lay awake with pounding heart most of the night, and when she slept, toward morning dreamed of death and loneliness again and learned that dreams were not to be trusted, that they were devil-sent torments, because Clotilde woke her out of the very depths of her nightmare to say that Chacier had brought a message from Alphonse and was waiting for her in the refectory.

  “He is—” she faltered, sitting up, a hand at her breast.

  “Eating his dinner like a starved boar,” Clotilde told her mistress sharply, wiping the tears off Barbara’s cheeks with the hem of her sleeve and blocking her attempt to get out of bed. “And cheerful with it too, so you needn’t fear any harm has come to Sieur Alphonse.”

  Relief seemed to lift Barbara out of bed and into her clothes. Quick as she was in dressing, she found Chacier already the center of a rapt circle to whom he was announcing the prince’s rout of the army Leicester had summoned from the east. Knowing Alphonse’s servant, Barbara was sure that he had been told to spread the word, and when he rose, bowed to her, and handed her a thick folded parchment, she signaled for him to continue with his news. Slipping the letter into her gown to lie next to her heart, she found a place and began to eat the food her maid brought her, listening as eagerly as the others to Chacier’s tale.

  She noted with a tiny surge of anxiety that Chacier gave the news of Simon’s coming to Kenilworth without saying how that news had reached the prince. If Alphonse had been telling the tale, that omission would have had no meaning, for Alphonse never drew attention to himself—except while actually fighting. Possibly Chacier followed the same path through habit, but more likely he had been warned not to pinpoint his mistress as having any special connection with the disaster that had overtaken Simon de Montfort. The caution, then, meant that Alphonse believed Leicester or his supporters might have sympathizers in the abbey.

  While one part of her thought that out, another heard how Edward had ordered all the forces that could reach him before vespers on the last day of July to come to the main camp outside of Worcester. As soon as it was dark, he and his chief vassals had left the city. The army, which had been alerted earlier, was ready, and as soon as its leaders were in place, marched east through the dark to Alcester. Turning more northward, they had continued by small lanes and over fields and meadows to within half a league of Kenilworth and had then stopped to rest. Just before dawn they had attacked Simon’s army and found most of the men still asleep, unarmed and unprepared. When Chacier began to describe, with considerable enthusiasm, the slaughter and looting that followed, Barbara got up quietly and went into the garden. Alphonse’s letter would also contain details, she was sure, but not gory ones.

  She was not disappointed. Alphonse wrote first about the prince’s warm thanks and said he had seized the opportunity to tell Edward that he hoped, after this battle had been fought and won, he would be permitted to take ship for France. The prince had agreed at once, and he had letters of transit in his purse, all signed and sealed. Barbara breathed deep with joy and offered up a brief prayer of thanks before she read on, even more eagerly.

  “The only reason, my love,” the letter continued, “that I did not come myself instead of sending this letter with Chacier, is that I have been busy making arrangements for the payment of some fat ransoms. You will not believe that Simon could be more foolish than he seemed in taking so long to come west, but he outdid himself after arriving in Kenilworth. He must have known the prince was not far off, and one would think he would by now have taken Edward’s measure, yet he seemed to think that he was perfectly safe. He sent out no patrols, which would surely have seen us marching through the open land despite the dark, nor did he set any special watch. Worst of all—we are still puzzling over the reason for such madness and thanking God, Mother Mary, and all the saints for removing whatever wits that young fool ever had—neither Simon nor any of his principal men went into the keep. They stayed in the village, and we caught them also abed. I captured, in naught but their shirts, the Earl of Oxford and William Muntchenesy and two other young gentlemen whose names I will not write because I took those two in the inn, not the priory, and they had not even braies on.

  “The one misfortune we had was, in the tumult and rush of naked men, we missed Simon himself. Apparently he knew where were kept the little boats use
d to row about for pleasure on the lake that fronts Kenilworth Keep. Perhaps he crept out through a window after we set guards on the doors, or his ears were keener than those of his friends and he fled without warning them before we reached the priory. All we know is that a boat was missing and though we found his armor, sword, and shield, Simon himself escaped.

  “As you can imagine there is considerable confusion here. Not only are there so many prisoners of high rank that we are having some difficulty in finding places that are safe and suitable to keep them, but very violent feelings have arisen between some captives and captors. I barely prevented Muntchenesy from spitting in Gilbert’s face, and Mortimer, for some reason I did not bother to ask, grabbed Adam de Neumarket by the throat and all but throttled him. Gilbert and I had much ado to pull him off. Thus I cannot simply turn my prisoners over to Gilbert and have him send me whatever ransom he decides is just.

  “Another thing, I have traded one of my braies-less young men for your aunt Joanna’s eldest son, Baldwin Wake. He was slightly wounded, not dangerously but enough to keep him from swinging a sword. Since he will not be able to fight for a time, I hope, if I can find a moment’s peace to plead his case to Edward, that I can get Baldwin paroled to his mother’s custody. But the prince is buried in all kinds of business and is not—for many reasons, some of them very good—inclined to show too much softness. I will have to remain here for a few days longer.”

  Barbara dropped the parchment in her lap. Was it only for Baldwin that he remained in Worcester or had he been wounded? She jumped up and ran back to the refectory to pull Chacier away from his eager audience and ask anxious questions.

  Chacier laughed. “With what would they have wounded him? A pillow? Most were naked and had not time even to snatch up a sword. Nay, my lady, he has not a scratch.”