Chapter 37
There were many greetings then, and reunions, some very sad as wives learned the terrible news of the battles of the Bridge of Stamford and guessed that they had probably become widows.
The simple-minded daughter of the farrier came and laid her pox-marked face against Sunniva's shoulder, then insinuated her sticky fingers into Marc's large hand. Marc kissed her palm, which sent the woman into giggles of delight. Marc was almost bowled over by the strapping figure of the farrier's daughter as she catapulted herself into his arms.
"You have made a friend for life there," Sunniva remarked.
"The best kind of friend, then," said Marc, hugging the woman and whirling her right off her feet, spinning her about as he would spin Alde or Judith or Isabella.
"More!" the woman crowed, but then Marc and Sunniva were mobbed by more villagers: old men returning a pot to Sunniva and extending a hand to Marc; children shuffling forward out of the mass from behind their mothers to stare up at Marc's height; girls secretly comparing their loose, baggy robes to Sunniva's French gown.
It was only much later, when the villagers had helped Marc and his men drink all the mead and Marc asked for lads to help him in the hunt, that Sunniva realized she had missed one very important person.
Thoughtfully she set about her work for the day, replacing wall hangings and dragging the tables back into the hall. For the moment she avoided the tiny bedchamber at the back of the hall, with its bitter, personal memories for her of Cena and her cowering mother, and concentrated on making the communal area clean and habitable again. She laboured steadily, answering Arni No-Hair's excited questions about London and the new king, promising old mother Friga that she would walk down later to Friga's hut with some venison stew. She remained very aware of busy, wiry Ragnar sharpening daggers and swords in the yard and very conscious of missing Marc, even as she reproached herself for being foolish — without Marc going hunting, there would be no fresh meat for tonight.
And still the one very important person had not been near.
She did not speak to Marc about it when he returned to the homestead in triumph, the villagers and his men proudly carrying the freshly-killed deer between them. Instead she instructed the village women to help her with preparing the meat, a role familiar to her since childhood. To her relief, the women took her directions without question: surely that showed she was accepted back as one of them?
Part-way though skinning the beast, she was reminded of her missing knives and wondered briefly what had happened to them.
She wondered, too, what had happened to her mourning for Cena and his sons. Now she was at home again she had expected to miss them, if only a little, but their absence remained nothing but a relief. Even the villagers did not seem to notice they were gone. Not one of them told Sunniva that they were sorry for her loss.
Is it because they truly do not care or because they know something? Sunniva fretted as she jointed the deer. Do my people know that I am not Cena's daughter? That my mother really was unfaithful? Is that why the priest has not visited to bless this house?
The next day, as Marc groomed the horses and explained to a gang of assorted boys that it was not a good idea to creep under the hooves of a war-horse, he spoke to Ragnar.
"Send men down to London with a message and money to my mother. All is secure here, so 'tis time she and my girls came north, before the spring thaws turn the roads to mud."
"As you wish." Ragnar gave him a curt nod. Then, smoothing his long moustache with his fingers, asked, "What ails your wife? Is she in pup?"
Marc kneaded one of his charger's fetlocks, glad that Ragnar could not see his scarlet face or hear his racing heart. If Sunniva were with child that would be a gift better than all the gold and incense of Constantinople. Their child: a youngster with Sunniva's spectacular hair and his skill with horses and her skill with knives.
I must give Sunniva back her knives. I have them in my pack and she must be missing them. Tomorrow, after our visit, I shall return them to her.
"Pray King Christ she is," he grunted. "And hope that is all it is."
Greasing a saddle, Ragnar leaned over the hurdle that Marc had placed in front of the stable door to stop his horse from trampling the milling boys and answered softly in French, "Perhaps she misses your nieces."
"That too," Marc said, "Which is why I want them sent for."
Abruptly he began lifting Theo's hooves, to check his shoes. "Have you seen the priest of these parts?"
"No, but then I have not been looking closely." Ragnar cracked his knuckles together. "Do you remember that priest in the great church in Constantinople, who caught us carving our names in the marble pillars?"
Ragnar went off into happy reminiscence, sailing the seas of memory, raising his voice slightly to draw in his admiring audience of English lads. Marc grunted and nodded and left him to it: he was considering the absent village priest.
That night, snuggled against Sunniva as they bedded down with Ragnar's men in the great hall of the homestead, Marc had still not forgotten the priest but now he dreamed of his mother. In the dream, Matilde walked through the door of the house and up to his head, standing beside his long body, tapping a foot. In life she was svelte and light-boned, with curling dark brown hair that was grey at its ends and a handsome, hook-nosed face and deep brown eyes that her granddaughter Alde had inherited. In the dream she seemed as tall as Marc himself.
"It is time, my son," she said. "I would see my daughter-in-law."
"I know, mother," Marc replied, feeling in the dream both irritated and yet happy — the way he often felt, dealing with Matilde. "I sense the moment, too, which is why I have sent for you and my brother's girls. But you will not order Sunniva."
"As I do you, sometimes? But how you would miss my advice and resent it, if I did not! Still I would not dream of it, my son. She is a woman. She has sense. This is her land, not mine."
She smiled at him, a less generous smile than Sunniva's but still a smile, and then she vanished.
Goodbye, mother, Marc thought, rolling over, back into deeper sleep.
"But where are we going?" Sunniva asked, in the afternoon of the following day, feeling like Alde or Judith as she did so. She knew that Marc's mother and nieces were coming north to join them but she and Marc were not on Ermine Street, looking out for their party. On a bright, blue-skied, snow-clad day, Marc had walked with her through the village and out again. Already they had crossed two fields and passed by a small wood and her shoes were damp with soft snow.
"Just a stretch farther," Marc replied. "I was given precise directions."
To where? Sunniva wondered, as the muscles of her legs began to burn after kicking her way through drifts of snow. She knew of no dwellings here, on the downward slope of the great ridge.
"I must have missed the main path, but I was told she moved to this place in the summer, while you were away on pilgrimage," Marc said, his breath hanging in the still, cold air. "The mother of Arni No-Hair said everyone in the village helped to build it."
"She talked to you?" Sunniva felt obscurely aggrieved: the mother of Arni No-Hair was very shy and hardly spoke to anyone.
"Aedilberg talked to me and laughed, especially after I gave her the deer offal."
They do accept him, Sunniva realized, in wonder. And part of her was glad, but a tiny, mean side of her mind whispered that it meant he did not need her at all.
"Why did you marry me in such haste?" she asked, stopping in the snow to stared into his face.
"What is this?" he huffed, smiling down at her in a tender way that made her want to burst out carolling again. "Do you regret our wedding already?"
"Never! But why did you not want to wait until we returned to London? You could have had your family about you," she added, very cunning.
He shrugged. "I took the moment King Christ offered us." He clasped her shoulder. "Come, sweetheart, your nose is turning red with cold."
Sunniva held her groun
d. "Marc —”
He took her hand and squeezed it. "In strict truth, sweeting, I thought it best that we were married before we saw William or his brother. To them you are a valuable property, an heiress. They would say that they gave me leave to search for you after you were kidnapped because you are an heiress. And if you had been still unwed on your return to the palace of Westminster, you would have been someone to dangle before lords as a prize."
As Cena used to do," Sunniva murmured, feeling scarcely comforted.
"Look." Marc interrupted her by drawing back the snow-covered bough of a pine tree and pointing.
Sunniva felt her jaw sag with astonishment. The turf-roofed hut was perched on the side of the hill, low and partly dug into the hill so that it seemed part of the landscape. Only the smoke issuing from the smoke hole revealed a dwelling — and the pattern of footsteps running to and fro through the pine trees to the house.
"Who lives here?" she whispered.
Marc smiled. "Come and see. We are expected." He swept his long green cloak back from his arms, revealing the pannier of gifts he had brought with them.
A few more wading steps through powdery snow brought them to the well-trodden path, then a door, sunken it seemed into the hill. Marc tapped at the door while Sunniva shook the snow from her gown and cloak.
"Welcome! Good wassail!" called a voice within, and Marc crouched and entered, holding the door for Sunniva. She too ducked beneath the low wooden lintel, carved with many runes and crosses, and felt her face glow with heat from a great, glowing fire-pit, set close to the threshold.
"Welcome, Sunniva!" said the voice. "We have much to speak of. Light the candles, will you, Marc?"
Sunniva glanced at her new husband. "You know this person?" she mouthed, embarrassed when he blew her a kiss and swung past her to light rank after rank of fine wax candles — there was so many that Sunniva felt for an instant that she was in a cathedral, bathed in light.
The light flared and grew, illuminating the seated figure at the far side of the fire-pit, and a great loom, and pieces of embroidery — dozens of them, completely filling the hut. Surprised, Sunniva instinctively stepped forward to study the work, teetering for an instant at the edge of the fire-pit before Marc, with a curse, caught her back.
"She was ever thus," chuckled the figure. "Eager and quick. Her mother and all the folk hereabouts found her a delight. Only her wretched father and my miserable son thought otherwise."
Sunniva looked more closely at the figure. "I know you," she began, and then memory and recognition dawned. "Mistress Cynwise!"
"Did you think me dead?" The woman lifted a candle balanced on one of the horizontal bars of the loom and brought it close to her face.
"Of course not." Smiling at the small, plump figure opposite, Sunniva hoped that the old woman would not guess that she had not thought of her at all — not for many, many years. She felt ashamed, because an age ago, another distant time, this brown-gowned, fur-draped woman had been her mother's friend. Her thoughts flew to a scene fixed in her memory when she was quite a little child: Ethelinda and Cynwise sewing together in a small room, by daylight, while she had played with a small, rough-coated dog. She remembered her mother laughing, kissing Cynwise's round, sallow face, and wondered, with another stab of guilt, how she had ever forgotten.
"How are you?" she asked.
"Older," came back the blunt answer. "But people take care of me. Not my son, with his mind on God and higher matters, but the village folk see me right." She nodded to a bubbling pot of stew. "Serve me and your man and get some for yourself. You will be staying the night."
Sunniva glanced anxiously at Marc but that arrangement was accepted, it seemed; he had already put down his pannier of gifts and sprawled on his elbow by the fire pit, his back set against the fur-lined outer door.
"Good!" said Cynwise, stabbing her staff on the beaten earth floor in emphasis, "I like a man who can take his ease. Unlike my boy.... Have you met him yet, my son the priest?"
Sunniva was so astonished she almost dropped the stew bowl she was handing to Marc. "Your son? Father Martin is your son?" she stammered. "I never knew that!"
"Few did, only the old ones of the village. Your mother knew, of course, but she never spoke of it. The villagers were guided by her."
Marc spoke from behind his steaming bowl of stew. "Why was this kept secret, mistress?"
"Why do you think?" Cynwise blew on her bowlful of stew. "My son does not want it widely known! And you need not pity me, either," she added, pointing her spoon like a dagger at Sunniva. "We never got on. He was always a jealous, envious little beast." She shifted in her seat, scratching her shoulder against the loom. "He is supposed to be ill now. He will not leave his church, the misery!"
"But you do not believe it," Marc said, swatting a fire spark off the pannier.
"Not a bit.... Any cheese in there, Marc de Sens? Yes, young lady, I know your lord's name! He visited this morning, as a lord should. Cut me logs, he did, and very neatly, too."
"Here, mistress." Marc rummaged in the pannier, rose and stretched across the fire, dropping a small linen bundle into the old woman's lap. "Why do you think your son is pretending to be ill?"
"Because the smug, self-serving fool does not want to see her, of course." She nodded to Sunniva, her wrinkled brown eyes very sharp. "He does not want to be questioned. Somewhere in that shrivelled soul of his he is ashamed."
Abruptly, she twisted round on her seat to look Sunniva straight in the eyes. "You do look like your mother. I loved her so much."
"So did I," said Sunniva, too overcome for the moment to do more than whisper. Marc gently stroked her arm but Cynwise did not hear; she was still speaking.
"My son made me give your mother up, give up our friendship while you were still a child. He said it was unseemly for the lady of the lord, and the daughter of the lord, to visit my house. Unseemly!" she snorted. "He was ever ashamed of me."
No, he was jealous, Sunniva thought.
"He envied your friendship," Marc remarked. "Did he have few friends himself?"
"None."
She spoke with relish, Sunniva thought, and her disquiet deepened.
"Did Cena give him small respect?" Marc persisted.
"Cena? Cena thought him a useless mouth to feed. Which he is! When old mother Friga's cat died last month, he would not give the creature a blessing! He told her it was not Christian. As if he would know!"
Sunniva glanced at Marc. The woman's bitterness filled the hut and she wondered why. A suspicion hovered in her mind but she hesitated to ask, in case she caused more pain.
"You hate your son," said Marc in his deep, calm voice. "I think at times all mothers do."
"No son can be as bad as mine," Cynwise rapped back, fast as the shuttle in her loom. "You think I cast him off? He rejected me! And after he had taken my promise. Even that was not enough for him!"
When my mother was ill, all that long winter and spring, this woman never visited, Sunniva remembered. My memories of her are all when my mother was young and I was a child. "I have not seen you to speak to for years," she said aloud. "Why is that?"
"My son's doing! He told me Cena did not want me to be friendly to Ethelinda, that I was coming between Ethelinda and Cena! I asked Ethelinda and she admitted that Cena was berating her after each time we were together. I asked my son to speak as priest to Cena, to ask for charity and allow two women to be friends. Do you know what my son did? He went to Ethelinda and told her she must respect her husband's wishes and obey him! Ethelinda felt she had no choice but to break with me. Then my son made me promise that I would not approach Ethelinda first. I thought that would satisfy him and Cena, but weeks turned into months and Ethelinda never came near. My son never came near me, either. It was years later before he admitted that he had told Ethelinda that I no longer wanted to see her."
The old woman's lip curled. "He waited until she was dead before he told me. Then, when it was too late, he claimed he
told that lie for a higher good. Those were his words, 'Higher good'. He was a meddler! He did it because he could not bear to see me happy! I moved out of the village after that. I could not bear to see his smug face."
Listening, Sunniva could only be sorry — even for Father Martin. If mother and son truly endured the relationship Cynwise had described, then no one in this sad triangle was the winner. As a son, it must be hard for Father Martin to know that his own mother despised him.
"I wanted to be your nurse, but my son stopped that," Cynwise went on. "He knew I loved you more than I loved him."
Sunniva sighed, pitying the poor priest even more.
"He is not your friend," Marc breathed warningly in her ear. "And now I hear more of Mistress Cynwise, I am not sure she is, either."
"So why are we here?" Sunniva whispered.
"To learn of your parents, I hope. Someone must know the story. I thought it might be this woman."
"Finished talking between yourselves, have you?" Mistress Cynwise asked, with a scowl.
Marc answered something that Sunniva missed; she was thinking of her mother. "Did my mother have a paramour?" she almost asked, but stopped herself in time — how would she know if the answer was true?
Poor Marc — he brought me here to try to help me and yet it seems we are on a wasted journey. Cynwise is too old, and too bitter.
She put down her stew bowl and looked about the hut, idly allowing her eyes to rest here and there. She did not know what she was seeking; inspiration of a sort, some sign.
And then she saw them. Between the newer, simpler samples of embroidery were older pieces, stretched on frames to best show off the skilful work. Sunniva rose and weaved a careful path through the frames, intent on two pieces in particular.
She picked up the nearest candle and looked closely at the pair.
"This is my mother's work," she breathed. "I remember her making this embroidery when I was younger than Isabella, although I have not seen it since."
She turned back to a startled Marc and a blushing Cynwise. "Why do you have my mother's embroidery?"
Love and Chivalry: Four Medieval Historical Romances Page 56