“Now try to glide on them,” Robert said, demonstrating. His blades cut through the ice as he slid forward. He hardly even seemed to be making an effort.
Well, he may have been my older brother, and he may have had far more experience than I did, but I was not about to let Robert best me. Throwing caution to the wind, I pushed forward and my skates glided across the ice. Oh, it was perfect! It was magic! I was doing it! Then I recognized that my feet were not sliding on the ice so much as they were sliding out from under me.
Before I even had time to scream, I was flat on my back. My whole body felt at once very cold and very sore.
“Ow!” I cried. “God Almighty, ow!”
I could feel the pain surging through my body. Then I heard the sound of Robert’s blades, and soon he was hovering over me, asking, “Are you hurt?”
I carefully moved each of my limbs and determined that they were in good working order. “Nothing seems to be broken.”
“See, I told you. Now, come on! Get back up!”
“Actually, I feel quite safe laying here. I think maybe I’ll remain until morning.”
“Very well. You’ll take a chill and die, but who am I to stop you?”
A terrible question occurred to me. “Would it be so bad if I died? I mean, would anyone miss me?”
Frowning, he bent down and pulled me back on to my feet.
“There you are, Empress Despair” he said. “Now, I’ll have no more talk of dying, or misery, or anything like it. This spirit of defeat is not helpful.”
“Easy for you to say,” I muttered.
“What was that?”
“Easy for you to say!” I repeated more forcefully. “You’re not the one who’s been through it and then some these past few months.”
He smiled and took hold of each of my arms at the elbow. “Hold on to me tight,” he instructed, and I did as he said. He began to skate backward, pulling me along.
“Not so fast!” I cried.
He paid no attention to me but continued to move in a circle. Slowly, I grew more comfortable. Indeed, I was almost enjoying myself. It was something between dancing and flying: a kind of movement I had never experienced.
“Keep holding tight,” he said, stopping in place and swinging me around.
We were spinning on the ice. It felt terrible and wonderful all at once. For the space of a breath, I leaned my head back and looked up at the stars as they spun above me. It was like something out of a dream. I looked back at Robert and we laughed.
“See, I told you this would be fun!” he said.
“Yes, but I’m getting rather diz—”
Then it happened again. I fell hard on to the ice, only this time it was not my own fault. I had been pulled down by my brother, or rather he had fallen down and I fell on top of him.
“Sorry!” he told me, as we both sat back up, holding on to the most painful spots on our bodies. “I must have caught a rough patch.”
I did not reply, but simply rubbed my shoulder, which had taken the worst of it. I could only imagine the bruises I would have the next day.
“It hurts,” said Robert. “It must hurt fiercely.”
“I dare say I’ll recover,” I remarked, attempting to stand under my own power.
“It hurts to fall: to try so hard, and then have your legs taken out from under you.”
I sensed that we were no longer talking about skating. I watched as he pulled himself up from the ice and brushed himself off. We looked each other in the eye, our faces illuminated only slightly by the torches.
“Was this meant to be a parable of some kind?” I asked.
“No, mostly it was for fun. You’ve been locked in a prison of misery for weeks, and I thought something new might do you good. If a point is made as a result, so much the better.”
“Because you could have taught me about falling and getting back up without putting me through all this.”
“Maybe,” he said softly, “but you’re more likely to remember it this way, aren’t you?”
“I don’t think my body will let me forget it for at least a week,” I muttered, rubbing my shoulder again.
He placed his hands on my arms and rubbed them to warm me. “Just remember this: everyone falls at times, but you must not stay down. Staying down is death.”
“Peace, Socrates! My bones can bear no more of your lessons. Now, can we return to the palace?”
“Very well. Your wish is my command.”
We hobbled more than skated off the ice, then exchanged the painful shoes for our original ones. Oh, how wonderful they felt! As we gathered up the torches and snuffed them out in the snow, Robert spoke again.
“They don’t have any power over you unless you allow them to.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, thrusting one of the flames into the snow.
“The king is powerful—that much is certain—but he is not all-powerful. He does not control your thoughts or your feelings. Neither does Lord Brian. Yet you have been allowing them to control you. You have been withdrawing out of fear of them, when you ought to be striding out as a conqueror.”
I had snuffed out all my sticks and was standing in place, waiting to hand them to my brother. He was busy placing his own back in the bag.
“Robert, what exactly would you have me do?” I asked. “I am little more than a pawn in this situation. I have no control over my own destiny. More to the point, I do not see how you can argue that my feelings are exempt from the actions of others, when our father has gone to great lengths to make me fear him, and the love I felt—that I still feel—for Lord Brian is not something that simply goes away overnight.”
“Nor would I think it would,” he said, taking the sticks from my hands.
“Then I ask again, what would you have me do? I cannot forget the past. It is a part of me. Nor can I do much about the future.”
“That is where you are wrong!”
He finished placing the last of the sticks in the bag and turned to face me again, grasping each of my arms. I struggled to make out his face in the dark, but his voice I could hear well enough.
“You know why I have always liked you, Maud?”
This seemed to me a very odd question. “Because I am your sister?”
“No!” he said firmly. “Plenty of people hate their blood relations. I like you because you are like a man.”
“Oh. Well, now I feel wonderful!” I cried with derision.
“Hear me out!” he begged. “You are a woman, sure enough, but you are strong, intelligent, and you have a will.”
“Do you mean to say that other women do not have these qualities? That they are not given to us by God? I should spit on you! Truly, I should!”
He laughed. “See, this is what I mean! You can sense foolishness a mile away, and you are stubborn as an ox. You are not afraid to speak your mind when necessary. Had you been born a man, they would have gladly made you a king.”
“Is there a point to this, or do you simply intend to go on comparing me to beasts?” I asked, speaking as much on account of my frozen toes as anything else.
“That you have been through difficulties, I do not deny,” he continued, “but there is much about your future that you still control. You can choose who to live for—what to live for. Other people may have their own aims for you, but you can set your own, even if it is known only to yourself. You say you have been miserable, but you can seize joy! You can create it within yourself. Every day, when you wake up, say, ‘I am not living for the king today. I am living for myself. If I obey him, it is only to achieve my own ends.’”
“Are you implying that I can simply produce joy within myself just by wishing it to be there?” I asked. The suggestion seemed truly absurd.
“No. You produce it by pursuing your desires to the utmost whenever you can: by milking as much pleasure out of this life as possible!”
I shook my head. “I will not win if I fight the king.”
“You don’t have to fight h
im. You just have to wait him out. You are the heir to the throne of England! One day, he will die, and you will be able to set your own destiny. Start working for that now!”
My brother was saying a lot of things, some of which seemed wise, but for whatever reason, I did not feel I could fully adopt his method. For one thing, I did not possess as much confidence in myself as he apparently did.
“All of this is well and good,” I said, “but I do not think I could stop loving Brian. When you give your heart to someone as I did to him, it leaves a mark on you. I think he will always have a hold on me.”
“You can share his bed for all I care, but that doesn’t mean he has to rule over you. He cannot be your final goal.”
“I know that well enough,” I whispered. “Whatever hopes I had for him are long dead, and there is no question of me sharing his bed. Even if I had no respect for the laws of scripture, he does not think of me in that way any more, if he ever truly did. I just—I miss him, Robert. I miss what we had. He used to tell me what he was reading: some play of Seneca, a bard of Aquitaine, an astronomer of Cordoba, or the book of King William. Even if it was simply the royal charters, I loved when he would tell me about them. I loved to hear his mind at work. He would teach me things—tell me stories. He always told me I was just as intelligent as him, but I knew better. At least I was wise enough to value such a mind, but it has left a hole for me now. I may never find its equal again. I miss our conversations. I miss him.”
I had cast my eyes down toward my right foot, which was digging into the snow. I was not entirely comfortable discussing this subject, even with my brother.
“Look at me, Maud,” he said, and I did. “Let him go. He no longer has a claim on your heart, so don’t give it to him.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath in and out. “I am letting him go,” I said.
“Yes, good. Keep telling yourself that.”
“I am letting him go!” I cried. Yes, I was crying tears as well as words.
We stood there embracing for a minute or so, then mounted the horses and began the long ride back to Westminster, where I hoped very much to climb straight into bed and sleep until noon the next day.
“The people that walked in darkness, have seen a great light: they that dwelled in the land of the shadow of death, upon them has the light shined.”[12]
The prophet Isaiah wrote those words about the coming of our Savior, but he may as well have been speaking of England around the anniversary of Christ’s birth. No one knows darkness until they step outside mid afternoon and find the sun already set. Ah, England in winter! The jolliest soul might be driven to despair by that eternal gloom. That is why, even before they saw the light of Christ, the peoples of these lands held great feasts in the middle of winter, for though we may be without harvest, we are not without hearth.
Our Savior came to earth at its darkest hour, all the better for his light to shine. That Christmas may not have been my darkest hour, but it was certainly among the worst. I had striven to follow Robert’s advice, but try as I might, I found it difficult to seize joy, nor did I see how merely seeking pleasure was a worthy life pursuit. When I obeyed the king’s call to Windsor, it was with a heavy heart. I did not foresee a joyous season.
Since the ruinous incidents of that autumn, I had employed every means possible to distract myself. I began by sewing—never a particular skill of mine in my youth, and as it turned out, nothing had changed. I made pilgrimages to Waltham, Saint Albans, and the new abbey in Reading, where the hand of Saint James had been sent. I must have played one hundred games of checks with brother Robert. How kind he was to humor me! And of course, I read.
It was in those hours of reading that I particularly came to enjoy the poetry of Archbishop Hildebert of Tours, an old friend to our family. Such a blessing I received from his verses!
“Alpha et Omega, magne Deus!
Heli! Heli! Deus meus,
Cujus virtus totum posse,
Cujus sensus totum nosse,
Cujus esse summum bonum;
Cujus opus, quidquid bonum.”
Thus on and so forth read the lyrics of his most famous hymn, a testament to the Holy Trinity. I was so impressed that I wrote to him of my admiration for his work. A few weeks passed before we received a reply. I was making ready to leave for Windsor when Drogo entered my private chamber bearing a chest that despite its medium size seemed rather heavy, if the bend in his knees was any evidence.
“What on earth is that?” I asked.
“From Tours—it just arrived,” the knight replied.
“From Tours? That must be from the archbishop. Open it!”
He placed it on the table near the door, opened the latch, and lifted the lid. For a moment, he simply examined the contents as I looked on, eagerly awaiting an explanation.
“I think you will like this,” he said, looking up once again.
“What is it?”
He smiled broadly and raised his brows. “Wine: lots of it.”
“Really?” I said, with some surprise.
“See for yourself.”
He stepped back, allowing me to move forward and look into the chest, which certainly did include eight bottles of the finest wine the Loire Valley had to offer, along with a sealed letter. I lifted one of the bottles and turned it around in my hand, examining every side.
“This is a kingly gift,” I said. “Here, Drogo: for your service.”
I extended my arm to hand him the bottle, but he stepped back and raised his hands.
“I couldn’t, my lady!”
“Oh, yes you could. Happy Christmas!”
He finally gave in and accepted the gift. As he continued to examine his treasure, I broke the seal on the letter and spent a moment reading it.
“What does it say?” Drogo asked.
I turned to see that he had set the bottle aside and was looking over my shoulder. “It is a poem made out to me by the archbishop.”
“A poem? About what?”
“About myself.”
“Oh … good or bad?”
“Good, I think. I haven’t read it all yet.”
“Well, go on then.”
“Very well. Let’s see …” I looked back down at the piece of parchment in my hand. “It’s in Latin. Let me try to translate it: ‘Born to august parents, Mathilda is more august still, in whatever praises’—No, forgive me—‘You evoke praises from skilled mouths, but in vain, for no one can render praise unto you which your birth and customs and beauty demand.’ Ha! The man has never laid eyes on me! ‘A tongue may make utterance about you, but you alone provide the matter of highest praise to all tongues. Your queenly face is fragrant like juniper, serious in gait, a beauty not fashioned by art. Learning did not lend sacred customs, a virgin modesty: each flowed from your ancestors.’ Virgin modesty? There are some who might disagree with that! Now, where was I? ‘You have it all from your mother who, closed in the tomb, gives light to the English kingdom with her merits, and lest the glory of the female sex should decline, she gave birth to you, fully reborn in your birth. Not born only once, the parent lies in the urn, rules in the court, here beside men, above beside God.’ Well, that is nice that he should speak of my mother. I wonder how well he knew her?”
“Are we near the end?” Drogo whined.
“Yes, yes—I am getting there. ‘Beside God, she sees how all that is left is nothing, how her daughter holding the scepter is … poor.’ Can that be right? Hmm … ‘Herself secure, I think she watches over you, and beseeches her maker thus …’ Ah, I think this is supposed to be my mother speaking now. ‘I have not yet been admitted fully to the heavenly see, great God, I enjoy only somewhat blessed rest.’”
“Is he saying she is in purgatory?” he asked, sounding as if he took offense.
“No, here we go: ‘A part lies in the tomb, a part governs the English kingdom—the court, the tomb, and heaven hold me divided. Help the one in the court, reform the one in the tomb, hear the one in
heaven, and be a crown to all three.’”
“Well … that was certainly strange,” Drogo concluded.
I set the letter back in the chest and took a moment to think. It was certainly nice to hear anyone speak of my mother. It made me think of a happier time in my life, but more than that, it caused me to remember what kind of a woman my mother was. She had sacrificed her own desires so many times on behalf of others. Her love was not selfish, but deep and pure. I recognized that I wanted to be that sort of person, but I didn’t know if it was possible for me. After all, my mother was so good. She seemed to live closer to God than the rest of us. Did she have something to teach me about purpose? In the end, I could not decide, and I recognized that Drogo was still standing there, waiting for me to say something. I therefore obliged him.
“I liked it, how it spoke of my mother looking down on me.”
“Hmm … maybe. I think I shall never enjoy poetry though.”
“That is why you are a knight, Drogo, though these days even knights are fond of verses. I must write to Archbishop Hildebert and thank him for these lovely words.”
“Thank him for the wine. The words, eh,” he said with a shrug.
“I do wish my mother was here now. I would ask her what I should do about the Anjou boy.”
“Why don’t you ask your friend the archbishop? Is he not in the lands of the Angevins?”
My knight had hit on something truly helpful, and it improved my mood. “Yes, he is. Excellent, Drogo! Now, let me just gather my things together and then you can take them down to the cart.” I walked around the bed with its high posts and looked at the objects I had been gathering on the other side of the room, pointing at each in turn. “We have the gifts for the king and queen, Bishop Salisbury—Heaven help us!—Lady Elizabeth, Beaumont, Beaumont … Drogo, are you paying attention?”
I turned around to see him testing the wine, which is to say taking a long drink straight out of the bottle.
“You couldn’t wait until I was done?” I asked.
He closed his eyes to savor the drink, a look of contentment on his face.
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