Aelwin had nothing to lose and a certain resentful courage seeped back with the boldness of the lie.
Mother Elinor closed her eyes, crossed herself. When she spoke, her voice was bleak. ‘I do not believe you. God does not believe you. Go to your cell. You are to stay there and meditate on your sins without food until you are summoned. The archbishop must advise me in this matter.’
Aelwin shuffled from the chapel, badly shaken, in the custody of the porteress. It was so unfair. She had been threatened by the baron’s son when he’d tried to force his way into the convent looking for Anne, until, later, he’d found that money provided a more useful path to knowledge; money that Aelwin planned to use in buying herself the abbess’s seat when the nuns next elected their superior.
That dream was now ashes and the prioress snuffled tearfully as she was locked, locked! into her cell by the porteress to wait on the pleasure of the abbess. Aelwin now knew, with searing clarity, that money was the root of all evil. She’d taken Sir Henry’s coin and that had made her think of milking the baron as well, to add to her election hoard. But Sister Bertha, her enemy, had betrayed Aelwin to Elinor. She’d seen the prioress talking covertly to the baron outside the walls of the convent — the day after Anne and Joan had left the convent, the evening of the same day his son tried to storm the gate — and watched as Aelwin accepted the old man’s bribe.
Aelwin was deeply, deeply resentful. It seemed the world had come undone; her career at Our Lady of the Sands was over; the Mother Superior would see to that when she spoke with the archbishop.
Elinor had won, the convent was hers now. God and Mammon — perhaps it was true? The evil one had tempted her and she had fallen; fallen for half an Angel and one silver sixpence. Nowhere near thirty pieces of silver, nowhere near.
Chapter Forty-Five
The third day since Anne and Joan had left the convent was nearly ended, yet the women continued to push themselves and their little donkey as fast as they could heading north, always north, towards Whitby, driven by Anne’s passion to go home to Brugge, to go home to her son.
The hare meat, the bannock and sheep’s cheese Mother Elinor had supplied them with were finished, and now they were chilled and hungry as the last light of day leached out of the western sky.
Behind them, the empty moor stretched away with no sign of shelter anywhere amongst the billows of heather.
Beside them, they could just make out the line of cliffs in the evening gloom. They’d have to stop soon, find what shelter they could, for walking tonight would be treacherous — too much cloud cover for the moon to light their way.
Anne shivered. Over the last days they’d been careful to avoid all roads and most tracks, reasoning that some few travellers would still be abroad whilst the ways were passable. But it was very lonely; this world of heather and sky was nearly silent, and, walking close to the edge of the gorse-clad clifftop, Anne longed, really longed, for the sound of voices, for lights to break up the gloom.
Would the candles be lit in the big house in Brugge now? Would her son be in the kitchen, warm and snug, with Deborah? And where was the king? Did he think of her, as she did of him?
Sometimes Anne’s courage failed as night came down, for it was then she felt most achingly alone in the world. Joan had become a friend, yes, but she wanted her son and she needed his father! If only they could hurry the journey to Whitby. Each day that passed brought them closer to winter, closer to the time when passage sailing across the open sea could not be bought, at any price.
Anne trembled convulsively. The wind from the east cut to the skin. Be practical, be sensible — and first, find somewhere to sleep tonight. They might find a way down to the shingled beach far below and perhaps there’d be a cave to shelter in? Anne was suddenly despondent. A cave, a dank cave? Had they become animals?
‘Anne!’ Joan’s voice was unnaturally loud and jerked Anne out of her reverie. ‘Look!’
From her greater height on top of the donkey, the nun had seen another, broader track joining the path they were on. It was just beneath the brow of the little hill that Brendan was stolidly plodding over and it led towards the edge of the cliff.
There was a way down to the sea!
‘Should we?’ Joan was nervous, but unless they could face sleeping on the open moor without a fire — in this large, rolling empty place, flames would be seen for miles and miles at night — they had little choice.
‘Yes. It will be fine on the beach, a good place, you’ll see. Perhaps there’ll be welks or even oysters to find.’ Anne was determined to keep Joan’s spirits up.
Suddenly a woman’s voice called to them from nowhere. ‘Hola! Hola, Sisters. Are you lost?’
A woman’s head appeared over the lip of the cliff, immediately followed by the rest of her body, clothed in home-woven woollen cloth. Then they caught her reek. Fish! She smelt of fish and smoke in equal parts — pungently.
‘Not lost, kind friend. That is, we’re on pilgrimage and may be a little off our chosen path.’
‘Ah, aren’t we all now, Sisters?’ The stranger laughed heartily, kindly.
Anne took the initiative. ‘Do you know if there’s somewhere we could pass the night nearby? A farmstead, perhaps?’
The woman shook her head. ‘There’s nowt up here.’ Seeing their faces fall, she smiled broadly. ‘But, never despair, the Bay’s just below.’
‘The Bay?’ Joan was disheartened all over again. To sleep on the shingle strand on a night such as this was a more than miserable thought.
‘Aye. Just let me get my Gwennie and I’ll take you down.’
Gwennie? Anne was puzzled, but a goat’s bleat of welcome made both she and Joan swing around to see their new friend stride up to a very handsome brown nanny goat, udders heavy with milk, who was hobbled in a dip beside the path.
‘There, sweet Gwen, time for home and the byre.’ The woman uncoupled the hobble from her legs. ‘Come now, Sisters, a fire and food is what you need.’
The girls were considerably cheered as Anne led Brendan, carrying the apprehensive Joan, over the lip of the clifftop path and there saw, far below, a group of tiny grey houses huddled into the base of the tall cliff. There was a harbour too, crowded with fishing smacks moored for the night. It was a fishers’ village with well-lit windows and the sound of human voices washing up on the wind from within the natural amphitheatre of the cliff.
Anne’s prayer had been answered, and for a moment she closed her eyes in gratitude. She opened them quickly, as wind, rising off the sea below, fluttered her veil and the skirts of her habit. Below, seabirds flew beneath her feet in the air of the dizzying drop, for it was a narrow track they followed on the cliff-face in the last of the light.
Gwennie, bleating, led them, anxious to be home. After her came Margery, for that was their new friend’s name, and then the terrified Joan, who was perched, sweating with fear, on Brendan’s back.
‘Just trust to the donkey’s feet, Sister, he’ll not let you down.’ Margery was a kind woman and a moment before she’d chanced to look back to see Joan’s rigid face and terrified eyes. Others were frightened of heights, that she knew, but for one who came up and down this path twice each day, and had since she could toddle, it was a wonder to see that fear so freshly in another.
‘Not far now, see, there’s my cot. You’ll stay with me and my good man.’
Robin Hod’s Bay had been part of the cliff a long time, a very long time. One of the few natural harbours on this wild part of the north-east coast, fishermen had come and gone from here after the cod, and the herring-schools for times long past remembering.
‘Come now, Gwen — milking for you.’ Anne and Joan no longer noticed Margery’s smell, for the evening breeze off the sea brought them an even greater one — the pungent tang of beached and rotting kelp, fish guts and coal smoke from the houses. It was a stink as sturdy as the solid stone of the houses they now walked amongst. Anne, breathing deeply of the cold, moving air, decided th
ere were many worse things in the world than a stench she was unused to. This was a good place. And good people lived here. Friends.
Margery led them to the last house in the steep, twisting street. It sat, huddled by itself, directly next to the curve of the sea wall protecting the harbour.
Anne, who had never thought of herself as tall, had to stoop as she followed Joan into Margery’s house through a narrow door barely wider than her own hips.
As the door shut behind the women, it took a moment to adjust to the gloom and the noise, for the communal downstairs room where Margery’s family ate and lived was filled with the sound of the sea, wash and slump, wash and slump. That, and the clamour of small, busy children.
It was low-raftered and small, the room they’d entered. And hung from numberless hooks on the ceiling — just to be glimpsed in the light from the fire, the only source of illumination now that last light had gone from the sky — was row after row of drying cod, stock to last the family through the winter. The eye-watering fish-miasma, coupled with smoke from the kelp and sea-coal fire with its salt-blue flames, set Joan choking until Anne banged her vigorously on the back.
Margery, who hurried in just after the two women, made rushed introductions as she found her milking pails.
‘Bernard, here, is my husband, Sisters. Big Bernard, he’s called, because he’s the da of my babies. And this is little Bernard, and Alice, and Mary and ... there you are, Jennet. Seat yourselves, I’ll just milk Gwen and put Brendan in the byre with her. Then we can eat.’
He wasn’t especially big, the man who stood to greet his guests, a wriggling, giggling two-year-old clasped in his arms. He’d been sitting by his fire on a settle, bare feet companionably towards the flames as all around him and under his legs played three other children of ascending ages, scrabbling as they threw ‘jacks’ made from knuckle bones on the beaten earth floor.
‘Welcome to my house, Sisters. Welcome.’ A surprisingly deep, very slow voice rumbled up from inside Bernard’s chest as he pressed the women to sit where he’d been sitting in the warmest part of the room beside the fire. For Joan and Anne, his slow, gentle ways, his calm, were comforting after days spent facing the uncertainty of the world outside the convent.
Bernard, seeing how exhausted both women were, took horn beakers and filled them with hot, steaming broth from a three-legged pot stationed at the front of the banked fire.
‘Drink!’ The man held out a beaker to each of the women in turn as Anne, shaky with gratitude, tried to thank Margery’s husband for his welcome.
‘Sir, you and your wife are most kind. It was dark on the moor and we had nowhere to sleep.’
‘Well, Sister, sleep you shall here.’ Margery appeared through the door, a bleached wooden pail in each hand filled with milk that was plaster-white in the gloom. A gust of sea wind came with her, skirling through the little room, sparking up the fire and causing the cod, overhead, to sway and nod. Almost like a field of flowers, thought Anne, absurdly.
Flowers. And the smell of flowers. Edward had given her flowers, a bunch of roses, white ones, the last time they’d made love in late summer on his fur-lined cloak on the floor in the Prinsenhof. To dream so sweetly, eyes open, was to remember what came next. What the runes had said. Storm, sacrifice. Hard, hard lessons and loss.
Anne’s eyes filled with unwilling tears and Margery was kind for the light of the fire caught the welling glint in Anne’s eyes. ‘Ah, you’re tired. We will eat and then you can sleep, both of you. Tomorrow will be better.’
It was quickly done, the children scattered from under their mother’s feet as she and Big Bernard quickly assembled a trestle-board, stored under the ladder to the upstairs room, for them all to eat at. Large bowls of red earthenware appeared from a cupboard — the one piece of furniture larger than a stool which the room boasted, with the exception of the fire-settle.
Anne and Joan sat with Mary and Jennet squashed between them on the backless plank form, while on the other side of the board, Bernard had the smallest, little Bernard, on his knee whilst Alice, an exquisite three-year-old whose tangled black curls clustered like grapes around a face of ivory and rose, cuddled up to his side.
Margery busied herself shuttling food from the fire to the table. There was a huge wooden bowl of good soup packed with pieces of white fish; a large, solid flour-covered loaf of barley bread; butter made from goats milk: almost white, rather than yellow; and a mound of small neaps, turnips, topped with crumbled goats cheese. It was substantial bounty from the sea and the small gardens that the villagers kept in sheltered places at the top of the cliffs.
‘Will you bless our meal, Sisters?’ Anne was embarrassed and flicked her eyes towards Joan, but the nun smiled, nodded at her friend, encouraging her.
‘Father, Mother, bless us all. Guard this family, and this house; keep them safe from all harm. May your sea and your sky be their friends, their garden, their farm. We are grateful for safe harbour here, and for this food.’
Anne spoke the words softly and for a moment the world receded into peace. She was hungry, so hungry, that food had never, ever tasted this good, this rich, or been so filling.
That night as they all slept together — crammed in the one large box-bed nearly the size of the room above on a ticking mattress stuffed with heather — Anne lay awake, little Bernard cuddled, breathing softly, against her body.
In the fitful moonlight, as the clouds came and went outside the one small window with its panes of horn, she could almost mistake this baby for Edward. Oh, let Edward be safe. Man and child both.
Eventually she slept, as the room filled up with the sound of the sea and all of them breathed as one.
Chapter Forty-Six
Worrying dispatches had arrived from York. The threat reported by Elisabeth to the king in Brugge was real once more: the north was beginning to rise.
Edward paced impatiently as his secretary droned on, laboriously translating the cipher of the letter from Richard as he read.
‘... and they have money from France. The rebels are being run ... out of the Borders; a French spy has been sighted ... hiding at a convent near here; the old queen is massing men in France and ... I need an army if we are to hold ... what we have now. Come quickly or all may be lost.’
The secretary could not help himself, he looked up fearfully as he read the last words. The king fixed him with a glance.
‘Be careful, Dickon, very careful.’
The man fought fear with pride. The king must be worried indeed if he thought for one moment that he, Dickon de Gracey, might betray the trust he held — that of utter silence on all he heard and saw in this, the king’s own private closet: the room from which he effectively ruled the kingdom.
Dickon was stoic. ‘What would Your Majesty prefer I do with this?’ He held up the parchment with the duke’s cipher on it, wriggling black symbols that seemed unnaturally bold on the cream calf-skin.
‘Here.’ The king held out one hand and as he was given the document, waved towards the door.
‘Go. But I will need you at first light tomorrow.’
Edward was not normally suspicious, or unkind to his servants, but the times were making him shorter, less instinctively polite. Turning his back on his secretary, who bowed himself from the room, Edward tossed the document on the fire and as the flames consumed the dried skin, the smell of burning flesh filled the room though the calf itself, origin of the vellum, was long, long since dead.
The king turned to William Hastings, quietly nursing a beaker of honeyed wine beside the fire.
‘Well, what do you think?’
With a sigh, William stood and joined the king, looking deeply into the heart of the coals.
‘There must be real need, or Richard would not ask. We will move as fast as we can.’
The two men were silent for a moment, each thinking of what must be done.
‘The queen will have to be told.’ Edward said it almost absently, as William kicked a log which
was threatening to roll out onto the hearth. The chamberlain nodded. ‘She will understand.’ It was an optimistic statement. Elisabeth, the mother-to-be, would be most unhappy when she heard the king had left for the north. The queen who’d brought news to Brugge of the mischief being wrought in the borders earlier in the year would know the king had to act. Yet pregnancy changed things — a woman wanted protection and reassurance at such a time from the father of her baby, even if he was a king, and even if they, man and wife, were estranged.
Unspoken, the thought hovered. Thus far Elisabeth had only had girl children. The king dearly loved his little daughters, but they would only be useful to the kingdom at a marriageable age. The country needed a male heir, especially now. Edward’s thoughts went to the little boy riding for York. And then he saw Anne’s face in the coals of the fire, laughing. The intensity took him still — the pain, the fear, did not dull with time. Abruptly he shook his head, hard.
Hastings watched covertly, but the king caught his eye, even grinned ruefully. ‘You know it and I know it. I must ride north with the small band with as much speed as we can find.’ Edward meant the men referred to as his ‘riding court’ — trusted friends and fighting companions from the wars who had put him on his throne. ‘I’ll raise the Standard with Richard; and you must bring me an army, parliament willing or not.’
Both men grimaced; they knew that assembling a real fighting force would take time — and parliament must be convinced of the danger. Soldiers were expensive line items in the country’s ledgers.
The times were nervous, though, very nervous, and Edward had taken the precaution to retain and feed the levies of men raised from the shires since before the last summer. At one time, earlier in the year before the wedding, he’d seriously considered an invasion of France itself, had even got so far as an inconclusive sea campaign, until he thought better of the expense of an all-out war.
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