If he reached out his arm his fingertips would graze her back, and yet he felt as though there was a yawning gap between them, one that he could not bridge.
Hirel propped himself up on one elbow. ‘Wife?’
She neither moved nor answered, and this annoyed him. The night was cold, and he wanted her body next to his, to warm him as much as for his pleasure and the kindling of the child he wanted so badly. And she was sitting so as to block the little heat from reaching him. ‘Bank the hearth and come to bed.’
She responded with a shrug of her shoulders that could have been designed to anger him, but he was determined not to let her goad him to fury, not this time. Tucked in the pouch around his neck was the silver penny that Luda had finally handed over, and Hirel came to an uncharacteristically sudden decision. Putting a smile on his wife’s face was not something that could wait until the first merchant ship or wandering pedlar came by in the spring when the sea-roads reopened. Give her the penny, and she could pass the winter with the pleasure of planning and choosing for herself.
‘Do as you’re told...’ He paused. ‘...and I’ve a gift for you, wife.’
That shrug again.
‘Wife?’
She muttered something.
‘What?’
‘Stop calling me that!’
Hirel felt an increasingly familiar surge of fury rising up from some pit of fire deep inside him, and he forced himself to keep breathing, to swallow it back. Shouting at her had got him nowhere. ‘Be firm with her,’ Luda had told him, ‘that lass needs a strong hand. Belt her if need be.’ But if he yelled at her, she just screamed back at him; and the one time he had taken her father’s advice and given her a smack she had brooded and huffed, and refused to let him near her for days on end. That had been a few weeks back, when he had first brought the flocks down to graze the home fields, and the blow had come because he had been so hurt and angry at her chilly welcome.
‘Saethryth? Look.’
He was fumbling with the tight thongs of the pouch, all his attention engrossed in unpicking the hard little knots. But, when he looked for her again, the silver penny pinched between his clumsy, stained fingertips, she was gone. The door was settling back on its leather hinges.
Hirel swore. His first thought was to go after her, and then he felt aggrieved again. He was bone-weary, and the heap of blankets, topped with a couple of sheepskins, was only just warming up. This wasn’t what he had bargained for when he and Luda had gone to Elfrun to tell her that the marriage was in the wind and Saethryth was willing.
Willing.
He swore again, and shoved the blankets to one side.
Outside the house the night was even colder, the heavens clear and a filling moon tangled in the top branches of the elder thicket. There would be ice on the puddles come the morning. Somewhere off to the west a vixen barked. Hirel turned east and south, he wasn’t sure why, towards the sheep-track that led ultimately down to the minster pastures. He trod softly, bare feet careful on the slick grass, but if she wanted to avoid him it would be easy enough, he knew. He was a big dark shape lumbering and crunching though the silver night.
Was he even going in the right direction? He stopped, and peered back up the slope. The moon was bright enough to cast a long shape, and he could see nothing moving, nor could he make out any huddled shadow that might be Saethryth holding her breath, waiting until he had gone.
What was wrong with the woman?
He was a good catch, a steady worker, a free man. He was young and healthy. There were sheep of his own running among those of hall and minster. He might not have the standing of her father, but he had thought her glad enough to get away from under her parents’ roof. You didn’t have to stand and gossip like the old women to know that Luda had a heavy hand. You only had to be near the steward’s house with a pair of ears on you. His wife fought back, though. That would be where Saethryth had learned her shrill curses.
Married all these weeks, and he’d only smacked her once. She should be counting her blessings.
Hirel carried on down the hill, for lack of a better option. She could have gone down the other track, the one that led to the hall. Back to her parents’ house, as well, though. Or turned uphill, and followed the winding path that climbed at last to reach the summer pasture. But she would find no shelter up there, not in December.
He wanted to call her name, but the midwinter night was too huge and silent. He felt as though his voice would be swallowed up by the moonlit emptiness. What if he tried to shout and no sound came from his lungs?
‘Wife?’ His voice was tentative enough. But she’d asked him not to call her that, though he loved its soft syllable. ‘Saethryth?’ The land rose before falling away again, and from here he could see the moonlight on the still waters of the sea, a silver streak on the horizon. The cold in the back of his nostrils told him again that ice was coming.
How far did Saethryth expect him to follow her? Hirel had thought he would have found her by now, waiting for him, chilled and penitent, wanting him to plead with her just once more to come home. He thought with a sudden savage pleasure of the satisfaction it would give him to put a ring in her nose and a rope through it, force her to do his will that way, as though she were one of the beasts.
The beasts were so much easier.
And he had had enough. He was cold, and his bed was waiting for him. From here the path went down into the stands of timber, and she could be hiding anywhere. She could play her stupid little games on her own. Hirel turned abruptly, and as he did so he stumbled. The silver penny, which he had forgotten he was clutching between his cold fingers, flew into the sagging tangles of winter grass.
Hirel stared after it in disbelief. There would be no finding it, not in this light which made everything shine silver. But that didn’t stop him from falling to his knees and rummaging through the dead grass after the little hammered disc of metal. Fruitless, and he knew it, and after a few moments he stopped and sat back on his heels.
Above, the silver circle of the moon mocked him.
Hirel wept.
35
Fredegar was alone in the church, broom in hand. He had been sweeping every corner of the muck and wind-blown detritus that constantly found its way in, despite his constant sharp words to the other clerics, especially the two boys. They never kept the door closed, and the birds had been constantly swooping in and out, soiling the altar.
The door was open now, but that was only because without the light that came through it he could not see to clean this hovel that passed for God’s house in Donmouth. The last of the old season’s filthy rushes had already been heaped and were outside the door, ready to be carted to the midden. A fitting job for Lucymas, the darkest day of the year. Lucy, whose very name meant light. The returning sun would shine on a clean church, whether the abbot liked it or not.
Like it? Ingeld wouldn’t even notice.
His jaw was tense and his hands had tightened around the broom handle as though it were a weapon. Fredegar was finding it hard to breathe. He knew his anger with Ingeld was what kept him going, a source of dark energy on which he could draw when the shadows started closing in again. But he also knew that it was a sin, and a danger. Spend too long wandering down that path, and he might never find his way back.
He began sweeping again, focusing on long, even movements of the broom as though each one were the strophe of a prayer, and slowly the hard heat around his heart began to ease. The dirt floor would never be really clean, and the thatch of the church roof had been full of mice since the first frost. The sparrows congregated up there as well: he could hear their cheeping now, and he wished the folk of Donmouth spent half as much time singing in their church as those little grey-brown birds did. Fredegar stopped sweeping, a smile almost forming on his face at the thought of the busy feathered flock in the roof at their ceaseless devotions, despite all the work they gave him.
His face grew sombre again.
Only the previou
s day, after supper in the minster hall, he had suggested to Ingeld that come the good weather they might replace the thatch. ‘Look at it, Father abbot. Sagging, so thick with moss, almost black in places! And it lets the water in.’
Ingeld hadn’t even turned to face him. ‘Order the reeds cut, then.’
‘I had thought perhaps oak shingles...’ Donmouth great hall, Radmer’s hall – that had shingles. No birds there that he had ever seen, and few signs of mice. The hall also had beautifully carved barge-boards and elaborate finials.
‘If you pay for them.’ Ingeld had pushed past him and out into the yard.
He pay for them? He had nothing of any value but his books: his psalter, his gospels, and his battered penitential... Did the abbot mean he should sell those to pay for timber? He was sure he could find a buyer for them, in York, but why should he? He didn’t need them – the words they contained were inscribed on his heart – but he loved them. Cold, sick fury sat in his belly as he stood in the doorway and watched Ingeld stroll away.
Fredegar began sweeping again, short vicious jerks of the twigs against the packed dirt. Bare earth. Bare earth and thatch for God’s own house. Ingeld’s own snug little hall might be thatched, too, but at least it had floorboards... Again, he forced himself to be calm. No merit in gouging little ruts in the consecrated floor.
After he had finished sweeping he would have to put his mind to the altar furnishings. The cloths were of fine quality, but old, dotted with ancient stains of wax and smoke, threadbare in places, their embroideries unravelling. In the dark of the church one hardly noticed their maculate state, but he had had them out into the light and he found it painful to look at them. He would talk to his domina Abarhild.
Wooden candlesticks.
A chalice of horn. Base horn, for the Sanguis Christi.
Only the processional cross had any beauty or richness in its making, and that had been the minster’s chief treasure since long before Ingeld had been born. Heahred had told him it had been a battle standard in its day, carried against the Mercians a hundred years ago and more. Certainly the prayer inscribed along its arms, Rise up, Lord, and scatter thy foes, was as fit for a fight as a mass.
Three months, he had been putting up with all this. Quite long enough.
As the strokes of his broom brought him gradually closer to the door Fredegar became aware of an unexpected shadow, long in the solstice light that shone from low in the south. Certainly, someone was waiting outside. Someone restless and fidgety, to judge from the shadow’s twitching. Had one of his flock summoned up the courage to consult him? Fredegar rested the besom against the wall and walked towards the door. His bare feet were almost silent, but as he came to the threshold the shadow darted away, and when he ducked under the thatch and squinted into the cold December sunlight he found the churchyard deserted. He peered to right and left. The frost was still thick on the grass, and he could see where feet had left their marks, but that shy visitor must have run with the speed of the wind.
Fredegar let out a long sigh. If someone among his folk had a troubled conscience he could only hope that whoever it was, man or woman, would find the courage to come back. He turned towards the church door again to finish his chores, and as he did so his eye fell on a small, ragged object just outside the doorway.
A scrap of brown sacking, carefully tucked around its contents. He picked it up gingerly, not knowing what it might contain, but the edges of the cloth unfurled to reveal a little cross, carved of bone, on a leather thong. A simple enough object, but made with some skill, highly polished and symmetrical. As he turned it in his hands, his brow furrowing, he realized that it had exactly the same proportions as the minster’s great treasure, the gilt-bronze processional cross, the same flared arms and pattern of little bosses. Someone had been observing minutely, and working with great patience, to make a gift that he might cherish.
But who? Which of Donmouth’s residents would take time out of their winter evenings to make a thoughtful offering to their foreign priest? The cross swung back and forth on its leather thong, teasing him.
A gift from an unknown hand was a disturbing thing. He did not know, by accepting it, to what obscure compact he might be setting his own hand. If such a gift had been left for Ingeld he would have been in no doubt that it was some light love token, from one of those shuffling, giggling girls who swarmed at the hall. But there was nothing, surely, in his own aspect or behaviour to prompt such inappropriate devotion. They shied away from him, rather. He was sure the story of Cudda’s death had lost nothing in the telling.
Still, Ingeld’s folly cast a long shadow.
Lucymas, and the shortest day, and this was the first time in all the long weeks Fredegar had been at Donmouth that anyone other than Elfrun and Abarhild had lifted a hand to make him feel welcome. At last, shrugging and still thoughtful, he slid the little knots together and eased the thong over his head to settle around his neck, the cross tucked out of sight under his robe. From whatever source, it was welcome.
But he paused again in the doorway before going back into the church, feeling the shape of the cross under the coarse wool of his robe. Were his first instincts wrong? Could Abarhild have left it, or asked someone to leave it for him? Possible, of course, always possible, but his instincts told him otherwise. If his domina wished to make him a gift, there would be no subterfuge. Elfrun, then? He had wondered about her, her clear singing voice and the regularity with which she obeyed her grandmother’s request for her to attend the offices several times in the week, despite the long walk and the many responsibilities which visibly burdened her. He would look up sometimes to find her disconcerting brown gaze fixed on him, as though she could see every mote of dust and cobweb that cluttered the darker corners of his soul. He knew Abarhild had been considering a convent for the girl, and he thought it would be a wise choice. She felt too deeply, that one.
But no. The little bone cross surely did not come from her. Like Abarhild, if Elfrun wished to present him with a gift she would do it openly.
Someone else cared enough to make him that small donation. As he went back into the church and began readying the altar Fredegar had tears in his eyes.
36
Elfrun traced her fingertip around the whorls and curves incised into the bronze. Finn had not come back. All that long day of All Saints, and the next, and a few days after that, she had been hoping every moment that he might yet come through the gate and into her yard.
But that had been weeks and weeks ago; and now, with Yule and Candlemas behind them, try as she might, she could barely recall the details of Finn’s face, and that troubled her. Nonetheless, looking at the mirror was a certain way of summoning once again that unfamiliar sensation of heat and light which his presence had given her. Sunlight glinting on the golden hairs of his arm as he drew the silk ribbons over his skin. The warmth of his hand pressing her fingers around the mirror handle. She could close her eyes and breathe in, letting the memories course along her veins, until she felt like a flower unfurling its grateful petals and opening itself to the generous sun.
Somehow she had managed to keep the mirror a secret all winter. Without having to ask she knew that Wynn had told no one. Taking it out and examining its patterns had become her great pleasure, all the more intense for being rare and guilty. She might spend a little time looking at her own softened and gilded features, searching for whatever the pedlar had called ‘beautiful’, but her reflection never held her for long.
No, the real attraction the mirror offered was its other side, those harmonious curves, one endlessly flowing into the next without seam or break, no beginning and no ending, and all perfect proportion and grace. The more she contemplated the pattern, the more certain she was that it encoded some secret, one that she could unlock if only given time enough and calm.
But, oh, God, how she wanted Finn to come back. She talked to him constantly in her head, telling him things that she could mention to no one else. How weary she was, how b
usy and how bored. Luda’s frustrating evasions, the way he told her in so many words not to make such a fuss about nothing; that he had everything in hand. Fredegar was teaching her how to read, and how to tally, but it was a slower and more painful business than she had ever imagined. And Luda’s records were kept according to some arcane formula he seemed to have drawn up himself, and she didn’t understand.
When she said as much, however, the steward had shrugged, and told her that Radmer never bothered checking the details. ‘Your father lets me do my work.’ That unnerving stare from eyes set too close together for comfort. ‘You should do the same, lady.’
Everything would be fine, surely, once Radmer returned?
Elfrun spent far too much time looking out, down the wintry, windswept river and estuary, to the open sea, and if she was honest with herself she admitted she was no longer sure whether she was looking for her father, or Finn. But the last few weeks had been proving dark and wet and muddy beyond belief, and Elfrun knew that she was a fool to imagine any ship would put into their harbour, or for that matter any wanderer of the roads would be seen at Donmouth, before Eastertide.
She sighed. There would be a long Lent first.
A clatter and a scuffle, and Elfrun hastily wrapped the mirror in a length of ragged linen and tucked it at the bottom of her box. Shoving the box away she scrambled to her feet, hot and confused. ‘Am I needed?’
Saethryth was in the doorway, gesturing. ‘Are you blind or something?’ Elfrun had never even noticed the goat that had wandered in and was now nosing enquiringly at the nearly finished length of tabby on the loom. They shooed it out together, and Elfrun closed the latch firmly behind her. Had Saethryth seen the mirror? Surely not – she had been crouched with her back to the door; and if the other girl had caught a glimpse she would surely have asked what it was.
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