by Linda Sole
‘I wondered where she had gone,’ Anne said, a teasing lilt in her voice for she had known that her beloved child would be with her father. Nicholas was a fond parent, as loving to the child as she could wish. Her smile faded slightly as she wished that he might show his feelings for her a little more.
‘We brought you this, Anne. Iolanthe picked it for you herself,’ Nicholas said and handed her the small posy of gillyflowers. Their perfume was sweet and scented the room, bringing the sunshine inside. ‘The gardens are beautiful. Perhaps if it keeps fine you may venture out later.’
‘Yes, I think I shall. I need to gain my strength and I shall never be strong again, if I do not make the effort.’ Anne looked down at the book she had been reading. It was a Bible, carefully inscribed and lettered, and illustrated with drawings in vibrant rich colours inlaid with gold leaf. Such a thing was beyond price, though it must be worth a small fortune. ‘I could not stop reading the Bible you gave me for it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, Nicholas.’
‘It is rare and fine. I believe it took a man most of his life to complete, and for that reason it is a work of devotion and love – but you are more beautiful. You and Iolanthe.’
‘You would say that,’ Anne replied and held out her hand to him. ‘Will you give me your arm so that I may walk in the gardens for a while? Iolanthe’s nurse will tend her until we return.’
‘You are not too tired, Anne?’
‘I do tire easily still, but I am growing stronger. In a few months I shall be well again.’
‘When you are well we shall go to a fair,’ Nicholas told her. ‘It will not be a great fair like that at Stourbridge, which lasts from mid September to early October, but I believe you will find it pleasant.’
‘I am sure I shall.’ Anne glanced at his profile as he offered his arm. ‘Sometimes she felt desperate to know what their life together had been before she was so ill. Had Nicholas loved her with passion or was theirs a marriage of convenience? She had asked him to tell her, but he insisted that it was best she discover the truth for herself. Many things had come back to her, little by little; she knew how to read and write, in Latin, French and English; she knew how to embroider and she had recently discovered that she could play chess and draughts with Nicholas and on occasion beat him. So why did she not know anything of her family?
Why could she not remember her wedding? Such things were important to a woman. Nicholas was all that was kind and generous. She felt safe and warm in his house, but there was a need in her – a deep need to feel more.
Sometimes when his hand brushed hers a shiver ran down her spine and she wanted him to take her in his arms and hold her close. She sensed that she had a passionate nature and she needed the closeness of marriage, the sweet loving that she believed it should be.
Nicholas turned his head to meet her gaze and something made her breath come faster. He had such a sensual mouth and she sometimes longed to feel it on hers. His eyes seemed to say that he felt as she did – yet he never came to her bed. Was it only because she had been ill?
There was at times a darkness in Nicholas. She felt it, sensed it, but did not understand its cause. It was as if he had some secret, some shadow that haunted him. Would he tell her if she asked?
Yet what could she ask? She would not offend him for the world, because he was her rock, the earth in which her roots had fastened. Without him she would be tossed into the maelstrom, alone and vulnerable. There was something at the back of her mind that haunted her, a memory of pain and a feeling of loss. She did not know what she had lost, but perhaps Nicholas could tell her – if he would.
Anne knew that she must wait until Nicholas chose to tear down the barrier that he had placed between them…until he told her the secret he was keeping from her.
PART TWO
FIVE
Marta looked at the child sitting in the special chair with carved arms that her brother had made to stop her falling out when they were too busy to look after her. Todd Carpenter had been sceptical about the child when they turned up on his doorstep that cold day early in April 1255, when she had finally arrived in Winchester after months on the road. Her feet had been raw and bloody from walking, for she had worn her boots through and could not afford to buy more. She had been on the point of exhaustion, fearful that he would send them away, but he had taken them both into his house despite the fact that he was unmarried. He listened to his sister’s amazing story, deliberated for a day and a half, and then gave her his verdict.
‘You can stay. It’s your home and I need someone to cook and clean for me – but the babe will have to go. You must find someone to take it.’
‘Yes, brother, as soon as I can.’
She had not objected for her intention at the start had been to sell the child as soon as she could. However, by the time she reached the Abbey of Saint Innocent, Marta was fairly caught. She could have left the child with a priest knowing he would give the babe away to a childless couple who would care for it and bring it up as their own but she had decided to keep her. Somehow she would find money to feed the child and herself on their long journey to her family home in Winchester. It was many years since she had been there but she had often wondered if she dared to return.
It had seemed an impossible journey to travel so many hundreds of miles, for she must walk much of it, and she had put the idea out of her mind.
As a young woman Marta had once loved and lost both lover and child in circumstances she had forced herself to forget. When she had found herself at the gates of Malvern she had been too wretched to question the nature of its master. Grateful for the chance to eat and get warm by his kitchen fire, she had stayed to serve him these past five years even though he terrified her. However, now that she had found the courage to run away she would not go back.
As she walked mile after mile, alone with the babe for much of the time, Marta’s mind was filled with memories she had kept at bay for years. In Nicholas Malvern’s house she had schooled herself to do his bidding and think of nothing but her work and the food she put in her mouth. Now, alone once more, as she trudged across the moors, following the lonely trails used by monks and pilgrims, thoughts of the past returned to keep her company.
She had heard nothing of her father, mother or brother since she had run away with a lover when she was fifteen, more than twelve years since. Some of those years had been good ones, travelling the road with her man as he sought work. Eric the tinker had not been a skilled man but he was honest and he could turn his hand to any work offered from mending pans to working in the fields. It hadn’t mattered to Marta that they had no settled home; she was happy to lie in the fields with him when the weather was clement or in a barn when they had work. For one glorious year they lived in a tiny one-roomed cottage while Eric tended the farmer’s pigs, but he had restless feet and they were off again the following spring.
That year, their seventh together, they did not find work so easily. Poor weather blighted the crops and there was sickness in the towns; people whispered of a plague and when the summer came both rich and poor folk fell ill and many died. Eric took the a virulent fever from some travelling folk he joined up with for a while and died within days of a rash appearing all over his body, despite Marta’s nursing. For some reason she escaped untouched. It was a few days after she buried her lover that she discovered she was carrying his child.
It was impossible for her to return home to Winchester. Her father would have driven her from the door for shaming him. Worn down with grief and hunger, she followed the roads she had walked with Eric looking for work but no one would employ a woman alone. At first she was met with kind words and sometimes a little food but once her condition showed the goodwives drove her away with stones. They called her a whore and would not have her near them, perhaps afraid that she would tempt their menfolk.
When her child was born she was alone, near to starvation and helpless. She did not know quite how she had managed to give birth and survi
ve but somehow she had endured her ordeal, knotting and cutting the birthing cord with her knife. The child had been sickly from the start and lived but a few days, even though she had milk in her breasts. Marta scraped a hollow in the earth with her bare hands and buried its tiny body. For some hours she sat weeping by the grave of her son but at last her tears tried. All feeling had gone. She no longer cared whether she lived or died: she would almost certainly have died soon enough had not Nicholas Malvern found her at his gates and taken her in. Grateful at first, she had been glad to serve the strange, ugly man but then she had begun to fear him. Yet still she had carried on, doing her work, eating his food, accepting him as her master. Now she had left his protection and she must fend for herself once more.
Marta knew that she was taking the risk that her father would turn her from his door but she had nowhere else to go. The child had given her the incentive to make the arduous journey and she grew fond of it as the days and weeks passed.
She had sold the candlestick she had stolen to buy the goat. The innkeeper in the village near the abbey of saint Innocent was an honest man and he had given her another three pennies besides the nanny goat. Marta discovered that if she held the babe to the goat’s teats she would suck and less of the milk was wasted. Now the child began to thrive; she no longer whimpered and cried as much as she had at the start. Marta became used to the warmth of her nestling in the shawl slung across her body. She talked to her, comforting the babe when the cold winds whipped across the open moors.
Then, eventually, they came to a softer landscape as they left the Yorkshire Dales behind and came to Lancashire. Never stopping, she travelled on to the next county. Here the fields were tilled in long strips, by the yeomen farmers and peasants who worked together on the lord’s land for three days a week before tending their own small plots. There were more people about and she sometimes met folk driving a pig to market or women with rush baskets on their arms. She bought bread and sometimes bacon from farmers and occasionally she was allowed to stay in a barn or an empty hovel for the night. One woman offered her work in a bakehouse but Marta refused. If she stopped once she would lose the incentive to carry on.
For weeks they walked slowly, giving the goat time to graze what grass it could find at the roadside. In return it gave the milk that kept the child alive. Sometimes they passed through towns, the streets choked with people and wagons, the noise unbearable to her after the silence of the lonely roads. Whenever possible, she avoided them, preferring the loneliness of country roads.
Sometimes, she met other travellers, often pilgrims on their way to pray at one of the great cathedrals or some special shrine. A few had taken up the Cross and were bound for the Holy Land and the crusades: it was the duty of all freemen to take up the Cross if they could, and many young knights aspired to it. Occasionally, her fellow travellers took pity on her. Once, a friar riding a donkey, had got down and insisted she ride it while he carried the child, at other times she was given food or a lift in a farmer’s cart. For the nobility it would mean shame and disgrace to ride in a cart, but for her it meant a brief respite and rest for her weary body. At times she was so desperately tired that she sat by the roadside and wept tears of self-pity. Her clothes and her body stank and at some time she had picked up lice and they drove her mad, making her itch and long to be clean again. She wished herself back at Malvern. She wished that she had obeyed her master, who now seemed less of a monster than he had that bitter night.
When she had left London behind her, Marta began to feel the beginnings of spring in the air. Trees began to unfurl their leaves after the deep winter sleep and primroses and violets grew in the hedgerows. People seemed friendly the further south she travelled and more often now there was a cart to take her a few miles, and sometimes a shared meal with the farmer.
When all her money had gone, Marta sold the fur-lined cloak. She missed its warmth and its softness when she lay down at night but it put bread in her mouth and enabled her to seek a ride from carters as they passed her on the roads. From them she learned that Prince Edward had brought his Spanish princess to England. The princess had turned up her aristocratic nose at her new home and was busy introducing silk hangings and carpets to make it more comfortable, much as Queen Eleanor had done before her. Marta had not even known the prince had married. News had come slowly to Malvern House for her master seldom admitted peddlers.
It was late March when Marta at last entered Winchester by the east gate and walked through the town towards the merchants’ quarter where her father had lived and plied his trade as a master carpenter.
Marta’s heart raced as she stood outside the small house, its sign of the carpenters guild creaking in the wind above her head. For a moment she wanted to turn and run but there was nowhere else to go. When she opened the door and went in, she saw her brother working with his lathe; his chisels, knifes and adze lay on a wooden bench together with the flat-headed iron nails he sometimes used in his work. He was a year or two older than she was but still looked strong and healthy. His face wore a puzzled expression as he gazed at her and then he smiled.
‘You’ve come back then. Ma always said you would one day.’
‘Where is she?’
‘With Pa in her grave.’
‘Both dead?’
‘Of a fever.’
Then…can I stay? Will your wife let me live with you?
‘I’ve no wife. Never had time to look for one.’ His gaze went over her. ‘You’d best come in and get warm by the fire. You can tell me your story as we eat. There’s soup in the pot…’
When Todd told her that she must give the child away, Marta agreed, but asked to be given a little time to rest after her long journey. It had taken months for her to reach him and she had not known what kind of a reception she would receive. The news that both her parents had died of a fever had shocked her but she did not grieve for them. Her brother was kinder than either her mother or her father. As the days, then weeks and first months passed, she secretly hoped that Todd would relent and allow her to keep the babe, who she had begun to wean from the goat’s milk to soft milky bread and porridge. In Marta’s mind the babe was hers. If her brother insisted she must get rid of it she might take it and leave.
That day late in May when she came back from the market and found him working on the chair Marta knew that her battle was won. He had grown fond of the babe, who was so quiet sometimes that they almost forgot she was there. As the months passed she flourished, becoming prettier than she had looked at the start, her hair a glorious dark auburn, eyes wide and green, inquiring as they followed Todd about the cottage.
When she did cry a word from him would hush her. Marta laughed and told him the babe thought he was her father. It was late summer before either of them had thought of giving her a name.
‘She be growing fast, sister,’ Todd said then. ‘She must have a name – what shall we call her?’
‘She is lucky to be alive. I thought she might die before I got her here for I had little enough to feed her, but she fought for her life and we survived.’
‘It was God’s work that brought you safely here.’ Todd said nodding wisely. He was a master carpenter and had recently found work at a church, which accounted for his pious words. As a young man he had been lazy and keener to drink than work, but after his parents died he had been forced to work for his living. ‘We should call her Mary after Our Lady.’
Marta agreed for want of a better idea. Mary seemed pleased with her name. Her big eyes seemed to follow Todd whenever he was about. She thrived in the warm kitchen and by the spring of 1556 she was taking a few steps and trying to speak. Marta was teaching her Todd’s name, because it would please him if her first word was his given name. Marta had begun to forget that the child was not truly hers. The events of those terrible months when she had walked such an impossible distance were hazy, pushed to the back waters of her mind.
She tried to forget that she had stolen the child.
*
‘Is dinner ready, sister?’ Todd asked as he came into the kitchen that morning. He walked over to the child strapped into her chair and bent down to chuck her under the chin with his big hands. ‘Something smells good.’
‘It is a mess of rabbit and vegetables.’ Marta bent over the black iron cooking pot, giving it a stir with the heavy ladle. ‘It is ready whenever you are. I didn’t like to disturb you for you were working on a special order.’
‘It is a commission from the Earl of Montroy,’ Todd told her and looked proud. ‘He wanted a marriage chest for his betrothed bride. She is on her way here so I’ve been told. Her father is bringing her all the way from Shrewsbury and the chest was needed for the wedding.’
‘Have you finished it?’
‘Aye. It is a thing of beauty. I dare say the fortunate bride will be pleased with such a piece to put her treasures in.’ Todd lifted the child from her chair, holding her high above his head and then bringing her down to his face, thereby making her chortle with laughter. ‘She is a beauty, our Mary. It was a good thing you did bringing her here, Marta.’
‘She is safer with us than she might have been,’ Marta agreed. ‘If the mother had spoken we might have given her to her family but there were no clues as to who she was that I could see.’
Todd frowned as he set the child down. ‘We are her family. She has none other. If anyone comes asking, she is your child. Just remember that and no one can take her from us.’
Marta glanced at his face. No one could ever call Todd Carpenter a handsome man for his nose had a hook and his eyes were set under heavy lids, but it seemed he had a soft heart. He had become attached to the girl and she thought he would take it hard if they lost her. There was no reason they should for who would ever know what she had done?
