Great Maria (v5)

by Cecelia Holland

  “Roll over,” he said.

  She turned on her other side, putting her back to him. His arms slid around her. “That’s better.” He ran his hands under her nightgown.

  “Be quiet,” she said, “you will wake up Ceci.”

  ***

  Three days later, in the waning moon in the morning, she lay down in childbed. At first, none of the women would even send for Richard, but Maria made some threats to Eleanor, and at last the girl went after him.

  When he came she was deep in labor. The women screeched at him like magpies. On his crutch he hobbled over to the bed. Maria was lying on her side. She bit her lips to keep from groaning. He said, “What do you want?”

  “Stay with me,” she said.

  Flora rushed up between them. “Here,” she said, “you are uncomfortable, you will tire yourself.” She rearranged all the pillows and made Maria lie down on her back. Going, she gave Richard a glare.

  He bent to talk to Maria. “I’ll just be downstairs. If anything happens, I can—”

  “Stay,” she said. “Please stay.” Her body clenched tight like a knot. She gasped.

  Richard said, “Somebody bring me a chair.” He backed away. Flora rushed up and moved all the pillows around again.

  Maria sank into a pain-ridden daze. Richard sat beside her; once or twice she saw him on his crutch pacing up and down through the women. At first she fought against screaming, but when the baby butted out she screeched her throat raw. Richard came up beside her. His face shone with sweat. Near the fire the baby cried furiously.

  “It’s a boy,” he said. “I want to call him Stephen.”

  Maria moved her head on the pillow. Emptied and exhausted, she had no real interest in the baby. “Robert,” she said. “For my father.” She put her hand out to him. “I was not brave.” He caught hold of her hand. Bending, he kissed her mouth.

  ***

  Maria stooped over the vat and stirred the fleece briskly in its bath of dye. The aroma of the hot steeped barks made her nose itch, as if she were about to sneeze. Over near the kitchen door, the baby let out a yell. The women had told her that the second baby was always an angel, but Robert made them all liars. Her wooden heels clacking on the floor, Eleanor scurried across the kitchen to pick him up.

  “He only cries because he knows you will come to him,” Maria called. She pulled a clump of the fleece up out of the dye. The deep green’s depth and clarity kept her gaze; she knew it would dry to a disappointing off-color. With a twist of the stick she dunked the fleece back in again. Eleanor walked up and down across the kitchen, singing to Robert. On her shoulder a mat of black hair showed above the baby’s blanket.

  Maria sank down on her heels and looked for Ceci, who was playing under the table. With the little girl sitting on her hip, she crossed the kitchen after Eleanor. The old ovens had been torn out and the place seemed enormous. In the pantry door, the cook stood talking to Eleanor, a brace of plucked chickens dangling from his hand.

  “I think you are justified,” Eleanor was saying. “They shouldn’t treat you like that.”

  The cook grunted something. He and Eleanor got along well together. “When the old man was alive—”

  “Eleanor,” Maria called. “Let’s go.” She carried Ceci over to the door. Eleanor followed her out into the ward.

  “That poor man suffers so. I don’t see why you dislike him.”

  “I don’t,” Maria said, surprised. “What is he telling you?”

  “It isn’t what he tells me,” Eleanor said. They walked across the ward. The first snow had fallen the night before. Swept into piles along the foot of the wall, it lay in a thin white crust on the tops of the walls and the towers. The wind shook the clothes of the two men keeping watch on the gate. The sky was gray beyond the dark-gray walls of the castle. Shivering, Maria hurried to the door into the New Tower.

  “And you shouldn’t let everybody steal from the kitchen,” Eleanor said. “I’m amazed you don’t keep better order among your household, Maria.”

  “So am I,” Maria said. She went fast up the stairs, to get away from Eleanor’s sermon, and went into the hall. Richard and Roger were sitting before the fire, their shoes off and their feet up on the hearth. Maria went to her end of the hall.

  Robert let out a raucous yell. His dark head bobbed from side to side above Eleanor’s shoulder. Maria lowered Ceci to the floor behind her spinning wheel. The men seemed to take no notice of them. Eleanor gave Robert up to her and she sat down to nurse him.

  The two women were weaving a tapestry. The fleece soaking in the kitchen was to make the border. Eleanor stood staring fixedly at the wall beside the loom, where they had drawn the design with charcoal. Maria glanced down the hall at Roger. He was ignoring Eleanor as intensely as Eleanor was ignoring him.

  “It is so confused,” Eleanor said, in a strained voice. She moved her head this way and that, to see the design from other angles. “There is no purity in it.”

  Maria thumbed up her nipple and poked it into the baby’s mouth. “I like lots of things happening in the picture. I get tired of simple work.”

  “But look how crowded it is,” Eleanor said. She turned her back to the men and sat down heavily on the little stool beside Maria.

  “Are you fighting with Roger?” Maria said, and Eleanor made a little open-handed gesture of despair. Robert strained in Maria’s arms, voracious. She looked around the hall for Ceci. The child was leaning against Richard’s knee, her head on his thigh, smiling up at him, her long brown hair across her breast. While Richard talked to Roger he stroked her cheeks.

  “See,” Eleanor said; she was frowning at the design on the wall, and she covered the two dancing couples with her hands. “If we left this out, and let the rest of the celebration take up the room—nobody ever dances here anyway.”

  “The villagers dance, on May Day,” Maria said. “At weddings and Christmas.” She laid Robert against her shoulder to make him burp. Fiercely he held his wobbling head up on his shoulders. “I like them there. They are the only happy people in the whole design.”

  Eleanor’s eyes flicked toward Richard and Roger. “Everyone is happy.” Her face was pinched and long.

  Suddenly Roger bolted out of the room. Maria started. She said, “Besides, something has to happen in that corner of the work. Robert is asleep, will you take him up to bed?”

  Eleanor snatched the baby from her and raced away. The door sighed shut behind her. Maria began to tie the ends of the warp threads down to the bottom roller of the loom, careful to spread them evenly. When she had knotted down half the warp, Richard came over to her, Ceci clinging to his hand.

  “What are they fighting about?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” He stooped a little to see the design on the wall. “Sweet kiss of Jesus. What are these people here doing?”

  “Dancing.”

  “That isn’t what it looks like to me.”

  Ceci leaned over the basket of mending, trying to reach something, and fell in headfirst. He lifted her out by the ankles. She came up startled, her hands groping in the air. Richard lowered her to the floor.

  “Is Eleanor pregnant?”

  Maria scratched her nose. Naturally she had considered that. She shook her head. “No. She would have told me. I would know.”

  Ceci pulled herself to her feet, her arms around his knee. He winced away from her. “Ah, sweeting, not that leg.”

  Maria drew the child away from him. Richard eased all his weight onto his good leg. His eyes fell to the sketch on the wall. “Those people are not dancing. When does anybody ever dance around here?” Limping, he walked quickly down to the hearth again.

  ***

  Richard went out raiding and left Roger to command the castle. Eleanor had taken to sleeping in a truckle bed in Maria’s room, to help, she said, if Robert woke in the night. After months of broken sleep, Maria was glad of the chance to stay in bed when the baby fretted. But sometimes in the dark, Eleanor groaned and sob
bed loud enough to waken her.

  Three nights after Richard left, snow began to fall, at first only a thin shower of flakes drifting through the torchlight in the ward, but mounting to a hammering storm. In the middle of the night, Maria woke up stifling in the heat. Eleanor had built the fire as full as the hearth allowed and it was blazing bright enough to turn the whole room twilit. Maria slid out of the bed.

  She thought she could hear hunting horns, somewhere far off, and cattle lowing. Eleanor was not in her bed. The covers were thrown back over the foot and her fur-lined slippers were still on the floor. The draft from the window was fanning the fire in the hearth. Ceci called out, “Mama?” from the bed behind her, and was asleep again when Maria went back to her. Robert was fast asleep in the cradle, overlaid with the flickering saffron light.

  When she leaned into the window, the snow blew stinging in her face: the wind had torn the shutter off. She put a cloak over her nightgown and went out onto the stair landing.

  The stair below was dark as a well. Above her beside the door to Roger’s room, a torch still blazed. She went up the stairs two at a time and knocked. The stone floor chilled her feet.

  Eleanor pulled the door open. Her face was slick with tears. “What is it? Why can’t you leave us alone?”

  Maria said, “There is a fire in the village, I have heard the horns twice.”

  The girl swallowed. On her cheekbones high color showed. She called, “Roger?”

  “Come in,” Roger said. “I heard her.”

  Maria thrust the door open and walked past Eleanor into the room. The blaze of candles filled it, and Roger was dressed, so they had not been in bed after all. He went to the window and reached across the deep sill to open the shutter. The edge of the wall hid his face.

  “I can’t see anything. Are you sure, Maria? Ah, I hear them.” He stood back from the window. “Get me my fur cloak. We can’t put out the fire. I’ll bring them here if they need shelter.” His voice was unemotional, but when he turned toward them his pallor and the hollows of his eyes startled Maria; all his beauty was gone. He cared for Eleanor after all. He burst between the two women and ran down the stairs.

  “I’m sorry,” Eleanor said to Maria. She rubbed the tears from her eyes. “I am sorry.”

  “Come down and go to sleep, there is little we can do.” But it rankled that Eleanor should have thought she was spying.

  Three houses burned in the village. Roger was out all night finding shelter for the homeless people. Through the next day, the snow fell steadily. With Eleanor carrying Robert after her and Ceci running before, searching for places where the snow had blown in, she swept and cleaned and put the whole of the New Tower in order.

  At noon, missing Eleanor and the baby, she went up the stairs after them. Eleanor stood in the doorway to the hall, the baby clutched in her arms, her shining unhappy eyes aimed into the room at Roger. When she saw Maria, the girl wheeled and ran away.

  Maria caught up with her on the landing to their room and took the baby. “See if you can make Ceci eat her porridge. She eats much better for you than for me.”

  Eleanor’s face sagged like an old man’s. “I want to have my own babies.”

  “Good,” Maria said. “Practice with mine.” She put Ceci’s hand into Eleanor’s and went down to the hall again.

  The few knights who had not gone out with Richard were massed at one end of the hall, cheering on a wrestling bout. As she came in, one of the wrestlers hit the floor with a thud. Maria went up to her end of the hall and sat down. She turned away from the room and put the baby to her breast. While he nursed she looked at the design on the wall and tried to imagine it filled in with colors. The two dancing couples were to have red clothes, and she decided to put a red bird in the corner diagonally across from them. Abruptly Roger came between her and the sketch.

  “Do you think we should send a messenger to Richard?” he said.

  “What—to tell him it’s snowing?”

  He sank down on his heels beside her. The day-old fuzz of beard on his cheeks was more blond than red; unshaven, he looked older. He scratched at his chin.

  “I cannot bring myself to send Eleanor away,” he said.

  “Don’t. She is my friend, and she will stay until I want her to go.”

  “But there is nothing between us,” Roger cried, and jerked his voice down. “Not anymore. Why should she be here if she will not lie with me?—” His hands rose between them. “Why did Richard leave me here?”

  “You should marry her.”

  “No.” His eyes were brilliant blue. “No.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Eleanor? I love fame, not Eleanor. I love valor and outdoing other men.” He lowered his gaze. His face had lost the marks of strain; he looked fresh again. “I suppose that’s arrogant, isn’t it?”

  “No,” she said. She put her hand on his thick red hair. Catching her hand between his fingers and his cheek, he turned and kissed her palm.

  “My little sister, I will always love you best.”

  Maria laughed. When she tried to pull her hand free, he clung to her. Their eyes met. She wondered what it would be like to lie with him. She wrenched her hand free and lowered the baby into her lap. Hitching up her shoulder, she brought her bodice closed across her breast.

  “If she stays,” he said bitterly, “I will have to see her every day.”

  “You won’t care, after a while,” Maria said.

  ***

  Richard came back, his horses loaded with plunder and Saracen captives. Eleanor and Roger fought and moped less and less. Once Maria came on them kissing on the stair, but they were not lovers again after that. Eleanor kept her arms full of Robert, even while she sat in the window with Maria and worked on the tapestry.

  On Candlemas, all the mothers of the region went to Mass, even the women of the shepherds, and Maria went with them. Afterwards they took salt and bread into the new houses in the village, and the people gathered in the church and danced and argued and got drunk.

  Leading their horses, Maria and Eleanor walked back up to the castle, Robert in Eleanor’s arms, and Ceci riding on Maria’s mare. Eleanor tossed Robert in her arms. The wintry air had brightened her face.

  “Are you done with Roger?” Maria asked.

  “No,” Eleanor said. She held herself straight, like a church image. “Although he is done with me. In God’s sight, I am his wife. Someday he may see that it is so.”

  Maria eyed her skeptically. It sounded like a verse: a pledge to keep faith at great cost. She had meant to ask if Eleanor would not marry someone else. She knew Richard could have arranged it with no trouble at all.

  “There,” Eleanor said. “Someone is coming.”

  Maria shaded her eyes to see. The sky was a flat gray; the snow-covered valley stretched colorless beneath it. A rider was coming up the road from the north. She turned to her mare. There was no reason to offer Eleanor another marriage if she would not accept it. Stabbing her foot into the stirrup, she pulled herself up behind Ceci on the saddle.

  Eleven

  The rider came from William, down in the Tower of Birnia. Maria could make no sense of what little she overheard of his messages, but before the servants had led away his steaming horse, Richard and Roger had gotten all but five of their men into their saddles and off to the north.

  In the black night before dawn, Maria woke and heard the dogs barking in the village. She leaned out her window. Richard and his men were galloping up the road. He shouted to the porter; his voice was harsh with excitement, and Maria went to the cupboard to get out her cloak.

  “Mama?”

  “Sssh—Eleanor is here.” She made sure that Eleanor was in her truckle bed and ran down the stairs.

  The racket of the knights streaming into the ward had brought out their servants and some of the castle women, looking for their lovers. Maria, the unfastened throat-latch of her cloak clutched in one hand, stood in the doorway. Roger made his horse rear and prance
in the middle of the ward to charm the women. Maria went out into the open.

  Suddenly Richard loomed up before her on his bay horse. “Here,” he said, throwing back his cloak. “Take this.”

  Maria reached her arms up, and Richard, with a father’s practiced grip, lowered a little boy into her arms. Maria braced herself against his weight. Rigidly the child resisted her embrace and turned his head away.

  “Who is he?” she called.

  “Take him upstairs.” Richard rode off. The child was sliding down out of her arms. Maria hitched him up again and carried him back up to her room.

  On the stairs she could hear Robert’s screams of rage and pain. Eleanor, her face smudged with sleep, was walking him up and down the room. Maria shut the door with her heel. The false dawn was blooming. The room was gloomy with its treacherous light. She took the strange child over to the bed.

  Ceci sat up, her thumb in her mouth. “Mama.”

  Maria kissed her. “Eleanor, so long as we are all up, will you send down for our breakfast? And bring me some of the cider.”

  Robert was howling. His belly was fat with colic. Eleanor took him away with her to get the breakfast. Maria poured water into a basin, found a cloth, and washed off the strange child’s face.

  “What’s your name?” Maria said.

  The boy said nothing. He was stocky and robust, dark as a winter apple; his face was old with suspicion. Beyond him, on the pillow, Ceci looked frail by contrast. Heralded by Robert’s shrieks, Eleanor came in the door with a steaming wooden cup.

  “It’s hot,” Eleanor said.

  Maria took the cider and blew on it to cool it. The strange boy was watching her, scowling, with a face like an enemy. She said, “God’s eyes, don’t look at me as if I’m going to eat you.” She drank off some of the cider and filled the cup again with water from the pitcher. “Drink this, like a good boy.”

  He took the cup in both hands and gulped down the cider. Maria tried to take it way from him, saying, “Slower, you’ll be sick,” and was surprised when he fought. She tore the cup out of his grasp and set it down, and went across the room to find him something to wear: the clothes he had on were filthy. When she went back to the bed, he had gotten hold of the cup again and was draining the cider.