Gyltha ignored the admonishment but not the mention of Adelia. “What d’you mean ‘as soon as she’s better’?” she asked, struggling to sit upright. “What’s happened to ’er?”
Allie sat on the bed beside her and explained about the accident.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” she said when Gyltha still looked concerned. “She is coming, I promise.”
When, at last, she had managed to convince her that there was nothing seriously wrong with Adelia, Allie started unpacking her medicine bag.
“I’m going to examine you now,” she said, arranging the contents neatly on a table Ulf had dragged to the bedside. “So open your mouth and don’t argue.”
When she had finished and was satisfied that, for tonight at least, her patient wasn’t in any imminent danger—that there was no discernible pestilence of her tonsils or swelling of her throat—she gave her a vial of the comfrey concoction Adelia had prepared to help Gyltha sleep and sat quietly beside her until she did. When at last she saw her eyelids flutter and her breathing become rhythmic, she stood up.
“She’ll live then, d’you think?”
Ulf’s voice startled her. She had been so absorbed by Gyltha that she had forgotten all about the others waiting so patiently for her prognosis.
“Oh, Ulf, I’m sorry,” she said. “Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. There’s no sign of any fever now, thank God, but she is weak and her blood is terribly thin, so tomorrow—if someone will show me where I might find some—I’ll get her some watercress; it’ll build her strength. In the meantime I think we should all get some rest.”
Ulf took her hand and raised it to his lips, then put his arms around Rosa and Hawise and ushered them toward the door.
Just before he left she overheard him tell Penda:
“See! Just like I said, chip off the old block, that one.”
Chapter 17
When Allie woke the next morning she lay for a while gazing drowsily around the room, absorbing her new surroundings.
She had been so tired by the time she eventually climbed into the bed that was laid out for her on the floor beside Gyltha’s that she could have fallen asleep anywhere—any lumpy old mattress would have done—but instead, she had found herself slipping into a set of freshly laundered, lavender-scented sheets on an amply filled palliasse.
That night she dreamed about Mansur.
Although he was never far from her thoughts, his absence was always thrown into sharp relief whenever she saw Gyltha, who was the great love of his life, just as he was hers.
It was a strange union, he, a eunuch—castrated as a boy by the Latin church to preserve the beauty of his singing voice—and she a Fenland eel seller, but an inspiration nonetheless, and if there was ever any doubt about how complete a union it was, Gyltha gave that short shrift.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she would say if anyone were to raise an eyebrow. “But just because some bits is missin’ don’t mean the rest don’t work like a charm.”
Allie suspected that, if he hadn’t met and fallen in love with Gyltha, in old age he might have been tempted back to the warmer climes of Salerno, but such was his devotion that when she returned to the Fens, he chose to go with her, to eventually die in her arms.
Gyltha!
God’s teeth! Just for a moment she had forgotten why she was there.
She sat up abruptly, poked her head above the bed and, satisfied that her patient was still breathing in and out, flopped back onto her pillows again.
A little while later, as she was gazing drowsily at one of the tapestries on the wall, a pretty, richly woven pattern of birds and griffins in roundels, she heard a knock on the door.
“Come in,” she said, sitting up, hastily pulling the blankets up to her neck.
The door opened and a face appeared around it.
“Hawise . . . in case you’ve forgotten,” it announced cheerfully. “Come to take you to fetch the watercress like you asked, mistress . . . if you’re ready, that is . . .”
“Thank you,” Allie replied. “I am . . . or I will be, if you don’t mind giving me a moment.”
Hawise grinned, curtsied and disappeared.
By the time Allie was washed and dressed, Gyltha was awake.
“Well, well, Almeison,” she said, gazing up at her fondly. “So I didn’t dream it, then? ’Tis really you, is it, bor?”
Allie sat beside her. “Of course it is!” she said. “You didn’t think I wouldn’t come when you needed me, did you?”
Gyltha shook her head and smiled. “No. I suppose not. And I ’ave to admit it’s done me a power of good just lookin’ at you.” She put her hand on Allie’s knee and squeezed it.
“And you’re feeling better?” Allie asked.
“Yes,” said Gyltha. “But you shouldn’t ’ave come, I can’t help wishin’ that meddlin’ old bugger hadn’t sent for you.”
Allie was about to leap to Penda’s defense once again when she saw, from Gyltha’s expression, that her outburst was prompted by more than simple irritation.
“What is it?” she asked, concerned by the sudden change in her mood and the look of fear on her face.
“I’d ’ave stopped her if I’d known,” Gyltha hissed, fixing her eyes on her with unnerving intensity as she struggled to sit upright. “It ain’t safe for you here no more. I don’t want you here . . . Not now.”
Allie started to wonder if she had missed something crucial during her examination, if perhaps Gyltha’s brain had been corrupted by the fever, but when she reached for the talisman of her medicine bag Gyltha stopped her.
“Listen to me,” she said, grabbing her wrist and pulling her close. “You must leave here, for your own sake. Never mind about me . . . Never mind about anyone . . . You tell Penda—”
“Tell Penda what?” said a voice from the doorway. “Mistress Allie isn’t going anywhere.” Hawise strode across the floor toward them. “Except to come with me now and fetch that watercress for you.”
She winked at Allie.
“You rest now,” she told Gyltha. “And don’t go filling Mistress Allie’s head with nonsense.”
When Gyltha’s eyes flashed and she opened her mouth to protest, Allie braced herself for the impending storm . . . which, to her enormous surprise, didn’t come. Instead Gyltha closed her mouth again and looked away sheepishly.
It was extraordinary. She had never seen Gyltha cowed before and started to recalibrate her opinion of Hawise, whom, last night, she had dismissed as a rather silly giggler of a girl. But in the light of the effect she had just had on Gyltha, Allie recognized a steeliness at her core that was deserving of respect.
“Come, mistress,” Hawise said cheerfully. “Best be getting along now.”
When the door closed behind them, Gyltha sank back on her pillows.
Even in the depths of her delirium, she had heard them, huddled around her bed, talking about the missing girls and fetching the mistress for her in the same breath. They must have thought that the fever had dimmed her wits, that she was half-dead, the way she looked to them, not realizing that while there was still a breath left in her body they would never be dimmed enough not to spark at the mention of Adelia . . . or Allie.
Oh, she would have stopped them if she could, fought them tooth and nail to stop them dragging her beloveds into danger, but it was too late. What was done was done, and for the time being, at least, there was nothing she could do except, of course, worry herself to death.
Hawise chattered all the way to the hall, so that Allie struggled to get a word in edgewise despite the fact that she was dying to ask her about her exchange with Gyltha. At first she put the loquacity down to nerves, but as time and the chattering wore on, she grew suspicious that it was more a tactic of diversion.
Ulf grinned when he saw them come into the room.
“Mornin’, Allie,” he said, his voice booming cheerfully across the room. “Slept well, I trust.”
He and Penda were sitting at a ta
ble on the dais, on either side of a rather dour-looking young man who didn’t look up from the ledger he was poring over.
“Likely she did,” Penda said. “And long, too. Weren’t them the terce bells just chimed? Well?” She crooked a finger at them. “Don’t just stand there, come up ’ere and Jodi’ll fetch your breakfast . . .” Then, turning to the young man—whom she later introduced as Sir Stephen, her steward—she demanded that he draw up a couple of stools for them.
While the girls ate, the meeting continued. From what little Allie could glean of it, it was a fairly dull affair: the weekly manorial tally of who owed what to whom, with Sir Stephen reading out a long roster of names and their associated expenses.
“Bart the dairyman, six pence a week and a seat at the hall table at Michaelmas,” he intoned. “Pampi the shepherd, ten pence a week and four ells of cloth at Christmas.”
And so on and so on, his ponderous finger working its way down a seemingly endless list. The only interesting part, as far as Allie was concerned, was the opportunity to observe Penda in her role as lady of the manor.
It was an incongruity she had only recently started thinking about. When they were first introduced she had assumed that Penda’s title and estate had been conferred on her by marriage—after all, Gyltha was as poor and lowly as a church mouse—but so far, there didn’t appear to be a husband, nor indeed any mention of one.
She took advantage of one of Hawise’s rare pauses for breath and asked her about it.
“Oh, she didn’t marry it,” Hawise replied. “She was given it. She saved someone’s life during the Anarchy and got given the house and title out of gratitude.”
“Who?” Allie asked.
Hawise shrugged. “I’m not entirely sure . . . A little boy I think.” Now that the conversation was no longer under her control, her attention had automatically diverted to her breakfast with equal zeal.
“A little boy conferred the house and title?” It seemed unlikely, but Allie persisted . . .
“No.” Hawise grinned. “It was the boy whose life she saved. It was his mother, or someone like that, who gave Penda the estate . . . At least I think so . . .”
Unable to understand such a dereliction of curiosity, Allie decided to ask Gyltha when she saw her next and, failing that, decided she might even pluck up the courage to ask Penda herself.
But as though she had read her mind, Hawise added quickly, “But I wouldn’t go asking Penda, or Gyltha for that matter, if I were you, mistress. They don’t like talking about the past and they won’t thank you for it.”
While Hawise returned to her breakfast, Allie turned to Penda, someone else she found herself reviewing this morning. She even looked different today; divested of her usual chaotic bundle of furs and pelts, she was dressed almost elegantly in a robe of scarlet worsted. She was also wearing a wimple, which, Allie realized, was a concession less to femininity than to business, which she took very seriously indeed: observing her conducting the meeting, Allie could tell that she had instant recall of every acre of plow land, the size of every herd and the extent of every grazing she held; knew by heart which of her tenants were free and which villeins; knew who owed what service to whom and how much rent they had to pay; and leapt on any discrepancy ruthlessly.
“What’s this?” she snapped when she came across one. “Well?” she prompted when Sir Stephen was slow to respond.
Allie saw him color as he squinted down at his ledger as though his life depended on it.
“It’s my eyes, madam,” he said. “Ah yes! Now I see . . . It’s . . . er . . . Bertha, madam.”
“Bertha the laundress. What about ’er?”
“Well . . . erm . . . Well . . . It says here that she is to receive a penny a day, a pair of shoes at Easter and a cottage near the gatehouse, provided that her husband plows the north field.”
“Exactly!” Penda stabbed her finger onto the parchment in triumph. “‘Provided her husband plows the north field’ . . . But ’e didn’t, did ’e? Pampi done it this year, saw ’im wi’ me own eyes. So, what was that idle bloody husband of ’ers doin’, then?”
Sir Stephen shifted uncomfortably on his stool and looked so nervous that Allie, who had taken an instant dislike to him, began to feel sorry for him instead.
“I believe he was injured in the Lammas Day football game, madam,” he replied, recoiling when she started making growling noises in the back of her throat.
“And I’m still payin’ ’em and housin’ ’em, am I? Ought to kick the lazy buggers out on their arses . . .”
“But she’s a good laundress and she’s pregnant,” said Sir Stephen in such a plaintive tone that it made Allie wonder whether he was a good deal more sensitive than she had first assumed or the paternity of the laundress’s unborn baby was in question. “And the husband’s leg will mend—or so they tell me . . .”
Despite her earlier reservation, Allie was beginning to find the machinations of Elsford fascinating and would happily have stayed to hear more if, at that moment, Hawise hadn’t scraped back her stool and announced that they ought to be setting off.
She followed her out of the hall along a covered walkway and past a kitchen—where a vast oven belched out hot air amid the lively invective of some invisible cooks and scullions—and beyond that to a door that opened onto a courtyard.
It was a bright and chilly day, and as soon as she set foot outside, she felt a breeze tugging on her veil like a bully, making her curse—and not for the first time—the inconvenience of having to wear a wimple.
It was an encumbrance foisted on her by her father comparatively recently—being, or so he said, more appropriate to her age and situation nowadays. Allie had resented the imposition from the first and felt pangs of envy for Hawise, whose own chestnut curls were restrained by a simple circlet and two braids on either side of her pretty face.
Muttering irritably, she tucked the flapping ends into the neck of her cloak and looked around.
Now that she could see it properly, she realized that Penda was meticulous about more than just the accounting. From the neatly swept cobbles to the well-maintained outbuildings, there was no sign of the gimcrack shambles of other, less orderly establishments here. If it didn’t quite possess the grandeur and elegance of Wolvercote, it was at least equally utilitarian—and neat.
On the left-hand side were a storehouse, a barn and a stable block; on the right, a small wooden barbican, a laundry and a sturdy-looking gatehouse, in front of which Hawise was waiting for her.
“We have to wait here a moment,” Hawise said. “We’re not supposed to go out alone, not after Martha—” And, to Allie’s astonishment, Hawise suddenly clapped her hand over her mouth and spun away from her, muttering furiously under her breath.
Allie stared at her uncomprehendingly; admittedly, she barely knew the girl, but there was no doubt about it, her behavior was distinctly odd, and there was something else . . . She had the disquieting feeling that there was something going on and there were things she wasn’t being told, which, for someone who always wanted to know everything, was frustrating, to say the least.
Resisting the urge to take Hawise by her shoulders and insist that she tell her whatever it was she was concealing, she took a deep breath instead.
“Hawise,” she said, addressing the back of Hawise’s head and trying hard not to sound irritable, “who is Martha?” It seemed to take an age, but at last, Hawise turned around, muttering something inaudible through her hand.
“Well?” Allie prompted sharply.
Hawise took her hand away reluctantly. “Oh, very well,” she sighed. “I’ll tell you, because I think you should know, but if I do, you must promise not to let on to Father or Penda, or anyone else, that I did . . . I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
Allie nodded emphatically. “On my oath,” she said.
“Well . . .” She looked around them furtively and lowered her voice even though the courtyard was deserted. “Well, you see . . . Martha was t
he girl whose body Father pulled out of the river the day before yesterday . . . Everybody thinks she drowned . . . except for Father.”
“Oh,” Allie said, trying not to sound as excited as she felt. “What does he think happened to her then?”
Hawise leaned forward conspiratorially and said in a whisper, “He thinks she was murdered like the others . . .” She was about to elaborate, Allie could feel it, when a young man carrying a falcon appeared in front of them and she broke off abruptly.
“Peter!” she cried with palpable relief at this timely intervention. “Peter. This is Mistress Allie, the one who’s come to look after Gyltha—and, mistress,” she said with an extravagant flourish of her hand in the young man’s direction, “this is Peter . . . Elsford’s falconer, the person we’ve been waiting for.”
“Greetings, mistress.” Peter took off his coif and clasped it to his chest, but Allie barely noticed him, because she was gazing at the magnificent bird on his wrist instead.
“What a beautiful creature,” she gasped, running the tip of her finger reverently down the bird’s breast. “A tiercel, too.”
“Indeed,” Peter replied with a broad grin. “I take it you’re a falconer yourself then, mistress?”
Allie nodded. “Well, I certainly prefer them,” she said. “Peregrines especially.”
“Then you’re a lady after my own heart . . . But . . .” He turned to Hawise. “I gather it’s only watercress we’re hunting this morning.”
“That’s right,” she said. “And we best be getting on with it.”
As they followed him through the gatehouse over the drawbridge, Allie tried to steer the conversation back to the dead girl, but Hawise’s obfuscation was masterful, and she continued to wield her loquacity like a weapon.
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