Allie felt an exquisite rippling sensation in her belly and had to steel herself to reply without her voice betraying her excitement.
“I’m sure we would be delighted,” she said. “But I will have to ask Lady Penda first, of course.”
He nodded. “Of course . . . Well, in that case, the invitation will be with you within the week, but in the meantime, I bid you good day.”
“Who were they, mistress?” Hawise asked her when she got back. “I was worried when I first saw them but then they seemed friendly enough.”
“Well, one was,” Allie said, and told her about the encounter.
“Aw,” Hawise groaned when she had finished. “I knew I should’ve come with you! I’ve still never clapped eyes on him. You’re so lucky, mistress.”
“Am I?” Allie said, affecting the nonchalance she reserved for discussing Lord Peverell with Hawise for some reason. “Perhaps,” she added.
By the time Hawise had packed up her things the Angelus was chiming for terce.
“That boy was with him,” Allie told her as they set off to the village.
“What boy?”
Hawise’s thoughts, unlike hers, had moved way beyond Lord Peverell some time ago and were now invested in her stomach, which was grumbling audibly for the pottage it knew was waiting for it at the cottage—if they ever got there. Allie, who was usually such a brisk walker, had started to dawdle.
“Oh, you know,” Allie said. “That boy . . . The one from the marsh. You remember?”
“Oh, him.” Hawise raised her eyebrows. “That pillard! Danny Wadlow, pain in everyone’s arse. What about him?”
“Well that’s what I was saying,” Allie replied, a note of exasperation in her tone. “He was with them!”
“Well, he would be,” said Hawise. “They use ’im sometimes when the old boy’s off. Good with the dogs, or so they say. That’s because he’s got a brain like one if you ask me.”
They walked along the towpath for some distance and around another sharp bend in the river and saw plumes of smoke rising from the village chimneys, cankering an otherwise pristine sky, and heard the unmistakable hubbub of the village going about its business: smiths hammering in their forges, babies crying, hogs bawling, dogs barking and cart wheels clanking along its rutted streets.
When they got to the main street they were engulfed by a crowd heading for the weekly market outside the gates of Ely Cathedral. Hawise took Allie’s hand, leading her expertly through it until she had to stop abruptly to avoid a woman coming toward them.
Allie was surprised that Hawise hadn’t noticed her before and that a collision was only narrowly avoided, because even from a distance, the woman stood out—something about the pallor of her skin, the misery in her expression and her apparent obliviousness to her surroundings. Indeed, she was so unaware of anyone or anything that if Hawise hadn’t stopped in time, Allie suspected the woman would have tried walking through her like a shadow.
“Who was that?” she asked as she turned to watch her disappear into the crowd.
“Nobody knows,” Hawise replied in a low voice. “Or at least, nobody knows her name. She’s from another village. The poor soul haunts the place looking for her daughter who went missing.”
The rest of the journey was rather somber after that. Allie was so distracted thinking about the woman that as they crossed the village green, she barely noticed the corpse hanging from the gibbet in the middle of it—which is to say that, although she didn’t avert her eyes and scuttle past, the way Hawise did, she didn’t linger in front of it as she might have done previously, nor, for once, did she envy the crows their early possession of such a valuable resource.
Their arrival at the cottage sent Rosa into a flap.
“Wish you’d warned me you was bringing Mistress Allie,” she chided, wagging her finger at Hawise. “I woulda tidied the place a bit. We must look such a mess! I ain’t even had the chance to change them rushes this mornin’! What must you think, mistress?”
“It’s lovely,” Allie said, looking around the neatly, if sparsely, furnished room, where there was barely a mote of dust visible even among the proliferation of rush-woven pots, bottles and baskets that lined the walls. Even the hens in the rafters were sitting tidily, not a dropping in sight, and the cauldron on the trivet was polished to a gleam.
“Stop fussing, Ma,” Hawise snapped; hunger was making her irritable. “Mistress Allie doesn’t mind how she finds us, do you?”
“No,” Allie said quickly. “Really I don’t. Besides, it’s perfect. It’s like the cottage where I grew up in Wisbech . . . only much, much tidier, of course.”
The reassurance had a calming effect on Rosa, who stopped flapping and ushered them to the table and the bowls of pottage Hawise had lusted after all morning.
When they had finished eating they stayed at the table discussing the weather, various village affairs, Bishop Longchamp’s departure and Penda’s Christmas feast, which, according to Rosa, was something to look forward to.
“She makes the place look so beautiful,” she said with pride. “And the food! Oh, Mistress Allie, you’ll never eat the like again!”
“Mistress’s got another feast to look forward to first,” Hawise piped up, to Allie’s horror. “She’ll be sick to the teeth of ’em by Christmas, won’t you, mistress?” she continued, ignoring Allie’s warning look. “Oh, don’t be shy. You will, won’t you? You’ll be sick to death of ’em by then.”
Allie’s heart sank further when Rosa turned to her, looking excited.
“Ooh,” she said, “what’s this then, mistress? Do tell.”
Allie took a deep breath and, because she didn’t have a choice, told her about her encounter with Lord Peverell.
“So that was them in the forest, was it?” Rosa asked when she had finished. “Thought I heard ’em calling when I was on the way back from the mill. So that was Lord Peverell then, eh?”
Allie nodded.
“He’s got that Danny Wadlow workin’ for ’im again,” Hawise said.
Rosa looked grave all of a sudden. “I don’t like ’im,” she snapped, her fingers fretting nervously at the threads of her shawl. “Wouldn’t trust that boy far as I could throw ’im. Got the hair of the wolf about him if you ask me.”
“He’s harmless, Ma,” Hawise said, taking her hand and stroking it gently. “Don’t worry so.”
But, refusing to be mollified, Rosa stamped her foot under the table. “Don’t you ‘He’s harmless, Ma’ me! He’s trouble, and don’t forget, he was there that day on the ice when Martha went missing—and don’t you shake your head at me, everyone saw ’im foolin’ around like ’e does, makin’ mischief of hisself as always . . .”
Hawise took her hand again. “But that’s all he is, Ma,” she said. “A nuisance, not a killer.”
Rosa stared at her for a moment, then got up and went to the window. Hawise and Allie exchanged glances.
“I hope you’re right,” Rosa said with her back to them, staring out over the marsh. “But you’d better be getting along now. It’s going to be dark soon and I don’t want you wanderin’ about in it.”
As they got ready to leave, grateful for the mantles she had warmed by the fire for them, Allie congratulated her again on the delicious soup and the tidy conviviality of the cottage and was rewarded with a hug.
“I think your mother might benefit from some vervain . . . or maybe lady’s slipper,” she told Hawise on the walk home. “Remind me to look out for some, will you? She needs something for her nerves.”
“She certainly does,” said Hawise with feeling.
Perhaps it was having spent too long in Rosa’s nervy company, or perhaps it was the eerie shadows cast by the dusk, but all the way home Allie had a peculiar sense of conspicuousness again, as though there were unseen eyes on her.
Chapter 26
There was no doubt about it, Rosa needed something for her nerves.
For some time now she had been struggling with a gr
owing sense of unease—nothing she could define precisely, but a gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach that something was amiss . . . or might be.
She had hoped, now that Bishop Longchamp had gone, that it would abate, but it didn’t; in fact, it was getting worse, and today she felt almost crippled by it.
That morning she had wanted to get on with her chores but, most unusually, was finding it hard to settle down to anything.
Perhaps it was the weather.
The cloud-bruised sky didn’t augur well; there was something ominous coming in from the east.
And it was chilly, too.
She got up to prod the fire and, as the smoke rose and disappeared through the louvered opening in the roof, lit some tallow candles, hoping they might brighten the room and her mood.
They didn’t. Perhaps nothing would; she would simply have to resign herself to the fact that the Nameless Dreads were back.
She called them “Nameless,” these peculiar feelings of hers, because she didn’t know how else to define them, and “Dreads” because of what they were: insuperable fears of and for almost everything, washing over her, when they came, like a wave and an affliction she had endured ever since Hawise’s birth almost sixteen years ago.
God, in his infinite wisdom, had granted her only one child, and after that, for reasons best known to himself, had closed her womb forevermore.
She had wanted more children, of course, so had Ulf, but they had learned to accept the divine forfeit they had unwittingly made for this one and didn’t question it. And yet even while she knew deep down, when the baby was born, that she would be her first and last child, she had obeyed the tradition of the Fens, tending the child with indifference for the first year of her life, neither naming her nor showing her affection, because, as all sensible Fen women knew, love for a baby that was as likely to die as it was to live was a poor investment.
But on her first birthday a terrifying storm of love had erupted inside Rosa and she had rushed to the baby’s cot weeping tears of joy and gratitude, taking the child in her arms and, throwing wide the window shutters, proclaiming her love for her for the world to hear.
“You gone soft, ol’ girl,” Ulf had told her, fearful of the vulnerability such love would bring her, but Rosa had smiled and waited patiently until, inevitably, he succumbed to it, too.
Poor Ulf! Poor her! she thought as she stared out over the sullen marsh. Such a curse it was, such a terrible thing to love a child, more terrible even than her fear of poverty, this overwhelming terror that one day something dreadful would happen to Hawise and she would be forced to survive it.
She shuddered, irritable for having succumbed to this latest bout of accidie, or whatever it was, and yet she felt it so acutely this morning that she barely knew what to do with herself.
It was never far away, of course, a reproachful presence in the shadows, but since Martha’s death and all the rumors about the missing girls, and what with Gyltha’s illness, she felt its presence more keenly, and it was shredding her nerves and opening her eyes to portents she might otherwise have ignored.
Only the other day she had seen a bat fluttering around in broad daylight, and just last week, there had been that strange encounter with the hermit.
She tried to avoid the Elsford hermit as much as she could but because he kept the bridge over the river Nene, levying a toll on all those who tried to cross it, it wasn’t always easy. Sometimes, when she had no choice but to go that way, she would try to get across before he spotted her, but she was rarely successful; despite his advanced age, there was something in his constitution, or perhaps the eremitic lifestyle, that endowed him with the speed and agility of youth.
Nobody quite knew when he had come to the Fens, or, indeed, where he had come from, but rumors abounded: one that he was once a fisherman to whom St. Anthony had appeared one night in a vision telling him to forsake society and all his worldly goods and spend the rest of his life performing penance in the service of God, another that he was a wealthy nobleman to whom another saint had appeared—with much the same message as St. Anthony—but nobody knew for certain. He was just there, like the Fenland bogs and mires, the alders and the fog.
As a child she had been terrified of him but as she got older, she wondered if, perhaps, she wasn’t a little envious of him, too, unbound as he was from the earthly responsibilities that ground so many into the mire, free to renounce the muddy turbulence of the world and spend his life in the service of a bountiful God. This envy, if that was what it was, had only increased when Hawise was born; after all, she reasoned, at least you knew where you were in the service of God, which wasn’t always the case with daughters.
That morning, as she made her way to the market, approaching the bridge with her usual trepidation, she was relieved not to see any smoke rising from the roof of his hut and even more relieved that she couldn’t see a deer carcass strewn across it, either. Since the hermit was famously partial to venison, if there wasn’t a carcass splayed across the thatch—where he kept them safe from the predation of wolves—it meant that he was probably out hunting for a replacement and would be gone for a while.
“Good,” Rosa muttered to herself, about to dash across, when, from nowhere, the hermit suddenly appeared in front of her.
“God’s teeth!” she screeched, flapping her hands in alarm. “What’d you do that for? You frightened me half to death!”
The hermit stared at her silently over the top of his staff, his icy blue eyes glinting like distant tarns under wild gray eyebrows.
He’s enjoying this, Rosa thought indignantly. He likes frightening people.
“Ask for a blessing and beg a prophecy,” the hermit said.
Too startled to speak, or run away, although she wanted to, Rosa waited, fear wedged tight in her chest, while he performed his prophesying ritual; stabbing his staff into the ground between them, he tilted his head back and sniffed the air like a dog. When he stopped sniffing, he lowered his head again and fixed her with a strange, mesmeric gaze.
“Pride comes before a fall,” he intoned gravely. “Repent now and ye may be saved; for he is coming.” When he had finished he pulled his staff out of the mud, turned on his heel and vanished into the hut.
“What about my blessing?” Rosa called after him, but he didn’t come back.
That evening, when Ulf got home he immediately noticed that something was wrong.
“Them ol’ Namelesses back again, are they?” he asked gently.
Rosa nodded, relieved to have them acknowledged at last, and then told him about the hermit.
“Have I been proud, do you think, Ulf?” she asked.
But he shook his head with an expression of such tenderness that it made her want to weep. “You?” he said, reaching across the table to take her hands in his. “Not my Rosa.”
Sniffing back her tears, she returned his smile, even though she could derive no comfort from his reassurance.
There was none to be had. It wasn’t true. She was proud. Not of herself, perhaps, but of Hawise, who was her life’s prize beyond rubies and for whom, she sometimes felt, she might burst with it.
And yet it was a sin nonetheless. The Bible said so: “Everyone that is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord and shall not be unpunished.” Her feelings for Hawise made her an abomination to God, for which, as the hermit had warned her, she was going to be punished.
A week later she was still preoccupied and had stood at the cottage window muttering to herself from the book of Proverbs long enough to see the day change, the soft gray light of the morning darkening as the storm clouds chased across the sky like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, casting long shadows over the wildfowlers crouched low in their punts in the marsh.
The auditory rebuke of the chapel bells sounding for nones brought her to her senses eventually and sent her scuttling to her clothes chest for her apron to prepare the supper for Ulf and Hawise’s return.
Chapter 27
Allie h
ad every intention of doing something for Rosa’s nerves and might well have done, if the arrival of a messenger the very next day hadn’t sent her into a spin.
She had spotted him from the solar window, a lone figure on horseback picking his way through the marsh, and had stood transfixed, her heart thumping with anticipation, mouth moving in prayer.
“Please, God, don’t let him be from Wolvercote; please don’t let him be from Wolvercote,” she muttered, fixing on him like a hawk on a mouse, hoping against hope that, as he got closer, the livery he was wearing would reveal his provenance and put her out of her misery.
But it didn’t. As it turned out he was in plain clothes, and the agony continued until Jodi came up to the solar and handed her a scroll.
“Another letter for you, mistress,” she said. “An’ one for Lady Penda,” she added, brandishing another.
Allie took hers and, hands trembling, turned it over to inspect the seal.
Thank God!
It wasn’t from Wolvercote! She felt like dancing around the room. At last it was the long-awaited invitation to the Dunstan feast.
Gyltha set about preparing for it as if it were a military campaign.
“Ain’t havin’ you two turnin’ up lookin’ like a couple of tatterdemalions,” she told Allie and Penda. “I’ll get a nice piece of samite . . . or maybe some damask,” she said, addressing Jodi this time, whom she was dispatching to Cambridge to buy ells of cloth for the new dresses. “And we’ll get a new mantle for you while we’re at it,” she said sternly to Penda before turning back to Jodi, whose mouth and fingers were moving furiously as she committed Gyltha’s growing list to memory.
“Miniver be best, I think . . . and some lye. Plenty of that, mind . . . and some cloves . . . for their baths. We want ’em smellin’ nice.”
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