Now, darling, I know how you feel—we have the same instincts, you and I—and I also know that you will be itching to get to the bottom of whatever it is that’s going on, but, for once, you must listen to me and do nothing! You don’t have the protection I had, you don’t have a Mansur, or a Henry, come to that, and it’s much too dangerous to act alone. By all means keep your eyes and ears open but don’t, under any circumstances, go looking for trouble, because knowing you, you’ll find it.
I’ve promised your father that I’ll stay in Wolvercote until Holy Innocents’ Day but after that, come what may, come snow, come civil war, come the Four Horsemen of the bloody Apocalypse, I will be leaving for Elsford and there is nothing either your father or anybody else can do to stop me.
When she finished it, she rolled it up, shoved it up her sleeve for safekeeping and then took herself off to a quiet corner of the room to think about it.
After all, there was a lot to think about, a lot she found disturbing. It wasn’t so much Adelia’s directive that she shouldn’t get involved in investigating the murders, although that was irritating enough; it was more the internal conflict it provoked between, on one hand, desperately wanting to see her mother again and, on the other, desperately not.
So much had happened and changed since she came to Elsford that she was a very different person now, enjoying a freedom that she would have to relinquish when Adelia arrived. Apart from anything else, her mother’s compulsion to interfere and to know everything about everything meant that she would have to fight for every mote of independence and privacy she had gained there, battles that would prove futile in any case, because once Christmas was over, Adelia would inevitably insist that she return to Wolvercote.
She went to bed that evening feeling miserable.
Chapter 37
The snow Rowley had so confidently predicted didn’t come, at least not in the south, so that, by the time the summons came to attend Eleanor at her Christmas court in Normandy, there was nothing to stop him from obeying it.
Of course he had known it was in the offing, but, as dreaded things will, it came quite suddenly, and on the wrong side of Christmas, forcing him to leave St. Albans in a hurry, dressed in full bishop’s regalia, with the smell of incense still clinging to his robes from a mass he’d only just finished celebrating.
Because speed was of the essence, he took only a small retinue with him, arriving in Dover as the bells rang for vespers on the day before Christmas Eve.
It was barely dawn as they rode to the quayside but the air was already shrill with the cries of gulls and the excitable voices of the fishermen and merchants dashing around a boarded dock that groaned under the weight of a veritable Noah’s ark of animals in cages, vast crates of vegetables and casks of wine.
Rowley hated Dover—all ports, in fact—because he loathed being at the mercy of anything as capricious as the weather, becalmed one moment, for weeks on end sometimes, then tossed around on the high seas with a ship’s timbers grinding treacherously underfoot the next. Unlike other people he knew, when he looked out over the channel, he saw not the wonder of adventure and the promise of foreign lands, but the morose, undulating back of a liquid monster.
Under Henry, who had spent only sixteen years of his thirty-four-year reign in England, Rowley had gone continually back and forth to the Continent, and despite loathing and dreading every one of those crossings, it was the last that had left him finished with the sea—almost literally—when he had sailed back from Italy with an assassin’s knife in his back.
Fortunately he remembered very little of the voyage—he had been half-dead, after all—but when he had recovered, many months later, he had vowed never to set foot in a boat again. And yet here he was again, waiting for the bloody tide, watching miserably as Walter, his groom, led their horses up the gangplank onto the clinker-built hulk waiting to take them to France.
Four mercifully uneventful days later, they arrived at the queen’s dower house in Bonneville-sur-Touques, where he was shown immediately into a wood-paneled room decorated like many of the grand rooms of Europe, with lavish gold leaf on the ceiling and heavy Flemish tapestries on the walls, but also remarkably unlike them. Its present incumbent had embellished it with touches of her own, introducing an air of exoticism to the otherwise somber grandeur, adding vibrant flashes of color from a multitude of Persian carpets, cushions and artifacts brought back with her from the Crusade.
Indeed, her presence was so palpable here that it took him a while to realize that he hadn’t seen her yet and that, apart from the page who had shown him in and a harpist perched on a stool in the corner, the room appeared to be empty.
It was only when he noticed the harpist glance nervously in the direction of a large oak-framed chair that he saw the tiny figure recumbent in the back.
“Eleanor!”
The utterance was quite involuntary, forced from his chest by an emotion that was almost as shocking as the realization that she had grown so old since he had last seen her. Precisely when that was, he couldn’t recall, but it was less than three years since he had ridden to Salisbury castle with William Marshall to break the news of Henry’s death and to release her from incarceration.
As he took a step toward her chair he saw her stir, and was shocked again to see that the lustrous rose gold of her hair, once the envy of every woman in Christendom, had turned white in his absence and that the taut, fierce beauty of her face, which, in its day, had inspired gossip in every court in the land, had crumpled around its tiny bones.
The other shock, of course, was that she was asleep at all. The Eleanor of old had never slept. She was like Henry in that regard, indefatigable, restless and crackling with an energy that, if misdirected, could be terrifying.
She raised her arms, stretching catlike, but when she turned her head and noticed him at last, a slow, bewitching smile spread across her face, immediately sloughing away the years.
“My lord bishop,” she said, rising from her chair and, he could have sworn, getting taller as she came toward him. “Rowley.” She extended her hand. “At last.”
He knelt in front of her, pressing her delicate beringed fingers to his lips, feeling the strange alchemy of her extraordinary presence, which not even age could diminish.
“Sit down,” she said, indicating a chair with a grimace when the confused harpist took it as his cue to start playing again.
“Thank you, Phillipe,” she said crisply. “You have delighted us for long enough, I think. You may leave now.”
When the young man had hurriedly packed up his things and left the room, she turned to Rowley, who withered under her forensic gaze, wondering whether she had noticed the passing of the years in him, too, and whether or not she thought they had been kind.
They chatted inconsequentially for a while. Like most relationships founded in a shared history, theirs transcended the usual mores of conversation with an implicit understanding that, whenever they met, there would always be too much to say and too little time to say it. And if their fluency foundered occasionally, it was because they were both aware of the strong undercurrent of suspicion running between them.
They were both Henry’s creatures, after all, and, at various times, during various crises in his reign, had taken opposing sides. Since they had survived those differences—although Rowley sometimes only by the skin of his teeth—a tacit understanding had developed that they were best not revisited.
So it was that by the time he got around to broaching the purpose of his visit, it was late afternoon and they were interrupted by a servant coming in to light the candles.
Rowley leaned forward on his chair. “I am here to advise you, lady,” he said, lowering his voice, “that your presence may be required in England soon.”
Her unwavering expression of polite indifference gave nothing away, but Rowley blanched anyway. She might have aged, he thought, but so far there was nothing to suggest that she had also mellowed; besides, she was famously contempt
uous of England, not only because it was where she had been kept prisoner by Henry for all those years but because, as she had once told him, English wine tasted of piss.
During the long silence Rowley developed a creeping nostalgia for the harpist, or, indeed, anyone who might divert the inscrutable gaze.
“Well,” Eleanor said at last, idly fingering the delicate embroidery at her sleeve. “You won’t be surprised to know that the request is not unexpected.”
He wasn’t. Of course she was aware of the situation and had already commanded her seneschals on the Angevin borders to repair and strengthen their fortifications in case of an invasion and, because she was also regent in Richard’s absence, had encouraged their English counterparts to do the same.
“John making a nuisance of himself again, is he?” she asked.
Rowley nodded. “I fear he is, lady,” he replied. “And worse, I have heard reports—on good authority, too—that he travels the country these days with an armed retinue, among whom there is no one with influence enough to correct him when he refers to himself, as he does increasingly, I fear, as ‘the next king.’”
Again the inscrutable gaze, only this time tempered by the merest suggestion of a smile.
“So he needs his mother’s influence, then, you think, Rowley?”
Rowley smiled. “I believe he does.”
She stared into her lap, muttering something under her breath, then looked up.
“How soon should I come? Is the threat imminent, do you think?”
He took a deep breath as he considered his response.
It was a difficult question to answer. There had been trouble brewing, as well she knew, ever since Richard left behind him an incendiary combination of a great vacuum of power and the parting gift of an entire principality—all of southwest England and a broad swathe of the Midlands—to his avaricious brother. Not since the conquest had anyone, other than the king himself, controlled such a vast territory, and the reckless generosity gave many cause to wonder whether he ever intended to come back.
And yet, other than John’s interminable posturing and his skirmishes with Longchamp, nothing had happened. However, the creeping sense that it might was dangerous to the fabric of a country over which the shadow of the Anarchy still loomed large.
“On reflection,” he said at last, “although the threat is imminent, I don’t think it is yet immediate, so my advice, lady, would be to monitor the situation for now and be ready to sail when the time comes.”
Eleanor nodded. “Very well. Then I presume that you and I will have to reconvene at a later stage?”
When Rowley nodded, she inclined her head with a smile of benign detachment, the signal that their audience was at an end and that, like the harpist before him, he had delighted her for quite long enough.
He rose stiffly from his chair, bade her farewell and was almost at the door when she called him back.
“I almost forgot,” she said, rising with, he noted bitterly, greater ease than he had. “Before you go you must tell me how Almeison is. I presume that you have married her off by now and that you made a good match for her?”
His heart sank to his boots. For a few blissful days he had forgotten about Allie, but to be reminded of her now, by Eleanor of all people, was a humiliation too far, and he didn’t know how to respond. How could he admit his failure to his queen? He stood at the door racking his brains for some sort of credible obfuscation.
“She is . . .” God’s eyes! What on earth was he going to say? He could hardly admit the truth—that she was obstinately refusing to marry and driving him to an early grave—and yet he had to say something . . . Eleanor was looking at him with that expectant look of hers.
“I’ve sent her to the Fens,” he managed to say eventually, and boldly, as if it were a universally acknowledged fact that sending one’s daughter to the Fens gave her an automatic, unrivaled passage to future wedded bliss. For a moment he even felt quite pleased with himself, until he saw that Eleanor was frowning.
“Did you say the Fens, Rowley?” she asked, the frown deepening.
He nodded.
“But isn’t Ely in the Fens?”
He nodded again.
“Then you must get her out of there immediately,” she snapped. “I’ve just received news that Longchamp went squealing to the Pope when you bishops confiscated his estates. He’s about to impose an interdict on the diocese. Things are about to become very unpleasant there, and very quickly!”
She said it with such uncharacteristic urgency that in his confusion he couldn’t remember leaving the room, only that he had done so in a fumbling great hurry with her warning echoing in his mind.
He slept fitfully that night, cursing Allie, who, even at a distance, was managing to heap worry on him.
Left to himself, he would have made for the coast there and then, but having driven his men so hard to get there in the first place, he was reluctant to drag them from their beds on a whim. Besides, now he came to think about it, perhaps it wouldn’t be all that bad. Interdicts were passed as frequently as they were ignored, and from what he knew of the Fens, by the time news of any sort reached there, it was often altered beyond recognition, blunted and mutated by the remoteness of myth and nothing to do with real life. Perhaps, by the time it came, Longchamp’s interdict would have undergone the same process and might, with any luck, have lost its teeth.
On that more optimistic note he turned over and closed his eyes, hoping for the oblivion of sleep.
But it didn’t come.
He sat up again.
But suppose he was wrong? Suppose it was imposed just the way Longchamp had intended? The effects would be devastating: no sacrament given, no sepulture for the dead, no masses celebrated, the dying denied the viaticum. He had seen the devastation wrought by an interdict before and had never forgotten the countless dead bodies hummocking the ground, their grieving relatives helpless to do anything but stand over them and weep.
After that he gave up hope of trying to sleep, and at first light the next morning, he roused his men and set off for the coast at speed.
Chapter 38
Holy Innocents’ Day had dawned dull after the excess of Christmas and, because it was also a fast day, engendered a certain tetchiness in those whose bellies had become accustomed to being full: from Elsford to Wolvercote, the joyful atmosphere pervading the country over the last few days was swept away by an air of melancholic ennui and increasingly bad temper.
Which was probably why it was also the day that Hawise and Allie had their first argument; an inconsequential matter, as these things so often are, engendered by hunger and boredom more than anything else—but bad enough for Hawise to stomp out of the solar in a huff.
Allie had been teaching her to play chess, and in the middle of a game, Hawise had said something about Lord Peverell—an innocuous remark; afterward she couldn’t even remember what it was—but Allie had rounded on her venomously and hurt her feelings, and she had trudged home, muttering indignantly under her breath. Even as she did so she was planning to return as usual the next day to make her peace, but when she woke up the following morning, still full of resentment, she decided it might be better if she didn’t.
By midmorning, however, she was beginning to regret her decision.
Rosa had left early to go to the mill, and Ulf was, as usual, on business somewhere for Penda, and so, by lunchtime, bored and lonely, she decided it was probably time to swallow her pride and go up to the manor after all. And, just in case Ulf found out that she had gone alone and got cross about it, she thought it would be a good idea to take the sting out of his anger by checking on her mole traps on the way.
By the time she turned off the lane and took the track to the river, a thick haar was settling on the water and the light was getting dimpsy; nevertheless she found her first trap easily enough and, in no time, had unearthed the small clay pot, lifted it clear of the mud and felt the satisfying judder of the animal inside. She flipped d
own the tailgate and inserted her hand cautiously—she bore too many scars not to be wary of the sharp little teeth inside—removed the tiny velvet body between her thumb and forefinger and, in one deft movement, struck its nose on the spade, killing it instantly. Then she stuffed the little corpse into her sack, reburied the trap and moved on to the next one.
She repeated the process several times, moving steadily along the riverbank until she came to the section of the river where Harry the Fish hung his nets out to dry. More often than not he would be there waiting for her, a fulsome account of the morning’s catch rehearsed and ready on his lips, but today he was long gone, his nets almost dry beside his upturned fishing creel.
She missed seeing him but there were other presences by the river. Somewhere in the rushes she could hear the thin high whistle of an otter, and in the distance, flying above the mist, she saw the ghostly outline of a barn owl flash white against the gray sky.
She came to her last trap and dug quickly. Her stomach was rumbling furiously, reminding her that if she didn’t hurry up she would miss lunch; besides, a cold, nagging breeze at her back alerted her to the fact that something nasty was coming in from the North Sea.
She dispatched her last mole, reburied her last trap and was gathering up her things when she felt a sharp blow on the back of her head and the world turned black.
Chapter 39
When she opened her eyes again she was met with such suffocating blackness that she closed them again immediately, preferring a blindness of her own making.
At first she assumed she was dead, but as time passed and her senses returned, she realized that she couldn’t be because she was in such pain—not, thank God, the searing heat of the cauldrons of hell, but a dull, secular throbbing in the back of her head and a peculiar soreness under her arms, the physical memories from the hands that had inflicted this darkness and dragged her from wherever she had been to wherever she was now.
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