Death and the Maiden

by Samantha Norman

  It was a bitter morning. A deep frost coated the boughs of the alders lining the riverbank, pinching Allie’s nose and cheeks above her furs. She was sitting in the prow, her head swinging right and left, ready to pounce on any landmark that might prompt her memory, the lack of which weighed heavily on her. After all, it was only by some miracle that she had been able to navigate to the landing stage that morning . . . Beyond that, she couldn’t remember a thing. All she knew for certain was that the coracle had traveled upstream; she could remember the drag of the current and, more than once, lying under the winnowing sheet in the bottom of the boat, had had to protect herself against Danny’s axe as it slopped toward her in the accumulating bilge.

  Other than that, the only other clues were auditory: Danny’s groans of exertion as the water became shallow; the bottom of the coracle hissing on the reeds that reached up from the river bed; the distant chanting of monks from an abbey, but which one, she hadn’t the faintest idea—the Fens, after all, were littered with them.

  Rowley and Ulf took turns at the oars, taking them past acre upon acre of desolate frost-nipped marshland, along stretches of the river dotted with untidy prickles of masts and trees marking the little fishing hamlets along the way. But still Allie could remember nothing of her journey of the night before and, as time wore on, became almost catatonic with self-loathing until an urgent cry from Ulf shook her out of it.

  “Mind that!”

  Under Rowley’s oarsmanship the boat was drifting perilously close to an island in the middle of the river.

  “Looks like a bittern’s nest,” Ulf said.

  Allie sat up abruptly. “Did you say ‘bittern’?” she asked, brightening suddenly.

  “Aye, I did.” Ulf nodded. “Tha’s a nest on that island! Vicious little bastards, them, worse ’an geese!”

  “Then this is the place!” Allie screeched, remembering how, the night before, she had heard Danny curse loudly about “buttleebumps”—the local name for bitterns, who were notoriously protective of their nests and capable of inflicting considerable harm on anyone who threatened them—as he fended one off with an oar.

  “The cavern must be very close to here!” she cried. “I’m certain of it.”

  Shortly after the skirmish with the bittern she remembered stepping out of the boat into bright moonlight and almost immediately into darkness again beneath a thick canopy of trees.

  “It’s over there!” she said, pointing at a copse in the distance, leaping to her feet in her excitement and rocking the boat dangerously.

  Penda pulled her back onto the bench and held her still while Rowley steered the boat to the bank. As soon as they moored she leapt out and ran into the copse.

  It was definitely the place; she hadn’t been wrong about that. She was looking at the scattered remnants of splintered wood from the trapdoor Danny had demolished to gain entrance to the tunnel, but instead of a tunnel there was only a mound of freshly dug earth where someone had filled it in.

  Penda spat on it.

  “Didn’t waste much time, the bastard,” she said bitterly.

  They stood staring at it, dumbfounded.

  “Well.” Rowley broke the silence. “We’re not going to be able to get down that in a hurry . . . In which case, does anyone have any idea where it might lead?”

  Penda and Ulf shook their heads.

  “They built a lot like that in the Anarchy,” Penda said. “You’re too young to remember—probably weren’t even born yet—but they built ’em as escape routes; dug like moles in them days in case of sieges. Some of ’em tunnels stretched a mile or more.”

  “Pen’s right,” Ulf said. “But ’less we can get down it we won’t know which way it goes. It could be anywhere.” He broke off, pointing in all directions. “A mile or so that way you’ve got Ely, then there’s Dunstan to the north, Ramsey east and Elsford west, not to mention all them little hamlets in between. We’re in the middle of nowhere and everywhere. That tunnel could’ve gone to any one o’ them places or none. It was worth tryin’ but ain’t going to help us, I’m afraid.”

  Penda spat again, then turned on her heel and set off briskly toward the boat. Ulf and Rowley followed her.

  Allie stared after them.

  “We can’t just give up!” she shouted, clenching her fists in fury. “We have to find him.”

  Rowley stopped walking but didn’t turn around. “Do you have any better ideas?” he called back. “Or possibly a shovel or two concealed about your person?”

  She stood for a moment, and, realizing that she didn’t, followed him reluctantly.

  There was a letter waiting for Rowley when they got back.

  “Bugger,” he muttered with a weary sigh as he took off his gloves to break its seal with his thumb.

  He didn’t need to read it. He knew its provenance and exactly what it was going to say.

  It was the summons from Walter of Coutances, sending him to Portsmouth to meet the queen, who would be arriving from France any day now, to dissuade John from invading Normandy with the French king.

  “Idiot boy,” Rowley muttered, scrunching it up in his fist.

  “Does that mean you’re leaving again?” Allie asked.

  He nodded. “I’m afraid so. Go and fetch your mother, would you?” Then, turning to the messenger, he told him, “Wait here, if you’d be so good. We’ll ride with you.”

  A little while later the three of them were standing in the courtyard waiting for Walt to bring the horses.

  Adelia was trying hard not to show how sad she felt at the prospect of yet another separation, but she was suffering. In fact, she didn’t know how many more she could bear. After almost a lifetime of these great yawning absences, she ought to have been getting used to them, but actually, she was finding them increasingly difficult. In the old days, when she was working for Henry, it had been different, and although Rowley’s leaving had never been a prospect she relished exactly, at least being busy had tempered the pain. Nowadays it was harder to fill all the days and weeks and months without him. And yet it was a private sorrow that she couldn’t share with Rowley or anyone else, because it was largely self-inflicted, the price she had to pay for refusing to marry him when he asked her all those years ago. The fact that she had grown old and weak and more in need in the meantime was nobody’s burden but her own.

  “Now, Rowley,” she said brusquely, brushing a piece of fluff off his shoulder, “don’t forget to tell Eleanor everything about the interdict. Don’t spare a single dreadful detail.”

  The situation was even worse, the diocese now littered with unburied bodies. Only the other day Bertha, the pregnant laundress, had nearly gone into premature labor when a fox, carrying a dismembered hand in its jaws, ran across her path in the drying court.

  “I won’t, my love,” Rowley said. “Of course I won’t. But I can’t promise she’ll do very much in a hurry. I rather suspect she has other priorities at the moment.”

  “Oh you do, do you?” Adelia sniffed, and was about to offer her wisdom, for him to hand on to the queen, about the prioritizing of priorities, when a bank of ominous black clouds drifted overhead and distracted her. “Oh! It’s going to snow,” she said, looking up at the sky anxiously.

  Rowley looked up, too. “Ah well,” he said with a shrug. “Even you must agree that there isn’t very much Eleanor can do about that.”

  They were interrupted from their concern about the weather by the sound of hooves on the cobbles behind them.

  “Ready, my lord?” Walt asked, leading the horses toward them.

  “Ready, Walt,” Rowley replied, then kissed his women, climbed into the saddle and set off into the glowering light of the snow-threatened afternoon.

  Just before she went into the house, Adelia paused on the step and glanced back at the sky again.

  Emma would consider that an omen, she thought with a shiver, and hurried through the door.

  Chapter 62

  Fortunately the snow didn’t fall until t
he early hours of the next morning, smothering the Fens in white and freezing the land as hard as iron so that even by midday, it took two strong men with heavy staves to break the ice on the manor well.

  By the time Allie woke up, the air in the solar was already thick with peat smoke—Jodi had set one of her special fires—but the room was still so cold that even when she got dressed, she had to rush back to bed, teeth chattering, to snuggle under the blankets with Hawise.

  She was also exhausted.

  During her waking hours Hawise was unstintingly brave, but her nightmares were taking their toll, and last night her cries had even outlasted the ten-hour candle Rosa insisted they burn lest she wake to the darkness that terrified her.

  Nobody had slept, and in the middle of the night, in desperation, Gyltha had braved both the cold and Adelia’s wrath by staggering across the room, swaddled in all her bedclothes, to beg her for a draft of poppy-head tea. She was swiftly and irritably dispatched back to her own bed, with Adelia’s admonishment ringing in her ears that it was only to be dispensed in cases of dire emergency.

  The irony was that Hawise slept longer than any of the others that morning, and by the time she woke up Allie was the only one left in the solar.

  “Bit bright, isn’t it?” Hawise said, shielding her eyes in the crook of her elbow.

  “It’s been snowing,” said Allie, patting down the rumpled sheets around her. “Came down hard last night . . . There.” She leaned across the bed to her. “How are you feeling this morning?”

  The cuts and bruises were still painful to look at but at least there was a little more color in her cheeks.

  “Better, I think,” Hawise said. “Less tired, anyway.”

  “All right for some, then,” said a voice. They looked up to see Penda coming into the room. “There’s summat I want to tell you,” she said, fixing on Hawise as she perched on the edge of the bed. “Because I think it might help you to hear it.”

  She looked different again this morning, Allie thought, even more preoccupied, if that was possible, than she had yesterday, and she could see her hands fretting nervously in her lap. Whatever she was about to say was obviously serious, and she seemed hesitant about saying it.

  In the heavy silence as they waited for Penda to speak, a peculiar tension filled the air, causing Allie to wonder whether perhaps whatever it was she was about to say wasn’t for her ears and it might be easier if she absented herself from the room for the moment.

  She got up. “Perhaps I should go . . . ,” she said, surprised when Penda shook her head and motioned for her to sit down again.

  “I ain’t good at this,” Penda said on a heavy breath. “Ain’t a talker like you, Hawise, or clever like you, Allie, but, the thing is—” She broke off, tension straining the sinews of her jaw as she steeled herself to carry on.

  “Well, the thing is . . . I was raped, too, see, just like you, and left for dead . . .” Despite her earlier hesitancy, she delivered the information so fluently and matter-of-factly that it took Allie a while to absorb it. When she had, she put her arm instinctively around Hawise.

  “It happened during the Anarchy,” Penda continued. “The time when, like they say, God and his saints slept . . . I was just a girl, mebbe nine, ten years old at most . . . Christ’s eyes!” She grinned, flapping her hand at all the vanished years. “It’s so bloody long ago now I don’t rightly remember . . . But, well, Father was taken from us, forced to fight for some local baron, as lots were in them days, leaving me, Gyltha and Ma to fend for ourselves . . .

  “Anyhow, one day . . . middle o’ winter, we ran out of fuel . . . So Ma took us into the marsh to fetch some more . . . and that’s when we heard ’em . . . The riders . . .”

  She broke off again, her chest heaving as she took another galvanizing breath.

  “Well . . . we knew, first off, they was up to no good because they was going so fast. Ma dragged me and Gylth into a ditch to hide but it was too late . . . They’d already seen us . . .”

  Allie heard the catch in her voice even before she stopped again, gazing bleakly into the distance as though at the sleeping giant of her memory.

  “So there we was, crouched in that ditch . . . hearts beatin’ nineteen to the dozen, and then, I dunno . . . being headstrong and fearless and a bit of a fool in them days, I decided to make a decoy of myself . . . lead ’em away from Gylth and Ma if I could, and next thing I knew I was running across that marsh like the devil was behind me, which, in a way, I suppose, he was . . . But my little ol’ legs weren’t no match for a horse and he soon caught me . . . and that’s when it happened.”

  She stopped for the last time, and Allie wondered whether anyone would ever dare break the ensuing silence, in which it felt as if even God was holding his breath, until Hawise said simply:

  “Thank you.”

  Penda nodded and stood up.

  “Better be goin’,” she said, as though they had only been discussing the weather.

  They watched her walk to the door, turning back when she reached it.

  “Tell you what though, bor,” she said, grinning. “It felt wonderful when I killed ’im eventually.”

  When the door closed Allie and Hawise sat silently for some time digesting what they had just heard.

  “Did you know?” Allie asked.

  “No,” said Hawise. “Not that. Sometimes she talks about when she disappeared but never that. She likes to talk about the man who rescued her, Gwil, I think his name was, some Flemish mercenary or something. It was him who brought her up after that and taught her to be an archer.”

  It was an extraordinary tale, more complex and more traumatic than anything Allie could have imagined, and although part of her wished she had never heard it, another part felt privileged to have been entrusted with it.

  “Do you think Gyltha knows?”

  Hawise shook her head. “No. Not the rape. Somehow I don’t think she would have told anyone else, not even Gylth. Maybe you won’t understand but it’s not something you’d ever talk about, not unless you had to.”

  Chapter 63

  The snow fell for days, smothering the meres and the marsh in white, and all the bodies on the churchyard wall.

  “I hope it isn’t like this in Portsmouth.”

  Adelia was watching a group of servants from the solar window struggling to clear a path in the courtyard.

  “If it carries on like this your father will never get through.”

  “Course he will,” Allie said, although she was only half listening; otherwise she was concentrating on the game of chess she was playing with Hawise, whom she was bitterly regretting having taught in the first place, because at that very moment, Hawise was threatening her queen.

  “Are you quite sure you want to do that?” Allie asked her. “Quite, quite sure that’s the move you want to make? Is it?”

  Hawise frowned at the board, deep in thought for a moment, and then, with a dexterous flourish and broad grin, plucked up the ivory figure and tossed it onto the bed beside her.

  “Yes I am,” she said, clapping her hands in delight. “Checkmate. Hurrah!”

  “Oops!” As if by accident, Allie’s knee suddenly spasmed, tipping the board off the tray in her lap and spilling the pieces over the bed. “Oh dear, oh dear,” she said. “What a dreadful thing to happen! Clumsy old me.”

  Hawise glared at her. “That was horrid. How am I supposed to pick them all up with only one hand?”

  Distracted by the bickering behind her, Adelia spun around to the room.

  “Oh, Allie!” she said, confirming Allie’s long-held suspicion that she did indeed have eyes in the back of her head. “What has gotten into you lately?”

  Boredom, Allie thought but didn’t say. On the list of sins her mother found intolerable, boredom was fairly near the top.

  It was true though. She was bored, almost to her bones. In the aftermath of the recent events—terrible, shocking and traumatic although they had been—she had been beset by a stu
ltifying sense of anticlimax.

  Life at Elsford was irrevocably changed; a new chapter had been promised but had not yet begun, and the hiatus seemed interminable. Not only that, but everything was still so untidy. So many loose ends left hanging, and dangerous ends at that.

  She had expected to feel eternal satisfaction and gratitude at Hawise’s return, but, it turned out, even that miracle wasn’t enough. She wanted more. She wanted resolution and justice, too; and yet they were still no closer to finding the person responsible for these crimes than they had been when she arrived.

  “Come.” Reading the signs, Adelia acted quickly. In this mood Allie had to be kept busy, so, taking her firmly by the arm, she ushered her out of the solar.

  “I need your help with some comfrey infusions, my stocks are getting low,” she explained when Allie was surprised to find herself in the kitchen. “Take these,” she added, sliding a pestle and mortar and a bushel of herbs along the counter toward her. “Make yourself useful.”

  She affected reluctance, tutting and sighing and pretending she would rather have been anywhere else, but secretly she was pleased to have something to do other than to lose at chess to Hawise.

  “Now,” Adelia said when they had finished, wiping her hands down the front of her apron, “perhaps you’d like to tell me what the matter is.”

  Allie rolled her eyes. “It’s nothing.”

  “I see,” Adelia replied crisply. “And that nothing wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain young gentleman that we know of, I suppose?”

  Allie thought for a while.

  Perhaps.

  There was certainly something of him mixed in with all the other malaise, but it wasn’t everything . . .

  “You do realize that your father is getting very excited about him,” Adelia said. “As a marriage prospect, that is . . .” She was looking at her quizzically. “Just so long as you’re happy, of course. That’s the main thing.”

  “I am . . . ,” Allie began, and then corrected herself. “At least I would be . . . It’s just that . . .”