The Conquest

by Elizabeth Chadwick

  'What kind of business, mistress?' Ailith responded politely.

  'Oh, I run a bathing establishment, with a hostelry lying next door. It's not a brothel, I have nothing to hide,' she added quickly as she saw Ailith's look. 'I'm a respectable widow, and that's what keeps me in clients.' She sucked her teeth and folded her arms beneath her copious breasts, hitching them up beneath her chin. 'I heard that you were looking for somewhere to stay and occupation for your hands, and that you too are a respectable widow, indeed with a daughter to provide for.' Her glance went to Julitta, who quickly dropped her gaze to the task of pea-podding. 'No-one asks too many questions round here. That way, no-one never gets told any lies.'

  Ailith coloured beneath the older woman's sharp scrutiny. The Southwark side of the Thames was outside London's jurisdiction, although in distance it was no more than a short boat journey or walk across the bridge. Here, bathing establishments had begun to flourish, some legitimate, others concerned with providing services less innocent than cleanliness of the body. She was not sure into which category Dame Agatha's premises fell, despite the woman's vehement reassurance. On the other hand, the offer of employment and a place to live seemed God-given.

  'What kind of occupation for my hands?' she asked.

  Agatha gave her a wintery smile. 'You're a suspicious one, aren't you?'

  'Life has taught me not to trust.'

  'Sometimes you have to take things on trust,' Agatha said. 'What I want is a someone to help me run my house and my business. Sigrid hasn't told me much about your life, but she says that you have worked in the households of a wealthy wine merchant and a Norman lord, and that you speak the language of the Franks fluently.'

  Ailith nodded stiffly. 'That is true.'

  'All to the good, since my clients are frequently Normans, and always rich.' Agatha tapped a ring-heavy forefinger against her prominent front teeth. 'You and the girl can have a chamber of your own, and I will pay you according to my profits — say five shillings a week and your board.'

  Ailith knew that she had little choice, but all the same, for the sake of her pride, she was determined to hold out just a little. 'I will think on it,' she said.

  Agatha's small eyes narrowed, but she nodded her approval. 'A day's grace I will give you, no more. I do not have the time, and neither, I think, do you.'

  Exhausted, soaked to the bone, Rolf entered the de Remys' fine new house by the Thames, sat down at the trestle near the hearth, and put his head in his hands. 'I am never going to find her,' he said desolately to Aubert. 'For three months I have searched. I don't know where else to look.'

  The merchant set a cup down in front of his friend.

  'Drink,' he said. 'And give me your cloak.'

  Rolf did so, and tasted the burn of ginevra mingled with the wine. He knew that he could remedy the hollowness within him by downing measure after measure of this concoction, that warm oblivion could be his for the swallowing, but only for a brief time. And payment was always exacted on waking.

  'Then perhaps you should stop looking,' Aubert said. 'If Ailith had thought the better of running away, she would have returned by now — either to Ulverton, or to myself and Felice.'

  'I could have made things right. She didn't have to go.' He listened to the heavy beat of the rain against the shutters. It had been spring when she left and now autumn was on the threshold.

  'No, she didn't.' Aubert sat down opposite Rolf and joined him in a drink. 'But she chose to, and I doubt that you could have made things right even had she stayed. You would be asking too much of her heart – that is what Felice says, and I am inclined to agree.'

  'She took our daughter too; she had no right.' Rolf ground an agonised fist into the trestle. 'God knows the kind of life Julitta might be leading!'

  Aubert eyed Rolf sombrely. 'I know that is no small part of your torment,' he said. 'But it is something that you must learn to bear. It is right to mourn, but not at the expense of everything else. You still have a wife and daughter. Arlette has been at your side through thick and thin — even if you have not wanted her. It is time you acknowledged that particular debt.'

  'You sound like a priest!' Rolf snapped savagely.

  'I am sorry. I only meant to be your friend.'

  'Ah God, I'm the one who is sorry,' Rolf grimaced and gripped Aubert's arm across the table. 'You present me with truths that I don't want to swallow.'

  Aubert gave him a pained smile and returned the grip. 'I miss her too,' he said.

  Rolf closed his eyes, squeezed them tightly shut, but Aubert's words were the key that unlocked a bitter flood of yearning and grief, and he lowered his head and wept until he was wrung dry of all emotion, and only a stone-like numbness remained.

  PART II

  JULITTA

  CHAPTER 37

  LONDON 1084

  Merielle was a whore, although she preferred to call herself a courtesan. The truth was somewhere in between. She did not frequent the houses and bastions of the city's wealthy burghers and French-speaking nobility; they came to her in clandestine fashion, ferried across the Thames by knowing boatmen to the Southwark side and appointments with their lust.

  Merielle was tall and shapely with flawless skin, huge blue eyes, and a pouting red mouth. In the six years since becoming the chief attraction of Dame Agatha's bathhouse, she had not once conceived, and the blessing of her barrenness made her very popular with men who had no desire to add the complication of bastard offspring to their family line, but urgently required the services that only a Southwark bath girl could perform. Merielle was ambitious and professional in her work. She was also a prize bitch.

  'You stupid little slut, you're not currying a horse! Can't you be more gentle!' she snapped at the girl with the comb. Her voice, which was musical and throaty for her customers, was ugly and petulant now.

  'I'm sorry,' Julitta said, not in the least. 'There was a tangle, it's out now.' She drew the comb down through Merielle's silky golden hair and thought grudgingly how beautiful it was. Her own hair was an uncontrollable mass of wood-shaving curls, and the colour was disastrous. 'Like raw liver – disgusting,' so Merielle was always telling her. But then Merielle never had a good word for anyone unless they were rich and male.

  'That will have to do. You're too slow, there's no time now.' Merielle swiped Julitta's hand aside. 'My robe, bring me my robe.' She snapped her fingers.

  Julitta curbed the urge to return the gesture in Merielle's overfed face. Her rebellious nature had already earned her several reprimands this week, and Dame Agatha was not patient at the best of times. With her mother sick, Julitta could not afford to incur any serious disfavour.

  Eyes lowered, she brought Merielle a gown of blue linen to cover the light chemise. It was of a fashion typical to nursing mothers, its deep neck opening fastened for modesty by a simple clasp at the throat. Julitta, at fourteen, was not ignorant as to the purpose of the dress in Agatha's bathhouse. On more than one occasion she had seen a bellicose merchant thrust his hand inside Merielle's bodice and squeeze her breasts like a housewife testing bread dough. It was always a preliminary to yet more intimate pawing, and she was not ignorant about that either, despite the protective efforts of her mother.

  She helped Merielle to don the blue gown, and arranged the blonde hair over it in a sheaf of sultry gold, her emotions vacillating between contempt and envy. The young whore pushed her dainty white feet into a pair of soft leather slippers, added an extra dab of rose oil perfume to her generous cleavage, and was ready to go down to her client, a corpulent gold merchant called Edmund.

  On the threshold, she turned imperiously to Julitta. 'Tidy this up,' she commanded, waving her arm to indicate the scattered debris of her preparations. 'Then come and help below. And mind you make haste.' Her dainty nose wrinkled. 'And tie your hair back too, you look like something out of the wild woods!' With which parting sally, she minced forth.

  Julitta swore at Merielle's retreating back and with a toss of her head, wound
her fingers through her hair, deliberately entangling it further. She looked like something out of the wild woods because she was something out of the wild woods, trapped in a noose and slowly strangling to death. It was no use complaining to Dame Agatha. There were other girls who worked at the bathhouse, but Merielle was the prize asset, and if it came to a choice between the whore and the housekeeper's rebellious fourteen-year-old daughter, Julitta knew who would win.

  Julitta's memory of a secure existence was a distant, unreal point of colour like a passage from a bard's winter song. Once there had been a little girl, a princess who lived in a rich hall and had everything she wanted, horses, servants, fine clothes, the world at her beck and call. A witch from the north lands had changed all that, setting a blood curse upon the girl so that she was changed into a beggar maid. It was a fantasy to which Julitta often returned, promising herself that one day the beggar maid would regain her true inheritance. But not today, she acknowledged to herself with a disgusted glance around the cluttered room.

  Julitta tidied Merielle's debris with nimble speed and a bad grace. Edmund the Goldsmith had bought his mistress a hand mirror in which she could admire her flawless beauty. Julitta picked it up to put on the coffer, and paused to study her own reflection. Her hair kinked in unruly close waves, its colour the dark, pure red of a Lothian garnet. The face returning her stare was of balanced proportions, the nose fine and straight, the eyes almond-shaped and of a deep, green-flecked blue, the jaw stubborn and slightly angular. She bore small resemblance to her mother lest it be in the generous curve of her lips and the width of her brow. Everything else, so she was told, was a feminine version of her father's.

  'You are so like him,' Ailith would mutter, shaking her head. But Julitta had no true idea what her father was like. She remembered being swept up in strong arms, and a deep voice, bright with laughter, she remembered the deliberate nuzzle of stubble on her cheek making her squeal with delight, and of riding with him to look at a meadow full of grazing horses, her small finger pointing, following his. But such memories were inextricably twined with other, darker ones that she preferred not to explore. If he was so wonderful, why had her mother left him and gone into hiding like a wounded animal?

  Abruptly Julitta turned the mirror over and placing it on the coffer, went down to the bathhouse, her hair falling to her hips in eldritch tangles.

  Dame Agatha was the widow of a Galwegian mercenary who had made his fortune by changing sides to be on the right one at the right time. In their turn he had served Hardraada of Norway, Harold of England, and William of Normandy. With the profits of his plunder, he had built a bathhouse in Southwark and lived to retire and die of apoplexy.

  The premises boasted six private bathing cubicles, each supplied with a large oval tub on a tiled floor, with sufficient room for a charcoal brazier to keep the bather warm, and a dressing couch, which had certain other uses. Dame Agatha's also contained a popular public steam room. The widow's husband had owned the foresight to build a cookshop next door to his bathhouse, so that his clients could send out for hot food, should their exertions make them hungry.

  Ailith appeared, carrying two buckets of scalding water.

  'I'll do that, Mama.' Julitta held out her hands, but Ailith shook her head.

  'I'm almost there now,' she panted. Entering the nearest cubicle, she dumped the buckets on the floor. Immediately Julitta took over the task of pouring the water into the huge bathtub. She saw that it would take at least another three journeys to fill it to a sufficient level, and knew that her mother would make herself ill if she did not rest. The cough which had bothered her throughout the winter had not eased with the advent of spring, and Julitta had become alarmed at how gaunt her once robust mother had become.

  Whisking the empty buckets from beneath Ailith's nose, Julitta was gone before her mother could protest. When she returned, the buckets full to the brim and steaming, Ailith was scattering herbs into the tub to scent the water. From the main room, where guests were greeted and made at home, they heard Merielle's alluring voice and the laughter of men.

  'I thought she was only entertaining Edmund?' Julitta said, eyeing the tub which, although capacious, was certainly not large enough for three. Perhaps they would all go into the steam room together.

  Ailith coughed harshly. 'Agatha told me he'd brought a friend with him. She's sent for Celestine to provide him with hospitality.'

  Dame Agatha would be pleased, Julitta thought as she journeyed to and fro with the buckets to fill the bath. Edmund was one of her best customers, and if he was introducing all his rich friends to the location, then so much the better for business. Celestine was Agatha's second-best girl, and like Merielle, only involved herself with the wealthiest clients.

  Julitta's assumption of Dame Agatha's delight was correct, for when the proprietor came to discover if the bath was prepared for their guests, her plump face was wreathed in smiles and she presented Julitta with a silver penny for herself. 'You're a good lass,' she declared, patting Julitta's cheek. 'I know I shout at you oftimes, but it's more bark than bite. You're a good worker. Now, I want you to go round to the cookshop and bring back two roast capons, a manchet, and a dish of pepper sauce.'

  Julitta turned to leave on her errand just as Merielle emerged from the main room with the two clients. Edmund's arm was around her waist, his hand fumbling at her breasts already. His friend was red in the face and kept touching his crotch. When he saw Julitta staring at him, he grinned, and striding forwards, snatched hold of her wrist in a grip heavy with rings.

  'How much is this one?' he demanded of Dame Agatha.

  Dame Agatha looked slightly taken aback, but she rallied quickly. 'I am sorry, Master Wulfstan, but Julitta is my housekeeper's daughter. She does not serve as a bath maid.'

  Julitta struggled against the biting grip on her wrist, but he only tightened it. 'I want her,' he said. 'How much?'

  Dame Agatha's chins wobbled as she swallowed. 'Celestine is very accommodating and trained to the arts,' she said. 'I am sure you will find her more to your taste.'

  'I think not. This one's a virgin? I'll pay you double for her maidenhead.'

  'Leave my daughter alone!' Ailith burst furiously upon the little group, her hand dropping to the haft of the all-purpose knife at her belt. 'Let her go,' she snarled at Wulfstan, 'or I will geld you!'

  The merchant recoiled, and Julitta was able to snatch herself free. Rubbing her wrist she ran to her mother's side for protection and stood panting and wide-eyed. The man gazed upon her and Ailith, his eyes narrowing. His hands went to his hips and a smile suddenly curved beneath his full, grey-gold moustache. 'Well, well,' he said softly, 'I always knew you would end your days in a brothel, Ailith. What happened, did your lover abandon you when your belly came between him and his pleasure?'

  Ailith stared. An expression of loathing contorted her features. 'Wulfstan!' she almost retched.

  'Aye, sweetheart, Wulfstan.' The goldsmith's smile grew mocking. 'You should have accepted my offer all those years ago. My wife dresses in silks and sables. She is the mother of four lusty boys, and mistress of a great household.'

  'And her husband visits bathhouses on the Southwark bank,' Ailith retorted with contempt.

  Wulfstan's complexion darkened, but he kept his smile. 'Aye, visits,' he sneered. 'I need not resort to living in one.'

  Ailith tried to stare him out, but she was seized by a violent paroxysm of coughing that doubled her over. Her ribs felt as if they were going to tear apart. Blood filled her mouth.

  'Mama!' Julitta put her arm around her mother, supporting her while she choked and spluttered.

  Wulfstan eyed the two of them, then turned decisively to Edmund, who had been watching the proceedings with astonishment. 'Go on, get in the tub before it goes stone cold,' he said. 'You've paid enough for the privilege. I want a private word with this good dame here.' He smiled at Agatha, but the expression was far from pleasant.

  'Of course,' she said faintly, th
en rallied herself. 'If you'll come this way to my solar. Julitta, take your mother to your room and let her lie down awhile. You had best take over her duties for tonight.'

  Wulfstan followed Dame Agatha into her sanctum, but not without casting a look of malice over his shoulder at mother and daughter.

  'Mama, who was he?' Julitta asked with a shudder of revulsion as she helped Ailith to their chamber and sat her down on the bed.

  Ailith spat blood into her kerchief. Mercifully the cough had eased. 'Wulfstan the Goldsmith. He courted me once and tried to force me into marriage. Your father intervened by offering me a position at Ulverton. Wulfstan was humiliated and he is not the kind to forgive and forget. He will joy in exacting vengeance.' Ailith bowed her head. 'Jesu, I am so tired, and my head is spinning. I do not know what to do.'

  Julitta was frightened. Her mother was usually so uncomplaining and resourceful, a rock to which she could cling when life threatened to engulf her. To see her like this made Julitta realise that she must either learn to swim on her own, or one day drown. She struck out in anger, as she had struck out as a small, spoiled child when learning against her will to make bread.

  'I hate it here!' she cried. 'Why did you ever leave my father? At least he would have taken care of us!'

  Her mother's face was waxen. 'I left your father because I did not respect him any more. He had dragged me through the mire once too often.'

  'And we are not being dragged through the mire now? Jesu God, Mama, you had an entire keep at your command, and you gave it up for a bathhouse?'

  Ailith sighed. 'Oh Julitta, Julitta,' she said wearily. 'If only it were that simple. Many is the time I have thought about swallowing my pride and returning to him, but it would be too late, I know, the bitterness is carved too deep. Do you remember that time I took you across the river to that big house with the wharf at the back?'