The Marsh King's Daughter (18 page)

That evening when she returned from a long day overseeing the bustle of the weaving shed, her head was ringing with the remembered clatter of the looms, her eyes were heavy with fatigue, but the tiredness was pleasurable and it was with satisfaction that she sat down in her box chair and gently rubbed her aching feet. Elfwen, the eldest Bridlesmith daughter, earned herself a wage by doing small tasks for Miriel. This evening she had prepared a supper of eggs, bacon and wheat waffles, which Miriel attacked with hungry gratitude. 'I swear food has never tasted so good,' she praised. 'You're the best cook along the whole of Cow Lane.'

Elfwen blushed with pleasure. 'I like cooking,' she said. 'I like keeping house.'

'Each to their own. I'm glad that you do,' said Miriel who was not particularly fond of either. She sent the girl home with a silver quarter penny and the promise of a wimple length of cloth from her first batch of weaving. Then she slotted the bar across the door and leaned against it, smiling contentedly.

The hot food had restored her energy. A cup of sweet honey mead was a further boost and she decided to make a start upon packing her belongings for the move to the weaving house. She barred the shutters upon the soft summer twilight and the chatter of folk lingering outside their homes to talk. The walls closed around her, but their solidity was like the comfort of a womb. Fire-and candle-light filled the room with a golden smokiness that she savoured for a moment before fetching a spade from the rock-cut store room. Dragging her clothing coffer away from the wall, she started to dig.

A fist banged on the door. 'Miriel, open up. You can't be abed this early!' yelled Gerbert in a peremptory voice.

She whirled with a gasp and her heart began to pound as if it would break from her body. 'Yes I am. I have a megrim,' she improvised. With shaking hands she threw the spade in her coffer.

'This is important; I have to speak with you.'

'Can it not wait until morning?' Miriel stooped to throw floor straw across the revealing hole and dragged her coffer back into place. She swished her hands in the tepid water of the cauldron and patted her face.

'No, it can't. Open up!' Gerbert's voice had a hard edge that Miriel had never heard before. She wondered if he had discovered her intention to quit the tenancy and wanted to talk her out of it. If so, she could think of nothing more tiresome to end the day. He did not sound as if he was prepared to be side-tracked or placated.

'Very well, but not for long, I've told you, I have a megrim.' She went to open the door.

He strode over the threshold and Miriel could tell at a glance that he was deeply upset. His clothes were rumpled and travel-stained, his white beard bristled like the fur of an angry cat and his complexion was the dusky colour of a man on the verge of apoplexy. She began to wish that she had kept the bar on the door.

'What's wrong?'

He gave her a furious look. 'You might well ask, Mistress Stamford.' The title emerged as a sneer.

Miriel's stomach gave a queasy leap. 'Would you like some mead?'

She watched him strive to control himself, opening and closing his fists, his jaw working. Finally he succeeded, and with a stiff nod and precise movements, seated himself on her coffer.

Miriel turned away to the flagon. It had a handsome finish of green glaze and the spout was fashioned in the shape of a horse's head. She comforted herself with the feel of its cool, polished surface. He was upset because he had found out she was leaving this house, and he had formed an attachment for her. That was what was wrong. She poured the mead and gave him his cup. 'Now then,' she said in a soothing voice. 'What have I done that you should give me such black looks?'

'You have deceived me,' Gerbert growled and took a deep drink.

Miriel raised her brows. 'Deceived you?'

He rested the cup on his knee. A slight tremor in his wrist made the mead shiver and ripple. 'Need I say more to you than St Catherine's?'

Miriel took an involuntary back-step and her knuckles whitened on the flagon handle. ,

'You do not deny it then?' His face sagged with an incongruous mingling of triumph and disappointment.

Miriel felt sick. How much did he know and how had he found out? 'Deny what?' she challenged, as always fighting back from a position at bay. 'I have done nothing of which I am ashamed.' Which was not entirely true, but that was a private matter between herself and Nicholas.

'Then you are a brazen whore.' The veins swelled alarmingly in his throat and his complexion grew plum-dark.

Miriel almost dashed the remains of her mead in his face. Only the very real dread that he might have a seizure prevented her. 'Those who cast stones are not spotless themselves,' she said contemptuously. 'The past is finished and I am doing my best to make a decent life for myself

'Built on a foundation of lies.' His voice thickened and choked. 'I trusted you. I thought ... I thought you were an honest and innocent widow in need of protection.'

'I am honest.' Miriel offered a silent prayer to God for a small amount of leeway. 'And I am innocent. I do not know what you have heard of me and from whom, but there are always two sides to a tale.' It was the overturning of his trust which had distressed him, she thought, the realisation that his initial judgement had been wrong.

Gerbert savagely gulped at his mead and glared at her. 'At St John's fair in Boston I negotiated a contract to buy the wool from St Catherine's Abbey. There had been a rift with their former buyer and they were in search of an agent.' His eyes nailed her. 'A rift concerned with a young nun absconding over their wall with a guest. The nun was Miriel Weaver, granddaughter of the renowned Edward Weaver of Lincoln, and the guest, an itinerant mercenary who went by the name of Nicholas de Caen.'

Miriel gnawed her lip. 'It is not what you think,' she said.

'How do you know what I think?' He plundered his cup a final time and banged it down on the coffer.

'It is there for me to read in your face.'

His beard jutted. 'What you read is anger at the way you have lied and deceived.'

'What harm have I caused?' Miriel made a throwing gesture. 'Have I not kept this house in good order and paid my rent on time? Have I not contributed to the livelihood of the people around me and shown my determination to settle here as a responsible townswoman?' She stamped her foot. 'Have I ever conducted myself in a manner to bring down scandal on your good name as my landlord?'

'What harm have you caused?' Gerbert's voice was a bellow of pain. 'Jesu, girl, you can hardly begin to know.' He looked at his cup. Miriel did not offer him more mead. Her stepfather's temper had always grown a stage more ugly with each measure he drank.

'What happened to your lover, this Nicholas de Caen?' Gerbert demanded.

'He wasn't my lover,' Miriel snapped. 'He came to St Catherine's sick with fever. I nursed him back to health and he was grateful enough to repay the debt by seeing me safe to Nottingham. Our bodies never once touched in lust and I still have my virginity to prove it!'

'A virginity you surely owed to Christ.'

Miriel bared her teeth at him, thoroughly furious and past caring. 'I owe nothing to Christ because I never took my vows. My beloved family forced me into that nunnery because they didn't want me and those sweet and saintly nuns cropped my hair as a punishment for defying their rule. They locked me up in a cell with bread and water and expected me to repent. When the opportunity arose, of course I ran away!' She drew herself up, tears of rage brimming in her eyes. 'I owe them nothing,' she spat. 'My life is my own, to make of it what I will, and neither you nor anyone else will tell me how to live it!'

The choking fury melted from Gerbert's face, leaving remorse in its wake. He rose, hands outstretched. 'Don't weep,' he implored. 'I cannot bear to see a woman's tears.'

'Then why drive me to the edge?' Miriel scrubbed her cuff across her eyes and jerked aside from his supplication.

'You lied to me; I was angry, I thought you had a lover. Don't, sweeting, please don't.' He put a clumsy arm around her shoulders and kissed her cheek.

She felt the heat of his breath, the bristle of his beard and with a gasp pushed out of his embrace. 'I think you should go,' she said, mustering her dignity. 'And you might as well know that I intend to dwell in Alice's house at the weavery. I was going to leave next week, but now I will make it the morrow.'

He looked at her in dismay. 'There is no need for that.'

'After the things you have said, there is every need,' Miriel contradicted grimly.

Gerbert swore beneath his breath and rubbed his thick, spatulate hands over his face. Then he gathered himself, his pugnacious chin jutting. 'I will leave when I have had my full say,' he announced with the pomposity of a village elder at a meeting. Going to the flagon, he poured a fresh measure into his cup and took a deep swallow.

Miriel eyed him warily, wondering what he was going to throw at her next.

Gerbert squared his shoulders. 'I came to face you with what I had found out. Indeed, I was in half a mind to report you to the sheriff and the Church, but I decided against it.'

'That is kind of you,' Miriel said with sarcasm.

'No, it is selfish.' He faced her, his legs planted apart, his chest and stomach puffed out in a single portly curve. 'I do not wish to see you whipped out of town or put in the stocks for what has happened in the past, but I will if I must.'

'If you must?' Miriel's sense of unease increased.

Gerbert drank his mead, his other hand wrapped tightly around his belt. He cleared his throat. 'I want you to marry me,' he said. 'I am weary of being a widower and my household is a dolorous place with only Samuel for company. It needs new blood, new life.'

'Marry you?' Miriel almost choked on the words. His interest had been present ever since that first night, but in her folly she had thought she could keep him at bay. Now he had a dangerous lever to use against her. 'Do not be a fool,' she said brusquely. 'You will keep me from one scandal only to throw us both headlong into another. When a woman weds a man three times her age, tongues grow busy and very sharp.'

'Let them wag,' he said stubbornly. 'The wonder will soon die down. I'm respected in the town for my sound judgement. What better than my wool trade should unite with that of the best cloth-weaving house in Nottingham?'

If Miriel could have moved, she would have grabbed her frying pan and chased him from the house without heed for the consequences. 'I will not yield up my business to you,' she said through her teeth.

Gerbert shrugged. 'I would not expect you to. By all accounts you know the weaving trade. I would leave it entirely in your hands.'

'And pigs might fly and roost in trees!' she spat. 'Virgin I may be, but I know all about the dishonest ways of men!'

'My word is my honour, which is more than can be said for yours,' he choked.

Miriel's cheeks flamed as though he had struck them with the flat of his palm. 'Then why do you want to marry me, if not to further your own interests?'

'Damn you, wench, of course I want to further my own interests, I'm not a saint!' he roared. 'I do not deny that my trade and yours fit neatly sword in sheath, but there is more to it than that. Jesu, I could have courted Alice Leen long ago if all I desired was the business!'

Miriel nodded viciously. 'But it's changed now, hasn't it? Instead of Alice Leen, there is me. You desire the feel of my body beneath the sheets; you desire to have me on your arm and show me off to your friends whose own wives are old and dowdy.'

She thought that he was going to strike her. In a way she hoped that he would, for it would make her decision simple. But he found the control and his hands remained around his cup and his belt.

'I do desire you,' he said in a voice that shook with the effort of remaining calm. 'What man in his right mind would not? And indeed I would be proud to have you at my side.' Now his hand left his belt and stretched beseechingly towards her. 'I want to cherish you, I want to protect you.'

Miriel narrowed her eyes. She was beginning to understand now. 'From men like Robert Willoughby, you mean?' Whose own interests were inextricably bound up with Gerbert's and the weaving trade.

He made a brief gesture. 'That is part of it, but not the whole.'

'And you think me incapable of defending myself?' The frying pan was within easy reach. All she had to do was grab it and let fly. 'Are you not taking advantage of me in your own way?'

'For your own good,' he said righteously.

'It was for "my own good" that I was sent to St Catherine's.'

Gerbert sighed and shook his head as if at the grizzling of a tiresome infant. 'I will not argue with you further. You can have until dawn to think the matter through. On the morrow you will give me your reply and I will act upon it. I promise that if you say yes, you will not lose by it. If you refuse' - he glowered beneath his brows - 'you know the consequences.' He went to the door and, on the threshold, paused to look over his shoulder. 'I do not mean to be harsh, Miriel. I swear to be the most tender and loving of husbands.'

She clenched her fists in her gown. 'Then why come wooing with a club?' she demanded.

He flinched as if she had struck him and left without another word. Miriel seized the frying pan off its hook and hurled it with all her might at the door he had just closed. It bounced off with a resounding clang, leaving a dint in the wood. The strength drained out of Miriel's legs and she collapsed on the bed bench.