Winter Siege (10 page)

‘Could it, indeed,’ Maud said angrily.

‘He struck me as soldier-like,’ Sir Rollo put in. ‘A base rogue, of course, but I think we may expect more discipline in his men than from the Brabançons.’

‘I thought he was rather attractive in a dangerous sort of way,’ Cousin Lynessa said, clasping her hand. ‘Didn’t you think so, Maud?’

‘No, I bloody well didn’t.’

Alan of Ghent watched them go. His lieutenant, Bartolomeus, looming beside him, expelled a breath. ‘What’s that thing the Saracens think we worship? Turn … term …’

‘Termagant?’

‘Yeah. That’s what she was. Not woman enough for me. Wouldn’t want to put that little harpy on her back. Too big for her boots.’

Ghent’s eyes were still on the gatehouse. ‘Pretty, though, ain’t she?’ he said, gazing after her.

While the Fleming and his men were
in situ
, Maud kept herself removed. Reports came up to her of the good behaviour, even courtesy, demonstrated by him and his officers – Morgana was in transports – but she refused to be beguiled. ‘Officers,’ she’d scoff. ‘Riffraff more like.’

The Empress’s pennant now fluttered over Kenniford; Ghent had produced it – a somewhat tattered, grubby and hastily sewn version of that lady’s personal seal, showing Matilda enthroned with a sceptre in her right hand, held in such a way as to suggest she might bash somebody on the head with it.

That was enough. Maud was flying the Empress’s colours: no need to hobnob with the rabble that served the woman. The devils were eating her out of house and home as it was.

On the second day Morgana left. ‘Back to the Marches, my dear,’ she told Maud. ‘Besides, I’ll be one less mouth to feed.’ Maud bit back her tears as she watched her leave, already ruing the departure of one who represented such stolid comfort. ‘You’ll be fine,’ Morgana said, blowing her a kiss. ‘These things have a habit of blowing over.’

On the third day, however, Alan of Ghent sent up a request for an interview. ‘More of a demand, really,’ Milburga told her, bringing it, ‘but put nice. Hurry up.’

‘He should come to
me
,’ Maud said, and then decided that her solar should not be so polluted. Putting on her shoes, she asked: ‘What does he want?’

‘He’s going. They’re all going.’

Maud made a quick obeisance of gratitude in the direction of the cross above her bed, and hurried downstairs.

The mercenary was in the hall, shaved, cloaked, spurred, with his helmet under his arm and an impatience that brought out the scent of the floor’s rushes as he strode back and forth. He began talking before she’d reached the bottom of the steps. ‘We’re pulling out, my lady. I’m leaving fifty men with you – all I can afford at the moment, but I’ll send more when I can. Lieutenant Bartolomeus will be remaining—’

‘And why is that?’

‘Why is Bart—?’

‘Why are you pulling out? I am delighted to hear it, but why?’

He shook his head to get sense into it. ‘I should have said. A message has come from the Empress recalling me; the situation has … changed. Stephen has been freed.’

Oh, Mary, Mother of God, I’ve just joined the wrong side.

When the mercenary had gone, Maud gathered her people to tell them that the war was on again.

‘
IT WAS THE
Empress’s fault,’ the abbot says.

‘In other words, another sinful Eve,’ his scribe says happily.

The abbot shakes his head with an energy that makes him cough. ‘Not sinful; at least, not like that. Nobody ever ascribed uncleanness to that particular Lady of England. Arrogance to the point of stupidity, yes, she had that, but not sin in the sense that you mean it. If she’d been in the Garden of Eden, Empress Matilda would have throttled the serpent for daring to address her. No, there she was: Stephen in her prison; the barons temporizing while they waited to see what would happen; England at her feet. And what does she do?’

The scribe giggles, and dares: ‘Buggers it up?’

‘Totally. Already she had alienated the bishops who’d gone over to her; she was haughty to King David of Scotland, who was on her side, and to Robert of Gloucester, most loyal of half-brothers. She has the crown in her grasp. All she needs to have it on her head is a coronation at Westminster Abbey, and all she needed for that was to treat the burghers of London as human beings; forgiveness for their support of Stephen, some courtesy, a little liberality. Does she extend any of these things? No, they are commoners; they must crawl to her; they must pay her an exorbitant sum for their former recalcitrance.’

‘She pissed them off, in fact,’ the scribe says, giggling again.

The abbot’s eyes are failing, but they can still quell inky young upstarts. ‘My son, we shall abjure these salty interjections, if you please.’

‘Yes, my lord. I apologize, my lord.’

His superior nods. ‘Though the description is apt, I fear. The Empress’s behaviour was so outrageous that the Londoners lost their tempers and rebelled, pouring out of the City to take revenge on this new Messalina where she sat at a banquet in Westminster. She got away only just in time, riding astride and heading for her heartland in the West Country
…’

‘Riding astride, my lord?’ The scribe was shocked. ‘You try going side-saddle on a horse with the hounds of Hell after you. The point, my son, is that she escaped to the West, thanks to her half-brother, who fought a courageous rearguard action all the way. Eventually, however, the earl was captured.’

‘One moment, my lord.’ The scribe closes the lid on his wax book, puts it down carefully on to the floor, and takes another on to his knee.

‘Your hand is not too tired, my son?’ the abbot asks, for lifting the stylus to change the direction of a stroke in wax takes considerably more effort than setting a quill to parchment.

‘No, my lord, I thank you.’

‘Consider, then, the Empress’s position. She is discredited; still uncrowned; her greatest general, Earl Robert, is in enemy hands. All she can do is swallow that bitter pill and agree to free King Stephen if the royal forces free Earl Robert in return. And so she does; the two men are exchanged. But Matilda doesn’t admit defeat; she still has two great assets. One of them is her husband, Geoffrey Plantagenet, who is in the last stages of conquering Normandy for her against crumbling resistance, presenting a cruel dilemma to men who own lands on both sides of the Channel.’

The abbot pauses. ‘And she has their young son, Henry Plantagenet.’

‘Henry Plantagenet.’ The scribe’s voice treats the name very differently. ‘Who grew up to become the killer of St Thomas of Canterbury.’

‘Sadly true.’ And the abbot is sad for it. ‘But, you must admit, he has also been the bringer of a peace and an order to England such as it has never known.’ He turns to his scribe. ‘You see, nobody had sworn loyalty to Stephen’s eldest son, Eustace. If, as many lords were beginning to think, the disasters of war that had befallen them were due to breaking their oath to the Empress, all could be amended by recognizing her son as heir to the kingdom after Stephen died. I think it is why, at that stage, his father allowed him to join his mother and uncle in England. A wave of a flag.’

The abbot pauses, his eyes return to watching the leaves of his oak tree, and he softly repeats to himself: ‘Henry Plantagenet.’

Nine years old the boy had been when his father let him make the dreadful Channel crossing. Not much older than the boy William. In the depth of winter. Into a country ravaged by war.

Geoffrey Plantagenet had known the risk, but he also knew his son was worth a battalion to the Empress’s cause. Round-faced, russet-headed, stocky, sparking with intelligence, loving every minute of the danger, throwing a temper when his mother sent him back to Normandy, word spread that here, perhaps, might be the future answer to England’s dilemma.

The abbot is returned to the present by his scribe’s sniff of disapprobation. Time’s a-racing. The sun entering his window is at a low angle, sending warmth on to skin that is becoming increasingly cold.

‘Well, well,’ he says. ‘Young Henry returns to his mother’s care. With their king back, Stephen’s armies go forth again, and one of them entraps our poor, beleaguered empress in Oxford Castle.’

‘Forgive me, my lord.’ The scribe is cautious. ‘But you seem to be expressing sympathy for a woman who brought disaster on herself.’

‘Am I? It may be so, it may be so. Or perhaps I am feeling pity for a little girl who was packed off to Germany at the age of nine to marry the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry the Fifth.’

‘A fine marriage, I’d have thought,’ the scribe says; he is not an imaginative young man, not where the female sex is concerned. ‘Wedded to the Christian emperor of the western world. And she seems to have been proud enough of the imperial title; she kept it, after all, even when she’d been widowed and then wedded to the Plantagenet.’

‘Perhaps she needed it.’ All at once, the abbot is too tired to go on. ‘My son, I think that tonight we shall have to leave her besieged in Oxford Castle with only a few knights, while a blizzard drowns out the howl of wolves, human and animal, circling the walls to bring her down.’

‘And tomorrow?’ The scribe begins packing his tablets away.

‘Tomorrow we must return to the wanderings of our mercenary and his adopted child. Goodnight, my son, and thank you.’

DESPITE THEIR LONG
headstart, the trail left by the monk and Ramon and their men was not difficult to trace. Tiny villages, Earith, Papworth, Gamlingay, Cardington, Potton marked an erratic swathe of looting, killing, rape and destruction that led south and west. Gwil and Penda, trying to find where the mercenary band had gone next, were met by people frantically trying to rebuild burned cottages and barns, and, almost invariably, by the question: ‘Where was God when this happened to us?’

Sometimes it was: ‘Where’s was the law?’ For it seemed that the system of justice that had prevailed under King Henry I had broken down. In too many isolated places like these, manorial courts no longer functioned because the knights who administered them had been pressed into the army of King Stephen as it rushed around the country putting down one rebellion only for another to erupt somewhere else. Men who should have been able to defend their homes, or form the hue and cry that would have chased down the despoilers, had been forced into service to build the unlicensed castles – despite the fact that even to fortify a manor with battlements without the King’s permission was against the law – which were now springing up like so many hydra heads as men took the opportunity provided by the general anarchy to defend themselves and at the same time increase their power over their neighbours.

‘Who we chasing, Gwil?’ Penda had asked.

‘Fellas that stole my crossbow,’ Gwil said shortly.

Oddly enough, the answer satisfied her. During their sojourn in a rented room in Cambridge, he had made a crossbow, buying the glue and tools in order to save time, but doing the shaping and laminating himself, a process producing an article of such beautiful craftsmanship that the girl, fascinated by it, could imagine no greater loss than to have it stolen.

‘Ain’t goin’ to catch ’em though, are we?’ she said. ‘They’re months ahead of we.’

‘They’re going to settle,’ Gwil told her. ‘Sooner or later, they’ll settle.’ He was convinced of it. Ramon’s daring was growing with each raid, and so was his booty; raging through countryside would become wearing; eventually the man would attack some vulnerable motte and bailey, fortify it and establish himself over its land as a robber baron. He wouldn’t be the first; disaffected mercenary bands setting up their own lordships were destabilizing England as much as the war itself.

‘If peace ever comes, it’s going to take a bloody strong king to put this country back together,’ Gwil said.

What he was going to do when he caught up with the gang, he had no idea; he wasn’t going to let Penda come face to face with it, he was sure of that – to re-encounter the men who’d damaged her so badly could only damage her more. Yet to let them just disappear without some sort of accounting for what they’d done, would, he knew, cause a dissatisfaction that would never let him lie easy.

Actually, the girl was improving; she still had no memory of who she was and he’d stopped asking because the question disturbed her, but she was beginning to show interest in the world around her. While she insisted on being taken as a boy, there’d been a surprising display of femininity when, in Cambridge, it had come to buying masculine clothes. He’d expected her to wish to remain inconspicuous, shrinking into the sartorial shadows, afraid of being noticed. But no, at the fripperer he’d taken her to in the market square, she’d spent an age hunting through piles of clothes until she’d found a stylish, slim woollen tunic in a colour that made Gwil blink. ‘It’s
scarlet
.’

‘I know. I think it’s pretty.’

It clashed horribly with her hair but the choice suggested that, as a male, she could gratify a delight in colour that had been unsatisfied in the fens where men and women only wore clothes dyed in woad, if they were dyed at all. He didn’t have the heart to refuse her, though the bright-green mid-thigh stockings she chose to cover the gap between sky-blue trousers and elfin, black leather boots were, he felt, literally going a shade too far. So was the purple cap with a jay’s feather in it. ‘Look like a bloody popinjay, you will,’ he grumbled.

‘What’s a popinjay?’

Gwil drew the line at a cloak that could have rivalled a rainbow and bought instead a hooded and voluminous thing in serviceable brown wool that concealed an otherwise eye-dazzling ensemble.

All this, with two sets of linen underclothing for her, a new cloak for himself,
plus
the outlay on the crossbow,
plus
the rent for the Cambridge room,
plus
packs in which to carry equipment for life on the tramp,
plus
food and drink while they were doing it – and prices were getting high – had severely depleted the stolen coins from Ely. Sooner, rather than later, if the search for Ramon and the monk were to continue, they were going to have to find the means of earning a living.