The Winter Mantle (72 page)

Matilda heard the low drone of a voice intoning in Latin and felt cool moisture on her brow as a gentle finger painted it with the shape of a cross. The click of prayerbeads joined the murmur. She wondered in confusion for whom everyone was praying. Perhaps she ought to join in… but she was very tired and her head ached so badly that even considering the notion made her feel sick. Perhaps if she slept first…

Simon had been watching Matilda's still face and thought he saw a ripple pass over it as the priest anointed her with the holy oil. But she did not move again, and no one else had seen a sign.

Three days she had lain in this cold trance. They had borne her back to Gisors on a litter and Simon had ridden alongside it, terrified that she was going to die. She hadn't, but he was aware of time trickling away and with it her chances of recovery. They had managed to dribble a small amount of milk down her throat, but she needed more sustenance than that. Already he fancied that the hollows beneath her cheekbones were cadaverous.

Chester gave Simon's shoulder a hearty slap. 'Come away,' he said. 'Leave her to the women. There is naught you can do here but get in their way.'

'I would rather stay,' Simon said and stiffened his spine, against the Earl's bonhomie. It was well intentioned, but it grated upon him like two ends of broken bone.

'Christ man, you're a soldier, not a wet nurse! She won't know if you stay or leave. Sink a few cups of wine. You'll feel the better for it.'

'She might not know, but I would,' he replied grimly. 'And sinking any more wine than I have done already will only give me a foul head.'

Chester grunted and spread his hands to show that he yielded. 'You are a couple well suited,' he declared. 'Both out of your wits.'

Chester left his irritation evident in the heaviness of his footsteps, but Simon barely noticed except to be relieved that he had gone. He took Matilda's hand in his. The fingers were warm and relaxed. He rubbed the pad of his thumb over the carved stone of her wedding ring.

'Matilda…' he said softly and stroked her copper hair. 'Whatever I have done to you… I am sorry. If I have been faithless, it was out of my own lack… never yours. Why in God's name you wanted to follow me to Gisors, I do not know… surely there are more worthy causes to pursue than a wayward husband.' There was a tight lump in his throat. 'Unless you wake and tell me, I will never know…'

Her face remained smooth and slack, the lips slightly parted. The silence stretched out, broken only by the settling of the charcoal in the nearby brazier and the soft murmur of Helisende and the wet nurse beyond the bed curtains.

Simon bowed his head to pray, but the physical and mental exhaustion took its toll. He closed his eyes, intending to entreat God's aid for Matilda, and promptly fell asleep.

Matilda was woken by the sound of a baby crying and someone swiftly shushing it. Her vision blurred and sharpened by turns, making her feel queasy. A fat wax candle cast gold and shadows over the bed. She was aware of a splitting headache emanating from the region of her left temple. Memories swam across her mind like dark-coloured fish and vanished into the murk before she was able to net them. There had been shouting, and battle.

The glittering edge of a sword. Blood. Pain. Nothing.

Her mouth was dry, and she could not swallow because she was so parched. She tried to raise her right hand to summon aid and found that she could not, for there was a weight pressing it to the bed. Inching her head round with difficulty, pain stabbing in sharp flashes, she saw that Simon was kneeling at the bedside and that he had fallen asleep against her arm. His fingers were meshed through hers, binding her to him. There was a three-day growth of golden-brown beard outlining his mouth and the hair at his brow had grown overlong so that his fringe was almost in his eyes. A wave of tenderness engulfed her. And then she saw the bandage wound around his other hand and the brown stains where blood had soaked through and dried.

'Simon?' she mouthed. Her voice was a parched croak. He did not raise his head, but his hand tightened its grip on hers as if he feared that she might leave while he was unguarded. Making a huge effort, she nudged him and once more breathed his name. His head came up slowly like that of a man being roused from a drunken stupor and for a moment his eyes were fugged and unknowing.

'Simon, I need a drink,' she breathed, and began to cough.

His gaze sharpened and cleared. Reaching for the cup at the bedside, he held it to her lips.

She sipped the watered wine in the cup and the dark fish of memory swam closer to the surface. She had been riding from a convent where she had just confronted her husband's lover. From beyond the curtain, the baby wailed again and the focus of her mind sharpened a further degree.

'Thank Christ,' he said, in a voice that shook. 'I have never prayed so hard in my life as I have prayed these last days… When the priest came to shrive you, I thought I would go mad.'

'Then you know my condition,' she murmured. 'For I too have been mad… mayhap I still am.' She closed her eyes, feeling sick. Pain hammered through her skull. The world and its problems were too vast to take in. It was easier to shut them out and return to the darkness.

She slept again, and when she woke Simon was still there. Indeed, she did not think that he had moved from her side, for his stubble was now decidedly a beard and even if her eyes had remained closed, she would have detected his presence by pungent smell alone. The candle no longer burned at the bedside and the curtains had been pulled back, revealing that even if the morning was not well advanced, it was beyond dawn. There was no one else in the hall, even by the hearth in the centre of the room where the cooking tripod had been moved to one side away from the direct heat of the flames.

Her head still ached but her vision was clearer, and her stomach no longer made her feel as if she were on the heaving deck of a ship. She tried to sit up and Simon moved to help her, but immediately desisted with a gasp of pain. She managed to struggle upright on her own. Her skull thundered and she was dizzy for a moment, but she weathered the feelings and looked at him in concern. 'What's wrong?'

He sat back down on the bedside stool, his hand pressed to his side. 'My ribs,' he wheezed. 'I took a blade side on and I think I've cracked a couple at least.'

'You fool, why haven't you had the chirugeon tend you?' Matilda forgot her own discomforts in witnessing his. The bandage wrapped around his hand was as grubby as a beggar's toerag and, although he had removed his mail, his quilted gambeson was so marinated in the stink of sweat, smoke and blood that it could have stood up by itself and walked around.

He shrugged, then immediately winced. 'I had a vigil to keep.' He took her hand in his and stroked it. 'I realised what I stood in danger of losing.'

Matilda found a bleak smile. 'So did I,' she said.

With his free hand he poured her a cup of wine, took a drink himself and then put the cup to her lips. The gesture was almost like the ritual of the loving cup at a marriage where bride and groom would sip from the same place. This time the wine was not watered but contained a burn of usquebaugh that made her cough.

'Sorry,' he said. 'I had to have something to sustain me in the long watch of the night.'

She made a speechless gesture to show that she would be all right in a moment. The usquebaugh launched itself from gullet to belly and flashed like fire through her veins. Her throat opened again and she inhaled a fiery breath of air.

He studied at her sombrely. The shadows beneath his eyes were the colour of slate. 'Why did you follow me to Gisors?'

She looked at him then down at the coverlet. A loose thread poked out of the braid selvage and she plucked at it. 'I came to Gisors because of my mother. And in a way I went to Evreux because of her too.'

'Your mother?' he looked at her, nonplussed.

She pointed to the chest at the bedside. 'Open it,' she said, 'and take out the roll of linen on the top.'

Wincing at the pain from his ribs, he did as she requested. 'What is it?'

She gestured him to unfasten the braid binding and unroll it. 'An embroidery. I found it when I was clearing her coffer of clothing to give as alms to the poor. She kept it all those years.'

'She had many embroideries,' Simon said as he spread the canvas out on the bed.

'Not in the end. She gave them all away… save this one.'

Simon looked at it, following the pattern with his eyes. A young woman on a black horse, a red-haired man on a chestnut, the stitches so skilfully wrought that an observer could almost see the breeze in their garments and hear their laughter. He touched the figures with the fingertips of his good hand and raised his head to Matilda.

'My mother put all her love and longing into an embroidery and then confined it to the darkness of a chest,' Matilda said with a lump in her throat and tears in her eyes. 'I do not want to live my life like that.' She picked up the canvas and traced the lovingly worked red-haired man with her index finger. 'I have dwelt so long in the shadows my father left behind that I am in danger of becoming a shadow myself.' Drawing a deep breath, she raised her eyes to his. 'That is why I came to find you… as my mother never came to find her husband.'

Simon swore softly beneath his breath. 'As I remember, she felt he had betrayed her,' he said. 'Have I not betrayed you?'

Matilda's gaze remained steadfast. 'That was what I went to Evreux to find out.'

'You could have asked me.'

'Had you been in Gisors, I would have done - likely with a pair of sewing shears. As it was, I took my fury to Evreux.' At Simon's look of alarm, she smiled, although her eyes were narrow like a cat's. 'You need not fear. Sister Sabina is still in one piece. We might not have met and parted the best of friends, but we came to an understanding. She told me what was between you.'

His exhaustion-pale complexion showed a sudden flood of colour. 'I am not proud of what happened, but I will do my best to set it rights. The child is a blameless innocent.' He took her hands in his. 'It is my duty to take him into my household - and into my heart. I will understand if you cannot do the same, but I would ask you to try.'

'It is my duty too,' Matilda said, her laughter fading. 'Of course I will do my best.' She had been taught all about duty, and how there were times when the doing of it held the world together. 'Do you still want her?' she asked in a low voice. 'Is there no part of you that regrets she has taken holy vows?'

Simon shook his head. 'It was a fire lit at a single stopping place along the way and doused to mutual agreement. I want you.'

'Do you?' She searched his face.

He took hers between his hands, the good one and the bandaged. 'I wanted you when I saw you in the garden at Northampton, and that wanting has never gone away. Never,' he said. 'And I am not speaking as a courtier or someone trying to ingratiate himself.'

'Then as what?' she whispered. Their lips were almost touching. 'Tell me, Simon. I need to know.'

'As a man who loves his wife to distraction,' he said. 'For her courage and her love and her forgiveness. For everything that she is.'

Matilda gave a small gasp and closed the infinitesimal space between their mouths. The kiss was tender and passionate, despairing and joyous, and when their lips parted they were both breathless.

'Close the bed curtains,' she panted, her eyes luminous.

He looked at her askance and shook his head. 'I don't think I can…'

'No, you fool.' She smiled at him through a shimmer of tears. 'Not for that reason! Neither of us is in a fit state. If you tried to stand up you would keel over, and my head is pounding fit to burst. I just want you beside me. Come to bed and sleep.' She flapped back the bedcovers.

He looked longingly at the space she made for him. 'I stink, I need to bathe,' he said with a grimace and a sniff of his armpit.

She shrugged. 'I have no complaint. The morrow will suffice. Come.'

He yielded to her insistence, and the fatigue rushed upon him like water through a burst dam. Somehow he managed to close the bed curtains and shut out the world. Somehow he stripped his gambeson and tunic, his leg bindings and hose. His hands fumbled, and his eyelids suddenly felt as if someone had weighed them down with death pennies. Still clad in braies and shirt, he tumbled into bed beside Matilda, pulled her close, and rested his chin against the top of her head. Within moments his breathing was slow and even.

Matilda nestled against him and heard the solid thud of his heart against her ear. She was not so naive as to imagine that they had faced and defeated all their demons. There would be more quarrels, struggles and misunderstandings to strew their way with thorns. She knew that. But there was also the grace of reconciliation… and the light of love. The past was behind them; the future beckoned.

Thoroughly content, Matilda slipped her arm across Simon's waist and fell asleep with a smile.

Now a note for those readers who are interested to know how much of the history in is true and how many liberties I've taken. This is quite a difficult question to answer, because some of the research has been contradictory and elusive, to say the least.

Waltheof of Huntingdon was beheaded for treason in 1076. From what the chroniclers of the time report, it would seem that he was foolish and easily led rather than filled with a wild rebellious zeal. He also had enemies at the Norman court who were only too willing to see him fall, and King William seems to have been swayed by their influence and perhaps by the thought that Waltheof had stepped over the line once too often. Judith is reported to have betrayed her husband to William, but after Waltheof's execution she was filled with remorse. Reading between the lines, I think that she expected her uncle to banish Waltheof as he had banished many other English lords who had rebelled against him, and she was shocked when he was beheaded.

Crowland Abbey still stands, partly in ruins, partly as a church in use, but there is little evidence of the abbey that stood on the site in Waltheof's time. It was seriously damaged by fire as mentioned in the novel and was rebuilt in the Norman style early in the twelfth century. Later on it was massively refurbished and it is these fourteenth-century remains that the visitor now sees when they visit Crowland. Despite the cult that was once attached to Waltheof, there is no mention of his tomb at Crowland, although the visitor can buy postcards of the skull of Abbot Theodore, who was murdered by raiding Danes in AD 850.