Winter Siege (3 page)

Maud turned to look at Father Nimbus, ever her confessor and adviser. Despite the knife at his neck, the little priest’s eyes were urging her to say no. This was too rushed, too dangerous for her future. While they were being hurried up the stairs to the chapel, he’d managed to hiss at her: ‘Sweetness! The man’s an absolute hog, just
look
at his fingernails. Tell them you want to be a nun. Tell them you’ll enter Godstow convent. Tell them you’re vowed to the Virgin.’

Oh yes, that would go down well. Several female saints and martyrs had tried that one, and achieved sainthood through martyrdom because of it.

The only reason these desperate men around her were bothering with a marriage ceremony at all, and weren’t taking over the castle willy-nilly, was that her own soldiers in the bailey outnumbered them two to one. Sir Rollo might not be very bright, but his affection lay neither with the King nor the Empress but with Maud. If she gave the signal, he and his men would fight for her. On the other hand, if she gave her consent, Sir John of bloody Tewing immediately became their legal, and therefore not-to-be disputed, commander. And hers.

The little chapel smelled, as it always did, of age and incense and whatever scented herbs the fastidious Father Nimbus mixed with it. Her father had commissioned a monk from Abingdon to paint its walls, so that the child Maud could learn her Bible from the depictions of a Garden of Eden (rather jolly), the Ascension, the Wise Men worshipping a plump baby Jesus, and the one that had always fascinated her: a depiction of virtuous Judith cutting off Holofernes’s head, which Father Nimbus had wanted obliterated for being too bloody, but her father had said counteracted Salome and John the Baptist.

It was remarkable, Maud thought, how much her bridegroom resembled the bestial, drunken Holofernes.

The officiating priest was putting the question again: ‘Do you, Maud of Kenniford …?’ She felt Waleran’s hand tighten on her arm.

‘Wait, will you?’ she snapped. ‘I’m thinking about it.’

An arranged marriage at some time or another had been inevitable; Kenniford with its manors and lands was a valuable prize to bestow on anyone the King wanted to reward; Maud’s own wishes had never been consulted, and never would be. While the present incumbent repelled her, so had the owners of the two broken necks: one a raving madman with a high laugh; the other a drinker never seen sober. Would this brute be so bad?

Maud considered it logically. He was old, which was in his favour; he would oblige her by dying, and, to judge from his choleric complexion, sooner rather than later. He was a renowned warrior – also in his favour, since he would spend much of his time away fighting battles in which somebody might kill him. With luck and the intervention of the Holy Virgin, to whom she would step up her praying from now on, he might rush off to war right away and save her the horror of the wedding night.

After all, even if she were allowed to adopt Father Nimbus’s ploy and go into a convent, it would mean giving up Kenniford and her other lands for ever. Which she could not do.

Since the age of eleven, on the death of her father, Maud had ruled her estates and their people like a despot. She was lucky in that the blood in her veins came from both Anglo-Saxon and Norman nobility – she was descended from King Edward the Elder on her mother’s side and Roger d’Ivry, Sheriff of Gloucester, on her father’s – which, until she should marry, gave her a legal right to command two castles (admittedly, one of them little more than a motte and bailey in Cambridgeshire and nothing to compare with Kenniford), five manors scattered around England, three more in Normandy, as well as the advowson of six churches, all of them acknowledging her as their overlord just as she acknowledged the King of England and Duke of Normandy as hers.

She had been well advised, of course; her father’s head steward, Sir Bernard, was a loyal and wise administrator, but he had found in his young mistress a mind quite as shrewd as his own, capable of retaining in it a record of her every acreage of ploughland, herd and grazing; which of her hundreds of tenants were free and which villeins; what dues they paid her; which of her knights owed her military service and castle guard; those who, by tradition, must render her seven geese, or embroidered gloves etc. on which saints’ days, or make some other service. (Maud took particular delight in the dues owed by William of Garthbrook, who held the tenancy of thirty Sussex acres and had to perform a simultaneous leap, a whistle and a fart at every one of her Christmas feasts.)

Never again to command her willing garrison, to order her kitchens, to sit in judgement on wrongdoers while rewarding the virtuous, to bully and physic the villagers outside her walls, to oversee the harvest, to dominate the Christmas feast … to change all that for incarceration in Godstow convent? Her soul would shrivel to nothing.

Yes, marriage would mean handing over her men and women to this husband, but she would still be around to protect them – a joy and a duty with which God had entrusted her.

Waleran’s hold on her arm had become tighter; the knife at Father Nimbus’s neck was pricking his skin. She could hear Sir Rollo gathering his men to charge the tower.

These were her people; she would not have one of them killed. Marriage to this old lout would be a sort of death – but it had to be hers, not Kenniford’s.

Maud came to the decision that she’d known from the first was the only one she could make.

‘Oh, very well,’ she said. A murmur of relief flitted around the room like a breeze, interrupted only by a howl of anguish from the Kigva woman.

Damn them, they weren’t in that much of a rush that they were going to gallop off into the night to put their castles on war footing without being fed first.

Maud, with a chaplet hastily made and crammed on to her head, sat with her new husband on the top table of her hall, miserable but nevertheless congratulating herself and her kitchens for the efficiency with which the wedding feast had been prepared at short notice. Now that she’d done what they wanted, the Beaumont twins, on her left, were being fulsomely complimentary about the food, reverting to the gallantry they’d shown during her visits to court. Their charm had won them earldoms from Stephen – the King being susceptible to it. Waleran had even been given Stephen’s four-year-old royal daughter in marriage, but the child had died soon after the wedding, in the same month as Maud’s infant fiancé, occasioning Maud and Waleran to exchange condolences which she’d supposed – wrongly as it turned out now – had led to a coincidental and mutual regard.

‘And your beef, my lady. Is it Welsh? How do you produce such taste, such tenderness?’

‘We hang it for two weeks like our enemies,’ Maud said shortly. Damned if she was going to be lured into a conversation on cattle breeding with them, interesting as the subject was.

On the other hand, they were the only ones she
could
converse with. Her husband was still not addressing her, preferring to quiz Sir Rollo about wall thickness and the siting of arrow slits, all the time spraying the poor man with food grabbed from dishes by his unwashed hand and chewed in his open mouth, lubricated with swigs of her best wine.

Maud passed him one of her linen napkins without comment, and turned to Waleran. ‘After such a defeat at Lincoln,’ she said, rubbing it in, ‘what are we to expect? Why must Kenniford be in readiness? Isn’t the King overthrown and the war over? Isn’t the Empress now queen?’

No, it appeared she wasn’t. Again, Maud found herself excluded as the twins took the first chance they’d had since Lincoln to make a careful analysis of the situation, but she listened hard. Until today – politics did not interest her – it hadn’t bothered her whether Empress Matilda or Stephen ruled England as long as Kenniford wasn’t threatened. Now that it was …

First, it seemed, Matilda’s claim had to be ratified by the Church. ‘And what’s the betting that bastard Henry deserts Stephen and persuades the other bishops?’ Waleran said.

‘She’s got the West Country, of course.’

‘She hasn’t got London.’

Maud managed to identify ‘that bastard Henry’ as the Bishop of Winchester, the King’s brother, a papal legate, the most powerful churchman in England next to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Stephen had been crowned with his help but had then offended him, so which way said bastard would turn could only be guessed at …

The West Country was dangerous, it appeared. Gloucester (of which the Empress’s adoring half-brother – another bastard, in both senses of the word – was the earl) … Cirencester … Wilton … Reading … Oxford … they’d all accept Matilda, if she could get there, God burn each and every one of the shitholes …

But the Empress would need London, and London was a commune – come back everything Waleran and his twin had ever said about bloody communes – to which Stephen, God knows why, had shown a liberality that the Empress, autocratic cow, was unlikely to extend to it. Yes, London was hopeful …

Normandy now … what of Normandy? Would Geoffrey Plantagenet, the Empress’s new husband, conquer that dukedom? He was making a damn good job of it at the moment. Mind you, was he doing it for himself? Or for the Empress? Husband and wife didn’t get on.

Maud struck in, to bring a touch of lightness. ‘There you are,’ she said brightly. ‘One of you make peace with Geoffrey and then, if the Empress
does
become Queen of England and
does
prove vindictive and confiscates your estates over here, you’ll still have Normandy.’

Until that moment she hadn’t appreciated how despairing they were. Two handsome pairs of eyes turned on her and in them she saw calculation. They were considering it, oh God,
actually considering it
.

If they took that way out, they’d still survive as powerful men; the twins owned vast estates on both sides of the Channel, while she, Maud, held only a few. Having now placed her firmly in Stephen’s diminishing camp, they’d put her at the Empress’s mercy. Without Kenniford and her other, smaller English estates, she’d be left with only a miserable Norman manor or two on which to subsist like a damned serf.

You
bastards
, she thought.

The exchange had succeeded in attracting Sir John’s attention. Throughout the meal he had been pawing at Kigva, nuzzling her grubby neck and squeezing her breasts in such a vulgar display that it made Maud’s stomach churn. Suddenly he turned to them and spat: ‘That bitch’ll never be queen.’

‘God grant she won’t,’ Waleran said, ‘but I wish I was as sure.’

‘Yah, where’re your balls, boy? God’d strike her dead at the coronation, even if I didn’t. A woman? Not natural. Women are for fucking, and that’s all they’re good for.’

Every head turned to him in the sudden silence. Men who believed what he’d said had been taken aback by it being shouted at a mixed table.

To Maud, it was like being punched by an opponent whose strength she hadn’t realized before; she’d known she was handing over control, but it hadn’t struck her with the force it did now. She was in the jaws of a dog. She looked at Kigva to see how she had taken it but the vacant expression on the woman’s slack features registered neither shock nor affront, changing only to spite when she saw Maud staring at her.

She looked away quickly; the woman was as sinister as Sir John was brutish. She found that her knees managed to stiffen enough to get her to her feet. ‘Ladies,’ she said clearly, ‘it is time to leave the gentlemen to their wine.’ Kigva, she noticed, did not rise and since only a few of the castle’s women had attended the feast, she was followed only by Lynessa and Lady Morgana, a Welsh aunt on a visit.

As they went, Waleran belatedly rose to toast the bride to her wedding night. ‘And may God bless this union with happiness and many sons.’ There was a ragged, self-conscious cheer.

Outside, Lynessa silently took Maud into her arms.

‘They’ll be off to war tonight, won’t they?’ Maud begged into the woman’s ample shoulder. ‘They’ll take him with them, won’t they?’

‘I don’t know, my poor dear.’

There was a half-hearted attempt to follow her to her chamber as bridesmaids should. ‘There ought to be ribbons and things, posies,’ Lynessa said, weeping. ‘Shall I fetch some?’

‘No.’ This was one marriage bed that needn’t be garlanded. Maud pushed herself away from Lynessa. ‘Festivities are not appropriate. You can leave me.’

The only person she really wanted was Milburga, the nearest of her dearest, except for Father Nimbus.

Milburga was waiting for her by the bed, the room’s brazier giving her ample body an even greater shadow on the wall. ‘I heard.’

‘Jesus God, what am I to do, what can I do?’ Maud clutched her forehead where, for the first time in her life, she felt thudding pain.

‘Well, a headache ain’t going to stop him. What you got to decide is, do you want his babies or not?’

‘NO.’ The wall hangings absorbed a cry of revulsion. ‘Not his, never his.’ It would be giving like birth to monsters. There’d be time to have her own children by another, better husband when this one was dead.

‘Didn’t think you would, so I got you these.’ Milburga’s outstretched hand held a clutch of feathery little seeds. She poured them on to the little table beside the bed.

‘What are they?’ Her nurse was a keen herbalist; there was nothing she liked better than a patient, a diagnosis and her own prescription, but occasionally her cures were as distressing as the disease. On the other hand, despite an enthusiastic and varied love life, Milburga had avoided all but two pregnancies.

‘Queen Anne’s Lace seeds as’ll put paid to his, the pig. But you got to chew ’em well otherwise they’ll go straight through.’

Seed. His seed. The revulsion was such that Maud began to retch. ‘Perhaps – oooh, do you think – oh help me, God – Milly, do you think they’ll take him with them when they go?’

There was no answer. Like Lynessa, Milburga didn’t know.

Maud looked up at her. ‘I had to, though, didn’t I? I had to say yes.’

Milburga nodded. ‘I was a-watching that other earl. He’d’ve cut Girly’s throat’ – Father Nimbus’s effeminacy drove Milburga mad – ‘and Lady Lynessy’s an’ then mine iffen you hadn’t.’ She sat down on the bed and put her arm round Maud’s shoulders. ‘There wasn’t nothing else you could do.’