A Place Beyond Courage (31 page)
The only horses were dead ones and they had had their harness taken. The men who had fallen in battle had been divested of their hauberks and gambesons. Fighting nausea, John stooped, stripped the shirt from a dead serjeant and with shaking hands, tore off a sleeve to use as binding for his wound.
He turned to Jaston who was seeking among the dead. ‘They must have taken Benet prisoner,’ the young knight said with relief in his voice. ‘He’s not here.’
John said nothing. He couldn’t deal with an exchange of conversation just now. He had to save his resources. They had no horses and knew none would be found after D’Ypres’s army had ridden through like a plague. He was aware of Jaston watching him with expectation in his eyes, awaiting orders. Think, Christ on the Cross. Think! They dared not head for Ludgershall for that was the Empress’s road and they would endanger her if the enemy saw them. The nearest safety was Marlborough - twenty-five miles away. Fluid filled his mouth. Do or die. He turned his head, spat and looked at Jaston out of his good right eye. ‘Help me take off my hauberk,’ he said. ‘We’ve a long way to go, and we’ll not do it in our mail.’
‘Madam, my lady, come quickly, come quickly!’
Aline had been leaning over a coffer in the clothing store, searching for a square of embroidery linen, but the fear and urgency in the maid’s voice caused her to spin round, eyes widening. ‘What is it?’
The woman shook her head. ‘Madam, Lord John has returned. You had better come.’
Aline’s stomach twisted. ‘Why, what’s wrong?’
‘That I don’t know, my lady. Jaston de Camville is with him. They arrived without horses and staggering like drunkards. They look as if they’ve been rolling in a hearth. They stink of smoke too . . .’
Aline swallowed. It was bad, it must be bad. Something had happened in Winchester. The woman was watching her with a mingling of pity and contempt. She rose to her feet, closed the lid of the chest and somehow brought herself to go to the door. ‘Where is he?’ she heard herself ask in a faint voice.
‘The bedchamber, madam.’
She wanted to run away but knew she couldn’t. It was her God-ordained duty to tend to him. At least he was home, she told herself. She wouldn’t have to weep about that any more.
He was lying on the great bed in their chamber, surrounded by a flurry of anxious attendants. Even from the doorway, she could see that he was covered in blood and streaked with horrible black grime. The smell of charred wood was like a vile thread twisting around everything. Jaston de Camville sat on a bench, his hands constantly raking through his dark hair in a distraught manner. He too was filthy, and there was what looked like a raw red burn on one of his hands. Aline raised her index finger to her mouth and bit upon it.
John made a sound from between clenched teeth: a sound she had never heard before, but it knifed through her. Then someone stood aside and Aline saw the appalling damage to the left side of his face, the redness, the blistering. Her knees buckled. Her maid, who had been standing close in anticipation, grabbed Aline’s arm and steered her to the bench on which Jaston was sitting.
Aline’s breath shuddered in and out of her lungs. Dear God, dear God . . .
Jaston raised his head. ‘Molten lead from the church roof,’ he said. ‘It dripped on his face . . .’
‘The church roof?’ Aline said faintly.
‘Wherwell Abbey. We took refuge there and William D’Ypres set fire to it . . . burned it down round our ears.’ He clamped his lips as he realised what he had said.
She knew Wherwell, had been there sometimes - had even toyed with the notion of taking vows there one day. ‘Oh, sweet Virgin, Mother of God, is he going to die? What’s to become of us?’
He shook his head and said nothing. Aline rose to her feet. She felt as if she was standing in a great, echoing space that was expanding by the moment and she was growing smaller and smaller, soon to disappear.
‘Madam . . .’ said her maid. ‘Madam?’
John cried out again - the sort of scream that gave her nightmares during the November slaughter month when the animals were held down and butchered. Uttering a gasp, her hand clapped to her mouth, Aline fled the room, reached the haven of her own chamber and retched and retched until her stomach was raw. She couldn’t cope - she didn’t want to know. The dreadful thought blossomed that it was all her fault. She had sinned by admiring his beauty and now God had punished her by taking it away.
Sybilla gazed at the silver piled on the trestle. Patrick was counting it into leather pouches and muttering to himself. Two rich wall hangings were folded near his elbow and a box full of assorted gold rings and brooches. This was her brother William’s ransom. The sooner his release was agreed the better. He had been captured during the retreat from Winchester whilst fighting a rearguard action at Stockbridge with Robert of Gloucester. Gloucester was a prisoner too, but it was going to take more than a trestle full of coins and baubles to ransom him.
‘It’s a disaster,’ Patrick growled. ‘William should never have sworn us to the Empress. If we’d stayed with Stephen, we wouldn’t be beggaring ourselves now.’
‘Is it truly a disaster?’ Sybilla envisaged a hungry tide of enemy troops surging around their walls, and then valiantly quashed the thought. Stephen was still under guard and the Empress free. In all likelihood, Gloucester would be exchanged for Stephen and nothing much would change.
‘It’ll leave us poorer by the price of a year’s wool clip,’ he snapped. ‘William’s a fool.’ He compressed his lips and counted in silence. Sybilla was turning to go about her duties when he added, ‘I don’t suppose John FitzGilbert is counting his blessings either.’
‘Was he captured too?’
‘No; the whoreson won free, but it’s done him no good. He was defending the crossing at Wherwell and when he retreated into the abbey, William D’Ypres burned it down round him. From what I’ve heard, he’s lost the sight of an eye and he’s not expected to live.’ He scooped another mound of silver into a pouch. ‘Even if God does spare him, he has no future. He’s finished.’
Sybilla caught her underlip in her teeth. ‘Poor man,’ she said with appalled compassion.
Patrick’s lip curled. ‘Save your sympathy, sister. You wouldn’t give it to a wolf intent on raiding our sheep, would you? It’s a good thing for us he’s gone down.’
Sybilla felt a sudden sting of tears. Patrick was probably right, but it was still a harsh thing to say. She wondered how a man renowned for his looks, and who enjoyed using them to good effect, was going to cope with being disfigured - if he survived. And what of his wife; how would she manage? Aline Marshal was already of fragile mind and totally squeamish. Sybilla still remembered that day at Salisbury when Aline had fainted at the sight of the man with the broken arm. Perhaps widowhood would be a blessing for her.
‘Still,’ Patrick said with reluctant admiration, ‘you have to respect the will of the man. To have walked twenty-five miles with an injury like that is no mean feat.’
Sybilla stared at him. ‘Twenty-five miles?’
Patrick nodded. ‘From Wherwell to Marlborough. No horses. D’Ypres took them. Won’t have done FitzGilbert any good walking all that way with such a wound. Bound to die.’ He returned to counting the money. ‘I suppose it might be of some benefit to us if he does. We can take Ludgershall because there’s nothing to stop us. That milk-and-water wife of his won’t put up any resistance. Marlborough too, if we’re fortunate.’ He pulled the drawstring tight on the money pouch. ‘But first we need to get this ransom sorted and paid. All else will follow in time.’
Unsettled by the conversation, Sybilla went to her chamber and brought out the enamelled jewellery box that had been her mother’s. After a final, longing look at the contents, and a little weep, she kept back only one ring and a brooch and put the rest for her brother’s ransom. Patrick said all else would follow and she shivered with trepidation at just what that might mean. And although her brother had called John FitzGilbert a wolf and he was probably right to do so, she still added him to her prayers when she went to light a candle in the cathedral later that day.
At Marlborough, despite Patrick’s prediction, John was far from dead - although much of the time he wished he were. The pain was excruciating and blotted out all reason, all cogent ability. They gave him poppy syrup in wine to dull the agony but it brought little relief and burdened him with vile dreams, ablaze with images of fire and scalding, glutinous metal that dripped on to his face and melted long silver tear tracks into his flesh, eating inwards, exposing him to the bone until he was picked as bare as a corpse at the crossroads. He would drag himself out of such dreams with his heart pounding with terror, and because he was ashamed of that terror, it made him angry too.
The left side of his face was bandaged at first, but when the linens and unguents were removed to be changed, he had no vision on that side either and could tell from the looks on the faces of the servants and retainers that it was bad. They tried not to expose their feelings, but, like his burned, raw flesh, they were obvious, whether they willed it or not.
Aline had not been near him, although he had heard her twittery voice in the antechamber several times enquiring how he was and saying that she had been praying for him - as if that was going to make a difference. She should have prayed for him to die. He was glad her courage had failed before she reached his bedside, because he could not have stood her presence, or the look of frightened revulsion he knew would cross her face if she gazed upon him.
Once the bandaging was off and the damage exposed to heal in the air, he had the shutters opened on daylight and called for a mirror. Jaston brought it to him. His own abrasions and burns were healing well, although his expression bore the imprint of haunted, sleepless nights.
‘My lord, I don’t think you should . . .’
‘Christ, give it to me. I will know the worst!’ John had to turn his head to snatch the small, round mirror case from the knight. He snapped the catch and as he stared into the tinned glass at his reflection, a bolt of shock tore through him. He had once seen a leper in Winchester with a face like this: distorted, eaten. The right side of his face still possessed its elegant symmetry; the high cheekbone, fine, straight nose, deep socket and clear eye. The other, across browbone, orbit and ear, looked as if the hand of death had passed over and wrought violence with a casual swipe. In a way, it had. His hair was flat and lank with sweat and grime and his jaw was stubbled with the beard of a five-day corpse. A man half-dead. How easy it would be to take a knife and kill the rest. He closed his fist around the mirror and hurled it at the wall. The glass within the case smashed into myriad dagger-bright shards and the reflection was gone. ‘Get out,’ he snarled to Jaston, who was staring at him with anxiety.
‘My lord . . .’
‘Out!’ John spat.
Jaston bowed and left. An older man, more experienced in the ways of the world, might have stayed, but Jaston, although a skilled warrior and strong in his art, was young and lacked the knowledge to deal with this.
John cursed and sat on the edge of the bed. Pain throbbed across his left socket and cheek. He had seen the way Jaston’s glance had slid over him and away. No one could bear to look at him and he didn’t blame them. He didn’t want to look at himself either and see the face of a gargoyle. There was nothing left. His best men were dead or taken for ransom; the Empress’s army had scattered in disarray. There had been no word from Matilda, no offers of succour, no gratitude for his stand at Wherwell. Silence. But whether it was the silence of a woman who thought his sacrifice no more than her due as his duty, or the silence of a cause on the bitter edge of defeat, he did not know.
He left the bed and went to the bright splinters of glass lying on the floor. The mirror was one he had bought for Aline before their wedding. It was more than appropriate it should lie in pieces now. She never used it, and he had seen enough. He picked up one of the glittering fragments in his right hand and turned the wrist of his left, exposing the strong tendons, the blue veins still pulsing with his lifeblood. He had always said he would fight to the last drop, never guessing what that might mean. He swallowed, closed his good eye and tightened his jaw. Coward.
‘Papa?’
He spun round, staggering slightly because of the difficulty in orientating himself. Gilbert was looking at him with the same, steady stare that until recently had been his own.
‘What?’ He fought for the control to answer in a level voice.
‘The horse-coper has arrived with some destriers. Do you want to look? Jaston says he can do it, but he wondered if you wanted to come out.’
‘And why should I want to do that?’
‘For when you’re better and can lead the men again. Shall I tell him no?’ The steadiness was replaced with trepidation.
It was as hard looking at his son as it had been to stare into the mirror. The side of his face was pounding like a fist on a drum. Hot pain was building in his ruined socket. There was rage and grief and hurting. From the open shutters the whinny of a horse floated up and the sound of men shouting - splinters of life being lived beyond the walls of this stuffy chamber. He clenched his jaw. ‘No, I’ll come. Give me a moment. Find your mother’s women and tell them to sweep this up before one of the dogs cuts its paws.’
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