Elizabeth Chadwick (37 page)

“If I might have your knife, my lord, I can cut the cord,” Gracia said.

In a daze, Fulke handed her the weapon. The maid probed beneath the blanket and snicked off and tied the cord.

Fulke returned the infant to Maude. She took him gingerly. He was so light, so small. It was indeed like handling a skinned coney. “He ought to be christened,” she said and swallowed against the tightness in her throat. “If he…if he dies, I want it to be in the grace of God.”

“He’s not going to die,” Fulke said forcefully, as if the strength of his voice would make a fact out of uncertainty.

Gracia bit her lip. “There is no priest, my lady, and I do not have the dispensation of a midwife.”

“I want him christened…” Maude’s voice cracked. It was the most and least she could do for him. She drew him close, pressing him to her body warmth. He was covered in a waxy gray substance that made him look as pale as a corpse. Tears of exhaustion blinded her eyes. Her womb contracted painfully and, between her legs, she felt the slither of the afterbirth.

“Roger de Walton was trained for the priesthood, but he never took his vows,” Fulke said. “He is the nearest we have to a priest.” He left the women and approached the fire, returning moments later with the young knight in question. Rather clumsily, de Walton took the baby in his arms while Fulke filled a drinking horn with water from the river.

“How is he to be named?” de Walton asked, worried lines furrowing beneath his mop of blond hair.

“After his father,” Maude whispered.

Fulke nodded and gestured to de Walton.

The baby’s wail became a fractious roar of sheer indignation as the cold river water trickled over his forehead. Roger de Walton muttered the words of baptism and bundled the baby back into Fulke’s arms.

“With a yell like that, he’s going to cling to life,” Fulke reassured Maude. “Look at him; he’s strong.”

She heard the pleasure and pride in his voice. The power of the baby’s cry and the fact of his baptism had calmed her fear. She knew that she must have miscalculated the time of his conception, for although he was small and scrawny, he was still too vigorous for a child born two months early. To Fulke, she managed the semblance of a smile, but only a semblance. They were still under threat of pursuit in the middle of nowhere and several miles from shelter. Out of the deepest part of the woods perhaps, but not yet clear of the trees. And she was so tired, so very tired.

***

On the morrow, they brought Maude in slow stages to the grange at Carreg-y-nant. They made her a litter out of cut saplings and blankets, for it would have been too dangerous for her to ride astride a horse or even sit pillion. Although her labor had been swift, she had bled considerably and was as pale as bleached linen, her eyes dark-ringed and bruised with exhaustion. It was impossible that she would be able to move on to Whittington the next day as Fulke had intended. Looking at her as they rode through the gateway of the grange, he was filled with apprehension. She had been very quiet for most of the journey, responding to his attempts at conversation in monosyllables. The baby had suckled from her a couple of times and, although scrawny and small, was tenaciously holding his own. It was Maude who worried him. He could not bear to think of losing her, but he knew that women often died bearing children, if not at the birth, then soon after.

At the grange, the monks furnished Maude with a pallet and a brazier in their tiny guest room. She was given hot mead to drink and a nourishing mutton and barley broth, after which she fed the baby again and fell asleep.

“She will recover, my lord,” Gracia reassured Fulke softly as he stared down at his sleeping wife and unconsciously gnawed on his thumb knuckle. “Peace and sleep are what she needs.”

“Peace!” Fulke uttered the word as if it were a curse. “I doubt she’s had that since the day Theobald died.” He cast his gaze around the stark, lime-washed walls, bare of all decoration save a simple wooden crucifix and an aumbry cupboard with a studded wooden door. There was peace for her here. The monks’ only visitors were shepherds. It was a rare occasion indeed when they received travelers such as themselves. “If I have killed her—” He broke off abruptly.

“In God’s name, Fulke, stop belaboring your conscience,” Maude muttered without opening her eyes. “It would take more than you to kill me. I knew what I wanted when I consented to wed you. Now go away, you great ox, I’m trying to sleep.”

“See?” said Gracia, spreading her hands palm upward.

Reassured, if not at ease, Fulke leaned over to kiss Maude’s brow and returned to his men, discovering that in his absence more guests had arrived. If the place had been full before, now it was as packed as a barrel of herrings, the glint of the mail like so many fish scales enhancing the comparison.

“My lord.” Fulke bent the knee as Prince Llewelyn shouldered forward, a mead cup in his hand.

“Get up,” Llewelyn said. “There’s little enough room to breathe, let alone to kneel.”

“No, my lord.” Fulke wondered with a sinking heart if he and his troop would have to move out to accommodate the Prince’s entourage. Maude would have to stay. However brave she was, she was not fit to travel even another hundred yards.

“Fortunate then that we are only tarrying to dine and water the horses,” Llewelyn said. “I understand that congratulations on the birth of a son are in order, Fulke.”

“Thank you, my lord.” Fulke did not miss the wary expression in the other man’s eyes. Something was either afoot or amiss.

“Maude is well?”

“Tired, my lord. The birth was swift but rough. The child came early, but he has taken no harm from it.”

“I am glad to hear it.” Llewelyn’s tone was stilted and Fulke began to feel uneasy.

“It is fortunate I have seen you,” Llewelyn continued, “because it saves me the task of summoning you. Certain changes have come about and we need to discuss them.” He glanced around the packed room, grimaced, and pushed his way to the door. “Outside might be better.”

With deep misgiving, Fulke followed him. “Certain changes” had an ominous ring.

The air was fresh and clear compared to the sweaty fug inside the small refectory, although there was still a pungent smell of sheep from a pen of ewes gathered for milking.

Llewelyn drew a deep breath. “You know that I have been negotiating to marry with Rhannult of Man?” he asked.

“Yes, my lord.” Fulke could see nothing to affect him in Llewelyn taking the Manx King’s daughter to wife.

“It has come to naught because I have received a better offer—better for me that is, and one that I cannot refuse even if it does take a very long spoon to sup with the devil.”

The hairs at Fulke’s nape began to prickle.

“King John has offered me his daughter Joanna to wife,” Llewelyn said. “She is of an age to marry and he has offered me the lordship of Ellesmere as her dowry. The wedding is to take place in Shrewsbury before Martinmas.”

“Congratulations, my lord,” Fulke said woodenly, the words emerging as if they were choking him just by being in his mouth. Llewelyn was right. It was an opportunity that no sane man would refuse whatever the length of spoon required. It would mean security for Llewelyn and for Wales. It would also mean his own position at Whittington would become untenable.

Llewelyn looked at him somberly. “I have been in negotiation with John’s representatives for some months. There is to be a truce between us. I will not raid his lands and he will not seek to encroach on Wales—for the moment at least.”

Fulke swallowed. “And what of me, my lord? I do not suppose that I will be a welcome guest at your nuptials?”

Llewelyn sighed. “I wish I had better news for you,” he said, “but I do not. John has asked me not to succor his enemies at my court. He even said that he would increase the size of his daughter’s dower if I were to present him with your body.”

The prickling at Fulke’s nape extended down his spine. “I have served you with loyalty, my lord,” he said hoarsely. “I have given you my trust. Are you going to betray that loyalty and trust at the whim of a man who has never kept a promise in his life?”

“It is not as simple as that,” Llewelyn said. “I would hope to keep the loyalty and trust of my men because I return that loyalty in full measure. But this is different. I cannot afford to sacrifice the peace and security of my entire people for one marcher holding that lies on the very edges of my jurisdiction—for one man.”

“I thought you were different,” Fulke said, bitterness swelling in his chest.

“I am. I refused to arrest or kill you. I told John that it was his dispute, not mine. But beyond that, I cannot help you. My hands are tied.”

“By John,” Fulke snarled. “You speak of freedom and then you hold out your wrists to be bound!”

“Fulke, enough,” Llewelyn warned. “I have given you my reasons and they are sound. Raging will avail you nothing.”

“The same as serving you then. Nothing.” Fulke bared his teeth. “I need not renounce my fealty since you have renounced yours in my enemy’s favor. You will live to regret it, my lord. You are not entering into an alliance, but a trap!”

One of Llewelyn’s attendants opened the door and looked out, drawn to investigate by the sound of raised voices. Fulke swallowed and held his fists down at his sides.

“You are right,” he said in a voice gritty with the effort of control. “You have given your reasons, and raging avails me nothing.” He strode away, putting distance between himself and the temptation to lash out.

In one fell swoop, he had again become a landless outlaw. Llewelyn would yield Whittington to John and the Welsh mountains would no longer offer succor and safety. He would have to take to living in the forests again and relying on the support of sympathizers to his cause or enemies of John. There was a bitter taste at the back of his throat. On the day that his son was born, he had lost his patrimony. The fight had to begin all over again, and he had no stomach for it.

It was a full hour later before he felt sufficiently calm to return to the guest house and join Maude and the children. She was asleep on her pallet, her braided hair gleaming on the coarse, bracken-stuffed pillow. The swaddled baby lay at her side in a makeshift cradle fashioned from a willow gardening basket. Fulke gazed upon his wife’s face, the dark shadows beneath her eyes, the delicacy of brow and cheekbone and jaw. He knew that most of that delicacy was false, that Maude was usually as robust as a horse, but the bearing of three infants in swift succession and the circumstances of her last travail had drained her strength. How could he ask her to live an outlaw’s life now, when she needed rest and comfort? How could he trail three small children in his wake, the youngest a baby prematurely born? It would be irresponsible and likely end in tragedy. He gnawed on his thumbnail, already bitten down to the quick and, turning from the bed, looked at his two daughters who were playing in a corner with Gracia. He had engendered them. Now it was his responsibility to give them a proper life.

Canterbury, November 1204

The light was fading and Maude could no longer see to set the tiny stitches into the new smock she was sewing for the baby. She had strung a row of wooden beads across the cradle, and he was hitting them with his fists and gurgling with the pleasure of accomplishment. Maude could almost feel his tenacity. Despite the handicap of being born on a wild Welsh riverbank, her son had thrived. There was still very little meat on him compared to her daughters at this stage in their lives, but he was formidably strong. Like rawhide, she thought with a half smile, rather than plump, soft leather. She was not unduly concerned about his health, for he had the voracious appetite of a wolf cub.

The great pity was that Fulke could not see his son’s development, the small daily changes that marked an evolving and strong-willed individual. The girls were growing and changing too, although not as swiftly as the baby. Like her brother, Jonetta was too young to miss her father, but it had affected Hawise. Not a day passed without her demanding to know when her papa was returning. She had become naughty and attention-seeking, and seemed to think that her father’s absence was her tiny brother’s fault because he had been born and then her papa had gone away. It was impossible to explain politics to a two-year-old, no matter how bright.

With a heavy sigh, Maude put her sewing aside and rose to close the shutters against the gathering dusk. The cathedral bells tolled the hour of vespers. For the last four months, she had lived her life to their sound, counting the time, fixed in a limbo of waiting and wondering.

After Prince Llewelyn’s declaration of his betrothal to John’s daughter, Fulke had brought his family to the sanctuary of Canterbury and put them beneath Hubert Walter’s wing, knowing that John would not dare touch them. Then he and his brothers had left England for exile in France: jousting, hiring their swords, spending the winter where John could not reach them. Maude had thought about crossing the Narrow Sea to join them, but it went no further than wishful thinking. A sea crossing at this time of year was always dangerous and never comfortable. She would have to leave the sanctuary of Canterbury to reach a port and would be game for capture. And the children were too small and vulnerable to risk such a journey. So she remained at the Archbishop’s palace under the auspices of her former brother-by-marriage and waited.

Come the spring, Fulke said he would return, but to what? An outlaw’s life hounded from pillar to post? She bit her lip and drew the iron bolt across the shutters. Each time she thought in that direction, she was frightened by the uncertainty of the future. What was going to happen to them?

“Play with me, Mama,” Hawise demanded, tugging at Maude’s dress. “Play clapping.”

Maude had no inclination to do so, but for her daughter’s sake she forced a smile and held up her palms so that the child could smack her own against them and chant a simple rhyme.

“Me too,” said Jonetta, toddling up.

“You’re just a baby. Go away, I’m playing with Mama.” Hawise gave her sister a violent shove. Jonetta toppled over with a thump and set up a mighty howling—although more from shock than injury.

“Hawise, you wicked girl!” Maude shouted with exasperation as she reached to pick up and comfort Jonetta. The way Hawise flinched from the raised voice immediately added guilt to Maude’s anger.

“I’m not wicked, I’m not!” Hawise stamped her feet in frightened defiance and her pale skin turned an alarming shade of beetroot. From the cradle, there came an indignant wail as the baby’s voice joined the mélange. Gracia, whose hands had been occupied with some intricate braiding, dropped her work and hastened to scoop up the roaring infant. Her action increased the size of Hawise’s rebellion to a full-blown tantrum.

The door opened and Hubert Walter stood on its threshold, his expression one of pained astonishment. Clutching his hand was a little girl, her eyes huge as she took in the scene.

“I have come at a difficult time, Daughter,” Hubert said. “I’ll return later.” He began to turn away.

“Oh no, Your Grace, please come in,” Maude implored, grimacing at the prospect of being abandoned to the mercies of three screaming children and wishing she was the one who could walk away. Perhaps Fulke had known what he was doing in more ways than one.

The sight of the Archbishop and the other little girl took the force out of Hawise’s tantrum. Her screams diminished, her color eased, although she continued to cry and ran to press herself against her mother’s skirts. Maude’s free arm enfolded her in a tender if exasperated embrace.

“Celibacy does have its rewards,” Hubert observed dryly.

“So does motherhood,” Maude answered with a pained smile. She looked at the child Hubert had brought with him. She was obviously ill at ease but stood her ground doggedly. Maude thought she must be about seven or eight years old. Her ash-brown hair was bound in two neat, shining plaits twined with red silk ribbons, and she had a solemn, pointed face, dominated by wide eyes the gray-gold of coney fur. “Who is this?” she asked.

Hubert glanced down at his charge and squeezed the small hand engulfed in his great paw. “My cousin and ward, Clarice d’Auberville,” he said. “She has but recently come into my charge after her father’s death.”

Maude knew that he did not literally mean that the small girl was his cousin. The relationship would be at least once or twice removed. She remembered from her marriage to Theobald that he had had a girl cousin who was married to a d’Auberville. This could not be their daughter. The age gap was too great, but a granddaughter was likely. If she was in Hubert’s care, then probably the mother was dead too. “I am sorry to hear such sad news,” she murmured.

“She was not close to him, and her mother died in childbed four years ago,” Hubert said as if the girl was deaf. “You know how it is in a great household when there is no mistress to rule it. She has spent her time with different nurses and the wives of her father’s knights. Now she has come into my care and I have to find a niche to suit. While she is at Canterbury, I would ask of you the boon of caring for her.”

“You think me capable?” Maude asked wryly.

Hubert smiled. “I know you are,” he said, sounding more confident than she would have been in his position.

Maude tilted her head. She felt deep sympathy for the child, whose circumstances sounded similar to her own as a girl. No mother and an indifferent father. “Of course I will take her.” She smiled reassuringly at the little girl.

Hubert relinquished his grip on his charge and stooped to speak to her. “This is Lady FitzWarin. You’ll be staying with her for a while until more permanent arrangements are made for you.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Clarice said, her childish treble aping the response of someone much older. She curtseyed to Maude, her manners beautiful. Maude ached for her, remembering herself as a child, weighed down by her grandmother’s lectures on propriety.

Satisfied, Hubert nodded and left, closing the door behind him.

There was a moment’s silence. Before Maude could decide how to break it, Hawise leaped into the breach. One fist still clutched in her mother’s skirts for safety, she took a step toward the newcomer.

“How old are you?” she demanded.

Clarice looked at her solemnly. “I was eight at the feast of St. Anne,” she said.

Hawise’s mouth became a circle of awe and admiration and Maude fought not to smile. Hawise viewed adults as giants who could be either kind or cruel according to their whim and her behavior. Older children, however, were worshipped because their position was not so far above her own. “When I’m a big girl” was Hawise’s constant refrain.

“I’m nearly four,” Hawise lied. “Can you play clap?”

Within moments, Clarice was seated on the rug of stitched sheepskins, playing a finger game with Hawise, all awkwardness forgotten. Hawise demanded; Clarice gave, her expression grave and sweet.

***

That first meeting set the tone of Clarice’s presence in Maude’s household. Gracia jestingly referred to the child as “St. Clarice” because of her unfailing good humor and patience. Unlike Hawise, whose moods were as volatile as her hair, Clarice was placid and gentle. She loved sewing and spinning. She adored the baby and playing big sister-cum-mother to Hawise and Jonetta. Her clothes were never disheveled or dirty, but, although fastidious, she was never prim. Maude sometimes wished that she would act more like a little girl of eight than a grown woman but came to accept that it was Clarice’s nature. She also began to love her and dreaded the day that Hubert would come and take her away when he sold her wardship or arranged her marriage. But she could not shut that love away. To deny affection to the child because of what might happen would be a sin, even though she knew that she was storing up heartache.

“When is Hawise’s papa coming home?” Clarice asked her one raw morning in late February the following year. She and Maude were sitting companionably together at the embroidery frame in the window embrasure and Hawise and Jonetta were out with Gracia.

“When he can.” Maude forced steadiness into her voice. When indeed?

Clarice bent over the needlework and made several dainty stitches. “Is he dead?” she asked.

“No, of course not!” Maude gasped and crossed herself. “Whatever makes you say that?”

“When my mama died, they said that she had ‘gone away,’” Clarice said. She set the needle precisely in the fabric and left it there. “I waited and I waited for her to come back, but she never did because she was dead and no one would tell me about her.”

Her composure was such that Maude felt an overwhelming surge of pity and grief. She put her arm around the girl’s narrow shoulders and drew her close. “Hawise’s papa quarreled with King John and had to leave England,” she said. “I promise you that he is still very much alive.”

Clarice nodded and pursed her lips. “Then when is he coming back?” She slanted a challenging glance at Maude who realized that Clarice would not believe until she saw with her own eyes.

“I cannot be sure of that…I am going to be honest with you and say that I miss him and I only wish that I knew.” It sounded as if she was deluding herself. Maude swallowed and began sorting through the tapestry silks, but all the colors blurred and ran together before her eyes, making it impossible to find the color that she needed.

***

A warm May breeze rattled the halyards and flapped the clewed sails of the vessels in the harbor at La Rochelle. Fulke watched a herring gull wheel overhead and then settle on the spar of a sleek galley.

“Get you to England in a day and night,” said the ship’s captain, whose name was Mador. “Swifter than a cormorant skimming the water.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together while eyeing Fulke from shrewd, weather-seamed eyes. “What do you say?”

Fulke considered the vessel. Any ship plying its trade across the Narrow Sea would do if he were being practical. That old wine hulk down the wharf or the fishing galley with the red sail that had just put off a cargo of Kentish oysters. But Fulke did not feel like being practical. He wanted to make a noble gesture, the reason he was looking at the largest galley along the length of the moorings, her new, clinker-built hull gleaming and her prow decorated with ornate carving. If he were going home, it would be in style. He would not skulk ignominiously into some obscure harbor aboard a poxy little boat stinking of shellfish or stale wine. Of course, he could have sailed last week with Hubert Walter and the Bishop of Norwich, but it would have been on their terms and he had not been sure at the time that he wanted to accept them.

“I say that if we can agree a price, I’ll take her,” Fulke said.

They repaired to a wharfside tavern where they drank tart red wine and dined on hot fritters filled with goat’s cheese. After some hard bargaining, a fee was agreed and half the money paid.

“They say that prowess in the joust makes men rich,” Mador said as he tucked the pouch of money into his leather mariner’s satchel. Between his lids, his eyes were glints of bright sea-blue.

“What makes you think we have been jousting?” Fulke asked.

“You wear it as plain as your clothes,” the ship’s captain said. He nodded at William who had just joined them. “Half your teeth missing at a young age and one ear resembling a lump of pease pudding. There’s a man who takes risks with his body.”

William looked indignant.

“And you, my lord.” Mador gestured at Fulke. “You have a mark high on your nose that has marred what was once fine and straight. Mayhap where a helm was forced back into your face?”

“A chessboard, actually,” Fulke said, touching the healed bone.

“Whatever.” The mariner shrugged. “I know the look; I’ve seen it oft times in mercenaries before. God knows, I am one myself.” He drank a mouthful of wine. “It is no coincidence they call outlaws wolf’s heads. They bear the same hunger in their eyes as such beasts—lean and prowling and ready for the kill.”

“So now we are outlaws?”

Unconcernedly, Mador reached for a fritter and bit into it, hollowing his lips and blowing at the scalding heat of the cheese inside. “You tell me,” he mumbled.

Fulke exchanged glances with William. He turned his cup on the board, and the dripped wine from its rim made a wet pattern on the scrubbed oak. “My name is Fulke FitzWarin,” he said.

Mador managed to close his mouth on the fritter. “Aye, I’ve heard of you.”

Fulke made a wry face. As usual, the ballads were doing the rounds of the taverns and winehouses.

“Heard you jousted in front of King Philip of France hisself.” Mador chewed noisily and swallowed. “They say you defeated his champion and the King offered you lands and riches.”

“Not precisely.” Strange how tales enlarged with the telling, Fulke thought. He had indeed fought a French knight one to one under the eye of the King of France, and won, but there had been many such individual bouts. King Philip had sent one of his mercenary captains to offer Fulke a position, but the daily wage of a household knight, while generous, barely constituted lands and riches. Besides, even if offered, he would not have taken them for he had seen how fickle such gifts were. Philip was at war with John. Fulke could have had free rein to waste towns and villages throughout Normandy, but he had no stomach for such warfare.