The Champion (52 page)

He caught it in his, and felt the clamminess of her skin. ‘How?’ he demanded with fear of his own. ‘What do you want me to do?’

She gripped his sleeve and her voice was breathy and shallow with pain. ‘Tell Hilda, fetch a midwife, I am losing the baby. I thought if I lay down it would stop … but it hasn’t.’

‘Losing the baby?’ he repeated blankly. ‘You are with child?’ Even as the question left his lips, he realised how foolish it was. Ignorant though he was of women’s matters, he knew that in any sort of childbirth, early or late, there was blood. Sometimes too much blood. He thought of Monday’s mother, and was filled with fear.

‘Almost four months,’ she said, and clung to him with a little mew of pain, while more blood soaked through her chemise and sweat beaded her brow. ‘I don’t want to die,’ she whispered, and as the contraction eased, looked up into his face. ‘I keep remembering my mother …’

It was as if she had plucked the thought out of his mind, and it unnerved him beyond fear into anger. ‘Christ, Monday, don’t talk like that. Your mother died because the child was lying sideways and couldn’t be born. Of course you’re not going to die.’ He lifted her in his arms and bore her back to the bed. The sheets were all bloody too, but that could not be helped. For the moment he had to find someone competent to help her. Remembering how wounds were dealt with on the battlefield, he seized the pillows and placed them beneath her hips, hoping that the slight elevation would help to stem the flow. He fetched the cup of wine and ordered her to drink it, then, with the dog scuttering at his heels, pelted from the room.

‘Go to your mistress,’ he commanded a staring Hilda. ‘She is in need of you. Where can I find a midwife at this hour?’

‘A midwife?’ Hilda’s upper lids almost disappeared.

‘She is bleeding; she needs help.’ His voice was raw and urgent with a fear that bordered on terror.

Hilda swallowed. ‘Dame Hortense, on Dock Alley. She’s not the nearest, but she knows her trade.’ Pale with shock, the nurse gave him instructions, and within moments he had raised the bar and banged out into the sultry Rouen night.

Monday awoke from a drugged sleep to sunny daylight and the sound of the breeze swishing in the apple trees. Mild cramp encircled her loins, but the vicious pains of earlier had ceased, and seemed part of a recent nightmare. Perhaps they had been a nightmare; perhaps she was still dreaming. Her mind floated on the sunlight and she watched motes of dust dance and sparkle with a lethargic fascination until her eyes closed. But she did not sleep for long. Her bladder was twinging with the need to be emptied, and her mouth was dry. Behind her lids, she saw strange dark images, lit imperfectly by candle glow. There was a witch – a tiny crone with a wizened face and not a tooth in her head and she was binding something around Monday’s hips. ‘Will she live?’ A man spoke, husky fear in his voice, and the crone replied in the cracked tones of the ancient. ‘God and St Margaret willing, young man. Fortunate that you sent for me when you did, else it would have been a priest your wife would be needing.’

Wife? Monday wondered at the word. She wasn’t anybody’s wife. Reaching down, she touched her waist and discovered some sort of cord wrapped twice around it, the ends stranding down over her belly and between her legs. So the dark images were not just figments of her mind. The man’s voice had been familiar, and in the moment that the thought entered her head, she saw a vision of his face.

‘Alexander,’ she said aloud, and struggled to sit up. Aching nausea surged through her belly, and she subsided against the bolsters with a gasp.

The woman who had been seated beside a small brazier, grinding herbs in a copper vessel, ceased her work and hobbled over to Monday’s side. She was the crone of the night, even more wizened in daylight, with brown blotches on blue-veined hands, and a smile like a hole in a rotten apple. Monday suppressed a shudder. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘Where’s Hilda?’

The old woman eased herself down on the coffer at the bedside and tilted her head. The flesh had creased and slackened around her eyes, hooding them, but they were as alert and dark as a bird’s, and full of salty humour. ‘Hilda is below, caring for your husband and child,’ she said, and clucked her tongue within her toothless mouth. ‘Now I know you think I look like a hag who has flown on her besom straight from the coven, but even I have no remedy for what the years have wrought, young woman. You should thank whatever saints you favour for my experience and your life.’

Monday lowered her gaze to the sheets. They had been changed, and the smell of dried lavender drifted past her nostrils. She felt resentment at the woman’s tone, was revolted by the sight of her, but also knew shame that she should recoil from the crone’s outward appearance. Doubtless the old woman had indeed saved her life, and she ought to be grateful. With an effort, she raised her eyes from the fresh linen and met the piercing dark gaze. ‘I do thank God, and I am grateful to you,’ she said. ‘But I still do not know who you are.’ Her voice was hoarse and dry, and when she had spoken, her throat closed and she had to cough.

‘My name, for what it matters, is Dame Hortense, and I delivered my first baby nigh on seventy years ago to a sailor’s wife. There ain’t nothing I don’t know.’ She hobbled to her feet and limped with surprising speed to the brazier, where she poured red liquid from a pitcher into a cup.

‘Here, drink this down; it’ll help restore you.’

Monday eyed the cup suspiciously and thought of some of the nostrums that Aline had poured down her throat at Lavoux when she was carrying Florian. And Dame Hortense’s observation about having flown here on a besom had struck very close to the mark of Monday’s hidden prejudice. She took a tentative sip, and was rewarded with a sharp but not unpleasant taste of wild berries, with an underlying tang of honey and herbs.

‘Just because it’s a nostrum doesn’t mean it has to taste bad,’ said the crone scornfully. ‘People are too quick to judge.’

Monday reddened. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you.’ She finished the liquid down to the dregs and returned the cup to the midwife.

‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to piss now,’ Dame Hortense said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Come, I’ll help you up. You are going to feel weak in the shanks; you bled a fair mart last night.’ With a surprising, wiry strength for someone so tiny and wizened, she helped Monday from the bed to the privy hole in a small antechamber beyond ‘Don’t bear down,’ she warned. ‘Bleeding’s stopped, but you must be careful.’

‘Why am I wearing this?’ Monday indicated the girdle as she threw back the covers.

‘It once belonged to the blessed St Margaret, patron of women in travail. If the bleeding holds off, you can remove it tonight.’

Dame Hortense checked the wad of linen between Monday’s thighs. There was a small gush of blood commensurate with rising, but nothing that the old midwife deemed serious.

‘It were a son you lost,’ she said, sucking her bare gums. ‘Stillborn, too young to draw breath. Your husband said as he could arrange prayers and a burial.’

Monday’s lips stretched into an expression half grimace, half bleak smile. ‘He is qualified,’ she said. ‘But he is not my husband.’

The old woman clucked her tongue again. ‘Then he should be.’ She guided Monday back to the bed.

Tears stung behind Monday’s eyes. She felt weak and dizzy, and very tired. Drained both in mind and body. The old woman gave her a different potion to drink, one that despite the honey had a bitter undertaste that almost made her retch.

‘Sleep,’ said Dame Hortense. ‘That is all you need, healing sleep.’

When Monday next woke, it was late in the day. The colour of the light had changed from pale to deep gold, and a somnolent warmth lay across the room. There was a weight on the bed at her right side, and a delicate smell of chicken and herbs. She slid her glance across and encountered Alexander’s concerned gaze, the sunlight brightening his eyes to amber and lying along the olive planes of his face. There was stubble ringing his mouth, and his clothes were somewhat crumpled.

‘Hecate says you have to drink this,’ he said, and pointed to a steaming bowl of broth on the coffer.

‘Who?’ Monday murmured, still half asleep. She struggled to sit up against the bolsters. He helped her, plumping the cushions at her back until she was upright and comfortable.

‘Dame Hortense, she of the beauteous countenance,’ he said fatuously, and picked up the bowl and spoon. ‘Shall I feed you, or can you manage?’

‘I can manage.’ A note of independence entered her voice and she took the soup from him. As her head cleared of sleep, she realised that she was hungry, and the broth not only smelled delicious, it tasted of heaven. In between spoonfuls, Monday glanced apprehensively round the room. ‘Where is she?’

‘Below stairs, brewing some concoction for you to swallow on the morrow. It involves beef bones, barley, and God knows what from that pouch at her belt. Smells promising though. She said that she would come up in a while to check on your progress. Hilda says that she is the best midwife in Rouen, but that she is overlooked these days. No one wants their child’s first sight in the world to be that of a toothless old crone.’

‘But it does not matter to women who miscarry,’ Monday said, and once again tears stung hot and salty behind her eyes, filling up, brimming, then overflowing. ‘I want my children back,’ she said, and then began to sob.

Alexander grabbed the bowl of broth before it spilled all over the bedclothes, then he folded her in his arms and drew her tight against his body, absorbing her shudders of grief. It was useless to say that she still had Florian, she still had him, had her life before her. All that was an empty waste compared to the emotions swamping her now. The old midwife had warned him that there might be tears; that he might find himself in the path of the storm. He might lose himself too, he thought wryly as he smoothed her hair and held her close.

‘As soon as you are able to move, you and Florian are coming with me,’ he said. ‘To the Marshal’s keep at Orbec. I will not brook no for an answer, and you are in no fit state to run away, so listen, and accept.’

Amid the trembling, he thought she nodded her head, but he did not know how much she understood through her grief. But then she half raised her head. ‘John,’ she said in a choked voice. ‘What about John?’

‘I know he is jealous of you, but at the moment he has other things to occupy him. I will set matters to rights.’

She nodded again and the weeping slowed, became loud sniffs and hiccups. He presented her with a clean strip of linen swaddling on which to wipe her eyes and nose, and as her composure strengthened, gave her the broth to finish. If not as hot as before, it was still sufficiently warm to be palatable.

She looked at him, her eyes puffy and swollen, her nose pink, and saw only tenderness and concern in reply. Had she shown such a visage to John, he would have stalked out in revulsion. She wondered how he would respond to the news of his son’s death, and her chin wobbled treacherously again. ‘What are you doing in Rouen?’ she asked, to distract her mind.

‘Overseeing the purchase and escort of supplies to Orbec,’ he said, then dropped his gaze to the coverlet and plucked at a loose thread on the striped wool. For a moment she thought that he was going to say something else, but he continued to tug at the thread, his lips slightly compressed.

‘I am glad you came,’ she said, ‘but after I wrote to you, I was sure that you would not.’ She toyed with the horn spoon, stirring it around the woodgrain pattern in the bottom of the bowl. ‘You say that you will set matters to rights with John, but how? You will put yourself in terrible danger.’

‘There is a risk, I would be foolish to deny it, but less than there was before.’

‘Because my son is dead, you mean?’ Her voice, apart from a slight quaver, was dangerously neutral. ‘Because I am no longer as valuable – less to give up?’

He looked up and ceased his assault on the coverlet. ‘I do not deny that will have a bearing on the situation,’ he said awkwardly, ‘but there is another, greater reason why I think he will let you go – the reason that I knocked on your door last night.’ He took her hand in his, his thumb lying across her knuckles, above the gold rings that John had given her. ‘I came to tell you that John has taken a wife, and that for the moment at least, he sees not beyond his wedding chamber door.’ He explained what he had heard at the palace the previous evening. ‘I wanted you to know before it became common coin. Not for my sake, but for yours.’

She looked down at his hand upon hers and felt the pressure. He was not telling the entire truth. He had come for his own sake as well, but she did not hold that against him. The thought of John in bed with his child bride filled her with little more than a tearful weariness. She discovered that she did not care; that losing John’s children was a far greater wound than the one of losing John. Indeed, she thought it might be like plucking a thorn from her side when she was able to feel again. She drew a deep shaky breath, and looked at him through tear-spiked lashes. ‘I need time to grieve and to heal. I cannot give you …’

‘All the time in the world,’ he interrupted before she could finish the sentence. Glancing down, he softened his grip as if realising that the tension in his fingers contradicted his words. ‘I promise, for what you deem a man’s promise worth.’

‘You should set your value higher than that,’ she answered with a watery smile.

Before he could answer, Dame Hortense arrived. She was out of breath from climbing the stairs, and limping like a seesaw.

‘I said take her the broth, not stay the night.’ She wagged a forefinger at Alexander. ‘You must leave now. Me and the mistress has women’s business.’

Feeling like a child caught stealing cakes at the bakehouse door, Alexander rose to his feet, and immediately towered over

Dame Hortense. Not in the least intimidated, she fixed him with a gimlet eye.

‘I’ve driven oxen to market bigger than you,’ she said. ‘Aye, and probably with more brain too.’ She gave him a push. ‘Go on, that son of yours keeps asking for you. Says you promised to teach him to use a sword.’ Her tongue clucked, displaying what she thought of the notion. ‘And don’t raise your brows at me like that. I could tell he was yours the moment I laid eyes on him.’