The White Cross (10 page)

My Lady Constance came in talking, went on talking nineteen to the dozen as she came across the solar from the stairway with her big son and little daughter close in train.

‘Come Edmay, stand by me. Do something useful, Garon, find us something firm to sit on. My Lady Blanche, you’re well I trust? Elise my dear, may I admire your work? But how unusual. What attractive colours! Poultry in a cabbage patch, is that the theme?’ (Confirming my worst fears.)

Sir Garon placed the bench for her and she subsided, putting back her veil. ‘Heavens all those stairs, I am exhausted,’ she confided with a kind of desperate pleasantry that anyone could see was false. ‘You know I am to bear another child by Candlemas, God willing. We’re hoping it will be a boy.’

So OLD! And pregnant to that dreadful man! (That’s when I pricked my finger on the needle.)

In her next breath My Lady Constance told us that her son had further tidings that must certainly surprise us. Which was when Sir Garon ducked his head, performed his ‘I’ll-look-anywhere-but-you’ thing balancing on one foot then the other, uneasy as a dog with fleas – then cleared his throat and blurted suddenly that he must fulfil his oath to join the Kings’ Croisade.

‘But be assured I will survive,’ he told the floor. ‘My knight-service is but for forty days. So when the Holy City’s taken I’ll return.’

‘Unless you’re slain, to leave your wife to moulder in the wilds of Sussex!’ In her distress Maman looped her girdle up into a knot that I could see would take her ages to untie.

For me the knot was on the inside while my future was discussed – and still I can’t think what to do.

But was it really just this morning we were married, united in the sight of Holy Church? It didn’t even feel quite real while it was happening – exchanging rings and pledges with Sir Garon’s big moist hand supporting mine (and eyes determinedly elsewhere), the vows he made to seal the bond before the castle chaplain sounding anything but joyful.

‘Have you the will to take this woman to wedded wife?

‘Aye, Father.’

‘To have her and to hold yourself to her and to no other to life’s end?’

‘Aye Father as I trust in God.’

‘Then take her by the hand…’

A bride should feel important at her wedding. But I did not. It seemed a hasty, patched-up thing, too soon begun and even sooner finished.

We stood together in the doorway of the fortress chapel, attended in their absence by my Lord and Lady’s Constable, by Lady Constance and her daughter. But without Sir Hugh who was away at Manor Court. (I’m pleased he wasn’t there, no really.) Maman was of course – and Hod, who’d thought to bring along a toad she’d found to make sure that the marriage would be fruitful. Sir Garon wore his sword and spurs. His red-haired squire stood by the door – and I suppose I should be grateful that they didn’t bring the horse!

I wore my campion gown to match the bright vermillion of my veil, with ripe ears of barley wound in my hair beneath it. The wedding mass and the repast in hall were fixed for the third week of September, to fall ’twixt harvest and Plough Monday, with the moon already waxing (and according to old Hod who claims to know a good deal more about my body than I do myself, my monthly cycle just approaching its most fertile phase).

So now we’re on the move again to start our honey-month at Haddertun, Sir Garon’s home and mine for all our future life – together or apart.

The sky is clear, a tang of autumn in the air. It’s good to be outside again away from town and fortress. I can smell water mint. Long-legged gran’father flies are blundering about the horses. A pair has drifted into Nesta’s mane cemented end-to-end – a symbol you could say of what’s about to happen to her rider!

The great fields of Sir Garon’s manor run from the forest almost to the bridge and water-mill – darker, redder than they really are, seen through my wedding veil. A moorhen dashes head-down for the reeds. An elm tree towers above his village; clay and wattle, huddled in the shadow of the downs. Another church, more patchwork strips and the chalk gables of the manor, standing as they’ve stood for more than forty winters.

And here they all come tumbling downhill; a parcel of excited whop-straw peasants, flapping homespun like a gaggle of brown geese. Peasant wives in caps and aprons grasping nosegays, patched skirts tucked into waistbands. Piefaced, tow-headed children, barefoot and half naked. Elders, lame or stooped from years of labour – all crowding round Sir Garon, smelling strong and shouting salutations. Daft grins on every weathered face.

How could I not be pleased to see them, folk struggling to make the best of life as common people do in every land and circumstance from Alfriston to Acre? As their Seigneur I liked to hear them call my name and wish me well, villeins, cottars and free tenants who’d known me as an infant and followed my advance through all the years from my first toddling steps about the manor to my return a married man. Despite our differences of birth we understood each other. And even if it seems a strange thing for a lord who had the power to sell them off the land to say, the manor folk had always treated me with kindness.

‘God bless, Lord Garry Sir, an’ send ye joy in wedlock.’

The hayward’s wife, Dame Martha, was the first to greet us. ‘Hayward here has fetched up combs from our best hives, to give ye strength all through yer honey-month an’ see ye plough the furrow like a good ’un.’

‘Aye, an’ harvest what ye sow, to swell yer lady’s belly as a fact,’ said Adam Hayward, panting up behind and pulling off his hat. ‘Or leastways make a tidy job of trying, eh boy?’ He stuck a grubby finger though a hole in the straw crown and waggled it, and grinned to show more gum than standing teeth.

Dame Martha laughed and told us both, as if she thought we needed telling, that however menfolk wanted sense, whatever else we might be doddlish about – ‘Ye’re all as smart as dogs at rat holes when it comes to hornwork, every Tom an’ Jack!’

And what was I to do but laugh back at their impudence? I liked the sound of their old language with its stops and starts and stretched out exclamations, knew all they said was kindly meant, and that I’d have to hear much more of the same sort before the girl and I were bedded. The mating of their lord was village business, and I found their interest in me as a stud beast almost reassuring.

Yet even as I smiled into their tanned familiar faces and gave the peasants my good day, my mind was elsewhere, most of it, on how to raise the cash for armour, food and a sea passage for my men and horses. And if I’d been unready for a wife before, God only knew how much more so I had become since I enlisted for croisade. With the girl already here in Sussex and the Countess standing sponsor, it was too late to break the contract. My mother was insistent. But if I could, I would have done it in a flash.

That was half my problem. The other half was my own ignorance of women. As far as I could tell they all were daughters of the temptress Eve. According to the Church the path to hell lay straight between their thighs. Carnality was sinful unless it be for procreation, and nothing I had seen or felt suggested otherwise. During my years as page and squire I’d seen men jerking out their seed. Or humping whores. Or buggering each other, sights commonplace in barracks – and monasteries as well if all we heard was true. The need was animal, at best a gross form of enjoyment like drunkenness or gluttony, at worst degrading to all parties. The Devil teased men with temptations. We had our morning stands and frantic fumbles, spring and autumn surges, noon and midnight cravings. But God had the last word in the end by giving us remorse. By leaving us with nothing more to show for sudden thrills than sticky voidings, weakness of the limbs and lingering regrets.

I’d never been a man myself to take a bondwoman by force or chase a serving girl for sport, as I knew that Hugh did frequently behind my mother’s back. When a base urge became too strong, I’d simply tamed the beast by taking it in hand. Or else paid Lewes whores to do it for me at a basic price for something brisk and businesslike, believing that the haste reduced the sin. And yet. And yet despite it all – despite my ignorance and my obsession with croisade, thoughts of the girl began to chafe at me like burrs inside my britches. When I beheld her riding legs astride, or pictured them astride without the horse, I couldn’t help but think, and revel in the thought that she would soon be mine to get an heir on. To fuck repeatedly and legally in sight of God and all his blushing angels.

It had taken the best part of two hours, nonetheless, to satisfy my squire that I was ready for my matress duty. I’d cleared my bowels. Jos set a tub before the kitchen fire in view of half a dozen smirking serfs, de-loused me, scrubbed me, shaved me, cleaned my teeth with salt and willow, even plucked my nostrils. He washed my hair in almond oil and trimmed it, combed the tangles to lie in meek waves on my neck, then showed me my reflection in a buckler. He groomed and polished every inch of me, but for my
arme de combat
which I attended to myself.

‘Long as life, eh Sir? Soon stretch her understandin’ that will!’ someone shouted from behind the pastry table.

The way Jos beamed as he held up a fur-lined pelisson to clothe my gleaming limbs, you might have thought he’d earned the compliment himself. With any more encouragement it wouldn’t have surprised me if my squire had stuck an apple in my mouth, a sprig of parsley up my arse and served me to the woman on a lattice of crossed leeks!

Flowers in the rushes on the floor – herb robert with fluellen and blue scabious to bring the grassy fragrance of the field into our chamber.

They’ve lit me in with torches made of hawthorn to bring fertility into the house. The fire is scented with sweet rosemary, and even Maman must appreciate an upper chamber with a chimney hearth, a thing unheard of in the north. Candles are everywhere – a chest, a hutch-press, perches for my clothes, a bench beside the hearth, a pisspot by the window. On the sill in a brown jug, Hoddie’s set a bunch of wilting harebells, one of the peasant women’s bouquets. The bed, near wide as it is long, stands open to the fire and Maman’s tactless observations.

‘But how wise to leave Sir Garon’s better sheets for later,’ she’s pretending to believe. ‘These wedding stains can be so stubborn – with first rate Irish linen hard to come by, I suppose, down here in Sussex?’

‘We weave and bleach our own linen and to a standard we have reason to be proud of,’ Lady Constance frigidly informs her.

‘And cat fur for a counterpane – do look Elise! How quaint it seems beside the marten we’ve been spoiled with up in Lancaster for all these years.’

‘I think the tabby’s lovely, Maman.’

And for Lord’s sake can’t she see I’m nervous – that the very last thing that I need just now’s another demonstration of her disapproval. Hod sees it, makes a sympathetic face while I squat on the pot beside the window. But Maman’s off again on a new tack.

‘We’ll put the candles out, and range the curtains round three sides of the bed-celer,’ she says to no one in particular and all of us in general. ‘That way Sir Garon’s first glimpse of my darling will be by firelight.’

‘Unless he falls and breaks his neck in his attempt to find her in the dark.’ Lady Constance gives a mirthless smile.

‘In my experience the method never fails in its effect on bridegrooms.’ Maman’s reaching up with both short arms to arrange the indigo-dyed curtains in the manner that she recommends, as Hoddie brings my night shift from its warming place before the fire.

‘It’s how we got Elise’s sister Cecily with child, when she was barely fifteen and her husband barely had the sense to tell his middle finger from his middle leg.’

‘Perhaps in his case,’ Lady Constance says caustically, ‘they were of the same size?’

Of course I know about these things. It hardly could be otherwise when you sleep with your parents half your life, and spend so much time stumbling over couples in the other half – in the long grass, in passageways and under tables – anywhere that they can find the space! You’d have to be blind, deaf and very stupid not to know what men and women do to together when they get the chance (although I do remember thinking as a child that if God extracted Eve from Adam’s body in the first place, it really should be women who are eager to get back into men and not the other way about).

After so many years of Maman’s teaching and of Hoddie’s, I think I know enough to be the mistress of a manor. Weaving isn’t difficult to learn and nor are spinning, baking, curing, brewing – none of them too hard to master once you know the way. But to be the mistress of a man in bed is something you would think, like Turkish-point, that needs some aptitude and quite a bit of practice – and although I’ve grasped the basics well enough I’m still a little hazy on the detail. I mean, how’s it going to feel to have that gristly thing pushed into me? And what should I be doing while he’s pushing? There’s bound to be some kind of trick to it…

Elise, unseemly! Stop at once!

‘The sheets have been well cleansed with Jordan Water. I saw to them myself,’ I am assured by Lady Constance.

‘And even if they’re still a little damp, please God the heated bricks I’ve brought will dry them in a jiffy.’ Maman’s wiping both hands on her skirts.

‘I’ve slipped some lavender and tansy leaves between them – and if I were you, chérie, I’d lodge a sprig or two under your shift as well.’

‘But see to it he asks you more than twice before you grant him sight of what’s below,’ Sir Garon’s mother offers as I climb into the bed. ‘You may believe that men will never set much value on a prize, my girl, unless they have to make some kind of trial to win it.’