CHAPTER THREE

 

Female Children 1091

 

 

‘Mother, it’s too early, the baby’ll die!’

‘Three weeks. Richard was earlier than that. The baby will not die,’ Wulfhild contradicted her, rolling up her sleeves. ‘We’re into September.’ And a fair, silver-gilt September at that, the mists clearing every morning before a sun which within fourteen days would bring the wheat to perfection if only it held. They’d have a saleable surplus this year, with luck. It wasn’t going to be spoilt by the loss of this child. ‘Gunnor, take her arm and keep her walking till I say she can lie down. Alice, you’ve been a good girl all summer and done what I told you. Just keep it up a few hours more and you’ll get your reward. Stoke the brazier, Editha, and get that water hot…’

‘…it’s a girl. And healthy. Sweet Mary, what a voice.’

‘A girl?’ Alice moaned.

‘Nothing wrong with girls. I was one myself,’ said Wulfhild, flintily good-humoured now the struggle was over. There had been a bad few minutes when she thought the baby’s head wouldn’t pass the pelvis. Alice was too narrow. If Richard had left the choice of a bride to his mother, she’d have chosen better. But: ‘Where there’s a sound girl, a sound boy may follow. And even a girl can inherit a manor.’

Romsey Abbey in the county of Hampshire, where Edith of Scotland had come for her education, in the care of her aunt, the Abbess Christina, was bigger than humble Withy- sham where Sybil of Fallowdene, also in the care of an aunt abbess, was reluctantly enduring hers.

Romsey was wealthy too, which Withysham certainly was not. Lying amid gracious rolling country, it too was gracious, the work of the finest Norman masons grafted on to the fabric of the old English abbey, but so tastefully that one could hardly detect the join.

And nowhere was the abbey lovelier than at its heart, where a cloistered walk encircled a garden in which grassy walks wound among beds of cultivated roses, and trellis tunnels, twined with climbing roses and starred, in June, with pale pink blooms, lay across the square garden in the sacred shape of the cross, thus consecrating, said Abbess Christina, these most beautiful of flowers to their creator.

The roses were of several varieties. Beginning with the hedgerow dogrose and a few variants bred by her predecessors, Abbess Christina had coaxed a dozen more colours and patterns of bloom into being. Her flowers were famous; even King Rufus had heard of them and sent for plants. He liked flowers to adorn his halls, apparently.

Edith loved the roses and the cloister walk and the warmth and gentleness of Hampshire after Scotland. Her health was better here; she caught fewer colds and shook them off more easily. She would have been ready to love the abbey altogether but it did have one serious drawback. Aunt Christina.

She walked in the cloister on a blustery autumn day, watching the wind shake the rose bushes, feeling it stir her brown hair. She was in the company of several other girls, of ages from nine to sixteen, all of them destined to be nuns. Edith was not destined to be a nun, by order of her father, a state of affairs for which she regularly thanked God on her knees. She was not yet quite eleven but she was already physically mature. Christina, on learning this, had been overcome with horror and had ordered her niece into a three-day retreat, fasting, and insisted on praying with her for the blessing of a pure mind and for freedom from the lusts of the flesh.

But Edith, in the rose-haunted days of the previous summer, with doves and cuckoos in the surrounding woods filling the air with a sound like a soft grey-blue cloud, had felt the first awakening within her of a yearning at once thrilling and slumberous, and knew that the thing which her aunt condemned as lust could have another name, and was her proper destiny.

Even if her father had not forbidden it, she would never be a nun. Whatever Aunt Christina said or did.

But her father was far away and her aunt was here. Because the day was cold, she and the other girls were all wrapped in thick mantles, but unlike the others, Edith wore no black veil over her head. The veil had a significance.

And only yesterday, her aunt – since Edith had ignored several hints – had commanded her to wear one. Walking bareheaded, she was defying the abbess and though she walked boldly and openly as the daughter of the King of Scotland should, holding her head high, within herself, Edith was afraid.

Christina sat in her office, going through the month’s accounts. They would soon be salting down meat for the winter and the annual consignment of salt for the purpose had arrived. But why on earth was it so much larger than last year’s? The quantity of meat would be the same. She must speak to the sister responsible.

The order for vellum, on the other hand, erred in the opposite direction. They always needed more than they could make and to have enough was vital. Without it, the work of translating books of devotion and learning between English, French and Latin, and putting the result into exquisite illuminated volumes, would be hampered.

It must not be hampered, since the preservation and perpetuation of learning was one of the things that abbeys were for. In a world racked with wars and struggles for power, the abbeys, the monasteries, were like fortresses housing between them a great treasure. Only within their walls could anyone hope to have the resources of time and energy to devote to scholarship – or even the space, come to that, to make a rose garden. In any house out in the world, it would have been dug up to grow cabbages, or turned into an enclosure for breaking colts.

And only within monastic walls, too, could women find time or freedom to expand their minds or think about their souls. In the world, they were for ever doomed to household cares and an endless cycle of pregnancies at the behest of men who not only wouldn’t give them time to think but would for the most part bitterly resent it if they tried.

Christina most heartily pitied her sister Margaret, forced into marriage with the Scottish king to please their brother Edgar. The three of them, Christina, Margaret and Edgar, were all that remained of the old English royal house. There had never been any real question of Edgar challenging the Norman house for the throne. He was far too ineffectual (‘Now, if only I’d been a man!’ Christina sometimes thought fiercely) and although the English didn’t like the Normans, they weren’t foolish enough to want Edgar in exchange. He had still needed asylum from the Normans, and had sought it from Malcolm, taking his sisters with him. And Malcolm had taken one look at Margaret and made her the price of his friendship, and the fact that Margaret, like Christina, greatly desired to become a nun meant nothing to him whatever, the unregenerate heathen! Christina, thinking of her sister’s fate, was apt to begin muttering to herself.

So poor Margaret had been handed over, a living sacrifice, to be defiled and invaded by that northern savage.

Christina sincerely believed that she herself regarded Malcolm with loathing. She would not have admitted, even in the face of death, that once the sweat and leather smell of Malcolm’s solid body had made her dizzy and that the glimpse of hair at the open neck of his tunic had set her imagining what he would look like naked and what that hard furred chest would feel like if one were pressed against it. She would have died by fire before she would have confessed, even to herself, that she hated him only because he had never looked at her, or that her present driving need to waken a sense of vocation in his daughter Edith, and win her for a nun against his wishes, was her ancient anger seeking revenge.

The sound of young voices made her look up. The small arched window on her right overlooked the cloister and the rose garden. Edith was out there, with the other girls, just cutting across a corner of the garden. The shining brown plaits of her niece gleamed shamelessly amid the demure veiled heads of Edith’s companions. With an outraged exclamation, Christina flung down her quill pen, and gathering her dark skirts clear of her feet, swept out.

She bore down on her quarry, striding across the grass by the quickest route, mouth and brow in straight lines across her face, hard-edged as a sword. Edith, seeing her, stopped short. Her knees felt shaky but she kept her back straight. Her father King Malcolm was afraid of nothing and she must be the same or she would not be worthy of him.

‘Where is your veil?

‘I can’t wear a veil, Mother Abbess.’ Edith always used the correct form of address. It was deliberate, Christina knew. Correct or not, it was a rejection of their relationship and it only made her angrier. ‘My father forbade it,’ said Edith, ‘in view of its meaning. It is only for nuns or novices.’.

‘This is England. Your father is not king here and if he were, he would still not give the orders inside my abbey. You are a woman now, Edith, and therefore subject to the temptations which beset womankind. It is time to armour yourself against them and to give grace a chance to enter your heart. To accept the veil and the state of mind that comes with it, is one way of doing so. Did I or did I not, yesterday, order you to put on the veil?’

Mutinous silence.

‘Did I?’ said Christina dangerously.

‘Yes. Mother Abbess,’ Edith muttered. Under Christina’s hard blue stare, her own eyes – which were grey-green, the colour of the sea, Scottish eyes, thought Christina, detesting them – fell.

‘And what did I say would happen to you if you persisted in arguing with me?’

Edith made herself look up again. ‘It will make no difference. I can’t wear the veil. Because of what my father said.’

‘Because you are hard of heart, impious, unable to recognise a magnificent opportunity when it is put before you. I will give you one more chance, Edith. Go to your dorter and fetch the veil I gave you. Put it on. Then we will say no more about this foolish fit of defiance.’

Edith stared at her feet again and neither moved nor answered.

‘Very well,’ said Christina, and shot out a hand to grasp Edith’s arm. She was only in her forties, but her fingers looked as if they belonged to a woman much older. They were, however, extremely strong. ‘Come with me,’ said Christina.

The other girls, who had drawn back, sorry for Edith but too frightened to speak in her defence, followed slowly, in an awed cluster, exchanging a few whispers. In the abbey building, they gathered at the foot of the steps to the dorter, up which Christina had dragged her victim.

They could hear it all. The most heartrending part was that they heard the whistle of Christina’s cane for so long before Edith shrieked. They turned to scatter as their abbess stormed down again but she saw them and spoke sharply, calling them back. ‘None of you are to go to the dorter or speak to her. She will come to the refectory, I hope, in a chastened state of mind and wearing her veil. You may speak to her then but not to express sympathy. And those of you who are crying had better dry your tears. They’re wasted. She brought her troubles on herself.’

Edith came into the refectory at the end of the afternoon last of all, and all heads turned to see her enter. She was walking stiffly, her eyes red. But she was still holding her head high, and on it there was no veil.

There were gasps, quickly checked, and furtive glances towards Christina.

Abbess Christina, who was standing up, awaiting the last arrival before pronouncing grace, went rigid, from head to heels, a shuddering rigidity of anger which could be felt throughout the silent refectory.

But she was a strategist. In thinking that had she been a man she could not have put up a better challenge to Norman William than her brother, she was quite right. She also knew a good deal about the ability of human beings to withstand agony once, twice, or three times and then break down at the fourth.

‘Still obstinate, I see,’ she said coolly. ‘Perhaps we need time to think, do we, Edith? We will let the matter rest for seven days. This time next week, Edith, I hope to see you wearing your veil in obedience to my orders, like all the others. If not – well, you will have the week in which to consider whether you wish your experience this afternoon to be repeated.’

In the November of that year, 1091, after Rufus and Curthose in partnership had driven Malcolm back from England’s northern borders, the Scottish king arrived home in a bad temper and forthwith quarrelled with his wife.

The subject of the quarrel was Edith.

It was rare for Malcolm and Margaret to fall out. For one thing, he reverenced her. Malcolm had been reared to think that reading and writing and quoting from the Scriptures were all so difficult that only the most dedicated intellects could master them.

Margaret could do them all and weave and bake and nurse sick children too. She was also the only person Malcolm had ever met, male or female, who actually lived according to Christ’s precepts, who really would whisk off an expensive beaver mantle and give it to a poor woman in the street on a cold day.

On her side, Margaret somehow managed to include within her saintly standards of behaviour an apparently endless tenderness towards the crude, stocky warrior who had insisted on marrying her in the face of her longing for a nunnery. There were times, certainly, when she found marriage to Malcolm rather like walking a tightrope but mostly, by some miracle, she kept her balance.

On this occasion, however, as she afterwards said to her confessor, she had been sufficiently weak, or sufficiently human, to fall off.

‘That’s enough,’ said Malcolm, interrupting her attempts to reason with him. ‘That’s more than enough. A pity that clacketty-tongued sister o’ yourn never learned to mind on her own business. I said she could have the lassie to educate. I said I wanted her accomplished, like her mother. It’s an ornament in a wife, I said. But I also mind I said that a wife she should be and nothing else. One more letter from your sister in her southron abbey, bleating about vocations, and the girl comes home!’

The Inverness fortress was stoutly built and furnished with gloomy magnificence, in which thick furs and velvet hangings in dark shades of red and green predominated. But at the moment it was wrapped in wind and nothing stopped the hearthsmoke from swirling out into the hall. Margaret coughed and strengthened her determination that Edith should not be recalled from her Hampshire Abbey and the milder climate of England. Besides, if Christina were right, it would be a grave sin to recall her. Somehow she must make Malcolm understand. She studied him gravely, her hands at rest in her lap. Margaret never stitched or spun while talking to her husband but gave him, always, her entire attention.

‘Malcolm, if Christina thinks that Edith may have a true calling, should we not listen? At least, will you not do as Christina asks and withdraw your objection to the wearing of the veil? So as to leave the child free to decide? My sister is a most learned and devout woman…’

‘Your sister is a dried-up old virgin who’d be the better of a good…’

‘Malcolm!’

‘All this talk of Edith having a calling; it’s nothing but notions in your sister’s mind. Sooner be like her than wed to me, eh, lassie? Envy her, do you? Wish your bonny bairns had never seen the light? Want to keep Edith from having any? Balls!’ said Malcolm. ‘Now take heed. I’ve more to say and I’d have said it sooner but you got in first with your yammering about vocations. I got another letter yesterday. You were at your Mass for All Souls so I got a clerk to read it to me. Well? Ye don’t ask who it’s from?’

‘Anselm, the Abbot of Bee. I saw his courier in the hall when I came back yesterday and asked who it was. In fact I spoke to him to make sure his lodgings were as they should be.’

‘Ye still think I’m a heathen who’ll lodge churchmen in the byre if ye don’t watch me? Instead o’ fussing over the messenger’s lodgings, why didn’t ye ask me what the message was?’

‘I knew that if it concerned me, you would tell me.’

‘Och, have ye no human curiosity, woman? Anselm had an idea to offer me. I’ve looked at many a lord for Edith but I hadna thocht of this. Anselm was gey sorry I’d been fighting with the English again though not as sorry as I am that I lost …Malcolm almost went off at a tangent but pulled himself back. and he’s got a sense of responsibility towards that English bugger’s soul and his succession. Funny,’ said Malcolm, off at another tangent, ‘how all you saintly folk spend so much time worrying over the state of other folks’ souls. He’s thinking to come to England next year and nae doot he’ll hae a try at converting their heathen king. He suggested…’

‘Edith and Rufus?’ said Margaret, and sat up very straight. ‘Ye’re sharp,’ said Malcolm admiringly. ‘Aye. Edith and

Rufus.’

‘No, Malcolm!’

‘God in heaven, woman, why not? She’d be Queen of England!’

‘But Rufus is…you said the word yourself, just now.’ Margaret’s pale skin had turned deep rose. Malcolm’s expression became still more admiring.

‘Ye mean, he likes men more than women? Och, it happens. But as often or not the man can manage with a woman when he’s got a good reason, like getting an heir.’

‘Malcolm, Edith is only a child. And delicately reared. To a young girl, even when the man is…is like other men, marriage can be…’

‘Was it so dreadful, then?’ enquired Malcolm. ‘Were my rough old embraces so little to your taste, my pretty violet? You came,’ said Malcolm lyrically, ‘the very first time, like the Hammer of Thor beating a swordblade.’

‘We’re talking of Edith, not me. And we’re talking of Rufus, not you. You can’t seriously…’

‘We can give her time to grow up. It needn’t happen tomorrow,’ said Malcolm easily. After this, Margaret would avoid his company for the rest of the day but he’d put it right in a quarter of an hour, come nightfall. ‘Once she’s grown,’ he said, ‘I’ve no fears for her, with Rufus or any other man. She’s my daughter, my lady. And what’s more, she’s yours.’

In Withysham Abbey, Sybil’s aunt, the calm and dedicated Abbess Edgiva, neither desired nor recoiled from the estate of matrimony but was on the contrary quite content to train her niece as somebody’s future wife. Sybil, however, unaware of her good fortune (she had never heard of Romsey or Edith), escaped from Withysham on a cold autumn day, timing her departure with care. About midday, she decided, after their noon meal. She must begin her five-mile journey with something in her stomach and the heavier main meal would be too late. She did not want darkness to overtake her in the forest. She must go through the woods because once she was missed, people might look for her on the road. So, midday it must be, at about the time for singing the office of Sext.

They always rested after the noon meal, and filed from the dorter to the church for Sext, under the eye of the nun in charge of the children, Sister Ermengarde, who was thin and sharp and convinced that baptism did a poor job of ejecting original sin from her charges. Christina would have found a kindred spirit in her.

Halfway across the courtyard on her chosen day, Sybil left her place and said: ‘Sister Ermengarde, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go to the privy.’

‘Nonsense. You went before you got into line, like the others.’

‘I know, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t go then. I tried.’

‘Well, you must wait.’ Sister Ermengarde rather enjoyed this kind of thing. They had to learn, these children. A few years of her training and the wildest of them became decent, devout girls who knew how to subdue the flesh.

‘Sister, I can’t!’ Sybil’s brilliant blue eyes brimmed with frightened tears. There’ll be an accident. Oooh!’ She gripped her stomach hard and half-crouched, knees pressed together.

‘If I let you go, there’ll be a penance.’

‘Yes, Sister Ermengarde. Oooh!’

There won’t be a penance, you silly old cow, because I shan’t be here.

‘Very well. Be quick and be very quiet when you come into the church. See me afterwards.’

‘Yes, Sister Ermengarde. Thank you, Sister Ermengarde,’ said Sybil and ran for the dorter. She went straight through, ignoring the privy stair on her left. Passing her bed, she snatched up the mantle she had left there in readiness. There was another way out, the one they used at playtime. She darted through, arriving in the open safely out of sight of the church and made for the place in the outer wall where the stonework was broken. She had been industriously working bits of stone loose over a period of months, seizing opportunities whenever she could, usually during recreation. She had made sufficient footholds now.

In the church, the singing of the Office had begun. Everyone must be inside. She clambered up the wall, hoisted herself astride the top of it and sat there, panting. Then, suddenly sick with terror that Sister Ermengarde would come in search of her, even so soon, and catch her, she dropped down on the other side, to land in a crackling drift of leaves. She lay, massaging a scraped ankle. She was committed now. The drop was further on this side and there was no broken stonework. She couldn’t get back even if she wanted to.

Moving as quietly as possible, she stood up and began working her way round the wall to find the track that led towards home. She must use it as a guide, she thought, keeping it in sight while she walked through the trees to one side of it. She must not get lost.

That was vital. She was in the Forest of Andred and once lost in Andred, she would stay lost for ever.

Andred was older than legend. It swept like a green ocean up to the northern march of the downs, where the soil grew chalky and too thin for trees. The woods of Fallowdene were an outpost of Andred, where the trees had flowed like water into a trough of earth deep enough to sustain them. Andred was twenty miles deep from north to south and fifty miles broad from east to west and the Conqueror’s New Forest of Hampshire was only its western extremity. It was crossed by roads here and there and a few patches of farmland had been carved out of it but these interruptions were few. The trees and the heathland reigned for the greater part unchallenged and there were wild creatures deep within it which scarcely knew the scent of man.

Most of them feared him and all were shy, even the wolf and the wild boar. Sybil, flitting cautiously among the trees with the homeward path on her left, knew she was unlikely to meet either so near to a path, and if she did, it would probably run away. Anyway, she told herself stoutly, she was agile enough to climb a tree at speed if necessary.

The going was slower than she had imagined and much noisier. Dead leaves were everywhere and even her light feet sounded to her like a marching army. There were also patches of undergrowth through which she couldn’t push her way and she frightened herself several times, thinking that in avoiding them she had gone too far from the track and lost it. Once, after a particularly bad fright, she sobbed with relief to see it again and risked walking on it for a time. But presently she heard hoofbeats behind her, coming from Withysham. She ran back to the trees and crouched behind a wide-girthed oak, heart pounding, until the rider, whoever it was, had gone past. After that, she went back to her cautious route among the woods. Presently, after what seemed to her like a very long time, she began to grow tired.

Her feet felt heavy. Roots and brambles began to seem like snares deliberately laid, and trees appeared to move into her path on purpose. She had no idea how far she had come. But the November afternoon was darkening; dusk was near. A gust of wind, getting up suddenly, ripped through the boughs and brown leaves whirled past her face. A mournful whining began in the branches overhead. She began to hurry.

The ground was too rough and the brush too tangled for running. Stopping to nurse a stitch, she glanced longingly towards the track. But there were more hoofbeats, coming the other way this time, more than one horse by the sound of it. Presently she crept out from the bush which had sheltered her while they went by, and went on through the wood, trying another way to make haste; walking and running alternately. Walk ten steps, run ten steps, walk ten, run ten, trip on something she couldn’t see in the olive-tinged twilight and fall sprawling. She lay face down, trying not to cry, her ankle throbbing where it had now been hit twice on the same place. She sat up to rub it and found herself listening. Not for hoofbeats or even the howl of a wolf but to the wail of the wind and to the nearer, smaller rustlings in the dark undergrowth. To the voice of the forest itself.

In Withysham, she had prayed to Herne. She had also made a game of him. Her best friend, an orphan girl of peasant stock, had given her new information and she had used it, whispering to the others that she knew secrets about the demons of the Wood, and threatening to call up Herne, the master demon, to snatch them away if they annoyed her or reported her to Sister Ermengarde. She had gained a fair amount of ascendancy over some of the more nervous.

But the thought of Herne was different here. Rain had begun to splash through the trees and it was almost night. She was by herself in the moaning, pattering gloom and yet not by herself for she was in the midst of Andred and Andred was alive. There was an inhuman anger in the tossing branches and mingled with it, an elemental glee. The forest was aware of her and her fear and her smallness. She was an intruder in Herne’s kingdom, and she had not respected Herne.

She scrambled up and stood uneasily under a chestnut tree, looking up. High overhead, outlined against a dim patch of scurrying greyness, which was all she could see of the sky, a spray of still-surviving leaves was like the shape of a giant hand, waiting to strike her down. Even as she stared, the wind wrenched at it, bent its fingers back and tore them off one by one. Panic gripped her. She ran, limping, stumbling, bolting headlong through brambles and leaves to reach the path and safety. She had feared wolves and human pursuers but they were only flesh and blood, as she was. The trees and the wind, which were not, were the foe.

Back on the track, she found herself stumbling head down into a wall of wind. It blew her hood back and her hair, coming unbraided, was turned into soaking rats’ tails. Rain drenched her and leaves snowed round her. When the forest began to hurl missiles at her, her whimpers were of fear but not surprise. Something crashed and broke at her feet; something else smashed to the ground behind her. She flung up her arms to shield her head and then screamed as a dark looming shape stepped into her path and fingers like steel talons bit into her shoulder.

Although, even in her terror, it did occur to her that she would not have expected Herne to carry a lantern.

You wicked girl. You wicked girl. She was at home but her mother’s greeting had been a slap and even as she changed Sybil’s clothes and roughly dried her soaking hair and sent Editha for hot broth, she went on scolding. ‘You could have been lost in the forest for ever. You could have been eaten. Ufi and Gurth are out in the weather now, searching for you. Withysham sent word you’d run off. You wicked girl!’

Editha said it too, in the very act of handing her the broth. Alice said it most fiercely of all, thrusting her small white face at Sybil. ‘What will they think at Little Dene when they hear of this? Do you think they’ll want you now? Running away from an abbey of God, indeed! What a wicked thing to do. How did you find her, Father Bruno?’

The priest was holding his drenched mantle to the fire to steam. ‘I heard slates coming off the church roof, in the wind. I took a lantern and went out to see how bad it was. She ran straight into me, out of the trees behind the church. She must have come on foot all the way from Withysham. Ufi and Gurth missed her somehow.’

‘Why did you do it?’ Alice demanded, rounding on Sybil. Tears dripping into her broth, Sybil tried to explain. ‘I’m not wicked, I’m not! Withysham’s horrible, cruel, all rules, rules about this and rules about that and if you don’t keep every last little rule you don’t get enough to eat and the church is so cold and we’re in it for hours every day. I couldn’t bear it. I prayed to come home.’ No need to go into details about the deity to whom she had addressed those prayers. ‘But nothing happened so I ran away. I wanted to come home, so much…!’

‘Eat your broth while it’s hot,’ said Wulfhild.

Sybil spooned and swallowed and snuffled. She had dreamed day and night of coming home but now she was here, it was all dreadfully wrong. It was different. It looked the same; the wallhangings were as usual, the swords on their hooks by the door. But something was strange…

On the other side of the fire trench down the centre of the hall, a baby started to cry.

Sybil looked up in astonishment as Alice hurried to the child. ‘Yes, you have a niece now,’ Wulfhild said. ‘Her name is Maud.’

Her mother sounded pleased. Maud was a favourite, evidently. While she had been immured in Withysham, remembering home every hour of the day and most of the night, had everyone at Fallowdene been forgetting Sybil, giving their love to this Maud instead? ‘Mother, don’t send me back again! Don’t send me back to that place!’

‘We’ll talk about that later,’ said Wulfhild. Sybil put down her empty bowl and shivered. Her mother was different too, older and further off, in some way. Wulfhild picked up her damp, discarded clothes and began to mutter over the tears the brambles had made. Father Bruno was studiously not looking at Sybil and the other women were ignoring her as well. Inquisitively, she left her stool and went round the fire to peer into the cradle which held the unknown Maud.

Alice was leaning over it, crooning. Very little could be seen of Maud herself; she was all swaddled up. But at the foot of the cradle, lying on top of the rug which was its outermost layer, was Sybil’s old stuffed toy, the one her mother had made for her, which looked slightly like a fox, Woollypaws.

‘Put that down!’ cried Alice. She snatched the toy away as Sybil picked it up. ‘Leave it alone!’

‘But it’s Woollypaws! It’s mine!’

‘No, it isn’t. It belongs to Maud now.’

‘It’s not Maud’s, it’s mine!’ Sybil held on to the other end of Woollypaws. ‘Anyway she’s too small to play with it!’

‘She’ll grow and it’ll be there when she’s ready for it….let go, you wicked girl, let go!’ Alice slapped at her and Sybil released the toy with a cry.

‘Now what’s going on?’ Wulfhild came hurrying round the fire trench, as fast as her stick would aid her.

‘This naughty child is trying to steal Maud’s toy…!’

‘It isn’t Maud’s, it’s mine, it’s Woollypaws! Sybil stamped her foot at Alice and burst into renewed tears.

Alice seized her shoulders and shook her. ‘Be quiet, be quiet at once! Stop it! You bring nothing but trouble…!’

‘Leave her alone, Alice. The toy used to be hers, that’s true enough…’

‘She’s almost eleven. She’s too old for toys. She’s got to get ready for marriage. She’s got a lot to learn. Back you go to your abbey, my girl, first light tomorrow…’

‘I won’t, I won’t! You only want me to go to make room for her!’ Sybil howled, pointing at Maud. ‘You all love her now and not me. You’ve let her take my place. You’ve given her my Woollypaws! I hate her!’ The method by which, in the abbey, she had bent her contemporaries to her will came back to her. She knew by instinct that some of their fears, on which she had played, were shared by Alice. ‘I’ll curse her,’ she said, and stopped crying in order to rearrange her features in the expression of menacing knowingness which had had such an electrifying effect on several girls who were bigger than herself. ‘I’ll wish for Herne to come and take her away and leave a changeling in her place and then she’ll have to go and live with him for ever in the cold, wet forest…’

Running frightened through the forest she had known that Herne was not something to play with. In the warm hall, although she was afraid of the anger of the people round her, she had forgotten the anger of the trees. Now it was as if it had followed her inside. Father Bruno’s voice was booming above her with a note of wrath she had never heard in it hitherto, even when he had been angry with her before. Alice, her hands clapped over her ears, was staring at Sybil aghast as though she had suddenly sprouted horns. Editha was making the sign against the Evil Eye. The very air quivered with outrage and fury. The only person who was not angry was her mother, who had burst out laughing, or cackling. It implied that her mother was now on her side but it was not reassuring since it seemed to be enraging everyone else still further.

‘She’s bad luck, that’s what she is. A witch!’ Alice lowered her hands and got between Sybil and the cradle. ‘I wonder I never saw it before. The harvests have been better since she’s been gone…’

‘Nonsense!’ snapped Wulfhild.

‘Oh, is it? And the very evening she comes home, the gale tears the new church roof to pieces, that I paid for? That’s nonsense too, I suppose? She brought the gale with her, I tell you!’

‘If Richard were here, my girl, instead of in Scotland, he’d tell you…’

‘You like to think he’s an unbeliever like you but I tell you he isn’t!’

‘You think you know more about him than I do, his mother?’

‘I am of the opinion,’ interposed Father Bruno calmly, ‘that what we have to deal with here is no more than an exceptionally ill-behaved child, but I agree that we have that. There have been gales all through this autumn,’ he said, turning to Alice. ‘The minstrel who visited us at All Souls told us that timber churches had been blown down in London in a storm and that people had been killed, if you remember. We cannot hold the child responsible because there is a gale tonight. But we can hold her responsible for her own disgraceful actions in running away. We…’

‘I’m not sending her back,’ said Wulfhild flatly. Sybil, trembling in the midst of them, looked at her mother with hope.

‘You must,’ said Father Bruno quietly. ‘She must learn manners and self-restraint. She will be married within three or four years. She must be prepared for that. She must not be allowed to think that defiance and… and blasphemy… will gain her anything. It was very very wrong to run away, Sybil. Two men are still out looking for you! As for this nonsense about pretending to curse people, and calling on demons…’

‘She’s just a child. She doesn’t know…’ Wulfhild began. ‘You always defend her because she’s just a child. You won’t see that she’s growing up and what is she growing up into?’ cried Alice. She looked at Sybil as though she were a giant spider. Sybil whimpered.

‘She’s desperate because she’s miserable. You heard what she said. They’re starving her.’

‘She looks adequately fed to me,’ said Bruno dryly. ‘Children exaggerate, you know. I’ll take her back myself, tomorrow.’

‘You will not.’

‘He will,’ said Alice. ‘I’m speaking for Richard. If he were here, that’s what he’d say.’

‘Oh, would he indeed?’

‘If he has his sister’s interests truly at heart, yes.'

‘I can’t go back!’ Sybil burst out in terror. ‘Sister Ermengarde will birch me! I can’t, I can’t!’

‘You’ll have to put up with it,’ Bruno informed her. ‘You should have thought of that before.’

‘I say no! Wulfhild moved towards her daughter.

‘And I say yes and I have the right to say it!’ Alice’s head was up and her voice breathless. ‘I’m Richard’s wife. Yes, and the mother of his child! When Maud was born, Mother, I had from you the first trace of approval since I came into this house. Good. But it was long overdue; I’m entitled to more. Entitled. I have the right to speak for Richard when he’s away from home and it’s time that right was recognised. Whether you like it or not, I believe that Richard would send Sybil back and I say on his behalf that back she goes!’

‘I’m going to saddle my mare. I must go out and see if I can meet Ufi and Gurth. I ask you both to consider carefully and resolve this quarrel before I return,’ said Bruno. ‘I have no wish to take sides. But quite apart from her own best interests, Sybil is clearly causing so much trouble under this roof that I would say it’s best that she goes elsewhere.’

‘You and Bruno,’ said Wulfhild, turning on Alice as the priest went out, ‘you think you run Fallowdene between you. You’re always together, hatching plots, about church roofs and harvesting Richard’s plants. It was for him to say, I’d have thought, whether we try the stuff out this year or next. Editha doesn’t like being given queer spices she doesn’t know and told to put them in the food, not by you. The time you and Bruno spend together, I sometimes wonder what Richard would say to that?

‘Mother!’ Alice flushed with indignation and embarrassment. ‘Father Bruno is a most devout and honest priest.’

‘And not a day over thirty, and he’s a man, my girl.’

‘Say what you like.’ Alice shrugged and turned back to the cradle to tidy the coverings. The baby, as though the raised voices had been a lullaby, had fallen asleep. ‘Sybil still goes back to Withysham tomorrow.’

‘When Richard comes home, we’ll hear what he really has to say about it.’

‘He’ll say I did right,’ said Alice coldly.

Sybil, weeping silently now, stomach roiling in fear of tomorrow and Sister Ermengarde, said nothing. She had already grasped that in a sense they had both lost interest in her, that she was no more than a symbol of a territory over which they were fighting, the territory of her brother Richard’s soul.

And that this time Alice had won.