The Icknield Way was really the Icknield Ways; not just one, but two, sometimes three, and occasionally several tracks meandering at different levels along the sixty miles of the chalk Chiltern ridge from the Thames basin to the flat lands of East Anglia.
It had been an ancient route before the Romans came and even before the Iceni whose name it commemorates. Along its south-western section, which Willem and Matilda were entering, were valleys in which lived a small, dark, narrow-headed people who had been in England before the arrival of the Iceni, and even they weren’t as old as the Icknield Way. They had been on William the Conqueror’s route to subdue England and were now suspicious and fearful, more likely to hide than welcome. At the onset of winter they hibernated inside their earthworks leaving the landscape to deer, hares and foxes whose tracks decorated the snow in aimless stitching.
Willem rode like a drunk, only able to focus straight ahead. But his Eurydice looked behind to the darkness she was leaving and saw part of it detach and follow her.
When they reached the barn Willem got them inside, horses as well, put Matilda on some straw, covered her, unsaddled the horses, lay down, covered himself and slept. Matilda slept less well. She heard shadows scrabbling outside whispering to be let in, so she woke the saints and they chattered to cover the sound.
On the next day Willem headed for the high track on the ridge where snow had been thinned by the wind and where the beech hangars allowed them to see but not be seen.
Loss of blood was making him weak and irritable. Matilda’s habit of looking constantly behind her as if someone was following them exasperated him.
He was not as concerned at Matilda’s mental state as another man might have been; he’d seen similar condition in soldiers who’d suffered unbearable anguish in war. She’d get over it. Nevertheless the saints were wearing travelling companions, mainly because they occupied all her attention. It was the saints who heaved off her boots at night, lit the fires, dug her latrines, provided her food and it was the saints she thanked for it. It was an eerie, lonely time for Willem and hard work for a man with a bad back and an arm that wasn’t healing well.
On the third night the only shelter they could find was a forester’s hut, so small he had to leave the horses outside. In his sleep his pain formed shapes and sounds, a blunt thudding in his shoulder and a flat drone in his lower spine pierced by shrill squealing. In the morning just lifting the bar from the door was difficult.
The horses had gone. Behind the windbreak he’d built for them were jumbled marks in the snow made by eight hooves and two feet.
“Shut up, for Christ’s sake.” Behind him Matilda had relapsed into manic chattering.
The woods were beautiful, the trunks of the beeches might have been sketched in charcoal and a man could be standing behind every one. He listened. The place echoed with desertion.
He took Matilda’s hand and backed with her to the hut where he’d stupidly left the door open. If someone had got inside and taken the crossbows… the crossbows were still there. He bolted the door while he got her ready for the walk ahead of them. She was shaking and talkative, though not to him. He had trouble fixing her cloak brooch – his left arm was almost useless. When she was ready he hung a crossbow and quiver over her head.
“Remember how to use this? Good girl. Of course you do.”
He had to arm himself the wrong way round because of his shoulder. He rolled up the thicker rugs and slung them round his neck and stuffed the flint and tinder fungus in his pocket. He looked with regret at the equipment they must leave.
After opening the door cautiously he listened for a long time, then ran, pulling Matilda after him. He ran to the edge of the trees and down the northern slope to the lower track. Matilda didn’t like being out in the open and his back yelped as she pulled against him. “He’ll see me,” she told the saints. But he didn’t dare stay in the woods where they could be jumped from any bush. He needed to see what was coming for them even if it meant being seen. Now they were on foot any travellers they encountered would consider them too poor to be worth noticing or robbing.
Nevertheless, as the ridge reared up to their right the exposure made him want to crouch, though at the same time they seemed to have become very small indeed, minute and impotent in an illimited expanse of white. If it was a peasant who’d stolen the horses he had no reason to kill them: if it was Fitz Payn, the bow was not his weapon.
Matilda walked with her face turned to the ridge and once she pointed, indicating some movement to her saints. Willem thought he saw something moving between the trees but his eyes were beginning to trick him. It could still have been a peasant who’d stolen the horses.
When they reached the flowers he knew it hadn’t been a peasant.
They looked like flowers from far off, a concentrated relief of anemone colours, blue, purple and red, in a heap in the snow. Nearer, they saw the flowers were steaming.
Nearer still they turned into guts, the anemone-coloured, glistening, contorted ropes of intestines.
They were out of a horse; Willem had seen things like them emerging from the belly wounds of horses in battle.
A line of footprints led up to and then away from the pile, those coming heavier than those going away. He had carried them in his arms to place his bouquet in Matilda’s path.
Matilda was quiet for once: she seemed puzzled. Willem took her hand and followed the footprints to a depression in the snow further on where the horse she had ridden away from Ibber had been slaughtered and eviscerated. What was left of it lay in a pandemonium of pink snow, its legs frozen in an ungainly kick, its yellow teeth exposed in a last shriek.
Other than the thin track which connected the carcase to its intestines, there were no footprints. Instead a wide scar started off untidily in the depression as if something had scrabbled to expose the blades of grass underneath, and then ploughed upwards towards the ridge, gaining width as it disappeared into the trees. He was still puzzling out this phenomenon when Matilda said clearly: “That is absolutely disgusting.”
He turned round to her. The sight of the animal had bypassed her madness to touch the horsewoman who had ridden more frequently than she had walked. For that moment she glanced up at Willem and she perceived him, not as some forked shape on the edge of a nightmare, but him, Willem. It was a moment of such contact that he said, “Hello.”
They were still facing each other when they heard the hill sighing and glanced up to see a huge ball of snow capering down the scar towards them. It was a childhood memory turned murderous. Sparks of ice flew from its surface. Willem took the full force of it on his bad shoulder and was thrown on to the carcase. Matilda fell as she jumped back and was covered with snow as the ball exploded over them both.
She got up, fiddling at her neck to dislodge ice slivers. Anger had refreshed her mind. She saw clearly the outline of the beeches on the ridge and the figure that stepped out of them to follow the snowball and finish them off.
In her old, mad mind he had grown superhuman; now in this landscape he looked small, and he staggered as he ran. He had been wounded. He called to her like a lover.
With her new clarity she saw him as disordered; put together wrongly in the still, metallic perfection around him. Her brothers had once tortured a beetle by sticking a needle into it, paralysing one side so that in moving it went in a circle. She looked from the running man to the man floundering in the snow. A right beetle and a wrong beetle.
“I’ll have to kill him,” she said.
The Mother sighed: “Poor beetle.”
Willem was groping with his right hand for the crossbow, it was the wrong side and he got it tangled with the quiver. The man had a knife in his hand and was coming not for Willem but for Matilda. He tried to fit his feet into the stirrup and moaned as his back tore. Matilda watched him: “You stay still,” she said kindly. “I’ll do it.”
Her arm brought the bow over her head and in the same movement down, cocking it as he’d taught her. Back over her shoulder two fingers gripped a goose-feather flight. She was part of the meshing mechanism of the world, a cog which interlocked with others to turn the wheel. The man was close now. She could see him smile and the blood on his jacket from the horse. She raised the bow and heard a voice repeating orders it had given in a sweet fenland a sweet time ago.
“Aim.” She aimed at a patch of blood on the russet jacket.
“Breathe in.” She breathed in and remembered to let it half-out.
“Don’t think.” She stopped thinking.
“Loose.” The bolt hit Fitz Payn just below the throat and knocked him back out of Matilda’s vision. The universe was tidy again.
“Good shot,” said the Magdalene as she faded into transparency.
The Virgin’s blue cloak became grey: “Goodbye, my dear girl.”
“But I had to kill him. Don’t leave me. I had to.”
“Quite right,” whispered the snow. “And quite wrong.”
Two snowflakes touched her on each cheek. They had gone.
Five days later Matilda woke up in the nuns’ priory at Markyate two-thirds along the stretch of Ermine Street which ran from Dunstable to St. Albans.
Her face was cold from an open window opposite her bed through which she could see rooks circling over tops of elms down a slope. Her body was warm and clean under quilted covers which smelled of lavender and a warm brick wrapped in wool exuded heat to her feet.
Besides lavender and beeswax there was the indefinable aroma that identified a Saxon dwelling and had something to do with vegetables.
The plank door opened and a nun came in with a tray.
“Time for supper.” Her remorselessly bright voice had interspersed Matilda’s dreams. She propped Matilda up with the air of one who enjoyed her own efficiency. “One for the Father, two for the Son, three for the Holy Ghost.” The spoonfuls of soup had shreds of ham in them with leeks and pearl barley. Matilda opened and shut her mouth to oblige not only the Trinity but the twelve disciples as well.
“Do you know where you are?” Matilda shook her head. She didn’t care much. “This is Markyate. You’ve heard of Christina of Markyate?”
Oddly enough, she had. She connected the name with East Anglia and Sigward. Sigward had talked with veneration of a Christina of Markyate as of a saint in the making. She was one of the rare Saxons who had obtruded themselves on Norman attention.
There was no need to rack her memory; the nun was a propagandist for her superior. Soon Matilda knew a lot about Christina and her wish for a virgin’s crown in heaven, her fight against her parents who’d wanted to marry her off, her flight to save her virginity, her sojourn among the hermits who dotted this part of the country, her eventual recognition as a holy phenomenon by the bishops and her founding of Markyate Priory. She began to remember the things Sigward had said: “The Abbot of St. Albans won’t make a move without consulting her. She could have been Abbess of Fontevrault, one of the most powerful women in Christendom, but her humility forbade her.”
The name of the talking nun was Helison and she fatigued Matilda. She wiped Matilda’s mouth. “There. You know all about us. Do you want to tell me who you are?” Matilda shut her eyes and let herself drift into a warm and soupy sleep.
The next morning she was strong enough to face the fact that she had to give some explanation, if only to stifle enquiry. She, who had thought it the proudest thing in the world to be Matilda de Risle, would rather have no identity.
She asked Helison after breakfast: “How did I get here?”
“Poor soul” – the nun was eager – “you were left at our gate. On a sled pulled by a horse. There was a man but it was too dark for the porteress to make him out. He said you were a lady who needed our charity. He said he was hurt and couldn’t protect you. He said he’d come back when you were better. And when he was.”
Hurt? She couldn’t remember him being hurt. Her mind made a brief foray backwards and recoiled as if scalded. Leading out of the scald was a bridge of days in which she and somebody had hauled each other along. She waved away her breakfast and went back to sleep.
After the evening feeding Matilda said: “I am a widow from…” Where was somewhere neutral? “…from Aquitaine. I am on a pilgrimage round the holy sites of Europe to pray for my husband’s soul.” Ridiculously, she couldn’t think of a false name. “And under a vow not to reveal my identity.” They could take it or leave it. She had disappointed the nun. “Who did you think I was?”
“Anyone. Somebody.” The nun’s eyes were wide. “You came so mysteriously. And it was near Christmas.”
“I fell among thieves who robbed me. I was rescued by a strange man. He was kind and brought me here.”
“Perhaps it was St. Christopher.” The nun was determined to rescue something miraculous from a bleak situation. She did not question further; what happened in the outside world, unless it happened at the mother house of St. Albans, was of no interest. Matilda had trouble finding out what had occurred at Oxford. “The Empress got away,” said Helison vaguely. “The war goes on.”
In many ways Markyate was what Matilda needed. Its petty, regulated life was soothing. She was tranquillised by female sounds, the sweep of brushes, hens, gossiping bondswomen, chanting. Her mind reassembled itself to canonical hours, not completely, not in the order it had been before, but enough.
All her life her happiness had depended on positive ambitions. Now, not to be cold, not to be in danger, not to be hungry or tired wrapped her in the negatives of peasant bliss.
Whiffs of her own childhood came back through the childlike convent where everything was kept in readiness for a miraculous visitor. They lived in constant expectation of the wondrous and, when it didn’t happen, made mystery out of the commonplace. Inanimate had animate potential. Every bucket must be blessed before it was filled to rid it of evil. An ancient mule was being kept alive long after its usefulness because it had once brayed: “Christina.”
During the summer they had got into a high old state over some bunches of marigolds left daily on their doorstep. Marigolds were the Virgin’s own flowers, ergo they were a portent and their petals were pressed in linen – only to be thrown away when a villein’s wife confessed to offering them for the safe delivery of her child.
The fire which kept this pot of nuns simmering was Christina herself in an unceasing series of petty miracles, visions and prophecies. The sisters recorded her every move to tell the monk who came regularly from St. Albans to write it all down. Matilda had stepped into hagiography in the making. Every local abbey and priory held its breath for this woman’s sainthood to be confirmed by a sign, a transfiguration – perhaps martyrdom.
“It takes it out of her,” said Helison. “She knows everything. She always foretells Abbot Geoffrey’s visits to the day and hour. Always. She can tell what you’re thinking. She knew when you were having sinful thoughts, didn’t she, Godit?”
Godit, one of the bondswomen, grunted: “Who asked her?”
Matilda’s own introduction to the wonder was delayed. Eventually she was persuaded to leave her bed and join the community in its refectory for the main meal. It was surprisingly hard to face the gaze of other women, even Saxons.
Christina chose that meal to emerge from a period of fasting and prayer in her chapel, and was led, tottering, to the table where nuns ran to and from the kitchen to prepare mixtums for her.
Matilda ate steadily and watched. Christina was a ginger Saxon with freckled skin stretched over large bones. Her protuberant eyes were blue and the lids were lined above and below, like targets. She held her flat chest as she announced: “My beloved will visit me on St. Stephen’s Day at noon.” Her expression was exalted but she cast a sharp glance at one of her nuns: “Have you got that down, Lettice?” Lettice obediently made scratches on a slate.
“She means Abbot Geoffrey of St. Albans,” Helison whispered to Matilda. “He likes to know her prophecies when he arrives.”
Eventually the prioress permitted herself to eat and drink and her eyes to rest on Matilda. She made a space on the bench beside her.
“This is the lady we told you of, mother,” said Helison. “She has been married.”
It was an apology. It put Matilda over the boundary which divided the uncelibate from them, the virgins who would end up in a superior part of Heaven. But Christina remained interested.
“You were seen in one of my visions. You were fighting the Devil.”
“I hope we all do that.” Matilda, who had walked with the Mother of God and the Magdalene, felt disinterest bordering on contempt.
Christina nodded. “He was in russet,” and gave permission for Helison to escort a fainting Matilda back to her cell.
From that moment Christina gained ascendancy over a humbled, admiring and frightened Matilda. The prioress was intrigued by this high-born Norman acolyte whom she had seen struggling in the arms of a russet Devil. The trouble was Christina took the vision allegorically and assumed Matilda was fighting to extricate herself from lusts of the flesh – and Christina knew about that.
As Matilda discovered in the nightly sessions to save her from the burning, Christina was a sensual woman – hence her continual fasting, cold baths and prayer. The discipline had subdued her body, which was rheumatic, but had heightened her senses to a level of which Matilda had never dreamed.
“I know the toils of the flesh. Once I was tempted by a man, a cleric, who importuned me and for whom my lascivious body was torn with desire. I overcame it with God’s help through fasting, nights without sleep, harsh scourgings. Believe me, I know what it is to be so inflamed with lust that the clothes clinging to my body might be on fire.”
“Which is a bloody sight more than I do,” thought Matilda. The marital state had never been like that. But if God and Jesus could love her… if she could make her besmirched body acceptable again. She became excited by the thought of new adventure in the unexplored country of the spirit.
The next day, while the nuns were at chapter, Godit popped her head round Matilda’s door. “Got a message for you.” She peeked back down the corridor; the message was secret. “He says he’ll be in the neighbourhood three days. He’ll come to the priory every night, starting tonight. Like he was a stranger.” Godit screwed up her face to get the exact words. “So’s he won’t compromise you. He says if you want to leave to give him the nod through me.” Willem had chosen his messenger well, Godit was delighting in the subterfuge. “Will you go?”
“I don’t know.”
“He wouldn’t have to ask me twice.” Godit was having sinful thoughts again.
Because of the war, travellers were rarer than they had been. Nevertheless, Markyate’s gate was opened and a meal and a bed ready for who needed them. Men were allowed to enter, provided they left weapons outside, and such was the veneration in which Markyate was held that the hospitality was never abused. Usually guests gave their name and provenance.
The man who asked admittance that night volunteered nothing beyond, yes, he would be grateful for a meal, no, he did not want a bed. Despite this, perhaps because of it, he caused a sensation. Matilda, now in tune with them, felt their expectation of a marvel rise. “Who is he?” was passed round with the salt.
She barely glanced at him. A fog had come in with him in which whirled obscene mutterings and drains and terror and, running like a handrail through them, the presence of this man.
“Who is he?” came from Helison on her left and passed on to Lettice on her right, but Matilda had remembered. “His name is Willem of Ghent,” she said quietly to herself. “He is a mercenary. He has a bad back.” He couldn’t expect her to leave the authority of Christina, where it was safe and childlike and she could be sure of Heaven if she prayed hard enough.
Helison caught the last sentence. “He is certainly in pain. Look how stiffly he moves. But look at his well-shaped features, he is not a common man.” She leaned across to Christina. “Mother, do you suppose…?”
“We must suppose nothing.” Christina was stern but her shrewd, hysterical eyes were fixed on the mercenary where he sat down the table among the low-caste visitors. “We must not surmise, Helison. But he does not look like a common man, nor does he eat like one.” The mercenary was taking no more food than he needed, unlike his neighbours who were stuffing down meat, beans, ale and bread as fast as they could. “Helison, take this fish pie and offer it to him. Look at his hands.”
Matilda’s head went up to stare. Hands? God Almighty, they were looking for stigmata. She turned to look herself. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps he was the Christ. Christ as a mercenary? For the first time she saw him properly without the distortions of insanity or bigotry, prejudice or class, and she saw a man, not God and not a saint, but a man. A dull man for peacetime maybe, but a rock in war. A man to go boar-hunting with, who’d protect your back. An ordinary, kind man with the sins that men were heir to – and as attractive as all get out: And he wanted her. Not as Christ wanted her, either. The cheek of it. The realisation made her gasp, then grin with unholy joy that she had attracted the man these nuns were in a flutter over, and still attracted him, else why was he here? It was shameful, it was presumption on his part, but it would be something to remember when she forsook the world.
Helison came twittering back. “He thanked you, mother. His voice is majestic, deep and lovely. He said with your permission he would return tomorrow.” Her voice went into a squeak. “Mother, do you think…?”
“Mother,” said Matilda, “I am sure he is not the Christ.” She could not identify him without identifying herself, but neither could she allow them to fool themselves.
“I have not said he was,” said Christina, as if her word decided the matter. “St. Paul warns us against delusion by the Lawless One. But neither must we close our minds and hearts to the promised coming, like Jews.”
“And it is near Christmas.”
That night Matilda prayed: “Let me find peace, dear God. Let me find peace here,” but she couldn’t find it and eventually got out of bed and, for the first time since Christina had given it to her, flicked the little scourge across her shoulders.
The next day was Christmas Eve and given over to preparation for the festival of the mass and the promised visit of the Abbot of St. Albans. The nuns scrubbed and polished and decorated the church while bondswomen sweated in kitchens that pulsed with heat and emitted the smells of spice, reconstituting fruits, boiling giblets and onions. On her way back from the woods up the hill with a sled of holly and ivy, Matilda passed the kitchens and heard Christina’s voice commanding something special to be cooked “…for the pilgrim”.
It upset her that she knew better than Christina. She didn’t want to know better; in Christina she had found authority and an all-seeing medium in touch with God. But the nunnery was whipping itself up into a state of near-hysteria. Christina looked ill and had to sit during Nones but at the versicle: “Today ye shall know that the Lord will come,” she staggered to her feet and gazed on the altar, rapt. “Blast,” thought Matilda.
By the time they opened the gates to the poor the nuns were almost frenzied. Christina was the only one who kept her head and ordered that the nuns stay in their places. She also ordered the bondswomen out. Christ was not to be drooled over by servants, if it was Christ.
But there was an audible breathing out when Willem came in with the beggars, and the door of the hatch between the refectory and the kitchen trembled from the prying heads behind it.
After grace, Christina rose and, with her sister Margaret, walked down the room, shifted a couple of beggars and sat opposite the mercenary in conversation. Helison skittered up and down the table, solicitously offering him food and ale and reporting back on what she overheard. The other nuns ate leaning towards the pilgrim as if bent by a strong breeze.
“Mother’s impressed, I can tell,” Helison said. “His answers are so wise… but there aren’t any nail-marks on his hands.”
Reluctantly Christina returned to her place; she was clutching her chest. “I have no doubt of it. As I listened to him my heart fluttered in my breast with spiritual joy.”
The whisper went round the table. “He is.”
Matilda sighed. She knew now she couldn’t stay among these women. They were too young for her, even Christina who was twice her age. She was too old, she had been exposed to too much reality to submit herself to a life of delusion. Suddenly she was cross with them. What was wrong with them that they did not accept what God had put under their noses? Marigolds were beautiful whether they came from a virgin or a villein’s wife. That man there was beautiful not because he was God Incarnate but because he was a man.
“Mother, it is time for me to leave. I thank you for your kindness and hospitality. I shall leave tomorrow.”
Christina nodded: “Won’t you stay for the procession?” but it was automatic courtesy. Matilda was no longer of interest.
“Is he coming for the procession, mother?” asked Lettice.
“I have invited him. Doubtless it is a matter of whether we are worthy.”
The mercenary got awkwardly up from the table as if in pain. The nuns moaned with sympathy. That’s what happened when you were crucified. As he turned to bow to Christina he looked for the first time at Matilda. She gave a brief nod. He turned and went out.
The trouble was, thought Matilda the next morning as she dressed herself carefully in her cleaned, outdoor clothes, they hadn’t been able to arrange anything. Godit was being kept too busy to act as go-between. She presumed if she walked out of the convent and down to the road he would be waiting for her.
She must reward the convent for its hospitality before she went… she had no money. The jewelled Belt her father had left to keep her safe and wealthy had been left behind at Ibber. She was penniless. Her estates were in the hands of others, both sides were her enemies. If she reappeared to claim the rents she would be liable to be sold to some other husband. She was a poverty-stricken refugee about to step into a hostile world with a man she barely knew and with nowhere to go.
She collapsed on to her bed and sobbed like a child.
It was Christmas Day. As dawn broke, the bells of Dunstable Priory chimed out the good news of the birth of a child in a stable to the rich Abbey of St. Albans whose own bells chimed it back. In between, along Ermine Street, tin bells in the roofs of tiny hermit cells swung in their frames, and villeins’ wives stood at the doors of their huts and clanged the bells which usually called their men home from the fields. In Matilda’s cell chimed a loving, fat voice from another Christmas. “I just wanted you, my dear, to have a bolthole; somewhere to hide should trouble come, where you and our children will always be safe and have plenty to eat.”
Matilda, spreadeagled on the bed, stopped crying to listen. “An odd little gift,” apologised the bells, “but I shall be happier that you have it.”
She sat up and wiped wet hair from her face. “Sigward, you were my only true love.”
Down the road Willem of Ghent, also concerned about the lack of a rendezvous, led his transport, a mule and a sled, into the woods and tethered it.
The horse remaining to him and Matilda, which he had found wandering near its dead companion, was dead itself, ridden to exhaustion through the snow to get Matilda to Markyate. He had sold its carcase for a few pennies and had worked for the past three days for Tosti, Markyate’s neighbour, in order to earn a few more to buy this ancient, moth-eaten and bad-tempered mule. In his spare time he’d managed to construct the sled. Neither activity had improved the condition of his back. Stiffly he began to climb the hill to the convent gates, looking for Matilda.
Two nuns ran towards him and curtsied in the snow. “My lord, my lord, we are so blessed that you have come, that you have found us worthy.”
Unacquainted with convent manners he supposed this enthusiastic courtesy was usual but it made him uncomfortable. With little pushes of their hands, as if they wanted to touch him but dared not, they urged him into the priory. “She is waiting for you.”
At the door of the church the sisterhood was assembled, each carrying a candle decorated with holly. The prioress sank to her knees. “My lord, my joy is unbounded. Will you say mass with us? Will you lead the procession?”
It would be nice to take communion again, but he wasn’t going to lead any procession. “Thank you, ma’am, but I’m just a common guest.”
Christina’s encircled eyes filled with understanding of his humility. “As it pleases my lord.”
A priest who was there to administer the host acted as crucifer and led the way, the nuns followed, chanting at the tops of their joyful voices, and Willem found himself bringing up the rear with Matilda. “What’s happening?”
She muttered back: “They think you’re the Christ come again.”
“Jesus!”
“Exactly.”
Neither derived much spiritual sustenance from the eucharist; they were too aware of the veneration exuded by the rest. The priest was in on the good news that Christ was in his congregation and his hands shook as he proffered the wine. At the anthem “Christ is born” every nun turned to look at Willem, nearly pushing him backwards by the blast of their singing. He began to panic.
As the priest led the procession out of the church, followed by Christina and the convent, the gaze of each one seemed to eat him up. He joined Matilda in the nave. “I can’t face this.”
They would never get away. She looked around: “See that window?”
He nodded. “I’ll meet you down by the road.”
Matilda went out singing and carefully shutting the door of the chapel behind her. The convent was assembled outside, facing her.
“Where is he?”
“He’s praying.” That would hold them for a bit. She kissed Christina’s hand. “Mother, I must leave now.” Christina nodded, her eyes on the door. Matilda looked at the rapt faces which ignored her. She could have wept for them. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
Outside the priory gates the world was its old, harsh, cold self. The snow enveloped her boots. She felt a revulsion of disgust which took in herself and the man waiting to meet her. She was only just recovering from the wounds received in a sexual assault from one mercenary and now she was about to go off with another. When he came up with her she looked at the transport. “Is that the best you could do?”
Willem wasn’t in a charitable mood either. His back hurt. “There weren’t any thoroughbreds going. Take it or leave it.”
They had found their modus vivendi. Reviling each other they set off up the long, steep hill to Caddington and the route back to the Icknield Way.
Into the Life of Christina was written the story of the mysterious pilgrim and of how the Son of God manifested Himself at Markyate Priory and disappeared back to Heaven while praying in its church.