The first night of the marriage between Sigward, Lord of Hatfelde, and Matilda de Risle of Normandy was more complex and less brutal than fourteen-year-old Matilda – whose ideas of human copulation were based on stockbreeding – had feared.
But her relief that things had gone comparatively well were as nothing to that of her lord’s.
As he rose from their bed the next morning his bellows of joy silenced cockcrow, set the dogs barking, scattered the pigeons from the loft and roused the drink-sodden wedding guests in their niches round the hall.
Matilda lay where she was, listening to Sigward thump down the stairs and hearing the castle come to life, waiting for her ladies to come and dress her.
As she’d known she would be, Berte, her nurse, was first in, her mouth pursed in triumph as if her lamb had vanquished the Devil single-handed. Their eyes met. “That’ll silence her,” said Berte. Silence seemed to be the last thing Matilda had achieved – the bell on the chapel roof was now adding to the hullaballoo – but Berte was referring to Matilda’s predecessor in the bed, a previous wife whom Sigward had repudiated after six years of marriage. She had not produced a child in that time and so had been tidied away into a convent but had managed to appeal to the bishops’ consistory court to have her marriage reinstated, although she was also spreading the rumour that Sigward was impotent.
“Contradictory, if you like,” Berte was saying, tidying away the mandrake root, corn dollies and other symbols of fertility she had concealed around the bed, afraid the priest would see them. “And lies anyway, so it do seem.” She was begging for revelations but Matilda gave her none.
“Nine months from now…” Berte crooned and opened the chest at the foot of the bed to take out Matilda’s robes and give them a shake. “Anyway, Sigward’s purchased the bishops’ goodwill to prove consanguinity between them and that’ll finish her for good.”
Actually it was difficult for a man and woman of the nobility not to be related within the seven degrees which the Church now said prohibited marriage. Matilda, who knew her pedigree as well as she knew the hunting coverts around her Normandy homes, was aware that she and Sigward shared a great-great-grandmother. But the laws were generally disregarded when it was desirable that two great families should be allied and invoked only when a husband wanted to rid himself of an unsatisfactory wife.
Sigward was down in the bailey now, whooping awake the guests who had been quartered in the outbuildings. Berte opened the shutters to watch him, smiling as at the antics of a small boy and letting in the smell of forest, bluebells, wood-smoke, horse manure and a Hertfordshire breeze that fluttered the garlands round the bed.
“Poor fat Saxon,” she said, leaning out and presenting her own ample backside to Matilda’s view. “Only needed a Norman spark to light his tinder.”
“He’s not Saxon,” said Matilda, stung. The fatness could not be disputed.
“Spindle-side, spindle-side,” chanted Berte. “His lady mother was Saxon and lady mother ruled this roost, so they tell me. It was her, God rest her soul, chose her, blast her. Good thing the Lord called her when He did, God rest her soul.”
“You show him respect or you’ll go back to Normandy.” Berte presumed too much on a relationship begun when she, Matilda, was one minute old.
“Don’t I respect him?” asked Berte. She turned back from the window and began brushing Matilda’s pelisse. “Didn’t I show that pis-aller cook how to honey the duck and didn’t his lordship chomp it up? Don’t the king think well of him? Isn’t he powerful? I like fat men: they’re cosy in bed.”
Matilda hissed with irritation: Berte was vulgar; worse still, she was right. Sigward’s girth had been embarrassing compared to the lean, Norman lords at her wedding. But in the darkness those broad expanses of flesh had been comforting, symbolising the richness of Sigward’s English acres. And Matilda, who loved richness in all things, had burrowed into them, joining the domain of bodies and lands and practising the submissiveness which Berte had advised. Berte had said: “Now you be humble, like a little child. None of your pride with him, my lady. She was bossy, so they do say, like the lady mother, and she was put away. We don’t want to be put away, do we? So be soft. Shy, but willing.”
Matilda had pretended to ignore her but her careful mind had considered the advice and found it good. Had she been put into a convent she would have had to please God; being married she must please her husband and God in that order. Heiress to large estates she might be, but wealthier women than she had been repudiated and left impoverished, their lords not having found it necessary to repudiate also the lands they’d brought with them. Only a generation before, Philip, then King of France, had repudiated his queen, Fat Bertha, after twenty years of marriage. The poor lady had died of shame and been buried in a commoner’s grave.
So Matilda had made a game of the night, play-acting the role society urged on wives, becoming compliant, tender, admiring, submissive, while the true Matilda watched and learned about men, the lords, in order to manipulate this one to her advantage. The effect had been an overwhelming response of joy from Sigward.
Now there was clatter on the stairs and other members of her personal household came in with most of the lady guests, some peeking quick glances, others frankly staring to see how the night had changed her. Adeliza regarded her with horrified curiosity as if she had been to the grave and come back, reeking, to tell the tale. Adeliza of Louvain was the twelve-year-old who was to be brought up in Matilda’s care until she should be married herself. They had been playmates and now, thought Matilda, they belonged to different generations.
Father Alors – nobody could remember his real name – her confessor and secretary stood at the foot of the bed with a crucifix upraised against contamination. His face was gloomy and getting gloomier with every shout of Sigward’s from the courtyard. “Search your conscience, my child, and tell me that you are yet in grace.”
As he had circled the two of them in bed last night, censing them with holy water, he had given improving selections from the Church’s current marital teaching: “If the spouses take pleasure in their marriage bed they sin,” and, “If a man love his wife too passionately he be guilty of adultery.” Sigward’s priest had been much jollier and winked at them.
“Father Alors always says Judgment Day is tomorrow,” Matilda had muttered to Sigward, who’d muttered back: “As long as it’s not tonight.”
Matilda searched her conscience, reducing the matter to essentials. What Father Alors was asking was had she enjoyed the night and she would be blameworthy if the answer was “yes”.
What did they want of her? She had not chosen to be married. She had been just as prepared to take the veil at Fontevrault. But then her two older brothers had died, one from measles and one from a hunting accident, and at once Matilda was heir, tenant-in-chief to King Henry, the Duke of Normandy, and a valuable asset to him since her marriage was in his gift.
He had given her, for a price, to Sigward. Matilda’s advisers had felt she could have done better, although Sigward was of good birth, but Henry had given neither them nor Matilda the choice. It had been strategically important that Matilda’s lands should not fall into the hands of the greater Norman barons in case they became too powerful and that Sigward, who commanded English lands and loyalty, should be bound even closer to his king.
So Matilda was married whether she wanted to be or not and now the Church in the shape of Father Alors was disappointed in her. It was better to marry than to burn, but only just. Had she enjoyed the night? Would the Virgin Mary, who had replaced Matilda’s long-dead mother in Matilda’s affection, still think her worthy?
Well, it had been a peculiar night, full of strange textures and experiences and not nearly as bad as she’d imagined, but if it never happened again she wouldn’t mind. Perhaps that would do.
She said, “I am as much in grace as I can be, being married.”
Father Alors sighed. “It is all we can hope for. God keep you in that state, my child.” He wandered off, nearly inert with the world’s coming death.
“C’est à en Paques Avril, que chantent oisillons gentils…” Jodi, her minstrel, had perched himself and his lute on a cupboard shelf and to the accompaniment of his singing Matilda was dragged out of bed, her head dunked in a bowl of water and the business of dressing her begun. Garment after garment was dragged down over her upraised arms until her thin body was layered like an onion. In itself the beautiful pelisse was three layers, the inner cloth and the outer silk sandwiching between them the ermine which was proof, or nearly, against the spring breeze outside the castle and the eternal draughts inside.
“Do we all wear the same tunic again today, Matilda?” asked Adeliza. In the wedding procession yesterday bridesmaids and bride had been covered in the same Virgin blue to confuse the evil spirits who were abroad to bedevil a marrying.
“We do not,” said Matilda. She loathed looking the same as anyone.
“Matilda spent the night wrestling with demons,” drawled Ghislaine.
“But did she win?” asked Flore.
Matilda aimed a barefoot kick at them both and within seconds the chamber was a mêlée of scuffling, giggling girls. Berte waded into it and grabbed Matilda’s hair which had become entangled in somebody else’s circlet. “This,” she said, “goes up.” It was a reminder of her dignified marital status.
The girdle they fastened around Matilda’s hips was set with carbuncles of topaz, agate, sardonyx and rubies which had been brought back from the Holy Land by Matilda’s father. Some protected against fever, some lighted up darkness. Matilda had compared it to those of the lady guests and had satisfied herself it was richer even than Matilda of Boulogne’s whose husband, Count Stephen of Blois, was representing the absent King Henry.
They were putting the finishing touches, dabbing her nose with saffron powder and her ears with rosewater when the two stewards made their entrance, tapping their rods of office. Matilda’s, Rollo, who had come over temporarily and would go back to supervise the Norman estates, was beaming. Alfwin, Sigward’s man, was impassive as ever. “My lady,” said Rollo, “your lord begs you to go down with your ladies and accompany him to church…”
Waleran of Meulan loomed up behind him: “You’ve been a clever girl, cousin, and are to be rewarded for it, apparently.”
“My lady,” continued Rollo, “to church and there receive your lord’s morning gift.”
The breeze flattened the squirrel cloaks and discs of hawthorn blossom stuck to flying veils. Tiny tides of yesterday’s thrown wheat ran over the ground to pile up under lavender bushes. Now, as yesterday, Matilda and Sigward stood in the church porch and faced their guests. Yesterday each had said: “I receive you as mine,” Sigward’s cloak had covered the two of them and Matilda had knelt to her husband and given up her legal existence. Henceforward her property, land, even her dower and marriage portion, were under Sigward’s control for as long as he lived.
Today he was handing something back. “Know all assembled here that, for the love I bear her, I grant to my wife, Matilda of Risle, my manor of Dungesey in the County of Cambridgeshire with all its appurtenances, rights of custom…” The enumeration of rights rolled out in thick deep notes, easily reaching the back of the crowd and was assisted by the breeze down the hill, over the elm tops, to the tiny wagons on the track and even to the villeins and cattle in the valley fields so that they turned their heads towards the cawing of this master rook.
The gift was as vulgar and generous as the man who performed it, and as Saxon. No full Norman could or would have instituted the tradition of the morning gift which was a reward for giving sexual pleasure, a sign that a husband found his wife congenial. The Church’s dislike of sexual satisfaction even in marriage had still not caught on among the lax and more matriarchal Saxons.
But the Norman Waleran of Meulan, who was Matilda’s cousin, had shown waspishness when he’d called her a clever girl as if she had gained advantage by unscrupulous means. Even Matilda herself, a true Norman, felt a moment of nausea at the thought that she had betrayed her breeding, that the tall, lean, confident men facing her, these arbiters of what was proper and what was not, should think less of her. She was embarrassed by the sweating emotion of the fat man she belonged to who was implicitly betraying her. “I’m not like that,” she wanted to shout. And at the same time, she was wondering what sort of manor it was.
It was nearly a year before she saw it because first it was necessary for Sigward to be introduced to his (once Matilda’s) lands in Normandy. They travelled from castle to manor to castle in a party sixty-odd strong, including some of Sigward’s dependent relatives, Matilda’s ladies and household, a chamberlain, a priest, grooms, servants, cooks, household knights and men-at-arms, staying at each estate for as long as its provisions held out or until the cesspit overflowed.
They hunted, paid visits and were visited, attended the local courts, gave judgments in their own, feasted, played, danced.
It was as administrative partners rather than as playfellows that the marriage prospered. Matilda found a revelling Sigward embarrassing; he drank too much and cried into his cups, he ate too much and belched like a Turk. He was too fat to dance without appearing ridiculous and out hunting he became puffed long before the quarry was killed. She found him most admirable when he was wielding power as a lord. Never was she so fond of him as when he was up on the dais surveying villeins, decreeing fines, settling disputes and receiving homage as her father once had. If he’d been a noticing man Sigward might have become aware that it was on the nights after official appearances that Matilda was most responsive to love-making.
So it was to quell her unworthy embarrassment and to heighten her admiration that she encouraged and took part in his governing.
It began at Guercy in the Suisse-Normande. At the Thursday court Matilda sat with Sigward on the dais and whispered into his ear as each villein came forward.
“Alcuin has encroached unlawfully on to West Field, which is yours.”
“Alcuin will be fined 6d for unlawful encroachment on the demesne,” said Sigward, promptly.
“Pierre has been pasturing his bull on the common and Rollo says he gave him no permission to do it.”
Pierre was fined 6d.
“The hamlet of St. Dreux has not put its sheep on your fallow to manure it this year.” St. Dreux, who wanted its own land manured, was fined 3s.
By the end of the day the returns from Guercy were up on what they had been when Matilda’s father was alive and Sigward was pleased with his wife. The villeins complained that they would starve, but villeins never said anything else.
After that Sigward took to consulting Matilda on most matters so that, as well as overseeing the preparations for the guests, the almsgiving, the menus and the general household conduct, she spent time with bailiffs counting tallies. She found herself to be a capable manager and enjoyed herself.
Their only disagreement was at Mainscourt near Rouen where Simnel, a villein, was presented at court for poaching a stag in the lord’s deerpark.
“Hang him,” said Matilda.
Sigward looked down on the man who was slouched almost unconscious with terror between two men-at-arms, and said nothing.
“My lord,” said Matilda, “there is no need to send him to the seigneur’s court. Here we have the right of infangthief. Hang him.”
“Judgment on Simnel will be postponed until tomorrow,” said Sigward.
Over the dinner table that afternoon Matilda pursued the matter. “He should hang.”
“The bailiff says he is adept at hunting truffles with pigs,” said Sigward. “I like truffles. It will be sufficient to cut off one of his hands – his left if he is right-handed; we must keep him useful.”
“It is a kindness to villeins in the long run to show them what is permissible and what is not,” said Matilda, quoting a tenet of her father’s. “If Simnel gets away with it they will all think they can poach deer and then we shall have to hang more than one.”
“Losing a hand isn’t getting away with it.”
The whole table joined in the argument. Sigward’s face went purple and he stood up, slamming his fist into Matilda’s plate of stew so that her second-best silk, six-thread gown was bespattered with gravy. “It is not for women to take life but to give it,” his voice went down the table, stunning it into silence.
Matilda stood up to swing her fist at him. “You…” She was going to yell “damned Saxon”, but Berte’s great forearm was jammed across her mouth and the other had slipped inside Matilda’s elbows to drag her backwards. She heard Berte say: “Get her keys,” as they fought their way up the steps to the solar and while Adeliza pinioned her feet Ghislaine unclipped Mainscourt’s keys from her belt. Seconds later she was in the solar, shouting all the dirty words she knew and clawing at the wrong side of a locked door.
When Sigward came up later it was to find she had ripped one of the bedcovers in half and was asleep on top of it.
Later that night Sigward had a nightmare. Matilda was woken to find his flesh moving involuntarily on his body like a scared horse’s and the bed damp with his sweat. She struggled through the bedcurtains and shouted at the servant who slept across the door to fetch water, a cloth and a lighted candle.
“Wake up, my lord.”
It was some time before he recognised her and the trembling stopped. “Send him away.”
Matilda waved the servant back to his palliasse. “Tell me.”
He told her in whispers. “I was in the impotency court, and the women had come to try and sexually arouse me, but they were hideous and I remained flaccid, so then the bishop – but he had horns – condemned me as ‘non vir homo’.”
Matilda howled with laughter. “Is there such a court?”
“There is,” said Sigward, “oh there is. You don’t know. It is a bishop’s court and the ladies who come to prove your potency are respectable matrons approved by the bishop.”
Matilda laughed so loud that the servant stirred and Sigward hushed her, although he was beginning to smile himself. “God save us,” stuttered Matilda, “canonically approved matrons: what can they be like?”
“These were awful.”
He had never discussed his first wife and her allegations with Matilda and she suspected he thought she didn’t know about them. She poked her finger into his chest. “Well, you have no reason to fear that.”
“I don’t, do I?” But before he went to sleep he said: “We will prove it to the world when you conceive.”
It was the second time that he had referred to the fact that, nine months had gone by and her periods were still coming regularly; this time she was not angry and so was not protected from an involuntary sounding in her head. “Barren.” She lay awake as linked words advanced on her: “Barren: Repudiation: Landlessness: Shame: Commoner’s grave.” She heard the watchman walk his rounds, badgers snuffling and grunting round the midden, the pigeons shifting in the loft, a foal neighing in the pasture. Before dawn she got up, took the candle and stubbed her toe on the guard. “Get out of the way.”
The man yawned: “Shall I come too, mistress?”
“No.”
The stones were painfully cold to her bare feet, but Normans were never diverted from a course by extremes of temperature. As she emerged into the chapel by the hole in its floor the candle transformed its moonlit calm into something risky, writhing a shadow on the cross, winking the eyes of the demons who were dragging sinners to Hell on the wall.
Matilda knelt on a hassock to contemplate the stone Virgin Mary on the altar’s right. It was black and extremely old, almost featureless with a round ball of a head balanced on top of a bigger one with protuberances indicating breasts, belly and arms. Matilda was used to it and stared through it to the beautiful saint.
“If you please, blessed Mother, make me pregnant.”
In her heart of hearts Matilda loved but was puzzled by St. Mary. Matilda was orderly, a conformist who believed in the rewards and punishments of heavenly and earthly justice. The Virgin Mary was quirky and drove the Devil to exasperation by her refusal to stick to the rules.
Matilda always pictured her with her diadem slightly awry, hair streaming out behind her, as she rushed through the mansions of Paradise to pester the Son with another request on behalf of her supplicants. Such supplicants – thieves, commoners, adulterers, debtors, whose only virtue was their worship of Mary. In what Matilda regarded as misguided enthusiasm for her admirers Mary had been known to support the feet of a thief so that he did not hang; once, when a nun had deserted her convent and run off with a clerk and many years later crawled back to her abbey, it was to find that her sisters hadn’t noticed her absence because the Virgin had covered up for her by taking her form all that time.
“Why do God and Jesus always obey her?” Matilda had asked Father Alors. “These are sinners and should be punished.”
Father Alors had sighed: “They do not obey her. They are greater than she and obey nobody. But God obeys His commandment: ‘Honour thy Father and Mother.’ She is Jesus’ mother and can only request: He, as her son, must comply with the commandment to honour His mother.”
She was so… earthy. She would squirt her milk on the sores of a sick man to cure him. But at least she had milk. She was fertile and gave fertility. Matilda’s numb fingers laced. “Why don’t you help me?”
But she knew. If Mary was everything feminine and life-giving, Matilda’s soul was a man’s. She had always suspected it; as a child she had longed to be a boy and shown more administrative capability than her brothers. The womanliness which had won Sigward on their wedding night was a pose. She was not pregnant because she was the wrong spirit in the wrong body. If she mended her ways and became more womanly she would find favour and conceive a baby. But womanliness meant irrationality and Matilda didn’t know how.
The stone and living women stared at each other with incomprehension. Matilda dragged off a ring from one of her fingers and dropped it into the dip formed by the swell of the figure’s stomach, but the quiet of the chapel increased. Matilda began to shake. She made her last offer. “If I give you the poacher…” and the saint replied through the scream of a vixen in the fields.
Matilda took up the candle and strode off to her room on feet she could no longer feel. “Not a deer left, of course,” she muttered crossly as she climbed into bed and jammed her feet against Sigward’s warm buttocks.
“What? What?”
“I have spoken to the Blessed Virgin: the poacher can live for me.”
“Just a hand?”
“Just an ear if you like,” said Matilda, “but just this once.”
By the time they arrived back in England Matilda was pregnant and as a reward Sigward took her to receive seisin of Dungesey.
The land went flat as if collapsed by the Devil sucking out its innards. The party going down the last hill went on to a tabletop of vast horizons, aware of the unseen sea to the east, afraid their weight might tip the table and make it rush at them. They dwindled from humans to beetles to ladybirds to ants, specks in the eye of God under a skyscape which altered natural laws. Skimming clouds became slow-moving in contrast with the distance they had to travel. A skein of birds formed a circle and wheeled it so that the earth spun.
Anything of any height at all, an elm, the tower of a church, achieved significance against a skyline all its own.
Foreshortened, crushed into squatness, they transferred to boats on water that changed shape. First it was orderly but unnatural, running straight between towpaths, the King’s Delph, a Roman road of water which led the eye to its distant, grey-green disappearing point.
“Is this Fens?” asked Matilda. Barges carrying building stone and wheat travelled it with them, pleasing her sense of efficiency.
“Part of it.”
They had left their horses on the uplands; to Matilda it had seemed like dismemberment. Sigward said: “We have special horses for the Fens. On the whole one does not ride there.”
“What does one do, then? How does one hunt?”
“Boat,” shrugged Sigward, “on foot. You’ll see.”
Matilda tried to imagine chasing a stag by boat and failed.
“You won’t be hunting anyway, my lady,” chipped in Berte.
“I shall if I feel like it.” But she didn’t feel like it; she felt sick. They travelled for miles hearing nothing but the hail of bargees and the cloop of moorhens until gradually came another sound like demons screaming in different keys, which became thunderous. “God save us,” shouted Father Alors. “What’s that?”
They saw what it was as they emerged from the Delph on to the biggest lake in England, Whittlesey Mere, a vast, grey plane of water, eighteen thousand acres of it, from their view as shoreless as the sea. The noise was the call of birds which covered it. But even that clamour was as nothing to the volcano of sound which erupted at their arrival.
The surface lifted upwards in sheets of grey and white bodies, duck, gull, swan, pelican, geese, until the boats were imprisoned in layered walls and ceilings, splashing droppings and calling in alarm. The humans covered their heads, as much to protect themselves from the noise as from the droppings.
It was a phenomenon and at first they marvelled at it, but the oars dipped and lifted through minutes into monotonous hours and the passengers coped with boredom – they were used to boredom – by falling asleep. Matilda woke with her head on Sigward’s pillowy shoulder, her clothes dampened by moisture and her second-best boots up to their insteps in bilge. Water still dominated the eye, but it had changed its character again, becoming shallower, diffuse and sinuous. Now for the first time she saw carr, alder and buckthorn which covered such land as there was in a low, brown mass, edging their stream so that they moved down its tunnel, soundless except for the slip of water on the oars and the sob of hidden curlew. They talked to each other, voices echoing from boat to boat, to hide their intimidation.
“Is this Fens?”
“Part of it. The home of the true English.”
“How did they find it?” Or their way in it once they’d found it. Even Sigward was using a local man to guide them. Until this moment she had never understood how Hereward and his fenmen had stood out so long against William the Conqueror; she saw now an army could dive into this place and disappear like water-rats, bobbing up to shoot from hidden positions. Her sympathy was with the Conqueror and his frustration at a fluid enemy.
The tunnels spewed them out into washes like deltas where sedge emerged above brown water in spongy islands and the boats hissed on the roots of dead rushes, and again the sky took over and disturbed the Normans by its untrammelled freedom.
Father Alors muttered St. Guthlac’s trials in this home of demons: “Save us from them, O Lord, with their great heads, long necks, lean, pale faces, stinking mouths and teeth like horses…”
Whatever human activity the Fens permitted was finished for the winter except for here and there rows of bobbing backs along a line where creatures cleared a drainage ditch. The people in the boats were seen but not greeted, the bare elder boughs clacked secret signals, the water hid its fish. The whole landscape excluded them.
Sigward said: “The Fens take the water of thirteen counties. It is England’s drain.”
From Jodi’s boat came a scatological echo. “England’s pisspot.”
A bank formed a dark bar against a sky that was losing light, and then gave way to a horizon of indeterminate greys against which a heron was walking. The heron was twice as tall as a man, and waded the water on scalene legs. Adeliza screamed. The heron had a man’s head.
“No, no,” Sigward was saying, “it is a man but on stilts. They use stilts here and walk on paths under the water which they follow because on those they do not sink, nobody knows why. They call them roddons.”
Matilda leaned over the boat side and was sick. Heron men stalking hidden paths completed the horror of this place. Since the journey started her island, which had been picturesque and conical in her mind, like Mont St. Michel, had diminished into what she knew must be the reality, a barely discernible mound rising out of this primaeval soup.
And so it was. By the time their boats bumped against the wall of Dungesey’s hythe they were lit by flares but it wasn’t dark enough to hide Dungesey’s flatness and ugliness.
Stupefied by fatigue and disappointment she was led to an open place surrounded by people at whom she did not look but who gave out an impression of lacking respect. From the corner of her eye she saw men whittling pieces of wood, others plaiting. Nearly all the women spun from handheld distaffs. One woman had a living, struggling duck under her arm and was plucking it. Matilda did not object to the cruelty but the creature’s squawking got on her nerves.
Adeliza whimpered, Ghislaine sniffed, Sir Percy of Alleyn kept his hand to his sword hilt, as befitted Matilda’s champion, Father Alors prayed and Jodi remembered St. Guthlac. “Rough ears, wrinkled foreheads, stinking mouths, teeth like horses – those weren’t demons: those were the natives.”
She had expected a noble-looking people. These English of the Fens had put up the only serious resistance to the Normans. She had expected a lot of things. She spoke over her shoulder: “My compliments to Steward Peter and that woman is to stop plucking that duck.” A proper steward would not have needed telling. Ghislaine spoke to the shadowy figure of the island’s steward who spoke to the woman, though not with the sharpness he should have. The duck was released and cantered off with its head outstretched and its nether parts obscenely bare. The woman took a distaff from her belt and began spinning instead.
“Sparky little flower,” shouted Badda to Thurchel on the other side of the circle, and he shouted back: “She’ll verrylike give us a tidy amount of no good.” The words went over Matilda’s head in incomprehensible loops of sound, long-drawn-out vowels and guttural consonants which slid up and down the scale always ending higher than it began.
“Where is Sigward?”
He came down the yew avenue from the darkness, having put on his mail. He stepped forward into the circle to face her and raised his voice: “Can you all see, you English?” The magic of ritual began to work; the women’s movements slowed down and the men’s whittling quietened, but they would not willingly show interest. They grunted.
With elaborate pantomime Sigward took off his right gauntlet and held it up. “See the War Glove. I give it to this lady.” Matilda felt the harsh weight slip on to her hand.
“The Vestita Manus,” boomed Sigward. “Lady Matilda, do you swear to defend this land against all comers?” Matilda’s blood responded to ceremonial. “I do.”
He took a small, bronze dagger from his belt and from one of the yew trees cut off a twig and brought it to Matilda who took it in her gauntleted hand. “The wood of Dungesey,” said Sigward. He knelt and drove the knife into the grass, jagging it round four corners to cut a turf. “The soil of Dungesey.”
Peter the steward came forward with an earthenware cup. Sigward took it and Matilda felt liquid trickle over her wrist and down into the gauntlet. “The water of Dungesey. Meadow, pasture, field, fen, marsh, turbary and sedge. All are yours.” He stepped back, snapped the cup in two, took the blade of the bronze knife in his left mailed hand and the hasp in his right and twisted it so that the blade broke. The two halves of cup and knife, now like no two others in the world, were put into Matilda’s hands.
“Lady, this is your manor and these your people. English of Dungesey, this is your lady.”
He made passes with his arms and walked away through the encircling peasants, leaving Matilda in the middle of them with her symbolic wreckage. The English louts stared at her and then turned away to the vat of ale which had been provided to drink the lady’s health.
There were half-hearted congratulations from her household. Sigward rejoined them: “And what do you think of your morning gift?”
“The flies are nice,” said Jodi. Matilda said nothing. She had given Sigward estates which a king could be proud of, she was carrying his baby; in return he had given her this.
Sigward wheezed. “There are reasons. Reasons. Enter your hall, Lady of Dungesey, and you’ll see some of them.” They walked under shadowed archways up steps into an old-fashioned hall. Matilda was prepared to despise it, but that night her eye and everyone else’s went to the long table in its centre and stayed there.
Rounded, gold-tan breasts shiny with basting, ribs of browned beef with the red juices welling out of them, bowls of stew the size of wheels with a herbal steam rising from dark gravy in which floated dumplings like snowballs, dishes of transparent jelly showing eels nestling inside, long silver fish sprinkled with parsley and roasted almonds, huge plaits of bread cut to show a milk-white interior – the table was a treasure chest of edible jewels.
Normans knew a thing or two about food and here, although there were none of the peacock-tailed, swan-headed trimmings, was the best. Percy of Alleyn, usually a silent man, enumerated the poultry in ecstatic chant: “Capon, greylag, wigeon, teal, oriole, by God…”
There was an unseemly dash to the benches. Sigward led Matilda to the top and gave the signal for grace which Father Alors said at speed. Conversation lapsed. Sigward speared a dumpling and popped it into Matilda’s mouth. “This is a fen floater,” he said, “elsewhere they’re sinkers.” The ugly but heavenly smelling shape on one of the dishes was lamprey, the favoured half-eel, half-fish. “Nowhere better than in the Fens,” said Sigward. “You see…” but he decided to make a speech of it instead and thumped the table for attention.
“This Christmas,” he said to chewing faces, “we shall attend the king’s court and for the fourth, or even fifth time, I shall swear to uphold the cause of his daughter when he dies.”
There was teeth-sucking round the tables. As a potential ruler Matilda, Henry’s daughter, was three times disadvantaged. First, hardly anyone knew her; she had been sent away at the age of eight to marry a man of thirty-eight, the Holy Roman Emperor, and had spent the time lording it over Germans which had made her haughty and disagreeable. After the White Ship went down Henry had summoned her back and married her off again, this time to a fifteen-year-old – she was twenty-six – Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, who was her second disadvantage since Angevins were the Normans’ traditional enemies and spent their time slaying priests and eating raw meat. It had not been an easy marriage but it had at least produced a son, named Henry after his grandfather.
Thirdly, she was a woman.
“A pig in a poke we’ll be getting,” said Father Alors.
“A sow in a poke,” said Jodi.
Sigward waved a fat finger at them. “She has fourteen kings in her ancestry on her mother’s side, from Egbert King of the West Saxons to the Confessor himself, besides being a granddaughter of the Conqueror. And I have sworn to uphold her.” There was silence. “But it’s true that not everyone is satisfied with the succession and, indeed, we may be in for a time of Unrest.” He made it sound like an attack of indigestion. “And what do we desire for our dear ones in a time of Unrest?”
“Not Dungesey,” thought Matilda.
“We need a Safe Haven. A constant Food Supply and out there” – Sigward swung an expansive arm around the walls – “is the richest source of wildfowl, fish and, when it’s not flooded, pasture in the world. The Abbot of Ely demands a rent of three thousand eels from Wisbech and gets it. The Abbot of Ramsey feeds his pigs on wheat.”
He turned to Matilda and, as when they were alone, stopped being pompous. “I just wanted, my dear, for you to have a bolthole, somewhere to hide should trouble come, where you and our children will always be safe and hidden and have plenty to eat. I know it seems an odd little gift to you and it will take time to get used to its people – these are the true English and nobody is odder than they – but I shall feel happier that you have it.”
She tried to think of some favourable comment. “Well, it is certain nobody would ever find me here.”
His enormous face creased into delight. “Tomorrow we shall explore your island.”
But that night Matilda woke up in pain. Keeping her trunk and legs rigid she dug Sigward with her elbow. “Fetch a light.” When he came back she twitched off the covers. “Am I bleeding?”
“Yes.”
“Fetch Berte.”
As once before she lay in bed and heard him rushing down the stairs, shouting. She dare not move. She had always been healthy but now her body was out of control. “Sweet Mary, save me.” She could hardly get the words out for panting. “Dear God, Son of God, save me. Mother of God, save the child and me.”
Half the household came in but Matilda saw only her nurse. “Well?”
“It’s certainly a show,” said Berte, “but nothing else seems to be happening. One thing for sure, you don’t move from this place till that baby’s stuck firmer in its womb than it is now.”
“The Christmas court?” asked Sigward.
Berte shook her head. “The journey would bounce the baby out.”
Across the Channel in a hunting lodge at Lyon-le-Fôret somebody else had been feasting off lampreys, against doctors’ advice. “Always they made him sick and yet he loved them,” said a chronicler later. For once the doctors were right and Henry of England had taken his last mouthful of anything.
An archbishop, a bishop, three earls and two counts leaned over his bedside as he died to try and hear what he was saying. What he said or whether he said anything at all was about to cause the most vicious war in Christendom. Quite likely he was trying to wrench in breath, but even that will could not command the impossible.