Winter Siege Read online

  About the Book

  Run, run, girl.

  In the name of God, run.

  It’s 1141 and freezing cold. Gwil, a battle-hardened mercenary, watches in horror as a little girl with red hair is dragged away by his own men. Caught in the middle of the fight for England, she is just one more victim in a winter of atrocities.

  Then a strange twist of fate brings them together again. Gwil finds the girl close to death, clutching a sliver of parchment – and he knows what he must do. He will bring her back to life. He will train her to fight. And together, they will hunt down the man who did this to her …

  But danger looms wherever they turn. As castle after castle falls victim to siege, the icy Fens ring with rumours of a madman, of murder – and of a small piece of parchment, the cost of which none of them could have imagined …

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  About the Authors

  Also by Ariana Franklin

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Perton Abbey, Autumn 1180

  IT IS A wood-panelled room of sumptuous size – the abbots of Perton have always done themselves well. The present incumbent, however, has stripped it of its tapestries and the gold leaf that once decorated the carved ceiling; they’ve been sold to benefit poor women of the parish. He’s also replaced an elaborate, padded prie-dieu with a plain version that is hard on the knees.

  This austerity has rather shocked his monks, who have also lost some of their comforts; they now have only three courses for supper rather than the seven that previously graced the table of their refectory. However, for all his asceticism, he’s a good abbot as abbots go: rather more understanding of peccadilloes than some.

  Anyway, he’s dying.

  He lies on a cot, propped up with pillows to aid his breathing, so that he may look out of the window opposite, which has its shutters open summer and winter. It is autumn now and the great oak in the garden beyond is beginning to change colour. Only its top is visible to him, but he can tell from the sound of munching and grunting, and an occasional coarsening of the fresh air, that the monastery pigs are enjoying the acorns at its base.

  He wonders whether he will live to see the last leaf fall from the oak, and knows that he must. He has something important to do. He has to record a tale of treachery and murder, also a story of courage and love, before he, too, twirls off life’s tree; yet he is too ill, too weak to write it himself.

  To this end, a young scribe has entered the room, and now sits on a stool beside the bed, a pile of wax tablets on the floor at his feet, one on his knees, stylus poised.

  ‘You are too young to remember the war between the Empress Matilda and King Stephen, though your grandparents will …’ the abbot says. He raises himself and fumbles among the parchments lying on his bed, finally extracting one. ‘I think, my son, that we can begin this chronicle by repeating the description by Orderic Vitalis in his Historia Ecclesiastica. I have the quotation here.’

  The young scribe rubs his hand with the skirt of his robe before accepting the parchment in order that, though he washed them only yesterday, his fingers should not sully its surface.

  ‘ “Thus troubles spread everywhere, far and wide,” ’ he reads out, ‘ “and England was filled with plundering and burning and massacres; the country, once so rich and overflowing with luxuries, was now wretched and desolate.” ’

  He looks up. ‘It was as bad as that?’ Either he had learned nothing from his grandparents, or he’d paid them no attention.

  ‘Worse.’ Even the good Orderic had not the words for it, the abbot thought. Anyway, he’d died in 1142 and the war had gone on for more than a decade. Fourteen years during which all decency fled the land, the powerful changing their allegiance this way and that to whomsoever promised them more power at the time, forgetting their responsibility to those beneath them so that their private and foreign armies ravaged the common people like dogs pulling apart a living deer. Women raped, peasants hanging from trees by their own entrails. Fourteen years during which England’s people said that God and His saints must be sleeping, since there was no answer to their prayers for deliverance.

  ‘Then it is a most excellent beginning, my lord, and one that will contrast well with the present day, when a merchant may travel English roads with gold in his pack without fear of molestation.’

  Damnation. This boy had been hired for his speed in writing, not his commentary, however cheery. Time, time. The leaves will be falling soon.

  ‘I think,’ the abbot says, ‘that we need expend few words on the circumstances of the war’s beginning, since everybody knows them.’

  ‘Er …’

  Damnation again. Didn’t they teach them history at Abingdon? ‘Its causes,’ the abbot says distinctly, ‘began with the death of King Henry the First of England in the year of our Lord 1135 in Normandy …’

  ‘Dead from a surfeit of lampreys,’ the scribe says brightly, ‘I know that much.’

  The abbot sighs. ‘A man of voracious appetite, and not only for food. His bastards were legion.’

  ‘Shall I put that down, my lord?’

  ‘I don’t care. But it would be useful if you could mention the King’s insistence that the nobles gathered about his deathbed should swear on oath that they would accept as their queen his only remaining legitimate child, the Empress Matilda, formerly Empress of Germany, but widowed by then and married again to the Angevin Geoffrey Plantagenet.’

  ‘The same Empress who was the mother of our present King Henry?’

  ‘The same. However, her cousin, Stephen, hearing of his uncle’s death, raced from Normandy to England and secured the crown for himself with the aid of some of the very barons who had sworn to support the Empress.’

  ‘They never having been ruled by a woman, nor wanting to be?’ asked the scribe helpfully.

  ‘If you like, if you like. And now, my son, we reach the nub of my chronicle when, in 1139, the Empress Matilda invaded England with an army to fight for the right her father had granted her. By this time Stephen had disappointed many of those who had so enthusiastically espoused his cause. Undoubtedly an affable man and, in war, a courageous one, he concealed a shifty cunning that caused him to break his word to the trustworthy in favour of men of the moment. His brother, Bishop Henry – a stronger character than he –
had helped him on to the throne, and might have expected to be made Archbishop of Canterbury as a reward. Instead, Stephen alienated his brother and conferred the position on the little-known Theodore of Bec. Also, he dismissed the lowborn but clever men who had run Henry the First’s administration and put in their place favourites who lacked the knowledge to govern efficiently. Arbitrarily, madly, he arrested three bishops, one of them the Bishop of Ely, who had displeased him, taking their castles into his own hands, thereby showing that he had no care for the liberties of the Church.’

  The young scribe tut-tuts; he sets great store by Church liberties. ‘Such wickedness.’

  ‘He was a fool,’ the abbot says. ‘His kingship was tainted with unwise decisions which, by 1141, had caused some of his erstwhile supporters to switch their allegiance to the Empress and fight against him. Worse, it gave opportunity to wicked men who cared not who ruled as long as they themselves flourished.’ He draws a long breath. ‘It is at this point, my son, where we must begin our history, with the war in full spate. And for that we must revert not to the doings and battles of the great, but to an insignificant village in the Cambridgeshire fenland and to an eleven-year-old girl who lived in it.’

  ‘Commoners, my lord?’ It is said with alarm. ‘Is this not to be an Historia Anglorum? An account for the edification of future generations?’

  ‘It is indeed, but this one is an Historia Vulgi as told through the mouths of ordinary people who, in turn, told it to me.’

  ‘But … common people?’

  The abbot wheezes with the irritability of the sick. ‘It is a tale of murder and treachery. It is the tale of the rape of a child, a castle and a country. Now, in the name of God, write …’

  Chapter One

  The Cambridgeshire Fens, February 1141

  AT FIRST, NEWS of the war going on outside passed into the fenland without impact. It oozed into that secret world as if filtered through the green miasma of willow and alder that the fenlanders called ‘carr’, which lined its interminable rivers and reed beds.

  At Scutney, they learned about it from Old Sala when he came back from his usual boat trip to Cambridge market where he sold rushes for thatching. He told the tale in the village church after the celebration of Candlemas.

  ‘Now yere’s King Stephen—’ he began.

  ‘Who?’ somebody asked.

  Sala sighed with the exasperation of a much-travelled man for the village idiot. ‘I told you an’ told you, bor. Ain’t Henry on the throne now, it’s Stephen. Old Henry’s dead and gone these many a year.’

  ‘He never told me.’

  ‘Well, he wouldn’t, would he? Him bein’ a king and dead.’

  As always, the little wooden church smelled of cooking from the rush tapers that had been dipped in fat. Scutney couldn’t afford beeswax candles; anyway, rushes gave out a prettier light.

  ‘Get on with it, will ’ee?’ Brother Arth struggled out of the rough woollen cope he wore to take the services and into the sheepskin cloak that was his working wear in winter. ‘I got ditchin’ and molin’ to see to.’

  They all had, but the villagers stayed where they were – it was as well to be informed about what was going on in them uplands.

  Sala stretched back his shoulders and addressed his audience again. ‘So this King Stephen’s started a-warring with his cousin, the Empress Matilda. Remember as I told you old King Henry, on his deathbed, wanted his daughter, this Matilda, to rule England? But the nobles, they don’t want no blasted female queenin’ it over un, so they’ve said no and gives the crown to Stephen, old Henry’s nephew.’

  He looked sternly into the standing congregation. ‘Got that now, Bert, have you? Good. Well now, Matilda, she ain’t best pleased with bein’ passed over and seems she’s brought a army as is a-fighting Stephen’s army out there some’eres.’

  ‘That it?’ Nyles wanted to know.

  ‘Enough, innit?’ Sala was miffed that Nyles, the big man of the village because he owned more sheep than anybody else, hadn’t been more receptive to the news. ‘I been tellin’ you as there’s a war goin’ on out there.’

  Nyles shrugged. ‘Allus is.’

  ‘Excitin’, though, Pa, ain’t it?’ asked eleven-year-old Em, looking up at him.

  Nyles cuffed his daughter lightly about her red head for her forwardness in speaking in church. She was his favourite, but it didn’t do to let females get out of hand, especially not this one. ‘Well, good luck to ’em, I say. And now let’s get on with that ditchin’ and bloody molin’.’

  But Old Sala, irritated by the interruption, raised his hand. ‘I’ll tell you summat else, Nyles. And you’ll want to listen this time. Want to be keeping a close eye on that one, you will,’ he said, pointing at Em. ‘Folk say as there’s a band o’ mercenaries riding round ’ere like the wild hunt and with ’em there’s a monk; likes red-heads, he does. Does terrible things when ee finds ’em too.’

  Nyles shook his head indulgently and turned towards the door. He knew Old Sala with his scaremongering and preposterous tales of abroad and yet he suddenly felt inexplicably chilly and, without realizing it, had reached out and drawn the child closer to him. Daft old bugger.

  ‘That it then, Sala?’ he asked. The old man looked deflated but nodded and with that the men, women and children of Scutney trooped out of its church to continue their own, unceasing war – against water.

  The North Sea, that great enemy, was always threatening to drown East Anglia in one of its rages, submerging fields and cattle, even lapping the just-above-sea-level islands that dotted the flattest land in England. In winter, the sluggish rivers and great drains had to be cleared of weed or they clogged and overflowed.

  Oh, and the mole, as big an enemy as the sea, had to be killed to stop the little bugger from weakening the dykes with his bloody tunnels.

  No, the people of Scutney didn’t have time from their watery business to bother about wars between the danged nobles. Anyway, they were safe because just over there – over there, bor, see them towers in the distance? – was Ely, greatest cathedral in England.

  Every year, the villagers had to deliver four thousand glistening, squirming eels to Ely in return for being protected by St Etheldreda, whose bones lay in a jewelled tomb within the cathedral walls.

  Powerful saint, Etheldreda, an Anglo-Saxon like themselves, and although Scutney people resented the number of eels they had to catch in order to feed her monks, they were grateful to her for keeping them safe from the outside world with its battles and carryings-on.

  Oh yes, any bugger who came a-trampling and a-killing in this part of the fens ’d soon have his arse kicked out of it by good old St Ethel.

  That’s if the bugger could find Scutney in the first place and didn’t drown in the meres or get led astray by spirits of the dead who took the shape of flickering Jack-o’-Lantern flames in the marshes by night.

  Folk allus said that for an enemy force to attack Ely it’d take a traitor to show the secret causeways leading to it. And who’d be so dang-blasted stupid as to betray St Etheldreda? Get sent straight to Hell, he would.

  Such was the attitude.

  But a traitor was even now preparing his treachery, and the war was about to penetrate Scutney’s fenland for all that St Etheldreda in her 500-year-old grave could do about it.

  The first the village knew of its fate was when soldiers sent by Hugh Bigod turned up to take its men away to build him a new castle.

  ‘Bigod?’ roared Nyles, struggling between two captors while his red-headed elder daughter batted at their legs with a frying pan. ‘We don’t owe him nothing. We’re Ely’s men.’

  Hugh Bigod, newly Earl of Norfolk, owned a large proportion of East Anglia. The Scutney villagers had seen him in his fine clothes swanking it at Ely with their bishop during Christmas feasts and suchlike. Didn’t like him much. But then, they didn’t like anybody from Norfolk. Didn’t like the next village across the marshes, come to that.

  Nor was he their overl
ord, as was being energetically pointed out to his soldiers. ‘Tha’s not law, bor. We ain’t none of his. What’s he want another castle for? He’ve got plenty.’

  ‘And now he do want another one,’ the soldiers’ sergeant said, ‘in case Empress Matilda do attack un. There’s a war on, bor.’

  ‘Ain’t my war,’ Nyles told him, still struggling.

  ‘Is now,’ the sergeant said, ‘and if them nippers of yourn don’t cease bashing my legs, they’ll be its next bloody casualties.’

  For Em had now been joined by her younger sister, Gyltha, wielding an iron spit.

  ‘Leave it,’ Nyles told his girls. But they wouldn’t, and their mother had to drag them off.

  Holding them tightly, Aenfled watched her husband and every other able-bodied man being marched off along the roddon that led eventually to Cambridge.

  ‘Us’ll be back, girl,’ Nyles shouted at her over his shoulder, ‘but get they sheep folded, an’ don’t ee sell our hay for a penny under thruppence a stook, an’ look to that danged roof afore winter’s out, and …’ He had suddenly remembered Old Sala’s warning in the church. ‘Keep Em close …’ And then he was too far away to be heard.

  The women of Scutney stood where they were, their men’s instructions becoming fainter and fainter until only an echo came sighing back to them and even that faded so that the air held merely the frightened bawling of their babies and the call of geese flying overhead.

  They didn’t cry; fenwomen never wept.

  The men still hadn’t come back by the beginning of Lent.

  It was a hard winter, that one. Birds dropped out of the air, killed by the cold. The rivers froze and dead fish could be seen enclosed in their ice. The old died in their huts; the sheep in their pens.

  In the turbaries, spades dulled themselves on peat that had become as hard as iron, so that fuel became scarce and it was necessary for tired, overworked women and their families to venture further and further away from the village in order to retrieve the peat bricks that had been stacked a year before to provide fire for shepherds during the lambing season.