Winter Siege Read online

  On St Valentine’s Day, it was the turn of Aenfled and her children to trundle a barrow into the marsh to fetch fuel. They’d left nothing behind in the woolly line and the thickness of their wrappings made them look like disparately sized grey statues perambulating through a grey landscape. Their breath soaked into the scarves round their mouths and turned to ice, but a veil of mist in the air promised that the weather might, just might, be on the turn. The children all carried bows and arrows in case a duck or goose flew within range.

  Tucked into Em’s belt was a little carved wooden key that Durwyn, Brother Arth’s son, had shyly and secretly shoved into her hand that morning.

  Gyltha wouldn’t leave the subject alone. ‘Wants to unlock your heart, he do. You got to wed un now.’

  ‘Sod that,’ Em said. ‘I ain’t never getting married and certainly not to a saphead like Durwyn. Anyways, I ain’t old enough an’ he ain’t rich enough.’

  ‘You kept his old key, though.’

  ‘Tha’ll be on the fire tonight,’ Em promised her. ‘Keep us warm.’

  They stopped; they’d felt the drumming of hoofbeats through their boots. Horsemen were cantering along the causeway behind them.

  ‘Get into they bloody reeds,’ hissed Aenfled. She pushed her barrow over the causeway’s edge and tumbled her children after it.

  Horses were rare in the fenland, and those travelling at speed suggested their riders were up to no good. Maybe these were friendly, maybe not, but lately there’d been nasty rumours of villages sacked by demons, women raped – sometimes even murdered – and grain stores burned. Aenfled was taking no chances.

  There was just time to squirm through the reeds to where the thick, bare fronds of a willow gave them some cover.

  Her hand clasped firmly over the mouth of her younger daughter, not yet old enough to be silenced with a look, Aenfled prayed: Sweet Mary, let un go past, go past.

  Go past, go past, urged Em, make un go past. Through the lattice of reeds above her head, she saw flicks of earth being thrown up as the leading horses went by. She bowed her head in gratitude. Thank ee, St Ethel, thank ee, I’ll never be wicked no more.

  But one of the middle riders pulled up. ‘Swear as I saw something dive into that bloody ditch.’

  ‘Deer?’ One of the leaders stopped abruptly and turned his horse back. As he approached the wind picked up, lifting his robes and revealing the animal’s flanks, which were lathered white with sweat and dripping blood from a set of vicious-looking spurs.

  Keeping still as still, Em smelled the stink of the men above her: sweat, dirt, horses, blood and a strange, pungent odour that was foreign to her.

  ‘Could ’a’ been.’

  ‘Flush the bastard out then. What are you waiting for?’

  Spears began thudding into the ditch. One of the men dismounted and started scrambling down, hallooing as he went.

  Em knew they were done for. Then her mouth set itself into the thin, determined line that her sorely tried mother would have recognized and dreaded. No we ain’t. Not if I lead ’em away. She pushed her sister’s head more firmly into the ground and leaped for the bank. A willow twig twitched the cap from her head as she went, releasing the flame-red curls it hid beneath but, although she paused briefly, she didn’t stop for it. Now she was running.

  Aenfled kept Gyltha clutched to her, her moans and prayers covered by the whoops of the men. She heard the one who’d come into the ditch climb back out of it and join the hunt. She heard hoofbeats start up again. She heard male laughter growing fainter as the riders chased their prey further and further into the marsh. She heard the far-away screams as they caught Em, and knew her daughter was fighting. She heard the horses ride off with her.

  Birds of the marsh that had flown up in alarm settled back into their reed beds and resumed their silence.

  In the ditch Aenfled stopped praying.

  Except for her daughter’s soul, she never prayed again.

  Chapter Two

  Kenniford Castle, Oxfordshire, February 1141

  STANDING IN HER own chapel in her own castle for her own wedding, sixteen-year-old Maud of Kenniford wondered whether they’d even have the courtesy to ask if she’d take this man, fifty-three-year-old Sir John of Tewing, to be her lawful wedded husband.

  If they did, the honest answer would be: ‘What in hell else can I do?’

  The question being put at the moment by the mud-flecked, out-of-breath priest in front of her was: ‘Who giveth this woman …?’

  At which point, one of the Beaumont twins grabbed her arm and pulled her forward. ‘I do, Waleran de Meulan, Earl of Worcester. This lady is a ward of our blessed King Stephen. In his name do I give her to this man. And for the sake of God, get on with it.’

  The earl, like this priest he’d brought with him, like the dozen or so knights surrounding Maud, smelled of sweat, horse and panic. They’d fled the Battle of Lincoln, which they’d apparently lost, to race here and marry her off to a man she’d never seen before in the name of a king who’d been captured – who might not even be king any more.

  For all they knew the Empress’s forces were about to overwhelm the country, a disaster which had to be avoided at all costs because, as Queen of England, Matilda would take away the lands of those who’d opposed her – their lands.

  And one of the costs, to Maud at any rate, was a marriage that would put said Maud’s castle and, more importantly, the vital crossing it commanded over the upper Thames, into the hands of said Sir John of Tewing, one of King Stephen’s most loyal supporters, so that the Empress could be denied access to the West if she came this way.

  Matilda’s own supporters, her head steward, Sir Bernard, her cousin, Lynessa, and Father Nimbus – who were to be witnesses – were hemmed in by a group of Stephen’s knights in case they objected – indeed, the Earl of Leicester, Waleran’s brother, was holding a dagger suggestively near Father Nimbus’s throat. Milburga, her nurse, had elbowed her way in, and not even England’s foremost barons had been able to deny her, or dared.

  Sir Rollo, the commander of Maud’s troops, stood in the bailey below with his milling soldiers, bellowing up at the chapel window: ‘Are you all right, my lady?’

  No, I’m not, you stupid old pillock. Why in hell did you open the gates?

  Strictly speaking, of course, Sir Rollo had no choice, just as Lynessa, Milburga and Father Nimbus could make no objection as long as Maud gave her consent. Kenniford was already nominally held for the King to whom, at the coronation, Maud’s dying father had chosen to pay homage, leaving Maud and her inheritance in Stephen’s wardship to be bestowed on whomsoever the King wished to reward.

  Unlucky gifts for the bestowees, as it had turned out. It became known that to choose Maud of Kenniford as a bride was to choose one’s coffin – a superstition that suited Maud down to her shoes. All Stephen’s three choices for her had died before marriage could take place: the first broke his neck in a hunting accident; ditto the second in a tournament; while the third, a five-year-old – Maud’s favoured choice because she thought she’d have no difficulty managing him – had shown deplorable carelessness by drowning in a well.

  But Sir John was prepared to court bad luck. He was bad luck himself. She wouldn’t be able to manage him, that was for sure. Overlarge, grizzled, scarred, lumbering, rank like a bear, the man’s manners were as boorish as his appearance; he had even brought his concubine with him, a sullen-looking unkempt woman by the name of Kigva who was lurking in the corner of the room staring sourly at Maud.

  Hello. The officiating priest was turning to her, opening his mouth, asking the question without which the marriage would not be strictly legal. ‘Do you, Maud of Kenniford, take this man …?’

  Maud turned to look at Father Nimbus, ever her confessor and adviser. Despite the knife at his neck, the little priest’s eyes were urging her to say no. This was too rushed, too dangerous for her future. While they were being hurried up the stairs to the chapel, he’d managed to hiss
at her: ‘Sweetness! The man’s an absolute hog, just look at his fingernails. Tell them you want to be a nun. Tell them you’ll enter Godstow convent. Tell them you’re vowed to the Virgin.’

  Oh yes, that would go down well. Several female saints and martyrs had tried that one, and achieved sainthood through martyrdom because of it.

  The only reason these desperate men around her were bothering with a marriage ceremony at all, and weren’t taking over the castle willy-nilly, was that her own soldiers in the bailey outnumbered them two to one. Sir Rollo might not be very bright, but his affection lay neither with the King nor the Empress but with Maud. If she gave the signal, he and his men would fight for her. On the other hand, if she gave her consent, Sir John of bloody Tewing immediately became their legal, and therefore not-to-be disputed, commander. And hers.

  The little chapel smelled, as it always did, of age and incense and whatever scented herbs the fastidious Father Nimbus mixed with it. Her father had commissioned a monk from Abingdon to paint its walls, so that the child Maud could learn her Bible from the depictions of a Garden of Eden (rather jolly), the Ascension, the Wise Men worshipping a plump baby Jesus, and the one that had always fascinated her: a depiction of virtuous Judith cutting off Holofernes’s head, which Father Nimbus had wanted obliterated for being too bloody, but her father had said counteracted Salome and John the Baptist.

  It was remarkable, Maud thought, how much her bridegroom resembled the bestial, drunken Holofernes.

  The officiating priest was putting the question again: ‘Do you, Maud of Kenniford …?’ She felt Waleran’s hand tighten on her arm.

  ‘Wait, will you?’ she snapped. ‘I’m thinking about it.’

  An arranged marriage at some time or another had been inevitable; Kenniford with its manors and lands was a valuable prize to bestow on anyone the King wanted to reward; Maud’s own wishes had never been consulted, and never would be. While the present incumbent repelled her, so had the owners of the two broken necks: one a raving madman with a high laugh; the other a drinker never seen sober. Would this brute be so bad?

  Maud considered it logically. He was old, which was in his favour; he would oblige her by dying, and, to judge from his choleric complexion, sooner rather than later. He was a renowned warrior – also in his favour, since he would spend much of his time away fighting battles in which somebody might kill him. With luck and the intervention of the Holy Virgin, to whom she would step up her praying from now on, he might rush off to war right away and save her the horror of the wedding night.

  After all, even if she were allowed to adopt Father Nimbus’s ploy and go into a convent, it would mean giving up Kenniford and her other lands for ever. Which she could not do.

  Since the age of eleven, on the death of her father, Maud had ruled her estates and their people like a despot. She was lucky in that the blood in her veins came from both Anglo-Saxon and Norman nobility – she was descended from King Edward the Elder on her mother’s side and Roger d’Ivry, Sheriff of Gloucester, on her father’s – which, until she should marry, gave her a legal right to command two castles (admittedly, one of them little more than a motte and bailey in Cambridgeshire and nothing to compare with Kenniford), five manors scattered around England, three more in Normandy, as well as the advowson of six churches, all of them acknowledging her as their overlord just as she acknowledged the King of England and Duke of Normandy as hers.

  She had been well advised, of course; her father’s head steward, Sir Bernard, was a loyal and wise administrator, but he had found in his young mistress a mind quite as shrewd as his own, capable of retaining in it a record of her every acreage of ploughland, herd and grazing; which of her hundreds of tenants were free and which villeins; what dues they paid her; which of her knights owed her military service and castle guard; those who, by tradition, must render her seven geese, or embroidered gloves etc. on which saints’ days, or make some other service. (Maud took particular delight in the dues owed by William of Garthbrook, who held the tenancy of thirty Sussex acres and had to perform a simultaneous leap, a whistle and a fart at every one of her Christmas feasts.)

  Never again to command her willing garrison, to order her kitchens, to sit in judgement on wrongdoers while rewarding the virtuous, to bully and physic the villagers outside her walls, to oversee the harvest, to dominate the Christmas feast … to change all that for incarceration in Godstow convent? Her soul would shrivel to nothing.

  Yes, marriage would mean handing over her men and women to this husband, but she would still be around to protect them – a joy and a duty with which God had entrusted her.

  Waleran’s hold on her arm had become tighter; the knife at Father Nimbus’s neck was pricking his skin. She could hear Sir Rollo gathering his men to charge the tower.

  These were her people; she would not have one of them killed. Marriage to this old lout would be a sort of death – but it had to be hers, not Kenniford’s.

  Maud came to the decision that she’d known from the first was the only one she could make.

  ‘Oh, very well,’ she said. A murmur of relief flitted around the room like a breeze, interrupted only by a howl of anguish from the Kigva woman.

  Damn them, they weren’t in that much of a rush that they were going to gallop off into the night to put their castles on war footing without being fed first.

  Maud, with a chaplet hastily made and crammed on to her head, sat with her new husband on the top table of her hall, miserable but nevertheless congratulating herself and her kitchens for the efficiency with which the wedding feast had been prepared at short notice. Now that she’d done what they wanted, the Beaumont twins, on her left, were being fulsomely complimentary about the food, reverting to the gallantry they’d shown during her visits to court. Their charm had won them earldoms from Stephen – the King being susceptible to it. Waleran had even been given Stephen’s four-year-old royal daughter in marriage, but the child had died soon after the wedding, in the same month as Maud’s infant fiancé, occasioning Maud and Waleran to exchange condolences which she’d supposed – wrongly as it turned out now – had led to a coincidental and mutual regard.

  ‘And your beef, my lady. Is it Welsh? How do you produce such taste, such tenderness?’

  ‘We hang it for two weeks like our enemies,’ Maud said shortly. Damned if she was going to be lured into a conversation on cattle breeding with them, interesting as the subject was.

  On the other hand, they were the only ones she could converse with. Her husband was still not addressing her, preferring to quiz Sir Rollo about wall thickness and the siting of arrow slits, all the time spraying the poor man with food grabbed from dishes by his unwashed hand and chewed in his open mouth, lubricated with swigs of her best wine.

  Maud passed him one of her linen napkins without comment, and turned to Waleran. ‘After such a defeat at Lincoln,’ she said, rubbing it in, ‘what are we to expect? Why must Kenniford be in readiness? Isn’t the King overthrown and the war over? Isn’t the Empress now queen?’

  No, it appeared she wasn’t. Again, Maud found herself excluded as the twins took the first chance they’d had since Lincoln to make a careful analysis of the situation, but she listened hard. Until today – politics did not interest her – it hadn’t bothered her whether Empress Matilda or Stephen ruled England as long as Kenniford wasn’t threatened. Now that it was …

  First, it seemed, Matilda’s claim had to be ratified by the Church. ‘And what’s the betting that bastard Henry deserts Stephen and persuades the other bishops?’ Waleran said.

  ‘She’s got the West Country, of course.’

  ‘She hasn’t got London.’

  Maud managed to identify ‘that bastard Henry’ as the Bishop of Winchester, the King’s brother, a papal legate, the most powerful churchman in England next to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Stephen had been crowned with his help but had then offended him, so which way said bastard would turn could only be guessed at …

  The West Co
untry was dangerous, it appeared. Gloucester (of which the Empress’s adoring half-brother – another bastard, in both senses of the word – was the earl) … Cirencester … Wilton … Reading … Oxford … they’d all accept Matilda, if she could get there, God burn each and every one of the shitholes …

  But the Empress would need London, and London was a commune – come back everything Waleran and his twin had ever said about bloody communes – to which Stephen, God knows why, had shown a liberality that the Empress, autocratic cow, was unlikely to extend to it. Yes, London was hopeful …

  Normandy now … what of Normandy? Would Geoffrey Plantagenet, the Empress’s new husband, conquer that dukedom? He was making a damn good job of it at the moment. Mind you, was he doing it for himself? Or for the Empress? Husband and wife didn’t get on.

  Maud struck in, to bring a touch of lightness. ‘There you are,’ she said brightly. ‘One of you make peace with Geoffrey and then, if the Empress does become Queen of England and does prove vindictive and confiscates your estates over here, you’ll still have Normandy.’

  Until that moment she hadn’t appreciated how despairing they were. Two handsome pairs of eyes turned on her and in them she saw calculation. They were considering it, oh God, actually considering it.

  If they took that way out, they’d still survive as powerful men; the twins owned vast estates on both sides of the Channel, while she, Maud, held only a few. Having now placed her firmly in Stephen’s diminishing camp, they’d put her at the Empress’s mercy. Without Kenniford and her other, smaller English estates, she’d be left with only a miserable Norman manor or two on which to subsist like a damned serf.

  You bastards, she thought.

  The exchange had succeeded in attracting Sir John’s attention. Throughout the meal he had been pawing at Kigva, nuzzling her grubby neck and squeezing her breasts in such a vulgar display that it made Maud’s stomach churn. Suddenly he turned to them and spat: ‘That bitch’ll never be queen.’