An Endless Exile

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2They let me run, as if they knew it was the only thing I could do, as if they knew I had done much the same thing before, over another, less terminal parting. And I suppose they knew I would come back.

And I did. Not so very much later. And I was calm, with the calm that can only be induced in me by fixed purpose. Yet, mostly, I felt detached from my surroundings, as if I were somebody else entirely.

Walking sedately back across the yard, I was aware of the men watching me with varying degrees of subtlety. Only Wulric the Heron, slumped in the open doorway of what used to be the men’s house, had no such pretensions. His white, ugly face looked wrung dry, his muddy eyes huge as they stared at me unblinkingly. His arm was roughly bandaged, and there was blood all over his coat.

Abruptly, I changed direction and walked over to him. Some habits are hard to break, whatever the circumstances.

“You are hurt, Wulric,” I observed, much as I had on many occasions past.

“I am alive,” he corrected me, without noticeable pleasure.

“I would like you to stay that way. May I see your wounds?”

“If you like. It’s nought to me.”

Taking his less bloody arm, I led him into the house. I said carefully, “You are grieving for him.”

“For him,” Wulric agreed. “Who is not? And for the lesser men.”

The lesser men. I remembered one, notably absent from the crowd in the yard. Why was it, I wondered with detachment, that one all-consuming pain could not dull the many lesser griefs? Instead, it seemed to sharpen them, so that I could not speak again until I had sat him down upon the nearest bed and unwrapped most of his filthy bandages.

“Have I taught you no better than this?” I asked severely, dropping the rags with exaggerated distaste.

“I did not care,” he said without emphasis.

“Wulric the Black is also dead?” I asked calmly, and the dead man’s friend nodded once, dumbly. His Adam’s apple wobbled precariously, making him look so ugly that I wanted to put my arms around him. However, since I didn’t think either of us could bear that, I stood up and went to fetch the water bowl lying on the table under the window. It looked clean.

Wulric the Heron watched me return to him, and when I had begun to wash, he said without flinching, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to add to — to...”

“They will all be added, Wulric.” My voice sounded perfectly calm, a little tight perhaps, but calm. Somewhere, I could still wonder at that, that I could still act and think as before.

Wulric’s eyes had lifted to mine, widening. A faint light even gleamed there, briefly. “God must have spared me to be revenged...”

Ignoring this slightly unlikely interpretation of God’s will, I said only, “What happened here, Wulric?”

“They were here,” he said. “Visiting the lady Aediva, or her daughter, I don’t know. But Hereward asked them to sit down for dinner. Again.”

“Who?” I asked. “Who did he ask?”

Wulric frowned. “That parcel of Normans. Asselin, Ralf of Dol, Hugh of Evermouth, Ivo de Taillebois...”

I glanced down at his face. “Ivo was there?” I asked quickly.

“Yes, and Deda. They all had their retinues of servants and soldiers, and they were all given hospitality.”

“Siward told me the servants carried weapons hidden in their clothes.”

Wulric stared unseeingly at the gory arrow-hole in his shoulder. “They drank with us. I think there was something in the ale. Or in some of it. I think they brought more to Wulric when he was on watch outside the hall, for he fell asleep. Wulric never sleeps on watch. They could have stepped over him to do their work, but they didn’t. They killed him anyway, when he could not fight back.”

I frowned at him. “You know this?”

“No, I’m guessing that part. I was inside the hall, with him. The first I — the first any of us knew, was when the door burst open and the Normans’ servants and soldiers rushed in. As if it was a signal, the others rose to their feet, swords were out, and the fight began. If you can call it a fight. With Hereward there was only Wynter and Martin and Leofric and me — and the two servitors who could not fight off their own grandmothers... Hereward saw at once we were lost and ordered me to bring the others — they were hidden in the old forest camp — but someone saw me opening the door and shot this arrow that pinned me there some time before I could get it out... And when I did, and I got out of the door, I tripped over something. They told me later it was Wulric the Black... I ran till I thought I would burst, giving the whistles as I went — they met me half way, but even so, we were too late...”

I wanted to close my eyes, as if that would shut it all out, make it unreal. I said prosaically, “That will be more comfortable. I’ll bind it for you now. Tomorrow I’ll put some ointment on it that will keep infection away and help it to heal faster.” Binding it with torn linen from the other bed, I said determinedly, “So the Normans’ servants conveniently began it. Did Hereward turn on their masters? Did any of you?”

“Hereward drew his sword,” Wulric said, after a moment’s frowning thought. “It was instinctive, and you know how quick he is... Was. He leapt over the table, to meet those charging into the hall, and they were upon him in a trice.”

“Who were?” I asked patiently.

“The boy who came to Ely once — Ralf. Hugh of Evermouth. Asselin. Chiefly.”

“Not Deda?” I asked, because I had to.

And even like this, Wulric could spare a faint upward tug of his torn lips for Deda. “No, not Deda. He was shouting furiously at the others, trying to push up their swords, but no one paid him any attention. All he could do was hustle the ladies away before they got hurt. Unless he’d been prepared to join us — a gang of Saxons fighting his own people!”

“And Ivo de Taillebois?”

Ivo, who would marry Hereward’s sister, if he could, yet who could not keep his black, sparkling eyes away from me...

Wulric frowned. “He’s a cool bastard. He fought if anyone came near him. Otherwise, he stood, or even sat, and watched. Sometimes, often when Hereward confounded the others, he laughed. I had an idea he disapproved of his countrymen, but he did nothing to interfere. I suppose he wouldn’t. Anyway, all that was at the beginning, before I got away... I wish I had never left him.”

“You could have changed nothing,” I said dully. “And you would be dead as well.”

He looked at me bleakly. “I know.”

* * * *

Leaving Wulric, I resumed my journey to the hall. My feet felt heavy and reluctant. I did not want to go in there. Not because I was afraid of the awful thing on the high table that had once contained the huge life of Hereward, but because I was afraid of his friends, of their effect on me, of their need of me. But I had to go to Folkingham. My children were there.

The door still hung crazily open, so they did not hear me come in. For a moment, I stood in the shadows, more from an inability to act than any desire to hear what they said.

And they were talking about me.

“... don’t care!” Siward the Red was exclaiming, violently punching his own leg as he half-sat on one of the trestle tables. “Why should you lie to her?”

“She didn’t think I had,” said Siward the White tiredly. “She thought I was — mistaken.”

“Why, in God’s holy name?”

“I don’t know. I think — probably — because she did not see it in the stars.”

There was silence.

Then: “But she cannot have imagined he was playing some trick!”

“I think that is exactly what she did imagine.”

“Dear God...” Duti said, sagging into an empty bench. “With what possible purpose?”

“Well think about it!” Siward the White said impatiently. “He arrived here over a month ago, giving no reason and making no attempt either to go to her in Lincoln or to bring her back to Bourne. She must have thought, like the rest of us, that he was seeking reconciliation at last. She must have thought he wanted her back, that he was too proud to beg or to chase, so she played along with his game, as she thought, to get her home. It probably suited her pride as well. White Christ! I don’t know what goes on in the minds of those two...”

This was unbearable. I found my eyes were closed, tightly, till some movement in the hall made me open them again in alarm.

“Well what convinced her you weren’t mistaken?” Outi was demanding, coming down from the dais with his quick, nervous tread. “That none of us were?”

The Siwards exchanged glances. This time, I would have intervened, but my tongue had got stuck, cleaving to the dry roof of my mouth.

“The ribbon,” said Siward the White at last, reluctantly, finally revealing the secret that he and his cousin had kept so long. “The ribbon that’s tied around his shoulder. He always wore it in battle, under his shirt — ever since Flanders. It was the first token she ever gave him.”

I moved forward then, suddenly, because my body could not bear to be still. Almost as one, they swung round to face me, and I saw without surprise that Deda was there too, now, seated at the table and half-hidden still by Siward the Red. He rose, abruptly, coming towards me and then, helplessly, pausing, as if he did not know how he — one of the party of Frenchmen who had killed Hereward — would be received.

“She doesn’t blame you,” Siward the White said quickly.

“Of course I don’t,” I said, just as hastily. “Later, later I will thank you for your care of my mother- and sister-in law. I am ready to go to Folkingham now.”

“Of course,” said the Siwards at once, and the twins too prepared to accompany me.

But I had seen Deda’s face, and when my enquiring gaze did not leave it, he said slowly, “Ivo de Taillebois is at Folkingham.”

A snarl that was only half pain writhed across the twins’ identical faces.

I said calmly, “Then Gilbert had better keep him away from my cousins. Shall we go?”

* * * *

I had done this before, ridden this path up to Folkingham Hall, just before dusk, with fear of the future in my heart. We had come into this very yard, and someone had helped me to dismount. Just as then, I did not look at the man who was setting me on my feet, for I was busy trying not to remember.

The yard was full of men, soldiers, gathering and drilling in expectation of the trouble Hereward’s murder was bound to inspire. Somewhere inside, in the hall probably, were my children, waiting to be told that their father was dead.

And coming out of the hall door, Gilbert of Ghent, Hereward’s god-father, wearing a breastplate over his rich tunic, and a sword at his belt. Gilbert in martial mood, though with what purpose I had yet to find out. At his heels came his son and heir, a worried frown creasing his serious brow, and beside them, the lady Matilda, who had been weeping.

Weep, Matilda, weep...

I think I would have coped if she had not smiled. But though the tears still glistened wetly on her puffy face, she tried to pull herself together when she saw me. Her hand lifted in sorrowful welcome, and yet she tried to smile, a quite inappropriate, almost grotesque effort in all its false brightness. Just so, flanked by her husband and a son, had she smiled at me when I had first come here twenty years ago, a furious but determined child of twelve, sent from Flanders by my own parents with the incomprehensible purpose of marrying me to Matilda’s eldest son.

Inevitably, the memories burst on me, overwhelming me until my breath rasped in my throat, and I gave up the fight, and let them come.

Past: Into Exile: April 1056 — January 1057