CHAPTER 16
In the hour before dawn, Rolf ceased tossing and turning on his pallet by the fire and conceding that sleep was impossible, rose to start his day. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would find a woman to keep his blankets warm. That always helped.
Apart from his grooms and retainers, he was alone. Aubert had elected to spend the night at St Aethelburga's guest house with his wife and the new baby. Rolf grimaced. Small wonder that the armourer's maid had rebuffed Aubert's tidings of Felice's safe delivery yester morn.
Rolf broke his fast on a heel of bread dipped in a bowl of thick gruel, his mind dwelling on the memory of Ailith's face and the way she had said 'My brothers, my baby, my husband. What more is there to take?' The image was too powerful and disturbing to dismiss and unsettled him into restless motion.
Collecting a horn lantern from the storeroom, he went to the stables and the makeshift shelters that had been hastily erected to house the extra horses. Sleipnir was dozing, a rug thrown over his back, but when he saw Rolf, he nickered a greeting and rapidly perked up. The man fussed the horse for a while, scratching the whiskery jaw, rubbing the questing muzzle before setting to work with the grooming tools. As Rolf worked, a memory came to him and made nothing of the years between himself as a ten-year-old boy, and the man of seven and twenty working on the thick silver hide of an Iberian warhorse.
It was autumn at Brize-sur-Risle, a day of dripping mist, the leaves drooping on the trees in tints of burnt orange, ochre, and weld-yellow, spider webs festooning the bramble bushes in clear, sprang-work designs. The surface of the great river was veiled in curling tendrils of its own breath, and every sound was muffled to grey distance.
It was the day they brought his father home across his horse.
Rolf could remember his mother growing ever more agitated as she waited for her husband to return from hunting a stray mare and foal in the forests on the south side of their estate. She had alternated between railing at her husband for being the greatest fool on God's earth, and praying aloud, that he would be safely restored to her. When he was not home by a drizzling, smoky dusk, she had flung on her cloak, and auburn hair uncovered, torch held high, had climbed to the wall walk as if her eyes could pierce the murk and guide him home.
One of the search parties had brought him in.
His horse had shied and thrown him against a tree. That he was not dead was due entirely to luck and the hardness of his skull. As it was, he was out of his wits for a full three days. Rolf had never forgotten the sound of his mother's high-pitched wail as her lord was brought to her across his saddle, had never forgotten the swoop of dread in his own gut. He should never have left the Saxon woman alone last night.
With a hiss of irritation, he finished grooming Sleipnir and went outside. Tiny flakes of snow starred the wind, and the ground underfoot was brittle and white. He shivered and slapped his arms. His cloak was still next door at the armourer's house. Blood-smeared it might be, but it was also double-lined and trimmed with coney fur. Self-interest said that he should fetch it before he froze to death. Besides, it was an expensive garment. Conscience said that he should make sure that the widow was all right.
By the light of a rush dip in the storeroom, he found the older maid mixing batter to make griddle cakes. She let out a scream when she saw Rolf, then clapped her hand to her mouth and stared at him wide-eyed.
He told her in halting English that he had come for his cloak, and with a nod, she wiped her hands on her apron and hurried to fetch it.
'Where is your mistress?' he asked when she handed him the garment.
The woman pointed outside. 'The privy,' she said.
Rolf had walked past the privy and knew that Ailith was not there. The withy screen surrounding the hole in the ground only came a little above waist height, and he would have seen her. Explaining this to the maid, however, was beyond him. He thanked her and left. His fingers discovered a damp patch on the cloak. In the strengthening light he saw that the blood had been cleaned away – or most of it. A stubborn trace still remained. He swept the garment around his shoulders and took the fastening pin from his pouch.
Of their own will, his feet took him not back down the garth past the destroyed vegetable garden, but towards the forge where only two days ago he had shared ale with the dead man and watched him work his magic to make a living thing out of an inanimate piece of metal. As he drew closer, he saw a light glimmering through a gap in the hide window covering, and heard a voice whimpering softly in grief.
It was her, he knew it was, and his scalp prickled at the emotions the sound raised in him. He halted in mid-step, deliberating whether to advance or retreat. My brothers, my baby, my husband. The words came back to him as they had done all through a sleepless night.
He pushed the workshop door open and stepped quietly inside. The air still bore a residue of heat from the forge, though the fire had died on the same day as its owner. She was leaning against the bench. Her right hand held an unfinished scramaseax blade at a cutting angle to the wrist of her left, and in contrast to yesterday's composure, her face was tear-wrecked and wild. She had looked up at the sound of his entry, and now, her eyes upon him and her breath shuddering, she forced the knife into her flesh.
'No!' Rolf roared and strode across the room. She tried to run from him, but he was too fast and caught her against the heavy brick side of the forge. She was tall for a woman, and strong. He was surprised by her strength as he tried to disarm her. Thigh braced against thigh they struggled, both of them becoming smeared with the blood that was trickling down Ailith's wrist. At last Rolf succeeded in taking a grip on the knife himself, and with a wrench and a twist, tore it from her hand and flung it across the room.
'Let me be!' Ailith screeched. 'Leave me alone, I want to die and be with Goldwin and my baby!' She struck at him furiously. Rolf seized her wrists to make her stop, and at the same time he squeezed her left hard to control the bleeding.
'If you kill yourself, you will go to hell and never see them again!' he said brutally. 'The priests won't bury you in hallowed ground either. You would probably fetch up in the town ditch!'
For a moment longer she struggled, and then the fight went out of her and she slumped against him as if she were boneless. The sound of her noisy weeping filled the forge.
'I have nothing to live for,' she sobbed into his cloak.
Rolf was completely at a loss to know what he should do. Arlette had never behaved like this. His only experience was of careful, dutiful composure. Perhaps his wife cried in private, but if so, she had never shown him. And of other women, Rolf knew only their welcoming arms and parted thighs. 'Of course you do,' he said awkwardly, and wished that her maids would come to investigate, or the priest, or even Aubert, damn him.
'Name it,' she challenged.
Rolf trawled his mind but caught nothing. So that when she died she would be reunited with her loved ones was a goal too distant and sanctimonious. The Normans held London, her own menfolk were all dead. To tell her that she would find a new husband and bear other children might earn him nothing but a kick in the shins and renewed hysterics. And then, another idea surfaced, one that was so obvious that he had almost overlooked it. He grasped it joyously in both hands.
'Your husband and child are dead, I am sorry for that.' He spoke the words quickly, without any great degree of sincerity because they were only an approach and he wanted to get to the core of the matter. 'But there is another child, a newborn infant, in great need of your help. Two nights ago, Aubert de Remy's wife bore a son. She was too badly mauled by the birth to be able to suckle him herself and Aubert has been searching for a wet nurse ever since.'
She sniffed loudly. 'Why should a Norman child be a reason for me to live?' she challenged in a watery voice.
'Because if you do not, he will die.'
'I do not believe that.'
'Already two women with babies of their own who could have fed Aubert's son have refused — or found excuses not to come to the convent. They are English, you see, and as you so rightly say, he is a Norman child.'
'My husband called Aubert de Remy nithing,' Ailith said. Her voice still quavered, but it was steadier now, and Rolf felt safe enough to release her.
