Great Maria (12 page)

Thirteen

After Ceci’s death, Maria longed for another baby. Robert was too old and active: whenever she tried to coddle him, he pushed her away. Each month while the moon waxed she prayed she was with child, but each month after the full moon she gave off blood. She had never understood before why the village women called the blood the curse of Eve.

In the fall, when she had been barren several months, she spoke roundabout to Father Simon, and something he said suggested to her that she was being punished for murdering Walter Bris, more than two years before. The old priest told her that for the punishment to cease she would have to repent sincerely of her sins, and she prayed every day for the grace to be sorry. She never asked Richard what he thought. The one time she mentioned Ceci to him, he put his back to her and furiously did something else.

As a proof that she was truly sorry, she swore to build a chapel at the Cave of the Virgin. Whenever she grieved for Ceci, she thought of the chapel and her heart lightened. Richard at first would not listen to her. All winter long he and Roger fought the Saracens in the foothills; he was in and out of the castle every few days, arriving usually late at night, turning the whole place over, and leaving the next day before noon, to everybody’s great relief. Then in the spring, after more than a hundred knights had come south to join his army, he seized the last two Saracen fortresses in the lowlands, and on Midsummer’s Day he stormed Iste itself. Exhilarated with this victory, he gave her all the money he had in plunder and let her take the local serfs who had worked on the New Tower for her father.

There were ten of these men. She took them to the Cave of the Virgin, collected a dozen more from the village there, and talked the English monk into sending to the chapterhouse in Agato for a mason. A passionate energy captured her. She went over the countryside talking people into making bricks and cutting lumber. A French pilgrim at the cave knew how to plan for building, and he helped her devise the scheme for the chapel. The pilgrim drew it out on vellum, lingering on at the shrine long past the time when he would have gone on his way to France. He was an interesting man. At night sometimes Maria dreamed lasciviously of him, although in the flesh she was always stiff with him and hardly ever spoke to him alone.

The English monk knew everyone in the region. He found other craftsmen to help her, and many of the local serfs came when they could to work on the chapel. Until the harvests were in, she had only her own men to dig and rake and smooth the ground she had chosen, but once the peasants had their grains and vegetables shored up and their meat salted, they walked with their families to the shrine and fell to work.

All this made her happy as she had ever been since her marriage. But sometimes when she thought of Ceci, she could not help but cry.

The master mason and his apprentices arrived in the balmy warmth of Saint Martin’s summer. The mason, Brother Nicholas, was a large, foul-smelling man, muscular as a knight. The taut skin of his tonsure was bright red from the sun. He prayed overnight in the cave, came out the next morning, tucked up his cassock between his knees, and told Maria she was doing everything wrong. Trailed at a good distance by his helpers, all expert at staying upwind of him, he went around making everything right. When she saw that he could do as well without her, she went back to her castle, which she had left in Eleanor’s keeping.

Richard had just come back from Iste. While with Eleanor’s help Maria took off her traveling clothes and re-introduced herself to Robert, her husband kept off to a corner of their room.

Maria could tell he was angry. Eleanor took Robert downstairs, and Richard turned on her.

“I didn’t marry you to live by myself.”

“You married me to get this castle,” Maria said.

He tramped up to her and stood over her. She thrust her chin out at him. “You married me to get around my father.”

Richard knocked her down. “Don’t talk back to me. I never did anything to your father.” He pushed her with his foot. “Get up.”

Maria lay back on the floor. “I think I’ll stay here, so I will not fall as far when you decide to do it again.”

Richard hauled her up onto her feet. “Shut the door. Everybody for leagues can hear you. You scream like an old gate sometimes.”

Maria slammed the door shut. It rebounded inward. She thrust it closed. Her head throbbed. She went to the window and stood, her heart pounding, her eyes directed out the shuttered window. Richard stamped around the room swearing.

She said, “Why should I have to stay here—you were gone most of the—”

“I came back three times in July and twice in August and you could have managed to be here once. I couldn’t even get my clothes mended.” He threw something violently into the fire.

“If you had told me you were—”

“I shouldn’t have to tell you,” he shouted. “You should be here.”

Maria stared at the wooden shutter. Her cheeks burned from fighting with him. She laid her hand on the cold stone sill.

“Are you finished now?” he said.

She turned toward him. “What?”

“Your church. Did you finish it?”

“No. It’s hardly begun.”

He flung his arms out. “Why now? Why can’t you wait until I don’t have a thousand things to do and a thousand people waiting for me to do one thing wrong? Jesus in Heaven— This place was chaos when you were gone. Can’t you help me even a little? And I never touched your father.”

“If you say so.”

“Are you trying to make me hit you?”

They stared at each other across the room. Maria said, stiff-lipped, “I’m sorry.”

“You’re staying here now. You’re not going back down there. Do you understand me?”

Maria clenched her teeth. She started toward the door. Eleanor knew little of keeping the castle. There was much to be done before winter struck. Richard followed her across the room. When she opened the door, he put his hand on it and slammed it shut again in her face before she could go out.

“Where are you going?”

She made him a deep bow. “I beg your pardon, my most gracious lord, have I your grace’s permission to leave you now?”

He sputtered at her. She pulled his hand off the door, opened it, and went downstairs. In the hall, Eleanor said, in a disapproving voice, “You are scarcely back from the holy place and you are already fighting.”

Roger was in Iste, William in Birnia, and Eleanor did not like to ride. Maria and Richard hunted alone in the snowfields and the wood, after the wolves and foxes that preyed on the herds. Richard set a breakneck pace. Maria had to strain to keep up with him. Their dogs ran one trail due south into the mid-morning, lost it, and cut another almost at once. They galloped through the snow-filled stony woods. The hard exercise filled her with energy. Just after noon, at the foot of a sheer boulder, the wolf turned. Maria wheeled her snorting mare away. The dogs barked and lunged at the wolf’s throat and flanks. Blood splattered the snow and streaked the coarse fur of the wolf. Richard called the pack away. Crouched against the boulder, the wolf snarled breathlessly. Richard put an arrow to his bow and shot. The wolf’s growl ended in a yelp.

The wolfhounds jumped and fought over the body. Dismounting, Richard waded in among them to retrieve his arrow. Maria looked away into the wood. The trees were stark against the snow and the flat gray sky. Her skin still glowed from the excitement of the hard ride. The whining and barking of the dogs made her horse restless, and she started back the way they had come.

Richard followed her. Unspeaking, they quartered through the wood, cutting toward the sea, looking for the wolf’s mate. The empty woods rang with the horses’ hoofs on the rocks. The wind was icy. In the mid-afternoon, the dogs, without running a scent, suddenly brought something to bay in a cleft of the hills ahead of them.

Richard was behind her. Maria galloped up through the trees, hanging onto her saddle in case the mare stumbled. The horse skidded to a stop in the mouth of a brush-choked ravine.

She cried out in surprise. The dogs were holding a man pinned down in the back of the ravine: a Saracen. He fended off the dogs with a long branch. Behind him in the snowy wind drift, another man lay, white as his clothes. Richard drew rein beside her.

Maria called the dogs back. They clustered around her, their eyes and their noses aimed at the Saracens. One or two of the big hounds lay down in the snow. She said, “That man is hurt, or sick.”

Richard and the Saracen with the branch were staring at each other. The wind chilled Maria’s face. The sick man heaved up a cough. She saw blood on his sleeve where he had muffled himself. Richard reached over his shoulder for his bow.

“Richard.” She put her cold hands on the mare’s neck. “They can’t fight back.”

“If that were you and me, they wouldn’t hesitate.”

“They are Saracens. They know no better.”

Richard looked at her and back to the Saracens. He pulled the case off the arrows on his saddle. Maria whistled to the dogs. Bending her mare around, she started up the snowy hillside. The mare carried her clambering up over the rocks. One of the Saracens gasped. She reined in her mare on the steep slope above the ravine. The bow sang again. When she looked, Richard was walking into the ravine to get his arrows.

He rode up beside her. They walked their horses on along the strange, silent hillside. Brown and dun, the dogs scattered around them through the colorless trees. She glanced at Richard. His eyes were vague, as if he looked inward.

They let their horses pick their way down the slope. Ahead, the beach spread its pale sand at the foot of the gray rolling surf. The wind tasted salt. She nudged her mare forward into the open.

They rode down onto the beach. The sea jumped and tossed off to the gray horizon. He led her through the wind toward a fisherman’s lean-to. They dismounted and brought their horses into the fragile two-sided shelter. The wind battered the thin boards over their heads. The surf boomed on the shore. They pulled off their clothes and coupled in the back of the lean-to, while the horses stamped and snorted and the dogs prowled around them. Wrapped in his heavy fur cloak, they lay still in one another’s arms. The night was coming. They got up and put their clothes on and rode home.

***

In the spring, after the planting, Richard took his men into the mountains, and Maria went back to the Cave of the Virgin, where her roofless chapel stood carpeted in new grass. Eleanor and Robert came with her. Every now and again Richard rode down from the mountains, and she had to go back to her castle to meet him, but he never stayed above a day and a night, and she left for the shrine again as soon as he was gone.

The summer pilgrims swelled the crowd of men and women working on the building. The chapterhouse had sent two brothers to help the English monk serve the shrine, and in a single day, all working together, the monks, the pilgrims, and the serfs threw up a sleeping house in the village, a mile from the cave. There, before Michaelmas, in September, Maria bore a son.

That put her out of humor. She had taken for granted that the baby would be another girl, another Ceci. From Richard in the mountains a messenger came to instruct her to name the baby Stephen. Robert hated him at once.

Brother Nicholas baptized the child. The master mason was carving the mullions in the chapel windows, twisting stone vines and trees around them, and in the branches of the trees putting birds and snakes. After every day of work, the people would come up to admire what he had done. Everybody loved him, in spite of his stench. At the end of his year with them, when he had to go back to his monastery in Agato, many of the people wept.

On the day he was to leave, they gathered on the roadside in front of the chapel, the men in their stained tunics, with their work-hardened hands and faces, and the women in their shawls, and he went from one to the next, blessing them by name and kissing them. Since he was a monk, they could give him no gift. Maria especially felt it sorely. She knelt before him with her two sons and he blessed them.

“Lady,” he said. “Keep faith with God.”

Maria kissed his hand. He took his staff and with his apprentices to windward of him walked away down the road. All the rest of the morning the men worked in a frenzy, but the women lagged and shook their heads and sighed.

At noon, Maria sat down under the trees in the yard of the shrine; opening her dress she gave her breast to the baby. Eleanor was calling to Robert on the stony hillside. Maria sang a ballad the French pilgrim had sung her.

Two horses were dragging a sled loaded with stone up the road. Behind them a few riders came, but she paid them no heed. The workmen were hammering inside the chapel. She fit her song to that.

A horse stopped in front of her. Startled, she looked up. Richard swung down from the saddle. She had not seen him since the midsummer. The sun had faded his hair to a light brown. She scrambled to her feet. The baby, losing the nipple, let out an angry cry.

“You look like a serf.” Richard kissed her. “I’ll take you into the woods, like a serf. Where is Robert?”

Maria shouted to Eleanor to bring him. Richard took the baby and juggled it. Over his mail, he wore a long white tunic, to keep the sun off. Maria put her hand on his back. He kissed her again. His mouth was softer than she remembered. Between them, Stephen cried, and Richard stood away from her.