Great Maria (6 page)

Seven

Just after dawn, Richard left with a dozen knights, and Maria sorted out the kitchen knaves and set them to cleaning out the ovens, on the hillside below the castle, and the kitchen itself, choked with the debris of years. Maria sat in the ward with Ceci, watching how they did. It was Lent, and most of the people were fasting, so she did not hurry them.

The town women had come up to work, and they brought out the linen of the castle to air. Maria set the baby down in the corner and went to help them. It was a beautiful warm day, like the late springtime, beneath a cloudless blue sky, and while they shook out the linen, the women laughed and gossiped. When Ceci began to cry, a big, pale townswoman went to get her and brought her back laughing and poking her fingers into the woman’s mouth.

Maria sat down to give the baby her breast. The other women gathered around her, admiring the baby. Beside her, the big woman got a loaf from her apron and broke it in half.

“What a beautiful day this is,” another woman said. “Not usual at all.
Lenten weather helps prayer,
my father always said.”

The others murmured in agreement. Their jaws munched steadily through their dinner loaves. The women of Maria’s village wore their hair uncovered, in braids; these had linen coifs on their heads, starched stiff as wings over each ear.

The fat woman beside her smiled at her. “I am the ostler’s daughter—my father is the spokesman for the town in some of our doings. We keep the inn here, of course. She is a pretty baby. What is her name?”

“Cecily. Do you have any children?”

The wide face was bland between the wings of her coif. “My husband died in the fire, when Birnia was destroyed.”

“Oh,” Maria said; she felt stupid for asking. “I’m sorry.”

“He deserved it. Maybe now when Birnia is calm again I will get another husband. Here comes yours.”

Maria stood up to see through the open gate. Richard on his red bay horse with a couple of knights after him rode up the hill from the town. He passed through the gate and across the ward. If he saw her, in the ward among the women, he ignored her, and she sat down again. She popped the baby on her shoulder and patted her back.

“Come, now,” said the ostler’s daughter, and got enormously to her feet. “We have six more baskets to bring down.” She touched Maria’s shoulder and led the other women off toward the Tower.

Maria laid the sleeping baby on the grass at the foot of the wall. Some broken bales of flax stood before the doorway down into the kitchen. Two dogs were fighting over a bone on the threshold. She looked around to make sure the baby was safe and went down the steps.

The cook appeared from the darkness in the back; he was shorter than she was, bird-faced. He hurried up to her.

“Come tell them they do not have to brick up the wall again. They sit in there and loaf and pretend they are bricking up the wall.”

“What wall?”

“In the back—the old pantry.” When Maria brushed by him into the kitchen, he followed. “I told them not to brick it back up—what’s the use of that, I said—”

Maria walked across the dark filthy kitchen into the back, where the pantry was. Here stacks and bales of goods had been piled up against the walls on either side, except for the narrow doorway to the pantry and the cellar. Now the trash was gone. The wall there had crumbled partly away, the bricks had fallen out, and the gap showed an old doorway, which breathed a draft of cold air into her face.

The three little knaves were briskly stacking brick on brick, and by the way they worked she guessed the cook was right: they had been loafing, or they would have finished long before. But she did not want to do as the cook said. “Unbrick it. What’s in there? The old pantry, you said. Maybe you could use it.”

The knaves twisted to watch her. With a glance at the cook they took to unstacking the bricks. Maria moved out of the draft. With the cook behind her she went back up into the daylight and looked to see that the baby was all right. The ostler’s daughter was carrying her around, laughing.

The cook said bitterly, “As much work as those boys do, they could do on the Sabbath and not make enough of a sin to pray over.”

“Keep watch on them—make them do it.” She crossed the paving stones to the sunlight, where the women were drinking cups of water and saying how weak they felt, and the fasting hardly begun. Lying on the grass in their midst, the baby rolled onto her back and played with her fingers.

“My lady,” the cook’s reedy voice called. He was coming toward her at a fast walk. “Lady—”

Maria stood up; he bustled over to her. “Lady, there is something there. God willed it. God told us to open up the pantry again.”

Maria headed toward the kitchen. “What do you mean?”

The cook shook his head. After walking across the ward and halfway back, he was out of breath. His face glowed importantly red. “This fellow Walter Bris,” he said, his voice lowered, “the man who commanded here when my lord Richard came, you know, he was not the true lord of this castle. This used to be a thieves’ nest, here, quite like—” He cleared his throat, suddenly embarrassed. She went after him into the kitchen and back toward the pantries.

They had lit another torch, casting light into every corner of the back of the kitchen, and through the unbricked wall into the old pantry. The light showed a huge old clothes chest, half-buried in dust in the corner.

Maria caught her breath. She climbed through the rubble of the bricks and knelt beside the chest. She could not move it, not with her whole weight pushing it, and the lid was rusted tight.

She went out to the kitchen. The three knaves and the cook stood out of the draft, their faces beaming. To the cook, she said, “Stay here. Let no one in. I’ll be right back.” She herded the knaves out of the kitchen and ran across the ward to the Tower.

Richard was not in the hall. She climbed the stairs toward the top room. Halfway up she heard a stranger’s voice there. She missed the first few words of what he said, but drawing closer, she overheard enough to know what he was talking about. She stopped on the stair, just below the door.

“My lord,” the stranger said, “what further worth is she to you? You have what you wed her for, Strongarm’s castle and his men. Count Theobald’s daughter will make you a lord.”

Richard laughed. Maria could make nothing of his laughter. She went in the door, to stop them talking. Both the men spun toward her, their faces taut. The other man she had seen before: one of the castle’s knights. She said, “Richard, there is something down here you must attend to,” and turned away before he could read her expression. The other stood on the hearth. Her hands were shaking. She went out again onto the stair landing.

“I’m coming,” Richard said. “Good day, Walter.”

Walter Bris, Maria thought. Richard behind her, she went down the stairs to the hall.

“What is this, anyway?” Richard asked. “I’ve got important things to do—”

“This is important,” Maria said. She led him across the hall to the outer staircase and down into the ward. The women were all sitting in a knot, playing with Ceci. She and Richard walked past them to the heaps of garbage before the kitchen door.

The knaves loitered in the shade, their heads ducked together in some gossip. Maria took Richard down into the kitchen, where the cook was standing bolt upright before the gap in the wall, like a sentry.

Richard went on before her into the pantry. She stopped to send the cook outside again. When she reached her husband, he was kneeling by the chest, swearing in a soft monotone in the darkness. His hands ran over the leather straps and the lid.

“Give me a fire-box.”

She handed him her tinderbox. He got the charred linen burning and used its feeble light to go quickly over the locks on the chains that held the chest to the wall. The light flickered out. He set the tinderbox impatiently aside, tried to force the lid and could not, pulled and shoved at the chest without moving it at all, and sat back on his heels.

“Devil damn me,” he murmured. In the dark she could not see his face.

“Whose is it?” Maria asked.

“Mine, now.”

He took hold of the chest and strained to move it. “That knight who was with me, just now—he was master here when I came, but he had only been here a few months, and this has sat for years, this box, look at it.” He put his hands lovingly on the chest. “He’ll cry all night when he hears of this, will Walter Bris.”

Maria put her lips together to keep from saying anything about Walter Bris. Richard stood up straight to draw his sword. The light from the kitchen leaped along the blade. With its edge he burst open the lid. The hinges shrieked. Maria craned her neck to see.

“Well,” Richard said. The chest was packed with dark cloth sacks. He lifted one, and the rotten fabric gave and chips of dull metal fell out, flooding over the edge of the chest into the dirt. Maria grabbed one and spat on it and rubbed it to a patchy shine on her skirt.

“Silver.”

Richard got up. “Come on.” He pushed her toward the door and they went out into the kitchen. The cook hung in the doorway. Richard pointed to him.

“Go get Ponce Rachet down here. He’s in the hall.”

The cook strode eagerly away. The three kitchen knaves crowded into the doorway; when the cook went up the steps they pressed him with questions. Richard held out his hand toward Maria.

“Give me that money you took.”

She handed it to him. He went up into the doorway, to look at it in the sunlight. “Saracen. Somebody’s treasure horde. Walter Bris is going to weep.” He put the coin in his wallet. “Get those people away from there.”

She herded the knaves and the little crowd that had gathered behind them back across the ward. Richard stood in the kitchen doorway, his eyes intently on nothing and his arms folded over his chest. Maria went over to the serving women to get the baby.

The women surrounded her, bursting with questions, and she shook her head. “I know nothing. It is all nothing to me.” Ceci was playing on the ground among them. She looked up and beamed at her mother. Maria lifted the baby and settled her on her hip, smiled at the ostler’s daughter, and went to the Tower.

On the steep outside stairs she passed Ponce Rachet, hurrying down from the hall. Richard was still in the kitchen doorway. Maria went up to her bedchamber on the top of the Tower.

There was no one in the room. She changed the baby’s clothes and put her to bed for a nap. From the window, she watched Ponce Rachet carry a heavy leather sack up from the kitchen, pause to ease his arms, and start across the ward. Maria rubbed her palms together. She wanted to kill Walter Bris, but she did not know how. She would have to get him alone, in a lonely place. He was strong, a grown man in his prime, so she would have to catch him by surprise. She could poison him, but someone else might die by mistake, and she put aside that idea.

The door downstairs banged open. Feet tramped up the stairs toward her. She went to the rack beside the cupboard where Richard kept his weapons and got a dagger with a long thin blade. God expressly forbade murder, but she would think of that later, when it was done. What he had said about her was worse than murder. She knew how Richard’s ambitions ran: If Theobald’s daughter would bring him what he wanted, she and Ceci would only be in his way. She tucked the dagger in her sleeve, kissed the baby, and went out, past Ponce Rachet coming up the stairs with a sack of treasure on his shoulder.

The sun was high in the sky. The hall was empty, save for a few servants and a woman weaving. The dagger hidden in her sleeve, Maria went down into the ward.

Richard was carrying a sack of money up through the kitchen door. She waited until his back was to her and went around the edge of the ward toward the stables. In the cool subterranean vault, several knights sprawled on the straw, arguing. None of them was Walter Bris. She went through the stables without even nodding when they greeted her and walked up again into the sunlight.

She looked outside the gate and around the back of the ward but Walter Bris was nowhere. She went back up toward her room. Ponce Rachet stood on the stair landing outside the door. He stepped aside to let her go by. Two huge bags of money sat on the floor midway between the door and the bed. Maria took the baby into a corner to nurse her. Feet pounded on the stairs, and Richard came in, lugging another sack on his shoulder. Ponce Rachet followed him inside.

“That’s all of it.”

The two men bent over the sacks. Richard found a chest and dumped the clothes in it out onto the floor. Maria watched him narrowly. When she thought that he might desert her her eyes stung with tears. At last the baby fell asleep. She put her in the bed, between two pillows to keep her from rolling off. Richard and his knight were stacking up the money on the chest. Outside the window, the sky turned softly pink and violet.

Abruptly she knew where Walter Bris was: in the town with the messenger from Count Theobald. Richard would not have mentioned the marriage proposal to a man he obviously disliked; Walter Bris would have heard it only from Theobald’s messenger. The cook had said Walter Bris had commanded here before Richard came. Maybe he had been the Count’s man even then.

The evening cool swept in from the river and chilled her face. She went down the stonework outer stair of the Tower and waited in the ward until she could sneak out the postern door unseen. Walter Bris would not stay away from the Tower much past sundown or Richard would begin to suspect him. She walked down under the trees that lined one edge of the road toward the town.