The Marsh King's Daughter (2 page)

'You want to send me to the nunnery too,' she whispered, and the terrible notion rose in her mind that perhaps it had been her mother's idea from the beginning.

Annet looked away. 'It is for the best,' she said stiffly. 'You should have been given to St Catherine's long ago, before you became too wild.'

'But I don't want to be a nun!' Miriel clutched her aching ribs and rocked her body in anguish.

'Then what do you want?' The grey stare was as cold as frost. 'To stay here?'

Miriel shook her head miserably. Three months ago, with her grandfather in good health and head of the household, it would have been a different matter.

'No,' Annet agreed grimly. 'None of us could bear it. Nigel would kill you in the end and I would not blame him.' She looked at the cloth and folded it in a precise, neat square. 'We could seek you a husband, but the way you behave, who would want you unless you came with a great dowry?' She gave a disapproving sniff. 'Even if some man did take you in marriage, we would dwell in constant fear of you shaming this household by being a bad wife.'

'As you shamed it by bearing me?' Miriel hit out, then flinched as Annet made an abrupt movement. The slap, however, did not descend. Annet lowered her hand and clenched it in her lap. Her eyes fastened on the dull gleam of her wedding ring and she tightened her jaw, emphasising the delicate lines of first ageing between nose and mouth.

'Yes,' she said, 'as I shamed it by bearing you. I was too young, too innocent to see your father for the thief in the night that he was. He stole my life from me in begetting yours. Now, by God's grace and the passage of years, I have found a good man and won back the right to hold my head high.' She gave Miriel a bright stare, the suspicion of a glitter on her lashes. 'I'll not have you jeopardising my future with your tantrums.' She made an abrupt gesture. 'Enough of this. I am wasting time that could be better spent.' Her glance flickered to the sooty mess around the hearth and the two women who were sweeping up the blackened floor rushes. Their backs were turned, but that did not mean they had lost their hearing. The scandal would be all over town by dusk. 'Can you stand?'

Miriel nodded and struggled to her feet. Her head was pounding fit to burst and she felt sick. She shook out the folds of her gown It was made of the finest English wool, woven and clipped on her grandfather's Flemish loom and dyed the colour of ripe, dark plums. The thought of exchanging such luxury for the scratchy drab folds of a novice's habit appalled her. As Edward Weaver's granddaughter, she was accustomed to wearing the most stylish of garments fashioned from the best fabric.

'Come.' Taking Miriel's arm, her mother drew her towards the door. 'You heard what your stepfather said. He doesn't want you in this house.'

'And you don't either.' Miriel's voice quivered.

'Not at the moment,' Annet said without compassion.

The warehouse, where sacks of wool were stored before being sorted, carded and spun, stood across the yard from the main house. It was a sturdy stone dwelling with solid oak doors and a shuttered gable window. Just now it was almost empty, for the shearing season had not long begun, and only a few raw fleeces were piled in the far corner.

Miriel heard the wooden bar shoot into place across the doors, and then the large iron key grinding in the lock. Rubbing her arms, she walked slowly to the middle of the room. Threads of light filtered through gaps in the shutters and sparsely illuminated the beaten earth floor. Although there were few fleeces in store, thirty years of use had saturated the walls with their ammoniac, fatty smell. To Miriel, the pungency was comforting and poignant. Her grandfather's white beard had been like a fleece and his clothing had always held the aroma of sheep in its creases.

Leaving the centre of the room, she paced its walls, running her fingers along the flinty stone and remembering herself doing just the same as a small child in her grandfather's shadow. Following him, asking interminable questions until he was jolted from his taciturn disapproval to laugh and answer. Her fascination had flattered him and through the years, first at his knee and then at his shoulder, she had learned the weaving trade until she knew as much as he did, albeit without the seasoning of maturity and experience. Much good it had done her.

Her throat tightened. She plucked a snag of wool from the stone and teased it between her fingers, recognising by the length of the staple that it had come from a lowland breed. Edwin Weaver her grandfather was dead, and Nigel Fuller ruled the household like a cockerel on a dunghill. He would no more tolerate her presence in the weaving sheds or at the fulling mill than he would contemplate sweeping the floor or washing his own dish after he had eaten. Men and women had their place in the world and never the twain should blend, except at night in the bedchamber, and even there man was the master.

Miriel wandered over to the pile of fleeces in the corner. Five hundred of them from the abbey at St Catherine's, the nunnery where she was to be imprisoned, out of sight, out of mind and, more to the point, out of trouble. They always sheared their flocks early. Her grandfather, with a twinkle of amusement, had called the start of the shearing season St Catherine's Day, although the saint did not celebrate her feast until November.

The family's association with the abbey was a long and profitable one. Her grandfather's twin sister had been the sacrist there until her death two years ago, and a distant cousin had taken her vows at St Catherine's before becoming a prioress at a Benedictine house near Lincoln. A new oblate from the Weaver household would be welcomed with open arms. Indeed, there had been hints from the Abbess on several occasions. Aided by Miriel's pleading, her grandfather had stolidly ignored them, but Nigel was of a different mind. Her mother was young enough to bear a complete generation of Fuller children. What need of a troublesome bastard daughter?

Miriel made herself a nest among the pungent, foamy fleeces and curled herself into a foetal ball. If she was going to be forced to callus her knees in a freezing chapel at all hours of the day and night, she would spend the time praying for God to visit a murrain on her stepfather.

'A murrain, a murrain, a murrain,' she chanted through her teeth like a holy song, until the words broke on a sob and the tears came,

The light ceased to glimmer through the shutters as dusk fell and darkness encroached. No one came to bring Miriel food or water or comfort. Only once did the heavy wooden draw bar rattle as someone checked that it was solidly in place. Then the footsteps trod away in the direction of the house. A small figure, lost in the vastness of the warehouse, Miriel closed her eyes and sought oblivion in sleep.

There was nothing to see over the sides of the cart but white, clinging mist. Nicholas de Caen knew that if only he could rid himself of the tough hemp cords binding his wrists and ankles, he could evade his captors in its thickness like a flea in a blanket. They would not spend precious time searching for him. Despite his bonds, he was to them a minor fish in the game, trapped in the net and kept in case he was useful.

He was going to disappoint them for they had already taken the only items of value he possessed - his elderly horse, his rusty mail shirt, and a rather fine old sword that had belonged to his father. Stripped of these, all that remained was a young man of three and twenty with no living relatives to pay his ransom and nothing to yield but hatred for King John who had beggared and destroyed the de Caen family.

Nicholas tested the knotted rope with his teeth, but his captors had been thorough and there was no give in the hemp. Undeterred, having naught better to do, he persisted. Around him the hazy shapes of other baggage carts and lines of roped pack ponies loomed in the thick sea-mist. Although he could see neither water nor beach, the salt tang of the muddy foreshore filled his nostrils.

They had camped the previous evening on the banks of the Wellstream at the hamlet of Cross Keys. This morning they were preparing to traverse the murky bay of The Wash at the inlet while the tide was out.

'Ye'll not loosen them ropes, lad,' said Alaric the cart-driver not unkindly as he appeared out of the mist, his woollen hood dewed in hoar and clear water droplets sparkling in his beard. 'I've trussed enough chickens in me time to know me trade.' He made sure the back of the cart was secure, then climbed on to the driving board and lifted the reins.

'I can but try,' Nicholas replied wryly. There was no profit in being sullen with his gaoler who was decent enough in his way. He had let Nicholas keep his cloak against the cold, and had not stinted to give him hot gruel and ale from the supplies that morning, although he had not been obliged to feed him at all.

'Then you're a fool.' Alaric glanced at Nicholas and scrubbed his nose on his sleeve. 'We'd not need to chase you with crossbows and dogs; you'd be sucked into them quicksands yonder faster than a wink.'

Nicholas shrugged. 'If it is so dangerous, then what is the baggage train doing here? Why didn't we take the long road with King John and the rest of the troops?'

"Tain't dangerous if you knows what you're doing,' Alaric said gruffly. 'There's a causeway straight across and we've got a guide. This way, although we're slower moving, we'll make up the distance. We should reach Swineshead Abbey by dusk, about the same time as the vanguard.' Facing forward, he clicked his tongue to the horse, and the cart lurched forward.

Nicholas was jolted against the sacks of grain which, apart from himself, were the wain's cargo. If he focused hard and concentrated, he could just make out a string of pack ponies following, their sides laden with chests and panniers. Their breath added to the drifting mist, and their keeper was a dark shape swathed in a broad-brimmed hat and heavy mantle.

If there were other prisoners in the baggage train, Nicholas had not seen them, but then his own capture had been a matter of pure mischance. If his horse had not cast a shoe, he would not have been at the smithy on the Lincoln road, where John's soldiers had seen and seized upon him as one of the escaping rebels from the aborted siege of Lincoln. They had brought him to Lynn where John was staying. By the time they arrived, the King had moved on to Wisbech, heading for Swineshead, so they had tossed

Nicholas in with the baggage until they had time to interrogate him.

Nicholas had no intention of being present when that moment arrived. He had heard far too much about the techniques employed by the King's mercenaries. As far as Nicholas was concerned, red-hot pokers belonged at the hearth and nowhere near a human orifice. Besides, he had sworn a vow to live until he was ninety and die in his bed.

He worked at the knot, but the tough fibres only cut further into his skin, making angry weals. The cart rumbled on to the causeway, which was little more than a narrow path raised above the surrounding mud. When the tide turned, that path would be obliterated by the freezing North Sea.

Nicholas tried not to think of the vast sheet of grey water lurking out beyond the horizon. He had been born to the sound of waves crashing against a harbour wall, had learned to sail almost before he could walk. The sea-surge was within him, blood and bone. There was love, and above that love was a deep, deep respect.

The mist cleared a little, a haze of white sun glimmering through somewhere in the region of noon, but Nicholas could see that it was a temporary respite. Come mid-afternoon, the faery wisps and veils would thicken into true, hobgoblin fog.

Alaric was whistling through his teeth, as much to keep his spirits up, Nicholas suspected, as from natural good humour. The young man knelt up to glance over the side of the cart, but even though the sun had thinned the cloud there was little enough to see: a glistening brown expanse of shore populated by gulls and oyster catchers probing the mud for crabs. The landward side was dun-coloured marshland, fading into a grey, vaporous haze.