The Winter Mantle (57 page)

You should know that I have made my peace with Ralf de Gael. He is here amongst us with a company of Breton lords and has spoken to me of his grief and regret over your father's death. I will speak more of this when I return, but I thought that you should know of this detail and think upon it. Lord Ralf has ever been a man of charm and easy words, but I truly believe that the matter of your father's death has lingered on his conscience.

Matilda raised her head from her reading and leaned her head against the rough bark of the tree. She felt a small stab of resentment. Well and good if Simon had made his own peace with De Gael, but she hoped that he had not made it on her behalf too. Her nature might be generous and loving, but in the matter of forgiving Ralf de Gael she was not prepared to be charitable. Indeed, she was irritated that Simon should mention him at all when this letter was all she had of him for months yet to come. He had spoken of hard fighting too, his manner offhand, but she knew that such indifference on the page was not necessarily the truth.

I trust that you are in good health, my love, and that our children are thriving. I hold you all dearly in my thoughts and wish that I could hold you in my arms too. Christ willing, that joyous time will not be too far away. Until then, may God keep you safe.

He had signed his name at the bottom of the missive, his hand neat and compact, showing none of the boldness and generosity of love that she craved. The last paragraph expressed tender sentiments but in an obligatory fashion, or perhaps she was expecting too much? A letter had to go through many hands on a journey of this length, and it was not unlikely that intimate details might be read by others.

With a soft sigh she folded the parchment and sat with it in her lap. The sky darkened from dusk to true dark, but she remained where she was, wondering what Simon was doing, how he was faring and if he truly was thinking of her the way that she was thinking of him.

Dorylaeum, Anatolian Plateau, June 1097

The night sky was a heavy blue, thickly populated with stars. Beside the small settlement of Dorylaeum on the trade route through Antioch to Jerusalem, the crusader army had encamped for the night - or half of it had. To ease the foraging conditions, the leaders had split the army. The Norman contingent were the vanguard, the southern French and Lorrainers were marching a day behind.

Simon had pitched his tents beside a spring of sweet water and the soft sound it made as it bubbled up from beneath the ground was cool and soothing. The day had been as hot as a bread oven, but with the sunset had come a chill wind and he was glad of the warmth of the white fur cloak. Hundreds of campfires surrounded his position, islands of orange heat and light in the stony darkness. The voices of men, the notes of flute and bagpipe, the high-pitched laughter of women rose and mingled on the night air with smoke and cooking smells.

Four days ago they had marched from Nicaea. The wounded had remained behind, and under the supervision of the Byzantine army were restoring and repairing the defences damaged during the siege. Absently rubbing his left leg, he wondered if he should have stayed with them. The area surrounding the old healed break was red and inflamed. It had been troubling him for more than a week and was gradually worsening. A physician had told him to wash the area in strong, hot vinegar twice a day, but thus far the treatment was having no effect.

'Your leg is bothering you?'

He turned from his musing to regard Sabina, who had emerged from her small canvas shelter and was studying him anxiously.

'A little,' he said in an offhand manner designed to make little of the difficulty. 'There are times when it has flared up before, but it has always subsided.'

'But usually you have been able to tend and rest it,' she said. She shook out the goatskin rug she held in her hands and knelt down on it before the fire.

'That I can do when we come to Antioch.'

'If you reach it alive,' she said grimly. 'This campaign eats men whole.' She tossed two lumps of charcoal from the supply sack into the small circle of glowing heat and watched the sudden dance of flame.

'Indeed, but no one who set out expected the road to Jerusalem to be easy,' Simon replied and studied her from his eye corner. For the first weeks after her husband's drowning she had moved through the world with as much animation as a child's straw doll, uncaring, interested in nothing. Gradually, however, she had begun to emerge from her trance. It was a slow, painful process. Seldom a day went past when she did not weep for her loss, usually when she was at prayer, but in the between times she had found a kind of balance. Occasionally she even smiled.

In return for Simon's care and protection, she had undertaken the task of laundress and cauldron tender to him and his men. She had her own small shelter, which she pitched beside theirs, and although she mostly preferred to keep aloof she would occasionally join their fire with a piece of mending, or come, like now, to warm herself and contemplate.

'Mayhap, but it is a hard road for a man to travel just to feel righteous about himself,' she said softly. 'You should turn back, before it is too late.'

Simon laughed without humour. 'My leg is not as bad as all that,' he said. 'Besides, I am not just travelling this road in order to feel righteous about myself.'

'Then for what?' Her eyes were dark in the firelight, her skin cast in pale gold. Between her slightly parted lips he could see the moist gleam of her teeth.

He hesitated. 'I am not sure that you would understand,' he said. 'Certainly my wife did not.'

A faint smile curved her lips. 'I am not your wife.'

There was something of her old spirit in the remark, and Simon felt a spark kindle beyond the compassion and pity that had been his response towards her thus far. 'But you are a woman.'

'I see. And more likely to understand your wife than you.' Her smile deepened.

'I suppose so, yes.'

'Then tell me, and let us know for sure.'

The challenge hung between them in the soft night air and Simon realised that if he took it up the level of intimacy between them would change. He needed the diversion. He did not want her to retreat to her shelter and her shell. Taking a stick of kindling, he drew a spiral pattern in the soil. 'I broke my leg when I was a young squire in King William's household,' he said. 'For weeks on end, I had to he abed while the bones knitted. It was a bad break and, although it did mend, the damage was irreparable. I was left with a limp and frequent pain. Some of this you must already know from the past.'

Sabina nodded. 'But you concealed it well,' she said. 'When we were younger I never gave it any consideration. To me you were just the King's squire Simon, with a new hawk to train and a certain way about you…" She looked down quickly, and the firelight made shadowy fans of her dark lashes.

'As I remember, you had a certain way about you too,' Simon said softly.

'It was a long time ago.' She plucked at the goatskin on which she was sitting as if performing a task of monumental importance.

'Not so long,' he said. 'I still have Guinevere in the mews at Huntingdon, and she still flies truer than many a younger hawk.'

'She was a good bird, and you trained her well,' Sabina said. 'Even if you were distracted on occasion.' She glanced at him, then down again.

Across the night a woman's throaty laugh floated from one of the other campfires. Simon rubbed his leg and tried to ignore the heaviness in his groin. If not arousal, it ran the sensation very close.

'You were telling me why you are here,' Sabina prompted.

'It is because of those weeks that I spent cooped in a small room with only the walls for company. I had visitors, I had my lessons and other such joys to pass the time, but everyone and everything had to come to me. I was a prisoner, and even at that tender age I realised how much I had always taken for granted until then.'

She nodded thoughtfully. 'So now you seize every opportunity for new experience that comes your way lest it pass you by?'

'It is more than that, and less,' he said. 'I cannot bear to feel enclosed by four walls, and that is what happens when I stop. Matilda, my wife… I love her dearly, but she is content to dwell within the four walls that I fear. For her they represent security, not imprisonment.'

'That is true, I think, of many women and men,' Sabina said. 'The women build nests to raise their children, and the men go out into the world.'

He laughed at first, but as he reflected on her words realised how true they were. 'But you did not remain behind when your husband took the Cross?' He phrased the words as a question.

'No,' she said. 'I followed him because I did not want him out of my sight. Besides, I had no nest to protect and no nestlings to nurture any more.' Abruptly she rose and retired to her small shelter. He heard the swish of the flap dropping, and knew that she had retreated because she was hurt and wanted to cry. For one wild moment he contemplated going after her to comfort her pain, but common sense pinned him down and the moment passed.

Sighing, Simon tossed more charcoal onto the flames. Recently, a small inner voice had been suggesting that he was a long way from home, and that Matilda had been right to suggest that the grass on the other side of the hill was not necessarily better just because it looked different. His mouth curved as he imagined her in her precious garden, surrounded by the damp, scented blooms of a northern summer. The letter he had written during their rest in Nicaea would not reach her until the leaves were turning to brown and the apples on her tree ripening a speckled red and gold. By the time she cut the seal, he might be in Jerusalem… or he might be dead. And all because he had to know what lay over the horizon.

To one side, four members of his troop were playing dice. He considered lecturing them about the profanity of their game but decided not to bother. They would only go behind his back. Even men filled with religious devotion needed their distractions.

He finished the wine and eased to his feet. A throbbing pain shot through his leg, making him gasp and swear.

'My lord?' One of the dice players raised his head, and eyed him anxiously.

'It is naught,' Simon said brusquely. 'Go back to your sport.' He limped to his own tent and ducked through the flap, waving away Turstan when the young man would have attended him. 'I need nothing else this night,' he said. 'Do whatever you wish.'

'Sir.' Turstan saluted and went to join the dice players.

Simon reached for his wineskin and took several long swallows of the dark Byzantine brew. Careful to avoid jolting his leg, he eased down onto his pallet and closed his eyes. The stuffing was made from several fleeces culled from the flocks that grazed on the fenland at his manor of Ryhall and suddenly it seemed to him that he was standing among the flocks, inhaling their ammoniac smell, and listening to their bleating as they grazed the rich summer meadow. His legs were sound and he went striding among them, seeking the path that ran towards the woods on the far side. The sheep scattered, bleating reproachfully, and he became aware of a figure standing on the edge of the woods, waiting for him. A tall man, copper-haired, blue-eyed, wearing a cloak with a white fur lining. His fist grasped a huge battleaxe, held in a way that said he was on guard but not about to strike. A red line, thin as scarlet thread, encircled his neck.