Winter Siege (9 page)

‘Missed the artery, but the barb went in deep,’ Lady Morgana said cheerfully. ‘I had to cut it out. That’s one mercenary not likely to use a bow again. Nor wield a sword, either. God’s judgement, that is.’ (Stang – a Tewing man through and through – had been little more popular with the ladies of the castle than his master.)

‘Did you tell him so?’

‘He knows.’

He did know it; always taciturn, his thin face had become bleak from pain and a future that no longer welcomed him – an incapacitated mercenary
had
no future. The act of courage he’d shown on the allure had served him badly.

If she’d disliked the man and his profession less, Maud might have felt sorry for him; as it was, she merely took his condition into her calculations. By default, Stang was now the Brabançons’ leader; his despair and the bribe she was going to offer him gave her a better chance of procuring his co-operation in getting them to lay down their arms.

Nevertheless, she was surprised at how simple it was; she’d expected him to show more loyalty to the cause that Sir John had espoused.

‘You do understand?’ she asked, in case the medicinal brandy in which Lady Morgana had soused him was confusing his wits. ‘I will ensure that the Fleming allows your men to march out of here in safety and with honour.’

‘Honour?’ His voice was flat. ‘Hell with honour, they’ll want pay. Make him agree to take ’em into his army. Only way.’

‘Will he do that?’

‘Yep. Good men, our men. Lucky to have ’em.’

‘And
they’ll
agree? They’ll switch allegiance just like that?’

Stang nodded. Apparently, mercenaries turned their coats for money as easily as they changed horses. He sneered back at the sneer on her face: ‘Lady, ain’t that what you’re doing? How’s your poor bloody husband?’ Then he shrugged. ‘Now, where’s that property that’s going to set me up for life?’

Sir Bernard and his scribe were sent for to bring the appropriate documents, and within minutes the Normandy manor of Saissons, near Caen, with its water mill, land for 4 ploughs, 36 acres of meadow, woodland 3 furlongs in length and 3 furlongs plus 10 perches in breadth, 4 freeholds, 8 villeins and 2 bordars, passed from Maud’s ownership into the mercenary’s.

‘I am not happy about this,’ Sir Bernard told her. The fact that he said it in English, his native tongue, one he both despised and rarely used, showed how unhappy he was.

‘The fellow is base, and this is good land. Not happy at all.’

‘Well, I am,’ Maud said. Actually, it wasn’t
that
good. She’d visited it on her travels round her far-flung estates. Saissons looked better on parchment that it did in reality; its meadows flooded, the woodland yielded little beechmast on which to feed pigs, and its villeins were sullen pains in the backside.

It was no great loss, but Maud saw no reason to say so.

As Stang held out his good hand for the documents, she snatched them away. ‘When the job’s done.’ She frowned. ‘How
is
it done? Do we put up a white flag?’

Grinding like the mills of Hell, the drawbridge went down and conjoined with its span on the opposite side. The portcullis screeched as it was pulled up. Maud’s herald, young Payn Fitzgilbert, in Kenniford blue and silver livery, with servants behind him carrying a trestle table and two chairs, advanced to meet the enemy’s much shabbier representative in the bridge’s middle and arrange a truce for the parley.

Maud waited for his signal in the shadow of the gatehouse, listening hard as Sir Bernard listed the terms she must ask for.

Both he and Stang were to go with her, as was Sir Rollo, but Maud had made it clear that she was to do the main negotiating: ‘
I
am the chatelaine.’

From all her women, she’d chosen Cousin Lynessa to go with her for propriety’s sake. A nun on leave from Godstow convent, to which Maud was a generous benefactor, Lynessa looked the ultimate in gravitas; the fact that she twittered with sentimentality as much as Father Nimbus and was prone to hysteria would not be apparent as long as she didn’t speak.

Maud had dressed for maturity in the purple bliaut, hair invisible under a sober veil and circlet, with her black velvet cloak clasped at the throat by plain black frogging. No jewellery. After all, she was as good as a widow now; whether she could elicit the Fleming’s sympathy remained to be seen but, if it played to her advantage, there was no harm in trying to get it.

Fitzgilbert’s trumpet sounded. Maud took a deep breath and marched out on to the bridge into the sunshine of a warm, late afternoon, her party behind her.

From below, on their steps, her villagers gave her a cheer. There was silence from the ramparts where the white flag flew and Brabançons sullenly lined the allure, their bows ready in case of enemy treachery.

The table had been set up in the middle of the bridge, the two chairs facing each other across it. The tall Fleming stood on its far side with two men behind him, one of them of proportions that would have dwarfed Milburga’s.

He bowed to Maud – ‘My lady of Kenniford’ – and gestured to one of the chairs, inviting her to take it. She gestured back; he should sit first; it was
her
table and
her
damn bridge.

He sat. She remained standing. ‘Before anything is agreed between us, Master Ghent,’ she said, ‘my stepson must be restored to me. Where is he?’

He got to his feet, put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. Immediately, a group of men on the Crowmarsh bank parted and a small figure stepped on to the far side of the bridge, and stopped.

Maud wanted to wave, but didn’t. ‘Eagerness is to be avoided,’ Sir Bernard had said. ‘It gives the enemy advantage. Lamentable it may have been, but Sir John’s attitude towards his son was on the right lines.’

‘Restored, I said,’ Matilda told the Fleming.

He was abrupt. ‘And I say a hostage.’

First blood to Alan of Ghent.

Once again, he indicated, politely, that Maud should sit.

Once again, she refused. ‘Not while my lady cousin is forced to stand.’

It was a ploy. She could have sent three chairs out on to the bridge but making the enemy provide one or otherwise appear discourteous was a move that put him in an inferior position.

While they waited for one of the Fleming’s men to fetch the chair for Lynessa, Ghent extended his condolences: ‘I hear your husband has been taken ill, my lady. I am sorry for it.’

‘I thank you.’ She was cold.

‘Just how ill
is
he?’

A departure from formality. With something like patronizing amusement, as if dealing with a child speaking for its parents. An attempt to undermine her in case she was undermining Sir John. Asking if she, a mere woman, was in charge, and whether any treaty would be nullified if her husband regained his strength.

Which, Maud had to admit, was the case, but it was still an insult.

It’s my damn castle
, she wanted to shout at him. Instead, she was icy. ‘That is none of your business,’ she said. ‘It is sufficient for you to know that his position has devolved upon me.’

She knew now why mercenaries unnerved her, not only because they were dangerous in themselves but because they were outside the only system on which her society,
real
society, was built, whereby everybody owed duty to somebody under feudal law, just as her tenants, free and unfree, her knights, her manor-holders had to pay her in various taxes and service, just as she, their tenant-in-chief, had to render taxes and service to the ultimate earthly authority, the King. Mercenaries were detached from the only mechanism that gave order to the world; they floated free of all responsibility except to those who paid them, like disgusting flies sucking at a sweetness to which they had not contributed.

That was why Maud did not see Alan of Ghent then. He was a representative shape to her. His Norman French was excellent but with a strong glottal catch that, to Maud’s ear, reduced it to the speech of a peasant. Nor did she recognize the long, carved lines of the man’s face and his intelligent, penetrating eyes as in any way individual; she saw only a tall figure that was repulsive and threatening, that hadn’t shaved in three days; another Stang, someone with whom, in better circumstances, it would have been beneath her dignity to converse on equal terms.

‘My people and I are prepared to acknowledge the lady Empress Matilda—’ she began.

‘Now that she has won the war,’ the mercenary pointed out, pleasantly.

I don’t care who won the bloody war, I wasn’t for Stephen, I wasn’t for anybody, I was forced into an allegiance by a forced marriage.

She went on: ‘… to recognize her as our sovereign to whom we owe our fealty.’

‘And so say all of you?’

Yes, blast you, because the only man who would say differently lies dribbling in his bed. How to put it?
‘All of us who are competent to say it,’ she told him.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I see.’

There
. She’d satisfied him because she’d had to, betrayed a sick and hateful husband to a man whom she hated more for forcing her to do it.

The mercenary raised his head to look at Stang. ‘And you? Do you and your men subscribe to this new allegiance?’

She was furious. Was she to spend her life as a child while men arranged matters over her head? ‘
I
speak for Master Stang,’ she said, ‘and, yes, he is willing to surrender to you as long as he and his men are allowed to do so honourably and without reprisals.’

‘And will Master Stang and his men fight alongside me for the Empress?’ Again that hint of amusement.

‘I undertake that they will,’ she said bitterly, ‘as long as you pay them for it.’

‘Oh, I shall. Nobody but a fool fights except for money.’

Base. It’s the only word for the lot of them.
‘So I understand,’ she said and hoped he heard the disdain in her voice.

Two Bibles were sent for, one Maud’s own, beautiful and gold-chased, the mercenary’s a battered thing that smelled of sweat and campfires. She had to place her hand on both as she swore before God her allegiance to the now Lady of England – the Empress’s title until her actual coronation – and future queen.

In the silence while she did it, she heard two blackbirds singing in the trees on the Crowmarsh bank, and sighed with relief.
I shall keep this vow, Lord, because You have sent me a lucky sign to tell me I must.

She flapped her hand at Sir Bernard to take over; her part was done, though she was going to stay and make sure the minutiae of the treaty didn’t cost her too much.

If she’d hoped – which she had, though without much expectation – that the whole boiling lot would now go away and leave Kenniford in peace, she was disappointed. Until things were settled and any barons still ready to fight for the imprisoned Stephen were defeated, her castle must be garrisoned by some of Ghent’s men.

Indeed, for a week, she must feed and pay all of them, Flemings and Brabançons.

She sat up. ‘All of you. A
week
?’

‘My men have marched fast and fought hard since Lincoln, lady. They need rest. Also, as I understand it, when Master Stang and his Brabançons vacate your castle, they become my dependants.’ He reverted to informality again. ‘And
I’m
not damn well paying them. Or feeding them.’ He turned to Sir Bernard: ‘Twopence a day per man, sixpence for my officers, a shilling for myself, two hundred beeves, four hundred sheep, a thousand capons, two hundred casks of ale …’

‘
What?
’ Maud’s shriek silenced the blackbirds.

‘A penny a day, threepence and ninepence,’ Sir Bernard said quickly, ‘ninety beeves, one hundred and fifty sheep, five hundred capons, thirty tuns of ale …’

Even that was too much for a load of blackguards. ‘Will you ruin me?’ Maud moaned.

The Fleming turned round in his chair and gestured for William to be taken back to the enemy encampment. Facing front again, he said: ‘And forty sack of grain, white for me and my officers, rye for the men
with
vegetables – I must consider their bowels.’

He’d winked. The bastard had winked at her.
I’ll consider your bowels, put on a spit and roasted
.

Sir Bernard upped his figures slightly; Ghent lowered his not at all.

Sir Bernard threw in inducements: the officers to be entertained in the castle, with feasting, but only for three days. ‘After all, the war is as good as finished.’

‘Not over yet.
Seven
days. And twenty ells of good worsted cloth, plus woollen hose.’ He looked sadly at a tear in the stocking just above his right boot.

‘And lace-fringed kerchiefs, I suppose,’ Maud said.

‘That would be nice.’

She withheld comment after that; irony was lost on the pig.

It went on and on. The sun descended behind the castle, the villagers meandered back to their cottages, blackbirds stopped singing, leaving the dusk to nightingales. Fires were lit on the river’s opposite shore, their glow reflected in the water. Maud looked for William, but couldn’t see him. She nudged Cousin Lynessa sharply. The nun had her elbows on the table, her chin cupped in her hands, and was hanging on Ghent’s every word as if he were spouting psalms rather than theft.

At last, settlement was reached and the Bibles once more employed, Maud vowing on hers grudgingly; Sir Bernard had done what he could, but it would be a thin winter at Kenniford now.

The mercenary nodded towards his end of the bridge, and William came trotting towards her. She stood up to hug him, and walked off with him without a word of farewell to Ghent, or to Stang who was joining the Flemings’ camp across the river. ‘Did they hurt you?’

‘No. Master Ghent said he was only going to pretend to hang me and I wasn’t to be afraid, so I wasn’t. We played conkers and I won. Is Father all right?’

‘Not well, darling, I’m afraid. Skip off and see him, but let Milburga feed you first.’

As the boy ran ahead, Lynessa, Sir Rollo and Sir Bernard caught up with her. ‘It went well,’ the steward said. ‘He was not unreasonable; it could have cost us a lot more.’