Black Pearls (20 page)

By the time I arrived at old Ædre's house, news of my ride had already reached her. She rushed to wrap me in a rough woolen cloak before I had set both feet on the ground. "Here, my lady," she said, far more embarrassed than I. "You must not show yourself like this." She put her arms around me and helped me into the house, as if my nakedness had somehow made me infirm.

I had ridden there in the heat of passion, filled with indignation. I had not cared who stared or gawked as the horse and I made our way along. Now, with the rude cloak thrown over me, I was suddenly ashamed. I had never set foot inside any of the villagers' homes, and this one was humbler than I could ever have guessed. The floor was tamped earth, and a chicken roused itself from one corner to meet us and peck boldly at my bare toes. The room was filled with sweat and heat. Behind a blanket hung from the rafters, I heard a woman scream. She moaned, then screamed again, and I knew it must be young Fride in the pangs of birth.

I had seen her in town, a strong-limbed, laughing girl who sold her grandmother's honey at market. Now, if the talk that had spread from town to castle, from gardener to cook, and finally to my own lady in waiting was true, this girl was giving birth to the Earl of Mercia's babe.

When yet another scream pierced us, Ædre bade me sit by the fire while she tended her granddaughter. "Aiiiiyeee," the girl wailed. And "There now," soothed Ædre. "It will not be long."

As I listened, memories filled my head and heart, memories I did not want in either place. Busying myself, I spat out the cloth bag I had hidden in my mouth. It looked like nothing, a tiny package wrapped in muslin. But when I untied the string and the square of fabric fell open on my palm, the ten gems in its center sparkled like stars.

"It hurts, Eldmoder! It hurts!" With Fride's cries, the time of my own first birth came rushing back. As I watched the shadows on the other side of the blanket, the old woman stooping to where the young one lay, I saw again the face of the midwife who had caught my daughter from the birthing chair. She'd held my babe in both hands, her forehead gleaming with sweat and her voice cracked with weariness. "There's no crying," she had said. "'Tis not a good sign."

"No, please," Fride yelled again from across the room. "Oh, no!" Though I felt little love for the girl, I could not help but smile. How young she was! How little she knew of real pain.

"See?" Ædre's voice was patient, firm. "See how it stops for a bit?" Her shadow on the blanket raised itself to a standing position, and she sighed an old woman's sigh. "Here, now. Take some water, girl. Rest while you are able."

But still the screams went on. "Oh, by Mary's bones! I cannot take more! I cannot!"

While the girl carried on in this way, I bethought me to remove the other bag of gems I'd hidden. I reached under the cloak with which the old woman had covered me and felt inside my own body. That is how, as Fride gave birth with groans and plaints, I delivered a much smaller bundle in the wink of an eye with only two fingers.

"Aiyeee!" The wailing came again and then, abruptly, ceased.

"There she is, by the Lord's mercy." I could hear the old woman's smile in the light new cast of her voice. And I could also hear what I'd yearned for years before—the lusty, outraged squall of a newborn babe. "You've a daughter, Fride. And a long-legged lass by the looks of her."

A daughter! My knees weakened and I sank to a settle by the hearth. Beyond this bench and the table beside it, there was no furniture in the room.

I heard straw shift behind the blanket. As Fride stirred and sat up, I closed my eyes against the shadow picture I knew must come next—the babe in her mother's arms.

"Here, now, you hold her. She'll find no milk in these old teats." Ædre laughed as the babe cried, then clucked with approval as it quieted. "Ay, she's a hungry one, is she not?"

The things I did not want to remember, the hurt I'd laid to rest, came rushing back. I saw again my little Nayla, felt the milk pressing like a flood inside me as the midwife put her to suck. What joy when her tiny mouth at last had closed round me, what despair when it opened again and all the milk spilled out.

Fride, her trials over, was laughing, cooing at her child. "Look, Eldmoder," she said. "She has small feet like yours!"

"They are all small to start," the old woman said, then softened. "See how she looks at you, girl. 'Tis enough to make you fall in love up to your ears."

More rustling in the straw, more settling sounds. "And what name shall we call her, Grandmother?" the girl asked.

Ædre stood upright again, her hands on her waist. "Why, your dear mother's name, I think. Ebba is a good sound, eh?"

"Yes!" Fride bent to the little one in her lap. "You will be named for the incoming tide, little one," she whispered. "You will always come home."

How different it had been with my lost babe: I had already chosen her name, but I could not hold her gaze, nor make her take my finger in her hand. Even when I propped her against my knees and lifted her head to my face, her cloudy eyes fell away from mine.

When Ædre had made the new mother comfortable and returned at last to me, I pressed the jewels I had brought with me into her hands. She looked at me as though I had come to her with Moses' tablets or placed a phoenix egg in her keeping. "What be this, lady?" she asked. "What be this?" Though her eyes could plainly tell what she held: pearls, rubies, sapphires, and an emerald as big as a walnut.

I closed her trembling fingers around the stones. "This be, good dame, your great-granddaughter's dower." As the foolish woman continued staring first at me, then at the fistful of twinkling gems, I pointed behind her to the blanket. "You surely know, as does the whole of Coventry, that the child Mistress Fride nurses not three paces from where we stand was fathered by my lord. You know, too, he may not own this babe. 'Twould not befit his title or his state to visit, to dandle her on his knee."

Once again, the dame was more embarrassed than I. She tried to throw her words, cloak-like, over this new nakedness. "You need not have come here, good madam," she said. "You need not have lowered yourself this way."

"Indeed?" I asked, again gesturing to the pair behind the blanket. "And hath not my husband already lowered himself?" Fride was barely fourteen years old and Leofric nearly forty. The girl knew nothing beyond Coventry's fields and farms; my husband was the confidant of kings and the leader of armies; armies that had laid waste whole villages, had left for dead mothers and babes.

"Men may have their way with poor lasses, madam," Ædre told me now. "'Tis the same as ever it has been. But—"

"But this shall be an end to it. These jewels will take care of the babe, better far than any father in this village could."

"We are to keep these, then?"

I was, of a sudden, angry—at the woman's thick peasant's face, at the way she continued to question her good fortune. And yes, at the picture this place had brought back: my Nayla, her lips wine-dark, her skin as white as the christening dress in which she was buried. "Do what you will with the stones," I snapped. "You may feed them to this chicken, for all I care." I stumbled over the fowl's plump body and strode to the door. "I will not come again." Leofric had been right, after all—this house, this babe, were nothing to me.

Still wrapped in the tattered garment my poor host had lent me, I set off on Felicity once more. I confess I hardly watched where I rode or cared who looked on us. The passion that had sustained me during my ride to town succumbed now to an exhaustion that overwhelmed my body and spirit. My horse walked on without my lifting the reins or digging my heels in her sides. As I yielded to an old sorrow, Felicity picked her way down the hill on which the village sat and headed toward the river Cune. I saw nothing around us, only Nayla's curled hands, her small body, the coffin fit for a doll. That tiny box had been covered over with a single shovelful of earth. In one stroke, my girl vanished, my daughter, my hope.

I already knew, then, what it was to lose everything at once. Perhaps this is why that very morning I had willingly left all I owned behind. When I told him what I planned, Leofric had refused to own the babe and bade me bring no thing of his to Fride's house.

"I shall not be part of this madness." My husband's color always rose when he was ill at ease. Now, despite his righteous words, his face and neck were all aflame. "You shall not drag me and my good name to perdition for your woman's pride."

"Forgive me, my lord," I had told him. "You mistake me. My mission in Coventry is not to punish, but to atone."

"'Mission'?" he had thundered. "'Atone'?" He followed me to my chambers, and there set his mighty frame against the door to block my way. "You sound like a very nun! Who are you to mount a mission on my behalf? To proclaim my guilt when I my self have not done so?"

"You have not denied it, sire." Nor can you, I might have added. I knew full well where he went when I turned him from my bed, when Nayla's cloud eyes haunted me and I dared not risk another babe.

"I have no need to account to gossips for my conduct."

I searched the countenance I knew as well as my own. "If not to gossips, Leofric," I asked, "then why not to your wife?"

He did not answer but, shamed, turned aside to let me pass. "Take naught of mine," he ordered as I pulled fast my chamber door. Not content with this, he pounded on the door until it shook and set to bellowing again. "Take naught of mine, I tell you. If you go, you go without my blessing or my purse."

He had thought sure to thwart me in this way, but my temper got the best of me. I opened the door when I should have bolted it, and I made a promise when I should have kept silent. "My liege," I told him, feeling my own blood rush to my face, "I will obey you in this, as in all. You have my word that I will ride to Coventry with nothing that is yours. And because everything I have is yours, I will ride with nothing at all."

Which is how it came to pass that when I set forth a few minutes later, I left behind every stitch of clothing, every bauble and cloak my husband had ever given me. And true to my word, I took with me nothing that he owned, only what was due his child. The gems, after all, were not Leofric's. His troops had plundered them at the siege of Worcester, and he planned to make a gift of them to the church in Evesham. They were intended for God's sweet children, and, I reasoned, his new babe could surely be counted among those.

As I saddled Felicity, then, I wore only what I had been born with. And just as I knew he would, my husband chased after me, swearing oaths. "By Christ's nails!" I heard his boots against the stable door, saw the dust whirl up, tiny armies scrambling in the beam of light he had let in. "Go, then!" he said, loud enough to startle the other horses in their stalls. "Give alms where none are sought." He stepped out of Felicity's path as I backed her from her pen. "None is sought and none, I tell you, is deserved."

But if he had been full of oaths and temper when he stormed into the stable, he fell utterly silent when he saw me now. His face wore the look of someone who has walked into the path of a coiled snake, a danger with which he has not reckoned. Yet this was a danger with milk-white shoulders and breasts only half hidden by the hair that fell around me. The countenance he raised to mine reflected alarm and lust in equal measure.

I rode past him to the stable door, but still he would not, or could not, speak. I reined the horse just outside and waited there. But my lord was paralyzed as well as dumb. He did not move, only stared and stared.

Because my mouth was stopped with jewels, I, too, must needs say nothing. A rare pair we were, then, a husband and wife with no words for each other. Just before I turned my horse, it seemed to me Leofric thought to speak. He raised one hand, and in his eyes was something like regret. But, the moment passed, he lowered his hand and I pulled Felicity's head around and rode off.

Now, as I left the village behind and the road gave way to a dusty trail, I, too, felt regret. Not for my rash rebellion that morning, or for the gift I had given old Ædre. What weighed on me like a stone, though, was the chance I had just renounced. What harm, I asked myself as I rode away from that poor hut, could it have done to hold the babe, to search for a trace of her father in her tiny face?

But I did not turn around. Hadn't I just told the old woman I would not visit again? On what pretext could I go back now? Yet as we neared the river, my arms ached for what they had not held and my eyes wept for what they had not seen. Two names chimed together in my heart:
Nayla,
with each beat of the horse's hooves.
Ebba,
with each step away from Coventry.

Felicity's nicker of surprise put an end to my pitiable musings. When she pulled short and refused to move further, I looked up to find that the bridge by which we'd come was washed away. The river, chuckling and babbling like a child under the fallen timbers, hardly seemed strong enough to have done such damage. Perhaps thieves or villains had contrived to knock down the bridge and foil those pursuing them. Had not Leofric himself used that very trick outside of Worcester?

My horse, after her initial startle, did not seem much perturbed. She ambled to the shore and, as if she knew no harm could come from the sun-dappled stream, put down her head to drink.

There was no other way across, and I decided, too, to trust the river. "What say you, madam?" I asked her. "Do you fancy a swim in the Cune?"

Apparently she did, for when she'd finished her drink and I had got down from her back, Felicity pulled ahead impatiently. I hiked up my cloak, held her bridle fast, and the two of us started across. The water was cold, not icy, and to own the truth, I felt at first like John the Baptist or one of the old holies. Walking up to my ankles and then to my waist in the chilly stream, I pictured my violent emotions, my pride, even my intemperate weakness for corduroy and lace, being washed away.

We had not gone ten steps, though, before the water's chuckle grew to a roar. I watched branches and then a whole tree float past us. I spied a heron flying above a weedy nest caught in the stream. The bird swooped low, calling and calling to the fledglings trapped inside. When the water reached my breast and my wet cloak threatened to pull me down, I tried to turn back the way we had come. But the current battled me so fiercely, I was forced to cling to my horse and let her carry me ahead.