The Book of Love (28 page)

Matilda pushed. She had no choice. The pressure on her abdomen was beyond bearing, and with a strange popping sound and another searing pain, she felt the child move through the birth canal and into the hands of the waiting midwife.

It was too early, and they all knew it. There could be no happy out
come in this birthing chamber. Matilda was in shock and exhausted with pain and fear, but she was aware enough to care. She waited in the silence that followed as the elder midwife wiped the blood from the baby.

“A girl.” There was no emotion in the announcement. And then suddenly, unexpectedly, there was the slightest cooing sound in the chamber. Matilda sucked in her breath. Could it be? Did her child live? She tried to sit up, but the younger midwife held her back gently.

The elder, for all her coarseness with Matilda, was surprisingly delicate and tender with the newborn, massaging it gently and whispering to it all the while. She snapped at the younger woman, “Fetch the priest.”

Placing the baby on a fresh blanket of virgin wool, the old woman brought Matilda’s tiny daughter and placed her next to her mother in the bed.

“She lives,” the woman said, the emotion gone again from her words and demeanor, “but not for long. She is too small, and breathing too hard. She will die before the night is through. Before her father ever gets to see her alive.” This was a pointed condemnation. “You must give her a name so that the priest may baptize her and her soul does not get lost. A Christian name.” The emphasis on
Christian
was clear. The midwife would not have this witch condemning the duke’s child any further than she already had.

It took all her strength, but Matilda raised herself and lifted the tiny bundle into her arms. The baby was so small that she didn’t look real. She was perfect, even in miniature. There was no sign of her father’s congenital deformity. In fact, the one trait that Matilda recognized was her lovely mother’s cleft chin. And while there was just the slightest amount of hair on the baby’s head, she could see that it was a deep reddish color.

For an eternal moment, the child locked eyes with her, and Matilda was sure that the baby was really seeing her. It was brief, but there was an instant of intelligence and recognition, a glimpse of the soul of this child who had come here for such a brief period. In that one wrenching
moment they were connected, mother and daughter, and Matilda was certain that her heart would break. She had caused this tragedy, brought it on her precious, innocent child. May God forgive her.

The priest arrived quickly, Godfrey’s dour confessor who disapproved of Matilda at the best of times. He sprinkled holy water on the child with great haste, as if certain she would be dead within the next minute.

“Have you given her a Christian name?”

Matilda ran her finger over the baby’s dimpled chin. She nodded slightly.

“I have. I would call her Beatrice Magdalena.”

The priest looked disapproving but said nothing. He baptized the infant and gave her last rites in the same few breaths, a strange sacrament of life and death all at once. Then he left the room without a second look at Matilda.

Gathering her baby to her breast, Matilda rocked the infant against her body for the remainder of the little girl’s short life. She knew no lullabies, so the baby took her last breaths listening to her mother weep, in between verses of the only song that had ever comforted her. The one in French, about love.

Matilda was smothering. Something was over her face and she could not breathe. She struggled to get out from under it, but to no avail. Her assailant was stronger than she was, particularly in her current weakened condition. As she was on the verge of slipping into unconsciousness, she heard a man’s voice raised in alarm. There was a struggle in the bedchamber and shouting in German. Then the cushion was removed from her face.

Gasping for air, Matilda tried to make sense of the room in her dizzy state and through her blurred vision. The hunchback stood over her with a cushion in his hands, the intended instrument of her demise. But he was not her assailant. Against all odds, it appeared that Godfrey
was her rescuer. The murder attempt had come at the hands of the elder midwife, who was glaring at Matilda with hatred. The woman spat at her.

“Devil. Murdering witch. You killed that child just as surely as if you cut her throat.”

“Enough!” Godfrey would have to deal with the midwife later. He could not allow murder in his own bedchamber, even if it was considered justifiable, and most of his household would agree that it was. As the older woman stormed out the door, Godfrey approached his wife’s bed. Matilda attempted to speak, but the words would not come out.

The hunchback looked down at her, pitiless and full of hatred. “Do not thank me for saving you, woman. It was not for your damnable flesh that I did so. I will simply not endanger my own mortal soul for the sake of a female infant by permitting murder in my house.

“But you should know that if the child had been a boy…I would have allowed the midwife to kill you.”

She had to get out of here, immediately. Matilda was certain that as long as she stayed in Verdun, her life was in danger. Everyone in the household was loyal to the hunchback, and they all believed her to be a murdering witch who had intentionally killed his child. She had found that the younger midwife, Greta, was something of an ally, as the girl came in to check that she was recovering and bring her some bread dipped in watered wine. Matilda coerced the girl into talking, through a combination of guilt and bribery.

Greta informed Matilda that the whisperings in the household were that it was just as well that the baby died, as it had the same unholy red hair as her mother. No doubt she would have been a witch and a curse on their good duke. The danger to the duchess was immediate, however. It had been mentioned, more than once, that if Matilda were to
die in the next few days, it would be easy enough to say that it was from complications of childbirth. No one in the castle would argue the point, and Godfrey would inherit all her properties and be free to take a younger wife and start anew.

Matilda offered Greta a portion of her jewel chest if she would arrange a horse for her. As fate would have it, the girl’s brother was one of the stable hands, and a ruby necklace fit for a queen was payment enough for him to prepare a horse for Matilda.

In the dead of night, Matilda left the palace through the rear servants’ exit with only the clothes on her back and waited in the stable for the boy to come. Once the horse was prepared, she rode out into the night, praying that the moon was bright enough to light her way, and pacing herself so as not to repeat her fateful fall.

“I need to stay here, Matilda. Everything we built is at risk. The hunchback will not hurt me. He wouldn’t dare. I am a monk, and this is a house of God. Remember, he has no idea what you are really creating here, and neither does anyone else. To the rest of Lorraine, we are simply building the most beautiful monastery in Northern Europe. That is a feather in Godfrey’s cap.”

Matilda nodded, praying this was true. She wanted Patricio to stay here in Orval, to finish the work, to complete the construction on their grand vision, which was coming to life in such a magnificent way. She had long since transferred all the funds into the abbey’s coffers, which Patricio controlled, so that Godfrey couldn’t halt the flow of money or their progress. But she was concerned that her husband would attempt to harm Patricio in some other way, as retaliation for what he believed was compliance in her treachery.

“My greater concern is what happens now. You have to get out of Lorraine immediately, but you cannot ride across the Alps as a woman alone.”

“No. But my mother has relations here, outside Stenay. A cousin. I
will go to her and tell her what has happened. From there, I will send a messenger to Tuscany and ask that they send a guard to escort me home.”

“Can you trust this relation of your mother’s?”

“I have never met her, but she is a duchess in her own right and one who has had to defy Henry on more than one occasion. So we have much in common, I think. I hope. But the truth of the matter is, I have no other choice, do I?”

“No. Godspeed, sister. And contact me as soon as you can. From now on we will have to use the Sator Rotas code for our communication.”

The Master had taught them a cryptic for encoded messages when they were children. The code had existed from the earliest days of Christianity in Rome, when certain violent death awaited anyone discovered to be a practicing Christian. It was through the cryptic that the earliest converts had been able to communicate in secret. For the young Matilda and Patricio, it had been like a great game, sending notes back and forth in the strange sequence of letters and numbers that occurred within the magic square. Now it would be employed once again in the serious business of preserving true Christianity and securing Matilda’s safety.

“God takes care of his own.”

The Master had said this to her on many occasions, and she had known it to be true throughout her life. When Matilda was in the direst need of divine assistance, it always arrived for her. On this occasion, the divine will manifested in the person of her mother’s cousin, Giselda, who had been named for the queen who raised Beatrice when she was orphaned. It appeared that strength and grace followed this name within their family. An eccentric, educated woman, it happened that this Giselda was disgusted and outraged by both the licentious reputation and the acquisitive nature of Henry IV, who had encroached upon
her own hereditary territories a few too many times. She was herself a direct descendant of Charlemagne who deserved better treatment than she was receiving at the hands of this decadent upstart, king or not.

Matilda’s arrival on her doorstep was a godsend, and before long the two women had formed a conspirational bond. Matilda pledged support from Tuscany when and if it was needed to protect Giselda’s territories, and the woman had, in turn, provided luxurious accommodation, competent doctors, and enjoyable company. She had also dispatched her most efficient messenger to Mantua.

It took weeks for the Tuscan retinue to arrive in Lorraine, giving Matilda much-needed time to heal. She tried, through prayer and spiritual practice, to work through the grief of her loss, the wrenching guilt, and the trauma of the hateful, nightmarish aftermath in Verdun. Giselda’s sympathetic ear and the peace of safe solitude nourished Matilda’s soul with new strength, while expert physicians helped her body to mend before she attempted crossing the Alps with winter approaching.

By the time the Tuscans were sighted, the sun shining off the ginger hair of the giant on horseback who had come to see her safely home, Matilda was ready for the journey.

A letter arrived from Patricio, carried by a messenger from a Benedictine monastery, the following day as Matilda and her Tuscan escort were preparing to depart for home. Written in the cryptic, it was a plea of desperation that required some deciphering. Matilda sat down and drew out the cryptic, determined to remember how precisely the letters were converted to numbers and then back again into letters to create a cohesive message:

Matilda was seething. She was also stunned. It had not occurred to her that Godfrey would want her back after what had transpired. She certainly hadn’t anticipated his attempting to blackmail her in such a fashion. She requested parchment and ink from Giselda and began composing her replies, both to Patricio and to the hunchback. The advantage of having such an exemplary education and intellect was that Matilda never had to wait for a scribe. She wrote the majority of her own correspondence and took great pleasure in doing so, particularly when she was able to express herself as she was today.

The first letter provided the catharsis. She injected the words with her outrage.

She signed the letter in the unabashed strokes of her boldest signature: Matilda, by the Grace of God Who Is, embedded in a cross and followed by the glyphs of Pisces and Aries, which had become her signatory emblems as the Christian daughter of the equinox prophecy. She was no longer acting in a charade for the hunchback, or for anyone. She would stand in the full glory of her identity and take back what was rightfully hers and under her protection. From that day forward, Matilda would use this radical statement of a signature to indicate that she was entitled to all she had by the grace of God, as his chosen child. She required no further acknowledgment, neither from husband nor from king, to claim and keep all that had been given her.