The Love Knot (28 page)

'I won't, I swear I won't,' Catrin said in a frantic attempt to calm Ethel's agitation. The old woman fought to breathe, her chest rattling, her grip like a bird's claw.

The priest arrived at a run and, taking one look at Ethel, set about the task of shriving with unprecedented speed, his Latin gabbled so swiftly that even another priest would have been hard pressed to understand him.

Even as he pronounced 'amen' Ethel slumped against Catrin, the holy oil trickling down her brow and sliding across one withered cheek like a tear.

Catrin held the old woman close, her head bowed against the wasted body, her nostrils filled with odours of incense, horehound and death. Agatha sobbed through her praying hands and the priest murmured softly, the Latin words offering the comfort of ritual.

Catrin heard the sounds but they had no meaning. Relinquishing her hold, she crossed Ethel's arms upon her breast and drew up the coverlet. The body was so hot with fever that it still bore the illusion of life. Ethel might only have been asleep was it not for the stillness of her chest. 'I will do what has to be done,' Catrin told the priest, her voice calm and practical.

'I'll help you too, Mistress,' Agatha snuffled. 'She were a good friend to me, God bless her soul.'

With a wordless nod, Catrin turned away and stepped outside to inhale the respite of the sharp February dusk. Light glimmered on the puddles in the dips of the bailey floor, and breath rose in curlicues of steam from a pen of sheep against one of the walls. Unseen, someone was whistling as they hammered at a task. It was all so ordinary, so unchanged from the morning, but now everything was different, distorted as if seen through thick green window glass.

The evening tranquillity was shattered as a courier rode in at the gallop, his tired horse splashing through the puddles, breaking the light on their surface, before staggering to a halt not far from Ethel's shelter. A groom came running to take the bridle, and Catrin found herself squinting at the animal in the poor light to see if it was the bay from Ethel's vision. Later she was to take herself to task, but at the time grief made sense of her action.

'Victory!' the messenger announced to the groom as he flung down from the saddle. 'Lincoln is ours and King Stephen taken prisoner. There was a pitched battle and we broke his army like straws in the wind!' Slapping the groom on the shoulder, the messenger ran on towards the keep.

Catrin gazed after him, his words ringing in her head without being absorbed. It was too much, too great a swing of emotion to encompass. All that she could salvage was that, as Ethel had predicted, Oliver would be returning, but the joy was marred.

'Why couldn't you have waited?' she said over her shoulder in the direction of Ethel's dwelling, and was so appalled at the anger she felt that she was immediately contrite. 'I didn't mean it, I'm sorry,' she whispered, and knew that even in opening her mouth she had told a lie. She did mean it, deny it as she might. 'Tell me how I am to be guided now,' she demanded, raising her face to the drizzly evening sky. Tears stung her eyes, brimmed and spilled, and she began to weep.

It was late in the morning when Oliver was fetched from guard duty and brought to the castle's chapel to identify Gawin's body.

'I told him to stay close, but he strayed off into a house on his own and was murdered by a citizen who had stayed to guard his hoard.' Randal de Mohun spread his hands in a gesture that absolved himself of all blame.

Oliver chewed the inside of his mouth. In the smallest corner at the back of his mind he had been expecting something like this to happen. He looked at Gawin's lifeless body with sorrow and anger but without disbelief. 'Where did this happen?'

'On the hill down from the Minster. The house is a ruin now. A spark from another roof caught the thatch and it went up so fast I only just got out alive.' De Mohun showed Oliver a patch of burned, blistered skin on the back of his right hand, and the charred cuff of his tunic. 'Don't look at me like that, I'm not a nursemaid. You should be grateful that I brought his corpse out of the accursed place instead of leaving him to burn!'

Oliver stared at Gawin's grey flesh, at the ugly slash in his throat that had bled his life away. 'I am damning your hide for ever taking him with you,' he said icily. 'And damning mine for ever allowing him to go.'

'Go swive a sheep, Pascal!' de Mohun retorted, curling his fists around his belt. 'He was seasoned enough to know the risks!'

Oliver looked from Gawin's torn throat to de Mohun's wolf-narrow eyes. 'I wonder if he was.'

'Hah, he's dead. There's no point in wondering, unless you want to bleed too. He took a chance, he died, God rest his purblind soul!' Turning on his heel, de Mohun stalked out of the chapel without even pausing to light a candle.

Staring in his wake, Oliver silently absolved himself of the debt he owed to Randal de Mohun. He did not think that Gawin's 'purblind' soul was going to rest easy with the end that his mortal body had received.

The fire was low, just the faintest glimmer of red to lend warmth to the midnight hour. In the dwelling that had been Ethel's, Catrin and Oliver lay entwined, savouring each other's body heat, the presence of living flesh joyfully confirmed in the act of love.

'I feared for you,' Catrin admitted, and ran her fingers through the dusting of ruddy-gold hair on his chest. 'Ethel had some very strange visions in her last days. She swore that you were safe but I was afraid to believe her because she told me other things that made no sense.'

She felt him shrug. 'You say that she had a fever. Belike she was wandering through her dreams.'

'Yes,' Catrin said dubiously, but more to agree with him than out of any conviction of her own. 'Yet she did tell me that you would return, and with a crown shining above you, and she was right. When I saw you ride into the bailey, you were part of the guard escorting King Stephen, and because he is a captive, Mathilda will be Queen.'

He gave a non-committal grunt. 'I can remember that when I was a child, some of the women would ask her to scry for them, but I always thought that it was nonsense - like her weaving of the knots. I'm sure that she gave good advice, but I think it was wisdom rather than premonition.' He angled his head to look at her. 'What else did she see?'

'That is the quandary: I do not know.' Frowning, Catrin told him about Ethel's warning concerning a bay horse, darkness and water. 'But what she saw, she did not say . . . could not, for she was dying.'

He stroked her arm and was silent for a time. 'More than half the soldiers in Earl Robert's pay ride bay horses -Geoffrey FitzMar for a start. I cannot imagine him being a threat to you.'

Catrin pressed close to him, absorbing the comfort of his smell, the warmth of his body. 'No,' she murmured against his skin. 'My mind tells me that I am being foolish, but there has been so much death and wanton destruction of late that I cannot help but jump at shadows.' She tightened her fingers in his chest hair until he flinched and hissed.

'The only wanton destruction here is what you are doing to me,' he said. His tone was tender rather than playful, and he lifted her hand from his breast and kissed the fingertips. 'Sometimes good can come out of the worst happenings. If not for the raid that destroyed Penfoss, we would not be lying together now, would we?'

'No,' Catrin admitted, and nuzzled him. 'But I cannot see the good in losing Ethel, or in what happened to Rohese and Gawin.'

Oliver was silent for a moment, pondering. Then he sighed. 'As to Ethel, it was her time, I think,' he said. 'I can count upon the fingers of one hand the people I know who have reached three score and ten, and she was older than that. Rohese and Gawin . . . well, perhaps you are right. Only time will tell and, if it doesn't, at least it will heal.'

Catrin tasted the salt on his skin with the tip of her tongue and thought how much she had missed him. 'Yes, perhaps,' she conceded, and thrust from her mind the image of the white, rotting body on the wharfside.

'It doesn't matter what Ethel saw, or at least it doesn't matter now, immediately . . . does it?' He circled her palm with the forefinger of his other hand and stroked a slow trail up the soft flesh of her inner arm.

'No,' Catrin replied with a sensuous shiver, adding with forced determination, 'You are right, it doesn't matter now.'

'Will your family lands soon be restored?' Catrin asked. They were still in bed, sharing a cup of mead while the dawn brightened in the East.

Oliver raised himself up on his elbows to take the cup from her. 'I hope so, but I do not believe that it will be much before the summer. Despite Stephen's capture, the Fleming who holds Ashbury has not submitted to the Empress. It may be that I will have to fight for them yet.'

'But with Stephen a prisoner, surely the war is almost at an end?' Catrin protested.

He sighed. 'I would hope so, but it is not as simple as it first appears. Stephen might be a prisoner, but that does not mean that his supporters will kneel to the Empress. If they yield, they stand to lose the lands and the powers that they have enjoyed under his rule. Mathilda does not know the meaning of forgiveness or compromise. She will not let men submit with their pride intact; she will expect nothing less than abject surrender.'

Hearing the censure and distaste in his voice, Catrin was moved to ask, 'Then why do you support her at all?'

'Not her, but her cause. My family swore allegiance to the Empress as King Henry's heir, and I gave my oath of my own free will to Robert of Gloucester. I am bound by my honour to serve them.'

'Bound in knots by the sound of matters,' Catrin said a trifle acidly, having no bias either way. She wished both sides to perdition.

'When my brother rebelled against Stephen, his lands were taken by force of arms. I own nothing, except by Earl Robert's grace. If that be a knot, then I unravel it to my own impoverishment.'

'But still I . . .'

Their conversation was curtailed by a knock on the doorpost of the shelter, and Richard poked his head around the screen to peer in at them. 'Catrin, the Earl wants you. He says that you're to come to his solar and bring your satchel.'

'Is he ill?' Oliver demanded sharply, and reached for his shirt.

The boy shook his head. His hair was in need of barbering and fell forward over his eyes, giving him the aspect of a shaggy dog. 'No, but Stephen is. It's the manacles. One of them has a sharp edge and it has made his wrist all raw.'

Turning her back on the boy for modesty's sake, Catrin tugged on her undershift and donned her ordinary brown hose. Oliver eyed Richard in consternation.

'Manacles?' he queried. 'I thought Stephen was to be kept under honourable house arrest?'

'Empress Mathilda says that it is not enough - that he might escape. His word's not to be trusted. She says that he deserves the weight of chains for stealing her birthright.'

Oliver groaned, and rubbed his hands over his face. Catrin thought he muttered 'stupid bitch' but could not be sure.

Hastily she donned her remaining garments and grabbed her satchel from the corner. Into it, she put a pot of Ethel's goose-grease unguent and several strips of linen bandage. Kissing Oliver in farewell, she followed Richard across the bailey and into the keep.

Stephen was being held in a small, but pleasantly appointed, wall-chamber with painted murals and a sturdy charcoal brazier to keep the damp at bay. The iron ring bolted into the wall detracted incongruously from such comforts. Looped through it was a length of stout iron bear-chain which was attached at either end to the wrist manacles cuffing the prisoner. There were chains on his feet too, although only fashioned ankle to ankle rather than to the wall.

King Stephen was in early middle age, with a fleece of hair only a little darker than Oliver's. His beard was fair too, with a single badger-stripe of grey mid-chin. Stephen's eyes were weathered blue, framed in attractive creases which revealed that despite all the troubles visited upon him since his accession to the throne, he was a man accustomed to laughter. Catrin could not help thinking that Empress Mathilda was a termagant and a very foolish woman to issue the command to bind him thus. For all that he had snatched her throne, he was yet an anointed king and her cousin into the bargain.

'Ah, Catrin.' Earl Robert beckoned her into the room. His colour was high and he appeared ill at ease. She swept him a curtsey and gave one to Stephen too. King or not, he was still a man of rank. The gesture earned her a thin smile from the captive.