Winter Siege
Authors: Ariana Franklin
Run, run, girl.
In the name of God, run.
It’s 1141 and freezing cold. Gwil, a battle-hardened mercenary, watches in horror as a little girl with red hair is dragged away by his own men. Caught in the middle of the fight for England, she is just one more victim in a winter of atrocities.
Then a strange twist of fate brings them together again. Gwil finds the girl close to death, clutching a sliver of parchment – and he knows what he must do. He will bring her back to life. He will train her to fight. And together, they will hunt down the man who did this to her …
But danger looms wherever they turn. As castle after castle falls victim to siege, the icy Fens ring with rumours of a madman, of murder – and of a small piece of parchment, the cost of which none of them could have imagined …
Contents
IT IS A
wood-panelled room of sumptuous size – the abbots of Perton have always done themselves well. The present incumbent, however, has stripped it of its tapestries and the gold leaf that once decorated the carved ceiling; they’ve been sold to benefit poor women of the parish. He’s also replaced an elaborate, padded prie-dieu with a plain version that is hard on the knees.
This austerity has rather shocked his monks, who have also lost some of their comforts; they now have only three courses for supper rather than the seven that previously graced the table of their refectory. However, for all his asceticism, he’s a good abbot as abbots go: rather more understanding of peccadilloes than some.
Anyway, he’s dying.
He lies on a cot, propped up with pillows to aid his breathing, so that he may look out of the window opposite, which has its shutters open summer and winter. It is autumn now and the great oak in the garden beyond is beginning to change colour. Only its top is visible to him, but he can tell from the sound of munching and grunting, and an occasional coarsening of the fresh air, that the monastery pigs are enjoying the acorns at its base.
He wonders whether he will live to see the last leaf fall from the oak, and knows that he must. He has something important to do. He has to record a tale of treachery and murder, also a story of courage and love, before he, too, twirls off life’s tree; yet he is too ill, too weak to write it himself.
To this end, a young scribe has entered the room, and now sits on a stool beside the bed, a pile of wax tablets on the floor at his feet, one on his knees, stylus poised.
‘You are too young to remember the war between the Empress Matilda and King Stephen, though your grandparents will …’ the abbot says. He raises himself and fumbles among the parchments lying on his bed, finally extracting one. ‘I think, my son, that we can begin this chronicle by repeating the description by Orderic Vitalis in his
Historia Ecclesiastica.
I have the quotation here.’
The young scribe rubs his hand with the skirt of his robe before accepting the parchment in order that, though he washed them only yesterday, his fingers should not sully its surface.
‘ “Thus troubles spread everywhere, far and wide,” ’ he reads out, ‘ “and England was filled with plundering and burning and massacres; the country, once so rich and overflowing with luxuries, was now wretched and desolate.” ’
He looks up. ‘It was as bad as that?’ Either he had learned nothing from his grandparents, or he’d paid them no attention.
‘Worse.’ Even the good Orderic had not the words for it, the abbot thought. Anyway, he’d died in 1142 and the war had gone on for more than a decade. Fourteen years during which all decency fled the land, the powerful changing their allegiance this way and that to whomsoever promised them more power at the time, forgetting their responsibility to those beneath them so that their private and foreign armies ravaged the common people like dogs pulling apart a living deer. Women raped, peasants hanging from trees by their own entrails. Fourteen years during which England’s people said that God and His saints must be sleeping, since there was no answer to their prayers for deliverance.
‘Then it is a most excellent beginning, my lord, and one that will contrast well with the present day, when a merchant may travel English roads with gold in his pack without fear of molestation.’
Damnation. This boy had been hired for his speed in writing, not his commentary, however cheery. Time, time. The leaves will be falling soon.
‘I think,’ the abbot says, ‘that we need expend few words on the circumstances of the war’s beginning, since everybody knows them.’
‘Er …’
Damnation again. Didn’t they teach them history at Abingdon? ‘Its causes,’ the abbot says distinctly, ‘began with the death of King Henry the First of England in the year of our Lord 1135 in Normandy …’
‘Dead from a surfeit of lampreys,’ the scribe says brightly, ‘I know that much.’
The abbot sighs. ‘A man of voracious appetite, and not only for food. His bastards were legion.’
‘Shall I put that down, my lord?’
‘I don’t care. But it would be useful if you could mention the King’s insistence that the nobles gathered about his deathbed should swear on oath that they would accept as their queen his only remaining legitimate child, the Empress Matilda, formerly Empress of Germany, but widowed by then and married again to the Angevin Geoffrey Plantagenet.’
‘The same Empress who was the mother of our present King Henry?’
‘The same. However, her cousin, Stephen, hearing of his uncle’s death, raced from Normandy to England and secured the crown for himself with the aid of some of the very barons who had sworn to support the Empress.’
‘They never having been ruled by a woman, nor wanting to be?’ asked the scribe helpfully.
‘If you like, if you like. And now, my son, we reach the nub of my chronicle when, in 1139, the Empress Matilda invaded England with an army to fight for the right her father had granted her. By this time Stephen had disappointed many of those who had so enthusiastically espoused his cause. Undoubtedly an affable man and, in war, a courageous one, he concealed a shifty cunning that caused him to break his word to the trustworthy in favour of men of the moment. His brother, Bishop Henry – a stronger character than he – had helped him on to the throne, and might have expected to be made Archbishop of Canterbury as a reward. Instead, Stephen alienated his brother and conferred the position on the little-known Theodore of Bec. Also, he dismissed the lowborn but clever men who had run Henry the First’s administration and put in their place favourites who lacked the knowledge to govern efficiently. Arbitrarily, madly, he arrested three bishops, one of them the Bishop of Ely, who had displeased him, taking their castles into his own hands, thereby showing that he had no care for the liberties of the Church.’
The young scribe tut-tuts; he sets great store by Church liberties. ‘Such wickedness.’
‘He was a fool,’ the abbot says. ‘His kingship was tainted with unwise decisions which, by 1141, had caused some of his erstwhile supporters to switch their allegiance to the Empress and fight against him. Worse, it gave opportunity to wicked men who cared not who ruled as long as they themselves flourished.’ He draws a long breath. ‘It is at this point, my son, where we must begin our history, with the war in full spate. And for that we must revert not to the doings and battles of the great, but to an insignificant village in the Cambridgeshire fenland and to an eleven-year-old girl who lived in it.’
‘Commoners, my lord?’ It is said with alarm. ‘Is this not to be an
Historia Anglorum
? An account for the edification of future generations?’
‘It is indeed, but this one is an
Historia Vulgi
as told through the mouths of ordinary people who, in turn, told it to me.’
‘But … common people?’
The abbot wheezes with the irritability of the sick. ‘It is a tale of murder and treachery. It is the tale of the rape of a child, a castle and a country. Now, in the name of God, write …’
AT FIRST, NEWS
of the war going on outside passed into the fenland without impact. It oozed into that secret world as if filtered through the green miasma of willow and alder that the fenlanders called ‘carr’, which lined its interminable rivers and reed beds.
At Scutney, they learned about it from Old Sala when he came back from his usual boat trip to Cambridge market where he sold rushes for thatching. He told the tale in the village church after the celebration of Candlemas.
‘Now yere’s King Stephen—’ he began.
‘Who?’ somebody asked.
Sala sighed with the exasperation of a much-travelled man for the village idiot. ‘I told you an’ told you, bor. Ain’t Henry on the throne now, it’s Stephen. Old Henry’s dead and gone these many a year.’
‘He never told me.’
‘Well, he wouldn’t, would he? Him bein’ a king and dead.’
As always, the little wooden church smelled of cooking from the rush tapers that had been dipped in fat. Scutney couldn’t afford beeswax candles; anyway, rushes gave out a prettier light.
‘Get on with it, will ’ee?’ Brother Arth struggled out of the rough woollen cope he wore to take the services and into the sheepskin cloak that was his working wear in winter. ‘I got ditchin’ and molin’ to see to.’
They all had, but the villagers stayed where they were – it was as well to be informed about what was going on in them uplands.
Sala stretched back his shoulders and addressed his audience again. ‘So this King Stephen’s started a-warring with his cousin, the Empress Matilda. Remember as I told you old King Henry, on his deathbed, wanted his daughter, this Matilda, to rule England? But the nobles, they don’t want no blasted female queenin’ it over un, so they’ve said no and gives the crown to Stephen, old Henry’s nephew.’
He looked sternly into the standing congregation. ‘Got that now, Bert, have you? Good. Well now, Matilda, she ain’t best pleased with bein’ passed over and seems she’s brought a army as is a-fighting Stephen’s army out there some’eres.’