The Handfasted Wife Read online

  Edith should have never allowed her sister-in-law to travel abroad in such terrible times. She sighed. Elditha was so beautiful and she had once been so very wealthy. She and Harold had been a beautiful couple. The marriage would give Alain of Brittany all that under the cloak of legality rather than simply by conquest. In one move – that of marriage – he would have her beauty and her wealth and the legal tenure of lands in Norfolk, Essex and Kent, lands where Harold had appointed diligent stewards to guard the wealth and on which substantial halls stood. What if Alain of Brittany looked elsewhere for an heiress and Duke William seized Elditha’s lands anyway?

  Fitz-Wimach slid into her presence and announced that Count Alain had arrived. Edith sat with her hands neatly folded in her lap and, when the angry Count pushed through the curtain, determined to remain in control she calmly indicated a winged chair opposite her own.

  ‘So the swan has flown?’ he opened in good Latin. ‘And you have no idea where she roosts?’

  Edith replied, ‘I do not.’ As she made an impatient gesture, her wide sleeve fell back from her hand. She let it fall again and drew herself tall. She sat very still and spoke again, this time in perfect Norman-French. ‘Count Alain, I am not part of any scheme to aid Lady Elditha’s disappearance nor, I am sure, is my mother, the Countess Gytha. A monk was responsible, a Benedictine monk. No one can say who he really is. He calls himself Brother Matthew, an apostle’s name.’ She paused and emphasised, her tongue rolling over his name as she thought for a moment. ‘Brother Matthew, an interesting choice, don’t you think, since St Matthew’s symbol is that of a human angel? I am quite sure it was against her will.’

  ‘Angel, my belt and boot; this Brother Matthew, whoever he is, is now an outlaw.’

  ‘Perhaps he always was. I have sent word to Wilton and to Exeter.’

  ‘My soldiers will question the monks of St Swithun’s Priory. Then they will descend upon every abbey and priory north, south, east and west of Winchester until she is found.’ He clasped his hands into one fist. ‘I have duty and honour to consider. My marriage was to be a gesture of recognition from your family of the King’s rightful kingship. I am a second cousin to the King through my mother.’ He glanced towards a small altar, a statuette of the Virgin and two comfortable prayer cushions in the corner of the antechamber.

  Queen Edith watched the knight. ‘Elditha has not broken faith, I assure you,’ she said. ‘Let us pray that Lady Elditha is returned to us. We shall find her.’ But the idea niggled. Had Elditha, in fact, absconded without a thought for how it could endanger her son? How could she have been so careless?

  20

  The falling tempest binds in winter’s vice

  the earth, and darkness comes with shades of night.

  The Wanderer, A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse, edited and translated by Richard Hamer

  Brother Thomas knocked on the door of the abbot’s chamber and entered, carrying a pot of stew and the usual basket of bread and cheese. When Elditha lifted the lid of the pot to peep inside, meat and herbs filled the room with a delicious aroma. Usually Brother Thomas rushed back to the infirmary. But as she turned from the cupboard with their bowls she saw that the monk was hovering by the bench. His face was creased with anxious lines.

  ‘We are a burden to you, Brother Thomas.’ Elditha said, as she slowly filled their bowls with the stew.

  ‘It is a pleasure to serve you, my lady. But a delegation of monks is expected from Westminster tomorrow. We have known of it for weeks but we had thought that they would wait until after Lent. They intend to investigate our abbey’s treasures, our relics but, most importantly, our library before they return to Normandy.’

  ‘Does Abbot Ealdred come with them?’

  ‘I fear it may be so.’

  ‘He will know my face.’

  ‘My lady, I hope that he would grant you anonymity but I cannot be sure. And it would be strange if he does not use his own chamber, so I must move you to another – my own in the infirmary. It is a plain cell, but it is only for a few days.’

  ‘You are placing yourself in great danger. Is there any way in which I can repay your kindness?’ she asked.

  The monk closed the basket. He began to look animated, as if something had just occurred to him. ‘There is something,’ he said, now hardly containing his excitement. ‘I wonder, I wonder if it would be safe if … later tonight, when the abbey sleeps … then I must show you a great treasure. My lady, you may be able to take it into safety.’ He gestured to the table where the stew was already cooling in the bowls. ‘Eat your dinner. I will reveal all later,’ he said and scuttled off, pulling the chamber’s great door shut behind him.

  That evening, in the grey quiet that fell between Vespers and Compline, Elditha and Ursula slipped away from the abbot’s bedchamber and followed Brother Thomas to his cell. He left them to settle in, saying that he would return before midnight.

  ‘I wonder what he wants to show you, my lady,’ Ursula said, after he had closed the door.

  ‘I cannot imagine, though a treasure could be a relic or a book.’

  Elditha looked around the small, chill room. It contained a bed, a pallet, a chair and a desk. She breathed in the scent of herbs slowly, trying to place smells of the earth, the sea, lichen and rocks and a hint of faraway places that existed beyond the monastery walls – places from beyond the oceans and distant mountains. A simple wooden cross was nailed on the narrow wall opposite her. Beside that there was a small shuttered window onto which rain splashed in a low, monotonous tone. ‘I think his treasure rests in the library,’ Elditha guessed as she surveyed his desk.

  Vellum sheets, roughly sewn together and without covers, were laid out neatly. She lifted a candle and peered closely at them. They contained unadorned writing with plain stroke after stroke. Letters merged into other letters, making translation difficult and the margins contained recent insertions. She examined these closely, wondering if they were Brother Thomas’s own additions. These leathery pages smelled of a life hidden away from daylight, musty and old, and as her candle burned down, Elditha turned them over, peering at them, trying to decipher the ancient script. Eventually, she was able to make sense of them. They were recipes for salves with descriptions of the attributes of various herbs. She already knew the usual remedies, such as those for coughs and aches, but here she found new suggestions. There were cures for headache, boils and toothache using unusual ingredients such as powder of onyx, tusk of unicorn and ground shells from the beach. She glanced at a shelf above the desk which held pots and boxes. Labels, written in the same script as the notes in the margins of the book, pasted onto the jars, indicated their contents.

  ‘Ursula, look at this – myrrh and frankincense, powder of sapphire, so good for ulcers if dissolved in milk,’ she said, taking two of them down. ‘Sapphire to cure disease of the eye. And these …’ She read the labels slowly. ‘Good St Cecilia, balsam, possibly from Jerusalem, ammoniacum, tragacanth and galbanum! These are rare. They come from places east of our Lord’s own lands.’

  Ursula reached along the shelf and lifted down a small wicker basket that held a collection of twisted and knotted roots. She dug her finger in, feeling around until she found one that was different to the others. She lifted it out. It was a plump root. She smelled its pungent scent and puzzled at its familiarity as she turned it over. Elditha leaned over Ursula’s hand and touched it with the tips of her fingers. She knew this one too, because she still possessed it, hidden deep within her casket. Murmuring sleepily as if its magic overpowered her, she said, ‘Mandrake – the Devil’s root.’

  Ursula returned it to the basket, pushing it deep inside among the others.

  As she replaced the basket on its shelf, Brother Thomas bustled in. ‘Our visitors will arrive before noon. We were just in time.’ He glanced at the papers on his desk. ‘Ah, I see that you have discovered my recipes,’ he said closing the cell door softly. ‘These ones are simple salves for use in our infirmary – old and wel
l-known remedies, but what I have is much more interesting.’ He came closer. ‘And if it were to be taken from this abbey into Normandy, a part of the medical knowledge held on our island would disappear. I have a book to show you and, if the Norman monks discover its presence in our library, they will remove it. Some fear the things spoken of within its pages. Come with me, and you will need your cloaks. Then, my lady, you must decide if you can help us.’

  They covered themselves with monks’ mantles and followed Brother Thomas through the abbey to the internal stairway at the end of the building. In single file they climbed up to an arched narrow door decorated, as had been the abbot’s chamber’s, with acanthus leaf carvings. The carvings inside the decorative leaves depicted the four saints of the Gospels with their symbols: a human angel hovered above St Matthew; a lion reclined by St Mark’s feet; behind Luke an ox appeared; and above John hung an eagle. Elditha traced the lion of St Mark with a finger. ‘The abbey has beautiful carvings,’ she remarked.

  ‘And as you will discover we have more wonders hidden here than ancient carved doors, great statues which line the abbey’s church or the magnificent black cross which stands in the chancel.’

  ‘There are so many of these crosses throughout England that I cannot imagine which one is the real cross.’

  ‘I often think about that. We have a relic collection below in the ossuary. One cannot help but wonder how many fingers St Benedict had, there are so many of them in our abbeys; and toenails, and teeth, portions of the crown of thorns, shreds of the apostles’ shrouds, nails from the true cross, a snip of the Virgin’s veil, the purse belonging to St Benet, St Catherine’s shoe, a rib of St Uncer, a bone from St Helena’s arm. So it continues, bones of this saint and that apostle; oh yes, we have bits of them too.’ He caught his breath and said, ‘But the abbey’s collection of books is our greatest pride. Come now and see the library and observe how we use our window glass here.’

  Brother Thomas shook a great key ring from his belt and, lifting it up to the light, chose one and then unlocked the door. Holding the sconce high, he leaned against the door and swung it open. He led them into a long room and, with a gesture of his free hand, he indicated tall windows of plain clear glass. These were divided with lead into sections and were deeply set into the abbey’s walls. The rain had ceased and stars and the moon shone through breaks in the cloud, breaking into the great chamber to illuminate it with a silver light. Along the length of the room ranged desks on which lay the tools of copiers: their inks and quills, vellum sheets, many already faintly ruled, others with beautifully decorated pages and books set above them, all opened at the pages the monks had been copying.

  ‘There must be so much light here by day,’ Ursula said. ‘Such a beautiful room; books everywhere.’

  They were stored on shelves which reached toward the rafters, hundreds of them piled beside each other from one end of the hall to the other. At the far end of the scriptorium was the partner fireplace to the one which was to the abbot’s bedchamber and, although the hour was late, a glow still lay within it. The room was cool, but not yet cold.

  ‘It is a wonderful place,’ Elditha said. ‘Busy with scholarship, so much learning contained within this one room.’

  Brother Thomas led them to the shelves, and walked along them saying, ‘Here are the Gospels, here the codices of the Apocalypse, here Psalters; here are books of poetry, riddles and fables and here the works of the Venerable Bede.’

  ‘Bede?’ repeated Ursula.

  Elditha provided the answer. ‘Bede was a great scholar, Ursula. I learned about him when I learned to read, after I had married Harold. Since Queen Edith and Countess Gytha could read, I learned to as well.’

  ‘Yes,’ echoed Brother Thomas, ‘Bede’s Historia Anglorum and his De Aedificatione Temple. Next, we have collected King Alfred’s Colloquies and here we have Annals that reach back from our own time to the time of Cedric. And look on that desk beside you, Ursula, where one of our brothers is copying our own Chronicle, the story of our abbey from the time of Hean, who founded it, until the present day.’ He moved on, holding his torch high so that they could see the great collection more clearly. ‘And here the teachings of Aristotle and Plato, Apuleius, Virgil and Horace. The Moorish copyists from Iberia have made many copies of books of mathematics and medicine from at least the time of Plato, and they have set down in Latin many of their own medical treatises.’ Brother Thomas lowered his voice. ‘We have a copy of their Koran here, the Bible of the Infidels, a perverse book too, and I expect the Norman monks will disapprove.’ He sighed, moved farther along and waved his hand at a large collection in a new case of shelves. ‘Look at these very old scrolls dedicated to the study of herbs and plants, and of course the encyclopaedias of animals. Beside them, see, we have collected three great bestiaries of fantastic animals living in distant lands, unicorns and so on, though I believe few have ever been so privileged to have seen these creatures, and we have five work calendars. There is no time to examine all these works. My Lady Elditha, come and look at our treasure.’

  Brother Thomas drew one book out from the last shelf. Like many of the other volumes it had a leather cover, but unlike many books where the cover had been embellished, this one was plain. Its only ornamentation was a gold clasp with a small gold key. Brother Francis turned the little key in its miniature lock, then carried the book to a table by the dying firelight and laid it open there. ‘It is a lapidary, the only one, I believe, on our island,’ he said.

  It was not a great volume. In fact, it was only the same size as a Psalter carried by a travelling monk; indeed similar to the Psalter that had belonged to Brother Francis. However, when it lay open on the table Elditha caught her breath as she bent over it and examined the miniature drawings contained on every page. It was a book of stones and jewels and every jewel and every stone was described in detail, as were their medicinal properties. Tiny mythical creatures journeyed through jewelled magical landscapes from page to page: basilisks, lions, unicorns, the phoenix, birds with men’s heads and angel wings, mermaids and sirens and even more wondrous creatures of the seas, whales and urchins, sea hydras with arms and twisting eels with men’s features. Every initial letter was delicately decorated with fantastic designs of intricate knot work in gold leaf, so tiny that it was almost impossible to see them. However, as they looked even more closely, the letters turned into odd, sometimes studious, little creatures, occasionally mischievous, their tails studded with gems. It was indeed a great treasure.

  ‘This is the most beautiful book I have seen.’

  ‘And you say that you can read, my lady?’

  ‘Yes, but I cannot write, and now I wish I had paid attention to writing when I was a girl. This work is so beautiful that I envy the scribe whose work it is.’

  ‘Not envy, but admire, my lady,’ Brother Thomas admonished in a gentle tone. ‘You can still learn to write. If you can read, then the art of writing is simple. My lady, now for my question: can you protect the lapidary?’

  ‘Yes, if you wish me to take the book into safekeeping. But where to; where will it be safe? Is it wise to trust it into my keeping?’

  ‘It would be safe in Ireland. Padar tells me that you will go there as soon as he arranges your travel. You will succeed in your journey, my lady. I feel it. I shall pray for it, for your safety, for the book’s safety. Take it to the Abbey of Bangor and hopefully, one day, in more peaceful times, it may be returned to our own abbey, where it belongs.’ Brother Thomas closed the book, locked it and gave the key to Elditha. ‘Keep the key safe too.’

  Elditha added it to the chain on her neck. It nestled against the key to her casket. One key was silver and the other gold, but both were now as precious to her as the air she breathed. Brother Thomas then took a sealskin bag from his cloak, placed the book inside it and gave the package to Elditha. ‘I will keep it close to my own person,’ she promised.

  ‘My lady, come here,’ called Ursula. She had crossed over to a window
and was staring down from it. ‘A boat filled with monks is landing on the wharf. There are torches on the river bank.’

  ‘Abbot Ealdred already?’ exclaimed Brother Thomas. ‘Stand back from the window. If you can see them, they may see you. It is unusual for the scriptorium to be occupied at night.’ He doused the flame of his torch and hurried with Elditha to a second window and looked out over the river. Moonlight illuminated the figures on the water. ‘Yes, it could be the abbot’s party,’ he said. ‘Look, the abbot’s staff is gleaming in their torchlight.’

  Elditha peered down. From below came shouts and a stir and the noise of boats splashing and knocking up against the jetty. When the arrivals disembarked they were immediately surrounded by stable boys, novices and monks. They began to snake their way along the bank from the jetty, a band of dark-cloaked and silent monks. The abbot strode at their head and led them onwards up the slope, holding his silver staff before him. One monk just behind the abbot glanced up at the abbey building. A rush light, held before him, illuminated his features. Elditha immediately drew back from the sill. ‘Abbot Ealdred must never know of our presence in his abbey.’ The monk shook his head and placed a finger on his lips. He wouldn’t reveal them. She added quietly, ‘Because, Brother Thomas, there is one down there in the abbot’s party who means us harm.’ She sent a prayer up to Heaven. ‘St Cecilia, bring Padar back to us soon.’

  21

  Oxford

  March 1067

  Master: What fish do you catch?

  Fisherman: Eels and pike, minnows and burbot,

  trout and lampreys.a

  Ælfric’s Colloquies, in A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse, edited and translated by Richard Hamer

  Footsteps outside their cell were followed by an urgent rap on the door. ‘My lady, are you awake?’