Rook (35 page)
Authors: Jane Rusbridge
She had woken some time later, her stomach churning. A cramp squeezed the hollow of her back and she thought her bowels were about to open. Stooped double, she crossed the landing to the loo. As soon as she sat and leaned forward on her thighs, her muscles unclenched and liquid gushed from her in a watery flood. She felt momentary relief until a cramp squeezed at her bowels again and forced a grunt of pain: less liquid this time. The pain was familiar, like period cramps, but stronger. She peered between her legs into the toilet bowl. Another cramp wrung the small of her back and spread fingers of pain, muscular and demanding, round to her womb, squeezing the breath from her. She lowered herself to the floor to inch across the smooth linoleum to the high-sided bath, where she turned both taps on full. Her mother might wake at the emptying gurgle of the hot tank, but warm water would help her relax. She thought the neat gin had made her sick.
Grains of Paradise.
Noah’s head was like a pomegranate, his skin red and wrinkled. Wisps of dark hair lay flat against his head and his eyes were closed, the lids pressed together as if sealed. He didn’t make a sound. She kissed his minute, translucent fingers. He did not stir. She wrapped him in the blue hand towel but unwrapped him again to study his chest. He was not breathing. She cupped his tiny body in her long hands.
Hinetone, mid-eleventh century
In the deep of winter, what remained of his bones was brought to her in a fishing creel.
The horse’s flanks heaved and the salty scent of wet dog told her the broad-shouldered stranger had travelled hard and fast. When he dismounted, though the light from the fire inside had scorched her vision, she saw a gathering basket slung across his body beneath his furs which he took time to unstrap. It was too late in the day for a fisherman to come selling, no silver-bodied fish slithered at the basket’s opening. The unfamiliar shape and size and the manner in which he cradled the basket gave her pause. She obeyed his gesture to step outside, but her hand shook as she protected the flame of the lamp.
The stranger showed respect and stood more than a stride away, straight-backed as a warrior, the basket at his chest shielded by his crossed arms. A blade had slashed one forearm in the recent months; the wound was puckered, still livid. The basket he clasped had a dense weave of rush. Her heart, brittle as a wick snuffed, pinched with unease.
On that night in October, the stranger said, young men, a group from Harold’s village in Sussex, had disguised themselves in garments stripped from the Norman dead. Their fathers, whose bodies lay for the women to reclaim, had been Harold’s playmates, and one among them had been schooled in the French language. They followed William Malet through the gl
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¯m, and heard Guillaume le Bâtard order him to bury the Norman dead. The digging and shovelling would take all night and more so. At the second command, Malet’s shoulders slumped. He was required to reassemble Harold’s corpse, wrap it in purple linen and return to the camp at Hastings to bury the remains on the white cliff’s crumbling edge. In this way, le Bâtard jested, Harold was to be granted his wish made in arrogance, and be left to guard for ever the sea he had so desired to rule.
As the pattern and purpose of the stranger’s story became clear, Edyth pulled her furs round her shoulders. Her mind shied from the remembrance of Harold’s corpse.
The Bosham Boy had dreamed a plan which he spoke to Malet in French: Harold’s body hauled in a net, far out to sea, a burial place impossible to discover. Malet hesitated. The Boy spat on the purple-wrapped body of the king then smiled up at Malet. The impermanence of the sea would allow no shrine. With that, Malet was persuaded.
Edyth pictured the boys taught alongside her sons by the elders of the church at Bosham. One of them?
‘No names,’ the stranger said.
Malet’s horse tossed his head and high-stepped on the cliff top as the Boy rowed out to sea with the purple wrappings. As soon as the net splashed overboard Malet, impatient, turned his horse to leave without witnessing the marker which bobbed to mark the place.
The Boy had family in that village, fisher folk. A few days later, wanting to pray forgiveness to Harold for his disrespect, he rowed out to the marker and transferred the royal remains to a fishing basket to allow the fish to clean the bones. The basket was checked regularly, changed often for another of tighter weft and weave, each basket made anew, woven with prayers for the king.
Edyth reached out to touch the rush woven neat as cloth. The basket gave off a smell brackish as a joined shell from the seabed cracked open in dry air, like the oysters she had shared with Harold twenty years since, their wrists tied in the binding knot of their hand-fasting.
‘All flesh has gone,’ he said.
Of this she was glad; his remains would be clean and strong. And there was no head. She was glad she would never gaze into the empty sockets of his skull. They will not return to her the heat of the man but these bones might be a different memento. Her children’s children chanted a rhyme as they played their hand-games of chance, gathering and counting and throwing small stones and bones. Her game of chance lay in the latticed dark of woven rush.
As the stranger placed the basket in her arms Edyth thought of the canons who had visited from Waltham not long ago. They told her Guillaume le Bâtard had allowed Harold’s mother to bury two of her sons at Bosham and also gave permission for Harold’s remains to be buried at the religious house he had founded at Waltham. She did not believe them. The canons’ true desire was for the abbey to become a shrine, a place of pilgrimage to which a throng of pilgrims would bring offerings of money to King Harold’s resting place.
Edyth told the canons she would not search for Harold again, knowing well that even if they did not find him, they would spin an untruth to suit their purposes. She allowed the dogs to unsettle their horses before whistling them to her.
The broad-shouldered stranger mounted his horse and left her standing in the doorway. At first light, she must ride with the hounds on the other side of the moat where the rooks swirl a cauldron of black over a stand of trees. She could keep him here, where he had ridden with her; bury his bones like twigs in the forest. Harold loved these broad horizons, had thought them not dissimilar to the flatlands of his Wessex manor. She could bury him where the rooks gather as the light thickens, a place where the men would not hunt boar because it was too marshy for the hooves of their horses. Even the dogs whined and cowered at the earth’s suck.
She turned towards the doorway and the fire beyond, the basket in her arms light as the winter air.
Harry swerves into the gateway of a field and gets out, leaving the engine running. They must be lost. Nora stays where she is, huddled in the van. The fan heater, turned to the highest setting, whines frantically as it whirs. Harry pulls on his woolly hat and gloves and gazes out across the flat fields towards the west, where the white sky has flattened the sunset into a rose-coloured smudge across the horizon. They are in the middle of nowhere. Harry walks round the van to the passenger side.
The door drops on its hinges as he opens it. Straight away, though she can’t see them, she hears the cacophony of rooks.
‘We’re here,’ he says.
She tugs the zipper on her fleece up to her neck. Outside the van the air is raucous with coarse croaks mixed with higher chirps and squawks, a clash of sound like the orchestra tuning before a performance. Her eyes fill with tears. Freezing air dries the back of her nose and throat as she takes a long breath. She has not ventured out much since Noah’s funeral; weary from inactivity, she thrusts her hands into her pockets and steps slowly towards the gate. Her body is stiff from the long drive and tractors have carved deep ridges in the mud at the field entrance, making it difficult to walk on. Harry reaches into the back of the van to grab her bundle of warm clothing – hat, gloves and scarf.
She has never seen so many rooks. Across the ploughed fields towards the distant trees, the furrowed earth seethes with black. She leans on the metal bar of the gate. At her feet, slabs of mud glisten in light from a low sun.
The hole they dug for Noah, though deep, was not much more than a foot long. She dropped a sprig of holly on to his wicker casket. Behind her, the churchyard was crowded with people from the village, who stood in quiet groups, their presence behind her a comfort though she was unable to look anyone in the face. In the end, though there was no court case, Nora had been cautioned, the criminal offence formally recorded; her fingerprints, photograph and DNA taken.
Clare, the family liaison officer, was right: when Nora thinks of Noah now, she sees the holly with its berries resting on basket weave. She sees the faded blue hand towel with its border of swans. And she sees the three photographs taken by Clare before the funeral.
A memory, of you and Noah
, Clare said. They were sitting on Eve’s terrace with the creek flowing past behind her, Noah in his wicker casket on her lap. Eve had threaded holly sprigs into the basket weave.
‘You’ll need these,’ Harry says. He holds out an extra pair of socks along with a pair of wellington boots he has fetched from the back of the van. She doesn’t answer. The air is filled with the noise of rooks, and she stands on the edge of turbulence. Harry nudges her elbow with the bundle of warm clothing, so she peels her fingers from the frozen metal, takes the extra socks from him and swaps her shoes for wellington boots.
With his hat pulled down over his ears, Harry looks different; the spray of lines at the outer corners of his eyes more noticeable. He is thinner.
Harry had washed the blue hand towel for her, pegged it out on the line to dry in the sun. Many mothers find keepsakes are important, Clare explained, as a focus for memories. We all grieve differently, she said. Just do what you feel you need to do.
Nora didn’t need to see soil thrown on Noah’s casket. She felt the spin of vertigo, saw herself on all fours, clawing back the dirt, until Harry offered his arm and they left the churchyard together. He turned right at the church gate, towards the millstream and she allowed herself to be led away from the village and the people heading home along the narrow lane. Jason was opening up at the Anchor Bleu, pushing the anvil doorstop into place with his foot. Others wandered between the gravestones in the winter sun, visiting their own dead. A man in a long dark overcoat held on to his hat as he ducked beneath the yew tree and she thought of Isaac. She dreams of him rarely these days.
She pushes her hands back into her pockets. Silhouetted on the skyline is a stand of trees where rooks cluster thick as black blossom. Those on the ground swagger and bound, spike at the earth with their beaks. More fly in to land on the telegraph wires slooping low under weight of numbers as the birds shift sideways for room, wedged together.
She and Harry walked for hours the day of Noah’s burial, until she was exhausted. He didn’t talk much, and said nothing to her about the consistory court proceedings held in the church a few days before Noah’s funeral. Permission for exhumation of the Godwin grave had been refused. She knew from Eve there was standing room only, the church filled with villagers who gathered to listen to the experts give witness. Though there were many differing viewpoints, translations and interpretations of various historical documents, Elsa Macleod was a minority of one in believing Harold to be buried at Bosham.
Eve said that when Elsa was called, a slant of light from the west window fell on to the stone slabs under the chancel arch, just where the stone coffins are buried. Elsa’s voice rang out as if she was preaching from the pulpit. She described the swans depicted in the margins of the Bayeux Tapestry, how she believes many clues lie hidden in the woollen stitches, coded messages she is determined to decipher. ‘Hers was the best performance,’ Eve said, ‘ten out of ten. It was magical. She had my full attention.’