The Exiled (17 page)

He danced toward her smiling, the black knife in his hand to cut her heart out, the rope to hang her with.

She struggled, but being tied, could not move. She screamed; screamed and screamed. He was closer, blood-rank breath in her face.

No! She would
not
be the sacrifice, would not be pressed down into the cold-water bog at the crossroads, mud and stones in her mouth. Travellers would
never
step on her bones, never grind
her
down into the unforgiving dark. Let them try, she could call on friends, powerful friends, she would fight! She struck at his face when he leant over her, made talons of her fingers slashing at his eyes, his wicked eyes.

Deborah was desperate. Anne was delirious, raging and arching her body against the fever, the aching goad of infection. Rosemary and bane-wort burned in the heart of the fire as Deborah prayed to the Goddess Aine, the Mother, the nurturer — since entreating the Lady Mary, holy patroness of Brugge, had done no good thus far.

‘Blessed Mother, let this girl live. My life for you, freely given. Life for Life: the old way. Life for Life, Mother.’

The old way, and the new. Perhaps there was power in both; the thought wove its way through Deborah’s tears, her terror. Did not the pale Christ, himself a victim of powerful men just as her daughter was, give his life for others? A small coal of hope flickered life in her heart, taking energy from the prayer.

But Anne screamed and reared up against the bolster, alone in a blood-red world. Deborah, despairing, lay down beside the girl and held her, held her, rocking, soothing, chanting, crying out for help, for guidance.

She’d tried every treatment she knew: she’d stopped the bleeding with a strong simple boiled down from salt, old wine and acorn cups and then packed a paste of ground elder leaves, comfrey and dried, powdered rosemary into the wound, and stopped it up with garlic and honey smeared on together. Then she’d bound sphagnum moss soaked in a garlic tea over the wound and held it in place with all the cobwebs she could find under clean linen strips. But still the blood and foul pus seeped, and the fever burned — hot and dry.

Desperate, Deborah filled a silver bowl with clean water. She saw nothing until, at last, light dazzled her. Light that came from inside the water.

The humming radiance filled her like a beaker as she’d asked the question, ‘Who? Who has done this thing?’, but there were no pictures, nothing to see, only a sense that much danger lay outside the light and around the girl, a wraith on the black, shadowed bed.

They were alone, these two, alone. The fire in the William Caxton’s room burned low as wind hunted the sharp casements of the house on that first night.

Three more nights and days wore away. Then, on the morning of the fourth, Deborah woke, stiff, as cold light seeped past the shutters. Her first sense was pain — cramped muscles from holding Anne’s body close for hours and hours; then horror gripped her. The girl was very cold and a dry, twittering whisper filled the corners of the still-dark room.

Panicked, Deborah sat up, pulling Anne’s rigid body against her chest. There was no breath. Nothing. No pulse. The girl lay like marble in her arms.

Deborah understood the whispering: spirits were waiting. She’d heard them before in a stone-barrow tomb of the oldest people: cold, dry voices, breath like snow on the wind.

‘No!’ Deborah pressed her mouth over Anne’s, holding the girl closer than a baby to her chest. ‘Anne, Anne come back. Anne! Hear me!’

It was a command, sent with all the skill Deborah knew, but Anne was a long, long way away.

She was happy. It was warm where she was, and the fear and pain were gone. The place was beautiful: a green, soft field graced with red poppies. There was a silver river with great trees on its banks, greater even than the forest of her childhood where the trees had been giants. She was waiting, love in her heart, for her mother. Alyce was coming; she would see her again very soon and she was so excited. Then she frowned. Someone was calling her.

‘Anne, Anne, by all the powers that were and are, I call you ...’

The voice was so sorrowful that Anne frowned, though the sound was only a whisper on this drowsy, beautiful day. Soon she would not hear it, soon her mother would be with her and nothing would ever separate them again ...

‘Anne, come back to me.’ The voice was a sigh, a breeze through sweet grasses, nodding the flowers as Anne saw the faces. There was her mother, her much-loved though never seen mother — a girl, younger than she was now — and another woman. Deborah. Both were gazing at her with infinite love, infinite sadness, but then her mother’s face and Deborah’s were the same and the meadow disappeared.

The scream was so despairing that William Caxton was jerked from his sleep beside Maud in the children’s dorter, and when he hurried through the door of his erstwhile bedchamber, his worst fears were given flesh. There was Deborah, weeping and keening over Anne’s corpse in his fine, carved bed; but then the girl sobbed a deep breath, her chest rose and fell. And she screamed again, like a lost soul, as she opened her eyes at last.

‘No, ah no.’

Deborah’s agony was over but Anne’s was fresh — another wound.

‘She lives...’ William Caxton hardly dared breathe the words, the relief was so immense. Anne turned her head towards the sound, still disoriented and made desolate by loss. A few moments more and she would have touched her mother, held her hand. All she felt now was searing, breathless, helpless pain.

Gently Deborah slipped an arm around the girl’s frail body to help her as Anne looked up into her eyes, oblivious again of the man at the door.

‘You have my mother’s eyes.’ Her voice was a breath ...

Quiet tears slid down Deborah’s face as Anne’s expression transformed into a faint smile — pale lips in a white face, but the pain cleared for the first time since she’d been shot. ‘I can sleep now.’

And deep, dark sleep took her into a place mercifully free from dreams.

Leaving Deborah to care for Anne, William Caxton dressed thoughtfully as Maud woke to scold their noisy children and complain to her husband yet again about the permanent guest in their own quarters. William’s servant Mathias was diligently scraping his master’s face with a well-whetted knife, removing the hot oil that was supposed to make taking the bristles easier, and doing his best not to look interested as his mistress, in a lengthy tirade, was breathtakingly frank about the character and ambitions of the girl in the room beside the children’s dorter.

‘ ... and it’s not as if we haven’t been good to her, William. No one could ask more, but if she’s recovered, surely we should get her people to remove her to her own bed? She’ll do better there — after all, it’s said whores only flourish in their own stew.’

William was very annoyed, yet he should have been accustomed to Maud’s jealous lack of charity. After all these years together, he knew to his cost that it was a waste of time to expect his wife to see the world as he did. He controlled himself with considerable effort.

‘Maud, we shall speak on this matter after mass. For now, we must be grateful that Mistress Anne, our
guest
, has survived. Enough, Mathias. You’ve flayed me!’

Mathias rapidly bowed and backed himself out of the room, scurrying down to the kitchen to spread the fresh gossip about Anne. Yet another source of annoyance to William Caxton: Mathias, whilst he had many qualities, was a chronic gossip.

William Caxton turned on his wife. ‘When you come to meet Saint Peter you will remember and rue this day, wife! For now, I expect you to recall your wedding vows. You will obey me, as you promised to do. I want the sheets on our bed changed and nourishing food prepared for Lady de Bohun — and I want it done now. Or by God you will feel my wrath.’

Maud, for once, was silenced. She’d never been beaten by William — normally he was a patient, courteous man, but today was different and she felt an almost pleasant thrill of anticipation at his unexpected response. In a long, boring marriage, anything new and different was to be welcomed. Normally there was an unspoken agreement between husband and wife that she had permission to goad William with her requests — she nagged and cajoled and nagged again — and it was his role, eventually, to accept and agree, though, out of pride, he rarely gave her everything she wanted.

Today, though, was different. When he thought about it later, he saw this was the action of guilt. For days now it had been easier to focus on his wife’s callous behaviour than address what had to be done, for that was proving very difficult to face.

Soon, Anne must leave his house and he could not protect her any more. Therefore, he must seek an audience with Duke Charles and ask his advice, for Anne’s shooting was a fearful matter. William Caxton did not want, past a certain point, to betray his English trading partners in their underhand dealings, but a much greater wheel was turning now, and if he and his family, and Anne, were to avoid being crushed under that iron rim, he must speak to Duke Charles.

God grant that he, the messenger of bad tidings, was not shot also.

O
n this warm spring day, with more than a feel of summer, Duke Charles felt smiled upon by all the Gods, at last.

When he had much to think about, hard exercise made him cheerful and this morning after mass, he and some of his affinity had taken turns at the quintain, running course after course, watched by a small group of friends and companions from the court. And whilst many of his young companions had been belted out of the saddle by the returning arm of the wooden warrior, Duke Charles himself had escaped. Thirty-five might be getting on in some people’s eyes, but his own timing, his vigour, had never been better — of that he was certain.

And now, too, he had the pleasure of watching that troublesome English mercer, William Caxton, squirm as he asked for help.

Not so long ago, their exchanges had been anything but cordial. William Caxton had been a long-time resident of Brugge and had been the Governor of the English merchants for some years, during which time the court and the English traders had frequently clashed over taxes and terms of trade imposed on their community by Duke Phillip. The English merchants had even recently decamped en masse to Ghent when Phillip had refused to renew the Wool Treaty on terms favourable to the English.

However, following his father’s death last year, Charles had seen how ruinous his father’s ‘victory’ over the English merchants had been for Brugge, and Burgundy, and had come to a commercial agreement with Caxton for an entirely new arrangement: one which brought the English merchants back to Brugge and set the golden river flowing through his city again.

Duke Charles was, at his very heart, a man who believed he should be a king. Everything he did, everything he dreamed of was focused on elevating his dukedom, both by commercial transcendence and then by alliance, to a kingdom. This English marriage was very, very important as part of that plan. As were continuing good relations between him, his court and the English merchants.

‘What cheering news this is, Master William. I, for one, would have been deeply sorrowful if Lady Anne had died. Is there any more knowledge of the assailant? When last I asked, they said he’d escaped.’

‘Your Grace is kind. But no, we have no further news of the man.’

Carefully composing his face to show polite concern, and nothing more, the Duke observed William swing in the wind of his own fears. He liked Lady Anne and was delighted she would live, but undoubtedly, there was a mystery here. One that was intriguing.

‘Sire, it may be that my colleagues and I had prior information regarding the Lady Anne — and who might wish her dead.’

The Duke laughed. ‘What, Master William, you mean it was not your own that shot her?’

Momentarily, the gloves were off and William winced — and was immediately furious with himself. Had he been so unmanned by events of the last days that he could not control his responses, even when the stakes were as high as these?

‘Lord Duke, it is true that some of my colleagues have had some concern with what they see as Lady Anne’s unfair success in trading.’

The Duke smiled gently. ‘Unfair? It seems to me you tried to shut her out, and she still made you look like fools. She has a lot of friends at my court. I count myself amongst them. Though, naturally, I would wish this ... mystery to be successfully addressed so that good relations amongst all your community can be speedily restored.’

The slight stress on ‘all’ was a warning note, and William swallowed a sigh. He hated this, every bit of it.

‘That is my hope also, Your Grace. But there are others, it seems, who had stronger feelings, more dangerous feelings, about the Lady Anne than any of my colleagues. And we were told who they might be. I tried to warn her myself.’ He guttered to a halt; he could not avoid the knowledge that in running with the many against his own judgment, the girl had nearly died.

‘In fact, my Guild asked me to warn her, but ...’

Now was the time, there was no help for it. ‘“We”’ yes, it was true, it had been “we”, ‘attached certain ... conditions to giving Lady Anne the information we’d been given. Under those circumstances she refused our help. And you are aware of the result.’

Confession vented, William waited for the duke to speak. But Charles was silent. His practice armour having been removed, along with sweaty felt jerkin beneath, he was now being rubbed down, naked, with oil and salt on a specially constructed high table by a Moor — a giant man with very black skin and very pink palms — who was a deaf-mute; useful during confidential conversations.

William allowed his last sentences to drift off into the silence. He could hear the shouts of those who were still practising at the quintain, but the noise was dreamlike, distant. All his attention was concentrated on this one small moment, this unpretentious little room which smelt of new sweat and sweet oil.

The silent Moor massaged his master’s glistening shoulders. Duke Charles sighed with pleasure.