The Winter Mantle (63 page)

'And what of your crusader's vow?' she asked. 'Will you have a priest absolve you?'

'Mayhap.' He gave an uncomfortable shrug. To be quit of the vow entirely would be to close a door. He had been relieved to turn back - the wanderlust no longer rode him hard - but he still needed to see through the open portal. lie watched his small son skip across the room and return to his side, the antler clutched in his hand. 'For the nonce I have a notion to build another church in Northampton and give thanks for my safe homecoming.'

Matilda relaxed and the expression in her eyes grew soft and warm.

'Can I help to build it too?' Waitheof demanded.

Simon smiled and ruffled the boy's red-gold curls. 'Of course you can,' he said. 'Looking after it will be one of your duties when you are a grown man.'

The boy beamed as if he had been given a present of great worth.

'You like buildings, do you?' Simon asked, diverted by Waltheof's enthusiasm.

I like churches,' he said, and hared off again to show his prize piece to one of the knights who was entering the hall after stabling his horse.

'My mother says that he has a natural vocation, and I believe she is right,' Matilda murmured. She looked through her lashes at her husband. They were spiky from her tears, but the effect, along with the slight reddening, only served to make the dark lapis colour of her pupils more luminous. 'One he cannot fulfil while he is an only son.'

Simon met the sidelong appraisal, and heat flared at his crotch, hot and deep. 'Then it behoves us to do something about it,' he said.

She looked over her shoulder. The last of the soldiers to enter from outside was just closing the door on a world of whirling whiteness. Candles glowed in all the sconces and the central hearth threw out a cheery red light. 'We have the time,' she said softly, and took his hand in hers. 'For a while, at least, whatever the state of the other side of the hill, you are not going to reach it.'

Matilda looked at the collection of small, innocuous brown bulbs that Simon had tipped out on the bed from their cloth pouch. 'What are they?'

He pillowed his hands behind his head and gave her a smile lazy with the repletion of lovemaking. 'For that you will have to take the word of the man who sold them to me. He says that if you bury them in the garden during the autumn they will produce the first flowers of spring. Milk flowers he called them, and he said that the blooms are white and delicate, but robust nonetheless.'

'I will plant them the moment we are home,' she vowed, and scooped them carefully back into their pouch.

'You see,' he said, 'even when I was chasing my demons I thought of you and your garden.'

Matilda was less than impressed. 'And I thought of you every day,' she said. 'I rubbed my knees raw at first with prayer and lamentation.' Setting the pouch carefully to one side, she faced him. 'But I learned to live with it. It was like grieving. The ache did not go away but it became less in time. My children needed me, so did the people. Much as I wanted to crawl into the darkness and lick my wounds, I couldn't.' Aware that her tone was growing accusatory and shrewish, she drew back from further recrimination. She had him now; that was all that mattered. And she could so easily have lost him. The scar on his leg and the hollow where the poison had eaten the flesh away was evidence of that.

'I did not mean to sound clever that I thought of you,' he said softly and unpillowed his hand to stroke a tendril of her hair. 'Perhaps it was more in the way of atonement for the way we had parted… and perhaps I was wondering what I was doing so far from home. When I bought them I wanted to imagine you planting those bulbs in your garden.'

Matilda was swept by a wave of tenderness and remorse. Leaning forward, she kissed him. 'You are home now,' she said. 'Let us not brood,' Deliberately lightening her tone, she drew away. 'I have gifts for you, too.'

'Other than the one you have already given me?' he grinned suggestively.

Matilda laughed and blushed, 'I do not think that I could dwell in a convent like my mother,' she admitted.

'Perish the thought.'

She went to her small travelling chest and raising the lid drew out a shirt of fine linen chansil and a tunic of blue Flemish wool, embroidered with a pattern of English interlaced work at cuff and hem and throat. 'I took the measurements from a tunic you left behind,' she said. 'It kept my fingers busy when I had naught to do.' She did not add that for a time she had slept with his old tunic clutched in her arms for comfort, or that the act of making him a new one had been a way of adjusting to his absence.

'More than busy,' he said gruffly as he took the garments and examined the delicate stitchwork with wonder. 'I have never set eyes upon such fine needlecraft!'

Matilda warmed beneath the admiration in his tone and rejoined him on the bed. 'I don't know,' she teased, picking up the leg of one his hastily discarded hose. 'You seem to have sewn a very neat patch on this.'

The hesitation that followed was infinitesimal but it changed the atmosphere. What had been warm and intimate was suddenly strained. 'I cannot take the credit,' he said. 'One of the laundresses did our mending.' Suddenly he was very busy, donning the shirt, trying on the tunic.

'One of the laundresses,' Matilda repeated, with slightly narrowed eyes.

'She sewed and washed clothes for everyone,' he said in a cloth muffled voice. When his head emerged through the neck opening of the tunic, his gaze did not quite meet hers.

Matilda said nothing. She decided not to ask if Simon had been faithful to her during his absence. Crusaders might take a vow to be chaste while they were soldiers of Christ, but she knew that many did not succeed in keeping their oath. Simon might not be a sexual predator, but she knew his predilection for pastures new. Still, a laundress was no threat to her position, and there had been no sign of such a woman among his entourage. Thus she spoke no more on the matter, and if she did not dismiss it from her mind, neither did she dwell on it with anguish.

Northampton, Christmas 1097

'Shall I put it here?' Waltheof asked. He wafted a brightly coloured knot of braid at his mother then stood on tiptoe to place it in the bare branches of the apple tree.

'Yes, sweetheart, just there,' Matilda paused in her own decoration of the tree to watch her son stretch out, the tip of his tongue protruding between his lips as he concentrated. She smiled wistfully. Her mother had never held with the ceremony of honouring a tree so that it would be fruitful during the next season. It was as pagan as the elfin the well, she said; nonsense, not to be tolerated. But her father had always permitted his people to 'wassail' the trees and Matilda had encouraged the custom.

Simon lifted his small daughter and helped her hang a row of silver bridle bells along a sturdy twig. 'This time last year I was kicking my heels in Brindisi and waiting for the spring,' he said. 'It seems a lifetime ago.'

'It is a lifetime ago.' Stooping to the basket at her feet, Matilda picked up some false apples carved of wood by one of the knights who had a skill in such things. She handed them to their son and glanced at her husband. 'You regret turning back, don't you?' she said shrewdly.

Simon wriggled his shoulders. 'In some small part, yes,' he admitted. 'I swore a vow, and I have always prided myself on holding to my word.'

'If you had held to it, you would likely be dead.' Matilda gave a small shiver.

'Yes, but honourably so,' he said with a wry smile. Taking one of the wooden apples he helped little Matilda to loop it on a high branch of the apple tree.

She bit her lip. 'Is that why you have not asked the priest to absolve you of your oath - because your business is unfinished? '

Simon pondered for a moment. 'While my vow remains open,' he said at last, 'it means that I have not given up. Mayhap it is more of a sop to my conscience than anything else, but if I go and ask for absolution it will mean that I have yielded.'

Matilda said nothing more. She did not really believe that he would set off again on another crusade to fulfil his oath, but she found it hard not to keep demanding constant reassurance. Hard, but not impossible. She had learned much during his absence, not least that she was strong if she had to be. It was only a matter of time before he would have to leave on the King's business anyway. There was war in Normandy, and Matilda daily expected a summons that Simon would have no choice but to answer.

That afternoon the second part of the ceremony was carried out and all the occupants of the hall gathered in the frosty garden grounds. Cups of steaming mulled cider were ladled out from a large cauldron and everyone joined hands and danced around the tree, exhorting it, as a representative of all the apple trees in the orchard, to grow strong and be fruitful in the coming year.

Dusk encroached, turning the world to silver blue as the first star shone in the sky. Laughing, filled with the pleasure of the moment, Matilda moved among the crowd. The hot cider had filled her with a delicious glow, and it almost seemed to her that her tree was glowing too, for the lanterns set around its base had gilded it with light.

Waltheof and some of the castle's children were playing a game of chase, winding in and out amongst the adults, their squeals high-pitched and carrying in the twilit air. Little Maude toddled after them, bundled up in various layers of clothing topped by a sheepskin mantle.

Simon curved his arm around Matilda's waist from behind and nuzzled aside her wimple to kiss her throat. Smiling, she turned in his embrace and offered him her lips.

From the direction of the courtyard the sound of a shout and the whinny of a horse carried on the clear, cold air. Simon lifted his head from Matilda's like a hound catching a scent. She resisted the urge to hold him more tightly and turned with him to face the sound of intrusion.

'Surely the King will not summon you to Normandy so close to the winter feast?' She was unable to prevent the note of desolation in her voice.

But the summons was not for Simon, it was for her. From Elstow. Her mother was sick with a fever of the lungs and beyond any help but God's. If Matilda wanted to bid farewell, then she must come at once.

Dazed, she made sure that the messenger was given a cup of mulled cider and bade him to take food from the trestle laid out to one side of the tree.

'I must go to her,' she said.

Simon glanced at the sky, which had deepened beyond turquoise and into sapphire. 'At night?' he asked dubiously. His words emerged on a puff of white vapour.

'The morning may be too late.' She looked at him. 'I have to do this — for my sake and hers.'

He studied her thoughtfully, then gave a nod of acceptance. 'You will need torches for the road and a stout escort. Go and make yourself ready for the journey and I will order the horses saddled.' Squeezing her arm, he left.

The people danced around her tree, singing the Wassail, making merry. She felt as if she were looking through a window on a bright and gilded scene from which she had been forcibly expelled. Grimly, she pulled her gaze from the celebration and left the enchantment of the garden for the bleak and practical world beyond.