The Eastern Mediterranean was going to explode. The Seljuk Turks were disorganized; their great advances had ground to a standstill while men fought over which heir should succeed the sultan, and powerful lords throughout the territory quietly got on with creating their own small fiefdoms.
But the threat which the Seljuks posed to the Christians of Constantinople wasn’t going to go away. The Turks held the Holy Places; they were more than capable of arranging matters so that no Christian pilgrim ever again walked where Jesus Christ was born, where he ministered, where he died, where he was resurrected. Sooner or later, the Turks would regain all their former strength and probably more, and then the assault would begin anew.
Alexius Comnenus would have no alternative but to appeal to the Church in the west for help. The Church would no doubt raise its powerful voice and call out for strong men, men of wealth and position, demanding their compliance, telling them in no uncertain terms that it was their duty as Christians. And kings and lords would answer: the draw of the fabled wealth of the east would be just too great.
King William of England would resist; he had already made that clear to Rollo, his trusted spy. William had his own scheme, however. His brother Robert, he was convinced, would race to answer the summons, and he would need money. In all likelihood he would beg a loan from William – nobody but a king would be able to provide the sort of funds such a venture would require – and William, after all, was family. William would agree, and Normandy would stand surety.
Rollo’s retentive memory was full of the Holy Land. He had information to sell which would be of inestimable value to a man bent on recapturing the lands of the Turks. It would be of no use to King William, but there were others who would pay.
And why, Rollo mused, should I not sell my hard-won intelligence twice over? To King William first, for it was he who had sent Rollo on the mission and to whom he owed first loyalty.
But, once he had divulged to his king every last fact and figure, extrapolation and opinion that could possibly be of interest, then what was to stop him slipping away, adopting a different guise and finding another paymaster? One who, if Rollo was any judge, would lap up the precious information even more eagerly?
Robert, Duke of Normandy.
NINETEEN
Lord Gilbert saw to the removal and interment of Rosaria’s body. I admired him for putting aside his angry resentment at how she’d fooled him, and doing the right thing. If I’m honest, it was a relief to see the last of her.
Although my aunt and I were in no doubt that Rosaria had poisoned her mistress in order to adopt her identity and take her place in what she believed would be Harald’s wealthy, influential family, we did not tell Lord Gilbert. Edild reported to him that the corpse of Harald’s daughter showed no obvious signs of poisoning, which I suppose was true. We would have had to look a lot deeper to discover the remnants of the substance that killed her. Without the label of murderess, Rosaria went quietly to her last resting place in the Aelf Fen graveyard.
I’d been very cross at first. I wanted her to face recrimination and punishment for what she’d done, even if only posthumously. But, as Edild pointed out, what was the point, when Rosaria would have to explain herself to the sternest judge of all? And, her voice unusually gentle, she reminded me that Rosaria’s life hadn’t been easy. ‘To what lengths might you have been driven,’ she asked me, ‘had you been mutilated as she was?’
We might not have revealed the truth to Lord Gilbert, but I had to tell Jack. He and I had been involved right from the start, when we met Rosaria on the quay at Cambridge, and it was only right to explain what had happened in the church crypt. I sought him out later on the day we finally knew how Harald’s daughter had met her death, meeting him coming out of Lakehall as I approached. When I explained how Edild and I had held back from checking the dead woman’s stomach for poison because, as our kinswoman, we could not bring ourselves to do so, he nodded in understanding. ‘For what it’s worth,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t have done it either.’
We buried Harald’s daughter in the Aelf Fen graveyard, too. My family, once they all knew who she was, would have liked to have put her to rest her with her kin out on the little island, but Father Augustine seemed to have taken a personal responsibility for her, and her funeral and burial had been arranged before we could protest. Maybe the priest was right; she might have been deeply devout, and lying in hallowed ground the best place for her.
We didn’t know her name. She was buried as the daughter of Harald of Aelf Fen and mother of Leafric.
I hope it was good enough.
The question that worried all of us was what was to become of the infant Leafric. He was the child of my great-uncle Harald’s daughter; my Granny Cordeilla was his great-aunt. His mother was a first cousin to my father and Edild, he was a more distant cousin to me and my siblings, and I don’t think any of us could have borne the idea of abandoning him. Yet we were poor people, and at times we had barely enough to feed ourselves and our close kin. My parents, I knew, were reluctant to take on the burden. Their youngest child – my little brother Leir – was six now, and there would be no more born to them. I knew that my mother had greeted the end of fertility with some relief. It would be cruel to play on her conscience and persuade her to take on yet another baby. I wondered if Edild would be prepared to adopt Leafric, and I dare say she thought the same about me. Both of us were, after all, single women with no dependants, and strong and healthy. But she had her work and, over and above that, I was pretty sure that she wasn’t very maternal. The only child she would really have welcomed would have been Hrype’s, and that was forbidden her.
In the end, it was my dear father who came up with the right solution.
He has a brother, Alwyn, the second eldest of Granny Cordeilla’s children. When I say brother, I really mean half-brother, my father having been sired by Thorfinn and not by Cordeilla’s quiet, reserved husband, Haward. It would be stretching the truth to say that my father and his two eldest siblings were close, but they cared for one another, were aware of how each other’s lives progressed, and, to an extent, shared in each other’s joys and griefs.
Alwyn was a fisherman and a fowler, living close to his creatures and the land which they shared. He had always been a self-contained man; my father and Granny Cordeilla always said he closely resembled Haward. Apparently the family had all decided he would live out his life in self-sufficient solitude, apart from the fish and the water birds, but, when he was heading into middle age, he surprised everyone by marrying a very pretty but extremely shy woman named Edith. She, too, was on the cusp of middle age, but nevertheless their union was just in time for her to conceive and bear a child: a daughter who they named Gytha.
Gytha was perhaps a couple of years older than my eldest sibling, Goda, and she had married the year before my sister. (I had only met her on a handful of occasions, but I could see that she was much nicer than Goda; that, however, applied to most people.) Gytha’s husband was a very pleasant, nice-looking man named Eddius, and I knew him rather better than I did Gytha because he, like my father, was an eel-fisher, and quite often they worked together.
You would have thought life was good for Gytha and Eddius. They clearly loved each other. They had a tiny but immaculately kept house close to a little-known waterway which was a fine source of eels. They were young and strong. Yet they had a great sorrow, for, despite seven years of marriage, they had no children. I believe both of them had consulted Edild, and apparently there was no obvious reason why the joys of parenthood had not been forthcoming. I was well aware that the barrenness of the marriage pained both of them, especially Gytha. On the rare occasions since the wedding that I had seen the pair – often at some gathering to welcome the newest member of the family – it had obviously taken a huge effort for Gytha to smile, congratulate the new parents and dandle the proffered baby on her knee.