‘There are some,’ said Hugh, ‘will soon be saying, “As a husband might,” if they were in bitter contention, and she drove him to violence first, and remorse afterwards. No, no need to fret yet for Ruald, he has been in the company of a host of brothers since before his wife was last seen whole and well. We’ll be patching together from their witness all his comings and goings since he entered his novitiate. And going back over the past few years in search of other women gone astray.’ He rose, eyeing the gathering dusk outside the door. ‘I’d best be getting back. I’ve taken too much of your time.’
Eudo rose with him, willing and earnest. ‘No, you did right to look this way first. And I’ll ask among my men, be sure. I still feel sometimes as though that field is my ground. You don’t let go of land, even to the Church, without feeling you’ve left stray roots in it. I think I’ve stayed away from it to avoid despite, that it was left waste. I was glad to hear of the exchange, I knew the abbey would make better use of it. To tell the truth, I was surprised when my father made up his mind to give it to Haughmond, seeing the trouble they’d have turning it to account.’ He had followed Hugh towards the outer door, to see his guest out and mounted, when he halted suddenly, and looked back at the curtained doorway in a corner of the great hall.
‘Would you look in for a moment, and say a neighbourly word to my mother, Hugh, while you’re here? She can’t get out at all now, and has very few visitors. She hasn’t been out of the door since my father’s burial. If you’d look in for a moment, it would please her.’
‘I will surely,’ said Hugh, turning at once.
‘But don’t tell her anything about this dead woman, it would only upset her, land that was ours so lately, and Ruald being our tenant. God knows she has enough to endure, we try to keep the world’s ill news away from her, all the more when it comes so near home.’
‘Not a word!’ agreed Hugh. ‘How is it with her since I saw her last?’
The young man shook his head. ‘Nothing changes. Only day by day she grows a little thinner and paler, but she makes no complaint. You’ll see. Go in to her!’ His hand was at the curtain, his voice lowered, to be heard only by Hugh. Plainly he was reluctant to go in with the guest, his vigorous youth was uneasy and helpless in the presence of illness, he could be excused for turning his eyes away. As soon as he opened the door of the solar and spoke to the woman within, his voice became unnaturally gentle and constrained, as to a stranger difficult, to approach, but to whom he owed affection. ‘Mother, here’s Hugh Beringar paying us a visit.’
Hugh passed by him, and entered a small room, warmed by a little charcoal brazier set on a flat slab of stone, and lit by a torch in a sconce on the wall. Close under the light the dowager lady of Longner sat on a bench against the wall, propped erect with rugs and cushions, and in her stillness and composure dominating the room. She was past forty-five and long, debilitating illness had aged her into a greyness and emaciation beyond her years. She had a distaff set up before her, and was twisting the wool with a hand that looked frail as a withered leaf, but was patient and competent as it teased out and twirled the strands. She looked up, at Hugh’s entrance, with a startled smile, and let down the spindle to rest against the foot of the bench.
‘Why, my lord, how good of you! It’s a long time since I saw you last.’ That had been at her husband’s funeral, seven months past now. She gave him her hand, light as a windflower in his, and as cold when he kissed it. Her eyes, which were huge and dusky blue, and sunk deeply into her head, looked him over with measured and shrewd intelligence. ‘Your office becomes you,’ she said. ‘You look well on responsibility. I am not so vain as to think you made the journey here to see me, when you have such weighty burdens on your time. Had you business with Eudo? Whatever brought you, a glimpse of you is very welcome.’
“They keep me busy,’ he said, with considered reserve. ‘Yes, I had business of a sort with Eudo. Nothing that need trouble you. And I must not stay to tire you too long, and with you I won’t talk business. How are you? And is there anything you need, or any way I can serve you?’
‘All my needs are met before I can even ask,’ said Donata. ‘Eudo is a good soul, and I’m lucky in the daughter he’s brought me. I have no complaints. Did you know the girl is already pregnant? And sturdy and wholesome as good bread, sure to get sons. Eudo has done well for himself. Perhaps I do miss the outside world now and then. My son is wholly taken up with making his manor worth a little more every harvest, especially now he looks forward to a son of his own. When my lord was alive, he looked beyond his own lands. I got to hear of every move up or down in the king’s fortunes. The wind blew from wherever Stephen was. Now I labour behind the times. What is going on in the world outside?’
She did not sound to Hugh in need of any protection from the incursions of the outside world, near or far, but he stepped cautiously in consideration of her son’s anxieties. ‘In our part of it, very little. The Earl of Gloucester is busy turning the south-west into a fortress for the Empress. Both factions are conserving what they have, and for the moment neither side is for fighting. We sit out of the struggle here. Lucky for us!’
‘That sounds,’ she said, attentive and alert, ‘as if you have very different news from elsewhere. Oh, come, Hugh, now you are here you won’t deny me a little fresh breeze from beyond the pales of Eudo’s fences? He shrouds me in pillows, but you need not.’ And indeed it seemed to Hugh that even his unexpected company had brought a little wan colour to her fallen face, and a spark to her sunken eyes.
He admitted wryly: ‘There’s news enough from elsewhere, a little too much for the king’s comfort. At St Albans there’s been the devil to pay. Half the lords at court, it seems, accused the Earl of Essex of having traitorous dealings with the Empress yet again, and plotting the king’s overthrow, and he’s been forced to surrender his constableship of the Tower, and his castle and lands in Essex. That or the gallows, and he’s by no means ready to die yet.’
‘And he has surrendered them? That would go down very bitterly with such a man as Geoffrey de Mandeville,’ she said, marvelling. ‘My lord never trusted him. An arrogant, overbearing man, he said. He has turned his coat often enough before, it may very well be true he had plans to turn it yet again. It’s well that he was brought to bay in time.’
‘So it might have been, but once he was stripped of his lands they turned him loose, and he’s made off into his own country and gathered the scum of the region about him. He’s sacked Cambridge. Looted everything worth looting, churches and all, before setting light to the city.’
‘Cambridge?’ said the lady, shocked and incredulous. ‘Dare he attack a city like Cambridge? The king must surely move against him. He cannot be left to pillage and burn as he pleases.’
‘It will not be easy,’ said Hugh ruefully. The man knows the Fen country like the lines of his hand, it’s no simple matter to bring him to a pitched battle in such country.’
She leaned to retrieve the spindle as a movement of her foot set it rolling. The hand with which she recoiled the yarn was languid and translucent, and the eyelids half-lowered over her hollow eyes were marble-white, and veined like the petals of a snowdrop. If she felt pain, she betrayed none, but she moved with infinite care and effort. Her lips had the strong set of reticence and durability.
‘My son is there among the fens,’ she said quietly. ‘My younger son. You’ll remember, he chose to take the cowl, in September of last year, and entered Ramsey Abbey.’
‘Yes, I remember. When he brought back your lord’s body for burial, in March, I did wonder if he might have thought better of it by then. I wouldn’t have said your Sulien was meant for a monk, from all I’d seen of him he had a good, sound appetite for living in the world. I thought six months of it might have changed his mind for him. But no, he went back, once that duty was done.’