Blood of the South

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.

I learned afterwards that, as concerned as the rest of us over Leafric’s heartbreaking circumstances, my father had had a private word with Edild, and she had quietly slipped away to see Gytha and Eddius, and asked them if they would consider adopting a six-month-old orphaned baby boy, adding, as if the proposal were not tempting enough for a child-hungry couple, that the baby was in fact kin to Gytha, her father and the baby’s dead mother having been first cousins.

It’s rare in life that what is a highly satisfactory outcome for one party in an arrangement is equally good for the other, but the adoption of Leafric by Gytha and Eddius quite definitely qualified. Of course, I never met Harald’s daughter alive; I only wish I had. But, from the moment I set eyes on Leafric, I had felt some sort of bond with him. It had affected me deeply to see him look so lost and sad, staring round him in puzzled misery as he tried to find the loving mother who wasn’t coming back. Gytha wasn’t the woman who bore him, but she made a very, very good substitute. Seeing her with her newly adopted son in her arms, smiling down into his little face, her eyes full of love and her hands as gentle as an angel’s, it was hard not to be moved to tears. Had Harald’s daughter been able to watch, too, I think she would have thanked her fenland cousin from the bottom of her heart.

Gytha and Eddius, knowing so little about their new son, decided to ask their priest to baptize him. The priest, a rotund, cheery, affectionate old man called Father Henry, readily agreed. As he said, better twice than not at all, and he was quite sure God wouldn’t mind a repetition.

To my surprise and delight, Gytha asked if I would stand as their son’s godmother. As I stood beside the font watching Father Henry pour the holy water over Leafric’s firm little head, his wide blue eyes looked straight into mine and he smiled.

Jack returned to Cambridge. With both his official and his unofficial business concluded – trying to locate Lady Rosaria’s kin, and identifying the woman whose body was found in the flooded pond – there was no reason for him to remain in Aelf Fen. He sought me out in the little back room at my aunt’s, and, staring down at the floor, told me he was leaving. I thought he sounded detached – cold, even – but then he raised his head and I saw his expression.

‘Will you be all right?’ I said. I wanted to reach out for his hand, but I didn’t know if he’d have welcomed such a gesture.

He grinned. ‘All right?’ he echoed.

I leaned closer, lowering my voice. ‘Your sheriff’s nephew sent a man to kill you. Unless he died out there where you left him -’ the thought still haunted me – ‘he’ll undoubtedly try again.’

‘Gaspard Picot was already among my many enemies,’ Jack said with a shrug. ‘Admittedly, I now have another, in the form of Gaspard’s hired killer, but one more won’t make a lot of difference.’

I didn’t understand how he could take it so calmly. ‘But you-’

‘How did you know?’ he asked, interrupting. His eyes were intent, his expression hard to read. ‘You knew the knife was aimed at us, and it was only because you threw yourself on me that it failed to find its target.’

I looked at him for some moments. I very nearly told him, but in the end I held back. ‘I said to you before that there was something I’d tell you one day, but I wasn’t yet ready,’ I said. ‘Do you remember?’

‘Of course,’ he said quietly.

‘This – how I knew we were in danger – is connected to it.’ That was an understatement, if ever there was one, and, feeling panicky, I hoped the shining stone wasn’t somehow able to pick up my words.

He waited, but, when I didn’t go on, he seemed to understand that I had said all I was going to. He smiled briefly. ‘I can wait,’ he murmured.

I didn’t know how to respond. Very aware of Edild in the next room, I muttered something about returning to Cambridge myself soon and no doubt we’d bump into each other.

I think he felt as confused as I did. He gave me a sort of bow, backed out of Edild’s little still room, struck his broad shoulders quite hard on the door frame, muttered something inaudible and then, turning so fast he almost tripped, hurried away.

I gave him a few moments, then slipped out after him. Crouching behind the low trees and bushes which conceal Edild’s house from the track, I watched him mount the grey gelding and, with my beautiful Isis following behind on a long rein, break into a trot, and then a canter.

An uninformed observer would have thought he couldn’t get away fast enough.

With a private smile, I went back inside and got on with my work.

I went back to Cambridge two weeks later.

I had to go back. I was in the middle of a course of instruction. When I’d left, Gurdyman was in the middle of revealing to me the mysteries and intricacies of the Nine Herbs Charm, and I knew he had many more such charms to teach me before I return to Aelf Fen for the dead time that is the middle of winter.

There was something else for which I needed Gurdyman’s wisdom; something whose importance, to me, exceeded everything else.

The shining stone.

I hadn’t seen Thorfinn since the awful night I’d shouted at him and told him the stone wasn’t his any more, and he could no longer use me to look into it for him. I had wished ever since that I had bitten back that parting shot, when I hurled at him that he ought to tell my father the truth.

I wasn’t very proud of myself for that.

I’d hoped to see Hrype, for then I could have asked him to act as intermediary. But Hrype was away from the village, and, when I asked my aunt when he’d be back, she merely shrugged. Finally I went back to the little inlet where Thorfinn’s boat had been moored, but, as I had feared, he was no longer there.

‘Did you find out what you were so desperate to know, Grandfather?’ I asked softly, gazing out over the marshy, treacherous ground and the numerous small waterways threading through it. ‘When I shut you out of using the shining stone, did you get Hrype to read the runes for you?’

I was still deeply curious about what he’d wanted me to see. What was the dreadful mission that Skuli had embarked upon? Had he succeeded? Was he even now on his way home, or had he and his crew perished? And – the question wouldn’t leave me alone – why had that image of Rollo intruded?

I had no answers.

Bending down, I gathered a handful of dry grasses and the last of the autumn wildflowers, weaving them into a little wreath. I threw it in the water where Thorfinn had moored his boat. ‘Be safe, Grandfather,’ I said. ‘And please come back soon.’

Then I turned and walked home.

I looked into the stone again that night. I cleared my mind, deliberately banishing thoughts of my grandfather and Skuli. I tried to let the stone speak to me. For a long time, I saw nothing but a sort of dark mist, with the ribbons of green and gold weaving through it. I was on the point of stopping when, just for an instant, I saw a long, beautifully shaped ship, flying on dark blue water under a huge square sail.

Then, in a flash so brief I couldn’t be sure if I’d really seen it, I saw Rollo. For an instant, he looked straight at me. Then he turned away.

The stone withdrew into darkness. With shaking hands, I wrapped it and put it back in its leather bag, then I stowed it away.

I would not look into it again, I vowed, until I had Gurdyman to guide me.

I walked back to Cambridge singing.

The resumption of my studies and the request for Gurdyman’s help with the shining stone were good enough motives for returning; both were true enough, after all.

But the real reason I wanted to be in Cambridge was because that’s where I’d find Jack Chevestrier.