Still unwilling to let him go Danise clung to
him until, after one last kiss, he gently set her aside. She
understood why Charles wanted Michel to make haste to secure his
new estate from Clodion and Clodion’s grasping family, but during
the next weeks his absence was a constant ache in her heart. She
wished she could ride through the springtime landscape of Francia
with him and show him the wide and sparkling Rhine, the little
village of Koln and, when they finally crossed the river, the
fortress of Deutz where her father acted as Charles’s commander.
Most of all, she missed Michel’s compelling presence at her side.
She arrived at Deutz in a dispirited state.
“The time will fly faster than you expect,”
said Clothilde. In recent days the maidservant was the only person
in whom Danise could confide, since Sister Gertrude was still
unreconciled to the idea of her marriage. “There is so much to do,
Danise. There are clothes to be sewn, household goods to be
collected—sheets and quilts, dishes and pans. And furniture. Does
anyone know how well Clodion had furnished his house at
Elhein?”
“Whatever was Clodion’s, I would want removed
and burned,” Danise responded. “I will have in my home no object
that once belonged to him.”
“Give it to the poor,” suggested Sister
Gertrude. “Clodion was so miserly that there must be many living on
his land who could use a bed or a table.”
Clothilde was right when she said they would
be busy. Savarec left word in Koln that he wanted to be notified of
any peddlers who came through the town with goods a bride might
use, so several times the women boarded the ferry that plied the
Rhine, crossed to the western shore, and there investigated some
itinerant merchant’s wares. Savarec set aside a room where the
items thus collected could be stored, and he gave Danise furniture
and linens that had once belonged to her mother.
There was also the bridal chamber to be
prepared, for the tiny room Danise usually shared with Sister
Gertrude and Clothilde when they were at Deutz was not suitable.
Savarec chose the best guestroom, a large, airy chamber on the
second floor, with a double window that looked out over the garden.
He ordered the walls freshly whitewashed, the floor and windows
scrubbed, and then he left it to Danise to furnish it as she
wanted.
She took a typical Frankish bed from one of
the other guestrooms. The wooden frame was made with carved
railings at head and foot and a long rail down the side that was
placed next to the wall. The mattress she stuffed with fresh straw
and covered it with a feathered quilt so the straw would not
scratch the occupants. New linen sheets, freshly stuffed feather
pillows, and a blue quilt from her mother’s belongings completed
the bed. Danise added to the decor blue curtains, a carved wooden
clothes chest, a table with basin and ewer, and a chamber pot
tucked under the table.
While all of this was being prepared, she
continued to sew on her clothing. With Clothilde to help her and
unknown to Sister Gertrude, whom she felt certain would have been
shocked, Danise made a nightrobe of sheer linen with delicate white
embroidery at the round neck and short sleeves. Clothilde sewed
several rows of narrow pleats around the hem of the garment.
“Michel will love to see you in this,”
Clothilde said.
“I will wear it for my first night with him.
Oh, Clothilde, when I think of it, I cannot breathe for excitement.
I love him so much. I can’t wait to be his wife, to have our own
home and all of our lives together to look forward to. It will be
so wonderful.”
* * *
While Danise busied herself with bridal
preparations and dreamed of the future, Michel was dealing with the
unbelievably ramshackle estate that now belonged to him. Located
several days’ ride due west of Aachen and set in a heavily forested
area, Elhein had been used by Clodion mainly as a hunting
lodge.
“How can I bring Danise to such a place?”
Michel asked Guntram. “The main building needs massive repairs.
From the looks of the fields I have seen, there won’t be much in
the way of crops to harvest and store for the winter. The servants
are sullen, and since they are all free people, they are likely to
leave at any time.” He paused, looking around his great hall in
consternation.
“If they have not run away under Clodion’s
rule,” Guntram said, “then they are too disheartened to fend for
themselves. They will stay, Michel. Your task will be to convince
them to work.”
Michel stared at the simple warrior who had
tended him when he was ill and weak, who embodied courage and
everyday common sense. Guntram had his own new estate to see to,
yet at Charles’s request he had come willingly to help his friend.
Michel made a silent vow not to fail either Guntram or Charles.
Most of all, he would not fail Danise.
“I have with me fifteen good men, including
you,” he said to Guntram. “I plan to use all of you. Send some
people out to round up everyone who lives at Elhein. I want every
single person, man, woman, and child, to appear in front of this
building at midday. I am going to give them a feast to celebrate my
arrival. Then I’m going to put them to work.” He was not sure how
Guntram would take these orders, but that dependable man grinned
his approval and went off to carry them out. Michel breathed a sigh
of relief. Having no practical experience in managing a large
estate, and knowing he would have access to nothing more than hand
tools, he did not know if he could succeed in what he wanted to do,
but he wasn’t going to give up. He was going to prove to himself
that he could turn Elhein into a self-supporting and profitable
estate, and at the same time he would make Danise proud of him.
He soon ran into trouble. The two women who
worked in the kitchen did not have Guntram’s faith in him. They
argued and complained when Michel told them what he wanted of them
on that day, saying they did not have time to prepare a feast, and
not enough food or drink. Feeling very much the tyrannical medieval
baron, Michel refused to listen to their objections.
“It is midsummer, a time of abundance,” he
said. “I have just sent a group of my men out to hunt birds and
rabbits for you to cook. I want you to start making bread at once.
When the women I have ordered to attend this feast arrive, I will
send them to you. Put them to work. Give the older children baskets
and tell them to go into the forest and fields to collect berries.
There are wheels of cheese in the coldhouse. I know, because I just
saw them. Bring some of them out and serve them. At least Clodion
left plenty of wine in the cellars. Well broach a few casks, but
not too many. I want everyone sober enough to understand what I am
going to say.”
“Kitchen work is women’s work, not men’s,”
cried the slovenly woman who claimed to be the cook, “and Count
Clodion never let anyone but himself touch the wine, nor drink it,
neither.”
“It’s not Clodion’s wine anymore,” he
reminded her. “It’s mine now and today I intend to share it with
the folk who work for me.”
Both kitchen women gaped at him as if they
could not believe what they were hearing.
“Before you do anything,” Michel directed,
“heat some water and wash your hands and faces. There’s not much
else you can do today except get the food on the table, but
tomorrow I want this kitchen scrubbed from top to bottom. From its
condition right now, I’m surprised you people haven’t all died from
food poisoning. Do you have any other clothes?” he ended, frowning
at the filthy, tattered garments the two women were wearing.
“This here’s all we got,” said the so-called
cook.
“I’ll do something about that as soon as I
can. While you are cleaning tomorrow, make a list in your head of
the supplies you’ll need for the kitchen. When I go to Deutz in a
couple of weeks, I’ll stop in Koln and get as much as I can and
send it to you. I’ll also see that you get cloth for new dresses.
What are you staring at?”
“I be needin’ a new kettle,” said the cook.
‘Th’ old one’s cracked. Clodion never cared ‘bout that.”
“Ain’t no soap left.” Her companion eyed
Michel with cautious hope. “Can’t clean wi’ no soap.”
“Right.” Encouraged that they were at least
paying attention to his wishes, Michel made a fast decision.
“Tomorrow you make soap. The following day you clean. I’ll tell the
other women to help you. As for the new kettle, you shall have two
of them. In the meantime, do the best you can with what you have
here now.”
He knew they did not quite believe him.
Neither did the rest of the folk whom Guntram and his men rounded
up, who came reluctantly and sullenly to the midday feast he had
ordered and who listened to his speech as if they had heard it all
many times in the past.
“You can’t expect them to change all at
once,” Guntram said later when Michel voiced his disappointment at
the general lack of enthusiasm for the changes he proposed to make.
“From what I’ve heard, Clodion was cruel but he was also lax. He’d
beat a few peasants on each of his visits, kill one now and then
just to show he could, and take the prettiest girls for his own
entertainment. But he didn’t care a bit what they did when he
wasn’t here. These people aren’t used to working regularly, and
they aren’t used to an honest master, either.”
“They’ll have to get used to both, and fast,”
Michel replied. “I intend to whip this place into shape before
Danise comes here.”
She was the reason for everything he did. He
wanted to write to her, but there was no parchment or ink
available, not even a wax tablet. No one at Elhein knew how to read
or write. Michel quickly learned how to keep lists in his head as
his companions did. He learned a lot in those few weeks before his
marriage to Danise, and most of it depressed him, for he soon
realized he was far out of his depth.
He was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of
work that had to be done using the simplest technology. For all his
training and archaeological experience, he did not know enough
about the details of daily life in the eighth century. He would
have been lost without Guntram’s help. By the time he departed
Elhein for Deutz and his wedding to Danise, Michel was deeply
discouraged.
* * *
It was raining when Michel first saw Koln. He
had been there several times in the twentieth century, when he and
his English-speaking colleagues referred to it as Cologne, and when
it was a large and prosperous city. Michel’s principal interest in
it at that time was for its twin-towered Gothic cathedral and for
the excavated remains of a Roman villa that had a splendid mosaic
floor in the banqueting hall. He had once spent an interesting
morning in the museum built over and around this villa.
What he saw on this present visit was a
village set within the boundaries of the rebuilt Roman walls, with
the Rhine providing extra protection along its eastern side. Long
forgotten by the inhabitants of Koln, the Roman villa lay beneath
half a millenium of dirt and rubble, and while the town was served
by a church built in the Romanesque style, the cornerstone of the
great cathedral would not be mortared into place for another three
centuries. Michel regarded Koln with a dizzying sense of
discrepancy, before reminding himself that he was the one out of
proper time and place.
Directly across the fog-shrouded river from
Koln lay Deutz, the fortress Savarec commanded. There was a
flat-bottomed ferry, little more than a raft with railings, to
carry them across the river.
After helping to load their horses onto the
ferry, Michel and the men with him stepped aboard and the ferryman
poled them slowly across the Rhine. As they drew nearer, Michel
could see the sentries patrolling the walls of Deutz. To his
archaeologist’s trained eye it was obvious that, like Koln, Deutz
had once been a Roman outpost, built to protect this convenient
crossing place from the depredations of the wild tribes who, even
in those distant Roman times, lived in the eastern forests.
Plainly, the Franks had the same sort of defense in mind when they
added to and refortified Deutz, using mellow old blocks of
Roman-cut stone for their additions.
Outside the fortress walls there were a few
dwellings near the ferry landing, probably for the families of the
men who worked the ferry. Beyond these houses, some fields were
under cultivation. A dozen or so peddlers had set up awnings or
wooden booths along the short, muddy road that led from the ferry
to the fortress. Comparing the organized simplicity of Deutz to his
own estate, Michel wondered what Danise would think when she first
beheld Elhein.
He did not have long to engage in dour
misgivings. Just as the ferry reached the shore, bumping gently
against the wooden wharf, Michel saw two mounted figures emerge
from the fortress gate and head toward the ferry.
“Danise,” he breathed, recognizing the
smaller of the riders despite the concealing hooded brown cloak
that shielded her from the rain.
“Did you doubt she would meet you?” asked
Guntram. “And Savarec with her. What have they done with Clothilde,
do you suppose? Or with Sister Gertrude?”
Michel wasn’t listening. He leapt ashore and
hurried toward the two who were now almost at the ferry landing.
Seeing him, Danise slid off her horse with a cry of welcome. She
ran no more than two or three steps before she was swept into
Michel’s arms.
He could not get enough of her sweet mouth,
could not hold her close enough. He kissed her again and again,
neglecting to greet Savarec, forgetting everything and everyone
else in his delight at holding Danise once more.
“I’ve missed you so,” she gasped between
hungry kisses. “I feared you would be delayed, or not come at
all.”
“Nothing could keep me away from you,” he
told her. “Nothing.” His desire to kiss her yet again was
forestalled by Savarec’s deep chuckle.