‘It was Sir Hugh,’ I said. ‘He hit me Hoddie. Then he raped me.’ And I almost had to smile at the variety of shocked expressions chasing one another over Hod’s unlovely features, while she searched for something comforting to say.
‘There then!’ were the first words that came to hand.
‘And ’aven’t I ’eld always that the devil stuck ’is bit on Adam, an’ all men after ’im, whiles God was backturned makin’ Eve?’ she offered as she took me in her bony arms.
If she said more, I can’t remember what. It was enough to let her stride about and shout at servants, have water heated and herbs fetched in from the garden. Enough to be a child again. To let her bathe me, soothe me, call me lambkin, poultice my bruises with her own concoction of crushed comfrey leaves and parsley – comb out my hair and fold me in clean linen sheets. Push pain away and filth and guilt. To let my mind go blank. To banish thought – and sleep…
‘Wake, wake up my Lady!’
Hod’s voice. Hod’s large hand on my shoulder. ‘He’s ’ere my Lady, d’ye ’ear me? Downstairs in the hall.’
‘Who? Who’s here?’ For a moment I stared stupidly at the grey plaits that framed her face.
‘Sir Hugh, that’s who. God pick ’is wicked eyes out, an’ stuff their ’oles with salt!’
Then all at once the knowledge flooded in. I was awake and shaking like the dodder. Terrified! ‘He’s here? Downstairs? But why? Why is he here? What can he want?’
‘Same as Master Reynolds who’s bin at the fowl-yard.’ Hod gave a bitter laugh. ‘Sly fox ’as come back ’asn’t ’e, to take another bite.’
‘I can’t see him, I can’t! Not after what he’s done!’
I heard the rising panic in my voice and struggled to control it.
‘Nor shall ye, lamb. An’ so I’ll tell ’im to his ’ead, an’ set ’im down in front of all – blamed if I don’t!’
If Hoddie’d had a chin to jut she would have jutted it. As it was she used her nose.
‘No Hoddie he’s too clever. He’ll twist your words, I know he will, and say I led him on. He will defame me, tell them I’m no better than a whore – and say that I’m unfit to hold a manor in my husband’s name!’
The desperate thoughts came one upon another, while I stood beside the bed with eyes tight shut and both hands to my temples.
And all the time, at any moment he could mount the stairs… Oh God, there was so little time!
Think! Think Elise, I told myself to stem the fear. And then it came to me – and in a flash I knew what I must do.
I ran to where the keys were hidden under the loose window board, and flung back the heavy coffer lid to lift a sac of coins for Hod to see.
‘There’s thirty shillings here,’ I said. ‘I’m taking them with me to Lewes.’ I rummaged for my agate brooch and garnet pin in my jewel casket – threw my summer mantle on the floor and tossed them onto it. Then slammed the coffer lid and turned the key.
‘I’ll go for justice from My Lord the Earl and Lady Isabel, and show them what he’s done to me before Sir Hugh can fill their ears with lies!’
‘But not alone, my dove. Not leastways without a stout ’and longside of ye to see ye safe.’ Hod clenched a hefty fist to show me what she meant. ‘Best if I come-along, ye’r never going to make it on your own,’ she added staunchly.
‘No Hod, you have to stay to keep him from suspecting. Tell him I am sick abed. Or that I’ve locked the chamber door and won’t come out. Feed him – make him wait to see me. Say anything you like to keep him here. Do you understand? To give me time to get away.
‘Now, help me dress and quickly! I’ll need a change of linen and another gown. The blue – my stoutest boots, the burnet cloak…’ Urgency, a sense of danger, sped my movements, cleared my brain. The broken creature of the wood forgotten in the need for action, whilst Hod packed the clothing in the mantle and knotted up the corners.
When Garon’s grandsire, Sir Arnould de Stanville, fortified the manor for Mathilde’s War, he’d had constructed as a means of possible escape, a narrow stairway hidden in the wall of the main upper chamber – its entrance covered by a tapestry and stout oak chest. Its exit through a poultry house in the farmyard below.
There must have been some chinks and crevices for insects to creep though. Because the candle that Hod held to light me down, cast my dark shadow on a tunnel of grey cobwebs, which wrapped themselves around me like a dusty shroud. A crack of daylight showed above a doorway at the bottom of the stair.
‘Look after Edmay,’ I urged her when we reached it. ‘And give Kempe the coffer key. We’ll have to trust him not to thieve.’
I set down my bundle, to use both hands on the rusty bolts. ‘Hod, bolt this door behind me when I’m through.’
The top bolt pinched my finger when it finally gave way. But what was pain? I almost smiled again when I looked back to see the old thing swathed in webs, and looking like some kind of animated duster.
‘I’ll send to you when I am safe and know what’s best,’ I told her as we hugged across the bundle.
‘Trust to me, lamb. I’ll keep ’im ’ere, if I ’ave to hogtie the bugger. An’ if he asks me where ye’ve gone, be sure I’ll shut up closer than an oyster. Wild ’orses wouldn’t drag a stuttick of it outter me,’ she promised, unaware of the strange picture of a horsedrawn shellfish she’d just conjured in my mind. The last sight I glimpsed of her before she closed the door, was a forced smile beneath two shining tear-tracks in the dust that coated Hod’s plain face.
‘There then. Lor’ save you an’ protect ye, lamb,’ she ended gruffly.
But for a pair of sitting hens in the nest boxes set along one wall, the poultry house was empty. I picked my way across the smelly droppings to the outer door and peered into the sunlit yard. The air was hot and heavy, threatening a storm. A gleaming tide of barley straw swept out across the cobbles from the open portals of the barn. That’s where the busy chickens were, competing with a flock of pigeons for any grain left in the litter. Otherwise with all afield, the yard was deserted.
I could have, should have sidled through the shadows of the barn to make sure there was no one on the track beyond. But that wasn’t what I needed.
I needed to break free. Do something wild and violent. Run headlong through the barn across the threshing floor. Send hens and pigeons clattering into the air – release the fear and anger, feel the power of my own body – racing, shouting, fighting back!
So that was what I did, although the madness lasted only for as long as I could run flat out. Which was no further than the outer boundary of the orchard, where a tree root brought me to my knees and to my senses, both at once. And the one, the one thought in my mind, as I knelt trembling with the effort, listening for sounds of a pursuit, was to escape to Lewes fortress and the protection of My Lord and Lady of Warenne.
Once I had crossed the millstream, I planned to leave the road and scale the long ridgeback of Caburn – which lay guarding the approach to Lewes like a huge hound with its head between its paws.
Thinking back, I have no sense of leaving the domain. The next thing I remember is the hill itself – the steepness of the bostal track, the effort that it cost to climb it in the sultry heat.
There was no sign of a pursuit the first time I turned. Nor yet the second. But the third time I looked, it was to see that God had sent the hills themselves against me. The whole long ridge of chalk across the valley surged toward me as I watched it, cresting to engulf the manor!
‘Holy Mary,’ I thought in a panic. ‘The downs are moving!’ And because I dared not trust my eyes, I closed them tight.
But when I dared to look again, I saw it was a bank of storm-clouds that was moving, not a hillside – their shadow that crept out across the land – and felt the fool I was! Next thing, a gust of wind blew back my hood to bring the smell of wet earth to my nostrils. Then the deluge, as a curtain seamed with silver came folding and unfolding while it swept across the fields – as unreal in its way as moving hills.
Then it was on me, stinging, wrapping my wet gown about me, slashing through the grass stems to dissolve the chalk beneath my feet. The trees down on the Ram’s Combe road were heaving like a sea in tempest. I heard the whinny of a frightened horse. But all I could see were outlines, looming slopes which vanished into cloud before I reached them.
Buffeted and battered, blinded, stung and deafened, I barely caught myself from stumbling over the lip of a deep chalk pit cut into the hillside, and balanced on the edge of the abyss, stared down upon the wet and steaming backs of cattle taking shelter from the storm.
Beyond the pit the hill rose steeply, surely to the summit? Yet as I laboured upward, each curved horizon gave way to another. Until at last I was the only upright thing in an empty prospect, dark as night, with nothing visible but gusting rain and sodden turf on every side. Until quite suddenly a jagged fork of lightning bathed everything in brilliant light – the leaden under-surface of the clouds, ten thousand diamond raindrops, every grass blade on the hill. To show me I was standing on the very shoulder of the sleeping hound!
The next instant, thunder cracked directly overhead and rolled around the summit. My hood fell back again. My heavy, saturated plaits lifted my face into the lancing rain.
I stood alone invisible to all but God, inviting the elements to scour me, cleanse me and beat back into my body some feeling – any feeling that was not of self-disgust or of defeat!
A violated woman in the centre of a summer storm. The same woman safe and warm in bed. Is it what’s happened in between that’s altered how I feel?
Another flash! A livid vein of lightning threw up the knotted branches of a thorn tree, deformed into a slanting shape and clinging to the bank of a descending combe.
I counted up to five before the thunder followed, and was already on the downhill track, before the next flash lit the gleaming roofs of Lewes.
The storm retreated, thumping and bumping as it went – and the rain had settled to a steady drizzle by the time I crossed the river to duck in through the Saxon Gate. I closed my ears to what the sentry shouted after me and hurried up the hill. The normal bustle of the place was dampened by the weather. But there were others sloshing through the puddles, or wrapped in cloaks like me and sheltering in doorways.
All of them with predatory stares and grasping hands. All capable of violence!
I kept as far away from them as possible, sticking to the centre of the road. I had rehearsed what I would say to those they’d set to guard the fortress. But when it came to it, there was but one old porter in the fortress gate-house – an aged individual in a gleaming kettle hat with brows like besoms and a forest of white bristles on his chin.
Quite as repulsive as the rest!
‘If you’re the one ’as got away I’d like to see the other feller,’ he said in French, when he had taken in my draggled hair and bruised, discoloured face. His teeth were rotten. I smelt his evil breath – thought suddenly of Hugh above me open-mouthed. Began to shake.
‘I am Elise of Haddertun,’ I said as steadily as I could manage. ‘The Countess of Warenne will vouch for me if you will send her word. I wish to be admitted.’
‘Wish all ye like. My Lady’s off abroad, an’ won’t be back ’til Hallowmas.’ The porter spat into the moat. ‘Constable ’as charge ’til then, an’ ’e won’t vouch for no one.’
I stared at the rude old man in silence. In all my haste to get away it had never crossed my mind that the Warennes, who always came to Lewes in the summer, might this year have made other plans.
‘So what ye got in there? T’other feller’s head?’ The porter pointed with his pike at the wet bundle I still clutched under my wet cloak.
And why is it men imagine that a joke is all you need to set the world to rights? Why are they so convinced of their own cleverness that they can’t see the pain they inflict on women with their endless subjugation. With their taunting jibes and noxious, thrusting bodies? That’s what I thought of the old porter at the fortress gate.
But here alone? Am I so sure they’re all the same?
The rain had stopped by then. The porter added something risible about a butcher’s shop and brawn. But I had turned across the wet boards of the bridge, to cross the street and make my way between the puddles to the alley where the moneylender lived. The one man in the town that I could trust.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Emir’s Palace, Acre: August 1191
ABLUTION
In fact King Richard’s bathtime.
Of all the many decorated courts and cabinets inside the palace of Saint Jean d’Acre, the most exquisite is a first floor chamber, once used by the Byzantine princess, Maria Comnena, and more recently by Emir Baha-uddin Karakush. The King has allocated smaller, plainer apartments within the palace to his wife and sister and the little maid from Cyprus, to save this architectural jewel for his own use.
Mercifully undamaged by the Christian bombardiers, its walls are tiled in turquoise, terre verte and carnelian, in an endlessly repeated pattern to signify God’s infinite capacity. Friezed in gold with calligraphic surahs from the Qur’an, they’re set at intervals with polished copper mirrors framed in porphyry, reflecting sunlight from the chamber’s gilded dome. Its floor is an elaborate mosaic composition of green fronds and lily pads, with swollen buds surrounding an enormous open lily flower. Enclosed within the lily’s petals carved in marble, are forty gallons of hot water, perfumed with spikenard and sweet basil – with at the very centre of the blossom, singing cheerfully and lounging like an outsized worm in an exploded bud, the nakedly pink person of Ricardus Rex.