‘Come on,’ I whispered, signalling for Eadgyth to follow me. The door opened smoothly, without a sound, and I hurried out and down the single step into the cloister, Eadgyth behind me. Beneath her habit she was wearing shoes, I noticed, but that could not be helped now.
‘Quickly,’ I said, and started making for the arch that we had come in through.
She caught my sleeve. ‘This way,’ she said, and headed off straight across the grass, towards the dormitory. I hesitated, but I knew that the longer we waited, the more likely it was that the circatrix would come out from the chapter house and see us.
I went after her, the frost upon the grass biting the soles of my feet. The doors to the dormitory were unlocked and we slipped inside, just as I heard the jangle of keys further down the cloister. But no shouts followed; we had made it. I looked to Eadgyth, but she was already climbing the first few steps up to her chambers.
‘My lady—’ I began, trying to keep my voice low. I was aware not just of the circatrix outside but also of the rest of the nuns in the next room.
‘No,’ she cut me off. ‘I cannot risk being out any longer. I must go.’
‘I would speak with you again later,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘I will speak no more. There is nothing else I wish to say, to you or Ælfwold. But give the letter to your lord; he will know what it means. If nothing else I ask that you do this for me.’
She appeared so small and fragile, somehow, though I knew that she was neither old nor infirm. As I looked up at her, I could not help but feel sorry for her.
I felt a dryness in my throat, and swallowed. ‘I cannot promise that.’
‘I know,’ she replied, and there was a resigned look upon her face. ‘You are one of his men, after all.’
She turned and, neither making a sound nor looking back, ascended the rest of the stairs. And then she was gone, her dark habit vanishing, becoming one with the darkness. Eadgyth, Harold’s widow.
Twenty-nine
I HAD TO
wait until the circatrix was safely out of sight before I could pass through the cloister again. In all it might have been as much as half an hour from my leaving the house to coming back, though it felt like much longer. Wace and Eudo were both waiting in the hall when I returned.
‘Where were you?’ Wace asked.
‘Let’s go somewhere we can’t be overheard first,’ I told them. ‘Then I’ll tell you.’ I wasn’t sure that the walls or floors here were thick enough to stop anyone else from listening.
The mill was close by, and so that was where we went: far enough from the house or from the cloister that we could neither be seen nor heard. The door was unlocked and I pushed it open. Sacks lay piled along one wall, some of them split with grain spilling out. The dark forms of rats scurried away as we approached.
‘Enough of this, Tancred,’ Eudo said. ‘Tell us what’s going on.’
‘It was Eadgyth,’ I said. ‘She was the one who left this.’ And I brought the scroll out from my belt. ‘I caught up with her in the church.’
‘What did she say?’ Wace asked.
‘Nothing I could make much sense of,’ I said. ‘She kept talking about her husband. About Harold, and how Malet was betraying his memory.’
Eudo narrowed his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It seems he made some promises to her some time ago, though she never explained properly. Promises which he hasn’t kept, at any rate.’
‘So we were right,’ Wace muttered, raising an eyebrow. ‘He has been conspiring with her.’
‘Except that she seemed to want nothing more to do with him,’ I said.
‘Yesterday she called him
nithing
,’ Eudo put in. ‘It means someone who is worthless or depraved. It’s one of the worst insults the English have.’
I had wondered what that meant. Ælfwold himself had used it of us the night before we had arrived here, I remembered now. Was that how he regarded us? I tried to put it from my mind; it wasn’t important now.
‘I don’t see how Malet can be a traitor,’ I said. ‘Whatever pledges he might have made to her once, it’s clear that they mean nothing to him now.’
At the very least his message hadn’t given her the answer she wanted. What was it, then, that she believed she deserved to be told?
‘Still,’ Wace said, ‘as long as they continue to pass secret letters between each other, how can we be sure?’
‘There is one way,’ Eudo replied, and he pointed to the letter in my hand. ‘We have to open it.’
Wace nodded. ‘It’s the only way we can know for certain.’
‘That’s what we thought about Malet’s letter,’ I said. ‘And we’re no closer after that.’
It struck me as unusual, too, that Eadgyth would leave any important message in our hands, if she had any reason to worry it might be intercepted before it reached Malet. I’d made no assurances to her – as if I would to the widow of our enemy. And so whatever words were contained within this scroll, it seemed unlikely that they would tell us what we wanted to know.
But all the same I knew that Wace and Eudo were right. It was not the hardest decision I’d ever had to make.
‘I need light,’ I said. There were no windows in the mill-room, nor had we brought any torch or lantern, in case we should be seen. But I could hardly read in the darkness.
The moon was behind a cloud, but it was enough to see by as
I stood in the doorway, with the other two gazing over my shoulder. I ran my finger over the seal, which I now saw bore the imprint of a dragon, or some other large winged beast, with the words ‘
HAROLDVS REX
’ around its edge.
King Harold
. Another mark left by the usurper. But Harold was long dead, and Eadgyth must surely possess a seal of her own. Why would she use his?
I pressed it between my fingers; it broke easily. I unfurled the parchment, and in the moonlight I saw neat lines of carefully rendered script, only this time it was not in Latin. Some of the letters I did not even recognise.
‘What does it say?’ Wace asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Whatever tongue it’s written in, it’s not one that I know.’
Latin was the one language in which I was lettered; even French and Breton I knew only how to speak, not read. I glanced down the sheet, hoping to find a word I might know. In the greeting on the first line was Malet’s name, as I might have expected; a little further down I found Harold’s, but otherwise there was nothing.
Of course it might be in English, I realised. That would make sense, since it was Eadgyth’s first tongue. And though I had never heard him speak it, it seemed likely that Malet knew it too, given his parentage and the many years he had spent in England.
My eyes passed over a phrase from the middle of the letter. ‘
Ic gecnawe thone gylt the the geswencth, and hit mœg geweorthan thæt thu thone tholian wille
,’ I said slowly, trying to pronounce the strange words. The writing was not as clear as the gospel books I had read when I was younger; the letters were smaller and harder to distinguish. I turned to Eudo. ‘Do you know what that means?’
He shrugged. If it was English, I was evidently saying it wrongly.
‘Is there anything at all you can make out?’ Wace asked.
‘Nothing of any use,’ I said. ‘Malet is mentioned, and Harold as well. That’s as much as I can tell.’
‘There’s one man at least who might be able to tell us what it says,’ Eudo said.
‘Ælfwold,’ I said grimly. Above all else one thing was becoming clear: sooner or later we had to speak with him. Short of Malet
himself, who was two hundred miles away in Eoferwic, only he could have any idea of what all this meant. He had been to see Eadgyth before on this or similar business; we already knew that. And there was no one who was closer to the vicomte. If we were to find out what was really happening, he was the one we had to confront.
The only question was when.
We rode out from Wiltune at first light. Abbess Cynehild was there, stern-faced as ever, with half a dozen other nuns as well, huddled in their habits. Among them was Burginda, as well as the fair-haired girl who had met us in the abbess’s house on our arrival. Eadgyth, though, was not there. Was that her choice, I wondered, or had the abbess told her to stay away?
Our horses and weapons were brought to us without a word, and it was likewise in silence that we mounted up. It was good to have my sword by my side once more – not that I thought we were at any risk in the convent, but I was so used to its presence that without it I couldn’t help but feel vulnerable.
I was relieved to be leaving Wiltune behind us, even though that meant another three days on the road, for at least we could be our own masters, rather than bound to the strictures of the nunnery and its abbess. Yet I was content to let Ælfwold continue to take charge for now, to let him make the decisions and for us to appear the servants, since perhaps then he would not suspect what was to come. For I knew that everything would change when we reached Lundene.
As it had on our way to Wiltune, the rain continued to fall, bitter and unrelenting, each day coming down heavier than it had on the last. Down in the valleys the winterbournes were in full flow; some of the larger rivers had overspilled their banks and the fields all about lay in flood. In one place the waters had risen so high that it was impossible for us to cross, and we had to ride more than a mile upstream to find the next fording point before we could join the road again.
Our only respite came when we stopped for the night, but even then we kept hearing stories of fresh risings nearby. Norman traders had been set upon in the market at Reddinges; at Oxeneford a whole ship’s crew had been killed in a tavern brawl when their Flemish speech was mistaken for French. And so shortly before Stanes we left the old road, deciding it was better instead to strike out across country and approach Lundene from the south, rather than risk running into trouble on the road. Even then we kept our hands by our sword-hilts. The paths that we followed were not the best travelled: the kind of way often frequented by robbers, who would lie in wait to ambush the unprepared. But if there were any, we did not see them, and it was past noon on the third day of March when the city came into sight, clinging to the northern shores of the grey Temes.
Of the encampment that had stood on the hill above Westmynstre, there was now not a single banner or tent to be seen. The king and his army were marching, just as we’d learnt in the alehouses and from other travellers we had passed on the way. They could not have been gone long, though, and I hoped we’d be able to catch them before they reached Eoferwic.
Wigod greeted us warmly on our arrival at Malet’s house. Elise and Beatrice had gone to visit friends across the city and so weren’t there, but the boy Osric was and he took the horses to the stables. I sent Malet’s three men to help him, and gave the signal to Eudo and Wace, who accompanied the priest inside, while I went with the steward to fetch some food and drink.
The kitchens were modest in size, but then this was only a townhouse, not a great palace such as the one the vicomte had at Eoferwic. In the corner stood two large barrels; Wigod wrested the lid from one of them and filled a pitcher from it. Against the walls were long tables with pots filled with some kind of stew, while at one end of the room was a great fireplace with a spit over it, on which some kind of meat was roasting. My stomach rumbled, but it would have to wait a little longer.
‘Your journey was pleasant, I hope,’ Wigod said.
‘Not particularly,’ I replied. ‘It was cold and wet. It rained all the way.’
He grinned. ‘You’ll be glad of some food inside you, then. Here, help me with these.’ He pointed to some clay cups which rested on one of the tables.
I looked around to make sure that we were alone. ‘You know your letters, don’t you, Wigod?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ he said as he rested the pitcher upon one of the tables. ‘Why?’
Being the steward of Malet’s house I’d thought he must have to, if only to be able to receive his lord’s writ when the vicomte was away from Lundene.
‘I have something I thought you might be able to read for me,’ I said, producing Eadgyth’s letter from my cloak pocket. I had folded it to make it easier to carry, and opened it out before handing it to him. ‘It’s written in English, or so I think.’
He looked at me quizzically, and I suppose it was an odd request to make. But he took the parchment nonetheless, laying it out on the table where the light from the fire played across it.
‘It is English,’ he said. He frowned, then slowly began to read: ‘“To Guillaume Malet, vicomte of Eoferwic and lord of Graville across the sea, Lady Eadgyth, wife and widow to Harold Godwineson, rightful king of the English, sends her greetings—”’ He broke off and drew back, turning away from the table. ‘I cannot be reading this, Tancred. This is meant for my lord, not for me. If he were to discover I had been doing this, he would expel me from his service, or worse.’
‘I was the one who broke the seal,’ I said. ‘I will carry the blame, if anyone.’
‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.
‘At Wiltune,’ I said. ‘From Lady Eadgyth herself. She was the one that Ælfwold was sent to meet. We think that your lord may be conspiring with her.’
‘Conspiring?’ Wigod said. ‘No. That isn’t possible. He is a loyal servant of the king.’
‘And yet we know he was once a good friend of Harold,’ I said.
‘That was a long time ago.’ I saw that there was sweat upon his brow, and his face had turned a shade of pink.
‘So you knew of this?’
‘It was never any secret,’ he protested. ‘In the years before he took the crown, Harold and his wife often stayed in this house when they came to Lundene. But he’s dead now, and Eadgyth I haven’t seen in years – I didn’t even know she was still alive.’
‘But Ælfwold did,’ I said. ‘He has met with her more than once, to pass on messages from your lord.’
‘I know nothing of that, I swear,’ Wigod said.
I had been given no reason to disbelieve the steward’s word before now, and so perhaps he was telling the truth. I tried a different approach. ‘Do you know anything about the promises Malet made to her?’ I asked.