Читать книгу The Black Rose - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 15

Before leaving to answer his master’s impatiently repeated summons, Wilderkin had said, “Ye’ll be able to see the Lady Hild at once, Master Walter.” This was unexpected good luck. His mother’s health was so uncertain that Walter had not been sure of seeing her before going on to Bulaire.

For ten years or more she had not stirred from her room except on rare occasions when she made an appearance at supper or on still rarer evenings when she walked in her garden after dusk had fallen. When she graced the supper table, she sat on the dais beside her father, but no words were exchanged between them.

Walter had always been certain that she kept herself hidden away because life had lost all savor for her. Her camera was the largest room on the solar floor, but it was not well suited to such continuous occupancy. It was exposed on three sides, which meant that it was very warm in summer and cold in winter. No amount of persuasion could get her to change it, however. She would smile gently when Walter girded at her about it, and say that she was a creature of habit, that she could be content nowhere else. He knew the real reason for her obduracy: From the east window she could see afar off, against the black gorget of Algitha Scaur, the donjon top of Bulaire!

Wulfa, her maidservant, shared her solitude, a gaunt woman with a bitter and intent face. Walter had never been able to detect a trace of warmth in the maid. Certainly she never smiled, and as for a word passed in jest it was not in the nature of her. But she was devoted to her mistress and gave her every waking moment. She emerged from the room only when something was necessary for their use, and she would then move swiftly about her task on noiseless heels. With the other members of the domestic staff she kept up a ceaseless warfare.

It was this faithful creature who answered his tap on the door. She did not smile but gave him a curtsy so brief and restrained that he expected to hear her knees creak.

“The Lady Hild is up and will see you, master,” she whispered.

He heard his mother cry: “Walter! Is it you, my son?” She was sitting in a rush-bottomed chair near the window which commanded the view of Bulaire, and she would have risen to greet him if Wulfa had not precipitated herself on her with almost frenzied cries. “No, no, my lady! You must not! You really must not try it! You have so little strength, my lady.”

His mother’s dark eyes smiled at Walter over the bent shoulder of her servant as though to say, “Forgive me for not getting up, but you see how it is.” He stood still for several moments and watched her with a sense of surprise and even awe. She had never looked more lovely. Her hair was white, but she looked young and fresh in spite of it. Her eyes seemed enormous in her pale face, and her features were as finely etched as a saint’s on a cathedral wall. Wulfa had seen to it that she was attired in a delicate cendal dress with a peplum wrapped about her neck.

There was another reason for surprise. Walter had expected to find her in the depths of despair, but instead there was a serene calmness about her. She seemed happy even.

“My son,” she said, taking his wrist and urging him into a chair beside her, “you know that he is gone? At first, when Wulfa told me, I thought the end of everything had come. It seemed so cruel. He was so strong, so brave, so beautiful! But now I see things more clearly. He was not happy, Walter, and now he is at peace. I feel that he’s closer to me than he has ever been, and so I know it is for the best, that it is God’s will. Before you came in, Walter, I was sitting here and watching the sky, and I was remembering. I was remembering many things, and I was happy.”

She went on talking in low tones. It was hard for him to follow her, for she spoke mostly of things of which he knew nothing. She had drawn her arm through his, and they sat closely together as she whispered some of her pleasantest memories. He glanced about the room and saw that Wulfa had made some changes while he was away. The bed of tapister’s work (it was so high that Wulfa herself slept under it on a truckle-bed) had a turkey-red coverlet now, and there were red candles instead of white on the top shelf of the old bink in the corner. The one tapestry in the room, hanging on the wall opposite the bed, had been so neatly repaired that he could see no trace of the once familiar rents. The changes made the room seem much more cheerful.

“You look so much like him, my son,” his mother whispered. “I am proud of you, so proud of you, because of that. You will become a learned man at the university, Walter. Your father had very little learning; you will excel him in that.”

She began to talk then in an almost lyric tone of things that had occurred before he was born. It was all so far removed from his ken that before long he found his attention wandering. He began to think how important this room had been in his life. He had been born here (although it had not been certain at first that his grandfather would permit the event to take place in his house), it had been his real home for several years, and it was here he had first seen Engaine.

She was about eight at the time, and he three years older. The confiscation was a new thing then, and there was the blackest of blood between Gurnie and Tressling. Many stories of the self-willed little beauty had reached them at Gurnie, and she was as ill thought of as her favor-pandering father. Walter might never have seen her had it not been for an accident.

It was a cold day in the dead of winter, with snow piled up in great white drifts and a wind brawling in from the west. Engaine had been permitted to set out for a ride, or had neglected to ask for permission, which seems more likely. A single page had accompanied her, a pasty-faced youth new to the district and to the feud between the two houses. When his young mistress became thoroughly numbed with the cold, the page had rapped at the front door of Gurnie, asking that they might rest and become warm. Lady Hild welcomed the girl and took her up to her own room, where a fine blaze roared in the fireplace. She sat Engaine down in front of it and instructed Wilderkin to heat a mug of morat for her. Walter was in the room, sitting off in one corner and missing nothing about this young guest with lovely blue eyes in a small, pinched face. He was hoping, vainly, that there would be some of the morat for him.

He still recalled that she wore a tunic of a rich shade of blue over her kirtle. It had quite obviously been cut down from adult size. This was not a matter for surprise. Even in the highest families, the handing on of garments from old to young, and from rich to poor, was a common practice. Walter was quite sure that the tunic, being the exact shade of her eyes, became her more than it had its previous wearer. The tight-fitting hood on her head was of ermine, and it had a liripipe of blue velvet tied under her chin.

Even at that age Engaine had a pert and venturesome tongue. She talked to Lady Hild with an ease quite surprising in so young a girl, and many times she went into trills of laughter. She even had the audacity to nod over the mug of steaming morat and say, “Waes hael!” By this time she had become warm again. Color had come back into her cheeks, a most delicate shading of pink, and her eyes sparkled as she talked. He had never seen anyone so lovely in all his life, and it was no wonder that his subjugation began there and then.

The girl looked about her with a lively curiosity, not neglecting to include Walter in the inspection. What she saw did not seem to impress her, for she said, with a slight curl of her very pretty nostril: “This house is small. It’s not nearly as fine as Tressling.”

“No,” answered Lady Hild. “It is humble compared to Tressling and Bulaire.”

“Our castle is the largest in the whole world. It has six towers.”

This was so far from the truth that Walter wanted to shout out a contradiction. Tressling had only two towers. He remained silent with great difficulty.

“My father has a hundred archers and fifty men-at-arms.”

This was going too far. “There are only twenty archers at Tressling,” Walter piped up. “And only ten men-at-arms!”

She turned around and looked him over so coolly that he was sorry he had spoken. “That boy has very bad manners,” she said. Then she looked back at his mother to ask, “What is your house called?”

“Gurnie. It’s an old house. It has stood, we believe, since the days of our great King Alfred.”

“King Alfred? I have never heard of a King Alfred.” She was thinking hard. “Now I know. I have heard my father speak of Gurnie. You have no archers here and no men-at-arms. You are Saxons.”

“Yes, my child, we are Saxons.”

“And we are proud to be Saxons!” cried Walter.

“Well,” said Engaine, after a long pause during which she stared steadily at him, “it can’t be helped, can it? I think you are really very nice. What is the name of that boy?”

“His name is Walter.”

“Then he’s Walter of Gurnie. It’s rather a nice name. Is his hair like that naturally or do you have to curl it? Mine curls naturally.”

“And so does Walter’s.”

“Do you know,” she said, after another pause, “he looks much like my father’s cousin, the Earl of Lessford. Do you think he will be as handsome as the earl when he grows up? But I do think it would be better if he combed his hair.”

He saw her quite often as the years passed. Engaine would condescend to speak to him at times, and always with a tinge of liking under her disdainful manner. He was never very happy after seeing her, for she made it clear that she regarded him as of very inferior clay. In spite of that, these glimpses of her provided him with most of the memories he cared to retain of a bleak boyhood.

“Walter,” said his mother, finally, “now that your father is gone, I think I must tell you the whole story. It is your right to know.”

Walter looked at her anxiously, thinking how bad her memory had become. She had told him the story many times and, as she never deviated in the telling, he could have recited it word for word. He got to his feet, knowing that the usual ritual would have to be observed. Wulfa had already vanished. He went to each door in turn, opening them to make sure there were no listeners, and even visiting each window.

When she began the familiar recital, he listened with a new interest, hoping that his father’s death would serve to revive additional memories in her mind.

“Your grandfather was against us, Rauf and I. Rauf was twenty-two, and I was going on sixteen. As we were both of gentle blood, and I was the heiress of Gurnie, it would not have been a one-sided match. But Rauf was of the Norman invaders and I was pure Anglo-Saxon, and so my father would not hear of it. No daughter of his would marry a foreigner, he swore. Imagine calling my Rauf a foreigner! He had been born at Bulaire, as had his father, and many generations before that. But Father hated the Normans and had never been able to forgive them the Battle of Hastings.” She indulged in a long sigh. “We used to meet, of course. Oh, it was all most proper, Wulfa, who was with me even then, was always along, and Rauf would have his squire. We wouldn’t even dismount, but would sit our horses side by side in some forest glade. Rauf would whisper to me. We were so sure that in the end we would marry.”

She sighed still more deeply. “Then the monks came again, carrying the Cross and preaching the need for another Crusade to help good King Louis of France. They put up a wooden cross—it was thirty feet high, I remember—and set it blazing. People gathered from all around and, when one of the priests told us of the things he had seen in the Holy Land, I wanted to stand up and cry out, as all the men did, that the Sepulcher must no longer be left in heathen hands! I was glad that Rauf was the first to step forward and kiss the Cross. I could not have gone on loving him if he held back. I sang as fervently as anyone, even ‘The Old Man of the Mountain.’ Over two hundred of our men took the oath that day.”

As usual she paused a long time at this point. So far she had told him nothing he had not heard before. He found a resentment of the Crusades rising in his mind. There had been so many of them, so much trouble and suffering. At Oxford, he was tempted to tell her, the clerks had fallen into the habit of discussing them with levity and, even, irreverence. A man who expressed his desire to see another was not looked up to as one bent on knightly endeavor. An expression was used instead, “He wants his gambeson tails free of his wife’s fingers.” No one had the patience any more to listen to the stories of returned Crusaders. They were all too familiar. The warriors were now called Old Cruses; sometimes the clerks would put it this way, “His head is filled with Arabian fleas.” There was even an offhanded method of saying that a man was a captive in the East: “He has the Cross burned on his buttocks,” that being one of the Saracen ways of treating their Christian prisoners.

His mother took up the story. “They were so brave and sweet, the young men who had sworn to win back the Holy City. They marched about with their crosses on their arms and a look of devotion on their faces. We knew that not more than one out of five would come back, for it had been that way all the other times. They would die of the heat and the thirst or they would be killed in battle; or, worse still, they would fall into the hands of the Saracens and be kept as slaves or even flayed alive. They had such a short time to live, and most of them were so young!” She let her head droop, and it was several moments before she continued. “There were eighteen children born hereabouts within nine months after they marched away; and you were one of the eighteen, my son. No attention was paid to the others, as it had always happened that way, but I was of noble blood, and that made so much talk that I thought at first I would die of the shame. But I was sure Rauf and I would be married when he returned—he would be one of the lucky ones, God and Our Lady willing—and so I withstood the tempers of your grandfather and forced myself to keep my head up.”

The customary pause followed. “It was four years before Rauf returned. When he did come back, he brought a wife with him!”

This had always been the end of her story. After a few moments, however, she went on with more passion than he had ever known her to display. “He would not have married if he had known about you, my son!” A trace of color flared in her cheeks. “There was no way of letting him know. And he was so terribly in debt. He had mortgaged his lands to raise the money to go, and on the way back his ship was wrecked on one of the islands off Greece. They held him there for ransom, just as the Germans did with King Richard. His kinsmen in Normandy, her people, paid the ransom. So he was married and stayed a year in Normandy before coming back with his ugly Norman wife and his son. Walter, my boy, he would have shouldered his debts and remained true to his vows to me if he had known about you!”

“How can you be sure of that, Mother?”

She was very tired now, but she answered him with a rally of triumphant spirit. “He told me. Yes, Walter, he came once to see me. It was when your grandfather was riding on the Welsh Marshes. We had such a long talk; and he was very sad and contrite, and he told me then he would have come back to face all his debts gladly had he known, that he would have sold all of Bulaire if necessary. He had been away four years, and he was sure I had given him up for dead long before. The thought had been in his mind even that I had wearied of waiting and married someone else.”

Walter interrupted eagerly. “You never told me before that he came to see you. I think—I think it makes a difference.”

“Yes, my son. A great difference. I don’t think I could have lived this long if I had not seen him at all. But he came! And he told me”—she took one of his hands and pressed it against her cheek—“he told me that I was the only one he had ever loved. I have had that to comfort me all these years!”

“There is something I have never told you, Mother,” confided Walter. “I had a talk with him too, and he said that he knew he was not a strong man; that he yielded to influences easily. I see now that he was trying to explain himself to me.”

There was a moment’s silence, and then she said in a whisper: “I have never seen his wife, Walter. What is she like?”

The son’s feelings flared out in angry words. “She is a Norman woman! Need I say more? She is determined to have her way in everything; and she is hard and grasping and cruel.”

“What a sorry life he has had!”

“Mother,” asked Walter tensely, “are you sure he would have married you if things had been different? And that I would then have been made legitimate?”

“Yes, my son, I am sure of it.”

“Are you sure he preferred you to his legal wife? And me, me, to his other son?”

“Walter,” she answered, earnestly, “never let yourself doubt that in his heart my Rauf felt I was his real wife and that you were the son he wanted at his right side! Never, never doubt it!”

A great sense of relief and happiness welled up inside him. He said to himself, “Now I need not go on hating his memory!”

The servingmaid came back and crossed swiftly to the side of her mistress. “You have talked too much, Lady Hild,” she said in a toneless voice which succeeded nevertheless in conveying a suggestion of blame. “Now you must lie down. Come, lean on me, my lady.”

His mother let herself sink back into her chair. Her eyes closed, and he could see that she was trembling.

“Oh, you have overdone it, my lady!” cried Wulfa. “I knew you would. I was sure of it.” She said to Walter in an urgent voice, “You had better go, master.”

She accompanied him to the door and there said in a whisper: “She is getting worse. The spells come oftener. I notice all the time how much worse she is.”

The figure in the chair had straightened up. She looked at them standing there in the doorway with all the appearance of conspirators. There was neither understanding nor recognition in her eyes.

“Wulfa!” she cried, in a high and unnatural voice. “What are you saying? What are you going to do?” Her voice rose even higher. “Come back to me! Wulfa! Who is that man?”