Читать книгу Below the Salt - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 28

Edward the Saxon was in the bathhouse, a dark and ill-smelling cavern under the keep.

It had been a sore point with the servants at Baudene that he was such a believer in cleanliness. They commented in wonder and umbrage on his demand for a bath once a week. It meant that they had to fill a large metal tank with water and build a fire under it, stoking the blaze until the bathhouse was filled with steam.

“He will kill himself with all this womanish scrubbing and he’ll break our backs a-doing it,” they would mutter among themselves. “If the men of God in the monasteries are allowed a bath only four times a year, why should this penniless Saxon pamper himself?”

Edward had envied his lady wife the luxury she enjoyed of bathing in her own rooms. Each day while she was alive there was a procession of maids with small leather buckets filled with steaming water, hurrying between the bathhouse and the sleeping chambers of the chatelaine. He would have made similar arrangements for himself if he had not realized that scorn would have been heaped upon him if he had.

He did not know how the rite was carried out in his lady’s chamber. Once he had entered unannounced and had caught a glimpse of his beautiful Maude standing beside a porcelain vessel from which steam rose in a scented cloud, while her maid, Gilsey, labored over her with busy hands. It was a very slender and white body which he thus saw for the first time. However, he caught no more than a fleeting glimpse, for Gilsey had rushed in his direction with a look of horror on her broad face, indignantly waving her hands.

“No, no, master! You must not come in. It is wrong.”

The woman had pummeled him on the shoulders until he hastily turned and withdrew.

That night as Edward and his wife lay in each other’s arms in the grand high Norman bed, after the last maid’s suppressed giggle had been heard in the corridor and the hooting of the owls had begun on the battlements, Maude had laughed delightedly over the incident.

“Sweet my love,” she whispered, “you could have stayed for all of me. I—I hoped you would. How nice if you had come and kissed me, although you would have got very wet if you took me in your arms. But, ah, dear Mother of God, it could not be! What a scandal it would have caused!”

The fact that the lady of the castle bathed regularly was almost a scandal in itself. Most ladies considered the use of water superfluous when such fine perfumes were being brought from the East.

As for the servants, they had a reluctance to cleanliness which caused Edward some concern. There was, for instance, a pretty little flaxen-haired thing who fluttered about the castle on duties which he had not been able to identify. Passing her at close range one day, he had become aware of such an unpleasant odor that he stopped and asked her when she had last taken a bath. The maid looked at him with surprise in her round eyes, as blue as cornflowers.

“Good my lord!” she tittered. “It is like my mother washed me when I was brought into the world. But never since has a drop of water touched me. Of course, my lord,” she added with a conscious air of pride, “I wash my face and hands every morning without fail.”

“You’ll never catch yourself a husband, my girl, if you aren’t more careful.”

The girl giggled at that. “My lord, it’s little you know,” she protested. “I can have my pick of husbands. I’ve been asked and asked. And once with promise of a proper churching.”

As for Sigurd, the brawny servant, his opinion on the matter was the voice of the kitchens, the psalteries, the forges, and the hayfields where men labored. “Do I want my belly crying shame at me,” he asked once, “if I treat it like a lady’s with soap and warm water?”

Edward’s mind, as he stood in the steamy atmosphere and sloshed water over his head and shoulders, had gone back to the gentle reticences of his deeply mourned wife. Although her eyes had always filled with unshed tears of happiness when he spoke of the depth of his love for her, she had found it very hard to tell how much she reciprocated his passion. She had carried her child for months before he, her husband, knew that the experience of parenthood was to be his. If she had divulged the secret sooner, it was possible that things could have been done with drugs and charms so that she would have been saved when the day of her ordeal came. He fell into a deeply melancholy mood and did not speak at first when Sigurd’s huge frame materialized before him like Blunderbore weaving through a mist.

“Master!” said the man.

“What is it, Sigurd?”

“Come with me, my lord. It is better you get this over quickly for once. There is something afoot.”

“What has happened?” asked Edward, drying himself with a sudden alacrity.

“I know not, master. But whatever it is, our little Bulchin is very pleased and so I know it is bad. He shouted at me to ask where you were.”

Bulchin was a nickname they used for the seneschal of the household, a Norman named Gillikin who had been kept in charge after the death of Hugh de Baudene. He had always been antagonistic and had dared to show his feeling openly.

The seneschal stood under the arch leading into the towers where the family lived when Edward and his man emerged from the cavernous temple of cleanliness. Several of the castle guards stood behind him, all with pikes in their hands and a certain apprehension in their manner. Gillikin was wearing a smirk in which it was easy to read both malice and triumph.

“I have received—this!” he said, flourishing a letter with a seal attached to it. “The castle and landholdings of Baudene are being taken over and will be administered by the king’s servants until such time as the courts decide on the rights of succession. A royal steward is on the way and is expected to arrive tomorrow. It will be necessary for you, Sir Saxon, to rid the domain of Baudene of your presence.”

“On your word, Master Gillikin?” Edward the Saxon laughed briefly and angrily. “You will give me that letter in your hand. It was intended for me undoubtedly.”

When Gillikin hesitated, Edward took it forcibly into his own hands. The perusal he gave it was, on the surface, a thorough one. Actually his small knowledge of writing made it impossible for him to decipher more than a few words. After a suitable pause, he handed it back with a gesture of indifference.

“It is a matter to which,” he said, “I must give some thought.”

“As stated in this order,” asserted the seneschal, “my lady’s son will become a ward of the king although the writ has not yet been received.”

“These are matters to be discussed with the royal steward when he arrives.” Edward’s manner gave no hint of the fear which had gripped him. It was the custom, he knew, for wards of the king to be placed in the hands of guardians appointed by the Crown. He might never see his little son again.

The seneschal threw out his chest importantly. “I give you a piece of advice, sirrah. Be off before the king’s officer arrives.”

Sigurd had been standing behind the seneschal while these few words were exchanged. His face turned an angry red at the impudence of the man. “Very well, my Bulchin!” he exclaimed. Reaching out with both hands, while the castle guards stood by and gaped, he seized Master Gillikin by the neck and the small of the back. His grip was so powerful that the servant was unable to move as he was hoisted high in the air. Carrying the stiffened figure to a large cistern which collected rain water from the roof through a lead pipe, Sigurd dropped the seneschal in. Gillikin opened his mouth to cry for help but the only result was that he swallowed enough rain water to make him splutter in impotence and rage.

“Norman swine, that will teach you how to address your betters!” said Sigurd, forcing the seneschal farther under the water with a stout rap on the head. “Come, master, let us go where we can fill our lungs with air that carries no Norman taint.”

An hour later Edward the Saxon rode out on the horse which had brought him to Baudene Castle. His sleeping son, now two months old, was carried in one arm. Sigurd cantered behind him on a stout roan which had been a gift from the Lady Maude. Edward was smiling for the first time since his wife died.

“I am glad,” he said, “to leave these walls which throw an alien shadow on the land of my forefathers. The rights of my little son will be passed over. We must be reconciled to that. But all men with English blood in their veins are accustomed to such injustice. We must wait for better days.”

When they came in sight of the gaunt walls of Rawen Priory and could see the stone and wattle house which had been Edward’s home before he married his Norman lady, the owner nodded with satisfaction.

“Sigurd,” he said, “it is the Lord’s will and I begin to think it may be all for the best. My son will grow up a Saxon. He will have your little son Tostig for a companion, and he will wax healthy and strong on the plain foods and the solid drink his forefathers knew. But,” he added, his mood losing abruptly all of its satisfaction, “am I to sit by in silence and see him robbed twice of the broad acres they now call the domain of Baudene? Someday there will be a reckoning and we, my son and I, will take back the rich lands which rightly belong to us.”

Sigurd shook his head at this. “Do not count upon it, master. You know what old Godgifu says, that the lands will never be ours again. And it’s true she can see things that none of us see and hear voices that are silent to all else. She has the gift, my lord.”