Alys Clare - Blood of the South

As if his thoughts threatened to overcome him, he got up, paced to and fro across the little room, and then came back to sink down on to the end of the bed where Rollo lay. He said simply, ‘I couldn’t find them. There were so many of us, all searching for our own dead, and, in truth, given the injuries, it was no easy task. Then the rumours started – William the Bastard’s men were coming back and they were going to finish off anyone they found still lurking around. That cleared away most of the living, I can tell you, and I took my chance and made one final attempt. I must have stared into a hundred dead faces, but I didn’t find either of my brothers.’ He gave a shaky sigh. ‘They lie buried with all the others now, on the field where they sacrificed themselves for the way of life they wanted to see endure. All in vain.’

His head dropped. Respecting his mood, Rollo waited, not speaking. After quite some time, Harald got up again and went over to the table. He picked up an object and, turning back to the bed, held it out to Rollo.

It was a small knife, the fine, sharp blade set into a handle carved in a pattern of curls and swirls which, when Rollo looked closely, resolved into extraordinarily shaped birds and beasts. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘Which one did it belong to?’

Harald smiled; a soft expression of happy reminiscence. ‘Sagar. I found it not six paces from where the king fell.’

Rollo gave the knife back, and Harald, after clutching it briefly in his right hand, laid it back on the table. He coughed a couple of times, then said, ‘So, you tell me I have a very pretty niece.’

‘She’s actually a great-niece, the granddaughter of your sister Cordeilla, but she is most certainly pretty.’ Rollo was staring into Harald’s eyes, understanding why their shape and colour had sparked off memories. ‘She has your eyes,’ he added.

Harald nodded, although he didn’t speak. It seemed to Rollo that, for a few moments, speech was probably beyond him.

As Gullinbursti covered the miles – sometimes flying over the waves as fleet as a swan; sometimes, when the wind failed or blew from the wrong direction, moving laboriously under oars rowed by increasingly exhausted men – Rollo’s mind roamed on. He thought often of Lassair; it was inevitable, given the depth of his sudden and intense friendship with the man who turned out to be her great-uncle. He wondered what she was doing, and if she was thinking of him.

He found himself almost hoping she wasn’t. If he could make himself believe that, what he was about to do wouldn’t make him feel so bad …

He would make his report to King William. He would be very well paid, for what he had to tell his king would please the man greatly, falling in as it did so neatly with how William judged events in the land beyond the seas would develop.

The Eastern Mediterranean was going to explode. The Seljuk Turks were disorganized; their great advances had ground to a standstill while men fought over which heir should succeed the sultan, and powerful lords throughout the territory quietly got on with creating their own small fiefdoms.

But the threat which the Seljuks posed to the Christians of Constantinople wasn’t going to go away. The Turks held the Holy Places; they were more than capable of arranging matters so that no Christian pilgrim ever again walked where Jesus Christ was born, where he ministered, where he died, where he was resurrected. Sooner or later, the Turks would regain all their former strength and probably more, and then the assault would begin anew.

Alexius Comnenus would have no alternative but to appeal to the Church in the west for help. The Church would no doubt raise its powerful voice and call out for strong men, men of wealth and position, demanding their compliance, telling them in no uncertain terms that it was their duty as Christians. And kings and lords would answer: the draw of the fabled wealth of the east would be just too great.

King William of England would resist; he had already made that clear to Rollo, his trusted spy. William had his own scheme, however. His brother Robert, he was convinced, would race to answer the summons, and he would need money. In all likelihood he would beg a loan from William – nobody but a king would be able to provide the sort of funds such a venture would require – and William, after all, was family. William would agree, and Normandy would stand surety.

Rollo’s retentive memory was full of the Holy Land. He had information to sell which would be of inestimable value to a man bent on recapturing the lands of the Turks. It would be of no use to King William, but there were others who would pay.

And why , Rollo mused, should I not sell my hard-won intelligence twice over? To King William first, for it was he who had sent Rollo on the mission and to whom he owed first loyalty.

But, once he had divulged to his king every last fact and figure, extrapolation and opinion that could possibly be of interest, then what was to stop him slipping away, adopting a different guise and finding another paymaster? One who, if Rollo was any judge, would lap up the precious information even more eagerly?

Robert, Duke of Normandy.

Lord Gilbert saw to the removal and interment of Rosaria’s body. I admired him for putting aside his angry resentment at how she’d fooled him, and doing the right thing. If I’m honest, it was a relief to see the last of her.

Although my aunt and I were in no doubt that Rosaria had poisoned her mistress in order to adopt her identity and take her place in what she believed would be Harald’s wealthy, influential family, we did not tell Lord Gilbert. Edild reported to him that the corpse of Harald’s daughter showed no obvious signs of poisoning, which I suppose was true. We would have had to look a lot deeper to discover the remnants of the substance that killed her. Without the label of murderess, Rosaria went quietly to her last resting place in the Aelf Fen graveyard.

I’d been very cross at first. I wanted her to face recrimination and punishment for what she’d done, even if only posthumously. But, as Edild pointed out, what was the point, when Rosaria would have to explain herself to the sternest judge of all? And, her voice unusually gentle, she reminded me that Rosaria’s life hadn’t been easy. ‘To what lengths might you have been driven,’ she asked me, ‘had you been mutilated as she was?’

We might not have revealed the truth to Lord Gilbert, but I had to tell Jack. He and I had been involved right from the start, when we met Rosaria on the quay at Cambridge, and it was only right to explain what had happened in the church crypt. I sought him out later on the day we finally knew how Harald’s daughter had met her death, meeting him coming out of Lakehall as I approached. When I explained how Edild and I had held back from checking the dead woman’s stomach for poison because, as our kinswoman, we could not bring ourselves to do so, he nodded in understanding. ‘For what it’s worth,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t have done it either.’

We buried Harald’s daughter in the Aelf Fen graveyard, too. My family, once they all knew who she was, would have liked to have put her to rest her with her kin out on the little island, but Father Augustine seemed to have taken a personal responsibility for her, and her funeral and burial had been arranged before we could protest. Maybe the priest was right; she might have been deeply devout, and lying in hallowed ground the best place for her.

We didn’t know her name. She was buried as the daughter of Harald of Aelf Fen and mother of Leafric.

I hope it was good enough.

The question that worried all of us was what was to become of the infant Leafric. He was the child of my great-uncle Harald’s daughter; my Granny Cordeilla was his great-aunt. His mother was a first cousin to my father and Edild, he was a more distant cousin to me and my siblings, and I don’t think any of us could have borne the idea of abandoning him. Yet we were poor people, and at times we had barely enough to feed ourselves and our close kin. My parents, I knew, were reluctant to take on the burden. Their youngest child – my little brother Leir – was six now, and there would be no more born to them. I knew that my mother had greeted the end of fertility with some relief. It would be cruel to play on her conscience and persuade her to take on yet another baby. I wondered if Edild would be prepared to adopt Leafric, and I dare say she thought the same about me. Both of us were, after all, single women with no dependants, and strong and healthy. But she had her work and, over and above that, I was pretty sure that she wasn’t very maternal. The only child she would really have welcomed would have been Hrype’s, and that was forbidden her.