Alys Clare - Out of the Dawn Light

Hrype gave me a wry smile. ‘I did not speak literally,’ he said. ‘As to whether he will be tried, I cannot say. I hope so, for it is better than summary execution, but then the trial will be performed by Normans and we are not of their kind.’

We all knew what he meant by that.

‘If there is a trial,’ he said, ‘then Sibert will have to prove that he could not have done the deeds of which he is accused. Somehow it will have to be demonstrated that the object he stole did not belong to Baudouin de la Flèche.’ He did not elaborate but I thought I knew what he meant; Sibert had said the crown had been made by his own ancestor and placed beneath the tree stump by men of his family. This surely made the crown his, and you can’t be convicted of stealing from yourself. ‘It will also have to be proved,’ Hrype went on, ‘that Sibert did not leap on Romain and batter him to death. For that to happen, it will have to be shown that he was elsewhere.’ I knew that his full attention was on me now, for all that he was staring down into the hearth, and it was a frightening feeling. ‘Someone,’ he concluded, ‘will have to speak for him.’

Silence fell, the echo of Hrype’s words slowly dying. My mind was whirling and I felt the vertigo returning. I shut my eyes, but that was worse. Someone will have to speak for him. Hrype can only have meant me, and it appeared he knew much more about Sibert’s and my escapade than I had thought.

My father, who must have been thinking as hard as I was, said, ‘Does Baudouin say where and when his nephew was killed?’

Hrype looked at him. ‘He does. He says the attack happened a few miles short of the road that goes from Lowestoft to Diss, and that it was five days ago.’

I counted. I had been back with Goda for two days and for the three days before that Sibert and I had been making our way home following the fight with Romain. This meant, I realized, that whoever had killed Romain must have caught up with him shortly after Sibert had laid him low with a knee in the crotch.

We had left Romain alive and fairly well, other than the bruised testicles. And from then on I had been with Sibert all the way home.

Despite everything, I felt a cry of triumph inside my head. Sibert was innocent, and I knew it.

Whether I could prove it — whether I even had the courage to try — was a very different matter.

In the morning I was up and quietly preparing to go out before my mother, my granny or Edild could try to stop me. We had talked late into the night, at first with Hrype and then, once he had gone home to the unenviable task of trying to comfort Sibert’s poor mother, among ourselves.

I had slept for a while but not long. My dreams had been deeply troubling and when I opened my eyes in the pre-dawn darkness and knew I would not sleep again, my waking thoughts were no more reassuring.

I knew what I had to do and I did not want to do it. I was very scared, for one thing, and as well as that I was nervous because I was about to make myself do something I would not normally have considered in a hundred years.

I had not said much more during the long discussions last night but I had listened very carefully, especially to a certain question posed by my father and answered by Hrype. This morning, as a consequence, I knew not only what I had to do but where I must go to attempt it. The how I would leave to what I hoped would prove a benevolent providence; having no clear idea yet, I prayed that inspiration would strike at the appropriate moment.

I did not want to do this at all. The problem was that I didn’t see I had any choice.

My mother was surprised to notice, on waking, that I was pulling my boots on. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked, brushing back her long plait. She wears her lovely strawberry blond hair like this for sleeping.

Her voice disturbed Edild, who had been asleep by the hearth. She propped herself up on one elbow and watched me, waiting for my reply.

‘Back to Goda’s,’ I said shortly.

My mother looked very surprised, as well she might as she would, I’m sure, have expected me to use the drama of Sibert as an excuse to stay in Aelf Fen as long as possible and certainly for today. ‘I think you should stay here and have a restful day,’ she said, sounding worried. ‘You were quite ill yesterday and we were anxious at how pale you were.’ She turned to her sister-in-law. ‘Don’t you agree, Edild?’

I met my aunt’s eyes and sent her a pleading look. She seemed to understand — really, I was asking a great deal of her just then — and said, after a moment’s consideration, ‘She looks better this morning. I believe that a walk in the fresh air followed by the resumption of her duties will be better for her than staying here and brooding.’

The voice of authority had spoken and my mother seemed to accept it. ‘Very well,’ she said, not sounding entirely happy. ‘But if you feel at all unwell, Lassair, you are to come home. Do you hear me?’

‘Yes, Mother.’

She muttered something under her breath, something about Goda having to get off her fat backside and manage without me, and I realized then just how disturbed my mother was, for in the normal way she never runs down one of her children in front of the others. Not even Goda.

Before either of them could say anything else — or, even worse, before my father could awake and get the chance to weigh in to the discussion — I said a swift goodbye to Edild and my mother and slipped out of the house.

Baudouin de la Flèche disliked having to stay under another man’s roof but, as he frequently and sourly reminded himself, he ought to have thought of that before he joined Bishop Odo’s rebels and by that action found himself on the losing side with his manor taken away from him. Its loss had followed the defeat at Rochester with breathtaking speed and he was still reeling from the blow. He had quit Drakelow with the clothes he wore, his knife, his sword, a saddlebag of provisions and one of hastily packed spare linen and his horse. Everything else in the house, the tower, the outbuildings and the whole estate was now under the care of the king’s representative.

Baudouin tried not to think about that.

There was plenty to distract his thoughts, although the labyrinthine cast of mind of Baudouin de la Flèche meant that some of his deepest, darkest thoughts and deeds were sometimes all but hidden even from himself. He was a man who acted with ruthless decisiveness and, if he did not actually regret things that he had done, he was on occasion faced with consequences that proved challenging to surmount.

Now was such a time, although he believed that already the way was becoming clearer. The boy was in captivity and the treasure was restored to its rightful owner. Or very soon it would be. .

Baudouin heard footsteps coming along the passage into the hall and, with some difficulty, composed his features into a smile of welcome.

The stranger’s roof under which he had slept the previous night was that of Gilbert de Caudebec. Gilbert’s father Ralf had fought with William the Conqueror and, having proved himself an efficient administrator rather than a ruthless and inspired soldier, his reward had been not one of the castles deemed crucial to the Conqueror’s defence of his new realm but the relative backwater of a small manor on the edge of the Fens known as Lakehall. There Ralf de Caudebec had settled quite happily, in due course marrying an English heiress, Alftruda, who gave him a son, Gilbert, and two daughters. On Ralf’s death Alftruda had gone to live with the elder of her daughters, leaving Lakehall to Gilbert and his young wife Emma.

The plump and easy-going Gilbert showed no more flair as a fighting man than his father but, unlike Ralf, he was not a particularly talented administrator either; probably the shrewdest thing he had ever done was to appoint a hard-working and highly efficient reeve. The estate that Gilbert controlled on the king’s behalf was a mixture of arable land on the higher, drier ground and waterlogged marsh out in the Fens. Happily for Gilbert, the people of the latter seemed content to carry on the way they had always done, back through the long decades and centuries before the Conquest, and that suited him very well.