Alys Clare: The Joys of My Life

‘She knew? She accepted this?’ He had to ask.

‘Deep inside her, she always knew. When she received her orders, she welcomed them with joy. Her acceptance would have been total except for one thing.’

‘What was it?’

‘You, Josse. You and her children. She loved all of you dearly and did not want to leave you. It was only when we gave our solemn oath to do as she asked that her mind was set at rest.’

‘What did she ask?’ He could barely form the words.

‘She wished you to raise them. Meggie is already yours and devoted to you. She will sorely miss her mother, but she has the consolation of being able to see and speak to her in the form that she now takes.’

‘Aye, I know.’ Josse had seen Meggie chattering with Joanna.

‘Ninian, too, has found his way to you.’ Ruis glanced up the deck at the sleeping boy. ‘He will not return to his life as a squire, Josse. He will ask you in the morning if he may live with you.’

‘I’ll say yes, with all my heart!’

Ruis smiled. ‘I know. I see the love you have for each other shining around you both. It began long ago and now this journey that you have taken together has reawakened it.’

‘I’ll have a family,’ Josse said slowly, trying to envisage the life that now awaited him. ‘I’ll have two children to raise. Dear Lord, I’ve given my home to Dominic, Paradisa and their family! If only I’d known, I would have-’

‘No you wouldn’t,’ Ruis said calmly. ‘You gave away your house because you were lonely there and you knew others would come to love it much more than you ever did. It was never the right place for you, Josse,’ he added. ‘Now even more, it is not where you should be.’

Josse wondered what Ruis could mean by that, but his thoughts were interrupted, for the man spoke again. ‘There is another place far more suitable, for it is both within the forest, where your children’s blood calls out to them, and in the place where your own heart lies.’

‘Where? What is this place?’ Josse cried.

‘It belonged to the children’s mother. Now that she is no longer here, it passes to you and to them. Until they are of age, it is in your care.’

‘You speak of the house in the woods?’

‘Yes.’

‘She wanted this, that I should live there with Ninian and Meggie?’

‘She did.’

It was a great deal to take in. Josse stood silent, imagining..

As if the figure beside him were somehow putting pictures into his mind, he then saw the family that would live in the old house, waking it up from its long sleep with laughter and happiness. He saw Ninian grown tall and strong; saw Meggie with her healer’s skill tending all who came, human and animal, in the way her mother and grandmother had done before her. In her hand he caught a sudden flash of brilliant blue as she dipped a precious jewel into a cup of water.

‘Yes,’ Ruis said quietly. ‘You see true, Josse.’ He gave Josse some moments to enjoy the vision. Then he said, ‘There is one more thing.’

Josse’s breath seemed to catch in his throat. ‘What is it?’

Ruis took his arm and led him down the deck. In the stern, the woman Deidre sat wrapped in shawl and cloak. One baby lay beside her, fast asleep; the other was suckling vigorously at her breast. Embarrassed at being a witness to such a moment of intimacy, Josse turned aside.

‘It is all right, Josse,’ Deidre said gently. ‘You may look. I do not mind.’

Josse looked; it seemed that his eyes were drawn to the spectacle of the woman and the babies almost against his volition. As he looked, he noticed something. Deidre’s dark eyes met his; she smiled up at him and he thought she whispered, ‘Yes.’

Ruis said, ‘What do you see?’

‘They are not twins,’ Josse said wonderingly, ‘for the one now at the breast is surely several months older than the other.’

‘The one who now suckles is Iana,’ Ruis said, ‘and she is the daughter of Deidre and me. The other child, her milk brother, is not yet a month old. He takes little but his need is the greater, so Deidre feeds him first.’

‘I have heard him!’ Josse knew it; the small mewls and cries that had haunted him were the sounds of a newborn.

Deidre looked down at the tiny child, compassion in her eyes, but she did not speak.

‘You have heard with your heart,’ Ruis said, ‘for although we have been following you, we have not been close enough for you to have picked up such tiny sounds.’

‘But why…?’ The question died before Josse could finish it.

He remembered holding Joanna, feeling the bulk of her satchel beneath her cloak. He saw her face as she was wound up inside the cone of power, fulfilment, exhaustion and a slow, deep happiness turning her expression to one of joy. He thought back to September when, after the equinox ceremonies, he and Joanna had spent their days together and their nights making love.

He heard the echo of Ruis’s words: You have heard with your heart.

He stared down at the baby lying asleep in its soft blanket. His heart overflowed.

Ruis bent down, picked up the baby with gentle hands and placed him in Josse’s open arms. ‘His name is Geoffroi,’ he whispered.

My father’s name, Josse thought. She remembered.

Tears blurred his vision as he stared down into the face of his child. Settling the baby on the crook of his left arm, he touched the soft, rounded cheek with the tip of his finger. Geoffroi opened his eyes and looked up.

Josse had been told that newborns did not focus very well and he was willing to believe it. It must, then, have been some special quality in this third and last child of Joanna’s that made the gaze so purposeful.

Josse and his son stared at each other. Josse might have been wrong, but he thought the small, sweet sound that chirruped from the baby might just mean that he liked what he saw.

Helewise knew they were near. Some newly awakened sense that seemed to wax within her whenever she went out to the new chapel put an image in her head of Josse riding with a boy that had to be Ninian. The boy led a rather beautiful white horse. Josse was holding a bundle — perhaps the black figure had been entrusted to him.

She went one evening to the chapel. The roof was to go on the following week; the team had worked very fast, taking full advantage of the continuing good weather. Helewise had carefully checked the finances and there was enough for a small additional request. She had commissioned Martin’s men to build a tiny habitation immediately behind the chapel, on the very edge of the abbey land. It would consist of a single room, its walls of wattle and daub on top of a first course of stone and its roof of local rush thatch. There was no need for it to be any larger, for it would house a solitary inhabitant. It was the dwelling of an anchorite; one of those who lived in seclusion and whose solitary devotions, or so the country folk liked to say, helped to anchor the faithful in the faith. Helewise, who knew a little Latin, was aware that the word implied simply the act of withdrawal, but she thought the country folk’s version might actually be more accurate. No such anchorite — or anchoress — was yet apparent, but Helewise thought that could change. Not yet, perhaps, but soon.

She stood inside the tiny room that would form the hermit’s accommodation. No, she mused, hermit was not the right word, for the purpose of having someone living here between the abbey and the forest was so that those who came in need would receive not only the solace offered within St Edmund’s Chapel but also a kind welcome, a mug of water and a bite to eat from the person who tended it.

It was not going to be easy; she knew that. Quite a lot of people would need a great deal of convincing. But she had made up her mind and she would not allow her vision to dissolve.