Ellis Peters: Virgin in the Ice

It was early in November of 1139 that the tide of civil war, lately so sluggish and inactive, rose suddenly to sweep over the city of Worcester, wash away half its livestock, property and women, and send all those of its inhabitants who could get away in time scurrying for their lives northwards away from the marauders, to burrow into hiding wherever there was manor or priory, walled town or castle strong enough to afford them shelter. By the middle of the month a straggle of them had reached Shrewsbury, and subsided thankfully into the hospitable embrace of monastery or town, to lick their wounds and pour out their grievances.

They were not in too bad case, apart from the old or sick, for the winter had not yet begun to bite hard. The weather-wise foretold that there was bitter cold in store, heavy snows and hard and prolonged frosts, but as yet the land lay dour, cloudy and mild, with capricious winds, but clear of frost or snow.

“Thanks be to God!” said Brother Edmund, the infirmarer, devoutly. “Or we should have had more burials on our hands than three, and they all past their three score and ten.”

Even so, he was hard put to it to find beds in his hospice for all those who needed them, and there was thick straw laid down in the stone hall for the overflow. They would live to return to their spoiled city before the Christmas feast, but now, exhausted and apathetic with shock, they needed all his care, and the abbey’s resources were stretched to their limits. A few fugitives with distant relatives in the town had been taken into the houses of their kin, and were warmly provided. A pregnant woman near her time had been taken, husband and all, into the town house of Hugh Beringar, the deputy sheriff of the shire, at the insistence of his wife, whom he had brought here to the security of the town, complete with her women, midwife, physician and all, because she, too, looked forward to giving birth before the Nativity, and had a welcome for any who came in the same expectation, and in any kind of need.

“Our Lady,” remarked Brother Cadfael ruefully to his good friend Hugh, “had no such reception.”

“Ah, there is but one of my lady! Aline would take in every homeless dog she saw in the streets, if she could. This poor girl from Worcester will do well enough now, there’s nothing amiss with her that rest won’t mend. We may yet have two births here for this Christmas, for she can’t well be moved until she’s safely over her lying-in. But I daresay most of your guests will soon be shrugging off their fears and heading for home.”

“A few have left already,” said Cadfael, “and more of the hale ones will be off within days. It’s natural they should want to get home and repair what they can. They say the king is on his way to Worcester with a strong force. If he leaves the garrison better found, they should be safe over the winter. Though they’ll need to draw stores from eastwards, for their own reserves will all have been carried off.”

Cadfael knew from old experience the look, the stench, the desolation of a gutted town, having been both soldier and sailor in his young days, and seen service far afield. “And besides wanting to reclaim what’s left of their store before Christmas,” he said, “there’s the spur of the winter coming. If the roads are cleared of bad customs now, at least they can travel dry-shod and warm enough, but another month, another week it may be, and who knows how deep the snow will be?”

“Whether the roads are cleared of bad customs,” said Beringar in wary reflection, “is more than I should care to say. We have a pretty firm hold here in Shropshire - thus far! But there’s ominous word from east and north, besides this uneasiness along the border. When the king is all too busy in the south, and his mind on where his Flemings’ next pay is to come from, and his energy mostly wasted in wavering from one target to another, ambitious men in remoter parts are liable to begin to spread their honors into palatines, and set up kingdoms of their own. And given the example, the lesser fry will follow it.”

“In a land at war with itself,” agreed Cadfael sombrely, “you may take it as certain that order breaks down, and savagery breaks out.”

“Not here, it shall not,” said Hugh grimly. “Prestcote has kept a close rein, and in so far as it falls to me as his man, so will I.” For Gilbert Prestcote, King Stephen’s sheriff of Shropshire, was planning to keep Christmas in the chief manor of his own honor, in the north of the county, and the castle garrison and the rule of law throughout the southern half of the shire would be left in Beringar’s hands. This attack on Worcester might be only a foretaste of further such raids. All the border towns were at risk, as well from the precarious loyalties of constables and garrisons as from the enterprise of the enemy. More than one lord in this troubled land had already changed his allegiance, more than one would do so in the future, some, perhaps, for the second or third time. Churchmen, barons and all, they were beginning to look first to their own interests, and place their loyalty where it seemed likely to bring them the greater profit. And it would not be long before some of them came to the conclusion that their interests could be served just as well by flouting both contendants for the crown, and setting up on their own account.

“There was some talk of your castellan in Ludlow being none too reliable,” observed Cadfael. “For all King Stephen set him up in the honor of Lacy, and trusted Ludlow castle to him, there have been rumors he was casting his eyes toward the empress. Touch and go with him, as I heard it, if the king had not been close and with a sharp eye on him.”

Anything Cadfael had heard, Hugh had certainly heard. There was not a sheriff in the land who had not all his intelligencers alerted, these days, and his own ear to the ground. If Josce de Dinan, in Ludlow, had indeed been contemplating defection, and thought better of it, Hugh was content to accept his present steadfastness, but with reservations, and was watching him still. Distrust was only one of the lesser horrors of civil war, but saddening enough. It was well that there could still be absolute trust between tried friends. In these days there was no man living who might not suddenly have acute need of a steady and stout back braced against his own.

“Ah, well, with King Stephen on his way to Worcester with an army, no one is going to lift finger or show face until he draws off again. But for all that, I never stop listening and watching.” Hugh rose from the bench against the wall of Cadfael’s workshop, brief refuge from the world. “Now I am going home to my own bed, for once - even if I am banished from my wife’s by my own arrogant brat. But what would a devout religious like you know about a father’s tribulations!”

What, indeed? “You must all come to it,” said Brother Cadfael complacently, “you married men. Third and unwanted where two are lost in admiring each other. I shall go to Compline and say a prayer for you.”

He went first, however, to the infirmary, to check with Brother Edmund on one or two patients who were slow in their recovery from their wanderings, being feeble from age or poverty and hunger, and renew the dressing on a knife-wound which was ill to heal, and only then went to Compline, there to pray for many more, besides his friend, his friend’s wife, and his friend’s child to come, this winter child.

England was already frozen into a winter years long, and he knew it. King Stephen was crowned, and held, however slackly, most of England. The Empress Maud, his rival for the throne, held the west, and came with a claim the equal of Stephen’s. Cousins, most uncousinly, they tore each other and tore England between them, and yet life must go on, faith must go on, the stubborn defiance of fortune must go on in the husbandry of the year, season after season, plough and harrow and seed, tillage and harvest. And here in the cloister and the church, the sowing and tillage and harvest of souls. Brother Cadfael had no fear for mankind, whatever became of mere men. Hugh’s child would be a new generation, a new beginning, a new affirmation, spring in midwinter.