Stephen Lawhead - Hood

She kept a tight rein on herself when others were nearby. She neither wept nor sobbed; not one sorrowing sigh escaped her lips. Her features remained composed, thoughtful perhaps, but not distraught, less yet grief-stricken. Anyone observing Merian might have thought her distracted or concerned. Knowing that nothing good could come of any overt display of emotion where Bran was concerned, she swallowed her grief and behaved as if the news of Bran's death was a thing of negligible significance amidst the more troubling news of the murder of Brychan ap Tewdwr and all his warband and the unwarranted Ffreinc advance into neighbouring Elfael. Here, if only here, she and her stern father agreed: the Ffreinc had no right to kill a sitting king and seize his cantre?

"It is a bad business," King Cadwgan told her, shaking his grey head. "Very bad. It should not have happened, and William Rufus should answer. But Brychan had been warned more than once to make his peace. I urged him to go to Lundein long ago years ago! We all did! Would he listen? He was a hell-bent, bloody-minded fool-"

"Father!" Merian objected. "It is beneath you to speak ill of the dead, and bad luck besides."

"Beneath me?" wondered Cadwgan. "Daughter, it is kindness itself! I knew the man, and of times would have called him my friend. You know that. On Saint Becuma's knees, I swear that man could be so maddeningly pigheaded-and mean with it! If there was ever a man with a colder heart, I don't want to know him." He raised an admonishing finger to his daughter. "Mark my words, girl, now that Brychan and his reprobate son are gone, we will soon count it a blessing in disguise."

"Father!" she protested once more, her voice quivering slightly. "You should not say such things."

"If I speak my mind, it is not out of malice. You know me better than that, I hope. Though we may not like it, that is God's own truth. Brychan's son was a rogue, and his death saved a hangman's fee."

"I will not stay and listen to this," declared Merian as she turned quickly and hurried away.

"What did I say?" called her father after her. "If anyone has cause to mourn Bran ap Brychan's death, it is the hangman who was cheated out of his pay!"

Merians mother was more sympathetic but no more comforting. "I know it is hard to accept," said Queen Anora, threading her embroidery needle, "when someone you know has died. He was such a handsome boy-if only he had been better brought up, he might have made a good king. Alas, his mother died so young. Rhian was a beauty, and kindness itself-if a little flighty, so they say. Still, it's a pity she was not there to raise him." She sighed, then went back to her needle. "You can thank God you were not allowed to receive him in company."

"I know, Mother," said Merian glumly, turning her face away. "How well I know."

"Soon you will forget all about him." She offered her daughter a hopeful smile. "Time will heal, and the hurt will pass. Mark my words, the pain will pass."

Merian knew her parents were right, though she would not have expressed her opinions quite so harshly. Even so, she could not make her heart believe the things they said: it went on aching, and nothing anyone said soothed the pain. In the end, Merian determined to keep her thoughts, like her grief, to herself.

Each day, she went about her chores as if the raw wound of sorrow was already skinning over. She attended her weaving with care and patience. She helped the women prepare the animal skins that would become furs to adorn winter cloaks and tunics. She stood barefoot in the warm sun and raked the newly harvested beans over the drying floor. She twirled the spindle between her deft fingers to spin new-carded wool into thread, watching the skein grow as she wound it round and round. Though she laboured with diligence, she did not feel the thread pass through her fingertips, nor the rake in her hands; she did not smell the strong curing salts she rubbed into the skins; her fingers gathered the wool of their own accord without her guidance.

Each day, she completed her duties with her usual care-as if the thought of Bran hunted down and speared to death like some poor, fearcrazed animal was not the sole occupation of her thoughts, as if the anguish at his passing was not continually churning in her gentle heart.

And if, each night, she cried silently in her bed, each morning she rose fresh faced and resolved not to allow any of these secret feelings to manifest themselves in word or deed. In this she made good.

As the weeks passed, she thought less about Bran and his miserable death and more about the fate of his leaderless people. Of course, they were not as Garran, her elder brother, so helpfully pointed outleaderless. "They have a new king now-William Rufus," he told her. "And his subject lord, Count de Braose, is their ruler."

"De Braose is a vile murderer," Merian snapped.

"That may be," Garran granted with irritating magnanimity, "but he has been given the conimot by the king. And," he delighted in pointing out, "the crown is divinely appointed by God. The king is justice, and his word is law."

"The king is himself a usurper," she countered.

"As were most of those before him," replied her brother, smug in his argument. "Facts are facts, dear sister. The Saxon stole the land from us, and now the Ffreinc have stolen it from them. We possess what we hold by King William's sufferance. He is our sovereign lord now, and it is no good wishing otherwise, so you had best make peace with how things are."

"You make peace with how things are," she answered haughtily. "I will remain true to our own kind."

"Then you will continue to live in the past," Garran scoffed. "The old ways are over for us. Times are changing, Merian. The Ffreinc are showing us the way to peace and prosperity."

"They are showing us the way to hell!" she shouted, storming from his presence.

That young Prince Bran had died needlessly was bad enough. That he had been killed trying to flee was shameful, yes, but anyone might have done the same in his place. What she found impossible to comprehend or accept was her brother's implied assertion that their Norman overlords were somehow justified in their crime by the innate superiority of their customs or character, or whatever it was her brother found so enamouring.

The Ffreinc are brutes and they are wrong, she insisted to herself. And that King William of theirs is the biggest brute of all!

After that last exchange, she refused to talk to anyone further regarding the tragedy that had befallen Bran and Elfael. She kept her thoughts to herself and buried her feelings deep in the fastness of her heart.

is

)Baron de Neufmarche, along with twenty men-atarms, accompanied his wife to the ship waiting at Hamtun docks. Although he had used the ship Le Cygne in the past and knew both the captain and pilot by name, he nevertheless inspected the vessel bow to stern before allowing his wife to board. He supervised the loading of men, horses, provisions, and weapons-his wife would travel with Ormand, his seneschal, and a guard of seven men. Inside a small casket made of elm wood, Lady Agnes carried the letter he had written to his father and the gift of a gold buckle received from the Conqueror himself in recognition of the baron's loyalty during the season of northern discontent in the years following the invasion.

Once Agnes was established in her quarters beneath the ship's main deck, the baron bade his wife farewell. "The tide is on the rise. Godspeed, lady wife," he said. Raising her hand to his lips, he kissed her cold fingers and added, "I wish you a mild and pleasant winter, and a glad Christmas."

"It may be that I can return before the snow," she ventured, hope lending a lightness to her voice. "We could observe Christmas together."