Death riddle, p.6
Death Riddle, page 6
“Yah,” said the potter.
“Did a man come past here before you saw the sow?” Gytha asked.
The potter shook his head uncertainly. “I saw no one,” he replied, “but it was about that time I went around back to take a piss, so if he went by then, I wouldn’t have seen him.”
They left the potter and walked away, disappointed. “It is sure to have been Gruntzen he saw,” Cuthbert said consolingly, “so at least we have discovered where she went.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t do us any good,” Gytha replied dismissively. “Whoever she was tracking must have come down this lane and gone through the gate, and I doubt whether the Norman bastard on duty there will tell us who it was, especially if it was one of his comrades.”
“He might have been English,” Cuthbert replied. “There are a few townsmen who go in there regularly with supplies for the men of the garrison, and the guard would have let any of them through without question.”
“Well, whoever it was, Gruntzen has disappeared and the only place she could have gone is through that gate. And if the guard did let her through, it would have only been to seize her for the castle kitchen. She has probably been slaughtered by now and is skewered on a roasting spit, I reckon, and no longer able to help Godric.”
Cuthbert said no more, sharing Gytha’s sense of failure, and wishing he could ease her distress. He had a great admiration for Gytha, and suffered as much from her disappointment as she did. With a heavy heart, he followed her back the way they had come, hoping that one of the others had been more successful in their common quest.
***************
Judith had gained a little more information than Gytha and Cuthbert when she went to talk with her father. Tosti had not been often in his shop during the last few months, he said, and then only to sell some deer antlers that had fallen from stags after last autumn’s rut, and that he had found in the strip of woodland where his pigs rooted for acorns.
“As you know, dohtor, I do not often buy pig bones; they are not the best for carving and are often taken from joints that have been roasted in the oven and are friable. Tosti used to bring me a few from pigs he had slaughtered himself, but has not done so recently.”
As Judith turned away to go back to Estrid and report her failure, her father added, “But he did come one other time to give me a commission rather than sell bones. It was shortly after his uncle’s death, I remember.”
Surprised, Judith asked what it was. “He brought me a pair of tusks from a boar he had slaughtered, and asked me to carve the ends into pawns for a chessboard. He said he had found a set of chess pieces among his uncle's belongings but two of the pawns were missing and he wanted to replace them. I told him I could match them more closely if he brought me one of the other pawns to copy, but he said that pawns, like the soldiers they represented, all looked the same anyway and it would not matter if they were not identical.”
“And did you carve them?” Judith asked.
“I did, painting one red as he asked and leaving the other the natural colour of the bone. A short time later I happened to be having a conversation with Arni, the silversmith, and he mentioned to me, in passing, that Tosti had brought him the pawns after I finished them and asked him to mount them on pedestals of silver, saying the rest of his uncle's set had been fashioned in that way.” Judith’s father had shrugged. “An expensive plaything for a pig farmer, but it is not meet that I pass judgement on another man's possessions.”
Judith stored away the information to tell Estrid, but was not sure if it would be of any importance, for she could not see how the commission of such items could have any relevance to Tosti's death.
***************
Wulfstan, in speaking to Godric’s friends, learned little more than Estrid’s son had already told his mother about Tosti’s dealings with the Norman garrison. The blacksmith had returned to his forge after leaving Estrid’s house and, certain that by now the young men who gambled in the storeroom with Godric and Tosti would have been apprised of the tragedy that had taken place that morning through gossip in the town, sent one of the two men he employed beside Godric to search them out and ask them to come to the forge in the hope they would have information that would assist in proving Godric’s innocence. They answered his summons speedily, all shocked at Tosti’s death and disturbed by the accusation of murder against their friend. There were three of them—Osferth, son of a tanner, a young man of eighteen years of age; Eric, recently married to a shoemaker’s daughter, and learning her father’s trade; and Cenred, a rather shy young man who had inherited his dead mother’s gift for healing and treated many of the townsfolk with his herbal remedies. Although all were willing to do their utmost to help, none of them possessed any details that were pertinent. All they could do was confirm Godric’s statement that Tosti sometimes carried a lot of money on him, and was close-mouthed about its source, adding that they knew of no reason why anyone might want to kill him.
Frustrated with their answers, Wulfstan asked if they knew whether or not Tosti had been involved with any women in the town. It was a thin hope that if he had, he might have told her more about his deception than his close friends, but he asked it just the same.
Cenred bashfully said that Tosti, as far as he knew, did not have a liaison with any of the girls in Rochester but that he had, on occasion, slept with a willing girl in the village where he had his pig farm, a small community on the other side of the Medway.
“Osferth and I also visit her,” he added haltingly, “as do some of the other young men in the town. Her father is dead and her mother allows her and her two sisters to have concourse with men to earn the wherewithal to support them all. The mother is willing for the girls to accept other things beside silver coin in payment, foodstuffs and the like, so Tosti usually gave them a shank of pig meat, Osferth some fish or vegetables from the market and I take one of my remedies—the mother has an affliction in her joints and the salve eases her pain.”
Wulfstan glanced at Eric, raising his eyebrows questioningly. The young man shook his head. “I have a wife at home and no need to visit a harlot, so never went there.”
Regretfully, Wulfstan thanked them all and sent them away, asking only that they come and tell him if they learned anything about Tosti or the Norman serjeant that might have a bearing on their murders. With a heavy heart, he set out to return to Estrid’s house, arriving just after the others had returned.
***************
In the meantime, Gruntzen, the pig, had returned to Tosti's shack. She had followed the scent of the man who killed her master as far as the gate that led to the intended bail of the new castle, but instinct and fear had stopped her from trying to pass the guard, who had looked at her speculatively and drawn his sword. After wandering down back lanes in a fruitless search for another opening that would enable her to follow the man she was after, passing the old potter in the process, she decided to return to her home, for she was hungry and dispirited.
She arrived at the shack just as the body of her master and that of the man who had been killed along with him were being removed by some soldiers from the garrison. Standing at the end of the lane and cautiously sniffing the air, she waited until they had gone before she ducked through the gate—which had fortuitously been left open—and went straight to the trough beside the sty where she slept when Tosti was not there. After eating her fill of the pile of turnips and other root vegetables that were in the trough, she sniffed disappointedly at the shallow depression in the ground at the end of the yard where Tosti had made her a wallow that he kept filled with water. Now, with the extraordinary heat of the last few days, it was almost bone dry. Finding a half-full bucket of water alongside the sty she lapped at it for few moments and then went into the shack. The odour of blood was strong in here, as was the smell of her master. Snuffling along the walls, she finally settled down on the pile of old blankets that her master had used as a bed. Accustomed to being left alone for long periods, and comforted by the familiar smell of Tosti on the pile of bedding, she was soon asleep.
CHAPTER 9
The afternoon was almost gone by the time Wulfstan arrived at Estrid’s house, and Cuthbert was preparing the evening meal. Everyone else had already returned and the table was laid with wooden bowls, pottery cups, and a platter of cold meats and cheese. In the cookhouse out in the yard there was fish grilling that would be served with onions soaked in brine as soon as all were ready to eat. One look at the blacksmith’s face as he came through the door revealed that he had not been any more successful than the rest of them.
Gytha was determined that their lack of achievement would not dishearten them. “Come, let us eat. A hungry warrior does not fight well and we must keep up our strength if we are to win this battle to free Godric.”
They all sat down and Cuthbert brought in the grilled flounder, a flatfish that went well with the onions, then took a seat beside young Judith. Estrid tried to obey Gytha’s sensible advice but the notion of eating turned on her stomach and she found she could only pick at the tasty morsels. The others too, even Gytha, found the worry of the situation had banished their desire for food and confined themselves to only a mouthful or two as they shared their paucity of information.
When all were finished their recitals, Estrid said, “Even if we have not found any evidence that will free Godric, we now know, from Mildryth, that Rocher was an impotent and vicious man; that Tosti had the wherewithal to pay for two expensive chessmen to be fashioned by Judith’s father and the silversmith and that he also, as was told to Wulfstan by Tosti’s friends, was in the habit of visiting one of the girls in the village where he lived. And there is the evidence of his own words to Godric that his pigs had taught him how to be devious. We must use this information as Judith said, as though it were parts of a riddle, and keep looking for more clues until we have enough to solve it.”
She paused and then told them she had asked Gundulf’s permission to search Tosti’s farm in the morning, and was to meet the bishop’s steward to travel there. “I do not have any great hope of finding something that will help us, but we cannot overlook even the slightest possibility. I would appreciate it, Wulfstan, if you would come with me—two pairs of eyes are better than one and Gytha needs to stay here to take Godric's food to him.”
When the blacksmith nodded his agreement to do as she asked, Estrid turned to Judith. “I would like you to accompany us as well,” she said to the girl. “While we are in the village, I want to seek out the young harlot that Tosti bedded and ask if he told her anything about his dealings with the Normans. If she agrees to meet with me, she may speak more freely to you, a person of her own age, rather than one of my years.”
Judith flushed with pleasure at being asked to help, and promised to come to Estrid's house early the next morning.
After relating what the bishop had told her about the possibility of Odo’s downfall—news which gave them all hope that Rochester would soon be free of his harsh rule—they dispersed; Gytha saying she was going out into the yard to hone her langseax just in case, she said darkly, its sharp edge should be needed, Cuthbert cleared the table and removed the uneaten remnants of food to store in the larder, and Judith went home. For a few moments Wulfstan lingered and then, after patting Estrid on the shoulder in a fatherly fashion, also took his farewell.
When they were all gone, Estrid went up the stairs to the workshop. She felt the need of solitude, some quiet moments to think over all that had happened and try to bring some order out of the confusion. The sense of peace that always seemed to exist in the workshop descended on her when she went in. It was a large room with a few tables where any work that was in progress was carefully rolled up at the end of the day, an assortment of rectangular frames that held different sized pieces of material—some so small they could be held in one hand which were useful for embroidering an edge or corner of an altar cloth—and baskets of wool sorted as to colour. Bone needles were also kept by size, thrust into a scrap of linen, and stacked on a shelf alongside the tiny shears used to cut thread. The room was in slight disarray after the alarm of the morning, the wools Judith had been sorting were laying on the table where she had tossed them when she had jumped up to run out into the street after Estrid and, on the settle where Gytha had been sitting lay the stole she was embroidering, the threaded needle dangling from the tiny cross she had been stitching.
Absently Estrid picked up the wools and sat down on a stool with a laddered back that she always used when working and gazed towards the casement, which had remained open since morning. The evening light was now fading and darkness approaching, but she did not light a candle. A large moth fluttered into the room and out again as she sat there, trying to still her mind. Her fingers, restless, drummed on her knee and she picked up a skein of tangled blue wool from the bundle in her lap and began to unravel it. Perhaps the familiar task would calm her. As she deftly pulled the delicate strands apart, she was reminded of Lady Emma. This particular shade of blue had been her favourite colour—‘it reminds me of the bluebells that grew in the woods near our burh’—she used to say, her voice wistful. The image of her father’s sister swam into her mind; a slender woman with delicate white skin, a sweet nature and soft manner, and with a deceptively determined will beneath her fragile exterior. Thoughts of Emma led to memories of the time just after she and Gytha had arrived in Rochester and the difficulties that had loomed ahead. They had seemed insurmountable at the time, but they had survived, and eventually prospered.
For a moment she dwelled on memories of those days. Lady Emma had received the confirmation of her brother’s death stoically—she had already feared he had been slain at Senlac, but had not received definite news until their arrival—murmuring only a prayer that his demise had been a quick one, and commiserating with Estrid on the death of a husband so young and full of life. She had then, briskly, turned her practical mind to how they were to face the future.
With the conquest of the Normans she knew that the revenues from the few small properties she had inherited from her late husband would soon be forfeit, along with the house she lived in and which was to be given to the church, and she had cast around for a way in which they could support themselves and soon divined the plan that would eventually bring them an income. Going to the then archbishop of Rochester, Siward, who had often admired her work and gratefully accepted as a gift two or three small tapestries with a religious theme to hang in the monastery alongside the cathedral, she asked if he would pay for her services, suggesting that she use her skill with embroidery to decorate the ecclesiastical vestments worn by him and other priests in the diocese, and also to embroider altar cloths and other linen used in the services. Siward, aware of her piety and, as an Englishman, sympathetic to her plight, readily agreed, saying he would only charge the very small fee of one silver penny paid twice a year for her right to continue to live in the house she now occupied, which would leave her more profit from the income.
Gratefully, she had accepted his generosity, but even so, they were soon hard pressed to secure the materials to fulfil the commissions and the wherewithal to pay for them. Selling the few bits of jewellery she possessed—a silver gilt brooch set with garnets, a gold ring and a necklace inlaid with crystal—Emma, in company with Gytha, had scoured the town and persuaded a few of their female neighbours to sell the yarns they had in store, and also managed—with a promise of payment in the near future—to obtain from a local weaver a length of fine linen that could be used to make altar cloths and the like. She had then sat down with her niece and Gytha, who both had only a rudimentary knowledge of embroidery making, and began her instruction to bring their skill to an acceptable level. They had worked long hours, sometimes far into the night by candlelight, but the results had been worth the effort. Before long, Estrid had shown herself to have inherited her aunt's talent and was showing enough deftness to stitch delicate bands of orphrey on ecclesiastical vestments, and Gytha—surprisingly so, for her hands were big and large knuckled—had not been far behind. By the time the following spring had arrived, and Godric born, Emma had hired some of the women in the town to collect wild flowers to use in dying thread, and also persuaded a local weaver to make such lengths of fine linen as they would require.
That had been the start of the embroidery workshop and Estrid knew that Lady Emma, if she were alive, would be proud of their continuing success. Those early times had been hard as they had been forced to swallow their grief and concentrate on their work while their homeland was being ravaged by the conquering duke—now crowned king of the English—as he brought his defiant new subjects under control. But there had been fleeting moments of happiness, too. After Godric had been born, he had immediately become the cosseted pet of all three women; the townsfolk of Rochester had been kind, especially Wulfstan and his wife, who had often brought food to sustain them; and Siward had given Emma additional commissions to swell their income.
Estrid, in reviewing the years and remembering the hardships and small triumphs, found solace for her son’s current plight. They had prevailed before in times of adversity, they would do so again. With a renewed determination, she put the blue wool back into the basket, closed the shutters over the casement and went downstairs to bed.
CHAPTER 10
Judith was at Estrid’s door before sunrise, Wulfstan close behind her. The blacksmith had brought one of Godric’s friends with him, Cenred the herbalist.
“I thought having Cenred with us would make it easier to find the girl that Tosti bedded,” Wulfstan explained to Estrid, “especially since he has also had congress with her.”
Cenred, a gangly young man a year or two younger than Godric, with long sensitive hands and a slim build, flushed red to the roots of his hair when Wulfstan mentioned his relationship with the village girl. Estrid gave him an encouraging smile as she thanked him for his assistance, and Judith turned her head away, not quite hiding the amused curve of her mouth. Cenred seemed relieved that neither of the women were disapproving, and fell into step beside Judith as they walked down the main thoroughfare to West Gate to meet Gundulf’s steward.
“Did a man come past here before you saw the sow?” Gytha asked.
The potter shook his head uncertainly. “I saw no one,” he replied, “but it was about that time I went around back to take a piss, so if he went by then, I wouldn’t have seen him.”
They left the potter and walked away, disappointed. “It is sure to have been Gruntzen he saw,” Cuthbert said consolingly, “so at least we have discovered where she went.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t do us any good,” Gytha replied dismissively. “Whoever she was tracking must have come down this lane and gone through the gate, and I doubt whether the Norman bastard on duty there will tell us who it was, especially if it was one of his comrades.”
“He might have been English,” Cuthbert replied. “There are a few townsmen who go in there regularly with supplies for the men of the garrison, and the guard would have let any of them through without question.”
“Well, whoever it was, Gruntzen has disappeared and the only place she could have gone is through that gate. And if the guard did let her through, it would have only been to seize her for the castle kitchen. She has probably been slaughtered by now and is skewered on a roasting spit, I reckon, and no longer able to help Godric.”
Cuthbert said no more, sharing Gytha’s sense of failure, and wishing he could ease her distress. He had a great admiration for Gytha, and suffered as much from her disappointment as she did. With a heavy heart, he followed her back the way they had come, hoping that one of the others had been more successful in their common quest.
***************
Judith had gained a little more information than Gytha and Cuthbert when she went to talk with her father. Tosti had not been often in his shop during the last few months, he said, and then only to sell some deer antlers that had fallen from stags after last autumn’s rut, and that he had found in the strip of woodland where his pigs rooted for acorns.
“As you know, dohtor, I do not often buy pig bones; they are not the best for carving and are often taken from joints that have been roasted in the oven and are friable. Tosti used to bring me a few from pigs he had slaughtered himself, but has not done so recently.”
As Judith turned away to go back to Estrid and report her failure, her father added, “But he did come one other time to give me a commission rather than sell bones. It was shortly after his uncle’s death, I remember.”
Surprised, Judith asked what it was. “He brought me a pair of tusks from a boar he had slaughtered, and asked me to carve the ends into pawns for a chessboard. He said he had found a set of chess pieces among his uncle's belongings but two of the pawns were missing and he wanted to replace them. I told him I could match them more closely if he brought me one of the other pawns to copy, but he said that pawns, like the soldiers they represented, all looked the same anyway and it would not matter if they were not identical.”
“And did you carve them?” Judith asked.
“I did, painting one red as he asked and leaving the other the natural colour of the bone. A short time later I happened to be having a conversation with Arni, the silversmith, and he mentioned to me, in passing, that Tosti had brought him the pawns after I finished them and asked him to mount them on pedestals of silver, saying the rest of his uncle's set had been fashioned in that way.” Judith’s father had shrugged. “An expensive plaything for a pig farmer, but it is not meet that I pass judgement on another man's possessions.”
Judith stored away the information to tell Estrid, but was not sure if it would be of any importance, for she could not see how the commission of such items could have any relevance to Tosti's death.
***************
Wulfstan, in speaking to Godric’s friends, learned little more than Estrid’s son had already told his mother about Tosti’s dealings with the Norman garrison. The blacksmith had returned to his forge after leaving Estrid’s house and, certain that by now the young men who gambled in the storeroom with Godric and Tosti would have been apprised of the tragedy that had taken place that morning through gossip in the town, sent one of the two men he employed beside Godric to search them out and ask them to come to the forge in the hope they would have information that would assist in proving Godric’s innocence. They answered his summons speedily, all shocked at Tosti’s death and disturbed by the accusation of murder against their friend. There were three of them—Osferth, son of a tanner, a young man of eighteen years of age; Eric, recently married to a shoemaker’s daughter, and learning her father’s trade; and Cenred, a rather shy young man who had inherited his dead mother’s gift for healing and treated many of the townsfolk with his herbal remedies. Although all were willing to do their utmost to help, none of them possessed any details that were pertinent. All they could do was confirm Godric’s statement that Tosti sometimes carried a lot of money on him, and was close-mouthed about its source, adding that they knew of no reason why anyone might want to kill him.
Frustrated with their answers, Wulfstan asked if they knew whether or not Tosti had been involved with any women in the town. It was a thin hope that if he had, he might have told her more about his deception than his close friends, but he asked it just the same.
Cenred bashfully said that Tosti, as far as he knew, did not have a liaison with any of the girls in Rochester but that he had, on occasion, slept with a willing girl in the village where he had his pig farm, a small community on the other side of the Medway.
“Osferth and I also visit her,” he added haltingly, “as do some of the other young men in the town. Her father is dead and her mother allows her and her two sisters to have concourse with men to earn the wherewithal to support them all. The mother is willing for the girls to accept other things beside silver coin in payment, foodstuffs and the like, so Tosti usually gave them a shank of pig meat, Osferth some fish or vegetables from the market and I take one of my remedies—the mother has an affliction in her joints and the salve eases her pain.”
Wulfstan glanced at Eric, raising his eyebrows questioningly. The young man shook his head. “I have a wife at home and no need to visit a harlot, so never went there.”
Regretfully, Wulfstan thanked them all and sent them away, asking only that they come and tell him if they learned anything about Tosti or the Norman serjeant that might have a bearing on their murders. With a heavy heart, he set out to return to Estrid’s house, arriving just after the others had returned.
***************
In the meantime, Gruntzen, the pig, had returned to Tosti's shack. She had followed the scent of the man who killed her master as far as the gate that led to the intended bail of the new castle, but instinct and fear had stopped her from trying to pass the guard, who had looked at her speculatively and drawn his sword. After wandering down back lanes in a fruitless search for another opening that would enable her to follow the man she was after, passing the old potter in the process, she decided to return to her home, for she was hungry and dispirited.
She arrived at the shack just as the body of her master and that of the man who had been killed along with him were being removed by some soldiers from the garrison. Standing at the end of the lane and cautiously sniffing the air, she waited until they had gone before she ducked through the gate—which had fortuitously been left open—and went straight to the trough beside the sty where she slept when Tosti was not there. After eating her fill of the pile of turnips and other root vegetables that were in the trough, she sniffed disappointedly at the shallow depression in the ground at the end of the yard where Tosti had made her a wallow that he kept filled with water. Now, with the extraordinary heat of the last few days, it was almost bone dry. Finding a half-full bucket of water alongside the sty she lapped at it for few moments and then went into the shack. The odour of blood was strong in here, as was the smell of her master. Snuffling along the walls, she finally settled down on the pile of old blankets that her master had used as a bed. Accustomed to being left alone for long periods, and comforted by the familiar smell of Tosti on the pile of bedding, she was soon asleep.
CHAPTER 9
The afternoon was almost gone by the time Wulfstan arrived at Estrid’s house, and Cuthbert was preparing the evening meal. Everyone else had already returned and the table was laid with wooden bowls, pottery cups, and a platter of cold meats and cheese. In the cookhouse out in the yard there was fish grilling that would be served with onions soaked in brine as soon as all were ready to eat. One look at the blacksmith’s face as he came through the door revealed that he had not been any more successful than the rest of them.
Gytha was determined that their lack of achievement would not dishearten them. “Come, let us eat. A hungry warrior does not fight well and we must keep up our strength if we are to win this battle to free Godric.”
They all sat down and Cuthbert brought in the grilled flounder, a flatfish that went well with the onions, then took a seat beside young Judith. Estrid tried to obey Gytha’s sensible advice but the notion of eating turned on her stomach and she found she could only pick at the tasty morsels. The others too, even Gytha, found the worry of the situation had banished their desire for food and confined themselves to only a mouthful or two as they shared their paucity of information.
When all were finished their recitals, Estrid said, “Even if we have not found any evidence that will free Godric, we now know, from Mildryth, that Rocher was an impotent and vicious man; that Tosti had the wherewithal to pay for two expensive chessmen to be fashioned by Judith’s father and the silversmith and that he also, as was told to Wulfstan by Tosti’s friends, was in the habit of visiting one of the girls in the village where he lived. And there is the evidence of his own words to Godric that his pigs had taught him how to be devious. We must use this information as Judith said, as though it were parts of a riddle, and keep looking for more clues until we have enough to solve it.”
She paused and then told them she had asked Gundulf’s permission to search Tosti’s farm in the morning, and was to meet the bishop’s steward to travel there. “I do not have any great hope of finding something that will help us, but we cannot overlook even the slightest possibility. I would appreciate it, Wulfstan, if you would come with me—two pairs of eyes are better than one and Gytha needs to stay here to take Godric's food to him.”
When the blacksmith nodded his agreement to do as she asked, Estrid turned to Judith. “I would like you to accompany us as well,” she said to the girl. “While we are in the village, I want to seek out the young harlot that Tosti bedded and ask if he told her anything about his dealings with the Normans. If she agrees to meet with me, she may speak more freely to you, a person of her own age, rather than one of my years.”
Judith flushed with pleasure at being asked to help, and promised to come to Estrid's house early the next morning.
After relating what the bishop had told her about the possibility of Odo’s downfall—news which gave them all hope that Rochester would soon be free of his harsh rule—they dispersed; Gytha saying she was going out into the yard to hone her langseax just in case, she said darkly, its sharp edge should be needed, Cuthbert cleared the table and removed the uneaten remnants of food to store in the larder, and Judith went home. For a few moments Wulfstan lingered and then, after patting Estrid on the shoulder in a fatherly fashion, also took his farewell.
When they were all gone, Estrid went up the stairs to the workshop. She felt the need of solitude, some quiet moments to think over all that had happened and try to bring some order out of the confusion. The sense of peace that always seemed to exist in the workshop descended on her when she went in. It was a large room with a few tables where any work that was in progress was carefully rolled up at the end of the day, an assortment of rectangular frames that held different sized pieces of material—some so small they could be held in one hand which were useful for embroidering an edge or corner of an altar cloth—and baskets of wool sorted as to colour. Bone needles were also kept by size, thrust into a scrap of linen, and stacked on a shelf alongside the tiny shears used to cut thread. The room was in slight disarray after the alarm of the morning, the wools Judith had been sorting were laying on the table where she had tossed them when she had jumped up to run out into the street after Estrid and, on the settle where Gytha had been sitting lay the stole she was embroidering, the threaded needle dangling from the tiny cross she had been stitching.
Absently Estrid picked up the wools and sat down on a stool with a laddered back that she always used when working and gazed towards the casement, which had remained open since morning. The evening light was now fading and darkness approaching, but she did not light a candle. A large moth fluttered into the room and out again as she sat there, trying to still her mind. Her fingers, restless, drummed on her knee and she picked up a skein of tangled blue wool from the bundle in her lap and began to unravel it. Perhaps the familiar task would calm her. As she deftly pulled the delicate strands apart, she was reminded of Lady Emma. This particular shade of blue had been her favourite colour—‘it reminds me of the bluebells that grew in the woods near our burh’—she used to say, her voice wistful. The image of her father’s sister swam into her mind; a slender woman with delicate white skin, a sweet nature and soft manner, and with a deceptively determined will beneath her fragile exterior. Thoughts of Emma led to memories of the time just after she and Gytha had arrived in Rochester and the difficulties that had loomed ahead. They had seemed insurmountable at the time, but they had survived, and eventually prospered.
For a moment she dwelled on memories of those days. Lady Emma had received the confirmation of her brother’s death stoically—she had already feared he had been slain at Senlac, but had not received definite news until their arrival—murmuring only a prayer that his demise had been a quick one, and commiserating with Estrid on the death of a husband so young and full of life. She had then, briskly, turned her practical mind to how they were to face the future.
With the conquest of the Normans she knew that the revenues from the few small properties she had inherited from her late husband would soon be forfeit, along with the house she lived in and which was to be given to the church, and she had cast around for a way in which they could support themselves and soon divined the plan that would eventually bring them an income. Going to the then archbishop of Rochester, Siward, who had often admired her work and gratefully accepted as a gift two or three small tapestries with a religious theme to hang in the monastery alongside the cathedral, she asked if he would pay for her services, suggesting that she use her skill with embroidery to decorate the ecclesiastical vestments worn by him and other priests in the diocese, and also to embroider altar cloths and other linen used in the services. Siward, aware of her piety and, as an Englishman, sympathetic to her plight, readily agreed, saying he would only charge the very small fee of one silver penny paid twice a year for her right to continue to live in the house she now occupied, which would leave her more profit from the income.
Gratefully, she had accepted his generosity, but even so, they were soon hard pressed to secure the materials to fulfil the commissions and the wherewithal to pay for them. Selling the few bits of jewellery she possessed—a silver gilt brooch set with garnets, a gold ring and a necklace inlaid with crystal—Emma, in company with Gytha, had scoured the town and persuaded a few of their female neighbours to sell the yarns they had in store, and also managed—with a promise of payment in the near future—to obtain from a local weaver a length of fine linen that could be used to make altar cloths and the like. She had then sat down with her niece and Gytha, who both had only a rudimentary knowledge of embroidery making, and began her instruction to bring their skill to an acceptable level. They had worked long hours, sometimes far into the night by candlelight, but the results had been worth the effort. Before long, Estrid had shown herself to have inherited her aunt's talent and was showing enough deftness to stitch delicate bands of orphrey on ecclesiastical vestments, and Gytha—surprisingly so, for her hands were big and large knuckled—had not been far behind. By the time the following spring had arrived, and Godric born, Emma had hired some of the women in the town to collect wild flowers to use in dying thread, and also persuaded a local weaver to make such lengths of fine linen as they would require.
That had been the start of the embroidery workshop and Estrid knew that Lady Emma, if she were alive, would be proud of their continuing success. Those early times had been hard as they had been forced to swallow their grief and concentrate on their work while their homeland was being ravaged by the conquering duke—now crowned king of the English—as he brought his defiant new subjects under control. But there had been fleeting moments of happiness, too. After Godric had been born, he had immediately become the cosseted pet of all three women; the townsfolk of Rochester had been kind, especially Wulfstan and his wife, who had often brought food to sustain them; and Siward had given Emma additional commissions to swell their income.
Estrid, in reviewing the years and remembering the hardships and small triumphs, found solace for her son’s current plight. They had prevailed before in times of adversity, they would do so again. With a renewed determination, she put the blue wool back into the basket, closed the shutters over the casement and went downstairs to bed.
CHAPTER 10
Judith was at Estrid’s door before sunrise, Wulfstan close behind her. The blacksmith had brought one of Godric’s friends with him, Cenred the herbalist.
“I thought having Cenred with us would make it easier to find the girl that Tosti bedded,” Wulfstan explained to Estrid, “especially since he has also had congress with her.”
Cenred, a gangly young man a year or two younger than Godric, with long sensitive hands and a slim build, flushed red to the roots of his hair when Wulfstan mentioned his relationship with the village girl. Estrid gave him an encouraging smile as she thanked him for his assistance, and Judith turned her head away, not quite hiding the amused curve of her mouth. Cenred seemed relieved that neither of the women were disapproving, and fell into step beside Judith as they walked down the main thoroughfare to West Gate to meet Gundulf’s steward.
