Death In the Forest by Jeremy Potter

Author:Jeremy Potter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448207350
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

9

Of all the virtues patience was the one Edith found hardest to cultivate. She could feel womanhood stealing upon her, the brief days of her life passing, while the world which she had determined to put to rights lay out of reach. Weeks came and went and William de Warenne did not honour his promise to return. So much for the depth and endurance of his passion for me, she thought, but the abbess reported that Romsey had been forbidden him by the new king.

Another report came from Wilton: the last of the Saxon queens was dead. After Edith’s departure she had lain in a peaceful coma for a week and gone to the next world early one morning with a smile such as had not been seen on her lips since the Conquest. She had long been forgotten and her passing caused no stir, but at Edith’s insistence a solemn mass was held in the abbey church. Her death, hard on the Conqueror’s, closed a chapter. Edith composed a memorial for both of them – one generous, the other harsh – in the chronicle of events which she was now writing. The focus of her interest had moved from the past to the present. Her Alfreid was laid aside incomplete: a thousand hard-wrung lines of Virgilian verse to moulder on the scriptorium shelf.

‘The time has come for you to take your vows,’ said Father Edmund, confronting her one day in her aunt’s chamber. The abbess had been called urgently to the infirmary to hear a dying bequest, and the chaplain’s shadow in the doorway caught Edith unawares.

‘Is that a command?’ she retaliated. ‘Have you of all men become a messenger for the Norman king?’

‘Your ladyship is unkind to me,’ he complained in the ingratiating voice she had learned to distrust. ‘You would wound me with your words when I speak only for myself and for the good of your soul. Why will you not accept me as a friend? Your frowns are plain for all to interpret. In what have I offended you?’

‘I am grateful for what you did when Queen Matilda came.’

‘And for nothing more?’ He advanced into the room and seated himself beside her.

‘Nothing.’ She made to move away, but he clutched her arm.

‘Do not run from me. I desire only that we should pray as one, knit our souls together in communion with God.’ He knelt and drew her down with him.

She complied without hiding her aversion. After he had called down God’s blessings and mercy on them she contributed a brusque amen. What would he have us knit together next, she asked herself indignantly. Did the lecher thus make use of the name of God in corrupting Aunt Christina?

‘Your ladyship looks troubled,’ he told her, making the words a pretext for bringing their faces together so that his breath played on her cheek. ‘Is there any comfort I can bring?’ His arm was round her shoulder, but she did not throw it off. The scent of his body was strong but not unsavoury.

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