Elizabeth Chadwick - The Conquest

Julitta of Ulverton was born a little after sunrise on a bright February morning in the year 1070. Having kept her mother awake all night with severe labour pains, she shot into the midwife's spread apron and announced her presence to the world in no uncertain terms. She had a fuzz of dark red hair and a face to match, although that soon became a more healthy pink as each resounding cry cleared her airway.

'And I thought Benedict was loud,' Felice remarked as the baby was cleaned of blood and mucus and wrapped in warm swaddling. The sight of Ailith labouring had swept her on a flood of memories to her own travail, and at the moment of Julitta's birth, she had been unable to watch. Nor was she at ease until the midwife, Dame Osyth, a woman with nine children of her own, had delivered the afterbirth and pronounced that the blood Ailith had lost was 'nought but a smidgin'.

'She resembles Rolf,' Felice said, giving the howling bundle to the exhausted, but happy mother.

Ailith laughed. 'God grant that she does not act like him. Two of them is more than I could bear!'

'You do not mean that!'

'Could you imagine Rolf in female form?' She put the infant to her breast. The baby found her nipple immediately and set to with a voracious will. 'But I fear you are right,' she added wryly. 'She certainly has his appetite.'

'I'll go and fetch him,' Felice said as the midwife set about tidying the room, putting the afterbirth and bloodstained bed-straw in a basket for burning and covering them with used linens.

Ailith gazed down upon her new daughter, enchanted by the fragility of her skin and the coppery-gold lashes lining her half-closed lids. She was long of limb, and since both her parents were tall, would doubtless grow to match them. Ailith spoke softly to the baby and her eyes opened. They lacked focus and were an indeterminate horizon-blue, but they followed the sound of the voice and seemed to study Ailith curiously. She felt a pang of protective love so fierce that it brought tears to her eyes.

'Julitta,' she murmured, testing the strange, Norman name on her tongue. At Yuletide she had made a bargain with Rolf beneath a kissing bunch of mistletoe. If the baby was a boy, she had requested that he be named Lyulph in remembrance of her younger brother. Not Goldwin, for that was a name too sacred and painful to her heart. Rolf had agreed on the condition that if the child was a girl, she should be named after his mother, Julitta.

'She did not have very much out of me or my father during her lifetime,' he had said with a shrug, 'and I know that she would have liked you.'

'Why didn't you give her name to your… your wife's daughter?' Ailith had asked, the word 'wife' sticking in her throat.

Rolf had smiled. 'I did think about it, but Arlette desired to call Gisele after her maternal grandmother, and I knew that I could have the naming of any sons. Besides, it did not seem to matter. When I saw Gisele lying in her cradle, I knew immediately that she was no Julitta.'

'And are you a Julitta?' Ailith asked her newborn daughter, and was answered by a loud sucking noise. The tug of the baby's lips on her nipple sent waves of cramp through Ailith's loins.

The hangings across the doorway moved, and she propped herself up and put a smile on her face for Rolf. The curtain billowed again, and instead of the anticipated lean, red-haired man, there entered a bright-eyed small boy.

'I've come to see the new baby,' announced a confident Benedict de Remy.

The midwife set her lips and started towards the child, but Ailith stopped her. 'No, let him come and look. He does no harm.'

Benedict sidled past the village woman and ran up to the bed. He stared solemnly at the sucking infant and very gently placed his finger on her downy red hair.

'Except for your mother and Wulfhild, and Dame Osyth here, you are the first person in the castle to have seen her,' Ailith told him.

Benedict nodded. 'She's very small,' he said, frowning.

'You were too when you were born.'

'I want a brother, but Mama can't have any more babies. What's her name?'

Ailith told him, and he repeated it carefully. A bright little imp was Benedict, full of life and filled with a ruthless quest for knowledge. In her tired state, he quite overwhelmed Ailith. She was rescued by Felice, who hurried into the room, looking exasperated.

'I'm sorry, Ailith, he gave me the slip. I should have known he would come straight here to you. Ben, leave Ailith alone, she's exhausted.'

The little boy pulled a face and refused to move from his post at the bedside, but he ceased his chatter.

'Where's Rolf?' Ailith asked of Felice. 'Could you not find him?'

'He's gone out to one of the horses. Mauger summoned him in a panic so the steward says, about half a candle notch since. Something about a broken leg.'

'Oh.' Ailith nodded and tried not to feel disappointed. She knew that his horses came first, that she should not expect him to be waiting in the hall on the whim of his child to be born, but nevertheless, weak tears filled her eyes. She blinked hard. Supposing Sleipnir had broken a bone, Rolf's prize stallion? Or what if it was Elfa, her own little mare?

'He'll be back soon,' Felice soothed with the false heartiness of a sickbed nurse. 'Try and sleep, so that you'll be refreshed when he does arrive. Come on, rascal, you can see the baby again later.' She took her son's hand and drew him firmly away while the midwife came to tend to Ailith and take the satiated baby from her arms.

Ailith gave Julitta to Dame Osyth and wearily closed her eyes. She knew that she was being irrational, but knowing did not prevent her from feeling as if she had been deserted.

Several hours later, a sound woke Ailith. The baby was no longer in her cradle where Dame Osyth had placed her, and of the midwife herself there was no sign. Ailith pulled herself up on her pillows and stared round the room. There were cramps in her belly and the entire area of the birth passage was no longer numb, but decidedly sore. The sound resolved itself into Rolf's voice talking softly near the shutters, and she saw that in his arms he was gently cradling the swaddled baby.

'Rolf?'

He turned as she spoke, and came to the bed. She saw that his face was slack and tired, as if he too had not slept all night. Certainly he had not shaved, for his lips and jaw were outlined in garnet stubble.

'Did I waken you?' Leaning over the bed, he kissed her.

'It does not matter. I am glad that you're here.' Her eyes filled with tears again. It was a weakness of women the days immediately following childbirth, or so Dame Hulda had told Ailith when she bore Harold. 'Is she a Julitta?' she managed to choke out. 'Does she meet with your approval?'

'She is a princess,' Rolf said softly, and brushed away her tears with the hand not occupied by his daughter. 'And yes, she is a Julitta. My mother was the one responsible for the red hair in the Brize bloodline, and I can see that this little one has it.' He seated himself on a stool at the bedside. 'Down her back it was, a mane of wild curls. But I think that her namesake is going to be even more beautiful.'

His words were a soothing balm on Ailith's earlier feelings of rejection, and a watery smile emerged through her tears.

'And I think that last night is only the first of many sleepless ones that she will cause us,' she teased.

Rolf acknowledged the truth of her words with a grimace. As if indignant at being maligned so young, Julitta set up a fractious wailing, and when rocking her only brought forth louder roars of protest, Rolf hastily handed her to Ailith for feeding.

'Felice said that you could not come when our daughter was born because you had gone out to tend a horse?' Ailith settled Julitta at her breast and hoped that her tone had not sounded petulant.

His grimace lost its humour. 'The bay pony stallion, the one I bought in the north,' he sighed. 'Put his leg in a mole mound this morning while Mauger was trying to catch him, and snapped the bone clean through.'

'Can nothing be done?'

'It was a hind leg; he would have been useless for breeding -no strength to mount the mares. The break was too severe to even try to save him. I had to kill him.'

'Oh, Rolf, I am sorry!' She touched his hand in sympathy with her free one and was ashamed at the anger she had felt earlier. 'And you had such hopes!'

'It just means I'll have to go north and buy another stallion.'

Ailith tightened her arm around the suckling baby and was filled with fear.

'Oh not yet,' he said as he caught the look on her face. 'Next month perhaps, or early in April when the roads are fit for travelling. I have learned my lesson about visiting those parts in wintertime.'

'Do you think there will be anything left up there to seek out?' she demanded with some agitation.

'What do you mean?'

'Oh you know as well as I do. The traders who come to Ulverton tell dreadful tales of what your king has done in the north lands; of the villages he has wasted. People say that if peace lies over England, it is the peace of death.'

If he noticed her say 'your king' as opposed to 'the King', he did not remark upon it. 'Pedlars always exaggerate,' he said uncomfortably. 'And the north was in rebellion — the Scots, the Danes, several English earls. What was he supposed to do? They had received warning enough already.'

She said nothing, but bit her lip and paid undue attention to the feeding baby. She did not have the strength to quarrel.

'I won't find another pony stallion of the bay's stamp in these parts. Nor will I know what I can obtain in the north unless I go and look for myself.'

'You will do as you please,' she said stiffly. Here he was, watching his newborn daughter suckle at her breast, and he was contemplating leaving her. It was a bitter morsel to swallow. Was this how his wife felt when she saw him for a few brief weeks each year? The land on the horizon was always better than the land he possessed. From feeling bathed in love, she returned to feeling desolate and frightened. The midwife would say that it was the effects of giving birth that were making her emotions swing from high to low like a falconer's lure, but Ailith knew differently.

'You need to sleep,' Rolf said, leaning over her to brush his lips lightly against her temple and cheek. 'I'll come back later.'

She watched him make his escape, treading buoyantly to the door, and wondered if that was what he always said. One day, she thought, he would 'come back later' to a cold hearth.