Elizabeth Chadwick - The Conquest

Gudrun returned with the wine and a small bowl of raisin cakes. 'There has been trouble at one of the other bathhouses tonight,' she told him breathlessly. 'A good thing Mauger didn't take you across the way to Dame Agatha's.'

Benedict took a swallow of the wine she poured for him and raised his brows in silent question.

'Do you know Wulfstan the Goldsmith?'

'Vaguely.' Benedict's curiosity sharpened. His parents often moved in the same company as Wulfstan, but they were not on speaking terms due to some quarrel in the past that had never been explained to him. 'Why?'

'One of the other girls has just told me that he's lying stone-dead on the floor of one of Dame Agatha's cubicles. A seizure so she said, but there's another rumour that one of Agatha's girls killed him.' Gudrun's eyes glowed. 'It'll be all over the city by tomorrow. Wulfstan was well feared, but not well liked. No-one'll likely mourn him, not even his wife.'

Benedict digested this information while he finished his wine and blotted up some of its potency with a couple of raisin cakes. He could almost hear Rolf saying As ye sow, so shall ye reap, and having just sown a few wild oats of his own, he felt a little uneasy. When he departed, he paid Gudrun from the depths of his niggled conscience, and her eyes widened at the amount of silver he pressed into her hand. When she made to exclaim, he put his forefinger to her lips and glanced quickly over his shoulder at Mauger who was making his own farewells.

'Say nothing,' he whispered. 'Just put it away against a time when you might need it. My friend… he wouldn't understand.'

Gudrun nodded. Her eyes flickered to Mauger. Aaliz said that he was as solid and unimaginative between the sheets as he was out of them, and not particularly generous. She contrasted that description with the good fortune withdrawing from her own arms now.

'Will you return?' Her fingertips slipped the length of his sleeve, the final contact of flesh, hand upon hand, and then the space of air between them, wealthy young man and riverside whore. He drew a breath, and this time it was she who laid a forefinger to his lips. 'No, do not answer that,' she said quickly. 'It was a foolish question.'

'Ready?' Mauger nudged Benedict. Gudrun stepped back, a professional smile on her face. There would be other customers as the darkness thickened and the night grew older.

Benedict returned her smile and walked away, turning to wave once before he lost sight of the bathhouse. It was drizzling, the twilight soft and murky and the air pungent with the smells of wet earth and smoky cooking fires. The two young men made their way down to the river and sought along the bank for a boatman to row them back across the water to civilisation.

'Was it worth it then?' asked Mauger, a slightly patronising smile on his lips.

Benedict murmured a reply and hoped without much optimism that Mauger was not going to demand a detailed account of his experience. He knew that the older man, having introduced him to the delights of Southwark, would feel entitled to know everything and be aggrieved at anything less.

They found a boatman within minutes. He was tying up his craft with determined tugs on the mooring rope whilst arguing with a slender young woman. An older female sat on the ground, her cloak bundled around her body, which shook with spasms of coughing.

'I tell you, I be finished for the day. I been rowing this hulk back and forth across the river since afore cockcrow this morn. Do you think I've no other life to live?' the boatman snapped.

'My mother's sick, she can't go any further. You must take us across!' The girl compounded her frustration by stamping her foot.

The gesture was familiar to Benedict, but he could not remember from where or why. The girl wore a dark cloak and a hood of paler, gold wool, the colour dim in the twilight. Escaping from its edge were several strands of curly dark hair. He could not see her face.

'I must do nothing, wench,' the man growled and started to walk away. In desperation, the girl leaped in front of him and clutched at his sleeve. Benedict was granted a swift vision of delicate features marred by the pinch of exhaustion and despair.

'Please, for the mercy of God!' Her young voice trembled on the verge of breaking.

Benedict intervened, stepping across the boatman's path as the man tried to shake her off and go determinedly on his way.

'I would make it worth your while,' he said. 'How much for the four of us? Come on, man, it's only one more journey there and back. Think of your profit!'

'I can't enjoy me profit if I'm dead from overwork!' the boatman snapped, but ceased trying to push past Benedict and put his hands to his hips instead, indicating that he was prepared to bargain.

Mauger rolled his eyes heavenwards and shook his head at what he saw as complete lunacy on Benedict's behalf. There were other boatmen further along the bank who would not cost the earth to hire. Let these women fend for themselves, they were of no importance. 'You are paying,' he said grimly to Benedict as an exorbitant sum was agreed.

Benedict drew the coins from his pouch. 'We cannot just leave them here,' he said. 'How would you feel if it was your mother or sister stranded here and sick?'

'Neither my mother nor my sister would be sitting on a riverside at dusk in a neighbourhood like this,' Mauger retorted.

Benedict's mouth tightened. 'Then for simple Christian charity, or don't you comprehend that either?'

Mauger gave him a fulminating look. 'You may think you know everything, but you don't,' he said curtly.

The boatman took the coins, made sure that they were genuine, and still grumbling to himself, set about untying the mooring rope. Benedict and Mauger glared at each other for a long moment, the hostility no longer sheathed but bare and bright.

It was the girl who broke the bitter eye contact by laying her hand on Benedict's sleeve, and pressing a silver penny into his hand. 'Thank you,' she said with heartfelt gratitude.

'No, keep your money.' He tried to push it back at her, for he could see that her cloak was patched and that a silver penny must mean far more to her and her mother than it did to him.

'Fair is fair,' she said, refusing to take it back, and turned away to help her mother to her feet.

They were all seated in the boat, and its grumpy owner had begun to skull out into the current, when the girl's mother raised her head and thanked Benedict with quiet dignity. He murmured a disclaimer, feeling uncomfortable. A sense of familiarity nagged at him, but pinning it down proved elusive, and it was Mauger, his arms folded across his chest and his gaze fixed broodingly upon the women, who made the discovery, his disgruntled expression becoming one of astonishment.

'Mistress Ailith?' he asked uncertainly. His glance flickered disbelievingly to the girl. 'Julitta?'

The older woman coughed into her blood-sodden kerchief and examined Mauger as intently as he was examining her. 'It's Mauger, isn't it?' she said weakly.

Benedict's sense of familiarity came home to rest with a breathjarring thud. He saw his own emotions mirrored in the expressions of the others, but individually tinged by their different characters. The older woman's gaunt, sick features wore a mingling of relief and fear. The girl was still bewildered, uncomprehending, but she had braced herself as if to resist a blow. Mauger's discomfort made him brusque and annoyed, while Benedict knew that his own features must display a fierce curiosity. Where had they come from? Where had they been? It was a return from the dead.

'It is impossible.' Mauger shook his head and his glower deepened. 'Lord Rolf searched high and low for the both of you. He thinks you are dead!'

Ailith grimaced wearily. 'He is not far wrong. Is he in London?'

'He is at Ulverton with his wife and daughter.'

'But my parents are in the city,' Benedict added quickly. 'Felice and Aubert de Remy.'

Ailith looked at him, and he saw a glimmer of recognition kindle through the pain in her eyes. She tried to smile. 'Benedict, I should have known you at least, since I suckled you at my breast for the first year of your life. You have your mother's eyes.'

'I remember you now,' Benedict said, a note of uncertainty in his voice, for the encounter had put him off his stride. 'But I would not have done so in passing.'

'And no surprise,' Ailith said with a wan smile. A cough shook her body. 'For the sake of old kindness, I ask you to take us to your mother. We have nowhere else to go and as you can see, my time is short.'

'Mama, you'll soon be well.' The girl clutched her mother's arm. The thread of fear in her voice reminded Benedict of a time long ago when he had dragged a terrified auburn-haired child across his pony's rump.

'Oh aye,' the woman said. 'I'll soon be free of pain.' She huddled into her cloak, retching.

Julitta bit her lip and swiped the heel of her hand across her brimming eyes.

Rain spattered into their faces. The boatman dipped the brim of his hat and clucked through his teeth, making his displeasure known. When they reached the London bank of the Thames, it was immediately obvious that Ailith's failing strength was not equal to walking the short distance along the bank between the mooring and the de Remys' house.

Mauger, being the stronger of the two men, lifted Ailith in his arms and carried her to their destination. In the past, he might have been hampered by her robust build, but the affliction of her lungs had wasted her to skin and bone. She lolled against him, only semi-conscious, the flesh surrounding her eyes so dark that it looked bruised.

'Your mother will soon be safe and warm,' Benedict reassured Julitta, as behind them the boatman clambered into his craft and sculled out into the black water, heading at last for home.

Julitta nodded and continued to chew her lip.

'Do you remember me?'

Julitta blinked through the rain. How could she ever forget? 'Yes, I remember. I was a princess then.' Suddenly it was hard to set one foot in front of the other, as if all her will had trickled out through the worn soles of her shoes. Her mind kept filling with the vision of the fat gold merchant turning blue on the floor at her feet. She could still feel the pressure of his body on top of hers, crushing out her life. But it was he who had died. She looked sidelong at Benedict. Once, in another world, he had saved her from being pecked to death by a goose. 'What were you doing in Southwark?'

He checked his long stride to accommodate hers which was slow with exhaustion and hampered by her wet gown. 'Visiting a bathhouse,' he said after a moment and avoided her eyes. 'I've never been to the Southwark side of London before.'

'I work in a bathhouse.' Julitta cast the words at him like a sharpened spear. 'Or I did until tonight.' The vision of the merchant hit her again, full force, and the weapon she had flung at Benedict rebounded and sank into her own breast. She would have run from the look on his face, but she stepped awkwardly on a stone in the road, wrenched her ankle, and fell with a cry.

He stooped over her. Julitta squeezed her lids tight and hung her head so that she would not have to meet his gaze. Besides, her twisted foot was agony. She heard him shout out to Mauger to wait. Gentle hands removed her clutching one and carefully examined.

'I don't think it's broken,' he said, 'but certainly you cannot walk on it. The flesh is puffing up faster than a batter pudding. I'll have to carry you.'

Julitta was dazed and exhausted, unable to reason any more, unable even to think. Risking a glance at his face, she saw that his recoil at her words had been replaced with an equally dangerous expression of pity. She tightened her lids again and bowed her head, holding her breath on tears. When he lifted her in his arms, she had to link her own about his neck to support herself. The smell of rain-wet wool filled her nostrils, and underlying it, rising directly from his smooth, olive skin, the herbal scent which came from long soaking in a bathtub.