Secret Song (Medieval Song 4)

“Very well. There will likely be a willing wench to assist you once we reach Thispen-Ladock. Tell me when you are ready to leave again.” He turned away to leave her in privacy.

Daria remembered the old woman’s mumblings of the previous evening when she’d slipped into the bedchamber. She didn’t cease shaking her head, back and forth, back and forth, as if she had no control over her own movement. “He’s not an earl,” Ena had said in her scratchy old voice, plucking up her skirts and shaking her head again. “He’s a rogue, not to be trusted, at least not with you, little mistress.”

“That’s nonsense and I’ll be pleased to hear no more from you.” The old woman merely scowled at her and took herself out of the bedchamber. Daria sighed. Just moments later, Ena had slipped back into the chamber and called out, her voice even more shrill, “Not even an earl, and yet ye wedded him. Shame on ye, little mistress. Ye jest wanted a pretty face. Now, the Earl of Clare—he was a fine man—a bit rough, but it is as a man should be, not all kind and soft like yer pretty priest—”

Daria shut out the memory of Ena’s words. She turned and walked back to the horses. She wanted to sit beneath a tree and lean back and close her eyes, but she knew that Roland was likely pacing in his wish to be gone. She stretched, lightly touched her fingers to her flat belly. “I’m ready, Roland,” she called out.

But it was Salin, a seasoned warrior of some thirty-odd years, who came to lift her onto Henrietta’s back. His face was intelligent and ugly, his hair thick and dark brown, curling around his large ears. He looked fierce and mean, but his voice was gentle.

“If you wish to stop again, mistress, you have but to call out to me.”

“Thank you, Salin.”

As she rode behind her husband, their pace slow and steady, Daria thought back to what Ena said once Daria had convinced the old woman to tell her what had happened to Tilda after she and Roland had left her in Daria’s place.

“It was a pity,” the old woman said. “Aye, a rare pity, and the earl struck her hard, not on her face, for even he thought her beautiful, but he smashed his fist in her chest and cracked a rib, I think, by the screeches from the little slut. He knew it wasn’t you, oh aye, right away he knew, and he struck her. The priest—a little worm with no guts—he said naught, merely stood there wringing his dirty hands. The earl then pulled the girl from the great hall and dragged her to his bedchamber. Her cries were loud, and then there was nothing.” Ena had spit then, a habit Daria hadn’t noticed before. “She deserved it, of course, the little harlot. You should never have left, little mistress. The earl wouldn’t have struck you.”

Daria felt bile rise in her throat. She’d been so unthinking, so selfish, and all the while that poor girl was lying somewhere within the castle walls in pain.

“Aye, then the earl told her—leastwise that’s what I heard one of his men saying—if she pleased him, he’d keep her. One of the women bandaged her ribs for her. I hid and he forgot about me,” Ena added, her voice filled with her own cunning.

Daria felt the shift in the air. The hot summer breeze had cooled considerably, and black clouds were gathering overhead. It would rain, just as it had in Wales. She realized she viewed the coming rain with little dread, so used to the wet Welsh days and nights she’d become during that short week with Roland. But the endless rain had made Roland ill. Her brow furrowed with worry for him.

“What is wrong, Daria?”

She smiled at him, unable not to even though his voice was cool at best. “It will rain, and I was remembering Wales.” Her frown reappeared. “I was remembering that you sickened in all that rain.”

“It wasn’t the rain that sickened me.”

She cocked her head to one side in question.

“I gave you my last tunic and thus wore a damp one for three days. The wet sank into my chest.”

“You shouldn’t have given me the tunic.”

“Probably not, but I did. How do you feel?”

“I’m fine.”

He rode beside her, silent now. But she felt the tension building up in him. She waited for his attack, knowing it was coming. Finally he said, “Why did you become ill so suddenly? You said you’d felt nothing before, no sickness of any kind, nothing at all. I don’t understand how it could strike you with no warning, and then only after you learned you carried a babe.”

“I wondered that as well. The queen said it was probably because I’d been so worried, so drawn into myself with other matters. Once I knew about the babe, once I’d accepted it and recognized its presence, then my body acted as it should.”

He only nodded. It would be foolish of him to begin an argument about what the queen herself had said. “There’s a Cistercian abbey about three miles ahead. We will beg shelter there for the night.”

The abbey was as old as the gnarled oaks that circled its perimeter. Jagged shards of stone were falling from the walls to lie on the fallow ground. When a brother appeared at the front gate, Roland dismounted and spoke to him. Within minutes another came and motioned Daria to follow him. She looked at Roland, but he only nodded to her. The brother led her to a separate building well apart from the main abbey. It was gray and forbidding, low-roofed, its stone walls jagged and crumbling. They walked through a narrow damp corridor

with a rough earthen floor to a small cold cell-chamber. It was more than dismal, it was miserably cold, and Daria found she couldn’t stop shivering. Dinner was brought to her by another cowled brother, who said nothing at all to her. Her dinner consisted of a thin broth and hard black bread.

She looked at the broth with its layer of grease congealed on the top, felt her stomach churn, and turned away to sit on the edge of the cot. The straw in the thin mattress was molded and damp and poked upward. She moved, but there was little relief.

Daria was hungry and cold and thoroughly miserable. Did God want women to be treated so poorly? Was that why they were shunted to dismal cells like these and hidden away? Were women to be punished for some reason she hadn’t been taught?

She fell to shivering again, only to look up and see the congealed soup in front of her. Her stomach pitched, for she imagined herself sipping at that disgusting soup, and to her dismay, she heaved up the lunch she’d eaten earlier in the afternoon, barely reaching the cracked earthen pot in time. Her knees throbbed with pain, for she’d skidded on the hard dirt floor in her rush to get to the pot. She remained on her knees, her arms wrapped around her stomach, trying to breathe shallow breaths, to think of other things, to distract herself. In her mind’s eye, she saw the farmer who’d helped her and Roland and she saw him horribly mutilated from the torture the Earl of Clare had inflicted on him. The cramps returned with a vengeance, and she retched and retched, her body shuddering with the effort, and she was trembling with weakness.

“Where is the vial the queen gave you?”

Daria didn’t look up. She didn’t know why he’d come. She wished he hadn’t. She wanted to be alone and she wanted to die, by herself. She wanted no onlookers. She started to answer, but another spasm took her and she was beyond speech and thought for many moments.