Ann of Cambray Read Free Page A

and that you hold them in gift and fee of Lord Raoul. . .’
    It was not that she was speaking in Norman-French, with less skill than I, for I knew it well enough and spoke it with my father and the upper folk at Cambray, nor was it that she would betray the Celt in us by holding their speech to be of little worth, although I told her that too. It was the words themselves, bleak and uncompromising, that brought the darkness back again. For all its similarities, Sedgemont was not my home. And we were strangers, unwanted here. All around was confusion and death . . . death to brother, father, and all my childhood had known. I turned my back upon the seneschal, Sir Brian; I would not greet his lady wife, who followed to bid us welcome. I would not smile or curtsy to all those staring men. So came I to Sedgemont, and saw it for the first time, and the stable boy, Giles, who would have put his hand out to save me, and Sir Brian and his lady, Mildred. And finally, Lord Raoul himself, whom I disliked the most of all.
    I will not count the early days at Sedgemont. They merged as one, into that darkness that followed the leaving of Cambray, the journey there, the horrors before. Sufficient to say it was the autumn of that terrible year. Dark for me, dark for England. Drear weather, poor harvest, rebellion, civil war — everywhere was death. Did it seem a dream or was it as real now as the day his companions brought my brother back, wrapped in his cloak, his arms trailing beneath as if they were too heavy to lift?
    ‘Drowned?’ said my father as they met in the courtyard at Cambray. He leaned over the side of his great grey horse and his face turned white under its open helmet. ‘Talisin, who swims like an otter?’ He slid forward from his horse. Colour never came back to him again; he was as if a dead man, crushed by grief. Although he sat for two days more with his sword across his knees at Talisin’s bier, he never moved or spoke, not even when I was sent to his side to tug and plead with him. So, they say, sat Henry the King when news came of his son’s drowning in the wreck of the White Ship. But the king lived on to speak and plan again. Although my father’s friends came for the burying, he said no word to them, did not move, and died at the second night with his sword naked in his hand. Nor did he plan for the daughter who still survived, but turned his face to the wall. Did he die of grief, of broken heart and broken hopes, that old soldier, come at last to lands and happiness, only to have them snatched away? Had he guessed something about my brother’s death that I was to learn years after? I only know I could not believe that Talisin was dead. He was as skilful as a seal in the rough waters of our coast. At times I used to go with him as he stripped upon the beach, as careless of me as a puppy underfoot. Clad in the breech clout he wore beneath his harness, he would run into the waves, no sport of Normans this, but of the old people, the sea folk of the first ages. Once I watched him and my father together. Both their bodies were white except where wind and sun had tanned them, but my father’s was seamed with old wounds like a gnarled tree. They were of a height, but my father was thicker, and beside him Talisin looked gangling, not yet grown into his strength. I slid among the sand dunes, ruining my clothes again, and made my way down to where they had left their cloaks. There I sat and waited, whilst behind me the men tended the horses, whistled and laughed among themselves. Talisin saw me although I crouched low. He turned to say something to my father, who I thought would shout at me to be gone. But this time he looked and laughed himself. His indulgence gave me courage. I ran towards Talisin, gathering up the skirts of my dress to skip over the waves. He took me by the hand and jumped me over; the green and brown dress billowed and sank beneath the rush