Ann of Cambray Read Free Page B

of water like a piece of weed. I tore it off and let it float away. Naked and happy, I swam through the breakers, and he bore me on his back like the dolphins. And when he was done, he wrapped me in his red woollen cloak and set me on his horse and we rode back to Cambray together, Gwendyth clucking and fussing that I would be the death of her. Death. How could the sea have taken my brother and thrown him lifeless, empty, upon the shore? Where were his friends that they did not help him? Why did my father sit with drawn sword in the presence of his companions? Why would my father not speak to me?
    ‘Look, Father,’ Talisin had said that day as we rode back, ‘she rides as well as she swims. One day there will not be a horse she cannot straddle. We will never make a Norman lady out of her.’
    ‘The nuns will do it when I bid them,’ my father said in his sharp way, but Talisin had laughed again, making things smooth between us. ‘She is Celt, my lord, through and through. She is of the old race, with those dark eyes and that long red hair,’ he said, making my father look at me despite himself. How could he have sat so white and still at the bier and said not a word to me for all my beggings? What had I done that he could not endure me? And of those other men who had crowded round afterwards, which ones could be trusted, which were friendly, which wished me harm?
    So came I then to Sedgemont, to the castle of my liege lord, Raoul, to ask that he should hold my life and lands until I was of age to wed. For although Cambray was my father’s, he held it from the lords of Sedgemont; and I could not inherit it until, in due course, they gave me a husband of their choosing to hold it in my name. That, too, I found hard to bear, that I must leave my home and live far away, by the order of a lord I had never met but who could arrange all things to his liking. Had not I been tenacious of life, despite myself, I think I too might have turned my face to the wall then, and let darkness roll me under too deep to find, until Judgment Day bids all rise up again. Yet life there was; whether I would or not, it clung to me. And so time passed; I lived and grew, and events came to pass as you shall hear.
    But one more recollection from that time, and let that year be done with. Let it go out of thought, out of mind, if we can keep it there. Yet sometimes, for all our care, those memories come crowding back, as fresh and clear as if they had happened yesterday, as if they have a life of their own, independent of us and our thoughts, as if somewhere God has had them in his keeping and reveals them to us, mirror-changed, what was and is and will be.
    No doubt the damp and cold had sickened me; no doubt death had spread his bony fingers to clutch me fast. I lay in the small bed in the anteroom where Gwendyth and I were bade go, and neither stirred nor smiled. I remember Sir Brian’s concern, which soon changed to scorn and alarm at my surliness. I remember my father’s men in their old-fashioned mail jackets; small and dark and strange they seemed beside these well-fed Norman knights, who looked askance at their old-fashioned ways. Had I been in health, curiosity would not have let me be so indifferent to what was to become of us. As it was, after that first surge of excitement at our arrival, it was indifference and lethargy I felt. And inferiority. I had never been away from Cambray before. Although my father paid me little heed, he and my brother were the sun of my world. At Sedgemont, I was desolate, having no friends, knowing no one, clinging to Gwendyth as she to me, because we had no choice. And although this place was to become my home, I did not fit into its life, as will soon be made clear.
    One afternoon, when I was up and about, languid yet restless, Gwendyth decided I should go with the other children to play in the pleaunce, or pleasure gardens, which lay outside the main