Winter Siege Read Free Page B

turned to look at Father Nimbus, ever her confessor and adviser. Despite the knife at his neck, the little priest’s eyes were urging her to say no. This was too rushed, too dangerous for her future. While they were being hurried up the stairs to the chapel, he’d managed to hiss at her: ‘Sweetness! The man’s an absolute hog, just
look
at his fingernails. Tell them you want to be a nun. Tell them you’ll enter Godstow convent. Tell them you’re vowed to the Virgin.’
    Oh yes, that would go down well. Several female saints and martyrs had tried that one, and achieved sainthood through martyrdom because of it.
    The only reason these desperate men around her were bothering with a marriage ceremony at all, and weren’t taking over the castle willy-nilly, was that her own soldiers in the bailey outnumbered them two to one. Sir Rollo might not be very bright, but his affection lay neither with the King nor the Empress but with Maud. If she gave the signal, he and his men would fight for her. On the other hand, if she gave her consent, Sir John of bloody Tewing immediately became their legal, and therefore not-to-be disputed, commander. And hers.
    The little chapel smelled, as it always did, of age and incense and whatever scented herbs the fastidious Father Nimbus mixed with it. Her father had commissioned a monk from Abingdon to paint its walls, so that the child Maud could learn her Bible from the depictions of a Garden of Eden (rather jolly), the Ascension, the Wise Men worshipping a plump baby Jesus, and the one that had always fascinated her: a depiction of virtuous Judith cutting off Holofernes’s head, which Father Nimbus had wanted obliterated for being too bloody, but her father had said counteracted Salome and John the Baptist.
    It was remarkable, Maud thought, how much her bridegroom resembled the bestial, drunken Holofernes.
    The officiating priest was putting the question again: ‘Do you, Maud of Kenniford …?’ She felt Waleran’s hand tighten on her arm.
    ‘Wait, will you?’ she snapped. ‘I’m thinking about it.’
    An arranged marriage at some time or another had been inevitable; Kenniford with its manors and lands was a valuable prize to bestow on anyone the King wanted to reward; Maud’s own wishes had never been consulted, and never would be. While the present incumbent repelled her, so had the owners of the two broken necks: one a raving madman with a high laugh; the other a drinker never seen sober. Would this brute be so bad?
    Maud considered it logically. He was old, which was in his favour; he would oblige her by dying, and, to judge from his choleric complexion, sooner rather than later. He was a renowned warrior – also in his favour, since he would spend much of his time away fighting battles in which somebody might kill him. With luck and the intervention of the Holy Virgin, to whom she would step up her praying from now on, he might rush off to war right away and save her the horror of the wedding night.
    After all, even if she were allowed to adopt Father Nimbus’s ploy and go into a convent, it would mean giving up Kenniford and her other lands for ever. Which she could not do.
    Since the age of eleven, on the death of her father, Maud had ruled her estates and their people like a despot. She was lucky in that the blood in her veins came from both Anglo-Saxon and Norman nobility – she was descended from King Edward the Elder on her mother’s side and Roger d’Ivry, Sheriff of Gloucester, on her father’s – which, until she should marry, gave her a legal right to command two castles (admittedly, one of them little more than a motte and bailey in Cambridgeshire and nothing to compare with Kenniford), five manors scattered around England, three more in Normandy, as well as the advowson of six churches, all of them acknowledging her as their overlord just as she acknowledged the King of England and Duke of Normandy as hers.
    She had been well advised, of course; her father’s