Book II: Alabaster Rook, Chapter One
August 1068, Tutbury, Staffordshire
On Monday after Lammas Day, Elise swept out of Tutbury’s Hall and hurried toward the stables. The morning breeze, so much hotter than her home in Normandie, surprised her. She hopped over ruts and darted past the cooks arguing in Saxon among themselves and through a cloud of flies swarming around the children plucking feathers. She plunged onto the congested causeway and skirted around the handcarts and basket-ladened fishers. Weaving between soldiers and muck wagons, Elise quickly crossed the castle’s inner courtyard, hoping to escape Osmund de Clères. Unlike her jailers, she found the priest as repulsive as a dead and putrefying eel.
“Lady Stafford!” the priest shouted.
Reined in by her married name, Elise stopped and turned, settling the icy gaze of Countess Genevieve Elysia de Fontenay on him. Watching the Norman priest thread his way toward her, she felt gratified that the protocols of status and rank concealed her informal name. It represented her true self. Her resistance. It was a secret shared only with those she loved and trusted, which excluded Osmund entirely.
The priest, wearing bright, richly colored robes, reached her. His stiff back, glaring eyes, and sharp, imperious nose accentuated his displeasure.
“You ride today?”
“Yes, Father. I’m going down to the marshes,” she said.
His expression darkened. “Oh? Is there a reason?”
She measured him, wondering what he wanted to know, and why. Since her marriage, she had become accustomed to explaining herself to her husband’s jailers, but she disliked Osmund’s presumption that she must explain herself to him as well.
“Perhaps you should ask Johan,” she said, seeing her husband’s seneschal limping toward them.
“God’s morning, my lady, Father,” Johan said.
“Father Osmund may wish to join us,” Elise said.
Johan’s eyes crinkled in humor as he looked the priest over. “Excellent! The tannery needs a good blessing!”
Elise nearly laughed seeing the fastidious priest blanch as he realized the stench of urine, feces, and rotting skins would linger in his clothing for days.
“It is unseemly,” Osmund said, “for Lady Stafford to visit such a place.”
Elise studied Johan de Vaux, the young seneschal governing Tutbury Castle and her husband’s other estates—and the man charged with imprisoning her. She wondered how Johan, new to such authority, would fare under the priest’s officious expectations.
He nodded to a couple of passing knights and pushed his light brown hair from his forehead. “Lady Stafford will accompany me.” To her he said, “Your horse is waiting, my lady. Make haste. I will follow in a moment.” He spoke again to Father Osmund, “You may join us if you wish. Along the way, we can discuss Assumption Day Festivities.”
Elise resisted the urge to smile. Johan’s response pleased her, though she would not tell him. At the stables, she greeted Jeoffroi, her frequent guard. The elderly knight ordered the nearby groom to help her mount, but before the boy moved, Marguerite d’Hesdins, her husband’s mistress, arrived.
“I have forbidden her to ride the white,” Marguerite said to the groom. “You know that, you dullard!”
The groom paled and ducked, for Marguerite often delivered quick, hard blows. “And so do you, Jeoffroi d’Ardain!”
Marguerite spun on Elise.“Dare you disobey my orders?”
Elise had never disputed her husband’s decision to appoint Marguerite chatelaine above his wife. She rarely spoke to the woman, preferring to neither validate Marguerite’s domestic authority, nor openly disobey her husband’s order. At twenty winters, the beautiful, petite Marguerite wore her long blond hair loosely, brazenly uncovered in the fashion of a maiden—or, as servants whispered, a woman of ill repute. Under Elise’s calm gaze, Marguerite’s cheeks reddened, and her pale blue eyes narrowed, a prelude to verbal assault.
“Lady Stafford, let me remind you that as chatelaine—”
“I ordered the white,” Johan said, just then reaching them. “Help Lady Stafford mount,” he told the groom, taking Marguerite’s arm and ushering her into the stables.
While Johan and Marguerite exchanged angry words, Elise mounted and urged her white mare into a leisurely walk alongside Jeoffroi on his roan. Giving Johan time to join them, they slowly passed the sulfurous heat emanating from the blacksmith’s shed. Red coals glowed from the fire. The smith, dripping in sweat, hammered on a white-hot piece of metal. Sparks fell to the pile of cooling stirrups strewn about the dirt floor, reminding her she needed new needles. Perhaps Johan would grant them to her. She would not, however, request he replace her wedding ring. The thin, flat iron band rusted away in a mixture of vinegar and salt from which she had made ink for her secret letters. Her wardens had not yet noticed the ring’s absence.
They stopped at Northgate to wait for Johan. Looking beyond the open portal to the training field, she saw her other keeper, Gilbert fitz Gilbert, castellan and constable, conferring with one of his captains. Mounted knights threw lances at straw targets or rode in complicated exercises. Swords clanked as pairs of soldiers engaged one another while groups of infantry marched and charged. At the far edge of the field, archers released their bowstrings and the fletchers ran to retrieve the arrows.
She estimated three hundred soldiers resided here at Castle Tutbury. Far too many given the number of armed men guarding her Norman fortresses. It was difficult to know exactly, for Gilbert rotated his companies of mixed knights and foot and sent troops out daily to patrol throughout Staffordshire, west toward Wales, and to the northern shires. Perhaps such vigilance was necessary, for this was a foreign land, surrounded by hostile villagers, and Gilbert’s men could quickly respond to a call-to-arms.
Scanning the guard towers flanking Northgate, she thought the castle’s defenses insufficient to ward off a serious attack. She would have closed Southgate, reserved for people, and moved Northgate to the steep northwest corner of the castle, completely hidden from the lower barbican, more difficult to reach and easier to defend.
Still, Northgate allowed goods to enter the inner bailey closer to the storerooms. She recognized the markings on a passing four-wheeled cart: wine from the Vexin and Aumale, her Norman estates, now belonging to her husband, Alaric the Norman of Ewyas, the Black Wolf, Seigneur de Tutbierrie, the tenant-in-chief of Staffordshire.
Their marriage had made him rich. Very rich.
A steady stream of handcarts and packhorses brought salt and wool from neighboring villages, alabaster from the reopened mine, grain from the fields below, kindling and firewood from the woodland. The sight pleased her. Unlike last winter, her first in this newly conquered land, they would have enough food and supplies to see them through comfortably.
She looked back over the inner courtyard. When she’d arrived last year in May after the Norman victory at Hastings, her husband had occupied this prominent crag for little more than one moon. Then, the castle, a rarity in Englelond, had a crude timber gate and temporary walls protecting hundreds of flimsy tents, a small longhouse, and an armory. The High Tower sitting atop an earthwork mound had been completed only days before she’d slept there. Since last December, High Tower, used by sentries to watch over the valley, had been set aside for the exclusive use of her husband if he ever returned, which she hoped he would not.
With forced labor and slaves expropriated from fallen English nobles, Gilbert rushed to complete, the ring ditch. Work crews had placed a drawbridge at Southgate and built timber defense walls with platforms and watchtowers. Soldiers now occupied thatched longhouses instead of tents.
Rain still flooded the inner bailey, and the latrines still overflowed. But a new causeway now linked the storehouse, kitchens, and armories, allowing people to avoid the mire making passage nearly impossible in the early days.
Amid the dreary mud, the black timber walls and gray thatched huts, the free-standing hall glistened bright white. Plastered with ground alabaster and lime, the structure contained the castle’s great room used for feasting and assembly and bedchambers for herself and high-ranking members of her husband’s household.
Despite improvements, this Alabaster Rook, as she thought of the castle was a crude, filthy, overcrowded little fort, placed boldly within the Danelaw to hold William’s land as one would defend squares on a chessboard.
“Shall we try to visit Frigga this week?” Jeoffroi asked.
“Perhaps,” Elise said, caution warring with candidness. She studied Jeoffroi’s weathered face. As he scanned the sky, his eyes crinkled against the sun and his lips curved into a mischievous smile. Did he suspect her forbidden alliance with Johan and Gilbert? As Gilbert’s second-in-command and captain of the knights, Jeoffroi held a prestigious and trusted position. Like her wardens, Jeoffroi was enjoined to keep Elise under guard at all times. Why had he introduced her to Frigga, why had he kept those meetings secret, and why did he leave her alone in the woods with a woman rumored to be a witch?