Lady of Hay by Barbara Erskine (reading an ebook TXT) 📕

Mother. You must get well. " The girl was bending over her, trying to ease away the foul pillow. Matilda heard herself scream as the girl jarred her body and she saw the terror in Margaret's eyes. Then she saw nothing more.

When she next awoke it must have been dawn. The sconces had gone out and the brazier was cold. A pale light was beginning to filter through the unshuttered window opposite the bed, and she could hear the clear, joyful caroling of a thrush from the rowan tree outside in the bailey. She lay quite still, shivering beneath the damp covers, wondering where she was. The room smelled terrible. She tried to lick her lips, but her tongue was too dry. She could feel the sticky pus running down beneath her arm and shoulder. After closing her eyes, she drifted into an uneasy sleep. She did not know it yet, but her indomitable body had won the battle against the plague.

As soon as she was strong enough, she sat in the high arched window of her solar, looking down toward the town and out across the river to the mountains. It worried her that her legs were feeble and unsteady still, but it was pleasant to lose herself for a while in the broad view, resting from her study of the accounts and figures that she had had brought to her bedside. The people of Aberhonddu had suffered terribly from their losses in the plague and the poor harvest, and she knew that they and all her vast estates faced untold hardships, if not starvation, in the coming winter. With her hand pressed to her aching forehead she tried once again to calculate how the meager contents of the granaries within the castle and its farms could be made to stretch.

Her eye was caught suddenly by a flurry of activity near the Honddu Bridge and she sat forward with interest. A small group of horsemen seemed to be waiting there, stirring the dust on the roadway as their impatient animals pawed the ground. Then she saw for whom they were waiting. A party of men-at-arms were riding two by two up the track from the east. Before them, clearly recognizable under his banner, rode William, his surcoat emblazoned with the rising eagle, shimmering in the sun, the black horse on which he rode prancing slightly, resenting the firmly held rein.

The party on the bridge rode forward to meet him and for a moment the two groups of horsemen drew to a halt, facing each other in the dusty road.

Matilda passed her hands over her eyes again, sighing. Her sight had seemed weaker since her illness and all this peering into the glare gave her a headache. She thought at first the flashes of light catching her vision were from her own head but then, with a shock, she realized they came from the sunlight reflecting on drawn swords. She leaned forward suddenly, her heart thumping, and the accounts slid unheeded from her knees to the floor.

The smaller group of men were being beaten back toward the bridge and they seemed to be fighting for their lives. She tried to follow William, lost sight of him, then saw him again. He was determinedly fighting one man, the leader of the other group. Then suddenly it was all over. The man was disarmed. Matilda saw his sword fly, at William's savage stroke, in a great arc, flashing in the sunlight as it fell into the undergrowth by the side of the road. The man was dragged from his horse and his hands bound behind him. Then the victors remounted and at a yell from William set off at the gallop toward the bridge. The man tried desperately to run with them, lost his balance and fell, to be dragged mercilessly behind the horses of his captors. Matilda watched, sickened, until they were out of sight at the gates of the township, and then she turned from the window. So William had come back.

Elen dressed her in her scarlet surcoat as she asked and then went down to find Dai, a shepherd who had come in from the hills to sell his flocks to the drovers and had stayed, working for a while, in the stables of the castle. Somehow it had become his self-appointed task to carry Matilda up and down the steep, winding stairs to her solar and out into the herb garden whenever she required, handling her with such gentleness and ease that she had grown dependent on him in her weakness, although she knew he pined for his hills and would long since have been gone but for her pleas that he stay.

"I will wait for Sir William in the great hall, Dai bach, " she said with a smile, and she was rewarded with a long slow grin as with a quiet "Ie, fyng arglwyddes" he bent over her.

But William did not come into the hall, although she waited for what seemed like an eternity. When she had almost given up, leaning with closed eyes against the narrow, high-backed carved chair by the hearth, she heard the clatter of hooves and the shouts of men in the bailey outside. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she pushed herself up from the chair to be standing when William appeared.

"A hanging! There's to be a hanging!"

She heard the excited page call across the hall and saw him scamper out again into the sun. With a quick look over their shoulders in her direction the three men who had been sweeping out the old rushes cast aside their brooms and ran after the page, pushing each other in their haste to leap down the flight of steps outside the hall.

Matilda looked around for Dai but he had gone. The man she had seen must have been some felon William had encountered on his way from Hay and he was going to administer summary justice before bothering to come to