“What has happened?” he said.
“My wife has disappeared,” gasped Osbern.
“We do not know that for sure,” argued Ralph. “Let the house be searched from top to bottom before we raise any alarm.” He pointed to a servant. “Take the candle and scour every room with care. Bring a report at once.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“I’ll help,” said Golde, following him upstairs.
“She is gone,” moaned the Reeve. “I know it.”
“At this time of night?” said Gervase.
“Eadgyth has run away.”
“That is foolish talk,” said Ralph, trying to calm him. “She has no cause to run away. This is her home.”
“My wife is sick. She does not know what she is doing.”
“We must find her at once,” said Gervase, lighting another candle from the one held by the servant. “I’ll try the kitchen and the solar.”
“Do not forget the stables,” said Ralph.
“Where is she?” demanded Osbern.
Snatching the candle from his servant, he went off on his own wild inspection of the ground floor, running from room to room and even climbing down the cellar to search for his wife. The frenetic activity was in vain. Eadgyth was definitely not in the house. As her husband was trying to cope with the horror of one loss, another was forced upon him.
Golde came hurrying down the stairs in consternation.
“Dear God!” she said. “The baby has gone as well!”
Still in her night attire, Eadgyth clutched her son to her breast and walked unsteadily along a rutted thoroughfare. Her hair hung loose and her feet were bare. Darkness took away the Canterbury she knew and replaced it with a bewildering maze of streets and lanes that led her in every direction but the one which she wanted.
When she paused at a corner to take her bearings, the baby awoke and cried its disapproval of the cool breeze around its head. Hugging him tight, she hummed a lullaby and rocked the child to and fro until it dozed off.
Night had its own collection of unexplained noises but she heard none of them. Even the occasional yelp of a dog did not penetrate her ears. Eadgyth blundered on, stopping from time to time to study the silhouette of a building which she thought she recognised, then choosing another wrong direction. Frustration only made her walk faster, impervious to the pain in her feet as they trampled indiscriminately over hard stones, discarded animal bones and the accumulated refuse of the city.
The impulse which drove her on eventually became a more reliable compass and guided her toward her destination.
Familiar houses loomed up, shops acknowledged her acquaintance and a horse trough was a reassuring landmark.
She was back home.
“We are coming!” she called. “We are here!”
Her cry woke the baby again and its complaints were more boisterous this time. It took her several minutes to lull it back to sleep with gentle rocking and warm kisses. As she moved on, the boy still in her arms, her words came out in an urgent whisper.
“Wait for us! We have not forgotten you!”
She was back in the Canterbury of her youth now, lifted by its memories and reassured by its certainties. The baby was her future but she carried him back into the safety of the past. When she turned a corner, Eadgyth saw the solid mass of the parish church of St. Mildred’s against the night sky. She paused to stare up at it with simple awe.
Most of her life had been circumscribed by its stone walls.
Baptised in its font and married before its altar, she had been an ardent member of its congregation for all the years in between and, although she now worshipped beside her husband in the daunting glory of the cathedral, it was the little church which still held her in thrall.
“We are here,” she murmured. “Do you see? We have come.”
It was almost dawn when they found her. Eadgyth was fast asleep in the middle of the churchyard, her back against a tombstone, her feet almost touching the fresh mound of earth beside it. The baby was fretful in her arms. Golde took it gently from her to wrap in a warm blanket. Osbern the Reeve knelt down to enfold his wife in the tenderest embrace.
Her eyes opened and she gave a smile of explanation.
“Bertha wanted me,” she said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nothing disturbed the even tenor of Canterbury Cathedral.
A murdered monk lay within its priory, a bitter dispute awaited it in the shire hall and an even more violent controversy threatened it from the abbey of St. Augustine but the cathedral went about its business at the same pace and with the same unassailable sense of purpose. It was the still centre at the heart of the city, a spiritual fortress that was proof against any upheaval from within and any siege from without. Archbishop Lanfranc was invincible.
Nobody had managed to convince Prior Gregory of this fact.
“The abbey will not be browbeaten. We will fight the archbishop with all our strength and resources. And we will win!”
“Lower your voice. This is hallowed ground.”
“He has done it again, Canon Hubert!”
“Done what?”
“Hauled me to the cathedral to keep me waiting.”
“Have you been sent away unseen?”
“Not this time,” said Prior Gregory. “When I had cooled my heels for an hour or two, Archbishop Lanfranc deigned to give me an audience. It lasted five minutes. I was hardly permitted to speak. Five minutes, Canon Hubert!”
Hubert was about to remark that it was five minutes more than he had contrived to spend with the archbishop but his pride held him back from that damaging admission. In his present mood, the disenchanted canon would have settled for five seconds in the presence of the head of the English Church in order to feel that his journey to Canterbury had been worth the effort and that the most significant and influential friendship in his long career had, albeit briefly, flickered back into life.
The aggressive religiosity of Prior Gregory was not to his taste.
It was the second time they had met in the cloister garth and this encounter was no more pleasant than the first. Canon Hubert struck what he considered to be an apostolic pose but his response sounded more like that of a Pontius Pilate.
“This is nothing to do with me, Prior Gregory.”
“It is,” insisted the other. “Do not try to wash your hands of the matter. You and your fellow commissioners are involved to the hilt.”
“The cloister is for meditation, not for acrimony.”
“Tell that to Archbishop Lanfranc.”
“Would that I had the opportunity!”
“Do you know what he told me this morning?”
“It is no concern of mine.”
“During our meagre five minutes together, that is.”
“You are violating my impartiality.”
“Abbot Guy is on his way to Canterbury.”
“Let me hear no more, Prior Gregory.”
“Our express wishes are being ignored.”
“Desist!”
“Abbot Guy will be no father of St. Augustine’s Abbey. He is a one-man army of occupation sent in by a tyrannical archbishop.
He must be stopped at all cost.”
“And so must you, Prior Gregory!”
Canon Hubert’s intemperate yell lifted the heads of every monk within earshot and raised their eyebrows in censure. The prior was undeterred but his portly companion was seething with embarrassment.
“Let me impress upon you once more,” he said through gritted teeth. “We will not take sides and we will certainly not be swayed by arguments thrust at us in this bellicose fashion. The property dispute between cathedral and abbey will be settled in the shire hall when we reconvene. Any other disagreement between you is an irrelevance to us.”
“Disagreement?” echoed the other. “An unworthy and wholly unacceptable abbot is to be forced upon us and you characterise this as a mere disagreement? Our spiritual lives are at stake here, Canon Hubert.”