Resigned for the moment to the futility of her sojourn here, Hildegard dutifully made her way to Athanasius’s cell to find out if his apothecary’s cure was taking effect.

**

The weather, fairly mild until now, changed abruptly when a strong wind brought great, bruising clouds rolling in from the north, with a deluge of rain that dropped indiscriminately onto the Great Courtyard. It cleared it in an instant the prelates, servants, and everyone in between, as they hurried to find shelter. Lightning flashed over the purple hills and thunder rolled around the valley, fading only in a series of distant reverberations.

Hildegard had chosen that morning to venture outside the palace to see if a walk by the river would reconcile her to a few more days here. When the rain started to fall in slanting arrows, kicking up the mud around her feet, she was standing on the bank looking at the swollen river where it had burst its banks. The water meadows were flooded, leaving animals stranded on little mounds of grass. The rain must have been torrential upstream to burst the banks of the river overnight. It had changed colour. Instead of the usual dark green it had become a swift-moving, murky yellow.

A little to her left it sluiced with an endless roar between the twenty or so arches of the bridge of St Benezet, the bridge of Avignon, hurling broken branches and other debris down river at great speed and where the water swirled past the wooden landing stage below it shook its supports, snatched at them and turned and eddied back on itself. In mid-river frothing shoals covered the sandbanks that had been visible only the day before.

I wouldn’t give much for the chances of anyone who fell in there, she thought, keeping safely to the higher ground at the top of the bank. The first drops of rain had begun to give way to a torrent. She pulled up her hood.

A small ferry boat was tied to a post below where she stood and the force of the current was making it buck and turn on its painter, almost tearing it free. She watched it crash again and again against the wooden pilings. The ferryman must have thought it best to risk losing his boat and keep himself dry inside his house because a stream of smoke flew above the thatch although there was no sign of him.

It was too late to run back to the palace. She would be soaked before she reached it. Tightening her grasp of her hood and looking for somewhere to shelter along the path, she resigned herself to a thorough drenching by the time she was half way back. Then a shout came from the depths of a thicket beside the track.

‘Here, sister!’

When she turned, a gloved hand beckoned from a hide of evergreens and she saw a flash of red and gold. Guessing it was someone from the palace she changed direction, skittering round the puddles that lay in the way, and lifting her hood just enough to make out several figures huddled out of the rain under a thick canopy of laurels. With a feeling of relief she hurried into this unexpected refuge.

A group of pages were huddled inside.

‘My thanks, masters. I wouldn’t have noticed this if you hadn’t called out.’

‘We aim to please, sister.’ To her surprise a tall youth, no more than fifteen or sixteen, standing eye to eye, rose up out of the bushes. She realised he was scarcely old enough to shave, nor were the others, as a swift glance showed. They wore the colours she had recognised the other night when Fitzjohn arrived from England, the red, blue and gold worn by Woodstock’s retainers. She had already noticed them about the palace.

‘English, God be thanked!’ The boys gaped as she threw back her hood. She had pulled off her coif earlier and her damp hair fell in a blonde sheen to her shoulders.

‘Forgive me,’ she murmured at their astonishment. ‘I expected to be alone when I set off just now and I get so sick of wearing this on my head.’ She pulled out the damp linen coif from her sleeve, put it on and stuffed her hair out of sight.

The tall youth said, ‘And so are you, sister. English, I mean. We guessed you were. Well met.’ He gave a cramped bow in the crowded den. ‘I am Edmund, squire to Sir Jack Fitzjohn. This is Peterkin,’ he indicated a sandy-haired Saxon youth with a thin, intelligent face covered in freckles. ‘And this miscreant is Bertram of Stowe.’ A thickset, dependable looking boy ducked his head in a bow. He was dark haired, confident, and might be a merchant’s son.

‘And I’m Simon Lorimer,’ piped up the youngest of the boys, no more than ten or so, and already growing out of his tunic.

‘Greetings. I’m Hildegard of Meaux.’

‘Of the Abbey there?’

‘Indeed.’

‘Should we know where it is?’ asked Edmund.

‘Only if you’re Yorkshire born,’ she replied. ‘It’s close to Beverley and only a day’s ride from York.’

They asked what she was doing so far from home. She explained her presence at Avignon as ‘being on church business.’ It was as far as she could go. They told her about themselves with, she suspected, equivalent reticence.

‘The only one of us who’s missing is Elfric. He’s from your part of the world, a place called Pocklington. It’s near York, he tells us. At present he’s running errands in the dry.’

‘I saw you arrive,’ she told them. ‘I guessed you were English by the blazons on your tunics. I’m pleased to find I’m not alone here.’ Except for Hubert de Courcy and his brother monks, she added to herself. ‘Do you know why you’ve been sent so far south?’

‘We simply follow our lord as he commands. We get to see foreign parts.’ It was the first youth again, the one called Edmund. He gave an ironic shrug. ‘We broaden our minds, domina, at his expense.’

‘I noticed a companion of yours in the chapel,’ she ventured. ‘He seemed upset.’

Silence followed her words while everyone watched the rain pelting down. It was falling with such venom it turned to mist as it smacked the ground then threw up clods of mud and ran in separate streams down the bank to join at the bottom in one expanding puddle that was quickly turning into a quagmire as they looked on.

The silence of the boys lengthened until eventually Bertram gave a sigh. ‘The companion you mentioned would be poor little Elfric. His brother died and he won’t believe it. He’s mad with grief.’

‘We told him he’d get over it but he said never, as long as he lives,’ added Peterkin.

‘I’m truly sorry to hear that. Only time can soften the sharp grief of losing someone we love.’ Rivera sprang to mind.

To her relief the boys began to argue in the courtly fashion they had been taught on the topic of whether the death of a brother or a father was hardest to bear.

‘My old pa is the devil incarnate,’ Peterkin announced, ‘that’s what everybody says, so it’s not just my opinion. I was glad to get away from him.’ He frowned. ‘It might be unnatural but it’s true to say he might as well be dead. It makes no difference to me, either way. He’s ruined my life.’

‘Ruined it?’

‘You’ll never believe it, domina, but when I wanted to take holy orders he told me I had to serve as page to one of Jack Fitzjohn’s knights until I was old enough to know my own mind. Then he beat me because I objected. I couldn’t walk for a week.’

‘You’ll never know your own mind, Peterkin.’ A casual scuffle ensued but was soon broken up.

‘So was Elfric’s brother back home in England?’ she asked when things quietened down.

‘Not at all. He was here in Avignon.’

‘What, retained by your lord Fitzjohn too?’

‘No,’ Simon piped up. ‘He was whisked from York years ago to attend a foreign cardinal who’d taken a fancy to him on account of his voice and poor Elfric hadn't seen him since he was a babe in arms.’

‘Not quite that,’ corrected Peterkin, the erstwhile priest. ‘He would never remember him if he’d been a baby. He must have been at least five or six. He remembers being carried on his shoulders and playing in the mead with him.’


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