Free Winter Siege by Ariana Franklin Page A

outnumbered two to one, were jeered at for being amateur soldiers (which they were; knights, sergeants and guards did their duty as Maud’s vassals for their regulation three months and then went home to see to the harvest, being replaced by an equivalent number once the crops were in) and set on if they jeered back.
    After one fight between the two sides, so many of Kenniford’s had been injured that Maud ordered Sir Rollo to bring all of them into the inner bailey and build yet another guardhouse for them, leaving the mercenaries to their own devices.
    This, however, as she’d pointed out to her husband, defeated the purpose of feudal service. ‘My men can’t patrol, can’t drill, can’t do anything, they’ve been rendered useless.’
    ‘That’s what they fucking are. Get rid of ’em. My Brabançons are all we’ll need in a fucking siege, they’ve got balls.’
    ‘But I’m besieged now,’ Maud shouted at him, ‘I can’t go hawking or coursing without filth being shouted at my ladies.’
    He’d merely shrugged and walked away from her.
    And now he was helpless, and she was once more Kenniford’s keeper. She had her castle back – if the Empress’s men didn’t destroy it.
    Father Nimbus was in his chapel, trying to comfort a sobbing, frightened Cousin Lynessa with one hand, while, with the other, packing his chrismatory box ready to take it up to the outer walls to give the last rites to whoever needed them. ‘Now, now, dear heart, don’t take on so or you’ll set
me
off, and we don’t want that, do we? Today, we’ve all got to be brave little soldiers for the Lord.’
    ‘Sir John’s had a seizure,’ Maud said, ‘Milburga says he might die.’ She didn’t pretend to grief – with this priest she didn’t have to.
    He
felt it, though; his little face screwed itself up into concern. ‘Oh dear, then I must go to him.’ Father Nimbus suffered for anybody and everybody who was hurt, even for a man who’d constantly held him up to ridicule as a ‘flouncing fucking betty’.
    Cousin Lynessa clung on. ‘Don’t leave me, Father. We’ll all be raped.’
    ‘Oh stop it, Lynessa,’ Maud snapped at her; she was too strung out herself to countenance another woman’s hysteria. As Father Nimbus began tripping towards the door, she held him back. ‘I’m going to surrender the castle.’
    The chrismatory box dropped to the floor and the priest’s rosebud mouth formed an ‘ooh’ of shock.
    ‘I’ve got to,’ Maud said desperately. ‘William’s been captured. He slipped out again before dawn and they found him. They’re threatening to hang him unless we give in.
He
was going to let them do it.’ Identification was unnecessary. ‘And he wouldn’t let the villagers come in, so they’re stuck in the line of fire. I’ve
got
to.’
    ‘Little William,’ moaned Father Nimbus. ‘Those dear people.’ His eyes were filling with tears; he cried often – a habit that caused people who didn’t know him to dub him a coward. For years he’d fought for Maud’s soul against her sense of her own worth, asking her to value more what was due to God than the Caesar she regarded herself to be. ‘Sweeting,’ he said, ‘are we sure we are giving up the castle for the sake of William and the villagers? Or are we tempted into exchanging one regime for another? In which case we may be jumping from the frying pan into the boiling pot, where neither William nor our people will be any safer. Is it revenge for a marriage that has made you unhappy? Let you search your soul.’
    She searched it. Saving William and the villagers, she thought, was the laudable act of a woman forced into submission out of love for those threatened. If, coincidentally, it provided that same woman with the opportunity to throw off a yoke that was hateful to her, God would surely forgive her.
    ‘There’s a bit of that,’ she admitted, ‘but I can’t allow slaughter.’ She began to babble. ‘It won’t be so bad, will it?