Innocent's Champion. Meriel Fuller
told off by her older sister and paid little heed to it. Katherine was suffering greatly in this late stage of pregnancy and this heavy, torpid heat wasn’t helping matters.
‘It’s nothing,’ she called to Katherine. ‘A lump of sticky burr, snagged on the hem.’ Reaching down, she pulled at the clump of green trailing weed, throwing it to the side of the track. The dark chestnut silk of her hair, firmly pulled into two plaited rolls on either side of her neat head, gleamed in the sunlight filtering through the trees. A fine silver net covered her intricate hairstyle, secured with a narrow silver circlet.
‘Come and sit in with me, Matilda, please.’ A nervous desperation edged her sister’s voice as she stuck her head out between the thick velvet curtains that afforded her some privacy within the litter. Her face looked puffy, skin covered with a waxy gleam that emphasised the violet shadows beneath her eyes. Matilda glanced at the sun’s position, thick light pouring down through the beech trees lining the route. The fresh green leaves bobbed in the slight breeze, lifting occasionally to send brilliant shafts of illumination straight down to touch the hardened earth of the track. It hadn’t rained for weeks.
‘If I climb in, it will only slow us down, Katherine,’ Matilda answered. One of the servants carrying the front of the litter mopped his face with his sleeve. ‘We’re almost at the river now. It’s not far from there.’ Guilt scythed through her as she saw the panic touch Katherine’s worried blue eyes. ‘Here, I’ll walk closer, alongside you.’ Matilda reached out and grasped her sister’s hand, shocked by how cold and limp it felt. ‘Are you quite well?’ she said sharply.
The jewelled net covering Katherine’s hair sparkled as she nodded slowly. ‘I can feel the baby kicking inside me,’ she whispered. ‘That’s a good sign, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ Matilda replied, with more conviction than she felt. The cold sweat from Katherine’s fingers soaked her palm. From the haunted look in her eyes, Matilda knew her sister was remembering that awful time before. And the time before that.
‘Do you think our prayers will work? Do you think I’ve done enough?’
Matilda nodded, throwing her sister a quick reassuring smile. She certainly hoped so. She wasn’t sure Katherine could endure another fruitless labour, another baby born that failed to live, to breathe. John, Katherine’s husband, had insisted they visit the shrine as often as possible, providing them with a litter, servants and two household knights as escort. He was determined that this pregnancy would be successful. He needed an heir. A male heir.
Worry trickled through her; she kicked at a loose stone beneath her leather boot, sending it spinning into the long grass at the side of the track. Although Katherine was four years older, and a married woman, Matilda often felt as if she were the more mature sibling, looking out for her sister, protecting her. All day she had watched Katherine, crouched awkwardly on the hard, iron-coloured stone of the chapel, muttering her prayers, calling on the Virgin Mary to grant her a successful labour, tears running down her perfect, beautiful face. Matilda had had to help her to her feet, almost dragging her away from the carved wooden effigy; it was as if Katherine wanted to stay there for ever, as if the longer she stayed, the more chance she would have of a successful labour.
Matilda reached out and touched Katherine’s shoulder, a gesture of support. The raised embroidery of her sister’s gown rubbed against her fingertips. ‘Your baby will be born soon and he will be fine. You must stop fretting, Katherine...’
‘What will John do to me if...?’
‘You mustn’t think like that.’ Matilda gripped Katherine’s fingers tightly. She must say the things that Katherine wanted to hear, even if she didn’t believe them herself. ‘John loves you...’
‘I need to stop...now.’ Katherine’s voice had taken on a new urgency, her eyes flicking up, searching Matilda’s face for understanding. She hunched forwards over her swollen stomach. ‘Earlier...I had too much to drink.’
Matilda signalled to the servants to lower the litter, then grabbed Katherine’s upper arm to haul her out. ‘No, stay here,’ she ordered the men, who, relieved of the heavy weight on their shoulders, stretched out their arms to alleviate the soreness in their tired muscles.
‘My lady...?’ One of the knights dismounted. ‘I should come with you...’ he offered dubiously, his gaze sliding quickly over Katherine’s stomach bulging out beneath the waistband of her gown.
Honestly, these men, thought Matilda, noting the young soldier’s reddening features. They treated pregnancy as if it were a disease! Something to be ashamed of, despite the fact it was the most natural thing in the world. She knew that the growing baby increased the amount of times Katherine needed to visit the garderobe, and when there was no garderobe available...well, the shelter of the trees and shrubs would have to do.
Leaning into the litter, Matilda seized her bow, shouldering the quiver full of arrows. She caught the glancing grin of a servant as he eyed the curved wood of her weapon. Let them think what they like, she thought irritably. It never hurt for a lady to know how to defend herself, especially one with her own precarious domestic arrangements.
‘No need, we’ll not be long. We’ll go over that little bridge, into that ruin behind the trees.’ Matilda pointed out a low-lying packhorse bridge spanning the river’s swift flow and the tumbled stones of a collapsed tower. She tucked her arm through Katherine’s and the two sisters walked together with a laboured, ambling pace through the soft, swaying grasses of the riverside.
Their progress up the steep cobbled surface of the bridge was slow; Katherine’s face reddened, sheened with sweat. ‘This heat, this heat affects me so,’ she gasped, as she reached the apex of the bridge. Pausing, she bent forwards, pressing one hand against the rickety parapet, her scalloped-edge sleeve falling in a graceful arc against the warm stone.
‘Why not take your cloak off?’ Matilda suggested, eyeing the rectangle of red silk-velvet that fell back from Katherine’s shoulders. It matched her own cloak of light blue, fastened across the neck with a fine silver chain and secured with a pearl clasp on one shoulder.
Katherine shuddered, fixing her sister with a horrified glance. ‘To be seen in public without a cloak? Are you out of your mind? Really, Matilda, you have no sense of propriety!’
Matilda shrugged her shoulders. ‘I only thought it would make you cooler,’ she replied. ‘You shouldn’t be travelling at all, at this stage of your pregnancy. I’m surprised that John—’
‘It was he that insisted upon it!’ Katherine interrupted. ‘You know what he’s like...’
Yes, thought Matilda. She knew what John was like. Arrogant and overbearing, with a short, irascible temper, he was unbearable at the best of times and ten times worse if things didn’t go the way he wanted. On his marriage to Katherine, he had made no secret of his joy at inheriting one half of the Lilleshall fortune: the castle at Neen and its vast tracts of fertile pasture. Now, it seemed, this was not enough for him; he had begun to drop very large hints about how he should be controlling the other half, the manor and estates of Lilleshall itself, still in the possession of Matilda and Katherine’s mother.
As Matilda steered her sister carefully down the other side of the bridge and into the shadowed privacy behind the toppled stones of the tower, Katherine clutched at her arm, her long fingers surprisingly strong. ‘You will stay with me, Matilda? Until I give birth? I need you to be there with me at Neen...do you promise?’
‘Katherine, you know I have to return to Lilleshall... I cannot promise that I will be there all the time.’
Lifting her skirts above the fallen stones to pick her way through the jumbled mass, Katherine pinned angry eyes on her sister. ‘Only because our useless mother refuses to do what she’s supposed to do!’
‘Katherine, that’s not fair! You know how she’s been since Father died.’ Matilda raised one hand to an errant curl of dark chestnut hair, tucking it back behind her ear. ‘I have to go back, to make sure the estate is running properly. You know that.’
‘Aye,’