Wessex Tales: "For Viviana's Wedding" (Story 16) Read online

  Chapter 5

  The manor hall around this time was a typical timber-built aisled structure, sixty-six feet on its east-west axis, forty-four across, on a foundation ditch of rubble and flint beneath a single capping layer of ashlar stone. The door, at the eastern end of the long north wall, corresponded with that of the kitchen, which stood apart, its long axis at a right angle to the hall, the principal dwelling protected against smells and the risk of fire by some thirty feet. A ‘corduroy’ path of logs between these and other buildings protected against the worst of the mud, but the passage to the kitchen was otherwise open to the elements.

  Half way along the north wall of the hall, set into it as a structural member, was a great fireplace with its sandstone chimney, the blocks carted in so long ago folk couldn’t recall its age. Within, the aspect of the hall resembled a church, two aisles and a central nave defined by the double row of great adze-squared oaken posts supporting the roof. Hurdles of hazel and curtains of rushes extended in places from the outer walls to the rows of posts, defining chambers and rooms for the household’s principal offices.

  The whole north end, some twenty feet deep, was raised about an arm’s length off the floor, on a base of rubble retained by stone and floored with flagstones, with hides for rugs. This was the private apartment, my lady’s solar, her parents’ and her great great grandparents’ before. It was walled off from the rest of the hall with oak planking and a heavy door—seldom closed in these times—this inner wall as well as the exterior ones slitted for archers, with ‘squints’ all around to spy out the world. In event of attack, if the manor’s household couldn’t reach the stone-built church, the de Eskellings’ solar must serve as their defence.

  But the only attack anticipated this day was nerves. A deep sigh moved the bride.

  “There now, lovely,” Ellie told her, “don’t ’ee take on so. He’ll be a good man to ’ee. He’s that steady, mind.”

  “O, I know, Ellie. I’ve enjoyed too much freedom for a woman, I suppose.”

  “Freedom? You was never bondswoman!” The larger meaning of the word had never occasion to trouble Ellie’s soul. She fussed with her mistress’s coif, tucking a stray strand of hair,

  while Viviana said, “Well, goodbye hair. I’ll never wear you loose again.”

  “Married or no, ’tain’t rightly fitty for a growed woman your age to go around wi’ hair down her backside like a maiden.”

  “That’s as may be. But you’ll never get me coiling it in those awful rams-horns.”

  “Folk do say ’tis all the fashion to town nowadays.”

  Ellie was light on her feet, and quick, for a large woman, a mix of peasant superstition and intelligent interest in the outside world. She’d been milady’s lady to Viviana since the latter was a child and herself not much older. Now she bustled about, fetching her mistress’s brooch, her feet noisy in the debris on the floor, her calf-length kirtle revealed as a flash of white in front, where she’d tucked her mantle in her waistband while she helped her lady bathe.

  Her own hair was hidden in a coif that covered head, and neck, and fell across her mantle to her shoulders, revealing only dark quick eyes in a round face, white, and washed, just like a nun.

  But then, Ellie knew about nuns, for she’d had an education of a sort in the larger world: she had gone along for two whole years while milady studied books with nuns up Shaftesbury way. Might have stopped there, too, but for Master dying of the throbbing pains that broke his guts, and the Mistress taken not long after—heartbreak, they said. That was when Viviana (and Ellie) came back to Okford, to her inheritance. There were no male heirs.

  Now Ellie kept her secret fears to herself while Viviana dressed. With milady a married woman what would become of her? Viviana had given her assurance, but you never knew with men. Of a winter night she even slept in Viviana’s bed. Till now. Now she’d have to find a berth with all the rest of them in hall, enduring all the jibes and loss of station that implied.

  And the bride? Well, having no man to ‘give’ her in marriage, the lady had given herself, and wisely, for Bartholemew Turberville was a fine young man of excellent patrimony, with a name as old as hers. Valiant as a woman-seule might be, the language of law understood and spoke but male chattel rights. And, between civil law and the Church, there were many attempts to encroach on the lordship of Okford. Back in the first years of Henry I, her own ancestor, Robert, son of the first Eskelin (or was it Schelin?) had granted half of the church at ‘Ocforde’ to the Priory of Montacute, severe Benedictines all, whose Visitors thought women good for nothing but handmaids to Temptation. Ah, the legacy one leaves one’s heirs! Then there were the monks at Forde Abbey, demanding haying rights on meadows at Bere Marsh. It was better that a man should protect the manor’s interest against these preying devils! And none better than a Turberville. They formed a virtual clan south of the Downs.

  It had to be marriage, then. Had the lady regrets? None, saving a natural reluctance at the prospect of change. What should she save herself for? At twenty-five, the better half of life was gone.

  Ellie came bustling back, brushing a fine wool mantle with a bunch of teasels. Viviana stood to receive it, revealing a plain linen gown of the times, a cotte, cut all of a piece in voluminous, beautiful style, falling in folds, and folds upon folds, dyed pale yellow with expensive saffron—a deeper hue would be extravagant, perhaps offending sumptuary laws—the bodice draping to a waist at which she wore a bejewelled deerskin belt. The sleeves of her cotte were wide at the shoulder, with arm holes almost to the waist, tapering to a tightly buttoned wrist—an older style, but novelty took some decades to penetrate to Okford, and the lady looked as gorgeous as a Grecian goddess in a frieze. Her neckline plunged to a modest V, at which Ellie had fastened her silver brooch.

  She wore a coif, of course, but one that knotted beneath her chin and did nothing to conceal the grace of a swan-like neck and throat. No town-bred modesty about our Viviana. Grace to her was a riverbank; reflections of light upon water; a crystal night sky; a secret place among nettles and comfrey twixt two girt old willows; the sounds and stinks of men and women living and pigs dying. Viviana had been her own young mistress much too long to be a toady to a man.

  There was rebellion too in the strand of light brown hair she let escape behind her left ear, a strand reaching down to her breast. But this rebellion was approved by Ellie: hadn’t Okford learned a year or so back that women’s flowing hair was quite the naughty thing at court? A fashion upheld, folk said, by no less a beauty than King Edward’s consort, Queen Eleanor of Castile.

  Now Ellie, with great ceremony, placed her fine woollen mantle-cloak on Viviana’s shoulders. The warmth of the day did not require it; solemn occasion did. Its cloth cut in a semi-circle, the hands might be withdrawn, or emerge to the elbows, long and elegant, bedraped in folds.

  All of which was not unlike the bride’s present situation, for now she leaves the darkness of her chamber to blink in sunlight at the manor door, greeted by the cheers and thrill of fifty or sixty rustic souls assembled in the muddy court beyond.