Lady of the English - By Elizabeth Chadwick Page 0,166
Henry said, looking at her askance. “I am here now. All is well. I will protect you.” She tried to hold back her tears and failed. “I am so pleased to see you, I am overcome,” she choked. “Let my lord FitzCount show you to your chamber and I will come and talk to you in a little while.”
Henry blinked for an instant, then adapted his mental stride and bowed to her again, and when he stood up, gave her a smile as bright as the sun.
“Come, sire.” Brian gave Matilda a worried look, but smoothly dealt with matters. “There is a fine chamber prepared for you and my lord of Gloucester, right up near the battlements.”
“Can I see the dungeons too? And the armoury?” Henry’s voice filled with excitement, his meeting with his mother already losing its importance in the face of more interesting, masculine fare.
“You can see the entire castle and I will show you where everything is and answer as many questions as you can ask,” Brian replied, “but first your chamber. Give your mama a moment to herself.”
As Brian left with Henry and Robert, Matilda allowed Maude and her women to help her to her room, but once there, she shrugged them off, furious at her own weakness. She gestured everyone to leave, and lay down on her bed with the curtains closed. Dear God, she thought. What sort of example was this to set to her son? She wrapped her arms around a pillow and held it against her body with her fists, trying to 411
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stem the spasms as other memories welled to the surface. All the things she had dammed behind the façade of being the empress now poured out of her. The flight from Winchester; the jolting over rough ground; the pursuit and the terror that she might be caught. Climbing down from the tower at Oxford into the bitter air. The long, dark drop and the fear that she was going to die. The moments with Brian when she had pulled back from intimacy and denied herself that comfort, choosing to walk alone. The nugget of concentrated emotion she had felt on seeing Henry so grown up had breached the flood banks and suddenly she had become a mother and a person. She couldn’t let Henry see her thus. He must not think she was weak.
At last the spasms subsided, leaving her like the survivor of a shipwreck cast up on a beach, wrung out and exhausted.
She lay on the bed for a while, but eventually rallied enough to rise and wash her face. Then she drank a cup of wine and summoned the women back into the room.
“Are you feeling better, domina?” Maude enquired.
“Thank you, yes,” Matilda said stiffly. “I have not seen my son in more than three years. Small wonder I should be overset.” From the middle finger of her left hand she removed her ruby ring and gave it to a chamberlain who was standing in the doorway. “Take this to the lord Henry,” she said. “Tell him I will talk to him in a little while, but that this comes to him with all the love of a mother’s heart.” And the red of a woman’s womb, she thought as the man bowed and departed.
ttt
Henry looked at the ring. It was far too big for any of his fingers and he had set it around his neck on a length of thin gold braid. The ruby was as big as his thumb and glowed like an illuminated drop of blood. It was a gift fit for a king, not just a trinket. He had decided it was going to be part of his regalia 412
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when his turn came to rule, and such a time could not be far away because it was the reason he had been sent here—to finish his education and to learn what he needed about becoming king of England. As far as he was concerned, he was already the uncrowned ruler of the country. His mother had done what she could, helped by his uncle Robert, but she was a woman, while he was growing into a man—albeit too slowly for his patience. The way she had wept in front of him and had to retire had been a little disconcerting, but that was just a part of her womanhood. His own eyes had tingled in response to the moment, but he had