Lady of the English - By Elizabeth Chadwick Page 0,172

squire helped him to remove his armour and Will hissed through his teeth as he bent over so the youth could pull the garments over his head.

“You are injured!” Adeliza reached to him in consternation.

“Cracked ribs,” he panted. “I took a blow from a flail when we were fighting our way out.”

The armour removed, he dismissed the squire and let Adeliza finish helping him undress. She gasped at the sight of the purple and red mottles flushing his right side. “Dear Jesu! And your face!”

“It could have been much worse, believe me.” He stepped gingerly into the tub and eased down into the hot water.

“Where was this battle? You have not said?” She tried to keep the panic from her voice, hoping it was not close to home.

He clenched his eyelids. “It was at Wilton.” Adeliza went rigid. “Wilton?” That was very close to home indeed.

He uttered a soft groan. “I wish I did not have to tell you.

Stephen wanted to capture Wareham from Robert of Gloucester and bade us muster at the abbey.”

“You did not tell me that when you left to join him.”

“I did not want to upset you, and all I knew was that it was the muster point. I did not know he was fortifying the nunnery until we arrived.”

“He put soldiers in the nunnery?” Her voice rose in outrage.

“He used Wilton to make war?” She felt as if she had been 425

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stabbed. “To occupy a nunnery is against God’s holy word!

How could Stephen do such a thing—and how could you let him?” Her voice was harsh with disgust.

“I didn’t let him.” Will snapped. “He was already in occupation when we arrived. I made my camp at Fugglestone—

and before you rail at me about that, I gave alms to the lazar house, and my men made their billets in a field away from the chapel.”

She turned away from him and, in a fruitless attempt to calm her anger, began fussing with a pile of towels. He spoke as if he thought his actions made everything all right.

“Stephen might have taken over the nunnery to billet his men and discuss his strategies,” he said in a hard voice, “but it was Robert of Gloucester and Miles of Hereford who threw torches into the buildings and burned the place to the ground.”

“Wilton is burned?” Adeliza whirled to face him, and now she truly was furious.

He grimaced. “Gloucester’s troops sacked the abbey and set it alight. I heard that they even seized men who had claimed sanctuary at the altar.”

Adeliza pressed her hand to her mouth and sat down abruptly as the strength left her legs. “Dear God,” she said with revulsion. “There is no end to this, is there?” Wilton. She tried to envisage the sanctuary in flames. Her retreat from the world after Henry’s death. The nuns who had been her comfort and her support. She thought of the rough tramp of soldiers’ feet in the cloister, and imagined the torches whirling through the air and landing in the thatch. “What happens now? What of the people burned out of their homes? They cannot turn for succour to secure castle walls and the arms of a waiting wife.

How can the Church help them, when the Church itself is naught but ashes? It does not matter who set the torches, husband, the result is the same.”

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He continued with his ablutions, his movements slow and painful and his shoulders rigid. She wondered if he was trying to cleanse himself of more than just the grime of hard riding and battle.

“You may not have thrown the torch, but you have dwelt in the house of God with a sword in your hand,” she said, hurling her words against his silence.

“Peace, wife,” he replied in a dull voice. “What has been done to Wilton is a terrible thing and a sin, I agree. I am no callous warmonger to be ignorant of the desperate plight of the people caught up in this battle.”

“Peace? How can I be at peace when my house has been razed by the man my husband follows and honours?” Bitterness scalded her throat. “What is going to happen to all of us if we continue to burn and rend and destroy? What will be left for our sons and daughters but a wilderness of ashes and bones, bereft of all moral worth?”

“I said peace!” he snarled. “I have enough bruises and cuts without taking more from your