Elizabeth Chadwick - The Conquest

'Only because she had no choice!' Julitta spat.

'That is not true either.' Felice fetched a bone comb and began to tidy Julitta's hair, plucking out fragments of straw and cleaning it of hayloft dust. 'She had several choices, and she judged your father to be the best of them in the end. I know that she talked about it to you before she died.'

Julitta gripped the coverlet in her fists and submitted for a moment to Felice's soothing ministrations. But in the end her fear and anger could not be contained. 'I don't want to see him!' she repeated and jumped to her feet. 'I won't go with him! It's all his fault that my mother is dead!'

'Julitta!' Felice stood up too, her dark eyes beginning to flash with anger.

'She is right,' Rolf said from the doorway, standing foursquare, banishing all Julitta's hope of escape. 'Had I heeded my conscience and had more self-discipline, Ailith would be with me yet, and none of this need ever have happened.'

Julitta's knees weakened and she sat down abruptly on the bed, her eyes lowered and her head averted.

Felice looked anxiously at Rolf. 'I do not know what to do with her,' she said.

'Leave her to me.' Rolf touched Felice's arm. 'I am indebted to you for your care…"

Felice smiled, but the gesture did not reach her eyes, which were troubled. She laid her hand over Rolf's, gave it a brief, sympathetic squeeze, and went out, leaving father and daughter alone together.

Rolf advanced two uncertain paces into the room. Julitta's head remained averted.

'I know that you want me to go away,' he said, 'but that is something I cannot do. You have haunted me for far too long. If I could change the past, I would, but since that is beyond me, I can only offer you the future.'

She was aware of him moving closer, could feel the warmth and vibration of his body now. 'You called me a hen,' she said in a low, aggrieved voice. 'You shouted at me.'

'You almost ran beneath the hooves of my horse, you could have killed us both. Besides, that is not the true reason you will not look at me.' He reached out across the last few feet of space between them and tilted her chin on his fingers, turning her to face him. 'It is because of your mother, is it not? You think I betrayed her?'

Julitta's thoughts and feelings were so tangled that there was not the slightest possibility of her being able to unravel them into coherence. All she knew was that she was angry at her mother for dying, and because the dead were inviolate, she had to take her anger and misery out on the living. And her father was a prime scapegoat.

'Didn't you?'

'Yes,' he admitted, 'I did betray her, and myself, and there is not a day that has gone by since then that I have not wished it undone. I won't betray her memory. Julitta, I want you to come with me to Ulverton. I want to do my best for you now.'

'And if I don't want to go?' She tossed her head defiantly, shaking off his touch. 'You'll make me, won't you?'

Rolf went to the window where only a few days before a jar of blue and yellow irises had blazed with brave colour. Now the top of the coffer was bare. He stood against the chest, arms folded, and looked out on the bustling yard, and beyond it, the wine wharf jutting into the Thames. 'Do you remember anything of your life before?' he asked. 'Do you remember Ulverton?'

Julitta stared at her father's turned back. His hair was unruly like her own, but maintained in cropped order, and the colour was neither as rich nor as dark, and diluted with wings of silver. Her mother had said that she resembled him as much in character as in looks. Did she remember Ulverton? Dear Jesu, if she tried, she could remember far too much. 'Not really,' she said with a sulky shrug.

'Your mother loved the sea,' he mused. 'At the slightest excuse she would take herself down to the shore in the summertime and go wading barefoot in the shallows. And in winter she would put on her cloak and watch the waves come pounding in for hours on end. She had never seen the coast until I brought her to Ulverton. I can still see her collecting driftwood with the other women, and you running between them, your hair like a banner in the wind.' His voice shook and he sucked an unsteady breath through his teeth.

Julitta bit her lip, fresh tears scalding her eyes. 'Yes, I do remember,' she whispered. 'And you came down and spoke to my mother, then you took me on your shoulders, and I could see so far that I thought the world was mine.'

'It still is if you want it.' Her father turned round and held out his hand once more, but this time he did not advance and touch. 'Princess?'

The word leaped at her and she was smothered by all its promise and heartache. His hand was quivering, perhaps just with the stress of position, but she thought not. There was a tension in his face that spoke of control on the verge of cracking. Her own composure broke beneath his gesture, his stare, and the memories he had invoked. Rising from the bed she ran to him. His arms closed about her, one hand convulsively grasping and smoothing her hair. 'Julitta!' he said hoarsely, almost weeping. 'Oh Christ, Julitta!'

Julitta pressed her cheek against the rough linen of his tunic. Hard, harder, forcing belief into her soul. She would go with him to Ulverton and piece together the shattered dream.

When they had both recovered somewhat from the emotional hammerblows, Julitta detached herself from her father's arms and going to a corner of the room, lifted the edge of a half-folded cloak, and withdrew a Danish war axe.

'My mother always kept this by her. She said that it was hers by right of blood. I remember it hanging on the wall at Ulverton, and falling down on the day that we left. I know that it once belonged to my uncle Lyulph and that he died on Hastings field. It was made by Mama's husband, the armourer.' Julitta gave a little shiver. 'I wish she hadn't kept it.'

'The luck of Ulverton.' Rolf took it from her, hefting its once familiar weight. Or perhaps its misfortune, cleaving in twain the lives of all who touched it. Christened with blood. 'I wish it too,' he said with a grimace, and stretched out his free hand. 'Come with me.'

Julitta took it, feeling the security of the warm grip, the tensile fingers. Her own hand was damp with cold sweat. 'Where are we going?' she asked as he led her down the outer stairs and across the yard toward the wharves.

'To the river to make an offering.'

'What sort of offering?'

'In times gone by, when a warrior died, his weapons often went to the grave with him, or were flung into the nearest river or lake as an offering to the Gods. That is what my grandfather used to tell me, and he had it from his own grandfather who was a pagan.'

Julitta was aware of people stopping work as she and her father went by. From the corner of her eye, she saw Benedict and Mauger standing together, their mouths open. The wharf-side was bustling with labourers and sailors as a Rouen wine galley was disembowelled of her cargo. The rumble of wooden tuns over the stones was deafening. Vinegary fumes from an accidentally broached cask assaulted the air.

Tugging Julitta in his wake, Rolf strode out onto a wooden jetty which currently had nothing but shallow boats moored to its sides. The smell of wine was replaced by the smell of the river as it slapped against the posts, grey and green, frilled with white foam. Gulls wheeled over their heads, and a single, black-winged bird that might have been a raven.

'Stand back,' Rolf said to Julitta, and when she was clear to his satisfaction, he began to whirl the axe around his body in double circles, faster and faster until the weapon was a gleaming blur. Then on a final surge he released it, crying out, and the axe sailed upwards and outwards in magnificence, the head flashing over and over in the sunlight as though it were on fire, before plummeting into the choppy water of the Thames to be quenched forever.

'It is neither good luck nor misfortune now,' Rolf panted, staring down at the opaque green wavelets lapping the posts of the jetty, and then at his daughter. 'It is nothing.'

Later, Julitta and Rolf visited Ailith's grave, the place a scar of fresh, raw earth in the cemetery. Rolf stared at it, still unable to believe that she was truly dead. He had not seen her, therefore it could not be. Even though he had disposed of the axe and its ability to strike, the wounds it had left were deep beyond healing.

Julitta knelt at the graveside and laid a fresh bunch of irises on the soil. Rolf swallowed, watching her. She had her mother's width of brow and generous mouth. There was also a touch of Ailith's stubborn jaw and more than enough of her mannerisms to give Rolf constant twinges of pain whenever he looked at Julitta. The past was an open grave from which the dead stretched out to touch him no matter how he tried to lay the ghosts. Ailith, his beautiful, betrayed Ailith.

'Come,' he said abruptly as Julitta rose from her knees and wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. 'Leave her to sleep. We have a road to travel.'