Death and the Lady (2 page)

Claudel’s absence was an ache still. It was worse tonight,
with this stranger in his place. My hand kept trying to creep toward the warmth
and the sound of her breathing, as if a touch could change her, make her the
one I wanted there. In the end I made a fist of it and pinned it under my head,
and squeezed my eyes shut, and willed the dawn to come.

oOo

Dawn came and went, and another dawn, and Lys stayed. The
sky that had been so clear was turning grey. We needed every hand we had, to
get in the crops before the rain came.

Even mine—Mère Adele scowled at me as I took my place, but I
stared her down. Lys took the row beside me. No one said anything. We were all
silent, that day and the next, racing the rain.

The last of the barley went in the barn as the first drops
fell. We stood out in it, too tired and too shocked by the stopping of a race
we had run for so long, to do more than stare. Then someone grinned. Then someone
else. Then the whole lot of us. We had done it, we, the women and the children
and the men too old or weak to fight. We had brought in the harvest in Sency-la-Forêt.

That night we had a feast. Mère Adele’s cook slaughtered an
ox, and the rest of us brought what we had or could gather. There was meat for
everyone, and a cake with honey in it, and apples from the orchards, and even a
little wine. We sat in the nuns’ refectory and listened to the rain on the
roof, and ate till we were sated.

Lame Bertrand had his pipe and Raymonde her drum, and
Guillemette had a voice like a linnet. Some of the younger ones got up to
dance. I saw how Pierre Allard was looking at Guillemette, and he just old
enough to tend his own sheep: too young and small as he had been in the spring
for the Comte’s men to take, but grown tall in the summer, and casting eyes at
our pretty idiot as if he were a proper man.

I drank maybe more of the wine than was good for me. I
danced, and people cheered: I had a neat foot even then, and Pierre Allard was
light enough, and quick enough, to keep up with me.

It should have been Claudel dancing there. No great beauty,
my Claudel, and not much taller than I, but he could dance like a leaf in the
Wood; and sing, too, and laugh with me when I spun dizzy and breathless out of
the dance. There was no one there to catch me and carry me away to a bed under
the sky, or more likely on a night like this, in the barn among the cows, away
from children and questions and eyes that pried.

I left soon after that, while the dancing was still in full
whirl. The rain was steady, and not too cold. I was wet through soon enough,
but it felt more pleasant than not.

My feet knew the way in the black dark, along the path that
followed the priory’s wall, down to the river and then up again to a shadow in
shadow and a scent of the midden that was mine and no one else’s. There was
light through a chink in the door: firelight, banked but not yet covered. Mamère
Mondine nodded in front of it.

She was blind and nearly deaf, but she smiled when I kissed
her forehead. “Jeannette,” she said. “Pretty Jeannette.” And patted my hand
that rested on her shoulder, and went back to her dreaming.

The children were abed, asleep. There was no larger figure
with them. Francha’s eyes gleamed at me in the light from the lamp. They were
swollen and red; her cheeks were tracked with tears.

I started to speak. To say that Lys was coming, that she
would be here soon, that she was still in the priory. But I could not find it
in me to say it. She had eaten with us. She had been there when the children
went out in a crowd, protesting loudly. When the dancing began, I had not seen
her. I had thought, if I thought at all, that she had come here before me.

In the dark and the rain, a stranger could only too easily
go astray. It was not far to the priory, a mile, maybe, but that was a good
count of steps, and more than enough to be lost in.

What made me think of the Wood, I never knew. Her words to Mère
Adele. My first sight of her on the Wood’s edge. The simple strangeness of her,
as I sat on the bed and tried to comfort Francha, and saw in the dimness the
memory of her face. We had stories, we in Sency, of what lived in the Wood.
Animals both familiar and strange, and shadows cast by no living thing, and
paths that wound deep and deep, and yet ended where they began; and far within,
behind a wall of mists and fear, a kingdom ruled by a deathless king.

I shook myself hard. What was it to me that a wayward
stranger had come, brought in our harvest, and gone away again? To Francha it
was too much, and that I would not forgive.

Whatever in the world had made our poor mute child fall so
perfectly in love with the lady, it had done Francha no good, and likely much
harm. She would not let me touch her now, scrambled to the far comer of the bed
when I lay down and tried to draw her in, and huddled there for all that I
dared do without waking the others.

In the end I gave it up and closed my eyes. I was on the bed’s
edge. Francha was pressed against the wall. She would have to climb over me to
escape.

oOo

One moment, it seemed, I was fretting over Francha. The
next, the red cock was crowing, and I was staggering up, stumbling to the morning’s
duties. There was no sign of Lys. She had had no more than the clothes on her
back; those were gone. She might never have been there at all.

I unlidded the fire and poked it up, and fed it carefully. I
filled the pot and hung it over the flames. I milked the cow, I found two eggs
in the nest that the black hen had thought so well hidden. I fed the pigs and
scratched the old sow’s back and promised her a day in the wood, if I could
persuade Bertrand to take her out with his own herd. I fed Mamère Mondine her
bowl of porridge with a little honey dripped in it, and a little more for each
of the children.

Perrin and Celine gobbled theirs and wanted more. Francha
would not eat. When I tried to feed her as I had when I first took her in, she
slapped the spoon out of my hand.

The other children were delighted. So were the cats, who set
to at once, licking porridge from the wall and the table and the floor.

I sighed and retrieved the spoon. Francha’s face was locked
shut. There would be no reasoning with her today, or, I suspected, for days
hereafter. Inside myself I cursed this woman who had come, enchanted a poor
broken child, and gone away without a word. And if Francha sickened over it, if
she pined and died—as she well could, as she almost had before I took her—

I dipped the porridge back into the pot. I wiped the
children’s faces and Francha’s hands. I did what needed doing. And all the
while my anger grew.

oOo

The rain had gone away with the night. The last of the
clouds blew away eastward, and the sun came up, warming the wet earth, raising pillars
and curtains of mist. The threshers would be at it soon, as should I.

But I stood in my kitchen garden and looked over the hedge,
and saw the wall of grey and green that was the Wood. One of the cats wound
about my ankles.

I gathered her up. She purred. “I know where the lady went,”
I said. “She went west. She said she would. God protect her; nothing else will,
where she was going.”

The cat’s purring stopped. She raked my hand with her claws
and struggled free; hissed at me; and darted away around the midden.

I sucked my smarting hand. Celine ran out of the house,
shrilling in the tone I was doing my best to slap out of her: “Francha’s crying
again, mama! Francha won’t stop crying!”

What I was thinking of was quite mad. I should go inside, of
course I should, and do what I could to comfort Francha, and gather the children
together, and go to the threshing.

I knelt in the dirt between the poles of beans, and took
Celine by the shoulders. She stopped her shrieking to stare at me. “Are you a
big girl?” I asked her.

She drew herself up. “I’m grown up,” she said. “You know
that, mama.”

“Can you look after Francha, then? And Perrin? And take them
both to Mère Adele?”

She frowned. “Won’t you come, too?”

Too clever by half, was my Celine. “I have to do something
else,” I said. “Can you do it, Celine? And tell Mère Adele that I’ll be back as
soon as I can?”

Celine thought about it. I held my breath. Finally she
nodded. “I’ll take Perrin and Francha to Mère Adele. And tell her you’ll come
back. Then can I go play with Jeannot?”

“No,” I said. Then: “Yes. Play with Jeannot. Stay with him
till I come back. Can you do that?”

She looked at me in perfect disgust. “Of course I can do
that. I’m grown up.”

I bit my lips to keep from laughing. I kissed her once on
each cheek for each of the others, and once on the forehead for herself. “Go
on,” I said. “Be quick.”

She went. I stood up. In a little while I heard them go,
Perrin declaring loudly that he was going to eat honeycakes with Mère Adele. I
went into the kitchen and filled a napkin with bread and cheese and apples, and
put the knife in, too, wrapped close in the cloth, and tied it all in my
kerchief.

Mamère Mondine was asleep. She would be well enough till
evening. If I was out longer, then Mère Adele would know to send someone. I
kissed her and laid my cheek for a moment against her dry old one. She sighed
but did not wake. I drew myself up and went back through the kitchen garden.

oOo

Our house is one of the last in the village. The garden
wall is part of Messire Arnaud’s palisade, though we train beans up over it,
and I have a grapevine that almost prospers. Claudel had cut a door in it,
which could have got us in trouble if Messire Arnaud had lived to find out
about it; but milord was dead and his heirs far away, and our little postern
was hidden well in vines within and brambles without.

I escaped with a scratch or six, but with most of my dignity
intact. It was the last of the wine in me, I was sure, and anger for Francha’s
sake, and maybe a little honest worry, too. Lys had been a guest in my house.
If any harm came to her, the guilt would fall on me.

And I had not gone outside the palisade, except to the
fields, since Claudel went away. I wanted the sun on my face, no children
tugging at my skirts, the memory of death far away. I was afraid of what I went
to, of course I was; the Wood was a horror from my earliest memory. But it was
hard to be properly terrified, walking the path under the first outriders of
the trees, where the sun slanted down in long sheets, and the wind murmured in
the leaves, and the birds sang sweet and unafraid.

The path was thick with mould under my feet. The air was
scented with green things, richer from the rain, with the deep earthy promise
of mushrooms. I found a whole small field of them, and gathered as many as my
apron would carry, but moving quickly through them and not lingering after.

By then Sency was well behind me and the trees were closing
in. The path wound through them, neither broader nor narrower than before.

I began to wonder if I should have gone to fetch the Allards’
dog. I had company, it was true: the striped cat had followed me. She was more
comfort than I might have expected.

The two of us went on. The scent of mushrooms was all around
me like a charm to keep the devils out.

I laughed at that. The sound fell soft amid the trees.
Beeches turning gold with autumn. Oaks going bronze. Ash with its feathery
leaves, thorn huddling in thickets. The birds were singing still, but the quiet
was vast beneath.

The cat walked ahead of me now, tail up and elegantly
curved. One would think that she had come this way before.

I had, longer ago than I liked to think. I had walked as I
walked now, but without the warding of mushrooms, crossing myself, it seemed,
at every turn of the path. I had taken that last, suddenly steep slope, and
rounded the thicket—hedge, it might have been—of thorn, and come to the sunlit
space. It had dazzled me then as it dazzled me now, so much light after the
green gloom. I blinked to clear my eyes.

The chapel was as it had been when last I came to it. The
two walls that stood; the one that was half fallen. The remnant of a porch, the
arch of a gate, with the carving on it still, much blurred with age and
weather. The upper arm of the cross had broken. The Lady who sat beneath it had
lost her upraised hand, but the Child slept as ever in her lap, and her smile,
even so worn, was sweet.

I crossed myself in front of her. No devils flapped shrieking
through the broken roof. Nothing moved at all, except the cat, which picked its
way delicately across the porch and vanished into the chapel.

My hands were cold. I shifted my grip on my bundle. I was
hungry, suddenly, which made me want to laugh, or maybe to cry. My stomach
lived in a time of its own; neither fear nor anger mattered in the least to it.

I would feed it soon enough. I gathered my courage and
stepped under the arch, ducking my head though it was more than high enough:
this was a holy place, though not, maybe, to the God I knew.

The pavement had been handsome once. It was dull and broken
now. The altar was fallen. The font was whole, but blurred as was the carving
on the gate. A spring bubbled into it and bubbled out again through channels in
the wall. It was itself an odd thing, the stump of a great tree—oak, the
stories said—lined with lead long stripped of its gilding, and carved with
crosses. Here the roof was almost intact, giving shelter from the rain; or the
ancient wood would long ago have crumbled into dust.

She was kneeling on the edge of the font, her dark head bent
over it, her white hands clenched on its rim. I could not see the water. I did
not want to see it. I could hear her, but she spoke no language I knew. Her
tone was troubling enough: pure throttled desperation, pleading so strong that
I lurched forward, hand outstretched.