Death and the Lady (4 page)

He did not move, but his men crossed themselves. “Even so,”
he said. “I loved my brother, too. Won’t you share what is left of him?”

“You have his bones,” said Lys, “and his tomb in Montsalvat.”

“I think,” said Mère Adele, cutting across this gentle,
deadly colloquy, “that this were best discussed in walls. And not,” she added
as hope leaped in milord’s face, “Sency’s. St. Agnes’ priory can house a noble
guest. Let you go there, and we will follow.”

He bowed and obeyed. We went down from the gate. But Mère
Adele did not go at once to St. Agnes’.

People had come to see what we were about. She sent them off
on errands that she had given them long since: shoring up the walls, bringing
in such of the animals as were still without, shutting Sency against, if need
be, a siege.

“Not that I expect a fight,” she said, “but with these
gentry you never know.” She turned to me. “You come.”

She did not need to turn to Lys. The lady would go whether
she was bidden or no: it was written in every line of her.

It was also written in Francha, who was never far from her
side. But she took the child’s face in her long white hands, and said, “Go and
wait for me. I’ll come back.”

One would hardly expect Francha to trust her, and yet the
child did. She nodded gravely, not a flicker of resistance. Only acceptance,
and adoration.

Not so Celine. In the end I bribed her with Pierre, and him
with the promise of a raisin tart if he took her home and kept her there.

oOo

Mère Adele set a brisk pace to the priory, one that gave me
no time to think about my frayed kerchief and my skirt with the stains around
the hem and my bare feet. Of course milord would come when I had been setting
out to clean the pigsty.

Lys stopped us at the priory’s gate, came round to face us.
The men had gone inside; we could hear them, horses clattering and snorting,
deep voices muted in the cloister court. Lys spoke above it, softly, but with
the edge which she had shown Messire Giscard. “Why?”

Mère Adele raised her brows.

Lys looked ready to shake her. “Why do you do so much for
me?”

“You’re our guest,” said Mère Adele.

Lys threw back her head. I thought that she would laugh, or
cry out.

She did neither. She said, “This goes beyond plain
hospitality. To chance a war for me.”

“There will be no war,” said Mère Adele, “unless you’re fool
enough to start one.” She set her hand on the lady’s arm and set her tidily
aside, and nodded to Sister Portress, who looked near to bursting with the
excitement of it all, and went inside.

oOo

Messire Giscard had time for all the proper things, food
and rest and washing if he wanted it. He took all three, while we waited, and I
wished more than ever that I had stopped to change my dress. I brushed at the
one I had, and one of the sisters lent me a clean kerchief. When they brought
him in at last, I was as presentable as I could be.

Mère Adele’s receiving room was an imposing place, long and
wide with a vaulted ceiling, carved and painted and gilded, and a great stone
hearth at the end of it. It was not her favored place to work in; that was the
closet by her cell, bare and plain and as foreign to pretension as the prioress
herself. This was for overaweing strangers; and friends, too, for the matter of
that. I hardly knew what to do with the chair she set me in, so big as it was,
and carved everywhere, and with a cushion that must have been real silk—it was
impossibly soft, like a kitten’s ear.

It let me tuck up my feet at least, though I was sorry for
that when the servant let milord in, and I had to untangle myself and stand and
try to bow and not fall over. Lys and Mère Adele sat as soon as milord did,
which meant that I could sit, too: stiffly upright this time.

He was at his ease, of course. He knew about chairs, and
gilded ceilings. He smiled at me—there was no mistaking it: I was somewhat to
the side, so that he had to turn a little. I felt my cheeks grow hot.

“This lady I know,” he said, turning his eyes away from me
and fixing them on Lys. “And you, reverend prioress? And this charming demoiselle?”

Well, I thought. That cured my blush. Charming I was not,
whatever else I was.

“I am Mère Adele,” said Mère Adele, “and this is Jeannette
Laclos of Sency. You are Giscard de Montsalvat from the other side of Normandy,
and you say you have a claim on our guest?”

That took him properly aback. He was not used to such
directness, maybe, in the courts that he had come from. But he had a quick wit,
and a smooth tongue to go with it. “My claim is no more than I have said. She
was my brother’s lover. She carries his child. He wished to acknowledge it; he
bound me before he died, to do all that I could on its behalf.”

“For bastard seed?” asked Mère Adele. “I should think you’d
be glad to see the last of her. Wasn’t your brother the elder? And wouldn’t her
baby be his heir, if it were male, and she a wife?”

“She would never marry him,” said Messire Giscard. “She was
noble enough, she said, but exiled, and no dowry to her name.”

“Then all the more cause for you to let her go. Why do you
hunt her down? She’s no thief, you say. What does she have that you want?”

He looked at his feet in their fine soft shoes. He was out
of his reckoning, maybe.

 
My stomach drew
tight as I watched him. Men like that—big beautiful animals who had never known
a moment’s thirst or hunger except what they themselves chose, in war or in the
chase; who had never been crossed, nor knew what to do when they were—such men
were dangerous. One of them had met me in the wood before I married Claudel;
and so Celine was a fair child, like the Norman who had sired her. A Norman very
like this one, only not so pretty to look at. He had been gentle in his way.
But he wanted me, and what he wanted, he took. He never asked my name. I never
asked his.

This one had asked. It softened me-more than I liked to
admit. Of course he did not care. He wanted to know his adversaries, that was
all. If it had been the two of us under the trees and the blood rising in him,
names would not have mattered.

Lys spoke, making me start; I was deep in myself. “He wants
me,” she said. “Somewhat for my beauty. More for what he thinks that I will
give. “

Messire Giscard smiled his easy smile. “So then, you tempt
me. I’d hardly sin so far as to lust after my brother’s woman. That is incest,
and forbidden by holy Church.” He crossed himself devoutly. “No, Mère Adele;
beautiful she may be, but I swore a vow to my brother.”

“You promised to let me go,” said Lys.

“Poor lady,” he said. “You were beside yourself with grief.
What could I do but say yes to anything you said? I beg your pardon for the
falsehood; I reckoned, truly, that it was needful. I never meant to cast you
out.

“You never meant to set me free.”

“Do you hate him that much?” asked Mère Adele.

Lys looked at her, and then at him. He was still smiling.
Pretty: oh, so pretty, with the sun aslant on his bright hair, and his white
teeth gleaming.

“Aymeric was never so fair,” said Lys. “That was all given
to his brother. He was a little frog-mouthed bandy-legged man, as swarthy as a
Saracen, bad eyes and bad teeth and nothing about him that was beautiful. Except,”
she said, “he was. He would come into a room, and one would think, ‘What an
ugly little man!’ Then he would smile, and nothing in the world would matter,
except that he was happy. Everyone loved him. Even his enemies—they hated him
with sincere respect, and admired him profoundly. I was his enemy, in the
beginning. I was a hard proud cruel thing, exile by free choice from my own
country, sworn to make my way in the world, myself alone and with no other. He—he
wanted to protect me. ‘You are a woman,’ he said. As if that was all the reason
he needed.

“I hated him for that: He was so certain, and so
insufferable, mere mortal man before all that I was and had been. But he would
not yield for aught that I could do, and in the end, like all the rest, I fell under
his spell.”

“Or he under yours,” said Messire Giscard. “From the moment
he saw you, he was bewitched.”

“That was my face,” said Lys, “and no more. The rest grew as
I resisted him. He loved a fight, did Aymeric. We never surrendered, either of
us. To the day he died he was determined to protect me, as was I to resist him.”

Messire Giscard smiled, triumphant. “You see!” he said to Mère
Adele. “Still she resists. And yet, am I not her sole kinsman in this world?
Did not my brother entrust her to me? Shall I not carry out my promise that I
made as he was dying?”

“She doesn’t want you to,” said Mère Adele.

“Ah,” said Messire Giscard. “Bearing women—you know how they
are. She’s distraught; she grieves. As in truth she should. But she should be
thinking too of the baby, and of her lover’s wishes. He would never have
allowed her to tramp on foot across the width of Normandy , looking for God
knew what.”

“Looking for my kin,” said Lys. “I do have them, Giscard.
One of them even is a king.”

“What, the fairy king?” Giscard shook his head. “Mère Adele,
if you’ll believe it, she says that she’s the elf-king’s child.”

“I am,” said Lys, “his brother’s daughter.” And she looked
it, just then, with her white wild face. “You can’t shock them with that,
Giscard, or hope to prove me mad. They know. They live on the edge of his Wood.”

He leaned forward in his chair. All the brightness was gone,
all the sweet false seeming. He was as hard and cold and cruel as she. “So,” he
said. “So, Alys. Tell them the rest. Tell them what you did that made my
brother love you so.”

“What, that I was his whore?”

I looked at her and shivered. No, he could not be so hard,
or so cold, or so cruel. He was a human man. She . . .

She laughed. “That should be obvious to a blind man. Which
these,” she said, “are not. Neither blind, nor men, nor fools.”

“Do they know what else you are?” He was almost standing
over her. “Do they know that?”

“They could hardly avoid it,” she said, “knowing whose kin I
am.”

“If they believe you. If they don’t just humor the madwoman.”

“We believe her,” said Mère Adele. “Is that what you want?
To burn her for a witch?”

He crossed himself. “Sweet saints, no!”

“No,” said Lys. “He wants to use me. For what he thinks I
am. For what he believes I can do.”

“For what you can do,” he said. “I saw you. Up on the hill
at night, with stars in your hair. Dancing; and the moon came down and danced
at your side. And he watched, and clapped his hands like a child.” His face
twisted. “I would never have been so simple. I would have wielded you like a
sword.”

Lys was beyond speech. Mère Adele spoke dryly in her
silence. “I can see,” she said, “why she might be reluctant to consent to it.
Women are cursed enough by nature, weak and frail as all the wise men say they
are; and made, it’s said, for men’s use and little else. Sometimes they don’t
take kindly to it. It’s a flaw in them, I’m sure.”

“But a flaw that can be mended,” said Messire Giscard. “A
firm hand, a touch of the spur—but some gentleness, too. That’s what such a
woman needs.”

“It works for mares,” said Mère Adele. She stood up. I had
never seen her look as she did then, both smaller and larger than she was.
Smaller, because he was so big. Larger, because she managed, one way and another,
to tower over him. “We’ll think on what you’ve said. You’re welcome meanwhile
to the hospitality of our priory. We do ask you, of your courtesy, to refrain
from visiting the town. There’s been sickness in it; it’s not quite past.”

He agreed readily: so readily that I was hard put not to
laugh. He did not need to know that it was an autumn fever, a fret among the
children, and nothing to endanger any but the weakest. Sickness, that year,
spoke too clearly of the Death.

oOo

“That will hold him for awhile,” said Mère Adele when we
were back in safety again: inside Sency’s walls, under my new-thatched roof.
People walking by could lift a corner of it and look in, but I was not afraid
of that. Most were in their own houses, eating their dinner, or down in the
tavern drinking it.

We had finished our own, made rich with a joint from a
priory sheep. Perrin’s face was shiny with the grease. Even Francha had eaten
enough for once to keep a bird alive. She curled in her lady’s lap, thumb in
mouth, and drowsed, while we considered what to do.

“He won’t go where there’s sickness,” Mère Adele said, “but
I doubt he’ll go away. He wants you badly.”

Lys’ mouth twisted. “He wants my witchcraft. No more and no
less. If my body came with it—he’d not mind. But it’s my power he wants; or
what he fancies is my power.”

“Why?” I asked. “To make himself lord of Normandy?”

“Oh, no,” said Lys. “He’d never aim so high. Just to be a
better lord in Montsalvat. Just that. If later it should be more—if his good
angel should call him to greater glory—why then, would he be wise to refuse?”

“He’d burn for it,” said Mère Adele. “And you with him. They’re
not gentle now with witches.”

“Were they ever?” Lys combed Francha’s hair with her
fingers, smoothing out the tangles. “It’s worse in the south, in Provence,
where the Inquisition hunts the heretics still. But the north is hardly more
hospitable to such as I.”

“We’re northerners,” I said.

She glanced at me: a touch like a knife’s edge. “You live on
the edge of the Wood. That changes you.”

I shrugged. “I don’t feel different. Is the story true? That
your king was a mortal king once, in the western kingdom?”

“He was never mortal,” she said. “He was king of mortal men,
yes, for a hundred years and more. But in the end he left. It was no mercy for
his people, to be ruled by one who could never age nor die.”