Paradise Red (14 page)

Outside, Laila pushes Brees into the great hall, still roofless. She tries to put the necklace on, but her fingers are shaking too much to fasten the clasp. Eventually she sits, holding the necklace tight. The moon appears from behind a cloud and the necklace winks at her, the rubies glistening like drops of blood. With a tiny cry Laila's hand flies to her mouth in sudden revulsion at what she has done. But the dragonfly is so beautiful. She
tosses it from hand to hand, sliding the silver scales over the curve of her chin. The weight and the even roll of the stones reassure her. She is not a bad person, she is just herself.

When she thinks an hour is up, she creeps back to the small hall. The door is still locked. Then she hears movement and, for the first time in her life, loses courage. She cannot keep the necklace and face Yolanda. Which is it to be? Almost without thinking, she begins to slide furtively away, like a burglar taking advantage of the dark. Seizing an abandoned cloak, she sets off for the postern gate and then stops. Her box of tricks is still in the small hall. Is she really going to leave that behind? She paces back and forth. Surely she can still look Yolanda in the eye. She can do anything. Yet she finds herself pushing the gate open and flicking her hair with too much self-conscious vigor. Then she finds her excuse. She has unfinished business with Aimery. For the moment, she decides with her own kind of bravado, she will focus exclusively on that.

Though the dawn chorus is long past, it is still dark in the small hall. It is also very cold because the fire has gone out. Two shapes are humped in the corner under the window.

Brees has been lying by his mistress since Hugh departed, forced out by the knowledge that an army without a commander very soon turns into a rabble. As he dressed, Hugh toyed with the idea of taking Yolanda with him and found strange how little thought he had given to what was to happen afterward before he came to Castelneuf. But now it was obvious. The battlefield would be no place for his wife, particularly not a battlefield on which Raimon and Aimery would be fighting. Yet he cannot force her to remain here or spare men to take her back to Carcassonne. So in the end he left her in God's hands—and Laila's, except that she was not lurking outside, as he expected. In the end, fretting about the time but unwilling to shout out Laila's name, he told Brees to keep good watch and sent the dog in.

And at first Brees was delighted, but when his mistress refused to move, he grew worried. Now he sits unhappily, his tongue furred from his own kind of hangover.

Yolanda is curled with her arms around her knees, the side of her face crammed so hard against a cushion that its creases line her cheeks. Her back is crushed against the wall, and the only things that occasionally twitch, quite involuntarily, are her toes. Whenever this happens, Brees looks hopeful. Perhaps she'll get up now?

She does not, and eventually a full bladder has Brees whining at the door. It does not open, so eventually he looses a stream against the table leg. It does not please him, but there is nothing else for him to do. And it has one effect. Eventually, Yolanda has to rise to answer a similar need of her own. She checks carefully that the room is empty before she stumbles to the small corner urinal and then locates her heap of clothes. Ignoring their dampness, she pulls them on and gets straight back under the wolf skin.

She can see nobody, speak to nobody. Most particularly she does not want to see or speak to Laila, because Laila will force her to remember and that she refuses to do. Her fists are clenched, and when they creep open, she clenches them again, tighter than before, as if they constituted some enormous bodily shield. When she can clench them no longer, she rises again, grabs a chair, and drags it to the water barrel, climbs up and plunges her head right in, soaking herself beyond her collar.

The water's icy skim is like sandpaper, filling her ears and scratching her neck. Nonetheless, she keeps her head dunked until she must gasp for breath. It has a momentary desired effect. When she pulls her head out, she can neither see nor hear anything. But as soon as the immediate hammer blow of cold subsides, shadowy memories seep in.

There is no pain, not anymore, there is just a sawing ache that doubles her up, and behind the ache there is shame and fear and the worst thing of all, a halo of taint. A few hours pass. Gui and Guerau knock on the door, at first just the normal greetings of the day, but then increasingly anxious and afraid. She speaks only to tell them that she is perfectly all right and that Laila is not with her. The postern gate was open, they say. Somebody has been in. She reassures them, sends Brees out, and tells them to leave her alone.

Just after noon, she longs more than anything for a bath, but she cannot have one without help, and for help she must go outside and find Laila, whose absence only now begins to concern Yolanda, except that her box of tricks is just where she left it, and she would surely go nowhere without that. Where is she, then? Another hour passes, and a tight band circles Yolanda's heart. “Where is she?” Surely Hugh has not hurt her as well. He wouldn't. “But he's just hurt me.” She cries silently. “He could do anything.”

“Perhaps she's gone to Sir Aimery at Montségur,” Gui suggests, when at last Yolanda emerges. “There was a closeness between them.”

“Why hasn't she waited for me? And why hasn't she taken her box?”

“Perhaps she heard that Sir Hugh's army is on the move, and she wants to get there before he does?” It sounds a feeble reason but at the mention of Hugh's name, Yolanda doubles up. “Hugh's not at Montségur,” she says, and Gui turns white as something of what has happened begins to dawn on him.

Yolanda straightens herself. “Hugh must have made her go,” she says without any further explanation. “He must have
threatened her.” She is determined to believe it. She'll believe anything of Hugh now.

She goes back to the small hall and locks the door again, but then, agitated, reemerges to demand that they ask the huntsman if he will help her empty the dog meal from the old leather tub that her father had made for campaigns he never fought and drag it into the hall. They manage, with some difficulty, and with Gui and Guerau banking up the fire, Yolanda throws herself wildly into the task of pumping water to heat. Only when every available pan, jug, and bucket is lodged in the hearth and the bath steaming and filled to the brim is she satisfied. Gui and Guerau exchange glances as she pushes them out. Before she closes the door, Gui lays a hand on her arm. She jumps back and slaps him smartly across the cheek. He gasps. She cringes. “Oh, God!” she cries, then, “go away! Please just go away!” They back off, their faces ashen.

When Yolanda has locked the door again, she pulls off her clothes and without looking at any part of herself climbs heavily into the bath and lies down. The leather feels scratchy against her back and the tub is not quite long enough, so her knees stick up. The water should soothe, but at first it jangles, and she cannot bear it seeping through every pore, reminding her in its insidious way that some barrier within her has been broken, not just the physical barrier that her friend Beatrice once told her about in breathless detail, but some other barrier, much more intensely personal. From the breach, she feels everything beautiful about her is leaking away, leaving only a dried up and desiccated shell. Terrified, she touches her lips to make sure they have not disappeared, as old women's do.

The rim of the bath digs into her neck, but now the water
is her friend and she wants to stay in this brown pool forever. Her reflection makes and unmakes itself and she stares at it as if she has never seen herself before.

Brees sits beside the bath, occasionally sticking his tongue in. The warmth of the water, with its faint tang of Yolanda, intrigues him. He gets a terrible fright when she suddenly leaps out and flashes white across the room, her feet marking a wet trail. She has gone only to grab a small blanket, and this time, when she leaps back into the bath, she attacks her legs and thighs, pummeling them, gouging them, to remove any last trace of Hugh. She goes over every inch of skin in meticulous detail: the back of her neck, behind her knees, her nails, the palms of her hands, and between her toes. She dunks her head again and again, pulling at her hair, raking her fingers across her scalp. Finally, she turns to her stomach and by the time she is finished, it is scraped raw as a burned pan, but she is triumphant. No des Arcis son could lodge in there now.

She uses the remaining jugs to rinse and after that the water is disgusting to her, so she climbs out and lets the fire dry her, raising her arms and turning around like a joint on a spit. She gets as close to the flames as she can bear, drawing away just before her skin scorches. Brees whines his concern, but the scorching, too, is part of the cleansing process. Eventually she lights a torch and rummages through Laila's halfsewn garments, choosing not a dress but a loose tunic and some trousers that remind her of pictures of people from the east she once saw in a book. The colors are inappropriately gaudy but she hardly notices. Lastly she finds knitted leggings and hard-soled boots that have obviously been stolen from the visitors. No matter. She tugs them on. Her own clothes,
the wet blanket, and all the other bedcovers, except for the wolf skin, she burns. The smell is vile and the smoke billows, yellow and greasy. She runs from it. Brees presses close to her until they get outside, then hunger makes him head for the kennels. She follows him for three paces and then stops. She has cleansed her body and before she speaks to anybody again, she wants to cleanse her mind.

She stands quite still and forces herself to remember exactly what happened. Does that seem strange to you? It does not to me, for Yolanda knows instinctively that every time she relives her ordeal, it will lose a little of its potency. Only familiarity can rob nightmares of both their poison and their disconcerting ability to creep up unawares. However, though Yolanda takes a deep breath and braces herself, detailed memories elude her. The drugged wine Laila gave her, such a disabling enemy when Hugh arrived, now turns friend. All she can remember is Hugh's shadow, his weight, and a long quaking shudder that might have been him or might have been her. Beyond that, nothing. She does not know whether to be grateful or not.

The troubadours approach tentatively. Her finger marks are still red across Gui's cheek. “Can you help me empty the bath?” she asks.

“We've already done it,” they reply. She blinks. She had no idea she has been standing still for so long. The troubadours say nothing more, only guide her to the kennels and sit with her in Farvel's empty stall until, much later on, amid the normality of the hounds' routine, she decalcifies like a melting stone and becomes Yolanda again. They tend her as carefully as a mother, never touching her, always announcing their
presence, asking no questions, making no demands. She feels safer here and does not return to the small hall.

Some days later, early in the morning, the huntsman smiles at her and places in her lap three mewling newborn hound puppies. At first she glares at them with dread, Hugh's demand for a son rattling in her ears. Puppies! And what if? What if? She shakes her head and cannot speak.

The huntsman is not abashed. “Farvel's offspring,” he says in his careful way, “and the start of a new pack.” His eyes are bright. This is nature's answer to loss. Farvel's stall must belong to others now.

“There'll be no need of a new pack here,” Yolanda says in a low voice.

“No new pack?”

“No. You must know that it's all finished for us. Aimery's gone and Raimon's gone. They're not coming back.”

“Is that right?” says the huntsman.

One of the puppies begins to scramble blindly up Yolanda's tunic, and she sits without moving until its paws paddle with increasing desperation and finally, to stop it from falling, she has to put out a hand. Brees takes a fatherly interest, and as more puppies arrive, Yolanda forgets her dread in the pleasure of seeing them wriggle and hearing the dogboys squeal with delight. The huntsman is right about one thing. There will be a new pack.

A week later, she is restless. “I'm going down into the town,” she says. “We need to know who's left.”

“You're not going back to Carcassonne, then?” Guerau asks. He is balancing four brindle bitches on his bull-like chest, and enjoying the jealousy that Gui, on whose chest only two puppies can fit, is trying unsuccessfully to conceal.

“No. Never.”

“Nor to Montségur?”

She hesitates. “Do you think that's really where Laila went?”

“I don't know where else she'd have gone,” Gui says, plucking up a tricolored puppy and allowing it to bite his ear. “She'll be after Sir Aimery, though. Those two are as thick as thieves.”

Yolanda does not want Aimery to know what has happened to her. She leans down and returns one of Guerau's puppies to its mother. “I don't know what good I could do at Montségur, and anyway, I've no horse.”

“No,” the huntsman says, “although the charcoal burner's got a sorrel on the other side of the valley.”

Yolanda shakes her head. Her desire to go into the town dissolves. She can decide on nothing.

In the end, as so often happens, something is decided for her. Six weeks after Hugh's visit, heralded by a muted chorus of bells and ritualistic chanting, a group of three inquisitors finally wends its way slowly up the disintegrating road to the chateau. After the snow, they spent Easter at Mirepoix before traveling farther south, and because producing a trail of smoke, human ashes, and misery takes time and effort, they are tired. Moreover, having been led to believe that the chateau would be rich hunting grounds for Saviors of Souls such as themselves, their exhaustion is compounded by the disappointment of learning that only a girl, two troubadours, a huntsman, and some ridiculous dogboys are in residence. All that stony way just for this thin haul? These straight-backed, hollow-faced men of God feel a sense of anger on their redeemer's behalf. Where are all the heretics? They chant more loudly, as if this might draw out sin as venom is drawn from a snake.