The Ghosts of Kerfol (2 page)

And?

“Never mind, now.” She brushed flour off her hands. “Here, take over the bread making. I’ve too much else to do.”

She showed me how to tend the great hearth and slip spongy loaves into the brick wells with a long-handled shovel. She drew out a golden loaf and flicked it with a fingernail, as if I’d never before baked bread. “Hear that? Nice and crisp. Stack them in that oak cupboard, and whatever you do, don’t let the fire go out, or we’ll have to send to the farmer’s wife for coals. No time for that today.”

Soon I’d exceeded my order of twenty loaves, swept up the flour, and resorted to thumbing through copies of
A New Booke of Cookery
and
The Accomplished Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery,
though I learned their titles only a good deal later. The books’ black type swam in my brain like minnows when the tide turns, but the pictures pleased me, almost as much as the smells that day.

My nose became a hound’s, heroic in its efforts to identify and classify. Whenever someone with a friendly face went by with a pot or platter, my eyes begged,
What’s in there?
One pock-faced runt even took pity, barking like a harassed innkeeper when he passed: “Shoulder of mutton with oysters,” or “Venison pasty with cherries and crème.”

Once the family and guests were served and the plates cleared, more and more sweet things passed and plagued me in my idleness: countess cakes and egg pie, apple cream and orange pudding.
How could all this be,
I thought stubbornly,
and not be mine?

How indeed.

“You are thin enough,” Maria said as if reading my mind, striding past with gingerbread and a pitcher of clotted cream. “But you’ll get thinner.”

“You’re not so thin,” I teased when she returned from the main dining room empty-handed.

“I take a lion’s share of pride in the fact that I keep a woman’s figure,” she boasted, “on the scraps I’m fed.” She thrust out her not insubstantial chest just as Youen entered with a cider cask on his shoulder. Once he’d passed, stony-faced, we covered our mouths, stooping, and laughed uproariously into our palms.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” Maria said then, smoothing her apron, and for the first time since my parents had sold me into service, I was glad, too. I let my mind wander out after Youen and his copper-colored hair. I’d never seen such hair before, only heard about it in Grand-mère’s stories.

Not ten minutes later, Maria’s slap stung my knuckles. Worse yet, it made me drop the macaroon I’d filched from a passing tray. The treat lay steaming an instant in the kitchen hay before a hen rushed out to peck at it. My mouth watered, and I looked away before my eyes did, too, thinking, Wasn’t it a puzzle? I’d grown up among peasants, yet it took a great house to teach me hunger.

“
Where
are your wits?” she accused.

“I thought just a taste—” My voice sounded small in the bustle, a very different bustle from the one back home. Here all were quiet as they went about their chores, and they were skin and bones except Maria, every one. “There’s so . . . much.”

“So much?” Maria’s brows arched. “And every crumb’s accounted for. You risk worse than a whipping, stealing from the baron’s pantry.”

They were foolish words but rolled out of my mouth before I could stop them: “It was nothing.”

Maria was our mother hen, our gossip in that house of horrors, our good captain, though I didn’t know it then. On that day, my first at Kerfol, I thought her a scold. She peered close, astonished or nearsighted or both. “Here we call it
stealing,
Mooncalf. We take our meals when
he
wills it.”

I looked down at my dusty clogs, picturing the flawless new pair Papa had crafted for me, the gift that came with his parting smile.
For you, Chicken. Lest you shame me in the baron’s chapel on Sundays.
“Yes, I’ll grant I’m distracted today.” The shoes were safe in my hemp sack, together with spare bonnets and a feather from the little bird Grand-mère had stolen from its mother’s nest in spring: Percy, who sang in his cage of sticks and twine. Missing them, all of them, would be another sort of hunger. “Though I hope to grow wise soon,” I added dutifully.

“Hear me, then.” Maria leaned closer still, too close for my liking, and for the first time that day I really looked into her eyes. What I saw there surprised me, concealed in her otherwise brisk aspect. Was it terror? Sadness? I know not, but it cowed me. “Keep your hands to yourself,” she warned, “and your eyes on me. Do as I do.”

I held my breath, ashamed of my ignorance.

“Do only that.”

I nodded, exhaling as she moved away.

Maria opened the pantry door and spat through it into the dust. “A taste,” she mimicked. “Ha.” She shut the door, and to soothe the mood between us, I opened it again, spat in my turn, and shrugged.

“You said to do as you do.”

A smile bloomed on her stern face. “Good girl,” Maria said, and tweaked my chin.

My first sight of Milady should have confirmed all.

She wasn’t slight so much as wasted, over-lean and luminous like the nymph of a young beech tree with a head of crow’s gloss. The black hair was pulled back severely from her face, pinned with elaborate lacquered combs for an exotic look. All told, she looked at the edge of health somehow — balanced, I would learn, on the blade of her own hunger.

When the mistress came into the kitchen, fanning herself with silk, Maria did a little mincing curtsey and dragged me over by the hand. “Here’s Perrette, Milady, your new chambermaid. She arrived last evening, but too late to greet you.”

The lady surveyed me, took my chin almost roughly — there was more strength in those slender hands than I might have guessed — moved my face this way and that, and her cool expression warmed. She set loose my jaw and held out her ringed hand. I stared in grateful, bovine fashion at the creamy knuckles.

“Kiss it,” Maria hissed close to my ear, then straightened up to plead, “She’s had no practice, Milady. Today is her first in service.”

The mistress revoked the hand with a bemused smile, reaching out to brush stray hair from my eyes. “Pretty thing.” Her voice was thin and absent, and she lowered it in a thrilling way, as if we had a secret. “Take your ease. I am happy today.”

She turned to Maria. “Sire would have more cider for the table. Send Perrette. You and Cook may feed the others.”

My stomach pitched as the lady glided away in a rustle of satin and Maria thrust a jug of cider at me, urging, “Don’t put your arm over their plates while you pour.”

Youen and several others were already gathering at the servants’ table as I passed. Oddly, there were no dogs beneath in the straw, ready for what morsels might come. What French table had no dog under it? I wondered as that little group eyed me.

I was a spectacle, it would seem, poised at what felt to be the edge of fate on that threshold, frozen ridiculously to the floor. But I had to wait till my hand stopped shaking lest I spill. I peeked round and glimpsed the huge chimneypiece strung with firearms, bows, hunting horns, and antlers hooked with whips and leashes.

Sire had shouted orders from his horse that morning, so I recognized in the low, manly murmur out there my new master’s voice, lamenting. With the harvest near, the women in his manor and village were waging a constant war on moles.
You are one of those women now,
I told myself. Breathing deep, I ducked in and was dazzled — as one who dives into fast-moving water is dazzled — by the roaring hearth fire reflected in pewter and green glass, copper and leather gilding. Every shelf was lined with fine things that glimmered. The sideboard groaned under cold heaps of lamb pie and homemade sausage, roast carp, plover, and wood pigeon: the greasy remains of the array that had crisscrossed under my nose all day.

I inched my way around the long table, pausing at each indifferent elbow as Sire and the visiting noble compared apple-planting methods. They spoke of manure, of scraping moss and cutting suckers, of whether ants were better repelled by pepper or by sand. They spoke of their pleasure in the ripening crop.

The party reclined in large cushioned oak chairs, with Sire at the head, and the only items left on the table were the saltcellar, spoons, wineglasses, and cider mugs. I poured carefully and well, my hand trembling only just.

“Now to mend the barrels, yes, Yves?” said the visiting noble, who went on to boast that he was a high priest of the Norman apple cult. It mustn’t be so easy, he hinted, nor profitable, to plant the beauties in Brittany when Norman soil suited them better.

Even I knew the two patriarchs were sparring, and the others at the table held vague faces, sipping and smiling. Then a voice I hadn’t heard before sounded. Strong, yet youthful, this voice had the gravity of an angel’s. Not some silly cupid, I thought, but the sort that steps from behind a tree to cast its shadow o’er you while you toil in the fields, one of the fearsome archangels from Grand-mère’s Bible tellings. What left his lips rang with prophecy, tender and merciful, but also fiercely irrefutable. The words themselves were playful, of little consequence — spoken with the air of one roused from boredom — but each left an echo.

He told how he had grown up hanging like a monkey from his father’s apple trees. “I’ve traveled the world,” he boasted, “but have loved no place better than my father’s orchard in moonlight.”

I stole a look at him in the shadows down the table and had to catch my breath, for he was staring straight at the mistress of the house while he spoke these sentimental words. “The trees,” he said, “look like dancing girls then, their silvery hair thrown forward.” It was the noble’s son, I realized, Hervé de Lanrivain. It had to be. Besides Milady, there were no others under thirty-count in the room.

The silence fast grew oppressive, so I hastened to fill every mug as the noble cleared his throat, jesting that his impudent son would sooner soldier or spout poetry than govern or grow so much as a weed.

A strange new mood had seized the party, I realized, with Milady at its center. Blameless, yet blamed somehow, her eyes fixed firmly on ringed hands lying flat as submissive dogs on the table. The silence said so. “Why not walk your guests out among the apple trees then, husband?” she soothed. “Show them your pride.”

Sire grunted in assent, and, following her suit, the gentlemen rose as one.

I think I did not take in air till I rounded the corner, and then with such incredulous gasping that every servant at the long kitchen table must have heard.

Mercy.

I’ll never know what transpired in the orchard. Maria took me by the shoulders, guided me to a free chair, and the roiling energy at that crowded table absorbed me. “
Now,
” she said, “you may eat.”

Cook spooned pottage with turnips into my bowl, grinning beneficently, and some two dozen servants mastered a smile at my expense.

Only this?

They did not linger long on my misfortune, and in spite of it, I ate gratefully. Everyone spoke at once, conspiring to educate me. “First, she’ll try to make you her own handmaiden,” one upstairs girl advised, “but he won’t have it, and you’ll end up in the laundry till she no longer pines for you. Then Sire will let you back in to change the beds again. But by this time, your hands are already ruined from the lye.” The party laughed, and my face colored, though I didn’t mind their attentions overmuch. There was comfort in the teasing, a hint of home.

Youen, who’d cleared his bowl and leaned back easily with an arm on his neighbor’s chair, winked at me across the table. It was a brotherly wink as much as to say,
This will all make sense in time,
but it reminded me of our morning encounter in the barn. This time I winked back.

With a swift, secret smile, he stood and walked his plate to the washbasin.

The others continued to gossip over wooden bowls with Youen at the door keeping watch, and I learned that the baron and his wife were childless and without personal attendants. Sire trusted no one enough to be his
laquais,
Cook said. His cross-eyed farmer, Symonette, was the closest he had to an attendant, and he’d suffer no cultured hands but his own to touch his wife, even a handmaiden’s. Only unsmiling peasants like Guillemette were permitted to attend her, though the lady would have given much for a companion to sing and sketch with by the fireside.

Later, as we scrubbed the meat grease off the iron pots with sand, Maria said, “He’s less given to gloomy silences since she came.”

“Who?” My mind had strayed back to the Red Boy, Youen.

Maria went on as if she hadn’t heard. “He’s less harsh with his tenants. But I doubt
she’s
happy.”

I elbowed her out of her reverie. “Who will know?” I asked, dipping my finger into the dregs of a pudding.

Once more Maria reached out, though she did not slap my hand this time, only caught my wrist and held it fast. She leaned close and whispered, “The walls have eyes. They have ears, too. And don’t forget it.”

The eyes were his.

The ears were his.

The baron was of hard, squat build with a sharp silver beard. He was a great horseman and hunter, though like many wealthy nobles, he spent his days managing the estate, superintending the harvest, and holding court. When he could, he liked to tend his apple trees, Youen explained.

Though I knew few of the particulars of their marriage until later — at the trial toward which my whole young life now craned — I learned that sixty-seven-year-old Yves de Cornault, lord of the domain of Kerfol, had met young Anne de Barrigan of Douarnenez at Locronan the previous spring. A day later he’d sent his steward, and mules heaped with gifts. The following week Yves de Cornault announced to his vassals and tenants that he would marry Anne de Barrigan at All Saints’ Day, which he did, with fanfare.

I considered this abrupt courtship as I roved the upstairs rooms the next day. Guillemette and the other upstairs girls, whose ranks I now joined, seemed pale as fish bellies compared to Maria and Cook, who tended the kitchen garden, fed the hens, and sometimes worked the fields; as such, they were the only female staff besides the farmer’s wife who seemed to see the sun. The upstairs girls — hardly “girls,” most of them — stalked about on stooped frames and sniffed like rabbits at the slightest provocation, or moved slowly, like figures underwater.