The Wise Woman (10 page)

“But you could make someone fall in love?” asked the young woman called Margery. Unconsciously her eyes rested on the young Lord Hugo. “You have love potions and herbs which stir desire, don’t you?”

Alys was suddenly weary. “There are herbs to stir desire, but nothing can change what a man thinks. I could make a man hot enough to lie with a woman—but I couldn’t make him like her after he had taken his pleasure.”

Eliza Herring went off into hoots of laughter. “You’d be no further on then, Margery!” she said delightedly. “For he has lain with you a score of times and despised you each time until he feels the itch again.”

“Hush, hush!” said the fourth woman desperately. “She’ll hear! You know how she listens!”

A servant came to each of them and poured them ale. Alys looked toward the lord’s table. In the clear light of the wax candles she could see the shine on the silver plates. The napery was white linen, unmarked by any blemish. They were drinking wine from glassware. Alys found she was snuffing at the air, breathing in the smell of clean burning wax, clean linen, good food. It reminded her of the abbey and of the overwhelming hunger she had felt when she first saw the cleanness of it, and the order. She had been a half-starved child—she would have worked at the abbey for the garbage from the kitchens alone. She had been cold all her childhood, she had worn wooden clogs, no stockings or hose for her feet. All winter her feet were blue with cold except for where they were blood-red with chilblains. When she had seen the fires in the abbey and the thick woolen robes and the good leather boots she had longed for them, as only the cold and the hungry can long. And more than anything else she was a child who hungered for affection. Morach’s protection, her gruff sharing of her wisdom were not enough. Alys wanted a mother to love her—and in the abbess she found a woman with a deep love for all her novices, and the wisdom and courage to express it. And Alys had been the abbess’s favorite—as beloved as a daughter. Nothing was too good for her. Then the statue of Our Lady had smiled on her, confirming her desire to be there, sanctifying Alys’s need for comfort, for food, for love. Alys felt herself blessed in her calling, in a holy place, in a state of grace.

She bowed her head over her plate to hide her face twisted with disappointment. She had lost everything in one night: her faith, her friends, her chance of wealth and comfort, and a life for herself. Alys could have risen to the highest office in the abbey, she could have been Reverend Mother herself one day. But then in one single night it was all gone. Now she was on the outside looking in, again. She had lost her future—and her mother too. Alys forced herself not to think of Mother Hildebrande and shame herself before them all by weeping for loneliness and loss at the dinner-table.

The lords’ table was served with fillets of salmon and salad of parsley, sage, leeks, and garlic. Alys watched them as they were served. The greens were fresh, from the kitchen garden she guessed. The salmon was as pink as a wild rose. It would have been netted in the Greta this morning. Alys felt the water rush into her mouth as she looked at the pale succulent flesh, shiny with butter. A serving-lad shoved a trencher of bread before her spread thickly with paste of meat sweetened with honey and almonds, and his fellow poured more ale into Alys’s goblet.

Alys shook her head. “I’m not hungry,” she said. “I want to rest.”

Eliza Herring shook her head. “You may not leave the table until Father Stephen has said grace,” she said. “And until the lords and my lady have left. And then you must pour your mess into the almoner’s bowl for the poor.”

“They eat the scraps from the table?” Alys asked.

“They are glad of it,” Eliza said sharply. “Didn’t you give to the poor in Penrith?”

Alys thought of the carefully measured portions of the nuns. “We gave whole loaves,” she said. “And sometimes a barrel of meat. We fed anyone who called at the kitchen door. We did not give them our leavings.”

Eliza raised her plucked eyebrows in surprise. “Not very charitable!” she said. “My Lord Hugh’s almoner goes around the poorhouses with the bowl once a day, at breakfast-time, with the scraps from the dinner and supper table.”

The priest, seated at the head of the table below the dais, rose to his feet and prayed in a clear, penetrating voice in perfect Latin. Then he repeated the prayer again in English. Alys listened carefully; she had never heard God addressed in English before, it sounded like blasphemy—a dreadful insult to speak to God as if he were a neighboring farmer, in ordinary words. But she kept her face steady, crossed herself only when the others did so, and rose to her feet as they did.

Lady Catherine, the old lord, and the young lord all turned toward the door beside the waiting-women’s table.

“What a lovely gown you have,” Lady Catherine said to Alys, as if she had just noticed it. Her voice was friendly but her eyes were cold.

“Lord Hugh gave it me,” Alys said steadily. She met Lady Catherine’s gaze without flinching. I could hate you, she thought.

“You are too generous, my lord,” Lady Catherine said, smiling.

Lord Hugh grunted. “She’ll be a pretty wench when her hair is grown,” he said. “You’ll have to take her into your rooms, Catherine. She did well enough sleeping by me when I was sick. If she is to stay, she’d best have a bed with your women.”

Lady Catherine nodded. “Of course, my lord,” she said pleasantly. “Whatever you command. But if I had known you needed a clerk I could have written your letters for you. I daresay my Latin is a little better than this…this girl’s.” She gave a light laugh.

Lord Hugh shot a dark look at her from under his white eyebrows. “I daresay,” he said. “But not all my letters are fit for a lady to read. And all of it is my own business.”

Two light spots of color appeared on Lady Catherine’s cheeks. “Of course, my lord,” she said. “I only hope the girl can serve you.”

“Come to my room now,” the old lord said to Alys. “Come, I’ll lean on you.”

He gestured Alys to his side and she stepped before Lady Catherine. She felt the woman’s resentment like a draft of cold air behind her. She held still a shiver which seemed to walk from the base of her spine up to the cropped, cold nape of her neck. Then Lord Hugh’s heavy hand came comfortably on her shoulder and he leaned on her as she led him from the great hall, across the lobby behind it, and up to his room in the round tower.

He did not let her go until the door was shut behind them.

“Now then,” he said. “You’ve seen the she-dog, my daughter-in-law, and you’ve seen my son. D’you see now why I let you meet no one, why my food is tasted?”

“You mistrust her,” Alys said.

“Damned right,” the old lord said with a grunt. He slumped into the heavy carved chair at the fireplace. “I mistrust them both. I mistrust them all. I’m cold,” he said fretfully. “Fetch me a rug, Alys.”

Alys took one of the fur-lined rugs from the bed and tucked it around his shoulders.

“You have to sleep with her women,” he said abruptly. “I can’t keep you here, it would make matters worse for you if they thought you were my whore. But you will keep your mouth shut about me and my business.”

Alys fixed her dark blue eyes on him and nodded.

“And you will remember that it was I that sent for you, that it is I who command here, and that until I am dead you will be
my
clerk and servant and none other. My spy too,” he said abruptly. “You can listen to her ladyship and tell me what she says of me, what she plans. And Hugo.”

“And if I refuse?” Alys asked, her voice so soft that he could not take offense.

“You cannot refuse,” he said. “You either consent to be my clerk, my spy, my cunning woman, and my healer—or else I shall have you strangled and dumped in the moat. It’s your choice.” He smiled wickedly. “A free choice, Alys, I won’t constrain you.”

Alys’s pale lovely face was as calm as a river on a sunny still day in June. “I consent,” she said easily. “I will serve you in all that I
can
do—for I cannot make spells. And I will tell no one your business.”

The old lord looked hard at her. “Good,” he said.

A
lys’s knowledge of Latin was tested to its full extent by the letters the old lord sent all around England. He was seeking advice on how an annulment of Hugo’s and Catherine’s marriage would be greeted by his family, and by her distant kin. He suggested that she and Hugo—as second cousins—were in too close kinship, and that was why their marriage was barren, and should—“perhaps,” “possibly,” “mayhap”—be annulled. His letters were a masterpiece of vague suggestion. Alys translated, and then translated again to hit upon the right tone of cautious inquiry. He was measuring the opposition he would face from his peers and rivals, and from the law.

He was also preparing his allies and his friends for his own death, smoothing the way for his son. He sent two very secret letters by special messenger to his “beloved cousins” at Richmond Castle and York, commanding them to act if his death was sudden, if it looked like an accident, or if it had been caused by an illness which could be blamed on poisoning. He commanded them to seek evidence against his son’s wife; and he implored them to have her tried and executed if any evidence could be found or fabricated which pointed to her. He cast the darkest suspicions on her plans and on her feelings toward him.

If (as a possibility only he mentioned it to them), if the crime pointed to his son—they should ignore it. The inheritance of Hugo was more important than revenge, and besides, he would be dead by then and they would have no thanks from him. Alys, her eyes never lifting from the pages before her, realized that Catherine executed for murder was disposed of as neatly, and indeed more cheaply, than Catherine set aside for barrenness. The old lord would not have died in vain if his death could be blamed on his daughter-in-law, his son set free to marry again, and a new Hugh born into the family.

Alys bent her cropped head over her writing as he dictated, and tried to translate blind and deaf, working without taking in the sense of what he was saying, scenting the dangers which surrounded him—and her with him—like a hare senses the hounds and cowers low. She learned for the first time that the land was ruled by a network of conniving, conspiring landlords answerable only to each other and to the king himself. Each of them had one ambition only: to retain and improve the wealth and power of his family; and that could only be done by expanding the boundaries of their manors—and willing it intact to the next heir and the heir after him.

Alys, her quill pen scratching on the downstrokes on the good-quality vellum, realized that the conception of Hugo’s son, the old lord’s grandson, was not a personal matter between Hugo and his shrewish wife, not even a family matter between the old lord and his son. It was a financial matter, a political matter. If Hugo inherited and then died childless the lordship of Castleton would be vacant, the manors would be broken up among buyers, the family history and crest revert to the king and be sold to the highest bidder, and the great northern family would fall, its history at an end, its name forgotten. Someone else would live in the castle and claim castle, crest, and even family history for their own. For Lord Hugh that prospect was the deepest terror in the world; another family in his place would deny that he had ever been. Alys heard his fear in every line he dictated.

He wrote also to the court. He had a hoard of treasure from Alys’s wrecked abbey to be sent south as a gift for the king. The inventory Alys translated was a masterpiece of sleight of hand, as gold candlesticks were renamed silver or even brass, and heavy gold plates disappeared from the list. “We did the work, after all, Alys,” he said to her one day. “It was my Hugo that wrecked the abbey, doing the king’s work with patriotic zeal. We deserve our share.”

Alys, listing the silver and the gold which she had polished and handled, remembering the shape of the silver chalice against the white of the altar cloth and the sweet sacred taste of the communion wine, ducked her head and continued writing.

If I do not escape from here, I shall go mad, she thought.

“It went wrong at the nunnery,” Lord Hugh said one day. His voice held only faint regret. “The king’s visitors told us that the nuns were corrupt and Father Stephen and Hugo went to see the old abbess and persuade her to pay fines and mend her ways. Everywhere else they had been, the nuns or the monks had handed over their treasures, confessed their faults, and Hugo used them kindly. But the old abbess was a staunch papist. I don’t believe she ever recognized the king’s right to set aside the Dowager Princess Catherine of Aragon.” Lord Hugh said the title carefully. He had called her Queen Catherine for eighteen years and he was careful not to make a slip even when Alys was his only listener. “She took the oath to acknowledge Queen Anne but I am not sure how deep it went with her.”

He paused. “She would not discuss her faith with Father Stephen, not even when he charged her with laxity and abuses. She called him an ambitious young puppy.” Lord Hugh snorted in reluctant amusement. “She insulted him and faced him down and threw them both out—my Hugo and Father Stephen. They came home like scolded boys. She was a rare woman, that abbess.” He chuckled. “I’d have liked to meet her. It’s a shame it all went wrong and she died.”

“How did it go all wrong at the nunnery?” Alys asked. She was careful to keep her voice light, casual.

“Hugo was drunk,” the old lord said. “He was on his way home with the soldiers, they had been chasing a band of moss-troopers for seven days up and down the dales. He was drunk and playful and the men had been fighting mad for too long, and drunk with stolen ale. They made a fire to keep them warm and give them light to pick over the treasures. They were taking up a fine, it was all legal—or near enough. Father Stephen would not meet them to reason with the nuns, he was still angry with the old woman. He sent a message to Hugo and told him to burn her out—and be damned to her. The soldiers wanted a frolic and some of them thought they were doing Father Stephen’s wish. They made the fire too near the hay barn, and then the place caught afire and the women all died. A bad business.”