The Wise Woman (18 page)

Hugh nodded. “Can you bear to eat it?” he asked.

Hugo laughed and took his knife up in reply. “Who will have a slice of my house?” he asked. “My pretty little house which I have drawn in an idle moment and then found these kitchen hounds stealing my papers and copying my dreams into sugar?”

“I will!” Eliza said invitingly.

Hugo threw her a smile.

“You would have a slice of anything of mine, Eliza,” he said. “You would beg for a lick, would you not?”

Eliza gave a little scream of protesting laughter. Hugo smiled at her and then switched the heat of his look to Alys. “Alys?” he asked. “Will you taste my pretty toy?”

She shook her head and slid back to the women’s table at the rear of the dais. When the others came back with their trenchers Eliza set a piece of the marchpane house before her.

“From him,” she said, nodding at the back of Hugo’s chair. “He served it for you under the nose of his wife. He has given you the front door. By—you’re playing a dangerous game, Alys.”

When the eating was done, and there was nothing on the tables but the voider course of dried fruit and hippocras wine, David stood behind the lord’s chair and called one man after another up to the dais for Lord Hugh to give him a gift or a purse of coins. Hugo sat at his father’s right hand, occasionally leaning forward with a word. Lady Catherine sat on Lord Hugh’s left, smiling her meaningless, small smile. She had given and received her gifts with her women on New Year’s Day and she had nothing for any of the castle servants nor for the soldiers. The line of servants and soldiers went on and on. There were a round four hundred of them. Alys, at the women’s table at the rear of the dais, unable to see, dozed after the revelry of the Christmas days and the sleepless fortnight which preceded them.

“It’s dull, this,” Eliza whispered mutinously to her. “Everywhere else does gifts on New Year’s Day. It’s only Lord Hugh who is too mean to gather everyone for a feast twice in the bad season!”

Alys nodded, uncaring.

“Let’s have another jug of wine!” Eliza suggested. She flapped her hand at a passing serving-wench. Margery frowned. “You’ll get drunk,” she said. “Alys is dazed-looking already.”

“I don’t care!” Eliza said. “It’s the last day of the feast. She won’t want us tonight. She’ll dress in her best nightgown and lie wakeful all night in her chamber in case the wine has roused Hugo’s lust.”

“Hush,” Ruth said with her usual caution.

Eliza giggled and poured from the new jug. “Maybe his Christmas gift to her is a decent tupping at last,” she whispered.

Margery and Mistress Allingham collapsed into scandalized laughter. Ruth shot an apprehensive backward look at their mistress. Alys sipped from her glass.

She liked the smell of wine. They had set glassware on the women’s table today in honor of the feast and Alys liked the feel of the cool glass against her lips. At Morach’s she had drunk from earthenware or horn, and in the castle she drank from pewter. She had not had the touch of glass against her lips since the nunnery. This wine tasted of itself, without a tang of ill-cleaned metal, the glassware was light and thin, appetizing. Alys sipped again. The drunkenness and the barbarity of the feast days had floated past her. No one had snatched her in a dark corner and tried for a kiss, she had danced with no one. The old lord watched for her, and when a soldier approached her for a dance, the old lord scowled at him and David waved him away. Lady Catherine smiled her thin smile at that and leaned back toward the women’s table.

“In the spring we will dance at your wedding, Alys,” she said, her voice acid-sweet. She glanced toward the young man who had gone back to his place. “That was Peter—a bastard son of one of Lord Hugo’s officers. He is the one I have chosen for you. Don’t you think I have chosen well?”

Alys looked down the hall toward him. He was well enough, slim, brown-haired, brown-eyed, young. She had seen him stab a knife into a dying dog at the bear-baiting. She had seen him screaming with excitement at the cock-fighting. She thought of what her life would be like as his wife, bound forever to a man with that perilous streak of excitement at the sight of pain.

“Very well, my lady,” she said. She smiled deceitfully into Lady Catherine’s face. “He seems a fine man. Has his father told him?”

“Yes,” Lady Catherine said. “We must persuade the old lord to find a proper clerk to replace you, and then you can be married. Maybe at Easter.”

“Very well,” Alys said softly and lowered her eyes to her plate so that Lady Catherine could not see the gleam of absolute refusal.

Alys sipped her wine again. All through the days of feasting and the nights of drunken games she had felt the young lord watching her. Lady Catherine watched her too. Alys rested the cold glass against her cheek. She had to break the net, the net that the three of them, the old lord, the young lord, and the shrew, had all cast around her. She had to take her power, she had to make the little dolls come alive and dance to her bidding.

Above the table—as it was Christmas—the waiting-women had pure wax candles in the candelabra. On the table was a silver candle-holder with pale, honey-colored candles. Alys watched the bobbing yellow flame and the pure transparency of the wax. There was the slightest hint of sweetness in the vapor. These were pure beeswax candles. A memory flickered to the surface of Alys’s mind and she winced as she realized that the candles would have been made by the nuns at the abbey with beeswax from the abbey hives.

Eliza poured more wine in her glass and she drank again.

In her purse tied on the girdle at her waist were the three candlewax dolls. They knocked against her gently when she moved. Alys had been tempted to fling them from her window down the steep side of the castle to smash against the rocks and tumble into the river below. It was death to be found carrying them and she was too afraid to hide them anywhere in the castle. She had not yet found the courage, or the desperation, to use them. She held to them like a talisman, like a final weapon which would be ready to her hand if their time ever came.

The tart cool taste of the clary wine flooded into her mouth and washed through her. I must be getting drunk, Alys thought to herself. All the voices seemed to come from a long way away, the faces around the table seemed to flicker in a haze.

“I wish…” Alys said thickly.

Eliza and Margery nudged each other and giggled.

“I wish I was Lady Catherine,” Alys slurred.

Ruth, the quiet one, glanced behind her to see that the two lords, watched by Lady Catherine, were still paying out gifts.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because…” Alys said slowly. “Because…” she stopped again. “I should like to have a horse of my own,” she said simply. “And a gown which was a new gown—not belonging to someone else. And a man…”

Eliza and Margery exploded with laughter. Even Ruth and Mistress Allingham tittered behind their hands.

“A man who left me alone,” Alys said slowly. “A man who was bound to me and wed to me, but a man who would leave me alone.”

“Not much of a wife you’ll make!” Eliza said, laughing. “Poor Peter will get short commons, I reckon.”

Alys had not heard her. “I want more than ordinary women,” she said sorrowfully. “I want so much more.”

All the women were laughing openly now. Alys, with her heavy gable hood sliding back off her mop-head of curls and her serious pale face, was exquisitely funny. Her deep blue eyes were staring unfocused at the candles. The young Lord Hugo, who now carried an awareness of Alys like a sixth sense, glanced back and took in the scene with one quick look.

“Your young clerk seems the worse for her wine,” he said softly to his father.

The old lord glanced back. David demanded his attention for another of the soldiers coming up for his gift.

“Get them to take her to her room,” he said briefly to the young lord. “Before she pukes on her gown and shames herself.”

Hugo nodded and pushed his chair back from the table. Lady Catherine had not heard the soft-voiced exchange and glanced up in surprise. “My father has an errand for me, I’ll only be a moment,” he said softly to her, and then he turned toward the women.

“Come, Alys,” he said firmly.

Alys looked up. Against the candlelight of the hall his face was shadowed. She could see the gleam of his smile. There was a ripple among the women like a flurry in a hen-coop when a fox gets in the door.

“I’ll escort you to my lady’s rooms,” he said firmly. “You.” He nodded at Eliza. “Come too.”

Alys got slowly to her feet. Magically the floor beneath her rolled and melted away. Lord Hugo caught her as she swayed forward and lifted her up. He nodded at Eliza, who drew back the tapestry and opened the little door at the back of the dais. They stepped out into the lobby behind the hall, and up the shallow stone steps to Lady Catherine’s rooms above. Eliza flung the door wide and Hugo strode into the gallery carrying Alys.

“I’ll give you a shilling to keep watch here and hold your tongue,” he said briefly to Eliza.

Her brown eyes were as large as saucers. “Yes, my lord,” she said.

“And if you gossip I shall have you whipped,” he said pleasantly. Eliza felt her knees melt at his smile.

“I swear it, my lord,” she said fervently. “I’d do anything for you.”

He nodded to her to open the door to the women’s chamber and she scuttled ahead of him and swung it open. He walked the length of the gallery carrying Alys easily. She opened her eyes and saw the moonlight from the window briefly illuminate his face and then they were in shadow again. He pushed open the door to the women’s room and laid Alys down on a pallet.

Without any haste, he pulled the pins from her hood and tossed it to one side. Alys fell back on the pillow, her face pale, her eyes closed. “I feel sick,” she said.

He rolled her to her side, skillfully unlacing her stomacher and the gown below it, so that when he rolled her on her back and lifted her legs and then her body to pull the gown over her head she was stripped down to her shift. Alys dropped back on the pallet, her arms above her head, her golden hair a tangle about her face. Lord Hugo sat back on his heels and scanned her, from her small dirty feet to her outflung hand. Alys snored lightly.

Lord Hugo pulled down his breeches with a little sigh and moved to cover her.

Alys’s dark eyes flew open as she felt the weight of him come down upon her and he readied himself to put a hand over her mouth to still her protesting scream; but her eyes, out of focus and hazy, were warm with welcome and she smiled.

“Hello, my love,” she said, as easily as if they had been wed for twenty years. “Not now, I am too sleepy. Love me in the morning.”

“Alys?”

She chuckled, the warm, confident sound of a woman who knows she is deeply beloved. “Not now, I said,” she repeated. “I am tired out with your wants, and your son’s wants. Let me sleep.” Her eyelids flickered shut and Hugo watched the lashes sweep her cheek.

“Do you know me?” he asked in confusion.

Alys smiled. “None better,” she said. She rolled on her side away from him and put her hand back toward him. In a gesture so familiar as to be unconscious, she felt for his hand and then pulled his arm around her and tucked his hand between the warm comfort of her thighs. Hugo, following the demanding tug of her small hands, snuggled up so that his body was cupped around hers. He could feel a deep ache of desire that he would normally have satisfied quickly and roughly on a woman whether she consented or not. But something about Alys’s drunken dream made him pause.

“How old are you, Alys?” he asked. “What year is it?”

“I’m near eighteen,” she said sleepily. “It’s 1538. What year did you think it was?”

Hugo said nothing, his mind whirling. Alys was dreaming of the future two years ahead. “How is my father?” he asked.

“Dead, nigh on twelve months ago,” Alys replied sleepily. “Go to sleep, Hugo.”

Her casual use of his Christian name brought him up short. “What of Lady Catherine?” he asked.

“Oh hush!” Alys said. “No one is to blame. She’s at peace at last. And we have all her lands for little Hugo. Go to sleep now.”

“I have a son?” Hugo demanded.

Alys sighed and turned away. Hugo, raising himself up on his elbow, looked down on her face and saw that she was deeply asleep. Gently he pulled his hand away from between her legs and saw a little flicker of regret cross her face. Then she turned deeper into the pillow and slept again.

He sat up on the pallet and put his head in his hands, trying to think soberly enough to understand. Either Alys was drunk beyond belief, dreaming some girl’s fantasy of him, or the wine had released in her some of her magic and she had spoken true. In two years’ time he would be the lord of Castleton, Catherine would be gone, and Alys would be his woman and the mother of his child.

He leaned forward and stirred up the fire so the light flickered in the little room. Alys’s clear, lovely profile gleamed in the half-light.

“What a son we would have!” he said softly. “What a son!”

He thought of the confident way she had tucked his hand between her legs, and her lazy command of loving in the morning, and he felt himself ache with desire again. For a moment he thought of taking her while she slept, without her consent; but then he paused.

For the first time in his life Hugo paused before taking his pleasure. She had given him a glimpse of a future which was luminous with satisfactions. She had given him a glimpse of a woman who was his equal, who desired him as he desired her. A woman who would plot and scheme alongside him, who had given him a son, and would give him more. He wanted Alys’s dream. He wanted that intimacy, he wanted to be on tender terms with her. More than anything else: he wanted her to give him a son.

He chuckled softly in the quietness of the room. He wanted her to call him Hugo, he wanted her to command his loving. He wanted to see her tired with the demands of his son, tired by his lust. Incredulously he looked toward her again. He would do nothing to spoil that promise between them, he thought. He would not force her, he would not frighten her. He wanted her as she was in that glimpse of the future: confident, sensual, amused. A woman of power, confident of her own power to command him, to rule her own life.