The Wise Woman (19 page)

He threw a rug over her and she did not stir. He leaned over and gently put a kiss on the smooth curve of her neck, just below her ear. The smell of her skin stirred him again. He chuckled. “My lady Alys,” he said softly. Then he got to his feet and walked out of the room.

Eliza was hovering at the doorway, her round face bright with excitement.

“All quiet, my lord,” she said. “Aren’t you having her? Don’t you want her now?”

Lord Hugo shot a quick look down the steps to the great chamber beneath them.

“Lift your skirts,” he said tersely.

Eliza’s mouth made a little round “oh” of surprise. “My lord…” she said in a delighted half-protest. He took her gown in one hard hand and wrenched it up to her waist. He backed her against the stone wall and rammed himself into her. Eliza screamed with the sharp pain of it and he at once clapped a hand over her mouth and hissed, “Fool! D’you want half the castle here?”

Above his hand Eliza’s eyes bulged at him imploringly. He thrust into her three, four times, and then he froze, his eyes tight shut, his mouth grim in a spasm of release which felt like anger.

Eliza gasped with discomfort as he released her, and staggered to one side, holding her bruised throat and mopping her gown against her crotch.

Hugo reached into his pocket and threw her a couple of silver coins. “You’ll keep quiet about that too,” he said. He turned his back on her and sauntered across the gallery and down the steps to the great hall.

She went to the doorway and watched him go down the stairs and pause in the lobby, straightening his clothes, and then she saw his shoulders go back and his smile appear as he opened the door to the dais and went back to sit with his father and his wife.

“God curse you, Hugo,” she said under her breath. She flinched with discomfort and turned toward the women’s room. “A new gown half ruined, half strangled, and tupped for a shilling,” she said miserably to herself. She hunkered down on her pallet and looked across at Alys who lay, still sleeping, as Hugo had left her.

“And all because that damned jade hexed you into losing your manhood with her,” she muttered grimly. “I saw you, you poxy bastard. I saw you lie beside her and stick your finger in and dare do no more while she muttered spells against you and all your family. And then you stick your cock in me! Damn you,” she grumbled, stripping off her gown and pulling a rug over herself. “Pox-ridden bastard.”

Alys turned over in her sleep, her hand stretched out, seeking him. “My love,” she said very softly.

Alys was sick the next day, heavy-eyed, white-faced, poisoned with the wine. She would eat nothing and would drink only water. Indeed, the whole castle, from Hugo down to the poorest scullion, had drunk better than they had drunk all year and were paying the price.

It was not until after dinner that any of the women felt better. Then Lady Catherine commanded them to sit in the gallery and sew while she spun. Alys was ordered to read aloud from a storybook.

Alys, nauseous and with her head throbbing, read until the badly printed words danced before her eyes. They were love stories, tales of ladies in castles and knights who worshiped them. Alys let her mind wander as she read the romance—life was not like these stories, she knew.

“Lord Hugo carried you up the stairs last night?” Lady Catherine’s arid voice cut into the reading. Alys blinked. “Carried you all the way to your room, did he?”

“I am sorry, my lady,” Alys said. “I cannot remember. I was faint and I did not know what I did.”

“Did he carry her?” Lady Catherine turned to Eliza.

“Yes,” Eliza said baldly. She ached inside this morning and she blamed Alys that Hugo’s lust had soured into violence.

“Into your room?” Lady Catherine asked.

“Yes,” Eliza said again.

“You were with them?” Lady Catherine confirmed.

Eliza hesitated. She would have given much to have her revenge on Hugo by telling that he had ordered her to stay outside. But the risks were too great. The young lord’s anger was swift and unpredictable, and she had stains on her gown and two silver sixpences which would support an accusation against her.

“Yes,” she said. “He tossed her down on her pallet and told me to watch her and make sure she did not vomit and lie in it like a dog.”

Alys’s pale skin flushed crimson.

“How disagreeable for him,” Lady Catherine said in mild triumph. “I think you had better drink ale in future, Alys.”

“I think so too, my lady,” Alys said quietly. “I am very sorry.”

Lady Catherine nodded with a glacial smile and stood while Mistress Allingham moved the spinning wheel for her into a patch of winter sunshine which fell on the wooden floor, brightly colored from the stained glass of the oriel window.

“Did he do that?” Alys whispered urgently to Eliza. “Did he throw me down?”

“He lay beside you,” Eliza said spitefully. “I’ve saved your skin with my lady by not telling. He gave me two silver sixpences to keep watch. I stood guard at the door while he tossed you down on your pallet and stripped you and lay beside you and stuck his finger in you.”

Alys went white and looked as if she might fall. “It’s not possible,” she said.

“It happened,” Eliza said harshly. “I saw him do it.”

“But I feel nothing,” Alys said.

“What are you girls whispering about?” Lady Catherine interrupted.

“About the color of the silk, Lady Catherine,” Eliza said at once. “I think it is too bright. Alys wants to keep it as it is.”

Eliza lifted up the tapestry which Alys had painstakingly stitched in the previous week and Lady Catherine considered it with her head on one side. “Rip it out,” she said. “You are right, Eliza, it needs to be a paler color, anyone could see that. Alys will have to stop reading and rip it back and do it all again.”

Alys picked up a pair of silver scissors and started snipping at the cloth, the work of seven days to be done all over again. Eliza bent over it.

“It didn’t hurt because you wanted it,” she whispered. “You let him take your gown off and you took his hand and guided it in, just like any slut! And after all you’ve said about not wanting to go with a man.”

Alys felt her world shift and heave. “It’s not possible,” she said.

Eliza shrugged. “Don’t you remember anything?”

Alys closed her eyes. Vaguely, like a dream, she could remember a sleepy sensuality, a confidence and an affection which she had never felt in her waking life. She remembered a gesture, rolling over on her side and pulling his arm over her, tucking his hand between her thighs. She flushed a sweating scarlet.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“What d’you remember?” Eliza demanded eagerly. “What did you say to stop him?”

Alys shook her head wordlessly. “I desired him,” she said. Her voice was hollow with her unhappiness.

“What?”

“I was drunk and I desired him,” Alys said again. “If he had wanted to take me he could have had me.
You
would not have stopped him, and I would not have wanted him to stop. He could have had me like any little whore in the castle, I would have had no words to stop him. I felt wanton. He could have had me.” She rubbed the back of her hand hard against her eyes. “I am lost unless I can stop this sickness,” she said. “I will lose everything unless I can guard myself. I am lost unless I take my power. I must guard myself with all the power I can hold.” Abruptly she threw down her sewing and went to the door.

“Alys!” Lady Catherine commanded. “What do you think you are doing? How dare you march out of the room without my leave?”

Alys rounded on her, her eyes, her whole face blazing with anger and despair. “Oh, go your ways, Lady Catherine!” she said bitterly. “I have no fear of you now. The one thing you could have taken from me has gone. I was not born to be a woman like you, a woman like these…” She made a sharp, dismissive gesture at the four women whose stunned faces were turned to her, gaping. “These pitiful slaveys. But now I have seen myself truly. I am no better than any of you. There is
nothing
about me which is special. I am a sinner and I am a fool. But at least now I see my way clearly. Now I am a woman without fear.”

Lady Catherine recoiled from her anger, but then blustered, “Don’t speak to me like that, girl…”

“I’m taking my power,” Alys swore. “You will not call me girl again! You will not rule me! And your husband will not have me as his plaything. You have driven me to it between you and I am taking my power!”

“Stop!” Catherine shrieked. Alys threw her a look like a burning brand and slammed out of the room. They could hear her feet pattering down the stone steps and then the bang of the door of the great hall.

“Is she leaving?” Mistress Allingham asked.

Only Lady Catherine stayed seated, the rest of them crowded to the wide oriel window and craned their necks to see the steps from the great hall below them into the garden, and the path to the gatehouse over the inner moat.

“She’s going,” Eliza confirmed. “She’s in the garden heading for the gate. Shall I run after her and order her to be brought back, my lady?”

Lady Catherine’s face was pale, her mouth pressed tight as she marshaled her fears and her suspicions.

“Let her go,” she said. “Let her go.”

The old lord did not miss Alys until that evening just before supper, when he wanted a letter written. David came to the women’s quarters to ask for her and Lady Catherine kept her plain face blank as she told him that Alys was missing.

“I will come in her place,” she said. She threw a dark cloak around her shoulders, pulled the hood over her head, and followed him to the old lord’s room in the round tower. On the dark corner of the stairs they passed young Lord Hugo, openly waiting for them. He put out his hand to stop her.

“Alys,” he said. She had never heard that tone from him before, he poured a world full of yearning into the girl’s name.

His wife put back the hood of her cloak. Her bony face gleamed hatred at him, her eyes were filled with triumph. “I thought so,” she said, venom in her tone. “I thought so.”

Hugo recoiled. “Madam, I…”

David the seneschal exchanged one look with Hugo and went on up the stairs to the old lord’s chamber, out of earshot.

“Don’t bother pretending,” she said passionately. “I wondered what hold she had over you and the old man. I suppose she has been bedding you both.” Her mouth worked angrily. “Bedding you both! Him in his dotage and you who run after anything in a skirt! As soon as I saw her in that whore’s dress I knew what was happening. But I waited and I watched. And I saw you eyeing her and I
knew
what you were thinking. God knows I’ve seen it often enough! God knows I’ve seen you looking at one woman after another with that smile of yours and that hot look. Then I saw you look at her, and I saw you carry her out of the feast. Carried her to her bed, did you? And paid that fool Eliza to look the other way! Paid that fool Eliza to play blind, and to lie to me, and to laugh at me behind her hand. And paid her to play the slut!”

She rounded on him and hit him hard with her open palm across the face. Hugo jerked back at the ringing slap and then stood still.

“And what about me?” Her voice rose from a passionate whisper into a muffled scream of rage. “What about me? You never look at
me
like that. You never come to my room wearing that smile! Every whore in the castle can have a hot look from you! Every slut in the town, every drab in every village can have you between her dirty legs—but me, your own wife, you ignore!” She seized him by the shoulders. “You ignore me!” she said. Tears were pouring down her face. She shook him hard. “You ignore me!” she cried again.

Hugo was rigid in her grasp, his whole body rejecting her with its stillness.

“Oh God!” she said in sudden longing. “Hugo, do to me what you do with her! Take me here!” She drew back into the shadow of the corner of the stair and feverishly pulled up her gown, grasped at the cord of his breeches, tugged at his codpiece, thrust herself against the embroidered padding, moaned as the stiff embroidery touched her. “Do it now!” she said desperately.

Hugo stepped back and pushed her away from him. In the shadows she could see his face, as unmoved as if it had been carved from stone.

“Have done,” he said, his voice low and level. “I did not touch the wench, whatever you fear and whatever women’s tattle you have heard. I did not lay a finger on her. I carried her to her pallet and I stripped off her gown, covered her with a rug, and left her there.”

Lady Catherine staggered as if he had slapped her. She dropped the hem of her skirt and pulled it down over her hips. She was still panting but the coldness of Hugo’s voice had entered into her awareness like ice. Her face was white and strained.

“You took off her gown and you did not have her?” she asked, as if she could not believe her ears. Hugo nodded, and turned to leave.

“Hugo!” Lady Catherine ran down the steps after him and clawed on his arm. “Hugo, tell me you did not desire her. Tell me you did not desire her and that is why you did not have her!”

He paused on the bottom step, smiling his cruel half-smile. “What now, my lady?” he said acidly. “First you berate me for tupping her, and now you cannot believe that I did not.”

Lady Catherine gave a little moan and tugged on the fine slashings of his doublet. “Please!” she begged. “Tell me truly what passed between you. I cannot bear not knowing. I cannot bear the thought of you…”

“You cannot bear what?” he asked acidly. “You cannot bear me lying with her, and you cannot bear me
not
lying with her. You must tell me, madam, what I should do to please you.”

She stared at him as if she could not comprehend his speech. “Oh God, Hugo,” she said hungrily. “I don’t want you to lie with her. But most of all I don’t want you to spare her. I’d rather you raped her than spared her. I don’t understand what you are doing if you are gentle with her. I don’t understand what it means! What are you thinking of if you treat her tenderly? I wish you’d raped her and hurt her! I wish you had torn her inside to slake your lust rather than be tender!”

He looked back up at her and for a moment she flinched from the disdain on his face. “You’d rather I raped her than spared her,” he said wonderingly. “You want a little maid of sixteen, in your care, torn inside by your husband’s rape? Good God, madam, you are an ugly woman.”