The Wise Woman (25 page)

“All night?” Alys asked coldly. She was thinking of the two dolls tied together and then their abrupt falling apart.

Eliza shook her head. “He took the blindfold off her and he put it around his own back,” she said. “He tied it around her so they were bound together. Then he lifted her up and lowered her on to him.”

Alys could feel vomit again rising in her throat from her empty belly.

“She screamed,” Eliza said. “A long really loud scream, as if he had really hurt her that time. And the two of them dropped to the floor and he humped her on the rushes until her back bled.”

“Give me some ale, Margery,” Alys said softly. “This story of Eliza’s makes me sick to my very heart.”

“It’s done,” Eliza said with quiet triumph. “The story’s done. I said you should have been here.”

Alys sipped the ale. It was warm and stale from standing all night in the pitcher. “Did he spend the night in her bed?” she asked, but she already knew the answer.

Eliza shook her head. “He untied the rope when he had done with her and sprang away from her as if he hated her,” she said. “Lady Catherine was still lying on the floor and he slapped her—one cheek and then the other—and then he pulled up his breeches and left her, like that. With her back all bruised and bloody and his hand print on both her cheeks.”

Alys nodded. “And is she grieved?” she asked, detached.

Eliza shook her head. “She was singing this morning when I took her cup of ale in to her. She had her hands on her belly and she told me that she is sure she has conceived a child. She is sure she is going to bear him a son. She has begged her way into paradise and she is content.”

Alys nodded and sipped at the ale again.

“Good,” she said. “Hugo is back with his wife, his wife is carrying his child. Neither of them will trouble me, I am spared her foul jealousy and his dangerous lusts. I can do what I ought to do—clerk for my lord and keep him and his household well.”

She got up from the stool and shook the dust from her gown. “It has a bitter taste,” she said quietly to herself. “I never knew it had a bitter taste.”

“What has?” asked Eliza. “The ale? It should be sweet enough.”

“Not the ale,” Alys replied. “The taste of victory.”

I
t was bitterly cold all February. The river froze into great long slabs of gray and white ice. When the ladies walked along the path beside the river they could see the water dashing along beneath the thick skin. Alys shuddered and drew as far back as the snowy banks would allow. In the second week a thick mist blew across the moors from the southwest and the women stayed indoors for one long winter day after another. It was dark when they woke, then pale and cloudy and brooding all day, then dark again at three in the afternoon. Sounds were muffled in the fog and from the window in the gallery you could not see the river below—from the old lord’s room high in the round tower you could neither see nor hear the castle courtyard.

Alys spent all the time she could with the old lord in his little room in the tower. It was warm there and the lord and his steward David were quiet easy company. She wrote as she was bid, restrained condolences to the Princess Mary for the death of her mother, the Dowager Princess Catherine of Aragon, she read to the old lord from bawdy, unlikely romances and listened to his anecdotes and memories of battles and jousting and of the time when he was young and strong and Hugo had not even been born.

The mood in the women’s gallery above the great hall was ominous. Lady Catherine plunged from hysterical gaiety, when she commanded the women to play and sing and dance, into a deep sullen anxiety when she would sit at her loom without weaving and sigh. The women bickered among themselves with the fretful irritation of caged animals. And once or twice a week, like a water-wheel turning against its will, Lord Hugo would come to the women’s chamber, bearing a jug of mead.

The evening would start merrily enough, with the women dancing and Lady Catherine in a flutter of excitement. Hugo would drink deep, his jokes would grow more bawdy. He would grab Eliza if she was within reach and fondle her openly, before his wife and the other ladies. Then he would up-end the jug and fling it toward the fireplace, take Lady Catherine by her wrists and drag her off to the bedchamber. As the women tidied the room, sweeping up the broken pottery and setting the glasses to one side on the cupboard, they would hear Catherine’s loud shrieks of pain and then her gasping unrestrained sobs of pleasure. At two in the morning, without fail, Hugo would loose his wife from the rope of linen which he always tied around them, and stagger, blear-eyed and foul-tempered, for his own bed.

“’Tisn’t natural,” Eliza said one night to Alys. The candle was out, they were lying in the dark. In the other corners of the room they could hear the quiet breathing of Mistress Allingham and a rumbling snore from Ruth. Eliza had long ceased to laugh at the antics of Lord Hugo and his lady. All the women were appalled at the turn the two had taken.

“Did you hear her this evening?” Eliza asked. “I reckon she’s bewitched. It isn’t natural for a woman to beg for a man like she does. And she lets him do anything he wants to her.”

“Hush,” Alys said. “It’s her way. And she’ll sleep well tonight and be sweet-tempered in the morning. And soon we’ll know if she’s in foal.”

“Whelping,” Eliza said with a sleepy giggle. “But it isn’t natural, Alys. I’ve seen bruises on her that he’s made with his belt. And when I showed them to her she gave me a smile…” She paused. “A horrid sort of smile,” she said inadequately. “As if she was proud.”

Alys said nothing more and soon Eliza was breathing deeply, sprawled out across Alys’s side of the bed. For an hour Alys lay sleepless in the darkness, watching the cold finger of moonlight move across the ceiling, listening to Eliza’s snuffling snores. Then she slipped quietly from the bed and went out to the gallery, and threw a couple of logs on the fire, and a handful of pine twigs.

The twigs spurted little flames and a sharp resinous scent filled the room. Alys sniffed at it and sat down on the warm fleece before the fire to watch the flames.

The castle was wrapped in utter winter darkness and utter nighttime silence. Alys felt she was the only being awake or even alive in the whole world. The embers of the fire formed into little castles and caverns. Alys stared deep into their red glow, trying to make out shapes, pictures. The sweet tangy scent of the burning pine reminded her of Mother Hildebrande and her quiet study where the little fire had been made of pinecones. Alys used to sit at her feet and lean against her knees while reading, and sometimes Mother Hildebrande would rest her hand gently on Alys’s head and lean forward to explain a word, or chuckle tolerantly at a mispronunciation.

“What a clever girl,” she would say in her soft voice. “What a clever girl you are, my daughter Ann!”

Alys took the sleeve of her nightshift and rubbed at her eyes. “I won’t think of her,” she said into the silence of the room. “I must go on not thinking of her, stopping myself thinking of her. I will be without her now. Without her, forever.”

She thought instead of Morach and the cold dark little cottage at the foot of the moor. Morach’s hovel would be up to the eaves in snow by now. Alys grimaced, remembering the cold, long, dark winter days, and the ceaseless unrewarding labor of digging out to the midden with the slopping pail of urine and shit, and then trudging back with chapped hands.

“Whatever I am doing now,” she whispered, “whatever it costs me, it is better than that life. Mother Hildebrande would know that. She would understand that. She would know that even though I’m very deep in sin…she would know…” Alys broke off. She knew that the abbess would never have accepted an argument which said that hardship justified a sinner in one sin after another, up to the very doors of hell itself.

“I won’t think of her,” Alys said unhappily.

She sat in silence for a little while, pushing the memories away from herself. It had been such a harsh childhood in the little hovel on the moor, and then such a short time when she had been warm and well-fed and at last, at last, beloved. Alys blinked tears away. “I won’t think of her,” she said again. “I only weep and weep when I think of her.”

The castle was silent in the long hours of the night. Alys sat, watching the red embers of the fire, then a burned log shifted and roused her from her daydream. She tossed a little kindling to the soft embers at the back and watched it glow and then blacken and then flame.

Very quietly behind her, the door to Lady Catherine’s bedroom opened and Hugo came out. He was wearing only breeches, his chest and back bare, carrying his boots, his shirt, and his doublet. He checked in surprise when he saw Alys, so still at the fireside. Then he came on.

“Alys,” he said.

“Hugo,” she replied. She did not move her head to look at him, she had not started at the sound of his voice in an empty room.

“Did you know I was there?” he asked.

“I always know when you are near,” Alys said. Her voice was dreamy. Hugo felt himself shiver as he came near her, as if all around her was some circle of deep power.

“I have not seen you for days,” he said. “I have not seen you, to speak with, since the night of your ordeal.”

Alys thought of the purse on her girdle with the little figures still safe inside, stuffed under her pallet in her room. She thought of the blinded model of Hugo knocking and rubbing against the fat belly and cavernous slit of the doll of Catherine.

“No,” she said.

“You lied, didn’t you?” Hugo asked gently. “When you told them that you were hot for me, and that you had made up a false prophecy to snare me?”

Alys shrugged as if it hardly mattered. “That was a lie, but I don’t know the truth,” she said slowly. “I truly cannot remember that night. I remember you carrying me from the hall but that is all. After that it was just sleep.”

Hugo nodded. “So you did not desire me?” he asked. “You were lying when you said it. You did not desire me then and you do not desire me now?”

Alys turned her head and looked at him. One side of her face was rosy with firelight, the other side in flickering shadow. Hugo felt the breath catch in his throat.

“Oh yes,” she said softly. “I desire you. I have wanted you, I think, since the moment I first saw you. I came into the great hall and your face was graven deep with hard lines—and then I saw you smile. I fell in love with you then, in that instant, for the joy in your smile. I hate her being with you, I hate the thought of you touching her. I cannot sleep when I know you are with her. And I dream of you constantly. Oh yes, I desire you.”

“Alys,” Hugo breathed. He put out his hand to touch her cheek, cupped his palm around her face as if she were a rare and lovely flower. “My Alys,” he said.

Alys hissed an indrawn breath. “Can you feel me?” she asked. She took his hand from her cheek and examined it carefully.

“Are you telling my fortune?” Hugo asked, amused.

Alys turned his hand over and looked at the clean short fingernails. She turned the hand back and looked at the perfect idiosyncratic whorls on the fingertips.

“Can you feel me?” she asked again. “Can you feel my touch?”

“Of course,” Hugo said, puzzled.

“With every fingertip? With every one?” she asked.

He laughed a little. “Of course,” he said. The words spilled out from him as if he had held them back for too long. “My little love, my Alys, of course I can feel your touch. I have waited and waited for you to reach out your hand to mine. Of course I can feel you!”

“When I whisper, like this,” Alys said, hardly breathing the words, “can you hear me?”

“Yes,” Hugo said, surprised. “Of course I can. My hearing is good, Alys, you know that.”

Alys put her hand out to his face and stroked with infinite tenderness his eyelids and the delicate lined skin around his dark eyes.

“Can you see me?” she asked. “Can you see as well as you ever did?”

“Yes,” Hugo said. “What is this, Alys? Are you afraid I am ill?”

Alys clasped her hands in her lap and looked back toward the fire.

“No,” she said. “It is nothing. I thought for a time that I wanted you blind and deaf to me. I know now, this night, that is not true. It never was true. Maybe my desire for you is stronger than anything else. Maybe my desire for you is stronger than my wish for safety. Perhaps even stronger than…” She broke off. “Anything else,” she said weakly.

Hugo frowned. “What ‘else’?” he asked. “What d’you mean ‘anything else’? It is some herbalism or some old women’s trickery?”

Alys nodded. “I wanted you to look away from me,” she said. “I feared Lady Catherine’s jealousy. After that time—when she made me take the ordeal—I knew she would catch me at something, force me to some test. And sooner or later I would fail.”

Hugo nodded. “And so you cast some silly girl’s spell to keep me away from you, did you?” he asked, half amused. “You must despair of your powers, Alys. For here I am, seeing you, touching you, hearing you, and desiring you.”

Alys glowed in the darkness like a pearl suddenly opened to the light.

Hugo chuckled. “Of course,” he said easily. “What other end could there be between you and me? I love you. I looked down the hall and saw you in that red gown which was too big for you, and your poor shorn head and your clear little face and your night-blue eyes and I wanted to take you and bed you at once. And I have waited and waited for the lust to pass—and instead of passing it has become love.

“I would have taken you that night—Twelfth Night. I would have taken you when you were drunk and you could neither refuse nor consent. But when I touched you I saw you smile, and you said my name as though we had been lovers for years. And as soon as you did—I wanted that. I didn’t want to take you like a whore. I didn’t want to force you. I want to make with you a life like that. I don’t believe you have the Sight. I don’t believe in that stuff. I don’t fear you are a witch or a magician or any of that silly mountebank stuff. But I do believe in a life for the two of us. No—three of us. Me, you, and my child: a son for me.”