The Wise Woman (26 page)

Alys was silent for a moment. She looked again at his fingertips and then she put out her hand to his face and gently touched the soft skin around his eyes.

“And your wife?” she asked softly.

“None of her business,” Hugo said promptly. “What you and I are to each other is none of her business. Besides, she’s well served these days. Soon she must conceive.”

Alys turned her face toward him and looked steadily at him. “And why is that?” she asked.

Hugo shrugged. “Because I go to her,” he said impatiently.

“And why is that?” Alys asked again.

“I don’t…” Hugo stopped the sentence short. “D’you think it’s your doing, Alys?” he asked, near to laughing.

Alys glanced behind her at the darkened room and at Lady Catherine’s bedchamber where the woman lay asleep, smiling even in her sleep at his abuse of her; bruised, drained, satisfied.

“I don’t know!” she said sharply. “I can’t tell! How would I know? I’m not trained in the black arts, I know nothing more than I saw old Morach do, up on the moor, to frighten stupid women out of their money. I don’t know why you lie with her. Nor do I know why you hurt and abuse her. It disgusts me, Hugo. I don’t know why it should be like that between you two. I would not have made it like that between any man and woman—not even if I hated her. I hexed you to lie with her—I admit that! But I did not plan that you should beat her and spit on her and force her into abominable acts. I did not plan that she should love you for it!”

“I don’t know why it is like that,” Hugo conceded. He moved to sit closer to Alys and laid his arm around her shoulder. She leaned toward him. “It disgusts me too,” he said, his voice very low. “I’ve never treated any woman like that—not the poorest whore. But something in me drives me to slap her and ride her and whisper curses to her…” he broke off. “And the more I do, the worse I am, the more she adores it.”

He shook his head. “It sickens me to my soul in the morning,” he said. “And I can only touch her when I am drunk. Alys, you should see her. She lies before me and begs me to hurt her in any way I please. It makes me feel…fouled.”

Alys nodded. “I made a spell that you would give her a son,” she said softly. “I am sorry that I touched you. I’m sorry that I made such a spell. I felt driven to it, I did not know what else to do to make myself safe here. I wanted my power. But now I wish I had not done it, Hugo.”

“D’you think it is your magic which is driving her?” Hugo looked from the fire to Alys’s clear profile. He kissed her temple where a tendril of golden hair curled. “I don’t think it is your spell, my lovely Alys. I think Catherine’s tastes have always been for pain. She was hot for our marriage even though she knew I did not care for her. She has always begged me to lie with her, even when we were quite little children. She has always allowed me to abuse her. It has never been as bad as this before. But I have never felt so angry with her before. I never felt constrained before now.”

“Constrained?” Alys asked.

Hugo nodded. “You know why,” he said. “Your safety lies in her conceiving. You cannot stay here with her waiting to trap you. She has to be satisfied. You were driven to your little spell, I am driven to lie with her. I know she has to be satisfied for her to leave you alone.”

“The spell made no difference?” Alys asked. She turned and looked at him and he saw her face lightening as if he was taking some guilt away from her.

“No difference at all,” he said honestly. “It is all nonsense, and you should not fear your power like this. I am acting as I wish. I am doing what I decide. I am doing my duty by Catherine as I should have done long before. I do it without desire, so I do it drunk and cruelly. And she—by some twist in her own appetites—likes me to be drunk and harsh with her. So she is well served. There is no magic in it.”

Alys gave a little sigh. “I have been afraid,” she admitted. “I was afraid it was all my doing, and the ugliness and the bitterness of my spell had made you ugly and bitter with her.”

Hugo gathered her into his arms and settled her on his lap, his arms around her, her cheek against his.

“Fear nothing,” he said. “I want a future for us. But I don’t believe in magic and all the old spells and fears. It is a new world we are building, Alys. A world free of superstition and fear. A world we can explore, full of new lands and adventures, full of wealth and opportunity. Don’t cling to old dark ways, Alys. Come out with me into the light and put that all behind you.”

Alys turned her face to him and laid her cheek against the warm stubble of his chin.

“You are so strange,” she said with half a smile. She pulled back and touched his face, her fingers tracing the lines around his eyes, the deep cleft between his eyebrows. “You are so strange to me and yet I feel I have known you all my life.”

“My friend, Lord Stanwick, told me I was cunt-struck!” Hugo said with a low laugh. “I was drinking with him the other day and I told him I loved a girl so much that I was in danger of a breach with my wife, with my father, and with my duty. He laughed till he wept and said he must meet you. He could hardly believe in the existence of a girl who could turn me from hunting and whoring and scheming for the future.”

Alys smiled. “And you?” she asked. “Are you—what d’you call it? Cunt-struck? Or is it something real which will last?”

He tightened his grip around her. “It will last until I die,” he said simply. “You have my heart, Alys, I am yours till death.”

Alys stirred at once. “Don’t say that!” she said. “Don’t speak of death! I want us to live forever, I want us to be young forever. I want this night to last forever!”

He laughed. “God! You’re fey, Alys. We will love while we are young, and while we are old, and then we will grow older and die and go to heaven and be two angels together. What is there to fear in that? Did you think I might go to hell for my few little sins? I have confessed! I am cleared! And you can never have sinned in your life. Not with a face as clear and as sweet as yours. Not my little maid Alys.”

Alys hesitated. She wanted to tell him of the abbey, of the smoke, of her panic in the firelit darkness. She wanted to tell him that she had run from her sisters and left them to burn. She wanted to tell him that she had once loved someone and been beloved. That she was not truly an orphan for she had been held and taught and loved by a mother. And that she had betrayed her and then denied her. Left to die in her sleep, shrouded with smoke, eaten alive by flames.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

She did not dare.

“Will you surrender your magic?” he asked. “The little spells and charms?”

Alys hesitated. “Why d’you ask it of me? You keep the things that give you power—your weapons, your wealth. My magic is all the power I have. It keeps me safe here.”

Hugo shook his head. “It does nothing except frighten you and make you feel that all the world’s sins are at your door,” he said roundly. “Keep your herbs and your crystal and your real skills, the ones you have used to make my father well. Keep your medicines and throw away your spells, Alys. There is real danger for you when you play with them. Not because they are true—for they are nothing but nonsense to frighten peasants!—but because they give your enemies a handle on you. Throw away the magic and keep the medicine.”

“All right,” Alys said reluctantly. “I agree. Unless I have need of them, unless I have need of that power, I will stop.” She thought of the figures in her purse, stuffed deep in the mattress in her room. “I never know whether it works or not,” she said honestly. “I was sure I had hexed you and Catherine, and now you tell me it is your own tastes.”

He nodded. “We were always like that,” he said. “No spell on earth could make me use a woman so if it were not to her taste as well as mine.”

“I will throw it away,” Alys said. “I should never have started but for that ordeal. I was afraid and I wanted some power—at any price.”

Hugo tightened his arm around her shoulders. “Don’t be frightened,” he said, his voice low. “I love you, I will protect you. You have my power around you now.”

He took her hand and turned it palm upward. As if he were sealing a bond he planted a kiss in the center and folded her fingers over. She took his hand to do the same for him. She kissed each fingertip one by one, as if to bless them, as if to keep them whole. Then they sat by the fire until the darkness of the arrow-slits started showing pale.

“I must go,” Hugo said.

Alys held her face up for his farewell kiss. He took it in both hands and kissed her lips, and then, very gently, both eyelids. “Sleep,” he said and his voice held a tenderness she had never heard from him before. “Sleep and dream again of the time I will be with you night and day and no one will come between us.”

“Soon,” Alys whispered.

“I swear it,” Hugo said.

“I want to be your wife, Hugo,” Alys said softly. “I want to belong here, as you do, without question. And I want to have your son, as I said in my dream.”

He chuckled. “Marriage is something else, my darling,” he said softly. “You and I were made to be lovers, we should be together. But marriage is business: land, property, dowry. Not for lovers like us. I want you to freely love me, to freely be mine. Not marriage, my darling, but long nights and days of love; and a son for me. Now sleep and dream of it.”

He kissed her again and went from the room. Alys stayed for a moment, listening to his soft steps down the stair, and then went into the women’s room and quietly closed the door.

She looked swiftly around. None of them had stirred, they were still all four deeply asleep. Noiselessly she crossed to her pallet on the floor and fumbled among the straw, pushing her arm deep into the bed. At last she found it and drew out the little purse with the three candlewax figures. She threw her cloak around her shoulders and went, barefoot, to the door.

The stone stairs beneath her feet were icy cold. She passed like a ghost out of the doorway and toward the gate which guarded the drawbridge. The soldiers were sleeping, there was no danger to watch for. Alys tiptoed across the bridge, her feet numb, and went to the moat-side.

She thrust her hand deep into her purse and pulled out the first doll she found. It was the Lady Catherine doll, grotesquely ugly with its monstrous sexuality and bursting belly. Alys shuddered as she held it in her hands and then she tossed it into the moat.

She had expected it to sink, to sink down into the green water and disappear. No one ever drained the moat, no one fished with nets. All sorts of rubbish and offal were thrown into it every day. Alys had thought the little dolls would sink to the bottom and no one would ever find them. Or if they did, the wax would be blurred and broken, and no one would ever think they were anything but candles, wastefully dropped by some negligent servant.

The little wax doll sank beneath the freezing water, and then, as Alys watched, it bobbed up again. Lady Catherine’s mocking, ugly smile stared at Alys. The little candlewax eyes looked at her.

“No!” Alys cried aloud. “Get down.”

An icy breeze rippled across the moat. The wax doll bobbed in the waves. The face of Lady Catherine seemed to smile as if she were enjoying Alys’s fear.

“Sink, damn you!” Alys dropped to her knees on the frozen bank, leaning out toward the bobbing doll. “Sink down! Go down!”

The fitful little wind blew the doll closer inshore.

“Go down!” Alys breathed. “Drown!”

At once she caught herself. “Oh God! I didn’t mean that!” she said. In a frenzy of sudden anxiety she reached out toward the little doll. “I meant the doll to sink, that’s all!” she said, as if she were explaining herself to the darkness all around her. “I didn’t mean drown. I just want to be rid of it.”

The breeze was taking the doll away. At the same moment Alys heard someone hammering on the outer gate: servants coming to work, demanding admission.

Alys bunched up her nightshift in one hand and stepped into the glassy cold water. She gasped at the icy touch and reached out toward the little doll. It bobbed out further, just beyond her reach.

“I’ve got to get it,” she said.

She gritted her teeth and stepped out a little deeper. The water was swirling around her knees. Her feet were aching to the very bones with the cold. Something slimy and icy flickered across her calf. “I’ve got to get it,” she said again.

The doll bobbed out further. Her little waxen white head turned away from Alys as if she were obstinate, as if she were playful.

“Come here,” Alys said. She clamped her teeth together to stop them from chattering, the cold seemed to be eating away at her feet, her legs, and now up to her thighs as she stepped further out.

The little doll bobbed in the winter dawn breeze and the face turned back to Alys. The doll was smiling at her.

Alys took one step further out and the little doll’s smile widened as if it were about to burst into tinkling, malicious laughter. Her little arms came out above the water, she reached toward Alys. Alys stretched, her fingers just fractions of an inch away from the little wax hands. Alys took one more step forward and then stumbled on the greasy rubbish of the underwater bank of the moat. She heard the doll’s tiny peal after peal of laughter as the steep side of the moat suddenly plunged downward and fell away beneath her feet. Enticed into the depths of the moat Alys dropped like a stone into the slimy icy water, her scream cut short as water rushed into her mouth. Her hand closed over the little doll, her other hand was clenched on the purse. She thrashed helplessly in the water.

Alys had never learned to swim, she sank and then bobbed up gasping for air in a frenzy of panic. When her face broke free of the water she snatched at a breath but then choked helplessly and felt herself going down again.

The cold was her enemy. The icy green waters of the moat were eating her, her legs had gone numb and her thrashing thighs were powerless. Deep in her belly the cold moved in. Alys sank beneath the water and came up, coughing and retching. She opened her mouth to scream and a wave of icy green water swept into her face.

“No!” Alys cried out. She snatched for a breath but it was water she gobbled and it rushed into her lungs and weighed her down, thrust her under the surface. Alys choked and retched and breathed in a lungful of water. Then suddenly there were a pair of hard hands on her arm, and then under her armpit.