The Wise Woman (28 page)

The other women exclaimed, Eliza’s eyes grew round. “At last,” she said. “Hugo’s done his duty at last.”

“Yes,” Alys said dryly. “Praise be. And what an act of love it was!”

“Is it true?” Eliza asked. “She’s had false alarms before. And if ever spite could stop a baby settling then she would be the one to do it.”

“I doubt it’s true,” Alys said. “She has every reason to lie. But I’ll tell her ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ And I’ll tell the old lord too. If she is lying, I will tell him at once.”

“Hush!” Ruth said instantly. “Go along, Alys, she’ll be waiting for you. Shall I come too?”

“Yes,” Alys said. “She’s been scratching at me until I am heartsore. Come with me, Ruth, and she’ll mind her tongue.”

“What are you going to do?” Ruth asked curiously as Alys took the prayer-book and the crystal from her bundle.

“I shall see if I can dowse for a baby,” Alys said easily. “Don’t look so amazed, Ruth, it’s a common enough skill.”

She led the way back into Lady Catherine’s room. Catherine was looking at herself in a beaten silver hand-mirror.

“What is this mark on my neck?” she asked Alys.

Alys looked a little closer. “It’s a bruise, my lady,” she said evenly. She could see the marks of teeth. He had bitten her and sucked her. Hugo had done this.

Catherine sighed luxuriously. “How could it have come there?” she asked innocently. “What sort of bruise, Alys?”

“A bite,” Alys said briefly.

“Ohh,” Catherine sighed. “I had forgotten. That was Hugo. He snatches at me and he bites me and sucks me as if he would eat me up. We will have a lion, not a son, Alys! For he mounts me like a lion!”

Alys nodded coolly, but her cheeks were scarlet. Catherine did not miss the signs of jealousy. She rarely missed anything.

“Are you a virgin still, Alys?” she asked. “I could forward the match we spoke of. The young soldier is still willing. I should hate to think of you becoming old and dried-up and unloved. To have a man mad for you is a wonderful thing, Alys. When Hugo comes to my bed I feel as if I am a queen. And when he takes me in his arms and covers my whole body with his kisses! I can’t tell you, Alys, how it feels! It is a pleasure so deep that it feels wicked—like a mortal sin.”

Alys felt her anger rising like vomit in her throat. “You are blessed in your love, my lady,” she said. “Now can you tell me when you last had your times?”

Catherine frowned at the interruption. “Five, no, six weeks ago,” she said.

“Are you at all sick?” Alys asked.

Catherine shook her head.

“Are your breasts tender or enlarged?” Alys asked. She felt her cheeks stinging with heat as she forced herself to speak coolly about Hugo’s lovemaking with his wife—the fat sow, Alys said inwardly.

Catherine laughed. “Of course they are tender!” she said rejoicingly. She opened her shift so Alys could see her. Her large, brown-tipped breasts were marked on both sides with thin red strips, like little lines of blood blisters.

Ruth gasped. “Are you hurt, my lady?” she asked.

Catherine closed her eyes, reveling in the memory. “Oh, he hurt me,” she said, her voice very low. “He bound me, and tied me, and mounted me from behind.”

She opened her eyes; they were dark with remembered desire. “Don’t you wish he would do that to you, Alys?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you love him to cover you? To mount you like a wild stallion on a willing mare?”

Alys cleared her throat. Her mouth was suddenly very dry. “No, my lady,” she said simply. “The ordeal you forced on me has cleared my head as well as my character. I no longer look for the young lord. In any case,” she said icily, “my tastes do not run that way. I should never revel in pain.

“Now, I shall lay my hand on your belly and see if I can dowse for a baby, my lady,” she said. “It is the same as water-divining, many people do it. There is nothing to fear.”

Catherine nodded, irritated at the coolness of Alys’s voice. “I fear nothing,” she said. “No one can hurt me but him.”

Alys took out the prayer-book and muttered a few words of nonsense in Latin. She did not dare to bless the work as she used to do. The memory of the fragile communion wafer which had to be torn into pieces like skin before it could burn was still very bright. She dared not invoke the name of the Lord or His Mother. But she waved the prayer-book around and whispered low so that no one could say later that she had done the work unblessed.

She touched Lady Catherine’s round belly with her icy small hands and noticed with malicious satisfaction how the slack flesh quivered to her touch.

“This woman is with child,” she said aloud. The crystal revolved in a lazy right-hand arc. Alys bit her lip and tasted her own blood, as warm and salty as a tear. Catherine was pregnant.

“What does it say? What does it say?” Catherine asked.

“You may be with child,” Alys said slowly. She longed with all her heart to deny the child. But nothing would stop it growing in Catherine’s fat belly. It could not be wished away.

“Ask if it’s a son!” Catherine demanded.

“The child is male,” Alys said.

The crystal swung again.

Catherine gave a little delighted crow. “Is that yes? Is that yes?” she demanded.

Alys nodded.

“Send for the young lord!” she said to Ruth. “You stay here,” she said to Alys. “He may want you.”

Alys gathered up her crystal and prayer-book and went over to the window. Outside a brisk wind was blowing, bringing snow down from the moor. The little herb and flower garden of the inner manse below was drifting with whiteness, snow swirling between Alys in the second story and the frozen ground below. Out on the moors Morach’s cottage would be white, with great drifts banked up against the door. If it snowed hard and long the soldiers from the castle would not be able to get through. Alys had a great longing to be out there, in the cold and loneliness of the moor. Anything rather than be here, in this little hot room with this spiteful, corrupt woman, and with the man she loved obeying his wife’s bidding.

Hugo walked in without knocking. Catherine did not cover herself. Her shift was open, her breasts splayed wide, her belly showing. The fine linen sheet of the bed only half covered the bush of hair. She looked at Hugo as if she expected him to start lovemaking again, before Alys, before Ruth.

“You sent for me, lady?” he said tersely. He did not look at Alys.

“I have some news for you,” she said. She patted her bed. “Come and sit a little closer.”

Hugo made no move. “Your pardon, madam, but I cannot wait,” he said. “I am riding out hunting today and they are waiting for me. If I delay, the horses will be chilled. There’s a bitter wind.”

“Stay home then,” Catherine said invitingly. She shrugged down a little deeper in the bed. The nipples on her breasts had hardened at the sight of him. Alys found herself staring. “I can find sport to amuse you here,” Catherine suggested.

Hugo nodded. “Tonight, madam,” he said. “I have promised my father venison for his dinner next week. I must hunt it today.”

“I’ll be quick then and tell you our news. I have good news for you. I am with child and Alys here thinks it is a boy.”

There was a stunned silence. Hugo still did not look at Alys.

“That is the best news I could hear,” he said levelly, his voice under tight control. “I congratulate you, madam. I hope we have a healthy son. And now I must go.”

“Where are you riding?” Catherine asked.

“Bowes Moor,” he said from the doorway.

“Oh, stop then!” she said, as if she had just thought of it. “Stop, my lord. Go to Alys’s kinswoman’s cottage and bid her come to the castle. Send one of your men back with her. I need her skill, Alys needs her advice. Isn’t that true, Alys?”

“Morach has greater skill than I,” Alys said. She did not look up from the floor. She knew Hugo was not looking at her. “But you will have no need of her until the birth, my lady, in October. You should summon her then.”

“My lord would want me to take no chances with my health,” Catherine said positively.

Hugo shook his head. “Whatever you wish, madam. I can fetch her today. But perhaps she will not be ready to come.”

Catherine opened her pale eyes very wide in surprise. “Then take her, my lord,” she said simply. “If we agree that we need her, what else should we do?”

Hugo bowed. “Very well, my lady,” he said and turned for the door again.

“You have not said good day to Alys,” Catherine said silkily. “She will be indispensable to me now. You must treat her with courtesy, Hugo! Whatever jade’s tricks she may have played in the past, she is my favorite lady-in-waiting now!”

With an effort he turned. He met Alys’s inscrutable blue gaze.

“Of course,” he said coldly. “Forgive me.” The lines at the roots of his brows and the corners of his mouth were deep. “Good day, Alys.”

“Good day, Lord Hugo,” Alys replied. She felt a deep coldness as if the waters of the moat had seeped from her belly through all her limbs. There would be no displacing Catherine now. There would be no annulment of the marriage, there would be no love-making in the big, well-lit chamber. Hugo would never sleep the night in comfort at her side. Catherine had won. And it was Alys’s own magic that had helped her to it.

Hugo met Alys’s eyes in one hard angry look, and then he turned and was out of the door before Lady Catherine could detain him any longer.

“Fetch my rose and cream gown, Alys,” Lady Catherine said contentedly. “He loves me in that color. And call a servant to bring hot water and hot sheets. I will have a bath. He loves me sweet-scented.”

Alys curtsied like a servant and did as she was bid.

Alys was surprised to find that she was eager to see Morach. She waited around the outer gateway for the soldiers who would bring Morach back from Bowes Moor. It was a bitterly cold afternoon, with a sulky half-light of dense grayness. The snow-bearing gray clouds lay belly-down over the gray forbidding walls of the castle. The mist in the moat was white-gray, the slivers of snow whirling constantly in the wind were the only source of light in the world. Alys wrapped her cloak closely around her and held her cold hands up inside her sleeves.

She heard them before she saw them. The rattle of hooves on the cobbles and then the hollow sound of them crossing the drawbridge. She stepped out of the archway as the man pulled his horse to a standstill and tossed the bundled Morach down as if he were glad to be rid of her.

“There, old lady!” he said. “Have done spitting at me! Here’s Alys come to greet you and show you your quarters. Blame her for fetching you away from your smoky fireside. Don’t blame me!”

“Hello, Morach,” Alys said.

Morach shook herself down and pulled her shawls around her bent shoulders.

“Alys,” she said. She looked at the girl critically, noting the strain on her white face.

“Hard times,” she said. It was not a question.

“I am sorry if they brought you against your will.” Alys said. “It was Lady Catherine’s idea and order. Not mine.”

Morach nodded. “With child, is she?” she asked.

Alys nodded.

“It was the dolls did it?” Morach confirmed.

Alys drew Morach into the shelter of the wall and put her mouth close to her ear.

“I don’t know,” she said. “How can you tell? Hugo said he went to her for choice, but he never went to her like that before I did the spell. And there was something so…” She broke off. “Something very unnatural about the way they are together.”

“Unnatural?” Morach asked with a sharp laugh. “Since when could you limit Nature, child. What d’you mean? That he mounts her like a dog? That he beats her? That he blows his hunting horn when he comes?”

Alys gave an involuntary giggle. “Not that!” she said. “But the rest. And he couples with her when they are tied together with a strip of linen. I tied the dolls together with a ribbon. D’you think this is my doing?”

Morach shrugged, stoical. “Could be,” she said. “Could be just his nature. Take me in, child, I am cold.”

Alys nodded at the guard and held Morach’s arm and little bundle as she took her across the outer manse, over the inner drawbridge which spanned the ghostly, mist-filled moat, and across the dripping garden of the inner manse, then into the main body of the castle. She led Morach through the great hall without stopping, though Morach dawdled and looked all around her.

“Tell me of the household,” she said as Alys tugged her onward. “This is Lord Hugh’s hall?”

Alys nodded.

“I’ve been here before when I was a witness in a case of theft against Farmer Ruley,” Morach said. “The old lord sat behind the table on his great carved chair.”

“He holds the quarterly court here,” Alys said tersely. “And he has dinner and supper here.” She drew Morach up the steps to the dais and opened the tapestry at the rear of the little stage. “This is where we come in,” she said. “This lobby outside is where we wait for the lords and my lady if we are too early. Sometimes they gather here and talk.” She nodded to one doorway. “This way leads to Lord Hugh’s round tower where his room is, his soldiers, and where the young lord sleeps.” She drew Morach up the flight of stairs to their left. “These are the stairs up to the gallery, the ladies’ gallery which is set above the hall. These are the women’s quarters—we stay here. You’re not welcome in the round tower except by the lords’ command.”

Morach nodded, following Alys up the flight of stairs, examining the tapestries which hung on either side.

“I am to have a new room to share with you,” Alys said. “But we are still housed in the women’s quarters. Lady Catherine sleeps off the gallery, the other women share a room opposite, and we are to have a new little room next door. They used to store lumber in it; I told them we needed space to distill herbs and make our goods. I’d rather we could have been in the round tower with the old lord. But Catherine watches me close.”

“Because of the young lord?” Morach asked, her breath coming short as they climbed the stairs.

Alys nodded. “She was jealous,” she said in a sudden rush. “And she put me through an ordeal. She was trying to get rid of me, Morach. Hugo had told her that he loved me. And last night we were alone together and he promised…he promised…” Alys broke off, her face hard with grief. “None of it matters now,” she said unsteadily. “It does not matter what he said to me, nor what plans we made. I dreamed of being his lady here. But it meant nothing. She is with child now. Her position is untouchable.”