The Wise Woman (31 page)

Alys stepped forward and gathered the thick manuscripts into her hands. She pushed them into the back of the fire and watched them flame and blacken and crumble. She found that she was staring at the fire, her face blank and hard.

“You can go,” the old lord said softly.

Alys dropped him a curtsy and went out, closing the door softly behind her. David the dwarf was coming up the stairs, his sharp little face curious.

“You look drab, Alys,” he remarked. “Are you sick? Or heartbroken? What’s the old woman doing in the ladies’ chamber? Are you not glad to have your kinswoman take your place?”

Alys turned her head aside and went down the stairs without answering.

“Is it true?” David called after her. “Is it true what the women are whispering? Lady Catherine is in child and Hugo is in love with her, and she is high in the lord’s favor again?”

Alys paused on the turret stair and looked back up at him, her pale face luminous in the gloom. “Yes,” she said simply. “All of my wishes have been fulfilled. What a blessing.”

“Amen,” said David, his face creasing into ironic laughter. “And you so joyful!”

“Yes,” Alys said sourly, and went on downstairs.

Hugo was late from hunting and came to the high table when they were eating their meats. He apologized gracefully to his father and kissed Catherine’s hand. They had great sport, he told them. They had killed nine bucks. They were hanging in the meat larder now and the antlers would be brought in for Lord Hugh. The hides, tanned, perfumed, and soft, would make a cradle, a new cradle for the new Lord Hugo.

He did not once look at Alys, and she kept her gaze on her plate and ate little. Around her the babble of excited women’s talk swayed and eddied like a billowy sea. Morach was silent too—eating her way through dish after dish with determined concentration.

When supper was over both Hugo and the old lord came to the ladies’ chamber and the women played and sang for them and Catherine sewed as she talked. Her color was high, she was wearing a new gown of cream with a rose-pink overskirt and a rose stomacher, slashed, with the cream gown pulled through. In the candlelight with her hair newly washed and dressed and her face animated with happiness she looked younger, prettier. The old bony greedy look had gone. Alys watched her glow under Hugo’s attention, heard her quick laughter at the old lord’s jests, and hated her.

“I need to pick some herbs in the moonlight,” she said quietly. “I must ask you to excuse me, my lords, my lady.”

Catherine’s bright face turned toward her. “Of course,” she said dismissively. “You may go.”

The old lord nodded his permission. Hugo was dealing cards and did not look up. Alys went down the stairs and across the hall, out through the great hall doors and into the yard of the inner manse and then turned to her right to walk between the vegetable- and herb-beds.

She needed nothing, but it was good to be out of the hot chamber and under the icy high sky. She stood for minutes in the moonlight, holding her cape tight around her, her hood up over her head. Then she walked slowly the length of the garden and back again. She was not planning. She was not thinking. She was beyond thought and plans or even spells. She was hugging to her heart the great ache of loneliness and disappointment and loss. Hugo would remain married to Catherine, they would have a son. He would be the lord one day and Catherine the lady of the castle. And Alys would be always the barely tolerated healer, clerk, and hanger-on. Disliked by Catherine, forgotten by Hugo, retained on a small pension from the old lord because in that large household one mouth more or less made little difference.

She could marry—marry a soldier or a farmer and leave the castle for her own little cottage. Then she would work from sunrise until hours after dark, bear one child after another, every year until she fell sick and then died.

Alys shook her head as she walked. The little hovel on Bowes Moor had not been enough for her, the abbey had been a refuge she thought would stand forever, the castle had been a step on her way, and her sudden unexpected desire for Hugo and his love for her had been a gift and a joy she had not anticipated. And now it was gone.

Behind her the hall door opened and Hugo came out.

“I can’t stay long,” he said in greeting. He took her cold hands in his warm ones and held them gently. “Don’t grieve,” he said. “Things will come out.”

Alys’s white, strained face looked up at him. “Hardly,” she said acidly. “Don’t comfort me with nonsense, Hugo, I am not a child.”

He recoiled slightly. “Alys, have a heart,” he said. “We both thought that you would be safer here if Catherine were with child. Now she is content and her position assured and you and I can be together.”

“In secret,” Alys said bitterly. “In doorways. Here in the kitchen garden in darkness, wary of watchers.”

Hugo shrugged. “Who cares?” he demanded. “I love you, Alys, and I want you. I have done my duty by Catherine, she will ask no more. I will get you a house in the town if you wish, and spend my nights there with you. You know we can never marry but we can be lovers at least! I want you, Alys, I care for nothing but that!”

Alys pulled her hands away and tucked them under her cloak. “I wanted to be your wife,” she said stubbornly. “Your father had a letter from the prince bishop today telling how an annulment could be done. We were very near to being rid of her. I wanted her gone. I wanted to lie with you in the lady’s chamber, not in some little house in town.”

Hugo took her by the shoulders and shook her gently. “Careful, my Alys,” he said warningly. “You are sounding to me like a woman who wants to leap to the top of the ladder. I would have taken you for love, I desire you in my bed. I would lie with you in a ditch, on the herbs here and now. Is it me you want or my name?”

For a moment Alys held herself stiff, then she moved into his arms. “You,” she said. He held her tight and the coldness and the pain in her belly melted in a great rush of desire. “You,” she said again.

“We’ll find some way,” Hugo said gently. “Don’t be so afraid, Alys. We will find ways to be together, and we will love each other. Don’t fret.”

Alys, held warm and close inside his cloak, rested her head against his shoulder and said: “If she were to die…”

Hugo was instantly still.

“If she were to die…” Alys said again.

He held her away from him and scanned her face, her blue innocent eyes. “It would be a tragedy,” he said firmly. “Don’t think that I would welcome that route away from her, Alys. Don’t make the mistake of thinking I would permit it. It is not a strange thought to me, I admit. I have wished her dead many and many a time. But I would never do it, Alys. And the man or woman who hurt Catherine would be my enemy for life. I have hated her—but she is my wife. She is Lady Catherine of Castleton. I owe her my protection. I command you, I
demand
you to keep her as well and as happy as it is in your power to do. She is a woman like you, Alys. Full of desire and longing like you, like any. She may be greedy, and she and I may lie together in all manner of perverse ways. But she is not a bad woman. She does not deserve death. I will not consider it. And she is trusting in your care.”

Alys nodded.

“Do you swear to protect her?” Hugo asked.

Alys met his intent gaze. “I swear it,” she said easily. She felt the arid taste of the empty oath in her mouth.

“I must go,” Hugo said quickly. “They will be watching for me. Meet me tomorrow, Alys, come to the stables in the morning, my hunter is sick, you can look at him for me and we can be together.” He kissed her gently, quickly, on the mouth and then he turned and was gone. She heard the hall door slam as he went inside, leaving her alone in the garden.

“If she died…” Alys said softly to the moonlit garden in the icy light. “If she died I could make him marry me.”

N
ext day Alys could not get away to the stables until just before noon. Lady Catherine had an ache in her back and ordered Alys to rub it with oils and essences. Alys worked on the broad fleshy back with mounting impatience. Lady Catherine, prone and sighing with contentment, would not let her go. Alys’s hands were hard, unloving on the other woman’s flesh, drained of their healing magic by Alys’s spite. She had to restrain an urge to pinch. After she had finished rubbing in the oil, Catherine’s smooth white back was striped with red.

“That was good, Alys,” she said, in a rare moment of contentment.

Alys curtsied, collected her oils into her basket, and shot from the room like a tom-cat. She half threw her basket at Morach and fled for the stairs, down the winding stony treads, across the hall, out of the kitchen door and around to the stables.

It was no good. Hugo had left. The simple lad who worked with the horses smiled his empty smile at her.

“Where is the young lord?” she asked abruptly. “Was he here?”

“Gone,” the boy said. “Long, long gone.”

Alys shivered and snapped her fingers under cover of her sleeves to recall her from a shadow of superstition.

“Long, long gone,” said the lad again.

Alys turned and went back to the castle. The stall for Hugo’s favorite horse was empty, he had waited for her only a moment. She ached with resentment at his leaving so readily, and disappointment that he could so easily go. Alys knew that if she had been waiting for him she would have been there all day.

She saw him at dinner at midday and he gave her a rueful grin and a wink but they did not speak. In the dying light of the afternoon he took his horse and his great deerhounds down the valley, riding fast by the flooding river, and she did not see him again until suppertime. Alys sat at the little table with the other women and watched the back of Hugo’s neck where the dark hair curled. She imagined the feel of that silky hair beneath her fingers and how it would be to grip the nape of his neck in one hand. She felt as if she could grip him and shake him with desire—and with anger too. They left the supper table early and Hugo joined them in the ladies’ gallery.

“My back aches again,” Catherine said faintly, and Alys watched as she leaned on Hugo’s arm and walked slowly into her bedroom. As the door closed Alys’s keen eyes saw Hugo’s arm go around his wife’s waist. Alys waited for him to bid her goodnight and come out again to Alys as she sat with the other women at the fireside. The door stayed shut. Alys felt Morach’s mocking black eyes smiling at her. There was no sound from Catherine’s bedroom.

“Aye, he’s very tender all of a sudden,” Eliza said, her mouth muffled by a thread of embroidery silk. “There’ll be no more slaps and curses now that she’s in foal.”

Alys looked toward the door again. It stayed shut. “He’s bound to try to keep her sweet,” she said unwillingly. “He has to have an heir, Catherine has to have her way—at least in these early months.”

Morach hawked and spat into the fire. “He likes it,” she said contemptuously. “He’ll like the taste of her when she’s big with his child. He’ll like the thought of a baby in her belly. He’ll like her breasts getting fatter and the richness of her body. Men are just babies themselves. He’ll suckle from her breasts and roll on her round belly like a new-born infant himself. He’s not a man right now, he’s a little boy with a new toy.”

Eliza giggled. Alys said nothing. The women sewed in silence, each of them craning their heads to hear what passed in the next room.

The door opened. “My lady is tired,” Hugo said. He looked toward Morach. “You or Alys, prepare her a tisane to help her sleep. She needs her rest.”

Morach nodded toward Alys. Hugo smiled at her, one of his open-hearted sweet smiles. “Thank you, Alys,” he said pleasantly. “You can bring it in when it is ready.” Then he turned on his heel and went back to his wife.

When the tisane was ready Alys gave it to Ruth to take in. She waited by the fire to see if Hugo came out again. He did not. That night, for the first time in their long, loveless marriage, he stayed in his wife’s bed all night long. For the first time in her life Catherine slept with her head on her husband’s shoulder and her brown hair tangled across his chest.

Alys sat by the fire with the others and sewed. When she went to bed, with Morach’s warm bulk beside her, she did not sleep. She watched the arrow-slit of silver light walk from one end of the chamber to the other as the moon nonchalantly traversed the sky. Alys lay on her back, her eyes open, seeing nothing, thinking nothing. She endured jealousy, as she might endure an attack of deadly ague, stoically; sickened to the heart, saying nothing.

The weather itself was against her, confining her to the castle. March was wild and full of rainstorms and flurries of thick wet snow which clogged doorways and blew into the west-facing windows, leaving puddles on the stone floors. The sky seemed lower than usual and it was dark every afternoon. The castle seemed to shrink in on itself, besieged by winter.

Alys was never alone. Morach shared her bed at night, Lady Catherine ordered her to the ladies’ gallery very often, and the old lord took to sitting with them in the afternoons, so Alys could not escape to his chamber in the round tower. Hugo rode out every day, going further and further afield, as restless as a mewed falcon. They heard stories of his adventures: of an alehouse which had been a nest of poachers burned down and the men and women turned out on to the snow-driven moor, of a pitched battle on the highway with some beggars, of a small riot in a bawdy house with mummery and masquers and lechery in the street.

“He is a rogue!” the old lord said proudly when he heard of Hugo’s ready violence.

Alys did not seek Hugo and neither did he summon her. A deep secret gulf of silence had opened up between them. She did not waylay him on the stairs, or even attempt to catch his eye when he was sitting with Catherine and her ladies. Alys waited, like the living water beneath the frozen ice of the river, for better times.

He was gentle with Catherine and she, eating well, sleeping well, attended by her ladies and popular with her father-in-law, gleamed with satisfaction. Hugo lay with her once or twice, and though the women listened they heard no screams of pain and pain-shot pleasure. On those two nights Alys sat up all night by the arrow-slit, watching over the white landscape on the other side of the river, chilled to the bone by the icy wind which blew off the high moor. All night she stared out over the desert of snow, white-faced and wide-eyed as a barn owl, seeing nothing. In the morning Morach exclaimed at the ice of her hands and the deep violet shadows in folds of skin beneath her eyes.