The Wise Woman (37 page)

“For the sake of Our Lady,” Catherine said. “Take my hand, Alys, and say you forgive me.”

At the name of the Holy Mother, Alys checked, closed her eyes for a second, and shook her head. She took a deep breath. The humming sound burned angrily in her head for a moment and then rumbled softly away, deep and soft, as if a dark swarm had gone back to a cave, to hide for a while, until their time should come again.

Catherine reached out for her. Alys stepped forward and reluctantly took her outstretched hand.

“I was jealous,” Catherine went on eagerly. “You were so beautiful when you first came to the castle, Alys. And Hugo was so cold to me. You are so clever and so learned, and the old lord liked you—and he never really liked me. And I was afraid that you were taking them from me, both of them. My husband and my guardian. I was afraid you would take my place from me. Then I would have had nothing, Alys.” She was breathing very fast but there was no trace of color in her cheeks. She was as white as a candlewax doll.

Alys, holding Catherine’s cold hand, holding on to her own power, felt the dark swarm flowing back through her, through her veins, through her head, out through her deadly fingertips.

Her hands became icy, colder than Catherine’s, colder than the winter river itself. Alys gave a little tremble of excitement and put her other hand over Catherine’s clinging grip.

“I think I’m dying,” Catherine said breathlessly. “The room is dark, so very dark, Alys. Hold my hand a little tighter, I can hardly see you.”

Alys tightened her grip as she was bid. A fierce hungry smile spread across her face. She could feel the coldness and the darkness pouring from her, pouring out through her hands into Catherine. “Are you cold?” she asked.

Catherine shuddered. “I am freezing, Alys! Freezing!” she exclaimed. “And all the candles are out! And the fire out! Why is it so cold? Why is it so dark? I feel as if there is no one here who loves me or cares for me at all. Hold my hand tighter, Alys! Talk to me! I am afraid! I am afraid!”

Alys laughed, a cold ripple of sound in the brightly lit steaming room. “I am here, Lady Catherine,” she said. “Can you not see me? The fire is banked high, it is terribly hot. Can you feel nothing? And all the candles are lit—the lovely bright beeswax candles. The room is as bright as day, as bright as sunlight. Is it all dark for you? Is it all dark for you at last?”

“Alys!” Catherine said imploringly. “Hold me, Alys, please! Hold me close! I feel as if the waters are taking me under. I am drowning, Alys! I am drowning in my bed.”

“Yes!” Alys said exultantly, her own breath coming fast. “You caught me like this last time, in the moat. You called me to you and then you pulled me down! But this time it is me drowning you! I need not put my hands to your throat. I need not do more than hold your hands as you wish, and you will go down, Catherine. You will go down alone, you will drown in your bed!”

“Alys!” Catherine cried. Her voice was as thin as a thread, and at the end of the word she choked, as if a wave of green icy water had slapped her in the mouth.

Alys laughed again, madly, recklessly. “You’re drowning, Catherine!” she said, amazed at her own power. “Morach could pull you out of the river but nothing and no one can save you from drowning! You’re going down, Catherine! You’re going down! You are drowning in your bed!”

The door clicked behind them and Alys whirled around. It was Hugo. Behind him was the old lord and David. He looked from one woman to the other and his face was puzzled.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Alys took a deep breath. The bright hot room seemed to swirl around her like the colors in a swinging crystal. “She is fearful,” she said. Her voice seemed to come from a long way away. “And she is holding on to me so tight! I tried to call for the women but they did not hear. And I am faint.” She swayed as she spoke and Hugo stepped quickly forward. Alys lurched toward him; but it was David the seneschal who stepped forward and caught her as she fell.

Hugo did not even turn around to look at her. He had Catherine gathered in his arms and she was sobbing on his shoulder.

C
atherine was ill for many days, through the springtime weather of May when the sun rose clear and early, and the birds sang till dusk, till the end of that storm-filled, sunshine-filled month; but she did not complain. She lay quietly in her bed, which was carried across to the little window so she could sit up on her pillows and see the courtyard and the garden and the life of the castle going on. She wearied easily and she liked to have Alys by her side to read to her. “I cannot see the print,” she said. “My head aches so. And Alys reads so sweetly.”

Lord Hugh passed her books and poems to read, and even some of his letters from London which told of Queen Anne’s trial and her execution. “‘By the hand of a French swordsman, especially trained and brought over from that country,’” Alys read to Catherine.

Catherine shook her head. “I never liked her,” she said softly. “I was named for Queen Catherine, you know, Alys. I always thought Anne Boleyn would fall. She was an adulteress, first with the king, and then with his courtiers. I won’t mourn for her. Her rise was ungodly swift.”

“No swifter than Jane Seymour’s,” Alys said logically. “She was lady-in-waiting to them both. And she will be queen in her turn. If a man is king, or even master of his destiny, he will choose the woman he wants. And she can rise as he wishes.”

Catherine turned her head on the pillow and smiled at Alys. “A marriage for love is best,” she said contentedly. “A marriage for love between equals is best.”

Hugo came to her every morning and sat with her until dinner. He dined with her in her chamber at noon, and the table in the big hall seemed strangely empty without them. Alys often waited on them in Catherine’s chamber as they ate. Hugo took her service without noticing her. He only watched Catherine, pressing her to eat the finest things, to drink little glasses of good red Mount Rose wine from Gascony to strengthen her blood. It was Catherine who thanked Alys.

In the afternoon while Hugo went out hunting, Alys would sing to Catherine and play the lute. She would read to her and copy passages from books which Catherine wanted to learn. “I am so glad you are here, Alys,” Catherine said sweetly one day. “I am so glad you are here to care for me. I feel so weak, Alys, I can tell you—but don’t tell Hugo. I feel so weak I feel as if I will never be strong again. I am glad to have you care for me. I don’t think I would have survived my drowning without your care.”

Morach, sitting idly at Catherine’s bedroom fire, shot a quick amused glance at Alys’s face. Alys looked blandly back.

“Who would have thought that you two girls would have become so close?” Morach wondered aloud. “Such friends as you now are!”

Alys drew her lips back in a smile. “It makes me very happy to be your friend, my lady,” she said stiltedly. “Perhaps you should have your rest now.”

Every afternoon Catherine slept in her high bed until suppertime, when she dressed to go down to the hall with her ladies. The women and the men, gathered for their supper, gave a little mutter of approval to see her strength growing every day.

“It was a near thing,” Morach said with satisfaction, as she reached for another slice of manchet bread on the ladies’ table. “A near-run thing indeed. I thought for a little while that we might lose her.”

“It’s a miracle,” Ruth said devoutly. “A miracle that she should be snatched from drowning and then not die of the cold nor lose the baby. I have thanked God for it.”

“It’s a miracle she should turn out so sweet,” Eliza whispered blasphemously. “She was as sour and as full of acid as a lemon until her dunking. Now she’s all honey. And kindly to you.” She nodded at Alys.

“Will the baby have a fear of water?” Mistress Allingham asked curiously. “I remember a child in Richmond whose mother fell in the river and she could never touch water without shivering.”

“I remember her,” Morach nodded. “Aye, sometimes it takes them that way, sometimes they swim like little fishes in the flood. D’you remember Jade the Idiot? His mother was drowned and I myself reached inside her dead body and pulled him out like a little lamb from a dead ewe. We wrapped him on the very bank of the river while the great flood was up high! And he could swim like he was more fish than man!”

Margery nodded eagerly and spoke of another fine swimmer. Alys leaned back a little and let the talk wash around her. The beeswax candles were very clear and bright tonight and the wine was sweet. Looking to her left she could see Hugo’s back, the padded broad set of his shoulders, the swirl of his cape. On the nape of his neck his dark hair curled tight, his cap was set askew in the new fashion. She stared as hard as she could, willing him to be aware of her, to turn, to see her.

She could not do it. He had lost his sense of her.

“You’re pale, Alys,” Eliza said. “Are you sick again?”

Alys shook her head. “No, I’m well,” she said. “A little weary, that’s all.”

Margery blew on her trencher of bread, piled high with her portion of savory meat mortrews, and bit into it with relish. “You’ve been sick since the Christmas feast, I reckon,” she said. “You were so bright and bonny when you first came to the castle and now your skin is pale as whey.”

“She’ll bloom in the summer,” Morach said. “Alys never liked being cooped indoors, and the reading and the writing she does would weary anyone.”

“’Tisn’t natural, for a woman to have such learning,” Mistress Allingham said roundly. “No wonder she looks so thin and plain. She’s working all the time with her mind and not growing plump and bonny like a girl should.”

“Plain?” Alys repeated, shocked.

Eliza nodded, mischievously. “Why did you think you were so high in my lady’s favor? Because Hugo never looks your way no more! You’re all thin and bony, Alys, and white as frost. He bundles up with Catherine and folds himself around her fat belly and thanks God for a bit of warm flesh in these cold nights.”

“She’ll bloom in summer,” Morach said again. “Leave the girl alone. The long, cold dark days of this spring would weary anyone.”

The talk moved on at Morach’s bidding but later that evening after supper, Alys slipped into Lady Catherine’s room while the rest of them were drinking mead around the fire in the gallery. She carried a candle with her and set it down before the glass to see her face. It was a large handsome mirror made of silvered glass and the reflection it gave was always kindly, forgiving. Alys set down the candle and looked at herself.

She was thinner. The gown of Meg the whore was wider than ever, the girdle spanned her waist and hung down low and the stomacher, laced as tight as it could go, flattened her slight breasts but was loose over her belly. She slipped her shawl back. Her shoulders were as scrawny as an old woman’s, her collarbones like the bones of a little sparrow. She stepped a little closer to see her face. There were dark shadows beneath her eyes and lines of strain around her mouth. She had lost her childish roundness and her cheeks were thin and pale. Her blue eyes looked enormous, waiflike. She radiated coldness and loneliness and need.

Alys made a sour face at the mirror. “I’ll not get him back looking like this,” she said under her breath. She stepped a little closer. The shadows under her eyes were as dark as bruises. “I’ll not get him back at all,” she said softly. “He could have loved me when I was straight off the moor, taught by my mother abbess, and skillful like Morach. He could have loved me then and been true to me then, and none of this misery would ever have happened. Now I’ve set my hand to magic and he’s been witched, and she’s been witched, and something is eating me away from the inside, like some great greedy worm, so all my strength drains from me and all I have left is my longing for him.”

The face in the mirror was haggard. Alys put her hand up and felt the tears on her cheek. “And my magic,” she said softly. “Longing and magic enough to hurt and wound. That’s all I have left me. No magic to summon a man to love me.”

She sighed and the candle flame bobbed at her breath and spat a trail of smoke. Alys watched it wind toward the bright-painted timbered ceiling.

“I dipped very deep to be rid of him,” she said softly to herself. “I used all the power I had to turn his eyes from me and his mind from me. I’ll have to go that deep again to get him back.”

The candle flame quivered, as if in assent.

Alys leaned forward. “Shall I do it?” she asked the little yellow flame.

It dipped again. Alys smiled, and her face lit up with her youth and her joy again.

“Flame-talking!” she said softly. “A flame as a counselor!”

The room was very still; in the gallery she could hear someone take up a lute and strike a few chords, trying the sound. The chords hung on the air as if Alys was holding back time itself while she made her decision.

“It’s more deep magic,” she said thoughtfully. “Deeper than I know. Deeper than Morach knows.”

The candle flame flickered attentively.

“I’ll do it!” Alys said suddenly. “Will it win me Hugo?”

The flame leaped and a tiny spark shot out from a fault in the wick. Alys gave a start of surprise and then clapped her hands over her mouth to hold in a ripple of laughter.

“I win Hugo!” she said delightedly. “I get what I want!”

She snatched up the candlestick and turned to go from the room. As she walked the flame billowed out like a streamer, lighting the walls and Hugo and Catherine’s big curtained bed so its shadow leaped up and jumped like a huge stalking animal. Alys opened the door to the gallery and stepped into the brightly lit room and the music. In its stick, unnoticed, the candle flame winked and went out.

The women were gathered around the fireside. Catherine, round and warm, was leaning back in her chair, her eyes closed, listening to Eliza plucking at the lute. Alys passed like a pale cold ghost through the room, carrying a darkened candlestick, and slipped into her bedroom.

She closed the door behind her but still Eliza’s careless off-key warble came through. She leaned her back against the door as if she would blockade the room from them all. Then she shrugged, as a gambler does when he has nothing more to lose, crossed to the garderobe, and rolled her sleeves up. Wrinkling her nose at the smell, she reached down the gap in the wall to feel for the string and the bag of the candle dolls. The bag was stuck to the castle wall, caked with muck. Alys’s fingers scrabbled, trying to get a grip. She got hold of one corner and tore the purse away from the wall and up into the room.