The Wise Woman (56 page)

“And what will happen to Catherine?” Alys asked, her voice soft.

Lord Hugh shrugged. “Lord knows,” he said carelessly. “If it were the old days she could have gone into a nunnery. Now I don’t know. She has no family to speak of. I suppose I might find someone to marry her. A widower with sons already who can afford a barren wife might do. She’s a personable enough woman, and warm in bed, Hugo says. I’ll give some of her dowry back. Or I could give her a little household somewhere in my lands. She could take a couple of her women and some servants.” He nodded. “As she wishes. She’ll be free to do as she pleases. If she does not stand against me she’ll find me generous.”

“Does Hugo know of this?” Alys asked.

The old lord shook his head. “No; and he’s not to know it from you either, my pretty wench. I’ll tell him when I get my replies. If they’re favorable we’ll go ahead with this plan. Take these letters to David for me and tell him they’re to be delivered at once. The messengers are to wait for the reply and come straight back. Tell him I’ll give a silver shilling to every man who is prompt. And tell the messengers to neither eat nor drink within the city of London. There’s plague in the town again, I don’t want it brought back here.

“And then go and lie down. Rest. If Catherine calls you, tell her it is my wish that you rest in the afternoons.”

Alys nodded, gathered up the papers and left.

She had not forgotten Mother Hildebrande. At noon, as Alys had smoothed her hair, looking in the mirror before going down to dinner, it was Mother Hildebrande’s stern face she saw. She saw her mother, standing in the doorway of the little cottage, shading her eyes against the sun, looking downriver, scanning the riverside path, waiting confidently for the daughter she had found again, certain that she would come, trusting the strict training, the habit of discipline, and—more than anything else—trusting the love which was between the two women. She would wait for an hour, her old legs and her tired back aching. The path would stay empty. She would be puzzled at first—Alys the novice nun had never been late for any lesson, never scuttled in after the others to chapel. Then she would be afraid for her daughter—fearing a fall from the horse, or an accident, or danger for Alys. Then she would turn slowly back into the damp cottage to sit by the empty fireplace and put her hands together and pray for the soul of Alys who had not come, though she was bound by every oath in the world to come; who had failed in her duty to her God, who had failed her mother, the only person left in the world who loved her.

Alys could see Mother Hildebrande in her imagination when she heard the ripple of pleasure at midday dinner as she had come through the door to the hall, with her belly thrust forward, to take Catherine’s place. When her food was put before her, Alys had a sudden vision of Mother Hildebrande struggling with damp firewood in Morach’s cottage, and the dry taste of stale bread left from yesterday. Alys was aware of her when Hugo’s dark scowl lightened and he drained his glass and jumped down to dance; even when his hand slid down her spine and rounded over her buttocks and Alys stood still and leaned into his caress, her long eyelashes sweeping down to hide the pretended arousal in her eyes.

When she translated the letters, using the skills Mother Hildebrande had taught her, part of Alys’s mind was still with the old woman. The sides of the riverbanks were steep now the river was at its midsummer low—she would not be able to get water. When the bread from yesterday was gone there would be nothing to eat unless she climbed the hill and begged from passersby on the road. Alys thought of the woman she had loved as a mother, with her hand held out to strangers and her quiet dignity insulted by pedlars.

Alys gave the letters and the instructions to David, making special emphasis of the danger of London’s plague, and went to her own room, shut the door, kicked off her shoes, and lay down on her bed. She gazed upward at the green and yellow tester like a ceiling above her head, elaborate, luxurious, expensive. She knew, as she had known from the moment when she sat at Mother Hildebrande’s feet on Morach’s dank earth floor, that she would not go back to live in the little hovel by the river. Alys would never again feel the empty-bellied misery of the poor in winter. Alys would never again break the ice on the river to pull out a bucket of stormy brown water. Alys would never again break her fingernails and bruise her hands scrabbling in frozen earth for icy turnips. Not if she could control her fate.

“I can’t go back,” Alys said aloud. “I won’t go back.”

She thought of her mother, the woman she had longed for, whose loss had grieved her every day, and she found that the deep wound of pain had gone, vanished. When she thought of Mother Hildebrande now it was with fear of her intrusion, it was with irritation, it was with anxiety. Mother Hildebrande was no longer a dead saint to be mourned. She was a lively threat.

“She should go away,” Alys said softly. “She should go away to a proper nunnery. I would go with her if she would only go to a proper nunnery. Even now, even with Catherine being set aside and everyone recognizing Hugo as my lover, and me as the mother of the heir; I would go with her if she went to a proper nunnery.”

Alys paused. She thought of the peace and deep pleasure of her girlhood as Mother Hildebrande’s favorite in the abbey by the river. She thought of the quiet lessons in Latin and Greek, of her pleasure in learning so quickly; of being the best. She thought of the still-room and the smell of the herbs and the tinctures. She thought of the herb garden and the raised beds and the stalky secret leaves of the herbs, of the smell of lavender when she rubbed it in her hands, of the feathery touch of sage, the tang of mint when she plucked a stalk and bit deeply.

Alys shook her head, still staring at the tester and the bed curtains, but seeing the little girl with the fair hair who longed for peace and plenty and who had loved the mother abbess who had given her both.

“No,” she said finally. “No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t go with her, not even if she went to another abbey. That was the life of my girlhood, just as Morach was the life of my childhood. I will not go backward to those old places. I am finished with them both. I wish they were both dead and gone.”

The door opened without knocking and Hugo came in.

“Resting like a lady, Alys?” he slurred, holding the door for support. He had stayed in the great hall after Alys and his father had left. The musicians had played on and on, the jugs of wine had gone around. The serving-wenches had come out from the kitchen and danced wildly. Hugo and the soldiers had drunk deep, shouting at the women, snatching one out of the circle and pulling her about. While Alys and the old lord had been working, writing and planning for the future, Hugo had been playing in the hall. There was no work for Hugo. He was an idle child.

Alys raised herself on one hand. “Your father ordered me to rest,” she said carefully.

Hugo levered himself from the doorway, shut the door, and came sideways into the room, his feet hastening to keep up with him.

“Oh yes,” he said nastily. “You’re his great favorite now, Alys, aren’t you?”

Alys said nothing, measuring Hugo’s drunkenness, judging his dampened-down anger.

“God knows why!” he exclaimed. “Your damned country wise-woman meddling lost me my child! Lost him his grandson! If we’d had a physician, a proper man who had studied and read these things, from York or from London, Catherine would still be carrying that child now! And I would get my money in the autumn, and have an heir to follow me.”

Alys shook her head. “The baby was sick,” she said. “It would never have gone full term whoever you had waiting for the birth.”

Hugo’s dark eyes blazed at her. “Wise-woman nonsense,” he said roundly. “You swore to me he was healthy. You swore to me it was a healthy boy. You are a liar and a cheat. And all the words you say to me are lies and cheats.”

Alys shook her head, but said nothing, watching his anger rise and curdle to malice.

“Get your gown off,” Hugo suddenly said.

Alys hesitated.

“You heard me,” Hugo snapped. “Get your gown off.
My gown
, remember? The one that brought your tally of gowns up to Catherine’s dozen. The one you begged for like a whore.”

Alys stood up and unfastened the gown, slipped it off, hung it carefully over the foot of the bed, opened the cold linen sheets and slid into bed, watching Hugo all the time.

Hugo undid his codpiece, untied his knitted hose, dragged them down. “Here,” he said. “Was it our romp that made Catherine lose the baby?”

Alys shook her head. “No,” she said, hiding her apprehension of Hugo’s temper. His sexuality, which had been in the palm of her hand, had escaped her. He had looked at the girl in the hayfield and desired her. He had taken Alys without her consent, and reveled in having her and Catherine at once, as if they were two of a kind: two slavish women. He had humbled Alys as if she were nothing more than his whore—a toy for Catherine. He had freed himself from Alys’s dominance and now he could use her as he wished.

He clambered on the bed and kneeled over Alys. His breath was thick with wine and onions from dinner. He kissed her, kneading her breasts roughly with his hands. Alys felt her muscles tensing and the warm dampness between her legs drying and cooling.

“I took you like a whore then,” he said.

Alys closed her eyes and put her arms around his neck in a loveless charade of desire.

“You loved it,” Hugo said. “All women are whores at heart. You, Catherine, the yellow-haired girl at haymaking. All whores.”

“I am not,” Alys asserted. “I am carrying your child, I am the only woman who can carry your child. And I can enchant you, Hugo. Have you forgotten how you feel when my sisters come to me?”

Hugo shook his head. “It’s a wife I need, not a scheming witch,” he said angrily. “It’s a legitimate son I need, not a bastard child from a woman with no name, with no family. I don’t know how to command my life anymore. I look at Catherine and think how mad she is for me, and I look at you and think how mad I was for you. And it’s all worthless. It’s a mess. All the things I need escape me. All the things I truly want are forbidden me. All I can do is play mad games with you, and get a son on you who will be of no good to anyone, and serve nothing but my private pride.”

“You could command your life,” Alys said cautiously. Hugo was soft with drink, irritable. Alys felt him thrust against her ineffectually. His hand went down and he fumbled against Alys’s cold refusing dryness.

“If Catherine were gone,” Alys said quickly, “and I had a son, your son, and instead of thinking of me as a whore and trying to reduce me to your whore, you saw me as I am—a woman of great power. I need no family behind me, no name. I need bring no fortune with me. My skills and my power are all the dowry any man would desire. We could be married—just as I dreamed. And your house, your new and lovely house, would be our house, and our son’s house. And we could live in the new way, as you wished, together.”

“And have more sons,” Hugo said with drunken enthusiasm. He thrust once more at her. Alys felt him, flabby and damp, against the tightly closed muscles of her body. She could smell him, the thick, clotted smell of his linen. Her teeth gritted with distaste.

“Yes, we could have more sons,” she said. “You would be the sire of a line. Legitimate sons.”

“More sons than my father had! More sons than my grandfather had!” Hugo babbled. “I am sick of what they are saying about me—that I cannot father a child. We’ll marry and move to the new house and have a hundred sons.”

“Marry?” Alys asked softly, ready to spring a trap of a verbal betrothal on Hugo. A promise of marriage was the most binding promise of all, an honorable man could not withdraw. “Do you ask me to marry you?”

“Hundreds of sons!” Hugo said, with a sudden swing to drunken cheeriness. “Hundreds of them.”

“Shall we marry?” Alys whispered insidiously. “Marry and have legitimate sons. Do you want to marry me, Hugo?”

For a moment she thought he would answer her, and she would have his word of honor and a chance to blackmail him with his own meticulous code. But he gave a sigh and pitched forward on his face, buried his way into the pillows and started snoring.

Alys slithered out from underneath him, threw a rug around her bare shoulders, and pulled over a chair to the hearth. She watched the flames. “Odin,” she said, thinking of the blank runes. “Death of the old way and the birth of the new. The old lives have to die. The old precious loves have to make way. There has to be a death.”

A log shifted and flamed, its yellow light flickering into Alys’s face making her look entranced, witchy. “Death of the old ways,” she said again. “There has to be a death.”

She sat in silence for a moment.

“A death,” she said softly. “Not my death, not Hugo’s, not the old lord’s. But there has to be a death. The old loyalties must be changed. The old loves must die.”

She said nothing more for a long while but watched the flames in silence. Alys knew that the runes were foretelling a death—she hoped to buy them off with a symbolic death of her old love and her old loyalty. But in her most secret heart Alys knew that the runes would want blood.

“Not my blood,” she said softly.

When Hugo woke he was clear-headed and anxious to be off hunting. Alys helped him on with his doublet, patted the thick padded back and shoulders and pulled the rich silk lining through the slashings on the sleeves and chest. Even with the shadows under his eyes from the drink and the dark haze on his chin, Hugo looked very fine. Alys did not correct him when he assumed that he had made love to her. She walked with him to the door of the ladies’ gallery and watched him run lightly down the stairs, then she nodded to Eliza sitting at the fire.

“Bring me Catherine’s writing desk,” she said and took a stool with them. Mistress Allingham was sewing the long tapestry they had been working ever since Alys came to the castle. Catherine’s mother and her women had started it, Catherine and her ladies had worked it. Alys fancied that she and her women would be working it long after Catherine had left the castle in disgrace. It was only a quarter completed. Idly Alys pulled out the folds and looked at the intricate bright colors of the design.