The Wise Woman (63 page)

“Ah, Alys,” Lord Hugh said genially. “Come in, come in. Here is our own good Stephen with news of his preferment. He has been made archdeacon! You must congratulate him.”

“Indeed I do,” Alys said prettily. She put out her hand to Stephen. “I can think of no better man for the task,” she said.

Stephen bowed slightly over her hand. His eyes flickered from her face to her belly. He had heard gossip that Alys was carrying Hugo’s child. Now he saw that it was true.

“I have much work to do,” the old lord said. “Stephen, you will take your old rooms? And talk with me this afternoon after dinner?”

“Certainly, my lord,” Stephen said.

“Come riding with me now,” Hugo said. “We can take the hounds and go up over the moor, get some meat.”

Stephen grinned. “Still hunting, Hugo?” he said. “Always some prey or another.”

It was a private joke. Both men grinned like schoolboys. “No preaching now,” Hugo said. “Not on your first day back with us!”

Stephen laughed and nodded. They swirled from the room in a flurry of colored capes and David went quietly after them, shutting the door.

Alys settled herself at the table in the window, smoothed her blue gown over her knees, turned her head and smiled.

“You’re looking very contented,” the old lord said approvingly.

“I have been talking with Catherine,” Alys said. “I think I have done you a service which will please you.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her and waited.

“If you will settle a decent-sized manor farm on her, and give her a pension, then I can persuade her to let the annulment go through without protest,” Alys said calmly. “She is ready to leave at once.”

“Christ save us!” the old lord exclaimed. He hauled himself up on his cane and walked around his chair. “Why?” he asked. “Why should she surrender Hugo after clinging to him for all these years?”

“She feels unclean,” Alys said. “She felt the miscarriage very deeply, she has wept without ceasing until today. She feels your anger and Hugo’s. She wants to please you and she wants to get away. She knows she is barren and she will have to go.”

The old lord nodded. “But I always thought her so lustful,” he said. “I thought we would have to lever Hugo out of her arms.”

Alys looked down and smiled complacently. “She is a woman of unnatural desires,” Alys said simply. “She now desires me.”

The old lord gave a crack of laughter. “God help us!” he said. “Hugo will be mortified! She’s had his cock between her legs and she prefers the peck of a hen! Wait till I tell him! He will die of shame! Catherine will let the marriage go if she can have his whore!”

He sobered in a few minutes. “And what of you?” he asked. “Playing both sides against the middle, as usual, I suppose?”

Alys looked up at him. “My lord?” she asked innocently.

“What light oaths have you pledged?” the old lord demanded. “Come now, girl, I need to know the terms, all the terms that Catherine is setting.”

“I have promised to live with her should I ever leave here,” Alys said.

The old lord nodded. “And she was satisfied with that? Sounds very thin to me.”

“She thinks Hugo will take another wife from far away,” Alys said. “She does not know that I carry Hugo’s child in my belly. She is a fool. Her own worries and her own fears blind her. Not even her ladies have dared to tell her that I carry Hugo’s child. She is so selfish, so drowned in her own needs, that she does not even see me. She understands nothing. She thinks I am a passing fancy, she does not see clearly enough to see me as Hugo’s lady.”

The old lord had turned away, Alys could not see his face. But the stillness of his back warned her.

“You thought that you would be the new wife?” he asked.

Alys found that her breath was coming fast. The sense of fear and anger in her belly which she had felt while watching Hugo flirting in the courtyard was flooding back. She felt her face grow cold and then flushed.

“Yes,” she said bravely. “I may not be noble and I bring no dowry. But I am the only woman ever to conceive and to carry his child. When my son is born he will be the only heir you have. You know as well as I that Catherine is not infertile—you have had physician after physician to look at her. You know it is Hugo’s seed which is weak. If you bring in another wife you will only have another barren marriage. It is
only
me who can conceive with Hugo.
Only
me who can carry his child full term. When I give birth to a son in the springtime you do not
dare
not to have us wed by then, and the child legitimate!”

The old lord, his back still turned, threw back his head and roared with cruel, mirthless laughter. Alys smiled nervously, hoping to share his humor.

“I dare?” he asked, turning around to face her. “You tell me: I do not dare? Oh, my pretty slut, I dare greater things than that!” He stepped across the chamber and thrust his bony hands in front of her face, counting off points on his fingers. “One: Hugo is not to marry a base woman from God knows where, of God knows what family or parents. Two: I don’t take gambles on appearances.” He patted her lightly in the belly with the back of his hand. “You could have a cripple in there, like Catherine had. You could have a girl.” He spoke as if cripple and girl were equally abhorrent. “You could have a dead baby or an idiot boy.”

Instinctively Alys put her hands over her belly as if to block out the words. He pushed her hands away. “Or wind. You could fail to go full term,” he said cruelly. “You could miscarry like Catherine. You have six months to get through yet, my little whore, it’s not likely I’ll buy without seeing what I’m getting, is it?”

Mutely Alys stared up at him, her hands in her lap, palms uppermost. “And thirdly,” he said loudly. “
If
it is a son, and hale and hearty, Hugo does not marry you, you little fool. We make the son legitimate! I adopt him as my heir. We want the child, we don’t want you! We never wanted you except for clerking and Hugo’s pleasure!”

Alys was white-faced, her hands were shaking.

“What made you think you could snare me, you little slut? Have you forgotten who I am? You seem to have forgotten your own base blood as soon as you had colors on your back. But me? Have you forgotten who I am? I am the lord of all the land around me for hundreds of miles! My family was planted here by William the Norman king himself, and I have fought and schemed for every acre under my foot. You might forget yourself—God knows you’re not memorable! But me? Have you forgotten my family? Have you forgotten my power? Have you forgotten my pride? Have you forgotten who I am?”

Alys rose unsteadily to her feet. “I am unwell,” she said. She could feel her face trembling. It was hard to form the words. “I will leave you, my lord,” she said.

“Sit down, sit down,” Lord Hugh said impatiently, his anger blown away in a moment. He thrust her into the chair and stamped over to the table and poured her a glass of wine. Alys took it and sipped. He watched the color creep back into her cheeks.

“I warned you,” he said gently. “I warned you not to try to overleap the boundaries, God’s own boundaries, between the noble and the rest.”

The wine was steadying Alys. “Hugo loves me,” she insisted softly.

The old lord shook his head. “Alys, don’t talk like a fool!” he begged. “You please Hugo. You are a pretty woman, desirable and hot. Any man would want you. If I were not frail and old, I’d have you myself. But don’t think these things are decided on whim, on pleasure in a face, or a night’s lust. Not even the king himself consults his appetites in this. It’s a political decision, always political. Hunting for heirs, hunting for new alliances. Making power, consolidating power. Women are just pawns in this game. Hugo knows as well as I that the next marriage has to be done well, to our advantage. We need a connection with a rising family of the southeast—someone close to the king. Hugo is right—the king is more and more the source of power, of wealth. We need a family high in favor at court.”

Alys put down the glass. “And do you have one in mind?” she asked bitterly.

“I have three!” the old lord said triumphantly. “The de Bercy family, they have a wench of twelve they would let us have, the Beause family—they have a girl too young, only nine—but if she is big and forward for her age she might do. And the Mumsett family—they have a girl on their hands whose marriage contract has collapsed. She’s twenty. The right age for Hugo. I need to know why her engagement failed, but she might do.”

The wine was spreading through Alys’s body like despair. “I did not know,” she said dully. “You never spoke of these to me. You never wrote to them. You never received letters from them. I did not know. How have you made these arrangements? I never wrote for you.”

Lord Hugh chuckled. “Did you think you saw all my letters?” he asked. “Did you not think that David writes for me, in Latin, aye, in English and Italian, or French too? Did you not think that Hugo writes for me sometimes? Did you not think that when it is deep, deep secret then I write for myself and send it out by a bird, releasing the bird with my own hands so that no one knows but me and a clever, secretive bird?”

Alys shook her head. “I thought you trusted me alone,” she said. “I thought I was close to your heart.”

The old lord looked at her with compassion. “And they call you a wise woman!” he said with gentle mockery. “You are a fool, Alys.”

She bowed her head.

“What will become of me?” she asked.

“I’ll keep you as my clerk,” the old lord offered. “There will always be a place for you in my hall. You will nurse your child for the first two years. I will not take him away from you before then. When he has tried his first steps I shall take him for my own and you can please yourself.”

“I can stay here?” Alys asked.

“As his nurse, if you watch your tongue. As long as Hugo’s new wife does not object. She will have the rearing of your son. He will be brought up as her child.”

“She gets Hugo and the castle and my son,” Alys said numbly. “This girl you do not even know. She gets Hugo
and
the castle
and
my son and I get nothing.”

Lord Hugh nodded. “I could send you to France to a nunnery when the baby is taken from you,” he offered. “I’ll give you a dowry and the name of a dead man. You could go back to the nunnery as a widow. I will do that for you.”

“I have lost my faith,” Alys said with weary dignity. “Step by step in this castle I have fallen into sin and lost what little faith I ever had. The life I have led here would have robbed the faith of a saint.”

The old lord laughed shortly. “Forgive me,” he said. “I am just a layman, I cannot dispute these things. But surely the life you lived here would have
proved
a saint. This should have been a good test for a little fledgling saint.”

Alys bowed her head under his mockery.

“Well then, you have your final haven,” he said, a ripple of laughter in the back of his voice.

Alys looked at him dumbly.

“Catherine and the manor-house!” he said, his laughter spilling out. “And the rest of your nights with Catherine’s fat body bouncing up and down on you and poking in her fingers where you want a cock!”

He exploded into laughter, unstoppable, genuine guffaws, ignoring Alys sitting frozen at the table. Then he broke off and mopped his eyes. “What a haven, my little one!” he said. “But you could do worse. You were born for a meaner estate than that, after all. It’s a triumph for you, in its way. I’ll settle some land on you as I promised, and Catherine shall have a fine enough manor. It is better than nothing, Alys; and you were born to nothing.”

Alys sat in silence, her eyes on the table, her cold hands clasped across her belly.

“Now to work,” Lord Hugh said briskly. “We’re holding a sheriff’s court this afternoon in the great hall. I want to see the cases which are coming up before me. And these letters have come from the king’s council. An armful of new instructions—pursuit of heretics, witchcraft, papists. Treatment of paupers, upkeep of roads, bridges. Numbers of big horses each tenant must keep, numbers of sheep on lands. Training of young men as archers, banning of the crossbow. Control of enclosures, Lord knows what else.” He dumped an armful of papers before Alys on the table. “Sort them into two piles,” he said. “The ones that require an answer at once, that we have to deal with today. And those that can wait. I’ll read the cases which will come before me this afternoon.”

Alys bent her head over the papers, smoothed out their creases, stacked them on one pile or another. She was not plotting, nor scheming how to turn the plans for the marriage to her advantage. She felt as if she had lost her ability to turn anything to advantage. She was up against the power and authority of men. There was no chance of anything but defeat.

A
lys worked until dinner. Lord Hugh trusted her to draft his replies to routine letters and then read them back to him for his scrawled signature and the stamp of his seal. However, some things he kept to himself. There were letters from London which came in a packet of linen with the seams stitched and sealed. He cut it open, sitting in his chair by the fireside, and burned each of the secret pages after he had read it.

At noon David came to the chamber. “Dinner is ready, my lord,” he said.

Lord Hugh started up from his thoughts and stretched his arm out to Alys. “Come away, Alys,” he said kindly. “Come down to dinner with me. This is weary work for you, are you sure you are not too tired?”

Alys rose from the table and followed him from the room. She saw David’s acute glance at the whiteness of her face and the slope of her shoulders.

“Does it fare merrily with you, Alys?” he asked. “Merrily, merrily?”

She looked at him without bothering to conceal her dislike. “I thank you for your wishes,” she said. “I hope they come back to you threefold.”

The dwarf scowled. He clenched his hand into the fist with thumb between second and third fingers, the old protection against witchcraft, crossed himself with the fist, and kissed his thumb.

Alys laughed in his glowering face. “Mind Father Stephen does not see you,” she said. “He would accuse you of popish practices!”