Wicked (17 page)

“I can see that.”

“Are you cooking up some lie? Is that why you hesitate?”

“Nay. I will tell you. You have plenty of land and wealth, Sofia. Thanks to all your antics during the past few years, the King is desperate to see you wed.”

She stood there without a single expression on her face.

“The way I see it, if I don’t wed you, no one will.”

She sucked in a deep breath; it made a sharp and long hissing sound.

“You have to admit that you have chased away every suitor possible. I am about all that is left. I figure if I do not make the sacrifice, then—”

“
Sacrifice
?” Her face turned pale, then her face and neck began to redden.

“You know what I mean. Someone has to do it, otherwise Edward will be hell to live with. Every time you rejected a suitor, Edward levied scutage on his vassals so he could add more gold to your dowry. The truth of it is, none of us could afford it much longer.

“And besides, why wouldn’t I want you? I can put up with almost anything for your rich dower price, even a spoiled woman with too much time on her hands to do much more than make mischief.”

She was bright red and barely breathing.

“Such mischief as those pig bladders filled with water or the toads in my bed.” He shoved away from the column and held up a hand. “And before you say anything, I know you paid the stable boy to put the toads there.”

She looked angry enough to spit toads.

For one moment he wondered if in his need to deflect her rebellion, to take her down a peg, he had gone too far.

“Are you finished?” Her words were clipped. Her shoulders were stiff, and her hands were clasped tightly in front of her, the knuckles red and bloodless.

“I believe that about covers my reasons.”

“Fine.” She turned and walked away from him, her head high and her steps measured and even. He watched her go, watched the control with which she made her way across the bailey and into the archway, where there was a door that led up to the tower stairs and her chamber high above.

For that one moment, when his memory was fresh with her quiet, controlled manner, and as the moon crept over the eastern wall, a sickle moon in the same shape as the tool the villeins used to cut live stalks of wheat, he wondered if he had made a mistake.

She had made a
mistake. She had allowed herself to believe that someone could love her. Walking away from him with her head high and her eyes dry was one the hardest things she had ever done.

A fool! A fool!
That was what her mind cried out as she took each step.

Her lips began to quiver and she pressed them tightly together. Moisture rose in her eyes and burned in the backs of them. She blinked away the tears and took the stairs slowly, one at a time, until she was finally inside her chamber where the candles had not yet been lit and the room was dark in all its corners. Light from outside made a slight shadow on the floor as she turned and slid the door latch closed.

A moment later she threw herself on her bed, buried her face on her arms and cried. He did not want her. He wanted a placid monarch and her dowry price.

She sobbed so hard that her breath caught in her chest. She cried for all she never had. She cried for what she had lost. She cried for ever believing that she could have something good and sweet, like love. She cried because she had nothing left inside of her but a thousand tears.

It took a long, long time before she could sit up. By then the moon was just a glowing sliver in the black night sky. She looked down, ashamed, because she knew the truth then: she was not good enough for anyone to love. Her father could not love her. Tobin could not love her.

All those suitors only wanted her because of what she looked like, she knew that. Every one of them failed the test; they could not prove to her that what they wanted was something more than only a beauty to wear on their arm the way warriors wore their swords. She was a possession. A decoration.

She had foolishly forgotten the one single lesson she learned early in her life, the one taught her first by her father.

In her desperate need and desire to have Tobin de Clare love her, she had forgotten that she cannot allow herself to need anything, particularly the things she could not have.

She did not have a father and mother; she could not need them. She did not have love; she could not need love.

She had been abandoned young, learned the lesson then that she needed to control everything. But she had forgotten that. She had forgotten why she distanced herself from those who claimed they would help her. The truth was, there was no one she could trust but herself.

She began to sob again, crying for all those foolish and wasted moments when she dreamed that her life could be different. She could not hope or believe in someone other than herself. She could not, because they would only let her down.

She walked to the table, lit the nearby candle, and took it from the iron holder above the table. Sitting on the table top was a polished metal looking glass, the one she used to check her hair in the morn. She leaned over and looked into it, saw the tears dripping down her face, the swollen lips and red eyes and the blotchy skin that all came from her tears, tears she should never have shed.

She swiped them away and looked at her face, the face they all claimed was so beautiful. The face that was the reason people looked at her.

She stared long and hard in the looking glass, then she threw it across the room. It slammed into the stone wall with a loud clanking sound.

Beauty was a worthless thing. It never got her a mother. It never kept her father at her side. It did not make him love her or value her. Beauty never gave her anything but trouble.

She stood and crossed the room, bent down, and picked up the metal looking glass, then she went to the chest near her bed and took out her sewing kit. She pulled the small scissors from inside, the ones shaped like a swan, and she went back to the table and propped the mirror against the stones of the wall.

For a long time she stared at herself. Then she took the scissors and the small dagger from her belt. She stared at them, wondering which one would do the most damage. She picked up the dagger and raised it to her face.

She looked in the glass, the dagger clutched in her fist. Tears came from her eyes and blurred the image before her. She grasped a handful of hair and she sliced it off. Then she grabbed another; and cut it. And another. Her long black hair fell to the floor in heaps, one section after another.

When she was done, she lay down the dagger and used the clips to cut off more hair, until it stuck out from her head in clumps that looked like the spikes on the side of the western wall.

She stood then and took a leather bag from a hook nearby, and she stuffed all the long black hair into it, then tied the strings into a tight knot. She lay down on the bed and curled into a tight ball, her hands clasping her arms so she was hugging herself. Her eyes were tired and burned from all those tears. She closed them and a moment later she was asleep.

It was well after
Sext the next day when Parcin, the captain of Tobin’s men-at-arms, came to find him in the stables, where his mount was chewing on hay and had showed no signs of lameness.

“Sir?”

Tobin turned. “Aye?”

His man was holding a brown leather satchel. “I was told this was yours.”

“Mine?” Tobin frowned. “Where did you get it?”

“Early this morn, as we were riding out to hunt, a lad came up to me near the gates and told me you had purchased this. He asked if I would deliver it to you.”

Tobin had not purchased anything. He took the sack and tested its weight, seeing if it was a trick. He knew of a man who was given a satchel, told it was a gift and there was an adder inside. This did not feel like a snake. It was not bulky. He dropped it on the ground, knelt and untied the strings. He looked inside and saw nothing but black.

Frowning, he turned the sack upside down.

Yards of gleaming black hair, Sofia’s black hair, fell into a tangled lump on the yellow straw below.

He stared at it, shocked into silence, then he straightened and swore viciously. A second later he turned and slammed his fist against the wooden wall.

His man flinched.

Tobin spun back around. “What lad? Where?”

“I do not know who he was, sir. He wore a broad-brimmed red hat, like the crofters. His face was filthy and black. He wore a woolen tunic, brown and rough, and braies.”

“Where did she go?”

“I do not know. I did not—” He paused. “She?”

“Aye, the lad was my betrothed.”

Parcin looked like he wanted to be ill. “I did not know it was her. I . . . I . . . ”

Tobin raised his hand. “’Tis not your fault. But think. What else did you see?”

“I did not see her after she ran out the gatehouse.”

Tobin was quiet.

“He, I mean, she left the castle about the same time as the supply wagons.”

Tobin shook his head. It was late in the afternoon and she had a full day’s start on him. He left the stable muttering about women and hair and stubbornness and fools. His long legs ate up the ground and his hands were in fists as he walked toward the King’s rooms to tell Edward what she had done now.

Off in the distance,
near Canterbury and a few miles away from Leeds, a young, dark-haired lad in a red hat and rough woolen clothes, his face smudged dark and dirty with ash, caught a ride toward London with a small caravan of entertainers.

Chapter 13

For Sofia, the next days were truly a lark. She rode with a small troupe of performers led by a kind young man who had hair the same color as the copper pennies his acts earned. He was a juggler and a jongleur, named Alan of Wisbury, and he could make the crowds laugh and cry and charm them with his friendly blue eyes and freckled cheeks. With him was his wife’s father, Bernard, a massive man who was a rope walker and acrobat and who had a huge dancing bear, named Satan.

There was Miranda, Alan’s wife and Bernard’s daughter, who told fortunes and could also walk the rope no matter how high it was strung, and their six year old twin daughters, Maude and Matilda. The twins liked to tumble and do somersaults through the air from their father’s and grandfather’s big arms.

None of them knew Sofia was not the lad she pretended to be. To them, she was an orphan—which was the truth; a wanderer, which was the truth; and teller of fanciful tales . . . well, Sofia figured she had always lied well.

Life in the King’s castles had taught her much about men, because there were so many of them around for her to observe. She learnt early that men swaggered and spit They boasted over even the smallest of incidences and made jests about privies and garderobes. She had heard the grooms tell stories about spying on the maids bathing in the river or watching the stablemaster in the hayrick with the cook. Basically, impersonating a man meant being about as arrogant and uncouth as possible.

’Twas not so difficult to mimic, now, when she needed a new identity. One night she managed to quaff a whole tankard of ale with the best of them and belch on the spot, six times in a row, while she sang a bawdy song. She won the first chunk of hot bread. She could even fart if need be, but she had to eat stringy mutton and turnips to do so, which was not too difficult, since that was what they ate almost every night.

The small troupe had moved through the countryside and on to London, but they could not cross the bridge, because the week before four of the arches had given way, worn by time, lack of maintenance, and from the harsh ice from the winter before. Alan had paid their passage tolls with new ha’pennies that her cousin Edward had minted in lieu of the old coins, which were supposed to be cut in halves and quarters. But over the years when his father, King Henry, had reigned, the old coins had been cut, then clipped and shaved and clipped again until their coinage value was half the weight of what it should have been. Sofia had not seen the new coins until Alan had pulled one from his purse and shown her before he paid the tolls.

Quarrymen poled them across the Thames to dark sections of the warrened city, part of London that Sofia had never seen before. There were narrow alleys where it seemed as if no one ever slept. On the houses and taverns there were still thatched roofs that could catch fire and spread with little more than a light breeze. Two buildings had burned down before her very eyes. The streets were a place where dogs moved along with the people, children hawked goods and where you could get your throat cut as easily as you could get your purse snatched.

But for Sofia, sheltered as she had been, it was all a new adventure and she saw not the danger, only another, fascinatingly wicked side of living she had never seen before.

To her delight, Alan had taught her to juggle the first night she joined them, and she was mastering the task rather splendidly, at least she thought so, since she could do it without her tongue sticking out of her mouth.

So she stood on the street corner in the dark side of the city, before a small crowd, tossing three red wooden balls in the air as she balanced on a small log.

“Hie, there, Ned!” Alan shouted her lad’s name, cheering her on as he passed his broad-brimmed hat, gathering coins from the small crowd gathered around her. She had told Alan and the others that her name was Edward, a lie that gave her no little amusement, since she was certain that the King, and her namesake, had most certainly ordered her found.

She was cavorting rather well. The bells on her shoes were tingling and her confidence was high enough that she was just about ready to add the fourth ball.

Then something hit her. Hard. Slammed right into her legs. She flew sideways, and sprawled facedown on the cobbled street. She caught her lost breath and inhaled mud and stink and whatever else was beneath her face and nose.

Through a daze of stunned pain, she heard laughter from the small crowd and a curious snorting sound.

Someone was nudging her ear.

She shook her head and pebbles flew every which way. She spit once, then looked up.