“Nothing that made sense,” she reassured him. “Sir William sent for me after midnight. He told me nothing. You were lying on a rug before the fire. He said only that you had fainted. When I got here, you were dazed with fever.”
He nodded. “I can remember nothing.”
She thought that he must spend his life forgetting half of it, and speaking of less, and now oblivion had come to him, like a curse in answer to a wish.
“His lordship sent for me and asked me to come up here with you to make sure that it was not the plague.”
“You came to me . . . although you said . . .”
“Yes,” she said steadily. “The lord of the manor sent for me. I had to.”
“But you agreed to nurse me.”
“His lordship asked me. I had to.”
“You came to me,” he insisted. “You chose to come.”
She showed him the sweetest, most generous smile. “I came to you,” she confirmed.
“And undressed me.”
“I had to see if you had the marks of the pox or the plague.”
“And stayed with me all night.”
“To watch over your fever.”
“You held me in your arms.”
“It was the only way you would lie still, and not toss and turn and throw off the covers.”
“I was naked in your arms.”
She pursed her lips. “For your own good.”
He was silent for a moment. “My God, I wish I could be naked in your arms again.”
“Hush,” she said, wondering how much they could hear in the stable below. “Hush.”
“I will not hush,” he whispered. “I have to speak. Alinor, I thought I would go away without seeing you again, I thought we would never meet. I have lost my faith—my God—I am forsworn so many ways. I have lost my king and my God and myself. But I thought there would be some meaning to my life if only I could see you again—and now you are here.”
“I am not faith, nor God, nor king,” she told him solemnly. “I am not even a woman of good repute. I know you met Zachary at Newport. He will have told you—unless the fever has made you forget—he must have told you that I’m a bad woman: neither widow nor wife.”
“He swore to all sorts of terrors. I don’t regard them,” he promised. “I didn’t listen to him, and I didn’t believe him. I can’t remember anything he said.” He did not even know that he was lying to her. “I thought I would never see you again—I am ordered to leave you, and leave Foulmire—and now here we are, locked up together, almost as if it is God’s will that we should never part. I swear in His name that I don’t want to be anywhere else. I’ve lost everything but you. I thought I was dying, and when I was at the very darkest moment, the only thing I wanted was you. I could not speak, I could not think, I could not pray: all I wanted was you. I thought I was dreaming that you were holding me. I thought it was a fever dream of desire. I would not have come back to life if it had not been for your touch.”
They were silent for a moment at the enormity of what he had said.
“When I tell them you’re well, you’ll be free to go,” she warned him. “And I’ll have to leave. You’ll go to your bedroom at the Priory to rest and grow strong, and I’ll go home and come back tomorrow to see that you continue well. Sir William may call the Chichester physician.”
“Then tell them you won’t know till tomorrow,” he instantly replied, and when she hesitated, he said again: “Alinor, I am begging you. We have no chance, we two. We have no chance to be together in the world, but we can have today and tonight, if you will just tell this one, this little lie, we can hold each other. Tell them that you are waiting to see the fever break, or the spots come out, or whatever it is that you might wait for. And give us today and tonight and tomorrow, here alone. Nothing more. I ask you for nothing more. But I beg this of you.”
She hesitated.
“You need not lie with me unless you choose to,” he offered. “I ask nothing of you but to be here with you. You can see I can’t force you.” As he spoke he realized that he was unmanned, as Zachary had said he would be. He shook his head to clear it of the malign thought. “I don’t want to force you. You shall not be constrained. I won’t even touch you if you don’t allow it. But, Alinor, give me a day and a night with you before I go out into that world where I have lost everything but you.”
Without replying she rose up from the bed and she untied the laces down the front of her linen shift, so that he saw, for the first time, the curve of her breasts. She untied the waistband of her skirt and dropped it to the floor so that she was naked but for her open shift, and beneath it, he saw the outline of the long line of her haunches and thighs.
“If you want, we will have today and tonight,” she agreed, like a woman preparing to drown in deep water. “Today and tonight,” and she came to his arms, half naked.
At noon Rob came to the yard under the window. Alinor leaned out, smiled down at her son, and told him that she was sure it was not the plague but she would stay and nurse Mr. Summer until his fever had broken. She praised him for the herbs he had chosen and said that she needed no more, just another jar of oil of lemon to bring down the fever. She told him to ask Mrs. Wheatley for more small ale and for Stuart to send up their dinner in a basket. She said that Mr. Summer was sleeping and he was feverish but no worse.
“But how are you, Rob? You don’t have it?”
“I’m well,” Rob said, looking up at her. “And Walter is well, too. I checked him for heat and I looked at his throat. No inflammation, no spots on his back or his chest. Whatever ails Mr. Summer, I don’t think Walter and me have it.”
“God be praised,” Alinor said. “And, Rob,” she lowered her voice as he stepped closer to the wall and looked trustingly up at her. “Don’t be troubled about your father. Mr. Summer won’t speak of meeting him and we need say nothing. Don’t speak of Zachary till I come out and we can agree what we want to say. Especially, Rob . . . don’t be unhappy about him. He has made his choice and will live his life. We’ll make ours. You should be happy. You have so much to look forward to.”
He nodded, his eyes on her face.
“And go and tell Alys to stay the night at Ferry-house,” she instructed him. “I’ll be home tomorrow. And say nothing to her yet.”
She blew him a kiss and he ducked his head in embarrassment, waved his hand to her, and went from the yard.
James, in his makeshift bed, watched her close the window and step back so that she could not be seen from the yard below.
“All well with him?” he asked her.
“God be praised,” she said.
He found he could not say: “Amen.” He thought that he could no longer speak to his God.
“I think I should make a new bed for you with clean sheets,” she said. “And shall I ask Stuart to bring water for you to wash?”
“Yes,” he said. “And we shall have all day and all night,” he said. “This is like a dream, as if I still had fever.”
At once she put the back of her hand against his forehead. “No,” she said. “No fever and it’s no dream.”
“And tomorrow . . .”
“Let’s not think of tomorrow till we have to,” she whispered, and he drew her down to him, as he lay on the bed and pressed her against him.
The hours went by unnoticed. Two or three times Stuart called from the yard below, and Alinor threw on her gown and let down the rope from the window. He passed up food, water for washing, ale for drinking, but they hardly noticed how often he came, nor what he brought. Alinor made up the bed with clean linen and they both lay down together naked, made love, fell asleep, and woke to make love again. They watched the sun set over the marshes from the west window, and they saw the moon set. All night they stirred and woke and made love and slept, as if there was neither night nor day, and they needed no light but the flickering candle that made their moving bodies glow.
“I never knew that it was like this,” James confessed. �
�When the brothers spoke of the love of a woman in the seminary I thought it was somehow harder and cruel.”
“Was this your first time? Your very first?” Alinor asked, feeling a pang of guilt as if she had sinned against James and taken his innocence.
“I’ve been tempted,” he said. “When I was in hiding and traveling from one house to another. There was a lady in London, and another at a house in Essex, I knew that I felt desire; but it always felt like sin, and I could resist it; but this feels right.”
Alinor imagined that the handsome young priest had been desired by more than one woman, receiving him into her house and hiding him from everyone, delighting in the secret. She laughed at the thought of it and at once his face lightened. “You must think me a fool,” he said. “To be a virgin at my age!”
“No,” she assured him. “I’ve learned to despise a man who has been with many women and loved none. Zachary was the only man I was ever with, and he was a hard husband. They were right to teach you that at the seminary. Hard and bitter and . . . thankless.” She found the truest word. “It was a thankless task being wife to Zachary.”
He took a bright lock of her hair and twisted it around his third finger as if it were a ring. “And have you had no man since him?”
She looked at him. “Did he tell you otherwise?”
He shook his head. “He told me all sorts of fears and terrors,” he said. “I was not asking because of his lies, but because I cannot believe that no one courted you.”
“I had no desire,” she told him. “If anyone had asked me—but nobody speaks of such things on Foulmire—I would have said that I was one of those women who feel no desire. For me, it was always pain and harsh treatment. Zachary said that I was cold as stone to him, and I thought there was no other way to be. I never knew that it could be like this.”
He smiled at her and touched her warm cheek with his finger.
“When I delivered a baby sometimes, and the woman asked me when she could lie with her husband again, I never understood why she would want to. I would tell her she must wait for two months, until she was churched, and I used to wonder why she complained that it was so long.”
“Would it seem long to you now?”
“A day would seem too long a time to wait, now.”
“So now you understand love?”
“For the first time.” She smiled at him. “So it is the first time for me too, in a way.”
He kissed her hand. “The woman of stone has melted?”
“I’ve become a woman of desire.”
Later in the night they woke, ravenously hungry, and ate the rest of the bread and cheese, good white bread from the Priory bread oven, smooth hard cheese with a salty crust from the Priory dairy.
“Zachary spoke of something,” James said tentatively, afraid of the darkening of her eyes, of her turning away.
“Oh, he’s one that never stopped speaking,” she said, with a smile. “He thundered like the tide mill at every low tide.”
“He said that Ned had a wife . . .” he began.
His words were like a blow. He had knocked the smile off her. At once she went as white as guilt.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . Don’t say anything,” he begged her. “You need say nothing. It was just . . .”
“Did you believe him? Will you repeat to Sir William . . . what he said? Whatever it was he said? Are you bound by your vows to tell the minister at St. Wilfrid’s?”
“No, I’ll never say. I wouldn’t have said anything now but . . .”
“But he made you wonder,” she said slowly. “For all your learning, and your languages, and your knowledge—for all your faith!—he made you wonder. He made you . . . afraid.”
“I’m not afraid!” he started up, but she put a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“If the world was as Zachary sees it, we would all be afraid,” she said gently. “For like a poor fool he has peopled it with monsters to frighten himself. He speaks of me as a woman who lies with faerie folk. He denies his own children. He says I cast a spell that unmanned him. He says that I killed my poor sister-in-law, Mary. You know, if people around here believed just one of these things, they would test me as a witch?”
He shook his head in denial of the terrible accusations against her. “They must know you’re innocent!”
“You didn’t know.”
“I did! I do!”
“You know what they would do to me?”
“I don’t know.” He did not want to know.
“They have a ducking stool on Sealsea quay and they strap a woman into the seat, truss her like a kitten for drowning. The seat is on a great beam that the blacksmith—usually it’s the blacksmith—pushes down on the other end. The woman goes up into the air, where everyone can see her, then he lowers her down into the water, underneath the water. They take their time and when they judge that the trial has been long enough, they bring her up and raise her in the air again, to have a look at her. If she’s retching seawater, they say that the devil has protected her, and they send her to Chichester, for trial in the court before the judges, who will hear the evidence and may sentence her to death by hanging. But if she comes up white as sea-foam, and blue as ink at the lips and fingernails, her mouth open from screaming in the water, her hands like claws from tearing at the ropes, then they know she was innocent, and they bury her in the holy ground in the churchyard.”
“I’ve heard of such things but—”
“It’s the law that every parish should have a ducking stool. You must know that.”
“I thought it was just a ducking?”
She showed him a thin smile. “Yes, that’s what it’s called. Makes it sound light work, doesn’t it? And some women are only ducked. But of course, some drown.”
“Sir William should make sure it is only a ducking.”
She shrugged. “He should. When he’s here. But it’s better for Sir William that they duck a witch from time to time, and blame some poor woman for their misfortunes, than ask him whose side he took at Marston Moor, what he did at Newbury—and why they should pay their tithes to him.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it! He’s paid his fine for serving the king. And he’s been forgiven by parliament.”
“We’ll never forgive him,” she said, speaking for her brother, for all the men who hoped for a better life without a lord. “He took a dozen lads from Sealsea with the king’s cockade in their hats, and he brought only seven home.”
“But that has nothing to do with it,” he explained patiently. “And he’s a civilized man—he would stop a witch trial. He’s a justice of the peace—he would uphold the law. He’s an educated man, a lawyer. He wouldn’t hurt an innocent woman.”
She smiled at him as if he were a child. “No woman is innocent,” she remarked and her words made him shudder as if it were Zachary speaking. “No woman is innocent. The Bible names the woman as the one to blame for bringing sin into the world. Everything is our fault: sin and death are at our door, from now till Judgment Day. Sir William isn’t going to risk his own authority by stepping in to save some poor slut from drowning.”
He was chilled by her cynicism, and he did not want to hear her. He wanted her back in his bed, warm and responsive. She had been hardened by the cruelties of her life and he wanted her to be soft and melting.
“But it doesn’t matter to us,” he suggested. “And I daresay there was nothing in what Zachary said anyway, about your sister-in-law?”
“Mary died under my care,” she told him frankly. “And the world knew well enough that we quarreled like a cat and a dog in the same barn, every day since Ned brought her into Ferry-house and set her up in my mother’s place. I disliked her and she loathed me. But, all the same, I cared for her the best that I knew how. I didn’t know what should be done for her; I don’t think anybody would have known. Her baby came too soon, and it was a bitter stillbirth for us all. Then I couldn’t stop her bleeding. She died in my arms and I couldn’t
save her. I don’t even know what caused either death: hers or the child’s. I’m not a physician, I’m just a midwife.”
“Zachary said it was his child, and you were jealous,” he said, and instantly regretted it.
She looked at him very coolly and levelly. She drew the sheet around her shoulders as if it was a silken stole. “He told you that, did he?” Suddenly she was cold. “Well, you must be the judge of what you hear. I’ve never defended myself against Zachary’s lies, and I’ll not reply to his foul words in your sweet mouth. But if it was his child—as he boasted to me, after she was dead and couldn’t answer back—then I doubt she was willing.”
He shivered with distaste. He felt that he could not bear the ugliness of these people’s lives on the very edge of the shore, with their loves and hates ebbing and flowing like a muddy tide, with their anger roaring like the water in the millrace, with their hatreds and fears as treacherous as the hushing well. That Zachary might have raped his sister-in-law, or seduced her, that he bedded his own wife without her consent, that her brother tolerated this, and instead of putting it right, went away to fight against the king, that Alinor’s own husband denied fathering her children! James’s shudder told him that he wanted nothing to do with any of them. He wished himself back with his own people, where cruelty was secret, violence was hidden, and good manners more important than crime.
Tentatively, he reached out to her; he wanted her to be the lover of his feverish dream, not the woman who struggled in this sordid world. “I believe in you. I believe in you, Alinor.”
The face she turned to him was warm and trusting, her eyes brimming with tears. “You can,” she said simply, and he felt that he was falling into the deepest sin as he kissed her soft mouth and her wet eyelashes as they rested on her cheeks.
After that, they kept to their promise not to think of the world outside the stable loft; not to think of tomorrow; but at dawn, making love even before they were fully awake, when her eyelids fluttered open in pleasure, she saw the dim light at the window and she said quietly, sorrowfully, “Ah, my love, it’s morning.”
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