Dark Maiden

by Lindsay Townsend

  For the second time in her life, the wild release overcame her, strumming her heart and tingling through her. Thrashing, unable to stifle her cry of pleasure, she sought his hard maleness, longing to grant him such a glorious, complete moment in his turn.

  She closed a hand around him, stroking the long, warm and silken shaft, and delicately traced the curving tip, making him gasp. Her father had spoken of peoples that worshiped the phallus. Touching Geraint’s, feeling its strength, life-giving vigor and yearning urgency, she could understand why.

  Through half-closed eyes, she saw a shadow flit across Geraint’s ardent face. “I love you,” she whispered, amazed by the depth of their emotion.

  The shadow bloomed, casting an impossible glamour over Geraint. He glowed all over as if brushed by the wings of an angel, burnished to a glittering perfection.

  A perfection surely more than human.

  He looks as glorious as a god, as tempting as a devil.

  Suddenly he shuddered, yelling no in Welsh, and rolled away.

  “Geraint!” She crawled to him but he kept going, falling off the bed platform. She lunged desperately, trying to catch him, but he was gone. “Geraint!” She scrambled to her knees, scrabbling for her fire flints. “Give me light.” It was half a prayer and half an order to herself.

  “No need, cariad.” Geraint bounded up from the hut floor.

  “Blessed Virgin and Magdalene, protect Geraint,” Yolande called in Latin. “Where is my bow?”

  “No need for that.” He moved closer. “Our lusty incubus did not like taking a fall.”

  She stared and saw only him, no other. The wild glamour had vanished and it was Geraint, mocking authority as ever.

  “Perhaps it reminded him too much of an earlier tumble from grace, eh?”

  She was glad he could laugh.

  “What an interruption!” Geraint smacked his thighs, whether with humor or irritation, Yolande did not know and did not care to discover. She knew she should be shifting, hunting the incubus, but she was shocked.

  A smell of stale perfume hung in the air. Demons do not reek of sulfur, only the restless dead stink in that way, but devils have their vanity and try to be fragrant.

  Her mind was blank. Familiar rituals of banishing and protection were lost to her.

  Geraint was almost possessed. What if we had joined while the incubus was in him? The shame and panic flared in her and Geraint caught her close before she could run out.

  “Steady, woman,” he snapped, sensing too much gentleness would only undo her further. “Use the wits God gave you.”

  When she struggled, he shook her, alarmed. Her lustrous skin had a faint pallor as if she had been rolled in ash. “Steady, Yolande,” he repeated. “I am me, and me alone.”

  “My sin gave the demon a way in.”

  He knew the danger of those thoughts of hers and his answer was swift. “When we are wed, we shall be a castle. We shall keep each other’s souls safe, for we shall be one.” She looked ready to dispute more and though he was pleased to see her courage, he did not want her arguing with him. “He tickled my vanity, that demon, for sure.”

  Yolande stiffened. “What?”

  Sure of her attention, he took a step back, imagining himself juggling, just to calm down a little. “He made me feel I was supreme, the best lover in the world.”

  It had been a heady sensation and he had been so wonderfully certain, as if nothing could touch him and he was worthy of worship. A risky sense in a performer, a dangerous one, and the thing that had alerted him to his spiritual intruder.

  “Perhaps that is how devils feel all the time,” he remarked, casting out the memory, not wanting to feel it again. Not if it means sharing my skin and Yolande with another…

  “No doubt.” Yolande relaxed slightly.

  “Do you think that is how the incubus has worked, by possession?”

  “And by dreams. Demons like people to dream. Folk are open in their dreams.”

  He almost asked what she dreamed of but knew he should be patient and wait. That was a question for when they were married. “Did it come to Father William first, do you think? Tempt him with a dangerous desire, perhaps for learning?”

  “And invoke in the priest a carnal longing for that poor soul who has since died. In her restless, angry death she has possessed the priest for most of his nights, I think.”

  “Perhaps he deserved it.”

  “Perhaps.” Yolande laced herself together and faced him. “Whoever she was. We should get that parchment, arrange it over the coffin of Martin and then question everyone again,” she went on. “And this time I will ask which women have died of late.”

  Geraint nodded agreement. He was ready.

  * * * * *

  She dug in the churchyard where Martin’s widow showed her Martin’s grave. As Yolande’s spade struck the side of the coffin, the winter sun finally peeped over the horizon.

  Thank the Mother for that mercy.

  Martin’s corpse did not reek of sulfur but was not so wholesome that she wished to linger. It was tempting to hurry but she forced herself to do everything correctly and give this restless ghost due reverence. Aware of a knot of villagers scuttling from the church and gathering behind her aching back—one reason why she had wanted Geraint facing them and not digging with her—she prayed aloud for Martin and laid the parchment on top of his coffin with as much care as she could manage.

  The small of her back ached like a toothache, and the calves of her braced legs were stiff with tension as she leaned over the open grave, straddling the coffin itself.

  This was a lustful ghost. I most relieved that I am still a maid and not open to his unwanted attentions.

  Dimly, she sensed the crowd watching her every act and was glad when they repeated the “amen” after her. She made the sign of the cross over the body, laid a crucifix at the foot of the coffin, plunging it as deep as she could into the hard winter earth, and sprinkled all with holy water.

  She waited, head bowed. No voice came, nothing from the revenant.

  “It is done,” she said in Latin.

  She might have swayed or, horror of horrors, tumbled into the newly opened grave itself, but Geraint’s sinewy arm held her upright and safe. She turned slowly to the villagers and forced her dry mouth to speak.

  “It would be a kindness, a most Christian, neighborly act, to cover him again. He will rest until Judgment Day in peace.” She held out the spade. “Who will aid Martin and his widow?”

  The reeve rose from a crouch and took it. As other men hurried to help and the sun rose over the freshly turned earth, Yolande guided Martin’s pale, quaking widow to the house where she and Martin had lived as man and wife. Without prompting, Geraint kept Godith from following by entertaining her and the other womenfolk with a show of tumbling.

  Earlier, he had written the parchment at Yolande’s direction—a letter to Martin exhorting him, by God and Saint Martin, to leave this earthly realm and join the saints and angels—and had been surprised by her neat signature. In all, he thought the whole ritual well done indeed. Had he been restless in his grave and fussed over by Yolande, given prayers, holy water, a sacred cross and a parchment lovingly placed over his heart, he would be vastly content.

  One soul is put to his eternal rest. We must do the same for the other poor creature, the female revenant. Then there are the wretched priest and the incubus. As Yolande said, so much trouble for one little village.

  All the time she had been working, he had sensed that Yolande also kept watch in the churchyard for signs of ghosts or demons. He himself had kept a sharp eye out for Father William. The priest was no longer possessed but that meant nothing. Geraint did not like priests and he did not trust him.

  He came upright from a slow somersault and a woman looked him up and down. His heart quickened. “Ladies, you are a perfect audience but allow me to take leave of you for a moment to make water.”

  He swept an outrageous, courtly bow and strode f
rom the churchyard, pleased to hear the giggling and whispering behind him. If these women and girls were amused and outraged in equal measures, that would keep them fixed where they were and gossiping.

  “That was well done.” The woman who had stared at him approached from behind the stocks. Geraint looked about quickly, checking that Godith was still with the other gossips, then took several deep breaths to steady himself.

  “Are you thirsty after? I always was.”

  The woman was gray-haired and pale but he could see by her flowing, easy stride and loose-shouldered swing of her arms that she had been a tumbler once.

  “Did you work the towns or country?” he asked.

  “Neither.” She twinkled an answer at him, clearly delighted he had guessed what she had been. “I was for the royal courts, me. I danced and tumbled for the old king.”

  “Edward?” Geraint was hazy about English kings but they were usually Edwards.

  “Right! And when I took with child, he gave me a good fellow to marry and we came to Halme.”

  Even though she had asked if he was thirsty, the woman had not offered him a drink or told him her name, but Geraint kept pace with her, sensing she had things to say. Side by side, they strolled out into the village. Smoke curled from a few cottages as men kept vigil by their hearths, waiting for the return of their wives and maids from church.

  The woman squinted into the sun and cleared her throat, still without stopping. “Your mistress, is she good at what she does?”

  “As you were at tumbling.”

  “I liked how she dealt with Martin.” She scratched at her forehead and slowed slightly, stepping off the cobbled track toward a well.

  Here it comes, whatever it is she wants to say. Geraint joined her and they peered together into the murky water of the well, Geraint and then the woman each dropping a pebble into its black depths.

  “I could not bury my daughter in the church grounds.”

  Geraint breathed out softly, still staring at the water. He did not wish to intrude on the woman’s grief.

  “They would not let me. The priest here—that filthy hypocrite—said she was a suicide.” The woman bent, snatched up another pebble and hurled it into the well. “Hilda was none such. Right to the end, on her deathbed, when he had deserted her and would not even come to give her the last rites, she clung to life. She wanted him to return. ‘William will come, I know,’ she kept saying. She died saying it.”

  Geraint gripped the edge of the well, squeezing the stones until his fingers burned in agony, wishing the brute, mute rocks were the priest’s neck bones.

  Still the woman spoke. “He took her maidenhead, her peace, her love and then he abandoned her. The whole village knew what he did, how he had seduced her, and they supported him. My own man was dead by then and no one would help me. The others, those creeping pigs, they made me bury her by the woodland, far away from sacred ground, and that priest did nothing, nothing! Not even a single prayer.”

  Bitterness here for a battalion of fallen angels. The air lightened around Geraint and a swift, familiar tread had him turning.

  Yolande came straight to the woman and gathered her into her arms. “I can help your daughter,” she said. “She will go to her rest, whole and sanctified, with me.”

  “Thank Christ,” said the woman, sobbing and shivering. “Thank Christ.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Yolande gave Hilda’s spirit a final blessing and stepped away from her grave. Hilda was a revenant whose anger and sense of betrayal had been great and more than justified, who had possessed the priest himself as the result of her loss and her spiritual rage.

  Preparing to commit Hilda’s earthly body to a better burial, Yolande had dreaded a great struggle with Hilda’s soul. But on that frosty Christmas Eve morning, Hilda, laid to rest with care and love, had been ready to move on.

  A bounty of relief and thankfulness overcame Yolande as she turned to Geraint and to Hilda’s mother. “She is at peace. She is with God.”

  The older woman began to weep soft, healing tears.

  No other villagers had joined them at the grave. Hilda’s mother had argued furiously that she wanted none of them. In the end, Yolande reburied Hilda beneath the holly tree where her mother had scraped her original shallow resting place. The tree made it a sacred place and the herbs she left and the relic she laid beside the tiny, shrouded body added more protection.

  “The lass has more sanctity about her than a bishop buried in his church,” Geraint remarked. “As it should be.”

  “Someone watches, behind,” Yolande warned him softly in Welsh. So far she had spotted no visible sign of the watcher but she could hear fast, anxious breathing close by. She guessed a figure lingered in deep cover amidst the trees.

  “The priest?” Geraint mouthed in the same tongue. He knew enough not to look ’round.

  “I think so,” she answered quietly. “I do not see who else it could be.”

  She cut a spray of holly from the tree for the grieving mother and laid it over the grave. “I will be here for a while yet,” she said in English then changed to Welsh. “Can you—”

  “Find and follow him? Nothing easier, cariad.”

  Yolande bit down on a plea that Geraint take care in following—in case he considered her too mothering. Then she put all thought of her honey Welshman aside to kneel again by the tiny mound of freshly piled earth. She began another prayer in Latin, sending her wishes and hopes for Hilda’s everlasting safe repose up to God.

  Geraint left her to it. He could offer comfort and had done so plenty of times during this past year of pestilence but hunting the earthly Father William was far more to his taste.

  Lead on, priest, and let me run you to your den.

  He cut away first, striding through the trees as if returning to Halme, and then doubled back. In moments, the watcher had become the watched. He stole up behind the figure he and Yolande knew must be Father William. The priest’s thin body shuddered with suppressed emotion.

  Grief or self-pity? I do not care, priest. You showed no tenderness to your former lover. If you suffer then good, say I.

  But was the fellow suffering? Experienced in reading performers’ pain from how they moved and held themselves, Geraint studied the huddled, dark-robed figure. The priest’s shoulders drooped but Geraint was certain the priest was still not crying.

  Even with his lover in the ground, he will not weep.

  And why had Father William cast Hilda off? Had she been with child? Had he denied it was his?

  “Yes, that kind of filthy betrayal would fit you,” said Geraint, willing the clergyman to stir. “Turn about at least. Show yourself.”

  As if he had heard, the man did exactly that. Catching the flicker of movement, Geraint slid behind the trunk of a beech tree, praying he had shifted in time before the priest turned about completely. He waited until his heart stopped hammering before peeping ’round the tree to look again.

  Father William, staring blankly into the distance, had not seen him.

  Geraint felt the air sucked from his lungs as it sometimes did when he took a bad tumble. The priest was a surprise—stooping and gray haired, yes, but of middle years and with an acne-reddened, mulish face.

  No vision of beauty, no vision at all, in fact, and still he treated his lover badly.

  Aggrieved for Hilda afresh, Geraint itched to hit something—one of the acne scars on the priest’s pouting upper lip maybe.

  Of course, he must remember that this particular apology for a priest had a spiritual ally, if an incubus could be called such.

  Now walk, will you, mister priest, and let me follow.

  For the second time, it was as though the man had heard his wish. Slipping on the frozen leaves, Father William set off, blundering forward, rushing away from the kneeling Yolande and her prayers. Padding softly after him, Geraint took care to leave Yolande a clear trail of his wanderings. He did not fear for himself, but his maid—and pray God she would not
be that for much longer—was the exorcist. Yolande would want to be present when the demon finally showed itself by daylight.

  And I intend to call you out, mister demon. No more creeping into maids’ dreams and beds for you.

  The gloomy words of the miserable smith—bitten off more than she can chew—rattled in his head like a warning. Geraint rolled his shoulders and cracked his knuckles together. The smith was a wretched fool and he would think no more of anything but trailing Father William.

  * * * * *

  Yolande had never been wearier. In a fog of bitter exhaustion, she coaxed Hilda’s mother away from her daughter’s resting place and back to her house. She made up the fire there, gave the older woman a warm tisane to help her sleep and changed and shook out the bedding. After cleansing the cottage with the last remaining sacred herbs she had on her, she left the widow bedded down by the fire, with more tisane at hand and some pottage gently bubbling in a crock set amidst the ashes.

  Slowly she wandered through the village. It was a little after noon, she reckoned, glancing at the position of the shrouded winter sun in the corpse-gray skies. Some hardy souls had already quit the church and returned to their homes, to keep Christmastime as best they could without a decent priest. Several waved and one even called out good day as she passed.

  No dreams for them last night I assume, and so progress, but I take no pleasure in it.

  She wished Geraint were with her but at the same time she was heartily relieved he was not. “I am fit company for no one,” she whispered. This was the true reason she had suggested he follow Father William. The priest was no longer possessed so no spiritual danger. For the rest, Yolande knew Geraint could more than take care of himself.

  Besides, if Geraint squired her now she would be tempted to share with him, to moan, and her honeyman would act on her complaints.

  He would certainly kill the priest for me in a passion and we should both be guilty of murder.

  “Is that why you dropped your bow somewhere and part of you is determined not to remember where you left it?” The new voice in her head was cool and elegant, perfumed. Her scalp tingled and her mind suddenly filled with bees.