Fair Weather

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  “Vespasian.” I had liked her before but now the woman was my gaoler and I had no need to be polite. I was impatient. “I’m not stupid. Don’t look at me as if I was. Vespasian’s the man who cleaned my wounds after I was abducted. Perhaps he did the abducting, I don’t know. Anyway, he was in this room last night. He helped me and he bandaged me.” The bandages were clearly visible, seeping scarlet where the blood was oozing through.

  “No such person lives in this house,” said the girl, tossing her curls, contempt in her eyes. “It must have been my aunt who tied your bandages. She can be kind sometimes. It must have been her. I don’t know anyone called Vespasian.”

  “You’re lying,” I said.

  “Think what you like.” She shrugged. “But I’ve never heard of anyone with such a name. You should not have come.”

  “That’s what he keeps saying.”

  “Eat,” said Uta. “You’ll need your strength. Stop making silly stories about people who don’t exist.” She left the room and locked the door behind her. I took the trencher she had given me to the small table under one window, settled on the high stool and spooned the stew from the bowl to the bread. I thought the food delicious and I could only hope it was neither poisoned nor drugged.

  I imagined it would take more than food to make me feel better but in fact, I regained some strength quite quickly. Perhaps it was the wine which was considerably more alcoholic and of a far greater quality than anything Tilda was used to. The improvement however, only increased the frustration and my awareness of each grinding, jabbing pain. Across both my chest and my back my body ached and throbbed, burning until I cried. I marched the small room, kicked at the cold coals in the grate and peered endlessly from each high arrow slit. There was absolutely nothing else to do.

  Apart from the small bed, the table and the stool, there was a huge carved chest which was locked and a tall wooden dresser with empty shelves except for an assortment of misshapen bowls in baked earth and pottery. Each contained ashes and the seeds of some dried plant. There were no tapestries on the walls, no shutters or parchment on the narrow windows and no other thing to take my interest. I watched the sun sink below the curved hilltop horizon and the silhouetted twilight. The stars came out slowly in their tiny bright pairs and there was no moon. I had been watching for some time, still leaning by the window and eased by the calming beauty of the night sky, when Vespasian came back.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The glitter of cold fury had faded from his eyes but his expression was masked and I had no idea what he might be thinking. He came in quickly and closed the door behind him though I noticed he did not lock it. I still leaned on the open ledge of the arrow slit. After a moment he sat on the edge of my bed and looked across at me. He said, “Come here.”

  Tilda obeyed him at once though I would not have done so. My legs were very weak but I walked slowly across and sat beside him on the bed.

  I was careful not to touch him or sit too close but he took my hand and turned it over, studying my palm. I was still excessively uncomfortable with each unexpected intimacy. Absurd perhaps, since he had recently put his hands all over the most intimate parts of my naked body, but he still made me nervous and shy. Yet in spite of the hard callouses from use of sword and bow, his clasp was now gentle.

  Then he said, “Who are you?” which was the last thing I expected him to say. His words made me sit upright with a sudden lurch.

  I just looked at him. Neither Tilda nor I could find an answer. There was no fire left and the chill had begun to creep in. Over the top of his head I could see the stars’ cold blue sparkle in the deepening sky. I looked back into his eyes but his focus was too demanding and searched too deep.

  “You know who I am,” I whispered at last into the expectant silence. “It would be more to the point, it’s more of a mystery isn’t it – to ask who you are?”

  He relaxed a little, releasing my hand as he shook his head. “No. Too many stories, too long to tell, and of no benefit to me to tell you. But there is something – something about you Tilda, which has long troubled me. For the last few months in particular, I’ve felt – the Other. You do things you should not know. You have matured in ways you cannot realise. You prove experience you cannot have. So piccina, are you just the same skinny brat I found on the streets seven years ago, or are you something else altogether?”

  So he remembered how long I had lived with him. Tilda was absurdly pleased, but she was also confused. “I don’t understand. I truly don’t understand you at all.”

  “So innocent, and yet there is –” he stopped. Then his gaze hardened. “You know, do you not, little one, that if you deny what I believe to be the truth if it is in fact the truth, you endanger not only both of us – but perhaps a thousand others. Perhaps an eternity of others. So is the innocence of one child worth the degradation of so many?”

  Now I really didn’t know what he meant. I was suddenly frightened. Tilda stammered, “So many others? What others? You speak of things I cannot see. Please, what are you doing here?”

  He began to smile. Vespasian was a man who smiled so rarely and this time, as usual, I found his smile vaguely malicious. “I am here to talk to you, and to check on your condition.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I muttered, feeling ridiculed. “You know what I mean.”

  “I am here in this house,” said Vespasian, unblinking, “because it belongs to me.”

  I stared. “Someone called Uta came with food.” I pointed to the bowl which still sat, empty now, on the table under the window. “She said she’d never heard of you.”

  “She was telling you the truth,” said Vespasian. “Now, you have been bleeding again and have ruined all my nice bandaging.” He was still smiling faintly but somehow it seemed more genuine and ironic amusement had replaced the menace.

  “I’m all right,” I said quickly, mightily uncomfortable with the idea of being stripped naked a second time. “They don’t need changing. They’ll only get spoiled again. I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but it hurts. It would be easier not to go through all that again just yet.”

  He kept looking at me as if expecting me to reveal some secret, or to turn suddenly into someone else. I swallowed back the uneasy realisation that he knew something about Molly. “Very well. They can wait until tomorrow,” he nodded at last. I thought he was going to get up and leave me but he sat back down again and spoke even lower, as though someone might hear him. I looked into his eyes. They were so black they showed no difference between iris or pupil. He said, “I want you to remember something, Tilda. Sometimes pain doesn’t matter. It has its place in the scheme of destinies. You can ignore pain if you go inside and find other places in your mind.”

  I stared back at him. “I know,” I whispered. “But I’ve never been able to control it.”

  “There are places in your head where pain cannot touch you,” he murmured. “Everyone can find them when they need to. You, perhaps, more than some others. Control is not always demanded. The necessity of the moment opens the doorways.”

  “I have places,” I admitted, “places to go to. I’ve always had that. But sometimes they’re more painful than the place I started in.”

  He looked less confused than I felt, and nodded. “Then change those places,” he said.

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked quietly. “What are you warning me about?”

  He stared at me. Again his gaze was so close and so vibrant that I could not look away. “You should never have come,” he said and stood up. “But it is too late and you are here now. I will help if I can. But there are some things I must now do myself, which I will do, but do not choose to do. Not like this. And not yet. But now I must put necessity before choice. And after me – it will be them.” He paused, looking away. After a moment, he sighed. He said, “Though that, perhaps, I can stop.” The soft murmur of his voice was as contained as always, but I thought he was speaking more to himself. Without looking a
t me again, he left the room.

  I watched him go, concentrating on the mystery, dismissing the impossibility of escape, ignoring the growing threat of his words. He had said this was his home. He looked at home. He was never out of breath when he came to me, up those hundred stairs while carrying water and bandages. He wore just a simple white linen bliaud with no cotte, as he was used to do at home in London, though this time its detachable sleeves were embroidered at the cuffs with tiny black mussel pearls and the belt was heavy Spanish leather, gold buckled, the tongue hanging long and loose by his legs. His hose were dark green silk and his shoes were such soft leather they seemed more like polished cloth. I took particular notice of his clothes for I had never seen him dressed so finely, even when he had returned with the wound in his shoulder. So perhaps he was, indeed, at home.

  I was, therefore, his prisoner. I remembered all the things I wished I had asked him while he was there, but most of all I hated him all over again. I also wished, very much, he would come back.

  But he did not return, and eventually I slept. It was while I was sleeping I repeated Vespasian’s words to myself. “Then change places,” he’d said. For a moment I wondered if he knew, somehow, the places I had. Then I realised that it was exactly what I could do. I could go back to Molly. Was he telling me that? Tilda was surely in more danger than I could manage. Vespasian spoke of pain. It was a promise of torture to come. Instead I could go back to Molly where Bertie would have the kettle on and Sammie would take me to lunch in the new Pink Panther Parlour where they served a help yourself and eat all you want buffet and that included puddings and cake smothered in chocolate, which the medieval world had never even heard of. If it was summer there still, the pansies would be out under the chestnut tree and the foxgloves would be all lined up by the fence. There would be bird song and ducks on the stream and all the tourists coming down to see where the grisly murders had taken place. I shivered with delicious temptation and I started to think myself back.

  In my dream I traced the village street and came to the church with the hollyhocks in purple flower and the sun bright on the high rose window. It was my own world but I was Tilda who dreamed of Molly. I looked down at my long skirts, hems ragged and mud stained, black woollen stockings threadbare with the rips at the ankle bone and the garters unravelling, little torn shoes with the red leather flaking like shredded paper. But my tired feet trudged the bright modern paths where Molly lived, with the street lights, aluminium and electricity, television aerials and the little telephone box by the bridge. Mrs. Hackett was walking across the bridge towards me, struggling with her shopping bags, but she didn’t see me. She walked right by me without a glance, for I wasn’t there.

  Then I heard the scream from the church. Tilda stopped. I stopped. Then I began to run towards the sound. A car whipped past me, its wheels tossing up dry dust from the road, and I felt the heat of its exhaust on my face. Tilda’s face. She kept running.

  At the arched doorway I stopped and stood still in the sudden shadow of the porch. Within the church there was candle light and all the pews stood silent in their rows, little hymn books placed neat along their wooden polish. The screaming had stopped. Then I heard a rattle, breath dying in a torn throat, open cavities filling with blood and slow choking death. Someone approached me from within and the light of the church candles silhouetted him from behind. He was tall and dressed in medieval black. His cotte was velvet and his belt was Spanish heather, its long tongue hanging loose from a heavy gold buckle. “You should not have come,” said Vespasian.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Iturned and ran. I ran behind the old hotel with its creaking sign of rutting deer and across to the stables with their abandoned jumping fences. I held up my long skirts so that I could run faster. I ran beyond the dark square of the little cemetery and abruptly turned the corner into Molly’s street. My house was last on the right, a corner block where the chestnut tree stood proudly extending its roots beyond my low dry-stone wall, pushing up through the pavement slabs. I stopped, panting, looking in at Molly’s windows. They were open to welcome the summer warmth and the white linen curtains ruffled in the breeze. Vespasian’s shirt was white linen, as fine as silk and through the transparency you could see the dark circles of his nipples and the line of black hair leading down like a signpost to the navel, and beyond.

  I heaved and gripped at the gate. It swung open. Across the lawn and under the dappled shade and twining wisteria, Sammie was lying stretched in the hammock, her eyes wide. I shivered. I thought she could see me. Then she shook her head as if clearing me out of her thoughts, and she turned away.

  I clung to the swinging slats of my own gate and desperately wished myself into one world or the other. I needed to escape the vertiginous nausea of two merging existences. I heard the gate’s hinges squeak. Sammie looked up again. Then slowly she pulled herself up, sitting, moved her legs over the side, and slipped neatly to the ground. For a moment I smiled. I had never been as elegant in climbing from that hammock and often tumbled on the grass. Sammie was always better than me at the intricacies of physicality. Then she came across and shut the gate and her hand passed right through my waist.

  I gasped and doubled over. She twisted around suddenly and looked directly into my face. She looked as terrified as I was. We stared at each other. Then Sammie shook her head again, turned and tramped back to the house. She pushed open the front door, went inside, and closed it behind her. The hammock continued to flap a lopsided rebound. The sunbeams sprang through their leaf cover and the shadows danced on my lawn. I watched for a few bleak moments and then retraced my steps the way I had come.

  I sat down beside the stream. The sloping banks were thick with daisies. Tilda started to make a daisy chain as her mother had taught her when she was a small child, splitting the stems and pushing one through another, caught by each tiny yellow centre, careful of their soft white petals.

  Tilda had never heard of gentle Muriel Bunting and her peaceful life. She had never heard of the terrible violence of its ending. But at the doorway of the church where Muriel Bunting hung butchered, she had seen Vespasian emerge from the sinister shadows. He had emerged in the wrong world at the wrong time.

  Tilda sat curled and bent her head. I was as miserable as she. Then I saw the reflections that frightened me even more. Visible in the sparkling water of the stream beyond my feet, the sky burst and ruptured. Above me, the heavens were peaceful azure summer, but they reflected the massed black and red storm that had already thrown me into the castle dungeon in Tilda’s world. Across the river water, clouds billowed like udders oozing black filth. The dark was struck by colour; luminescent gold became slime green. Jagged lightening split the stream. Thunder rolled around me, wrapping me in vibration. I felt the rain pound on my shoulders and was soaked.

  I opened my eyes, waking back in my truckle bed. The fire had been lit again and flared against the dark stone walls. It was night and outside the arrow slit windows it was black. I could still hear the thunder. I sat up, cold and frightened, reaching out my hands to the warmth. I was locked in a stone tower with a high beamed ceiling solid over my head, but I was still clutching the little soggy daisy chain and I was drenched in freezing cold rain.

  The room was empty but a bowl of food steamed on the floor beside the bed, a pewter mug of ale and a trencher of dark bread. I heaved my legs over the side of the bed and watched the mattress stain with the damp indentation I left behind me. I stared at the bedraggled daisies, picking at the petals.

  I had no idea how long I had been wandering in Molly’s world between dimensions but the bandages across my body were wet not only with rain but with blood. Clearly the wounds Vespasian had cleansed and treated were still unhealed. I looked for something to dry myself but there was nothing in the room except for the sheet on my bed, which was already wet. I huddled on the floor beside the fire and let its heat steam across my torn clothes and body. Fear raced back and forth through my head. I tried to eat but I
could not swallow. I remembered the ripped throat of the woman in the church.

  They came in behind me. I whirled around, expecting Vespasian again, but it wasn’t him.

  They came one by one, each looking at me with curiosity, peering down at me as though I was a specimen. The old man came first, then the woman. I knew them both. Uta and her cousin came behind them and then others I had never seen before. Vespasian was not one of them. I didn’t count the faces but there were four women and at least twelve men crowding into my turret room. I became very small, shrinking into the space between the hearth and the bed, squeezing my knees beneath my chin, staring back, defiant, at their curiosity. The fire was burning lower. One of the younger men pushed forwards and threw a handful of small coals into its heart. An unexpected spit of orange brilliance raged up to the vaulted ceiling arches and I cringed further back.

  “Who has treated it?” demanded the old man, pointing down at me. His fingers were dirty and gnarled and the nails were too thick and too long. He spat, “Someone has dared to nurse it.” The firelight shadowed his face in virulent cinnabar highlights, emphasising the ridges from nostrils to mouth, the runnels down his cheeks and the hooked beak of his nose. His lower eyelids sagged in scarlet streaks like scratches and his eyes were small lashless pits. His face disgusted me and his breath smelled of decay and corruption. I crossed my arms over the torn front of my tunic and the seeping pink bandages and, defiance intimidated, stared into my lap.

  A rustle of concern interrupted the concentrated attention of the crowd. All black clothed like craning ravens, the people stared at me, looked warily at the old man who spoke, then back at me. Uta, all pretty and fashionable with her pale face and rosy plump cheeks, yellow hair in sleek combed curls down her back, said, “My lord, the girl spoke of a man called Vespasian. She told me he had bandaged her. I thought it must have been my aunt.”