I leaned forward over the pummel, impatient for the first glimpses. “But it’s so big,” I said into the swirl of his cloak. “You called it a hunting lodge. I imagined small and cosy.”
“There is nothing small about the de Vrais barony,” he answered me in the soft voice of apology, “and nothing you might choose to call cosy. My ancestors were never known for their humility.”
I believed that without any difficulty. “But it’s beautiful.”
“I am glad you like it,” he said simply.
I wondered if he had previously sent notice of his arrival, and if his people had been hired to set things in order as they had for Gerald. I soon learned they had. Now I also knew what had taken Vespasian such a long time before coming to get me in London.
There were six stable boys and a head groom as we clattered into a cobbled courtyard. Feeling dull and horribly crumpled in my serving woman’s linen beneath a man’s cloak while knowing my complexion to be unfashionably tanned and disgustingly sickly, I insisted on dismounting unaided. I walked slowly across to the doorway held open for me and into the shadows within. Vespasian stood back a little, understanding. There were servants at the step but he dismissed them all, took my elbow, and together we went inside.
Vespasian’s house welcomed me with long slanting sunbeams across marble tiles. The high walls were lined with tapestries so vivid at first I thought they were windows. But I was allowed no time to look around. Through the great hall, up five stone steps, still watched by the bobbing huddle of servants, Vespasian led me directly to the master chamber. Intimidated by such unaccustomed grandeur and desperately shy, I hesitated, but he guided me across to the high curtained bed, closing the door behind him. To him of course, I was as transparent as always. “Don’t be a fool,” he told me softly. “Would you sooner faint on the bed or in my arms? Lie still and close your eyes.”
It was some time before he returned. I knew I must have slept again, for the long windows let in only a muted darkness and a streak of moonshine. Vespasian sat on the huge carved chest under the window, one foot up and his elbow on his knee.
“Here we go again,” I said wearily.
“Did you expect to recover more quickly?” he said. “I’m afraid that would be impossible. Didn’t you realise you were poisoned?”
I hadn’t realised, but of course, it made sense. Not that any of it made sense. Vespasian had nursed me so many times, I had been wounded so many times, pain and torture had become the habit of my life, and my body was a patchwork of injuries, old and new. As usual he seemed to know what I was thinking. “Before there was only the spite of a human hand,” he said. “This time, you were tormented with all the malicious barbarity and malevolence of Lilith herself. You cannot possibly conceive what that entails.”
“No,” I whispered. “Not really. You put me into a trance.”
“But now,” he said, “I have all the tools of healing around me. Before I had nothing more than hot water, a piss pot for you to vomit into and the power of my own hands. But this house is a study of alchemy, of medicine, of potions and magic.” He was watching me, and thinking aloud. “I will not dose you with poppy syrup if I can avoid it. Opiates can also enslave the patients they cure.” He paused, and smiled. “It might be easier to get you drunk.”
I wondered if he’d gone quite mad, and stared. “Drunk? But I’ll just be sick again.”
He said, “You need an anaesthetic of some kind, piccina. Lilith’s splinter is buried inside the dragon. I must remove it but the pain will be far too much for you to bear alone.”
“I thought,” it was so hard to think at all, “the dragon brand frightened her. That’s why you put it there, isn’t it? You said it burned her and cut her hands.”
There was a corner hearth with a proper chimney and over the flames a domed copper hood gleamed with dancing reflections. Two long windows flanked the hearth and Vespasian drew heavy tapestries across the shutters, enclosing the warmth and colour and leaping firelight. As the master chamber, there was only one bed with a truckle rolled beneath. The velvet hangings were pulled back, their heavy golden folds disguising the patterns of the embroidery. The mattress was wide enough for several people and so thick and softly padded that in spite of the pain, I had never known a bed so comfortable. The high beamed ceiling now sprang with light from fire and candle. The beeswax was sweet scented. I barely recognised the difference between dream and reality anymore and this seemed to encompass both.
He came and sat close to me on the bed, looking down at me. “Lilith’s nail entered your breast,” he said softly. “That’s when she touched the dragon. She was hurled backwards and the altar split but she left the point of her claw in your body. It’s been worming inwards and poisoning you ever since. It would kill you, if I left it. I’ve treated most of the other wounds during our journey, but until now, this was beyond me.” He put his palm to my forehead. His fingers were icy and I shivered. “Now I must not wait any longer,” he told me.
I knew I was feverish. I was also sick with disgust, knowing some part of Lilith was still inside me. “Can I – sleep?” I asked, “while you do – whatever you do? Won’t you make me unconscious again?”
He shook his head. His eyes reflected the firelight. I knew he was worried. “This isn’t simple nursing, piccina,” he said. “My power challenges hers. This time your heart is her battlefield, your body the altar. I will not risk you dying under trance. I might not even know, until it was too late.”
He gave me heavily spiced wine and propped me up while he held the cup. The wine was dark red, almost black in the curtain shadows, and tasted glorious. It was unlike anything I’d ever drunk before. Tilda wasn’t used to strong alcohol but I was, so I was surprised when I realised, very quickly, I was intoxicated. Vespasian watched me intently while I drank, and when the cup was empty, he refilled it. “I’ve had – enough,” I said and my voice sounded absurdly plaintive.
He smiled with a trace of the old malice. “What an easy conquest you would have been, had my intentions been otherwise.” I thought it an unwise subject for him to tease me with.
“You’ve drugged the wine,” I accused. Now my words were slurred.
He lifted the cup to my mouth, insisting I drink again. “Of course.” He removed some of my pillows so I lay almost flat. “The wine is doctored,” he said, “though not with the poppy. It will help, a little.”
Carefully, one by one, he removed my clothes, though left my tunic bundled around my hips and over my belly, groin and legs. Then he unwound the bandaging he’d tied during our journey. I lay back on his bed, uncovered to the waist. I was now used to being undressed in his presence, but even half drunk and half drugged, I was timid at the intimacy of his fingers brushing across my breasts. I’d liked the warmth of his own soft shirt against me, but now my sudden nakedness made me tremble. I closed my eyes.
While I was partially naked, Vespasian wore a new linen shirt belted over his hose. One sleeve was ripped up to the shoulder, exposing his left arm, now heavily bandaged. I counted the small wounds still scratched across his face and hands. I wondered if either of us would ever be free of Lilith’s battle scars.
I couldn’t look down at myself now, but I knew what lay there. Over the long months, the dragon brand had sunk into flat lines like dark embroidery. Now plunging deep into its snarl, was a black hole which bled continuously, leaking a pinkish slime. My breast was red and inflamed. It hurt like the devil.
Vespasian washed me with herbal salves. Then he stretched his long fingers, hot from the water, and began to massage around the outline of the dragon. The pain flared at once. I gasped and held my breath. “Breathe,” he ordered me. “Breathe deep, little one. I cannot be quick.”
I’d always liked the hard strength of his hands. Now his fingertips felt like iron. His palms rubbed against my nipples but he ignored my discomfort. He probed close to the dragon’s wings, watching both where his fingers worked, and then my face, constantly reading my
expression. He was not gentle at all. Spasms of pain raged through me. He spoke often, or chanted, first with words I couldn’t understand though I thought the language might be Greek or Arabic, then softly in English, and sometimes directly to me. If he hoped to distract me from the agony he himself was now inflicting, then it was quite in vain. I didn’t dare flinch. I bit my lips and stayed very still, staring up at him as if I could enter his eyes. “I cannot hurt you less,” he said. “I am sorry.”
His hands roamed. He pressed deeper. For a moment it seemed his fingers were groping inside my body, always searching for the splinter. He traced it from the dragon’s tiny snout, along its relentless passage into my flesh. Now I could imagine it in me, wriggling ever closer towards my heart.
Then at last I felt it inside and screamed. “It is nearly over,” he said, and leaned across me. His breath was in my eyes. A magical promise, with one brief moment’s relief. Then something plunged red hot into my breast. I screamed again, and with the point of a long curved silver needle, he hooked the splinter and plied it out.
He held it up to me. It was green as a jewel and burned with a small wisp of foul smelling steam. “It is finished,” he said. “There is nothing more.”
I slumped, gasping for breath. For a moment I was fainting. Then his breath was in my eyes again and in spite of weakness, I felt a delicious sensation like sleep and invigoration all mixed up together. “It feels – wonderfully – better already.” I sounded drunk.
Vespasian grinned. I saw the sweat beads gleaming on his forehead and forearms, gathering along the creases of his own dark scars. He looked utterly exhausted, and totally happy.
He still held the needle. It was slick with my blood and tiny points of weeping flesh. Its length had pierced the tip of the splinter, now quickly disappearing into smoke. He flung it into a small pewter bowl and watched until it burned to ashes. Then he threw the ashes on the fire. Spitting into tiny green flares, they spluttered, then died, and were gone. Vespasian washed his hands in the herb scented water and then came back beside me. He began to wash my breast. The hole in the dragon’s face gaped red and ugly.
Vespasian took a small metal object with a narrow blunt end, and thrust it for some moments into the heart of the fire. When he returned to the bed, he leaned over me again, his eyes inches from my own.
“One last torment, piccina,” he said softly, and instantly brought the red hot metal onto my skin at the point of the wound. I smelled burned flesh and thought I’d faint. The mark on my breast singed and puckered. Then it closed into a tiny dark keyhole.
Vespasian used a soft blue ointment and began to cover the face of the dragon. He pushed some very gently into the cauterized wound with the tip of his finger. Finally, with patience and care, he bandaged all across my chest, tucking my breasts into the linen binding.
I thought he’d tell me to sleep. I could see the deep bruises of exhaustion around his eyes and white pain around the edges of his lips. I was so tired I knew I couldn’t have moved from the bed if Lilith herself had appeared. I whispered, “Thank you,” and nothing else because I had no voice left.
He ripped the last bandage, tying the ends around me in a quick knot, testing its resilience. He looked up at me over his busy fingers. “This will heal slowly,” he said. “But the poison is gone. The splinter is gone. Gradually, the pain will be gone.” He lifted me slightly, his hand at my back, wedging pillows again behind my head. It seemed he was purposefully avoiding my eyes. He stood and I thought I heard him breathe more deeply. Then what he said was so shockingly abrupt, I was sure I was dreaming.
“But now,” he frowned, choosing his words with more care than usual, “within the next few days, if you will accept it Tilda, I believe I must find you a husband.”
I was completely inebriated, which wasn’t helping. Then all the tiredness and the desire to sleep fled away. I opened my mouth and no words came out at all. Finally, I managed to squeak, “What?”
But he had already left the room with an armful of unguents and bandages, and I knew perfectly well that he’d intentionally spoken at the moment of leaving and that he wouldn’t allow me conversation on the subject until I was stronger, when he would not be able to avoid it.
Chapter Fifty Seven
I woke twice, briefly, in the night, aware of being watched. Vespasian had pulled the truckle bed out into the room and was sleeping at some distance from me, lost in the far shadows away from the guttering fire. But though the shape of him beneath the covers was immovable, I was sure I saw the black glitter of his eyes under half closed lids, and believed he was awake and aware.
When I stirred in the morning, he had gone. I had a hangover.
My head thumped with a malicious regularity, but the rest of my body breathed easy, blissfully relaxed. There was no deep pain. The assault which had previously so ravaged my body, was just a memory.
Tired muscles ached from hours in the saddle, I was weak and light headed from days of nausea, very little food and a surfeit of wine the previous evening. The tracery of bruises, cuts and healing scars stung and any sudden movement still made me wince. Where Vespasian had specifically probed the wound over the dragon brand, the skin was inflamed and the whole area sore. Even my unpractised wrist was swollen, throbbing from the weight of the sword. But none of it compared to the pain of before. No agony remained of Lilith’s claw in my breast. Even the brand seemed to have shrunk. I stretched my legs, curled my toes and exhaled very deeply. It was delicious. Then I remembered what Vespasian said before I fell asleep, and my contentment faded.
I tried to get up and open the shutters. The sunshine was buzzing outside, a whole golden morning waited beyond the sickroom. But staggering from the bed was not as easy as I’d expected and my legs collapsed neatly beneath me like an ironing board. I giggled, clambered to my knees and squirmed back under the coverlet. I was then surprised to discover myself, though still semi naked, wearing soft woollen hose, lacings loose, beneath which I was conscious of the remarkable and unexpected folds of a man’s linen braies.
I began to hone and practise the words I intended saying to Vespasian once he reappeared, a dignified combination of intense gratitude, and denial of his unwelcome wedding plans, but found that I had a disconcerting time given me to repeat, and then forget them. Vespasian did not come.
“I might have been dead by now,” I said in exasperation when he finally strode into the room many tedious hours later.
He had brought me a bowl of soup spiced with cumin and a mug of mulberry wine. “I’m delighted to find you so full of humble gratitude,” he said. “You will now eat, and drink, and regain even more of your strength.”
He put the bowl and spoon into my hands and the cup on the chest beside the bed. He was leaving again. I would never get to use my much practised speech. “At once?” I demanded. I relented. “I suppose you have a lot to do.”
He paused at the doorway. “After being away from the estate for something in the way of twelve years, yes, I find there are one or two things I need to attend to.”
“Alright. It doesn’t matter,” I said. “And I am grateful. Incredibly, stunningly endlessly grateful. So grateful that I can’t think of the right words. But you said something else last night which has worried me ever since, and I wanted so very much to talk about it.”
“Ah,” he said, coming back reluctantly into the room. “I understand. Then I shall stay just a few minutes longer, if you will eat that soup.”
I ate the soup, which was thick and very good. The nausea did not return. “Though I have a headache,” I said.
“A modest superfluity of wine last night,” he suggested, looking down at me. The fire had dulled into a scatter of peat ash without flame but the room retained the warmth and was already daytime bright. He now lifted open the window shutters so the sun streaked in through the sheepskin parchments and haloed around the gleam of his hair. So often tangled and ignored, his hair now looked newly washed and combed, reflecting the light
like black polished metal or the square jet crystals of the brooch at his shoulder.
All my studied speech was lost. I said the first thing that came into my head. “You’ve put me into under-pants,” I said. “Women don’t wear braies.”
There was a slight pause before he answered, while controlling the vague twitch at the corners of his mouth. “What an unexpected child you can be, Tilda,” he said. “You’re wearing a gentleman’s hose, my own in fact, and they come complete with braies as the laces combine. I thought you might enjoy some unexpected modesty, so both for your own sake and for mine, a little added coverage seemed – let us say – suitable. But from now on I imagine you’ll be able to dress yourself and there will be fewer mistakes. It seems the skills of undressing a woman and of dressing her again, are quite diverse, and clearly I am more adept at one than the other. Soon I must even forgo the repeated pleasure of undressing you. Instead I’ll order new clothes made up. You can of course choose your own fabrics.”
I had finished the soup and handed back the bowl. I certainly didn’t want the wine. “It wasn’t clothes I wanted to talk about,” I said, studiously polite. “If you have the time, that is. It was about finding me – a husband.”
He sat, most reluctantly I thought, and faced me. “You’ve already told me several times,” he said, “that you don’t wish to be married. Considering the lame proposals I know you’ve already received from some of your young companions, I can appreciate the reasons for this. I thought I might find you someone a little older, somewhat more intelligent and considerably more wealthy.”
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