Fair Weather

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  “This place,” I said, sweeping my arm around the lost murmuring of old worship, “could be beautiful. I should like to try and understand.”

  “What? More questions?” Vespasian smiled but I thought his eyes suddenly sad. “No, it will be dismantled,” he said. “Amongst the beauty of alchemy which you see, are the traces of black prayer, which must be destroyed. If you like, I will restore it to the Christian legends.”

  I pointed. “I know that,” I said, “without having to ask.” Above the glittering silvered stars on the wall beside us, flying over the moon and spread in scarlet dark clawed wings and flashing eyes, was the pattern of the dragon, symbol of the fifth essence and the inner sacred fire.

  Vespasian nodded. “It has protected this house for many years,” he said.

  “Then you shouldn’t destroy it,” I whispered. “It saved my life.”

  “It is over,” said Vespasian. “I will not hide behind the memory of old beliefs.”

  He was leading me from the room, a gentle pull away from the past. Behind me he locked the door. “But the dragon brand you gave me,” I said. “You told me it wouldn’t fade.” I looked up at him suddenly. “I know why – but how? How so indelible? So eternal?”

  “With fire,” he answered, his voice reluctant. “With fire and magic. I made sure you were in a trance, piccina, and felt nothing, but I’m sorry for the pain it’s caused you since. It was the greatest protection I could give you. I couldn’t know whether I’d always be around to keep you safe. Indeed, I expected to be killed. The fifth essence is a far greater guarantee, as you saw, in the end.”

  He told me the truth, as he always did, but I knew there was something more than that. “You were worried, weren’t you,” I said to my toes, “even though you – claimed the rights of the gatekeeper – someone could come later, and take the power away from us both?”

  “More with Molly than with Tilda,” he said softly, “where my influence was weak.” He led me out into the courtyard and under the sun where the breeze blew away the smoky sadness and the scent of incense and witchery. “Enough now,” he smiled and the sun reflected in his eyes, “I’ve promised I’ll no longer deny you the answers you require of me, but think first, vita mia, before you ask. You should limit your questions, for sometimes the truth can hurt us both. Now, let us return to present pleasures and lock the Wiccan memories behind their crumbling doors.”

  But sometimes, in the sweet soft blue shadows of our bed and in the warmth of his arms after love making, I still asked Vespasian about the puzzles that slipped between my thoughts. “Do you have children?” I asked him one evening. The bedroom fire was spitting low but it was peaty and aromatic with branches of laurel and herb. “Do you even know? You’ve admitted your past, and in any case, I always knew what you did, as well as Isabel. You could have sired children, even without knowing.”

  I kept my face buried in the curve of his shoulder but I knew he was laughing at me. “You forget,” he said, “I’ve my own magical guarantees against unwanted pregnancies. Are there any other equally immodest questions you’ve saved up for me, to accuse me while I’m vulnerable?”

  “I don’t believe you’re ever vulnerable,” I sniffed. “But there is something else. It’s about Uta.” I had some difficulty saying her name. “She said you promised yourself to her. Did you? I know in the end you were foresworn, and I know I shouldn’t ask. But did you make love to her? Did you ever touch her at all? She’s the only one I worry about. I’m not jealous of anyone else.”

  I knew he’d stopped smiling when I felt the line of his jaw harden against my cheek. “May I remind you,” he said, very soft voiced, “that in this honeyed and unenlightened age, wife flogging is perfectly legal.”

  But I knew he would never strike me. “I still have nightmares, you see,” I murmured, “especially about Uta, because I know I killed her. I didn’t mean to but I did. Sometimes the last sight of her comes back and haunts me. You told me once you could cure my night terrors. So, will you answer me, even if you’re angry I asked?”

  He had made love to me for an hour or more, there on the wide velvet bed in the flickering firelight and the drifting perfumes. I was sorry to spoil our echoes with the vision of Uta’s death, but Vespasian relented then, and spoke softly into the top of my sweat damp hair, his careless hands closing a little tighter and more consciously around my breasts.

  “It is true,” he said, “that I promised her my body and my service. I was Arthur’s prisoner in my own home and I knew they held Richard and by then, also Gerald, whom I was pledged to keep safe. Then I discovered they had taken you.” He shifted and, leaning down, kissed my eyes. “Arthur did not trust any promise I could give him for I’d already killed several of their brood on my previous visit. You may remember the occasion, since you insisted on embroidering my shoulder.” The badly stitched wound still ran haphazard in a thick white scar beneath his collar bone. “Lying chained in a reeking dungeon seemed an inordinate waste of time. I took the easiest form of quick release, which was to lie. Uta, in spite of her disdain, was gullible.” He had caressed my nipples into pronounced arousal, but his mind was elsewhere. “It’s a great arrogance, but I confess I always knew the affect I could have on women, if I wished it. This was the quickest way to obtain my freedom.”

  “I’m not blaming you for anything,” I said. “I just wanted to know. My dreams trouble me.”

  “Then know this,” said Vespasian, words lost in the shadows, so I could barely hear. “I never touched her, nor ever desired her. Do you imagine I’d fuck a woman who had lain with Lilith, or swive with a mouth that licked Lilith’s feet? I promised what I had no intention of fulfilling. It was a risk I believed to be worth the result. I remained foresworn until you took the card from the tarocchi pack in my name.”

  “Or Lilith would have claimed your soul?”

  “Hush child,” he said, bending to kiss my mouth closed and smother the words I might still have said. “All this is passed. I have left it all behind, the bright passion of alchemy as well as the dark night of necromancy and lost religions. I will cleanse the last room in this house that carries the memory.” He ran his fingers absently across my nipples. “Your own magic is, I believe, also passed. I see no sign in you of the power of Janus, Cernunnus or Thoth, who all hold the keys you used to open the doorways. With the banishment of the veleda, when Lilith pierced the dragon – here – and was broken, she no longer orders you and I do not think you are any longer the gatekeeper.”

  “It’s true,” I confessed, reaching up my hand to his cheek, “that I seem to have reverted to myself. I’m one person again, though a combined nature, with memories of places I have never been. It’s like being twins in one body.”

  “It is a remarkably beautiful body,” he breathed, kissing my palm, and moving his own hand down to the soft skin of my inner thighs. “Here you are silk.” He sighed. “Do you regret, Tilda, the strange experiences you and I have shared? They have brought you more pain than is just in a God-fearing world, but whatever happens to us, makes us what we are.”

  “You say I’m fire and water in astrology,” I said, “Fire and water have no regrets. They’re both moving, insubstantial elements that see, learn, absorb and move on.”

  “Acqua nostra,” murmured Vespasian, as though it was an incantation. “The water which in alchemy becomes the inner sacred fire, and the fifth essence which you will always carry, the dragon flying across your breast and guarding your heart.”

  I smiled into his shoulder. “You say you’ll never return to magic and alchemy,” I said, “but you can’t disguise your beliefs. You quote without thinking.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But alchemy aspires to perfection and that is the most dangerous thing of all. I shall try and forget the things that bring shadows. I shall teach you to ride, Tilda, and we’ll go hunting in the forests here behind the house. Not for deer and boar, but for sunlight and silver pools, and squirrels and otters playing in the moonshi
ne. I shall show you a deeper magic, of sensual beauty and of love. I will teach you the magic of happiness.”

  Chapter Fifty Nine

  All through the long winter Vespasian kept his promise. I learned happiness as a poet discovers the perfect melody he has searched for all his life. When spring ruffled the land and the blossoms brought out the bees and the first bud and leaf was shy lemon green under the timid sun and the rain was a scattering of dancing gold and the wind gusted down our valley, I was as happy as I had ever thought to be in my life and happier than Tilda had ever imagined was possible. It was Jasper, not Vespasian Fairweather, who made love to me with all the languid sensuality that I had never before discovered, and it was Jasper who began to educate me to the life of a lady, Baroness de Vrais of Stourbury and Gloucester, and (officially though no longer practically) of Demis-Bayeux. We visited Gerald and stayed many days but it was being alone together that we cherished too much, and so avoided company.

  We made some concession to other nobility who rode over, curious about the baron returned, and once Jasper made his representation to the king for the claim of his title and estates, John acquiesced and proposed that he would come to stay with us in autumn, for the hunt. In the meantime, we had time to ourselves.

  And then, after five soaring months of everything Tilda had ever hoped for, it was Beltaine. The cattle were taken from their stuffy barns and put out to pasture and the house martins moved in, nesting all along the eaves under the thatch. I had walked down to the stream with Jasper in the morning to watch the fish jumping. He had pointed out the great dark shadow of the pike on the pebbled bed and the slide of the ripples as it darted from ambush. He had showed me the wedge of pearly spotted frog spawn caught against the water weed and the splayed footprints of the heron along the soft muddy bank. We sat under the willows and I took off my shoes and wriggled my toes in the cold water and he had reminded me of the forest pool beside the other house, and how I had often gone there to swim, and how he had followed me. “You were beautiful then,” he said, “but you’re more beautiful now.”

  “You told me then,” I reminded him, “that you thought of me as a daughter.”

  “I lied,” he said.

  As the long afternoon shimmered under its high sun, the field workers began their Mayday celebrations. With a great deal of raucous music and singing, dancing and drinking, work stopped and the children ran between the cottages with streamers of vine. One old man had a lute, which he played badly, another a fiddle, which he played well. Two children had drums but no sense of rhythm and the local priest who had arrived on his mule up from the village, was trailed by his wife and six sons, none of whom he was supposed to have.

  Afternoon slipped into a merry twilight and then a tipsy sunset. The soaring coloured kites and swirling flags of the shrinking sun paled suddenly into cloudless ivory and Beltaine was nearly over. I went back inside where the long shadows drifted across the tiles. Jasper lit the candles and ordered the fire in the hall to be set ready against the evening chill. He poured me a cup of our own wine, last year’s laying and a little raw but strong with a perfume of apples and raspberry and we sat close on the window seat, watching as the last of the peasants trooped back to their cottages, tripping over their feet, the final vestiges of song like a rustle among the trees. The barn owl woke, silent swoop and off to hunt mouse and shrew in the gathering darkness.

  “Soon it will be summer,” said Jasper. “Will you come with me up to Stourbury, when the wheat is high, and help me put the other estate in order? It has been left longer to ruin and the work will be harder.”

  I knew he’d avoided returning to the other estate, for it was there he’d found his wife hacked in blood on the bed of their love making and all his life and happiness spread in wretched ruin. I was therefore deeply content, flattered perhaps as few other things flattered me, that now, with me, he felt strong enough to face that place again. “I’ll come wherever you go,” I said. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  “I knew you would,” he said. “It is still polite to ask.”

  I managed to hide my approval. “Polite?” I grinned. “Too unexpected for comfort.”

  He leaned forward and kissed me, a little harder and a little longer than daytime kisses were apt to be. “Then come with me now,” he said, very softly, “and I’ll remind you what comfort really means. For you are, anima mia, utterly irresistible.”

  With his fingers tight on my wrist, he led me across the hall and up the steps to the bedchamber, so that I spilled my wine as I followed him, and lost one of my shoes on the stairs. He lit no more candles and the hearth was empty, but the unshuttered windows still allowed a pale light, the last azure tinge before the Earth spun away from the sun and dropped hard into night. I thought I saw the evening star, a sudden glitter just above the horizon, the star I now called my own. I turned back to Jasper. He’d quickly pulled open his own cotte and shirt, and now undressed me slowly, touching and caressing and moving the warmth of his breath through parted lips down my breasts and across my stomach. I arched my back and felt the heat pulse from toes to finger tips. When I was unclothed, he removed his own, and lay beside me, the smile fully lit in his eyes and the curve of his mouth extended into soft delight. “You have no idea, bien amie, my Tilda,” he whispered before making love to me, “the joy you bring me, every day.”

  The moon was huge and full and right outside our window when he lay back, arms spread wide, gazing at me as I curled beside him, holding to the warmth of his neck. I leaned forwards then, and kissed his eyes closed, the long black lashes soft silk on the tip of my tongue. “Sleep, beloved,” I said. “I’ll go and tell Edmund to lock up, and hold supper for tonight. Some of the men are still drunk under the pigeon coop, but I’ll tell Edmund to move them on before settling the horses. I won’t be long. When I come back, I shall slip into your dreams, and kiss you there.”

  He sighed, and held my hand for a moment before I pulled the eiderdown over his nakedness and slipped from the bed, dressed hurriedly in a quickly belted robe, and tiptoed down again into the hall. It was very quiet and the great moon shone in silver pools across the marble. The fire had been only half set and remained unlit. I snuffed the candles, all except one.

  It was not long before I returned to the house, hurrying to be all the quicker into the warmth of my lover’s arms. Outside a sharp little wind had turned bitter and the warm day had become a cold night. All the servants had been at the celebrations and the kitchens were empty. I carried my candle into the hall where its small flicker danced up amongst the beams, all red and black like London’s scurrying rats. It was coming from the door in the yew tree that I saw the figure.

  I had dismissed the cook and already said goodnight to our steward Edmund so no one else should have been in the front of the house except Jasper, half asleep upstairs. I called out and the figure stood in the far darkness, waiting for me. I walked over, and at once felt ice trickle across the back of my neck.

  “Had you forgotten me?” said Malcolm.

  I had. I had forgotten all of them, all the vile nightmare. I couldn’t speak. Someone behind me said, girlish English and a cherubic sweetness, “Well dear, what a delightful place you have here. Perhaps we should have come before. But of course, you didn’t invite us.” I couldn’t breathe.

  There were three, the two women and the man. In the women’s presence, Malcolm swaggered. I turned and stared in disgust at the squat Ableside sisters, Ruth and Sarah, who had no right at all to be in my bright new world. “I have opened no doorways,” I shuddered. “How have you come?”

  “Why, dear,” smiled Sarah, “you never did understand the way it really works, did you? Even though you were such a part of it yourself.”

  “The veleda is dying,” said Ruth. “Cernunnus has taken back the keys,” and she stretched out her hand to me so that I froze and stood immobile before her, as if spell bound by the point of her finger. “You have no power of any kind, and revert to who you should
always have been, a shred of useless humanity without knowledge.”

  “But Jasper has knowledge,” I whispered. “He beat you all once and he can do it again. He will hear you and come down.”

  Malcolm laughed, a snivelling sour giggle that came more from his nose than this throat. “He won’t hear us,” he said. “Now we have Lilith and you no longer have the seal of Thoth or the ouroboros and nothing to help you at all.”

  “I can scream,” I said, “and he will hear. He said you whipped me once. You’ve never paid for that. But you’ll never touch me again and you’ll feel a hundred times more agony than you ever inflicted on me. I still have the dragon brand and in that room –” but I was pointing to the yew tree on the wall where the door led to the chapel. It was from there that Malcolm had come and now the door was fading out and the painted tree was turning to barren winter with all its rich coloured leaves disappearing under a white crystal spatter of snow.

  “But he cleared the room,” sniggered Malcolm. “Did you make him do that? Were you a good little housewife and scrubbed away all the power? It’s clean washed and everything destroyed.”

  “You see,” smiled Ruth, “it is we who have the ouroboros now,” and she opened her palm. The little curved serpent lay tucked snugly into the fleshy swell of her plump hand, its sad blue eyes glimmered dim, its tail forced between its blunt teeth. It was the modern copy I had seen in the other world, the thing that had once given me faith that she, and her sister, and Thomas Cambio, were all friends and would help me.