by Alys Clare
I said nothing.
We danced on – he was very good, light on his feet and as practised in the steps of the old dances as any of the villagers – and presently I noticed that he had guided me to the edge of the clearing where the surrounding trees cast deep shadows.
Was this deliberate? Did he want to be alone with me in the darkness? Did he want to kiss me?
The thought was both thrilling and alarming. Nobody had kissed me like that before. I was young for my age – all my female relatives kept saying so – and my body was boyishly straight. The sensible part of my mind had already worked out that Romain must have something other than sex in mind when abruptly he stopped dancing, dragged me to a halt beside him and, ducking down beneath the trees, whispered, ‘There’s someone else here who wants to see you.’
My sweet and short-lived little fantasy of collapsing into Romain’s strong and manly arms as his firm mouth found mine gave a wave of its flirtatious hand and melted away.
I followed Romain through the undergrowth. I had no choice, for he had hold of my wrist and I could not break away. He moved quickly and, afraid that my beautiful shawl would be snagged on a bramble and spoiled, I said quite sharply, ‘Slow down!’
To my great surprise, for he seemed preoccupied and intent, he did. Then, after progressing more decorously through the thin woodland for perhaps another hundred paces, we emerged into an open space where a shallow stream ran over stones. Somebody was there, leaning against a tree. He stepped forward into the moonlight and I saw that it was Sibert.
We had not parted on good terms. I said rudely, ‘What do you want?’
He gave a guilty smile, just like Squeak when he’s been found out in some bit of mischief he thought he’d got away with. ‘Now, Lassair, don’t be unkind,’ he began, holding out his hands palm down and patting at the air as if by so doing he would soothe me out of my anger. ‘You—’
‘I thought you were my friend,’ I shouted, ignoring his protest, ‘and did you come to see me when I was told I had to come and look after Goda? Did you sympathize and promise that you’d come to visit me in my exile, if you were allowed to? Did you even bother to say goodbye?’
‘I—’
‘No you didn’t!’ I answered for him, at a considerably higher volume than he would have done. ‘You were barely speaking to me at Goda’s wedding and afterwards you – you – disappeared, and I didn’t know if I’d offended you or if it wasn’t just me and you were cross with the whole world, and you never gave me the chance to find out because every time I saw you, you ran away!’
I stopped, listening to the echoes of my furious words on the still air. Goodness, I hadn’t realized how much his defection had hurt me and now, oh, no, now I’d blurted it out and neither of us could be in any doubt at all.
I felt deeply embarrassed. I felt the hot blood flush up into my face and was very glad of the darkness. All cats are grey in the dark, they say, and hopefully, by the same token, all faces too.
After a moment Romain cleared his throat and said diplomatically, ‘Er, actually, Lassair, I’m afraid it’s all my fault.’
I spun round to face him. ‘All what?’ I demanded.
‘Um – Sibert’s preoccupation. His disappearance.’
Disappearance? I was puzzled. ‘You mean he left the village? He left Aelf Fen, with you, and that’s why I didn’t see him?’ No, that couldn’t be right, because I had seen Sibert once or twice, but he had refused to meet my eyes or speak to me.
‘No,’ Romain said. He took a deep breath and then went on, ‘I have asked Sibert to do something for – I should say, with me. We are’ – he paused and shot a glance at Sibert – ‘conspirators. Accomplices.’
‘Oh,’ I breathed. It sounded alarming. Intriguing. Exciting. I thought they had better explain. ‘What exactly do you mean?’
Again, Romain sent that quick glance at Sibert. I could have been mistaken – the only light, after all, was from the moon and the stars – but I thought I saw Romain give a tiny nod. Probably I did, because it was Sibert who spoke.
‘Romain and I have much in common,’ he began pompously, and I almost laughed because, as far as I was concerned, they could not have been more different and all that united them was their age, although Romain was maybe two or three years older. ‘You don’t understand,’ Sibert was hurrying on huffily, as if he’d sensed my reaction, ‘but it is the truth. We have decided to combine our efforts to achieve a certain clandestine purpose, and it is profoundly in both our interests to do so.’
He was speaking, but the words did not make much sense. Furthermore, they did not sound like Sibert’s natural speech. I’d never heard him use words like clandestine and profoundly and I was almost sure that, although Sibert was doing the talking, Romain had told him what to say.
‘So what is this great purpose?’ I asked, not disguising the sarcasm. ‘What is it going to gain and why’ – I really ought to have asked this first – ‘are you telling me?’
‘The purpose involves a search,’ Romain said smoothly. ‘I know the rough location where the search must be carried out and Sibert knows about the – er, the object of the search. It is quite possible, indeed likely, that we will find what we seek ourselves. However, Sibert has told me that you have a very particular talent, and so we thought it was worthwhile approaching you to see if you would care to help us.’
‘I’m a dowser,’ I said shortly. I was becoming tired of his flowery way of speaking.
‘Yes, I know.’ He gave me a beaming smile. ‘So, would you like to help us?’
My suspicions were growing. He was making it sound as if it would be quite useful to have me along, although far from essential. Yet he had started to sweat and the muscles of his jaw were working and I knew that a great deal depended on my answer.
I knew I was going to say yes. Whatever this business was all about, it was just too enticing to refuse. But I decided to make them wait.
‘What sort of help would you want?’ I asked, making my voice feeble and scared. ‘Finding something, I realize that, but where would I have to look? Here?’ I looked around me. ‘In Aelf Fen?’
‘Neither, exactly,’ Romain said cautiously. ‘You – in fact, Lassair, our purpose would necessitate a journey.’
‘A long journey?’ I was finding it hard to keep up the pretence of nervous little ninny, but I did my best. ‘Oh, I don’t know if I’d be brave enough for that.’
Sibert, I noticed, was eyeing me closely. I had better be careful.
‘Oh, not that long!’ Romain gave a very false-sounding laugh. ‘We have to go – er – to the coast.’
The nearest sea to where we stood was about thirty miles north. Eastwards, it was maybe forty-five or fifty miles. ‘Oh dear,’ I whispered, ‘that sounds a very great distance.’ I was thinking hard, for I urgently needed to know more about this business than they seemed prepared to tell me. ‘How long would I be away? I’m looking after Goda, you know, and I don’t think she would want me to leave her, especially now when the baby’s birth will surely be quite soon.’
‘She must not know where you’re going!’ Sibert said quickly. ‘You can’t tell anyone, Lassair!’
I certainly can’t unless you first tell me, I almost said. I stopped myself. ‘Then I suppose I would have to think of an excuse,’ I said, frowning as if this was going to be difficult.
‘Can you do that?’ Romain asked, unable to keep the anxiety out of his voice. ‘Can you tell a convincing lie?’ He didn’t know me very well.
‘Oh, I expect so,’ I replied innocently. I felt Sibert’s quick, suspicious glance. He, on the other hand, knew me much better.
‘Do you mean you’ll come with us?’ Romain said. He was standing right beside me now, almost breathless as he waited to hear what I would say.
I pretended to think. ‘If we must travel for as much as fifty miles, do this search for whatever it is and then come back again, we must surely be away for several days and—’
; ‘We shall travel fast,’ Romain interrupted eagerly. ‘The weather is fine, the roads and tracks are dry. We may be able to cover as much as twenty miles in each march.’
‘There’s plenty of daylight at this time of year,’ I added.
The two of them exchanged a look. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to travel after dark,’ Romain said.
I had a feeling he would say that. ‘Because all of this is so secret?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Yes. So secret that you won’t be able to seek permission to make the journey. In fact, Sibert shouldn’t even be here now, which is why you had to meet him out here in the woods.’
Oh. Not only did I seem to have agreed to act as treasure-seeker for these two conspirators, but I was about to compound my potential misdemeanours by setting out on a considerable journey – to the sea! Oh, it was exciting! I’d never in my life seen the sea! – without the knowledge or agreement of the lord.
This should have made me come to my senses and say a courteous but very firm no. I was not quite sure what sort of trouble a girl of my age would land in if caught absconding from the manor without permission but I knew it would be grave. Very grave, and probably not only for me. But then I thought of Goda, moaning and sweating in her smelly bed. I thought of how furious she would be if – probably when – she discovered that I’d drugged her so that I could disobey her explicit command and go out to join in the Midsummer’s Eve celebrations. Life in her house was already miserably hard. How much more would I have to suffer when she heard how I’d tricked her?
As I prepared to give them my answer, I was already planning what I would say to my sister to justify the sudden urgent need to be away from her for perhaps as long as a week.
That was going to be the easy part.
FIVE
I was good at making up creditable fictions but, although I say it myself, the tale I wove for Goda was convincing even by my standards. I knew that if I were to cite anybody who might at some point be asked to verify my story, then it had better be someone I trusted not to let me down. The obvious person, since we already shared quite a lot of secrets, was my aunt Edild.
She is, as I have said, a herbalist and a healer. She is honest and good and always does her best to help people. If they are very poor and in desperate need, sometimes she does not charge them, merely saying that one day when she was in need, they can do something for her. Those days never seem to come.
Times, however, were changing. Churches, abbeys and monasteries were springing up all over the place and the black-clad priests seemed to be multiplying fast. Not that I had any complaints about that. The vast majority of the people were poor and the men of the Church gave them much-needed support when they were desperate. Most of them did, that is; there were exceptions. However, the problem was that some of the priests apparently believed that sickness and injury happened to people who had in some way offended God and therefore they should be made to suffer, or at least have their pain helped only by God’s own men. Edild and I did not see it quite like that and we helped all who came asking, without first enquiring whether we should let them suffer a while for the good of their soul before we did so. Furthermore, women like my aunt always aroused suspicion because they were different. Edild, typical of her kind, was unmarried, dependent on no man for the food on her table or the roof over her head. She was clever and could read and write (I once heard a priest say that a literate woman was an abomination in the eyes of God, although he was talking in general and not about Edild). And people – particularly priests – were deeply suspicious of the old ways. The God whom they worshipped, to the ruthless exclusion of any other, did not allow people to believe in the old deities or the spirits that inhabited the streams, the trees and the very stones of the earth. Edild’s methods, in their eyes, were very close to sorcery.
It had always seemed quite natural and logical, therefore, that much of what I learned from my aunt must not be spoken of outside the four walls of her snug little house. She could depend on me to be diplomatic and she knew, I hoped, that I would lie to protect her if I had to. I was as sure as I could be that she would do the same for me.
On the morning after my night-time meeting with Romain and Sibert, Goda woke from a long and profound sleep – so profound that she did not appear to have moved at all throughout the night – in a surprisingly good mood. All things are relative, and for my sister a good mood meant that she didn’t shout at me because a refreshing drink wasn’t ready for her the instant she awoke or hurl the mug at me if the drink wasn’t precisely to her liking. Still, to have her glare at me in silence was an improvement on her usual torrent of abuse.
I took advantage of the fact that she had slept so late and told her that first thing that morning, just after Cerdic had left for work, a messenger had come from Aelf Fen to summon me because Edild needed me urgently.
‘What does she want you for?’ demanded Goda.
Modestly I cast down my eyes. ‘Several people have been injured in an accident and she needs another pair of hands to treat them all.’
Goda looked at me with her mouth turned down in a sarcastic scowl. ‘She must be desperate if she wants a clumsy, ham-fisted oaf like you to tend the wounded,’ she observed. Then, prurient curiosity getting the better of her as I had known it would: ‘What sort of accident?’
‘There was a heavily loaded hay cart being drawn back to the lord’s yard and lots of people were riding on it,’ I said in a hushed tone. ‘Many more were walking along beside it and then something startled the horse – they think it may have been stung by a hornet – and somehow it put its offside feet over the edge of the ditch and before anyone could do anything the cart went over.’
‘Were many people hurt?’ Goda asked.
‘Oh, yes. Broken arms, collarbones, concussion, bad bruising. Some of the injured,’ I added, ‘were small children.’
Even Goda could not ignore the necessity to offer all possible aid to a hurt child, could she?
‘It sounds bad,’ she muttered, frowning.
It was bad. It happened just as I had described it, but it had happened more than a week ago and Edild had managed perfectly well on her own. I was told the news by the tinker who visited Icklingham. He usually went to Aelf Fen as his previous call and, knowing I came from there, often brought titbits of gossip.
One of my cardinal rules is if you’re going to lie, make it as close to the truth as you can. In this instance, all I was altering was the timing.
‘Yes, awful,’ I agreed. ‘I don’t really want to go but I think I should,’ I added, frowning to express my pretended reluctance. ‘Apparently a man’s got a bone actually sticking through the flesh of his leg and Edild needs me to help her push and pull till the bones go back into their proper position, which means we’ll have to—’
Goda had gone quite pale. ‘Yes, yes, enough!’ she said abruptly. Then, after a moment, ‘How long will you be gone?’
‘Oh, quite some time, I’m afraid,’ I said, my frown deepening as if I hated the very thought. ‘Perhaps as long as a week? There will be such a lot to do. You have to be so careful to keep flesh wounds clean, you see, especially in summer, what with the flies and—’
‘All right!’ bellowed my sister. She shifted in the bed and a smell of stale sweat wafted out, accompanied by the sharper stench of urine. ‘You’d better get me cleaned up if you’re going away. Then you can fetch the midwife for me – she’ll have to look after me till you get back.’
For a moment I stood unmoving, quite taken aback at how easy it had been. Then I saw Goda flap her hand about and I realized she was searching for something to throw at me. I spun on my heel and hurried away to heat up the water and find the wash cloth.
The sooner I was out of the house, the better. Goda clearly didn’t know yet about my forbidden excursion last night. If she had noticed my pallor and the dark circles that must surely be under my eyes – very unlikely, as the only person whose well-being concerned her was herself – she did
not comment. By the time she found out what I’d been up to, I wanted to be well away from Icklingham. That morning, my sister received the swiftest, most obliging attention I had ever given her.
Even that failed to make her smile.
I had arranged to meet Romain and Sibert as dusk fell, under a spinney of beech trees that stood beside the road that led east out of Icklingham. I hurried through the rest of my appointed tasks for Goda and then, as befitted someone on an urgent healing mission, I set off north-westwards on the road to Aelf Fen.
I walked through the neat strips of land for a couple of miles or more. Many people were out that fine morning tending their land and several of them straightened up as I passed to smile and nod a greeting. One of Goda’s neighbours was trying to turn his plough at the end of a field, cursing and swearing because the shoe was deep in a rut. He looked up, saw me and, smiling wryly, apologized for his language. Returning his smile, I hurried on. I crossed a stream and passed through a narrow belt of woodland where, I noticed, several of the villagers had left wrapped bundles of food for the midday meal in the shade of the trees. On the other side of the copse there was a patch of rough ground where a few goats were tethered. I looked around carefully but could see nobody watching me. I walked quickly across the wiry grass. Then, sure that at last I was out of sight of interested eyes, I doubled back and, keeping to the cover of trees and hedgerows, made my way to the meeting point. It was just after noon; I had several hours to wait.
Crouching there deep in my hiding place with nothing to do but think was the last thing I wanted as it gave me the chance to reflect on my decision. With hindsight, it seemed to me that I had been incredibly reckless. Romain and Sibert had told me next to nothing about this extraordinary mission and I had no idea where we were going, other than to the coast, or why, except that I was to help them search for something. Did this thing belong to one of them and was it something they had carelessly lost? Or – and this seemed far more likely – was it someone else’s property that they were plotting to steal? Surely that was right, or why else was this whole business shadowed so deeply in secrecy? Why else were we forced to travel by night?