The fire crackled gently, the scent of lemon verbena was very sweet in the room. The three of them—the two naked pregnant women, and the half-dressed young lord—lay still. The lord and his lady slept.
Catherine came down for supper in the great hall, rosy in her pink and cream gown, her face smiling, fat as a pudding, her hair spread out over her shoulders, her appetite sharp. Hugo had her on his arm as they walked into the dining-hall and there was a shout of appreciation and welcome from all the diners. Alys took her old place at the women’s table and cast a hard look around at all of them to warn them not to mock her for her return.
“Welcome back,” Eliza said irrepressibly.
Alys met her bright eyes with a cold stare. “I am happy to dine with you, Eliza, and with you all,” she said levelly. “But do not forget that I am carrying Hugo’s son in my belly—something each one of you would give a year’s pay for. Don’t forget that when Catherine takes to her bed again I shall be sitting next to the old lord and that I am his favorite. Don’t forget that I am Mistress Alys to you and every one of you. My fortunes may rise and fall, but even at their ebb they are higher than you could dream.”
All the women looked at their plates and supped their broth in silence. Alys let the silence go on and on. She watched Hugo. Half a lifetime ago it seemed that she had sat here with Morach beside her, and watched Hugo’s back with a desire so strong that she had thought she would die of it. Now she looked at his shoulders and his neck and the set of his head with silent hatred.
“Are you not eating, Mistress Alys?” Ruth asked quietly.
Alys glanced down at her bowl. The broth had grown cold, thick lumps of grease floated in it. Alys took a sip of wine tainted with the metallic taste of the pewter cup. David the steward had seen that her place on the women’s table was laid with pewter, like theirs. Glass was only for the top table, and she had lost her place there.
“I am not hungry,” she said briefly. “I will ask Hugo to send me something to my room later.” She rose from the table and went to the high table, to the old lord.
“I wish to leave the table,” she said softly in his ear. “I have some pains and I feel sick. I wish to go to my room.”
The look he turned on her was kindly enough, but he smiled as if he could see straight into her heart. “Don’t be envious, vixen,” he said softly. “You come second to Catherine. We always told you that. Go and sit at your place and drink and eat from pewter. She will keep to her room again some time and you can queen it up here then. But when she chooses to eat with us in the hall where she belongs, you take your place at the women’s table—where you belong.”
Alys glanced across at Hugo. He was listening to some jest a man was shouting to him from a table further down the hall. He caught the end of the riddle and threw back his dark head in a shout of laughter.
“No,” the old lord said, following her glance. “There is no appeal against my decision. I am master here still, Alys. Go and sit where you are bid.”
Alys smiled her sweetest smile. “Of course, my lord,” she said. “I did not wish to spoil the good cheer and merry company at the ladies’ table with my illness. But if you wish it, of course I will sit with them.”
Lord Hugh glanced back at the table and barked a sharp laugh at the four sour faces. They were straining to hear what Alys and the old lord were whispering about.
“Oh, go your ways,” he said indulgently. “I will spare you the merry cheer of that crew. Go to your room now, but another time you must sit with the silly bitches.”
Alys dipped him a curtsy and slipped out through the tapestry-hung door behind them. She caught Eliza’s eye as she left and remembered her first dinner in the castle when they had told her that no one could leave before the lord.
“Things are better for me now than they were then,” Alys said to herself grimly. She mounted the stairs to the ladies’ gallery, pushed open the door and pulled up a chair before the fire. “It is better for me now than in Morach’s ugly cottage.” She threw another log on the fire and sat watching the sparks fly. “I have forced them to see me for what I am,” she said defiantly to herself. “I came here as a nobody and now they call me Mistress Alys and I have twelve gowns of my own. I have as many new gowns as Catherine.”
The quietness of the room gathered around her. “I have forced them to see me for what I am,” Alys said again. She was silent for a moment, watching the flames.
“They see me as his whore,” she said softly. “Today I became Hugo’s whore. And everybody knows.”
Chapter
24
Alys was alone in her bedroom when the others came up to the gallery. She heard them talking and laughing, she heard the clink of jug on pewter. She sat by her little fireside, her door firmly shut, and listened to them playing a card game as Eliza sang. Then the chatter died down as one by one the women excused themselves and went to their room. Alys listened for Hugo’s voice and heard him call “Good night” to one of them. She sat by her fireside and waited.
He did not come to her.
In the early hours of the morning, when the darkness was still thick and the moon was setting in the west, Alys wrapped a shawl around her and crept across her floor to the door. She opened it and peeped out. The fire in the long gallery had died down, the ashes cold. Catherine’s door was shut. There was no sound.
Alys paused for a moment by the hearth and remembered the time when she had sat there absorbed in her longing for Hugo and he had come from Catherine’s room and put his arm around her and told her that he loved her. Alys shrugged. It was a long, long time ago. Before Morach’s death, before her deep magic had come to claim her, before she had played the wanton with him—and had him take her at her word.
She crept to Catherine’s door and turned the handle gently. Opening it a crack, she could hear deep rhythmic breathing. She slid through the door like a ghost and peered into the room.
The room was dark. All the candles were out and the fire had died away in the darkened grate. The little window faced the castle courtyard and garden and no moonlight shone. Alys blinked her eyes, trying to see through the shadows.
In the great high bed was Catherine, sprawled on her back with her high belly making a mountain of the covers. One arm was thrown carelessly above her head; Alys could see the thick clump of dark hair in her armpit. The other arm was cradling the man lying beside her. Alys stepped a little closer to see. It was Hugo. He was deep asleep, lying on his side with his head buried into Catherine’s neck, his arm thrown proprietorially over her body. They lay like a married couple. They lay like lovers. Alys watched them without moving while they breathed steadily and peacefully. She watched them as if she would suck the breath out of their bodies and destroy them with the weight of her jealousy and disappointment. Hugo stirred in his sleep and said something.
It was not Alys’s name.
Catherine smiled, even in the darkness Alys could see the calm joy of Catherine’s sleepy smile, and gathered him closer. Then they lay still again.
Alys closed the door silently, and crept back, across the empty, cold gallery to her own room, shut the door behind her, drew her chair up to the fire, wrapped her shawl around her, and waited for day to come.
In the half-light of dawn, before the sun was up but while the sky was pale yellow with the promise of sunshine to come, Alys went over and opened the chest of her magic things. Tucked away in the corner was Morach’s old bag of bones—the runes.
Alys glanced behind her. Her bedroom door was shut, no one in the castle was stirring. She glanced out of the arrow-slit window. In the pale light she could see strips of mist hovering and rising from the silver surface of the river. As she watched they rose and billowed. One of them looked like a woman, an old woman with gray hair and a shawl wrapped around her.
“No,” Alys whispered, as she recognized her. “I am not calling you. I will use your runes for I need to know my future. But I am not calling you. Stay in the water. Stay out o
f sight. You and I will both know when your time comes.”
She watched the mist until it billowed and ebbed and lay flat and quiet again, and then she turned from the arrow-slit and sat on the rug before the fire.
She shook the bag like a gambler shakes dice and then flung them all out before her. Without looking at the marks she picked three, carefully considering each choice, her hand hovering over one and then moving to another.
“My future,” she said. “Hugo uses me as his whore and now I am nothing here. There must be more for me. Show me my future.”
She spread the three of her choice before her, one beside another, and gathered the others into their purse again.
“Now,” she said.
The first one she had drawn was face down. The back was blank and she turned it over. The front was blank as well.
“Odin,” she said surprised. “Nothingness. Death.”
The second was blank. She turned it over, and then turned it over again. “It is not possible; there aren’t two blank runes,” Alys whispered to herself. “There is only one blank rune. All the rest are marked.” She flipped over the third. It was smooth and plain on both sides, one side as empty as the other. Alys sat very still with the three faceless runes in her hand.
Then she raised her head and looked toward the arrow-slit. The mist quivered as it lay on the river, quivered and formed the shape of a resting woman. “You knew,” Alys said in a low whisper toward the mist. “You told me, but I did not hear. Death, you said. Death in the runes. And I asked you, ‘How long?’ and you would not tell me. Now your runes are blank for me too.”
She tipped out the purse. The other bones spilled out on to the floor. Each one was smooth and as innocent of any mark as an old polished skull.
Alys shuddered, as if the cold river water was pressing around her, as if the green deep wetness of it was coming up to her chin, lapping over her mouth. She gathered the runes together with one hasty gesture, slung them into the bag, and tossed the bag into the corner of the chest. Then, with her shawl wrapped tight around her, she crept into bed. She could not sleep for shivering.
Hugo went out riding at first light, Catherine slept late. The women in the gallery eyed Alys sideways when she came out of her room, her face serene, her red cloak around her shoulders.
“I’m going up to the moors,” she said to Eliza. “I need some more herbs for Catherine. Is she sleeping still?”
“Yes,” Eliza said. “When will you be back?”
Alys looked at her coldly. “I shall be home in time for supper,” she said. “I will take my dinner with me and picnic out on the moors.”
“I’ll come with you to the stables,” Eliza said.
She and Alys went down the stairs, across the hall and out of the great door to the gardens. Eliza trotted to keep pace with Alys as they walked through the gateway, over the bridge and across the grass to the stables.
“It’s a pretty mare,” Eliza said enviously as the stable-boy brought Alys’s new pony out.
“Yes,” Alys said with grim satisfaction. “Yes, she is. She was expensive.” She snapped her fingers to the stable-lad. “Fetch me some food from the kitchen. I’ll dine on my own on the moors.” The lad dipped a bow and ran off.
“Hugo slept with Catherine all night,” Eliza said in a confidential undertone, watching the lad run to the kitchen door.
“I know,” Alys said coldly.
“Has he turned away from you now?” Eliza asked.
Alys shook her head. “I am carrying his son,” she said coldly. “My place is safe.”
Eliza looked at her with something very close to pity. Alys caught the look and felt herself flush.
“What is it?” she demanded. “What are you staring at?”
“You’d have been safer married to that soldier Lady Catherine picked out for you,” Eliza said shrewdly. “If you wanted to know where you were with a man, he would have been the one for you. Hugo is as changeable as weather. Now he’s back with Catherine again, next it’ll be another woman. You can’t ever call yourself safe if you trust in Hugo.”
The stable-lad was running back with a small leather bag in his hand. He tied it to the saddle and brought the mare forward. “He bought this for me, didn’t he?” Alys said to Eliza, pointing to the pony. “And I have a chest full of gowns. And I am carrying his son in my belly. I am safe enough here, aren’t I?”
Eliza shrugged, holding Alys’s herb sack while the lad helped her up. “He’s fickle,” she said again. “A woman who lives as a whore should keep a big bag of savings. It’s a chance-made business. You’ve ridden very high, Alys, but I think you’re coming down now.”
“Mistress Alys to you!” Alys flared. She shook out the skirts of her red gown, smoothed the rich embroidered overskirt, and gathered her reins in her hand. She looked down at Eliza as if she were a beggar at the gates and Alys a fine lady. “I am Mistress Alys to you,” she said again.
Eliza shrugged her shoulders. “Not anymore, I reckon,” she said. “I reckon you’re falling, Alys. I reckon you are on your way down.”
Alys wheeled the mare around, her face set, and kicked her toward the castle gateyard. As she trotted past the soldiers they shouldered their pikes in a salute but Alys looked neither left nor right. Down the little hill of Castleton she spurred the pony and then around the base of the cliffs at the foot of the castle to cross the bridge over the river and up to the moors. She did not pull up the pony until they were on the far side of the riverbank and it was blowing hard and out of breath. Then she drew rein and looked back at the castle, gray and lovely in the summer sunlight. Alys stared at it, as if she would swallow it up, gobble the whole place to sate her hunger, lords, ladies, servants, and all.
Then she turned the pony around and headed up for the moorland.
She had not planned to ride to Morach’s cottage, she had headed west from the castle, heading for the moors without any sense of purpose. The herb bag had been an excuse but as the hedges fell away from the side of the road and the land became more wild Alys saw a little clump of wildflowers on the side of the road and pulled up the horse. She slid from the saddle and picked them, wrapped them in dock leaves, and then, leading the horse by the reins, she walked down through the field toward the river, watching the thick meadow grass under her feet for any other herbs or flowers she could use.
The river was at its summertime ebb, sluggishly winding along the stone slabs, standing still in deep brown peaty pools, disappearing down the cracks of the river bed and then welling up in a narrow drying stream a few yards on. A redshank flew up from a pool calling and calling a clear sweet sound. Further downriver the water would have drained from Morach’s grave, her body would be rotting, busy with flies. Alys shrugged and turned her thoughts away from it.
Alys walked along the riverbank, leading her horse, watching the banks for herbs and for the innocent faces of the small meadow flowers. The smell of wild thyme was sweet and heady, the harebells stirred as the steady ceaseless moorland breeze breathed through them. The little dark-faced Pennine violets bobbed as the red skirts of Alys’s long gown brushed them. Away on the higher ground, white, mauve, and blue clouds of lady’s-smock swayed together on their long stems. Alys walked as if she could walk away from loneliness, walk away from need, walk away from the love of her life which had turned sour as soon as she had twisted it to serve her purpose.
With her little mare dawdling behind her, Alys walked, wishing she were far away from the castle, far away from Hugo, far away from her own ceaseless ambition. Alys walked, her eyes watchful for healing herbs, her mind at a loss as to her next step. God had failed her, love had failed her, magic had entrapped her. Alys, sure-footed on the familiar paths, was lost. All she could still feel was her hunger to survive—as keen and as vivid as ever; and behind that her old grief for her mother—Mother Hildebrande—that stayed with her, sharp and alive even when the runes read blank and Alys was as unsighted as any ordinary woman. On the clear sun-
filled day, with larks climbing as high as heaven and lapwings calling and curlews crying, Alys walked alone in her own world of darkness, coldness, and need.
She stopped abruptly. She had walked nearly as far as the deep pool before Morach’s old cottage. She shaded her eyes against the bright morning sunlight and looked up the hill toward it. It was in the same state that it had always been. The stone-slated roof looked ready to slide off into a heap, the one tiny horn window was dark and abandoned. No smoke eddied from the window or the door. Alys walked toward it and tied her horse to the hawthorn bush laden with creamy-white sickly flowers at the garden wall. She hitched up her skirt and climbed through the little sheep gap. Morach’s vegetables were sprouting, burdened with weeds, in their bed. Alys stared at them for a moment, remembering that she had planted them, all those months ago in the autumn. It seemed odd that Morach should be dead, long dead, and yet her turnips were growing in their bed. The front door was unfastened; the little hook had never held it firm, it was banging in the light breeze. Alys guessed that the bravest of children from Bowes village might have pushed open the door to look inside and then scattered, breathless with terror. None of them would have dared go nearer.
“I dare,” Alys said aloud. But she stayed, waiting on the outside.
The door squeaked and banged. Inside the cottage something softly rustled. Alys thought that there would be rats in the cottage, grown fat on Morach’s seed store, nesting in the rags of her bed. Alys waited on the doorstep, almost as if she expected to hear Morach’s irritable voice calling her to stop dawdling and come in.
The rustling noise in the cottage had stopped. Still Alys paused, delayed pushing open the door, stepping over the threshold. Then, as she hesitated, she clearly heard the noise of someone moving. Someone moving, inside the cottage. Not a rat, not the rustle of a small animal. Alys heard footsteps, someone walking heavily and slowly across the floor.
Novels 03 The Wise Woman Page 41