“It serves no good purpose to execute her,” Alys insisted. “She’s so old and frail that people will hate you and Hugo for hurting an old woman. They could turn against you. It’s hardly worth the risk.”
The old lord turned his head to Alys. “It’s out of my hands,” he said gently. “She is accused before the court and I will try her tomorrow. Stephen will be reasoning with her and questioning her. She wanted no one to represent her. If she does not repent, take the oath of supremacy and acknowledge the king as head of the church, then she has to die. It’s not whim, Alys. It’s the law.”
“Couldn’t you…” Alys started.
Lord Hugh turned his head toward Alys and his look was acute. “Do you know her?” he asked sharply. “Was she from your old order? Are you pleading for her?”
Alys met his eyes squarely. “No,” she said. “I have never seen her before in my life. She means nothing to me, nothing. I am just sorry for her. Such a foolish old woman to die for her delusions. I feel distressed that my complaint has brought her here, nothing more.”
Hugh leaned forward and clapped his hands at the hens. They scuttered out of reach. The cock flapped his wings and jumped awkwardly to the flat top of the little box-hedge. He stretched his neck and crowed.
Alys watched the deep emerald shimmer on his throat.
Lord Hugh shook his head. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “She would have preached or taught people. She would have gathered people around her. She would have come to our attention one way or another. And then we would have had to take her up. She is an old fool looking for sainthood, that one. She would never have taken the easy route, never altered her faith and her vows to suit the times. She’s a foolish old martyr. Not a wise woman like you, Alys.”
Alys walked slowly into the castle through the doorway of the great hall. After the golden sunshine of the garden the smoky darkness of the great hall was a relief. She walked without purpose, without direction. Hugo was riding out to his new house, practicing archery, riding at the dummy in the tilt-yard, or trifling with one plaything or another. Hugo would make no difference. Alys paused at the top of the hall and leaned against the table where the senior soldiers sat for their dinner. Hugo was like a child. His father’s long life and power had kept Hugo as a merry child—happy enough when things were going well, sullen and resentful when his will was crossed. He would not save Mother Hildebrande at Alys’s request. He would not care enough. Not for her—a poor old woman who should have died last year. Not for Alys.
There were men sleeping off their dinnertime ale in the shadows of the hall, on the benches under the tables. Alys walked quietly past them, mounted the dais, and drew back the hanging over the lord’s doorway. One of them turning over in his sleep caught sight of her and crossed himself. Alys saw his gesture. Superstition hung around her still. She must remember that she was not safe herself. She put a hand to her belly. Her only safety was in the baby she carried: Hugo’s son. She started wearily to climb the stairs to the ladies’ gallery.
She might carry Hugo’s son but the old lord had planned all along to take the child from her and adopt him as his own. Alys had not thought of that. She had not known that such things could be done. She had thought that the baby boy would be her passport into the family. She paused on the stairs, waiting for her breath to come back and the dancing black spots to go from her vision.
“I am ill,” she said aloud.
If she was ill then Catherine would not insist that they share a bed, Lord Hugh would not threaten her. If she was ill and in her own bed then no one could blame her when Mother Hildebrande rushed upon martyrdom without Alys saying one word to save her. No one could blame Alys for Mother Hildebrande’s hunger for sainthood, especially if Alys were ill.
“I am ill,” she said again with more conviction. “Very ill.”
She walked slowly up the steps to the ladies’ gallery and opened the door.
It was empty and quiet. Mary was sitting at the fireside, stitching some plain work. She laid it aside when Alys walked in and bobbed her a curtsy.
“Lady Catherine has been asking for you, my Lady Alys,” she said pleasantly. “Shall I tell her you are here? Or should you lie down?”
Alys looked at her with dislike. “I will see Lady Catherine,” she said. “She was disturbed when she looked from her window and saw you flirting with her husband in the courtyard.”
Mary gave a little gasp of surprise.
“The young Lord Hugo will take his pleasures where he wishes,” Alys said distantly. “But do not flaunt yourself, Mary. If you distress Lady Catherine she will turn you out of the castle.”
Mary’s cheeks were blazing. “I am sorry, my lady,” she said. “It was just words and laughter.”
Alys’s look was as sour as if she had never heard words or laughter, or seen Hugo’s hot, merry smile. “If your humor is lascivious you had better avoid the young lord,” she said coldly. “It would go very ill for you indeed if you offend his wife. You told me yourself your father is poor and out of work. I suppose it would be difficult for all of them at home if you returned without your wages and without hope of work in service again.”
Mary dipped her head. “I beg your pardon, my lady,” she said humbly. “It won’t happen again.”
Alys nodded and went into Catherine’s room, the taste of spite very sweet and full in her mouth.
Catherine was dressed, sitting in a chair by the window, looking out over the courtyard and the garden, the sun-drenched wall of the inner manse and the tops of the apple trees in the outer manse. The smooth round prison tower stood like a dark shadow behind the little bakehouse. Alys, looking past Catherine out of the window, saw nothing else.
“How well you are looking, Catherine!” Alys said. Her voice was high and sharp, the words a babble. “Are you feeling better?”
Catherine’s face when she turned to Alys was bleak with sorrow. The old hard lines had reappeared from the rosy plumpness of pregnancy.
“I just saw you in the garden,” she said. “Talking to the old lord.”
Alys nodded, her face alert.
“I have been a fool,” Catherine said suddenly. “I called your girl in here and asked her if you were with child and she curtsied to me and said, ‘Yes, my lady,’ as if it were a known fact, as if everyone knew!”
Alys drew up a chair and sat down.
“Is it Hugo’s?” Catherine asked fiercely. “Is it Hugo’s child? I must have been blind not to see it before. When you walked across the garden I could see how you thrust your belly forward. Are you with child, Alys? Hugo’s child?”
Alys nodded. “Yes,” she said quietly.
Catherine opened her mouth wide and began to cry soundlessly. Great drops of tears rolled down her sallow face. She cried shamelessly like a hurt child, her mouth gaping wide. Alys could see the white unhealthy furring on her tongue and the blackness of one bad tooth.
Catherine snatched a breath and swallowed her grief.
“From when?” she asked.
“June,” Alys said precisely. “I will give birth in April. I am three months pregnant now.”
Catherine nodded, and kept nodding, like a little rocking doll. “So it was all lies,” she said. She took a scrap of linen from her sleeve and mopped at her wet face, still nodding. “You will not come with me to the farm, that was all lies. You will stay here and have Hugo’s child and hope to rise higher and higher into his favor and into the favor of the old lord.”
Alys said nothing.
Catherine gulped back sobs like a carp bubbling in the fish ponds. “And while I thought that you would come to love me and that you were pledged to live with me you were scheming to have me sent away so that you and Hugo could romp together in public,” Catherine said, nodding wildly. “You have shamed me, Alys. You have shamed me before the whole castle, before the whole town, before the country. I thought that you were my friend, that you would choose me instead of Hugo. But all this morning when I was talkin
g with you and planning our life together you were playing with me. Scheming to have me sent away.”
Alys sat still as a rock. She felt the high flood-tide of Catherine’s anger and grief wash around her but leave her dry.
“You have betrayed me,” Catherine said. “You are a false friend. You are untrue.” She choked on another rich sob. “You act the whore with Hugo and you are sweet as a daughter to the old lord,” she said. “You play the false friend with me and you queen it among my women. There is no truth in you, Alys. Nowhere is there a scrap of honor or truth. You are meaningless, Alys, meaningless!”
Alys, her eyes on the round tower without windows, inclined her head. What Catherine said was probably true. “Meaningless.” What would they be doing with Mother Hildebrande in there now? Alys rose to her feet. “I am not well,” she said. “I am going to my chamber to rest before supper.”
Catherine looked up at her pitifully, her sallow face wet with her tears. “You say nothing to me?” she asked. “You will leave me here as I am, grieved and angry? You do not defend yourself, you do not even try to explain your false faith? Your disloyalty? Your dishonor?”
Alys glanced toward the round tower once more as she turned to the door. “Disloyalty?” Alys repeated. “Dishonor?” She gave a shrill little laugh. “This is nothing, Catherine! Nothing!”
“But you have lied to my face,” Catherine accused her. “You promised to be my friend, promised to be my lover. I know you are false.”
Alys shrugged. “I am unwell,” she said flatly. “I am too ill. You will have to bear your pain, Catherine. I cannot be responsible. It is too much for me.”
Catherine’s face grew pale. “Are you sick as I was?” she demanded. “Is his child turning rotten inside you, as mine did? Is that all that Hugo can father? Candle wax?”
Alys’s dream of the maggot-filled roadside and then the little dolls hastening to Castleton, seeking their mother, rose very vividly in her mind. She blinked hard and shook her head to rid herself of the walking dolls. “No,” she said. She put her hands on her belly as if to hold the baby safe. “My baby is whole and well,” she said. “Not like yours.”
That gesture—the simple gesture of pregnancy—broke Catherine’s anger into grief. “Alys! I forgive you! I forgive you everything! The deceit and the lies, the shame you have laid on me. Your infidelity with my husband! I forgive you if you will come with me. They will have me thrown out of the castle, I shall have to go. Come with me, Alys! We will look after your son together. He will be my child as well as yours. I will make him my heir! My heir, Alys. Heir to the manor that they will give me and my dowry which they will return. You will be rich with me. You will be safe with me and so will your son!”
For a moment Alys hesitated, weighing the odds, scanning her chances. Then she shook her head. “No, Catherine,” she said coldly. “You are finished. Here in the castle they are finished with you and will be rid of you. Hugo will never touch you again. The old lord will never see you. I was playing with your desires to get you to leave without making an uproar, and to do my lord a service in furthering his ends. I never meant to go with you. I never wanted your love.”
Catherine’s hands were over her mouth. Her wide eyes stared at Alys over her spread fingers. “You’re cruel!” she said disbelievingly. “Cruel! You came to my bed with Hugo, you held me in your arms this very morning! You nursed me in my sickness and kept my secret safe.”
Alys shrugged and opened the door. “It meant nothing,” she said coldly. “You mean nothing. You should have drowned in the river that day, Catherine. All the destinies are coming homeward like evil pigeons. She will burn, and you will drown. There is no escaping your fate, Catherine. There is no escape for her.”
Catherine looked around wildly. “What d’you mean, Alys? What fate? And who will burn?”
Alys’s face was sour and weary. “Just go, Catherine,” she said. “Your time is finished here. Just go.”
She closed the door on Catherine’s wail of protest and went across the ladies’ gallery. The other women had come in from the garden and were taking off their headdresses and combing through their hair, complaining of the heat. Alys went through them all like a cold shadow.
“What ails my lady?” Ruth asked, as they heard Catherine’s cries and saw Alys’s resentful face. “Shall I go to her?”
Alys shrugged. “She’s to leave the castle,” she said succinctly. “My lord has ordered it. She’s to be set aside, the marriage annulled.”
There was a moment’s silence and then an explosion of chatter. Alys threw her hands up to fend off the hysterical questions. “Ask her yourself! Ask her yourself!” she said. “But remember when you give her your service that she’s soon to be a farmer on a little manor at the back end of nowhere. She’s Lady Catherine no more.”
Alys smiled at the sudden stillness in the room. Each one of them was silent, fearful for their own future. Slowly, one after another, they looked to her.
“I will wash before supper,” Alys said composedly. “Eliza, order a bath for me. Margery, order them to light a fire in my bedroom. Ruth, please mend my blue gown, I kicked out the hem the other day when I was walking upstairs. Mary—” she looked around. The girl was standing by the chamber door, her eyes cast down, the picture of the perfect maidservant. “Lay out my linen, I will wear a fresh shift.”
Alys watched them move to do her bidding. Her women.
Behind her door Catherine wept as her room grew darker. When suppertime came no one called her, and no one brought her food. She lay on her bed, sobbing into her pillow, and heard the noises of eating and drinking and laughter from the hall below. It grew darker, no one came to light her fire nor bring her candles. They left her in the cool evening air in darkness.
She heard the women come upstairs from the hall and heard their low-voiced chatter. She heard Alys’s laughter, edgy and shrill. But no one came to her door. No one came to see if they could be of service to her.
The silence from Catherine’s chamber put a blight on the gallery. No decision had been made but somehow the new positions had coalesced. Hugo did not ask after Catherine, the old lord had not spoken of her since the miscarriage. And now Catherine’s own women, who had served her since she was a girl, looked away from her shut door and did not offer her service. It was as if she were gone to live far away over the moors already, thought Alys, or drowned and buried; and she laughed again.
“I heard an odd tale today,” Eliza said, pouring the nighttime cup of ale.
Ruth glanced toward Lady Catherine’s door as if she feared her still.
“Tell it!” Margery said. “But not too frightening, I need to sleep tonight.”
“I stepped into Castleton market this morning and met a woman I know selling eggs,” Eliza said. “She had walked the moorland road this morning from Bowes.”
Alys looked up from her cup and watched Eliza’s face.
“Ahead of her in the dust in the road she saw the strangest thing,” Eliza said.
Ruth shuddered and crossed herself. “I’ll not hear talk of the devil,” she warned. “I’ll not hear it.”
“Hush,” the others said. “Go to your chamber, Ruth, if you have not the stomach for the tale. What did she see in the dust, Eliza? Go on!”
“She saw little tracks,” Eliza said mysteriously.
Alys felt herself grow cold.
“Tracks?” she asked.
Eliza nodded. “Footprints. The marks of the heels of riding boots, and a pair of shoes. As if a woman and two men had been walking on the road.”
Margery shrugged. “So?” she asked.
“They were tiny,” Eliza said. “Tiny little footprints, the size of mice feet, she said ‘Tiny.’”
Mistress Allingham exclaimed, “Fairy folk!” She clapped her hands. “Did she wish? Did she wish on the little people’s tracks?”
“She followed them!” Eliza said. “Two tracks from boots and one track from shoes, like two men and a woman.”<
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The women shook their heads in amazement. Alys said nothing, she sipped her ale. It went down her throat as if it were ice.
“And the little woman’s footprints were dirty,” Eliza said. “Dirty with slime like a snail. Slug juice.”
Ruth crossed herself abruptly and rose up. “I’ll hear no more,” she said. “Nonsense to frighten children!”
The rest of the women were fascinated. “And so?” they asked. “What then?”
“She bent down and poked the trail with a stick,” Eliza said. “She would not touch it.”
They shook their heads. Touching slime from one of the fairy folk could bring all sorts of dangers.
“She said it was…” Eliza whispered. They all leaned closer. “She said it was like candle wax!” Eliza said in triumph. She sat back on her stool and looked around at their faces. “An odd story, isn’t it?”
Alys drained her cup. She noticed her hands were steady. “Where were these tiny tracks?” she asked carelessly. “On the road, which road? Whereabouts were they?”
Eliza gave up her cup to Margery who put them away in the cupboard with the empty pitcher of ale. “Just a mile above the bridge,” she said. “From Bowes Moor heading into Castleton. And coming closer. A horrible story, is it not? But she swore by it.”
Alys shook her head. “Tiny tracks!” she said derisively. “Candle wax! I thought you were going to frighten us with a ghost six feet tall!”
Eliza bridled. “But it is true…”
“I’m weary,” Alys interrupted. “Fetch Mary for me, Eliza, I’ll go to bed.”
Eliza glanced at the closed door to Catherine’s room. “Should I see if she is all right?” she asked Alys. The rest of the women waited for Alys’s decision. Alys, thinking of the little dolls just a mile from her door this night, smiled bleakly.
“It does not matter,” she said. She laughed, a high, sharp laugh, while the women looked at each other in surprise. “Nothing is going to matter after all!” she said. “After all this trouble. Nothing matters at all!”
Chapter
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Novels 03 The Wise Woman Page 52