Fires of Winter

by Roberta Gellis

  “I hope not,” I replied, feigning indignation. “I was instructed by artists, not allowed, as most men are, to follow their brute instincts. Would you rather I disgusted you and caused you pain?”

  Melusine had begun to smile at my jesting answer, but before I finished, her eyes slid away from mine, and her voice was uncertain when she said, “No, of course not.”

  Thinking she had suddenly realized who I meant when I said “artists” and that she might now object violently to my use of whores—she had been jealous over poor Edna—I stroked her cheek and murmured, “You need not fear I will be unfaithful. You content me more than any such woman ever could.”

  She looked up then and laughed. “And I save you both sin and expense too.”

  “Fool that I am, I never thought of that!” I exclaimed, smiling back at her. “But so you do. You are triply precious.”

  “And you,” she retorted, suddenly thrusting back the covers and swinging her legs out of bed, “are as skilled with your tongue as with your shaft. Did you learn that from artists too?”

  “God witness me, no!” I swore. “No one has ever accused me of oversmooth speech before. Who would bother seeking sweet words for a whore?” While I spoke, she had pulled the pot from beneath the bed and squatted above it. The sound of her water flowing sparked in me an ardent need for similar relief, and I exclaimed that she should hurry.

  “There is the window.” Melusine giggled. “Easy for you; impossible for me.”

  I was up on the chest before she finished speaking, sending a golden arc of liquid sparkling through the air. “Not impossible,” I remarked judicially, “but a tight squeeze, I agree. But I do not think you could fall out, and what a view from below.”

  Melusine laughed again, but did not answer, and I glanced at her over my shoulder to see if I had offended her. Her expression truly surprised me, for the remains of laughter mingled with a worried frown, which seemed a very odd response to so light and silly a jest. In the next moment she had drawn on her bedrobe and was gone to open the door and call down the stair for Edna while I came down from my perch. When she turned back to me, she looked only pleasant and mildly intent on her business, which was choosing clothing for me from my chest.

  “The cart arrived,” I said.

  “Two days ago,” she answered. “They had very good weather, only enough drizzle to keep down the dust and keep the horse cool. I sent the men and cart back to Winchester yesterday. I hope I did right. Audris said she would lend us another cart if we needed it, and if…if you do mean to go to Ulle—”

  “Indeed I do—if you are willing, Melusine.”

  She was tying one sleeve of my shirt, her head bent to her task so that I could only see her temple and the curve of her cheek. I put my free hand over hers and captured them. She looked up.

  “Yes, I am willing.”

  “If you cannot bear it, we will go away—perhaps to one of the other manors, where your memories will not be so sharp.”

  Melusine was silent for a moment, looking down again at our clasped hands. “Perhaps that would be best in any case,” she said slowly. “If the king’s bailiff is at Ulle, will he not send Stephen word that you were there and I also?”

  Was this a test of my loyalty? Or was she already urging me to take the first small step into concealment and lying that would lead in the end to open treachery? I could lay a trap for her, but the innocent fall into traps as often as do the guilty, and I wanted no deception on my part. I would make her understand that even after a night of love I would never forget, even while her closeness woke in me faint echoes of that delight, my loyalty to Stephen stood firm.

  “I would expect him to do so,” I remarked sharply. “I am not trying to hide our presence. That would be treachery. In fact, if the bailiff does not inform the king of our visit, I will tell him myself.”

  She blinked with surprise. “But you bade me not talk of it, lest we be forbidden—”

  “Certainly, I did not wish to be forbidden beforehand because of the queen’s conviction that you will create some kind of disaster if you return to Ulle. I know you will not cause trouble.” I put all the threat I was capable of into that statement, and Melusine flung up her head and stared at me, wide-eyed. But though I had decided not to deceive her, there was no harm in offering honest honey to sweeten the threat, so I went on, “In fact, part of my proof that it would be safe to enfeoff me with your lands will be this visit—the evidence I can present, with the bailiff to support my word, of how you greeted your people and soothed them so that the land would be quiet under the king’s hand. Do you understand me, Melusine?”

  “Have my people not been obedient?” she asked in a thin, fearful voice. “I bade them be quiet.”

  “Did you?” I asked, unsure whether to be surprised or assume she was lying.

  “Yes, I did,” she assured me anxiously, and then her lips thinned with anger. “Not for fear or for the king’s sake but for theirs. I did not wish them to be tormented or killed. What do they care who rules? They care for their fields and their herds and their boats.”

  “And you, Melusine? For what do you care?”

  “I care to have my lands back, and no longer be a beggar picking up crumbs from the queen’s table!”

  There was passion enough in that, her eyes flashing with rage, and I nodded acceptance. I thought the reply was honest; I prayed it was honest. I could not bear to think of what I had promised to do if Melusine tried to stir up rebellion in Cumbria. For a moment as I looked at her, bending to pick up my tunic, I felt I must find an excuse and not go to Ulle so that she would have no chance to show the evil that was in her. But even as the beauty I had never before seen in her face tugged at me, I knew I could not live that way. I had warned her over and over. I must take her to Ulle and test her with fire.

  It was easy to think, not so easy to do. To tell the truth, I seized eagerly on every excuse offered to linger in Jernaeve and put off that test, but I only increased my pain. Each day made Melusine more precious to me. She and Audris were so different and yet their joy in each other’s company was clear; little as I knew of such matters, it was plain from Lady Eadyth’s approval that Melusine was a householder of knowledge and high standards; and the nights and early mornings…I understood at last why lust was numbered high among the deadly sins.

  At last I set the morrow, a few days before the start of November, as the time to leave. The weather was already turning cold and rainy, and Melusine said if we did not go soon, the high passes between Ulle and the other smaller manors would be blocked with snow. Because we had been talking of the journey to Ulle from time to time, all was planned. The chests were to stay at Jernaeve; what we would need for Ulle would come with us in travel baskets on two packhorses. With us also would come Edna, riding pillion—we had her practicing each day we lingered—behind one of my new men-at-arms. I had three: Fechin, Cormi, and Merwyn; they had come to me to ask if I would take them the day before Hugh planned to select a few men to act as guards and messengers.

  After a moment of astonishment, both at the way the servants and men-at-arms knew what no one had yet told them and at these men’s eagerness to join me—for I knew Hugh to be a good master—I recognized them; they were older now, but all three had served with me when Sir Oliver had sent me to France as Sir Bernard’s squire. I explained that I was not offering an easy duty, that they would not be idling at court but serving mostly as messengers, riding back to Jernaeve in all weathers from all parts of England.

  Fechin, the eldest, must have been near forty, but he grinned at me. “If I be goin’ to see new things,” he said, “I better be at it now, before it be too late.” Then he looked down and scrubbed at the earth with one foot. “We be old friends, we three, and no women nor young to bind us. Sir Hugh, he be a good man, but—but it be strange wi’out Sir Oliver. We’ul be easier wi’ you.”

  The ot
hers nodded soberly, and tears came to my eyes. I realized suddenly that since I had returned, Audris and Hugh had concealed any signs that Hugh was now lord of Jernaeve. At meals or in the evening, we all sat together on benches; Lady Eadyth ruled the household as she had always done; in the work of rebuilding, Hugh and I gave the orders—but all that riding up and down and helping the men lift and fit and pull out burnt stumps was young men’s work and we would have done that even if Sir Oliver was still alive; it was as if he was away, up by the northern wall or visiting another keep. Nonetheless, I understood what Fechin meant. I swallowed the tightness in my throat and said I would have them gladly, if Hugh agreed.

  There was no trouble about that, of course, and we set off for Ulle on the twenty-eighth day of October. It was a bright morning, the air crisp enough to nip nose and cheeks into rosiness but not sharp enough to bite, and the sun lay warm on our backs without dazzling our eyes as we rode west after fording the river. There was a smell of smoke in the air as we neared the village that was beholden to Jernaeve, but it had no acrid taint of destruction. This was the pleasant, homely smell of wood fires, bringing thoughts of warmth and ease. As we passed through I did see signs of the ravages of the Scots—the pale wood of the doors on some houses marked the recent replacement of older doors smashed in; there was new thatch on some roofs and burns scarred some walls.

  I noticed too that a few of the places had not been repaired. Likely the menfolk of those had been killed, unless their skills had been needed in Jernaeve and they had been summoned to pay their due of labor in the keep. But the few folk who were at work in the village waved at us cheerfully, and Merwyn called out to one man to tell another that he would be gone for a while. A laughing, jesting answer was returned, showing that under Hugh as under Sir Oliver the villagers and the men-at-arms were on good terms. I was glad Sir Oliver’s discipline had held and the men of the keep had not taken advantage of Hugh’s sickness and single-minded devotion to the restoration of Jernaeve to ill-use the common folk. Briefly I was annoyed with myself for forgetting to ride down and make sure all was well, but fortunately no harm had been done.

  When the river turned north, we angled northwest across the rising ground toward the road that ran just south of the great wall. It was easy riding because the land was grazing common, not wooded, but when we had almost reached the crest, Melusine exclaimed in surprise. I had half drawn my sword and my men were gazing around in utter astonishment for any threat before I realized that Melusine was looking far down the valley to where an eight-ox plow was breaking the sod of a fallow field for the planting of winter wheat.

  “Now what do you find so startling about the field?” I asked.

  “The field!” she exclaimed. “It looks to me like a whole shire. It goes on forever.”

  I stared at her, puzzled. The fields of Northumbria were small compared with those plowed in the fertile south. Melusine must have seen those expanses, checkered with their different crops, many times when she rode out with the queen. Yet surely her expression of amazement was a result of true surprise; she could not at this point in our marriage believe it worthwhile to raise again the subject of whether she had been playing an idiot during her first months with the court—or could she? In any case, I would not join her game if that was her purpose.

  “If you think so,” I replied, “the fields of Ulle must be very small indeed.”

  “Compared with these, yes,” she agreed at once. “I cannot remember ever seeing eight oxen on a plow. Two are what we use most often, sometimes four to break new land.”

  “The soil is light then?”

  “I do not know,” she replied, looking at me with lifted brows. “I never looked to the farms, except to mark down the yield and lord’s share and suchlike. I had my own garden, of course, for herbs and spices, but—”

  “But a manor garden does not grow grain for bread or peas and beans sufficient to last the winter,” I interrupted. “Did you buy corn? And with what?”

  “There are fewer people so we often do have enough,” Melusine said absently, her mind clearly elsewhere. Then she added, seemingly reluctantly, “And we have the wherewithal to trade—or did have before the king came and drove all the people away.”

  I needed a moment before I could answer. “You have tripped into your own snare,” I remarked coldly. “I was with the king’s force when we came down through Cumbria and there was strict order against looting or misusing the people where there was no resistance. In the north, there was some trouble, and those who made it were punished. But I know no one was driven away from Ulle. There was no one there to drive away.”

  “The people fled in fear,” she answered insolently, looking right into my eyes.

  “By your order?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said with a slow smile of calm defiance. “I had to stay. I knew I could not hold Ulle, but I was not going to give it away. Anything taken by force—and more so from a helpless woman—is an outrage than can be appealed to a just lord.”

  “A just lord? King David?” My voice rose, but she still met my eyes.

  “If he had the power to give me Ulle—yes!” Then she shrugged. “Since he has not, I will take it back from Stephen’s hands as gladly.”

  To hear that last sentence was a distinct relief, and I remembered now that when we came into Ulle it was empty. The common folk had not fled in a last minute panic with what they could carry. Everything of value had been taken from the manor as well as from the very small village outside the walls. So her admission that she had given the order for the people to go was probably true, but that tale did not sit well with what she had said to me some days ago about ordering the folk to submit and obey the king’s warden.

  “You cannot have it both ways,” I snarled. “Either you bade your people go or you bade them be quiet and obey the king’s warden. Which is the lie, Melusine?”

  She smiled at me, which did not ease my heart. “Do not be foolish. Why should both not be true? My people fled the army, but when that was gone, why should they not return? It was the dead of winter, and that hardship would be worse to bear than the harsh treatment of the warden. They could always go back to the hills in the spring if they were used too cruelly.”

  I have never hit a woman—except a few gentle slaps on Audris’s hands or bottom when she was a babe—but I came near it in that moment. What Melusine said might be the literal truth, but something in the way she said it made it into a lie. I was too angry to say more, and rode ahead for a time, but no matter how I turned the matter in my mind, I could see no present political purpose for either lying or defiance. There was no war in Cumbria now, no Scottish troops that could be victualled or supported by Melusine’s people nor any of Stephen’s men, except the guards living in Ulle itself, to be harmed.

  Then it occurred to me that Melusine might still fear what she had done in the past could bring punishment on her. I thought of those men Stephen had disseised and exiled with their wives and families. If any had appealed to her, arms, comforts, and supplies might have been carried to them by those she had ordered to “run away.” But that was near a year past now and did not matter to me. All I cared about was what Melusine would do in the future.

  However much the matter worried me, it did not weigh at all on Melusine’s conscience. She was in high spirits, and I must confess teased me back into good humor by her unaffected appreciation of a landscape that most Southrons find too wild and barren. Only when we came near Carlisle she grew silent, sad too, I think, but she said nothing. To spare her, I did not seek lodging at the castle but sent Merwyn ahead to find a decent place that would take us in for the night. I would not have troubled her that night, but she clung to me, so I loved her until she was weary—I too—so she would sleep.

  The next day I would have followed the path the army took, west to the coast road, then inland and north again, knowing no other. But when I set off toward the
west, Melusine called me back, asking in surprise whether I did not wish to go to Ulle and then telling me there was a shorter way. It would take three days to go the long way round, she said—I knew that was true because it had taken the army more than a week—but we could be in Ulle before dusk if we followed her. There had been something strange in her look and manner from the time we woke this morning. Until she spoke of a quicker way to Ulle, I had believed she was tormented by sad memories. Now I had doubts. Still, I could not believe she would be so foolish as to try either to escape me or to lead us into some ambush, so I agreed to go her way; however, I was prepared for trouble, and I warned my men that we would be going into wild and dangerous country.

  At first there was little difference between the old road to Penrith and the one we had followed from Jernaeve. Some distance past the town, though, as we topped a rise of ground, Cormi called out to me in a voice that held a note of fear. My hand was on my sword hilt before my eyes followed his pointing hand, but I knew he would not fear men, and then Merwyn, who was closer muttered, “Faery!”

  “Faery?”

  Certainly it was a ring, clear of brush and smoothly grassed as if scythed with care, but the faery were little folk, and this ring was some twenty yards across, with a ditch and fosse. However, I doubted that ditch and fosse were for defense. For one thing, though far too deep and high to be the work of the little folk, they were surely not sufficient to protect defenders; for another, I could see the top of the raised mound of earth, and that had never held post holes for a palisade. Moreover, I could see that there was an inviting path of smooth green turf leading into the ring.

  “I do not know.” It was Melusine who answered my doubting question. “But I have passed it many times and have come to no harm.”

  Her voice was flat, as if she had no interest in the strange place, but I thought she knew more of it than she wished to say.