He closed his eyes and waited for God to strike him. Nothing. An eel splashed in the river shallows; a mosquito, drawn by his sweat, buzzed around his face. He heard Leyla cropping the grass, then walking slowly to the water’s edge.
The starlings and linnets in the pines, stunned to silence, returned to the bushes to fuss and chatter.
And then, something else, the snap of a twig, a rustling of fern. Leyla gave a little whinny of alarm. Philip looked around. A squirrel darted across the meadow with a hazelnut in its jaws.
Leyla laid back her ears. Her flanks twitched, and she stamped a hoof.
Then he smelled it. Wild boar had a rank smell of their own, unmistakable to any man that had hunted them. Good game from the saddle when you had a pack of raches at your command, enough meat to feed the entire household.
But this was different. Here he was, rash and unarmed, and a good thirty paces from his horse. He clicked his tongue and Leyla’s ears pricked again and she started to walk towards him, wary, the stink of the hog making her nervous.
Too late. The boar burst out of the thicket fifty paces to his left, a hideous brute with slitted eyes and tusks that could disembowel a horse. Hadn’t he seen it happen enough times?
It stopped, watching him, trying to understand what he was, what threat he posed.
If I stand quite still, he thought, it will perhaps move on. It can’t put me on a spit and eat me, as I would do to him. And he isn’t sure of the danger. The presence of the horse has confused him.
If I stand quite still . . .
He yelled and ran towards it. The boar put its head down and charged.
*
The arrow struck the animal in the neck and sent it reeling away, squealing in pain. Its blood steamed as it made contact with the air. It staggered sideways, then dropped.
‘Renaut,’ he said.
His squire stepped his horse out of the shallows. One arrow, through the jugular at forty paces. He had taught him well.
‘How did you find me?’
‘I didn’t. I followed you. You almost lost me though; your Arab is too fast for my little mare. I almost kept going at the ford but then I heard a man shouting. I thought you were dead.’
‘And so I would have been if you had not spent so much time at the archery butts.’
He got down from his horse. ‘You left the château so fast, I thought the Devil himself was after you.’
‘Worse. Giselle.’
They walked over to the boar. It had bled out and the huge mountain of flesh still twitched even though it was dead. Renaut pulled out his arrow and then ran his hand over the tusk to the razor tip. ‘I’m glad I found you. I should not like to die this way. Nor should you.’
Did he see me rise and run towards my death? Philip wondered. What was I thinking? He was right. Not a good way to die.
‘What did the lady Giselle say to you that you preferred the company of this razor-tooth?’
‘She wishes me to join the Pope’s crusade against the Midi. She thinks that is why my boy is sick.’
‘He sickened before the crusade was called.’ Philip shrugged. ‘God’s ways are mysterious, they say.’
‘I still do not understand why you took another wife.’
‘Renaut, ours is a normal marriage. I have her rather modest dowry, which I needed to pay off some of my debts. She has a husband with a château and a fief and her family has a useful political alliance. It was what I had with Alezaïs that was not . . . usual. We loved each other. It is something that a man more often only finds with his mistress or another man’s wife. For a while I was fortunate. Now . . . not so much.’
‘How is your son?’
Philip tested the pig’s belly with his boot. ‘Some good meat there.’ He walked back to his horse.
‘You know, there is a crone in Poissy, just ten leagues from here. Her name is Marguerite.’
‘Yes, I have heard of her. She makes love spells and delivers babies.’
‘More than that, she can make a poultice to draw the poisons from wounds and brews potions that cure the ague and the flux and ward off the pestilence. She collects every kind of herb and bark and plant to make her salves.’
‘A sorceress and a heretic. She makes incantations to the moon.’
‘Does it matter what she is if she can heal your son?’
Philip picked up Leyla’s reins from the grass. ‘If you stand guard here on your kill, I will fetch some men and horses to drag the carcass back to the château.’
‘You have tried everything else. These butchers who call themselves doctors have bled him and purged him and done every foul thing and still he sickens.’
‘Thank you for saving my life. Come the next Easter, you will be more than a squire.’
‘Marguerite. At Poissy. Think about it.’
‘The woman is unholy.’
‘God has not been faithful to you in this. Do what you need to do, seigneur.’
‘You’re a good man, Renaut,’ Philip said and turned Leyla’s head and headed back down the stream through the shallows to the ford.
XXXII
MARGUERITE LIVED HALF a league from Poissy, in a wild place where no trees grew and rushes disputed the marshy ground with ferns and young willows. The forest they passed through was dank, with impenetrable thickets of bracken and old trees with tortured branches. His men were sullen and quiet. Philip felt eyes on them, perhaps animals, perhaps sprites. All knew that in woods like this fairies slept in the leaf bowers and strange dwarves scurried through the shadowed gloaming. Any man who died here without the holy sacraments would be damned to be a will-o’-the-wisp for all eternity.
A skein of white smoke drifted up through the trees, and guided them to her cottage. The crone was in her garden, collecting herbs. She had wild grey hair to her waist, and possessed the chilling stare of a cat. She watched their approach, one hand on her hip, the other shielding the sun from her eyes.
‘You’re Marguerite, the wise woman?’ Philip said.
‘I am. And you’re Philip of Vercy. What is such a fine seigneur as yourself doing out here in the wood?’
‘Do you not know?’ he said, testing her.
She bent down and snapped a sprig from a rosemary bush. ‘I have heard your boy has been sick. I dare say you have had him bled and purged and prayed over and now you have come to see me as a last resort.’ She smiled at his confusion. ‘I cannot read minds, my lord. I am just not as mad as I look.’
Philip handed the reins of his horse to his sergeant-at-arms and slid from the saddle. There was a plank path that sank into the mud with every step. ‘They say you heal all manner of sickness with your potions and salves.’
‘I am equally famous for those I don’t cure. You’d best come inside.’
Philip followed her, knocking his head on the low door. It was very dark. With a quick glance he made out some herbs and dusty sprigs of dried flowers hanging from the ceiling, others drying over the hearth fire. A rusted pot sat crooked over a pile of ash and charred wood.
Marguerite pulled aside a tattered curtain at the back of house; behind it there was a table with two chairs, and a few narrow shelves crowded with jars. He recognized some petrified sprigs of fleabane and another of blackberry leaves. Most of the others he did not know. There was a pestle and mortar sitting in the middle of the table.
‘Sit,’ she said to him.
Well, this is novel, he thought. Not often I have been ordered about like this. Not even by my wife. But he sat, without complaint.
‘I’ll have the servants bring spiced wine in a moment,’ she said.
‘Just some figs and sherbets will do.’
She teased a sprig of rosemary between her fingers, split it, held it to her nose and breathed in the aroma. ‘God makes fine things,’ she said. Her hands were brown and gnarled with age, all crooked joints and swollen veins. But she had a young woman’s eyes, bright and quick and intelligent. ‘But then He unmakes them. It is a mystery and sometim
es a very painful one. Tell me about your son.’
‘It started just after the Feast of the Epiphany. He was slow to rise in the mornings, seemed listless, and then could not keep down his food. We had the doctor look at him; he applied leeches and such. But by Easter he was barely out of his bed and all he can take in now is water and a little broth. He is skin and bone, no more.’
‘Does he suffer?’
‘The doctor prescribed belladonna. For a time it helped but now he moans and tosses night and day. I hardly leave his side; I am afraid to fall asleep, thinking that when I wake up he will be gone. As you say, we have prayed and prayed, have fetched doctors from as far away as Bayeux, sold much of my wife’s dowry to pay for them. Still no good.’
‘Is there fever?’
Philip shook his head.
‘Does he pass blood?’
‘If he did not moan and occasionally call out for his mother, who is now in her grave these four years, he would no longer do anything that a living creature does.’
Marguerite reached across the table and took his hands in hers. He was surprised at her strength and the heat coming off her. He was also surprised that she might presume to lay hands on her seigneur without bidding.
She took a piece of hessian cloth and some jars from the shelf; she poured a little from one, more from another. Other herbs she crushed in the mortar before adding them to the little pile of leaves and powder on the cloth. She deliberated long over each bottle before she was finally satisfied. Then she took needle and thread, tied it into a bundle and handed it to him.
‘What is this?’ he said. It smelled foul.
‘Hawkwood, sorrel, marigold, purslane. Also some hellebore, spikenard and nightshade. Angelica for purifying the blood. Many things. You must make an infusion with this, and have him drink it, as much as he can stand.’
‘This will cure him?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I will not let him die.’
‘Even a prince cannot argue with Death.’
He took the bag from her and handed her some silver coins. She passed them back. ‘I’m not a quack, or a priest, thank God. Only pay me when he is well.’
‘That is just for your time. Make him well and there will be ten times that.’
As he was leaving she called him back. ‘I wasn’t always a hag,’ she said. ‘I once had a son, and a husband too. They both died. And I could not help them, though to others I give my herbs and they rise from their beds like Lazarus. I am not a witch, seigneur. I cannot do magic for you. I wish I could.’
‘My son is not going to die,’ he said.
She watched him ride away. A good man, they said.
But too proud by half.
XXXIII
PHILIP WENT DOWN to the scullery to prepare the infusion himself. He poured warm water into a kettle and hung it over the fire.
As he was bent there he felt his wife’s hand on his shoulder, the warmth of it; he was so startled that he turned his head to look for her. But the dead do not come back to life.
Alezaïs, my heart, help me. I am doing all I can.
When the water on the herbs had boiled down, he swung out the crane and filled a pewter mug with the bubbling mess. The smell was sickening. He wrapped the handle in a towel and went back to his son’s bedchamber.
He tried to make Renaut drink some of the witch’s magic tea but he could not keep it down. Again and again he vomited, retching with such violence that he thought he must tear his stomach out. The vomit was streaked with bright red blood. Finally he pushed the mug away. When Philip persisted Renaut struck out violently and sent the mug and the precious contents crashing on to the flagstones. Philip yelled in frustration and kicked the mug across the floor. It landed in the fire.
Renaut twitched and kicked, muttering words he could not understand. Philip wrung a cloth in cold water and laid it across his forehead. ‘I will not let you die,’ he promised him.
A few chinks of light found a way through the shutters, fading as the afternoon wore on. He lit a taper and continued his vigil.
He had found Alezaïs’s comb, silver and tortoiseshell. He had taken to carrying it with him everywhere, inside his tunic. He rolled it over and over in his hands like a puzzle. It still had her hairs in it. He unravelled one, held the fine strand towards the light. He put the comb back inside his shirt. She is gone, he reminded himself. She is gone and she is not coming back.
There was a tapestry on the wall, above his son’s bed, of a battle between a Christian knight and a Saracen. Once it had hung above his own bed, when he was a child. He had dreamed of being that knight, of the glory he would win himself, capturing Jerusalem from the infidel single-handed, hailed as Christendom’s greatest-ever warrior. The reality had been so different. What should I put in my tapestry now?
He heard the bell in the chapel strike for compline. He felt tired to his very bones. He called for a servant girl. Watch him, fetch me if he wakes, even if he just cries out. Do you understand?
His men-at-arms were drinking ale by the dying fire in the great hall; some dogs were sniffing around the rushes, looking for scraps left over from supper. Some of the other men were already on the floor, asleep. He stopped for a moment to stare at one of the stable boys, curled up under his cloak with one of the laundry maids, his head on her breast. I will exchange your place there for my warm bed and cold love, if you like.
He went up the narrow stone steps to his bedroom at the top of the donjon. He imagined he was greatly envied, for the seigneur and his wife had the one thing denied everyone else; they could sleep and love and bathe without being seen or heard.
Tonight he just wanted to sleep.
Moonlight angled across the bed from the window. By the sound of her breathing Giselle was asleep, thanks be to God. He groped towards the bed. His bed! One of the greatest luxuries of privilege: a feather mattress, a bolster filled with down. For the last three nights he had dozed fitfully in a hard wooden chair beside his son’s bed.
There was a curtain to keep out the draughts. He pulled it aside and felt for the wooden pole that kept their clothes from the rats and mice, hung his breeches and tunic on it, then folded his shirt and placed it under the bolster. A long time now since he had come to bed without his clothes. He pulled back the linen sheet.
Suddenly she sat up. ‘Well. A strange man in my bed.’
‘Expect little. I am too exhausted even to speak.’
As he reclined on to the bolster she swung her leg across him, so that her breasts were level with his face. Fine breasts, too, pert, ivory in the silver moonlight. If he had loved her it would not have mattered if he had just walked a hundred miles across the desert.
‘Let me comfort you,’ she said, and reached down and cupped him in her hand.
‘I am beyond comfort.’
‘I can make you another son.’
Did she really say that? He was tired; perhaps he had only imagined she said it. But wasn’t that the reason for marriage? Children, politics, money; especially children. For a man of noble birth it was just good husbandry to have a wife and produce heirs, it should have nothing to do with love. An heir to lands is never his own master, his father had told him.
Yet something in him rebelled. Lose a son, make another; lose a wife, marry another. He had made all the necessary compromises with life and now he despised himself for them.
‘My son is dying, woman,’ he whispered and pushed her away. After a while he felt her crying, though she was too proud to weep out loud. What did you think, Philip, that you could reject her and she would not mind it? Married a year and you have bedded her just twice. Is she really such a vixen or did you make her into one? He got out of bed, left the feather mattress and the bolster filled with down, and dressed. Then he went back downstairs to sleep in a wooden chair and listen to his son whimper in his sleep.
*
Old Marguerite sat on the palfrey as if perched on the edge of a cliff. The servants watched from the win
dows; the stable hands stood around, staring. Well, he knew this would excite talk. Enough that they gossiped about his relations with his wife, or lack of them, now here he was bringing a sorceress to the castle.
Where would it end?
‘Thank you for coming,’ he said.
‘I did not have a choice when these ruffians showed up,’ she said, indicating Renaut and his sergeant-at-arms.
‘These men would not hurt you. They look terrifying but you would slay them both in a fair fight.’
The men lounging by the gate laughed. For all that he was half-mad at least the seigneur had not lost his sense of humour.
He helped her down from the horse and led her inside the donjon. His son’s bedroom was just below the great hall. He was awake, the great blue eyes sunken yet further into his head, the blue veins livid against his skin, which had turned a ghastly grey colour. No flesh on his skull. This is how he will look when he is dead, Philip thought. Except he will no longer blink.
The old woman knelt beside his bed and put a hand to his forehead, but tenderly as a mother would do. He guessed his son wanted to ask her name and who she was but did not have the strength.
‘Poor child,’ Marguerite said.
‘Please,’ Philip said. ‘Do something.’
‘Did you give him the infusion?’
‘I did. But he could not keep it down.’
‘Something is eating him from the inside. I told you, for everyone that I cure, another dies. I can heal what might be healed. I cannot do magic.’
‘There must be something. I will give everything I have to save him, just tell me what to do.’
The old woman hesitated. ‘Do you mean this?’
‘I never say anything I do not mean.’
‘Well, then, there is one way. I have heard travellers talk of a woman in the south who does miracles. It may be just rumour for I have never seen this woman myself. And the chances that you will find her, that you might even bring her here . . .’
‘Where does she live? I will find her.’
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