by Anne Bishop
“Understand what?”
Agitated, Elinore set her teacup on the table, then walked to the glass door. She stared at the world beyond the glass for a minute, as if she needed to draw strength from the view. Then she turned to face him.
“My great-great-grandfather was a witch’s son,” she said quietly. “He was the eldest son, but the Old Places always belong to the women of the family, and he wanted something to call his own. When he was a young man, he left home with his mother’s blessing. He traveled for a few years, learned a bit about several trades as he worked for his food and lodging and a few coins to rub together. Then, one day, he saw a piece of land that made him want to put down roots, so his mother and grandmother helped him scrape together enough money to buy the land and build a small cottage.
“He had a gift for knowing what the land could yield and what needed time to ripen. He was canny when it came to business—and he was canny when it came to people. Like the land, he could sense what each could yield and when something or someone needed time to ripen.
“He prospered, and the people he dealt with prospered, as well.
“When he eventually married, he took a witch for a wife. They had several children, and the family continued to prosper. By then, his merchant business was turning a good profit, and he built a large, rambling country house.
“His eldest son went into the business with him, while the other sons and daughters found their callings in other kinds of work. In time, some of them fell in love, got married, and had children, and their children had children.
“And so it went. And while the family never hid their ties to the witches who lived in several of the Old Places, they also didn’t flaunt those ties. As generations passed, not all of the spouses could make the same claim of having ties to an Old Place, and the gifts that come down through the blood became watered down or disappeared altogether.” Elinore paused, then shook her head. “Not disappeared. Nuala says the Mother’s gifts sometimes sleep in the blood, waiting to reappear again.” She smiled sadly. “The name means nothing to you, does it? Our nearest neighbor for all of these years, and you don’t even know who she is.”
“Of course I know,” Liam said testily. “She’s one of the witches.”
Elinore walked back to the sofa and sat down, folding her hands in her lap. She sighed. “Yes, she’s one of the witches. She’s also my father’s cousin, several times removed.”
Having no idea what she expected him to say, Liam drank his now-cold tea to give himself a little time. Given his father’s animosity toward the witches who lived in the Old Place that bordered the estate, he understood quite well why his mother had never mentioned this aspect of her family heritage. But...
“As you said, it was several generations ago,” Liam said, thinking she was worried about his feelings toward her changing. “You’ve no reason to feel shame because of it.”
Elinore’s eyes widened. “I’m not ashamed of my heritage. If I regret anything, it’s that my gift from the Mother is so weak.” Then she looked slightly annoyed. “Perhaps it’s because it came down through the paternal line in my branch of the family that the men’s gifts from the Mother were less diluted. My brother certainly has a stronger connection to water than I do to earth.”
Liam opened his mouth, then shut it again before he said anything. What was she trying to tell him? That she regretted not being a witch? How could she want to be like them?
“Mother,” he began hesitantly. “I can appreciate your concern for those ... women ... who live in the Old Place since they’re distantly related to you. But they’re distantly related.”
“To me,” Elinore replied. “But not so distant to you.” She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then looked at him. “The youngest of them is your half sister, one of your father’s bastards. She’s four years younger than you, and she’s not distant, Liam. She is family.”
“No!” Unable to sit anymore, Liam restlessly prowled the room. As he passed the table, he snatched up the decanter, splashed some whiskey into a glass, and downed it. He poured another two fingers into the glass, but, this time, resisted the urge to gulp it down.
“No,” he said again as he continued to prowl around the room. “She’s no more family than any of the other bastards my father seeded in the women he seduced. I know you established a fund to help those women and assist the children in learning a trade so that they could have a living, but they’ve never been acknowledged as family.”
“No, they never have.” Elinore looked down at her hands. “I’m not proud that I couldn’t find it in my heart to accept the children, but it is, I think, an understandable failing. But Keely is different. She was only fourteen when your father took her, and what he did to her scarred her mind in ways that time has never healed. And with the talk and stories that are starting to be told about witches, your sister—”
“She’s not my sister!”
“—is more vulnerable than any of those other children.”
“If she’s four years my junior, that makes her twenty-three,” Liam said. “She’s no longer a child.”
“Which doesn’t change the fact that she needs your protection.” Elinore stood up. “They all need your protection, Liam. There are troubles in the east. Things are happening there that threaten every woman, not just the witches. My cousin Moira—”
“Oh, yes, cousin Moira,” Liam said nastily—and then realized he’d used the same tone of voice his father had always used when Moira was mentioned.
“Did you know that the girls in her village were turned away from school last fall? The baron who rules Pickworth declared that too much learning is unhealthy for females. It makes them unfit for the duties that are beneficial to a man’s family. So now they are permitted to learn how to read and write and do sums to the extent that it is sufficient for them to run a household. By those standards, Brooke should be learning nothing more than how to do fine needlework and write out a menu rather than learning how to think for herself.”
“You misunderstood what Moira said,” Liam insisted. “Or she exaggerated something sensible, turning it into the ridiculous.”
“Sensible? Do you call leaving women totally dependent on the men in their families, with no way for them to earn a living on their own, sensible? What about the Widow Kendall? Should she have become little more than a beggar when her husband died instead of running the merchant store and making a good living for herself and her children? Or maybe she should have accepted any man who offered to marry her, whether she cared for him or not, trading the use of her body for sex in exchange for food and lodging for herself and the children. It isn’t sensible, Liam. All it does is turn women into unpaid domestic help and legal whores.”
“What?”
“If a woman is controlled by the male head of her household until she marries, performing whatever duties are required to provide him with a comfortable, well-run home, and then has to spread her legs when she does marry in order to earn her food and lodging, what would you call it?”
He said nothing for a moment, staggered by the crudeness of her words. “What’s wrong with a man taking care of his family?” he finally asked. “What is so wrong with him making decisions for his children or younger siblings since they would be too inexperienced to always make good decisions for themselves?”
Elinore sighed. “There’s nothing wrong with those things, Liam. But I’m not talking about children. I’m talking about grown women, independent women who are as capable of thinking for themselves and making choices about their lives as any man, who are now being forced back into being as dependent as a child. I don’t think a strong, healthy community can exist with that kind of forced dependence, but it’s my gender that is vulnerable. You, being a man, may see things differently.”
Liam shook his head. “You’ve misunderstood something.”
“No, I think I understand perfectly what is at stake. I don’t think the eastern barons care about healthy communities anymor
e,” Elinore said. “I don’t think they care about anything but having domination over women, over the land, over life.” She paused, then added bitterly, “But I will not stand by and let it happen here.”
“It would never happen here, so it’s a moot point.” Liam angrily circled the room.
“Won’t it? Your father was going to make the same decree, forbidding girls to receive more than three years of formal education. He was also going to follow the example of some of the eastern barons and forbid women of any age to read anything that wasn’t approved of by the male head of the household. And he was quite pleased to inform me that the barons were considering a new decree that would prevent a woman from owning property in her own name, or running a business, or even having an independent income.”
“But that would mean—”
“That your father would have had control over my income. He could have spent it as he pleased, and I wouldn’t have seen another copper from it except what he chose to dole out to me.”
Liam shook his head. His father had made some dark hints about changes in the wind, but this?
“Even if he wasn’t just baiting you for some cruel reason,” Liam said slowly, “it still has nothing to do with the witches.”
“It has everything to do with them!” Elinore’s hands clenched. “Don’t you see? These troubles all have the same root. The witches were the first to be destroyed in the east. Once they were gone, other things began happening to the rest of the women. It’s not that far a step from killing one kind of woman to enslaving the rest.”
“That’s nonsense, and you know it!” Liam shouted. “Why are you pushing this?”
“Because I’m afraid!” Elinore’s breath hitched. It took several seconds for her to regain control. “I’m afraid for myself, but I’m more afraid for Brooke because I don’t want her to live in fear that any thought she has, any comment she makes, anything she does might give a man an excuse to brutalize her. If these decrees are passed, fear and pain are the only things she’ll know.”
“You’re jumping at shadows, Mother, and I’ve heard quite enough of this.” Realizing he still held the glass of whiskey, he drank it.
Spinning around, Elinore rushed to the work basket next to the chair near the windows. She pushed aside the needlework, pulled something out of the bottom of the basket, strode back to the sofa, and tossed two objects on the cushions.
Liam studied the strips of leather that had brass buckles and were connected to what looked like a leather tongue.
Harness of some kind, but, for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what animal a harness like that would fit.
“It’s a scold’s bridle,” Elinore said, her voice deliberate and cold. “A tool and a punishment to teach females never to speak unless their words are pleasing to a man’s ears. You don’t like what you’ve heard? You don’t like the feelings and opinions I’ve expressed? That’s your answer, Baron Liam. You’re bigger than I am, and you’re stronger. Will you force me down to the floor and shove that leather tongue into my mouth and buckle that bridle around my head? Will you use your fists to subdue me when I fight you so that when you order me to open my mouth to be bridled I’m too frightened and hurt too much to do anything but obey?”
Liam swallowed hard to keep down the whiskey that threatened to rise up in his throat. “He did that to you? He did that?” He suddenly understood the days, a few months ago, when his mother had barely spoken, had moved so carefully, had denied there was anything wrong. The whiskey glass slipped from his fingers, hit the carpet, but didn’t break. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“If I’d said anything, he would have hurt Brooke.”
Liam looked at the second, smaller bridle. “Did he—? Did he ever—?”
“No,” Elinore said. “If he had, he wouldn’t have lived long enough to choke at his mistress’s table. I would have cut the bastard’s heart out before then.”
A long, uneasy silence hung between them.
“You have a choice to make, Liam. You can give me your word that you’ll do whatever you can to protect the witches in the Old Place.”
“And if I don’t give you my word?” he asked hoarsely.
“Then I will pack my things, take my daughter, and go live with my kinswomen.”
If she’d pulled a bow and arrow from beneath the sofa and aimed it at his heart, she couldn’t have shocked—or hurt— him more.
“You’d leave me? You’d walk away from your son to live with them?”
“I wouldn’t be walking away from my son since I would already have lost him. I’d be walking away from the Baron of Willowsbrook and any control he might have over my life.”
“Mother...” Liam rubbed his hands over his face. “If you left like that, everyone in the village would know inside of a week. We’d be laughingstocks.”
“I don’t have the luxury of considering hurt feelings,” Elinore replied quietly. “Not when my daughter’s life is at stake.”
Anger burned through him. “Do you truly think I’m capable of hurting Brooke? She’s my little sister.”
“I know what my son would, and wouldn’t, do. I don’t know what the new baron is capable of when he doesn’t get his own way.”
He looked at her pale face and clenched hands. Pain lanced through him when he admitted to himself that she meant every word.
“You make your choice, Liam. Then I’ll make mine,” Elinore said.
“I can’t give you an answer. I—I can’t think. I need to think.”
He strode out of the room, slamming the door behind him. He left the house and headed for the stables. A hard ride. That’s what he needed. A horse that required his attention and energy as a rider. Maybe fresh air and speed would help clear his head so that he could think again. But, right now, he needed a little time not to think at all.
When Liam reached the stables, Flint, the stable master, gave him a sour look. Nothing new about that. Flint had been the old baron’s man and had always resented taking orders from anyone else—including the baron’s heir.
“You’ll be wanting the gelding again?” Flint asked, his tone implying that unsaddling the gelding had wasted the time of one of his men.
“Yes,” Liam said curtly. He turned away to wait for the horse, then turned back. “No. Have Arthur saddle Oakdancer.”
Flint’s expression soured even more, but he turned his head to call out, “Boy! Saddle the stallion for Baron Liam.”
One of these days, he’s going to use that tone with me and find himself looking for a new position, Liam thought as he took a few steps away from the stable. His feelings were too raw, and butting heads with Flint now would only add to the resentment most of the men felt toward the boy for being the only person besides Liam who could handle the big bay stallion.
“So you want to buy a stallion from me?” Ahern said, scowling at his guest.
Wondering if his father had been right about this being a fool’s errand, Liam set the small glass of ale on the scrubbed kitchen table without tasting it. “Yes, sir.”
Ahern was silent for a long moment. Then, looking at the woman who kept house for him, he said, “The lad will be staying for supper.”
“Good for the lad,” the woman replied tartly. “He—and the rest of you—just might find some supper to be had if you take your business out of my kitchen and back to the stables where it belongs.”
Ahern flashed the woman a quick grin before draining his glass. “Come on then,” he told Liam as he walked to the kitchen door. “Let’s see if you’ll suit one of the youngsters.”
Liam offered the woman a weak smile of apology for intruding on her domain—an effort that was wasted since she’d already turned her back on him to fuss with something near the sink. He eyed the sugar bowl on the table. Not finely ground, as it was in many of the gentry houses these days, but broken up into small lumps. After another quick glance to make sure the woman wasn’t watching him, and keeping his back to the kitchen door, he snitche
d a couple of lumps of sugar and stuffed them into his coat pocket as he turned to follow Ahern back to the stables.
“It’s been said that you raise the finest horses in Sylvalan,” Liam said, stretching his legs to keep pace with the older man.
“There’s truth to the saying,” Ahem replied.
Well, so much for flattery, Liam thought. Not that he’d actually thought it would help. The other things that were said about Ahern being gruff and difficult to deal with were equally true. The old man sold horses when he chose, to whom he chose. And no amount of money could seal the bargain if Ahern decided against a man for some reason.
They walked silently for several minutes until they reached a fenced pasture where a dozen young stallions grazed. Heads came up. Ears pricked. Then they all returned to their grazing.
Ahern climbed over the fence. Liam followed.
“Stand there,” Ahern said, pointing to a spot on the ground before walking a few feet away.
“But—”
“Stand.”
Liam stood. And waited.
Nothing happened.
“How can you keep them pastured together?” Liam asked.
“I don’t tolerate bad manners.”
From man or horse, Liam concluded, biting his tongue to keep from saying anything else to fill the silence.
Then the wind shifted just enough for the horses to catch the scent of the two men. Suddenly they were all in motion, cantering in a large circle as if to show off their paces. Two of them veered away from the rest, headed toward the men, wheeled, and galloped to the far end of the pasture. Two more broke away from the circle, moved off a ways and began grazing. One by one, the young stallions lost interest in the men until only one, a bay, trotted toward Liam.
Slipping his hand in his pocket, Liam brought out one of the lumps of sugar, loosely clasped in his fist.
The stallion came forward more slowly now.
Hoping to hide the sugar from Ahern, Liam cupped his hand and held it out. “Hello, lad,” he said quietly. “Come to make friends?”