Remembrance Read online

  Now, one of the girls was escaping and her seven sisters looked on with envy. Never mind that the man she was marrying was so thin his bones nearly showed through his clothes and that his manners were worse than any stable lad’s. What mattered was that tomorrow this daughter would be able to escape their father’s house.

  As for John he tried his best to forget that his life was plagued with eight daughters and two worthless sons. He spent every waking moment badgering the peasants in the fields, trying to squeeze yet more money and work out of them, and killing any creature that had the misfortune to walk or fly across his lands.

  “Look you at them,” John repeated to his wife. “I must bribe some poor man to marry them, eight of them. Do you know what that will cost me?”

  Alida wanted to say that it would cost him about half of what her father had given him to marry her, but she did not dare. Brains did not stand up against muscle and obstinacy.

  It wasn’t that her husband was stupid. In fact, he was clever in his own way. He was very good with the everyday aspects of life, such as hounding the peasants into producing more food than any other farmers in the county. He knew where every grain of wheat went and no one ever cheated him, as he always found them out. And when he did, his punishments were swift. He was a big, good-looking man, with as flat a stomach today as he had when they were married nineteen years ago.

  But John had no understanding of anything that didn’t involve producing more coin, food, or power. Music bored him. “It does not feed me,” he said. He thought education was a waste of time; he thought any entertainment except getting drunk now and then was for fools. Once when he caught his wife reading a book, he grabbed it from her and threw it out the window. “This is why you give me daughters,” he bellowed at her. “I put sons into your belly and you change them into worthless females with your fairy stories.”

  Now, John was in his worst mood because he could see all eight of his daughters and his two young sons. Four years ago when Alida had at last given birth to the much-coveted son, she had wept with joy. And through her tears she had seen her husband come running to her. As he grabbed her into his arms, heedless of the fact that she had just given birth, Alida did not care, for there was such happiness on his face. For a moment her heart filled with all the hope and joy she’d felt before she married him. Dreams of a happy life filled her as John held her, kissing her face and neck, telling her she was the most wonderful of wives.

  “Let me see him,” John had demanded, and in an instant Alida’s happiness had fled her, for she saw the faces of her maids and knew instantly that something was very wrong.

  “No,” she whispered, trying to prolong the moment of truth when that sublime joy would leave her husband’s face when he saw whatever was wrong with the child.

  Alida could see that the maids were trying to conceal the problem, so they presented the boy in swaddling clothes, bound tightly to prevent his limbs from growing crooked. But John wanted to see for himself that the child was a boy and bade the maids unwrap him.

  With her breath held, Alida watched her husband and when he saw the boy’s perfect body, his face seemed to melt in tenderness as he cradled it in his arms. John had never touched one of their daughters, never done anything but ask its sex, then wave it away. But now he cradled his son as though it were what he had lived his life for—as it was.

  “He is beautiful,” John said and Alida’s eyes overflowed with tears. Her husband had never seen beauty in a flower or a sunset or even a woman, but he thought that this son she had given him was beautiful.

  With her maid’s help, Alida had sat up straighter in the bed to look with her adoring husband at the child and, innocently, she had started to move the swaddling cloth back from the child’s feet. But the quick intake of breath from her maid had made her draw her hand back as though the cloth were on fire.

  John, not usually aware of subtlety, had caught the movement and tossed the blanket back from the child. One of its feet was deformed. The boy would never be able to walk properly.

  What had a moment ago been love and joy in John’s eyes was replaced with hatred. “How could I have thought that you, madam, would give me what I want?” he spat at her as he opened his arms and let the child fall. Had not the nurse caught the baby it would have hit the stone floor. In another moment John had left the room and thereafter he did not try to conceal the disgust he felt for his wife.

  The next year she presented him with another son but by then John had grown cynical. He did not go to see the boy when he was told it was born. “What is wrong with it?” he asked, and when the maid hesitated, he bellowed, “What is wrong with it? I do not believe that that wife of mine would give me a perfect son.” John had three choices in life: He could believe that God was the cause of his having only daughters and a deformed son, he could believe that he was the cause, or he could blame it all on his wife. He chose to blame his wife.

  “The child is not well,” the maid managed to whisper.

  At that John began to laugh. “I will not hope that it will die. Nor will I dare hope that that cursed wife of mine will die in childbirth and free me to marry a woman who knows how to breed proper sons.” He grabbed a tankard of wine from a table. “It will live,” he said with fatalism. “As all my children live so will this one. It will cost me to feed and clothe it and never give me pleasure. Go! Leave me.”

  John’s prophecy was right and the child did live, but the boy was always sickly, with a disease of the lungs that made him cough continually.

  Two years later Alida gave birth to a healthy baby girl, but John did not even look at it; he did not so much as ask after it. He noticed that his wife had once again been relieved of a child, but he threatened never to visit her bed again. What use was it? The surrounding villages supplied him with women to appease his lust. He refused to notice that whenever a girl was brought to bed with a child that he had reason to believe was his, it was always a girl. John merely denied that these children were his. No matter that the baby girl had his blue eyes or the set of his chin. John’s policy was that if the child was a female then he did not father it. It was well known that if any woman, no matter what her background, could give John Hadley a son, then he would take her into his home and she would live a life of luxury. Although several had tried (one woman three times) no one had yet succeeded in giving him his perfect son.

  “Look you at him,” John demanded of his wife, nodding toward a man on the far side of the room. “Why is it that his wives can beget sons and you cannot? It is said that his wives give him sons so large that the women die from the birthing of them.”

  Trying to look dutiful, as though she wanted to learn something, Alida turned toward the man John was pointing to. But her heart, indeed her entire body, was filled with rage. Was this another point against her, that she had not died in giving birth to a child the size of a calf? Were children to be judged solely upon weight, as though they would be sent to the butcher’s? Her husband did not look at the fact that the daughters she had given him were intelligent and comely; the oldest were even pretty. Their two sons were sweet natured and the oldest could already read. It did not matter to her that one of the boys limped and the other coughed as though each day would be his last.

  With a cold heart, Alida looked at the man her husband was pointing to. Gilbert Rasher was a brute of a man, the size of a bear, unwashed, bad-tempered, uneducated, but, in his day, he had been a great jouster, unseating any man who took him on. Some said that too many lances hitting his helmet had scrambled his brain and made him stupid. But then how did one account for his calculating eyes that saw everyone and everything and always managed to get every bit he could get out of them?

  Gilbert had had three wives, each presenting him with a hulk of a son in the image of the father, then dying from the birth. Gilbert liked to brag that his virility killed his wives, but most women agreed that the women died to get away from his filthy body and his filthier mind.

  Now Gi