Novels 03 The Wise Woman Read online

  Morach laughed, a harsh, sharp sound. “So the little virgin has claws, too, does she?” she crowed. “Then I’ll tell you—I have a good woodpile out the back. Now fetch the food.”

  Chapter

  6

  As the days grew darker and colder at the end of October Alys’s work as the old lord’s clerk increased. He grew more frail and tired quickly. When a messenger arrived with letters in English or Latin he would summon Alys to read them to him, he was too weary to puzzle them out himself. When young Lord Hugo came to tell him about judgments in the ward, or disputes over borders, or news from the wider world, from the Council of the North or from London itself, he would have Alys by him, sometimes taking notes of what the young lord was saying, sometimes standing behind his chair listening. Then when Hugo was gone, with a swirl of his dark red cape and a mischievous wink at Alys, the old lord would ask her to tell him, over again, what Hugo had said.

  “He mumbles so!” he said.

  The tension between the old lord and the young one was clear now to Alys. The young lord was the coming man: the soldiers were his, and the castle servants. He wanted to make the family greater in the outside world. He wanted to go to London and try for a place in the king’s court. The king was a braggart and a fool—wide open to anyone who could advise him and amuse him. The young lord wanted a place at the table of the great. He had embraced the new religion. Father Stephen, another ambitious young man, was his friend. He spoke of building a new house, leaving the castle which had been his family’s home since the first Hugo had come over with the conquering Normans and taken the lordship as his fee and built the castle to hold the land. Hugo wanted to trade, he wanted to lend money on interest. He wanted to pay wages in cash and throw peasants off their grubbing smallholdings and make the flocks of sheep bigger still on long, uninterrupted sheep-runs. He wanted to mine coal, he wanted to forge iron. He wanted the sun shining full upon him. He wanted risks.

  Old Lord Hugh stood against him. The family had held the castle for generation after generation. They had built the single round tower with a wall and a moat around it. Little by little they had won or bought more land. Little by little they had made the castle bigger, adding the second round tower for soldiers, and then the hall with the gallery above, adding the outer wall and the outer moat to enclose the farm, a second well, stables and the great gatehouse for the soldiers. Quietly, almost stealthily, they had wed and plotted, inherited and even invaded to add to the lordship until the boundaries of their lands stretched across the Pennines to the east, and westward nearly to the sea. They kept their power and their wealth by keeping quiet—keeping their distance from the envy and the struggles around the throne.

  Lord Hugh had been to London only half a dozen times in his life, he was the master of the loyal excuse. He had gone to Queen Anne’s coronation, where a man was safer to be seen in support than absent, wearing sober clothes and standing at the back, the very picture of a provincial, loyal lord. He voted by proxy, he bribed and negotiated by letter. When summoned to court he pleaded ill health, dangerous unrest in his lands or, lately, old age; and at once sent the king a handsome present to please the errant royal favor. He knew from his kin at court who were the coming men and who were likely to fall. He had spies in the royal offices who reported to him the news he needed. He had debtors scattered across the country who owed him money and favors. A thousand men called him cousin and looked to him for favor and protection and paid him with information. He sat like a wily spider in a network of caution and fear. He represented the power of the king in the wild lands of the north, and took his place on the great Council of the North, but never more than once a year. He never showed the family wealth or their power too brightly, for fear of envious southerners’ eyes. He followed the traditions of his father and his grandfather. They lived on their lands, riding all day and never leaving their own borders. They sat in their own courts. They handed down justice in their own favor. They announced the king’s laws and they enforced those they preferred. They did very well as obscure tyrants.

  Their greatest rivals were the prince bishops and the monasteries, and now the bishops were fighting for their wealth and could be fighting for their lives. The old lord saw the good times opening slowly for his son, and for his son’s unborn, not-yet-conceived heir, and his son after him. Hugo’s grandson would be as rich in land as any lord in England, would command more men than most. He could throw his influence with Scotland, with England. He would own a little kingdom of his own. Who could guess how far the family might rise, if they waited and used their caution and their wisdom as they always had done?

  But the young Lord Hugo did not want to wait for the great lands of monasteries to come his way in maybe five, ten years from now. He did not want to wait for the sheep to be shorn, the copyholders’ fines to be slowly increased, the annual rents brought in. He wanted wealth and power at once. He had friends who owned wagons, one who had a fleet of barges, one who was mining coal and iron ore, another who spoke of ocean-going ships and prizes to be had from countries beyond Europe, beyond the known world. He spoke of trade, of business, of lending and borrowing money at new profitable rates. He never showed his impatience with his father, and Alys feared him more because of this single, uncharacteristic discretion.

  “He wants to go to London,” she warned the old lord.

  “I know,” he said. “I am holding him back and he will not tolerate it forever.”

  Alys nodded.

  “Have you heard more?” the old lord asked. “Any plots, any plans? D’you think his impatience grows so strong that he would poison me, or lock me away?”

  Alys’s nostrils flared as if she could smell the danger in the question. “I have heard nothing,” she said. “I was only saying that the young lord is impatient to make his way in the world. I accuse him of nothing.”

  “Tssk,” the old lord said impatiently. “I need you to be ready to accuse him, Alys. You are in my daughter-in-law’s chamber, you hear the gossip of the women. Catherine knows full well that if she does not conceive a child within the year I will find a way to be rid of her. Her best way would be to get rid of me before I make a move. Hugo is mad for the court and for London and I block his way south. Listen for me, Alys. Watch for me. You go everywhere, you can hear and see everything. You do not need to accuse Hugo or Catherine, either one or the other. You just have to tell me your suspicions—your slightest suspicions.”

  “I have none,” Alys said firmly. “Lady Catherine speaks of your death as an event in the future, nothing more. I have never heard her admit that she fears a divorce or an annulment. And Lord Hugo comes to her rooms only rarely, and I never see him outside your chamber.”

  He was silent for a moment. “You don’t see Hugo outside my room?” he confirmed.

  Alys shook her head.

  “He does not waylay you?”

  “No,” Alys replied.

  It was true. Either Morach’s tisane had worked, or the old lord had made his wishes plain. When Alys rode back to the castle from Morach’s cottage, Hugo had shot her one unrepentant wink, but never ordered her to his chamber again. After that, she kept out of the young lord’s way as much as she could, and kept her eyes on the ground when she had to walk past him. But one cold morning, in the guardroom below the old lord’s private chamber, she was coming down the little staircase as Hugo waited to walk up.

  “Always in a hurry, Alys,” Hugo said conversationally. He took her sleeve in a firm grip between two fingers. “How is my father today?”

  “He is well, my lord,” Alys said. She kept her eyes on the stone flags between his riding boots. “He slept well, his cough has eased.”

  “It’s this damp weather,” Hugo said. “You can feel the mist coming off the river, can’t you, Alys? Doesn’t it chill you to the bone?”

  Alys shot a swift upward look at him. His dark face was bent down toward her, very close, as if she might whisper a reply.

  “I have no compla