Novels 03 The Wise Woman Read online

  Without any haste, he pulled the pins from her hood and tossed it to one side. Alys fell back on the pillow, her face pale, her eyes closed. “I feel sick,” she said.

  He rolled her to her side, skillfully unlacing her stomacher and the gown below it, so that when he rolled her on her back and lifted her legs and then her body to pull the gown over her head she was stripped down to her shift. Alys dropped back on the pallet, her arms above her head, her golden hair a tangle about her face. Lord Hugo sat back on his heels and scanned her, from her small dirty feet to her outflung hand. Alys snored lightly.

  Lord Hugo pulled down his breeches with a little sigh and moved to cover her.

  Alys’s dark eyes flew open as she felt the weight of him come down upon her and he readied himself to put a hand over her mouth to still her protesting scream; but her eyes, out of focus and hazy, were warm with welcome and she smiled.

  “Hello, my love,” she said, as easily as if they had been wed for twenty years. “Not now, I am too sleepy. Love me in the morning.”

  “Alys?”

  She chuckled, the warm, confident sound of a woman who knows she is deeply beloved. “Not now, I said,” she repeated. “I am tired out with your wants, and your son’s wants. Let me sleep.” Her eyelids flickered shut and Hugo watched the lashes sweep her cheek.

  “Do you know me?” he asked in confusion.

  Alys smiled. “None better,” she said. She rolled on her side away from him and put her hand back toward him. In a gesture so familiar as to be unconscious, she felt for his hand and then pulled his arm around her and tucked his hand between the warm comfort of her thighs. Hugo, following the demanding tug of her small hands, snuggled up so that his body was cupped around hers. He could feel a deep ache of desire that he would normally have satisfied quickly and roughly on a woman whether she consented or not. But something about Alys’s drunken dream made him pause.

  “How old are you, Alys?” he asked. “What year is it?”

  “I’m near eighteen,” she said sleepily. “It’s 1538. What year did you think it was?”

  Hugo said nothing, his mind whirling. Alys was dreaming of the future two years ahead. “How is my father?” he asked.

  “Dead, nigh on twelve months ago,” Alys replied sleepily. “Go to sleep, Hugo.”

  Her casual use of his Christian name brought him up short. “What of Lady Catherine?” he asked.

  “Oh hush!” Alys said. “No one is to blame. She’s at peace at last. And we have all her lands for little Hugo. Go to sleep now.”

  “I have a son?” Hugo demanded.

  Alys sighed and turned away. Hugo, raising himself up on his elbow, looked down on her face and saw that she was deeply asleep. Gently he pulled his hand away from between her legs and saw a little flicker of regret cross her face. Then she turned deeper into the pillow and slept again.

  He sat up on the pallet and put his head in his hands, trying to think soberly enough to understand. Either Alys was drunk beyond belief, dreaming some girl’s fantasy of him, or the wine had released in her some of her magic and she had spoken true. In two years’ time he would be the lord of Castleton, Catherine would be gone, and Alys would be his woman and the mother of his child.

  He leaned forward and stirred up the fire so the light flickered in the little room. Alys’s clear, lovely profile gleamed in the half-light.

  “What a son we would have!” he said softly. “What a son!”

  He thought of the confident way she had tucked his hand between her legs, and her lazy command of loving in the morning, and he felt himself ache with desire again. For a moment he thought of taking her while she slept, without her consent; but then he paused.

  For the first time in his life Hugo paused before taking his pleasure. She had given him a glimpse of a future which was luminous with satisfactions. She had given him a glimpse of a woman who was his equal, who desired him as he desired her. A woman who would plot and scheme alongside him, who had given him a son, and would give him more. He wanted Alys’s dream. He wanted that intimacy, he wanted to be on tender terms with her. More than anything else: he wanted her to give him a son.

  He chuckled softly in the quietness of the room. He wanted her to call him Hugo, he wanted her to command his loving. He wanted to see her tired with the demands of his son, tired by his lust. Incredulously he looked toward her again. He would do nothing to spoil that promise between them, he thought. He would not force her, he would not frighten her. He wanted her as she was in that glimpse of the future: confident, sensual, amused. A woman of power, confident of her own power to command him, to rule her own life.

  He threw a rug over her and she did not stir. He leaned over and gently put a kiss on the smooth curve of her neck, just below her ear. The smell of her skin stirred him again. He chuckled. “My lady Alys,” he said softly. Then he got to his feet and walked out of the room.

  Eliza was hovering at the doorway, her round face bright with excitement.

  “All quiet, my lord,” she said. “Aren’t you having her? Don’t you want her now?”

  Lord Hugo shot a quick look down the steps to the great chamber beneath them.

  “Lift your skirts,” he said tersely.

  Eliza’s mouth made a little round “oh” of surprise. “My lord…” she said in a delighted half-protest. He took her gown in one hard hand and wrenched it up to her waist. He backed her against the stone wall and rammed himself into her. Eliza screamed with the sharp pain of it and he at once clapped a hand over her mouth and hissed, “Fool! D’you want half the castle here?”

  Above his hand Eliza’s eyes bulged at him imploringly. He thrust into her three, four times, and then he froze, his eyes tight shut, his mouth grim in a spasm of release which felt like anger.

  Eliza gasped with discomfort as he released her, and staggered to one side, holding her bruised throat and mopping her gown against her crotch.

  Hugo reached into his pocket and threw her a couple of silver coins. “You’ll keep quiet about that too,” he said. He turned his back on her and sauntered across the gallery and down the steps to the great hall.

  She went to the doorway and watched him go down the stairs and pause in the lobby, straightening his clothes, and then she saw his shoulders go back and his smile appear as he opened the door to the dais and went back to sit with his father and his wife.

  “God curse you, Hugo,” she said under her breath. She flinched with discomfort and turned toward the women’s room. “A new gown half ruined, half strangled, and tupped for a shilling,” she said miserably to herself. She hunkered down on her pallet and looked across at Alys who lay, still sleeping, as Hugo had left her.

  “And all because that damned jade hexed you into losing your manhood with her,” she muttered grimly. “I saw you, you poxy bastard. I saw you lie beside her and stick your finger in and dare do no more while she muttered spells against you and all your family. And then you stick your cock in me! Damn you,” she grumbled, stripping off her gown and pulling a rug over herself. “Pox-ridden bastard.”

  Alys turned over in her sleep, her hand stretched out, seeking him. “My love,” she said very softly.

  Alys was sick the next day, heavy-eyed, white-faced, poisoned with the wine. She would eat nothing and would drink only water. Indeed, the whole castle, from Hugo down to the poorest scullion, had drunk better than they had drunk all year and were paying the price.

  It was not until after dinner that any of the women felt better. Then Lady Catherine commanded them to sit in the gallery and sew while she spun. Alys was ordered to read aloud from a storybook.

  Alys, nauseous and with her head throbbing, read until the badly printed words danced before her eyes. They were love stories, tales of ladies in castles and knights who worshiped them. Alys let her mind wander as she read the romance—life was not like these stories, she knew.

  “Lord Hugo carried you up the stairs last night?” Lady Catherine’s arid voice cut into the reading. Alys