Novels 03 The Wise Woman Read online

  Eliza looked at her. “Don’t you know?” she asked. “Are you so cold that you don’t know that? She was loving it. She wanted him to treat her like that. She wanted to be his brood mare, his whipped dog. She was not his wife; she was his whore.”

  Alys sat very still and let the echo of her spell wash over her and around her. She wondered how deep an evil she had done.

  “He made her crawl up and down the floor,” Eliza said. “He made her crawl on her hands and knees. He tied the shift over her eyes so she could not see and he made her crawl around. Sometimes he entered her from behind, sometimes he went to her head and forced her mouth onto him. And whatever he did”—Eliza’s voice was soft with delighted shock—“she cried for more.”

  “All night?” Alys asked coldly. She was thinking of the two dolls tied together and then their abrupt falling apart.

  Eliza shook her head. “He took the blindfold off her and he put it around his own back,” she said. “He tied it around her so they were bound together. Then he lifted her up and lowered her on to him.”

  Alys could feel vomit again rising in her throat from her empty belly.

  “She screamed,” Eliza said. “A long really loud scream, as if he had really hurt her that time. And the two of them dropped to the floor and he humped her on the rushes until her back bled.”

  “Give me some ale, Margery,” Alys said softly. “This story of Eliza’s makes me sick to my very heart.”

  “It’s done,” Eliza said with quiet triumph. “The story’s done. I said you should have been here.”

  Alys sipped the ale. It was warm and stale from standing all night in the pitcher. “Did he spend the night in her bed?” she asked, but she already knew the answer.

  Eliza shook her head. “He untied the rope when he had done with her and sprang away from her as if he hated her,” she said. “Lady Catherine was still lying on the floor and he slapped her—one cheek and then the other—and then he pulled up his breeches and left her, like that. With her back all bruised and bloody and his hand print on both her cheeks.”

  Alys nodded. “And is she grieved?” she asked, detached.

  Eliza shook her head. “She was singing this morning when I took her cup of ale in to her. She had her hands on her belly and she told me that she is sure she has conceived a child. She is sure she is going to bear him a son. She has begged her way into paradise and she is content.”

  Alys nodded and sipped at the ale again.

  “Good,” she said. “Hugo is back with his wife, his wife is carrying his child. Neither of them will trouble me, I am spared her foul jealousy and his dangerous lusts. I can do what I ought to do—clerk for my lord and keep him and his household well.”

  She got up from the stool and shook the dust from her gown. “It has a bitter taste,” she said quietly to herself. “I never knew it had a bitter taste.”

  “What has?” asked Eliza. “The ale? It should be sweet enough.”

  “Not the ale,” Alys replied. “The taste of victory.”

  Chapter

  11

  It was bitterly cold all February. The river froze into great long slabs of gray and white ice. When the ladies walked along the path beside the river they could see the water dashing along beneath the thick skin. Alys shuddered and drew as far back as the snowy banks would allow. In the second week a thick mist blew across the moors from the southwest and the women stayed indoors for one long winter day after another. It was dark when they woke, then pale and cloudy and brooding all day, then dark again at three in the afternoon. Sounds were muffled in the fog and from the window in the gallery you could not see the river below—from the old lord’s room high in the round tower you could neither see nor hear the castle courtyard.

  Alys spent all the time she could with the old lord in his little room in the tower. It was warm there and the lord and his steward David were quiet easy company. She wrote as she was bid, restrained condolences to the Princess Mary for the death of her mother, the Dowager Princess Catherine of Aragon, she read to the old lord from bawdy, unlikely romances and listened to his anecdotes and memories of battles and jousting and of the time when he was young and strong and Hugo had not even been born.

  The mood in the women’s gallery above the great hall was ominous. Lady Catherine plunged from hysterical gaiety, when she commanded the women to play and sing and dance, into a deep sullen anxiety when she would sit at her loom without weaving and sigh. The women bickered among themselves with the fretful irritation of caged animals. And once or twice a week, like a water-wheel turning against its will, Lord Hugo would come to the women’s chamber, bearing a jug of mead.

  The evening would start merrily enough, with the women dancing and Lady Catherine in a flutter of excitement. Hugo would drink deep, his jokes would grow more bawdy. He would grab Eliza if she was within reach and fondle her openly, before his wife and the other ladies. Then he would up-end the jug and fling it toward the fireplace, take Lady Catherine by her wrists and drag her off to the bedchamber. As the women tidied the room, sweeping up the broken pottery and setting the glasses to one side on the cupboard, they would hear Catherine’s loud shrieks of pain and then her gasping unrestrained sobs of pleasure. At two in the morning, without fail, Hugo would loose his wife from the rope of linen which he always tied around them, and stagger, blear-eyed and foul-tempered, for his own bed.

  “’Tisn’t natural,” Eliza said one night to Alys. The candle was out, they were lying in the dark. In the other corners of the room they could hear the quiet breathing of Mistress Allingham and a rumbling snore from Ruth. Eliza had long ceased to laugh at the antics of Lord Hugo and his lady. All the women were appalled at the turn the two had taken.

  “Did you hear her this evening?” Eliza asked. “I reckon she’s bewitched. It isn’t natural for a woman to beg for a man like she does. And she lets him do anything he wants to her.”

  “Hush,” Alys said. “It’s her way. And she’ll sleep well tonight and be sweet-tempered in the morning. And soon we’ll know if she’s in foal.”

  “Whelping,” Eliza said with a sleepy giggle. “But it isn’t natural, Alys. I’ve seen bruises on her that he’s made with his belt. And when I showed them to her she gave me a smile…” She paused. “A horrid sort of smile,” she said inadequately. “As if she was proud.”

  Alys said nothing more and soon Eliza was breathing deeply, sprawled out across Alys’s side of the bed. For an hour Alys lay sleepless in the darkness, watching the cold finger of moonlight move across the ceiling, listening to Eliza’s snuffling snores. Then she slipped quietly from the bed and went out to the gallery, and threw a couple of logs on the fire, and a handful of pine twigs.

  The twigs spurted little flames and a sharp resinous scent filled the room. Alys sniffed at it and sat down on the warm fleece before the fire to watch the flames.

  The castle was wrapped in utter winter darkness and utter nighttime silence. Alys felt she was the only being awake or even alive in the whole world. The embers of the fire formed into little castles and caverns. Alys stared deep into their red glow, trying to make out shapes, pictures. The sweet tangy scent of the burning pine reminded her of Mother Hildebrande and her quiet study where the little fire had been made of pinecones. Alys used to sit at her feet and lean against her knees while reading, and sometimes Mother Hildebrande would rest her hand gently on Alys’s head and lean forward to explain a word, or chuckle tolerantly at a mispronunciation.

  “What a clever girl,” she would say in her soft voice. “What a clever girl you are, my daughter Ann!”

  Alys took the sleeve of her nightshift and rubbed at her eyes. “I won’t think of her,” she said into the silence of the room. “I must go on not thinking of her, stopping myself thinking of her. I will be without her now. Without her, forever.”

  She thought instead of Morach and the cold dark little cottage at the foot of the moor. Morach’s hovel would be up to the eaves in snow by now. Alys grimaced, rememb