Novels 03 The Wise Woman Read online

  She needed nothing, but it was good to be out of the hot chamber and under the icy high sky. She stood for minutes in the moonlight, holding her cape tight around her, her hood up over her head. Then she walked slowly the length of the garden and back again. She was not planning. She was not thinking. She was beyond thought and plans or even spells. She was hugging to her heart the great ache of loneliness and disappointment and loss. Hugo would remain married to Catherine, they would have a son. He would be the lord one day and Catherine the lady of the castle. And Alys would be always the barely tolerated healer, clerk, and hanger-on. Disliked by Catherine, forgotten by Hugo, retained on a small pension from the old lord because in that large household one mouth more or less made little difference.

  She could marry—marry a soldier or a farmer and leave the castle for her own little cottage. Then she would work from sunrise until hours after dark, bear one child after another, every year until she fell sick and then died.

  Alys shook her head as she walked. The little hovel on Bowes Moor had not been enough for her, the abbey had been a refuge she thought would stand forever, the castle had been a step on her way, and her sudden unexpected desire for Hugo and his love for her had been a gift and a joy she had not anticipated. And now it was gone.

  Behind her the hall door opened and Hugo came out.

  “I can’t stay long,” he said in greeting. He took her cold hands in his warm ones and held them gently. “Don’t grieve,” he said. “Things will come out.”

  Alys’s white, strained face looked up at him. “Hardly,” she said acidly. “Don’t comfort me with nonsense, Hugo, I am not a child.”

  He recoiled slightly. “Alys, have a heart,” he said. “We both thought that you would be safer here if Catherine were with child. Now she is content and her position assured and you and I can be together.”

  “In secret,” Alys said bitterly. “In doorways. Here in the kitchen garden in darkness, wary of watchers.”

  Hugo shrugged. “Who cares?” he demanded. “I love you, Alys, and I want you. I have done my duty by Catherine, she will ask no more. I will get you a house in the town if you wish, and spend my nights there with you. You know we can never marry but we can be lovers at least! I want you, Alys, I care for nothing but that!”

  Alys pulled her hands away and tucked them under her cloak. “I wanted to be your wife,” she said stubbornly. “Your father had a letter from the prince bishop today telling how an annulment could be done. We were very near to being rid of her. I wanted her gone. I wanted to lie with you in the lady’s chamber, not in some little house in town.”

  Hugo took her by the shoulders and shook her gently. “Careful, my Alys,” he said warningly. “You are sounding to me like a woman who wants to leap to the top of the ladder. I would have taken you for love, I desire you in my bed. I would lie with you in a ditch, on the herbs here and now. Is it me you want or my name?”

  For a moment Alys held herself stiff, then she moved into his arms. “You,” she said. He held her tight and the coldness and the pain in her belly melted in a great rush of desire. “You,” she said again.

  “We’ll find some way,” Hugo said gently. “Don’t be so afraid, Alys. We will find ways to be together, and we will love each other. Don’t fret.”

  Alys, held warm and close inside his cloak, rested her head against his shoulder and said: “If she were to die…”

  Hugo was instantly still.

  “If she were to die…” Alys said again.

  He held her away from him and scanned her face, her blue innocent eyes. “It would be a tragedy,” he said firmly. “Don’t think that I would welcome that route away from her, Alys. Don’t make the mistake of thinking I would permit it. It is not a strange thought to me, I admit. I have wished her dead many and many a time. But I would never do it, Alys. And the man or woman who hurt Catherine would be my enemy for life. I have hated her—but she is my wife. She is Lady Catherine of Castleton. I owe her my protection. I command you, I demand you to keep her as well and as happy as it is in your power to do. She is a woman like you, Alys. Full of desire and longing like you, like any. She may be greedy, and she and I may lie together in all manner of perverse ways. But she is not a bad woman. She does not deserve death. I will not consider it. And she is trusting in your care.”

  Alys nodded.

  “Do you swear to protect her?” Hugo asked.

  Alys met his intent gaze. “I swear it,” she said easily. She felt the arid taste of the empty oath in her mouth.

  “I must go,” Hugo said quickly. “They will be watching for me. Meet me tomorrow, Alys, come to the stables in the morning, my hunter is sick, you can look at him for me and we can be together.” He kissed her gently, quickly, on the mouth and then he turned and was gone. She heard the hall door slam as he went inside, leaving her alone in the garden.

  “If she died…” Alys said softly to the moonlit garden in the icy light. “If she died I could make him marry me.”

  Chapter

  14

  Next day Alys could not get away to the stables until just before noon. Lady Catherine had an ache in her back and ordered Alys to rub it with oils and essences. Alys worked on the broad fleshy back with mounting impatience. Lady Catherine, prone and sighing with contentment, would not let her go. Alys’s hands were hard, unloving on the other woman’s flesh, drained of their healing magic by Alys’s spite. She had to restrain an urge to pinch. After she had finished rubbing in the oil, Catherine’s smooth white back was striped with red.

  “That was good, Alys,” she said, in a rare moment of contentment.

  Alys curtsied, collected her oils into her basket, and shot from the room like a tom-cat. She half threw her basket at Morach and fled for the stairs, down the winding stony treads, across the hall, out of the kitchen door and around to the stables.

  It was no good. Hugo had left. The simple lad who worked with the horses smiled his empty smile at her.

  “Where is the young lord?” she asked abruptly. “Was he here?”

  “Gone,” the boy said. “Long, long gone.”

  Alys shivered and snapped her fingers under cover of her sleeves to recall her from a shadow of superstition.

  “Long, long gone,” said the lad again.

  Alys turned and went back to the castle. The stall for Hugo’s favorite horse was empty, he had waited for her only a moment. She ached with resentment at his leaving so readily, and disappointment that he could so easily go. Alys knew that if she had been waiting for him she would have been there all day.

  She saw him at dinner at midday and he gave her a rueful grin and a wink but they did not speak. In the dying light of the afternoon he took his horse and his great deerhounds down the valley, riding fast by the flooding river, and she did not see him again until suppertime. Alys sat at the little table with the other women and watched the back of Hugo’s neck where the dark hair curled. She imagined the feel of that silky hair beneath her fingers and how it would be to grip the nape of his neck in one hand. She felt as if she could grip him and shake him with desire—and with anger too. They left the supper table early and Hugo joined them in the ladies’ gallery.

  “My back aches again,” Catherine said faintly, and Alys watched as she leaned on Hugo’s arm and walked slowly into her bedroom. As the door closed Alys’s keen eyes saw Hugo’s arm go around his wife’s waist. Alys waited for him to bid her goodnight and come out again to Alys as she sat with the other women at the fireside. The door stayed shut. Alys felt Morach’s mocking black eyes smiling at her. There was no sound from Catherine’s bedroom.

  “Aye, he’s very tender all of a sudden,” Eliza said, her mouth muffled by a thread of embroidery silk. “There’ll be no more slaps and curses now that she’s in foal.”

  Alys looked toward the door again. It stayed shut. “He’s bound to try to keep her sweet,” she said unwillingly. “He has to have an heir, Catherine has to have her way—at least in these early months.”