The Wise Woman Read online

  Alys shook her head slowly. 'And instead, I was just another virgin,' she said softly. 'An ordinary girl.'

  Hugo stood up, tossed aside the bloodied cloth and drew Alys into his arms. 'Ordinary girls give pleasure too,' he said consolingly. 'Another time, sweetheart, when I am not wearied with travelling and sated with Catherine. Another time it will be better for us both.'

  Alys nodded, hearing dismissal in his voice. 'But don't send Morach for me again,' he said warningly. 'Catherine is bound to find out and distress could harm the baby. I will come to you when I can leave her without her knowing. I will come to you when she sleeps.'

  'In corners,' Alys said. 'In doorways. Hidden in secrecy.'

  Hugo gleamed. 'I love it like that,' he said 'Desperate and quick. Wouldn't you like me to take you like that, when we're too hot to wait for a proper time?'

  Alys turned her head away so that he could not see the anger and resentment in her eyes. 'Like any ordinary girl,' she said.

  He put an arm around her waist and kissed her carelessly on the top of her head. 'I must go,' he said. 'Sweet dreams.' The door shut softly behind him. Alys walked wearily to the bed, flung herself down on her back and watched the flicker of the firelight on the ceiling. She did not turn her head as the door opened. She knew it was not Hugo.

  'Fool,' Morach said companionably. 'I thought you were hot for him. I could have told you it would hurt, lying with a man you hate.'

  Alys turned her head slowly on the pillow. 'I don't hate him,' she said slowly. 'I love him. I love him more than life itself.'

  Morach gave a little crow of laughter and hitched herself up into the high bed.

  'Aye, you say you do,' she said agreeably. 'And you think you do. But your body says different, child. Your body said "no" all the way through, didn't it? Even when you kept trying to tell yourself you were in heaven.'

  Alys raised herself up on one elbow. 'Help me, Morach,' she said. 'It hurt and I hated him touching me like that. And yet I used to tremble when he so much as looked at me.'

  Morach chuckled and heaved the blankets over to her own side. 'He's a disappointment to you,' she said. 'And you hate Catherine. You're torn different ways at once. And you don't consult your own pleasure. Get hold of your power, Alys! Find what you want and take it. You lay there tonight and asked him to rape you. What he wants is a woman to drive him mad – not another victim.'

  Alys pulled the blankets back and turned on her side with her back to Morach. 'And you watched,' she said irritably.

  'Of course,' Morach said calmly. 'And I can tell you, he had more pleasure with Catherine's wanton joy than he did with you.'

  Alys said nothing.

  'If it had been me,' Morach said thoughtfully to Alys' stiff back, 'I'd have taken my time and given him wine, and taken a glass myself. I'd have drugged him maybe. I'd have used earthroot which makes a man dream of desire until he is mad with it and makes him hard with no chance of ease for hours. I'd have told him bawdy stories, I'd have let him watch me touch myself. I'd have told him I was a witch and that if he touched me he would go mad for my touch forever. And when he was half pickled with lust then I'd have let him have me. I wouldn't have whimpered beneath him like a ravished scullion.' Alys shut her eyes and hunched up her shoulder. 'But I wouldn't have done any of that until I'd decided whether I wanted him or not,' Morach said to the quiet room. 'I wouldn't have a man when we had a score to settle. I wouldn't tup a man who was lying his head off to me. I wouldn't let him roll on me and then wash himself clean as if I was dirt. I'd make him choose between me and his wife. And I'd use my magic to make him choose me.'

  Alys turned around and looked at Morach. 'There is no magic in the world that can stand against an heir,' she said bitterly. 'All I can hope for is for the bitch to die in childbirth and the heir to die with her.'

  Morach met her look. 'And me here to see she does not,' she said equably. 'It's a fine net you've meshed yourself in, little Alys.'

  Alys turned her back on Morach again and thumped down into the bed.

  'You must wish you were back at the abbey,' Morach said, rubbing salt in the old wound. 'You'd have been safe from all this uncomfortable reality there. Safe with your mother in Christ.' She paused. 'Pity,' she said cheerfully.

  Alys had thought herself unhappy before, but after that night her days were harder still. The weather was against her through a long wintry April. Alys thought that the long season of darkness and cold would never end.

  She had known harder winters in her childhood with Morach when food and even firewood had been scarce, and for frozen day after frozen day Morach had sent her out of the door of the snowed-in shanty to scoop a bucket of snow and set it to thaw on the little precious flame. At night they had huddled together for warmth and listened for the cry of the wolf pack which came nearer at twilight and dawn. Morach would throw another turf of peat on the fire and a handful of herbs and laugh as if the bitter cold and the pain in her belly and the long lonely cry of the wolves amused her.

  'Learn this,' she would say to Alys – wide-eyed and thin as an orphan lamb. 'Learn this. Never cross a powerful man, my Alys. Find your place and keep it.' And the little child with the great blue eyes too big for her white face would nod and clench her little chicken-foot hands in the old sign against the evil eye. 'That farmer was a bad man,' she said solemnly. 'He was that,' Morach replied with relish. 'And dead now for his injustice to me. Find your place and keep it, Alys! And then avoid the hard men with power!'

  Alys had been cold then with a deep iron coldness which had stayed with her for all her life like some incurable growth of ice in her belly. All the petting at the abbey, all the banked fires of blazing logs, all the sheepskin rugs and the wool tapestries could not cure her of it. When the wind howled around the walls of the abbey she would shiver and look up at Mother Hildebrande and ask:

  'Was that wolves? Was that wolves, Mother Hildebrande?'

  And the old abbess would laugh and draw the child's head against her knees and stroke her fingers through her fair curly hair and say, 'Hush, my little lapwing. What if there are? You are safe here, behind the thick walls, are you not?'

  And the child would reply, with deep satisfaction: This is my place now.'

  And now I have no place, and I am cold again, Alys said to herself.

  She was seated on the kitchen step, her hands dug deep into her sleeves, her face turned up to the thin yellow light of the winter sun. All the other women were indoors, chattering and laughing in the warm gallery. Morach was singing some bawdy ditty to amuse them and Catherine was laughing aloud with one hand held over her swelling belly.

  Alys had left them with an irritable shiver to run down to the garden to gather herbs. The old lord had a cough at nights which made him weary and Alys wanted the heads of lavender for him to help him rest. They were stunted and frozen, they should have been picked when the juice was in them, fresh and violet and sweet in midsummer.

  'They were neglected and left, and now they are cold and dry,' Alys said, turning the arid handful in her lap. 'Oh God, Hugo.'

  Between Catherine's demands for company and the needs of the old lord who sank one day but rallied the next, Alys should have been busy, with no time to brood. But all those long weeks, as it snowed deeper, and then thawed, and then snowed again, Alys moped at the fireside, at the arrow-slit window, or shivered on her own in the frozen garden.

  'What ails you, Alys, are you sick?' the old lord asked.

  David the dwarf peeped at her and gleamed his malicious smile. 'A sick physician? A foolish wise woman? A dried-out herbalist?' he asked. 'What are you, Alys? A gourd rattling with dried seeds?'

  Only Morach in the dark room which they shared at night put her dirty finger precisely on the root of Alys' pain. 'You're dying for him, aren't you?' she said bluntly. 'Dying inside for him.'

  Hugo barely noticed her in his busy days. He wrote a stream of letters to London, to Bristol and to Newcastle, and cursed like a soldier at the delay