Novels 03 The Wise Woman Read online

  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’s 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 in their delivery and replies. He supervised the pulling-down of the big keystones of the abbey and the men dragged them over the snow on sledges to make a heap where he planned his new house. “Not a castle,” he told Catherine. “A regular house. A Tudor house. A house for a lasting peace.”

  He drew plans for his new handsome house. It was to have windows, not arrow-slits. It was to have chimneys and fireplaces in every room. He would have had the men dig foundations, but no one could drive so much as a knife into the frozen ground. Instead, he measured up and drew it, and showed it to David, and argued about kitchens and the bakehouse and the number of rooms and the best aspect. When he strode into the castle, as the early winter darkness came down in the afternoon, all the women in the castle fluttered—like hens in a shed with a fox beneath the floor. Hugo let his dark laughing eyes rove over all of them, and then took his pick in a shadowed doorway for a few minutes of rough pleasure.

  He rarely had the same woman twice, Alys saw. He never willfully hurt them or played the mad cruel games he had done with his wife. He treated them with abrupt lust and then quick dismissal.

  And they loved him for it. “He is a rogue!” “He is the old lord reborn!” “He is a man!” she heard them say. He put his hand out to Alys once with a quizzical smile and a dark eyebrow raised. Alys had looked through him, her face as inviting as frozen stone, and he had laughed shortly and turned away. She heard him whistle as he ran down the stairs, accepting her rejection as lightly as he had accepted her invitation. She no longer ran deep in Hugo’s blood—he had too many diversions. He never came again to her room while Catherine slept—Alys never expected it. She had taken a gamble on her desire and lost him, and lost her desire too.

  All she had left to her was a nagging knowledge that she needed him, at a level that ran deeper than lust. Alys felt she had tried his lust and found it wanting. In his easy dismissal of her she felt her power—over him, over herself, over all of them—drain away like the pale sunsets which bled light from the narrow line of the western horizon in the early afternoons of the dark winter days.

  One day the crystal on the thread hung downward heavy and still, like a plumb-line, when she laid her hand on the old lord’s chest.

  “Have you lost your power, Alys?” he asked sharply, his dark eyes wide open, alert as a ruffled old eagle owl.

  Alys met his gaze unmoved. “I think so, my lord,” she said, cold to her very bones. “I cannot get the thing I desire, and I cannot learn not to desire it. I’ve no time nor appetite for anything. Now it seems I’ve no ability either.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked briefly; he was short of breath.

  “Hugo,” Alys said. “He wanted me to be an ordinary woman, a girl to love. Now I am so ordinary he passes me by. I threw my power away for love of him and now I have neither the power nor the love.”

  The old lord had barked a sharp laugh at that which ended in him coughing and wheezing. “Get Morach for me then,” he said. “Morach shall tend me instead of you. Catherine says that she trusts her with everything. That she is a great healer, an uncanny herbalist.”

  Alys nodded, her face pinched. “As you wish,” she said. The words were like flakes of snow.

  The old lord used her as his clerk still, but there were only a few letters he cared to write during his sickness, during Lent. But when she was sitting at the wide oriel window of the ladies’ gallery on the Wednesday after Easter Day Alys saw a half-dozen homing pigeons winging in from the south, circling the castle in a broad determined swoop and then angling, like a flight of sluggish arrows, toward their coops on the roof of the round tower. It meant urgent news from London. Alys bobbed a curtsy to Catherine and left the ladies’ gallery. She arrived at Lord Hugh’s door as the messenger came down the stairs from the roof of the tower with the tiny scrap of paper in his hand. Alys followed him into the room.

  “Shall I read it?” Alys asked.

  Lord Hugh nodded.

  Alys unfurled the little scrap. It was written in Latin. “I don’t understand it,” Alys said.

  “Read it,” Hugh said.

  “It says: On Easter Tuesday the Spanish envoy refused an invitation to dine with the queen. The king took mass with him and the queen’s brother was ordered to attend him.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes,” Alys said. “But what does it mean?”

  “It means the Boleyn girl has fallen,” Lord Hugh said without regret. “Praise God I am friends with the Seymours.”

  He said it like an epitaph on a gravestone, and closed his eyes. Alys watched his hard, unforgiving face as he slept and wondered if Queen Anne yet knew that she was lost.

  After that day there was little work for her in the castle except reading to the old lord and sitting with Catherine. She could not be trusted to sew an intricate pattern—she lacked attention, Catherine complained. She had lost her intuition for herbs and Catherine shivered at the touch of her cold fingers. Day after day Alys had less and less to do but watch and wait for Hugo—and then, see him pass by her without noticing her in the shadows.

  She grew thinner and she took to drinking more and more wine at dinner as the food stuck in her throat. It was the only thing which helped her sleep, and when she slept she dreamed long wonderful dreams of Hugo at her side, and his son in her arms, and a yellow gown slashed with red silk and a snow-white fur trim.

  As snow turned to sleet and then rain, the ground grew softer. At the end of April the young lord rode out every dawn and did not come back till dusk. They had started digging the foundations for the new house and on the day they had completed the outline he came home early, at midday, dirty with mud, bursting into Catherine’s gallery, where she was sewing a tapestry with Morach idly holding the silks at one side of her and Alys and Eliza and Ruth stitching the border.

  “You must come and see it!” Hugo said. “You must, Catheri