Novels 03 The Wise Woman Read online

  Morach, sitting idly at Catherine’s bedroom fire, shot a quick amused glance at Alys’s face. Alys looked blandly back.

  “Who would have thought that you two girls would have become so close?” Morach wondered aloud. “Such friends as you now are!”

  Alys drew her lips back in a smile. “It makes me very happy to be your friend, my lady,” she said stiltedly. “Perhaps you should have your rest now.”

  Every afternoon Catherine slept in her high bed until suppertime, when she dressed to go down to the hall with her ladies. The women and the men, gathered for their supper, gave a little mutter of approval to see her strength growing every day.

  “It was a near thing,” Morach said with satisfaction, as she reached for another slice of manchet bread on the ladies’ table. “A near-run thing indeed. I thought for a little while that we might lose her.”

  “It’s a miracle,” Ruth said devoutly. “A miracle that she should be snatched from drowning and then not die of the cold nor lose the baby. I have thanked God for it.”

  “It’s a miracle she should turn out so sweet,” Eliza whispered blasphemously. “She was as sour and as full of acid as a lemon until her dunking. Now she’s all honey. And kindly to you.” She nodded at Alys.

  “Will the baby have a fear of water?” Mistress Allingham asked curiously. “I remember a child in Richmond whose mother fell in the river and she could never touch water without shivering.”

  “I remember her,” Morach nodded. “Aye, sometimes it takes them that way, sometimes they swim like little fishes in the flood. D’you remember Jade the Idiot? His mother was drowned and I myself reached inside her dead body and pulled him out like a little lamb from a dead ewe. We wrapped him on the very bank of the river while the great flood was up high! And he could swim like he was more fish than man!”

  Margery nodded eagerly and spoke of another fine swimmer. Alys leaned back a little and let the talk wash around her. The beeswax candles were very clear and bright tonight and the wine was sweet. Looking to her left she could see Hugo’s back, the padded broad set of his shoulders, the swirl of his cape. On the nape of his neck his dark hair curled tight, his cap was set askew in the new fashion. She stared as hard as she could, willing him to be aware of her, to turn, to see her.

  She could not do it. He had lost his sense of her.

  “You’re pale, Alys,” Eliza said. “Are you sick again?”

  Alys shook her head. “No, I’m well,” she said. “A little weary, that’s all.”

  Margery blew on her trencher of bread, piled high with her portion of savory meat mortrews, and bit into it with relish. “You’ve been sick since the Christmas feast, I reckon,” she said. “You were so bright and bonny when you first came to the castle and now your skin is pale as whey.”

  “She’ll bloom in the summer,” Morach said. “Alys never liked being cooped indoors, and the reading and the writing she does would weary anyone.”

  “’Tisn’t natural, for a woman to have such learning,” Mistress Allingham said roundly. “No wonder she looks so thin and plain. She’s working all the time with her mind and not growing plump and bonny like a girl should.”

  “Plain?” Alys repeated, shocked.

  Eliza nodded, mischievously. “Why did you think you were so high in my lady’s favor? Because Hugo never looks your way no more! You’re all thin and bony, Alys, and white as frost. He bundles up with Catherine and folds himself around her fat belly and thanks God for a bit of warm flesh in these cold nights.”

  “She’ll bloom in summer,” Morach said again. “Leave the girl alone. The long, cold dark days of this spring would weary anyone.”

  The talk moved on at Morach’s bidding but later that evening after supper, Alys slipped into Lady Catherine’s room while the rest of them were drinking mead around the fire in the gallery. She carried a candle with her and set it down before the glass to see her face. It was a large handsome mirror made of silvered glass and the reflection it gave was always kindly, forgiving. Alys set down the candle and looked at herself.

  She was thinner. The gown of Meg the whore was wider than ever, the girdle spanned her waist and hung down low and the stomacher, laced as tight as it could go, flattened her slight breasts but was loose over her belly. She slipped her shawl back. Her shoulders were as scrawny as an old woman’s, her collarbones like the bones of a little sparrow. She stepped a little closer to see her face. There were dark shadows beneath her eyes and lines of strain around her mouth. She had lost her childish roundness and her cheeks were thin and pale. Her blue eyes looked enormous, waiflike. She radiated coldness and loneliness and need.

  Alys made a sour face at the mirror. “I’ll not get him back looking like this,” she said under her breath. She stepped a little closer. The shadows under her eyes were as dark as bruises. “I’ll not get him back at all,” she said softly. “He could have loved me when I was straight off the moor, taught by my mother abbess, and skillful like Morach. He could have loved me then and been true to me then, and none of this misery would ever have happened. Now I’ve set my hand to magic and he’s been witched, and she’s been witched, and something is eating me away from the inside, like some great greedy worm, so all my strength drains from me and all I have left is my longing for him.”

  The face in the mirror was haggard. Alys put her hand up and felt the tears on her cheek. “And my magic,” she said softly. “Longing and magic enough to hurt and wound. That’s all I have left me. No magic to summon a man to love me.”

  She sighed and the candle flame bobbed at her breath and spat a trail of smoke. Alys watched it wind toward the bright-painted timbered ceiling.

  “I dipped very deep to be rid of him,” she said softly to herself. “I used all the power I had to turn his eyes from me and his mind from me. I’ll have to go that deep again to get him back.”

  The candle flame quivered, as if in assent.

  Alys leaned forward. “Shall I do it?” she asked the little yellow flame.

  It dipped again. Alys smiled, and her face lit up with her youth and her joy again.

  “Flame-talking!” she said softly. “A flame as a counselor!”

  The room was very still; in the gallery she could hear someone take up a lute and strike a few chords, trying the sound. The chords hung on the air as if Alys was holding back time itself while she made her decision.

  “It’s more deep magic,” she said thoughtfully. “Deeper than I know. Deeper than Morach knows.”

  The candle flame flickered attentively.

  “I’ll do it!” Alys said suddenly. “Will it win me Hugo?”

  The flame leaped and a tiny spark shot out from a fault in the wick. Alys gave a start of surprise and then clapped her hands over her mouth to hold in a ripple of laughter.

  “I win Hugo!” she said delightedly. “I get what I want!”

  She snatched up the candlestick and turned to go from the room. As she walked the flame billowed out like a streamer, lighting the walls and Hugo and Catherine’s big curtained bed so its shadow leaped up and jumped like a huge stalking animal. Alys opened the door to the gallery and stepped into the brightly lit room and the music. In its stick, unnoticed, the candle flame winked and went out.

  The women were gathered around the fireside. Catherine, round and warm, was leaning back in her chair, her eyes closed, listening to Eliza plucking at the lute. Alys passed like a pale cold ghost through the room, carrying a darkened candlestick, and slipped into her bedroom.

  She closed the door behind her but still Eliza’s careless off-key warble came through. She leaned her back against the door as if she would blockade the room from them all. Then she shrugged, as a gambler does when he has nothing more to lose, crossed to the garderobe, and rolled her sleeves up. Wrinkling her nose at the smell, she reached down the gap in the wall to feel for the string and the bag of the candle dolls. The bag was stuck to the castle wall, caked with muck. Alys’s fingers scrabbled, trying to get a grip. She go