The Wise Woman Read online

  Mutely Alys stared up at him, her hands in her lap, palms uppermost. 'And thirdly,' he said loudly. 'If it is a son, and hale and hearty, Hugo does not marry you, you little fool. We make the son legitimate! I adopt him as my heir. We want the child, we don't want you! We never wanted you except for clerking and Hugo's pleasure!' Alys was white-faced, her hands were shaking. 'What made you think you could snare me, you little slut? Have you forgotten who I am? You seem to have forgotten your own base blood as soon as you had colours on your back. But me? Have you forgotten who I am? I am the lord of all the land around me for hundreds of miles! My family was planted here by William the Norman King himself, and I have fought and schemed for every acre under my foot. You might forget yourself – God knows you're not memorable! But me? Have you forgotten my family? Have you forgotten my power? Have you forgotten my pride? Have you forgotten who I am?'

  Alys rose unsteadily to her feet. 'I am unwell,' she said. She could feel her face trembling. It was hard to form the words. 'I will leave you, my lord,' she said.

  'Sit down, sit down,' Lord Hugh said impatiently, his anger blown away in a moment. He thrust her into the chair and stamped over to the table and poured her a glass of wine. Alys took it and sipped. He watched the colour creep back into her cheeks.

  'I warned you,' he said gently. 'I warned you not to try to overleap the boundaries, God's own boundaries, between the noble and the rest.'

  The wine was steadying Alys. 'Hugo loves me,' she insisted softly.

  The old lord shook his head. 'Alys, don't talk like a fool!' he begged. 'You please Hugo. You are a pretty woman, desirable and hot. Any man would want you. If I were not frail and old, I'd have you myself. But don't think these things are decided on whim, on pleasure in a face, or a night's lust. Not even the King himself consults his appetites in this. It's a political decision, always political. Hunting for heirs, hunting for new alliances. Making power, consolidating power. Women are just pawns in this game. Hugo knows as well as I that the next marriage has to be done well, to our advantage. We need a connection with a rising family of the southeast – someone close to the King. Hugo is right – the King is more and more the source of power, of wealth. We need a family high in favour at court.'

  Alys put down the glass. 'And do you have one in mind?' she asked bitterly.

  'I have three!' the old lord said triumphantly. 'The de Bercy family, they have a wench of twelve they would let us have, the Beause family – they have a girl too young, only nine – but if she is big and forward for her age she might do. And the Mumsett family – they have a girl on their hands whose marriage contract has collapsed. She's twenty. The right age for Hugo. I need to know why her engagement failed, but she might do.'

  The wine was spreading through Alys' body like despair. 'I did not know,' she said dully. 'You never spoke of these to me. You never wrote to them. You never received letters from them. I did not know. How have you made these arrangements? I never wrote for you.'

  Lord Hugh chuckled. 'Did you think you saw all my letters?' he asked. 'Did you not think that David writes for me, in Latin, aye, in English and Italian, or French too? Did you not think that Hugo writes for me sometimes? Did you not think that when it is deep, deep secret then I write for myself and send it out by a bird, releasing the bird with my own hands so that no one knows but me and a clever, secretive bird?'

  Alys shook her head. 'I thought you trusted me alone,' she said. 'I thought I was close to your heart.'

  The old lord looked at her with compassion. 'And they call you a wise woman!' he said with gentle mockery. 'You are a fool, Alys.'

  She bowed her head.

  'What will become of me?' she asked.

  'I'll keep you as my clerk,' the old lord offered. 'There will always be a place for you in my hall. You will nurse your child for the first two years. I will not take him away from you before then. When he has tried his first steps I shall take him for my own and you can please yourself.'

  ‘I can stay here?' Alys asked.

  'As his nurse, if you watch your tongue. As long as Hugo's new wife does not object. She will have the rearing of your son. He will be brought up as her child.'

  'She gets Hugo and the castle and my son,' Alys said numbly. 'This girl you do not even know. She gets Hugo and the castle and my son and I get nothing.'

  Lord Hugh nodded. ‘I could send you to France to a nunnery when the baby is taken from you,' he offered. 'I'll give you a dowry and the name of a dead man. You could go back to the nunnery as a widow. I will do that for you.'

  'I have lost my faith,' Alys said with weary dignity. 'Step by step in this castle I have fallen into sin and lost what little faith I ever had. The life I have led here would have robbed the faith of a saint.'

  The old lord laughed shortly. 'Forgive me,' he said. ‘I am just a layman, I cannot dispute these things. But surely the life you lived here would have proved a saint. This should have been a good test for a little fledgling saint.' Alys bowed her head under his mockery. 'Well then, you have your final haven,' he said, a ripple of laughter in the back of his voice. Alys looked at him dumbly.

  'Catherine and the manor-house!' he said, his laughter spilling out. 'And the rest of your nights with Catherine's fat body bouncing up and down on you and poking in her fingers where you want a cock!'

  He exploded into laughter, unstoppable, genuine guffaws, ignoring Alys sitting frozen at the table. Then he broke off and mopped his eyes. 'What a haven, my little one!' he said. 'But you could do worse. You were born for a meaner estate than that, after all. It's a triumph for you, in its way. I'll settle some land on you as I promised, and Catherine shall have a fine enough manor. It is better than nothing, Alys; and you were born to nothing.'

  Alys sat in silence, her eyes on the table, her cold hands clasped across her belly.

  'Now to work,' Lord Hugh said briskly. 'We're holding a sheriff's court this afternoon in the great hall. I want to see the cases which are coming up before me. And these letters have come from the King's council. An armful of new instructions – pursuit of heretics, witchcraft, papists. Treatment of paupers, upkeep of roads, bridges. Numbers of big horses each tenant must keep, numbers of sheep on lands. Training of young men as archers, banning of the crossbow. Control of enclosures, Lord knows what else.' He dumped an armful of papers before Alys on the table. 'Sort them into two piles,' he said. 'The ones that require an answer at once, that we have to deal with today. And those that can wait. I'll read the cases which will come before me this afternoon.'

  Alys bent her head over the papers, smoothed out their creases, stacked them on one pile or another. She was not plotting, nor scheming how to turn the plans for the marriage to her advantage. She felt as if she had lost her ability to turn anything to advantage. She was up against the power and authority of men. There was no chance of anything but defeat.

  Thirty

  Alys worked until dinner. Lord Hugh trusted her to draft his replies to routine letters and then read them back to him for his scrawled signature and the stamp of his seal. However, some things he kept to himself. There were letters from London which came in a packet of linen with the seams stitched and sealed. He cut it open, sitting in his chair by the fireside, and burned each of the secret pages after he had read it.

  At noon David came to the chamber. 'Dinner is ready, my lord,' he said.

  Lord Hugh started up from his thoughts and stretched his arm out to Alys. 'Come away, Alys,' he said kindly. 'Come down to dinner with me. This is weary work for you, are you sure you are not too tired?'

  Alys rose from the table and followed him from the room. She saw David's acute glance at the whiteness of her face and the slope of her shoulders.

  'Does it fare merrily with you, Alys?' he asked. 'Merrily, merrily?'

  She looked at him without bothering to conceal her dislike. 'I thank you for your wishes,' she said. 'I hope they come back to you threefold.'

  The dwarf scowled. He clenched his hand into the fist w