The Wise Woman
Philippa Gregory
Reissue of Philippa Gregory’s disturbing novel of passion and betrayal in Tudor England.A haunting story of a woman’s desire in a time of turbulence.Alys joins the nunnery to escape hardship and poverty but finds herself thrown back into the outside world when Henry VIII’s wreckers destroy her sanctuary. With nothing to support her but her looks, her magic and her own instinctive cunning, Alys has to tread a perilous path between the faith of her childhood and her own female power.When she falls in love with Hugo, the feudal lord and another woman’s husband, she dips into witchcraft to defeat her rival and to win her lover, but finds – as her cynical old foster-mother had advised – that magic makes a poor servant but a dominant master. Since heresy against the new church means the stake, and witchcraft the rope, Alys’s danger is mortal. A woman’s powers are no longer safe to use…
PHILIPPA GREGORY
The Wise Woman
Copyright (#u733f7f0d-cd35-5955-a7be-bf1a4bbeaa53)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by Viking 1992
Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 1992
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006514640
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 9780007383344
Version: 2017-02-07
Contents
Cover (#u68f92a7b-a6c6-5907-b545-82b38057c89d)
Title Page (#uaa8fc157-59b1-587d-94ea-39beae8e53a9)
Copyright
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About the Author
By the Same Author
About The Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#u733f7f0d-cd35-5955-a7be-bf1a4bbeaa53)
In my dream I smelled the dark sulphurous stink of a passing witch and I pulled up the coarse blanket over my head and whispered ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us’, to shield me from my nightmare of terror. Then I heard shouting and the terrifying crackle of hungry flames and I came awake in a rush of panic and sat up on my pallet and looked fearfully around the limewashed cell.
The walls were orange and scarlet, with the bobbing light of reflected flames, and I could hear yells of angry rioting men. I knew at once that the worst thing had happened. Lord Hugo had come to wreck us, Lord Hugo had come for the abbey, as we had feared he might come, since King Henry’s Visitors had found us wealthy and pretended that we were corrupt. I flung on my gown and snatched my rosary, and my cape, crammed my feet into my boots, tore open the door of my cell and peered into the smoke-filled corridor of the novitiate dormitory.
The abbey was stone-built, but the rafters would burn, the beams, and the wooden floors. Even now the flames might be licking upwards, under my feet. I heard a little whimper of fear and it was my own craven voice. On my left were the slits of open windows and red smoke swirled in through them like the tongues of hungry serpents licking towards my face. I peered out with watering eyes and saw, black against the fire, the figures of men crossing and recrossing the cloister green with their arms full of treasures, our treasures, holy treasures from the church. Before them was a bonfire and while I watched incredulously these Satan’s soldiers ripped off the jewelledcovers and threw the fluttering pages of our books into the flames. Beyond them was a man on a big roan horse – black as death against the firelight, with his head thrown back, laughing like the devil: Lord Hugo.
I turned with a sob of fear and coughed on the smoke. Behind me were the single cells where the young novitiates, my sisters in Christ, were still sleeping. I took two steps down the corridor to bang on the doors and scream at them to awake and save themselves from this devil inside our gates and his fiery death of burning. I put my hand out to the first door, but the smoke was in my throat and no sound came. I choked on my scream, I swallowed and tried to scream again. But I was trapped in this dream, voiceless and powerless, my feet wading through brimstone, my eyes filled with smoke, my ears clogged with the shouts of heretics wrecking their way to damnation. I tapped on one door with a light hand. I made no sound.
No sound at all.
I gave a little moan of despair and then I picked up my skirts and I fled from my sisters, from my duty and from the life I had chosen. I scuttered down the breakneck spiral staircase like a rat from a burning hayrick.
The door at the foot of the stairs was barred, beside it was the cell where my mother in Christ, the Abbess Hildebrande slept. I paused. For her above them all, I should have risked my life. For all of my young sisters I should have screamed a warning: but to save Mother Hildebrande I should have burned alive and it would have been no more than her due. I should have banged her door off its hinges, I should have screamed out her name, I should never, never have left without her. She was my guardian, she was my mother, she was my saviour. Without her I would have been nothing. I paused for amoment – a bare half second I gave her – then I smelled smoke spilling under the refectory door and I flew at the bolts on the back door, rattled them open, and I was out in the west garden with the herb-beds around me cool and pale in the darkness.
I could hear the shouts from the heart of the abbey but out here in the gardens all was clear. I raced down the formal garden paths and flung myself into the slim shadow of the door in the outer wall and paused for one moment. Over the rapid thudding of my pulse I heard the noise of the coloured windows cracking in the heat and then the great crash as they were smashed by a thrown candlestick or silver plate. On the far side of the door I could hear the river flowing, splashing over the stones, showing me my way back to the outside world like the pointing finger of my own especial devil.
It was not too late, I was not yet through the door. For a second, for half a breath, I paused, tested my courage to go back – pictured myself hammering on the doors, breaking the windows, yelling for my mother, Mother Hildebrande, and my sisters, and facing whatever was to come at her side, with her hand in mine, and my sisters all around me.
I waited for no more than a moment.
I fled out of the little garden door, and slammed it shut behind me.
No one saw me go.
Only the eyes of God and His Blessed Mother were on me. I felt their gaze burning into my back, as I kilted up my skirts and ran. Ran from the wrecked chapel and the burning abbey, ran with the speed of a traitor and a coward. And as I ran, I heard behind me a single thin scream – cut off short. A cry for help from someone who had woken too late.
It did not make me pause – not even for a second. I ran as if the very gates of hell were opening at my heels, and as I ran, leaving my mother and my sisters to die, I thought of Cain the brother-killer. And I believed that by the time I came to Bowes village the branches of the trees and the tendrils of the ivy would have slashed at me as I ran – laid their stripes upon me – so that I would be marked forever, as Cain, with the curse of the Lord.
Morach was ready for her bed when she heard the noise at the door of the hovel. A pitiful scratch and a little wail like a whipped dog. She waited for long moments before she even stepped towards the threshold. Morach was a wise woman, a seer; many came to her door for dark gifts and none went away disappointed. Their disappointment came later.
Morach waited for clues as to her visitor. A child? That single cry had been weakly, like an ailing bairn. But no sick child, not even a travelling tinker’s brat, would find the courage to tap on Morach’s door during the hours of darkness. A girl thickening in the waist, slipped out while her heavy-handed father slept? A visitor from the darker world, disguised as a cat? A wolf? Some misshapen, moist horror?
‘Who’s there?’ Morach asked, her old voice sharp.
There was silence. Not the silence of absence; but the silence of one who has no name.
‘What do they call you?’ Morach asked, her wit quickened by fear.
‘Sister Ann,’ came the reply, as low as a sigh from a deathbed.
Morach stepped forward and opened the door and Sister Ann slumped into the room, her shaven head glinting obscenely in the guttering candle’s light, her eyes black with horror, her face stained and striped with smuts.
‘Saints!’ Morach said coolly. ‘What have they done to you now?’
The girl swayed against the door-frame and put out a hand to steady herself. ‘They’re gone,’ she said. ‘Mother Hildebrande, the sisters, the abbey, the church. All gone. Burned out by the young lord.’
Morach nodded slowly, her eyes raking the white, stained face.
‘And you?’ she asked. ‘Not taken for treason or heresy? Not seized by the soldiers, by the young Lord Hugo?’
‘No,’ she said softly, her breath like a sigh.
‘You ran,’ Morach said flatly, without sympathy.
‘Yes.’
‘Anyone see you? Anyone follow you here? Anyone coming behind to burn me out, as well as you and your saintly sisters?’
‘No.’
Morach laughed as if the news gave her especial, malicious, pleasure. ‘Ran too fast for them, did you? Too fleet of foot for the fat soldiers to follow? Faster than your sisters, I’ll be bound. Left them to burn, did you? While you hitched up your skirts and took to your heels? That won’t get you into the sacred calendar, my little martyr! You’ve lost your chance now!’
The girl bowed her head at the mockery. ‘May I come in?’ she asked humbly.
Morach stepped back, eyed her brightly. ‘To stay?’ she asked conversationally – as if the world were not black as pitch outside her door and a wind with rain at the back of it howling down the valley, gathering speed in the darkness.
Sister Ann nodded, dumb with weariness.
‘For long?’ Morach jibed.
She nodded again. The dark smears on her bare head and face gave her the look of an old striped plough ox.
‘Coming back to live here?’ Morach asked, covering old ground again for the pleasure of reviewing the landscape.
Ann raised her head. ‘Will you take me back?’ she asked. ‘My vows are broken – I was not obedient. I ran when the soldiers came – I am a traitor and a coward. My house is broken up and my sisters are dead or worse. I am nothing. I am nothing.’
She paused for a moment. ‘My mother is dead,’ she said very low. ‘Mother Hildebrande, the abbess. She will be in paradise this night, in paradise with all her daughters, with all her true daughters.’ Sister Ann shook her head dully. ‘This is the only home I have ever known except the nunnery. Will you take me back, Morach?’
Morach paused a moment. The girl was coming back, she had known it the moment she let her cross the threshold. But Morach was a woman whose skills led her to savour each moment.
‘I might,’ she said, consideringly. ‘You’re young and strong, and you have the Sight. You were my changeling child, given to me for my apprentice, and I would have made you the next wise woman after me but you chose the nuns. I’ve not replaced you. You could come back.’ She stared at the pale sullen face, the clear shape of the bones. ‘You’re lovely enough to send a man mad,’ she said. ‘You could be wed. Or we could sell you to a lover.’
Sister Ann kept her gaze down, her eyes on her muddy boots and the filthy rushes on the earth floor. Then she looked at Morach. Her eyes were not black but a dark, measureless blue. ‘I am the bride of Christ,’ she said bluntly. ‘I can wed no man. I can use no dark arts. There is nowhere for me to go, and I have broke my vows; but I was made a bride of Christ for life, and I am a bride of Christ still. I will be His until the day I die. I will never have any man. I will never use the skills of the devil. I am your apprentice no more.’
She turned her face from the smoking light and took one step towards the door. A sharp scud of rain rattled through the open door and into her face. She did not even blink.
‘Come in!’ said Morach irritably. ‘Away inside! We’ll speak of this more. We’ll speak of this later. But you can go no further tonight.’
She let Morach take her by the arm, lead her to the little fire in the centre of the room where the banked-down embers glowed under the peat.
‘Sleep here,’ Morach said. ‘Are you hungry? There’s porridge in the pot.’
She shook her head and, without another word, sank to her knees before the fire, her hand fumbling in her gown for her beads.
‘Sleep then,’ Morach said again, and took herself up a rickety ladder to the loft which spanned half of the room.
From that little eyrie she could watch the girl who did not sleep for a good hour, but kneeled before the cooling fire and prayed very earnestly, moving her lips and telling her beads. Upstairs, in the shelter of a dirty nest of torn blankets, Morach pulled out a bag of carved white bones, and in the light of the smoking tallow candle spilled out three of them and summoned what powers she possessed to see what would become of Sister Ann the nun, now that she was Sister Ann no more.
She laid them in a row and stared at them; her dark eyes narrowed to slits with pleasure.
‘Married to Lord Hugo!’ she said softly. ‘Or as good as! Fat eating, soft living.’ She leaned forward a little closer. ‘Death at the end of it,’ she said. ‘But there is death at the end of every road – and in any case, she should have died tonight.’
She picked up the bones and slid them back into the little ragged purse, hid them beneath her mattress of straw. Then she pulled a verminous bit of woollen shawl up around her shoulders, kicked off her rough clogs, and slept, smiling in her sleep.
Sister Ann was the first to wake in the morning, alert for the knock of the nun summoning her to lauds. She opened her eyes ready to call ‘Deo gratias!’ to the familiar ‘Benedicite!’ but there was silence. She blinked when she saw dark rafters and the weave of a thatched roof above her eyes instead of the plain, godly, white plaster of her cell. Then her eyes went darker yet with the sudden flooding-in of awareness of her loss and she turned her face and her bald head into the hank of cloth which served as a pillow and wept.
Softly, under her breath, she said her prayers, over and over with little hope of a hearing. There was no comforting chant of the prayers around her, no sweet strong smell of incense. No clear high voices soaring upwards to praise the Lord and His Mother. She had deserted her sisters, she had abandoned her mother the abbess to the cruelty and rage of the wreckers and to the man who had laughed like the devil. She had left them to burn in their beds and she had run like a light-footed fawn all the way back to her old home, as if she had not been a child of the abbey for the past four years, and Mother Hildebrande’s favourite.
‘You awake?’ Morach said abruptly.
‘Yes,’ replied the girl with no name.
‘Get some fresh water and get the fire going. It’s as cold as a saint’s crutch this morning.’
She got up readily enough and pulled her cape around her shoulders. She scratched the soft white skin of her neck. All around her neck and behind her ears was a chain of red flea bites. She rubbed at them, scowling, while she kneeled before the hearth. All that was left of the fire on the little circle of flints embedded on the earth floor was grey ash, with a rosy core. She laid a little kindling and bent down her bald head to blow. The curl of wood-shaving glowed red. She blew a little more strongly. It glowed brighter and then a red line of fire ate its way down the curl of wood. It met a twig, lying across it, and the light died as it smouldered sullenly. Then with a little flicker and a puff the twig caught alight, burned with a yellow flame. She sat back on her heels and rubbed her face with a grimy hand. The smell of the woodsmoke was on her fingers and she flinched from it, as if she smelled blood.
‘Get the water!’ Morach shouted from her bed.
She pushed her cold feet into her damp boots and went outside.
The cottage stood alone, a few miles west of the village of Bowes. In front of it was the dull silver of the River Greta, slowly moving without a ripple. The river rose and sank through great limestone slabs at this stretch, deep and dangerous in winter, patchy in drought. The cottage had been built beside one of the deeper pools which was always filled, even in the driest of summers. When Sister Ann had been a little girl, and everyone had used her given name of Alys, and Morach had been Widow Morach and well-respected, the children from the village used to come out here to splash and swim. Alys played with them, with Tom, and with half a dozen of the others. Then Morach had lost her land to a farmer who claimed that he owned it. Morach – no man’s woman, sharp-tempered and independent – had fought him before the parish and before the church court. When she lost (as everyone knew she would, since the farmer was a pious man and wealthy), she swore a curse against him in the hearing of the whole village of Bowes. He had fallen sick that very night and later died. Everyone knew that Morach had killed him with her snake-eyed glare.
If he had not been so thoroughly hated in the village it would have gone badly for Morach after that. But his widow was a pleasant woman, glad to be free of him, and she made no complaint. She called Morach up to the farmhouse and asked her for a poultice to ease her backache, and overpaid her many times to ensure that Morach bore no dangerous grudge. The old farmer’s death was explained easily enough by his family’s history of weak hearts. Morach took care not to boast.
She never got her land back. And after that day the village children did not come to play in the deep pool outside her door. Those visitors who dared the lonely road and the darkness came huddled in their cloaks, under cover of night. They left with small bunches of herbs, or little scraps of writing on paper to be worn next to the skin, sometimes heads full of dreams and unlikely promises. And the village remembered a tradition that there had always been a cunning woman in the cottage by the river. A cunning woman, a wise woman, an indispensable friend, a dangerous enemy. Morach – with no land to support her, and no man to defend her – nurtured the dangerous superstition, took credit and high payment for cures, and blamed deaths on the other local wizards.
Only Tom still came openly up the road from Bowes, and everyone knew he was courting Morach’s little foundling-girl, Alys, and that they would be wed as soon as his parents gave their consent.
For one long summer they courted, sitting by the river which ran so smoothly and so mysteriously down the deep crevices of the river bed. For one long summer they met every morning before Tom went to work in his father’s fields and Morach called Alys to walk out over the moor and find some leaf or some weed she wanted, or dig in the stony garden.
They were very tender together, respectful. On greeting and at parting they would kiss, gently, on the mouth. When they walked they would hold hands and sometimes he would put his arm around her waist, and she would lean her golden-brown head on his shoulder. He never caught at her, or pulled her about, or thrust his hands inside her brown shawl or up her grey skirt. He liked best to sit beside her on the river-bank and listen to her telling tales and inventing stories.
Her favourite time was when his parents were working in Lord Hugh’s fields and he could take her to the farm and show her the cow and the calf, the pig, the linen chest, the pewter and the big wooden bed with the thick old curtains. Alys would smile then, her dark eyes as warm as a stroked cat.
‘Soon we’ll be together,’ Tom would murmur.
‘Here,’ Alys said.
‘I will love you every day of my life,’ Tom would promise.
‘And we’ll live here,’ she said.
When Morach lost her fields and did not get them back, Tom’s parents looked higher for him than a girl who would bring nothing but a tumbledown shack and a patch of ground all around it. Alys might know more about flowers and herbs than anyone in the village, but Tom’s parents did not need a daughter-in-law who knew twenty different poisons, forty different cures. They wanted a jolly, round-faced girl who would bring a fat dowry of fields and perhaps a grazing cow with a weaned calf. They wanted a girl with broad hips and strong shoulders who could work all day in their fields and have a good supper ready for them at night. One who would give birth without fuss so that there would be another Tom in the farmhouse to inherit when they had gone.
Alys, with her ripple of golden-brown unbraided hair, her basket of leaves and her pale reserved face, was not their choice. They told Tom frankly to put her out of his mind; and he told them that he would marry where he willed, and that if they forced him to it he would take Alys away – even as far as Darneton itself – he would do it and go into service if needs be.
It could not be done. Lord Hugh would not let two young people up and off his land without his say-so. But Lord Hugh was an ill man to invoke in a domestic dispute. He would come and give fair enough judgement, but he would take a fancy to a pewter pint-pot on his way out, or he saw a horse he must have, cost what it may. And however generous he claimed to be, he would pay less than the Castleton butter-market price. Lord Hugh was a sharp man with a hard eye. It was best to solve any problems well away from him.
They ignored Tom. They went in secret to the abbess at the abbey and they offered her Alys. They claimed that the child had the holy gift of healing, that she was a herbalist in her own right, but dreadfully endangered by living with her guardian – old Morach. They offered the abbey a plump dowry to take her and keep her behind the walls, as a gift from themselves.
Mother Hildebrande, who could hear a lie even from a stranger – and forgive it – asked them why they were so anxious to get the little girl out of the way. Then Tom’s mother cried and told her that Tom was mad for the girl and that she would not do for them. She was too strange and unlike them. She had turned Tom’s head, perhaps with a potion – for whoever heard of a lad wanting to marry for love? He would recover but while the madness was on him they should be parted.
‘I’ll see her,’ Mother Hildebrande had said.
They sent Alys up to the abbey with a false message and she was shown through the kitchen, through the adjoining refectory and out of the little door to where Mother Hildebrande was sitting in the physic garden at the smiling western side of the abbey, looking down the hill to the river, deeper here and better stocked with fish. Alys had approached her through the garden in a daze of evening sunshine and her golden-brown hair had shone: like the halo of a saint, Mother Hildebrande had thought. She listened to Alys’ message and smiled at the little girl and then walked with her around the raised flower- and herb-beds. She asked her if she recognized any of the flowers and how she would use them. Alys looked around the walled warm garden as if she had come home after a long journey, and touched everything she saw, her little brown hands darting like harvest mice from one leaf to another. Mother Hildebrande listened to the childish high voice and the unchildish authority. ‘This one is meadowsweet,’ Alys said certainly. ‘Good for sickness in the belly when there is much soiling. This one looks like rue: herb-grace.’ She nodded solemnly. ‘A very powerful herb against sweating sickness when it is seethed with marygold, feverfew, burnet sorrel and dragons.’ She looked up at Mother Hildebrande. ‘As a vinegar it can prevent the sickness, did you know? And this one I don’t know.’ She touched it, bent her little head and sniffed at it. ‘It smells like a good herb for strewing,’ she said. ‘It has a clear, clean smell. But I don’t know what powers it has. I have never seen it before.’
Mother Hildebrande nodded, never taking her eyes from the small face, and showed Alys flowers she had never seen, herbs from faraway countries whose names she had never even heard.
‘You shall come to my study and see them on a map,’ Mother Hildebrande promised. Alys’ heart-shaped face looked up at her. ‘And perhaps you could stay here. I could teach you to read and write,’ the old abbess said. ‘I need a little clerk, a clever little clerk.’
Alys smiled the puzzled smile of a child who has rarely heard kind words. ‘I’d work for you,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I can dig, and draw water, and find and pick the herbs you want. If I worked for you, could I stay here?’
Mother Hildebrande put a hand out to Alys’ pale curved cheek. ‘Would you want to do that?’ she asked. ‘Would you take holy orders and leave the world you know far behind you? It’s a big step, especially for a little girl. And you surely have kin who love you? You surely have friends and family that you love?’
‘I’ve no kin,’ Alys said, with the easy betrayal of childhood. ‘I live with old Morach, she took me in twelve years ago, when I was a baby. She does not need me, she is no kin of mine. I am alone in the world.’
The old woman raised her eyebrows. ‘And no one you love?’ she asked. ‘No one whose happiness depends on you?’
Alys’ deep blue eyes opened wide. ‘No one,’ she said firmly.
The abbess nodded. ‘You want to stay.’
‘Yes,’ Alys said. As soon as she had seen the large quiet rooms with the dark wood floors she had set her heart on staying. She had a great longing for the cleanness of the bare white cells, for the silence and order of the library, for the cool light of the refectory where the nuns ate in silence and listened to a clear voice reading holy words. She wanted to become a woman like Mother Hildebrande, old and respected. She wanted a chair to sit on and a silver plate for her dinner. She wanted a cup made of glass, not of tin or bone. And she longed, as only the hungry and the dirty passionately long, for clean linen and good food. ‘I want to stay,’ she said.
Mother Hildebrande rested her hand on the child’s warm dirty head. ‘And what of your little sweetheart?’ she asked. ‘You will have to renounce him. You may never, ever see him again, Alys. That’s a hard price to pay.’
‘I didn’t know of places like this,’ Alys said simply. ‘I didn’t know you could be clean like this, I didn’t know that you could live like this unless you were Lord Hugh. I didn’t know. Tom’s farmhouse was the best I had ever seen, so that was what I wanted. I did not know any better.’
‘And you want the best,’ Mother Hildebrande prompted gently. The child’s yearning for quality was endearing in one so young. She could not call it vanity and condemn it. The little girl loved the herb garden as well as the refectory silver.
Alys hesitated and looked up at the old lady. ‘Yes, I do. I don’t want to go back to Morach’s. I don’t want to go back to Tom. I want to live here. I want to live here for ever and ever and ever.’
Mother Hildebrande smiled. ‘Very well,’ she said gently. ‘For ever and ever and ever. I will teach you to read and write and to draw and to work in the still-room before you need think of taking your vows. A little maid like you should not come into the order too young. I want you to be sure.’
‘I am sure,’ Alys said softly. ‘I am sure now. I want to live here for always.’
Then Mother Hildebrande had taken Alys into the abbey and put her in charge of one of the young novitiates who had laughed at her broad speech and cut down a little habit for her. They had gone to supper together and to prayers.
It was characteristic of both Alys and Tom that while he waited for her as the sun set and a mocking lovers’ moon came out to watch with him, Alys supped on hot milk and bread from fine pottery, and slept peacefully in the first clean pallet she had ever known.
All through the night the abbess waked for the little girl. All through the night she kneeled in the lowliest stall in the chapel and prayed for her. ‘Keep her safe, Holy Mother,’ she finished as the nuns filed in to their pews in sleepy silence for the first of the eight services of the day. ‘Keep her safe, for in little Alys I think we have found a special child.’
Mother Hildebrande set Alys to work in the herb garden and still-room, and prepared her to take her vows. Alys was quick to learn and they taught her to read and write. She memorized the solemn cadences of the Mass without understanding the words, then slowly she came to understand the Latin and then to read and write it. She faultlessly, flawlessly charmed Mother Hildebrande into loving her as if she had been her own daughter. She was the favourite of the house, the pet of all the nuns, their little sister, their prodigy, their blessing. The women who had been denied children of their own took a special pleasure in teaching Alys and playing with her, and young women, who missed their little brothers and sisters at home, could pet Alys and laugh with her, and watch her grow.
Tom – after hanging around the gate for weeks and getting several beatings from the porter – slouched back to his farm and his parents, and waited in painful silence for Alys to come home to him as she had promised faithfully she would.
She never did. The quiet order of the place soothed her after Morach’s tantrums and curses. The perfume of the still-room and the smell of the herbs scented her hands, her gown. She learned to love the smooth coolness of clean linen next to her skin, she saw her dirty hair and the wriggling lice shaved off without regret, and smoothed the crisp folds of her wimple around her face. Mother Hildebrande employed her in writing letters in Latin and English for the abbey, and dreamed of setting her to copying and illuminating a bible, a grand new bible for the abbey. Alys learned to kneel in prayer until the ache in her legs faded from her mind and all she could see through her half-closed eyes were the dizzying colours of the abbey’s windows and the saints twirling like rainbows. When she was fourteen, and had been fasting all day and praying all night, she saw the statue of the Holy Mother turn Her graceful head and smile at her, directly at Alys. She knew then, as she had only hoped before, that Our Lady had chosen her for a special task, for a special lesson, and she dedicated herself to the life of holiness.
‘Let me learn to be like mother,’ she whispered. ‘Let me learn to be like Mother Hildebrande.’
She saw Tom only once again. She spoke to him through the little grille in the thick gate, the day after she had taken her vows. In her sweet clear voice she told him that she was a Bride of Christ and she would never know a man. She told him to find himself a wife, and be happy with her blessing. And she shut the little hatch of the thick door in his surprised face before he could cry out to her, or even give her the brass ring he had carried in his pocket for her ever since the day they plighted their troth when they were little children of nine.
In the cold morning of her new life Sister Ann shivered, and drew her cape tighter around her. She dipped the bucket in the river and lugged it back up the path to the cottage. Morach, who had been watching her dreaming at the riverside, made no comment, but tumbled down the ladder to the fireside and nodded to Sister Ann to fill the pot and put some water on to heat.
She said nothing while they shared a small piece of bread with last night’s porridge moistened with hot water. They shared a mug to drink the sour, strong water. It was brown and peaty from the moorland. Sister Ann was careful to turn it so her lips did not touch where Morach had drunk. Morach watched her from under her thick black eyebrows and said nothing.
‘Now then,’ she said, when Ann had washed the cup and plate and the tin spoon and set them at the fireside. ‘What will you do?’
Sister Ann looked at her. Her dreaming of the past had reminded her of where she belonged. ‘I must find another abbey,’ she said decisively. ‘My life is dedicated to Christ and His Sainted Mother.’
Morach hid a smile and nodded. ‘Yes, little Sister,’ she said. ‘But all this was not sent solely to try your faith, others are suffering also. They are all being visited, they are all being questioned. You were fools enough at Bowes to make an enemy of Lord Hugh and his son but nowhere are the abbeys safe. The King has his eye on their wealth and your God is no longer keeping open house. I dare say there is not an abbey within fifty miles which would dare to open its doors to you.’
‘Then I must travel. I must travel outside the fifty miles, north to Durham if need be, south to York. I must find another abbey. I have made my vows, I cannot live in the world.’
Morach picked her teeth with a twig from the basket of kindling and spat accurately into the flames. ‘D’you have some story ready?’ she asked innocently. ‘Got some fable prepared already?’
Sister Ann looked blank. Already the skin on her head was less shiny, the haze of light brown hair showed like an itchy shadow. She rubbed it with a grimy hand and left another dark smear. Her dark blue eyes were sunk in her face with weariness. She looked as old as Morach herself.
‘Why should I need a story?’ she asked. Then she remembered her cowardice – ‘Oh Mary, Mother of God …’
‘If you were seen skipping off it would go hard for you,’ Morach said cheerily. ‘I can’t think an abbess would welcome you once she knew that you smelled smoke and bolted like any sinner.’
‘I could do penance …’
Morach chortled disbelievingly. ‘It’s more like they’d throw you out in your shift for strangers to use as they would,’ she said. ‘You’re ruined, Sister Ann! Your vows are broke, your abbey is a smoking ruin, your sisters are dead or raped or fled. So what will you do?’
Sister Ann buried her face in her hands. Morach sat at her ease until her shoulders stopped shaking and the sobbed prayers were silenced. It took some time. Morach lit a little black pipe, inhaled the heady herbal smoke and sighed with pleasure.
‘Best stay here,’ she offered. ‘That’s your best way. We’ll get news here of your sisters and how they fared. If the abbess survived she’ll seek you here. Wander off, and she’ll not know where to find you. Maybe all of the girls ran like you – scattered back to their old homes – perhaps you’ll all be forgiven.’
Sister Ann shook her head. The smoke had been hot, the fire close to the cloisters. Most of the nuns would have been burned in their cells while they slept. ‘I doubt they escaped,’ she said.
Morach nodded, hiding a gleam of amusement. ‘You were the first out, eh?’ she asked. ‘The quickest?’ She paused for emphasis. ‘Then there is nowhere for you to go. Nowhere at all.’
Sister Ann swayed against the blow. Morach noticed the pallor of her skin. The girl was sick with shock.
‘I’ll take you back,’ Morach said. ‘And people will stay mum. It will be as if you were never away. Four years gone and now you’re back. Aged sixteen, aren’t you?’
She nodded, only half hearing.
‘Ready to wed,’ Morach said with satisfaction. ‘Or bed,’ she added, remembering the reading of the bones and the young Lord Hugo.
‘Not that,’ she said, her voice very low. ‘I will stay with you, Morach, and I’ll work for you, as I did before. I know more now, and I can read and write. I know more herbs too and flowers – garden flowers, not just wild ones. But I will only do God’s work, only healing and midwifery. No charms, no spells. I belong to Christ. I will keep my vows here, as well as I can, until I can find somewhere to go, until I can find an abbess who will take me. I will do God’s work of healing here, I will be Christ’s bride here …’ She looked around her. ‘In this miserable place,’ she said brokenly. ‘I will do it as well as I can.’
‘Well enough,’ Morach said, quite unperturbed. ‘You’ll work for me. And when the young lord has ridden off north to harry the Scots and forgotten his new sport of tormenting nuns, you can step down to Castleton and seek some news.’
She hauled herself to her feet and shook out her filthy gown. ‘Now you’re back you can dig that patch,’ she said. ‘It’s been overgrown since you left. I’ve a mind to grow some turnips there for the winter months.’
The girl nodded, and rose to her feet and went to the door. A new hoe stood at the side – payment in kind for hexing a neighbour’s straying cattle.
‘Sister Ann!’ Morach called softly.
She spun around at once.
Morach scowled at her. ‘You never answer to that name again,’ she said. ‘D’you hear me? Never. You’re Alys again now, and if anyone asks you, tell them you went to stay with your kin near Penrith. You’re Alys. That’s your name. I gave it to you once, now I give it to you back. Forget being Sister Ann, that was another life and it ended badly. You’re Alys now – remember it.’
Two (#ulink_22a19b5a-5680-5f9c-92c9-60d0e441e906)
In the aftermath of the firing of the abbey there were soldiers and bullyboys chasing the rumours of hidden treasure and golden chalices. They had little joy in Bowes village where the half-dozen families did not take kindly to strangers and where four or five were now out of work with the abbey ruined and no services needed. Morach let it be known that she had a new apprentice, and if anyone remembered the previous girl who had gone four long years ago, no one said. It was not a time for speculation and gossip. There were a dozen vagrants still hanging around the ruins of the abbey – refugees from the nuns’ charity with nowhere else to go. The villagers of Bowes locked their doors, refused anyone claiming rights of residence, and chose not to talk about the abbey, or the nuns, or the night of the fire, or the minor thefts and pillaging of the ruined abbey which went on in the later days.
It was said that the firing of the abbey had been a mistake. The soldiers led by the young Lord Hugo were homeward bound from a raid on the mosstroopers, and they stopped at the abbey only to frighten the nuns to do the King’s will, and surrender their treasure and their bad popish ways. It had all begun with some wild sport, a bonfire of broken wood and some tar. Once the flames had caught there was nothing that Hugo could do, and besides the nuns had all died in the first minutes. The young lord had been drunk anyway, and could remember little. He confessed and did penance with his own priest – Father Stephen, one of the new faith who saw little sin in stamping out a nest of treasonous papists – and the villagers gleaned over the half-burned building and then started carting the stones away. Within a few weeks of her return to Morach’s hovel, Alys could walk where she wished; no one recognized her as the half-starved waif who had gone away four years ago. Even if they had, no one would have taken the risk of reporting her, which would bring Lord Hugh down on the village or – even worse – his son, the mad young lord.
Alys could go freely into the village whenever she wished. But mostly she went up on the moor. Every day, after digging and weeding in the dusty scrape of the vegetable patch, she went down to the river to wash her hands and splash water over her face. In the first few days she stripped and waded into the water with her teeth chattering, to wash herself clean of the smell of sweat and smoke and midden. It was no use. The earth under her fingernails and the grime in the creases of her skin would not come clean in the cold brackish water, and anyway, wading back to the frosty bank with shivery goose-flesh skin, Alys had only dirty clothes to wear. After a few weeks she lost her shudder of repulsion against the odour of her own body, soon she could barely smell even the strong stench of Morach. She still splashed water in her face but she no longer hoped to keep clean.
She rubbed her face dry on the thick wool of her dirty robe and walked upstream along the river-bank till she came to the bridge where the river ran beneath a natural causeway of limestone slabs – wide enough to drive a wagon across, strong enough to carry oxen. She paused there and looked down into the brown peaty water. It flowed so slowly there seemed to be no movement at all, as if the river had died, had given up its life into stagnant, dark ponds.
Alys knew better. When she and Tom had been little children they had explored one of the caves which riddled the river-bank. Squirming like fox cubs they had gone downwards and downwards until the passage had narrowed and they had stuck – but below them, they had heard the loud echoing thunder of flowing water, and they knew they were near the real river, the secret river which flowed all day and all night in eternal darkness, hidden deep beneath the false river bed of dry stones above.
Tom had been scared at the echoing, rushing noise so far below them. ‘What if it rose?’ he asked her. ‘It would come out here!’
‘It does come out here,’ Alys had replied. The seasons of her young life had been marked by the ebb and flow of the river, a dull drain in summer, a rushing torrent during the autumn storms. The gurgling holes where the sluggish water seeped away in summertime became springs and fountains in winter, whirlpools where the brown water boiled upwards, bubbling from the exploding pressure of the underground streams and underground rivers flooding from their stone cellars.
‘Old Hob is down there,’ Tom said fearfully, his eyes dark.
Alys had snorted and spat disdainfully towards the darkness before them. ‘I ain’t afraid of him!’ she said. ‘I reckon Morach can deal with him all right!’
Tom had crossed his finger with his thumb in the sign against witchcraft and crawled backwards out of the hole and into the sunshine. Alys would have lingered longer. She had not been boasting to Tom, it was true: raised by Morach she feared nothing.
‘Until now,’ she said quietly to herself. She looked up at the clear sky above her and the sun impartially burning down. ‘Oh, Mother of God …’ she started, then she broke off. ‘Our Father …’ she began again, and again fell silent. Then her mouth opened in a silent scream and she pitched herself forward on the short coarse grass of the moorland. ‘God help me!’ she said in a grief-stricken whisper. ‘I am too afraid to pray!’
It seemed to her that she lay there in despair a long while. When she sat up again and looked around her the sun had moved – it was the middle of the afternoon, time for nones. Alys got to her feet slowly, like an old woman, as if all her bones were aching. She set off with small, slow steps up the hill to where the buds of early heather gleamed like a pale mauve mist on the slopes of the hill. A lapwing called overhead and fluttered down not far from her. Higher again in the blue air a lark circled and climbed, calling and calling, each higher note accompanied by a thrust of the little wings. Bees rolled drunkenly among the early heather flowers, the moor sweated honey. Everything around her was alive and thriving and joyful in the warm roil of the end of summer – everything but Alys, icy Alys, cold to her very bones.
She stumbled a little as she walked, her eyes watching the sheep track beneath her feet. Every now and then she moaned very softly, like an animal in a trap for a long, long night of darkness. ‘How shall I ever get back?’ she said to herself as she walked. ‘How shall I ever get back? How shall I ever learn to bear it here?’
At the edge of the moor, where the land flattened in a curved sweep under the wide, unjudging sky, Alys paused. There was a little heap of stones tossed into a cairn by shepherds marking the path. Alys squatted down on one dry stone and leaned back against the others, closed her eyes and turned her face up to the sun, her face locked in a grimace of grief.
After a few moments she narrowed her eyes and looked southward. The moorland was very flat, bending across the skyline in a thousand shades of green, from the dark lushness of moss around a bog, to the pale yellow colour of weak grass growing on stone. The heather roots and old flowers showed pale grey and green, a bleak landscape of subtle beauty, half pasture, half desert. The new heather growth was dark green, the heather flowers pale as a haze. Alys looked more sharply. A man was striding across the moor, his plaid across his shoulder, his step determined. Alys got to her feet quietly, ready to turn and run. As he saw the movement he yelled out, and his voice was whipped away by the steady wind which blew over the top of the moor, even on the calmest of days. Alys hesitated, ready for flight, then he yelled again, faintly:
‘Alys! Wait! It’s me!’
Her hand went to her pocket where the beads of her rosary were rounded and warm. ‘Oh no,’ she said. She sat down again on the stones and waited for him to come up to her, watching him as he marched across the moor.
He had filled out in the four years she had been away. When she had left he had been a boy, lanky and awkward but with a fair coltish beauty. Now he was sturdy, thickset. As he came closer she saw that his face was tanned red from sun and wind, marred with red spiders of broken veins. His eyes, still that piercing blue, were fixed on her.
‘Alys,’ he said. ‘I’ve only just heard you were back. I came at once to see you.’
‘Your farm’s the other way,’ she said drily.
He flushed a still deeper red. ‘I had to take a lamb over to Trowheads,’ he said. ‘This is my way back.’
Alys’ dark eyes scanned his face. ‘You never could lie to me, Tom.’
He hung his head and shuffled his thick boots in the dust. ‘It’s Liza,’ he said. ‘She watches me.’
‘Liza?’ Alys asked, surprised. ‘Liza who?’
Tom dropped to sit on the heather beside her, his face turned away, looking back over the way he had come. ‘Liza’s my wife,’ he said simply. ‘They married me off after you took your vows.’
Alys flinched as if someone had pinched her. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘No one told me.’
Tom shrugged. ‘I would have sent word but …’ he trailed off and let the silence hang. ‘What was the use?’ he asked.
Alys looked away, gripping the beads in her pocket so tight that they hurt her fingers. ‘I never thought of you married,’ she said. ‘I suppose I should have known that you would.’
Tom shrugged. ‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘You’re taller, I reckon, and plumper. But your eyes are the same. Did they cut your hair?’
Alys nodded, pulling the shawl over her shaven head a little tighter.
‘Your lovely golden hair!’ Tom said, as if he were bidding it farewell.
A silence fell. Alys stared at him. ‘You were married as soon as I left?’ she asked.
Tom nodded.
‘Are your mother and father still alive?’
He nodded again.
Alys’ face softened, seeking sympathy. ‘They did a cruel thing to me that day,’ she said. ‘I was too young to be sent among strangers.’
Tom shrugged. ‘They did what they thought was for the best,’ he said. ‘No way for them to foretell that the abbey would be burned and you would be homeless and husbandless at the end.’
‘And in peril,’ Alys said. ‘If the soldiers come back they might take me. You won’t tell anyone that I was at the abbey, will you?’
The look he shot at her was answer enough. ‘I’d die rather than see you hurt,’ he said with a suppressed anger. ‘You know that! You’ve always known it! There never was anyone else for me and there never will be.’
Alys turned her face away. ‘I may not listen to that,’ she said.
He sighed, accepting the reproof. ‘I’ll keep your secret safe,’ he said. ‘In the village they think only that Morach has a new apprentice. She has said before that she was seeking a girl to do the heavy work. No one has thought of you. You’ve been forgotten. The word is that all the nuns are dead.’
‘Why did you come this way then?’ Alys demanded.
He shrugged his shoulders, his coarse skin blushing brick-red. ‘I thought I’d know,’ he said gruffly. ‘If you had died I would have known it.’ He thumped his chest. ‘In here,’ he said. ‘Where I carry my pain for you. If you had died it would have gone … or changed. I would have known if you were dead.’
Alys nodded, accepting Tom’s devotion. ‘And what of your marriage?’ she asked. ‘Are you comfortable? Do you have children?’
‘A boy and a girl living,’ he said indifferently. ‘And two dead.’ He paused. There were four years of longing in his voice. ‘The girl looks a little like you sometimes,’ he said.
Alys turned her clear, heart-shaped face towards him. ‘I have been waiting to see you,’ she said. Tom shivered helplessly. Her voice was as piercing and sweet as plain-song. ‘You have to help me get away.’
‘I have been racking my brains to think how I can serve you, how I can get you away from that wretched old woman and that hovel!’ Tom exclaimed. ‘But I cannot think how! Liza watches the farm, she knows to a groat what we have made. My mother and she are hand in glove. I took a risk coming to see you at all.’
‘You always did dare anything to be with me,’ Alys said encouragingly.
Tom inspected a callus on the palm of his hand. He picked moodily at the hard skin with one stubby fingernail. ‘I know,’ he said sullenly. ‘I ran to you like a puppy when I was a child, and then I waited outside the abbey for you like a whipped dog.’
He shifted his gaze to Alys’ attentive face. ‘Now you are come out of the abbey everything is changed again,’ he said hesitantly. ‘The King’s Visitors said that you were not true nuns and the lord’s chaplain says Hugo did well to drive you out. The abbey is gone, you are a free woman again, Alys.’ He did not dare look at her but stared at the ground beneath his feet. ‘I never stopped loving you,’ he said. ‘Will you be my lover now?’
Alys shook her head with an instinctive revulsion. ‘No!’ she said. ‘My vows still stand. Don’t think of me like that, Tom. I belong to God.’
She paused, shot him a sideways glance. It was a difficult path she had to find. He had to be tempted to help her, but not tempted to sin. ‘I wish you would help me,’ she said carefully. ‘If you have money, or a horse I could borrow, I could find an abbey which might take me in. I thought you might know of somewhere, or can you find somewhere for me?’
Tom got to his feet. ‘I cannot,’ he said simply. ‘The farm is doing badly, we have only one working horse and no money. God knows I would do anything in the world for you, Alys, but I have neither money nor a horse for you.’
Alys’ pale face was serene though she was screaming inside. ‘Perhaps you will think of something,’ she said. ‘I am counting on you, Tom. Without your help, I don’t know what will become of me.’
‘You were the one who always did the thinking,’ he reminded her. ‘I just came to see you, running like a dog to the master’s whistle, like I always have done. The moment I heard the abbey was fired I thought of you. Then when I heard Morach had a new wench I thought she might be you. I came running to you. I had no plans.’
Alys rose too and stood at his shoulder, very close. She could smell the stale sweat on him, and the stink of old blood from butchering, sour milk from dairying. He smelled like a poor man, like an old man. She stepped back.
Tom put his hand on her arm and Alys froze, forcing herself not to shake him off. He stared into her face. Alys’ dark blue eyes, as candid as a child’s, met his gaze.
‘You don’t want me as a man,’ he said with a sudden insight. ‘You wanted to see me, and you talk sweet, but all you want is for me to save you from living with Morach, just as your old abbess saved you from her before.’
‘Why not?’ Alys demanded. ‘I cannot live there. Morach is deep in sin and dirt. I cannot stay there! I don’t want you as a man, my vows and my inclinations are not that way. But I need you desperately as a friend, Tom. Without your help I don’t know what I will do. We promised to be true to one another and to always be there when the other was in any need or trouble.’ She tightened the rack on his guilt. ‘I would have helped you if you had been in need, Tom. If I had a horse you would never walk.’
Tom shook his head slowly, as if to clear it. ‘I can’t think straight!’ he said. ‘Alys, tell me simply what you want me to do! You know I will do it. You know I always did what you wished.’
‘Find somewhere I can go,’ she said rapidly. ‘Morach hears nothing and I dare not go further than Castleton. But you can travel and ask people. Find me a nunnery which is safe, and then take me there. Lord Hugo cannot rage around the whole of the north. There must be other abbeys safe from his spite: Hartlepool, Durham or Whitby. Find where I can go, Tom, and take me.’
‘You cannot hope to find your abbess again?’ Tom asked. ‘I heard that all the nuns died.’
Alys shook her head. She could remember the heat in the smoke which had warned her that the flames were very close. She remembered the thin clear scream of pain she had heard as she dived through the garden door. ‘I will find a new order, and take a new name, and take my vows again,’ she said.
Tom blinked. ‘Are you allowed to do that?’ he asked. ‘Won’t they wonder who you are and where you come from?’
Alys slid a measuring sideways glance at him. ‘You would surely vouch for me, Tom. You could tell them I was your sister, could you not?’
Tom shook his head again. ‘No! I don’t know! I suppose I would. Alys, I don’t know what I can do and what I can’t do! My head’s whirling!’
Alys stretched out her soft white hand to him and touched him gently in the centre of his forehead, between his eyes, with all her power in her fingertips. She felt her fingers warm as her power flowed through them. For a dizzying moment she thought she could do anything with Tom, make him believe anything, do anything. Tom closed his eyes at her touch and swayed towards her as a rowan sways in a breath of wind.
‘Alys,’ he said, and his voice was filled with longing.
She took her hand away and he slowly opened his eyes.
‘I must go,’ she said. ‘Do you promise you will find somewhere for me?’
He nodded. ‘Aye,’ he said and hitched the plaid at his shoulder.
‘And take me there?’
‘I’ll do all I can,’ he said. ‘I will ask what abbeys are safe. And when I find somewhere, I’ll get you to it, cost me what it will.’
Alys raised her hand in farewell and watched him walk away. When he was too distant to hear she breathed out her will after him. ‘Do it, Tom,’ she said. ‘Do it at once. Find me a place. Get me back to an abbey. I cannot stay here.’
It grew colder. The winds got up for a week of gales in September and when they fell still the moors, the hills, and even the valley were shrouded in a thick mist which did not lift for days. Morach lay in bed later and later every morning.
‘I’ll get up when the fire’s lit and the porridge is hot,’ she said, watching Alys from the sleeping platform. ‘There’s little point in us both getting chilled to death.’
Alys kept her head down and said little. Every evening she would turn her hands to the light of the fire and inspect the palms for roughness. The skin had grown red and sore, and then blistered, and the blisters had broken and then healed. The plump heel of her thumb was toughened already, and at the base of each finger the skin was getting dry and hard. She rubbed the oil from sheep’s fleeces into the calluses, frowning in disgust at the rich, dirty smell, but nothing could stop her hands hardening and growing red and rough.
‘I am still fit to be a nun,’ she whispered to herself. She told her rosary before she went to bed and said the evening prayers of vespers, not knowing the time, far away from the discipline of the chapel bell. One evening she stumbled over the words and realized she was forgetting them already. Forgetting her prayers. ‘I’m still fit to be a nun,’ she said grimly before she slept. ‘Still fit to be a nun if I get there soon.’
She waited for news from Tom but none came. All she could hear in Bowes were confused stories of inspections and changes. The King’s Visitors went everywhere, demanding answers in silent cloisters, inspecting the treasures in orders sworn to poverty. No one knew how far the King would go. He had executed a bishop, he had beheaded Thomas More, the most revered man in England, he had burned monks at the stake. He claimed that the whole clergy was his, parish priests, vicars, bishops. And now he was looking to the abbeys, the nunneries, the monasteries. He wanted their power, he wanted their land, he could not survive without their wealth. It was not a time to attempt to enter an order with a false name and a burned gown.
‘I am cursed and followed by my curse,’ Alys said resentfully, as she hauled water for Morach and pulled turnips from the cold, sticky ground.
Alys felt the cold badly. After four years of sleeping in a stone building where huge fires of split trees were banked in to burn all night she found the mud floor of Morach’s cottage unbearably damp and chill. She started coughing at night, and her cough turned to racking sobs of homesickness. Worst of all were the dreams, when she dreamed she was safe in the abbey, leaning back against Mother Hildebrande’s knees and reading aloud by the light of clear wax candles. One night she dreamed that Mother Hildebrande had come to the cottage and called to Alys, scrabbling on her knees in the mud of the vegetable patch. ‘Of course I am not dead!’ Mother Hildebrande had said joyously. Alys felt her mother’s arms come around her and hold her close, smelled the clean, sweet scent of her starched linen. ‘Of course I am not dead!’ she said. ‘Come home with me!’
Alys clung to the rags of her pillow and closed her eyes tighter to try to stay asleep, to live inside the dream. But always the cold of the floor would wake her, or Morach’s irascible yell, and she would open her eyes and know again the ache of loss, and have to face again that she was far from her home and far from the woman who loved her, with no hope of seeing her mother or any of her sisters ever again.
It rained for weeks, solid torrential rain which wept down out of the skies unceasingly. Every morning Alys woke to find her pallet bed wet from the earth of the hovel and her robe and her cape damp with morning mist. Morach, grumbling, made a space for her on the sleeping platform and woke her once, twice, a night to clamber down the rickety ladder and keep the fire burning. Every day Alys went out downriver towards Bowes where the oak, elm and beech trees grew, looking for firewood. Every day she dragged home a fallen bough of heavy timber and hacked at it with Morach’s old axe. Fetching wood for the pile could take most of the hours of daylight, but also there was the pot to be emptied on the sloppy midden, water to be lugged up from the river, and turnips and carrots to be pulled in the vegetable patch. Once a week there was marketing to do in Bowes – a weary five-mile trudge there and back on the slippery riverside track or the exposed high road. Alys missed the well-cooked rich food of the nunnery and became paler and thinner. Her face grew gaunt and strained. When she went into Bowes one day a child shied a stone at the back of her gown and as she turned and cursed him he howled with fright at the blank, mad anger of her eyes.
With the cold weather came sickness. Every day another person came to tap on Morach’s door and ask her or Alys for a spell or a draught or a favour to keep away the flux or chills or fevers. There were four child-births in Bowes and Alys went with Morach and dragged bloody, undersized babies screaming into the world.
‘You have the hands for it,’ Morach said, looking at Alys’ slim long fingers. ‘And you practised on half a dozen paupers’ babies at that nunnery of yours. You can do all the childbirths. You have the skills and I’m getting too old to go out at midnight.’
Alys looked at her with silent hatred. Childbirth was the most dangerous task for a wise woman. Too much could go wrong, there were two lives at risk, people wanted both the mother and the child to survive and blamed the midwife for sickness and death. Morach feared failure, feared the hatred of the village. It was safer for her to send Alys alone.
The village was nervous, suspicious. A wise woman had been taken up at Boldron, not four miles away, taken and charged with plaguing her neighbour’s cattle. The evidence against her was dramatic. Neighbours swore they had seen her running down the river, her feet moving swiftly over the water but dry-shod. Someone had seen her whispering into the ear of a horse, and the horse had gone lame. A woman said that they had jostled each other for a flitch of bacon at Castleton market and that ever since her arm had ached and she feared it would rot and fall off. A man swore that he had ridden the wise woman down in the fog on Boldron Lane and she had cursed him and at once his horse shied and he had fallen. A little boy from the village attested that he had seen her flying and talking with the doves at the manor dovecot. All the country had evidence against her, the trial took days.
‘It’s all nonsense,’ Alys said, coming back from Bowes with the news. ‘Chances that could happen to anyone, a little child’s bad dream. It’s as if they had gone mad. They are listening to everything. Anyone can say anything against her.’
Morach looked grim. ‘It’s a bad fashion,’ she said, surly. Alys dumped a sack of goods on the floor beside the fire and threw three fatty rashers of bacon into the broth bubbling in the three-legged pot. ‘A bad fashion,’ Morach said again. ‘I’ve seen it come through before, like a plague. Sometimes this time of year, sometimes midsummer. Whenever people are restless and idle and spiteful.’
Alys looked at her fearfully. ‘Why do they do it?’ she asked.
‘Sport,’ Morach said. ‘It’s a dull time of year, autumn. People sit around fires and tell stories to frighten themselves. There’s colds and agues that nothing can cure. There’s winter and starvation around the corner. They need someone to blame. And they like to mass together, to shout and name names. They’re an animal then, an animal with a hundred mouths and a hundred beating hearts and no thought at all. Just appetites.’
‘What will they do to her?’ Alys asked.
Morach spat accurately into the fire. ‘They’ve started already,’ she said. ‘They’ve searched her for marks that she has been suckling the devil and they’ve burned the marks off with a poker. If the wounds show pus, that proves witchcraft. They’ll strap her hands and legs and throw her in the River Greta. If she comes up alive – that’s witchcraft. They might make her put her hand in the blacksmith’s fire and swear her innocence. They might tie her out on the moor all night to see if the devil rescues her. They’ll play with her until their lust is slaked.’
Alys handed Morach a bowl of broth and a trencher of bread. ‘And then?’
‘They’ll set up a stake on the village green and the priest will pray over her, and then someone – the blacksmith probably – will strangle her and then they’ll bury her at the crossroads,’ Morach said. ‘Then they’ll look around for another, and another after that. Until something else happens, a feast or a holy day, and they have different sport. It’s like a madness which catches a village. It’s a bad time for us. I’ll not go into Bowes until the Boldron wise woman is dead and forgotten.’
‘How shall we get flour?’ Alys asked. ‘And cheese?’
‘You can go,’ Morach said unfeelingly. ‘Or we can do without for a week or two.’
Alys shot a cold look at Morach. ‘We’ll do without,’ she said, though her stomach rumbled with hunger.
At the end of October it grew suddenly sharply cold with a hard white frost every morning. Alys gave up washing for the winter season. The river water was stormy and brown between stones which were white and slippery with ice in the morning. Every day she heaved a full bucket of water up the hill to the cottage for cooking; she had neither time nor energy to fetch water for washing. Alys’ growing hair was crawly with lice, her black nun’s robe rancid. She caught fleas between her fingers and cracked their little bodies between her finger and ragged thumbnail without shame. She had become inured to the smell, to the dirt. When she slopped out the cracked chamber-pot on to the midden she no longer had to turn away and struggle not to vomit. Morach’s muck and her own, the dirt from the hens and the scraps of waste piled high on the midden and Alys spread it and dug it into the vegetable patch, indifferent to the stench.
The clean white linen and the sweet smell of herbs in the still-room and flowers on the altar of the abbey were like a dream. Sometimes Alys thought that Morach’s lie was true and she had never been to the abbey, never known the nuns. But then she would wake in the night and her dirty face would be stiff and salty with tears and she would know that she had been dreaming of her mother again, and of the life that she had lost.
She could forget the pleasure of being clean, but her hungry, growing, young body reminded her daily of the food at the abbey. All autumn Alys and Morach ate thin vegetable broth, sometimes with a rasher of bacon boiled in it and the bacon fat floating in golden globules on the top. Sometimes they had a slice of cheese, always they had black rye bread with the thick, badly milled grains tough in the dough. Sometimes they had the innards of a newly slaughtered pig from a grateful farmer’s wife. Sometimes they had rabbit. Morach had a snare and Alys set a net for fish. Morach’s pair of hens, which lived underfoot in the house feeding miserably off scraps, laid well for a couple of days and Morach and Alys ate eggs. Most days they had a thin gruel for breakfast and then fasted all day until nightfall when they had broth and bread and perhaps a slice of cheese or meat.
Alys could remember the taste of lightly stewed carp from the abbey ponds. The fast days when they ate salmon and trout or sea fish brought specially for them from the coast. The smell of roast beef with thick fluffy puddings, the warm, nourishing porridge in the early morning after prayers with a blob of abbey honey in the middle and cream as yellow as butter to pour over the top, hot ale at bedtime, the feast-day treats of marchpane, roasted almonds, sugared fruit. She craved for the heavy, warm sweetness of hippocras wine after a feast, venison in port-wine gravy, jugged hare, vegetables roasted in butter, the tang of fresh cherries. Sometimes Morach kicked her awake in the night and said with a sleepy chuckle: ‘You’re moaning, Alys, you’re dreaming of food again. Practise mortifying your flesh, my little angel!’ And Alys would find her mouth running wet with saliva at her dreams of dinners in the quiet refectory while a nun read aloud to them, and always at the head of the table was Mother Hildebrande, her arms outstretched, blessing the food and giving thanks for the easy richness of their lives, and sometimes glancing down the table to Alys to make sure that the little girl had plenty. ‘Plenty,’ Alys said longingly.
At the end of October there was a plague of sickness in Bowes with half a dozen children and some adults vomiting and choking on their vomit. Mothers walked the few miles out to Morach’s cottage every day with a gift, a round yellow cheese, or even a penny. Morach burned fennel root over the little fire, set it to dry and then ground it into powder and gave Alys a sheet of good paper, a pen and ink.
‘Write a prayer,’ she said. ‘Any one of the good prayers in Latin.’
Alys’ fingers welcomed the touch of a quill. She held it awkwardly in her swollen, callused hands like the key to a kingdom she had lost.
‘Write it! Write it!’ Morach said impatiently. ‘A good prayer against sickness.’
Very carefully Alys dipped her pen and wrote the simple words of the Lord’s Prayer, her lips moving in time to the cadence of the Latin. It was the first prayer Mother Hildebrande had ever taught her.
Morach watched inquisitively. ‘Is it done?’ she asked, and when Alys nodded, silenced by the tightness of her throat, Morach took the paper and tore it into half a dozen little squares, tipped the dusty powder into it and twisted the paper to keep the powder safe.
‘What are you doing?’ Alys demanded.
‘Magic,’ Morach replied ironically. ‘This is going to keep us fat through the winter.’
She was right. The people in Bowes and the farmers all around bought the black powder wrapped in the special paper for a penny a twist. Morach bought more paper and set Alys to writing again. Alys knew there could be no sin in writing the Lord’s Prayer but felt uneasy when Morach tore the smooth vellum into pieces.
‘Why do you do it?’ Alys asked curiously one day, watching Morach grind the root in a mortar nursed on her lap as she sat by the fire on her stool.
Morach smiled at her. ‘The powder is strong against stomach sickness,’ she said. ‘But it is the spell that you write that gives it the power.’
‘It’s a prayer,’ Alys said contemptuously. ‘I don’t make spells and I would not sell burned fennel and a line of prayer for a penny a twist.’
‘It makes people well,’ Morach said. ‘They take it and they say the spell when the vomiting hits them. Then the attack passes off.’
‘How can it?’ Alys asked impatiently. ‘Why should a torn piece of prayer cure them?’
Morach laughed. ‘Listen to the running nun!’ she exclaimed to the fire. ‘Listen to the girl who worked in the herb garden and the still-room and the nuns’ infirmary and yet denies the power of plants! Denies the power of prayer! It cures them, my wench, because there is potency in it. And in order to say the prayer they have to draw breath. It steadies them. I order that the prayer has to be said to the sky so they have to open a window and breathe clean air. All of those that have died from the vomiting are those that were weak and sickly and in a panic of fear in dirty rooms. The spell works because it’s powerful. And it helps if they believe it.’
Alys crossed herself in a small gesture between her breasts. Morach would have mocked if she had seen.
‘And if they can pay for a spell then they can pay for good food and clean water,’ Morach said fairly. ‘The chances are that they are stronger before the sickness takes them. The rich are always blessed.’
‘What if it fails?’ Alys asked.
Morach’s face hardened. ‘You had better pray to your Lady that it never fails,’ she said. ‘If it fails then I can say that they have been bewitched by another power, or the spell has failed them because they did not do it right. If it fails I go at once to the heirs and try to buy their friendship. But if they are vengeful and if their cattle die too, then you and I stay away from Bowes, keep our heads down, and keep out of sight until the body is buried and people have forgot.’
‘It’s wrong,’ Alys said positively. ‘At the abbey we followed old books, we knew the herbs we grew, we made them into tinctures and we drank them from measured glasses. This is not herbalism but nonsense. Lies dressed up in dog Latin to frighten children!’
‘Nonsense is it?’ Morach demanded, her quick anger aroused. ‘There are people in this village who will swear I can make a woman miscarry by winking at her! There are people in this village who think I can kill a healthy beast by snapping my fingers over its water pail. There are people in this village who think the devil speaks to me in my dreams and I have all his powers at my command!’
‘Aren’t you afraid?’ Alys asked.
Morach laughed, her voice harsh and wild. ‘Afraid?’ she said. ‘Who is not afraid? But I am more afraid of starving this winter, or dying of cold because we have no firewood. Ever since my land was stolen from me I have had no choice. Ever since my land was taken from me I have been afraid. I am a wise woman – of course I am afraid!’
She put the pestle and mortar to one side and then spooned the dust into one scrap of paper and then another, her hands steady.
‘Besides,’ she said slyly, ‘I am less afraid than I was. Much much less afraid than I was.’
‘Are you?’ Alys asked, recognizing the note of torment in Morach’s voice.
‘Oh, yes,’ Morach said gleefully. ‘If they seek for a witch in Bowes now, who do you think they will take first? A little old woman with a few herbs in her purse who has been there for years and never done great harm – or a girl as lovely as sin who will speak with no one, nor court with any man. A girl who is neither maid nor woman, saint nor sinner. A girl who is seen in Bowes very seldom, but always with her cloak around her shoulders and a shawl over her head. A girl who talks to no one, and has no young women friends. A girl who avoids men, who keeps her eyes down when one crosses her path. It is you who should be afraid, Alys. It is you who they see as a strange woman, as someone out of the ordinary. So it is you that they think has the skill to cure the vomiting. It will be you they praise or blame. It should be you who is afraid!’
‘They cannot think these are spells!’ Alys exclaimed. ‘I told you from the start they were prayers! You asked me to write a prayer and I did! They cannot think that I do magic!’
‘Go on!’ Morach gestured to her impatiently. ‘Write some more! Write some more! I need it to wrap these doses. It is your writing, Alys, that makes the powder work. Ever since you came back, the fennel has cured the vomiting. They say you are the cunning woman and I am your servant. They say you have come from the devil. They say that the singed corner of your robe was from the fires of hell – and that you are the bride of the devil.’
‘Who says?’ Alys demanded stoutly though her voice shook a little. ‘I don’t believe anyone says anything.’
‘Liza – Tom’s wife,’ Morach said triumphantly. ‘She says you’ve tampered with Tom’s sleep. He names you in his sleep – a sure sign of hexing.’
Alys laughed bitterly. ‘Oh aye,’ she said tartly. ‘He is calling me to rescue him from her sharp tongue.’
‘Curse her then?’ Morach’s face was bright in the shadowy cottage. ‘Try it! Curse her to death and make Tom a widower, rich with her dowry, so that he can return to you and you can use your roughened hands on his land where you will see the benefit. She’s a useless, spiteful woman, no one’s friend. No one would miss her.’
‘Don’t,’ Alys said quickly. ‘Don’t speak of such things. You know I would not do it and I don’t have the power.’
‘You do have the power,’ Morach insisted. ‘You know it and I know it! You ran from your power and you hoped your God would keep you safe if you forgot your skills. But here you are, back with me, and it is as if you were never away. There are no safe nunneries left, Alys! There is nowhere for you to go! You will stay with me forever unless you go to a man. Why not Tom? You liked him well enough when you were young and he has never loved another woman. You could kill Liza. You should kill Liza. I can tell you the ways to do it. Hundreds of ways. And then you can live soft in Tom’s farmhouse, and wash every day as you long to do, and even say your prayers, and think of how we would eat! A little spell and a great difference. Do it, Alys!’
‘I cannot!’ Alys said desperately. ‘I cannot. And even if I could, I would not do it. I have no power but my learning from the abbey. I will not dabble in your spells. They mean nothing, you know nothing. I shall never use your skills.’
Morach shrugged her shoulders and tied the twists of powder with a thread. ‘I think you will,’ she said in an undertone. ‘And I think you feel your power in your fingertips, and taste it on your tongue. Don’t you, my Alys? When you are alone on the moor and the wind is blowing softly, don’t you know you can call it? Bid it go where you will? Blow health or sickness? Wealth or poverty? When you were on your knees in the abbey, couldn’t you feel the power around you and in you? I can feel the power in me – aye, and I can feel it in you too. The old abbess saw it clearly enough. She wanted it for her God! Well, now your power is freed again and you can use it where you will.’
Alys shook her head. ‘No,’ she said determinedly. ‘I feel nothing. I know nothing. I have no power.’
‘Look at the fire,’ Morach said instantly. ‘Look at the fire.’
Alys looked towards it, the banks of badly cut peat glowing orange, and the burning log lying on the embers.
‘Turn it blue,’ Morach whispered.
Alys felt the thought of blue flames in her mind, paused for a moment with the picture of blue flames before her inner eye. The flames bobbed, flickered, and then they burned a steady bright periwinkle blue. The embers glowed like a summer sky, the ashes were a deep dark violet.
Morach laughed delightedly, Alys snapped her gaze away from the fire and the flame spurted and flared orange again.
Alys crossed herself hastily. ‘Stop it, Morach,’ she said irritably. ‘Stupid tricks for frightening children. As if I would be fooled by them after a childhood with you and your cheating arts.’
Morach shook her head. ‘I touched nothing,’ she said easily. ‘It was your gaze, and your mind, and your power. And you can run and run from it as fast as you ran from your holy life. But the two of them will keep pace with you forever, Alys. In the end you will have to choose.’
‘I am a nun,’ Alys said through her teeth. ‘There will be no magic and dark skills for me. I do not want them. I do not want you. And I do not want Tom. Hear me now, Morach, as soon as I can leave here, I will go. I swear to you that if I could leave this very night, I would be gone. I want none of it. None of it. If I could, I swear that I would ride away from this place now and never come back.’
‘Hush!’ Morach said suddenly. Alys froze into silence and the two women strained their ears to listen.
‘Someone outside the door,’ Morach hissed. ‘What can you hear?’
‘A horse,’ Alys whispered. ‘No, two horses.’
In a quick gesture Morach tipped the pot of water on to the embers of the turf fire. The glow died at once, the room filled with thick smoke. Alys clapped her hand over her mouth so as not to choke.
The banging on the little wooden door was like thunder. The two women shrank together, their eyes fixed on the entrance as if the door would splinter and fall apart. Someone was hammering on it with a sword hilt.
‘I’ll open it,’ Morach said. In the darkness her face was as white as a drowned woman’s. ‘You get yourself upstairs and hide under my pallet. If it’s the witch-taker it’ll likely be for me, you might escape. No one will listen to Tom’s wife without others to speak against you; and no one has died this week. Go on, wench, it’s the only chance I can give you.’
Alys did not hesitate, she fled towards the ladder and upwards like a shadow.
‘I’m coming,’ Morach said in a harsh grumbling voice. ‘Leave an old woman’s door on the hinge, can’t you?’
She checked that Alys was hidden above, and then swung the wooden latch to open the door.
The two tall men on horseback filled the skyline like giants. Around their shoulders the stars shone and the dark streams of cloud raced past their looming heads.
‘We want the young wise woman,’ the man said. His face was muffled against the cold, he was armed only with a cudgel and a short stabbing dagger. ‘The new young wise woman. Get her.’
‘I’m not rightly sure …’ Morach started, her voice a plaintive whine. ‘She is not …’
The man reached down and grabbed the shawl at Morach’s throat and lifted her up till her face was near his. The horse shifted uneasily and Morach gurgled and choked, her feet kicking.
‘Lord Hugh at the castle orders it,’ he said. ‘He is ill. He wants the young wise woman and the spell against the vomiting. Get her, and no harm will come of it. He will pay you. If you hide her I shall burn this stinking shack around your ears with the door nailed up, and you inside.’
He dropped Morach back on her feet, she stumbled back against the door frame, and turned back towards the cottage, half closing the door.
Alys was looking down from the sleeping platform, her eyes huge in her white face. ‘I cannot …’ she said.
Morach snatched the shawl from her own shoulders, spread it on the hearth and heaped into it handfuls of herbs, a black-backed prayer-book, four of the twists of powder, a shiny lump of quartz tied up with a long scrap of ribbon, and the pestle and mortar.
‘You’ll have to try or they’ll kill us both,’ she said bleakly. ‘It’s a chance, and a good chance. Others have been cured of the sickness. You’ll have to take the gamble.’
‘I could run,’ Alys said. ‘I could hide on the moor for the night.’
‘And leave me? I’d be dead by dawn,’ Morach said. ‘You heard him. He’ll burn me alive.’
‘They don’t want you,’ Alys said urgently. ‘They would not do that. You could tell them I’m spending the night in Bowes. I could hide by the river, in one of the caves, while they’re gone to look for me.’
Morach looked at her hard. ‘You’ve a bitter taste,’ she said scowling. ‘For all your lovely face you’ve a bitter taste, Alys. You’d run, wouldn’t you? And leave me to face them. You’d rather I died than you took a chance.’
Alys opened her mouth to deny it but Morach thrust the shawl into her hands before she could speak.
‘You would gamble with my death, but I will not,’ Morach said harshly, pushing her towards the door. ‘Out you go, my girl, I’ll come to the castle when I can, to get news of you. See what you can do. They grow herbs there, and flowers. You may be able to use your nun’s arts as well as mine.’
Alys hefted the bundle. Her whole face was trembling. ‘I cannot!’ she said. ‘I have no skills, I know nothing! I grew a few herbs, I did as I was ordered at the abbey. And your arts are lies and nonsense.’
Morach laughed bitterly. The man outside hammered on the door again. ‘Come, wench!’ he said. ‘Or I will smoke you out!’
‘Take my lies and nonsense, and your own ignorance, and use it to save your skin,’ Morach said. She had to push Alys towards the door. ‘Hex him!’ she hissed, as she got the girl over the threshold. ‘You have the power, I can feel it in you. You turned the flame blue with your thought. Take your powers and use them now, for your own sake! Hex the old lord into health, Alys, or you and I are dead women.’
Alys gave a little moan of terror and then the man on the horse leaned down and gripped her under both arms and hauled her up before him.
‘Come!’ he said to his companion and they wheeled their horses around, the hooves tearing up the vegetable patch. Then they were gone into the darkness, and the wind whipped away the noise of the gallop.
Morach waited a while at the cottage doorway, ignoring the cold and the smoke from the doused fire swirling thickly behind her, listening to the silence now that Alys had gone.
‘She has power,’ she said to the night sky, watching the clouds unravelling past the half-moon. ‘She swore that she would go, and in that moment the horses came for her and she was gone. What will she wish for next? What will she wish for next?’
Three (#ulink_22a19b5a-5680-5f9c-92c9-60d0e441e906)
Alys had never been on a galloping horse and she clung to the pommel of the saddle before her, thrown and jolted by the horse’s great rolling strides. The wind rushed into her face and the hard grip of the man behind her was that of a jailer. When she looked down she could see the heaving shoulders of the great horse, when she looked forward she saw its tossing mane. They went over the little stone bridge from the moorland road to Castleton with sparks flying upwards from the horses’ hooves, and clattered up the cobbled street between the dozen stone-built houses at the same breakneck speed. Not a light showed at any of the shuttered windows, even the smaller houses, set back from the main street on earth roads, and the little shanties behind them on waste ground were dark and silent.
Alys was so shaken that she had no breath to cry out, even when the horse wheeled around to the left and thundered up the drawbridge into the great black maw of the castle gateway. There was a brief challenge from two soldiers, invisible in the darkness of the doorway, and a gruff response from the rider and then they were out into the moonlit castle grounds. Alys had a confused impression of a jumble of stables and farm buildings on her right, the round tower of the guardroom on her left, the smell of pigs, and then they crossed a second drawbridge over a deep stagnant moat, with the noise of the hooves rumbling like thunder on the wooden bridge, and plunged into the darkness of another gateway.
The horses halted as two more soldiers stepped forward with a quick word of challenge and stared at the riders and Alys, before waving them through into a garden. Alys could see vegetable-beds and herb-beds and the bare-branched outline of apple trees; but before them, squat and powerful against the night sky, was a long two-storey building with a pair of great double doors set plumb in the centre. Alys could hear the noise of many people shouting and laughing inside. The door opened and a man stepped out to urinate carelessly against the wall; bright torchlight spilled out into the yard and she could smell hot roasted meats. They rode the length of the building, Alys saw the glow of a bakehouse fire in a little round hive of a building set apart from the rest on their right, and then before them were two brooding towers, built with grey stones as thick as boulders, showing no lights.
‘Where are we?’ Alys gasped, clinging to the man’s hands as he thrust her down from the saddle.
He nodded to the tower which adjoined the long building. ‘Lord Hugh’s tower,’ he said briefly. He looked over her head and shouted. An answering cry came from inside the tower and Alys heard a bolt sliding easily back.
‘And what’s that tower?’ she asked urgently. She pointed behind them to the opposing tower, smaller and more squat, set into the high exterior castle wall, with no windows at all at the base and a flight of stone steps running up the outside to the first storey.
‘Pray you never know!’ the man said grimly. ‘That’s the prison tower. The first floor is the guardroom, and down below are the cells. They have the rack there, and thumbscrews, a press and bridle. Pray you never see them, wench! You come out more talkative – but taller! Much taller! Thinner! And sometimes toothless!Cheaper than the toothdrawer at any price!’ He laughed harshly. ‘Here!’ He called a soldier who stepped out of the shadows. ‘Here is the wise woman from Bowes. Take her and her bundle to Lord Hugh at once. Let no one tamper with her. My lord’s orders!’
He thrust Alys towards the soldier and he grabbed her and marched her up the flight of stone steps to the arched doorway. The door, as thick as a tree trunk, stood open. Inside, a torch flickered, staining the wall behind it with a stripe of black soot. The castle breathed coldness, sweated damp. Alys drew her shawl over her rough cropped head with a shudder. It was colder even than Morach’s draughty cottage. Here the castle walls held the wind out, but no sun ever shone. Alys crossed herself beneath her shawl. She had a premonition that she was walking towards mortal danger. The dark corridor before her – lit at the corners with smoking torches – was like her worst nightmares of the nunnery: a smell of smoke, a crackle of flames, and a long, long corridor with no way out.
‘Come,’ the man said grimly and took Alys’ arm in a hard grip. She trailed behind him, up a staircase which circled round and around inside the body of the tower, until he said, ‘Here now,’ and knocked, three short knocks and two long, on a massive wooden door. It swung open. Alys blinked. It was bright inside, half a dozen men were lounging on benches at a long table, the remains of their supper spread before them, two big hunting dogs growling over bones in the corner. The air was hot with rancid smoke and the smell of sweat.
‘A wench!’ said one. ‘That’s kindly of you!’
Alys shrank back behind the soldier who still held her. He shook his head. ‘Nay,’ he said. ‘It’s the wise woman from Bowes, come to see my lord. Is he well?’
A young man at the far end of the room beckoned them through. ‘No better,’ he said in an undertone. ‘He wants to see her at once.’
He pulled back a tapestry on the wall behind him and swung open a narrow arched door. The soldier released Alys and thrust her bundle into her hands. She hesitated.
‘Go on,’ the young man said.
She paused again. The soldier behind her put his hand in the small of her back and pushed her forward. Alys, caught off balance, stumbled into the room and past the watching men. Before her, through the door, was a flight of shallow stone steps lit by a single guttering torch. There was a small wooden door at the head of the flight of stairs. As she climbed up, it slowly opened.
The room was dark, lit only by firelight and one pale wax candle standing on a chest by a small high bed. At the head of the bed stood a tiny man, no taller than a child. His dark eyes were on Alys, and his hand smoothed the pillow.
On the pillow was a lean face engraved by sickness and suffering, the skin as yellow as birch leaves in autumn. But the eyes, when the heavy lids flew open and stared at Alys, were as bright and black as an old peregrine falcon.
‘You the wise woman?’ he asked.
‘I have a very little skill,’ Alys said. ‘And very little learning. You should send for someone learned, an apothecary or even a barber. You should have a physician.’
‘They would cup me till I died,’ the sick man said slowly. ‘They have cupped me till I am near dead already. Before I threw them out they said they could do no more. They left me for dead, girl! But I won’t die. I can’t die yet. My plans are not yet done. You can save me, can’t you?’
‘I’ll try,’ Alys said, pressing her lips on a denial. She turned to the fireplace and laid down Morach’s shawl. By the light of the fire she untied the knot and spread out the cloth and arranged the things. The little man came over and squatted down beside her. His head came no higher than her shoulder.
‘Do you use the black arts, mistress?’ he asked in a soft undertone.
‘No!’ Alys said instantly. ‘I have a very little skill with herbs – just what my mistress has taught me. You should have sent for her.’
The dwarf shook his head. ‘In all Bowes they speak of the new young wise woman who came from nowhere and lives with the old widow Morach by the river. He’ll have no truck with the black arts,’ he said, nodding to the still figure in the bed.
Alys nodded. She straightened the black-bound prayer-book, put the herbs and the pestle and mortar to her right.
‘What’s that?’ the dwarf said, pointing to the stone and ribbon.
‘It’s a crystal,’ Alys said.
At once the little man crossed himself and bit the tip of his thumb. ‘To see into the future?’ he demanded. ‘That’s black arts!’
‘No,’ Alys said. ‘To find the source of the illness. Like dowsing for water. Divining for water is not black arts, any child can do it.’
‘Aye.’ The man nodded, conceding the point. ‘Aye, that’s true.’
‘Have done chattering!’ came the sudden command from the bed. ‘Come and cure me, wise woman.’
Alys got to her feet, holding the frayed ribbon of the crystal between her finger and thumb so that it hung down like a pendulum. As she moved, the shawl covering her head slid back. The dwarf exclaimed at the stubble of her regrowing hair.
‘What have you done to your head?’ he demanded. Then his face grew suddenly sly. ‘Was it shaved, my pretty wench? Are you a runaway nun, fled from a fat abbey where the old women grow rich and talk treason?’
‘No,’ Alys said quickly. From the courtyard below the window a cock crowed briefly into the darkness and then settled to sleep again. ‘I was sick with a fever in Penrith and they shaved my head,’ she said. ‘I am not a nun, I don’t know what you mean about treason. I am just a simple girl.’
The dwarf nodded with a disbelieving smile, then he skipped to his place at the head of the bed and stroked the pillow again.
Alys drew closer. ‘In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,’ she muttered under her breath. The stone on the ribbon swung of its own accord in a lazy clockwise arc. ‘This is God’s work,’ Alys said. The stone swung a little wider, a little faster. Alys breathed a little easier. She had never used a pendulum at the abbey, the nuns frowned on it as a supernatural force. The stone was Morach’s. By blessing it Alys hoped to stay inside the misty border which separated God’s work from that of the devil. But with the old lord glaring at her, and the dwarf’s slight malicious smile, she felt in equal danger of burning for heresy as being taken as a witch and strangled.
She put her hand, which shook only slightly, on the old lord’s forehead.
‘His sickness is here,’ she said, as she had seen Morach do.
The dwarf hissed as the crystal broke its pattern of circular swing and moved instead back and forth.
‘What does it mean?’ he asked.
‘The sickness is not in his head,’ she replied softly.
‘I didn’t see your fingers move the crystal?’
‘Have done with your chatter,’ the old lord flared at the dwarf. ‘Let the wench do her work.’
Alys drew back the rich rugs covering the old man. She saw at once how his skin shivered at the touch of the air, yet the room was warm. Tentatively she put the back of her hand against his withered cheek. He was burning up.
She moved her hand cautiously to rest on his flat belly. She whispered: ‘His sickness is here?’ and at once she felt a change in the movement of the stone. It circled strongly, round and round, and Alys nodded at the lord with renewed confidence.
‘You have taken a fever in your belly,’ she said. ‘Have you eaten or fasted?’
‘Eaten,’ the old man said. ‘They force food on me and then they cup me of the goodness.’
Alys nodded. ‘You are to eat what you please,’ she said. ‘Little things that tempt you. But you must drink spring water. As much as you can bear. Half a pint every half hour today and tomorrow. And it must be spring water, not from the well in the courtyard. And not from the well in town. Send someone to fetch you spring water from the moor.’
The old man nodded. ‘When you are cold, cover yourself up and order more rugs,’ Alys said. ‘And when you are hot have them taken off you. You need to be as you please, and then your fever will break.’
She turned away from the bedside to her shawl spread before the fire. She hesitated a moment at the twists of burned fennel and then she shrugged. She did not think they would do any good, but equally they did no harm.
‘Take one of these, before you sleep every night,’ she said. ‘Have you vomited much?’
He nodded.
‘When you feel about to vomit then you must order your window opened.’ There was a muted gasp of horror from the little man at the head of the bed. ‘And read the writing aloud.’
‘The night air is dangerous,’ the dwarf said firmly. ‘And what is the writing? Is it a spell?’
‘The air will stop him being sick,’ Alys said calmly, as if she were certain of what she was doing. ‘And it is not a spell, it is a prayer.’
The man in the bed chuckled weakly. ‘You are a philosopher, wench!’ he said. ‘Not a spell but a prayer! You can be hanged for one thing as well as the other in these days.’
‘It’s the Lord’s Prayer,’ Alys said quickly, the joke was too dangerous in this dark room where they watched for witchcraft and yet wanted a miracle to cure an old man.
‘And for your fever I shall grind you some powder to take in your drink,’ she said. She reached for the little dried berries of deadly nightshade that Morach had put in the bundle. She took just one and ground it in the mortar.
‘Here,’ she said, taking a pinch of the powder. ‘Take this now. And you will need more later. I will leave some for you this night, and I will come again in the morning.’
‘You stay,’ the old man said softly.
Alys hesitated.
‘You stay. David, get a pallet for her. She’s to sleep here, eat here. She’s to see no one. I won’t have gossip.’
The dwarf nodded and slid from the room; the curtain over the door barely swayed at his passing.
‘I have to go home, my lord,’ Alys said breathlessly. ‘My kinswoman will be looking for me. I could come back again, as early as you like, tomorrow.’
‘You stay,’ he said again. His black eyes scanned her from head to foot. ‘I’ll tell you, lass, there are those who would buy you to poison me within these walls this night. There are those who would take you up for a cheat if you fail to cure me. There are men out there who would use you and fling you in the moat when they had their fill of you for the sake of your young body. You are safest, if I live, with me. You stay.’
Alys bowed her head and retied Morach’s shawl around the goods.
For the next five days Alys lived in a little chamber off the old lord’s room. She saw no one but Lord Hugh and the dwarf. Her food was brought to her by the dwarf; one day she caught him tasting it, and then he tasted the food for Lord Hugh. She looked at him with a question in her face and he sneered and said: ‘Do you think you are the only herbalist in the country, wench? There are many poisons to be had. And there are many who would profit from my lord’s death.’
‘He won’t die this time,’ Alys said. She spoke with real confidence. ‘He’s on the mend.’
Every day he was eating more, he was sitting up in bed, he was speaking to the dwarf and to Alys in a voice loud and clear like a tolling bell. On the sixth day he said he would take his midday dinner in the hall with his people.
‘Then I shall take my leave of you,’ Alys said when he was dressed with a black hat on his long white hair, a fur-lined robe over his thick padded doublet, and with embroidered slippers on his feet. ‘Farewell, my lord, I am glad to have been of service to you.’
He gleamed at her. ‘You have not finished your service,’ he said. ‘I have not done with you yet, wench. You will go back to your home when I say, and not before.’
Alys bowed her head and said nothing. When she looked up her eyes were wet.
‘What is it?’ he demanded. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘It’s my kinswoman,’ Alys said softly. ‘Morach of Bowes Moor. I had a message that she is ill with a fever in the belly. She is all the family I have in the world …’
She snatched a glance at him and saw he was nodding sympathetically.
‘If I could go home …’ she half whispered.
Lord Hugh snapped his thin white fingers. The dwarf came to his side and bent low. There was a low rapid exchange in a language Alys did not know. Then Lord Hugh looked at her with a wide grin.
‘When did your kinswoman fall ill?’ he asked.
‘Yesterday …’ Alys said.
‘You lie,’ Lord Hugh said benignly. ‘She came here this morning and asked for you at the gatehouse and left a message with David, that she was well, and that she would come next week with more herbs for you.’
Alys flushed scarlet and said nothing.
‘Come on,’ Lord Hugh said. ‘We are going to dinner.’
Halfway to the door he paused again. ‘She looks a drab!’ he exclaimed to David. Alys’ old habit, singed by the fire and trailed in the mud, was tied around her waist with a shawl. She had another grey shawl over her head tied under her chin.
‘Get her a gown, one of Meg’s old gowns,’ Lord Hugh tossed over his shoulder. ‘She can have it as a gift. And take that damned shawl off her head!’
The dwarf waved Alys to wait and flung open a chest in the corner of the room. ‘Meg was his last whore,’ he said. ‘She had a pretty gown of red. She died of the pox two years ago. We put her clothes in here.’
‘I can’t wear her clothes!’ Alys exclaimed in revulsion. ‘I can’t wear a red gown!’
The dwarf pulled a cherry-red gown from the chest, found the shoulders and shook it out before Alys.
Alys gazed at the colour as if she were drinking it in. ‘Oh!’ she said longingly and stepped forward. The cloth was woven of soft fine wool, warm and silky to the touch. It was trimmed at the neck, the puffed sleeves and the hem with dark red ribbon of silk. Meg had been a proud woman, ready to defy the laws against commoners wearing colour. There was even a silver cord to tie around the waist.
‘I’ve never seen cloth so fine!’ Alys said, awed. ‘The colour of it! And the feel of it!’
‘It comes with an embroidered stomacher,’ the dwarf said, tossing Alys the gown and turning back to the chest. ‘And an overskirt to match.’ He rummaged in the chest and dragged out the stomacher with long flowing sleeves and fine silver laces up the back, and a rich red skirt embroidered with silver.
‘Get it on,’ he said impatiently. ‘We must be in the hall before my lord comes in.’
Alys checked her movement to take the stomacher and skirt from him. ‘I cannot wear a whore’s gown,’ she said. ‘Besides, I might take the pox.’
The dwarf gasped and then choked with malicious laughter. ‘Not such a wise woman after all!’ he said, tears oozing from his eyes. ‘Take the pox from a gown! That’s the finest excuse I ever heard.’ Abruptly he flung the stomacher and skirt at her and Alys caught them. ‘Put it on,’ he said, suddenly surly.
Alys hesitated still. In her head she could hear a cry in a voice, her own voice, calling for Mother Hildebrande to come and take her away. To save her from this shame just as she had rescued Alys, all those years ago, from Morach. She shook her head. The loss of the abbey and the loss of her mother were like a nightmare which cast its shadow over every moment of her day. A long shadow of loneliness and danger. There was no mother loving her and protecting her, not any more.
‘I cannot wear a whore’s gown,’ she said in a little whisper.
‘Wear it!’ the dwarf growled. ‘It’s that or a shroud, Missy. I don’t jest with you. The old lord has his way without question. I’ll stab you as I stand here and go to dinner alone if you wish. It’s your choice.’
Alys untied her belt and slid her robe to the floor. The dwarf stared at her as if appraising a mare for breeding. His eyes slid over the swell of her breasts under her coarse woven shift, assessed her narrow waist and her smooth young muscled flanks. His lips formed into a soundless whistle.
‘The old lord always had an eye for a wench,’ he said softly to himself. ‘Looks like he saved the pick of the crop for his deathbed!’
Alys flung the gown over her head and pulled it down, thrust her arms through the soft woven sleeves. They were padded on the inside with white silk and slashed so the fine white fabric showed through, caught at each wrist with a little cuff and button made of horn. She turned her back to David and he laced the scarlet laces at the back of the gown and tied them in silence. She turned back and eyed the stomacher and overskirt.
‘I don’t know how this goes,’ she confessed.
David looked at her curiously. ‘I thought maids dreamed of nothing else,’ he said. ‘The overskirt goes on next and ties behind.’ He held it out for her and Alys stepped into it, turned under his hands and let him tie the skirt at her waist. It swept from her waist to the floor with a rustle, leaving an open slit at the front for the plain red to show. Alys smoothed her hands down the skirt; the silver embroidery was cold and scratchy under her palms. The skirt was too long – Meg, the old lord’s whore, had been a tall woman.
‘Now this,’ David said. ‘Make haste, girl!’ He held out the stomacher and sleeves towards her and Alys thrust her arms through the wide-cut hanging sleeves and turned her back again for David to lace her from behind.
‘Damned lady’s-maiding,’ he grumbled, as he pulled the silver laces tight and threaded them through the holes. He tied a firm bow at the base of the stomacher and stuffed the bow out of sight under the boned waist. Alys turned to face him.
‘Pull it down at the front,’ he ordered. ‘And pull the sleeves down.’
Alys pulled the stomacher down at her waist. It was too long for her as well, stopping at the swell of her hips and with the sharply pointed V at the front extending too low. It held her stiffly so that her breasts were flattened into one smooth line from the rich swirl of the skirt to the square neck of the gown which showed at the top of the stomacher. She tugged the oversleeves on both sides. They were long and sweeping, folded back to show the undersleeves like rich slashed pouches beneath them. David nodded.
‘And the girdle goes loosely over the top,’ he said. Alys fastened the silver girdle and straightened it so the long end fell down in front, enhancing the narrowness of her waist and the pointed line of the bodice, subtly suggesting the desirable triangle at the top of her thighs. She ran her hand over her cropped head where her growing hair was golden and stubbly.
David nodded. ‘A sweeter honey even than Meg,’ he said to himself. ‘Who will stick his tongue in this pot?’
Alys ignored him. ‘Is there nothing to hide my head?’
The dwarf rummaged in the chest for a few moments. ‘Nothing you could wear without hair to pin it on,’ he said. ‘You’d best go bareheaded.’
Alys grimaced. ‘I suppose no one will look at me,’ she said.
‘They’ll look at nothing else!’ he said with malicious satisfaction. ‘Half of them think you’re a holy healer, and the other half think you’re his whore. And the young lord …’ his voice trailed off.
‘What?’ asked Alys. ‘What of the young lord?’
‘He’s got a keen eye for a pretty wench,’ the dwarf said simply. ‘And besides, he’s got a score to settle with you. If the old lord had died he could have taken himself to the King’s court, put aside that shrew he wed, and made his way in the great world. He’ll not thank you for that.’
‘The shrew? His wife?’ Alys asked.
The dwarf motioned her to follow him through the door and then led her down the twisting stone staircase. As she passed an arrow-slit window Alys breathed in the cold wind which blew from the wintry moorland to the west of them, over the River Tees. It smelled of her home, of her childhood. For a moment she even longed for the little hovel by the river with the moor quiet all around it.
The dwarf grinned. ‘She complains of him to the old lord,’ he said. ‘I’ve been there, I’ve heard her. Lord Hugo won’t come to her bed, or he won’t use her kindly. One time she angered him so that he beat her favourite waiting-woman before her. Too proud to touch his lady, but a temper on him that would scare the devil! The old lord used to keep Hugo on a short leash but they’re both weary of the shrew. He used to watch that the young lord didn’t abuse her over-much, and kept her supplied with trinkets and perfumes, little sweeteners for her vinegar. But she has called down a storm on them both too often, they both long to be rid of her.’
‘They can’t do that, can they?’ Alys asked, frowning.
David shrugged. ‘Who knows what can be done now?’ he asked. ‘The Church is ruled by the King now, not the vicar of Rome. The King does as he pleases with his women. Why not the young lord? The rightful wife stays barren, but if they dismiss her they lose her entailed lands and her dowry. And in all of Hugo’s roistering he’s never got a wench with child. So the shrew stays here until they can think of a way to be rid of her and yet keep her wealth.’
‘How?’ Alys asked.
‘If she were taken in adultery,’ David said in a whisper. ‘Or died.’
There was a cold silence around them as they went through the empty guardroom, and down the flight of steps to the entrance of the great hall.
‘And she?’ Alys asked.
David hawked and spat disdainfully. ‘She’d do anything to take the young lord’s fancy,’ he said. ‘She’d do anything to creep into his bed. She’s a passionate woman gone sour, a lustful woman on short commons. There’s nothing she would not do for the young lord. I’ve heard her women talk.
‘She’s praying every day for an heir to make her place secure. She prays every day for the young lord to turn to her and give her a son. She prays every day for the old lord to cleave to her cause, not to take up the new ways of setting aside wives as lightly as changing hunters. And she’s hot for Hugo.’ He paused. ‘All the women are,’ he said.
‘And he,’ Alys began. ‘Does he …’
‘Sshh,’ the dwarf said abruptly. He glanced over his shoulder to see that Alys was ready and at her nod he pushed open one of the thick wooden doors at the side of the great hall.
Four (#ulink_22a19b5a-5680-5f9c-92c9-60d0e441e906)
The great hall was a high arched chamber, dark with only arrow-slit windows high up in the thick stone walls. A massive fire was burning against the east wall, great trunks of trees flung pell-mell and blazing, the smoke filling the room, smuts and light white ash dancing in the air. Beside Alys, to her left on a raised dais, was a long table with three empty high-backed carved chairs behind it, facing the room. Down the length of the room ran four long tables and benches, soldiers and guards seated in the best places at the dais end of the hall; the servants, scullions and women struggled for places nearest the south door.
The place was in uproar: three or four dogs were fighting by the east wall, the soldiers were hammering on the table and yelling for bread and ale, the servants were shouting to be heard above the noise. In the brackets on the walls there were burning torches, and as Alys watched a well-dressed young man stepped up to the lord’s table and lowered a fine candelabra from a candlebeam and lit sconces of pale golden wax candles.
David the dwarf nudged Alys in the ribs. ‘You will sit in the body of the hall,’ he said. ‘Come on, I’ll find you a place.’ He led the way, with his rolling, half-lame stride, between the tables. But before he could seat Alys at an empty place there was a ripple of excitement in the hall. David turned around and tapped Alys’ arm, directing her attention to the high table. ‘Now you watch!’ he said triumphantly. ‘You see the welcome he gets, my Lord Hugh! You see!’
The tapestry behind the table on the dais was drawn back, the little arched door opened, and Lord Hugh stepped through and took his place in the great carved chair at the plumb centre of the table. There was a moment’s surprised silence and then suddenly there was a great roar of delight as the soldiers and servants cheered and hammered the table with their knives and drummed their boots against the benches.
Alys smiled at the welcome, and saw how the old lord nodded his bony head in one direction and then in another. ‘He looks well!’ she thought. After nearly a week of seeing him as an invalid, in the cramped room of the tower, she was surprised to see him now as the lord at his own table. He had flushed a little, with the heat and with pleasure at his howling, yelling welcome. I cured him! Alys thought, with sudden, surprised pleasure. I cured him! They left him for dead but I cured him. Hidden by her drooping sleeves she stretched out her hands, feeling her power flow through her, down to her fingertips.
Alys had cured people before, vagrants and sick paupers in the infirmary, farmers in their heavy beds, peasants on pallets. But the old lord was the first man she had made well and seen rise up and take his power, great power. And I did that! Alys said to herself. I had the skill to cure him. I made him well.
She looked at him, smiling at the thought, and then the curtain behind him moved again and the young Lord Hugo came into the hall.
He was as tall as his father, with his father’s sharp bony face. He had his father’s black piercing eyes too, and his beaky nose. There were deep lines either side of his mouth, and two lines at the roots of his eyebrows like a permanent scowl. But then someone shouted, ‘Holloa! Hugo!’ from the benches and his face suddenly lit up as if someone had put a brand to a haystack, in the merriest, most joyful smile. Alys said, ‘Mother of God!’
‘What is it?’ David said, shooting a look at her. ‘Have you the Sight? Have you seen something?’
‘No,’ Alys said, in an instant denial. ‘I see nothing. I see nothing. I just saw …’ she broke off. ‘I just saw him smile,’ she said helplessly. She tried to look towards David but she could not take her eyes from the young lord. He stood, his hand resting casually on the back of his chair, his face turned towards his father. A jewel on his long fingers winked in the torchlight, an emerald, as green as his bulky doublet, and his velvet cap sat askew on his black curly hair.
‘There’s the shrew,’ David said. ‘Coming to sit on my lord’s left.’
Alys hardly heard him. She was still staring at the young lord. It was he who had been there at the burning of the abbey. It was he who had laughed as the tiles on the roof cracked like fireworks in the heat and the lead had poured down like a blazing waterfall. It was his fault that the abbey was burned, that Mother Hildebrande was dead, and Alys alone and vulnerable in the world again. He was a criminal, in the deepest and darkest of sin. He was an arsonist – a hateful crime. He was a murderer. Alys looked at his severe face and knew she should hate him as her enemy. But Hugo had charm as potent as any magic. His father said something which amused him and he flung back his head to laugh and Alys felt herself smiling too – as people will laugh with a child or smile for another’s upsurging joy. Alys looked down the length of the hall at Hugo and knew that, unseen and unnoticed, her own face was alight with pleasure at seeing him.
‘See that woman’s pride!’ the dwarf said with disdain.
The young lord’s wife was tall and looked older than him. She carried her power around her like a cloak. Her face as she scanned the hall was impassive, her welcome to her father-in-law was coolly perfect. She hesitated for a courteous second before sitting so the lords were seated first. Then she looked directly down the hall and saw Alys.
‘Bow,’ the dwarf said. ‘Bow! Get your head down for God’s sake! She’s looking at you.’
Alys held the woman’s cold grey stare. ‘I will not,’ she said.
Lady Catherine turned to one of the women seated behind her and asked a question. The woman stared at Alys, and then beckoned a servant. Alys was aware of the chain of command, and of the lowliest servant coming towards her, but she did not take her eyes from Lady Catherine’s face.
‘Two cats on a barn roof,’ David said under his breath.
Alys found her palms were tingling from her fingernails driven into them. She was holding her hands in tight fists, hidden by the sweep of the long sleeves.
‘Lady Catherine says you’re to go forward!’ the servant said, skidding to a halt before her on the dirty rushes. ‘Go up to the high table. She wants you!’
Alys glanced at David. ‘Go your ways,’ he said. ‘I’m for my dinner. You go for the cat fight. Come straight to my lord’s room after dinner. No dawdling.’
Alys nodded, still not taking her eyes from Lady Catherine’s square, sallow face. Then she walked slowly up the length of the hall.
One by one the chattering men and women fell silent to watch her. A great wolfhound growled and then followed Alys up the centre of the hall, up the wide nave between the tables until she was standing with two hundred people staring at her back and Lady Catherine’s cold eyes staring at her face.
‘We have to thank you for your skill,’ Lady Catherine said. Her voice was flat with the ugly vowel sounds of the southerner. ‘You seem to have restored my lord to perfect health.’
The words were kind but the look that accompanied them was ice.
‘I did no more than my duty,’ Alys said. She did not take her eyes from Lady Catherine’s face.
‘You could tempt me to fall sick tomorrow!’ the young lord said easily with a laugh. The officers on the benches nearest the table laughed with him. Someone whistled a long, low whistle. Alys looked only at him. His black eyes were hooded, lazy, his smile was as warm as if they shared a secret. It was an invitation to bed as clear as a mattins bell to church. Alys felt the blood rising to her face in a slow deep blush.
‘Don’t wish it, my lord!’ Lady Catherine said evenly. Then she turned again to Alys. ‘Where do you come from?’ she asked sharply.
‘Bowes Moor,’ Alys replied.
Lady Catherine frowned. ‘Your speech is not from here,’ she said suspiciously.
Alys bit the inside of her lips. ‘I lived for some years in Penrith,’ she said. ‘I have kin there. They speak softer and they taught me to read aloud.’
‘You can read?’ the old lord asked.
Alys nodded. ‘Yes, my lord,’ she said.
‘Can you write?’ he asked, astonished. ‘English and Latin?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ Alys replied.
The young lord slapped his father on the shoulder. ‘There’s your clerk for you!’ he said. ‘A wench for a clerk! You can count on her not to rise up in the church and leave you!’
There was a laugh from the head of the long table nearest the dais and a man in the dark robe of a priest raised his hand to Hugo like a swordsman acknowledging a hit.
‘Better than none,’ the old lord said. He nodded at Alys. ‘You may not go home yet,’ he said gruffly. ‘I need some writing done. Get a seat for yourself.’
Alys nodded and turned to a place at the back of the hall.
‘No,’ the young lord said. He turned to his father. ‘If she’s to be your clerk she’d best sit up here,’ he said. ‘You permit, Catherine?’
Lady Catherine opened her lips on a thin smile. ‘Of course, my lord,’ she said quietly. ‘Whatever you wish.’
‘She can sit with your women,’ the young lord said. ‘Holloa! Margery, shift up and make a place for the young wise woman. She’ll dine with you.’
Alys kept her eyes down and went to the side of the dais and climbed the three shallow steps. There was a small table by the dais door where four women were sitting on stools. Alys drew up a fifth stool and sat with them. They eyed each other with mutual mistrust while the servers brought Alys a pewter plate, a knife and a thick pewter goblet stamped with the Castleton crest.
‘Are you old Morach’s apprentice?’ one of them said eventually. Alys recognized a woman who had been left a widow with a fine farm near Sleightholme, but driven out of the house by a powerful daughter-in-law.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I lived at Penrith, and then I came to work for Morach.’
The woman stared at her. ‘You’re her foundling!’ she said. ‘The little wench. You were living with her when I left to come here.’
‘Yes, Mistress Allingham,’ Alys said, her mind working rapidly. ‘I did not recognize you at first. I left for Penrith just after your son was wed. Then I came back again.’
‘I heard you had gone to the abbey,’ the woman said sharply.
There was a muffled scream from one of the other women. ‘Not a nun’s servant!’ she exclaimed. ‘I won’t sit at the table with a nun’s servant! This is a godly household, my lord cannot wish us to sit with a heretic!’
‘I only stayed there for three days, on my way to Penrith, waiting for the carter,’ Alys said steadily, her fingers clasped lightly in the lap of the cherry-red gown. ‘I did not live there.’
Mistress Allingham nodded. ‘It would have been bad for you if you had done,’ she observed. ‘It was the young Lord Hugo himself who led the men to strip the abbey. They say he robbed the altar of popish treasures himself, laughing at the sacrilege. They were drunk – he and his friends – and he let his men fire the buildings. But they went too far, it was botched work, all the nuns were burned in their beds.’
Alys felt her hands tremble and clasped them together in her lap. She could still smell woodsmoke. She could still hear that one brief cry. I wish I had died then, she said to herself. I wish I had died in the same fire as my mother and then I would never have had to sit here and hear of her death told as tittle-tattle.
‘I’ll warrant he did more than that!’ one of the other women, the one named Margery, said in a low whisper. ‘An abbey full of nuns! He would do more than burn them in their beds!’
Alys stared at her in utter horror, but the women were watching Lady Catherine’s straight back.
‘Sssh,’ said one of them. ‘She has ears like an owl, that one.’
‘I warrant he did, though,’ Margery said. ‘I can’t imagine the young lord hanging back when there was lechery being done. He is as hot as a butcher’s dog, that one.’
Another woman giggled. ‘He’d have had a round dozen out of their beds before the fire got them!’ she exclaimed. ‘He would have taught them what they had been missing!’
‘Ssshhh!’ said the woman more urgently, while the others collapsed into giggles. Alys kept her face turned away and fought the bile which rose unstoppably into her mouth.
‘Hush,’ said Mistress Allingham in pretended concern. ‘This must be distressing for the girl. You stayed with them for three days, and they were your friends, were they not?’
A cock pecking under the tables in the hall squawked as a running servant kicked it aside. ‘No,’ Alys said, swallowing down vomit. ‘Old Morach owed them some labour in their garden in exchange for the use of their herbs. I was sent to work off her debt. I stayed until the work was done and then I came away. I did not know any of them well. I lodged with their servants.’
In the darkness of the hall she could suddenly see the abbess’ face, its soft wrinkled skin and the gentle smile. For a moment she could almost feel the touch of her hand as she leaned on Alys’ shoulder to walk around the garden. The cool, dry sweetness of the herb garden was very far away now.
‘I never even saw half of them,’ Alys said, proffering additional detail. ‘They were in the middle of some fast or feast and I was kept in the gatehouse. It was a dull three days, I was glad when the carter came and gave me a lift to Penrith.’
A serving-lad stepped up to the dais and presented a silver platter to the old lord, to the young lord, and only then to Lady Catherine. They took slices of dark meat.
‘Venison,’ Mistress Allingham said with satisfaction. ‘David orders a good table.’
‘David?’ Alys asked involuntarily. ‘Does David command the meals?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Margery said. ‘He’s the old lord’s seneschal – he commands all that happens inside the castle and manages the tenants, commands the demesne, watches over the manors, tells them what crops to grow and takes the pick for the castle. The young Lord Hugo partly serves as seneschal for outside, he rules the villages and sits in justice with his father.’
‘I thought David was a manservant,’ Alys said.
Mistress Allingham tittered, and Alys flushed. ‘Best not let him hear you say that!’ she said brightly. ‘He’s the most important man in the castle after my lord and the young Lord Hugo.’
‘And the most dangerous,’ one of the women said low. ‘As spiteful as a little snake, that David.’
They had to wait a long time for their food. It was brought on thin pewter platters, only the two lords and Lady Catherine ate off silver. They ate the meat with their fingers and knives, and then a bowl of broth and bread with a thick-handled spoon. The bread was a thick trencher of well-milled rye flour. At the top table they had a wheaten loaf, Alys could see its pale, appetizing colour. All the food was tepid, except for the broth which was cold.
Alys set her spoon down.
‘Not to your liking?’ one of the other women asked. ‘My name is Eliza Herring. Is it not to your liking?’
Alys shook her head. ‘It’s cold,’ she said. ‘And too salty for my taste.’
‘It’s made with salted meat,’ Mistress Allingham said. ‘And from the bottom of the barrel I’ll be bound. But it’s always cold. They have to carry it from the kitchen. I haven’t had hot meat since I left my own home.’
‘I daresay you’d rather stay, cold meat and all,’ Eliza Herring said sharply. ‘From what I hear, the new young wife your son married wouldn’t have fed you venison, hot, cold or raw.’
Mistress Allingham nodded. ‘I wish the plague would take her!’ she exclaimed, then she stopped and looked at Alys. ‘Can you work on a woman you don’t know?’ she asked. ‘Could you soften her heart towards me? Or even carry her off? There’s much sickness about – no reason why she should not take an ague.’
Alys shook her head. ‘I am a herbalist, nothing more,’ she said. ‘I cannot cast spells and I would not do so if I could.’ She paused to make sure that all the women were listening. ‘I cannot make spells. All I have is a little skill in herbalism. It was these skills that cured my lord. I cannot and I would not make someone sick.’
‘But you could make someone fall in love?’ asked the young woman called Margery. Unconsciously her eyes rested on the young Lord Hugo. ‘You have love potions and herbs which stir desire, don’t you?’
Alys was suddenly weary. ‘There are herbs to stir desire, but nothing can change what a man thinks. I could make a man hot enough to lie with a woman – but I couldn’t make him like her after he had taken his pleasure.’
Eliza Herring went off into hoots of laughter. ‘You’d be no further on then, Margery!’ she said delightedly. ‘For he has lain with you a score of times and despised you each time until he feels the itch again.’
‘Hush, hush!’ said the fourth woman desperately. ‘She’ll hear! You know how she listens!’
A servant came to each of them and poured them ale. Alys looked towards the lords’ table. In the clear light of the wax candles she could see the shine on the silver plates. The napery was white linen, unmarked by any blemish. They were drinking wine from glassware. Alys found she was snuffing at the air, breathing in the smell of clean burning wax, clean linen, good food. It reminded her of the abbey and of the overwhelming hunger she had felt when she first saw the cleanness of it, and the order. She had set her heart on having the best, the very best that the abbey could have offered. And she had been well on the way to gaining the best cell, the softest pallet, the best-woven cloak and smoothest robe. She was the abbess’ favourite – as beloved as a daughter – and nothing was too good for her. And then the statue of Our Lady had smiled on her, confirming her desire to be there, in a holy place, in a state of grace.
She bowed her head over her plate to hide her face twisted with disappointment. She had lost everything in one night: her faith, her friends, her chance of wealth and comfort, and a life for herself. Alys could have risen to the highest office in the abbey, she could have been Reverend Mother herself one day. But then in one single night it was all gone. Now she was on the outside looking in, again. She had lost her future – and her mother too. Alys forced herself not to think of Mother Hildebrande and shame herself before them all by weeping for loneliness and loss at the dinner-table.
The lords’ table was served with fillets of salmon and salad of parsley, sage, leeks and garlic. Alys watched them as they were served. The greens were fresh, from the kitchen garden she guessed. The salmon was as pink as a wild rose. It would have been netted in the Greta this morning. Alys felt the water rush into her mouth as she looked at the pale succulent flesh, shiny with butter. A serving-lad shoved a trencher of bread before her spread thickly with paste of meat sweetened with honey and almonds, and his fellow poured more ale into Alys’ goblet.
Alys shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she said. ‘I want to rest.’
Eliza Herring shook her head. ‘You may not leave the table until Father Stephen has said grace,’ she said. ‘And until the lords and my lady have left. And then you must pour your mess into the almoner’s bowl for the poor.’
‘They eat the scraps from the table?’ Alys asked.
‘They are glad of it,’ Eliza said sharply. ‘Didn’t you give to the poor in Penrith?’
Alys thought of the carefully measured portions of the nuns. ‘We gave whole loaves,’ she said. ‘And sometimes a barrel of meat. We fed anyone who called at the kitchen door. We did not give them our leavings.’
Eliza raised her plucked eyebrows in surprise. ‘Not very charitable!’ she said. ‘My Lord Hugh’s almoner goes around the poor houses with the bowl once a day, at breakfast-time, with the scraps from the dinner and supper table.’
The priest, seated at the head of the table below the dais, rose to his feet and prayed in a clear, penetrating voice in perfect Latin. Then he repeated the prayer again in English. Alys listened carefully; she had never heard God addressed in English before, it sounded like blasphemy – a dreadful insult to speak to God as if he were a neighbouring farmer, in ordinary words. But she kept her face steady, crossed herself only when the others did so, and rose to her feet as they did.
Lady Catherine, the old lord and the young lord all turned towards the door beside the waiting-women’s table.
‘What a lovely gown you have,’ Lady Catherine said to Alys, as if she had just noticed it. Her voice was friendly but her eyes were cold.
‘Lord Hugh gave it me,’ Alys said steadily. She met Lady Catherine’s gaze without flinching. I could hate you, she thought.
‘You are too generous, my lord,’ Lady Catherine said, smiling.
Lord Hugh grunted. ‘She’ll be a pretty wench when her hair is grown,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to take her into your rooms, Catherine. She did well enough sleeping by me when I was sick. If she is to stay, she’d best have a bed with your women.’
Lady Catherine nodded. ‘Of course, my lord,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Whatever you command. But if I had known you needed a clerk I could have written your letters for you. I daresay my Latin is a little better than this … this girl’s.’ She gave a light laugh.
Lord Hugh shot a dark look at her from under his white eyebrows. ‘I daresay,’ he said. ‘But not all my letters are fit for a lady to read. And all of it is my own business.’
Two light spots of colour appeared on Lady Catherine’s cheeks. ‘Of course, my lord,’ she said. ‘I only hope the girl can serve you.’
‘Come to my room now,’ the old lord said to Alys. ‘Come, I’ll lean on you.’
He gestured Alys to his side and she stepped before Lady Catherine. She felt the woman’s resentment like a draught of cold air behind her. She held still a shiver which seemed to walk from the base of her spine up to the cropped, cold nape of her neck. Then Lord Hugh’s heavy hand came comfortably on her shoulder and he leaned on her as she led him from the great hall, across the lobby behind it, and up to his room in the round tower.
He did not let her go until the door was shut behind them.
‘Now then,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen the she-dog, my daughter-in-law, and you’ve seen my son. D’you see now why I let you meet no one, why my food is tasted?’
‘You mistrust her,’ Alys said.
‘Damned right,’ the old lord said with a grunt. He slumped into the heavy carved chair at the fireplace. ‘I mistrust them both. I mistrust them all. I’m cold,’ he said fretfully. ‘Fetch me a rug, Alys.’
Alys took one of the fur-lined rugs from the bed and tucked it around his shoulders.
‘You have to sleep with her women,’ he said abruptly. ‘I can’t keep you here, it would make matters worse for you if they thought you were my whore. But you will keep your mouth shut about me and my business.’
Alys fixed her dark blue eyes on him and nodded.
‘And you will remember that it was I that sent for you, that it is I who command here, and that until I am dead you will be my clerk and servant and none other. My spy too,’ he said abruptly. ‘You can listen to her ladyship and tell me what she says of me, what she plans. And Hugo.’
‘And if I refuse?’ Alys asked, her voice so soft that he could not take offence.
‘You cannot refuse,’ he said. ‘You either consent to be my clerk, my spy, my cunning woman and my healer – or else I shall have you strangled and dumped in the moat. It’s your choice.’ He smiled wickedly. ‘A free choice, Alys, I won’t constrain you.’
Alys’ pale lovely face was as calm as a river on a sunny still day in June. ‘I consent,’ she said easily. ‘I will serve you in all that I can do – for I cannot make spells. And I will tell no one your business.’
The old lord looked hard at her. ‘Good,’ he said.
Five (#ulink_22a19b5a-5680-5f9c-92c9-60d0e441e906)
Alys’ knowledge of Latin was tested to its full extent by the letters the old lord sent all around England. He was seeking advice on how an annulment of Hugo’s and Catherine’s marriage would be greeted by his family, and by her distant kin. He suggested that she and Hugo – as second cousins – were in too close kinship, and that was why their marriage was barren, and should – ‘perhaps’, ‘possibly’, ‘mayhap’ – be annulled. His letters were a masterpiece of vague suggestion. Alys translated, and then translated again to hit upon the right tone of cautious inquiry. He was measuring the opposition he would face from his peers and rivals, and from the law.
He was also preparing his allies and his friends for his own death, smoothing the way for his son. He sent two very secret letters by special messenger to his ‘beloved cousins’ at Richmond Castle and York, commanding them to act if his death was sudden, if it looked like an accident, or if it had been caused by an illness which could be blamed on poisoning. He commanded them to seek evidence against his son’s wife; and he implored them to have her tried and executed if any evidence could be found or fabricated which pointed to her. He cast the darkest suspicions on her plans and on her feelings towards him.
If (as a possibility only he mentioned it to them), if the crime pointed to his son – they should ignore it. The inheritance of Hugo was more important than revenge, and besides, he would be dead by then and they would have no thanks from him. Alys, her eyes never lifting from the pages before her, realized that Catherine executed for murder was disposed of as neatly, and indeed more cheaply than Catherine set aside for barrenness. The old lord would not have died in vain if his death could be blamed on his daughter-in-law, his son set free to marry again, and a new Hugh born into the family.
Alys bent her cropped head over her writing as he dictated, and tried to translate blind and deaf, working without taking in the sense of what he was saying, scenting the dangers which surrounded him – and her with him – as a hare senses the hounds and cowers low. She learned for the first time that the land was ruled by a network of conniving, conspiring landlords answerable only to each other and to the King himself. Each of them had one ambition only: to retain and improve the wealth and power of his family; and that could only be done by expanding the boundaries of their manors – and willing it intact to the next heir and the heir after him.
Alys, her quill pen scratching on the downstrokes on the good-quality vellum, realized that the conception of Hugo’s son, the old lord’s grandson, was not a personal matter between Hugo and his shrewish wife, not even a family matter between the old lord and his son. It was a financial matter, a political matter. If Hugo inherited and then died childless the Lordship of Castleton would be vacant, the manors would be broken up among buyers, the family history and crest revert to the King and be sold to the highest bidder, and the great northern family would fall, its history at an end, its name forgotten. Someone else would live in the castle and claim castle, crest and even family history for their own. For Lord Hugh that prospect was the deepest terror in the world; another family in his place would deny that he had ever been. Alys heard his fear in every line he dictated.
He wrote also to the court. He had a hoard of treasure from Alys’ wrecked abbey to be sent south as a gift for the King. The inventory Alys translated was a masterpiece of sleight of hand, as gold candlesticks were renamed silver or even brass, and heavy gold plates disappeared from the list. ‘We did the work, after all, Alys,’ he said to her one day. ‘It was my Hugo that wrecked the abbey, doing the King’s work with patriotic zeal. We deserve our share.’
Alys, listing the silver and the gold which she had polished and handled, remembering the shape of the silver chalice against the white of the altar cloth and the sweet sacred taste of the communion wine, ducked her head and continued writing.
If I do not escape from here, I shall go mad, she thought.
‘It went wrong at the nunnery,’ Lord Hugh said. His voice held only faint regret. ‘The King’s Visitors told us that the nuns were corrupt and Father Stephen and Hugo went to see the old abbess and persuade her to pay fines and mend her ways. Everywhere else they had been, the nuns or the monks had handed over their treasures, confessed their faults, and Hugo used them kindly. But the old abbess was a staunch papist. I don’t believe she ever recognized the King’s right to set aside the Dowager Princess Catherine of Aragon.’ Lord Hugh said the title carefully. He had called her Queen Catherine for eighteen years and he was careful not to make a slip even when Alys was his only listener. ‘She took the oath to acknowledge Queen Anne but I am not sure how deep it went with her.’
He paused. ‘She would not discuss her faith with Father Stephen, not even when he charged her with laxity and abuses. She called him an ambitious young puppy.’ Lord Hugh snorted in reluctant amusement. ‘She insulted him and faced him down and threw them both out – my Hugo and Father Stephen. They came home like scolded boys. She was a rare woman, that abbess.’ He chuckled. ‘I’d have liked to meet her. It’s a shame it all went wrong and she died.’
‘How did it go all wrong at the nunnery?’ Alys asked. She was careful to keep her voice light, casual.
‘Hugo was drunk,’ the old lord said. ‘He was on his way home with the soldiers, they had been chasing a band of mosstroopers for seven days up and down the dales. He was drunk and playful and the men had been fighting mad for too long, and drunk with stolen ale. They made a fire to keep them warm and give them light to pick over the treasures. They were taking up a fine, it was all legal – or near enough. Father Stephen would not meet them to reason with the nuns, he was still angry with the old woman. He sent a message to Hugo and told him to burn her out – and be damned to her. The soldiers wanted a frolic and some of them thought they were doing Father Stephen’s wish. They made the fire too near the hay barn, and then the place caught afire and the women all died. A bad business.’
‘Oh,’ Alys said. She drew a quiet breath to steady her belly, which was quivering.
‘None of them got out,’ Lord Hugh said. ‘A bad business. Hugo tells me he could hear them screaming, and then a dreadful smell of burned meat. Like a kitchen with a vexed cook, he said.’
‘Are these letters to be sent today, my lord?’ she asked. Her hand holding the candle beneath the sealing-wax shook badly, and she bodged the seal.
In the afternoon when the old lord rested she was supposed to sit in the ladies’ gallery over the great hall and sew. It was a handsome room, the best in the castle. There was a wide oriel window looking out over the inner manse filled with clear and coloured panes of Normandy glass. The beams of the ceiling were brightly coloured: green, red, vermilion and the bright blue of bice. The walls were hung with bright tapestries, and where the wood showed it was panelled and carved with sheaves of wheat, fat lambs, bundles of fruit and goods, reminders of the wealth of the Lordship of Castleton. The doorway was carved with the heavy linenfold pattern which was repeated all around the room and on the window-seat before the oriel window, where Catherine could sit with a chosen confidante and avoid interruption from the others. There was a fireplace as good as the one in the nunnery and a square stone-carved chimney to take the smoke away so the air of the room was clear and the walls stayed clean. The floor had the dark shine of seasoned polished wood and was strewn with fresh herbs which gathered in heaps, swept around by the women’s gowns. It was a long room, three-quarters the length of the great hall below it. Catherine’s chamber was on the left at the far end, overlooking the courtyard through an arched window fitted with expensive glass. The women slept opposite her, looking out over the river through arrow-slits which admitted draughts and even snow when the wind was in the wrong direction. Next door to them was another small chamber, vacant except for lumber and a broken loom.
In winter, and for many days in the bad weather of autumn and spring, the women spent every hour from breakfast till darkness inside the four walls. Their only exercise was to go up and down the broad, shallow flight of steps from the great hall to the gallery for their breakfast, dinner and supper. Their only occupation in the winter months was to sit in the gallery and sew, read, write letters, weave, sing or quarrel.
Alys pretended she had extra work from Lord Hugh and stayed away whenever she could. She disliked the women’s furtive, bawdy gossip, and she feared Lady Catherine, who never threatened Alys nor raised her voice, but watched all the women, all the time. The room was tense with an unstated, unceasing rivalry. In the long hours between midday dinner and supper served at dusk, while Hugo was out hunting, or sitting in judgement with his father, or riding out to collect his rents, or check the manor lands, the women might chatter among themselves, pleasantly enough. But as soon as Hugo’s quick steps rang on the stone stairs the women straightened their hoods, smoothed their gowns, glanced at each other, compared looks.
Alys kept her eyes down. There was always sewing to be done in the ladies’ gallery. An endless tapestry in twelve panels, which had been started by Lady Catherine’s long-dead mother and willed to her daughter. Alys kept her eyes on her hands and stitched unceasingly when Hugo banged open the door and strode into the room. Since the first moment of seeing him Alys had never again looked directly at him. When he came into a room Alys went out, and when she had to pass him on the stairs she would press back against the cold stones, keeping her eyes down and praying that he did not notice her. When he was near her Alys could feel his presence on her skin, like a breath. When a door shut behind her, even out of her line of vision, she knew it was he who had gone out. She was tempted to look at him, she found her gaze drawn always towards him. She was fascinated to see whether his face was dark and silent, in his look of sullenness, or whether he was alight with his quick, easy joy. But she knew that when he was in the room Lady Catherine’s gaze swept them all like a sentry on a watchtower. The least sign of interest by Hugo for any woman would be noted by Catherine and paid for, in full, later. Alys feared Lady Catherine’s unremitting jealousy, she feared the politics of the castle and the secret, unstated rivalry of the ladies’ gallery.
And she feared for her vows. More than anything else, she feared for her vows.
He paused once, while he was running lightly up the stairs as Alys came down, waited on the step beside her and put a careless finger under her chin, turning her face to the arrow-slit for light.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. It was as if he were measuring her looks for fault. ‘Your hair is coming through golden.’
Alys had a mop-head of golden-brown curls, still too short to fasten back so she wore her hair as a child, loose around her face.
‘What age are you?’ he asked.
She sensed the quickening of his interest, so tangible that she almost smelled it.
‘Fourteen,’ she said.
‘Liar,’ he replied evenly. ‘What age?’
‘Sixteen,’ she said sullenly. She did not take her watchful eyes off his face.
He nodded. ‘Old enough,’ he said. ‘Come to my room tonight,’ he said abruptly. ‘At midnight.’
Alys’ pale face was impassive, her blue eyes blank.
‘Did you hear me?’ he asked, slightly surprised.
‘Yes, my lord,’ Alys said carefully. ‘I heard you.’
‘And you know where my room is?’ he asked, as if that could be the only obstacle. ‘In the round tower on the floor above my father. When you leave his room tonight, take the stairs upwards to me instead of down to the hall. And I shall have some wine for you, little Alys, and some sweetmeats, and some gentle play.’
Alys said nothing, keeping her eyes down. She could feel the heat of her cheeks and the thud of her heart beating.
‘Do you know what you make me think of?’ Hugo asked confidentially.
‘What?’ Alys asked, betrayed into curiosity.
‘Fresh cream,’ he said seriously.
Alys’ eyes flew to his face. ‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Every time I see you all I can think of is fresh cream. All I think of is pouring cream all over your body and licking it off,’ he said.
Alys gasped and pulled away from him as if his touch had scorched her. He laughed aloud at her shocked face.
‘That’s settled then,’ he said easily. He smiled at her, his heart-turning merry smile, and swung around and took the steps upwards two at a time. She heard him whistling a madrigal as he went, joyous as a winter robin.
Alys leaned back against the cold stones and did not feel their chill. She felt desire, hot and dangerous and exciting, in every inch of her body. She gripped her lower lip between her teeth but she could not stop herself smiling. ‘No,’ she said sternly. But her cheeks burned.
Alys knew she needed to see Morach and she had her chance that afternoon. Lord Hugh wanted a message taken to Bowes Castle and Alys offered to carry it. ‘If I am delayed I shall stay the night with my kinswoman,’ she said. ‘I should like to see her for a little while, and I need some herbs.’
The old lord looked at her and smiled his slow smile. ‘But you’ll come back,’ he said.
Alys nodded. ‘You know I’ll come back,’ she said. ‘There’s no life for me on the moor now, that life is closed to me. And the one I had before. It’s like a journey down a chamber with doors that shut behind me. Whenever I find some safety I have to move on, and the old life is taken from me.’
He nodded. ‘Best find yourself a man and close all the doors for good; those before you, and those behind you,’ he said.
Alys shook her head. ‘I won’t wed,’ she said.
‘Because of your vows?’ he asked.
‘Yes …’ Alys started and then she bit the words back. ‘I’ve taken no vows, my lord,’ she said smoothly. ‘It’s just that I am one of those women who cannot abide bedding. It goes with the skill of herbs. My cousin Morach lives alone.’
Lord Hugh coughed and spat towards the fire which burned in the corner of his room, smoke trailing through the arrow-slit above it. ‘I guessed some time ago you were a runaway nun,’ he said conversationally. ‘Your Latin is very weak in profane language, very strong for sacred texts. Your hair was shaved, and you have that appetite – like all nuns – for the finest things.’ He laughed harshly. ‘Did you think, little Sister Blue-eyes, that I have not seen how you stroke fine linen, how you love the light from wax candles, how you preen in your red gown and watch the light glint on the silver thread?’
Alys said nothing. Her pulse was racing but she kept her face serene.
‘You’re safe with me,’ Lord Hugh said. ‘Father Stephen is mad for the new ways and the new Church – he’s a fanatical reformer, a holy man. Hugo loves the new Church because he sees the gains he can make: the reduction of the Prince Bishops, fines from the monastery lands, the power that we can now claim – us peers working with the Crown – and the spiritual lords cast down.’
He paused and gave her a brief smile. ‘But I am cautious,’ he said slowly. ‘These turnabouts can happen more than once in a lifetime. It matters not to me whether there is a picture or two in a church, whether I eat flesh or fish, whether I pray to God in Latin or English. What matters more is the Lordship of Castleton and how we weather these years of change.
‘I won’t betray you. I won’t insist that I hear you take the vow of loyalty to the King, I won’t have you stripped and flogged. I won’t have you examined for heresy and when you fail given to the soldiers for their sport.’
Alys scarcely registered the reprieve.
‘Or at any rate,’ the old lord amended, ‘not yet. Not while you remember that you are mine. My servant. My vassal. Mine in word and body and deed.’
Alys inclined her head to show that she was listening. She said nothing.
‘And if you serve me well I shall keep you safe, maybe even smuggle you away, out of the country, safe to an abbey in France. How would that be?’
Alys laid her hand at the base of her throat. She could feel her pulse hammering against her palm. ‘As you wish, my lord,’ she said steadily. ‘I am your servant.’
‘Fancy an abbey in France?’ the old lord asked pleasantly.
Alys nodded dumbly, choked with hope.
‘I could send you to France, I could give you safe conduct on your journey, give you a letter of introduction to an abbess, explaining your danger and telling her that you are a true daughter of her Church,’ the old lord said easily. ‘I could give you a dowry to take to the convent with you. Is that what it takes to buy your loyalty?’
‘I am your faithful servant,’ Alys said breathlessly. ‘But I would thank you if you would send me to a new home, abroad.’
The old lord nodded, measuring her. ‘And serve me without fail until then, as a fee for your passage,’ he said.
Alys nodded. ‘Whatever you command.’
‘You’ll need to stay a virgin I suppose. They won’t accept you in the nunnery otherwise. Has Hugo been tugging at your skirts yet?’
‘Yes,’ Alys said precisely.
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I said nothing.’
The old lord let out a sharp bark of laughter. ‘Aye, that’s your way, my cunning little vixen, ain’t it? So he no doubt thinks he’ll have you, and I think you’re sworn to my interest and all along you follow your heretical beliefs, or your mysterious arts, or your own sweet way which is none of these, don’t you?’
Alys shook her head. ‘No, my lord,’ she said softly. ‘I want to go to a nunnery. I want to renew my vows. I will do anything you ask of me if you will see me safe into my Order.’
‘Do you need any guarding against my son?’
Alys shook her head slowly. ‘I wish to see my kinswoman. I could stay with her tonight,’ she said. ‘She will advise me.’
He nodded and rested his head against the back of his chair as if he were suddenly weary. Alys went silently to the door. As she turned the handle she glanced back: he was watching her from under his hooded eyelids.
‘Don’t poison him,’ he said sharply. ‘None of your damned brews to kill his ardour. He needs a son, he needs all the vigour he has. I’ll tell him to stick it to his wife when he feels his lust rising. You’re safe under my charge. And I mean to honour my promise to see you safe behind walls when your work here is done.’
Alys nodded. ‘When would that be, my lord?’ she asked in a small voice, careful not to betray her anxiety.
Lord Hugh yawned. ‘When this damned marriage business is settled, I should think,’ he said carelessly. ‘When I am rid of the shrew and I have a new fertile daughter-in-law in Hugo’s bed. I will need you to work secretly for me until I can see my way clear, but I won’t need you after that. If you serve me well in this one thing, I’ll put you back behind convent walls again.’
Alys took a deep breath. ‘I thank you,’ she said calmly, and left the room. She paused outside his door and leaned against the wall, looking out of the arrow-slit. The air which blew in was sharp with the cold from the moor. For the first time in months Alys felt her heart lift with hope. She was on her way back to her home.
She borrowed a fat pony belonging to Eliza Herring to ride to Bowes, confident of her ability to manage the overfed old animal, riding astride with the red gown pulled down over her legs, one of the lads from the castle running beside her. As the pony picked its way around the filth of the wet street she saw a few doorways open a crack to eye her, and a thrown handful of stones spattered on the wall behind her. She nodded. She had no friends in the village. She had been feared as a cunning woman and now she would be reviled as the lord’s new whore, a village girl vaulted to the highest place in their small world.
She left the letter with the steward of the castle knowing that even if he dared to break the seal and open it, he would not be able to read the Latin. She ordered the lad to go back to Lord Hugh’s castle. She would be safe going on alone. The road from Castleton to Bowes to Penrith ran along dry ground at the crest of the moor. Alys, glancing up the hill from the valley of Bowes, could see the pale ribbon of it running straight as a Roman ruler bisecting the country from east to west. It was empty of traffic. These were wild lands. Travellers who had to make the journey would delay on either side of the moor, at Castleton in the east, or Penrith in the west, so that they could travel together and protect each other. There were wild animals – boar and wolves, some spoke of bears. There were sudden snowstorms in winter, and no shelter. Worst of all, there were brigands and mosstroopers, marauding Scots, sturdy beggars and vagabonds.
Alys avoided the road and set the pony towards the little sheep track which ran from Bowes alongside the River Greta, through thick woods of beech and elm and oak, where deer moved quietly in the shadows of the trees. The river was full and wide here, moving slowly over a broad rocky bed. Underneath the stone slabs a deeper, secret river ran, a great underground lake stocked with fishes that preferred the dark deeps. Even on horseback, Alys could sense the weight of water beneath the ground, its slow purposeful moving in the secret caves.
The pony broke out of the trees, puffing slightly, and then started the climb westwards and upwards through swathes of poor pastureland where sheep could feed and perhaps a few scrawny cows, and then higher again to the moor. Before the plague had come to Bowes and there had been more working men, someone had walled off one pasture from another. The stones had fallen down now and the sheep could run where they wished. At shearing in spring, or butchering in winter, they would be sorted by the marks on their fleeces. Every village had its own brand – but they all belonged to Lord Hugh.
The river was in spate here, a fast-moving swell of water overlapping the stone of the banks and flooding the meadows in great wet sweeps of waterlogged land. Alys rode beside it, listening to the gurgle and rush of the water, and laughed when the little pony shied sideways from a puddle. Bits of wood and weed were tumbled over and over in the peaty water, and at the river’s edge the springs bubbled and gurgled like soup pots, spewing out more brown water to swirl away downstream. The branches of ivy nodding at the tumbled drystone walls carried thick heads of dull black berries, a rowan tree glowed with clusters of scarlet berries against the green and grey of the weak winter grass speckled by small brown toadstools on weak leggy stems. Alys kicked the old pony and surprised it into a loping canter. She sat easily in the saddle and felt the wind in her face as the hood of her cape blew back.
The grey stone slabs of the bridge came into sight, the waters backed up behind it and spreading in a great sheet of flood water as shiny as polished pewter. Morach’s cottage, like a little ark, stood on a hillock of higher ground away from the waters of the flood. Alys stood up in the stirrups and shouted: ‘Holloa! Morach!’ so that Morach was standing in the doorway, shading her eyes against the low, red winter sun when Alys came trotting up on her pony.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, without a word of greeting.
‘A loan only,’ Alys said casually. ‘I’m not home for ever, I am allowed to visit this evening. And I need to talk with you.’
Morach’s sharp dark eyes scanned Alys’ face. ‘The young Lord Hugo,’ she stated.
Alys nodded, not even asking how Morach had guessed. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘And the old lord has forbidden me to give him anything to kill his lust.’
Morach raised her black eyebrows and nodded. ‘They need an heir,’ she said. ‘You can tether that animal outside the gate, I won’t have him near my herbs. Come in.’
Alys tied the pony to a twisted hawthorn bush which grew at Morach’s gateway, picked her fine red gown clear of the muck, and went in.
She had forgotten the stink of the place. Morach’s midden was downwind at the back of the cottage but the sweet sickly odour of muck and the tang of urine hovered around the cottage, seeped through the walls. The midden heap was as old as the cottage, it had always smelled foul. The little fire was flickering sullenly on damp wood and the cottage was filled with a mist of black smoke. A couple of hens scuttered out the way as Alys entered, their droppings green and shiny on the hearthstone. Under Alys’ new leather shoes the floor felt slippery with damp. The body of flood water only yards from the threshold made the very air wet and cold. At dusk the mist would roll along the river valley and seep under the door and in the little window. Alys gathered her new cloak closer and sat by the fire, taking Morach’s stool without asking.
‘I brought you some money,’ she said abruptly. ‘And a sackful of food.’
Morach nodded. ‘Stolen?’ she inquired without interest.
Alys shook her head. ‘He gave it me,’ she said. ‘The old lord. Gave me these clothes too.’
Morach nodded. ‘They’re very fine,’ she said. ‘Good enough for Lady Catherine herself. Good enough for Lord Hugh’s whore.’
‘That’s what they think me,’ Alys said. ‘But he is old, Morach, and has been very sick. He does not touch me. He is …’ She broke off as the thought came to her for the first time. ‘He is kind to me, Morach.’
Morach’s dark eyebrows snapped together. ‘First time in his life then,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Kind? Are you sure? Maybe he wants you for something and he’s keeping it close.’
Alys paused. ‘He could be,’ she said. ‘I’ve never known a man to plan so far ahead. He has thought of everything, from his deathbed, to the death of the young lord’s son who isn’t even conceived. He has a place for me in his schemes – to work for him now, he needs a clerk who will keep secrets, and he’ll see me safe to a nunnery when my work is finished.’ She broke off, meeting Morach’s sceptical black glare. ‘It’s my only chance,’ she said simply. ‘He says he will get me to France, to a nunnery there. He is my only chance.’
Morach muttered something under her breath and turned to climb the ladder to her sleeping platform. ‘Put the water on,’ she said. ‘I’ve some chamomile to mash. I need it to clear my head.’
Alys bent her head and blew at the fire and set the little pot of water on its three legs in the red embers. When the water started to bubble Alys threw in some chamomile leaves and set it to stand. When Morach came down with her bag of fortune-telling bones, she and Alys shared the one chipped horn cup.
Morach drank deep, and then shook the bones in their little purse.
‘Choose,’ she said, holding out the purse to Alys.
Alys hesitated.
‘Choose,’ Morach said again.
‘Is it witchcraft?’ Alys asked. She was not afraid, her blue eyes were fixed challengingly on Morach. ‘Is it black arts, Morach?’
Morach shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ she said carelessly. ‘To one man it’s black arts, to another it’s wise woman’s trade, and to another it’s a foolish old woman muttering madness. It’s often true – that’s all I know.’
Alys shrugged and at Morach’s impatient gesture took one of the carved flat bones, then another, then a third, from the little pouch.
Morach stared at her choice. ‘The Gateway,’ she said first. ‘That’s your choice, that’s where you are now. The three ways that lie before you – the castle life with its joys and dangers and its profits; the nun’s life which you will have to fight like a saint to regain; or here – poverty, dirt, hunger. But …’ She laughed softly. ‘Invisibility. The most important thing for a woman, especially if she is poor, especially if she will grow old one day.’
Morach studied the second bone with the rune scrawled on it in a rusty brown ink. ‘Unity,’ she said, surprised. ‘When you make your choice you have the chance for unity – to travel with your heart and mind in the same direction. Set your heart on something and stay true to it. One goal, one thought, one love. Whatever it is you desire: magic, your God, love.’
Alys’ face was white, her eyes almost black with anger. ‘I don’t want him,’ she said through her teeth. ‘I don’t want love, I don’t want lust, I don’t want desire, I don’t want him. I want to get back where I belong, to the cloister where my life has order, some peace and some security and wealth. That’s all.’
Morach laughed. ‘Not much then,’ she said. ‘Not much for a drab from Bowes Moor, a runaway wench, a runaway nun. Not much to wish for – peace, security and wealth. Not a great demand!’
Alys shook her head irritably. ‘You don’t understand!’ she exclaimed. ‘It is not a great demand. It is my life, it is what I am used to. It is my proper place, my deserts. I need it now. Holiness – and a life where I can be at peace. Holiness and comfort.’
Morach shook her head, smiling to herself. ‘It’s a rare combination,’ she said softly. ‘Holiness and comfort. Most holy roads tend to the stony, I thought.’
Alys shrugged irritably. ‘How would you know?’ she demanded. ‘What road have you ever followed but your own choice?’
Morach nodded. ‘But I follow one road,’ she reminded Alys. ‘And they call me a wise woman rightly. This is what the Unity rune is telling you. Choose one road and follow it with loyalty.’ Alys nodded. ‘And the last one?’
Morach turned it around, looked at both sides and studied the two blank faces for a moment. ‘Odin. Death,’ she said casually and tossed the three back into the bag.
‘Death!’ Alys exclaimed. ‘For who?’
‘For me,’ Morach said evenly. ‘For the old Lord Hugh, for the young Lord Hugo, for you. Did you think you would live forever?’
‘No …’ Alys stumbled. ‘But … d’you mean soon?’
‘It’s always too soon,’ Morach replied with sudden irritation. ‘You’ll have your few days of passion and your choices to make before you come to it. But it’s always too soon.’
Alys waited impatiently for more but Morach drank deep of the tea and would not look at her. Alys took the little purse of copper coins from her pocket and laid it in Morach’s lap. Morach knocked it to the floor. ‘There’s no more,’ she said unhelpfully.
‘Then talk to me,’ Alys said. For a moment her pale face trembled and she looked like a child again. ‘Talk to me, Morach. I am like a prisoner in that place. Everyone except the old lord himself is my enemy.’
Morach nodded her head. ‘Will you run?’ she asked with slight interest. ‘Run again?’
‘I have the horse now,’ Alys said, her voice quickening as the idea came to her. ‘I have a horse and if I had money …’ Morach’s bare dirty foot stepped at once to cover the purse she had knocked to the floor. ‘There must be an order of nuns where they would take me in,’ Alys said. ‘You must have heard of somewhere, Morach!’
Morach shook her head. ‘I have heard of nothing except the Visitors and fines and complaints against nunneries and monasteries taken as high as the King,’ she said. ‘Your old abbey is stripped bare – the benches from the church, the slates from the roof, even some of the stones themselves are pulled down, and carted away for walls, or mounting blocks. First by Lord Hugo’s men from the castle and now on his order by the villagers. It’s the same in the north from what I hear, and the south. They’ll have escaped the King’s investigations in Scotland, you could try for it. But you’d be dead before you reached the border.’
Alys nodded. She held out her hand for the cup and Morach refilled it and handed it to her.
‘The mood of the times is against you,’ she said. ‘People were sick of the wealth of the abbeys, priests, monks and nuns. They were sick of their greed. They want new landlords, or no landlords at all. You chose the wrong time to become a nun.’
‘I chose the wrong time to be born,’ Alys said bitterly. ‘I am a woman who does not fit well with her time.’
Morach grinned darkly. ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘And a whole multitude of others. My fault was that I gained more than I could hold. My sin was winning. So they brought the man’s law and the man’s power against me. The man’s court, the law of men; I have hidden myself in the old power, in the old skills, in woman’s power.’
She looked at Alys without sympathy. ‘Your fault is that you would never bide still,’ she said. ‘You could have lived here with me with naught to fear except the witch-taker but you wanted Tom and his farmhouse and his fields. Then when you saw something better you fled for it.
‘They thought Tom would die of grief for you, he begged me to order you home. I laughed in his face. I knew you would never come. You’d seen something better. You wanted it. I knew you’d never come back of your own free will. You’d have stayed forever, wouldn’t you?’
Alys nodded. ‘I loved Mother Hildebrande, the abbess,’ she said. ‘I was high in her favour. And she loved me as if I were her daughter. I know she did. She taught me to read and to write, she taught me Latin. She took special pains with me and she had great plans for me. I worked in the still-room with the herbs, and I worked in the infirmary and I studied in the library. I never had to do any heavy dirty work. I was the favourite of them all, and I washed every day and slept very soft.’ She glanced at Morach. ‘I had it all then,’ she said. ‘The love of my mother, the truest, purest love there is, comfort and holiness.’
‘You’ll not find that again in England,’ Morach said. ‘Oh, the King cannot live forever, or he may cobble together some deal with the Pope. His heirs might restore the Church. But English nuns will never have you back.’
‘They might not know I ran …’ Alys started.
Morach shook her head emphatically. ‘They’ll guess,’ she said. ‘You were the only one to get out of that building alive that night. The rest burned as they slept.’
Alys closed her eyes for a moment and smelled the smoke and saw the flicker of flames, orange on the white wall of her cell. Again she heard that high single scream as she ducked through the gate and kilted up her habit and ran without care for the others, without a care for the abbess who had loved her like a daughter, and who slept quiet, while the smoke weaved its grey web about her and held her fast till the flames licked her feather mattress and her linen shift and then her tired old body.
‘The only one out of thirty of them,’ Morach said with subterranean pride. ‘The only one – the biggest coward, the fleetest of foot, the quickest turncoat.’
Alys bowed her head. ‘Don’t, Morach,’ she said softly.
Morach smacked her lips on a sip of the chamomile tea. ‘So what will you do?’ she asked.
Alys looked up defiantly. ‘I won’t be defeated,’ she said. ‘I won’t be driven down into being another dirty old witch on the edge of the moor. I won’t be a maid-in-waiting or a clerk. I want to eat well and sleep well, and wear good cloth and ride dry-shod, and I won’t be driven down into life as an ordinary woman. I won’t be married off to some clod to work my life away all day and risk my life every year bearing his children. I’ll get back to a nunnery, where I belong, one way or another. The old lord won’t break his promise to me – he’ll send me to France. If I can escape the notice of the young Lord Hugo and the malice of his wife, and if I can keep myself a virgin in that place where they think of nothing but lust – I can get back.’
Morach nodded. ‘You need a deal of luck and a deal of power to accomplish that,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Only one way I can think of.’ She paused.
Alys leaned forward. ‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘A pact,’ Morach said simply. ‘A pact with the devil himself. Have him guard you against the young lord, make him turn his eyes another way. I know enough of the black arts to guide you. We could call up the dark master, he would come for you, for sure – a sacred little soul like yours. You could trade your way into comfort forever. There’s your way to peace and order and safety. You become the devil’s own and you are never an ordinary woman again.’
For a moment Alys hesitated as if she were tempted by the sudden rush into hell, but then she dropped her face into her hands and moaned in torment. ‘I don’t want to,’ she cried as if she were a little girl again. ‘I don’t want to, Morach! I want a middle way. I want a little wealth and a little freedom! I want to be back in the nunnery with Mother Hildebrande. I am afraid of the devil! I am afraid of the witch-taker! I am afraid of the young lord and of his icy wife! I want to be somewhere safe! I am too young for these dark choices! I am not old enough to keep myself safe! I want Mother Hildebrande! I want my mother!’
She broke into a storm of crying, her face buried in her arms, leaning slightly towards Morach as if begging wordlessly for an embrace. Morach folded her arms and rested her chin on them, gazing into the fire, waiting for Alys to be still. She was quite untouched by her grief.
‘There’s no safety for you, or for me,’ she said equably when Alys was quieter. ‘We’re women who do not accord with the way men want. There’s no safety for our sort. Not now, not ever.’
Alys’ sobs weakened against the rock of Morach’s grim indifference. She fell silent, rubbing her face on her fine woollen undersleeve. A piece of wood in the fireplace snapped and burned with a yellow flame.
‘Then I go back to the castle and take my chance,’ Alys said, resigned.
Morach nodded.
‘Our Lady once chose me,’ Alys said, her voice very low, speaking of a holy secret. ‘She sent me a sign. Even though I have sinned most deeply, I hope and I trust that She will guide me back to Her. She will make my penance and give me my absolution. She cannot have chosen me to watch me fail.’
Morach cocked her eyebrow, interested. ‘Depends on what sort of a goddess she is,’ she said judicially. ‘There are some that would choose you to see nothing but failure. That’s the joy in it for them.’
‘Oh!’ Alys shrugged impatiently. ‘You’re a heathen and a heretic, Morach! I waste my time speaking with you.’
Morach grinned, unrepentant. ‘Don’t speak with me then,’ she said placidly. ‘Your Lady chose you. So She will keep you safe to play Her game, whatever it is. Depend upon Her then, my little holy lamb! What are you doing here, drawing the runes and praying for the future?’
Alys hunched her shoulders, clasped her hands. ‘The young lord is my danger,’ she said. ‘He could take me from Our Lady. And then I would be lost.’
‘She won’t strike him blind to save you?’ Morach asked sarcastically. ‘She won’t put out Her sacred hand to stop him feeling up your gown?’
Alys scowled at Morach. ‘I have to find a way to defend myself. He would have me for his sport,’ she said. ‘He ordered me to his room tonight. If he rapes me I’ll never get back to the nuns. He’d have me and throw me aside, and his wife would turn me out. I’d be lucky to get through the guardroom once they knew the young lord had done with me.’
Morach laughed. ‘Best keep your legs crossed and your Latin sharp then,’ she said. ‘Pray to your Lady, and trust the old lord.’ She paused. ‘If you would stoop to take them, my saint, there are some herbs I know which would make you less sweet to him.’
Alys looked up. ‘I may not kill his lust,’ she warned. ‘The old lord forbade it and he will be watching me. I cannot give Hugo anything to weary him of venery.’
Morach rose from the floor and went to the bunches of herbs dangling on strings from the beams of the sleeping platform. ‘It is you who takes this,’ she said. ‘Make it into a tisane, every morning, and drink it while it cools. It kills a man’s desire for the woman that drinks it.’
Alys nodded. ‘And what would you use to kill a woman’s desire?’ she asked casually.
Morach turned, her dark face under the shock of grey hair alight with mischief. ‘A woman’s desire?’ she said. ‘But my little nun, my precious virgin, who is this lustful woman? We were talking of the young lord and his persecution of your sainted virginity!’
‘Have done,’ Alys said sulkily. ‘I was asking for one of the women in the gallery.’
Morach chuckled. ‘I would have to meet her,’ she said slyly. ‘This woman, is she young or old? Has she known a man or is she a virgin? Does she long for his love, his devotion – or is she just hot for his body to crush her and his wetness inside her and his hands all over her?’
Alys flushed rosy. ‘I don’t know,’ she said grimly. ‘If she asks me again I will bring her to you.’
Morach nodded, her eyes sparkling with amusement. ‘You do, pretty Alys,’ she said. ‘Do bring her to me.’
Alys tucked the bunch of herbs into her pocket. ‘Anything else?’ she asked. ‘To kill Hugo’s ardour? Anything else I should do?’
Morach shook her head. ‘I have no other herbs, but you could bring me some candlewax when you next come and I’ll make images of them all,’ she offered. ‘We’ll make them all into moppets to dance to your bidding, you and me.’
Alys’ eyes widened. ‘It cannot be done!’ she exclaimed.
Morach smiled darkly and nodded. ‘I’ve never done it before,’ she said. ‘It’s deep magic, very deep. But the old woman who was here before me taught me the words. It never fails except …’
‘Except what?’ Alys asked. She shivered as if she were suddenly cold. ‘Except what?’ she asked.
‘Sometimes they misunderstand.’
Alys drew a little closer. ‘What?’ she asked. ‘Who misunderstand?’
Morach smiled. ‘You take the little figures and you bind them with deep magic. Understand that?’
Alys nodded, her face pale.
‘You order them to do your bidding. You command them to do as you wish.’
Alys nodded again.
‘Sometimes they misunderstand,’ Morach said, her voice very low. ‘I heard of one woman who ordered her lover to come alive again. He was dead of the plague and she could not bear to lose him. She made the candlewax moppet while he was lying cold and poxed in the room next door, the sores all over him. When she made the moppet walk, he walked too, just as she had commanded.’
Alys swallowed against a tight throat. ‘He was better?’
Morach chuckled, a low chilling laugh. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He was dead and cold, covered with sores, his eyes blank, his lips blue. But he walked behind her, as she had commanded; everywhere she went he walked behind her.’
‘A ghost?’ Alys asked.
Morach shrugged. ‘Who knows?’
Alys shook her head. ‘That’s foul,’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s black arts, Morach! As foul as your pact with the devil. I’ll not touch magic, I’ve told you before. You tempt me and you bring me no good!’
‘Wait till you are in need,’ Morach said scathingly. ‘Wait till you are hungry. Wait till you are desperate. And then bring me the candlewax. When you are desperate – and you will be desperate, my little angel – you will be glad enough of my power then.’
Alys said nothing.
‘I’m hungry,’ Morach said abruptly. ‘Fetch the food and let’s eat. I’ve only enough wood for another hour, you can gather some more in the morning.’
Alys looked at her resentfully. ‘My hands are softening,’ she said. ‘And my nails are clean and growing again. You can get your own wood, Morach. I’ve brought you food and money, that should be enough.’
Morach laughed, a harsh, sharp sound. ‘So the little virgin has claws, too, does she?’ she crowed. ‘Then I’ll tell you – I have a good woodpile out the back. Now fetch the food.’
Six (#ulink_22a19b5a-5680-5f9c-92c9-60d0e441e906)
As the days grew darker and colder in November Alys’ work as the old lord’s clerk increased. He grew more frail and tired quickly. When a messenger arrived with letters in English or Latin he would summon Alys to read them to him, he was too weary to puzzle them out himself. When young Lord Hugo came to tell him about judgements in the ward, or disputes over borders, or news from the wider world, from the Council of the North or from London itself, he would have Alys by him, sometimes taking notes of what the young lord was saying, sometimes standing behind his chair listening. Then when Hugo was gone, with a swirl of his dark red cape and a mischievous wink at Alys, the old lord would ask her to tell him, over again, what Hugo had said.
‘He mumbles so!’ he said.
The tension between the old lord and the young one was clear now to Alys. The young lord was the coming man: the soldiers were his, and the castle servants. He wanted to make the family greater in the outside world. He wanted to go to London and try for a place in the King’s court. The King was a braggart and a fool – wide open to anyone who could advise him and amuse him. The young lord wanted a place at the table of the great. He had embraced the new religion. Father Stephen, another ambitious young man, was his friend. He spoke of building a new house, leaving the castle which had been his family’s home since the first Hugo had come over with the conquering Normans and taken the lordship as his fee and built the castle to hold the land. Hugo wanted to trade, he wanted to lend money on interest. He wanted to pay wages in cash and throw peasants off their grubbing smallholdings and make the flocks of sheep bigger still on long, uninterrupted sheep-runs. He wanted to mine coal, he wanted to forge iron. He wanted the sun shining full upon him. He wanted risks.
Old Lord Hugh stood against him. The family had held the castle for generation after generation. They had built the single round tower with a wall and a moat around it. Little by little they had won or bought more land. Little by little they had made the castle bigger, adding the second round tower for soldiers, and then the hall with the gallery above, adding the outer wall and the outer moat to enclose the farm, a second well, stables and the great gatehouse for the soldiers. Quietly, almost stealthily, they had wed and plotted, inherited and even invaded to add to the lordship until the boundaries of their lands stretched across the Pennines to the east, and westward nearly to the sea. They kept their power and their wealth by keeping quiet – keeping their distance from the envy and the struggles around the throne.
Lord Hugh had been to London only half a dozen times in his life, he was the master of the loyal excuse. He had gone to Queen Anne’s coronation, where a man was safer to be seen in support than absent, wearing sober clothes and standing at the back, the very picture of a provincial, loyal lord. He voted by proxy, he bribed and negotiated by letter. When summoned to court he pleaded ill health, dangerous unrest in his lands or, lately, old age; and at once sent the King a handsome present to please the errant royal favour. He knew from his kin at court who were the coming men and who were likely to fall. He had spies in the royal offices who reported to him the news he needed. He had debtors scattered across the country who owed him money and favours. A thousand men called him cousin and looked to him for favour and protection and paid him with information. He sat like a wily spider in a network of caution and fear. He represented the power of the King in the wild lands of the north, and took his place on the great Council of the North, but never more than once a year. He never showed the family wealth or their power too brightly, for fear of envious southerners’ eyes. He followed the traditions of his father and his grandfather. They lived on their lands, riding all day and never leaving their own borders. They sat in their own courts. They handed down justice in their own favour. They announced the King’s laws and they enforced those they preferred. They did very well as obscure tyrants.
Their greatest rivals were the Prince Bishops and the monasteries, and now the Bishops were fighting for their wealth and could be fighting for their lives. The old lord saw the good times opening slowly for his son, and for his son’s unborn, not-yet-conceived heir, and his son after him. Hugo’s grandson would be as rich in land as any lord in England, would command more men than most. He could throw his influence with Scotland, with England. He would own a little kingdom of his own. Who could guess how far the family might rise, if they waited and used their caution and their wisdom as they always had done?
But the young Lord Hugo did not want to wait for the great lands of monasteries to come his way in maybe five, ten years from now. He did not want to wait for the sheep to be shorn, the copyholders’ fines to be slowly increased, the annual rents brought in. He wanted wealth and power at once. He had friends who owned wagons, one who had a fleet of barges, one who was mining coal and iron ore, another who spoke of ocean-going ships and prizes to be had from countries beyond Europe, beyond the known world. He spoke of trade, of business, of lending and borrowing money at new profitable rates. He never showed his impatience with his father, and Alys feared him more because of this single, uncharacteristic discretion.
‘He wants to go to London,’ she warned the old lord.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I am holding him back and he will not tolerate it forever.’
Alys nodded.
‘Have you heard more?’ the old lord asked. ‘Any plots, any plans? D’you think his impatience grows so strong that he would poison me, or lock me away?’
Alys’ nostrils flared as if she could smell the danger in the question. ‘I have heard nothing,’ she said. ‘I was only saying that the young lord is impatient to make his way in the world. I accuse him of nothing.’
‘Tssk,’ the old lord said impatiently. ‘I need you to be ready to accuse him, Alys. You are in my daughter-in-law’s chamber, you hear the gossip of the women. Catherine knows full well that if she does not conceive a child within the year I will find a way to be rid of her. Her best way would be to get rid of me before I make a move. Hugo is mad for the court and for London and I block his way south. Listen for me, Alys. Watch for me. You go everywhere, you can hear and see everything. You do not need to accuse Hugo or Catherine, either one or the other. You just have to tell me your suspicions – your slightest suspicions.’
‘I have none,’ Alys said firmly. ‘Lady Catherine speaks of your death as an event in the future, nothing more. I have never heard her admit that she fears a divorce or an annulment. And Lord Hugo comes to her rooms only rarely, and I never see him outside your chamber.’
He was silent for a moment. ‘You don’t see Hugo outside my room?’ he confirmed.
Alys shook her head.
‘He does not waylay you?’
‘No,’ Alys replied.
It was true. Either Morach’s tisane had worked, or the old lord had made his wishes plain. When Alys rode back to the castle from Morach’s cottage, Hugo had shot her one unrepentant wink, but never ordered her to his chamber again. After that, she kept out of the young lord’s way as much as she could, and kept her eyes on the ground when she had to walk past him. But one cold morning, in the guardroom below the old lord’s private chamber, she was coming down the little staircase as Hugo waited to walk up.
‘Always in a hurry, Alys,’ Hugo said conversationally. He took her sleeve in a firm grip between two fingers. ‘How is my father today?’
‘He is well, my lord,’ Alys said. She kept her eyes on the stone flags between his riding boots. ‘He slept well, his cough has eased.’
‘It’s this damp weather,’ Hugo said. ‘You can feel the mist coming off the river, can’t you, Alys? Doesn’t it chill you to the bone?’
Alys shot a swift upward look at him. His dark face was bent down towards her, very close, as if she might whisper a reply.
‘I have no complaint, my lord,’ she said. ‘And the spring will come soon.’
‘Oh, not for months and months yet,’ Hugo said. ‘We have long days of darkness and cold yet to come.’ He whispered the words ‘darkness and cold’ as if they were an invitation to the firelit warmth of his room.
‘I do not feel the cold,’ she said steadily.
‘Do you dislike me?’ Hugo asked abruptly. He dropped her sleeve and put both hands either side of her face, turning it up to him. ‘You told my father that I had invited you and that you were unwilling. Do you dislike me, Alys?’
Alys stayed still and looked steadily at the silvery whiteness of the falling band of his collar, as if it could cool her.
‘No, my lord,’ she said politely. ‘Of course not.’
‘But you never came to my room,’ he observed. ‘And you told tales to my father. So he told me to keep my hands off you. Did you know that?’
He held Alys’ face gently. She stole a quick look at his eyes; he was laughing at her.
‘I did not know that.’
‘So you do like me then?’ he demanded. He could hardly hold back his laughter at the absurdity of the conversation. Alys could feel laughter bubbling up inside herself too.
‘It is not my place, my lord, to either like you or dislike you,’ Alys said primly. Under his fingers her cheeks were tingling.
Hugo stopped laughing, held her face still with one hand, and with a gentle fingertip traced a line from the outside of her eye, down her cheek-bone to the corner of her lip. Alys froze still, unmoving beneath his caress. He bent a little closer. Alys shut her eyes to blot out the image of Hugo’s smiling intent face coming closer. He hesitated, a half, a quarter of an inch from Alys’ lips.
‘But I like you, Alys,’ he said softly. ‘And my father will not live forever. And I think you would feel the cold if you were back on Bowes Moor again.’
Alys stayed mute. She could feel the warmth of his breath on her face. His lips were very close to hers. She could not move away from his kiss, she could only wait, passive, her face turned up, her eyes slowly, drowsily closing. Then his hands left her face and he straightened up. Alys’ eyes flew open; she stared at him in surprise.
‘In your own time, Alys,’ he said pleasantly, and he swung out of the room and ran up the curving stairs of the tower to his father’s room.
No one had seen them, no one had heard them. But Lady Catherine knew.
When Alys was summoned to the ladies’ chamber to sew, Lady Catherine waved her to a stool near her own chair, where she could watch Alys’ face as the others talked.
‘You’re very quiet,’ she said to Alys.
Alys glanced up with her polite, deferential smile. ‘I was listening, my lady,’ she said.
‘You never speak of your own kin,’ Lady Catherine said. ‘Do you have any family other than the mad old woman on the moor?’
‘No,’ Alys said. ‘Except those at Penrith,’ she corrected herself.
Lady Catherine nodded. ‘And no sweetheart? No betrothed?’ she asked idly. The other women were silent, listening to the interrogation.
Alys smiled but made a tiny movement of her shoulders, of her head, to signify her regret. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not now. Once I had a sweetheart,’ she glanced to Mistress Allingham. ‘You would know of him, Mistress Allingham. Tom the sheep farmer. But I had no portion and I went away to Penrith and he married another girl.’
‘Perhaps we should dower you, and send you off to be wed!’ Lady Catherine said lightly. It’s a dull life for you here, where no man sees you and nothing ever happens. It’s well enough for us – we’re all married women or widows or betrothed – but a girl like you should be wed and bearing children.’
Alys sensed the trap opening up before her. ‘You’re very kind, my lady,’ she said hesitantly.
‘That’s settled then!’ Lady Catherine said brightly. Her voice was as gentle as a diamond scratching glass. ‘I will ask my Lord Hugo to look among the soldiers for a good man for you, and I will give you a dowry myself.’
‘I cannot marry,’ Alys said suddenly. ‘I cannot marry and keep my skills.’
‘How is that?’ Lady Catherine asked, opening her grey eyes very wide. ‘You do not need to be a virgin to be a healer unless you deal in magic, surely?’
‘I use no magic,’ Alys said swiftly. ‘I am just a herbalist. But I could not do my work if I belonged to a man. It is time-consuming and wearisome. My kinswoman lives alone.’
‘But she’s a widow,’ Mistress Allingham interrupted, and was rewarded with a swift, small smile from Lady Catherine.
‘So you can wed and still keep your arts,’ Lady Catherine said triumphantly. ‘You are shy, Alys, that is all. But I promise you we will find you a fine young husband who will care for you and use you gently.’
Eliza Herring and Margery tittered behind their hands. Ruth, who feared Lady Catherine more than they did, kept very silent and stitched faster, bending low over her work.
‘You do not thank me?’ Lady Catherine asked; her voice was clear and underneath it – like an underground river – was a current of absolute menace. ‘You do not thank me for offering to dower you? And have you married to a good man?’
‘Yes, I do indeed,’ Alys said with her clear, honest smile. ‘I thank you very much indeed, my lady.’
Lady Catherine turned the talk to the gossip of London. She had a letter from one of her distant family in the south which spoke of the King and his growing coldness towards the young Anne Boleyn, his new Queen, even though she was big with his child again. Alys, who blamed the King and the whore, his pretend Queen, for all her troubles, smiled an empty smile as she listened, and hoped that Lady Catherine had been merely amusing herself by tormenting her with promises of marriage.
‘And the new Queen was nothing more than a maid-in-waiting in the old Queen’s bedchamber when she took the King’s fancy,’ Eliza Herring said tactlessly. ‘Think of that! Serving a queen one day and being a queen yourself the next!’
‘And the one he looks to now, Lady Jane Seymour, has served them both!’ Margery said. ‘Served the old Queen – the false one I mean – and now Queen Anne.’
‘A fine place to have at court, a lady-in-waiting,’ Eliza said. ‘Think how high you might rise!’
Lady Catherine nodded but her face was impassive. She looked at Alys as if to warn her. Alys ducked her head down and sewed.
‘Those are London manners,’ Catherine said with soft menace. ‘And what is right and proper for the King is not always a course for his subjects.’
‘Of course not!’ Margery said, flustered. ‘Besides, if Queen Anne has a son, he will cleave to her! No King would put aside a wife who gave him a son! It is only barren wives who get that treatment!’
Catherine’s face went white with anger.
‘I mean …’ Margery stumbled.
‘The King’s marriage was annulled because Catherine of Aragon was his brother’s wife,’ Catherine said icily. ‘That was the only reason for the annulment of the marriage, and you have all sworn an oath of allegiance recognizing the King’s rightful heir and the truth of his marriage to Queen Anne.’
The women nodded, keeping their heads down.
‘Any talk of divorce at the whim of the King is treason,’ Catherine said firmly. ‘There can be no divorce. The King’s first marriage was invalid and against the law of God. There can be no comparison.’
‘With what?’ Eliza asked dangerously.
Catherine’s grey eyes stared her down. ‘There can be no comparison between your positions and the Queen’s ladies,’ she said with acid clarity. ‘You are none of you high enough to wear scarlet, whatever borrowed clothes Alys may use. I hope that none of you would want to overset the natural order, the God-given order. Unless Alys hopes to see herself in purple? Married to a lord?’
The women laughed in a nervous, obedient chorus.
‘Who did the gown belong to, Alys?’ Catherine asked vindictively.
‘I was told it belonged to a woman called Meg,’ Alys said, clearing her throat and speaking low.
‘And do you know who she was, Alys?’ Catherine asked.
Alys lifted her head from her sewing. ‘Lord Hugh’s whore,’ she said softly.
Catherine nodded. ‘I think I would rather wear brown than flaunt borrowed colours,’ she said. ‘I would rather wear honest brown than the gown of a whore who died of the pox.’
Alys gritted her teeth. ‘Lord Hugh ordered me to wear this gown, I have no other.’ She shot one look at Catherine. ‘I hope I do not displease you, my lady. I do not dare disobey Lord Hugh.’
Catherine nodded her head. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Very well. But you had best borrow only the gown, Alys, and not the manners of the last owner.’
Alys met Catherine’s hard, suspicious gaze. ‘I am a maid,’ she said. ‘Not a whore. And I shall stay that way.’
After that she kept even more carefully away from anywhere that she might meet the young lord. When he came to his father’s room she sat in a corner, in the shadows. She put off the cherry-red gown which the old lord had given her, and asked if she might take a new one from the box. She chose a dark blue one, so dark that it was almost black, and wore it with a black stomacher tied as flat as a board across her belly. It was too large for her and came too high up under her chin, hiding the swell of her tight-pressed breasts. She rummaged in the box and found an old-fashioned gable hood in the style which had gone out with the old queen, the false Queen Catherine. Alys scraped back her growing curly hair into a black cap pinned tight. Then she pulled the gable hood on top of the cap and pinned it down. It was heavier than her wimple and hotter with her hair underneath, but it reminded Alys for a moment of the steady pressure of the wimple and the bindings around her face which she had worn for so long.
‘You look like a nun,’ the old lord said. And when he saw her swift guarded look at him he said, ‘No, wench, you’re safe enough. You look like a woman who is trying to be invisible. Who are you hiding from, Alys? Lady Catherine? Hugo?’
‘The other gown was dirty,’ Alys said evenly. ‘I have sent it to be washed. And it is time I wore a hood.’
Lord Hugh raised his white eyebrows. ‘You can have your pick of that chest of clothes,’ he said. ‘And tell David to show you the other chest. You might as well wear them as anyone else while you are here. When you leave they must stay.’
‘Thank you,’ Alys said quietly. ‘Is it not an offence for me to wear scarlet, my lord? I thought only a wife of a landholder could wear red?’
Lord Hugh chuckled. ‘I enforce the law of the land. The laws are what I say. And anyway, women don’t matter.’
The castle was preparing for the feast of Christmas and the turkeys and geese gobbled innocently on extra feed. The old lord developed a cough which kept him awake at nights and made him tired and irritable during the day. Alys went out in the dawn frost to pick fresh herbs in the little garden outside the kitchen door and bumped into a man, wrapped thick in a cloak, coming in.
He put out a hand to steady her, gripped her arm. As soon as he touched her she knew it was Hugo.
‘I gave you a fright.’ His smile gleamed from the shadow of his hood. He swept her with him back into the warmth of the kitchen. Servants were sleeping on the floor before the fire and on the benches. Hugo kicked two or three with his booted foot and they staggered sleepily out of his way. He pulled up two stools and thrust Alys down by the glowing embers.
‘You’re frozen,’ he said. He took her hand. Around her fingernails her fingers were blue with cold.
‘I was picking herbs with the ice on them,’ Alys said. ‘Your father’s cough is a little worse.’
Hugo took her cold hands and put them between his warm palms. As the feeling came back into her numb fingers Alys grimaced, pulled her hands away and shook them. Hugo laughed softly and leaned forward to recapture them. ‘I’ve been out all night,’ he said. His voice was low; no wakeful servant could hear them. ‘Don’t you want to know what I have been doing, Alys?’
Alys shook her head slightly and looked away from his intent face to the fire.
‘I met some friends who think as I do,’ he said. ‘One of them is the son of landowners, a wealthy man though not noble. Another is the son of a trader. We’re all young, we all want a share of the new world which is coming. We are all held back by our fathers.’
Alys made a little movement as if she would rise. Hugo tugged her back to the stool with a handful of her cape. ‘Listen to me,’ he said softly. ‘See how I trust you.’
Alys turned her face away, Hugo kept his hold on her.
‘One of my friends plans to set his father aside, have him declared insane and take his land and his wealth. His mother has agreed to support his claim, his wife too. A wicked way to treat your father, is it not, Alys?’
Alys said nothing. Hugo saw that her face was rosy from the warmth of the fire but around her dark blue eyes the skin was white. He knew she was afraid.
‘I would not do that, Alys, unless I was tempted very badly,’ he said. ‘But my father stands in my light – d’you see it, Alys? If it were not for his order that I stay here I would be in London. If it were not for his schemes to keep Catherine’s entailed lands I would be free of her. If it were not for his ambition to be hidden, his passion for peace, I would be at court, chancing my life and my wealth for tremendous prizes. Can you see how impatient I am, Alys?’
Alys’ lips were pressed together. Hugo had hold of both her hands. If he had not held her fast she would have clapped them over her ears.
‘Your chance will come, when God wills,’ she said as he waited for her to reply. ‘You will have to be patient, my lord.’
He leaned forward so his face was very close to hers. ‘And if I am not patient?’ he asked. ‘If I am not patient and I found someone to assist me? If my father were ill and no one could heal him? If he died? If then I set my wife aside? If I were rid of my wife? Rid of my wife and looking for a woman that I could trust, to hold the castle for me while I was away. A woman who could read, who could write? A woman who would be mine, sworn to my interest, dependent on me? A woman who would be my ears and eyes. Like you watch and listen for my father?’
Alys could not move. His whisper was hypnotic, he was luring her into some trap which she could not foresee.
‘I have to be free,’ she said in a low voice of longing.
‘Do I tempt you, Alys?’ he asked softly. ‘The wealth and the power?’
He saw her eyes darken slightly as if with desire.
‘And pleasure,’ he went on. ‘Nights and long days of pleasure with me?’
Alys jerked backwards as if he had thrown cold water in her face. She pulled her hands free.
‘I have to go,’ she said abruptly.
He rose as she did and slid one hand around her waist, holding her close to him. His mouth came down towards her. Alys felt her head tip back, her lips open.
Then he released her and stepped back.
Alys staggered a little, off balance.
‘Go now,’ he said. His dark eyes were bright with mischief. ‘You can go now, Alys. But you are learning who is your master, are you not? You cannot hide behind my father for much longer. I have had many wenches and I know the signs of it. You desire me already, though you hardly know it yet. You have taken the bait like a salmon in the spring flood. You may swim and swim but I shall land you at last. You will dream of me, Alys, you will long for me. And in the end, you will come to me and beg me to touch you.’
He smiled at her white face.
‘And then I will be gentle to you,’ he said. ‘And I will make you all mine. And you will never be free again.’
Alys turned from him and stumbled towards the kitchen door.
‘You’re in very deep now,’ he said softly to himself, as she pulled the door open and fled across the lobby to the great hall. ‘You’re in very deep, my Alys.’
For twelve nights Alys lay wakeful, waiting for the dawn light to come with winter slowness. For twelve days she moved in a dream through her work for the old lord, writing what he ordered without taking in any sense of the words. She picked herbs for him and brewed them or pounded them according to their potency. She sat in Lady Catherine’s chamber and nodded and smiled when they called on her to speak.
For twelve days she waded through a river of darkness and confusion. She had never longed more for the quiet certainties of Mother Hildebrande. She had never missed those ordered easy days more acutely. For twelve days Alys wandered around the castle like a ghost and when she heard a door bang, and Hugo’s merry whistle, she found she was trembling as if she had an ague.
She was by the castle gate when he rode in from hunting one day, his cap lost – blown away on the moor – his face bright. When he saw her he vaulted from the saddle and tossed the reins to one of the men.
‘I have killed you a grand dinner, Alys!’ he said joyfully. ‘A wild boar. They will stuff it and bring its head in and lay it at your feet! And you shall eat rich meat and dark gravy and nibble on the honeyed crackling! My Alys!’
Alys fumbled for her basket. ‘I am fasting,’ she said breathlessly. ‘It is Saint Andrew’s day, my lord. I do not eat meat today.’
He laughed carelessly, as if none of it mattered at all. ‘That nonsense!’ he exclaimed. ‘Alys, Alys, don’t cling to the old dead ways that mean nothing to anyone any more! Eat fish when you want to! Eat meat when you are hungry! Don’t let me ride out all day, and chasing a wild boar too, and then turn your face away from me and tell me you won’t dine with me!’
Alys could feel her hands trembling. She held the basket tighter. ‘You must excuse me,’ she said. ‘I …’
There was a shout from behind them as someone drove a cart through the narrow gateway. Hugo pressed forward, his hands either side of Alys’ head. She shrank back against the wall and then felt him, deliberately, lean his warm body against her. Her stomacher was like armour, her gable hood like a helmet. But when Hugo pressed against her she felt the heat of his body through her clothes. She smelled the clean, fresh smell of his linen, the sharp tang of his sweat. His knee pressing against her legs, the brush of his thick padded codpiece against her thigh, was as intimate as if they were naked and alone together.
‘Don’t you long for a taste of it, Alys?’ he asked, his voice very soft in her ear. ‘Don’t you dream what it would taste like? All these forbidden good things? Can’t I teach you, can’t I teach you, Alys, to break some rules? To break some rules and taste some pleasure, now, while you are young and desirable and hot?’
And Alys, in the shadow of the doorway, with the warmth of him all around her and the whisper of his male temptation in her ear, turned her face up towards him and closed her eyes and knew her desire.
As lightly as a flicker of candleflame he brushed his lips against her open mouth, raised his head and looked down into her tranced face with his smiling dark eyes.
‘I sleep alone these nights,’ he said softly. ‘You know my room, in the round tower, above my father’s chamber. Any night you please, Alys, leave my father, climb higher up the tower instead of running to be with those silly women. Climb higher up the tower and I will give you more than a kiss in a gateway, more than a taste. More than you can dream of.’
Alys opened her eyes, hazy with desire.
Hugo smiled at her. His wicked, careless smile. ‘Shall you come tonight?’ he asked. ‘Shall I light a fire and warm the wine and wait for you?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
He nodded as if they had struck an agreeable bargain at last; then he was gone.
That night Alys ate the wild boar when they brought it to the women’s table. Hugo glanced behind him and she saw his secret smile. She knew then that she was lost. That neither the herbs nor the old lord’s warning to Hugo would stop him. And that no power of will could stop her.
‘What’s the matter with you, Alys?’ Eliza asked with rough good nature. ‘You’re as white as a sheet, you haven’t eaten your dinner for nigh on two weeks, you’re awake every morning before anyone else and all day today you’ve been deaf.’
‘I am sick,’ Alys said, her voice sharp. Bitter.
Eliza laughed. ‘Better cure yourself then,’ she said. ‘Not much of a wise woman if you can’t cure yourself!’
Alys nodded. ‘I shall,’ she said, as if she had come to a decision at last. ‘I shall cure myself.’
On that night, when Alys felt her skin burn in the moonlight and she knew the moon would be lighting the path to Hugo’s room through twenty silver arrow-slits, and that he would be lying naked in his bed, waiting and yet not waiting for her, she rose and went to Lady Catherine’s gallery where there was a box of new wax candles. Alys took three, wrapped them in a cloth, tied the bundle tight and sealed the string. The next morning she sent it by one of the castle carters to Morach’s cottage, telling him it was a Christmas gift for the old lady. She sent no message – there was no need.
On the eve of the Christmas feast one of the kitchen wenches climbed the stone steps to the round tower to tell Alys that there was an old woman asking for her at the market gate. Alys dipped a curtsey to the old lord and asked him if she might go and meet Morach.
‘Aye,’ he said. He was short of breath, it was one of his bad days. He was wrapped in a thick cloak by a blazing fire and yet he could feel no warmth. ‘Come back quickly,’ he said.
Alys threw her black cloak around her and slipped like a shadow down the stairs. The guardroom was empty except for one half-dozing soldier. Alys walked through the great hall past half a dozen men who were sprawled on the benches, sleeping off their dinner-time ale, through the servers’ lobby to the kitchen.
The fires were burning, there was the smell of roasting meat and game hung too long. The floor had been swept after the midday meal and piles of bloodstained sawdust stood in the corner, waiting to be taken out. The cooks ate well after the hall had been served, the kitchen staff had emptied the jugs of wine and dozed now in corners. Only the kitchen boy, stripped down to his shorts, monotonously turning the handle of the spit roasting the meat for supper, stared at Alys as she walked through, her skirts lifted clear of the muck.
She walked out of the kitchen door and through the kitchen garden. The neat salad beds ran along one side of the path, the herbs were planted on the other, all edged with box-hedging. At the tower which guarded the inner ward the guards let her through with a ribald comment to her back, but they did not touch her. She was well known to be under the old lord’s protection. She walked across the bridge which spanned the great ditch of stagnant murky water and then across the outer ward where the little farmyard slept in the pale afternoon sunshine and a blackbird sang loudly in one of the apple trees. There were hives and pigsties, hens roaming and pecking, a dozen goats and a couple of cows, one with a weaned calf. There were sheds for storing vegetables and hay, there was a barn. There were a number of tumbledown half-ruined farm buildings. Alys knew from her work for Lord Hugh that they would never be repaired. It was too costly to run a complete farm inside the castle walls. And anyway, in these days, there was no threat to the peace of the land. Scotland’s army never came this far south and the mosstroopers threatened travellers on lonely roads, not secure farms, not the great Lord Hugh himself.
Alys walked through the farmyard area towards the great gate where the portcullis hung like a threat and the drawbridge spanned the dark waters of the outer moat. The gate was shut but there was a little door cut into the massive timbers. There were only two soldiers on duty, but an officer watched them from the open door of the guardroom. The country might be at peace but the young lord was never careless of the safety of the castle, and the soldiers were expected to give him value for money. One of the guards swung the door open for Alys and she bent her head and stepped out into a sudden blaze of winter sunshine. As the shadow of the castle lifted from her, Alys felt free.
Morach was waiting for her, dirtier and more stooped than ever. She looked even smaller against the might of the castle than at her own fireside.
‘I brought them,’ she said, without a word of greeting. ‘What made you change your mind?’
Alys slipped her hand through Morach’s arm and walked her away from the castle. The market stalls were set out along the main street of the town, selling fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, eggs and the great pale cheeses from the Cotherstone dairies. Half a dozen travelling pedlars had set out their stalls with fancy goods, ribbons, even pewterware for sale, and they shouted to passers-by to buy a Christmas fairing for their sweethearts, for their wives. Alys saw David walking among the produce stalls, pointing and claiming the very best of the goods and nodding to a servant behind him to pay cash. He bought very little. He preferred to order goods direct from the farms inside the manors which belonged to the castle. Those farmers could not set their own prices, and anything the lord required could be ordered as part of the lord’s dues.
She drew Morach away, past the stalls and the chattering women, down the hill, and they sat on a drystone wall which marked the edge of someone’s pasture and looked down the valley to the river which foamed over the rocks at the foot of the castle cliff.
‘You’re getting prettier,’ Morach said, without approval. She patted Alys’ face with one dirty hand. ‘You don’t suit black,’ she said. ‘But that hood makes you look like a woman, not a child.’
Alys nodded.
‘And you’re clean,’ Morach said. ‘You look like a lady. You’re plumper around the face, you look well.’ She leaned back to complete her inspection. ‘Your breasts are getting bigger and your face finer. New gown.’
Alys nodded again.
‘Too pretty,’ Morach said shrewdly. ‘Too pretty to disappear, even in a navy gown and a gable hood the size of a house. Has the tisane worn off? Or is it that your looks fetch him despite it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Alys said. ‘I think he speaks to me for mere devilry. He knew I did not want him and he knows his wife watches me like a barn owl watches a mouse. He is playing with me for his sport. He takes his lust elsewhere. But the devil in him makes him play with me.’
Morach shrugged. ‘There’s nothing you can take to stop that,’ she said. ‘Lust you can sometimes divert, but not cruelty or play!’ She shrugged. ‘He’ll take his sport where he wishes,’ she concluded. ‘You will have to suffer it.’
‘It’s not just him,’ Alys said. ‘That icy shrew his wife says she’ll give me a dowry and have me wed. I thought it was just a warning to stay clear of her damned husband, but one of her women, Eliza, is wife to a soldier and she said that Lady Catherine has told one of the officers that she’s looking for a husband for me.’
‘It can’t be done unless the old lord consents,’ Morach said, thinking aloud.
‘No,’ Alys agreed. ‘But if the soldier is told that we are as good as betrothed, and Lady Catherine pays over a dowry, and then sees that we are alone together …’
Morach nodded. ‘Then you’re raped, and maybe pregnant or poxed, and you’ve lost the game,’ she concluded with a grim smile. ‘No return to an abbey for you with a belly on you or pox-scabs on your pretty face.’
‘There’s worse,’ Alys said miserably. ‘He talks to me of his plans and his ambitions, he tempts me to join his cause. He is seducing me while I watch him.’
‘For desire?’ Morach asked.
‘I don’t know!’ Alys burst out. ‘For desire or devilry, or worse.’
‘Worse?’
Alys leaned forward and spoke in Morach’s ear. ‘What if he wants me in his power to suborn me against the old lord?’ she whispered. ‘What if he wants me to spy on the old lord, to copy his letters? What if he takes me as a pawn in his game to play against the old lord?’
Morach shrugged. ‘Can’t you tell him “no”?’ she asked. ‘Tell the old lord what he’s doing and claim his protection?’
Alys met Morach’s look with a fierce glare. Morach scanned her pale, strained face, and her eyes which were filled with a new expression, a kind of hunger.
‘Why, he has caught you and you are ready to own it at last!’ she said with sudden insight. She burst into a cackle of laughter. ‘You’re hot for him! My little nun! You’re dragging yourself into hell with desire for him! Your Lady couldn’t protect you from the heat between your legs then! Your God has no cure for that after all!’
Alys nodded grimly. ‘I desire him,’ she said bitterly. ‘I know I do now. I feared that I would when I came to you for the herbs. But I thought if I could keep the thought away then I could keep myself safe. Then I thought I was sick of some illness, I was burning up with heat, I could not sleep, I could not eat. When I see him I feel as if I shall faint. If I do not see him I feel sick to my very soul with longing for him. I am trapped, Morach. Damn him – he has caught me.’
Morach whistled softly as if she would summon a storm. ‘Have him then,’ she said simply. ‘It should cure your heat. That’s what they always say. Take him like you would take a bottle of wine, drink yourself sick of him and then never touch him again. I can show you a way to have him and not get with child. Have him and satisfy your hunger. Why not?’
‘Because I am a bride of Christ,’ Alys said through her teeth. ‘I cannot taste him and gamble that once or twice or even a hundred times will be enough. I am a nun. I should not even be in the world and this is the reason. I should not be able to look on a man. And now I have looked, and seen him, and I want him more than my life itself. But I am still the bride of Christ and Hugo must leave me alone. You forget very easily, Morach. You forget my vows. But I do not!’
Morach shrugged, unrepentant. ‘Then what will you do?’
‘I dare not trust him, and I fear the jealousy of his wife,’ Alys said. ‘I have to find a way to have some power in this net they all weave. I am ensnared every way I turn and they play with me – each one of them – as if I were a village simpleton.’
Morach nodded.
‘They use me,’ Alys went on in a low, resentful undertone. ‘The old lord has me as his only friend and real ally. He tells me he owns me outright, he has me trapped, afraid of a charge of heresy, afraid of being exposed as a nun. The young lord wants to ensnare me as a pawn against his father, or else he desires me, or he wants to play for the cruelty of it. And Lady Catherine will throw me to a rapist to punish me for taking the old lord’s trust and the young lord’s eye. I must have some power in this, Morach. I am like an unweaned babe among wolves.’
Morach nodded. ‘You need woman’s power, as I did,’ she said. ‘Your Christ will not keep you safe. Not now. Not against real danger and the lusts of men. You need another power. The old power. The power of the old goddess.’
Alys nodded. ‘I’ve no choice,’ she said. The cold air around her seemed very still and silent. ‘I’ve no choice,’ she said again. ‘I have been driven so far and now I am at bay. I have to use what power I can. Give me the things.’
Morach glanced around; the meadow was deserted, the noise of the market was behind them. No one was watching. She unwrapped the cloth bundle and Alys gasped at what she saw.
They were three perfect models, three convincing likenesses, as good as the statues in the chapel. Lady Catherine’s flowing gown and her cold sharp face were carved out of the wax as precise and white as a cameo. Her gown was opened at the front, her legs spread. Morach had scratched the wax at her vagina to give the illusion of hair and the vagina was a deep, disproportionate hole made with a warm bodkin.
‘They fit!’ Morach said with a harsh giggle. She showed Alys the model of the young Lord Hugo. She had graven his face in his hard look – the one Alys and all the castle dreaded. But around his eyes there was the tracery of lines from his ready smile. Morach had modelled him a penis as big as a codpiece. ‘He must wish to be that size!’ she sniggered.
She took the two candlewax dolls and showed Alys how they slotted together. ‘That’ll turn his lust towards her,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘You’ll be safe when he is like this.’
The last doll was the old lord. ‘He’s thinner than that now,’ Alys said sadly. ‘Thinner and older looking.’
‘I’ve not seen him for a long time,’ Morach said. ‘You can shape him how you wish – use a warm knife for carving, and your fingers. But take care.’
Alys looked at the three little statues with distaste. She uncoupled Lord Hugo and Lady Catherine and wrapped them up again. ‘What care?’ she asked.
‘Once you’ve made them your own, claimed them as models for the life, then whatever you do to them takes place,’ Morach said softly. ‘If you want the old lord’s heart to soften, you cut into his chest, carve out a little piece of wax, mould it into a heart, warm it till it melts, and drip it back into the hole. Next morning he’ll be tender as a woman with a new baby.’
Alys’ dark eyes widened. ‘Is that true for all of them?’ she asked. ‘I could make Lady Catherine sick by pinching her belly? Or make the young lord impotent by softening his prick?’
‘Yes,’ Morach gleamed. ‘It’s a powerful piece of business, isn’t it? But you have to make them your own, and you have to make them represent those you mean to change. And – as I warned you – they can obey you too well. They can … misunderstand.’
There was a silence in the winter meadow. Alys met Morach’s eyes. ‘I have to do it,’ she said. ‘I have no safety without some power.’
Morach nodded. ‘This is the spell,’ she said. She put her mouth to Alys’ ear and chanted over some nonsense words, part Latin, part Greek, part French, and partly mispronounced and misheard English. She said it over and over again until Alys nodded and said she knew it by heart.
‘And you must take something from each of them,’ she said. ‘Something which is close to them, a bit of hair, a bit of fingernail, a paring of skin, and stick it on the part of the doll where it came from. Little fingernail to little finger, hair to the head, skin to where it was cut. Then you have your doll and your power.’
Alys nodded. ‘Have you done it before?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Morach said decidedly. ‘There wasn’t the urgency. I’ve had women ask me to soften their husband’s heart but it’s easier done with herbs in his dinner than a wax candle. I’ve had someone wish a man dead, but I’d never do it. The risk is too great. I always thought the risk was too great to make one of these.’
‘Why’ve you done it now?’ Alys asked directly.
Morach looked into her smooth young face and said, ‘You don’t know, do you? All your learning and all your planning, and you still are ignorant.’
Alys hunched her shoulder. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’
Morach put her dirty hand over Alys’ clean one. ‘I did it for you,’ she said gruffly. ‘I did it to give you a chance, to help you gain what you want, and to save you from rape by a soldier or by the young lord or by both. I don’t care for your dream of a nunnery but I do care for you. I raised you as my own daughter. I wouldn’t see you on your back under a man who cares nothing for you.’
Alys looked into the sharp old face. ‘Thank you,’ she said simply. She looked carefully into Morach’s dark eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said again.
‘And if it goes against you,’ Morach said challengingly, ‘if it’s found, or if they know they’ve been hexed, I want my name out of it. You tell them you carved this yourself, it was your own idea. That is the condition. I’ve made them but I won’t take the danger of them. You tell them they are your own if you are ever caught. I want to die in my bed.’
The moment of tenderness between the two women was dispelled at once.
‘I promise,’ Alys said. She caught the look of suspicion on Morach’s face. ‘I promise,’ she said again. ‘I will make you a solemn oath. If anyone finds these I will tell them they are my own, made by me and used by me.’
‘Swear on your honour, on your old abbess, and on your God,’ Morach said insistently.
Alys hesitated.
‘Swear you will say they are yours,’ Morach demanded. ‘Swear it or I’ll take them back!’
Alys shook her head. ‘If anyone finds them I am lost anyway,’ she said. ‘Owning them would be enough to see me hanged.’
Morach nodded. ‘Throw them in the moat on your way home if you’ve changed your mind,’ she said. ‘If you need magic there’s a price to pay. There’s a price for everything. The price for this is your oath. Swear by your God.’
Alys looked at Morach with desperation in her face. ‘Don’t you see?’ she demanded. ‘Don’t you know? I can have no God! My Lord Christ and Our Lady have turned their faces away from me. I ran from them when I left the convent and I hoped to take them with me. But all my efforts cannot keep them by my side. I kept the hours of prayer while I lived with you, Morach – as far as I could guess the right time. But in the castle they are near to being Protestants, heretics, and I cannot. And so Our Lady has abandoned me. And that is why I feel lust for the young lord, and why I now put my hand to your black arts.’
‘Lost your God?’ Morach asked with interest.
Alys nodded. ‘So I cannot swear by Him. I am far from His grace.’ She gave a harsh laugh. ‘I might as well swear by yours,’ she said.
Morach nodded briskly. ‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Put your hand on mine and say, “I swear by the Black Master, by all his servants, and in the power of all his arts, that I will own these dolls as my own. I wanted them, I have them, I acknowledge them.”’
Alys shrugged and laughed her bitter laugh again – half crying. She put her slim white hand on Morach’s and repeated the oath.
When she had finished, Morach captured her hand, and held it. ‘Now you are his,’ she said slowly. ‘You’ve summoned him now. You must learn the skills, Alys, you must know your master.’
Alys gave a little shiver in the bright wintry sunlight. ‘I am his until I can get back to my abbey,’ she said. ‘I will loan him my soul. I am damned until I can get back to an abbey anyway.’
Morach gave a harsh laugh and struggled to her feet. ‘Good Christmas,’ she said. ‘I’m away to collect my Christmas goods from my neighbours. They should be generous this year, the plague has stayed away from Bowes, and the vomiting sickness has passed on.’
‘Good Christmas,’ Alys replied and reached in her pocket. ‘Here,’ she said, offering a silver threepenny piece. ‘My lord gave me a handful of coins for fairings. Have this, Morach, and buy yourself a bottle of mead.’
Morach pushed the coin away. ‘I’ll take nothing from you today but your oath,’ she said. ‘Nothing but your solemn oath that if they find the dolls you claim them as your own work.’
‘I promise!’ Alys said impatiently. ‘I’ve promised already. I’ve promised by the devil himself!’
Morach nodded. ‘That’s binding then,’ she said. Then she pulled her shawl over her head again and turned back towards the town.
Seven (#ulink_22a19b5a-5680-5f9c-92c9-60d0e441e906)
They celebrated the Christmas feast with a series of great dinners at the castle which started on the first day of Christmas and went on till the early winter darkness fell on the twelfth day. They had singers and dancers and a troupe of dark-skinned tumblers who could walk on their hands as well as their feet and whirled around the hall going from hands to feet so fast that they looked like some strange man-beast – an abomination. They had a man with a horse which could dance on its hind legs and tell fortunes by pawing out ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the ground.
On the second day they brought in a bear and forced wine on her and made her dance around the great hall while the young men leaped and cavorted around her – always making sure to keep clear of those huge flailing paws. When they were sick of the dance they took off her mask and baited her with dogs until three hounds were killed. Then Hugo called a halt. Alys saw he was distressed by the loss of one dog, a pale brown deer-hound. The bear was still snarling and angry and her keeper fed her with a dish of cheat-bread soaked with honey and some powerful mead. She went all sleepy and foolish in minutes and he was able to put her mask back on and take her from the hall.
There were some who would have liked to kill her for the sport of it when she was dozy and weak. Hugo, who had been excited by the danger of her and the speed of her sudden charges, would have allowed it but the old lord shook his head. Alys was standing behind his chair.
‘Do you pity her? The great bear?’ she asked.
He gave his sharp laugh. ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘But the keeper sells her play very dearly. If we had wanted to kill her it would have cost us pieces of gold!’ He glanced back at Alys with his knowing smile. ‘Always check a man’s purse before you scan his heart, little Alys. That is where most decisions are made!’
The next day the young men went out hunting and Hugo brought back a deer still alive, with its thin legs bound, so that they could release it in the hall. It leaped in terror on to the great trestle-tables, sliding on the polished surface, frantically glaring around the hall for escape, and people ran screaming with laughter out of its way. Alys watched its shiny black eyes bulging with fear as they drove it from one corner to another. She saw the slather of white sweat darken the russet coat until they hustled it forwards and up to the dais so that the old lord could plunge his hunting dagger into its heart. The women all around her screamed with pleasure as the brilliant red blood pumped out. Alys watched the deer fall, its dainty black hooves scrabbling for a foothold even as it died.
On the morning of the twelfth day they held a little joust. David had ordered the castle carpenters to build a temporary tilt-yard in the fields of the castle farm, and a pretty tent of striped material for the old lord to sit at his ease and watch the riders. Catherine sat beside him, wearing a new festive gown of yellow, bright in the hard winter sunlight. Alys sat in her dark blue gown on a stool at his left hand to keep the score of hits for each rider.
Hugo was monstrous and exciting in his armour. His left shoulder was hugely enlarged by a great sheet of metal forged into shape and studded with brass nails which terminated in a gross gauntlet. His right shoulder and arm were scaled like a woodlouse with overlapping plates of jointed metal so he could move freely and hold the lance. His chest and belly were covered by a smooth polished breastplate, shaped to deflect any blow, and his legs were encased in jointed metal. He walked stiffly and awkwardly to his horse, the big roan warhorse, which was also plated from head to tail, only its bright, excited, white-ringed eyes showing through the headpiece.
‘Is it dangerous?’ Alys asked Lord Hugh.
He nodded, smiling. ‘It can be,’ he said.
Hugo’s challenger was waiting at the other end of the lists. Catherine leaned forward, her eyes gleaming with excitement, and dropped her yellow handkerchief. At once the horses sprang forward and the two charged one another. As they came closer the lances came down, and Alys shut her eyes, dreading the sound of lance against body. All she could hear was the thunder of hooves, and then the horses were still. Lord Hugh nudged her.
‘No score,’ he said. ‘Pair of boys.’
In the second run Hugo struck his opponent on the body, on the third he took a blow to his shoulder, and on the fourth his lance hit his challenger smack in his metalled belly and threw him from the horse.
There was a great yell of approval from the watching crowd and the townspeople, who were crowded in at the gate end of the ground, threw their caps in the air and shouted ‘Hugo!’
Hugo pulled his horse up and trotted back down the lists. They were bending over the challenger and taking his helmet off.
‘Are you all right, Stewart?’ Hugo called. ‘Just winded?’
The man raised his hand. ‘A little tap,’ he said. ‘But I’ll let someone else unseat you!’
Hugo laughed and trotted back to his place. Alys sensed his complacent smile hidden beneath the helmet.
They jousted until the early afternoon and then only went in for a late dinner as the light began to fail. Hugo stripped off his armour at the ground floor of the tower and ran up the spiral stairs in his shirt and hose shouting for a bath. He was washed and dressed in his red doublet in time for dinner and sat at his father’s right hand and drank deep. As the lords ate, the mummers sang and danced, and when Lord Hugo called for the bowl and washed his hands and was served with hippocras wine the Lords of Misrule marched in from the kitchen with the lowliest server at their head.
Lord Hugh laughed and vacated his seat at the high table and took a chair at the fireside with Catherine standing behind him. They seated him comfortably and then brought a dirty apron for Hugo and ordered him to serve them all with wine. The women in the body of the hall shrieked with laughter and sent the young lord racing around the hall with one order after another. The serving-lad sat in the lord’s chair and handed down commands and judgements. A number of men were outrageously accused of girls’ play, and ordered to be tied one on another’s back in a long laughing line, to see how they liked a surfeit of it. Several of the serving-wenches were accused of venery and taking the man’s part in the act of lust. They had to publicly strip to their shifts and wear breeches for the rest of the feast. A couple of soldiers were accused of theft while raiding in Scotland with Hugo, a couple of the cooking staff were named for dirtiness. A wife was accused of infidelity, a girl who worked in the confectioner’s department of the kitchen was accused of scolding and had to wear a scarf tied across her mouth.
The serving-lad giggled and pointed to one servant after another who shrieked against the accusation and could plead guilty or not guilty and was judged by the roar of the crowd.
Then he turned his attention to the gentry. Two of the young noble servers were accused of idleness and ordered to stand on their stools and sing a carol as punishment. One of Lord Hugh’s cousins was accused of gluttony – sneaking into the kitchen after dinner begging for marchpane. Hugo’s favourite, a young lad who was always in the guardroom talking warfare with the officers, was named a seeker of favours, a courtier, and had his head blackened with soot from the fireplace.
People laughed even more and the serving-lad grew bolder. Someone cast Lord Hugh’s purple cape around his shoulders and he stood on the seat of the carved chair, jigging from one foot to the other, and pointed his finger at Hugo who was clowning around at the back of the hall with a tray and a jug of wine.
‘Lust,’ he said solemnly. The hall rocked with laughter. ‘Venery,’ he said again. ‘I shall name the women you have been with.’
There were screams of laughter, and around Alys at the women’s table a nervous ripple of discomfort. The serving-lad was lord of the feast, he could say anything without any threat of punishment. He might name any one of them as Hugo’s lover. And Catherine would not be likely to forget, nor pass off the accusation as the fun of the feast.
‘How shall you remember them all?’ someone yelled from the back of the hall. ‘It has been more than three hundred days since last year! That is at least a thousand women!’
Hugo grinned, postured, throwing back the apron to show his embroidered codpiece, thrusting his hips forward while the girls screamed with laughter. ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘More like two thousand.’
‘I shall name the women he has not had,’ the serving-lad said quickly. ‘To save time.’
There were screams of laughter at that. Hugo bowed. Even the old lord at the fireplace chuckled. The hall fell silent, waiting to hear what the lad would say to cap the jest.
‘There is only one woman he has not had,’ the lad said, milking the joke. He swung around and pointed to Catherine where she stood beside the old lord at the fireside. ‘His wife! His wife! Lady Catherine!’
The hall was in uproar, people were screaming with laughter. Catherine’s women, still in their seats at the table on the dais, clapped their hands over their mouths to smother their laughter. Hugo bowed penitently, even the old lord was laughing. Soldiers clung to each other and the serving-lad took off Lord Hugh’s purple jewelled cap and flung it in the air and caught it to celebrate his wit. Only Catherine stood, white with anger, unsmiling.
‘Now the old lord!’ someone yelled. ‘What has he done?’
The serving-lad pointed solemnly at Lord Hugh. ‘You are very, very guilty, and you become guiltier every year,’ he said.
Lord Hugh chuckled and waited for more.
‘And every year, though you do less, you are the more guilty,’ the serving-lad said.
‘A riddle!’ someone yelled. ‘A riddle! What is his crime?’
‘What is my crime?’ Hugh asked. ‘That I do less and less every year and am more and more guilty?’
‘You grow old!’ the serving-lad yelled triumphantly.
There was a great roar of scandalized laughter led by Lord Hugh. He shook his fist at the lad. ‘I had best not see you tomorrow,’ he shouted. ‘Then you shall see how old my broadsword is!’
The serving-lad danced on the chair and knocked his skinny knees together, miming terror. ‘And now!’ he yelled. ‘I order dancing!’
He slid from the cape and left the cap on the great chair and led out the dirtiest, lowliest slut from the kitchen to take his hand at the head of the set. Other people, still chuckling, fell in behind them. Alys leaned towards Eliza.
‘D’you see her face?’ she said softly.
Eliza nodded. ‘He’s worse than last year,’ she said. ‘And he was impertinent enough then. But it’s a tradition and it does no harm. The old lord loves the old ways and Hugo doesn’t care. They always make a butt of Catherine; she’s not well liked and they love Hugo.’
One of the mummers came to the ladies’ table and laid rough hands on Ruth. She gave a soft shriek of refusal but he dragged her to the floor.
‘Here’s sport!’ Eliza said joyfully, and chased after Ruth to find a partner for herself. Alys went down the hall like a shadow in her navy gown to stand behind Lord Hugh and walk with him back to his chair on the dais.
‘Not dancing, Alys?’ he asked her over the loud minor chords of the music and the thump of the drum.
‘No,’ she said shortly.
He nodded. ‘Stand behind my chair and no one will call you out,’ he said. ‘It’s rough sport but I love to watch it. And Hugo –’ he broke off. Further down the hall Hugo was on his knees to a serving-wench, half hidden behind a mask of a duck’s head. Catherine, unwilling, her face set and pale, was dancing in a set partnered by one of the young knights. ‘Hugo is a rogue,’ the old lord said. ‘I should have matched him to a girl with fire in her belly.’
They danced all afternoon and well into the night. A lad stood and sang a madrigal very sweetly, a gypsy girl came into the hall and danced a wild strange dance with clackers made of wood in her hand, then to a roar of applause the servers came from the kitchen and processed around the hall with the roast meats and set them down on the high table and in messes – four persons to a platter – at all the other tables. It was their final dish of the feast and grander even than all that had gone before. There was swan from the river, roasted and refeathered so that it was as white and complete as a live bird, head rearing up from the serving dish. At the other end of the top table there was a peacock with its tail feathers nodding. The lower tables had cuts of roast goose, turkey, capons, wild duck. Everyone had the best bread at this feast – manchet, a good white bread with a thick golden crust and a dense white crumb. The lords ate with unceasing appetite; Catherine beside them wiped her plate with her bread and took another slice of wild swan, though her face was still set and angry.
The jugs of wine came in, and one dish followed after another. Alys, rocking with weariness, ate little but drank the sharp red wine, cool from the barrels in the cellar. It was midnight when the sweetmeats finally came in, two for the top table. A perfect marchpane copy of the castle with Lord Hugh’s flag fluttering over the round tower was put before the old lord. The women got up from the side table to see it and crowded around.
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