Tiher sat for a minute in a cold silence that would have made Alain angry if it had been anyone else. “I see,” said Tiher at last. “But it sounds as though increasing the charges has hurt, and you’re not even getting any extra money from it.”
“No,” Alain said angrily again, “because of the pure perversity of the people here. They could afford to pay — the rents here are half what they were in Fougères — but they think they have a right to have their grain ground at the old price. They’d rather do without flour than pay a farthing more a week for their bread.”
Tiher slapped the table. He had never run a manor himself, but he knew that villages consisted principally of people, who might be expected to behave with all the unreasonable conservatism and perversity of human nature. “For God’s sake, Alain, what else did you expect?” he demanded in exasperation. “Would you tamely agree to pay more for the same old thing, when you could get the old price by going a mile up the road? If you raise the price of bread, of course the peasants hate you! You never did have any sense. I could have told you this would get you nothing but ill-will.”
“I can’t back down now!” protested Alain. “The people here all hate me as it is. If they think they can disobey me and get away with it, God knows where it will end.”
Eline, who’d said virtually nothing since Tiher arrived, suddenly jumped up from the table and ran from the room. Alain looked at his cousin accusingly. “You’ve upset her,” he said.
“I? I didn’t say anything.”
“It was that bit about ill-will. She’s been very worried about that. The servants keep running off, and people call her names behind her back. I try to have them punished, but it’s hard to catch them. And she’s … she shouldn’t be upset just now. She’s going to have a child, Tiher.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Tiher, with a stab of pity for the white, sick, frightened seventeen-year-old who’d just fled the room. He delivered the conventional congratulations without conviction. “I pray God send you both joy of it.”
Alain shook his head, then sank it in his hands. “I pray God does send joy, because there hasn’t been any joy of it yet! Tiher, we ought to be so happy, but right now it’s just one more thing to worry about. She’s been so wretched the past few months that I’m afraid for her. I want to take her away from here. She needs peace — but I don’t have anyone I could trust to run the place in my absence. That bailiff of mine, Gilbert, is a thief, and the people here hate him even more than they hate me. Anyway, I can’t afford to buy her a house, not with this debt hanging over me.” He looked up at Tiher with the old, familiar pleading blue-eyed gaze. “I’m so glad you came,” he said. “I don’t know what to do, Tiher! The people here hated me even before I arrived, and everything I do only seems to make it worse. They always compare me to their machtiern. If they knew what their precious machtiern really was, they wouldn’t want him back!”
“What do you mean?” Tiher asked impatiently.
Alain grimaced and shook his head. “He wasn’t the noble knight everyone took him for. Eline found that out.”
He did not explain, and Tiher wondered if Eline had “found out” anything more than that her husband lost his temper when nagged about his hunting expeditions, or if Tiarnán had produced a bastard by some village woman. He doubted it was more than that. Alain had been a fool as a landless knight, and becoming lord of a manor seemed only to have made him a worse fool. Why, by all the saints, had he borrowed money?
“I hated the fellow before,” Alain went on abruptly, “but not nearly as much as I hate him now. I’m sharing the house with his ghost — and it’s a wicked, dark, deadly ghost. I don’t know how much more of it I can stand. Tiher, you’re clever, and you have the duke’s favor. Help me, please!”
Tiher set his teeth and wondered miserably if this “dark, deadly ghost” was the shadow of Alain’s own guilt. He wished desperately that he knew where his cousin had gone when he told that story about buying hawks in St. Malo.
But that was a question he did not dare to ask — not then, with Alain waiting anxiously for hope, for the help that he was sure his prickly older cousin could supply.
“Listen, then,” Tiher said after a long silence. “Duke Hoel owns houses all over Brittany. He might lease one to you at a nominal rent, for Eline’s sake, considering the condition she’s in and the way things are here. If you like, I can suggest it to him. But you’re going to have to admit to him that you haven’t been able to manage Talensac and do something to get your lands in order. If you know your clerk is a thief, sack him and find someone else.”
“I can’t!” moaned Alain. “I told you, the people here all hate me! I don’t dare trust anyone in Talensac as bailiff.”
“Then ask the duke to find you someone trustworthy.”
“I can’t. He offered to do that last March when he was at Treffendel. He told me to get a native Breton speaker. I said I’d rather have Gilbert.”
Tiher stared at Alain incredulously. The thought that Hoel had offered Alain help and advice, and that Alain had turned it down, made him wish he could wash his hands of the matter: Alain was so pigheaded in his folly that there was no saving him. But of course he couldn’t leave his cousin in the pit, staring up desperately and begging Tiher to toss him a lifeline. Tiher contented himself with making his opinion clear. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” he exclaimed. “You brought this on yourself. And on your wife. You went into a perfectly respectable manor, your overlord gave you advice on how to run it, and you blithely ignored him and pulled the whole thing down on top of yourself! Alain, what do you want to do? Stay here and be hated, or put in a reliable bailiff and go live in a comfortable house in Nantes or Vannes until things here have calmed down a bit?”
Alain had stared guiltily down at the table during Tiher’s scolding; at this he looked up again. For once he made no attempt to justify himself. “I want to get away,” he said instead, very simply. “For Eline’s sake, and the child’s, I’ve got to.”
“In that case, you’re going to have to go to the duke and ask for help. Look, he’s not going to do anything worse than say ‘I told you so,’ and if I make a few excuses for you first, he won’t say even that very loudly. What you must do is come to Treffendel and join in the stag hunt. Then you can pick your moment to talk to him. I’m inviting you now in the duke’s name. Eline can come, too. The duchess and her ladies are going to be there, so it will be perfectly natural for her to come along, and when they see her, they’ll want to help her. Hoel hasn’t forgotten how much Tiarnán adored her. He’ll be willing to help her for his favorite’s sake, even if you have offended him by ignoring his advice.”
He noticed how Alain flinched at his rival’s name, and all at once ached for the morning so that he could leave. Talensac might not be haunted, but Alain certainly was, and the blister in Tiher’s heart reminded him that a ghost will seek out his murderer.
When the ducal party arrived at Treffendel, two evenings later, Marie was with them. The sight of her riding in on her bad-tempered roan mare was like rain on thirsty ground to Tiher. The blister in his heart ached now, and he wanted it to burst soon, one way or another.
He waited until he saw Marie going out to the yard, then managed to catch her privately before she came back in. In silence he handed her the letter from his uncle’s shipping agent in St. Malo. She took it, read it quickly, stood staring at it for a long time. Then she sighed, crossed herself, and handed it back to him.
“Alain was lying when he said he was going to St. Malo,” Tiher said flatly. “Do we go to the duke?”
“You don’t need to ask me that,” Marie replied quietly. “You know the answer already. We go to the duke. But let’s do it privately.”
Tiher nodded heavily. It was the duke’s responsibility to administer justice for his vassals. If he were presented with the problem privately, he could check whether there was an innocent explanation for the lies before the whole matter emerged into the public disgrace of a cour
t hearing. Tiher still hoped that Alain could explain, but the circumstances gave him little grounds.
“I’m sorry, Tiher,” Marie said gently. “I shouldn’t have involved you: he’s your cousin.”
“You didn’t involve me,” Tiher pointed out. “I guessed what you were doing and involved myself. But a member of Alain’s family should be involved. Just to help him with his case.”
This was true, but Marie still grieved for it. Tiher’s distress for his cousin was only too apparent. Moreover, as far as Tiher knew, the murder, if there was one, had been committed purely from lust and greed. She knew already that it had involved more than that: at its heart lay a secret so alarming that it had turned Eline against her husband, and perhaps driven Eline’s lover to violence on her behalf. Moved partly by an impulse to comfort Tiher, and partly from a solemn sense that the whole truth should be served, she decided to tell him everything she knew.
Tiher was bewildered by it. “Are you sure this isn’t just chasing chaff?” he asked. “The man was mad about hunting; it doesn’t need a terrible secret to explain that.”
“There was a secret,” she said wearily. She would have given half her dowry to be able to say that there weren’t. “His confessor as good as admitted it. And if we press Alain and his wife too hard, it will probably come out. Which is another reason to make sure that the duke talks to Alain privately. I don’t want to blacken the reputations of the living or the dead. It would be good if we could think up some excuse for Hoel to use when he summons Alain, so that no one else is aware that anything is happening at all.”
“He won’t need to summon him; Alain and his wife will be coming here tomorrow,” said Tiher. He found himself telling Marie all about Talensac and his visit there. It was a relief to confide in her. The memory of the men glaring from the stocks, and of Eline’s sick, white face and Alain’s feverish one, had clung stickily to his mind since he left, whatever else he tried to do.
“Poor Eline,” she said when he’d finished. “And poor Alain, and poor Talensac. Dear God, it’s easy for people to be miserable.”
He stood for a moment looking at her. She was dressed in one of the gowns Havoise had given her for the trip to Paris, a fine tawny thing, and she was wearing a necklace of rubies he hadn’t seen before. The richness suited her, reinforcing the air of calm self-possession that she had had even in monastic black. Her face, though, was vulnerable and troubled. Tiher wanted suddenly to kiss her, but held back: what he’d told her of Talensac was something she’d taken into herself, and it would be wrong to disturb her so soon. “Do we go to Duke Hoel tonight, then?” he asked instead. “Or tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” Marie decided firmly. “After the hunt. Let Hoel enjoy his day with his brother first.”
“As you say.” Tiher paused, still watching her. “I almost forgot,” he said, forcing a smile. “How was Chalandrey? And your convent?”
She smiled back, also with some effort. Their eyes held for a moment in a wordless salutation. People could easily be made miserable, so they would work at their scrapings of happiness. “Confusing,” she answered. “They were the same, and I wasn’t.”
He offered her his arm, and they began walking back to the lodge. “Chalandrey was stunned by you?” he asked.
She smiled more naturally. “They were stunned anyway. They didn’t know what to make of an archangel as an overlord.”
“They wouldn’t have gained much experience in the ways of angels from Duke Robert of Normandy.”
“No,” agreed Marie solemnly. “Still, they were prepared to attend to him. In fact, they were relieved that he was all they had to worry about.”
She had seen, as soon as she got to Chalandrey, that she had been right to cling to her honor. So many other people had depended on it. The officials and servants in the manor house had been afraid that Hoel would get the manor and they’d all lose their positions. The peasants on the estate had been afraid that a Norman would come in and raise the rents. They were all pleased to think that everything would go on as it had been, expect for the rent money going to Saint Michael. She could not have lived in that house if she’d had to throw out all the old faces from her childhood. It had been desperately strange, though, to be back in a place still so familiar and to find herself so different. Her father’s bailiff had tried at first to lecture her, the old chaplain who’d taught her her letters had tried to give her advice, and the manor officials and servants had tried to condescend the way they’d done in the past. After a little while both she and they had realized that they were talking to someone who didn’t exist anymore, and they had stopped, and looked at her with baffled eyes, and started to call her “my lady.” Yet it had been only four years since she was last at Chalandrey, and all the rooms had been exactly as she remembered them; the faces of the people had hardly changed. She had known that she had changed, but so much? It was disconcerting and unpleasant to be a foreigner in her own home. She had taken the inventory with Grallon, collected some of the movable property, and gone on to Mont St. Michel, already suspecting that she would never go back to Chalandrey again.
At St. Michael’s it had been just the same as at Chalandrey. When Lady Constance met her at the convent gate, she’d called Marie “my dear child” and praised her pious intention of bestowing such a fine manor upon the priory. She, too, had eventually faltered to a stop and looked at Marie in confusion. Then Marie had found herself treating the prioress in a way she hadn’t expected — not with the earnest respect she’d had when they first met, and not with the mixture of dutiful obedience and secret contempt that had replaced it by the time she left. Instead, she’d noticed how much Constance resembled her half-sister Havoise, and plied her with sly jokes, like Sybille’s, until the prioress began laughing and talking with a pleasant worldly frankness. Of course, Constance lacked Havoise’s honesty-but she was a kind woman, too, and this time, Marie had liked her. When the ceremony of bestowing the lands was over, and the bailiff of Chalandrey had been confirmed in his post, Constance had suddenly embraced Marie and said, “You will come back, won’t you, my dear? I know you wanted to stay here once, and really, I’d be delighted if you did.”
Perhaps, Marie thought now, perhaps. There are worse fates. I could be in charge of the convent library and ride out on expeditions to buy books; I could work in the hospital or the school. I could pray and find peace. It wasn’t St. Michael’s fault that I was miserable before, but my own. Perhaps you need to be at peace with the flesh to be a nun as much as to be a wife. Yes, I could be happy there, after all. As I could be happy with Tiher, if the duke does give him an estate big enough to support us, and if he still wants to marry me when he has it. But I’m wrong to count on him: I don’t dare take his love for granted. He only needs to meet a pretty girl, livelier than me, who falls in love with him because she loves laughter, and he’ll take her and thank God. I haven’t given him any reason to be faithful. But I don’t know my own mind yet, let alone his. Leave it a little longer. There’s no hurry to decide.
“So: you stunned them,” said Tiher, grinning at her, and she looked at him sideways and smiled back. “And you’ve duly disinherited yourself?”
“I have duly rendered myself as landless as you are.”
He stopped, just outside the door of the lodge, and caught her hands. “Why don’t we run away and get married tonight?”
“No doubt you’ve decided what we’d live on if we did?”
“Take no thought for tomorrow, for tomorrow will take thought for itself. Sufficient unto the day the evil thereof.”
“Ah, so you still plan to be a holy man, taking no thought for the things or the body! I applaud you. Perhaps I’ll become a holy woman and join you. We will live in a hut in a forest glade, eating nuts and berries and drinking fresh springwater. But holy saints don’t marry. We will live together as brother and sister.”
“Your brother has a wicked, incestuous heart,” said Tiher, grinning, but he let go of her hands to open t
he door for her. “But I don’t fancy a diet of nuts and berries. There’s marrow-bone pie and pigeons in red wine on the menu tonight. Maybe we shouldn’t run away until tomorrow.”
The following morning dawned cloudless and bright, with a white sun rising tremulously from a shimmer of pink summer haze. The air was warm and nearly windless, and around Treffendel the great forest seemed to be drawing a deep green breath, as though it were about to sing. Alain arrived at the hunting lodge early, with Eline sitting behind him on their gray palfrey and holding onto his waist, and two servants Following behind them with some hounds. A little color had come back into Eline’s face, and she was smiling. The prospect of getting away from Talensac and spending a day with the court had stopped her tears — and the further prospect of getting away from Talensac altogether and settling in a house in Nantes had given her hope for the first time in months.
The yard of the lodge was full of noise and motion. Horses were being saddled for the hunt; hounds in couples barked at each other and ran back and forth whining with excitement; men and women sounded their horns and admired each other’s clothes. Alain spotted Tiher, locked in a discussion of stag’s droppings with the duke’s forester and Bishop Quiriac of Nantes. He drew in his horse beside his cousin, jumped down, and helped Eline off. As Alain had expected, Tiher broke off his discussion to greet them.
The Wolf Hunt Page 35
