Alys shook her head slowly. 'And instead, I was just another virgin,' she said softly. 'An ordinary girl.'
Hugo stood up, tossed aside the bloodied cloth and drew Alys into his arms. 'Ordinary girls give pleasure too,' he said consolingly. 'Another time, sweetheart, when I am not wearied with travelling and sated with Catherine. Another time it will be better for us both.'
Alys nodded, hearing dismissal in his voice. 'But don't send Morach for me again,' he said warningly. 'Catherine is bound to find out and distress could harm the baby. I will come to you when I can leave her without her knowing. I will come to you when she sleeps.'
'In corners,' Alys said. 'In doorways. Hidden in secrecy.'
Hugo gleamed. 'I love it like that,' he said 'Desperate and quick. Wouldn't you like me to take you like that, when we're too hot to wait for a proper time?'
Alys turned her head away so that he could not see the anger and resentment in her eyes. 'Like any ordinary girl,' she said.
He put an arm around her waist and kissed her carelessly on the top of her head. 'I must go,' he said. 'Sweet dreams.' The door shut softly behind him. Alys walked wearily to the bed, flung herself down on her back and watched the flicker of the firelight on the ceiling. She did not turn her head as the door opened. She knew it was not Hugo.
'Fool,' Morach said companionably. 'I thought you were hot for him. I could have told you it would hurt, lying with a man you hate.'
Alys turned her head slowly on the pillow. 'I don't hate him,' she said slowly. 'I love him. I love him more than life itself.'
Morach gave a little crow of laughter and hitched herself up into the high bed.
'Aye, you say you do,' she said agreeably. 'And you think you do. But your body says different, child. Your body said "no" all the way through, didn't it? Even when you kept trying to tell yourself you were in heaven.'
Alys raised herself up on one elbow. 'Help me, Morach,' she said. 'It hurt and I hated him touching me like that. And yet I used to tremble when he so much as looked at me.'
Morach chuckled and heaved the blankets over to her own side. 'He's a disappointment to you,' she said. 'And you hate Catherine. You're torn different ways at once. And you don't consult your own pleasure. Get hold of your power, Alys! Find what you want and take it. You lay there tonight and asked him to rape you. What he wants is a woman to drive him mad – not another victim.'
Alys pulled the blankets back and turned on her side with her back to Morach. 'And you watched,' she said irritably.
'Of course,' Morach said calmly. 'And I can tell you, he had more pleasure with Catherine's wanton joy than he did with you.'
Alys said nothing.
'If it had been me,' Morach said thoughtfully to Alys' stiff back, 'I'd have taken my time and given him wine, and taken a glass myself. I'd have drugged him maybe. I'd have used earthroot which makes a man dream of desire until he is mad with it and makes him hard with no chance of ease for hours. I'd have told him bawdy stories, I'd have let him watch me touch myself. I'd have told him I was a witch and that if he touched me he would go mad for my touch forever. And when he was half pickled with lust then I'd have let him have me. I wouldn't have whimpered beneath him like a ravished scullion.' Alys shut her eyes and hunched up her shoulder. 'But I wouldn't have done any of that until I'd decided whether I wanted him or not,' Morach said to the quiet room. 'I wouldn't have a man when we had a score to settle. I wouldn't tup a man who was lying his head off to me. I wouldn't let him roll on me and then wash himself clean as if I was dirt. I'd make him choose between me and his wife. And I'd use my magic to make him choose me.'
Alys turned around and looked at Morach. 'There is no magic in the world that can stand against an heir,' she said bitterly. 'All I can hope for is for the bitch to die in childbirth and the heir to die with her.'
Morach met her look. 'And me here to see she does not,' she said equably. 'It's a fine net you've meshed yourself in, little Alys.'
Alys turned her back on Morach again and thumped down into the bed.
'You must wish you were back at the abbey,' Morach said, rubbing salt in the old wound. 'You'd have been safe from all this uncomfortable reality there. Safe with your mother in Christ.' She paused. 'Pity,' she said cheerfully.
Alys had thought herself unhappy before, but after that night her days were harder still. The weather was against her through a long wintry April. Alys thought that the long season of darkness and cold would never end.
She had known harder winters in her childhood with Morach when food and even firewood had been scarce, and for frozen day after frozen day Morach had sent her out of the door of the snowed-in shanty to scoop a bucket of snow and set it to thaw on the little precious flame. At night they had huddled together for warmth and listened for the cry of the wolf pack which came nearer at twilight and dawn. Morach would throw another turf of peat on the fire and a handful of herbs and laugh as if the bitter cold and the pain in her belly and the long lonely cry of the wolves amused her.
'Learn this,' she would say to Alys – wide-eyed and thin as an orphan lamb. 'Learn this. Never cross a powerful man, my Alys. Find your place and keep it.' And the little child with the great blue eyes too big for her white face would nod and clench her little chicken-foot hands in the old sign against the evil eye. 'That farmer was a bad man,' she said solemnly. 'He was that,' Morach replied with relish. 'And dead now for his injustice to me. Find your place and keep it, Alys! And then avoid the hard men with power!'
Alys had been cold then with a deep iron coldness which had stayed with her for all her life like some incurable growth of ice in her belly. All the petting at the abbey, all the banked fires of blazing logs, all the sheepskin rugs and the wool tapestries could not cure her of it. When the wind howled around the walls of the abbey she would shiver and look up at Mother Hildebrande and ask:
'Was that wolves? Was that wolves, Mother Hildebrande?'
And the old abbess would laugh and draw the child's head against her knees and stroke her fingers through her fair curly hair and say, 'Hush, my little lapwing. What if there are? You are safe here, behind the thick walls, are you not?'
And the child would reply, with deep satisfaction: This is my place now.'
And now I have no place, and I am cold again, Alys said to herself.
She was seated on the kitchen step, her hands dug deep into her sleeves, her face turned up to the thin yellow light of the winter sun. All the other women were indoors, chattering and laughing in the warm gallery. Morach was singing some bawdy ditty to amuse them and Catherine was laughing aloud with one hand held over her swelling belly.
Alys had left them with an irritable shiver to run down to the garden to gather herbs. The old lord had a cough at nights which made him weary and Alys wanted the heads of lavender for him to help him rest. They were stunted and frozen, they should have been picked when the juice was in them, fresh and violet and sweet in midsummer.
'They were neglected and left, and now they are cold and dry,' Alys said, turning the arid handful in her lap. 'Oh God, Hugo.'
Between Catherine's demands for company and the needs of the old lord who sank one day but rallied the next, Alys should have been busy, with no time to brood. But all those long weeks, as it snowed deeper, and then thawed, and then snowed again, Alys moped at the fireside, at the arrow-slit window, or shivered on her own in the frozen garden.
'What ails you, Alys, are you sick?' the old lord asked.
David the dwarf peeped at her and gleamed his malicious smile. 'A sick physician? A foolish wise woman? A dried-out herbalist?' he asked. 'What are you, Alys? A gourd rattling with dried seeds?'
Only Morach in the dark room which they shared at night put her dirty finger precisely on the root of Alys' pain. 'You're dying for him, aren't you?' she said bluntly. 'Dying inside for him.'
Hugo barely noticed her in his busy days. He wrote a stream of letters to London, to Bristol and to Newcastle, and cursed like a soldier at the delay
in their delivery and replies. He supervised the pulling-down of the big keystones of the abbey and the men dragged them over the snow on sledges to make a heap where he planned his new house. 'Not a castle,' he told Catherine. 'A regular house. A Tudor house. A house for a lasting peace.'
He drew plans for his new handsome house. It was to have windows, not arrow-slits. It was to have chimneys and fireplaces in every room. He would have had the men dig foundations, but no one could drive so much as a knife into the frozen ground. Instead, he measured up and drew it, and showed it to David, and argued about kitchens and the bakehouse and the number of rooms and the best aspect. When he strode into the castle, as the wintry darkness came down in the afternoon, all the women in the castle fluttered – like hens in a shed with a fox beneath the floor. Hugo let his dark laughing eyes rove over all of them, and then took his pick in a shadowed doorway for a few minutes of rough pleasure.
He rarely had the same woman twice, Alys saw. He never wilfully hurt them or played the mad cruel games he had done with his wife. He treated them with abrupt lust and then quick dismissal.
And they loved him for it. 'He is a rogue!' 'He is the old lord reborn!' 'He is a man!' she heard them say. He put his hand out to Alys once with a quizzical smile and a dark eyebrow raised. Alys had looked through him, her face as inviting as frozen stone, and he had laughed shortly and turned away. She heard him whistle as he ran down the stairs, accepting her rejection as lightly as he had accepted her invitation. She no longer ran deep in Hugo's blood – he had too many diversions. He never came again to her room while Catherine slept -
Alys never expected it. She had taken a gamble on her desire and lost him, and lost her desire too.
All she had left to her was a nagging knowledge that she needed him, at a level which ran deeper than lust. Alys felt she had tried his lust and found it wanting. In his easy dismissal of her she felt her power – over him, over herself, over all of them – drain away like the pale sunsets which bled light from the narrow line of the western horizon in the early afternoons of the dark winter days.
One day the crystal on the thread hung downwards heavy and still, like a plumb-line, when she laid her hand on the old lord's chest.
'Have you lost your power, Alys?' he asked sharply, his dark eyes wide open, alert as a ruffled old eagle owl.
Alys met his gaze unmoved. 'I think so, my lord,' she said, cold to her very bones. 'I cannot get the thing I desire, and I cannot learn not to desire it. I've no time nor appetite for anything. Now it seems I've no ability either.'
'Why's that?' he asked briefly; he was short of breath. 'Hugo,' Alys said. 'He wanted me to be an ordinary woman, a girl to love. Now I am so ordinary he passes me by. I threw my power away for love of him and now I have neither the power nor the love.'
The old lord had barked a sharp laugh at that which ended in him coughing and wheezing. 'Get Morach for me then,' he said. 'Morach shall tend me instead of you. Catherine says that she trusts her with everything. That she is a great healer, an uncanny herbalist.'
Alys nodded, her face pinched. 'As you wish,' she said. The words were like flakes of snow.
The old lord used her as his clerk still, but there were only a few letters he cared to write during his sickness, during Lent. But when she was sitting at the wide oriel window of the ladies' gallery on the Wednesday after Easter Day Alys saw a half-dozen homing pigeons winging in from the south, circling the castle in a broad determined swoop and then angling, like a flight of sluggish arrows, towards their coops on the roof of the round tower. It meant urgent news from London. Alys bobbed a curtsey to Catherine and left the ladies' gallery. She arrived at Lord Hugh's door as the messenger came down the stairs from the roof of the tower with the tiny scrap of paper in his hand. Alys followed him into the room. 'Shall I read it?' Alys asked. Lord Hugh nodded.
Alys unfurled the little scrap. It was written in Latin. 'I don't understand it,' Alys said. 'Read it,' Hugh said.
'It says: On Easter Tuesday the Spanish envoy refused an invitation to dine with the Queen. The King took mass with him and the Queen's brother was ordered to attend him: 'That all?'
'Yes,' Alys said. 'But what does it mean?' 'It means the Boleyn girl has fallen,' Lord Hugh said without regret. 'Praise God I am friends with the Seymours.'
He said it like an epitaph on a gravestone, and closed his eyes. Alys watched his hard, unforgiving face as he slept and wondered if Queen Anne yet knew that she was lost.
After that day there was little work for her in the castle except reading to the old lord and sitting with Catherine. She could not be trusted to sew an intricate pattern – she lacked attention, Catherine complained. She had lost her intuition for herbs and Catherine shivered at the touch of her cold fingers. Day after day Alys had less and less to do but watch and wait for Hugo – and then see him pass by her without noticing her in the shadows.
She grew thinner and she took to drinking more and more wine at dinner as the food stuck in her throat. It was the only thing which helped her sleep, and when she slept she dreamed long wonderful dreams of Hugo at her side, and his son in her arms, and a yellow gown slashed with red silk and a snow-white fur trim.
As snow turned to sleet and then rain, the ground grew softer. At the end of April the young lord rode out every dawn and did not come back till dusk. They had started digging the foundations for the new house and on the day they had completed the outline he came home early, at midday, dirty with mud, bursting into Catherine's gallery, where she was sewing a tapestry with Morach idly holding the silks on one side of her and Alys and Eliza and Ruth stitching at the border.
'You must come and see it!' Hugo said. 'You must, Catherine. And you shall see the rooms I have planned for you and for our son. She can come, can't she, Morach? She can ride the grey palfrey?'
His glance flickered past Alys to the older woman. Alys kept her eyes on her work but she could feel him near her as a trout can feel a fisherman's shadow.
'If it's a very quiet horse,' Morach replied. 'Riding will not harm either of them, but a fall could be fatal.'
'And all your ladies,' Hugo said expansively. 'All of them! You must be pining to go out – mewed up here like fat goshawks! Wouldn't you like to smell the moorland air again, Alys? Feel the wind in your face?' Catherine smiled at Alys. 'She won't leave your father,' she said. 'She is always with him or running errands for him. She can stay. And also Margery and Mistress Allingham. I will come, and Eliza and Ruth and Morach.'
'As you wish,' Hugo said readily. 'As you wish. We'll go tomorrow. I'll walk out with you today, after dinner.' He caught sight of Alys, face down-turned to her work. 'You don't begrudge us our pleasure, Alys?' He had a wish, as wilful as a teasing child, to see her face and her eyes and to hold her attention.
She did not look up at him. 'Of course not, my lord,' she said, her voice thin but steady. 'I hope you and my lady have a pleasant day.'
'You must be thirsty, my lord,' Catherine interrupted. 'Alys, call for some wine for my lord before you leave us. You are bid to go to Lord Hugh, are you not?' Alys rose to her feet and went to pull the bell. 'Is my father ill?' Hugo asked.
'Oh no,' Catherine reassured him. 'Alys does not tend his health now. She has lost her skill. Isn't that strange? Morach tends him now. But he likes Alys to read to him. Doesn't he, Alys?'
Alys shot a quick look at Hugo from under her eyelashes. 'Yes,' she said. 'May I go now?'
Hugo smiled, his eyes resting on her, his look thoughtful, and nodded her away. Alys, her eyes on the floor, her face pale, went out of the heavy door and closed it quietly behind her.
'Not long now,' Morach said, watching Hugo's eyes following Alys to the door. 'Not long now,' she said with malicious satisfaction. 'What?' Catherine demanded impatiently. Morach's grin was irrepressible. 'I said, not long now. I was thinking of a game I know.'
Sixteen
The old lord kept Alys with him after dinner, he had a letter by messenger from his cousin in London.
The man had come slowly, overland up the Great North Road, travelling with others delayed by snowdrifts. The news he brought was a week old. But gossip and rumours have a long life. Lady Jane Seymour had been given her own apartments at Greenwich Palace – as grand as those of the Queen. Rochford, the Queen's brother, was not to be elected to the Garter. That honour was given elsewhere. The King had danced with Lady Jane Seymour all evening. The King and the Queen were to watch a May Day joust together but the court was seething with stories of a quarrel between the Queen and King when she had stripped the baby Princess Elizabeth naked and thrust her at him, demanding if he could find a flaw, a single flaw, on the chubby little body. Another perfect child would follow the first, she swore. But the King had turned away.
Alys read the letter to him and then burned it when he nodded to the fire. There was also a letter from the College of Heralds. Lord Hugh wanted to add a quartering to his shield to greet his new grandson. There was a precedent for the honour in Catherine's family and the old lord and the college were haggling about the justice of the claim and the price that would have to be paid for the added lustre to Hugh's name. He shook his head at their demands. 'I must watch my ambition,' he said. 'See what ambition is doing to the Boleyns, Alys. The safest place to be is halfway down the hall. Not too near the top table.'
There was a lease sent from the Bowes manor for his inspection. A tenant was resisting a change of his holding from entry and occasional fines to an annual rent. He wanted to pay his fines in goods but the castle was hungry for cash. Alys read the medieval Latin of the lease slowly, stumbling over the archaic words. Lord Hugh watched the flames in the fireplace, nodding first with concentration and then with weariness, and then his eyes slowly closed. Alys read on a few sentences more and then softly laid down the parchment and looked at him. He was fast asleep.
The Wise Woman Page 26
