by Sophie Jaff
Soon that cottage would be theirs, be hers, and she could arrange things as she liked.
Yearning whispers like fine linen through one’s fingers. It grasps like an infant’s hand. It sounds like the throaty clucks of the neighbor’s fat hen, and tastes like the last sweet sip pooling from the bottom of the wineskin. It is a minstrel’s sly croon to those long married, and the jangle of coin in the merchant’s purse. It is the deep and rosy pink of a milky nipple, as strong as your father’s arm swinging you up, and smells of your lover’s hair you once buried your face in.
Overnight, his lordship went back on his word and gave away her home to his new whore. The alewife. She had seen her once as they both waited at the well, pride and insolence itself, and she tried to spit in the slattern’s face. Only Guy had pulled her back. He was weak, but not so foolish as for all that. He might have restrained her for the best. Still, she can’t bear to think of that bitch inside her house, and so now she walks.
She knows it isn’t so safe, but she doesn’t brood as much when there’s a task to be done. She fills her lungs with the night air, lowers her bucket, and fills it too. Its damp wooden side bumps against her shins as she begins the journey home. Head down, she turns right into you.
The water splashes up and out, dripping down your legs. She laughs. She doesn’t mean to, but the surprise on your face was funny. She prays you do not take offense.
You don’t. You are courteous to a fault, and insist on walking her back to the well so she may refill her bucket. She knows who you are and she is thrilled to her core. It must be fate.
Scheming is the color of soiled straw, a shadowed face beneath a cowl. It hisses like a dying fire, it whispers like the sword drawn from its sheath, it crinkles as a piece of parchment rolled up tight.
She thinks that if you like what you see, you’ll put in a word for her, perhaps to the lord himself. He’ll be reminded of the nights they spent together. He’ll be ashamed at his lapse of reason. The whore and her son (for she is sure he is her son) and their fool will be thrown out, and she and her family, can move in. After all, she was promised.
You do like what you see. But it is not in your interest to aid her. Instead you say that you’ll escort her back. She is disappointed but hopeful. She thinks there’s still time to persuade you.
There isn’t.
You are solicitous. You smile and nod, and she is so engaged, so wrapped up in indignation, which is the color of thin gruel, that she doesn’t realize you have steered her off the path and into the hills, out of sight and out of hearing from the castle and its surrounding cottages.
Guy was right. It really is too dangerous for a woman to walk alone at this hour of the night.
17
Margaret
Today we ride. Lord August has given me my own mare, a chestnut whose large dark eyes are set in a delicate head. The stable master was ordered to give me lessons, and at first, he was scornful. Why waste time on a woman when there was real work to be done? He stood there, arms folded, contempt in his eyes. But I earned his grudging admiration. He could not believe that I had never ridden before, and more than once he proclaimed that riding must be in my blood. I did not tell him about my people. I did not tell him how I can see the world through my mare’s eyes, how I can feel where she wants to go. It is good to ride.
When I ride I do not think of anything but the rhythm of her hooves on the land stretching under and before me. I do not think about the scowls, the black looks, or what Thomas has told me. I have not spoken with him properly of late. Many of these nights I am not home, and when I return to the cottage he is gone. Bread is brought to us now, bread and rabbit and venison. Still, Thomas chooses to go Warin for his portion, more for friendship than for bread. When he is not with Warin, I suspect he is keeping company with Father Martin, the priest here. I do not understand why he has taken up with an aged priest when he could have the company of pages or squires or apprentices or any of the dozen other boys who always seem to be running around. I do not trust priests or nuns. No one of the cloth.
“Why?” Thomas had asked me when I first challenged him about Father Martin. “How can you judge when you do not know them?”
I have my reasons. I do know them. I have eaten at their table and worked beside them and prayed with them on bended knees, and I know what they are capable of. I cannot stop Thomas from speaking with him, though. I can only warn him that many are not what they seem.
He was defiant. “Father Martin says I have a fine mind.”
“I have told you that myself. You do not need a priest to tell you so!”
“He says that I might make a fine novice, one who could be taught to read and write.”
“Yes, but at what price? Must you give up life and love?”
“Father Martin says . . .” he began, and stopped.
“Father Martin says what?”
“That love should only be between a man and wife. Only in marriage should there be that bond. Otherwise it is a terrible sin.”
“And what would Father Martin know of such love? What do any of them know? They pervert what is natural and beautiful. They are warped and twisted through lack of love.”
I see again the young girl who thought she was safe with the village priest until she was pulled into his bony lap, his rough robe scratching against her. Then the same girl, only a few years older, kneeling with bowed head before the Sister, her white-knuckles gripping the back of the pew. That girl will never forget the burning pain of the rod, the welts rising, her terror and humiliation.
I blinked back to the present, saw Thomas’s uneasy face and lowered my voice. “But perhaps it is not only what the priest says that troubles you.”
He would not meet my eye. “There has been talk,” he muttered.
“What kind of talk?”
He would not answer.
“You need not be scared to tell me. I know his counselors do not like me, nor many of his knights.” I had felt their cold eyes upon me often enough. After all, I had no dowry, nor land nor means to make an alliance between warring factions.
“It is more than that,” he had said then.
“More?” A fist squeezed my heart.
“There is talk of something darker.” Thomas squirmed, his gaze still fixed upon the table.
“Thomas, tell me what you know.” My pride and defiance were swept away by a wave of fear.
“They say that you have bewitched him. Why else would he show you such generosity, such favor, when he hardly knows you? You are but a servant.”
I thought about my mare and my dresses of silk and satin, the gold and silver buckles, the pearl strands for my ears and neck, and my sparrow hawk. “Could it not be because he loves me and wishes to make me happy?”
He shrugged. “They say you bewitched the steward and all the steward’s men, that you tricked them into bringing you here. They fear you have great power over his lordship, that you have enchanted the cup from which he drinks so he will listen to you above all others.”
“But Thomas, this is nonsense! You know that this is nonsense.”
“I know.” He nodded. “But it is not I who needs convincing. There are knights who do not wish to drink the ale you brew and serve.”
I had already gotten wind of this. Lord August had greeted me one night not long before with a face white with fury. His touch bordered on violent, but I accepted it, wishing only to soothe him and he finally told me the story. A knight had refused a cup of my ale, and the insult of it burned a hole between them. In the end, talk of a duel came to nothing, but the knight no longer sat at his lordship’s table. Perhaps he was sent away, or perhaps he had fled.
A small, very small, part of me wondered what Cecily would have said if she had learned that Lord de Villias was fighting over my honor. I had felt a flush of triumph, but after Thomas’s warning I saw how this became yet another stone in the wall they were building against me.
“And it’s not just that. They say you hav
e cursed the castle.”
“What do you mean?”
He reluctantly met my eyes. “The dead girls.”
“Dead girls?” I was utterly bewildered.
“Found in the fields and in the forest.” Thomas peered sideways at me, amazed at my ignorance.
I had been so caught up in my own happiness that I failed to catch the undercurrents. Now I risked drowning. “And what do these girls have to do with me?”
“They say the murders only began after we arrived. They say it is the work of the devil.”
“How so?”
Thomas lowered his voice. “They say unholy symbols are carved deep into their flesh with a blade. They say it is the devil’s art, that his canvas is skin and that his ink is blood.”
I saw my mother returning to me through my dreams in the woods. Her body drained of life. The man working with his knife.
I sank down upon a chair. “When was the first one found?”
“Less than a fortnight after we came.”
That night, I could not sleep. I lay awake a long while, hearing his voice over and over again.
When the time is right, I’ll come for you.
I knew then in my heart that I should go. Thomas and Rudd would be fine, better than fine, if I left now. With Rudd’s brute strength and gentle nature, and Thomas’s wits, they would fare well. No one would hold my sins against them. No one would blame them.
But how could I leave? I thought of the sweetness, the joy I had discovered. We hungered for each other. And yet.
How long could I stay before Thomas and Rudd would also bear my burden?
Tomorrow all may end, but today we are hawking. To ride with the wind against my skin, blowing back my hair, to be at one with my mare up and over and down again. We stop at the top of the Downs to view the green and rolling land laid out before us. He who is by my side owns all we survey.
The falconer, whose cruel hooded eyes and beaked nose resembles a falcon himself, places my magnificent sparrow hawk, upon my arm. I admire her sheen of smoky plumage and fierce golden eyes. He guides me as, with a great ruffle and flap, I let her soar into the wind to search for prey. She circles and I stare up at her. She thinks of nothing but the flight and the kill. I wish I were her.
I look over and see Lord August staring at the bird with much the same longing. Perhaps he shares my wish. I think of the councils he must sit through with every petty squabble of fief and serf and landowner and the constant intrigue among his advisers and knights. What would he give to be free himself? Our eyes meet, and an understanding passes between us, a heat rising.
My sparrow hawk returns at last, a limp vole clutched in her talons. She is much petted and praised. Then Lord August sends the attendants and the falconer back, ordering them to take my horse. He helps me up so I can ride behind him, and we canter away. I press my cheek against his broad cloaked back, close my eyes, inhale his smell.
How can I give him up when I belong to him, and him to me?
You cannot, you cannot, you cannot, you cannot, the hoofbeats tell me.
We do not ride far, cannot ride far, only to where the hills shield us. Then he dismounts, looping the reins over a nearby bough. He flings down his cloak and lays me on it, the wool against my back and under it the grass, the earth. He is on top of me a moment later, and soon I am driven to cry out again and again.
“My lord! My lord!”
Another cry, another voice. We lie still as stone.
Sure enough, the shouts come again. “My lord! My lord!”
With an oath he wrenches himself from my arms. The rider is almost upon us.
Lord August is furious, but upon seeing the rider’s livery, he calls out, “What is it?”
“Oh my lord I have been sent to you.” The messenger is breathless. His face is ashen, and there is foam upon his horse’s flanks. “Come quickly.”
“What is wrong?”
The messenger only shakes his head. “You must see for yourself, my lord.”
Lord August turns to me, meaning to carry me up and back onto his horse. Propriety is forgotten amid urgency, and it is the only way I can return now that my own mare is gone.
“My lord, it would be better for the lady if she did not witness this. It is no sight for a maid’s eyes.”
“You must stay here and I will send for you soon,” he declares before I can protest and swings himself into the saddle. “Lead the way,” he orders.
His eyes are hard, his mouth set, but I know that, like me, he is afraid.
I wait. The breeze that once seemed soft now carries a sharper chill; the grass hisses; somewhere a bird cries mournfully. I wait and wait. He does not return. My mind is filled with terrible thoughts and visions. Perhaps the messenger was sent to lead him into a trap, and my beloved, riding in such a state, was ambushed unawares. They will come for me next, I know it.
Eventually I hear the thud of hooves and see a rider cresting the hillock. It is Landon. Of all those to come and fetch me, I would least have it be him. Ever since he escorted me to Lord August’s chamber that first night, his manner toward me has changed. He will no longer speak to me and yet his eyes follow me wherever I go. It infuriates me. I wish to slap the mocking smile from his lips.
He has no such look now.
“Come,” he tells me. “There is little time to lose.” His face is grim.
“What is happening?”
He makes no answer.
I press again. “Landon?”
“They have found a girl. Close to the castle.”
There is a buzzing in my ears as the world turns misty and begins to swim before me.
“Drink!”
Landon’s voice is faint, and a wineskin is pressed to my mouth. I drink. It is not my ale, nor even wine, but some far stronger stuff that burns as it travels down my throat. I blink and the mist thins a little.
“How do you feel now?”
Landon’s face is sharp. My vision has returned. “Better.”
“Are your wits about you once more?”
“They are.”
“Good,” he says. “Then we must ride.”
We talk no more on the journey.
It is night when we arrive. I hurry to the cottage and gather word from Thomas, who is bursting with the news. She has been placed in the de Villias chapel, where all will pay their respects. Nuns from the nearby priory will hold a prayer vigil until dawn. We wait for Lord August to speak. Rumors spark flames. It is a declaration of war. It is the work of bandits. It is a jealous husband’s rage.
I stand with Thomas in the dark. We have left Rudd safe in the cottage, away from this nightmare. The line shuffles forward, step by step. The chapel is cold inside and smells stale, as if dusty prayers have collected in the shadows. Thomas has told me of his love for its murals. No painting, no matter how miraculous, could tempt me back to a life within the church.
As I walk up to the altar where they have laid her out, I try to slow my breath, calm my heart. I command my feet to move one in front of the other. It is not my mother. It is not my mother lying there, but the fear, the fear presses down upon me as a great stone might.
The nuns have prepared her body, closed her eyes. She lies in a shroud of white linen. She seems at peace.
“She was naked when they found her,” Thomas had said. “Her throat slit, like the other girls.”
When I first saw her, she was glaring at me. She will have no use for the cottage now, I think and I am drenched by a wave of shame. I stare at her face. If I stare long enough, perhaps she will open her eyes and name her killer but her life is gone.
No sooner have I melted back into the crowd than a murmuring and shuffling begins as Lord August makes his way to the altar. With great care, he slowly places a single white rose upon her breast. He turns to address us. He speaks softly, but his voice carries. He tells us that this latest unspeakable act will not go unavenged. The sheriff and his men will not rest until the culprit has been found and swiftl
y brought to justice, no matter the cost.
He beseeches us to pray for her family now that God has called her to His side. At his prompt, all around me kneel down and close their eyes in prayer. I kneel but my eyes stay open. I gaze at his lowered head as he prays with all the others, and then I see one man whose head remains raised, whose eyes are also open. Landon stares back at me with no expression at all.
I shut my eyes in a hurry, and the moment is over.
Lord August rises. He is sure that God will protect us from this demon who now torments us, but no woman is to travel unaccompanied, night or day, until he is caught. Then he turns to Father Martin, bowing his golden head while the priest’s voice rises and falls.
I know he cannot look at me, that it would be most wrong, especially here, especially now, and yet I need him to. Look at me, I plead with him silently. Only look at me, make some sign that you know I am here. Only a few hours ago we lay together in the grass, in each other’s arms. But when Father Martin’s liturgy ends, he leaves without a glance.
Thomas and I return to the cottage. Neither of us feels like talking. Rudd is already asleep. I lie upon my bed. It has been so long since I spent a night alone.
I close my eyes.
I am at the edge of the woods. It is night. Snow lies on the ground. Stars glitter in the icy sky. A woman stands a little way among the trees. She beckons for me to join her. She is smiling.
I inch closer and realize she wears a shroud. It is Ida, the Candlemaker’s wife. She raises her arm to reveal deep cuts dark red and crusting.
“Come, Margaret,” she calls out softly. “We are waiting for you.”
The trees are becoming women. Their branches stretch into mottled limbs, thin twigs claw to fingertips. Bark peels back as strips of skin, revealing bloodied flesh. Wet white eyes peer out from sunken knots. Jagged tree hollows are gaping mouths stretched in endless, soundless screams. A forest of murdered women, their tears brown, dead leaves, pattering and scattering in the wind.
