Death and the Lady

by Tarr, Judith

  Mère Adele snorted. “I’d sooner let a bull in with the cows. Are you here to take what’s left of our men? Or will you believe that we’re drained dry?”

  “That,” said Lys behind, still on the stair, “was hardly wise.”

  “Let me judge that,” said Mère Adele without turning. She folded her arms on the parapet and leaned over, for all the world like a goodwife at her window. “That’s not a device from hereabouts,” she said, cocking her head at the banner. “What interest has Montsalvat in poor Sency?”

  “Why, none,” said milord, still smiling. “Nor in your men, indeed, reverend lady. We’re looking for one of our own who was lost to us. Maybe you’ve seen her? She would seem to be on pilgrimage.”

  “We see a pilgrim now and then,” said Mère Adele. “This would be an old woman, then? With a boy to look after her, and a little dog, and a fat white mule?”

  I struggled not to laugh. My lord Giscard—for that he was, no doubt of it—blinked his wide blue eyes and looked a perfect fool. “Why, no, madam, nothing so memorable. She is young, our cousin, and alone.” He lowered his voice. “And not . . . not quite, if you understand me. She was my brother’s mistress, you see. He died, and she went mad with grief, and ran away.”

  “Poor thing,” said Mère Adele. Her tone lacked somewhat of sympathy.

  “Oh,” he said, and if he did not shed a tear, he wept quite adequately with his voice. “Oh, poor Alys! She was full of terrible fancies. We had to bind her lest she harm herself; but that only made her worse. Hardly had we let her go when she escaped.”

  “Commendable of you,” said Mère Adele, “to care so much for a brother’s kept woman that you’ll cross the width of Normandy to find her. Unless she took somewhat of the family jewels with her?”

  Lys hissed behind me. Mère Adele took no notice. Milord Giscard shook his head. “No. No, of course not! Her wits were all we lost, and those were hers to begin with.”

  “So,” said Mère Adele. “Why do you want to find her?”

  His eyes narrowed. He did not look so pretty now, or so much the fool. “She’s here, then?”

  “Yes, I am here.” Lys came up beside me. She had lost a little of her thinness, living with us. The weight of the child did nothing to hamper her grace. Her hands cradled it, I noticed, below the parapet where he could not see.

  She looked down into his face. For a moment I thought that she would spit. “Where were you? I looked for you at Michaelmas, and here it’s nigh All Hallows.”

  He looked somewhat disconcerted, but he answered readily enough. “There was trouble on the road,” he said: “English, and Normans riding with them.”

  “You won,” she said. It was not a question.

  “We talked our way out of it.” He studied her. “You look well.”

  “I am well,” she said.

  “The baby?”

  “Well.”

  I saw the hunger in him then, a dark, yearning thing, so much at odds with his face that I shut my eyes against it. When I opened them again, it was gone. He was smiling. “Good news, my lady. Good news, indeed.”

  “She is not for you,” said Lys, hard and cold and still.

  “If it is a son, it is an heir to Montsalvat.”

  “It is a daughter,” said Lys. “You know how I know it.”

  He did not move, but his men crossed themselves. “Even so,” he said. “I loved my brother, too. Won’t you share what is left of him?”

  “You have his bones,” said Lys, “and his tomb in Montsalvat.”

  “I think,” said Mère Adele, cutting across this gentle, deadly colloquy, “that this were best discussed in walls. And not,” she added as hope leaped in milord’s face, “Sency’s. St. Agnes’ priory can house a noble guest. Let you go there, and we will follow.”

  He bowed and obeyed. We went down from the gate. But Mère Adele did not go at once to St. Agnes’.

  People had come to see what we were about. She sent them off on errands that she had given them long since: shoring up the walls, bringing in such of the animals as were still without, shutting Sency against, if need be, a siege.

  “Not that I expect a fight,” she said, “but with these gentry you never know.” She turned to me. “You come.”

  She did not need to turn to Lys. The lady would go whether she was bidden or no: it was written in every line of her.

  It was also written in Francha, who was never far from her side. But she took the child’s face in her long white hands, and said, “Go and wait for me. I’ll come back.”

  One would hardly expect Francha to trust her, and yet the child did. She nodded gravely, not a flicker of resistance. Only acceptance, and adoration.

  Not so Celine. In the end I bribed her with Pierre, and him with the promise of a raisin tart if he took her home and kept her there.

  oOo

  Mère Adele set a brisk pace to the priory, one that gave me no time to think about my frayed kerchief and my skirt with the stains around the hem and my bare feet. Of course milord would come when I had been setting out to clean the pigsty.

  Lys stopped us at the priory’s gate, came round to face us. The men had gone inside; we could hear them, horses clattering and snorting, deep voices muted in the cloister court. Lys spoke above it, softly, but with the edge which she had shown Messire Giscard. “Why?”

  Mère Adele raised her brows.

  Lys looked ready to shake her. “Why do you do so much for me?”

  “You’re our guest,” said Mère Adele.

  Lys threw back her head. I thought that she would laugh, or cry out.

  She did neither. She said, “This goes beyond plain hospitality. To chance a war for me.”

  “There will be no war,” said Mère Adele, “unless you’re fool enough to start one.” She set her hand on the lady’s arm and set her tidily aside, and nodded to Sister Portress, who looked near to bursting with the excitement of it all, and went inside.

  oOo

  Messire Giscard had time for all the proper things, food and rest and washing if he wanted it. He took all three, while we waited, and I wished more than ever that I had stopped to change my dress. I brushed at the one I had, and one of the sisters lent me a clean kerchief. When they brought him in at last, I was as presentable as I could be.

  Mère Adele’s receiving room was an imposing place, long and wide with a vaulted ceiling, carved and painted and gilded, and a great stone hearth at the end of it. It was not her favored place to work in; that was the closet by her cell, bare and plain and as foreign to pretension as the prioress herself. This was for overaweing strangers; and friends, too, for the matter of that. I hardly knew what to do with the chair she set me in, so big as it was, and carved everywhere, and with a cushion that must have been real silk—it was impossibly soft, like a kitten’s ear.

  It let me tuck up my feet at least, though I was sorry for that when the servant let milord in, and I had to untangle myself and stand and try to bow and not fall over. Lys and Mère Adele sat as soon as milord did, which meant that I could sit, too: stiffly upright this time.

  He was at his ease, of course. He knew about chairs, and gilded ceilings. He smiled at me—there was no mistaking it: I was somewhat to the side, so that he had to turn a little. I felt my cheeks grow hot.

  “This lady I know,” he said, turning his eyes away from me and fixing them on Lys. “And you, reverend prioress? And this charming demoiselle?”

  Well, I thought. That cured my blush. Charming I was not, whatever else I was.

  “I am Mère Adele,” said Mère Adele, “and this is Jeannette Laclos of Sency. You are Giscard de Montsalvat from the other side of Normandy, and you say you have a claim on our guest?”

  That took him properly aback. He was not used to such directness, maybe, in the courts that he had come from. But he had a quick wit, and a smooth tongue to go with it. “My claim is no more than I have said. She was my brother’s lover. She carries his child. He wished to acknowledge it
; he bound me before he died, to do all that I could on its behalf.”

  “For bastard seed?” asked Mère Adele. “I should think you’d be glad to see the last of her. Wasn’t your brother the elder? And wouldn’t her baby be his heir, if it were male, and she a wife?”

  “She would never marry him,” said Messire Giscard. “She was noble enough, she said, but exiled, and no dowry to her name.”

  “Then all the more cause for you to let her go. Why do you hunt her down? She’s no thief, you say. What does she have that you want?”

  He looked at his feet in their fine soft shoes. He was out of his reckoning, maybe.

  My stomach drew tight as I watched him. Men like that—big beautiful animals who had never known a moment’s thirst or hunger except what they themselves chose, in war or in the chase; who had never been crossed, nor knew what to do when they were—such men were dangerous. One of them had met me in the wood before I married Claudel; and so Celine was a fair child, like the Norman who had sired her. A Norman very like this one, only not so pretty to look at. He had been gentle in his way. But he wanted me, and what he wanted, he took. He never asked my name. I never asked his.

  This one had asked. It softened me-more than I liked to admit. Of course he did not care. He wanted to know his adversaries, that was all. If it had been the two of us under the trees and the blood rising in him, names would not have mattered.

  Lys spoke, making me start; I was deep in myself. “He wants me,” she said. “Somewhat for my beauty. More for what he thinks that I will give. “

  Messire Giscard smiled his easy smile. “So then, you tempt me. I’d hardly sin so far as to lust after my brother’s woman. That is incest, and forbidden by holy Church.” He crossed himself devoutly. “No, Mère Adele; beautiful she may be, but I swore a vow to my brother.”

  “You promised to let me go,” said Lys.

  “Poor lady,” he said. “You were beside yourself with grief. What could I do but say yes to anything you said? I beg your pardon for the falsehood; I reckoned, truly, that it was needful. I never meant to cast you out.

  “You never meant to set me free.”

  “Do you hate him that much?” asked Mère Adele.

  Lys looked at her, and then at him. He was still smiling. Pretty: oh, so pretty, with the sun aslant on his bright hair, and his white teeth gleaming.

  “Aymeric was never so fair,” said Lys. “That was all given to his brother. He was a little frog-mouthed bandy-legged man, as swarthy as a Saracen, bad eyes and bad teeth and nothing about him that was beautiful. Except,” she said, “he was. He would come into a room, and one would think, ‘What an ugly little man!’ Then he would smile, and nothing in the world would matter, except that he was happy. Everyone loved him. Even his enemies—they hated him with sincere respect, and admired him profoundly. I was his enemy, in the beginning. I was a hard proud cruel thing, exile by free choice from my own country, sworn to make my way in the world, myself alone and with no other. He—he wanted to protect me. ‘You are a woman,’ he said. As if that was all the reason he needed.

  “I hated him for that: He was so certain, and so insufferable, mere mortal man before all that I was and had been. But he would not yield for aught that I could do, and in the end, like all the rest, I fell under his spell.”

  “Or he under yours,” said Messire Giscard. “From the moment he saw you, he was bewitched.”

  “That was my face,” said Lys, “and no more. The rest grew as I resisted him. He loved a fight, did Aymeric. We never surrendered, either of us. To the day he died he was determined to protect me, as was I to resist him.”

  Messire Giscard smiled, triumphant. “You see!” he said to Mère Adele. “Still she resists. And yet, am I not her sole kinsman in this world? Did not my brother entrust her to me? Shall I not carry out my promise that I made as he was dying?”

  “She doesn’t want you to,” said Mère Adele.

  “Ah,” said Messire Giscard. “Bearing women—you know how they are. She’s distraught; she grieves. As in truth she should. But she should be thinking too of the baby, and of her lover’s wishes. He would never have allowed her to tramp on foot across the width of Normandy , looking for God knew what.”

  “Looking for my kin,” said Lys. “I do have them, Giscard. One of them even is a king.”

  “What, the fairy king?” Giscard shook his head. “Mère Adele, if you’ll believe it, she says that she’s the elf-king’s child.”

  “I am,” said Lys, “his brother’s daughter.” And she looked it, just then, with her white wild face. “You can’t shock them with that, Giscard, or hope to prove me mad. They know. They live on the edge of his Wood.”

  He leaned forward in his chair. All the brightness was gone, all the sweet false seeming. He was as hard and cold and cruel as she. “So,” he said. “So, Alys. Tell them the rest. Tell them what you did that made my brother love you so.”

  “What, that I was his whore?”

  I looked at her and shivered. No, he could not be so hard, or so cold, or so cruel. He was a human man. She . . .

  She laughed. “That should be obvious to a blind man. Which these,” she said, “are not. Neither blind, nor men, nor fools.”

  “Do they know what else you are?” He was almost standing over her. “Do they know that?”

  “They could hardly avoid it,” she said, “knowing whose kin I am.”

  “If they believe you. If they don’t just humor the madwoman.”

  “We believe her,” said Mère Adele. “Is that what you want? To burn her for a witch?”

  He crossed himself. “Sweet saints, no!”

  “No,” said Lys. “He wants to use me. For what he thinks I am. For what he believes I can do.”

  “For what you can do,” he said. “I saw you. Up on the hill at night, with stars in your hair. Dancing; and the moon came down and danced at your side. And he watched, and clapped his hands like a child.” His face twisted. “I would never have been so simple. I would have wielded you like a sword.”

  Lys was beyond speech. Mère Adele spoke dryly in her silence. “I can see,” she said, “why she might be reluctant to consent to it. Women are cursed enough by nature, weak and frail as all the wise men say they are; and made, it’s said, for men’s use and little else. Sometimes they don’t take kindly to it. It’s a flaw in them, I’m sure.”

  “But a flaw that can be mended,” said Messire Giscard. “A firm hand, a touch of the spur—but some gentleness, too. That’s what such a woman needs.”

  “It works for mares,” said Mère Adele. She stood up. I had never seen her look as she did then, both smaller and larger than she was. Smaller, because he was so big. Larger, because she managed, one way and another, to tower over him. “We’ll think on what you’ve said. You’re welcome meanwhile to the hospitality of our priory. We do ask you, of your courtesy, to refrain from visiting the town. There’s been sickness in it; it’s not quite past.”

  He agreed readily: so readily that I was hard put not to laugh. He did not need to know that it was an autumn fever, a fret among the children, and nothing to endanger any but the weakest. Sickness, that year, spoke too clearly of the Death.

  oOo

  “That will hold him for awhile,” said Mère Adele when we were back in safety again: inside Sency’s walls, under my new-thatched roof. People walking by could lift a corner of it and look in, but I was not afraid of that. Most were in their own houses, eating their dinner, or down in the tavern drinking it.

  We had finished our own, made rich with a joint from a priory sheep. Perrin’s face was shiny with the grease. Even Francha had eaten enough for once to keep a bird alive. She curled in her lady’s lap, thumb in mouth, and drowsed, while we considered what to do.

  “He won’t go where there’s sickness,” Mère Adele said, “but I doubt he’ll go away. He wants you badly.”

  Lys’ mouth twisted. “He wants my witchcraft. No more and no less. If my body came with it—he�
��d not mind. But it’s my power he wants; or what he fancies is my power.”

  “Why?” I asked. “To make himself lord of Normandy?”

  “Oh, no,” said Lys. “He’d never aim so high. Just to be a better lord in Montsalvat. Just that. If later it should be more—if his good angel should call him to greater glory—why then, would he be wise to refuse?”

  “He’d burn for it,” said Mère Adele. “And you with him. They’re not gentle now with witches.”

  “Were they ever?” Lys combed Francha’s hair with her fingers, smoothing out the tangles. “It’s worse in the south, in Provence, where the Inquisition hunts the heretics still. But the north is hardly more hospitable to such as I.”

  “We’re northerners,” I said.

  She glanced at me: a touch like a knife’s edge. “You live on the edge of the Wood. That changes you.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t feel different. Is the story true? That your king was a mortal king once, in the western kingdom?”

  “He was never mortal,” she said. “He was king of mortal men, yes, for a hundred years and more. But in the end he left. It was no mercy for his people, to be ruled by one who could never age nor die.”

  “No mercy for him, either,” said Mère Adele, “to see them grow old and die.” And when Lys looked at her with wide startled eyes: “No, I’m no wiser than I ought to be. I read a book, that’s all. I wanted to know what the stories were. He swore a vow, they said, that he would go under the trees and never come out; not in this age of the world.”

  “Nor will he,” Lys said, bitter. “Nor any who went in with him, nor any who was born thereafter. It’s a wider realm than you can conceive of, and this world is but a corner of it; and yet it is a prison. I wanted this air, this sun, this earth. His vow—sworn before ever I was born—forbade me even to think of it.”

  “So of course you thought of it.” Mère Adele sighed. “Young things never change.”

  “That is what he said,” said Lys, so tight with anger that I could barely hear her. “That is exactly what he said.”

  “He let you go.”

  “How could he stop me? He knew what would happen. That the walls would close, once I’d opened them. That there’d be no going back.”