Fierce Enchantments

by Janine Ashbless

  They slid apart, lying back upon the embroidered coverlet, limbs spread as they tried to cool. Guinevere lifted her head to look at her husband. He was staring at the draped cloth overhead.

  “I will not tell you not to lie together again,” he said. “You’ll do it, with or without my knowing.”

  She reached out and ran fingers through the wet hair on his chest, longing to reassure him. Arthur blinked, rolled a little to see her, and stroked her tangled golden locks.

  “You may continue in your adulteries,” he said. His voice was soft again, his eyes mild and warm. He was the husband she remembered. “But there’s a price for my forgiveness. Always, there must be justice. For each sin you and he commit together, I will punish you both, as I did this time.”

  Lancelot pushed himself up onto his arms, wincing, and laughed in his throat. Guinevere thought of the way her husband had whipped her, of the terrible retribution he’d visited on her soft round bottom. Even now it smarted and throbbed.

  “I’d like that,” she said shyly. “Very much.”

  Arthur’s length, fat with repletion, twitched. Like a serpent dreaming in its cavern, waiting to rise.

  At Usher’s Well

  There lived a wife at Usher’s Well,

  And a wealthy wife was she;

  She had three stout and stalwart sons,

  And sent them o’er the sea.

  –Child Ballad No. 79

  The rain never bluidy stops, it just comes in at different angles. Sometimes falling straight down like God Himself is taking a pish on us, sometimes flung in our faces by fists of wind. It cascades off the slate roofs and seeps through the thatch, and turns the yard into one great basin of water. The cattle were brought in to their winter byres early, before they drowned in the swollen burns, but they’re growing lame on their softening hooves and sick on the mildewed hay. It’s only November and already we’re eating into the winter stores and burning the wood that should have been seasoning for the long haul into spring. There’s mold on every surface. You come in all clarted up wi’ mud, and you can try to wash your clothes but you cannae dry them afterwards over the smoky, spitting fires, so no one bothers. Everything smells fusty. Everything is twice as heavy as normal and treacherously slippery.

  It’s all her fault.

  She sits in her chamber, looking out of her window at the track up the fellside, the one that leads to the coast. Somewhere beyond that gray-green slope the sea waits, huge and hungry, and there are times that I imagine that the roar of the wind is the sound of its waves. That’s the road the three of them took that morning, riding out so braw and handsome in their new cloaks of red wool that she and I had cut and hemmed and lined, working together through the evenings. She watches the track, waiting for them to come back.

  My Mistress has the finest window in all the village of Usher’s Well, there in that chamber. Near as big as a kirk window, with leaded-glass panes almost as clear as air, though the fellside is a murky, slithering green through the rain. She’s got one of the few rooms that the downpour hasnae found a way into through the roof, too. No drip drip drip from sodden thatch onto the coverlet of her bed. Which is good for me; one of my duties is to sleep beside the widow and keep her bones warm, sharp elbows and all. In my exhaustion, I’ve even learned to sleep through the weeping.

  Others may guess at her pain, but I’m the only one who knows for sure. She’s a strong wifey, my Mistress. By God, she’s had to be—bereft of a husband at such a young age, but holding together household and demesne for the three strapping sons she raised. She’s as tough as a butcher’s apron and as hard and true as a cleaver. No man in Usher’s Well has won an inch of ground from her, nor taken a single penny that she didnae owe him fair and square. You’ll never see her give way, not in public.

  She only cries at night, in the dark. By day she watches, dour-faced, through her window. I try to coax her to eat. But she only obeys because I tell her she must keep her strength up, if she is to be hale and hearty for her sons’ return. You see, she refuses to believe they are dead; that’s the thing. She has set her will against God’s, and for the life of me I cannae tell whose is the stronger.

  That’s the source of this terrible dreich weather.

  I know that, because I heard her say it. I was there, when the messenger came from Dunbar with the news that the Dancing Annie had gone down in heavy seas, not even out of sight of land. She’d been pushed south down the coast onto rocks, and wrecked there. All hands dead.

  My Mistress cried out when she heard, like a lamb having its throat cut, and fell down upon the cobbles of the yard. I rushed over to help her, not having heard the words spoken from where I watched at the kitchen door, my besom in my hands.

  “What’s wrong, Mistress?” I asked, but she only wailed. I looked up at the messenger, a hare-lipped youth with frightened eyes. “What did you say?” I demanded.

  He could only mumble, “A storm. God rest their souls.”

  “They are not dead!” she gasped.

  I didnae understand, at first. I didnae piece it together. The weather had been blustery all week, raining on and off. “Come up, Mistress,” I begged, pulling at her shoulders. “You’re getting your dress all mucky.” It’s my task to clean and mend her clothes, you see. “Come inside—it’s horrible wet out here.”

  “May it never stop raining, Meg,” she said, in an awful, cracked voice that made the hair stand up on my neck. “May the winds never cease. Not until they blow my sons home to me, safe and sound in their earthly flesh and blood.”

  That’s when I understood. It hit me cold and keen, like a knife in the belly.

  We got inside, and the heavens opened. It hasnae stopped raining since. We havnae seen sun since that day, nor heard silence. Nothing but the sluicing of water and the hustle and blare of the wind, blowing from the east; from the sea. Always a murky dark, even at noon. The musty stink indoors, and outside the numbing cold and the tang of salt. The sky pressing down over our heads like a roof.

  Nine bluidy weeks.

  The world feels like a lead coffin, one that’s half flooded, and we’re sealed inside being rattled about on the back of a bier. There’s nowhere for the water to go, it cannae drain out, so it just keeps hitting us.

  They’re starting to leave, the other servants. They’re vanishing one by one, down the fell-track to Dunbar. Looking for employment or to sign on to a ship, or going back to family crofts—anything, anywhere, that might be drier and less uncanny than this place. They say we’re cursed.

  I know we are cursed.

  My Mistress is wrestling with God, and will not give an inch.

  I watch her from the floor of her chamber, as I squat over the fireplace trying to get the logs to blaze properly. We’re using birch because it’s the only thing that’ll catch when wet, but it burns through so fast, and with so little heat, that I’m forever traipsing up and down the stairs with the log-basket on my back. She’s wrapped in a fur-lined pelisse to make up for my lack of success. Her face, thinner now after all these weeks of half-starving herself, catches the gray light along her cheek bone.

  Oh Lord, but she looks like Finlay from that angle. My heart clenches inside me, a spasm of loss.

  Finlay. Sweet Finlay with the curly brown hair and the fluff of beard on his lean cheeks. Finlay who would follow me into the dairy and press me against the shelves and call me his sweet Meg, his pretty Margaret, his windflower and his kitten and his little white dove. Who’d kiss my hands and my lips and hold me close, nuzzling my hair. Who swore he loved me, even when I laughed him off and pushed him away.

  Gently. I was gentle with him. I didnae want to hurt his feelings. He said he loved me and would marry me and we would have beautiful bairns together, three of each, and the lassies would look like me and the lads would look like him.

  It was all lies of course—no, not lies, but thistledown dr
eams. He was the smart one, the son who had learned his letters. He was destined for Oxford University far away down south, and so to take Holy Orders. He would never marry anyone. Besides, my Mistress would never countenance any one of her sons marrying a mere serving maid. Marriage is for equals, and I’d never be theirs’.

  That hadnae stopped Finlay’s older brother Rory tumbling me of course—and taking my maidenhead, in fact. Rory was a big, straightforward fellow with a boisterous, ever-eager cock. He rummaged his way through every wench of beddable age in the household, but I doubt that anyone resented him for it, for he was always generous with his coins, and an easygoing master who often intervened with his mother to make sure there were extra portions at dinner for the servants, or to turn away her wrath at some domestic transgressor. Unlike my Mistress, Rory never complained that I was late lighting his fire in the morning, or slow serving at the table. He would only wink and smile at me and pat my rump, and when he came upon me in private he’d pull up my skirts and bend me over a press and slip me his length, strong and easy. On feast days he’d dance me on his broad lap until his prick was as hard as a pole and I was red and flustered, and then he’d touch me secretly under my skirts until I was running as wet and slick as a crock of butter left too close to the oven, and ready to do anything he wanted. That was how he had me, the first time.

  “Are you a woman, yet, Meg?” he’d murmured in my ear as he dandled me. He could have shouted it and no one would have heard over the ruckus.

  “No, Master Rory,” I’d said, blushing, feeling my blood soar and my skin flame and my bones loosen.

  “Are you ready for me to make you one?” His fingertips had stroked my purse until it gaped, begging for him to steal what lay within.

  I’d moaned then, and shuddered on his lap.

  “Och, this medlar is ripe, I think,” he’d said. His other arm was around me, his other hand stroking and squeezing my maiden breasts through my bodice. I was losing all sense; nothing in all the world mattered as much as that devastating tease between my thighs.

  “Aye,” I’d whimpered. And as that wicked fingertip had circled the plump little pip of my medlar, I’d said “Aye!” again and shut my eyes and pressed my face to his neck as I’d slithered helplessly over into paradise—right there in front of the whole household, his brothers and his mother and all the guests. I didnae cry out, but I heard the catch of Rory’s breath and then his long exhalation. I dinnae ken if anyone paid any attention. Well—I know that my Mistress saw, because she shot me a narrow-eyed glare as Rory eased me from his lap, patted my rear, and pushed me out of the hall in front of him

  It was the Midsummer feast. Rory led me out into the unmown hayfield and laid me down in the long grass, lifting my skirts. His length looked smooth as wood in the moonlight. He wet his thumb in my juices and placed it over my pip, and he kept that there, pressing and stirring, as he laid his cock to my gates and broke them down.

  He was heavy, and the smell of wine and crushed grass made my head spin. I wondered why anyone did anything else but this all their lives.

  My poor Mistress at the window there disnae look like Rory, and never has. I suppose he takes after his father, who was dead before I came to this place. Certainly he’s her favored son.

  Was her favored son. It’s hard sometimes to remember that he’s dead, she denies it so adamantly. They’re all dead, drowned in the deep.

  Damn, but what was she thinking putting all three on the same vessel?

  Ach, I suppose she must have asked herself that many a time, poor thing. It had seemed wise enough when they took their leave, to travel together and look after each other—Rory to journey all the way to London and take up his father’s affairs at the guildhall, Finlay to attend classes at Oxford, Allan to spend time on board one of the family ships as he longed to do, learning a captain’s trade from the master of the Dancing Annie.

  The youngest of the three brothers, Allan, was different again to his siblings. Sharp-nosed and almond-eyed, he always found the walls of this house too constraining. From an early age he was out every day, riding the fell ponies or disappearing down to Dunbar, where we heard he liked to hang about on the docks and talk to the ships’ captains and pilots. He had a taste for Dunbar women, and the dowdy servant girls back home never interested him much. I lay with him only once, when he was brought to bed with a fever for a few days. The doctor his mother had summoned told him that he must on no account rise and exert himself, and the poor lad went nearly mad with boredom. I was sent in to change his bedpan but I ended up riding his narrow hips, and sucking his slender, red-crowned cock until he filled my mouth with brine.

  Allan I barely knew. But I liked Rory. He was a fine and pleasant man. And always, when I had an itch, I knew Rory would be there to scratch it, so long as I could sneak away from my Mistress to creep into his bed. He would have made a fine Master, had he lived.

  Finlay … Finlay I liked very well too, but there was a pang there. Perhaps I liked him too much. He made me want things I couldnae have, so I turned him down every time.

  I wish now I hadnae. He was a virgin when he left us, so far as I know. Too shy for his own good, that lad—one who thought with his head and not with his body, unlike most, and got trapped in there. Damn it. He should not have drowned unloved; that straight young body untasted. I wish that just once before he left …

  Ach, it’s too late for regrets. The ache under my ribs does no good. The milk is spilled, and all the wishing in the world will not put it back in the pail.

  Though my Mistress is of another opinion.

  ♦♦♦

  It fell about the Martinmass,

  When nights were long and dark:

  That carlin wife’s three sons came hame,

  Their hats were made of bark

  ♦♦♦

  “Meg,” she says, suddenly. I look up from the pan of ashes I’ve been scraping together.

  “Mistress?”

  Her voice is low and hoarse. Wind and rain have worn it away. “They’re here.”

  I rise from the hearth, knuckling my aching back. She disnae sound excited, or happy, so I dinnae feel anything but my normal weary pity. I wander over to the window where she sits, and look out over her head. I dinnae expect to see anything.

  There: there on the crest of the track, as it rises over the pasture field. Three figures, side by side, pale against the rain-slicked road. They dinnae appear to be moving, and through the rippled glass and the falling eve it’s impossible to make out any detail. Nevertheless, a chill slips through my layers of woollen cloth and brushes my spine like the touch of cold fingers.

  “It’s them!” My Mistress sounds surer of herself this time, though her voice is still weak. “They’ve come home!”

  “No, Mistress,” I say, laying my hand on her shoulder. My own voice is perhaps a little unsteady. “Dinnae get your hopes up. It’s … it’s too far to tell at this distance.”

  “Then we must go see!”

  I nod, dumbly. What else am I supposed to do? As she gathers her skirts I light a candle from the hearth fire, to illuminate her descent down the stairs. And I precede her through the shadowy interior of the great house, holding my skirts with one hand so she does not tread on my train.

  At the front door the porter Jacob is sitting in stockinged feet, hacking caked mud off his boots with a knife. He glances up.

  “Jacob, open the door! My sons are returned home!”

  I see the whites of his widening eyes. For a moment he stares, and then he crosses himself. “Mistress?”

  “Open the door!”

  He looks at me, for confirmation. I say, with a creeping reluctance I cannot quite admit to myself, “There are men on the road.”

  “Mistress, it’s near dark. I’ve just shut the outer gate. No one of good intent will be abroad at this hour.”

  She draws herself up
. “Open the door, man!”

  He moves slowly, drawing the heavy bolts. He shoots me a loaded look as he lifts the latch; I know he means me to run through to the hall and gather the menservants at the first sign of trouble.

  The pale gloaming evening sifts into the porch. For a moment I cannae work out what’s wrong, what’s different. Then I realize that it’s not raining. The evening hangs like silk, and not a breath of wind stirs in our faces.

  It’s stopped. Not until they blow my sons home to me, I think, suddenly far colder than even the November air warrants.

  Across the wet yard comes the clang of the bell at the outer gate.

  Furtively, I take my turn to cross myself.

  “Go out and open the gate, Jacob,” my Mistress commands.

  He looks at her, and out again across the cobbles at the arch silhouetted against the last glow of the sky. “No,” he says flatly.

  She stares. I think I see the old fire kindling in her eyes. Jacob feels a sudden need to justify himself.

  “Not on my soul, Mistress. This is the uncanny hour, when the Good People are abroad. I’ll not dare it.”

  She looks down at her own feet, clad in their tiny slippers, and then turns to me. “Meg?”

  The bell sounds again, a flat mournful noise. I dinnae know what to do. I dinnae want to wade through the puddles to confront … I hardly know what … out there in the weird half-light. I’m scared. I shouldnae be. I’m not afraid of anything—not of the bullocks on the hillside nor of the men in the hall when they’ve had a skinful of ale. I’m the only servant girl who’ll walk round the house at night in the dark, not even taking a candle to light my way. I’ll even go after nightfall into the buttery, which the cook and all the other womenfolk swear is haunted by a boggart.