Lady of Hay

by Barbara Erskine

“Very well, Jo. I want you to relax completely and close your eyes.”

  Jo felt the panic overtaking her. Her eyes flew open and she sat upright. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I don’t think I can do it.”

  “Just as you like. Try leaning back against those cushions. Why don’t we try a light trance first, just to make you feel more relaxed, shall we? There’s nothing to worry about. Just something to make you feel good. You may have seen Bill Walton do it. It’s a very usual way of testing people’s reactions.”

  Behind him Sarah smiled grimly, recognizing the tone of his voice as she saw Jo make herself comfortable against the cushions, her ankles crossed on the soft hide of the sofa. Jo closed her eyes once more and visibly tried to make herself relax.

  “That’s fine.” Bennet moved toward her on silent feet. “Now, the sun is filling the room once more, so I’m going to ask Sarah to pull down the blinds, but meanwhile I want you to keep your eyes tightly closed.” He glanced at the window. The sun had gone. The narrow strip of sky visible from the room was a livid bruise of cloud. There was a low rumble of thunder as he began speaking again. “That’s right. You can feel the light burning your eyes. Keep them tightly closed. That’s fine.” He touched her face lightly. “Now you want to open them but you can’t. The light is too bright.”

  Jo did not move. She could hear him clearly and she knew she could open her eyes if she wanted to, but she could sense the glare behind her lids. There seemed no point in moving until Sarah had shut out the sun, the dazzling white shape that had appeared over the rim of the house on the other side of Devonshire Place, shining directly into the room.

  Bennet took her hand gently. “Jo, can you hear me? Good. Now I’m going to tickle your hand slightly, just enough to make you smile. Can you feel me do it?”

  Sarah gasped. He had taken a small pin from his lapel and driven it deeply into her palm. Jo smiled, her eyes still closed, still wondering why he didn’t shut out the sun.

  Bennet glanced at Sarah. Then he turned back to Jo. “Now, my dear, I want you to go back to when you were a little girl…”

  Some ten minutes later Sarah’s whisper broke into his concentration. “Carl, she’s the best subject I’ve ever seen.”

  He frowned at her, his whole attention fixed on the figure lying back against the cushions in front of him. “I had a feeling she might be,” he replied in an undertone. “I can’t understand why Cohen couldn’t reach her, unless—” He broke off and looked at her thoughtfully.

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless he gave her a posthypnotic suggestion that she should not remember for some reason.” He turned back to Jo. “Now, Jo, my dear, I want you to go back, back to the time before you were born, to the dark time, when you were floating free…”

  Jo stirred uneasily, moving her head from side to side. Then she lay still again, completely relaxed as she listened to him.

  “Now, Jo. Before the darkness. When you lived before. Do you remember? You are another person, in another time. Do you remember? Can you tell me? What do you see?”

  Jo opened her eyes and stared hard in front of her at the arm of the sofa. “It’s getting dark,” she said uncertainly. “Dark and cold.”

  “Are you indoors or out, can you see?” Bennet frowned at the window, which showed that it was indeed getting dark and that a torrential summer rain had begun to fall, streaming down the windows, gurgling from a broken gutter. There was another deep roll of thunder.

  Jo spoke hesitantly. “It’s the trees. They’re so thick here. I don’t like the forest.”

  “Do you know which forest it is?” Bennet was watching her intently.

  “No.”

  “Can you tell me your name?”

  She frowned, puzzled. “I don’t know. Some call me—they call me Matilda—No, Moll…I don’t know.”

  “Can you tell me something about yourself, Matilda? Where do you live?”

  Slowly Jo pushed herself up from the cushions till she was sitting bolt upright, staring into space. “I live,” she said firmly. “I live far away from here. In the mountains.” Then she shook her head, perplexed. “The mountains fill my eyes. Black and misty, not like at home.” She began to rub her eyes with her knuckles, like a child. She looked bewildered. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I want to sleep.” She lay back and closed her eyes.

  “Tell me something else then, Matilda,” Bennet prompted gently. “What are you doing?”

  There was no answer.

  “Are you walking in the forest, or riding perhaps?”

  Jo hunched her shoulders rebelliously and said nothing. Bennet sighed. “Come now, my dear. Tell me what are you wearing? Are you dressed in your prettiest clothes?” He was coaxing now. He glanced at his watch and then looked at Sarah. “Pity. I thought we were going to get something interesting. We might try again another time—” He broke off as Jo let out an exclamation.

  “They told me to forget. How can I forget? It is happening now…”

  Bennet had not taken his eyes off her face. He leaned forward, every nerve ending suddenly tense.

  Slowly Jo was standing up. She took a couple of paces from the sofa and stood looking at the wall, her eyes wide open. “When is it going to stop snowing?” she asked distinctly. She wrapped her arms around herself as if trying to enfold herself more warmly in her thin linen dress and he saw her shiver violently.

  “It is snowing hard,” Bennet agreed cautiously.

  She frowned. “I had hoped it would hold off until we reached the castle. I don’t like the snow. It makes the forest so dark.”

  “Can you tell me what the date is, my dear?”

  “It is nearly Yule.” She smiled. “Time for feasting.”

  “And which year, do you know?” Bennet reached for a notepad and pen. He watched Jo’s face carefully. Her eyes were normal and focusing, but not on him. Her hand, when he reached gently and touched it, was ice cold.

  “It is the twentieth year of the reign of our lord King Henry,” she said clearly. “What a foolish question.” She took another step. “Oh, Holy Mother of God, we’re nearly there.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “I am going to William.”

  “Who is William?” Totally absorbed, Bennet stopped writing and looked up, waiting for an answer.

  But Jo did not answer. Her whole attention was fixed on something she could see distinctly lying on the road in front of her in the snow. It was the bloody body of a man.

  5

  The melting snow was red with blood. Richard, the young Earl of Clare and Hertford, pulled his horse to a rearing halt, struggling to control the animal as it plunged sideways in fear, its ears flat against its head. It had smelled the carcass and the wolves at the same moment, and it snorted with terror as Richard tried to force it around the deserted kill at the edge of the track. A buzzard flew up at the riders’ approach, leaving all that remained of the mangled corpse in the slush-threaded mud. A few rags of clothing were the only sign that it had once been human.

  “What is it? What’s happened?” The slim red-haired girl swathed in a fox fur mantle who had been cantering fast behind him was concentrating so hard on catching him up that his sudden halt nearly unseated her. Behind her, at a more sedate pace, rode a second young woman and Richard’s twelve knights, wearing on their surcoats the gold and scarlet chevrons of Clare.

  The riders formed a semicircle in the cold sleet and gazed down at the torn limbs. One or two of the men crossed themselves fervently and the red-haired girl found herself swallowing hard. She pulled her veil across her face hastily. “Poor man,” she whispered. “Who could have done such a thing?”

  “Wolves.” Richard steadied his horse with difficulty. “Don’t look, Matilda. There’s nothing we can do for the miserable bastard. No doubt the men of the village will come and bury what the buzzards and kites leave.” He turned his horse and kicked it on, forcing it past the body, and the other riders slowly followed him, averting their eyes. Two or three had their hands nervously on
the hilts of their swords.

  All around them the bleak Welsh forest seemed deserted. Oak and ash and silver-limbed beech, bare of leaves, their trunks wet and shining from the sleet, crowded to the edge of the track. Save for the ringing of the horses’ hooves on the outcrops of rock and the squeak and chink of harness it was eerily silent.

  Richard gazed around apprehensively. He had been shaken more than he liked to admit by the sight of the slaughtered man. It was an ill omen so near the end of their journey. He noticed Matilda edging her horse surreptitiously closer to his and he grinned in sympathy, silently cursing the need for an armed escort, which prevented him from taking her before him on his saddle and holding her in the safety of his arms.

  But escort there had to be. He scanned the lengthening shadows once more and tightened his grip on his sword.

  Wales was a savage place; its dark glowering mountains, black forests, and wild people filled him with misgivings. That Matilda should want to come here of her own free will, to join William de Braose when she did not have to, filled him with perplexed anger.

  “We should never have left Raglan,” he said tersely. “Walter Bloet was right. These forests are no place for a woman without a proper escort.”

  “I have a proper escort!” He saw the angle of her chin rise a fraction. “You.”

  Far away, echoing from the lonely hills, came the cry of a wolf. The horses tensed, ears flat, and Matilda felt the small hairs on the back of her neck stir with fear.

  “How much farther until we get there?” she whispered.

  Richard shrugged. “A few miles. Pray God we reach there before dark.” He turned in his saddle, standing up in the stirrups to see his men better. “Make all speed,” he shouted, then spurred his horse on toward the north.

  Matilda pounded after him, clinging low over her horse’s neck, determined not to drop behind, and their thundering hooves threw up clods of mud where the ice-rimmed puddles were melting slowly in the rain. The track was growing increasingly treacherous and slippery.

  She quickly drew level with him again, her white veil blowing for a moment across her face from beneath her fur hood. “Richard,” she called, “wait. Slow down. This will be our last chance to talk…”

  He slowed fractionally, wiping the sleet from his eyes. “We have had time enough to talk,” he said abruptly. “You have chosen to tell me very little. I have no idea, even, why you are here, which will make it hard for me to face your no doubt irate husband with a satisfactory explanation as to why I have brought you to him.”

  He saw her flush. “Just tell him the truth,” she retaliated defensively.

  “Very well.” He lashed his reins across the horse’s neck. “I shall tell him how I was quietly riding, minding my own business, from home in Tonbridge to Gloucester when I met his baggage of a wife, completely unescorted except for one trembling female, hell-bent on riding the breadth of England to his side in midwinter. I shall tell him that I saw it as my chivalrous duty to escort you myself. And I shall tell him that any man who leaves a young, beautiful, newlywed bride alone in Sussex with her mother-in-law, while he travels to his farthest lands, is a mutton-headed goat.” He managed a wry grin, ducking the wet slap of a low-hanging branch in his path. If Matilda had been his wife he would not have left her. He clenched the reins fiercely; no man would accuse Richard de Clare of lusting after another man’s wife. He admired her daring and her humor and her spirit, so unusual in a woman, no more than that. He glanced across at her and saw that she was smiling. “Why did you choose to come to Wales?” he asked suddenly.

  She looked down at her hands. “Because I have nowhere else to go but to my husband,” she said simply. “With him I am a baron’s lady, mistress of a dozen castles, a woman of some importance.” Her mouth twitched imperceptibly. “At Bramber with his mother I am merely another female with the sole distinction of being hated by her twice as much as anyone else. Besides,” she added disarmingly, “it’s boring there.”

  He stared at her in disbelief. William de Braose was a vicious, ill-bred man at least twice her age, with a reputation few men would envy. Even the thought of the brute’s hands touching her made the blood pound in Richard’s temples. “And you would prefer your husband’s company to being bored?” he echoed incredulously.

  She raised her chin a fraction, a mannerism he was beginning to know well. “I did not ask your opinion of him, just as I did not ask you to escort me to him.”

  “No, I offered.” He took a deep breath. “So—I shall tell him also,” he went on, “that an invitation to this Christmas banquet we hear he is to give for Prince Seisyll tomorrow is the only reward I shall ask for all my trouble. I shall wave aside the gold and jewels he is bound to press on me for my services in escorting you. I shall nobly ignore his passionate outpourings of gratitude and praise.”

  Matilda made a small grimace, all too well aware of her husband’s reputation for tight-fistedness. She frowned, glancing at Richard sideways. “Supposing he’s furious with me for coming?”

  “So you have considered that possibility at last!” Richard squinted into the wind. “He’ll probably beat you and send you back to Bramber. It’s what you deserve.”

  A racing shadow in the trees distracted him for a moment. He scanned the surrounding forest, his face set. They were passing through a clump of junipers, thick and impenetrable: the ideal hiding place for an ambush. Secretly he suspected that his men, however well armed, would be no match for the leaping, yelling Welsh should they choose to attack. He had heard that they could sweep down, cut a throat, rip open a horse’s belly, and be away again before a man ever had the chance to draw his sword. He shuddered every time he thought of the dangers on the route that Matilda had so confidently decided she and Nell could ride on their own.

  “Is that what you’d do to your wife?” She peered at him, wiping the rain from her eyes as they trotted on again, side by side.

  “What?”

  “Beat her and send her home.”

  “Of course. Especially if she turned up with a good-looking fellow like me.” He forced a smile, his eyes still narrowed as he gazed through the icy sleet.

  Matilda glanced at him, then changed the subject, turning in her saddle. “Poor Nell. She’s still keeping up.” The girl was white-faced and rode slumped in the saddle, her eyes fixed determinedly on her shiny knuckles as they clutched the cold, wet reins. She was obviously near to tears, oblivious to the halfhearted banter of the knights around her or the tired baggage animals who jostled her horse constantly with their cumbersome packs. Matilda grimaced ruefully. “She started this adventure so well with me, but she’s regretting every step now. Ever since we crossed out of Sussex, even with you there to protect us, she’s been scared and weepy. Seeing that poor man will be the last straw. She’ll spend the night having the vapors.”

  “Don’t tease her.” Richard leaned forward to slap his horse’s steaming neck. “She had a lot of courage to come with you. You didn’t feel so brave yourself when you saw that corpse. And don’t forget, no one else would come with you at all.”

  She frowned, and dug her mare indignantly with her heels, making it leap forward so that she had to cling to the saddle. “Most of the others were Lady Bertha’s women anyway, not mine,” she said defensively. “I didn’t want them to come. I shall ask William for my own attendants as soon as we get to Abergavenny.”

  Richard suppressed a smile. “That’s a good idea. Go and ride with Nell now. I’m going to scout ahead and check all is quiet.” He did not give her the chance to argue, spurring his horse to a gallop.

  The very stillness of the forest worried him. Where were the woodsmen, the charcoal burners, the swineherds, the usual people of the woods? And if not theirs, then whose were the eyes he could feel watching him from the undergrowth?

  Sulkily Matilda reined in and waited for Nell to draw level. The girl’s china-blue eyes were red-rimmed from the cold. “Are we nearly there, my lady?” She made an effort at sm
iling. “My hands are aching so from the cold, I’m drenched through to my shift, and I’m so exhausted. I never imagined it would be so many days’ ride from Bramber.” Her voice had taken on an unaccustomed whining note that immediately irritated her mistress.

  “We’re almost there, Nell.” Matilda made no effort to hide her impatience. She was straining her eyes ahead up the track after Richard as the trees thinned and they crossed a windswept ridge covered in sodden bracken, flattened by the rain. There was a movement in some holly bushes on the hillside to the right of them, and she peered at them, trying to see through the glossy greenery. Her heart began to pound. Something was hidden there, waiting.

  Two deer burst out of the thicket and raced away out of sight up the hill. Richard cantered back to her side. He was smiling, but there was a drawn sword in his hand. “I thought we were in for trouble for a moment,” he called. “Did you see? Shall I send a couple of men after them? Then we can make our own contribution to the feast.”

  They plunged into the thickness of the forest again, their horses’ feet padding in the soft wet leaf mold beneath the bare trunks of ash and beech. From time to time the cold waters of the Usk appeared in the distance on their left, pitted gray with raindrops. Sometimes the track ran straight, keeping to the line of the old Roman road, then it would wander away over the curving contours that followed, among the trees, the gently sloping hills. Slowly dusk was coming on them through the trees, up from the river valley, and with it came menace.

  The escort closed more tightly around them and, at a command from Richard, the men drew their swords. Matilda saw his face was concentrated and grim and she felt a sudden shiver of fear.

  They rode on in silence through the darkening forest until at last in the distance through the trees they glimpsed the tall white keep of Abergavenny Castle, swimming in the mist that had gathered over the river.

  Richard’s face grew more taut as he saw it. The castle meant sanctuary from the threatening forest. But it also meant facing de Braose and relinquishing to his care the beautiful child-woman who was his wife.