by Norah Lofts
The brief winter day was just ending when they reached Intake. ‘That is my house,’ Sir Godfrey said. Knight’s Acre presented to Tana the same bleak, unlighted face as it had turned to Sybilla. Sybilla had thought it large, Tana found it disappointingly small. She had never lived in an ordinary house; her father’s strong mountain fortress, tents or, sometimes, on the extreme borders of his domain, grass-roofed huts; the quarry and then the palace at Zagelah; after that sometimes no roof but the sky; and then inns.
Passing the turn-off to Moyidan, Sir Godfrey, without slackening his pace, had turned his head and said, ‘That is where my other brother lives. Where I was born.’ And the old castle, reared long ago by a man who, if he could have written his name, would have spelt it Taillebois, just showed above the trees. Tana also understood, from the behaviour of everyone who understood English, the captain and crew of the ship, the people in the rich-seeming place at the top of the hill, that Godfrey, in his own country, was a kind of chieftain. So the plain stolid house that Master Hobson had built and his son-in-law had plastered and decorated did not strike her as impressive; a house unworthy of him; and too small to contain two women.
Lady Randall’s rose trees, now well grown, still held a few frail leaves on their almost stripped branches. He was glad, momentarily, that Sybilla had attained some kind of garden. He said, ‘This way,’ and took the track to the yard. It had changed somewhat during his absence, more outbuildings, Walter’s house gone. But the well was there and a woman was drawing water. She was bareheaded and the wind teased her white hair. With a slow, weary, old-woman’s action, she unhooked the bucket and steadied it on the rim of the well with one hand while with the other she pushed back her hair with a gesture of careless impatience. She did not look towards them, the time when the sound of a hoof alerted her was long past. Any movement at the yard’s entry meant that Henry and Tom and the grey horse were back from the field.
As she brushed back her hair he recognised her but with an almost stunning incredulity. Old, bowed over, doing a serving-boy’s job! His Sybilla.
He spoke her name. Then she looked, stared and gave a cry that could be heard down in the village. The bucket tilted and fell into the well as she ran towards him, arms outstretched. He had slipped from the saddle and run to meet her, lifting her, holding her, as in the old days, as in his dreams…
Tana, still mounted, unnoticed, sat and watched. The sun, just before plunging down behind the woods to the south of the river, sent one last gleam, cruelly revealing. The feminine eye, turned in assessment upon another woman, missed nothing, the white hair, the thin, slightly crooked body, the heavy clumped shoes that dangled from the edge of the shabby skirt, even the red coarse hands which clutched and clung.
With cold hostility, with hot jealousy, with hope, with fear, Tana watched that long embrace and listened to the broken, incoherent exchanges of endearment in a language she did not understand.
On the broken balcony in Seville he had said, ‘Sybilla must never know.’ But Sybilla would presently know, without a word being spoken. The children of love always resembled their fathers.
The embrace ended. Sybilla said, ‘Darling, set me down. But hold me, still. I am so weak with joy.’
So with one arm round his wife, Sir Godfrey—the least likely man to be in such a situation and the least competent to deal with it—reached out his hand to his mistress. He said, in Arabic, ‘Welcome to our home,’ and in English, ‘darling, this is Tana who set me free. But for her I should not be here.’
Somewhere along the journey Tana had discarded the rough sheepskin coat and acquired a hooded cloak of mulberry-coloured cloth. She had worn it throughout the voyage, huddling, he thought, against the cold. Now, without assistance from the offered hand, she dismounted and at the same time loosed the loop at the neck of the garment, so that the hood fell back and the front gaped.
Another instant feminine assessment. Beautiful in a strange way, shining with youth, black hair as sleek as satin caught back in a pearl-studded net.
Of course! Of course!
Be sensible. No man could be expected to live like a monk for seven years. But more than sense was at work—the memory of the night when she herself had felt the brush of sheer, unthinking, physical passion. Walter, living, had always tried to make life easy for her and now, rotting in his shallow, unhallowed grave, he made this easy.
She said, ‘I thank you from my heart.’
‘She knows no English.’
An embrace then.
The face she pressed to Tana’s was damp, from the mingled tears of the joy, from the long kisses. Tana turned her face away. The old woman smelt like a peasant, of onions, of wood-smoke, of cooking.
Released, Tana stepped back, bowed, put her hand to the soil of an English farmyard and then to her forehead.
‘A gesture of the utmost respect,’ Sir Godfrey explained.
Sybilla matched it. She made to Godfrey’s deliverer the deep curtsy due to one’s social superiors. The injured hip screamed its protest but she ignored it and, standing again as straight as she would ever be, she said, ‘My love, tell her how grateful I am, how welcome she is.’
The gleam faded; twilight flooded the yard as Sybilla thought—And the child—his child—shall be welcome, too.
