The Burning Time (14 page)

“Presiding over it,” Helena corrected.

“
—presiding
over it,” Sysok shot a glare at his wife, “and whilst himself was presiding over it, he excommunicated you, Lady Alyce. Just like that.”

“Summarily excommunicated! I
am
crushed,” the lady said dryly. “Now I cannot attend mass anymore. Oh lackaday.”

“
Will
you be taking this seriously?” Sysok complained, “Oh—again, begging your pardon, m’Lady, for my being too … but t’is
daft
to be lighthearted when—”

“Your Ladyship, on this point Sysok be right.
T’is
somber news. And t’is not the worst, by far. Hear us out, please,” Helena added, urgency rising in her voice. “Through that court, the Bishop … M’am, he has accused you of
sorcery
. Formally. Seven charges.”

“Seven!” said Alyce, “Rather excessive. I should have thought one would suffice.”

“
Seven
,” repeated Helena. “You stand accused of renouncing your Christian faith, of mocking the Church and the Sacraments, of making pacts with the Devil to swear obedience, of possessing magick powders and poisons, of practicing divination and medical sorceries—wait, how many is that?”

“Five so far,” Sysok said tersely. Then he added, with embarrassment, staring down at his large, calloused hands, “Sixth is the charge of—pardon me, m’Lady—of, ah …” he cleared his throat, then forged ahead, “… consorting with the Devil in the shape of a black man who was Robin Artisson.
The Bishop claims he has witnesses who saw you, together with the Devil, more’n two summers ago, in a lewd dance—”

“What? But no Moors have visited me in—why, it must be almost a decade. That is
pure
imagination! There is not even an acorn of gossip from which to grow such an oak of a tale! No, w
ait …
unless … that’s it! It has to be! My having danced at some sabbat with Sean Fergus—you know, Brendan Canice—a priest, to boot, in his foolish charcoal-covered disguise!”

“Aye, well your precious Sean-Brendan not be sabbat dancing now. Too busy scuttling after his Bishop like a pet rat.”

“Now Sysok, be fair,” Alyce chided, “Sean Fergus was ever a decent man. T’is not his doing, this madness. Though when I heard he had been sent for to wait upon the Bishop, I admit I hoped his presence might soften de Ledrede.”

Sysok was not one to be charmed out his denunciation nor deflected from reporting his list of Church accusations.

“May that turncoat rot in his Christian hell. Now where was I? Six?”

“Seven, dear,” put in Helena, now trying to keep track of both the list and her husband’s temper.

“Oh, aye, the seventh charge. Well, t’is … pardon me again, M’am … t’is about your having, ah … intimacy with the Devil in the shape of your Familiars, a black cat and a white goat—”

“Holy hell!” exclaimed Alyce, immediately realizing that her oath was, in the circumstances, not the wisest. “Now Prickeare and Greedigut are my paramours? Poor beasts!”

“
And
,” Sysok continued grimly, “of making charms and ointments with—ach, beastly stuff. Dead men’s fingernails, animal innards, flesh from dismembered babies. They say you boiled it all up in the skull of a beheaded robber.… Begging your pardon, Your Ladyship.”

Silence descended, as the group sat, taking all this in.

“Oh. And he also charges you with murdering your first three husbands,” Helena whispered, as an afterthought.

“He demands you answer every charge, m’Lady.”

Alyce roused herself as if from a daze.

“Answer every charge? Answer even a
single
charge? I shall do nothing of the kind. His religious court is not empowered to judge me. About the charge of murder he
will
get a reply—of sorts. I shall
sue
that madman for slandering my character and the Kyteler name. Pacts with devils! As if it is likely I would swear obedience to another male, human
or
inhuman! Nothing personal, Sysok.” Alyce threw him a glum smile. “But truly, who
does
de Ledrede think will believe such lies? He himself cannot believe them!”

Helena bit her lip, reluctant to add more details yet knowing she must.

“Well, he be claiming he personally witnessed the devil-worship.”

“Oh? And where was that? In his Cathedral, where he keeps his devils stored?”

“At our Sabbat, M’am.”

“Then we
know
that he is simply
lying
. Helena, I have talked with this man at some length. He is a servant of the Church, yes. He goes in his master’s name. And he is certainly full of himself. Keenly ambitious, I suspect. I am sure he is capable of doing harm. But I have glimpsed in him a sophisticated mind. He
cannot
genuinely believe that at our Sabbat he saw—”

“He says everyone was garbed in Satan’s colour.”

“Oh, and red is not the shade worn by archbishops?” Alyce sputtered.

“And he be claiming he saw a small girl forced to caress the Devil, who went sniffing about in the form of a shaggy black dog—”

“Who could he possib—you mean the way Sara rides around on Tyffin as if the little hound were a pony?”

“More,” Helena went on. “He says the wine casks were abrim with a poison liquid. He says bats and frogs were swimming in it.”

“Feh,” Alyce made a face, “The vintners will not appreciate his compliments. Or is he blaming it on your casks, John?”

“And,” Helena added, “he claims you pointed a sorcerer’s wand at him, m’Lady, and then he was sent flying through the air without being touched. Aye, aye,
t’would
be funny if t’weren’t so demented. But most horrid of all, he be swearing he spied the burnt remains of newborn infants he says had been thrown into the fire—he swears he saw a dismembered
child, bleeding from its chest, lying hacked to pieces by the stone altar. There. T’is the whole of it.” Finished with her list, Helena sat back, breathless.

Alyce pondered the last items.

“Now where could his fevered brain have conjured
that
from?” she muttered.

Then she had it.

“
The kirn dollies
,” she whispered, “
And Petronilla’s Spectacle
.” “What?” chorused her companions.

“Yes. Of course!” Excited now, Alyce began speaking rapidly as she thought aloud. “That
must
be the answer. The Bishop saw last year’s discarded kirn dollies lying in the embers … and when he and his priests came upon us—just
think
about it—we were beginning to carve up Petronilla’s marzipan Green Man … and de Ledrede—de Ledrede’s perverse mind turned that into a human sacrifice. The kirn poppets: burned babies. The Spectacle Food: a dismembered child. But surely he
knows
that we would never—wait … wait.
He
eats the body and blood of
his
god, so he actually might assume that we … Great Morrigan, the man might
believe
what he is saying.…”

The four of them fell silent again as the full impact of the Bishop’s accusations sank in.

Then Alyce broke their reverie. But she spoke with new resolve.

“It is time to move against this man, I think,” she declared. “We must adapt with the seasons—be a wren or a mouse, a hare or a trout—when we find ourselves pursued. It is time to unpack the gowns and the jewels, and masquerade as a Lady. It is time for me to travel to Kilkenny Town.”

Early the next morning, an increasingly peevish Alyce Kyteler sat and stood, and sat again, and stood again, in her chamber. She was being attended on and attired as befitted the Dame of Kyteler Castle—“being arrayed in my armor,” as she put it. The procedure required five hours, three of her women—Petronilla, Helena, and Annota Lange—and layers of preparation, decoration, and clothing, all of it accompanied by a running commentary of intensifying irritability from the subject of these ministrations.

First came a white silk chemise. Then there was the “ordeal,” as Alyce groaned, of sitting still to have her hair dressed: the long thick carroty mane brushed, combed, pulled, twisted, and gathered up into a silk net studded with pearls; the sides tightly braided in ten tiny plaits from each temple and then wound in whorls and pinned with silver clasps; and the front held back by two high amber combs that, she snarled, “feel like tiny pikes jousting at my scalp.”

Little did it help that Annota kept trying to distract her mistress with chatter about how much worse it could be: wearing the old cone-shaped hennin headdress with the floor-length hanging veils, for instance, or that new-fashioned turban all the ladies were beginning to copy that took half a day to coil properly, or the latest style from Burgundy, the houppelande—a heavy, pleated skirt so voluminous its wearers could barely stand up straight. As a seamstress, Annota tried to up with such things. But Alyce’s mood grew still more sullen when the wimple—of pure white linen, as befitted wives and widows—was wound around her head and tightly under her chin. A small, opaque, white silk gorget was draped over it—“I may as well be back at the convent,” she muttered crossly—and a third white veil, this one long and of translucent silk, over that. Atop the whole, a diadem of beaten gold was firmly pressed, “to keep me from sailing away in all my cloth flappings.”

Grumbling with disbelief that she could ever have worn such “adult swaddling clothes” daily, Alyce was then laced into a bodice embroidered in gold thread with the Kyteler crest, but Helena’s energetic lacing made her lady swear in a most un-ladylike manner. The bodice was followed by a wide skirt of heavy dark blue silk that hung to the floor and pooled there, ending in a three-foot-long weighted train, its border patterned with Irish thistles worked in silver thread. Separate
lemon-coloured sleeves of stiff brocade reaching to the middle of her hands were then fastened to the bodice, buttoned with pearls at the shoulders and buttoned again, tightly, all the way down to the wrists. They made her feel, Alyce growled, as if her arms were carved from willowwood, incapable of all but the smallest gesture.

The cyclas—a knee-length, sleeveless, open-front tunic of dove-grey silk banded in tissue of silver—came next, topped by an additional long sur-coat of pale blue brocade with crystal beads sewn along its edges. There would also be, before departure, a full-length wine-coloured cowled mantle of thin wool—although Alyce had flatly refused to wear the fur-rimmed cloak proper to her rank even in summer. For now, however, all that remained to be done was gird her waist with the belt of indigo-blue-dyed leather, from which hung the aumoniere—the leather purse “containing the bribes,” as Alyce sourly noted. The transformation was completed by decking her with a heavy gold necklace chain, two waist-length strings of pearls, two bracelets of gold and one of silver inlaid with garnets, and a large ring on each hand: emeralds embedded in gold on one, a walnut-sized ruby clasped in silver on the other. Petronilla knelt, holding out the gold-embroidered black velvet slippers with curled toes for Alyce to step into, since, so attired, her mistress could not bend.

“
No
!” that lady shouted. She tried to turn her head to face her women, but could only rotate stiffly, from the waist, and her face was bright pink with frustration. “
Not
those evil shoes! I have been pinched, laced, and combed. I have a headache from so much weight on my skull. I can barely move, and I am
suffocating
under so many layers in this heat. But some things I will
not
do. I will
not
wear furs in Lúnasa—t’is late summer! And I will
not
wear shoes shaped like no human foot and designed for a woman who will be carried everywhere in a litter. And no, no,
no
—I can see it coming in your expressions—I will
not
ride to Kilkenny in a covered horse litter, no matter what gossip is fed by my traveling in an open cart! I would ride Tissy, as usual, if I could—but the poor horse would perish under all this weight! But
no
litter!” She paused, braced for argument. Her women said nothing. They bobbed curtseys, exchanged glances, and stared intently at the floor, trying to stifle laughter behind pursed lips.

“That settles that, then,” Alyce announced. “I shall wear my hemp sandals. At least my feet will be comfortable, even if the rest of me feels so cramped. No one can see my shoes anyway, hobbled as I am in fabric stretching for counties round my ankles.” She huffed and drew herself up to sweep haughtily across the room. But the train threw her off balance, destroying any attempt at dignity. Wobbling, her arms stuck out to steady herself, she was reduced to pleading, near tears, like a petulant child.

“Will someone please find my sandals? And help me maneuver myself downstairs?”

And so they did, enduring at every step her rancorous denunciations of the Bishop for being the cause of her having to suffer such a wretchedly fashionable state.

But it was no petulant child who arrived that evening in Kilkenny, accompanied by a small party of retainers and—shockingly enough to the townsfolk—riding in an open cart, drawn clattering through the narrow streets that rapidly filled with onlookers. It was Her Grace, the Most Noble Dame Alyce Kyteler, in full splendour.