The Burning Time (28 page)

“Sorry, M’am, I dinna know,” Helena shrugged.

“By now, probably he—he surely must …” Alyce’s words were withering in her throat. She knew that she must put this subject away for now. She knew that later, when alone, was the time to unfold it, in what would be many private midnight grievings, for the rest of her life. She swallowed hard.

“May my son Will carry himself honourably. May he act like the gentle knight he is. May he walk always in Her sight, whether—whether he knows it or not.” She paused, bracing herself. “Please. Go on.”

“The Cailleach be demanding Her justice, though. T’was less than a year after the Cathedral was repaired—all that costly lead roofing being too heavy—that the roof caved in.
Aye. Brought down the choir, the side chapels, all the bells. No one can claim She be lacking a sense of humour,” Helena murmured, the wince of a smile flickering across her face.

“But Helena, the others … you. How did your back—”

“Me. I … be in prison these seven years. On bread and water. Chained to the floor.”

“Oh Helena,” Alyce whispered.

“T’is part of why my back got twisted—though also I did heavy labor, later on.… The sole reason I be set free was the Bishop made himself too many important enemies, himself wanting ever more power than he already had. At last, the Archbishop of Dublin brought a charge of heresy against him—aye, he did. So the Bishop was forced to scamper back to France, to hide beneath the Pope’s skirts.… Otherwise t’is in prison I should be still—caged, chained, for the rest of my days. In a foul, stinking cell acrawl with vermin.”

“Helena, my dear—” Alyce reached out to her.

“Dinna touch me. If ye do, I likely canna finish. The Bishop, he be gone. But naught will ever be the same. People be practicing The Craft only in secret now. Can ye believe it? In Eire!”

“But—then the people themselves are still …? Where is Sysok?”

“Dead,” Helena replied in a flat voice. “We be captured that very night, right outside Clonroche. He struggled with the yeomen. They killed him. One sword thrust, just like that. He looked so surprised. Only later did I come to grasp he had
good fortune. To go so quick, I mean. His father perished on the way back to Kilkenny. Soaked, frozen. The yeomen took the warm clothing ye gave us. And the horses. And the cart. And sure the gold. They marched us that whole night through with no stopping, in the harshest storm in memory. John was old, you know. He tried hard to keep up, but he fell again and again and they …”

Alyce stared into the fire, thinking of Sysok in the prime of his manhood, Sysok of the quick temper and quick intelligence. And Old John, whose gnarled, skilled cooper’s hands she had never seen idle, Old John who voiced what others dare not speak.

But Helena had lived so long with her dead that she continued her narrative in a level tone.

“Henry and Alyce, they be taken in the forge before they even had a chance to leave. The Bishop must have suspected we be fleeing. Henry and Alyce were both slain on the spot. They fought, though. They took four of the Bishop’s men with them to their deaths.

“Eva de Brounstoun—we be in prison together. Not at the beginning, but later on. A bitter first winter it was there, and them permitting no aid for any sicknesses. Her lungs, you know … she be coughing red spit and she be daft with fever at the end, ranting on about how it was time for lambing and kidding and that she was needed out in the fields.… She died in my arms.”

Alyce moaned softly. But Helena continued in her calm, listless voice.

“Annota Lange, somehow she be getting separated from her traveling companions. Once at Wexford, she must have gone about trying to find the others. But twenty of the Bishop’s men found her first. Twenty soldiers against one widow. By the time they brought her body back, she had abandoned it.”

Alyce covered her face with her hands.

“Robert de Bristol was in prison, too. But I dinna know what became of him. I heard he was pardoned at last and planned to take holy orders as a friar, but I dinna know for certain. Will Payn and his family … they were sentenced to be whipped through the streets to the marketplace with the rest of us—Eva and me, too, before we were shut in prison—but Will Payne, somehow he kept singing through it, to keep our spirits up. So they took him and they … they burned a cross into what was left of the flesh on his back.

“Others mayhap got away, for some were sentenced, ‘in absentia’ they call it, to banishment and excommunication. I be thinking that likely means they had already escaped the Bishop’s reach.… Still, whilst I worked my way here these past three years—in contract serfdom to pay my passage—along the way I be asking everyone did they know anything. But people be fearful about saying things now. One man who worked the boats at Wexford said he thought he had once shipped across with some people who sounded like ones I be describing. But he said
t’was a long time ago, and then he said his memory was faulty. Nobody at the Cardigan port in Wales be remembering a thing. I went to the Fishguard port, too, in case.… But if you heard naught about ’em or from ’em, if they never tried to find you, as I did, t’is not likely …” Her voice trailed off. “So now I finally know, too,” she added dully, “I be the first. And t’is all but certain I be the last. Likely the rest never even got so far as Wales.”

She sat motionless, empty from her recital, drained of all her deaths.

Alyce was weeping silently, tears cascading down her face. Helena lifted her head and stared at her, as if surprised to see her old mistress sitting nearby, in a kitchen, by a fire, crying.

“There, there, Lady Alyce. T’is all long ago. They all be gone. They be gone a long, long time.”

“Not for me. For me they die tonight. For me they die backwards from tonight. They only now …”

Alyce looked up at Helena through brimming, red-rimmed eyes. Even in her grief, she missed the name not spoken. She opened her mouth to ask a question, but Helena spoke first.

“And what of ye and the children, Your Grace?”

“I … we …”

She had no names for safety, plenty, or peace after Helena’s news. She gazed into the fire. Then she settled for a recitation of plain facts she thought she could enumerate without breaking down. That much she owed Helena. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her nightdress.

“We have—fared tolerably. Certainly compared with what you … we did find sanctuary here, though not quite what I would call welcome. After some time, it became clear that we were not … not soon to return home. So I bought land and—tomorrow I shall take you round and show you everything. We live quietly here in England. King Edward ascended the throne six years ago. The rumours beginning back when he was Crown Prince were true. He
is
drawn to The Craft, though he must keep his Seeking private to himself and a few trustworthy friends. He would have liked me to be one of them—but court life was not for me, and that displeased him. It matters little, though, since he usually is off fighting France and massacring the Scots. But the man is no fool. I myself have heard him vow to curb Church power. He wants to abolish Peter’s Pence, a tax every household in England is being forced to pay the papacy. And Helena! Five years ago, Edward seized the revenues of Richard de Ledrede. He swears if the Bishop is ever fool enough to return to England, the Crown will ensure he is ostracized.”

Helena drained her soup bowl and set it down, turning eyes dim with fatigue on Alyce, who realized that her guest hadn’t comprehended most of what had just been said.

“More talk can wait until morning, Helena, after you have rested. Come now and—”

Then Helena, speaking absently from inside her own thoughts, interrupted.

“T’was the first thing I noticed when you opened the door. Your hair. Your fiery red Celtic hair. You be old enough for some greying, mayhap, Lady Alyce. Yet your hair be paler than Petronilla’s. Why be your hair stark white?”

ALYCE SPOKE SLOWLY
searching for the words she needed, finding them one at a time, losing them again, seeking a way to say what she had never yet spoken aloud and feared to name now.

“The night … the night after we left home, the eve of Samhain, we stopped in the high woods near Wexford. We were waiting for dawn, when we could board the boat. Something … happened there. During the storm. I cannot describe it. I—I fell. Into a—a
somewhere
. I became … snared, sucked into this place. It is a perilous place, from which there is no way back, no way forward. No way out … I gazed directly at Her—at The Morrigan. I saw Her true Face. Death Bringer. Mother of Despair. The Tomb of Every Hope. Finally I saw Her truths. They were—unspeakable. Indifferent to our puny truths, unaffected by our pathetic faith. Hideous.

“Her truth—the real truth—was that The Burning Time was neither rumour nor myth, not something hideous happening somewhere else to other people. The truth was that the Inquisition had arrived where
we
were. It was happening
now
,
to
us
. The truth was that I had been a fool to think us safe from the world on our little island, a fool to be sure I could do what was necessary to defend us, a fool to feel secure under Her protection … and something else. The cruelest truth. I realized that I knew nothing, understood no one. I, always so certain I could read people well—I was ignorant, witless. And cold inside,
cold
. Colder than I had ever …

“Then I saw—I saw the skin of the universe peel back. Festering there under the surface—alive, squirming, heaving, crawling up through the rip in the skin—were
lies
. They glowed a greenish white iridescence. It was a cosmic nest … of maggots. Huge, fat, flagrant lies; tiny, winged, subtle lies. Lies about the existence—even the possibility—of health, friendship, trust. Sly, side-glancing, hypocritical, grinning, giggling lies. And everywhere,
everywhere
, betrayal.

“Simply, I saw life. Bare, sour, brutish, unadorned by illusion. Nowhere a gleam of honesty or sweetness. No way to lend purpose to meaninglessness, not even in passing, not even as a gesture. Only contempt for others—their stupidities, vulgarities, self-important scurryings busy as insects. Only disgust with myself—my conceits, willfulness, ignorance, spite.…

“I died that night. Like the banshee, I became a host for the dead. I welcomed it, welcomed death into my heart. It lent me an armor against feeling anything—pain, joy, curiosity, love. It brought a strange solace—a hard, icy power. It settled the
nausea of boredom, because it assured eventual release. I could
believe
in death, because death alone has proven its existence. That night I lost my faith in everything else I had been foolish enough to build my life on. The sole order I could recognize was disorder. The sole promise I could trust was death.”

A brief, bitter smile curled her lips.

“But the children … the children were still there, still needed me, still had to be carried to safety. I
hated
them for that. Aye. I hated the burden of them, hated the pledge I had made to care for them, hated all you serfs for having extracted that pledge from me at the moment I humbled myself to what I thought were our shared beliefs. So had I been neatly trapped between all of you on the one side, and the Bishop on the other. So did I hate you both. It was then I discovered the
energy
of hate—a formidable energy. Hate drove me, by dawn, somehow to get seven screaming children—in a mud-mired, rain-soaked wagon hauled by one wheezing, drenched horse—down to the wharf and aboard the boat. At daybreak we weighed anchor. By the time the storm lifted and the sun burned through the fog, we were into clear water. It was in that sunshine I first saw it, after—still fueled by hate—I had fed the children, bedded them down in their cabins, and sung to them until they slept, warm and dry. Then I climbed back abovedeck to see if I could spy any receding outline of Ireland through the haze. I could. Just barely.

“It shrank as I watched it fade. One final sight, to last me the rest of my life. Eire. Erin. Home. The land I knew, the hillocks and paddocks; the rushing sound the river made in spring. The stones I knew, the echo of footsteps in familiar chambers where dust would fur my silent loom now; the stars seen from my turret window. The people. My son—child, man, heir; the rebel nuns who raised me; my parents’ graves. The dull gold summer evening light, the expressions on certain animals’ faces; the rich brown smell of onions stewing in wine near suppertime in winter. The child and girl and woman I had been, the only self I knew …

“I stood in that sunshine, watching it all go. The wind freshened and began billowing the sails and whipping my hair about. I reached to brush some strands from my eyes. It was then I saw that my hair had turned pure white during a single midnight storm.”

Helena looked at her with the glint of an all but forgotten pride.

“We were right, you see,” she said, “You saved our children. And our children saved you.”

“I saved your children, aye. But I was not saved. I have never spoken these dark things aloud. I have paced through these ten years an imposter of myself—for your children’s sake. Oh aye, I can pretend through the daylight hours. I have learned to practice lying as an art. I can act as if I believe
The Craft was worth such loss, as if I believe The Craft is more than yet another myth. How can I blame my Will for recanting when I myself pretend to believe The Old Ways still have power or meaning? Oh, I can celebrate a Sabbat convincingly for the children’s sake; children need the illusion of hope. But I have lost the voice of a High Priestess. My spells ring as rote, like those Christian parishioners I once pitied for mumbling their rosaries without conviction or even attention. I can
act
as if I remember how to feel joy.… Yet in the nights, alone, I know who I am—and who I am not. Then the bleakness tightens around me and swallows up the air. Then I cannot breathe … and then I know I am a charlatan among the living, an imposter, a dead woman. Not even properly dead, merely in a lifelong transition, dying down all my hours. Until someday I am let go, finally. Safe from living.”