The Wise Woman (35 page)

Alys had left them with an irritable shiver to run down to the garden to gather herbs. The old lord had a cough at nights which made him weary, and Alys wanted the heads of lavender for him to help him rest. They were stunted and frozen, they should have been picked when the juice was in them, fresh and violet and sweet in midsummer.

“They were neglected and left, and now they are cold and dry,” Alys said, turning the arid handful in her lap. “Oh God, Hugo.”

Between Catherine’s demands for company and the needs of the old lord who sank one day but rallied the next, Alys should have been busy, with no time to brood. But all those long weeks, as it snowed deeper, and then thawed, and then snowed again, Alys moped at the fireside, at the arrow-slit window, or shivered on her own in the frozen garden.

“What ails you, Alys, are you sick?” the old lord asked.

David the dwarf peeped at her and gleamed his malicious smile. “A sick physician? A foolish wise woman? A dried-out herbalist?” he asked. “What are you, Alys? A gourd rattling with dried seeds?”

Only Morach in the dark room which they shared at night put her dirty finger precisely on the root of Alys’s pain. “You’re dying for him, aren’t you?” she said bluntly. “Dying inside for him.”

Hugo barely noticed her in his busy days. He wrote a stream of letters to London, to Bristol and to Newcastle, and cursed like a soldier at the delay in their delivery and replies. He supervised the pulling-down of the big keystones of the abbey and the men dragged them over the snow on sledges to make a heap where he planned his new house. “Not a castle,” he told Catherine. “A regular house. A Tudor house. A house for a lasting peace.”

He drew plans for his new handsome house. It was to have windows, not arrow-slits. It was to have chimneys and fireplaces in every room. He would have had the men dig foundations, but no one could drive so much as a knife into the frozen ground. Instead, he measured up and drew it, and showed it to David, and argued about kitchens and the bakehouse and the number of rooms and the best aspect. When he strode into the castle, as the early winter darkness came down in the afternoon, all the women in the castle fluttered—like hens in a shed with a fox beneath the floor. Hugo let his dark laughing eyes rove over all of them, and then took his pick in a shadowed doorway for a few minutes of rough pleasure.

He rarely had the same woman twice, Alys saw. He never willfully hurt them or played the mad cruel games he had done with his wife. He treated them with abrupt lust and then quick dismissal.

And they loved him for it. “He is a rogue!” “He is the old lord reborn!” “He is a man!” she heard them say. He put his hand out to Alys once with a quizzical smile and a dark eyebrow raised. Alys had looked through him, her face as inviting as frozen stone, and he had laughed shortly and turned away. She heard him whistle as he ran down the stairs, accepting her rejection as lightly as he had accepted her invitation. She no longer ran deep in Hugo’s blood—he had too many diversions. He never came again to her room while Catherine slept—Alys never expected it. She had taken a gamble on her desire and lost him, and lost her desire too.

All she had left to her was a nagging knowledge that she needed him, at a level that ran deeper than lust. Alys felt she had tried his lust and found it wanting. In his easy dismissal of her she felt her power—over him, over herself, over all of them—drain away like the pale sunsets which bled light from the narrow line of the western horizon in the early afternoons of the dark winter days.

One day the crystal on the thread hung downward heavy and still, like a plumb-line, when she laid her hand on the old lord’s chest.

“Have you lost your power, Alys?” he asked sharply, his dark eyes wide open, alert as a ruffled old eagle owl.

Alys met his gaze unmoved. “I think so, my lord,” she said, cold to her very bones. “I cannot get the thing I desire, and I cannot learn not to desire it. I’ve no time nor appetite for anything. Now it seems I’ve no ability either.”

“Why’s that?” he asked briefly; he was short of breath.

“Hugo,” Alys said. “He wanted me to be an ordinary woman, a girl to love. Now I am so ordinary he passes me by. I threw my power away for love of him and now I have neither the power nor the love.”

The old lord had barked a sharp laugh at that which ended in him coughing and wheezing. “Get Morach for me then,” he said. “Morach shall tend me instead of you. Catherine says that she trusts her with everything. That she is a great healer, an uncanny herbalist.”

Alys nodded, her face pinched. “As you wish,” she said. The words were like flakes of snow.

The old lord used her as his clerk still, but there were only a few letters he cared to write during his sickness, during Lent. But when she was sitting at the wide oriel window of the ladies’ gallery on the Wednesday after Easter Day Alys saw a half-dozen homing pigeons winging in from the south, circling the castle in a broad determined swoop and then angling, like a flight of sluggish arrows, toward their coops on the roof of the round tower. It meant urgent news from London. Alys bobbed a curtsy to Catherine and left the ladies’ gallery. She arrived at Lord Hugh’s door as the messenger came down the stairs from the roof of the tower with the tiny scrap of paper in his hand. Alys followed him into the room.

“Shall I read it?” Alys asked.

Lord Hugh nodded.

Alys unfurled the little scrap. It was written in Latin. “I don’t understand it,” Alys said.

“Read it,” Hugh said.

“It says:
On Easter Tuesday the Spanish envoy refused an invitation to dine with the queen. The king took mass with him and the queen’s brother was ordered to attend him
.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes,” Alys said. “But what does it mean?”

“It means the Boleyn girl has fallen,” Lord Hugh said without regret. “Praise God I am friends with the Seymours.”

He said it like an epitaph on a gravestone, and closed his eyes. Alys watched his hard, unforgiving face as he slept and wondered if Queen Anne yet knew that she was lost.

After that day there was little work for her in the castle except reading to the old lord and sitting with Catherine. She could not be trusted to sew an intricate pattern—she lacked attention, Catherine complained. She had lost her intuition for herbs and Catherine shivered at the touch of her cold fingers. Day after day Alys had less and less to do but watch and wait for Hugo—and then, see him pass by her without noticing her in the shadows.

She grew thinner and she took to drinking more and more wine at dinner as the food stuck in her throat. It was the only thing which helped her sleep, and when she slept she dreamed long wonderful dreams of Hugo at her side, and his son in her arms, and a yellow gown slashed with red silk and a snow-white fur trim.

As snow turned to sleet and then rain, the ground grew softer. At the end of April the young lord rode out every dawn and did not come back till dusk. They had started digging the foundations for the new house and on the day they had completed the outline he came home early, at midday, dirty with mud, bursting into Catherine’s gallery, where she was sewing a tapestry with Morach idly holding the silks at one side of her and Alys and Eliza and Ruth stitching the border.

“You must come and see it!” Hugo said. “You
must
, Catherine. And you shall see the rooms I have planned for you and for our son. She can come, can’t she, Morach? She can ride the gray palfrey?”

His glance flickered past Alys to the older woman. Alys kept her eyes on her work but she could feel him near her like a trout can feel a fisherman’s shadow.

“If it’s a very quiet horse,” Morach replied. “Riding will not harm either of them, but a fall could be fatal.”

“And all your ladies,” Hugo said expansively. “All of them! You must be pining to go out—mewed up here like fat goshawks! Wouldn’t you like to smell the moorland air again, Alys? Feel the wind in your face?”

Catherine smiled at Alys. “She won’t leave your father,” she said. “She is always with him or running errands for him. She can stay. And also Margery and Mistress Allingham. I will come, and Eliza and Ruth and Morach.”

“As you wish,” Hugo said readily. “As you wish. We’ll go tomorrow. I’ll walk out with you today, after dinner.” He caught sight of Alys, face down-turned to her work. “You don’t begrudge us our pleasure, Alys?” He had a wish, as willful as a teasing child, to see her face and her eyes and to hold her attention.

She did not look up at him. “Of course not, my lord,” she said, her voice thin but steady. “I hope you and my lady have a pleasant day.”

“You must be thirsty, my lord,” Catherine interrupted. “Alys, call for some wine for my lord before you leave us. You are bid to go to Lord Hugh, are you not?”

Alys rose to her feet and went to pull the bell.

“Is my father ill?” Hugo asked.

“Oh no,” Catherine reassured him. “Alys does not tend to his health now. She has lost her skill. Isn’t that strange? Morach tends to him now. But he likes Alys to read to him. Doesn’t he, Alys?”

Alys shot a quick look at Hugo from under her eyelashes. “Yes,” she said. “May I go now?”

Hugo smiled, his eyes resting on her, his look thoughtful, and nodded her away. Alys, her eyes on the floor, her face pale, went out of the heavy door and closed it quietly behind her.

“Not long now,” Morach said, watching Hugo’s eyes following Alys to the door. “Not long now,” she said with malicious satisfaction.

“What?” Catherine demanded impatiently.

Morach’s grin was irrepressible. “I said, not long now. I was thinking of a game I know.”

T
he old lord kept Alys with him after dinner, he had a letter by messenger from his cousin in London. The man had come slowly, overland up the Great North Road, traveling with others delayed by snowdrifts. The news he brought was a week old. But gossip and rumors have a long life. Lady Jane Seymour had been given her own apartments at Greenwich Palace—as grand as those of the queen. Rochford, the queen’s brother, was not to be elected to the Garter. That honor was given elsewhere. The king had danced with Lady Jane Seymour all evening. The king and the queen were to watch a May Day joust together but the court was seething with stories of a quarrel between the queen and king when she had stripped the baby Princess Elizabeth naked and thrust her at him, demanding if he could find a flaw, a single flaw, on the chubby little body. Another perfect child would follow the first, she swore. But the king had turned away.

Alys read the letter to him and then burned it when he nodded to the fire. There was also a letter from the College of Heralds. Lord Hugh wanted to add a quartering to his shield to greet his new grandson. There was a precedent for the honor in Catherine’s family and the old lord and the college were haggling about the justice of the claim and the price that would have to be paid for the added luster to Hugh’s name. He shook his head at their demands. “I must watch my ambition,” he said. “See what ambition is doing to the Boleyns, Alys. The safest place to be is halfway down the hall. Not too near the top table.”

There was a lease sent from the Bowes manor for his inspection. A tenant was resisting a change of his holding from entry and occasional fines to an annual rent. He wanted to pay his fines in goods but the castle was hungry for cash. Alys read the medieval Latin of the lease slowly, stumbling over the archaic words. Lord Hugh watched the flames in the fireplace, nodding first with concentration and then with weariness, and then his eyes slowly closed. Alys read on a few sentences more and then softly laid down the parchment and looked at him. He was fast asleep.

She rose quietly from her chair and went softly to the arrow-slit in the westward wall and looked out. Below her on the far side of the riverbank she could see Lady Catherine walking awkwardly, wrapped in furs, one hand on Hugo’s arm. He was leaning toward her so that he could hear what she said above the rushing of the water. Even at that distance Alys could see Catherine’s adoring gaze up at Hugo and her smile.

The old lord was dozing behind Alys, the fire crackled in the grate. Alys watched how Hugo leaned toward Catherine and how he helped her across the muddy parts of the path. At a distance Morach followed, with a basket on her arm and Eliza Herring walking at her side. The other ladies must have stayed indoors. Behind them were two armed servants on horseback. Hugo was taking no chances with the safety of his wife and unborn son.

Alys felt her hands hurting and looked down. She had clenched them into fists and her nails had marked four deep red sickles into each palm. “Oh God, this jealousy is my crucifixion,” she whispered, but she stayed watching, unable to leave the window.

Catherine slipped a little on the mud and Hugo caught her with one arm around her waist. Alys could almost hear her laugh as Hugo held her, then she turned her face up to him and his dark head came down and he kissed her.

Alys felt her cheeks burn. Somewhere, from the back of her mind, came the memory of the doll which she had thrown in the moat. The three dolls were hidden in the purse on a piece of string dangling out of the garderobe, waiting for the time that they could be buried. Alys had kept her mind away from them with the same disciplined blindness that she stopped herself thinking of the nunnery, of her mother, or a fire.

But when she saw Catherine slip, so near to those deep icy waters, she thought again of the little doll of Catherine which she had thrown far out into the green waters of the moat and which had bobbed and turned its face to her, and then smiled at her and nearly drowned her from its own power and malice.

“Oh, but I’m safe now,” Alys said aloud. “I’m safe here indoors, while you are out there.”

She glanced back into the room. The old lord was snoring, his cap askew, his head on one side. The warm glow of the firelight flickered red on the stone walls. The deerhound dozed before the fire, paws twitching now and then in his dream.

“Nothing could hurt me here,” Alys said. She looked back out of the window. “But you…” she whispered to Catherine. “
You
are very near the water. And the spell on the dolls was very potent. So potent that your husband went to you and loved you with such passion that he has forgotten all about me. It was my power in the dolls that drew him to you. It was my power in the dolls that put that baby in your belly. And the doll for you was drowning, Catherine. Your doll was drowning.”