Alisoun shook her head. ‘Too early to know aught.’
‘Will you help me to the riverbank?’
She would prefer that the girl lie abed for a day. This was the hardest part for Alisoun, keeping her counsel. Thine opinion is naught but interference, Magda would say. If thou wouldst care for her again, do what she asks and no more. She must allow the girl to return to the house where her master lay in wait, and he would continue to lie with her until she again conceived a child and carried it long enough for his wife to discover her condition, tossing her out onto the street as a Magdalene.
Unless the charm worked. Alisoun had whispered it over the girl as she slept, a charm said to render a man impotent when he touched her. Magda was not here to chide Alisoun for using it. Even so, she had shivered as she whispered the words, imagining Magda’s sharp eyes watching from afar. No one knew the extent of the Riverwoman’s powers.
A risk. But Magda had said that Alisoun must find her own way …
‘Will you?’ the girl repeated, tugging on Alisoun’s sleeve with the dimpled hand of a child.
‘If that is what you wish, come along while the tide is low. I have prepared a powder for you to add to ale or water and drink down if the pain returns.’
‘I cannot be lazy …’
‘This is not so strong that you cannot work as usual. You need not be in pain.’ Alisoun pressed it into the girl’s hand.
Once she had escorted the child safely through the ankle-deep water, Alisoun returned to the hut and sat down by the fire to dry the hem of her gown while planning her day. She should see Muriel Swann, make certain that the flutters she had felt days ago were indeed the child moving in her womb. Not a young woman, this was the first time Dame Muriel had carried a child long enough to feel it quicken, and the experience had both excited and frightened her. Alisoun added to her basket a calming potion for Muriel’s headaches, and a tisane to increase her appetite.
A memory teased her, dogs barking in the night, and a man’s cries. Terror. Agony. The girl had awakened, calling out in fear, and Alisoun had risen to comfort her, assuring her it was just a bad dream.
But it had been no dream. Had she been alone, Alisoun might have stepped outside, listening in order to gauge whence came the cry, then set out at first light to see if she might be of help. But the girl had been her first responsibility.
Now she gathered the same remedies she had administered to Crispin Poole a week earlier. As it was light, she might walk upriver, see if she came across someone lying injured. She placed the basket with all she might need on the small chest by the door, then fetched her bow and a quiver of arrows. Poole had not returned, nor had she seen him or heard anything of him, and that silence, that absence made her uneasy.
A soft rain in the night had freshened the late-summer foliage in the meadows and woodland along the road from Freythorpe Hadden to York and tamped down the dust, for which Owen was grateful. He knew the misery of riding for hours blinking away the dust in his one good eye, a scarf protecting his nose and mouth. For Lucie and the children, riding in the cart ahead of him, there was still the discomfort of a bumpy ride, but he heard no complaints.
For a while they had traveled behind a group of players who serenaded them with songs and japes, a felicitous arrangement, though he hoped that his eight-year-old daughter Gwenllian would forget the bawdier lyrics. Now that the players had moved on, the monotonous rattle of the cart and horses was punctured occasionally by sounds of reapers and gleaners in the fields, though not as many as on their journey to Freythorpe. Harvest was almost over. Adding to the monotony, his companion droned on and on about something – Owen had stopped listening to Geoffrey a while back. Chaucer was shaping one of his poems aloud, replete with mythical palaces, gods, fantastical creatures, which might be entertaining but for his pauses to play with language, trying a phrase this way and that. Owen was perhaps to blame, having insisted that Geoffrey not address the mission that had brought him to York until they returned to the city. He’d hoped the man might ride in silence, but he’d know that was too much to ask of the chattering jay.
In her wisdom, Magda Digby might have found a way to delay Geoffrey’s departure. Thou art needed in the city, she had told Owen as they sat beneath an oak the previous evening, drawing down the day. Depart in the morning.
But Lucie …
Agrees with Magda. She has readied the children.
How do you know?
Not the question, Bird-eye. She had turned to him, pressing her forefinger to the spot between his eyes. Open thine eyes. Trust thyself. The wolves circle their prey. Thou hast the sight to see what awakens.
He’d questioned the wolves. They came only in winter, the wolves that the steward of the Forest of Galtres swore no longer bided in the land.
What do folk see when they see a wolf, Bird-eye? The animal? Think again.
Magda Digby, his guide, his tormentor. In his mourning for John Thoresby, Owen had sought her out, confided in her all that was in his heart. Long she listened, holding his hands, looking into his eye. Open thine eyes, she repeated, and corrected him when he argued that he had but one. He did not understand, and she did not explain. Her last words to him on departing Freythorpe, Trust thyself, Bird-eye. Thou art called.
Trust himself. Open his eyes. He was called. Called from a year of mourning, a year of doubting his judgment, his worth, a year of questioning all – all but his devotion to his family. He had failed in his last task for Archbishop Thoresby, keeping the peace at his deathbed. Failed by missing signs of a trusted comrade’s discontent, so certain was he of the man’s loyalty when the impending death of their patron rendered his future uncertain.
He’d spent the past year grieving for Thoresby and the end of a career that had given Owen purpose, and now he mourned the death of Philippa, a woman of strength and heart who had endeared herself to him over a decade. Philippa’s death had taken him by surprise. Though she had suffered for years of a palsy, her strength and memory failing, her end was sudden. One morning she simply did not rise from her bed. She was missed.
Wolves circling their prey. The sight to see what awakens. Something that had already been stirring in York before Philippa’s death? He had been preoccupied with his own life the past months, helping out in the apothecary and the medicinal garden while Lucie sat with her failing aunt, riding out to familiarize himself with his new property, a manor in the gift of the Bishop of Winchester, the deed transferred to Owen on the late archbishop’s urging. Thoresby’s last gift, and, as ever, a double-edged sword. He must clear his mind of all that now.
He had a vague memory of a rumor of wolves in the wood. There were always rumors of wolves in winter, but this time it had continued through the spring and summer. Wolves prowling the yards at night, stealing chickens and pigs. Mauley, sergeant of Galtres, had been incensed by the claims. Though his immediate predecessors had performed their duties with deputies, rarely coming north – king’s men, the status a gift – Mauley was often in York, biding with his daughter in the Fenton house on Coney Street. He was proud of order in the forest. Owen searched his memory for more, but he could not think clearly with Geoffrey’s jabbering. He’d made his excuses this morning, asked Geoffrey to stay at Freythorpe Hadden with Magda, who was to remain behind a while. But Magda had scoffed at that suggestion. She was not always Owen’s friend.
‘Spare me your poetic struggles,’ Owen grumbled.