Dawn came and went, and another dawn, and Lys stayed. The sky that had been so clear was turning grey. We needed every hand we had, to get in the crops before the rain came. Even mine—Mère Adele scowled at me as I took my place, but I stared her down. Lys took the row beside me. No one said anything. We were all silent, that day and the next, racing the rain.
The last of the barley went in the barn as the first drops fell. We stood out in it, too tired and too shocked by the stopping of a race we had run for so long, to do more than stare. Then someone grinned. Then someone else. Then the whole lot of us. We had done it, we, the women and the children and the men too old or weak to fight. We had brought in the harvest in Sency-la-Forêt.
That night we had a feast. Mere Adele’s cook slaughtered an ox, and the rest of us brought what we had or could gather. There was meat for everyone, and a cake with honey in it, and apples from the orchards, and even a little wine. We sat in the nuns’ refectory and listened to the rain on the roof, and ate till we were sated. Lame Bertrand had his pipe and Raymonde her drum, and Guillemette had a voice like a linnet. Some of the younger ones got up to dance. I saw how Pierre Allard was looking at Guillemette, and he just old enough to tend his own sheep: too young and small as he had been in the spring for the Comte’s men to take, but grown tall in the summer, and casting eyes at our pretty idiot as if he were a proper man.
I drank maybe more of the wine than was good for me. I danced, and people cheered: I had a neat foot even then, and Pierre Allard was light enough, and quick enough, to keep up with me.
It should have been Claudel dancing there. No great beauty, my Claudel, and not much taller than I, but he could dance like a leaf in the Wood; and sing, too, and laugh with me when I spun dizzy and breathless out of the dance. There was no one there to catch me and carry me away to a bed under the sky, or more likely on a night like this, in the barn among the cows, away from children and questions and eyes that pried.
I left soon after that, while the dancing was still in full whirl. The rain was steady, and not too cold. I was wet through soon enough, but it felt more pleasant than not. My feet knew the way in the black dark, along the path that followed the priory’s wall, down to the river and then up again to a shadow in shadow and a scent of the midden that was mine and no one else’s. There was light through a chink in the door: firelight, banked but not yet covered. Mamere Mondine nodded in front of it. She was blind and nearly deaf, but she smiled when I kissed her forehead. “Jeannette,” she said. “Pretty Jeannette.” And patted my hand that rested on her shoulder, and went back to her dreaming.
The children were abed, asleep. There was no larger figure with them. Francha’s eyes gleamed at me in the light from the lamp. They were swollen and red; her cheeks were tracked with tears.
I started to speak. To say that Lys was coming, that she would be here soon, that she was still in the priory. But I could not find it in me to say it. She had eaten with us. She had been there when the children went out in a crowd, protesting loudly. When the dancing began, I had not seen her. I had thought, if I thought at all, that she had come here before me.
In the dark and the rain, a stranger could only too easily go astray. It was not far to the priory, a mile, maybe, but that was a good count of steps, and more than enough to be lost in.
What made me think of the Wood, I never knew. Her words to Mère Adele. My first sight of her on the Wood’s edge. The simple strangeness of her, as I sat on the bed and tried to comfort Francha, and saw in the dimness the memory of her face. We had stories, we in Sency, of what lived in the Wood. Animals both familiar and strange, and shadows cast by no living thing, and paths that wound deep and deep, and yet ended where they began; and far within, behind a wall of mists and fear, a kingdom ruled by a deathless king.
I shook myself hard. What was it to me that a wayward stranger had come, brought in our harvest, and gone away again? To Francha it was too much, and that I would not forgive. Whatever in the world had made our poor mute child fall so perfectly in love with the lady, it had done Francha no good, and likely much harm. She would not let me touch her now, scrambled to the far corner of the bed when I lay down and tried to draw her in, and huddled there for all that I dared do without waking the others. In the end I gave it up and closed my eyes. I was on the bed’s edge. Francha was pressed against the wall. She would have to climb over me to escape.
One moment, it seemed, I was fretting over Francha. The next, the red cock was crowing, and I was staggering up, stumbling to the morning’s duties. There was no sign of Lys. She had had no more than the clothes on her back; those were gone. She might never have been there at all.
I unlidded the fire and poked it up, and fed it carefully. I filled the pot and hung it over the flames. I milked the cow, I found two eggs in the nest that the black hen had thought so well hidden. I fed the pigs and scratched the old sow’s back and promised her a day in the wood, if I could persuade Bertrand to take her out with his own herd. I fed Mamère Mondine her bowl of porridge with a little honey dripped in it, and a little more for each of the children. Perrin and Celine gobbled theirs and wanted more. Francha would not eat. When I tried to feed her as I had when I first took her in, she slapped the spoon out of my hand. The other children were delighted. So were the cats, who set to at once, licking porridge from the wall and the table and the floor.
I sighed and retrieved the spoon. Francha’s face was locked shut. There would be no reasoning with her today, or, I suspected, for days hereafter. Inside myself I cursed this woman who had come, enchanted a poor broken child, and gone away without a word. And if Francha sickened over it, if she pined and died—as she well could, as she almost had before I took her—
I dipped the porridge back into the pot. I wiped the children’s faces and Francha’s hands. I did what needed doing. And all the while my anger grew.
The rain had gone away with the night. The last of the clouds blew away eastward, and the sun came up, warming the wet earth, raising pillars and curtains of mist. The threshers would be at it soon, as should I.
But I stood in my kitchen garden and looked over the hedge, and saw the wall of grey and green that was the Wood. One of the cats wound about my ankles. I gathered her up. She purred. “I know where the lady went,” I said. “She went west. She said she would. God protect her; nothing else will, where she was going.”
The cat’s purring stopped. She raked my hand with her claws and struggled free; hissed at me; and darted away round the midden.
I sucked my smarting hand. Celine ran out of the house, shrilling in the tone I was doing my best to slap out of her: “Francha’s crying again, mama! Francha won’t stop crying!”
What I was thinking of was quite mad. I should go inside, of course I should, and do what I could to comfort Francha, and gather the children together, and go to the threshing.
I knelt in the dirt between the poles of beans, and took Celine by the shoulders. She stopped her shrieking to stare at me. “Are you a big girl?” I asked her.
She drew herself up. “I’m grown up,” she said. “You know that, mama.”
“Can you look after Francha, then? And Perrin? And take them both to Mere Adele?”
She frowned. “Won’t you come, too?”
Too clever by half, was my Celine. “I have to do something else,” I said. “Can you do it, Celine? And tell Mere Adele that I’ll be back as soon as I can?”