“This lady I know,” he said, turning his eyes away from me and fixing them on Lys. “And you, reverend prioress? And this charming demoiselle?”
Well, I thought. That cured my blush. Charming I was not, whatever else I was.
“I am Mere Adele,” said Mere Adele, “and this is Jeannette Laclos of Sency. You are Giscard de Montsalvat from the other side of Normandy, and you say you have a claim on our guest?”
That took him properly aback. He was not used to such directness, maybe, in the courts that he had come from. But he had a quick wit, and a smooth tongue to go with it. “My claim is no more than I have said. She was my brother’s lover. She carries his child. He wished to acknowledge it; he bound me before he died, to do all that I could on its behalf.”
“For bastard seed?” asked Mere Adele. “I should think you’d be glad to see the last of her. Wasn’t your brother the elder? And wouldn’t her baby be his heir, if it were male, and she a wife?”
“She would never marry him,” said Messire Giscard. “She was noble enough, she said, but exiled, and no dowry to her name.”
“Then all the more cause for you to let her go. Why do you hunt her down? She’s no thief, you say. What does she have that you want?”
He looked at his feet in their fine soft shoes. He was out of his reckoning, maybe. My stomach drew tight as I watched him. Men like that—big beautiful animals who had never known a moment’s thirst or hunger except what they themselves chose, in war or in the chase; who had never been crossed, nor knew what to do when they were—such men were dangerous. One of them had met me in the wood before I married Claudel; and so Celine was a fair child, like the Norman who had sired her. A Norman very like this one, only not so pretty to look at. He had been gentle in his way. But he wanted me, and what he wanted, he took. He never asked my name. I never asked his.
This one had asked. It softened me—more than I liked to admit. Of course he did not care. He wanted to know his adversaries, that was all. If it had been the two of us under the trees and the blood rising in him, names would not have mattered.
Lys spoke, making me start; I was deep in myself. “He wants me,” she said. “Somewhat for my beauty. More for what he thinks that I will give.”
Messire Giscard smiled his easy smile. “So then, you tempt me. I’d hardly sin so far as to lust after my brother’s woman. That is incest, and forbidden by holy Church.” He crossed himself devoutly. “No, Mere Adele; beautiful she may be, but I swore a vow to my brother.”
“You promised to let me go,” said Lys.
“Poor lady,” he said. “You were beside yourself with grief. What could I do but say yes to anything you said? I beg your pardon for the falsehood; I reckoned, truly, that it was needful. I never meant to cast you out.”
“You never meant to set me free.”
“Do you hate him that much?” asked Mere Adele.
Lys looked at her, and then at him. He was still smiling. Pretty, oh, so pretty, with the sun aslant on his bright hair, and his white teeth gleaming.
“Aymeric was never so fair,” said Lys. “That was all given to his brother. He was a little frog-mouthed bandy-legged man, as swarthy as a Saracen, bad eyes and bad teeth and nothing about him that was beautiful. Except,” she said, “he was. He would come into a room, and one would think, ‘What an ugly little man!’ Then he would smile, and nothing in the world would matter, except that he was happy. Everyone loved him. Even his enemies—they hated him with sincere respect, and admired him profoundly. I was his enemy, in the beginning. I was a hard proud cruel thing, exile by free choice from my own country, sworn to make my way in the world, myself alone and with no other. He—he wanted to protect me. ‘You are a woman,’ he said. As if that was all the reason he needed.
“I hated him for that. He was so certain, and so insufferable, mere mortal man before all that I was and had been. But he would not yield for aught that I could do, and in the end, like all the rest, I fell under his spell.”
“Or he under yours,” said Messire Giscard. “From the moment he saw you, he was bewitched.”
“That was my face,” said Lys, “and no more. The rest grew as I resisted him. He loved a fight, did Aymeric. We never surrendered, either of us. To the day he died he was determined to protect me, as was I to resist him.”
Messire Giscard smiled, triumphant. “You see!” he said to Mere Adele. “Still she resists. And yet, am I not her sole kinsman in this world? Did not my brother entrust her to me? Shall I not carry out my promise that I made as he was dying?”
“She doesn’t want you to,” said Mere Adele.
“Ah,” said Messire Giscard. “Bearing women—you know how they are. She’s distraught; she grieves. As in truth she should. But she should be thinking too of the baby, and of her lover’s wishes. He would never have allowed her to tramp on foot across the width of Normandy, looking for God knew what.”
“Looking for my kin,” said Lys. “I do have them, Giscard. One of them even is a king.”
“What, the fairy king?” Giscard shook his head. “Mere Adele, if you’ll believe it, she says that she’s the elf-king’s child.”
“I am,” said Lys, “his brother’s daughter.” And she looked it, just then, with her white wild face. “You can’t shock them with that, Giscard, or hope to prove me mad. They know. They live on the edge of his Wood.”
He leaned forward in his chair. All the brightness was gone, all the sweet false seeming. He was as hard and cold and cruel as she. “So,” he said. “So, Alys. Tell them the rest. Tell them what you did that made my brother love you so.”
“What, that I was his whore?”
I looked at her and shivered. No, he could not be so hard, or so cold, or so cruel. He was a human man. She …
She laughed. “That should be obvious to a blind man. Which these,” she said, “are not. Neither blind, nor men, nor fools.”
“Do they know what else you are?” He was almost standing over her. “Do they know that?”
“They could hardly avoid it,” she said, “knowing whose kin I am.”
“If they believe you. If they don’t just humor the madwoman.”
“We believe her,” said Mere Adele. “Is that what you want? To burn her for a witch?”
He crossed himself. “Sweet saints, no!”
“No,” said Lys. “He wants to use me. For what he thinks I am. For what he believes I can do.”
“For what you can do,” he said. “I saw you. Up on the hill at night, with stars in your hair. Dancing; and the moon came down and danced at your side. And he watched, and clapped his hands like a child.” His face twisted. “I would never have been so simple. I would have wielded you like a sword.”
Lys was beyond speech. Mere Adele spoke dryly in her silence. “I can see,” she said, “why she might be reluctant to consent to it. Women are cursed enough by nature, weak and frail as all the wise men say they are; and made, it’s said, for men’s use and little else. Sometimes they don’t take kindly to it. It’s a flaw in them, I’m sure.”
“But a flaw that can be mended,” said Messire Giscard. “A firm hand, a touch of the spur—but some gentleness, too. That’s what such a woman needs.”
“It works for mares,” said Mere Adele. She stood up. I had never seen her look as she did then, both smaller and larger than she was. Smaller, because he was so big. Larger, because she managed, one way and another, to tower over him. “We’ll think on what you’ve said. You’re welcome meanwhile to the hospitality of our priory. We do ask you, of your courtesy, to refrain from visiting the town. There’s been sickness in it; it’s not quite past.”
He agreed readily: so readily that I was hard put not to laugh. He did not need to know that it was an autumn fever, a fret among the children, and nothing to endanger any but the weakest. Sickness, that year, spoke too clearly of the Death.