He smiled at her and touched her warm cheek with his finger.
“When I delivered a baby sometimes, and the woman asked me when she could lie with her husband again, I never understood why she would want to. I would tell her she must wait for two months, until she was churched, and I used to wonder why she complained that it was so long.”
“Would it seem long to you now?”
“A day would seem too long a time to wait, now.”
“So now you understand love?”
“For the first time.” She smiled at him. “So it is the first time for me too, in a way.”
He kissed her hand. “The woman of stone has melted?”
“I’ve become a woman of desire.”
Later in the night they woke, ravenously hungry, and ate the rest of the bread and cheese, good white bread from the Priory bread oven, smooth hard cheese with a salty crust from the Priory dairy.
“Zachary spoke of something,” James said tentatively, afraid of the darkening of her eyes, of her turning away.
“Oh, he’s one that never stopped speaking,” she said, with a smile. “He thundered like the tide mill at every low tide.”
“He said that Ned had a wife . . .” he began.
His words were like a blow. He had knocked the smile off her. At once she went as white as guilt.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . Don’t say anything,” he begged her. “You need say nothing. It was just . . .”
“Did you believe him? Will you repeat to Sir William . . . what he said? Whatever it was he said? Are you bound by your vows to tell the minister at St. Wilfrid’s?”
“No, I’ll never say. I wouldn’t have said anything now but . . .”
“But he made you wonder,” she said slowly. “For all your learning, and your languages, and your knowledge—for all your faith!—he made you wonder. He made you . . . afraid.”
“I’m not afraid!” he started up, but she put a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“If the world was as Zachary sees it, we would all be afraid,” she said gently. “For like a poor fool he has peopled it with monsters to frighten himself. He speaks of me as a woman who lies with faerie folk. He denies his own children. He says I cast a spell that unmanned him. He says that I killed my poor sister-in-law, Mary. You know, if people around here believed just one of these things, they would test me as a witch?”
He shook his head in denial of the terrible accusations against her. “They must know you’re innocent!”
“You didn’t know.”
“I did! I do!”
“You know what they would do to me?”
“I don’t know.” He did not want to know.
“They have a ducking stool on Sealsea quay and they strap a woman into the seat, truss her like a kitten for drowning. The seat is on a great beam that the blacksmith—usually it’s the blacksmith—pushes down on the other end. The woman goes up into the air, where everyone can see her, then he lowers her down into the water, underneath the water. They take their time and when they judge that the trial has been long enough, they bring her up and raise her in the air again, to have a look at her. If she’s retching seawater, they say that the devil has protected her, and they send her to Chichester, for trial in the court before the judges, who will hear the evidence and may sentence her to death by hanging. But if she comes up white as sea-foam, and blue as ink at the lips and fingernails, her mouth open from screaming in the water, her hands like claws from tearing at the ropes, then they know she was innocent, and they bury her in the holy ground in the churchyard.”
“I’ve heard of such things but—”
“It’s the law that every parish should have a ducking stool. You must know that.”
“I thought it was just a ducking?”
She showed him a thin smile. “Yes, that’s what it’s called. Makes it sound light work, doesn’t it? And some women are only ducked. But of course, some drown.”
“Sir William should make sure it is only a ducking.”
She shrugged. “He should. When he’s here. But it’s better for Sir William that they duck a witch from time to time, and blame some poor woman for their misfortunes, than ask him whose side he took at Marston Moor, what he did at Newbury—and why they should pay their tithes to him.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it! He’s paid his fine for serving the king. And he’s been forgiven by parliament.”
“We’ll never forgive him,” she said, speaking for her brother, for all the men who hoped for a better life without a lord. “He took a dozen lads from Sealsea with the king’s cockade in their hats, and he brought only seven home.”
“But that has nothing to do with it,” he explained patiently. “And he’s a civilized man—he would stop a witch trial. He’s a justice of the peace—he would uphold the law. He’s an educated man, a lawyer. He wouldn’t hurt an innocent woman.”
She smiled at him as if he were a child. “No woman is innocent,” she remarked and her words made him shudder as if it were Zachary speaking. “No woman is innocent. The Bible names the woman as the one to blame for bringing sin into the world. Everything is our fault: sin and death are at our door, from now till Judgment Day. Sir William isn’t going to risk his own authority by stepping in to save some poor slut from drowning.”
He was chilled by her cynicism, and he did not want to hear her. He wanted her back in his bed, warm and responsive. She had been hardened by the cruelties of her life and he wanted her to be soft and melting.
“But it doesn’t matter to us,” he suggested. “And I daresay there was nothing in what Zachary said anyway, about your sister-in-law?”
“Mary died under my care,” she told him frankly. “And the world knew well enough that we quarreled like a cat and a dog in the same barn, every day since Ned brought her into Ferry-house and set her up in my mother’s place. I disliked her and she loathed me. But, all the same, I cared for her the best that I knew how. I didn’t know what should be done for her; I don’t think anybody would have known. Her baby came too soon, and it was a bitter stillbirth for us all. Then I couldn’t stop her bleeding. She died in my arms and I couldn’t save her. I don’t even know what caused either death: hers or the child’s. I’m not a physician, I’m just a midwife.”
“Zachary said it was his child, and you were jealous,” he said, and instantly regretted it.
She looked at him very coolly and levelly. She drew the sheet around her shoulders as if it was a silken stole. “He told you that, did he?” Suddenly she was cold. “Well, you must be the judge of what you hear. I’ve never defended myself against Zachary’s lies, and I’ll not reply to his foul words in your sweet mouth. But if it was his child—as he boasted to me, after she was dead and couldn’t answer back—then I doubt she was willing.”
He shivered with distaste. He felt that he could not bear the ugliness of these people’s lives on the very edge of the shore, with their loves and hates ebbing and flowing like a muddy tide, with their anger roaring like the water in the millrace, with their hatreds and fears as treacherous as the hushing well. That Zachary might have raped his sister-in-law, or seduced her, that he bedded his own wife without her consent, that her brother tolerated this, and instead of putting it right, went away to fight against the king, that Alinor’s own husband denied fathering her children! James’s shudder told him that he wanted nothing to do with any of them. He wished himself back with his own people, where cruelty was secret, violence was hidden, and good manners more important than crime.
Tentatively, he reached out to her; he wanted her to be the lover of his feverish dream, not the woman who struggled in this sordid world. “I believe in you. I believe in you, Alinor.”
The face she turned to him was warm and trusting, her eyes brimming with tears. “You can,” she said simply, and he felt that he was falling into the deepest sin as he kissed her soft mouth and her wet eyelashes as they rested on her cheeks.