CHAPTER ONE

MOST LOVE STORIES BEGIN IN MAY sunshine, with secret glances at a dance or feast, or stolen conversations in a hidden garden. But mine begins in winter, with a funeral, when my heart’s love was sealed into the tomb forever. It was only duty then that kept my soul from following Master Kendall’s into that long sleep. Nothing but the tears of the two little daughters he had left me bound my unwilling heart to the earth. So I resolved to stay yet a while for Cecily’s and Alison’s sakes, but to give myself only to their upbringing, and never to another man. For having once been wed to Master Kendall, who would be the spouse of a lesser man? There were others who were lords in rank, but who more lordly in manner than Roger Kendall, mercer of London? And who could ever be his equal in kindness, or greatness of spirit? His memory strengthened my resolve against the ever growing numbers of badgering suitors who hoped to obtain his fortune by marrying his widow.

But what men cannot achieve by cozening or guile they will have by force. Master Kendall’s memorial was scarcely set into the wall at St. Botolphe’s when I found myself stolen from a house spattered with the blood of failed contenders and would-be heirs by the most shameless, fortune-hunting family in the entire realm: the impoverished, quarrelsome, pretentious tribe of the de Vilerses. And worst of all, it was I myself who had foolishly let the first of them into my house, in the form of a scapegrace younger son, a failed monk and poetic scribbler who went about town under the name of Brother Gregory. For it was through my intervention that he’d got himself retained by my husband as a clerk. And now, grief, self-pity, and rage at my own weakness contended for first place in my heart when I found myself wedded to him by the sword in the chapel of his father’s house.

IT WAS ONE OF those gray, drizzling days in early spring, when the sky seems that it might almost touch the ground. Here and there the snow, standing in unhappy piles crusted by slippery ice, broke apart to reveal a bit of dead grass or frozen mud. Along a rutted track that wound across a frozen meadow and through a village of thatched huts, a party of riders approached their destination: Brokesford Manor, a fortified house built in the old Norman fashion, half hidden behind a tumbledown wall at the end of an avenue of bare-branched trees. At the village, a dozen peasants, barefooted in the icy mud, stood in a cluster by the road, while children peeped out of the windows to see the spectacle. It was mid-February in the Year of Our Lord 1356, and the Sieur de Vilers was returning home from an adventure to which he had ridden out at full canter less than a week before, followed by his sons, squires, grooms, and an arms-laden packhorse.

A murmur went up from the group as the party came closer. It was not the same group that had set out. At its head, it is true, rode old Sir Hubert himself, straight and arrogant, on his tall red palfrey, followed by his eldest son, Sir Hugo, on the bay. Then a groom, leading the packhorse. But—after that—something different altogether. Robert and Damien, the two esquires, were riding double. Before their saddles were the small figures of two children. Girls, by the look of them, though they were heavily bundled. Behind them, in a shapeless gown and sheepskin cloak, rode Sir Hubert’s younger son, the one who’d been seized by a religious mania and run off heaven knows where for years, causing his father untold trouble. But the most delicious scandal of all was that he’d got a young, pretty woman riding pillion behind him. A frail-looking, pale-faced woman, with red, swollen eyes, wearing a rich, deep black cloak and gown. Even before the grooms at the end of the party were within the gates, the gossip had spread that the woman was a wealthy widow, an authentic heiress from the City, rescued from certain death by the bold lords of Brokesford.

But the best part, the part that set up clucking speculation around every hearth in the village, was that she was to be married on the instant, without even publishing the banns. And not to old Sir Hubert, who had long been a widower, or even to Sir Hugo, who really ought to be producing a legitimate heir by now, but to Gilbert, the lunatic who wasn’t fit for anything better than looking in books. How had he found her anyway? Perhaps Gilbert was more his father’s son than they’d thought. Imagine the opportunity for a man of religion to slip into married women’s houses by the back door. Exactly like the rascally friar in the ballad! And everyone knows that the women who live in London have no morals. To think he’d been loose in a whole city full of shameless women. After all, the old lord and his eldest between them had at least a score of unacknowledged bastards spread all the way from the Cinque Ports to the Scottish border. It was a great joke that the runt of the litter might have outdone both his father and elder brother.

BUT IN THE BUSTLE of the return, the widow had seemed to have been forgotten. She’d been fussy about setting her fancy slippers in the mud, so they’d lifted her off at the stair before the horses had been led off to the stable through the churned-up muck of the courtyard. There she stood, a black bundle silhouetted against the low, arched door, her little girls clutching her skirts.

Not until he’d seen that the horses were off and sent for the chaplain did the old lord remember to offer her his arm, and the hospitality of his house, leading her into his hall with a flourish. She sat shivering in her damp cloak on a bench by the fire, while the squires cleaned up the bloodstained breastplates and chain mail and went to stow them upstairs. The old knight called for drink and turned to eye his younger son up and down. The young man was nearly a head taller than his father, rawboned and dark-headed, with arched eyebrows over brown eyes that glittered with intelligence. With a shrewd, appraising blue eye, the old man took in the sandals with ragged leggings wadded beneath, the worn, ankle length gray gown with the blood splashes dried all down the front, and the atrocious, matted sheepskin.

“You’re not getting married in that,” the old man said.

“There’s nothing wrong with it. Getting married was your idea,” said the younger.

“Insolent as ever. Don’t any of those books you read tell you ‘honor thy father’? I’m telling you now, you’re not getting married in that. You’re in my house now. Remember that, and quit acting disgracefully.”

The young man looked truculent. His father called for a bath to be drawn in the kitchen that lay behind the screen at the end of the hall. Then he sent one of the lounging housegrooms to look up a suit of clothes in the solar upstairs. The stone walls of the hall were twelve feet thick, and as damp and cold as a cave. Puffs of frosty air could be seen coming from the old lord’s mouth as he spoke.

“I don’t want a bath.”

“You’ve gone soft, living in the City.” The old man prowled around his son, looking at him from all angles, as if to assess which side had grown softest. The widow turned her head to watch, her face impassive.

“I don’t need one. I don’t want one. Getting married ought to be enough to satisfy you.”

“There are four times in a man’s life when he should wash—in your case three. When he is born, when he is knighted, when he dies, and—WHEN HE’S MARRIED! And if you don’t yet know your duty, I’ll call six men to show it to you, even at the risk of your drowning!” The old man’s voice was thunderous. The son drew himself up to his full height with a graceful, catlike dignity.

“As usual, father, your command of logic has convinced me.”

“Serpent’s tooth,” growled the old man as he followed him into the kitchen.

The widow had looked about her, where she sat by the great fire in the center of the room. She was still clutching the cup she’d been given, but the ale didn’t look touched. She had wrinkled up her nose when she first smelled it, but luckily no one had seen her do it.

Beyond the screen, in the tall, rain barrel–shaped bath by the kitchen fire, things had proceeded as the old man had commanded. The widow could hear the splash as the manservant poured cold water over the standing occupant of the tub. The old man’s voice, never a soft one, carried beyond the screen.

“Don’t you dare turn your back on your father…. Turn around and look me in the eye.—Hmm, who laid those on? He had an even hand. A priest? That accounts for it then.—What for? A book? You went and wrote a book? Damn fool thing to do. That’s what you get for messing with books. And they burned it, too, you say?—Well, knowing you, it’s probably better off burned. I’ve never known you to have a sensible idea yet. You should have listened to me. If you’d done the respectable thing and stayed in the military, instead of giving yourself over to this ridiculous God-chasing and scribbling, you’d be carrying your scars on the front, like an honorable man, instead of on your back….”

Margaret sighed, put down the cup, and clutched Cecily and Alison to her. It didn’t seem like a very auspicious way to begin a marriage.

IT WAS EARLY IN Lent, on the eve of the Feast of Saint Matthias the Apostle, and scarcely more than a fortnight after my hasty and dreary wedding, that I began to suspect I was being followed by something that was—well, not entirely natural. Sorrow and loneliness can play tricks on us. And sometimes, too, God makes wonders for our consolation, as when a friend of Robert le Tambourer received, in the midst of remorse over a great sin, a visitation of Saint Bartholomew that was fully twenty-five feet high and glowed with a color like flame.

But this visitation was no handiwork of God’s; it was an eerie unsettling feeling, very like being watched in an empty room. It followed me in the day and lay with me in the dark. When I sat, all wakeful in bed beside the stiff, stubborn form of my sleeping husband, who, in his rage against his father, still refused to consummate the marriage the old lord had ordered, I could hear a strange whistling sound, soft, like the blowing of wind in the night stillness of the room. So I fell into despair that the Evil One might be watching me secretly, and redoubled my prayers in the cold, ill-furnished little chapel of the new father-in-law’s house. What did I pray for, besides my deliverance? Most of all, I prayed for the soul of my lost husband, good Master Roger Kendall, who had died so swiftly, he had not been shriven.

The fearful watching began after my new husband and his relations returned from that first trip they made to London after the wedding. For no sooner had the vows been said than they were off again to get their hands on the property that had been left to me, and on my girls’ dower-funds, if they could. There was other necessary business too: seeing lawyers and bribing the judges in the case concerning the murder of my stepsons, which they claimed was entirely justified as self-defense. I suppose in a way it was, depending on how you look at it, since my stepsons had tried to kill a member of the de Vilers family first. Of course, as Master Kendall’s sons by his first marriage, they had expected to inherit everything until, in his old age, he had married me and produced new children to suck away what they thought was their due.

Now Master Kendall was very fond of me and always interested in my improvement, so he hired Madame for my French teacher and Brother Gregory for my reading tutor. That’s what gave them their chance. First they tried to get him to put me away by telling him I had disgraced his name with Brother Gregory. But Master Kendall just laughed at them and then disowned them entirely for their insolence. Everyone in the household knew Brother Gregory was too prickly for that; he was touchy because his family had come down in the world and women were nearly as high on his list of dislikes as merchants, money changers, lawyers, purchased knighthoods, and forged genealogies. But what no one knew at the time was that because he had needed the work, he hadn’t bothered to tell anyone that his abbot had thrown him out for his unbearable quarrelsomeness, and he wasn’t a Brother anymore, or a Gregory either, though I still call him that when I forget.

But then when Master Kendall died, his sons plotted to be rid of me again, and when Brother Gregory discovered the plot and tried to help me, they would have been rid of us both if his family hadn’t finished them off. So you see I counted Gilbert de Vilers as a friend, at least until his family decided they would reward themselves for their pains with Master Kendall’s fortune and make off with me as if I were a bride in a story. After that he wouldn’t talk to me, and every glance was full of resentment for the marriage his father had forced on him. And as for me, the more I saw of his family, the more I counted him as one of them—a hypocrite, a shameless tomb robber in a false monk’s gown.

Then in the midst of this bitterness came the watching, the strange flitting chill that left me with a feeling I was on the verge of madness itself. It was a week after the wedding—the day they came back from London with my things—I remember that very clearly.

“Well, sister,” said Hugo, striding into the room ahead of two churls carrying a chest, “we’ve brought your things from the City. Father says he doesn’t want to see a new bride moping around the house in black, so he says you are to wear color to supper tonight.” I can’t tell you how much Hugo irritates me. I have yet to decide whether it’s his stupidity or his vanity that offends me most. Or perhaps it’s because he thinks no woman on earth can resist him. At any rate, there he stood in his travel-stained surcoat, hands on his hips, with his vulgar ballocks-knife slung low down at midwaist. When he talks to women, he caresses the long handle and eyes them suggestively. It’s hard to imagine he and my husband are brothers, they’re so different. Gilbert is dark and tall, but Hugo is medium in height and rather square-looking, like his father, and light-haired like him too. Or rather, his father must have been blond once, for his hair and beard are quite white. But where his father is fierce, with ferocious white eyebrows and piercing blue eyes, Hugo travels about instead in a cloud of self-conceit that irritates my husband nearly as much as it offends me.

“I’m wearing what I want to wear,” I told him.

“Be careful how you refuse me, you stubborn little she-ass,” he replied. Hugo was coming much too close. I glared at him.

“If you were mine, you’d be better disciplined,” he said, stroking the long, leather-bound hilt of his knife. “I’d tear that dress off and beat you until you begged to wear whatever I told you. Gilbert’s a fool. Unbedded women always get shrewish.” He leered and then turned on his heel. The chest had been set down in the corner of the solar, and Cecily and Alison were digging in it, looking for their things. Suddenly Cecily shouted and held up her amber beads. How could I help it? When I saw them, I thought of how her father had given them to her that last, beautiful Christmastide, and started to cry. Then Alison, who is still a baby, started to bawl, and Cecily to wail.

I could hear Hugo’s “Women! Ridiculous!” as he thumped down the narrow, coiled stone stair to the Great Hall, leaving both the stair doors open. The stair is not designed for convenience, but for the defense of the upper part of the house—only one person at a time can go up its slippery stones, directly under the murder-holes, and the heavy oak doors at the top and bottom can stop a battle-ax. But when the doors are open, the sound from the hall rises up just like smoke through a chimney, and the goings on can be heard as clearly as if you were in the hall yourself.

As I knelt on the matted rushes to look through my chest, I could hear the rising sounds of the quarrel downstairs.

“You DAMNED fool! I tell you, if they find out it’s not consummated, they’ll try to get it annulled! Then where will I be?”

“Out of purse, which you deserve for being greedy.”

“Out of purse for your sake, you miserable whelp! Bribes for the judges, bribes for the bishop, an entire tribe of lawyers, and God knows who else will turn up! How was I to know he’d left her so much that half of London would be ready to cut my throat for it?”

“You could have asked, before you made off with her.”

“It was you that wanted it. It was all for your sake.”

“My sake? MY sake? Who wanted the roof mended? You saw the money and you grabbed her! I was HAPPY the way I was! It’s YOU that couldn’t resist meddling, and got us into this mess!”

“Mess? There’d be no mess if you’d do your duty and put a baby in that woman’s belly. What’s wrong with you anyway? Hugo could put twins in any woman! Look at him—bastards here, bastards there! Now THAT’S a man! HE doesn’t roll his eyes up at the sky and gabble about God all the time!” There was the noise of blows, before Hugo’s voice sounded cheerfully above the scuffle.

“Come now, Father, he won’t be able to do anything if you keep bashing him like that.”

“Then—just—have—him tell me,” said old Sir Hubert, catching his breath, “what excuse he has this time.”

“It’s Lent. What’s more, it’s a Friday.” I could hear Gregory’s voice. It sounded prim and righteous. I knew him well. He’d have turned up his nose and looked at his father with that priggish look that drives the old man crazy. Just thinking of it made me smile. I sat back on my heels to listen better. In all the time I’d known Gregory, thorny-tempered as he is, I’d never imagined he had a family like this. That’s the problem with marriage. You don’t just marry a person, really, you marry a whole family.

“What has that to do with you failing your family?”

“All the Authorities agree, that if a man dedicated to religion finds it necessary to marry, he should forswear carnal relations on holy days.”

“Just what sort of holy days, you holy imbecile?” rose up the staircase in a low growl. There was a crashing and a rustling in the rushes below, as if someone had leapt aside to escape a blow. I could hear Hugo laugh.

“Lent, Advent, Sundays, feast days, the eve of feast days, Wednesdays, and—also”—another crashing and rustling, and the sound of a bench hitting the wall—“Fridays.”

“Mama, they’re smashing the furniture,” whispered Alison, her eyes big.

“Don’t you think to go down there, Cecily, get away from the stairs at once.” When I saw her reluctantly pull her tousled red head in from the doorway, I looked again in the chest. Beneath a pair of little shoes and the folds of my blue wool kirtle, the spine of a book peeped out. I felt a brief start of joy. Gregory must have slipped it in when they’d gone through the London house. I pulled it out and ran my hand over the initials embossed on the binding. M. K.—Margaret Kendall. My Psalter. Maybe God hadn’t abandoned me after all. Voices echoed up the stair.

“I tell you, Father, I intend to see God whether or not I’ve left Witham, and you’re not going to stop me.”

“See God? SEE GOD? Didn’t the abbot knock that idea out of you for once and for all? What makes you think God has time to see you? God’s a busy man! He doesn’t waste his time seeing younger sons who disobey their fathers! I tell you, you take care of your family’s business, and God will take care of you!”

“Try all you want, I refuse to let you distract me. My conscience belongs to me, and I’ve got plans….”

“To spend your time listening for voices in the air? Quit trying to distract me with moonshine and play the man, or I tell you, I’ll lay on stripes that make that priest’s look like a baby’s handiwork….”

I picked up the book, opened the pages, and ran my finger along the neatly written lines marked off with the red capitals. All English. Beneath them, the lines marked by blue capitals were in Latin, and a mystery to me. My good dead husband had had the idea of the book, and he had commissioned Gregory to do the translation, because he said he knew a first-class scholar when he saw one, even if he was as prickly as an entire basketful of nettles. Who had ever loved me as much as Master Kendall, to think of something as a gift that meant the whole world to me? It was at that very moment that I felt the eyes watching me, and a sort of cold breath on the back of my neck.

“Who’s there?” I whirled around in a panic, but I didn’t see a soul. Except for the two girls, who were now standing on their toes at one end of the long window seat, trying to peep out the window, there wasn’t anyone in the room. It was a big room, the entire second story over the kitchen, buttery, and pantry, and a “solar” only by courtesy, since it didn’t catch that much sun. The walls were eight feet of solid stone, pierced by high, narrow, unglazed and shutterless windows that let in thin columns of pale sunlight when the weather was good. Long stone window seats, devoid of cushions or comfort, were set perpendicular to the windows in the wall openings. Nothing could hide there. Was there something in the shadows? I looked along the walls and checked the corners. The long perches on the walls above the beds were still hung with clothes, chain mail, and sheathed longswords. At the squires’ bed, a falcon napped, head under his wing, while another paced up and down the perch beside his companion, jingling his bells.

Maybe it was a person, someone hiding under the beds. Well, he wasn’t going to catch me unaware. I got up and pulled down a heavy longsword, and poked it under the nearest bed. “Get out of there, you,” I whispered fiercely. Nothing under the bed where the squires slept. Nothing under the rumpled, pulled-out straw truckle bed where their bodyservants slept—it lay directly on the floor. The chests were against the wall. No room for anyone behind them. On the opposite wall stood the sagging little bed where the pages had once slept, when there had been pages in the house. Now it was Cecily and Alison’s. Suppose he were hiding under there? I strode across the room, carrying the heavy sword in both hands. But behind me, I heard something like airy footsteps rustling in the rushes, just behind my own.

“Get out of there!” I said, prodding fiercely under the little bed. But there was nobody beneath it. I sat down on the bed to think. The big door that led from the solar to the tower was shut—nobody could have left that way. The stair door was open, but no one had come in. That left only the big bed, Sir Hubert’s second best, standing against the wall. Our wedding bed, such as it was. The sagging curtains were pulled aside, so no one could be hiding behind them. But underneath—well, underneath it was very wide. Too wide for the sword to reach. I’d look first, no matter how much it frightened me. I crept quietly to the bed, crossed myself, turned up the hanging covers, and knelt to peek underneath. I need to be strong, I told myself. My girls are here, and I won’t let anything get at them. I peered into the musty darkness, half expecting to see the white shine of a pair of evil eyes in the shadow.

“Get out at once or I’ll call the men up and have you killed,” I hissed, and whipped the sword in a semicircle, as far as I could reach. I thought I heard a soft sigh behind my ear.

“No use,” it said. And that is when I knew for a certainty that it wasn’t human. I turned and leaned against the bed, still kneeling, and clutched at the cross I always wear at my neck. It is a famous talisman, not, perhaps, as famous as the Cross of Rouen, which has a fragment of Christ’s shroud in it and has been known to raise the dead, but almost as famous. It has protected me ever since I got it, though I haven’t the time to tell you how just now. “In the name of God, begone and trouble me no more,” I whispered, so the children would not hear. But the only answer I had was like an icy puff of wind that passed through me and made my spine crawl.

Downstairs, the quarrel had not abated one whit, but I was no longer interested in it. I could hear Hugo’s voice announcing, “When I wed, I’m certainly not going to hunt up any skinny, sharp-tongued, snobbish London widow. I don’t blame you a bit, Gilbert. She’s too long in the tooth to give pleasure anymore. You might as well use her money and be holy. I’ll find something fresh and new to bear me plenty of sons.” There was the clatter of more furniture being overturned. I could feel the tears running down my face. Old, old. That was it. I was old. Not young and fresh anymore. Twenty-three, and tired of trying so hard, and too old ever to be truly loved again.

“Oh, Master Kendall, why did you have to die?” I cried. “You always loved me and were good to me. You weren’t all that old—not too old for me—you could have lived longer, and spared me this.” I could feel the cold thing wrapping around my shoulders, but I was too sad even to shiver. The girls had tired of climbing on the window seats, and seeing me so sorrowful, they came to sit on my lap and console me. In the air behind us there was a thin sound—sad, like a sigh.

But soon it was suppertime, and after that, drinking time, which is the chief entertainment in this house, which hasn’t even got a minstrel. The big fire blazed at the center of the hall, its only light, setting an orange glow on the faces at the trestle tables. At the head table they always spoke in French, just to remind anyone who was listening—including God—that the de Vilerses are a very old family, and not tainted with a lot of English peasant blood. On our right was a long wall entirely forested with antlers, still clinging in pairs to the bits of white skull-bone from which they had sprouted. The wall on the left of the dais was decorated with captured pennants from Sir Hubert’s recent campaign against the French, with old Scottish and Welsh battle-axes, and a large, dented shield displaying a badly peeled version of the three cockleshells and red lion of the de Vilers arms. Not a single tapestry. They were too “soft.” If he’d ever had one, Sir Hubert would have traded it for a horse.

“I pray you, drink, madame my sister,” said Hugo, passing the ale cup. “You’ve picked at so many meals, you shrink daily. You need to pad out your bones to please my brother.” Chivalry: just meanness in fancy dress, I thought.

“Dear brother, I thank you for your concern, but I am not yet thirsty,” I replied also in French. It’s hard to get thirsty in a house where they draw the water for the ale from the same moat they throw the garbage into. Not that I would ever tell them, but I could brew ale ten times better than this. I never use anything but sweet spring water; that’s one of my secrets. The other secret is a special prayer I use when it’s fermenting, but I’m not going to write that down for just anybody to know. Master Kendall loved my ale; so did Gregory—that’s one of the reasons he hung around the house so much, picking quarrels about theology with Master Kendall.

“Ha, listen to that wool-in-the-mouth accent. Convent bred, I’ll wager,” said old Sir Hubert, wiping his beard on the tablecloth. Gregory, who knows more about my family than is decent, composed his face in a sardonic look. At the lower table, we could hear the jokes and insults traded in English getting louder. Sir Hubert drained the cup. Ale, even this ale, made him mellower—but not mellow enough. I inspected their faces as they sat there, wondering if Gregory would ever become as impossible as his father. The old man belched and wiped a drop of gravy from his raggedy white beard with the tablecloth. He was dressed with a kind of shabby arrogance in a well-worn old-fashioned knight’s gown of heavy wool cut below the knee topped with a long brown embroidered surcoat lined in squirrel’s fur. Beside him in the place of honor sat Sir Hugo, whose new knighthood had exhausted the family’s resources. He’s even worse, I thought, watching him tilt the cup to his lips. Gregory is at least much better looking.

Sir Hubert’s younger son was at least a head taller than his father and older brother, with a heavy mop of dark brown curls, dark eyes, and savage eyebrows that he could arch up in ironic detachment, an expression he favored, especially when among his family, fools, and strangers. I ought to know, he used it often enough on me when first we met. He had a mind, too, and that made him different from the others in his family. He could write poetry in three languages and argue about theology well enough to make a bishop weep, neither of which counted for anything under his father’s roof. Here at his father’s hearth his witty, malicious tongue was stilled, and a habitual look of sullen rage had transformed his handsome features. His father had trapped him into coming home again, trapped him by using me, and he was furious.

But Sir Hubert had seen me inspecting them. As his squire knelt to present the next dish, he put down the cup and addressed me.

“Madame my new daughter-in-law, what do you think of our ancient family seat?” He raised a white eyebrow and gazed at me as if he’d seen a louse crawl up my neck. Oh, table manners, I thought, I’m tired of you. Your only virtue is to give me relief from all the shouting. I spoke in my politest court French.

“Most honored lord and father-in-law, your esteemed manor is a source of infinite interest and novelty for myself, who had previously to content herself with a simple life in the City.”

With a silky growl, he replied, “It would delight me to hear you enumerate these novelties that interest you so much.” Even as he spoke, I knew it might have been unwise to have anything to drink on an empty stomach.

“It is my duty to obey your every wish,” I said, looking down regretfully at the dark green surcoat I had put over my black kirtle. “So I will now tell you that your delightful house has rats in the rushes, fleas in all the beds, and a Weeping Lady in the chapel.” I saw him start with rage, and put his hand on the dog whip he always wears stuck in his belt when he’s at home. The hounds under the table shifted and growled. I set my chin. Just let him break courtesy at table.

Suddenly, he sat back and chuckled in English, “Sharp-tongued, but at least you’ve got backbone. Not bad—this is no house for limp women.” He leaned toward me. “I suppose you’ve been gossiping with the chaplain, and he told you about the Weeping Lady. Don’t you know you’ve swallowed a fool’s tale? It’s his excuse for saying Mass drunk.”

“No,” I answered, “I’ve never found him sober enough for conversation. In fact, it’s a wonder he ever got through the wedding service without falling down. I heard the Weeping Lady myself.”

“Yourself? Now there’s a tale. Pray tell, what’s she weeping about?”

“I wondered that myself for quite a while, but as I pray alone in the chapel quite a lot, I hear her weeping quite frequently. Then one night just before vespers, I heard words in the weeping. She sobbed, ‘All my children, all dead,’ and then went on weeping a while more before she vanished.” At these words, Hugo started and crossed himself, and Gilbert looked grave and quiet.

But the old man thumped on the table with his fist and shouted, “Wouldn’t you know it? She’s gone and found another way to annoy me! Just when I thought I was free of it! There’s no end to the trouble women give a man!” His voice was so loud that people looked up from the lower tables to see what was going on. But when the evening was ended and we were all going upstairs, Sir Hubert grabbed his oldest son by the sleeve.

“Stay with me, Hugo. I’m going to get very, very drunk tonight,” he said, and together father and son and all their rowdy retainers sat at the fixed table, among the rubble of dismounted trestles and sleeping hounds, and began a whole new hogshead of ale.

I could hear the sound of doleful singing below as I sat on the bed, took off my veil, and combed out my braids. They hadn’t even found a maid for me, or a nursemaid either. They were incapable of imagining how anything female ever got done, and they’d never bothered to ask me either. Not that they’d listen if they thought to ask. Gregory, as usual, had stripped to his underdrawers and knelt before his crucifix, which he had hung by the bed. Monkish habits die hard. You could still see a bit of a dent in the curls at the back of his head where the tonsure had grown out. He was furious his father wouldn’t let him reshave it, at least in the scholar’s tonsure to which he had a right, and had burned his long gown. But looking at him now, I wasn’t so sure it wasn’t an improvement. I’d never noticed when I first met him how attractive his unruly dark curls were. And who would ever have guessed what a well-made figure had been hidden beneath the shapeless old gown? But he’d kept his hair shirt. And he wore it every day now, underneath his father’s second-best hunting tunic, as if to punish himself for having returned home.

Sometimes I wished so hard things were back the way they were: that I was his student and he was Brother Gregory again. It was easier when I thought of him only as a mind, and not a man. I know people say that there was something nasty going on between us, but that really wasn’t true at all. That’s why it was such a good thing. I loved Master Kendall best, and I loved learning next best. And Brother Gregory, even if he was a trial, was my gate to learning, and helped me open my mind to the sunshine. How could I not admire him for that? It was all an innocent distraction, watching his moods, fits and fancies, like watching cloud pictures form and re-form in the sky.

To this day I remember how his long, muscular hands looked, so curiously delicate as they held the stylus, elegantly tracing letters in wax for me to copy, and his sour face when he saw the first letter I spelled all by myself. Then there was the disgusted look he’d get when my old mongrel dog would lie on his feet under the writing table, falling asleep with loud snores just as he was trying to explain what Aristotle said about aesthetics. Or his standing quarrel with Cook’s bird, who chattered rudely at him when he entered the kitchen unannounced. And when Master Kendall, with gracious good humor, would offer Gregory a dinner or a new gown, the whole household would crowd around to watch with amusement the conflicting emotions on the tutor’s face as he tried to decide whether he could accept such an offer from a man who made his living in trade. Brother Gregory was the only man I had ever seen who could accept his wages as if he were doing you a favor.

So of course I couldn’t have been more surprised—or more grateful—than that day after the funeral when he turned up, sword in hand, to rescue me from my murderous grown stepsons. But after that it was only bitter gall. He wasn’t made to be married, nor I to marry again.

Now, without even looking at me, he laid the hair shirt on the bed beside me and fumbled for his discipline in the bundle he had taken from the chest. The more I saw of that nasty little stick with the sharp leather thongs, the more I hated it. Maybe I’m simple, but I don’t see what beating yourself has to do with pleasing God. And every night, the same. Didn’t he think I was even worth a courteous “good night”? Was I too ill-favored, or too ill-born, to deserve a look or a decent word, now that we were wed?

As I watched Gregory set up once again for his devotions, I got angrier and angrier—so angry, my face felt hot and my heart beat harder and harder. Was I so old, so plain, that I deserved this? He had faced the wall, now, kneeling silently before the crucifix that hung beside the bed. I looked at my shift, which hung nearly to my bare feet. It had a nice embroidered hem. It’s not a hag’s garment, I thought, and there’s no old woman underneath it. I picked up one of the long, pale ash-brown locks that lay in waves all the way down to my waist. What’s wrong with this? It’s still pretty, even if it’s not blond. I put down the comb. He paused, and as the blood dripped down his back, I could hear him say, “Blessed be God …” God indeed! Doesn’t God say that men who marry have an obligation to their wives? What was so wrong with me that he should act as if I were invisible?

I could feel myself getting angrier and angrier. I’ve had two babies, strong ones that still live, and only one little stretch mark that hardly even shows. Some people would count themselves fortunate to have a wife like that. And I’ve brought him money, too, so he can do anything he likes—even feed his stuck-up, greedy family. And he never says a kind word to me, even though I’m all alone here among strangers. What would God say to that?

The anger came and stuck like a knot in my throat. I was so very angry, I didn’t even think. My eyes felt all bloody inside. Suddenly, my mind just broke with the rage. I snatched up the hair shirt from the bed, and before he could even realize what I’d done, I leapt up, grabbed the whip from his hand, and ran like a madwoman for the door. I flew down the stairs so fast, my feet didn’t even feel the stones. I didn’t listen to his shout of rage as he tore after me, or the drunken cheers of the men downstairs as I raced to the fire in nothing but my shift. Shaking with rage, my face all hot and red, I threw his hair shirt and discipline into the fire, grabbed the poker, and shoved them to the very hottest part, where they began to burn merrily. There was a chorus of guffaws as the drinkers realized what I was burning.

Then I felt a heavy hand spin me around—his other was holding up his underdrawers, the points, freed from their moorings on his hose, flapping behind.

“What have you DONE, you shameless, wanton—woman!” he roared at me.

“I’ve burned them, and it serves you right!” I shouted right back, oblivious to the fire dancing perilously close behind my loose hair.

“My God, what a woman!” I could hear his father exclaim. Gilbert turned his head to see the old man leaning on the table, thumping it repeatedly with his fist, tears of laughter rolling down his flushed face.

“I’ll have her anytime, if you don’t want her!” shouted a man’s drunken voice.

Gregory turned back to me in a fury, and I was fortunate that one of his hands was already occupied, or he might have strangled me.

“Look what you’ve done. You’ve disgraced me. You’ve disgraced me in front of everyone.” I didn’t care if I died. Just let him push me into the fire.

“Go ahead and kill me! I’m tired of you!” I shrieked.

Gregory’s father had ceased holding his sides, and had walked up beside him. Silently, he took the dog-whip from his belt and held it out to his son. “It’s high time you broke her to your hand,” he said calmly.

“Don’t you dare beat me, don’t you dare touch me!” I shouted, looking frantically at the crowd of grinning red faces taking in the scene. Gregory looked at them too. God, it’s going to be bad, I thought. He hates being humiliated worse than anything.

Gregory let go of my shoulder and took the whip without a word. He looked down at his other hand, and then, with as much dignity as he could manage under the circumstances, said to his father, “But not down here in front of everyone. Leave us alone, and I’ll take her upstairs and do it right.”

“Of course,” said his father.

“If you touch me, I’ll throw myself out the window,” I hissed at him. I hated them all: heartless, repulsive men.

“Margaret,” he said in a hard voice, “you’ve gone too far, and it’s time you paid. Now march upstairs, or there’s plenty of people down here who’ll be delighted to assist me.” They were all silent, and those who could stand had formed a circle around us. There was no escape.

As Gregory walked up the stairs behind me, I heard someone hiccup, “I always said that woman needed a good beating.” I could feel my eyes burning. As I got to the top of the stairs, I turned. His face looked grim.

“For God’s sake, don’t kill me. Think of my babies. Please.” But his face never changed. With a single harsh move he threw me down on the bed. Savagely pulling the curtain behind him, he climbed up beside me, and I screamed and put my hands up to protect my face as I saw him raise the dog-whip high above my head. There was a horrifying whack, but I didn’t feel the blow. Had the madness made me lose my senses? I peeked out between my fingers, and my eyes opened wide. He’d missed; he’d hit the bolster.

“For goodness’ sake, Margaret, keep on screaming, or they’ll be up here to do the job properly,” he hissed. I was shaking all over.

“Then—then you’re not—not going to …?”

“Did you truly think so little of me? Can’t you see I couldn’t ever bear to hurt you? Do you want to break my heart, looking as if you fear me so?” Biting his lip, he raised the whip again. “Scream again, you ninny.” Then he brought the whip down savagely on the pillow. “It’s them I hate, I hate them!” and he gave the pillow cut after cut.

“Oh, God, don’t break my bones!” I screeched, getting into the spirit of the thing.

“I’ll break every bone in your body, wife; it’s my right!” he thundered. “Never disobey me again!” We could hear them cheering downstairs. I howled horribly. Somehow it felt good—I don’t know why. Then he howled too. Another few cracks, and the bolster split. A cloud of feathers flew into the air, and I began to cough. It sounded just like sobbing. More cheers from below, and a rising wail from the children’s bed.

“Wait a moment,” I said, and slipped out from the curtains to shush the children. “Mama’s fine,” I told them. “You’re just having a dream.”

“Pretty loud dream,” said Cecily, sitting up.

“I don’t like dreams. Can we get into bed with you, Mama?” queried Alison, half asleep still.

“No, you can’t. We’re playing a game. We make the noise, and you be still as mice and go back to sleep, and—and I’ll let you ride the donkey tomorrow.” I tucked them in again.

“All day?” whispered Cecily.

“All day, but only if you go to sleep right away, and no cheating.” They made an elaborate pretense of sleeping, but as it is with children, pretense soon became reality. Before long I could hear them breathing softly, sound asleep in each other’s arms. I turned back to see Gregory sitting glumly on the bed, the dog-whip drooping from his hand. A beam from the full moon shone in the window, laying a streak of light across the place where he sat. He had feathers stuck in his hair and beard. I went to sit beside him.

“You’ve got feathers all over,” I whispered.

“So do you,” he whispered back. Downstairs, they were singing again. Something about an old man who beat his scolding wife all around the town-o.

“Do I look as silly as you do?” I asked.

“Sillier,”he said, blowing away a feather about to land on my nose. I tucked my feet up onto the bed, and he pulled the curtain.

“It’s been horrible,” he said. “I thought you didn’t like me anymore—you’ve been so sharp.”

“I thought it was you who didn’t like me,” I said. “You never said a kind word—never even looked at me. You didn’t even lecture me about Aristotle, like in the old days.”

“It’s Father,” sighed Gregory. “He drives me crazy. And now he’s tangled me up with lawyers and land claims—your estates are a hopeless tangle, you know, and there are at least a half-dozen spurious claimants—so I haven’t got a moment to call my own.”

“I never understood about your father, before, when you told me,” I whispered into the dark. “But now I know that’s because words are inadequate to describe him.”

“Too true.” He sighed again. “It’s because he’s always wanted me to be just like Hugo. You don’t admire Hugo, by any chance, do you? Most women do.”

“No, I think he’s awful. His head looks just like a plucked chicken to me, and he’s not very smart.”

“A plucked chicken, eh? You know, you’re right. I never thought of that.” I took his hand, and for once he did not pull it away.

“Oh, Gregory, Gregory, I’m so sorry I embarrassed you in front of them. Just be my friend, and I won’t ask for anything more.”

“You ought to be sorry,” he said ruefully. “We must have made a sight.” I couldn’t see him, there in the dark behind the curtains, but I could feel his warm breath. Something about it made me feel strange all over. “It’s my fault. It made me angry to see you hurt.”

“It did? Was that really it?” I could feel his body tremble slightly.

“Gregory, have you ever done it before?” I asked into the dark.

“You know I’ve been saving myself for God, Margaret. I’ve never sinned. Well—not sinned that way, at any rate.”

“It’s not sin, if you’re married, and if you—like—the person, and if you—want to,” I answered him.

“It’s not just that, you know—it’s them too. Always prowling around, checking up. This is the first night they haven’t all been up here, ready to count how many times—just like one of Father’s stud horses. I couldn’t bear it.” I reached out and put my hand on his arm. I could feel him shaking all over.

“Oh, God, you’re so beautiful,” he said, just before I kissed him, pulling him down on me. I didn’t need to show him much. Somehow he seemed to know already. It was I, I who had known everything who knew nothing. What could I ever have understood of a lifetime of passion, all locked behind high walls, until the moment I had opened the gate to be drowned in the flood of it? I could feel the heat of his body blazing on mine, my skin all damp and flickering with the strange shivering glow of the lightning that leapt within us and between us. I don’t even know what to call what we did that night. The heart of a fire, the eye of the sun—it consumed us to leave only a whisper of white ash behind. And somewhere in the midst of it I realized that this must be the passion of the body that the bards sing of: the stuff of dreams and damnation, that only leaves you the hungrier for the having of it. Mindless and mad, it kindled itself and belonged to itself. A thought, like the drift of a sinking ship, swirled to the surface: Is this death? Die here then. Then we were pulled under again by the maelstrom.

It was nearly dawn before we fell asleep, racked and exhausted by lovemaking. It wasn’t until several days later I remembered that in the last moment before I closed my eyes, I heard something like the sighing breeze, and felt the Cold Thing, even though the curtains were pulled tight.