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‘Do I tempt you, Alys?’ he asked softly. ‘The wealth and the power?’
He saw her eyes darken slightly as if with desire.
‘And pleasure,’ he went on. ‘Nights and long days of pleasure with me?’
Alys jerked backwards as if he had thrown cold water in her face. She pulled her hands free.
‘I have to go,’ she said abruptly.
He rose as she did and slid one hand around her waist, holding her close to him. His mouth came down towards her. Alys felt her head tip back, her lips open.
Then he released her and stepped back.
Alys staggered a little, off balance.
‘Go now,’ he said. His dark eyes were bright with mischief. ‘You can go now, Alys. But you are learning who is your master, are you not? You cannot hide behind my father for much longer. I have had many wenches and I know the signs of it. You desire me already, though you hardly know it yet. You have taken the bait like a salmon in the spring flood. You may swim and swim but I shall land you at last. You will dream of me, Alys, you will long for me. And in the end, you will come to me and beg me to touch you.’
He smiled at her white face.
‘And then I will be gentle to you,’ he said. ‘And I will make you all mine. And you will never be free again.’
Alys turned from him and stumbled towards the kitchen door.
‘You’re in very deep now,’ he said softly to himself, as she pulled the door open and fled across the lobby to the great hall. ‘You’re in very deep, my Alys.’
For twelve nights Alys lay wakeful, waiting for the dawn light to come with winter slowness. For twelve days she moved in a dream through her work for the old lord, writing what he ordered without taking in any sense of the words. She picked herbs for him and brewed them or pounded them according to their potency. She sat in Lady Catherine’s chamber and nodded and smiled when they called on her to speak.
For twelve days she waded through a river of darkness and confusion. She had never longed more for the quiet certainties of Mother Hildebrande. She had never missed those ordered easy days more acutely. For twelve days Alys wandered around the castle like a ghost and when she heard a door bang, and Hugo’s merry whistle, she found she was trembling as if she had an ague.
She was by the castle gate when he rode in from hunting one day, his cap lost – blown away on the moor – his face bright. When he saw her he vaulted from the saddle and tossed the reins to one of the men.
‘I have killed you a grand dinner, Alys!’ he said joyfully. ‘A wild boar. They will stuff it and bring its head in and lay it at your feet! And you shall eat rich meat and dark gravy and nibble on the honeyed crackling! My Alys!’
Alys fumbled for her basket. ‘I am fasting,’ she said breathlessly. ‘It is Saint Andrew’s day, my lord. I do not eat meat today.’
He laughed carelessly, as if none of it mattered at all. ‘That nonsense!’ he exclaimed. ‘Alys, Alys, don’t cling to the old dead ways that mean nothing to anyone any more! Eat fish when you want to! Eat meat when you are hungry! Don’t let me ride out all day, and chasing a wild boar too, and then turn your face away from me and tell me you won’t dine with me!’
Alys could feel her hands trembling. She held the basket tighter. ‘You must excuse me,’ she said. ‘I …’
There was a shout from behind them as someone drove a cart through the narrow gateway. Hugo pressed forward, his hands either side of Alys’ head. She shrank back against the wall and then felt him, deliberately, lean his warm body against her. Her stomacher was like armour, her gable hood like a helmet. But when Hugo pressed against her she felt the heat of his body through her clothes. She smelled the clean, fresh smell of his linen, the sharp tang of his sweat. His knee pressing against her legs, the brush of his thick padded codpiece against her thigh, was as intimate as if they were naked and alone together.
‘Don’t you long for a taste of it, Alys?’ he asked, his voice very soft in her ear. ‘Don’t you dream what it would taste like? All these forbidden good things? Can’t I teach you, can’t I teach you, Alys, to break some rules? To break some rules and taste some pleasure, now, while you are young and desirable and hot?’
And Alys, in the shadow of the doorway, with the warmth of him all around her and the whisper of his male temptation in her ear, turned her face up towards him and closed her eyes and knew her desire.
As lightly as a flicker of candleflame he brushed his lips against her open mouth, raised his head and looked down into her tranced face with his smiling dark eyes.
‘I sleep alone these nights,’ he said softly. ‘You know my room, in the round tower, above my father’s chamber. Any night you please, Alys, leave my father, climb higher up the tower instead of running to be with those silly women. Climb higher up the tower and I will give you more than a kiss in a gateway, more than a taste. More than you can dream of.’
Alys opened her eyes, hazy with desire.
Hugo smiled at her. His wicked, careless smile. ‘Shall you come tonight?’ he asked. ‘Shall I light a fire and warm the wine and wait for you?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
He nodded as if they had struck an agreeable bargain at last; then he was gone.
That night Alys ate the wild boar when they brought it to the women’s table. Hugo glanced behind him and she saw his secret smile. She knew then that she was lost. That neither the herbs nor the old lord’s warning to Hugo would stop him. And that no power of will could stop her.
‘What’s the matter with you, Alys?’ Eliza asked with rough good nature. ‘You’re as white as a sheet, you haven’t eaten your dinner for nigh on two weeks, you’re awake every morning before anyone else and all day today you’ve been deaf.’
‘I am sick,’ Alys said, her voice sharp. Bitter.
Eliza laughed. ‘Better cure yourself then,’ she said. ‘Not much of a wise woman if you can’t cure yourself!’
Alys nodded. ‘I shall,’ she said, as if she had come to a decision at last. ‘I shall cure myself.’
On that night, when Alys felt her skin burn in the moonlight and she knew the moon would be lighting the path to Hugo’s room through twenty silver arrow-slits, and that he would be lying naked in his bed, waiting and yet not waiting for her, she rose and went to Lady Catherine’s gallery where there was a box of new wax candles. Alys took three, wrapped them in a cloth, tied the bundle tight and sealed the string. The next morning she sent it by one of the castle carters to Morach’s cottage, telling him it was a Christmas gift for the old lady. She sent no message – there was no need.
On the eve of the Christmas feast one of the kitchen wenches climbed the stone steps to the round tower to tell Alys that there was an old woman asking for her at the market gate. Alys dipped a curtsey to the old lord and asked him if she might go and meet Morach.
‘Aye,’ he said. He was short of breath, it was one of his bad days. He was wrapped in a thick cloak by a blazing fire and yet he could feel no warmth. ‘Come back quickly,’ he said.
Alys threw her black cloak around her and slipped like a shadow down the stairs. The guardroom was empty except for one half-dozing soldier. Alys walked through the great hall past half a dozen men who were sprawled on the benches, sleeping off their dinner-time ale, through the servers’ lobby to the kitchen.
The fires were burning, there was the smell of roasting meat and game hung too long. The floor had been swept after the midday meal and piles of bloodstained sawdust stood in the corner, waiting to be taken out. The cooks ate well after the hall had been served, the kitchen staff had emptied the jugs of wine and dozed now in corners. Only the kitchen boy, stripped down to his shorts, monotonously turning the handle of the spit roasting the meat for supper, stared at Alys as she walked through, her skirts lifted clear of the muck.
She walked out of the kitchen door and through the kitchen garden. The neat salad beds ran along one side of the path, the herbs were planted on the other, all edged with box-hedging. At the tower which guarded the inner ward the guards let her through with a ribald comment to her back, but they did not touch her. She was well known to be under the old lord’s protection. She walked across the bridge which spanned the great ditch of stagnant murky water and then across the outer ward where the little farmyard slept in the pale afternoon sunshine and a blackbird sang loudly in one of the apple trees. There were hives and pigsties, hens roaming and pecking, a dozen goats and a couple of cows, one with a weaned calf. There were sheds for storing vegetables and hay, there was a barn. There were a number of tumbledown half-ruined farm buildings. Alys knew from her work for Lord Hugh that they would never be repaired. It was too costly to run a complete farm inside the castle walls. And anyway, in these days, there was no threat to the peace of the land. Scotland’s army never came this far south and the mosstroopers threatened travellers on lonely roads, not secure farms, not the great Lord Hugh himself.
Alys walked through the farmyard area towards the great gate where the portcullis hung like a threat and the drawbridge spanned the dark waters of the outer moat. The gate was shut but there was a little door cut into the massive timbers. There were only two soldiers on duty, but an officer watched them from the open door of the guardroom. The country might be at peace but the young lord was never careless of the safety of the castle, and the soldiers were expected to give him value for money. One of the guards swung the door open for Alys and she bent her head and stepped out into a sudden blaze of winter sunshine. As the shadow of the castle lifted from her, Alys felt free.
Morach was waiting for her, dirtier and more stooped than ever. She looked even smaller against the might of the castle than at her own fireside.
‘I brought them,’ she said, without a word of greeting. ‘What made you change your mind?’
Alys slipped her hand through Morach’s arm and walked her away from the castle. The market stalls were set out along the main street of the town, selling fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, eggs and the great pale cheeses from the Cotherstone dairies. Half a dozen travelling pedlars had set out their stalls with fancy goods, ribbons, even pewterware for sale, and they shouted to passers-by to buy a Christmas fairing for their sweethearts, for their wives. Alys saw David walking among the produce stalls, pointing and claiming the very best of the goods and nodding to a servant behind him to pay cash. He bought very little. He preferred to order goods direct from the farms inside the manors which belonged to the castle. Those farmers could not set their own prices, and anything the lord required could be ordered as part of the lord’s dues.
She drew Morach away, past the stalls and the chattering women, down the hill, and they sat on a drystone wall which marked the edge of someone’s pasture and looked down the valley to the river which foamed over the rocks at the foot of the castle cliff.
‘You’re getting prettier,’ Morach said, without approval. She patted Alys’ face with one dirty hand. ‘You don’t suit black,’ she said. ‘But that hood makes you look like a woman, not a child.’
Alys nodded.
‘And you’re clean,’ Morach said. ‘You look like a lady. You’re plumper around the face, you look well.’ She leaned back to complete her inspection. ‘Your breasts are getting bigger and your face finer. New gown.’
Alys nodded again.
‘Too pretty,’ Morach said shrewdly. ‘Too pretty to disappear, even in a navy gown and a gable hood the size of a house. Has the tisane worn off? Or is it that your looks fetch him despite it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Alys said. ‘I think he speaks to me for mere devilry. He knew I did not want him and he knows his wife watches me like a barn owl watches a mouse. He is playing with me for his sport. He takes his lust elsewhere. But the devil in him makes him play with me.’
Morach shrugged. ‘There’s nothing you can take to stop that,’ she said. ‘Lust you can sometimes divert, but not cruelty or play!’ She shrugged. ‘He’ll take his sport where he wishes,’ she concluded. ‘You will have to suffer it.’
‘It’s not just him,’ Alys said. ‘That icy shrew his wife says she’ll give me a dowry and have me wed. I thought it was just a warning to stay clear of her damned husband, but one of her women, Eliza, is wife to a soldier and she said that Lady Catherine has told one of the officers that she’s looking for a husband for me.’
‘It can’t be done unless the old lord consents,’ Morach said, thinking aloud.
‘No,’ Alys agreed. ‘But if the soldier is told that we are as good as betrothed, and Lady Catherine pays over a dowry, and then sees that we are alone together …’
Morach nodded. ‘Then you’re raped, and maybe pregnant or poxed, and you’ve lost the game,’ she concluded with a grim smile. ‘No return to an abbey for you with a belly on you or pox-scabs on your pretty face.’
‘There’s worse,’ Alys said miserably. ‘He talks to me of his plans and his ambitions, he tempts me to join his cause. He is seducing me while I watch him.’
‘For desire?’ Morach asked.
‘I don’t know!’ Alys burst out. ‘For desire or devilry, or worse.’
‘Worse?’
Alys leaned forward and spoke in Morach’s ear. ‘What if he wants me in his power to suborn me against the old lord?’ she whispered. ‘What if he wants me to spy on the old lord, to copy his letters? What if he takes me as a pawn in his game to play against the old lord?’
Morach shrugged. ‘Can’t you tell him “no”?’ she asked. ‘Tell the old lord what he’s doing and claim his protection?’
Alys met Morach’s look with a fierce glare. Morach scanned her pale, strained face, and her eyes which were filled with a new expression, a kind of hunger.
‘Why, he has caught you and you are ready to own it at last!’ she said with sudden insight. She burst into a cackle of laughter. ‘You’re hot for him! My little nun! You’re dragging yourself into hell with desire for him! Your Lady couldn’t protect you from the heat between your legs then! Your God has no cure for that after all!’
Alys nodded grimly. ‘I desire him,’ she said bitterly. ‘I know I do now. I feared that I would when I came to you for the herbs. But I thought if I could keep the thought away then I could keep myself safe. Then I thought I was sick of some illness, I was burning up with heat, I could not sleep, I could not eat. When I see him I feel as if I shall faint. If I do not see him I feel sick to my very soul with longing for him. I am trapped, Morach. Damn him – he has caught me.’
Morach whistled softly as if she would summon a storm. ‘Have him then,’ she said simply. ‘It should cure your heat. That’s what they always say. Take him like you would take a bottle of wine, drink yourself sick of him and then never touch him again. I can show you a way to have him and not get with child. Have him and satisfy your hunger. Why not?’
‘Because I am a bride of Christ,’ Alys said through her teeth. ‘I cannot taste him and gamble that once or twice or even a hundred times will be enough. I am a nun. I should not even be in the world and this is the reason. I should not be able to look on a man. And now I have looked, and seen him, and I want him more than my life itself. But I am still the bride of Christ and Hugo must leave me alone. You forget very easily, Morach. You forget my vows. But I do not!’
Morach shrugged, unrepentant. ‘Then what will you do?’
‘I dare not trust him, and I fear the jealousy of his wife,’ Alys said. ‘I have to find a way to have some power in this net they all weave. I am ensnared every way I turn and they play with me – each one of them – as if I were a village simpleton.’
Morach nodded.
‘They use me,’ Alys went on in a low, resentful undertone. ‘The old lord has me as his only friend and real ally. He tells me he owns me outright, he has me trapped, afraid of a charge of heresy, afraid of being exposed as a nun. The young lord wants to ensnare me as a pawn against his father, or else he desires me, or he wants to play for the cruelty of it. And Lady Catherine will throw me to a rapist to punish me for taking the old lord’s trust and the young lord’s eye. I must have some power in this, Morach. I am like an unweaned babe among wolves.’
Morach nodded. ‘You need woman’s power, as I did,’ she said. ‘Your Christ will not keep you safe. Not now. Not against real danger and the lusts of men. You need another power. The old power. The power of the old goddess.’
Alys nodded. ‘I’ve no choice,’ she said. The cold air around her seemed very still and silent. ‘I’ve no choice,’ she said again. ‘I have been driven so far and now I am at bay. I have to use what power I can. Give me the things.’
Morach glanced around; the meadow was deserted, the noise of the market was behind them. No one was watching. She unwrapped the cloth bundle and Alys gasped at what she saw.
They were three perfect models, three convincing likenesses, as good as the statues in the chapel. Lady Catherine’s flowing gown and her cold sharp face were carved out of the wax as precise and white as a cameo. Her gown was opened at the front, her legs spread. Morach had scratched the wax at her vagina to give the illusion of hair and the vagina was a deep, disproportionate hole made with a warm bodkin.
‘They fit!’ Morach said with a harsh giggle. She showed Alys the model of the young Lord Hugo. She had graven his face in his hard look – the one Alys and all the castle dreaded. But around his eyes there was the tracery of lines from his ready smile. Morach had modelled him a penis as big as a codpiece. ‘He must wish to be that size!’ she sniggered.
She took the two candlewax dolls and showed Alys how they slotted together. ‘That’ll turn his lust towards her,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘You’ll be safe when he is like this.’
The last doll was the old lord. ‘He’s thinner than that now,’ Alys said sadly. ‘Thinner and older looking.’
‘I’ve not seen him for a long time,’ Morach said. ‘You can shape him how you wish – use a warm knife for carving, and your fingers. But take care.’
Alys looked at the three little statues with distaste. She uncoupled Lord Hugo and Lady Catherine and wrapped them up again. ‘What care?’ she asked.
‘Once you’ve made them your own, claimed them as models for the life, then whatever you do to them takes place,’ Morach said softly. ‘If you want the old lord’s heart to soften, you cut into his chest, carve out a little piece of wax, mould it into a heart, warm it till it melts, and drip it back into the hole. Next morning he’ll be tender as a woman with a new baby.’
Alys’ dark eyes widened. ‘Is that true for all of them?’ she asked. ‘I could make Lady Catherine sick by pinching her belly? Or make the young lord impotent by softening his prick?’
‘Yes,’ Morach gleamed. ‘It’s a powerful piece of business, isn’t it? But you have to make them your own, and you have to make them represent those you mean to change. And – as I warned you – they can obey you too well. They can … misunderstand.’
There was a silence in the winter meadow. Alys met Morach’s eyes. ‘I have to do it,’ she said. ‘I have no safety without some power.’
Morach nodded. ‘This is the spell,’ she said. She put her mouth to Alys’ ear and chanted over some nonsense words, part Latin, part Greek, part French, and partly mispronounced and misheard English. She said it over and over again until Alys nodded and said she knew it by heart.
‘And you must take something from each of them,’ she said. ‘Something which is close to them, a bit of hair, a bit of fingernail, a paring of skin, and stick it on the part of the doll where it came from. Little fingernail to little finger, hair to the head, skin to where it was cut. Then you have your doll and your power.’
Alys nodded. ‘Have you done it before?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Morach said decidedly. ‘There wasn’t the urgency. I’ve had women ask me to soften their husband’s heart but it’s easier done with herbs in his dinner than a wax candle. I’ve had someone wish a man dead, but I’d never do it. The risk is too great. I always thought the risk was too great to make one of these.’
‘Why’ve you done it now?’ Alys asked directly.
Morach looked into her smooth young face and said, ‘You don’t know, do you? All your learning and all your planning, and you still are ignorant.’
Alys hunched her shoulder. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’
Morach put her dirty hand over Alys’ clean one. ‘I did it for you,’ she said gruffly. ‘I did it to give you a chance, to help you gain what you want, and to save you from rape by a soldier or by the young lord or by both. I don’t care for your dream of a nunnery but I do care for you. I raised you as my own daughter. I wouldn’t see you on your back under a man who cares nothing for you.’
Alys looked into the sharp old face. ‘Thank you,’ she said simply. She looked carefully into Morach’s dark eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said again.
‘And if it goes against you,’ Morach said challengingly, ‘if it’s found, or if they know they’ve been hexed, I want my name out of it. You tell them you carved this yourself, it was your own idea. That is the condition. I’ve made them but I won’t take the danger of them. You tell them they are your own if you are ever caught. I want to die in my bed.’
The moment of tenderness between the two women was dispelled at once.
‘I promise,’ Alys said. She caught the look of suspicion on Morach’s face. ‘I promise,’ she said again. ‘I will make you a solemn oath. If anyone finds these I will tell them they are my own, made by me and used by me.’
‘Swear on your honour, on your old abbess, and on your God,’ Morach said insistently.
Alys hesitated.
‘Swear you will say they are yours,’ Morach demanded. ‘Swear it or I’ll take them back!’
Alys shook her head. ‘If anyone finds them I am lost anyway,’ she said. ‘Owning them would be enough to see me hanged.’
