Fires of Winter Read online

  I suppose I must have spoken to people and eaten and suchlike, but I remember nothing of that. I remember washing myself—with soap to be sure I was clean—and the odd thought, as I walked from the house where I had paid for the use of a chamber to the church, that I was glad it was summer or my feet would have been cold. I confessed that petty thought as I confessed my greater sins and my lack of faith in my doubts about my coming marriage. It was a long confession, for I was not usually overcareful in freeing myself of my sins. I heard my penance and rejoiced; I would perform it and be free. My heart was lighter, even when I thought of Melusine, as I changed into my armor and went to stand and pray through the night. I have no more to say of that. I do not wish to hold anything back in this telling of my life, but I have no words for what I thought and felt.

  To my surprise and great joy, I was not without sponsors. William Martel, the king’s steward, and Robert de Vere, his constable, separated from the group watching and came forward, one taking my sword and the other my helmet, so they could return them to me as first and second guarantors of my fitness for knighthood. And the queen, acting for the king, gave me a pair of gilded spurs as third guarantor. I was so happy, I could have floated up on to the dais, but I managed to keep my feet on the ground and even kneel.

  The king looked down at me and I saw the mingled amusement and remaining touch of spite in his face. He meant to knock me off the dais to sprawl on the floor and I almost let him do it—almost, but when the blow from his fist came my pride would not yield and I braced myself. He rocked me, but I did not fall, and he laughed, his good humor restored as I sprang to my feet. He embraced me with good will, and called my name aloud, “Sir Bruno of Jernaeve, Knight of the Body, I greet you.” I knew him, all his faults and weaknesses, but how could I help but love him nonetheless?

  There was time to change out of my armor before dinner, but when I presented myself at the king’s table and he had, as was customary because of my clumsiness at carving and presenting, excused me from serving, I noticed that Melusine was not among the queen’s ladies. The king might have forgotten a small thing like that; the queen would not. I have no doubt it was Maud’s doing too when, after dinner, the king summoned me and sent me off to Oxford with a letter for his castellan. Since I was given no verbal message that might need discretion, any messenger could have done the task as well.

  I guessed at once that the purpose was to keep me out of the way; nonetheless when the castellan of Oxford confirmed my suspicion by telling me it would take him a day or two to find the answers the king desired, I was overwhelmed by a black loneliness. Although I had known the time for fulfillment could not be soon and my chances of success slim, I had nourished a dear dream ever since the king had taken me into his service. I had hoped that when England was firmly in Stephen’s hand, I would be given some estate as a reward for loyalty. Then it would be possible for me, I dreamed, to take a wife—a woman who would be a pleasure to my eyes and heart and who would come willingly, even with joy, to my bed so that I would have a warm, caring companion with whom to share my life.

  That dream was utterly destroyed. From the queen’s eagerness to prevent Melusine and me from catching even a glimpse of each other, I had to assume that Maud had used the word “willing” to gloss over a sullen acquiescence to the king’s command. Then, even if Melusine did not recognize me as the first invader of her hall and think of me with hatred, it seemed the best I could hope for was a cold indifference. One spot of warmth and light shone steady above the sea of black despair—Audris’s love. To that I turned, purchasing parchment, quills, and ink and setting myself to pour out my anguish, writing in my own hand what I could never have spoken out loud to a scribe.

  It was not the first time that I blessed my slow and awkward management of a quill. Before I had struggled through the first part of the tale, I had rehearsed my bitterness in my heart ten times over, not only that I must take an unwilling wife who was not to my taste but that I would in the end carry this burden without the ability to feed and clothe the woman, who must be as unhappy as I with the bargain. The fourth or fifth time that ran through my head, I finally understood what it meant.

  If the king failed in payment of the pension he had promised, I might be brought to the point where no resource at all remained to me so that Melusine might need to live on Audris’s charity someday. I did not need to add to my poor wife’s bitterness by sending her to a place where she would be treated with cold courtesy, for I knew Audris would resent anyone she believed had made me unhappy. Thus, I realized that no hint of my reluctance to marry Melusine must stain the letter.

  By then, thanks to God, the very thought of Audris’s sympathy had soothed me and I began to think that patience and kindness might in the end win me what I hoped to have at first. I did not then believe that even fondness could make Melusine beautiful to my eyes, but that was a small matter. One hardly sees the physical form of those with whom one spends every day—there were some among my fellow squires I had once thought ugly, some beautiful, and now I did not notice the difference between them.

  I cannot tell how often I wrote and rewrote that letter. I scraped clean that parchment so often that the surface became too rough and the ink spread from each letter into a blot no matter how carefully I wrote. Still, I never found the right words to explain my marriage. At last, every explanation seemed suspect to me, and when I got a fresh parchment, I wrote to Audris only that I had been knighted and that I had more important news for her which I would bring in person as soon as I could get leave to come to Jernaeve for a visit. And after all my effort, I could not find a messenger willing to carry my letter to Jernaeve. All had heard horror stories of the Scottish invasion, and I knew there was no purpose in arguing. I could send my letter with one of the king’s messengers going to Newcastle.

  Having talked, or rather written, myself into some concern for the poor woman whose dreams had no doubt also been shattered, I used the idle days in Oxford to have new shoes made and a fine gown of dark red, richly embroidered, as elegant as any nobleman’s dress. Usually I dressed plainly, partly to spare my purse, partly because I was more comfortable in simple garments that freed me of the constant worry of soiling and spoiling, and partly so that no man could say that the king’s favor was making me rich. In this case I thought it more important that Lady Melusine not be shamed or shocked at our wedding by a common appearance after all she had probably already borne from gossip about my birth.

  Chapter 6

  Melusine

  Mad! I must have been mad, for by the king’s and queens’s orders, I was married—without a murmur of protest, I have been assured—to a man without name or property, a landless bastard who had no more to recommend him to me than that he was the favorite of my captors.

  I do not remember being dressed; I do not remember the king leading me to the great doors of Winchester; I do not remember Henry, bishop of Winchester, speaking the words that bound me to Sir Bruno of Jernaeve; I do not remember the crowd of witnesses that watched my wedding, nor the celebration that followed it, nor being undressed and shown to my groom. Doubtless he was displayed to me too, but I must not have looked at him, which was taken for maidenly modesty, I suppose. I do not remember the chaff of jest that flew about, nor being led to the bed and placed into it with Bruno beside me.

  All I remember is a piercing pain between my thighs and suddenly coming awake to see above me the face of the man who had burst in the doors of the hall at Ulle and turned away from my terror with such contempt. The shock deprived me of both speech and movement, and I did not fight him or even cry out in my pain. To me, no time had passed between the moment I dropped senseless before the king in my agony of grief and finding myself impaled on the shaft of the invader of my home. I could only believe that the king had thrown me to his army to be used until I died, and that kind of death was a horror that again deprived me of my senses.

  I came to myself w
ith screams bubbling in my throat, with my hands curved into claws—and with nothing to claw or scream about. I lay unmolested, a fine woven, light woolen coverlet drawn up over my shoulders. For a single instant my heart leapt with joy as I wondered if all the horrors that had befallen me were no more than an evil dream; in the next moment I felt the ache between my legs and the stickiness on my thighs that told me my maidenhead had been reft from me and that the soft breathing to my left was not a maid on a pallet but that man.

  One man. A flood of relief lifted me on a wave crest only to sink me into the trough with shame that I should prefer to be an enemy’s leman to dying, even by torture. And the shame brought back the face I had seen above me—handsome in its lean, dark way, although I have never found dark men to attract me—which bred more shame. There had been no joy, no pleasure, not even a leer of lust in that man’s face. The hunger I remembered in his expression was there, but it was not hunger for me. That was a deep, abiding part of his nature. Overlying the hunger was the hard mask of a man doing a distasteful duty. But why should a man who did not want me take me for his leman?

  Though the answer to that question—that one does not refuse what a king offers, even if it is not what one desires—came into my mind at once, I had no time to consider it because a maelstrom of incongruities burst upon me. A thin woolen coverlet was all that covered me, the bed curtain was looped back, and by the light of the night candle I could see a black rectangle of unshuttered window—yet I was almost too warm. In the depths of winter?

  A faint shudder passed through me as I remembered Magnus’s frozen eyes. Yes, it had been winter when Magnus was killed; I could not be mistaken about that. And it had been no longer than a few weeks later when the king took Ulle. But the light breeze that came from the open window and stirred the bed-curtain near my head was heavy with warmth and sweet with the scent of flowers, and the wall into which the window was set was stone. This was not Ulle, and winter was long gone.

  I very nearly fainted again and for what seemed like a long time I did not think at all. The first new question that formed in my head after I realized that I had lived out the winter and spring and most of the summer—instinct, not thought, had picked out the scent of late-blooming plants—was how long I had been the leman of a man whose name I did not know. I almost turned to look at him, to confirm that I had really seen the face I thought, but the slight movement of my hips recalled a shadow of my pain and reminded me of the blood that had flowed. I had, then, been a maiden until this night.

  Screams of a different kind of terror tore my breast, but I set my teeth against them. It is no light thing to realize that more than half a year of one’s life is gone without one spark of memory to mark it, but to me it was a worse thing to wake the man beside me. I could choke back my cries, but my body would not be denied completely and I could feel deep tremors starting inside me. Holding back my shudders with the last of my will, I eased myself inch by inch out of the bed. Once I felt the man stir, but he did not turn toward me and I made good my escape.

  A few steps took me to the door, but I was no longer mad and I stopped. Where could I run, naked and blood smeared? Clothing lay across two chests. I stepped softly to that with the woman’s garments, but I did not don them. The cloth was richer than any I had ever worn, even for a high celebration at Ulle, and the gown and tunic gleamed with gold thread embroidery. Who had given me such garments and why? Even if the king had decided to carry me with his court—what could stone walls mean but a royal keep?—as some kind of trophy of victory, such a gown and tunic could not be everyday attire. That notion joined and mingled with the soreness I felt on walking, and it came to me what such fine clothing and the loss of my maidenhead after so many months of captivity must mean. Marriage!

  “Come back to bed.”

  The deep voice brought a faint squeak of terror from me before I could close my mouth with my hands. I stood frozen, regretting that I had not pulled on the clothes and fled.

  “Come back to bed,” the man repeated. “You will take a chill standing there naked. The night is warm, but cold oozes from the stones. Come. I will not touch you again.”

  The tone was weary and sad, the words spoken slowly, as if to one who had great difficulty in understanding, like a very young child or…or a woman of feeble mind. That was when I first realized that the months missing from my life were missing because I had been mad. A protest rose to my lips, but I swallowed it down, wondering if I might not benefit from being still thought out of my mind. Then the bed leathers creaked and I knew that the man was making ready to rise and put me back to bed. I could not bear to look at him, so I came back before he could move and lay down. A moment later he started to turn toward me, and I shrank away instinctively before I could think whether that might anger him. If it did, he did not show it then for he came no closer.

  I neither wished to sleep, fearing that despite his promise, he would take me again if I did, nor did I think I could sleep. I suppose that my shock and confusion had exhausted me, however, because I remember lying stiff and wary at one moment and, seemingly, the next, opening my eyes to see sunlight in the room. This time though I had no need to gather the small fragments of memory together. The man, fully clothed, stood by the window, looking out.

  “Get up now, Melusine,” he said. “You will want to dress before the king and queen come to see that you have been well and truly made a wife.”

  I realized that I must have been wakened by him saying my name, but he did not turn his head toward me as he spoke, only repeating, “Melusine, get up and dress now.”

  I stirred then, unable to bear the dull, patient repetition. As I got out of bed, I seethed with fury. What kind of a man, I asked myself, marries a madwoman, even at a king’s command. Only the dregs of the earth—either a coward, shivering for the safety of his skin, or one so eaten up with greed that no act is too shameful if it will fill his purse. My eyes flicked from side to side seeking a weapon with which I could rid myself of this creature, but there was nothing, and I remembered that he had said the king and queen were coming. The king and queen? Then I was at court. But I had no time to think of that. I did not want to be found naked with blood-smeared thighs, and I hurried to the chest, laid the fine garments on the other, and opened it.

  “Do you not wish to wash?” The slow words were a mocking insult. “There is time for washing, and I have poured water for you.”

  Still without turning, he pointed to a table on which stood a basin with a washing cloth and a drying cloth folded beside it. I hesitated a bare instant, unwilling to accept what seemed a kindness from the animal that had despoiled me, but I was disgusted to sickness by the dry stains on my legs, and I almost ran to the table. In stretching my hand for the washing cloth, I saw my nails were all filthy, and I shuddered, realizing that I had scratched at the smears during my sleep when they dried and began to itch. The reminder was of use though, for I washed my face first—I could not have borne to wash it with dirty, bloody water—and then my hands, only last cleaning my legs and the thick black curls that covered my woman’s parts.

  I could not even bear to leave the water in the basin, and I carried it to the pot to pour away, but the moment I saw the pot, of course, I felt an urgent need to relieve my bladder and bowels. Before that man? I threw a hate-filled look at him and saw that he was still staring out of the window. Then I realized he had not once looked at me—or if he had, it was no more than a brief glance. One can feel it when one is watched, I more than most because I had been so often annoyed by my father’s and brothers’ watchful eyes. So he found his bargain distasteful, did he, that clod who had accepted a madwoman or half-wit for profit?

  While the thoughts coursed through my mind, I had used the pot. He must have heard—there are unmistakable sounds—and he made one small movement that almost caused me to leap up half finished. But he did not turn, only moved the shoulder he was leaning on the window frame.
Nor did he speak again until I had selected clothing from the chest and pulled on my underclothes and tunic. When I thrust my arms through the sleeveless summer bliaut and settled it on my shoulders to show the proper amount of the embroidered neck of the tunic, he asked, “Shall I lace you up?”

  I was too surprised to reply, partly by the keenness of his hearing, which had apparently told him to what stage my dressing had progressed, and partly by the offer itself. But it was necessary. The loose gown of a peasant woman can be simply pulled over the head. At Ulle I had a number of such gowns for work in the stillroom or the garden, but the fine bliauts of a lady laced tight to the body from hip to breast either at the back or the sides, and a maid was necessary. The absence of a woman to assist me was another shock. Who had helped me dress all these months—or had I been moping and mowing in a cage all this time, only drawn out to be married to this man? And married for what purpose? Ulle?

  He turned and came to me before I could speak the bitter questions in my mind. I do not know what showed on my face in the instant before I made it blank; it did not matter because I do not think he even glanced at me. A surge of fury at his contempt followed. What right had he to be contemptuous of me? One does not deliberately go mad. It is no shame to be stricken by the hand of God or to be broken by sorrow. To my mind it was a far greater shame to fill one’s purse or lickspittle by taking a mad wife. Nor did it soothe me that he knew well how to lace a lady’s dress, drawing it just so in a way that did not furrow the cloth between the lace holes. So he was a womanizer too. Well, who else would take a mad wife but a man who used women so freely that a disgusting wife meant nothing.

  “There,” he said, turning me about and stepping back. “You look…ah…very handsome. Can you comb your hair or…”