The Wise Woman

Fifteen

Alys spent the evening on the other side of the ladies' gallery fireplace from Hugo and watched with an impassive face as Catherine tapped him on the shoulder in reproof at a jest, rested her hand on his shoulder and twisted one of his dark curls around her finger.

Alys was ordered to bring Hugo some more Osney wine from the sideboard. She went down on one knee to serve him. He smiled down at her.

'Are you well, Alys?' he asked under his breath, so that only she could hear. 'When I wrote to my father of all my doings I thought of you, reading the letters. I wrote to you as well as to him, you know.'

Alys' hand pouring the wine shook a little and the bottle rattled on the lip of the cup.

'When I lay with a whore I thought of you, Alys,' he said, his voice very low. 'I wondered if you were playing with me. If you have played with me all along, and with my father, and with my wife. What dark games do you have, Alys? Have you truly given up play and magic after all, as you promised?'

He glanced swiftly round. No one was watching them. 'I went away half mad for you,' he whispered. 'Everywhere I went in Newcastle the edge was off my pleasure. I kept wondering what you would think of a thing, how you would like it. And then I was angry with you, Alys. I believe you bewitched me after all. I believe you have played with me to spoil my peace.'

'I have no magic, my lord,' Alys said stiffly. 'I have a little skill with herbs, sickness and childbirth.' She shot a quick look at him from under her eyelashes, then she stood with the bottle of wine still in her hands. 'And my peace is spoiled too,' she said.

Hugo laughed up at her, his white teeth sharp in his smile. 'I'm ready to be witched,' he said. 'I'm ready to be tempted! But see how I am placed now, Alys! There can be nothing in my life till October -I get everything then. We could make merry till then, you and I. But in secret.'

'What are you saying?' Catherine interrupted. 'What are you saying to my lord, Alys? Don't you think she has grown thin, Hugo? Thin and white. I am afraid we are not feeding her well enough. She was so pretty when she first came to the castle and now she is as boney as a spinster at her distaff!'

The women laughed in an obedient chorus. Alys met Hugo's quick scrutiny with a look of blank resentment.

'Are you unwell?' he asked neutrally so that they could all hear.

'No,' Alys said in a tone as level as his. 'I am weary with being indoors so much. That is all.'

'Leave us now,' Catherine interrupted. 'One of you check that my bed is warm.' She shot a look at Hugo. 'Though I will be hot enough in a moment, I reckon,' she said in a loud whisper.

Hugo laughed and took the hand she reached out for him. 'Away to bed, my lady,' he said caressingly. 'You must rest for the health of my son. You don't know what a fortune I have riding on him!'

Eliza went into Catherine's bedroom and checked there were fresh herbs on the floor and under the pillows. Then she bobbed a half-curtsey to the two of them before the fire and she, and all the ladies, went to their rooms.

'Not so hot for you these days,' Morach commented as she and Alys stripped off their gowns and scurried into the cold bed in their shifts. 'No,' Alys said shortly. 'Why's that d'you think?' Morach pried. 'I don't know,' Alys said. 'I wonder why,' Morach said, undeterred. "The old lord has him fast,' Alys said, in sudden impatience. 'He did it today, I heard every word. He will make Hugo's fortune if Catherine bears a healthy son. He has promised him a thousand pounds for his own free use.'

Morach gave a low whistle. 'So Hugo's bought off!' she said. 'No future for you then, Alys. I reckon that work you did with the moppets worked better than you thought!' 'I've wished that away a thousand times,' Alys said. 'Why?' Morach asked. 'Because you love him and desire him now? Because you want him so much that you will risk everything to lie with him? While you look at him so coldly and walk past him without looking back, are you praying he will put her aside and come to you; as hot for you, as you are for him?'

Alys pushed back the covers and jumped down to the cold floor.

'Yes,' she said through her teeth. She rattled the wood basket and threw a log on the fire. 'I am sick to my very soul for him. I cannot eat, I cannot sleep, and now tonight he lies with her again, and after this child there will be another, and another, and all there will be for me will be the leavings from her dinner.'

Morach chuckled delightedly. 'Pass me my shawl,' she said. 'And put on another log to bank up the fire. It's as good as the mummers, life in this castle. You're lost now she's with child, you know. Even without the money he wouldn't stop going with her. He has the taste of her now.'

Alys threw the shawl to Morach. 'What d'you mean?' she asked. She took a comb from the chest of clothes and a steel mirror and started to comb her hair. It was shoulder length now, a tangle of brass and gold. Alys picked impatiently at the knots.

'The taste of her?' Morach asked. 'Oh, men are trapped by it. When their women are carrying a child. Men see their women's breasts grow fuller, their rounded bellies. They like the evidence of their own rutting, even as they do it. It's two parts male swagger, and one part something else. Something old, deeper. And Hugo has it badly.'

Alys pulled at her hair mercilessly and coiled it into a rough plait. 'Badly?' she asked.

Morach cocked an eyebrow at her. 'Sure you want to hear?' she asked. Alys nodded.

'He had her this afternoon,' Morach said. 'After he had been with his father. You were still in the old lord's chambers. He came striding down here and shooed all the women out of the room and he took her like he was possessed. If this is your magic moppets then they've done their job well. He can't leave her alone. First this afternoon and then tonight again.'

Alys' face was shocked. 'How were they together? Was he as rough with her as ever? He was never tender with her?'

Morach shook her head. 'He didn't bind her this time,' she said. 'But he did everything else he had a mind to do. He slapped her a little and he pulled her hair. Then he made her take him in her mouth. He's careful for the child so he would not lie on her. He thrust himself into her mouth and bellowed like a bull with pleasure.'

'Stop it,' Alys said abruptly. 'You're disgusting, Morach. How d'you know all this? You're lying.'

'I watched,' Morach said, smiling, tucking the fine shawl around her shoulders and moving the pillow behind her tousled head. 'I needed to know. Of course I watched.'

Alys nodded. Nothing Morach could do would surprise her.

'And what about her?' Alys said abruptly. 'Why does she permit it? Now that she has his child. Why is she still so demanding?'

Morach chuckled 'She's not demanding – you silly little virgin!' she exclaimed. 'What should she demand? She's getting everything a woman could want – and more than a decent woman would admit to wanting. She lies there, like a pink soft mountain, and lets him crawl all over her.'

Alys scowled. 'He said he would go to her no more once she was pregnant,' she said. 'He said he had to have a son, and then he would come to me. Then he said he would go to Newcastle to think what to do -that he longed to live with me and yet he had to keep her sweet. All this time I have been waiting and waiting. All this time, Morach! Waiting and waiting for him.'

Morach looked at her without sympathy. 'Go to him then,' she said. 'You cannot fight her whelping heat with your convent coldness. Go to him and tell him you want him, and that he's to leave her. Hex him, promise him darkness and passion. Pain beyond pain and pleasure beyond pleasure. There are things you could give him, there are things you could do, that he has never even dreamed of with his little drabs. Tell him you're a witch and that if he comes to you you can give him pleasures that mortal men only dream of. He's like any man – they all long for witchery and wickedness at night. If you want him, Alys, take him! You don't have much time, you know.'

'Time?' Alys asked instantly. 'You've foreseen something, Morach?'

'Away.' Morach flapped her hands, fending Alys off. 'You've not much time while you're young and beautiful. The plague could come any day and mark your face. The wind could blow and scar you. You could fall sick and lose the clear colour of your skin and your eyes and hair. You're getting thinner every day with this passion burning up inside you – a month from now and you'll be a plain spinster. If you want something you should get it at once. Waiting is a trial for no one but yourself.'

Alys nodded. 'I am on a rack of desire for him,' she said softly.

'Shall I tell him?' Morach asked. 'I'm the last person to leave them at night. I could take him to one side and tell him that if he leaves Catherine's room he can come here. And I'll keep guard till the two of you are done.'

Alys turned towards the bed and looked at the old woman. Her face was suspicious. 'Why?' she asked. 'Why would you risk offending Lady Catherine – you who stand so high in her favour, paid twice what the rest get, free to come and go, eating like a pig and free to speak your mind to her? Why risk it?'

Morach chuckled. 'It's a game, child,' she said indulgently. 'It's like casting the runes, or reading the cards, or making herbs. It's a game. What will happen next? All magic is the question – what will happen if…? I want to know what will happen to you when Hugo has you. I want to see that happen. It takes my fancy, that's all.'

'Can't you see it?' Alys asked. 'Why can't you see the future as you used to see it, Morach?'

The old woman shrugged. 'I can see you don't have long; that should be enough for you. When I look, it all goes dark, I can see nothing except darkness and water. So you'd best act as any woman would – never mind the Sight. What will it be? Shall I tell him you want to see him?'

Alys paused. 'Yes,' she said, with sudden decision. 'Now. Call him out now. Get him away from Catherine now. I can't bear him to lie with her tonight.'

The old woman nodded and slipped from the bed, spread the shawl around her shoulders and crept through the door. Alys took up the mirror again, ruffled her hand through her thick hair, watched the colour rise in her pale cheeks. Across the gallery she could hear Morach's peremptory knock on the door and her call: 'Lord Hugo! The old lord is asking for you. He said you were to come at once!'

She heard Hugo's muttered oath and his quick step to the door. She heard him call to Catherine, telling her to sleep, and then the bedroom door slam behind him. He stepped out into the gallery.

Alys tossed aside the mirror and went out of her room to meet him.

'Lord Hugh does not need you, I sent Morach to call you out,' she said. She held her head very high and her hair fell in a ripple of gold away from her face. Hugo stared at her, at the thin cotton of her nightgown and at the rapid pulse beating at the hollow of her neck under the half-open gown.

'Alys,' he said softly.

He could see the muscles in her neck move as she swallowed.

'I cannot bear you to lie with her,' Alys said. 'You told me to wait until you came back from Newcastle and I have waited. I want you as my lover. I have dreamed and dreamed of you coming home to me.'

Hugo's dark gleam of a smile came, and faded. 'You heard my father,' he said. 'You know how much I need an heir. You know that my future and my family's future depends on an heir to this castle and these lands. And he has promised me that money, Alys. I cannot distress Catherine when she is carrying the child I need more than anything else in the world!'

'What about me!' Alys broke out. 'I see what Catherine needs – aye, and gets! And I see what you need! But what about me?'

Hugo looked at her, his smile crinkling around his eyes. 'You want me,' he said. It was not a question. Alys nodded.

'Is Morach gone from your room?' he asked. Alys did not look up; she nodded again. 'Come then,' he said and slid his arm around her waist, and she let him lead her to her bedroom, swing her off her feet and lay her on the bed.

He pulled up her gown to see her naked and gave a little grunt of pleasure at the sight – like an animal, Alys thought. She closed her eyes and thought of the nights and days she had longed for him, had longed for this moment. 'This is Hugo,' she said to herself. 'Hugo, that I have dreamed of and longed for, and desired more than I have ever desired anyone in my life.'

It did not help. She felt cold and arid. She was nervous of the pain and the weight of him. Hugo hitched his nightshirt up around his waist. 'If you were a witch indeed then you would enchant me,' he said. 'They were talking of witchery in Newcastle. They say if a man so much as touches their skin then no other woman can ever excite him again.'

Alys shook her head. 'I'm no witch,' she said. 'You told me to put all that aside, I did as you hid me. I cannot enchant you.' She was getting cold, half naked before him.

Hugo dropped on top of her and Alys was crushed beneath his weight. He had eaten spicy meat at supper and his breath was sour. She threw her arms around his broad shoulders and said, 'Hugo,' thinking how she had longed for this moment – that it must be what she wanted, since she had wanted it for so long.

'If you were a witch,' Hugo said, rubbing himself gently against her, 'what pleasures would you give me, Alys? Do you think witches can make men fly? Do you think they can make them lust all night and all day? Would you conjure for me virgin after virgin? All of them wet with desire, all longing for me. All lying with me and with each other? A great rolling bed of women with mouths and hands and bodies for my pleasure alone?'

As his words excited him he arched his back and leaned up on his hands and pushed into her. Alys screamed – a sharp scream of pain – and wriggled at once away from him. 'No!'

Hugo laughed, put his hands on her thin shoulders and said breathlessly: 'Take it, Alys! It's what you've been hot for! It's what you've been pining for! What did you expect? A touch as gentle as your own busy little fingers? This is what a man does, Alys! Learn to like it!' At every word he spoke he thrust deeper into her. Alys scrabbled frantically against him, trying to pull herself up and away from his greedy lust. 'Oh!' Hugo said suddenly, and he fell heavily on her.

They lay very still for a few moments. The pain inside her eased a little and she felt his cock grow limp and slide away. She smelled her blood and felt it trickle on her cold thighs. She felt the skin around her eyes tighten and grow cold with drying tears. She moved a little and Hugo rolled off her, like a pig in a wallow, and lay on his back, gazing blankly at the ceiling.

Alys crept a little closer and put her warm head on his shoulder. She could hear his heart thudding and slowing. His arm came around her and held her.

'I hurt,' Alys said in a little voice, like an injured child.

Hugo chuckled. 'Not a witch then,' he said. 'You've done no shagging with the devil, that's for sure.'

'I told you I was no witch,' Alys said impatiently. 'I was a virgin. You have taken my virginity. And you hurt me, Hugo.'

He nodded, as if it did not matter much. 'It always hurts maids the first time,' he said indifferently. 'What did you expect?'

Alys said nothing, but the world of her expectations was laid out before her in bitter colours.

Hugo gave a yawn and sat up. 'Give me a cloth,' he said. 'I cannot go back to Catherine like this.'

Alys slipped from the bed and walked awkwardly over to the linen chest. She could feel a trickle of blood flow warm down her thigh. She passed him a length of linen. 'Go back to Catherine?' she said stupidly.

'Of course,' he said. He mopped at his crutch with quick, hard gestures, wiping her blood away. Wiping the smell of her away. He looked up at her shocked face and shrugged.

'Come on, Alys,' he said impatiently. 'You heard my father, you know what this child means to me. Every night of my life until the baby is born I shall sleep in Catherine's bed. I shall make her as content and serene as I can. I owe it to my son, I owe it to my line and, by God, I owe it to myself! I have waited to sire a son for eighteen years! One woman after another has been barren with me. Now my wife, my own legal wife, is with my child and they all say it will be a son. Of course I shall watch over her, and anything she wants will be hers!'

'I dreamed of a son that we would have,' Alys started. 'You and me.'

Hugo leaned forward and patted her white cheek. 'When you are pregnant with my son you will be my favourite,' he said carelessly. 'While Catherine carries my son I am hers to command. Right now there is only one thing in the world which could keep me from Catherine.' 'And what is that?' Alys asked. Her throat was aching from holding in her anger and her pain.

Hugo grinned. 'The rutting I have dreamed of with you!' he said, laughing. 'Ever since I saw you, and especially since they all thought you were a witch, I thought you would take me – like witches are said to take men. I thought you would ride me like I mount a horse. I thought you would know ways which would drive me mad with lust for you.'

Alys shook her head slowly. 'And instead, I was just another virgin,' she said softly. 'An ordinary girl.'

Hugo stood up, tossed aside the bloodied cloth and drew Alys into his arms. 'Ordinary girls give pleasure too,' he said consolingly. 'Another time, sweetheart, when I am not wearied with travelling and sated with Catherine. Another time it will be better for us both.'

Alys nodded, hearing dismissal in his voice. 'But don't send Morach for me again,' he said warningly. 'Catherine is bound to find out and distress could harm the baby. I will come to you when I can leave her without her knowing. I will come to you when she sleeps.'

'In corners,' Alys said. 'In doorways. Hidden in secrecy.'

Hugo gleamed. 'I love it like that,' he said 'Desperate and quick. Wouldn't you like me to take you like that, when we're too hot to wait for a proper time?'

Alys turned her head away so that he could not see the anger and resentment in her eyes. 'Like any ordinary girl,' she said.

He put an arm around her waist and kissed her carelessly on the top of her head. 'I must go,' he said. 'Sweet dreams.' The door shut softly behind him. Alys walked wearily to the bed, flung herself down on her back and watched the flicker of the firelight on the ceiling. She did not turn her head as the door opened. She knew it was not Hugo.

'Fool,' Morach said companionably. 'I thought you were hot for him. I could have told you it would hurt, lying with a man you hate.'

Alys turned her head slowly on the pillow. 'I don't hate him,' she said slowly. 'I love him. I love him more than life itself.'

Morach gave a little crow of laughter and hitched herself up into the high bed.

'Aye, you say you do,' she said agreeably. 'And you think you do. But your body says different, child. Your body said "no" all the way through, didn't it? Even when you kept trying to tell yourself you were in heaven.'

Alys raised herself up on one elbow. 'Help me, Morach,' she said. 'It hurt and I hated him touching me like that. And yet I used to tremble when he so much as looked at me.'

Morach chuckled and heaved the blankets over to her own side. 'He's a disappointment to you,' she said. 'And you hate Catherine. You're torn different ways at once. And you don't consult your own pleasure. Get hold of your power, Alys! Find what you want and take it. You lay there tonight and asked him to rape you. What he wants is a woman to drive him mad – not another victim.'

Alys pulled the blankets back and turned on her side with her back to Morach. 'And you watched,' she said irritably.

'Of course,' Morach said calmly. 'And I can tell you, he had more pleasure with Catherine's wanton joy than he did with you.'

Alys said nothing.

'If it had been me,' Morach said thoughtfully to Alys' stiff back, 'I'd have taken my time and given him wine, and taken a glass myself. I'd have drugged him maybe. I'd have used earthroot which makes a man dream of desire until he is mad with it and makes him hard with no chance of ease for hours. I'd have told him bawdy stories, I'd have let him watch me touch myself. I'd have told him I was a witch and that if he touched me he would go mad for my touch forever. And when he was half pickled with lust then I'd have let him have me. I wouldn't have whimpered beneath him like a ravished scullion.' Alys shut her eyes and hunched up her shoulder. 'But I wouldn't have done any of that until I'd decided whether I wanted him or not,' Morach said to the quiet room. 'I wouldn't have a man when we had a score to settle. I wouldn't tup a man who was lying his head off to me. I wouldn't let him roll on me and then wash himself clean as if I was dirt. I'd make him choose between me and his wife. And I'd use my magic to make him choose me.'

Alys turned around and looked at Morach. 'There is no magic in the world that can stand against an heir,' she said bitterly. 'All I can hope for is for the bitch to die in childbirth and the heir to die with her.'

Morach met her look. 'And me here to see she does not,' she said equably. 'It's a fine net you've meshed yourself in, little Alys.'

Alys turned her back on Morach again and thumped down into the bed.

'You must wish you were back at the abbey,' Morach said, rubbing salt in the old wound. 'You'd have been safe from all this uncomfortable reality there. Safe with your mother in Christ.' She paused. 'Pity,' she said cheerfully.

Alys had thought herself unhappy before, but after that night her days were harder still. The weather was against her through a long wintry April. Alys thought that the long season of darkness and cold would never end.

She had known harder winters in her childhood with Morach when food and even firewood had been scarce, and for frozen day after frozen day Morach had sent her out of the door of the snowed-in shanty to scoop a bucket of snow and set it to thaw on the little precious flame. At night they had huddled together for warmth and listened for the cry of the wolf pack which came nearer at twilight and dawn. Morach would throw another turf of peat on the fire and a handful of herbs and laugh as if the bitter cold and the pain in her belly and the long lonely cry of the wolves amused her.

'Learn this,' she would say to Alys – wide-eyed and thin as an orphan lamb. 'Learn this. Never cross a powerful man, my Alys. Find your place and keep it.' And the little child with the great blue eyes too big for her white face would nod and clench her little chicken-foot hands in the old sign against the evil eye. 'That farmer was a bad man,' she said solemnly. 'He was that,' Morach replied with relish. 'And dead now for his injustice to me. Find your place and keep it, Alys! And then avoid the hard men with power!'

Alys had been cold then with a deep iron coldness which had stayed with her for all her life like some incurable growth of ice in her belly. All the petting at the abbey, all the banked fires of blazing logs, all the sheepskin rugs and the wool tapestries could not cure her of it. When the wind howled around the walls of the abbey she would shiver and look up at Mother Hildebrande and ask:

'Was that wolves? Was that wolves, Mother Hildebrande?'

And the old abbess would laugh and draw the child's head against her knees and stroke her fingers through her fair curly hair and say, 'Hush, my little lapwing. What if there are? You are safe here, behind the thick walls, are you not?'

And the child would reply, with deep satisfaction: This is my place now.'

And now I have no place, and I am cold again, Alys said to herself.

She was seated on the kitchen step, her hands dug deep into her sleeves, her face turned up to the thin yellow light of the winter sun. All the other women were indoors, chattering and laughing in the warm gallery. Morach was singing some bawdy ditty to amuse them and Catherine was laughing aloud with one hand held over her swelling belly.

Alys had left them with an irritable shiver to run down to the garden to gather herbs. The old lord had a cough at nights which made him weary and Alys wanted the heads of lavender for him to help him rest. They were stunted and frozen, they should have been picked when the juice was in them, fresh and violet and sweet in midsummer.

'They were neglected and left, and now they are cold and dry,' Alys said, turning the arid handful in her lap. 'Oh God, Hugo.'

Between Catherine's demands for company and the needs of the old lord who sank one day but rallied the next, Alys should have been busy, with no time to brood. But all those long weeks, as it snowed deeper, and then thawed, and then snowed again, Alys moped at the fireside, at the arrow-slit window, or shivered on her own in the frozen garden.

'What ails you, Alys, are you sick?' the old lord asked.

David the dwarf peeped at her and gleamed his malicious smile. 'A sick physician? A foolish wise woman? A dried-out herbalist?' he asked. 'What are you, Alys? A gourd rattling with dried seeds?'

Only Morach in the dark room which they shared at night put her dirty finger precisely on the root of Alys' pain. 'You're dying for him, aren't you?' she said bluntly. 'Dying inside for him.'

Hugo barely noticed her in his busy days. He wrote a stream of letters to London, to Bristol and to Newcastle, and cursed like a soldier at the delay in their delivery and replies. He supervised the pulling-down of the big keystones of the abbey and the men dragged them over the snow on sledges to make a heap where he planned his new house. 'Not a castle,' he told Catherine. 'A regular house. A Tudor house. A house for a lasting peace.'

He drew plans for his new handsome house. It was to have windows, not arrow-slits. It was to have chimneys and fireplaces in every room. He would have had the men dig foundations, but no one could drive so much as a knife into the frozen ground. Instead, he measured up and drew it, and showed it to David, and argued about kitchens and the bakehouse and the number of rooms and the best aspect. When he strode into the castle, as the wintry darkness came down in the afternoon, all the women in the castle fluttered – like hens in a shed with a fox beneath the floor. Hugo let his dark laughing eyes rove over all of them, and then took his pick in a shadowed doorway for a few minutes of rough pleasure.

He rarely had the same woman twice, Alys saw. He never wilfully hurt them or played the mad cruel games he had done with his wife. He treated them with abrupt lust and then quick dismissal.

And they loved him for it. 'He is a rogue!' 'He is the old lord reborn!' 'He is a man!' she heard them say. He put his hand out to Alys once with a quizzical smile and a dark eyebrow raised. Alys had looked through him, her face as inviting as frozen stone, and he had laughed shortly and turned away. She heard him whistle as he ran down the stairs, accepting her rejection as lightly as he had accepted her invitation. She no longer ran deep in Hugo's blood – he had too many diversions. He never came again to her room while Catherine slept -

Alys never expected it. She had taken a gamble on her desire and lost him, and lost her desire too.

All she had left to her was a nagging knowledge that she needed him, at a level which ran deeper than lust. Alys felt she had tried his lust and found it wanting. In his easy dismissal of her she felt her power – over him, over herself, over all of them – drain away like the pale sunsets which bled light from the narrow line of the western horizon in the early afternoons of the dark winter days.

One day the crystal on the thread hung downwards heavy and still, like a plumb-line, when she laid her hand on the old lord's chest.

'Have you lost your power, Alys?' he asked sharply, his dark eyes wide open, alert as a ruffled old eagle owl.

Alys met his gaze unmoved. 'I think so, my lord,' she said, cold to her very bones. 'I cannot get the thing I desire, and I cannot learn not to desire it. I've no time nor appetite for anything. Now it seems I've no ability either.'

'Why's that?' he asked briefly; he was short of breath. 'Hugo,' Alys said. 'He wanted me to be an ordinary woman, a girl to love. Now I am so ordinary he passes me by. I threw my power away for love of him and now I have neither the power nor the love.'

The old lord had barked a sharp laugh at that which ended in him coughing and wheezing. 'Get Morach for me then,' he said. 'Morach shall tend me instead of you. Catherine says that she trusts her with everything. That she is a great healer, an uncanny herbalist.'

Alys nodded, her face pinched. 'As you wish,' she said. The words were like flakes of snow.

The old lord used her as his clerk still, but there were only a few letters he cared to write during his sickness, during Lent. But when she was sitting at the wide oriel window of the ladies' gallery on the Wednesday after Easter Day Alys saw a half-dozen homing pigeons winging in from the south, circling the castle in a broad determined swoop and then angling, like a flight of sluggish arrows, towards their coops on the roof of the round tower. It meant urgent news from London. Alys bobbed a curtsey to Catherine and left the ladies' gallery. She arrived at Lord Hugh's door as the messenger came down the stairs from the roof of the tower with the tiny scrap of paper in his hand. Alys followed him into the room. 'Shall I read it?' Alys asked. Lord Hugh nodded.

Alys unfurled the little scrap. It was written in Latin. 'I don't understand it,' Alys said. 'Read it,' Hugh said.

'It says: On Easter Tuesday the Spanish envoy refused an invitation to dine with the Queen. The King took mass with him and the Queen's brother was ordered to attend him: 'That all?'

'Yes,' Alys said. 'But what does it mean?' 'It means the Boleyn girl has fallen,' Lord Hugh said without regret. 'Praise God I am friends with the Seymours.'

He said it like an epitaph on a gravestone, and closed his eyes. Alys watched his hard, unforgiving face as he slept and wondered if Queen Anne yet knew that she was lost.

After that day there was little work for her in the castle except reading to the old lord and sitting with Catherine. She could not be trusted to sew an intricate pattern – she lacked attention, Catherine complained. She had lost her intuition for herbs and Catherine shivered at the touch of her cold fingers. Day after day Alys had less and less to do but watch and wait for Hugo – and then see him pass by her without noticing her in the shadows.

She grew thinner and she took to drinking more and more wine at dinner as the food stuck in her throat. It was the only thing which helped her sleep, and when she slept she dreamed long wonderful dreams of Hugo at her side, and his son in her arms, and a yellow gown slashed with red silk and a snow-white fur trim.

As snow turned to sleet and then rain, the ground grew softer. At the end of April the young lord rode out every dawn and did not come back till dusk. They had started digging the foundations for the new house and on the day they had completed the outline he came home early, at midday, dirty with mud, bursting into Catherine's gallery, where she was sewing a tapestry with Morach idly holding the silks on one side of her and Alys and Eliza and Ruth stitching at the border.

'You must come and see it!' Hugo said. 'You must, Catherine. And you shall see the rooms I have planned for you and for our son. She can come, can't she, Morach? She can ride the grey palfrey?'

His glance flickered past Alys to the older woman. Alys kept her eyes on her work but she could feel him near her as a trout can feel a fisherman's shadow.

'If it's a very quiet horse,' Morach replied. 'Riding will not harm either of them, but a fall could be fatal.'

'And all your ladies,' Hugo said expansively. 'All of them! You must be pining to go out – mewed up here like fat goshawks! Wouldn't you like to smell the moorland air again, Alys? Feel the wind in your face?' Catherine smiled at Alys. 'She won't leave your father,' she said. 'She is always with him or running errands for him. She can stay. And also Margery and Mistress Allingham. I will come, and Eliza and Ruth and Morach.'

'As you wish,' Hugo said readily. 'As you wish. We'll go tomorrow. I'll walk out with you today, after dinner.' He caught sight of Alys, face down-turned to her work. 'You don't begrudge us our pleasure, Alys?' He had a wish, as wilful as a teasing child, to see her face and her eyes and to hold her attention.

She did not look up at him. 'Of course not, my lord,' she said, her voice thin but steady. 'I hope you and my lady have a pleasant day.'

'You must be thirsty, my lord,' Catherine interrupted. 'Alys, call for some wine for my lord before you leave us. You are bid to go to Lord Hugh, are you not?' Alys rose to her feet and went to pull the bell. 'Is my father ill?' Hugo asked.

'Oh no,' Catherine reassured him. 'Alys does not tend his health now. She has lost her skill. Isn't that strange? Morach tends him now. But he likes Alys to read to him. Doesn't he, Alys?'

Alys shot a quick look at Hugo from under her eyelashes. 'Yes,' she said. 'May I go now?'

Hugo smiled, his eyes resting on her, his look thoughtful, and nodded her away. Alys, her eyes on the floor, her face pale, went out of the heavy door and closed it quietly behind her.

'Not long now,' Morach said, watching Hugo's eyes following Alys to the door. 'Not long now,' she said with malicious satisfaction. 'What?' Catherine demanded impatiently. Morach's grin was irrepressible. 'I said, not long now. I was thinking of a game I know.'