Beauty (32 page)

"When the plague returned," she nodded. "In sixty-one."

"Year of our Lord," I murmured, putting out a hand to catch myself.

"Thirteen sixty-one," she said. "Yes. I am his widow, Lydia. We had only been married a short time when he died. But that was almost six years ago. How could you not have heard?"

"I've been away," I said, wondering where the intervening years had gone. I had left in fifty-one. "Far away. In ... the Holy Land."

"A pilgrim," she chirruped. "Do come in," she took my arm. "Oh, what a shock it must be."

We went into the little sitting room. It had been my room, with chairs in it, not wainscot chairs against the wall, but real chairs one could move about, with carved arms, made for me by a man who worked for Lord Robert, given me as a wedding gift. They were still there, still with the cushions I had worked when I was pregnant with Elladine. Sadly soiled and worn, those cushions. The fireplace was deep in ashes. Everything was dirty and ragged. Evidently this lady, like my aunts, did not hold with soap.

"His daughter?" I asked. "Little Elly ... ?"

"Elladine? Oh, she survived, yes indeed. Very healthy child, she was. Is, I should say, though she's not a child any longer."

"How old ... ?"

"Elladine would be what? Sixteen? Seventeen? Hard enough to keep track of my own, such an army of them."

"Your own?"

"Gloriana, that's the eldest. Then my oldest son, Harold. Then my second son, Bertram. Then Griselda. Then comes Elladine. Then the two Edward and I had together. Twins. Catherine and young Edward. Your nephew Edward named them. Why, I just thought! Catherine must be named after you?"

I nodded again, feeling lost. Possibly Edward had named his second daughter after his aunt. And possibly the twins were not Edward's children at all. "You were a widow when you married Edward?"

She threw her arms wide, miming woe. "Twice, now. Oh, it's very hard to bear. Very hard, Lady Catherine. Lord Robert died early in the year, then Janet and the children. Then the youngest brother, Richard. Then, soon after we were married, Edward himself. All of Wellingford has fallen to me. I've the care of all of it to see to, and no one to help!"

If her two sons were older than Elladine, then she should have some help. "Your sons," I suggested weakly.

"Mere children," she waved her hand to suggest something inconsiderable. "Striplings. Caring for nothing but gaming and the hunt. Boys. Mere sweet boys."

"Your daughters?" I suggested, a little more strongly.

"So talented," she said. "So very musical. And such graceful girls. A little tall, perhaps, but then so is a willow, and nothing is more graceful, moving in the wind." She mimed wind, swaying at me. "But then, I'm forgetting myself. You must be famished? Thirsty? Weary? I didn't see your carriage?"

"I rode," I said. "Hired a horse in ... in ... "

"East Sawley?" she suggested.

I nodded, inventing. "Two horses and a man to carry my box. Sent them back again."

And she was dismayed. "Then you plan to stay? Not that you aren't welcome. Oh, you're very welcome. It's just such very short notice."

I gestured vaguely, signifying that I would make do. "There's an extra room, surely."

"A very little one," she assented. "Over the kitchen."

It was the warmest room in the house. The one I had used as a nursery after Elly was born. There was a narrow bed in it, as I remembered. Though, after sixteen years ...

We got my box. I carried it myself. There seemed to be no one else to carry it. The bed was still there, full of mice. The whole room was very dirty. Why was my whole history one of being given dirty rooms to occupy? "If you'll send me up a serving maid or two," I suggested.

"Serving maid," she said vaguely, as though she should know the word but had forgotten it. "Maid?"

"Women. Who clean rooms, who sweep floors."

"Oh. Of course. Yes."

As we had come along the corridor, I had noticed that the little linen room was shut, just as I had left it when I had gone away with the key in my pocket. The key was still in the deep pocket of my cloak where I had thrust it when I left. Though it seemed a wild hope, I went back to the closet and tried the key. Inside were sheets and covers and two clean ticks, and pillow cases and the extra pillows I had made when we killed the geese the last fall I had been in the Dower House. The mice hadn't been at it, or if they had, the chunks of black hellebore root scattered along the shelves had poisoned them. The cupboard hadn't been opened in all those years! No one had wanted to break it open; perhaps there had been no locksmith available. Perhaps Lydia had simply been too lazy to bother. The linens still smelled faintly of lavender as I carried sheets and pillows and one of the ticks back to the nursery in time to meet two maids, one of them the girl who had answered the door, the other an older version. Slatterns, both. They regarded me with insolent immobility, jaws moving like cows.

"You will clean this room," I said quietly. "You will use soap. Scrub the floors. Sweep down the cobwebs. Scrub out the windows. Take that mattress away and bring me clean straw for this one."

They looked at one another, back at me, challenging me to make them move. Aha. Well and a day.

"Else," I smiled, "I will summon a dragon to eat you both." I snapped my fingers and made fire dart at them so that they screamed. It was a fine, hard fireflight, which told me I was in a time when magic flowed strong.

They had no more sense of how to clean a room than of how to fly. I kept coming back and making them do it over, getting a little angrier each time and they getting a little more frantic at the fire biting them. The whole house was evidence of their slipshod ways, theirs and Lydia's. As for Lydia, she had gone upstairs to lie about on a disordered bed with her elder daughters and the twins, playing the lute (tunelessly) and singing (less melodiously than Grumpkin had used to howl) and talking of the future. I put on my cloak for a reconnaissance and overheard them from the hallway. Their plans seemed to consist of selling Wellingford and going to London to live on the fruits of that sale. For a moment I struggled with this idea, certain that Elladine was the heir if all the Wellingford brothers were dead. But, of course, she was not. Young Edward was the heir: the six-year-old monster whom I caught torturing a dog in the stables, and whose britches I set alight to teach him better manners. He looked nothing like Edward. Nothing at all. Edward, my poor sweet fish, taken twice on the same hook!

And where was Elladine? Over an indescribably bad dinner, I asked again for my "grandniece."

"Poor Elladine," Lydia murmured. "Such an unfortunate name to give a child. Not a Christian name, surely."

"But where is she?"

"She goes off. On a horse, sometimes. Sometimes afoot. We're never sure where she is. Poor child. First motherless, then fatherless, I'm sure she'll be so glad to meet any kin at all."

"You and Edward were married in ... what year?" I asked.

"In the year of the second Death. Almost at once after Robert and Janet died," she said, "together with Robert's youngest brother and all their sons. Edward was the heir, and he felt he needed someone to help him maintain the estate. And, of course, I'd been left a widow and desperately needed someone to help me, as well. Four fatherless children to rear, with people dying everywhere, it is no pleasant Maytime to be alone in such circumstance, believe me. Edward most wanted someone to care for Ella. I told him I would maintain his daughter if he would maintain me. It was not a love match, precisely, though I was fond of Edward."

Poor Edward. Destined always to be a husband of convenience. "How did you meet?"

"Janet was my cousin. I was visiting here when the plague struck. Oh, there were many visitors, then. Robert and Janet had taken in half the countryside who were homeless. I remember Janet going on and on about being unable to keep the place clean."

Which is why the plague had struck Wellingford, I thought. Poor Janet. So charitable. Giving a home to the multitude, with all their fleas.

"Of the Wellingfords, only Edward and Ella were left alive when the dying paused for a time," Lydia said, leading me into the next room as we heard the maids breaking crockery behind us. She went on to give me the details of the dying, with an unnecessary relish in the recounting, interrupting herself to say, "Ah, here she is!"

A ravishingly beautiful young woman came through the door. Sixteen or seventeen, perhaps. Wild dark hair. Wild dark eyes. A bruise on one cheek. Hands coarse and scratched and black around the nails.

"Elladine, this is your father's Aunt Catherine," Lydia said in a kindly tone, edged with some emotion I did not quite understand.

"What would she have here, madam? What's left?" the girl asked insolently. It was the same tone in which Candy might have said "So?" or "Big deal!" in the twentieth.

Lydia flinched, giving me an apologetic glance. Discipline wasn't Lydia's forte either, poor thing. I had yet to find what Lydia's forte was. Surely she must have had something to recommend her to Edward. Or was he so distraught at all the dying, he had grasped her as he, drowning, might have grasped at a straw? Ah well, if discipline was not her thing, neither were manners my daughter's.

"Elly, my dear," I said, kissing my child on her unwelcoming face. "I am your great-aunt, from Ylles, come to visit you."

She gave me a look to tell me she did not care. Her face was Jaybee's face, made feminine, made soft, but with broken glass beneath it. Her hand, as she pushed me away, was as hard as his had been. Elladine remained with us only so long as we held her in unwilling conversation, then departed as quickly as she might, and I stared after her, wondering what I could do to make this situation tenable.

I thought, her mouth is wide and sensual. She has hooded eyes. Her figure is as graceful and lithe as mine once was. Her breasts curve like the swell of a sail, and her cheeks are softly rose. She is beautiful, not as I was, but nonetheless, beautiful. I cannot tell if she is intelligent. She is hard as stone.

I wondered, how much of her hardness is my fault? How much of this iron rancor came from doing without a mother's love?

There was no time to weary myself assessing guilt. Someone had to see to her, see to things, and it was obvious that Lydia could not see to boiling an egg. Though Elladine could use a parent, I could scarcely introduce myself as her mother. I had no idea whether Edward settled anything on her or not before he died. Without a dowry, her future would be unenviable. All I could do under the circumstances was to be her aunt, stay with her, and try to remedy the situation.

LATER

Later yesterday I met Lydia's four older children. The two daughters are awkward and ungainly girls, both with an intransigent dirtiness about them. The younger one, eighteen perhaps, would not be bad looking if she were cleaner, and if she would stand up straight and comb her hair. The older, however, Gloriana, a maiden of some twenty years, is taller than any woman I have ever seen. She has a face that could carve stone and hands as big as a large man's. I knew at once who was responsible for the bruises on Elladine's face. Gloriana's hands twitch, knot, twitch again whenever she looks at Elly, like creatures with a will of their own. She is as full of anger as Elladine is, though from a different cause. An ugly girl who hates girls who are not. When I heard her voice, it was no surprise. Hers was the knife-edged shriek from the kitchen. That both of the girls are slovens simply fills out the picture. Their shifts have not been washed in many a season, their nails are brown with unthinkable dirt, their hair, I warrant, is as full of lice as mine was when I woke at Westfaire.

The boys, Harry and Bert, looked slightly less dirty when I met them. I believe their relative cleanliness may be due to their having been caught in the rain oft times while hunting. Both are beefy boys, red in the face, big in the teeth, with small eyes and large noses. They are even taller than Gloriana. Though Lydia is a woman of average size, her first husband must have been a giant to have begot these monsters.

Of the twins, the least said the better. They have been spoiled so rotten that they smell of corruption. Neither has ever been forced to do anything he or she did not want to do. They have two voices: a whine; a scream. They have no graces at all.

So, if the family is of little use, what about the servants? There are serving women about the place, but I recognize none of them. Besides the two who eventually finished cleaning my room, I found several more, enough to do the washing, sweep out the filthy hall, bring in wood for the fire, heat the kettle and fill the tubs. Lydia's daughters could have bathed. Their clothes could have been scrubbed. I wonder why they choose instead to go about in dirt? Well, they could do as they chose, but the Dower House need not follow their example.

I slept last night in a clean chamber. I rose this morning at dawn. I found the maids still sleeping, routed them out, and set them to work, though they grumbled mightily when I told them to clean the fireplace in Elly's chamber, saying that she always did that herself.

"Elly," I explained sweetly, "is my nephew's daughter. She does not sweep chambers, carry out slops, or make up fires. You do. You do it well and consistently or you will be eaten alive by dragons!" I glared at them and they cowered.

Elly came upon me in mid-dudgeon, carrying a pail of ashes. She shook her head at me angrily. "It won't do any good," she sneered. "Stepmama won't keep after them once you're gone. They're lazy sluts, all of them." I noticed again that her nails were black.

"They certainly won't do it if you do it for them," I suggested. "Go wash your hands."

One of the maids sniggered behind me. I set a small imp to pinch her black and blue, and her howling could be heard for half a mile. It had a salutary effect on the others. I smiled at Elly, who regarded me with dawning interest.

"You know what these sluts call me," she asked. "Ella of the Ashes. Just because I carry out the ashes so I can get the fire in my room to burn. The others are so lazy, they'd rather freeze. They all pile in one bed together to keep each other warm. Like pigs."