Black Juice (3 page)

‘She isn’t one for anything much,’ says my Gerd. ‘A flash of fire, a prickly bit of lightning. She doesn’t know what she herself’s about, let alone her lord and his lordship.’

Night falls while we’re in the hills, a clear night with no moon yet. I catch up with Mullord spelling his horse, walking the Grey Comb, a shadow in the starlight.

‘Berry,’ he says as I come up.

‘Mullord.’

He’s walking purposive, has not lost his stride. I dismount and walk beside, as I can here, trotting a little to keep up. But he does not disburthen himself to me, for the full length of the Comb; he watches his footing and keeps moving, as if she has a hook in his breast and is drawing him to her through the night, and all he can feel is the pain of it, and work and work to ease it.

The Plunge by starlight is a dire place, and not something you hurry. You hold yourself by teeth and ears and your horse’s toenails to that cliff, and promise Nature anything if she’ll let you out the other side. You ponder nothing but getting step to step; there’s no time even to curse the lady who brought you here.

And then I’m wobbling with relief on the flat, and the paler darkness of the road swings out of the trees and into our path, and I think we have a chance again.

My cousin the innkeeper is already out, with a lamp and fresh horses ready.

‘You’re in luck,’ he says. ‘They needed a wheelwright. I sent them over Yarrow way to Dipsy Wheeler, but I don’t know as they’ll make it as far as that.’

‘And our lady was among them?’ Mullord cuts in.

Cousin’s eyes dart aside.

‘How was she conducting herself? Tell me true, man. Was she upright?’

‘She was upright and … she was singing, Mullord.’

‘Had they plied her with wine?’

‘She-she-she gave every appearance of being sober, sir.’ He busies himself with some harness-straightening at my foot.

‘Come, Berry,’ says Mullord, and kicks his horse into a trot.

My cousin stands back and casts me a look that says,
Didn’t we all know it would come to this?
and it’s off with us into the night again.

Heaven Seat pushes its stony shoulders up out of the forest beside us. Mullord disappears into the trees, and my mare follows him. I keep my head down and see almost nothing until we reach the place where we leave the horses. Even walking up to the Seat, there’s only the master’s shape
striding against tangle upon darker tangle. When we clear the brush, the starlight makes me squint after such close darkness, and the breeze is sudden and cold.

She always drew your eye to her, did the mistress. There at the edge of the farmlands spilling along the valley floor, in the golden whirl of the rag-tags’ camp, that’s her dancing, that’s the spinning, sparkling skirt of her. There are other women, of course, but none have cause to move so fiercely. Tiny shouts come up to us, miniature cheers, scrapings of music, fine as crickets’ wheezing.

And Mullord pauses. I thought he would cry her name out and rage down the hill, dagger drawn. I thought he’d be set afire by the final sight of her, after all this riding, after all this strife. But he pauses, and seems blind, the gleam of their distant camp in both his gazing eyes.

‘Will we go down, sir?’ I say, at last.

There’s time for a reel to finish, a round of gleeful cries, the fiddler to tune up and another faster dance to begin, before he speaks. ‘Yes, Berry, we’ll go down. But slowly, silently.’

‘You want to surprise them, sir?’

‘I’ll do nothing yet.’

We slip back into the dark brush, and cross the road at the Seat’s foot, into the more open forest. It’s a while of walking before we hear the music stronger, before shards and flickers of fire-orange show among the trees. Mullord moves quieter and quieter, until he’s like a cat stepping silent through the
forest, not snapping twig nor rasping leaf. I stay a little behind him and choose the same quiet places to let my foot fall.

We come up to the camp behind the broken wagon. The music digs fingers into my brain and twirls it like a top. I remember from last night the feverishness of it, fast impatient music that demands new steps of your feet. Those tunes are the only fine thing the rag-tags have—the rest is missing teeth and leathery skin and ruffianly manners.

They’ve built up a great fire just like the one in the keep courtyard, a great cone twisting to a sparking plume at the top. They’re all dancing, from the old toothless ones to the little staggerers jigging and tumbling at the edges. And the mistress is being passed (or passing herself—it’s hard to say) from hand to hand around the circle, a whorl within a whorl. Her fine blood shows, and her less fine—she has bearing, but she also has their energy, their not wanting to be bothered with courtliness, with subtle talk and after-you-no-after-youmullord ways.

I arrive at Mullord’s side. He stands like a statue; only the gleams in his eyes move. His hands don’t clench; his jaw is not set with rage. What is the man made of, that he can have such outrage before his eyes and be calm? That he can watch his own wife cavort with the rubbish of the earth and keep his temper?

More astounding still, that he can smile! I stare at him. Yes, it’s true! It’s not just fire-flicker tweaking his mouth, but—what? Mirth? Joy? I hunt and hunt for wryness or
bitterness in his face, for poison, for grief. I find none. He might be watching the children’s tourney on Midsummer Eve, benign—charmed even.

Rage surges at my throat. Were she my wife—But I chose a good wife, one that would steady me in my youth and companion me in my old age. Mullord, steady in himself from his very beginnings—well, what was he after, taking this wild girl to him? She’s ornament enough, but does she care for his holdings and his duty? Does she mind about his people, like a proper lady? I’d swear sometimes he wed her expressly to crumble his keep from within, to stab his right hand with the dagger held in his left.

Mullord steps out of the forest, idly almost, lightly. I strain after him, frightened to follow, frightened of the noisy dancers and of what they will make of him. And he walks forward unnoticed, to the ring of dancers. And he joins them, and begins to hand the women along, just like all the others.

I hold my breath as she comes around to him. I watch for the slight change of his rhythm that will mean he has gone for his dagger. She will slump to the ground; the whole spellbound lot of them will fall into disarray, the music will go on for a little, until fiddler and drummer see the confusion and stumble in their rhythm and stop, and then it’ll be all blood and horror, with Mullord in the centre, dealing out the punishment they so richly deserve.

She comes to him. She twirls. She passes on.

She did not even see him, I think.

And he, he might not care a jot; he reaches for the next raggy woman in her garish dress, with her eye-paint and her brass earrings and her mouth like a hole in her face, and he spins her too, as if she were noble as his lady.

‘Strike me!’ I’m saying in the bushes. ‘Knock me down with a goose-feather! What’s the man up to?’

I keep watching. I think, maybe the third time he’ll have built up rage enough to strike at the minx’s heart. But the third time passes, and the seventh, and the twelfth. All the magic numbers pass, and then the music changes, and a shout goes up, and each man takes hold of the woman in front of him, and some men grasp men and some women women, and the big circle breaks up into many smaller circles. Mullord, he isn’t lost in there—he’s taller, and cleaner of skin, and smoother-haired than any of them—but he’s as lost as a lord can be among rag-tags, a witch in his arms and his wife in the arms of a fox-eating thief.

I don’t see the moment his lady notices him, whether she has the grace to startle, or whether she cries out in joy to see him there, the best of both her worlds dancing at the same fire. But I see them partnered in the dance, just like gipsies, as if they care no more and no less for each other than for any of the mad-caps whirling around them. They move on with no glance back, but give themselves entirely to the next man, the next woman the dance whirls into their path.

But she deserves killing, for what she does to Mullord’s heart! She deserves beating at least for stupidity, running away
from the finest, wisest lord that ever lived. And here he is—he lets her play, lets her have her way, never shows her the pain she causes him. She dances, and
he dances with her
as if none of it mattered: not her night’s carousing in the courtyard of his keep; not her snuffing out the life, perhaps, of good loyal Minnow; not our long ride after her over the hills and down the Plunge—

’Tis
I
who hold the mattering, the bitterness, on his behalf, on behalf of us all. I hold and stir and carry it back and forth among the bushes, until it curdles into a poor kind of sleep. All night I lie where I can lift my head and see the fire and the dancers, where I can hear a change—though no change comes—in the music or the mood, where I can wait in sick discomfort, for morning and for sanity.

A
S NIGHT LIFTS INTO THE FIRST GREY OF DAWN
, I walk the curving road around Heaven Seat. Mullord has gone on ahead to fetch our horses. I’m to walk the mistress—on the keep’s best mount, that she helped herself to—around by the road to meet him.

I feel as if I’ve breakfasted on grit, as if sand has been rubbed into my eyes, as if moss-clumps have been shaken through my clothes and left them damp and itchy. I’ve dreamed so many endings to these dreadful days, I cannot tell whether this is just more dreaming.

And when she speaks, I cannot tell if it’s her or my own mind speaking. Her voice is ragged from the long night’s singing and smoke.

‘You don’t care greatly for me, do you, Berry?’

‘It is not my place to think of you any particular way, Mistress,’ I say, without turning to her.

‘I asked you a question; have the grace to answer it.’ The voice is soft and rough, and perhaps knows my answer already.

Field and forest are utterly silent around us. It’s that moment when the birds pause between waking and heralding the dawn. The road leads us into thicker grey air, full of silty shapes that might become green, might become brown, with time, with light. I search my own grey heart for some truth. It’s a long search, while the horse idles along beside me, his great warm head at my shoulder.

The mistress makes some patient movement with her arm, perhaps to push her loosening hair from her eyes. The expensive sound of sleeve against bodice enrages me anew. A dress such as my Gerdie would never dream to wear, the new dress, freshly boned and beaded and trimmed, in which Madam made her first grand entrance into the keep two nights ago, graciously acknowledging the gipsies’ yodels of admiration—now that rich dress is singed, and splashed with wine, and its lace-bands are torn off and given to some witch-woman back at the wagon. Hours of work, it will take, to bring it back from such a state, hours Mullord will go sleepless about his duties, hours the mistress will no doubt sleep away in her feather bed, aware of naught but her own comfort.

I wait to speak, until I know my voice will not shake with
anger. ‘Mullord sees something in you,’ I finally say, ‘beyond your beauty and beyond your rage at the world. If he sees it, I believe it must be there.’

She gives a tiny, mirthless laugh. We round the bend beside the Seat. Up among the trees a horse greets the master with a whinny.

‘Continue, Berry.’

‘Mistress?’

‘
My lord
sees something in me, you say. But does Berry see?’ She’s not jesting; she’s asking me for a piece of myself, without telling me how she’ll use it; whether she’ll toss it away, and Berry with it, or hold it in her heart to fester and poison my life with.

I stroke the bay’s head for comfort. There’s no care inside that great skull; nothing will ever come out of those tunnel nostrils, that soft-leather mouth, but grassy air.

‘Why, I see the rage, as we all do. And I see the beauty, for no one could miss that either.’ That prickle of lightning, which doesn’t know its own power.

The tree-shadows muffle nothing—not my voice, not the mistress’s fine ears. ‘But the other thing—I cannot lie to you, Mistress. I do not see it.’

We wait at the bottom of the path. The sun creaks a little higher at the edge of the world, and I can see the mistress’s face composed, raised to the scrubby hillside, her beauty no less for the absence of its usual colour, for the shadows exhaustion has painted around her eyes.

‘I will tell you, Berry,’ she says, her voice broken to a croak, ‘I cannot see that other thing either.’

And in that moment I glimpse it, in that ruefulness, in that bearing. Danced to a rag and faced by only herself in the morning, still she is straight-backed and undiminished.

She turns to me, and a comb from her head tinkles to the road. The hair falls sumptuous on her shoulders, unrolls down her back, pools in her lap. She meets my eye, her face white and cool.

‘So we must both trust my lord’s sight,’ she whispers, ‘and hold onto that trust, mustn’t we? ’Tis all either of us can do.’

I bend to retrieve the comb. As I straighten, I find myself smiling. I have never looked her full in the face before.

She does not smile back; I never expected that. There won’t ever, I don’t think, be smiles and kindnesses out of this Mullady. She regards me a moment longer with her shadowed eyes. Then she turns her head, and I turn mine, and we both are still, listening to the master and horses come down the hill.

‘H
AVE YOU
GOTTA
DO THAT
?’ It was my first time out with Jelly; I was used to quiet.

But Jelly had class, and all the allergies that come with that. He hawked and gobbed in the corner one last time. ‘Yeah, or it chokes me. Whaddaya see?’

‘When I can
concentrate
… nothing yet.’

In the circle of the sights, the wet banner sagged. Of
Jeux des Bouffons
, I could only read
Jex Buffs
, and the face beside it was folded across the middle, so it wasn’t even red-nosed.