Dark Maiden (15 page)

“My flowers, gone,” she whispered, sorry for that even as she raised her body to give him more intimate passage.

“You are a flower,” he answered, sweetly caressing her. “And I shall give you more.”

For the second time in her life, the wild release overcame her, strumming her heart and tingling through her. Thrashing, unable to stifle her cry of pleasure, she sought his hard maleness, longing to grant him such a glorious, complete moment in his turn.

She closed a hand around him, stroking the long, warm and silken shaft, and delicately traced the curving tip, making him gasp. Her father had spoken of peoples that worshiped the phallus. Touching Geraint’s, feeling its strength, life-giving vigor and yearning urgency, she could understand why.

Through half-closed eyes, she saw a shadow flit across Geraint’s ardent face. “I love you,” she whispered, amazed by the depth of their emotion.

The shadow bloomed, casting an impossible glamour over Geraint. He glowed all over as if brushed by the wings of an angel, burnished to a glittering perfection.

A perfection surely more than human.

He looks as glorious as a god, as tempting as a devil.

Suddenly he shuddered, yelling no in Welsh, and rolled away.

“Geraint!” She crawled to him but he kept going, falling off the bed platform. She lunged desperately, trying to catch him, but he was gone. “Geraint!” She scrambled to her knees, scrabbling for her fire flints. “Give me light.” It was half a prayer and half an order to herself.

“No need,
cariad
.” Geraint bounded up from the hut floor.

“Blessed Virgin and Magdalene, protect Geraint,” Yolande called in Latin. “Where is my bow?”

“No need for that.” He moved closer. “Our lusty incubus did not like taking a fall.”

She stared and saw only him, no other. The wild glamour had vanished and it was Geraint, mocking authority as ever.

“Perhaps it reminded him too much of an earlier tumble from grace, eh?”

She was glad he could laugh.

“What an interruption!” Geraint smacked his thighs, whether with humor or irritation, Yolande did not know and did not care to discover. She knew she should be shifting, hunting the incubus, but she was shocked.

A smell of stale perfume hung in the air.
Demons do not reek of sulfur, only the restless dead stink in that way, but devils have their vanity and try to be fragrant.

Her mind was blank. Familiar rituals of banishing and protection were lost to her.

Geraint was almost possessed. What if we had joined while the incubus was in him?
The shame and panic flared in her and Geraint caught her close before she could run out.

“Steady, woman,” he snapped, sensing too much gentleness would only undo her further. “Use the wits God gave you.”

When she struggled, he shook her, alarmed. Her lustrous skin had a faint pallor as if she had been rolled in ash. “Steady, Yolande,” he repeated. “I am me, and me alone.”

“My sin gave the demon a way in.”

He knew the danger of those thoughts of hers and his answer was swift. “When we are wed, we shall be a castle. We shall keep each other’s souls safe, for we shall be one.” She looked ready to dispute more and though he was pleased to see her courage, he did not want her arguing with him. “He tickled my vanity, that demon, for sure.”

Yolande stiffened. “What?”

Sure of her attention, he took a step back, imagining himself juggling, just to calm down a little. “He made me feel I was supreme, the best lover in the world.”

It had been a heady sensation and he had been so wonderfully certain, as if nothing could touch him and he was worthy of worship. A risky sense in a performer, a dangerous one, and the thing that had alerted him to his spiritual intruder.

“Perhaps that is how devils feel all the time,” he remarked, casting out the memory, not wanting to feel it again.
Not if it means sharing my skin and Yolande with another…

“No doubt.” Yolande relaxed slightly.

“Do you think that is how the incubus has worked, by possession?”

“And by dreams. Demons like people to dream. Folk are open in their dreams.”

He almost asked what she dreamed of but knew he should be patient and wait. That was a question for when they were married. “Did it come to Father William first, do you think? Tempt him with a dangerous desire, perhaps for learning?”

“And invoke in the priest a carnal longing for that poor soul who has since died. In her restless, angry death she has possessed the priest for most of his nights, I think.”

“Perhaps he deserved it.”

“Perhaps.” Yolande laced herself together and faced him. “Whoever she was. We should get that parchment, arrange it over the coffin of Martin and then question everyone again,” she went on. “And this time I will ask which women have died of late.”

Geraint nodded agreement. He was ready.

* * * * *

She dug in the churchyard where Martin’s widow showed her Martin’s grave. As Yolande’s spade struck the side of the coffin, the winter sun finally peeped over the horizon.

Thank the Mother for that mercy.

Martin’s corpse did not reek of sulfur but was not so wholesome that she wished to linger. It was tempting to hurry but she forced herself to do everything correctly and give this restless ghost due reverence. Aware of a knot of villagers scuttling from the church and gathering behind her aching back—one reason why she had wanted Geraint facing them and not digging with her—she prayed aloud for Martin and laid the parchment on top of his coffin with as much care as she could manage.

The small of her back ached like a toothache, and the calves of her braced legs were stiff with tension as she leaned over the open grave, straddling the coffin itself.

This was a lustful ghost. I most relieved that I am still a maid and not open to his unwanted attentions.

Dimly, she sensed the crowd watching her every act and was glad when they repeated the “amen” after her. She made the sign of the cross over the body, laid a crucifix at the foot of the coffin, plunging it as deep as she could into the hard winter earth, and sprinkled all with holy water.

She waited, head bowed. No voice came, nothing from the revenant.

“It is done,” she said in Latin.

She might have swayed or, horror of horrors, tumbled into the newly opened grave itself, but Geraint’s sinewy arm held her upright and safe. She turned slowly to the villagers and forced her dry mouth to speak.

“It would be a kindness, a most Christian, neighborly act, to cover him again. He will rest until Judgment Day in peace.” She held out the spade. “Who will aid Martin and his widow?”

The reeve rose from a crouch and took it. As other men hurried to help and the sun rose over the freshly turned earth, Yolande guided Martin’s pale, quaking widow to the house where she and Martin had lived as man and wife. Without prompting, Geraint kept Godith from following by entertaining her and the other womenfolk with a show of tumbling.

Earlier, he had written the parchment at Yolande’s direction—a letter to Martin exhorting him, by God and Saint Martin, to leave this earthly realm and join the saints and angels—and had been surprised by her neat signature. In all, he thought the whole ritual well done indeed. Had he been restless in his grave and fussed over by Yolande, given prayers, holy water, a sacred cross and a parchment lovingly placed over his heart, he would be vastly content.

One soul is put to his eternal rest. We must do the same for the other poor creature, the female revenant. Then there are the wretched priest and the incubus. As Yolande said, so much trouble for one little village.

All the time she had been working, he had sensed that Yolande also kept watch in the churchyard for signs of ghosts or demons. He himself had kept a sharp eye out for Father William. The priest was no longer possessed but that meant nothing. Geraint did not like priests and he did not trust him.

He came upright from a slow somersault and a woman looked him up and down. His heart quickened. “Ladies, you are a perfect audience but allow me to take leave of you for a moment to make water.”

He swept an outrageous, courtly bow and strode from the churchyard, pleased to hear the giggling and whispering behind him. If these women and girls were amused and outraged in equal measures, that would keep them fixed where they were and gossiping.

“That was well done.” The woman who had stared at him approached from behind the stocks. Geraint looked about quickly, checking that Godith was still with the other gossips, then took several deep breaths to steady himself.

“Are you thirsty after? I always was.”

The woman was gray-haired and pale but he could see by her flowing, easy stride and loose-shouldered swing of her arms that she had been a tumbler once.

“Did you work the towns or country?” he asked.

“Neither.” She twinkled an answer at him, clearly delighted he had guessed what she had been. “I was for the royal courts, me. I danced and tumbled for the old king.”

“Edward?” Geraint was hazy about English kings but they were usually Edwards.

“Right! And when I took with child, he gave me a good fellow to marry and we came to Halme.”

Even though she had asked if he was thirsty, the woman had not offered him a drink or told him her name, but Geraint kept pace with her, sensing she had things to say. Side by side, they strolled out into the village. Smoke curled from a few cottages as men kept vigil by their hearths, waiting for the return of their wives and maids from church.

The woman squinted into the sun and cleared her throat, still without stopping. “Your mistress, is she good at what she does?”

“As you were at tumbling.”

“I liked how she dealt with Martin.” She scratched at her forehead and slowed slightly, stepping off the cobbled track toward a well.

Here it comes, whatever it is she wants to say.
Geraint joined her and they peered together into the murky water of the well, Geraint and then the woman each dropping a pebble into its black depths.

“I could not bury my daughter in the church grounds.”

Geraint breathed out softly, still staring at the water. He did not wish to intrude on the woman’s grief.

“
They
would not let me. The priest here—that filthy hypocrite—said she was a suicide.” The woman bent, snatched up another pebble and hurled it into the well. “Hilda was none such. Right to the end, on her deathbed, when he had deserted her and would not even come to give her the last rites, she clung to life. She wanted him to return. ‘William will come, I know,’ she kept saying. She died saying it.”

Geraint gripped the edge of the well, squeezing the stones until his fingers burned in agony, wishing the brute, mute rocks were the priest’s neck bones.

Still the woman spoke. “He took her maidenhead, her peace, her love and then he abandoned her. The whole village knew what he did, how he had seduced her, and they supported
him
. My own man was dead by then and no one would help me. The others, those creeping pigs, they made me bury her by the woodland, far away from sacred ground, and that priest did nothing, nothing! Not even a single prayer.”

Bitterness here for a battalion of fallen angels.
The air lightened around Geraint and a swift, familiar tread had him turning.

Yolande came straight to the woman and gathered her into her arms. “I can help your daughter,” she said. “She will go to her rest, whole and sanctified, with me.”

“Thank Christ,” said the woman, sobbing and shivering. “Thank Christ.”

Yolande gave Hilda’s spirit a final blessing and stepped away from her grave. Hilda was a revenant whose anger and sense of betrayal had been great and more than justified, who had possessed the priest himself as the result of her loss and her spiritual rage.

Preparing to commit Hilda’s earthly body to a better burial, Yolande had dreaded a great struggle with Hilda’s soul. But on that frosty Christmas Eve morning, Hilda, laid to rest with care and love, had been ready to move on.

A bounty of relief and thankfulness overcame Yolande as she turned to Geraint and to Hilda’s mother. “She is at peace. She is with God.”

The older woman began to weep soft, healing tears.

No other villagers had joined them at the grave. Hilda’s mother had argued furiously that she wanted none of them. In the end, Yolande reburied Hilda beneath the holly tree where her mother had scraped her original shallow resting place. The tree made it a sacred place and the herbs she left and the relic she laid beside the tiny, shrouded body added more protection.

“The lass has more sanctity about her than a bishop buried in his church,” Geraint remarked. “As it should be.”

“Someone watches, behind,” Yolande warned him softly in Welsh. So far she had spotted no visible sign of the watcher but she could hear fast, anxious breathing close by. She guessed a figure lingered in deep cover amidst the trees.