Dark Maiden (9 page)

Finally at peace, she lay with Geraint amongst the grasses, content to watch the blue sky and listen to the skylarks.

England, the North, six months later

It was the day before Christmas Eve and a whole night past the danger of the winter solstice. The place should have been filled with a happy tumble of baking, spitting and roasting. Women and children should have been gathering green stuff to hang from the beams of their cottage roofs. The men ought to have been in a holiday mood, checking the beer and ale and wandering from house to house to exchange greetings. Instead, the place was still, as silent as a grave and about as welcoming.

And where was the priest? Why had he not appeared to welcome her?

Yolande glided down the stone track that wound through the cluster of houses to the church. Halme was certainly rich but the whole village had a gray, beaten look. The cottage doors were pointedly closed against her as she passed.

Perhaps it is because of my color or because I wear man’s clothes
, she reflected, but she sensed it was more. These folk were afraid.

But why? The great pestilence appeared to have left them untouched. There were no empty homes, no untended fields or fences. The reeve here, Michael Steward, clearly kept all tidy, with the lord’s lands as well-tended as the villagers’ and the sturdy cows and sheep free of pests and blight. Still, fear crept around them like a low fog.

Does the priest here sense this? If he does not, he is a poor creature, but if he does, why does he do nothing?

She breathed in slowly, seeking to catch any scent of sulfur, any whiff of the restless dead. She caught no such stink, but russet-cheeked Michael Steward, shorter and stockier than she was and stamping along beside her, tightened his grip on his staff.
He wants to ask me what I sense.

“How long has it been this way?” she asked, gesturing to a closed door.

“What?”

He was not a stupid man. Yolande asked again, more bluntly. “For how long has Halme been afflicted with night terrors that turn people against honest travelers and strangers? And your priest—”

His full lips quivered and a torrent burst from him as he interrupted. “Night terrors! No, madam, those would be a blessing compared to what my girls and the other maids here presently endure. Filthy dreams of carnal couplings and handsome demons fondling them!”

“Alms,” called a new voice, issuing like the voice of God himself from the churchyard. “Alms for a poor, misjudged soul who never did any harm…”

What has he done now?
Yolande quickened her pace and vaulted over the low stone wall bordering the churchyard, leaving the reeve to go the long way ’round by way of the church gate.

“In thought or deed,” the voice went on.

Behind her, Michael Steward finished his complaint with, “And my youngest daughter is but twelve years old.”

“They are dreams and dreams can be fought,” Yolande countered with firm reassurance, striding across the grass. Halme’s priest was still absent but a handsome, tanned fellow sat in the churchyard stocks, batting away pebbles and rotten fruit as if he made great sport with the crowd. Geraint loved working an audience.

“Gentle lady,” he addressed her, sweeping his tasseled cap off his riot of black curls. “Pity, I pray you, and tell these good folk I am no thief.”

“You know this man?” Michael Steward forgot the plight of his three daughters in his doughty disapproval of her companion, who grinned and clapped his bare feet together like a pair of hands.

“Geraint Welshman is my servant.”

That was the lie she and Geraint had decided upon so she could spend last night at the reeve’s house and Geraint could spend it watching the graveyard and church for any sign of revenants.

So what is he doing in the stocks? Look at him, winking at me and juggling pebbles for the crowd. He may be a strolling player but does he have to turn every occasion into a show? He can be out of those stocks in a moment. Why isn’t he?

A buxom matron pushed to the front of the tightly knit group. “He stole a loaf of my bread and put his hand up my dress.”

Geraint answered roundly, “I paid for the bread, goodwife, with my tumbling and kept my hands to myself.” Iron bit into his next words. “This I swear, especially the last.”

“You call me a liar to my face?”

“I say you are mistaken. No more, no less.”

Yolande knew he was aggrieved. Geraint might filch a king’s deer or a lord’s trout but he did not thieve from the people and he never made free with his fingers. Glancing at the blush on the older woman’s neck, she understood the desire—did she not feel it herself, every day? But even so, matters had gone far enough.

“I have two good silver pennies here to see my servant set free before his feet rot off,” she intervened, hoping she sounded tart and disinterested.

Sprawling in the stocks as if on the most comfortable of thrones, Geraint rolled her another bow. “Lady, you are all grace but I wish to prove my innocence.”

Stubborn man.
“I thought you were keeping guard over this place,” Yolande said in Welsh, a language he had patiently taught her these last six months.

Six months traveling together, close enough to touch, to lie side by side each night and yet never to join… Why have I heard no reply to my message yet? For how long must we wait?

“I was, until ‘Goodwife Bosom’ took a fancy to me.”

Yolande translated Geraint’s answer in her head and fought to pay closer attention. “You have been in the stocks all night?” she demanded in English.

“That I have, and with no sign of any fresh snow, ghosts, revenants or succubi,” he replied in the same tongue before switching seamlessly back to Welsh. “Although you are tempting enough for any man.”

Glad the bronze of her skin hid her blush, Yolande turned to the reeve. “Can he be freed quickly? I have work here and I need his help.”

This was not strictly true but she would be glad of his company.

“No matter,
cariad
. I have done it myself.”

There had been no creak or turn of the heavy timbers of the stocks but Geraint was beside her, stamping his bare feet against the slightly frosted grass and saying to the reeve, “My lady would not say no to a jug of ale or hot spiced wine and nor would I.”

Finally he was out of the churchyard and away from the hot-breathed matron. Geraint gripped his cup of spiced wine a little tighter, wishing he could be more relaxed.

So why was he not? He was beside a good fire, tucking into a steaming leek porry. Three young lasses sat opposite, adoring him across the flames. Better yet, Yolande sat beside him in that curious squat-with-her-legs-drawn-sideways posture of hers, close enough that one of her long shapely thighs brushed against his. Each time the fire crackled and she shifted slightly in response, their thighs caressed in a sprightly tingle.

We shall be sleeping together by the hearth and in sleep she may snuggle against me.
He wanted more, yes, as did she, but while she worked as an exorcist, Yolande was certain she must be chaste.

“I must labor for a time of seven,” she had said. “I wait for a clear sign and as I wait, I work.”

He did not know what clear sign she waited for—maybe she did not know herself—but he believed her. He had seen and fought too much not to believe.

She was deep in speech with the reeve—they were in the fellow’s house—and Michael Steward grumbled as much as any farmer, although his complaints were not of the weather.

“What are revenants again?”

“Michael,” said his wife, casting a warning look at their three daughters and twin sons. The boys were only seven and as bright and quick as squirrels or Geraint might have suspected them of making mischief and torment for their sisters. But these brothers and sisters indulged each other and he had no fears on that matter.

“Mistress Steward, it is best your youngsters hear this,” Yolande was saying. “Then you may defeat it together.”

“Revenants are spirits who will not rest,” Geraint said before the reeve’s wife had another objection. “They are departed souls who will not leave because they wish to have revenge or justice.”

“Or they cling to a place they loved in life, or to their beloved,” added Yolande quietly.

In an echo of the large-breasted goodwife, the reeve’s wife folded her arms across her middle. “Is this not a matter for our priest?”

“But Godith, Father William is so old, and consider what he says concerning the rest,” Michael pleaded.

“That all trouble is the girls’ own sins.” Godith crossed herself while Yolande sighed and stared into the fire.

“One of
those
priests,” she remarked softly in Welsh.

“Now we know why he did not summon you or come out of his house or church to welcome you,” Geraint answered in the same tongue. “A black female exorcist will be a great evil to him.”

“And Father William has often taken to his bed this past ten days.” Michael shrugged his drooping shoulders in a gesture of hopelessness.

“No priest here and at the darkest time of the year, when spirits and the dead gather,” Yolande said in Welsh. Geraint wished he could tip the priest out of this village and drag in another. The Archbishop of York should be able to help her and would do very well.

“What are you saying? Are you talking about me?” demanded Godith’s youngest daughter.

“No, my lovely.” Geraint snapped his fingers. The girl drew a new blue ribbon from her hair and exclaimed with delight.

Yolande cast him a look. “Still up to your old tricks?”

“You will not wear the ribbons I bought for you, so why should I not give them to these girls?”

The three lasses, chattering like magpies, tugged more new ribbons from their hair.

“How do you do it?” Yolande inquired as the tension in the hut vanished like a burst soap bubble.

“You have the secrets of your trade and I have mine.” He wanted to give her more, of course—bright ribbons, bright tunics to suit her sultry looks—but so far she had smiled at him very prettily for his ribbons but not worn them. And as for tunics…she had told him quietly that an envious spirit or demon would be tempted to tear such clothes off her and he could not argue with that. She was the exorcist.

Their eyes met. What would it be like to kiss her again, really kiss her? He need only lean forward to find out…

His fragile dream was shattered by the reeve, who pushed himself up from the family’s low sleeping platform and said to Yolande, “I have something to show you in the lean-to.”

Geraint gave the rest of his bowl of porry to the twins and leaped to his feet. “I will come too.”

If Michael Steward was about to confess anything, he wanted to hear it. And he was not about to let Yolande out of his protection, whatever her skills.

She may be the exorcist but by the pricking at the base of my neck, I would say there is danger here, a practical, knife-blade kind of risk. My kind of danger.

She knew she and Geraint had been betrayed even before Michael Steward broke into a ragtag run outside the lean-to, galloping and gasping into the night. She knew even before the torches bloomed into fire and the stink of anxious, stale bodies crowded into her nostrils. She knew by instinct as Geraint knew. She could feel the tension in him as he stepped straight behind her, shielding her as he had so often in these past few months.

Yolande had her bow, her sacred bow of Saint Sebastian, but no room to draw it. And she could do better by far than make these fearful people her unrelenting enemies.

The instant before the torches were lit in the dying garden plot of the reeve’s house, she made her plan and acted on it.

She raised her fist and called out, “I have a mandrake here and the seven herbs of Christ. If you do me or mine harm, the herbs will change into spears. The mandrake will turn into a man and you will die.” She paused, allowing her pity for the villagers’ fear to drain away. “You will die badly, believe me.”

“Believe her,” hissed Geraint out of the gloom, keeping out of range of the flickering torchlight. “I have seen the mandrake man and it is terrible.”

“That proves you are a witch!” shouted a woman, and one of the torches swayed as she lost her footing on the damp ground.

“No witch may touch the seven herbs of Christ and live,” said Yolande calmly. Glimpsing a flash of white as another villager moved an arm, she stooped, plucked a pebble from the earth and threw it all in a single movement. The woman howled and dropped her dagger, where it lay gleaming.

“You are black as Satan!” called another woman, and others in the circle echoed her cry.

“Or Saint Maurice or the Magi,” Yolande replied.

Godith came to the door. “How do we know you came in answer to the reeve’s call?”

“I came, Godith, because that is my Christian duty. You need my help here.”

“But you are black,” mumbled Godith. Encouraged by shouts of agreement, she joined the crowd.