The Marsh King's Daughter (45 page)

Guichard nodded at the statement and rubbed the side of his jaw. He looked at his wife. 'A hundred marks is a paltry sum when held against five hundred,' he remarked in a voice devoid of expression.

'You cannot kill a man already dead,' Nicholas responded in a similar tone.

A wintry smile parted Guichard's fair beard. 'No, but I can resurrect one for that price,' he said.

Miriel was woken by the sound of an April squall blustering against the bedchamber shutters. It rattled the slats and shook the latches as if seeking entrance to the darkened room beyond.

She pulled herself up in the bed and stared dully around the room whose walls had been the boundary of her world for the past three weeks while she recovered from the childbirth that had almost killed her. Most of the time she slept, if not naturally, then with the induced oblivion of poppy in wine for she could not bear to be awake with her thoughts. Her grief was a wave so huge that she had no notion of how to sail on it to survive. Nicholas and their child, murdered both. Although she knew that the baby had been taken from her, the blood that still stained the linen pad between her thighs was like a continuous accusation.

Two days ago she had begged Elfwen to put a powerful sleeping dose in her wine so that she might slumber for eternity. Shocked, the young woman had burst into tears and refused. The request had been reported and vigilance increased. Now she was scarce left alone for a moment lest she take it into her head to hang herself with a bedsheet, or tip over the brazier and set the room alight. She had contemplated both and decided against them since they were fallible, involved yet more suffering and would take too long. Death by sleep would have been easy and gentle.

She was alone, but not for long, she knew. Either Elfwen would appear, or Robert, or one of the women he had employed to tend her. Miriel stretched out her hand to the cup on the bedside. It was empty of all but sticky lees and the tantalising smell of the drug that would grant her oblivion. She licked her lips, feeling longing and nausea and disgust.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs, two sets, and she heard Elfwen's voice, bright and talkative. Miriel lay back and closed her eyes. She had no wish for visitors.

The door opened. Although her lids were shut, she saw with her ears. The click of the latch, the familiar thrusting sound as the wood caught slightly on the floor, the creak of the hinge.

'Of course, she may be asleep,' Elfwen said.

'Then wake her. I haven't come all this way just to listen to her snoring,' said Alice Leen in her peremptory voice. 'Small wonder if this is a sick room. It smells like one! Let's have these shutters opened!' 'But the light, it disturbs her!'

'Hah, then let her be disturbed. She can't lie there for the rest o' her life like a grub in a cabbage leaf.'

Miriel's irritable apathy was enlivened by a spark of indignation. Opening her eyes, she struggled up against the bolsters and was in time to see Alice Leen hobble over to the shutters and free the catches. A glorious, sun-washed spring day gusted into the room, flapping the wall hangings, fluttering the garments on the clothing pole and chasing away the cloying smell of poppy-seasoned wine.

'Better,' said Alice, sucking her teeth in approval, and turned round on her walking stick to stump over to the bed where Miriel was squinting at her, thoroughly bedazzled by the return of so much light.

'Didn't think you were asleep,' Alice commented, easing down on to the stool at the bedside.

'What are you doing here?' Miriel demanded, her tone less than welcoming.

Alice
did not seem in the least put out; indeed, she grinned. 'Elfwen told her mam she was worried about you, and her mam told me. Said as you'd taken the loss of the babe hard and were refusing to leave your bed.'

'It is no concern of yours,' Miriel said with a furious look at Elfwen who was wringing her hands.

'I didn't build up my weaving trade to see you squander it,' Alice snapped. 'Only sold it to you because I thought you were a woman after my own heart - strong as sword steel and able to withstand the blows of the world. Now I find you malingering in bed feeling sorry for yourself instead of picking up the pieces of your life.'

Miriel pushed herself further up and back against the bolsters. Anger surged through her. 'If you knew anything about my life, you would not dare to come here and say such things,' she said furiously. 'My child is dead and I am in living death. Your paltry weaving weighs as nothing in the balance when compared to that. Go away and bother the monks with your tongue, not me.'

Alice
too drew herself up to do battle. 'I know more than enough about your life,' she spat. 'God's eyes, I've lived more than the half of it myself, and most of the time I did not have your pampered advantages. Do you think I wallowed abed in misery when my babies died or when a childbirth went wrong and I was sick? I didn't have that luxury, my girl. Folk were depending on me. If my cloth wasn't sold, then my weavers didn't eat. And that weighs in the balance more than a child that never had the opportunity to know the gripes of starvation, or a wench who would rather turn her face to the wall than square up to her responsibilities!'

Biting her lip, looking frightened at the storm she had unwittingly unleashed, Elfwen fetched Alice a cup of wine.

Rendered speechless, Miriel stared at the old woman. Her tirade had been as effective as a bucket of winter water in the face. Poisonous old besom, was Miriel's instinctive response, but beneath that, beneath the defensive anger, was the shameful knowledge that Alice's savage words contained a shred of truth.

Alice
downed the wine and it went straight to her cheeks, tinting the vellum hue of her skin with apple-crimson. 'You get out of that bed and on your feet. The past's for leaving behind,' she said with a vehement nod at her own wisdom.

The tart comment came to Miriel's lips that Alice did not practise what she preached in the matter of her former business where her nose was always intruding, but she bit it back. 'It is not always so simple to leave it behind,' she remarked instead.

'Never said it was.' Alice thrust the cup at Elfwen and walked on her stick to Miriel's dress pole. Her hands plucked and sorted. 'You could open a clothing stall with all these,' she said.

A memory came to Miriel, surfacing with all the clarity and brightness of the April day pouring into the room. Herself standing in a graveyard, consumed by a hideous, louse-infested grey dress with green embroidery; Nicholas laughing as she cursed him. The incident had been neither amusing nor pleasant at the time, but in hindsight it seemed both. If only she had known then what she knew now. If only she had stayed with him. Instead, she had trodden her own thorny path to disaster and cushioned it along the way with fine clothes and material goods. Now the rich dresses through which Alice was sorting might as well have been beggar's rags.

'Here.' Alice returned to the bed with a gown of deep rose-pink wool. 'Wear this, it'll give you some colour. I want to see those weaving sheds, and you can't show me from your bed.'

Miriel found herself being bullied into donning proper clothes for the first time in three weeks. Elfwen combed and dressed her mistress's hair, cross-gartering the plaits with strips of rose-coloured braid, her every movement anxious and swift as if at any moment she expected Miriel to sink back into her world of drowsy apathy.

Miriel submitted to her attentions with resignation. It was easier to swim with the tide than fight against it, and standing up to Alice had exhausted her reserves.

'Better,' Alice said as she viewed the maid's finished efforts. 'You don't look like a lost soul any more.'

Miriel grimaced. 'Appearances can be deceptive,' she said on a lingering echo of contrariness.

The act of leaving the bed and walking across the room made Miriel feel weak and dizzy, as if her soul had indeed been lost to her body and, newly reunited, had no concept of how to deal with a cage of flesh. She clutched the doorpost for support. Mouth firm with determination, Alice thrust her walking stick into Miriel's hand. 'Use this,' she said. 'You need it more than I do for the nonce.'

Miriel took the stick. Descending the loft stairs was an ordeal and there was sweat on her brow by the time she reached the main room. The smell of onion pottage wafted from the cooking pot and one of the spinsters was tending it in between twirling yarn from distaff to drop spindle. She looked astonished to see Miriel, and stammered words of welcome. Miriel managed a weak smile in return and progressed slowly outside.

The wind snatched at her garments and almost stunned her with its bright strength. Linen sheets hung on a rope to dry, snapped like the billowing sails of a ship. The sunlight dazzled her eyes which had been accustomed only to darkness for the past three weeks. For a moment Miriel was filled with panic and wanted nothing more than to turn tail and hide in the smallest, darkest corner she could find. As if sensing her mood, Alice took her arm in a firm grip and drew her forward.

'You've come this far,' she said. 'You can go a little further.'

And so Miriel crossed the yard, each step taking her from the dark cage of her sick-bed and into the world she had once known. In the weaving sheds she was greeted with pleasure. The clack of the looms as the sheds changed was like a heartbeat, the flow of the shuttle the pulse of blood. The scent of raw wool hit her like the aroma of cooking and she experienced a hollow hunger that she had not realised existed. Alice was right, life did go on, even if it was irrevocably altered.

The old woman was watching her with her sharp, miss-nothing eyes. 'Aye,' she said. 'This is what you need.'

Robert returned from an outlying hamlet two days later. Miriel had abjured the loft chamber for a cushioned bench in the weaving shed. Alice Leen had stayed to keep her company and was enjoying her role both as guest and unofficial supervisor of the weavers.

'Be a surprise for your husband to find you up and about,' she said as they heard the clatter of hooves in the yard and saw the stable lad go running.

Miriel murmured appropriately and rose to her feet. She was not looking forward to greeting him. He had watched over her in her illness and made sure that if he was not by then she was always well attended. He had been gentle and thoughtful, caring for her every need with a devotion that others perceived as selfless and which Miriel found cloying and self-seeking. He had what he wanted and he could afford to be magnanimous. It was as if she had leaned against a rock for support and discovered too late that its firm surface concealed a devouring mouth that was slowly engulfing her. Not once had he mentioned the dead child or acknowledged that she needed to grieve. It was a distasteful incident and now it was dead and buried - in an unmarked grave.

Slowly she went out into the yard. Robert stopped in the midst of dismounting and stared at her. Then his lips parted in a delighted grin. He took his foot from the stirrup and strode to greet her. 'Sweetheart, what a glad sight for road-sore eyes!' he declared and kissed her on either gaunt cheek and then full on the mouth.

She held herself stiffly under his embrace, the image of the engulfing rock so powerful in her mind that it was all she could do not to wrench away. The wet mouth, the fringed bristle of beard like a mollusc, the intrusion of his expanding merchant's belly against her own, empty and barren now. Nausea surged. She clenched her stomach.

'If Alice had not dragged me out, I would have stayed in my room until I died,' she said.

'Alice?' He looked round and as his eyes fell on the old woman watching him by the weaving sheds, his lids tensed. 'Not that interfering old sow.'

'If not for her, I would still be in my sick-bed instead of welcoming your return,' she defended, beginning to wonder if Alice's intervention had been a blessing or a curse. Without it, Miriel could have turned her face to the wall and feigned sleep to greet her husband's arrival.

'Then I will bear with her,' he said with a forced smile. 'But I hope she is not staying long.'

'I think not,' Miriel answered, knowing that Alice would likely depart with the morrow's dawn. Robert's antipathy was returned full measure where the old woman was concerned. And her own antipathy? Miriel went to fetch him a drink, falling into the customary habit of a wife and feeling as numb inside as an empty vessel. She could not fill herself with Robert's love, for it would be like drinking poison. Her sustenance, as before, would be her work. The fine bolts of cloth would be her offspring. The resolution caused an involuntary shudder to ripple up her spine as she looked at Alice, scowling on the bench, and saw herself in forty years' time.

Robert was in an expansive mood that evening. His business was flourishing. The death of Maurice de la Pole had been the turning point and he was amassing wealth as swiftly as the layer of fat around his waist. 'Who knows,' he said, in between taking decisive bites out of the chicken thigh in his fingers, 'by next year I could buy us a title. How would you like to be Lady Willoughby and a have a fine manor house to accompany your gowns?'

Miriel smiled so as not to cause confrontation. What would he say if he knew what lay under that old wooden coffer in the store room? She could have a fine manor house now if she wanted, would have jumped at the chance once, but now it seemed not to matter.

'Hah!' Alice sniffed from her end of the table. 'A beggar may put on the robes of a king, but he'll always be a beggar underneath.'