The Raven's Head (33 page)

‘Stop! It is a waste!’ Gisa is angry. If the boy could only eat this meat Lord Sylvain is so wantonly throwing away, he might recover.

Sylvain jerks round, staring at her, as if a rabbit has snarled at him. ‘Do you want to eat it?’

She shakes her head. She wants to explain about Peter. Beg him to help. He is powerful enough to keep the boy safe from the White Canons, but would he? She watches the last of the meat fall.

Shafts of sunlight creep, slug-slow, around the tower, slithering through each narrow window in turn. The last gap is always the longest of the day, when the sun seems to have fallen asleep in the sky, but at last it reaches the slit. She hears the distant ringing of the church bell for Vespers and, glancing out, sees the great bulk of Odo plodding across the grass towards the door in the wall to unlock it. She throws her cloak about her shoulders. But just as she is about to hurry down to him, she hears Sylvain’s footsteps descending the staircase above her.

In silence he inspects the various herbs she has left to steep in spirits of wine, dipping glass rods into the flasks, smelling, tasting, drawing the rods slowly over his long pale tongue. She waits in a fever of impatience, glancing agitatedly at the sky. She must get back to her uncle’s house to find food for the boy, but is afraid to depart until she is dismissed.

Finally he turns. ‘It is well done,’ he says. ‘You are diligent and you learn quickly.’

He takes a pace towards her and draws his finger across the throat of the white swan brooch on her cloak. She blushes at his proximity, at his smell. The same long cold finger slides beneath her chin to raise her head, so that she is forced to meet the intense gaze of those poison-green eyes.

‘I told you when you came here that nothing you do or see is to be discussed outside this tower, not with my servants, not with your aunt and uncle, no one.’

‘But I haven’t, I swear,’ Gisa says, suddenly alarmed that he is accusing her.

‘I do not need oaths to know that you have kept your silence. I can read it in your face. Besides, I would be told at once if you had broken your word. There are many outside who ascribe what they cannot comprehend to the devil’s work and others who would seek to use what I do for their own ends. So, I remind you to keep silent. I would not wish to see you suffer as your father did.’

‘My father?’ Gisa is startled. ‘My aunt and uncle have told me little of him, how he died. Can you tell me?’

His fingers stroke the soft skin of her cheek. ‘If, my little swan, you do all I instruct you to do, you will not need to ask, nor will I need to tell you. You will know. Oh, yes,’ he whispers, ‘you will know it in your body and your soul.’

He releases her and she runs down the stairs so fast that she almost slips. Her skin crawls where his fingers touched her face.

She hurries down the track, away from the manor, trying to make sense of what he has said. But she cannot. Her father suffered, Sylvain said. Was he talking about her father’s death or something that happened before he died? And how will she know what that was without being told?

‘Your pardon, mistress, but you dropped this!’

A young man steps out from the shadow of the trees. He bows and hands her a ball of yellow cowslips.

She takes it before his words penetrate her thoughts. Then she realises what he said and thrusts it towards him. ‘You’re mistaken. I didn’t drop this. I’ve no time to make cowslip balls.’

He shrugs and grins, but does not take back the ball. ‘Pity – a beautiful maid like you should have nothing else to do except make cowslip balls to discover her future husband.’

The young man is mocking her. She knows she is not beautiful, not even pretty. Aunt Ebba has told her often enough, and all of Aunt Ebba’s friends agree. Gisa walks away from him down the track, though she can’t bring herself to drop the delicate blossoms.

She is approaching the hole beneath the abbey wall where Peter is hiding, but she deliberately looks the other way for, in spite of his limp, the young man is keeping pace with her and she dare not draw the stranger’s attention to the boy’s hiding place. She must hurry home and return with food for the child.

‘. . . baron shouldn’t make you work so hard,’ the young man is saying. ‘But, then, old Sylvain was always a hard master.’

Startled by his use of the name, Gisa’s thoughts are jerked away from little Peter and she looks at the young man properly. He’s tall and spindly, with hunched shoulders, like a sapling that’s grown bent in a fierce wind. He certainly doesn’t have the muscles of a farmer or a sailor, but he is no clerk either: the bleached gold of his beard and hair is startlingly bright against his tanned face. His deep blue eyes are rather too close together and his nose a little squat, but he has an easy smile, as if he is greeting an old friend. But he is not her friend. Gisa knows by sight every young man who buys and sells in the marketplace, hefts the loads or tends the horses, and he is none of those.

‘You work for Lord Sylvain?’ she asks.

‘No, sweet maid. But we have a mutual friend. In fact, I’ve been trying to call on your master. I have a message from a noble knight, which I am instructed to deliver only to Lord Sylvain’s ears. But that manservant of his won’t let me see him. You know him? Giant of a man, face as sour as a barrel of pickles. Looks as if he thought he was biting into a sausage and found himself chewing a turd instead.’

Gisa giggles. That’s exactly how Odo looks.

‘Not much liked, is he, that master of yours? Most people seem afraid of him. Still, I suppose you can’t expect a man to be as merry as the Lord of Misrule when his wife has run off. But I dare say you’ve got to know him, seen a different side of him. I never believed those rumours about him. Someone actually told me he has a daughter he keeps locked up in his tower, only lets her out to walk at night.’

Gisa feels the young man’s sharp glance, but doesn’t turn her head. Only this afternoon, Lord Sylvain was telling her to say nothing of his business and now here is a stranger asking questions about him. Is this another of Sylvain’s tests?

She turns down a snicket between the backyards of the houses, trying to shake off the young man. It is not possible for them to walk two abreast here, because of the deep open sewers that line the path, but still he limps after her.

With relief she reaches the gate to her uncle’s yard and pulls it open just wide enough to edge through.

‘Gisa!’

She turns, taken aback that he knows her name.

‘Would you take pity on me and ask the baron to grant me an audience? My ship sails soon and I must be aboard. I swore a solemn oath on the Holy Cross of Bromholm to deliver the message to Lord Sylvain and my soul will be cursed in this life and the next if I fail.’

‘Why don’t you write the message or ask a scribe to write it for you? Odo would give him that, I’m sure.’

He takes a step towards her, lowering his voice. ‘This matter is so secret and delicate, I cannot entrust the words to a scribe. Your master would not want anyone else to know of it.’ He leans towards her, and gently takes the hand that still grasps the ball of cowslips. ‘Please,’ he whispers. ‘My name is Laurent. Ask him. Beg him. I shall wait outside the manor all day tomorrow, in the hope that you can persuade him. I know you can. You could persuade the sun to shine in the middle of a storm.’ He gazes earnestly into her eyes. ‘I will wait for you, Gisa. My very soul is in your hands.’

He smiles, and his smile makes her blush, though she doesn’t know why it should. But she gives him no reply. She slips through the gate, closing it firmly behind her. As she crosses her uncle’s courtyard, she pauses by the well to sprinkle drops of water on the cowslip ball to keep it fresh. She reminds herself that the flowers don’t belong to her. She still believes he has given her the cowslip ball by mistake, but all the same it reminds her of his smile and she doesn’t want either of them to fade.

The third day again to life he shall uprise, and devour the birds and beasts of the wilderness, crows, popinjays, pyes, peacocks, and seagulls, the phoenix, the white eagle and the griffin of fearfulness.

Even through the box, I felt the raven’s head tremble with excitement, its beak drumming on the wood, urging me to hurry. For the first time since I’d had the silver head in my possession, I sensed it was willing to let itself be sold. All I’d heard about Sylvain’s love of birds convinced me he would be just the man to buy Lugh and would probably pay me far more than the head was worth, no questions asked. I was almost whooping with excitement: if I succeeded in selling him both the raven’s head and a story, I’d come away with such a weighty purse, his story would be the last I’d ever need to tell.

I’d done well enough out of my stories, enough to buy a bed and a warm meal most days. But I’d had enough of eking out a living on the road. I wanted to be invited to the tables of the wealthy to dine and to have men bow to me as I passed them in the streets instead of looking through me as if I was a wraith. One really heavy purse was all I needed. Then I could buy myself a house, invest in a cargo or two and wait for money to come flowing to me, instead of having to scratch around for it. But there was little point in the raven’s head leading me to a rich man’s door where I might make my fortune, if I couldn’t get inside. That was where a woman would be far more use than a bird.

I quickly realised the apothecary’s niece would not be bribed into helping me by a promise of money, and she was not like the tavern wenches, who could be flattered into refilling my flagon behind the innkeeper’s back. But young Gisa had one weakness. Her neighbours and customers agreed she was a tender-hearted creature who would not see anyone suffer. That was the snare I would use to catch her.

But, all the same, I knew it wouldn’t be easy to coax her to do what I asked. I’d seen her hurry from Sylvain’s gate, stopping only to draw breath when she thought she was safely out of sight of that tower. It was plain she was as afraid of Sylvain as the rest of the townsfolk. I’d have to work hard to persuade her to pluck up the courage to get me through those gates.

But if ever a man was in need of reinvention, Sylvain was, especially after my rumours began to trickle around the town. The people already thought him a strange, sinister figure, but by the time I had dropped a little hint here and prompted a vague recollection there, they were starting to believe he was the horned one himself, who could command the winged demons to snatch babies from their cradles or drop polluted blood into the wells to bring sickness and death to any who crossed him. I was so convincing, I even frightened myself and had nightmares in which Sylvain flew like an owl from the top of his own tower.

But each time I drew Lugh from the box, the raven’s head whispered to me –
He’s the man who will make your fortune
– and I believed it. For Sylvain was rich, there was no doubting that. It was said even his servants lived in luxury, eating the finest food, drinking French wines, their loyalty amply rewarded by the generous corrodies he’d bought for them at the local abbey, which, in old age, would keep them in the kind of comfort a bishop would envy. Clearly, here was a man who was prepared to pay for silence and pay most handsomely. I could not walk away from a chance like that.

The morning after my encounter with Gisa I prised myself off my pallet at the inn, at a ridiculously early hour. I didn’t even stop to eat. Shivering and hungry, I made my way to the end of the snicket that ran behind the apothecary’s shop and leaned against the wall, yawning. A watery light was seeping up over the thatched roofs and the morning star still hung in the sky. Grey smoke spiralled up through the roofs of the cottages as women stirred fires back to life. Men and boys stumbled along the track on their way to the fields, and a handful of travellers were setting off early for distant towns, but most did little but grunt in my direction. Several times the click-clack of wooden pattens roused me, but none of the footsteps was Gisa’s. I was on the verge of turning away, fearing she had taken a different route, when I saw her coming towards me, a small sack dangling from her hand.

She was a slender little creature with hair as dark as Lugh’s eye, at least what little I could see of it from the wispy tendrils around her temples. Though she was as yet unmarried, her hair was bound up under a cloth wound round her head as kitchen maids do to keep it from catching on the cooking fires. Her brows and long lashes were black against her white face, her lips full but almost bloodless, and there were dark circles beneath her large eyes. That gargoyle in the town had described her as plain, but she was far from that. She was like an outline of the painting of the Holy Virgin that an artist had sketched in black and white, but not yet filled in with colour.

Amée had been beautiful and she knew it. She knew how to glance up suddenly from beneath her lashes to drown men in the depths of her blue eyes, knew how to thrust her reddened lips into a pout so you ached to kiss them. This girl made no attempt to use any of her charms. It was as if she was determined not to be seen, much less admired.

Gisa gave a slight start of recognition as she caught sight of me, and tried to hide the sack she was carrying beneath her cloak. I fell into step beside her and she quickened her pace.

‘Will he rail at you if you are late?’

‘There’s much to do,’ she answered.

I could feel the raven’s head stirring in the box, tapping with his beak on the wood with such force I was surprised Gisa didn’t turn her head or ask what was making the noise. As we drew level with the abbey walls, she seemed to become even more agitated, and strode ahead as if desperate to lose me. But I would not be shaken off so easily.

‘Will you see him today?’ I said, hurrying to catch up.

‘I see him every day.’

‘Then will you take pity on me, sweet Gisa, and ask him to receive me? He will thank you for it, that I promise, when he knows the nature of my business.’

I felt a little twinge of guilt in telling her that. He wouldn’t be grateful at all. What man is, if he thinks you are trying to squeeze money from him? But on the other hand I would probably be doing her a favour if he flew into a rage and dismissed her. Anyone could see she hated working for him. She’d be much happier back in her uncle’s shop, gossiping with the women and flirting with the boys, assuming she had the first idea how to flirt. I continued to try to persuade her as we trailed up the road beyond the abbey and the marshes, but she never once turned her head or answered.