The Secret Book of Paradys (16 page)

“What are you at, eh, mooning along there?” said Belnard, riding up on his step-child.

“The goats are in the wheat,” she said.

“Chase ’em out then,” said he.

So Jehanine ran forward into the field, clapping her hands and calling, and scattering the goats away into the pasture beyond. Once there she had a mind
not to go back to the path, but Belnard, anticipating this perhaps, had ridden through the wheat after her, and now approached her again under the pear trees.

“Do you miss your brother?” said Belnard, riding along beside Jehanine.

“Yes,” said Jehanine.

“Yes. It seemed to me, you and he were always close. Too close maybe for brother and sister. Teach you some tricks, I expect, did he? And you him a thing or two.”

Jehanine lowered her eyes and clenched her fists. She was now beginning to be afraid.

Belnard reached up and plucked a pear. But it was unripe and after a bite he spat and threw the rest away. This waste was part of his flaunt of ownership. He could do what he liked here.

“Now, on the other hand,” said Belnard, “you and I are no proper kin at all. I’m not your dad. Christ knows what son-of-a-sow got you on her.”

Jehanine picked up her skirts and began to run.

With a hearty laugh, not put out, Belnard kicked the donkey into a gallop. Presently he rode the animal straight into the fleeing girl and tumbled her under a tree. Swinging from the donkey’s back, Belnard dropped down on her. She tried at first to fight him, but he said smiling, “Don’t you raise your hand to me, my girl. Or I’ll break your nose. Do you think I can? So, then. Lie still.” And so Jehanine lay like a piece of wood. He pulled up her dress and forced her. “By bleeding Christ, a virgin still,” he said. In another minute this was no longer the case. “Move,” he grunted then, “move, you bitch.” So Jehanine obediently moved. He soon finished, collapsing upon her. When he recovered he rose and left her in her blood on the ground. He glanced only once into her tawny eyes that looked now almost as white as her face. “Well not much to that,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll improve with use. Don’t take all day there. There’s milking to be done. And don’t let any of my men catch you like that. Pull your skirts down, you trull.”

Jehanine pulled the cloth down over her thighs and lay under the pear tree watching Belnard ride away. When he was out of sight beyond the orchard, she kneeled and vomited. Then she wept, but not for very long.

That evening, when Jehanine, with her younger sisters and the farm girls, served the men their supper, Belnard seemed to have forgotten what he had done in the orchard. Though it was of slight consequence to him, nevertheless now he had accomplished it, he might wish to repeat the venture. Virgins were somewhat scarce. Of course, too, the act had been a sin. Belnard might feel bound to make a confession and give the lord’s priest some money. Jehanine, since all women were besmirched by the fall of the first woman, Eve, would be held largely to blame.

Jehanine’s mother whined and complained during supper. Afterwards two of the brothers fought in the yard and returned with wounds. Much later, when the moon rose outside, the farm was full of snoring and sighs as the family and the house-slaves slept. Somewhere off over the hills, a dog, or perhaps a wolf, bayed at the moon. Jehanine lay awake on the edge of the mattress she shared with her sisters, and listened. She thought of Pierre, who had always been kind to her and who, on leaving, had made her a promise. “When I’m rich, I’ll send for you. You shall keep my house for me. I’d trust none of the others. But you’re clean, and clever. We’ll have servants, and you can order them all. When I come home from decorating angels on to the walls of some church, or goddesses in a private supper-room for a prince, I’ll lie down with my head in your lap and you can comb my hair and sing to me. I’ll give you three silk dresses, Eastern silk from the Spice Lands.” “You’ll marry,” Jehanine had murmured. “Marry? Not I. A girl or two, maybe. But you’re the only one I’d want in my house.” There had been nothing between them that was sexually familiar, but Jehanine had always been in love with her golden-haired brother. He was the only beautiful thing she had ever known, beyond the natural things, the weather, the country and its beasts, whose beauty harsh everyday use had inevitably spoiled for her.

When she had finished thinking of Pierre, Jehanine thought of her stepfather’s rape, and of the fact that he might like to repeat it. Then she listened to the wolf, howling in its ecstasy of lonely freedom.

In the middle of the night, Jehanine got up and put on her clothes in silence. In equal silence, opening the clothes-chest, she took one of her sisters’ mantles, for they were of good quality and so more durable than her own. Although she had never really considered the thing she now began to do, in some part of her mind she must have made a plan. She went about it quickly and quietly. She first spoke softly to the big house dogs that lay by the hearth. Then going into the stone larder, she took a slab of bread and another of cheese and wrapped them in a piece of linen. Then she took a jar of milk and drank it dry.

As she left the farm and stole across the dirty yard, by the well and the hen-house and the duck-pond, Jehanine felt neither regret nor anxiety.

She skirted the huts of the labourers with care, because their dogs did not altogether know her and might give an alarm. When she reached the track between the fields, the moon was going down. There was another long hour to sunrise, and no Belnard would be stirring much before.

The track ended and Jehanine came out upon a road, old as the hills and kept in repair by the lord. This was the way Pierre had come, though he had had a donkey to ride, and one of the farm men to accompany him.

Jehanine, however, did not feel a lack. She had known only the farm and the surrounding landscape all her eighteen years. Now she was heedlessly
eager to be off, to discover the rest of the world which lay waiting. She turned south, for the road conveniently ran that way. She walked briskly, holding her small bundle of provisions, looking ahead.

By the time the dawn began, Jehanine was well down the valley, and above her, eastward, she saw the humped tower of the village church. The bell was not ringing, for the priest was a sluggard. Inside the church stood a golden crucifix with jewels on it, which the lord had had made with some of the wealth brought back from the Holy Land. In a niche a pale and melancholy Madonna exhorted women to do their duty. She wore a golden crown, also the lord’s gift, because she had obviously done hers.

Belnard, too, had relics of the Crossade on show. A great Saracen spear was hung up in his bedchamber, its tasselled sling still dark with blood. Besides, there were some jewels, or so he and the brothers said. Belnard had once announced he would give each of his daughters a jewel on her wedding day. He had been drunk at the time. But he had also vowed to give Pierre something at his leavetaking. This might have been true.

Brighter than all jewels, the sun pierced through the sky.

Though men and women were out in the fields few saw Jehanine, or if they did, apparently reckoned her on some errand. Once past the cultivated lands of the lord, the road went down among the pine forests. An unfriendly place in winter, full of hungry wolves and starveling robbers – or so they said. Bears even sometimes loitered in the pines, not to mention creatures of the Devil. But winter was a way off, and surely the City nearer?

Among some fallow fields, Jehanine heard hoof-beats on the road behind her. She withdrew hastily to the side of the road, but there was nowhere to conceal herself. She was suddenly afraid her step-father might be after her, for it sounded like his donkey – only the lord’s sons had horses. She crouched down.

Sure enough, the donkey came clumsily pelting along the road. On its back sat a heavy, hairy boy, not Belnard in fact, but one of the younger sons. He blundered past and reined up, hauling the animal round. He had seen his sister in the shallow ditch. The hood had slipped from her hair and the sun fired it like a pale torch.

“There you are, you cat,” said Belnard’s son, Jehanine’s half-brother. “He said you’d be sure to go this way. When the sluts woke up and found you gone, he said to me, You take the ass and go and bring her back. She’s got work to do. He told me something else, too,” said Jehanine’s half-brother, riding up to her. His shadow came between her and the sun. He slid down from the donkey abruptly, dropping, falling against her and rolling her over in the ditch. “If you did it with him, now you can do it with me.”

Jehanine did not struggle. Her eyes went wide and blank. She said, “If you want. But not here.”

“Here, here and now,” he said, fumbling at her.

“No. The priest may come along.”

Her half-brother considered. If the priest did come this way, or the lord’s steward, which was also a possibility, Belnard’s son would be fined, or pilloried, for they were bloodkin, he and she.

“Get up then, quick,” he said. “Come there, where the trees are.”

He dragged her over the fallow ground, but not so fast she could not stumble and pick up as she did so a spiky, hand-sized rock from the soil.

As soon as they reached the trees, he pushed her against one, and Jehanine struck him in the face, on the forehead, as hard as she was able. She only stunned him, but he poured with blood, and staggering aside, he fell. Then she ran round him, kicking and beating at him with the stone, now from one side, now another, until his howls and groans ceased and he lay still. The rough vengeance gave her satisfaction, but she was also frightened. Looking back down to the road, she saw no one was there. The donkey had wandered away into a patch of clover. Left to itself it would gladly feed all day, and perhaps be lost. Belnard would think his son had not found the runaway, but continued on to an inn to get drunk.

She was not sure she had not killed her half-brother, though he was breathing. Strangely, it seemed the other inner part of her mind had again been formulating plans, even as she beat him unconscious.

Though he was bigger than she, his clothes in their turn were rather too small for him, being cast-offs of the slender Pierre. She stuffed the loutish boots with leaves and pieces of her own shift, to make them fit, and with a strip of her shift she bound her breasts before she drew on his tunic and sleeveless surcoat. With the innocence of thoughtless knowledge, she also tucked a roll of the material inside his hose – now hers – at the appropriate juncture.

She left him naked under the trees and ran back down to the road. She could not ride, and besides did not dare to steal her step-father’s donkey.

The boots, so much too large, would hurt her before the day was done. But the clothes gave an extra freedom of movement, and though she did not care for their odour, this too would help in disguising her.

She had now gone so far on her career she felt the rightness of it. She strode out, her heart was light.

An hour later she left the lord’s estate’s behind, and came down to the brink of the pines. She had never been so far before. This in itself would be her talisman.

The journey absorbed several days, and Jehanine kept no count of their number. Everything was so unusual to her, the area, her aloneness, the act of her flight itself. By the second day she was convinced that Belnard would not attempt to have her followed further, or that if he did so, she was now
immune to his search. The weather was consistently fine, and even the nights, when she slept on the earth, were fraught only with owls.

She walked south, which was quite easy, though the first road vanished on the first day. Later on, there were other tracks, and other better roads. Sometimes she passed through a village, where she would beg for food. Generally they gave her something; the summer had been plentiful. They thought her a boy off to make his fortune. Though her clothes were travel-stained and not new, they were those of a wealthy peasant, and her chiselled features led women to believe she was the by-blow of some duke. Now and then too, Jehanine passed the estate of some other lord, and once a fortress craned above the woods. But she had no difficulties. The land changed again, rolling and swooping, clad in wild flowers and ruined towers, then vineyards.

Finally, she had the luck to fall in with a sort of caravan, the wagons of a tanner and an apothecary, and certain others, making for the City, which was now only one day away.

The apothecary seemed keen to take the boy (who gave his name when pressed as Jehan) into apprenticeship. It was conceivable too that the apothecary fancied Jehan. Nevertheless, the man’s advances were mild, and he was inclined to feed his travelling companion, while allowing him to ride in the wagon among the vials and antique bottles, spilled powders and dried scorpions.

“The City is a wonderful place,” said the apothecary, boastfully. “You’ve never been there before? Stick by me, I’ll see you don’t go wrong. Have another sausage.”

In the middle of the afternoon, Jehanine put her head out of the wagon and saw a hilly plain below, awash as if in a sea-flood in the amber light. A river cut the plain in long burning loops.

“There is Paradys,” said the apothecary even more boastfully, as if he had built it, pointing into the plain. Jehanine could see nothing but the landscape, then, gradually, she began to make something out. It was like a heavenly city, all hollow arches and disembodied towers, floating on a ring of walls halfway up the sky.

Then the apothecary began to fondle her leg, and Jehanine was forced to round on him with a gruff “Leave off.”

“Now, young lad. This is the City. It has got great markets and avenues. We are building enormous churches to the glory of God. We’re sophisticated here. Slough your peasant morals.”

Jehanine considered her blistered feet. She said, lowering her eyes, “Well, maybe tonight, then.”

Having said which, she remained silent as the apothecary’s servant drove
the wagon across the river, and along a winding road full of traffic, and uphill, and at last through the ring of City walls. Soon they were caught in a jam of carts and mules. Jehan-Jehanine absented herself from the wagon on the excuse of nature, and thus gave the apothecary the slip.