“To be sure, to be sure,” said Thomas sharply. “Coom inside, Bess—all o’ ye!” He waved his arm to the servants who had accompanied him from Dacre, one was leading blind Janet’s horse.
It was cheerful though smoky in the Hall. Pine logs crackled, there were candles as well as rushlights. The Baron and his wife gave Thomas and Bess a hearty welcome, smacked kisses on their daughter-in-law’s cold cheeks, determined to think her better, relieved that there was no strange look in her large dark eyes.
With composure she sat beside Lord Dacre while they supped. She smiled at times. In her plain gown of bleached homespun she dominated all the russets, blues and greens. She did nothing untoward, drank sack delicately, showed no interest in the bloodier hunks of roasted mutton, and by her remote courtesy somewhat subdued the others.
“Eh, there, Tam,” grunted the Baron to his son, while downing an extra noggin of whisky, “I vow Lady Bess’ll gi’e ye anither son yet, ye’ll tak’ a go at it this neet, won’t ye, lad?”
“Aye . . .” answered Tom, but his eyes shifted and the quick glance he gave his wife was uncertain.
“She’ll no ha’e heard o’ your doin’s in Carlisle, she couldna . . .” said Lord Dacre very low. “Not that I blame ye—i’ the saircoomstances—but ye knaw wot happened afore. Keep ye’re snot clean at Na’orth, an’ dinnet go near that Jeannie, the woodcutter’s wench—aye, I’m no’ blind. Her belly’s thickenin’—’tis ye I suppose, ’less ’tis Leonard. Either way we’ll ha’e ta gi’e her faither some siller.”
Tom said nothing. Not for worlds would he have admitted that he was afraid of his wife, that the thought of bedding her again gave him gooseflesh, and yet excited him.
“Bess’s a’reet,” he said curtly. “Janet says she’s drunk no bluid nor sung that song the past month.”
Dacre nodded. “’Twas only her wild fancy made her blame ye fur the death o’ the bairn. She’ll be over it noo.” He signaled to his piper and demanded a merry jig.
Tom felt the old flush of guilty anger. The baby’s death had naught to do with him. A pinprick on the little chest from the knife Tom had left unsheathed at his belt. It cut wee Tammie as his father gathered him up in a boisterous embrace. A scratch—but it did not heal. It puffed and reddened. Some days later it burst, dribbling green pus and blood. It was then that Bess began to suck and lick the wound, insisting that it was the only way to cure her baby. They hid the child from her, but on the second night she stole in and saw the wet nurse they had found. Bess hit the poor wench on the breasts, she pummeled her, screaming that Tom, not content with hurting her baby, had given it to one of his whores. Then she crouched in a corner and began to lick the infant’s chest wound, like any hound bitch or cat mother. Before they could restrain her, her mouth was full of blood. And the baby died next day. Bess’s hoarse screams resonated through the castle. After a week of this they sent her to Dacre. Nigh to a year ago, Tom thought, and the horror faded. She was quiet and courteous to him now; despite the coarse white robe she insisted on wearing, she looked again like the lovely Neville bride he had been so glad to win.
“A wedding,” said Tom to his father, “it’ll gladden the lot o’ us.” He began to bang on the table in time with the piper’s jig. “Where’s Leonard?” he asked.
“A bit late coomin’ heem, but he ha’ business i’ Gilsland, some complaint o’ ma crofters, he’s na guid at handlin’ ’em. I troost he’ll not muck up the manor at Greystoke. I’m sendin’ ’em there ye knaw.”
Tom did know. Lord Dacre had bestowed one of his lesser estates on the young couple.
“We found the lass huddled i’ the courtyard,” said Tom shrugging. “Na doot they’ve had a lover’s tiff.” Both men looked at Celia who was sitting very quietly beside Magdalen. “A bonny beauty,” said Tom appreciatively, “I’d a bedded her mysel’, had she no got betrothed to Len, but I’m no the man ta cuckold ma own kin.”
Dacre nodded again. He and his elder son were always in agreement. They had their code and lived up to it.
“Ye saw Scrope i’ Carlisle?” asked the Baron. “Gi’e me the full account, we mun keep better order i’ the Marches. Scots’ll want a fresh lesson.”
They drifted happily into talk of raids, the fort at Berwick and the need for circumventing the upstart Dudley’s ill-considered directives.
Celia went to bed that night stupefied and hopeless, and yet she dreamed, though not of Stephen.
She dreamed of Master Julian, of whom she had hardly thought since leaving Cowdray. It
was
the Italian doctor, but did not resemble him. His face peering down into hers had become clean-shaven and lean. He had no four-cornered hat, his hair was smoothly black, and his brown eyes, intense and pleading, were sending a beam of light into her brain. She felt the lightbeam glowing in her head and heard an urgent voice say, “Celia!” Something he wanted her to do, something she could not do.
She shut her eyes tighter against the command, while she heard other voices whispering nearby. Somebody said, “I think there was a flicker there,” and she heard a strange distant roar like rushing water mixed with honking or hootings outside, a noise she did not recognize.
“Celia!” Again she heard Master Julian. “Open your eyes!” She struggled this time to obey, but she could not. She woke up instead at Naworth to find that she was trembling, and filled with wondering amazement. She sat up in bed, thereby disturbing Magdalen.
“Wot’s ado? Lay doon fur pity’s sake—Ye’ve jairked the covers off me!”
“Maggie—I’d a dream, it seemed real. Master Julian, that doctor I told you of, the one who tried to see King Edward, but he’d altered . . . Master Julian, I mean. He was trying to help me; his eyes were brown, not gray, but he was real, as real as
you
. . .” She put her hand on Magdalen’s shoulder.
“Havers!” Magdalen shoved Celia, and pulled up the blankets. “Mun ye waken me fur sech bletherin’?” She turned over and slept.
Celia lay staring up at the beams blackened from peatsmoke. The sensation of the dream’s reality lessened and no longer seemed immediate. It was like a sudden memory from childhood, the day she fell downstairs at the Spread Eagle and twisted her ankle, and her mother carried her to the bench in the courtyard and gave her some raisins to comfort her. She had never remembered it before, but now she could taste the sweetness of those raisins, feel the crunchy seeds between her teeth. A memory—and so had been the dream.
In bed with Magdalen and her prospective marriage two nights away, she could think about it calmly, purged from frenzy and desperation. She made no more plans to escape. There was no need, she had no idea what might happen, she simply knew that the wedding would not take place.
On the next following dawn which was Childermas—that evil, ill-omened day commemorating the slaughter of the Holy Innocents by Herod—Celia’s certainty was confirmed.
It was a boisterous night of sea winds roaring down the Solway through Carlisle and over all the Western Marches. Amidst whistling wind and driving hail nobody but blind Janet heard the commotion in the bedchamber where Thomas slept with Lady Bess. They did not hear his shout, nor later, Janet’s wild scream. When Janet, moaning and staggering, managed to grope her way and arouse the Dacres, it was almost too late to save Thomas. And Bess was dead, lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood. She had fumbled her attack on her husband and had only slashed his upper arm, but the knife which she had plunged into her own breast—precisely at the spot on which she always made the bloodcross mark—that had pierced straight to her heart.
Celia and Magdalen learned of the tragedy after going down to the chapel for Mass. The chapel was empty. Puzzled, they went to the Hall where some servants were huddling, frightened, murmuring, crossing themselves.
The girls, aware of bad trouble, grabbed each other’s hands.
“What can be amiss . . .” Magdalen whispered. “What can it be?”
She saw her brother George come in and make for the whisky keg. “Geordie!” she cried, “is somebody deed?”
George drank a noggin and walked to the girls. He was blanched; there was sweat on his forehead. “Aye—Bess is. Tam near so, but our mother says he’ll do. She’s stopped the bleeding, and we’ve sent to Brampton for the leech.”
Magdalen gasped. Celia drew herself in, very quiet and still. “Lady Bess is dead?” She crossed herself, as did Magdalen.
“Aye—she turned Tam’s dirk on ’em baith. She fooled us these twa neets, ’tis sick’ning.” He glanced at Celia with a touch of his usual malice. “There’ll be na wedding fur ye the morrow, m’lass! Funeral instead.”
“Yes,” said Celia. “Oh, poor, poor thing.”
Magdalen gasped again, gave a sob and threw her arms around Celia. They wept together, but it was Celia who comforted.
Later they breakfasted with the appalled family and Ursula. She had been helping Lady Dacre staunch Tom’s wound, and decently arranging Lady Bess’s body on the bed, and had had no time for thought as yet.
The Brampton leech came, poulticed Tom’s wound with cobwebs, and approved Lady Dacre’s tourniquet. He was given no explanation for the savage cut on the young heir’s arm, and nothing was said about Lady Bess except that she had had some fatal attack. The Dacre family knew that there would be speculations and rumors to ignore, and would ignore them.
They had consulted with the priest, who was as anxious as they to avoid consigning a Neville-Dacre to a suicide’s grave at a crossroads, which even her known madness would not have precluded.
So by evening, when many shocked wedding guests had arrived, Bess’s body lay in state before the alter in Lanercost Church. Above the embroidered black velvet pall her waxen face looked serene and lovely. Tall flickering tapers illumined the faint smile often seen on newly dead lips. A smile of secret knowledge, of remote compassion. All night and all the next day mourners filed by and knelt by Lady Bess’s bier, while the priest intoned prayers for the dead. When Celia’s turn came and she knelt on the hard bench, she wept like the others, but unlike the other mourners her pitying sorrow was tinged by gratitude. Awe-ful as the tragedy was, it had been the means of Celia’s release, and Bess, so gently asking in the courtyard—“What troubles you, poor maiden?”—was after all the helping angel Celia had mistaken her for.
A
T THE BEGINNING
of June in that year of grace 1553, Celia and Ursula, accompanied only by Simkin Farrier, set out for Cowdray, as unsure of their welcome as they had been of the welcome at Naworth eight months ago.
In March, Ursula had first written to Sir Anthony Browne, requesting permission to return home. She had outlined the Dacre tragedy, hinted that the continuing visit to Cumberland was becoming awkward and burdensome, and asked if Wat might be sent to fetch them now that the spring thaws had begun.
When she received no answer, Ursula decided that the peddler to whom she had consigned her letter had been unreliable, and sent another by the official courier bound from Carlisle to London with Lord Dacre’s report on the state of the Western Marches.
Still no answer came from Cowdray, nor any return courier to Lord Dacre. There was fearful unrest on the Border, alarms and excursions daily, many panic-stricken rumors. The old Baron mobilized his sons and all his clansmen to combat another attack on Carlisle, leaving Naworth so vulnerable that he sent his remaining household to the greater safety of Dacre keep. The warning beacons burned nightly on the hilltops. Provisions ran short, and though Lady Dacre was too kindhearted to say so, it was obvious that the Southerners were a nuisance. Food became scarce, they slaughtered the cattle; lambing was late this year; moreover, many ewes were sickly and dropped malformed little fetuses on the scarcely thawed ground. Tempers grew short, and when George Dacre, racked by fever and a bloody flux, suddenly turned shrilly delirious and cried that Simkin Farrier was really a “barguest,” or werewolf, Ursula made up her mind.
She approached Lady Dacre and said that they were leaving. The unhappy baroness did not protest. Magdalen, too, was relieved. She had much affection for Celia, but she agreed with her mother that the guests had stayed overlong, and brought ill luck.
There was no reason to blame the girl for any of the troubles which had assailed them after Mad Bess’s suicide, yet nothing had gone right since with the Dacres, and it was natural that one should resent dependent aliens.
The girls kissed good-bye outside the great postern at Dacre.
“Matters dinnet tur-rn oot as we hoped, hinny,” said Magdalen, sadly. “Na doot ’twasn’t God’s will—I’ll send ye a bit o’ prayer noo an’ agen.” But her eyes were peering over Celia’s shoulder to see if that puff of dust on the Graystoke road was made by the eagerly awaited flock from the Newbiggin pasture. Otherwise, there would again be no meat for dinner.
“Farewell, Maggie dear,” whispered Celia, sighing, yet glad that the past months of sorrow and strain were over. Neither girl expected that they would ever meet again.
Ursula had hoarded ten shillings all during the Cumberland stay. She had meant them for Celia as a bridal gift, but after the wedding was so definitely canceled, she had saved the coins for the journey home, once Sir Anthony had given permission. Since none ever came, they must manage without, and did so. Simkin, though taciturn, his pitted face set in an habitual scowl, proved as good a guide as his father. And they all remembered the way south. Celia kept gazing steadfastly ahead, nor looked back to the mountains and the moors which she had thought so excitingly beautiful last year. She had learned much in those months, learned ugly fearsome things. Lust, madness, violence—all those had touched her close in Cumberland. There was also that other thing, the scene in the stable loft between Simkin and George—part of the chilling strangeness, which her mind refused to dwell on.
By the time they reached London—and the sun shone on tender green leaves, the hedgerows were dappled with wild roses, healthy lambs frisked in the meadows, and birds trilled night and day—Celia had begun to laugh once more. Ursula, though worried, smiled sometimes, and even Simkin brightened, and took to playing a willow pipe he had made for himself.