The Rope Dancer (42 page)

His eyes fell on the stable, and it seemed empty and quiet to him. No doubt it had been thoroughly searched already and was not likely to contain anything both valuable and small enough to slip into a man-at-arm’s purse. Telor looked back at Deri and Ann, who were following.

“Deri, will you take Ann and—and—” Telor hesitated, unable to think of any practical activity in which Deri and Ann could engage, but Deri simply nodded. His face was expressionless, and a pang of guilt stabbed Telor, but Carys came first.

She blinked at the change of light when they entered the stable and stopped. “They are not here,” she said, still not looking at Telor. “They are in the pen outside, all wet.”

She looked away to the left, and Telor recalled that she had twice recovered from fear or shock in Lechlade when she had had something to do. “Let us fetch them in, then,” he said, “and dry them, and then try to find our saddles.”

Slipping from his arm, Carys turned as if to go out, and then stopped and raised tear-filled eyes to his face. “I wish to stay with you,” she whispered, “but I cannot live if you take my skill from me.”

“Take your skill!” Telor echoed. “What are you talking about?”

“If we marry—”

“Do you think you are more likely to get with child because a priest says we are man and wife than if we just lie together? That is nonsense, Carys.”

Her eyes grew even larger. “Oh, I had not thought about getting with child.”

Telor held his breath. Would she now refuse to couple? And what if she was already carrying? Would she hate the child because it kept her off her rope? The breath eased out as she shook her head.

“No, that does not matter. I can work until near the end, and even then I can practice on a low rope.” The tears spilled over her lower lids and rolled down. “I would like to have your child, Telor. But to stay always in one place, and be part of a family that would die with shame if it became known that I was a player…” She began to sob. “I cannot! I cannot!”

“Carys!” Telor exploded. “Whatever put that into your head?”

But Telor knew what had put it into her head. It had been in his own mind, a heavy and unpleasant weight. To him, marriage had always meant leaving the road and settling into a house where children could be raised. The feeling must have carried into his voice or the way he had phrased what he said about marriage. And he was suddenly filled with joy, feeling that he was the first man in the world to have the marvel of freedom and the blessing of a loyal woman at the same time.

“No, indeed, dearling,” he went on. “Not only will we still travel the road, but we will be a true troupe, for I will do just as Deri urged and put on jester’s colors and white my face and play for you and Deri—and we will all grow rich.”

“But your family in Bristol?” she faltered. “They will not like you to take a penniless dancing girl for a wife.”

“No, they will not,” Telor answered frankly. “They did not like my going with Eurion either, but they are good people, Carys. They did not cast me out. And if great evil should befall us, they would not let our children starve. That was all I meant when I said that I must look to the future, that my people must know you and also know we are well and truly married and our children true born.”

“Oh, Telor,” Carys sighed, her molten gold eyes so bright they could have been small suns, “I…I cannot bear so much joy. I will burst with it! I—”

“Joy!” Deri thundered from the doorway. “You little devil, Carys, you should be whipped. Telor, we are in trouble, deep trouble.”

“Lord William?” Telor asked, glancing out past Deri to see if armed men were converging on them. “But what—”

“Not Lord William,” Deri growled, “the cook! Ann’s father. He will have our hides—or mine, at least—for abduction.”

“No!” Ann cried, slipping around Deri. “He cannot make me say I was unwilling. He need never even see you.”

Deri cast a disgusted look at her. “You mean we should drop you in the street like offal and leave you to whatever fate comes? Perhaps we should!”

“You mean your father does not know you went away with Carys?” Telor asked. “I thought you came from Lechlade this morning.”

“That was what I thought,” Deri said. “I asked her what farradiddle she told her father to let her go off with Carys, and this—this—this—”

“Brave and clever girl,” Carys put in pertly.

Deri turned purple.

Ann looked at him apprehensively, but she did not move away. “I only wanted to talk to you,” she said pleadingly. “Papa would not let me—”

“Talk?” Deri gasped. “Talk? You crept out of your house and came to the cookshop dressed like that in the middle of the night to talk?”

Telor rubbed a hand over his face. The matter was serious, for to be accused of abducting a decent girl could get a troupe of players hanged. Nonetheless, Telor’s strongest impulse was to laugh. He had not realized who the dwarf girl was until he heard Deri call her “cook’s daughter,” and at that moment his whole mind was taken up with what Carys had done. Now he remembered that Lord William had said the “troupe of players” had been his men and he realized that Carys had brought the dwarf girl along to make the troupe seem genuine. And the girl had come—for Deri’s sake, not for Carys’s. She was brave and clever, and very pretty too.

“Deri,” Telor said sharply, “you should be honored. But why, Ann? No, my dear, I do not mean why you wished to…er…talk to Deri, I understand that very well. I meant why did you listen to Carys when she asked you to do such a dangerous thing? You could have been hurt. And you must have known that your father would be angry.”

“I did not care about being hurt,” Ann said. “If I had been killed, it would have been a mercy. Angry? Yes, my father will be angry, but more angry at my coming back than at my going away.”

“Oh, Ann, you cannot mean that,” Telor said gently. “I saw the way your papa rushed to save you when you cried out. He loves you.”

She sobbed and dropped her head. “Yes, I suppose it is true, but I am such a burden to him. He wants to take my sister’s betrothed into the cookshop, but there is not work enough for three and—and he does not want to make me useless. And Ned’s family turns green whenever they lay eyes upon me and ask for a greater dowry to lay by for any monsters that may be born of Bessy.”

Deri had turned away, his shoulders hunched as if to endure a beating. Carys began to cry and ran to kneel and take Ann in her arms.

“Cannot she stay with us?” she begged. “She is so quick and so clever. In one day she learned to mimic me and make a crowd laugh. I have almost all my share of what we took from the men-at-arms and what I earned from the rope dancing at the cookshop. I will give it all to her father, and if it is not enough, will you not lend me more? You can have my share until I have paid—”

“Carys!” Telor said sharply. “It is not a question of money but of whether her father is willing to let her go.” He stifled a sigh, remembering Eurion’s advice to Ann’s father about players. The cook had believed Eurion, and now the harsh words had come home to roost. What was worse, the advice might have some truth in it, even if Ann were not misused by her companions. “More than that,” Telor added slowly, “it depends on whether Ann can endure our kind of life.”

“I can!” Ann cried. “I can. I slept better on the ground last night with Carys, knowing I was welcome and needed, then I have slept in my bed for long and long, knowing that I am nothing but trouble to my parents.”

Deri turned back, bright streaks of tears on his cheeks. “My share too,” he said huskily, and went to put an arm around Ann’s shoulders. “I will take her to Creklade and wait for you and Carys there, so she will be beyond her father’s reach.”

“Wait,” Telor said, suddenly remembering that they had the ear of a man of great influence and power. “Better I take the chance of asking one more favor of Lord William. If he will say a word to Ann’s father and tell him that we are good folk who will be kind to Ann—”

“Tell him I will take her to wife,” Deri offered, tightening his grip on her shoulder as Telor left the stable in search of the lord, and smiling as Ann looked up at him with wide adoring eyes.

There was his dream, Deri thought, and even if the girl was no match for that, despite her eagerness, she would be happier with him because he did not think her a monster and because he could understand her need to be needed, which echoed his own. He could protect her in ways that only he would know she needed protection. It would have been better if they had had more time to know each other, but that was not possible. If he did not marry her, her father might agree to whatever Lord William said, then change his mind and have them hunted far and wide for stealing his daughter the minute Lord William was gone. Once he and Ann were married and had proof of it, her father could not try to snatch her back.

They waited for Telor’s return, scarcely able to breathe with anxiety, but the tension was broken a few minutes later by a man they did not know coming in with Telor’s instruments, which had been found in the screened-off room at the end of the hall. The recovery of the instruments delighted Deri and Carys, and it lightened Carys’s mood from despair tinged with hope to hope made breathless by uncertainty. The new eagerness led her to jump to her feet and run to the doorway to watch for Telor.

It was Deri who told the man where to put the instruments, and he thought about opening the cases to examine them, but Ann continued to cling to him as if he were the last floating spar in a heaving ocean. That clinging, hampering as it was, was something entirely new to Deri and not at all unpleasant. For all Mary’s love and dependence on him, Mary had never clung to him physically. She could not have done so; it would have looked ridiculous.

With a kind of wondering tenderness, Deri touched Ann’s cheek, and his finger tangled in a strand of her hair. Then he remembered something and put his hand to his purse, where, at the bottom, he could feel the gold silk net he had bought in Castle Combe. He did not take it out, but laid his cheek against Ann’s night-dark hair and thought how the threads would shine, and how Ann’s dark eyes would shine too, with never a cloud in them because the gift was given by a dwarf. He turned his head to say that whatever happened, he would find a way to stay with her and protect her, but the words were cut off by a joyful cry from Carys.

She saw Telor coming, and suddenly it did not matter to her what his news was. Somehow they would find a way to help Ann; what really mattered was that Telor was coming, that for her he would always be a part of her life. She flew to meet him, flung herself into his arms, and drew his head down into a wild and hungry kiss. He held her to him and gave her a full measure of response, even though he laughed aloud at her when their lips parted for so passionate a greeting over so short an absence. But then he clutched her tight again, understanding that all the hours, days, and years they spent together would seem short, and every minute they were apart would be very, very long.

“Well?” Deri called, coming to the door of the stable with his arm still around Ann.

Telor grinned with triumph. Never had he had a more appropriate memory in his life than when he recalled the cook and his daughter. “Lord William will do it!” he cried. “He laughed and laughed and said it would be a double wedding, and he would come himself to give away the brides. And he has offered us a house in Shrewsbury for every winter. We will have the best of the road, and a warm, safe haven for the bad times. And a place to raise our children, and no families to frown at us.”

“We are a troupe!” Carys twirled round and round and then did cartwheels and handstands all around the others. “We are a real troupe!” She stopped and glanced at Deri and Ann, who were smiling at each other, then looked at Telor with a glory of love in her face and whispered, “Oh, Lady, thank you.”

This book is a departure from my usual work. First, it concerns people on the lower levels of society rather than the nobility or squirearchy. Second, in a sense, it is not the kind of historical novel I usually write, in that few historical personages appear nor does the action revolve around a series of historical events. In other ways, however, this novel is no less “historical” than any other I have written for I am describing as accurately as I can the knowledge, attitudes, and way of life of the people about whom I am writing.

In medieval times it was not considered shameful to have a master; indeed, the opposite was true. Every man had a master from the king and pope, who claimed God as their master, through the great vassals and archbishops, who bowed only to king and pope, down to the serf and slave, whose masters always seemed to be too close for comfort. Only outlaws had no master—outlaws and the traveling players, who were considered by many to be little better. They lived on sufferance alone, because they lightened the lives of those they entertained, but no law protected their lives or property—laws in medieval times were only for those who had an accepted place in society and varied according to that place; that is, all men (and certainly all women) were
not
equal before the law.

The players were treated solely according to the humor of the overlord of any keep they visited or the temper of the townsfolk and had no recourse—except to spread the word when they were dealt unusual harshness. Overlords and townsfolk knew that word passed from group to group, and if a keep or town got a reputation for repeated and too brutal mistreatment, all the players would avoid it, depriving those who mistreated them of entertainment altogether.

Also, the world of the traveling players, although larger than that of the serf who seldom traveled more than five or ten miles from the place he was born, was still very small. These people would not care much who was king or whether one faction or another was in favor in the royal court. What was important to them was the attitude of the lord of the manor before whom they played. No matter how insignificant his power on the national level, he was all-powerful to them. And a small private conflict that happened to be taking place in the area in which they were, was a matter of much greater importance to them than a major war, as long as the major war was far enough away that they were not caught up in it.

One problem becomes more serious in this book than in any previous one. I am caught between describing accurately—from a twentieth century point of view—the physical conditions in which these people existed or describing the conditions as they appeared to the characters themselves. Looking back, the hardships of the lives of common persons, particularly those down at the very bottom of society, in medieval times are very great. Probably few citizens of the western world could long survive the filth, the unsanitary food and water, the diseases carried by such insects as lice and fleas and bedbugs, which infested all people and dwellings to varying degrees, the constant exposure to cold and damp to which most of us with central heating are no longer adjusted. Transported back in time, I suspect many of us might die of shock and disgust without waiting for something usually considered fatal to attack.

On the other hand, people who had known nothing different—for even the nobility lived under conditions that we would consider appalling, although they were much better than those of the lowest members of society—did not think of their everyday life as being fraught with hardship any more than the ordinary person these days thinks of life being terribly hard. Part of the evidence that medieval people enjoyed life is amusing—fierce diatribes by priests against dancing in church or, worse, coupling on the tombstones, repeated orders to do away with the pagan maypole (not only was it pagan, but the dancing led to dallying all too often), sermons against gambling, drinking, wenching—in fact all the sins (if they are sins) that are today deplored.

Since this is true, is it fair to describe conditions of total gloom and misery, just because that is the way
we
would see them? Surely at times medieval people were miserable—a cruel lord, a war that swept over their little plots of land, even a hard winter could change a life to which they were accustomed to one of unbearable privation. But we know they laughed and danced and sang—even the lowest of the low—and I have chosen to depict their lives as
they
lived them, with mingled pleasure and pain, and little awareness of the cold and heat or the filth and pests that surrounded them.

For those readers who wish to write to me, you may reach me though my website (
www.RobertaGellis.com
) or more directly through my email address [email protected].