Death and the Lady Read Online Free PDF Page B

he was bewitched.”
    “That was my face,” said Lys, “and no more. The rest grew as
I resisted him. He loved a fight, did Aymeric. We never surrendered, either of
us. To the day he died he was determined to protect me, as was I to resist him.”
    Messire Giscard smiled, triumphant. “You see!” he said to Mère
Adele. “Still she resists. And yet, am I not her sole kinsman in this world?
Did not my brother entrust her to me? Shall I not carry out my promise that I
made as he was dying?”
    “She doesn’t want you to,” said Mère Adele.
    “Ah,” said Messire Giscard. “Bearing women—you know how they
are. She’s distraught; she grieves. As in truth she should. But she should be
thinking too of the baby, and of her lover’s wishes. He would never have
allowed her to tramp on foot across the width of Normandy , looking for God
knew what.”
    “Looking for my kin,” said Lys. “I do have them, Giscard.
One of them even is a king.”
    “What, the fairy king?” Giscard shook his head. “Mère Adele,
if you’ll believe it, she says that she’s the elf-king’s child.”
    “I am,” said Lys, “his brother’s daughter.” And she looked
it, just then, with her white wild face. “You can’t shock them with that,
Giscard, or hope to prove me mad. They know. They live on the edge of his Wood.”
    He leaned forward in his chair. All the brightness was gone,
all the sweet false seeming. He was as hard and cold and cruel as she. “So,” he
said. “So, Alys. Tell them the rest. Tell them what you did that made my
brother love you so.”
    “What, that I was his whore?”
    I looked at her and shivered. No, he could not be so hard,
or so cold, or so cruel. He was a human man. She . . .
    She laughed. “That should be obvious to a blind man. Which
these,” she said, “are not. Neither blind, nor men, nor fools.”
    “Do they know what else you are?” He was almost standing
over her. “Do they know that?”
    “They could hardly avoid it,” she said, “knowing whose kin I
am.”
    “If they believe you. If they don’t just humor the madwoman.”
    “We believe her,” said Mère Adele. “Is that what you want?
To burn her for a witch?”
    He crossed himself. “Sweet saints, no!”
    “No,” said Lys. “He wants to use me. For what he thinks I
am. For what he believes I can do.”
    “For what you can do,” he said. “I saw you. Up on the hill
at night, with stars in your hair. Dancing; and the moon came down and danced
at your side. And he watched, and clapped his hands like a child.” His face
twisted. “I would never have been so simple. I would have wielded you like a
sword.”
    Lys was beyond speech. Mère Adele spoke dryly in her
silence. “I can see,” she said, “why she might be reluctant to consent to it.
Women are cursed enough by nature, weak and frail as all the wise men say they
are; and made, it’s said, for men’s use and little else. Sometimes they don’t
take kindly to it. It’s a flaw in them, I’m sure.”
    “But a flaw that can be mended,” said Messire Giscard. “A
firm hand, a touch of the spur—but some gentleness, too. That’s what such a
woman needs.”
    “It works for mares,” said Mère Adele. She stood up. I had
never seen her look as she did then, both smaller and larger than she was.
Smaller, because he was so big. Larger, because she managed, one way and another,
to tower over him. “We’ll think on what you’ve said. You’re welcome meanwhile
to the hospitality of our priory. We do ask you, of your courtesy, to refrain
from visiting the town. There’s been sickness in it; it’s not quite past.”
    He agreed readily: so readily that I was hard put not to
laugh. He did not need to know that it was an autumn fever, a fret among the
children, and nothing to endanger any but the weakest. Sickness, that year,
spoke too clearly of the Death.
    oOo
    “That will hold him for awhile,” said Mère Adele when we
were back in safety again: inside