Alys Clare - The Enchanter's Forest

His silence was far longer this time. Then he said wonderingly, ‘God’s boots, but you’re quite right. I never thought of it quite that way.’ Raising himself up on one elbow, he looked down at her, grinned and said, ‘Aren’t your people wise?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed. She was both touched and pleased that he had made the remark; he was going to meet some of her people tomorrow at Folle-Pensee — and probably powerful ones, at that — and for him to be able to put aside his perfectly natural prejudices and admit to being impressed by their wisdom even before encountering them was surely a good omen.

Tomorrow.

One way or the other, she thought sleepily, it promised to be quite a day. Turning away from him, nestling her bare bottom into the angle of his belly and his thighs, she drew the blankets around them both and, smiling as she felt his arm creep around her to pull her close, shut her eyes.

The next day was as warm and sunny as its predecessors. Joanna and Josse broke camp early — he had copied her ways the first morning and now could leave a patch of forest innocent of the marks of their presence almost as well as she could — and by mid-morning were well on the way. Meggie was riding with her father; intrepid child that she was, she expressed a preference for the big horse and appeared to take a real delight in sitting up there in front of Josse, securely held but with the height above the ground giving the illusion of danger.

Josse loved to have her there with him. The two of them chattered away incessantly and had developed a series of favourite games of which Meggie never tired.

‘Josse?’ Meggie said.

‘Yes, Meggie?’ He pitched his voice low, as if the matter was of seriously grave import.

She allowed a small tension-creating pause. Then, ecstatic as yet again her trick succeeded, she shouted, ‘Nothing!’

He tried to do it too but somehow she knew what was coming; ‘Meggie?’ he ventured.

And his daughter, shrieking with delight, answered, ‘Nothing, Josse!’

So their unhurried progress through the sunlit glades and the heather-covered open spaces was accompanied by the sound of laughter. There was birdsong on the air; to Josse, the sound of his child’s merriment sounded like the fluting of some particularly melodious warbler.

They stopped for lunch — the day was now very hot and they had ridden for a while out in the full sunshine — and when they had eaten, sitting relaxed in the shade of a stand of beech trees, Joanna made Meggie lie down on the cool, mossy grass where, despite her protests that she wasn’t a bit tired, she promptly fell asleep.

‘Are we almost at this place, whatever it’s called?’ Josse asked in a low voice.

‘Yes. I’m fairly sure it’s over the next small rise, then about another couple of miles,’ Joanna replied. ‘And it’s called Folle-Pensee.’

‘Foolish thought? Mad thought?’ Josse suggested.

‘Yes, I suppose just that.’ She paused, then said, ‘We have among our people healers of both body and mind, and they say that the waters issuing from the spring at Folle-Pensee can help when patients are troubled by strange thoughts. Me, I think it’s the skill and the patience of our healers that makes them well.’

‘Aye.’ Josse was sure she was right. He was thinking of something similar that he had once observed and presently he said, ‘I once met a young mother who believed she was unfit to care for her child. There was no reason for this belief, for she was intelligent and competent and in fact her little boy was thriving. Sister Euphemia — she’s the Hawkenlye infirmarer’ — Joanna nodded — ‘said she’d seen such conditions before in new mothers and that it was often just a matter of listening to their fears and not dismissing them out of hand, then treating them with kindness and patience until they began to feel better.’

Joanna was looking at him with interest. ‘I have met the infirmarer,’ she said, ‘and what you say merely enhances the impression of her that I have already formed.’ She dropped her eyes, frowned and then, looking straight at him again, said, ‘Josse, doesn’t it strike you that fundamentally we are all striving for the same thing?’

He had an idea what she was trying to say. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, your nuns and monks are good people who look after the sick and the troubled and who don’t spare themselves in trying to help others. Hawkenlye Abbey is not so very different in essence from Folle-Pensee, nor from other special centres that I’ve seen and been told about where my own people strive to drive out the demons of mental and bodily sickness so that their patients can resume happy and healthy lives. Yet were I to say as much to someone such as the terrible old priest whose stinking and unwholesome presence bedevilled my days when I was wed to Thorald, he would have accused me of possession at best and heresy at worst.’

Josse waited a moment before speaking. Then he said, ‘Joanna my sweet, as I’m sure I must have said to you before, it’s unwise to judge the whole church by one foul-minded and frustrated man. You’ve met men and women from Hawkenlye; I don’t suggest that you take them as the norm, for in their way I believe that they are as unusual as your stinky old priest, but I would venture to say that maybe you could try to see them as the good face of the church, and that as such they can perhaps do a little to redress the balance for you who have experienced the most evil one.’

She opened her mouth to say something but apparently changed her mind. Giving him a very sweet smile, she said, ‘I’ll try, Josse.’

They sat for some time longer in the deep shade. Josse closed his eyes and dozed. Then he sensed Joanna getting to her feet; as he opened his eyes and looked up at her, she met his gaze and said, ‘Time to go. Will you wake Meggie, please?’

They packed up, mounted and rode out into the sunshine. As before, Joanna was in the lead; watching her, Josse thought the set of her shoulders suggested a certain tension. It’s important to her, he reflected, this meeting between her man from the world of the outsiders and her new people. Well, I shall strive not to let her down.

Meggie, slumped against him, had her thumb in her mouth and was still sleepy. Just when I would have welcomed her chatter as a distraction to my increasing sense of apprehension, Josse thought with a grin, she decides to lose herself in her dreams. Hugging her close, he squared his shoulders and tried to still the increasingly wild pictures that his mind was throwing up.

Reality was quite different from imagination. The tiny settlement of Folle-Pensee lay hidden away at the end of a track that twisted and turned through the trees, among which outcrops of the local stone — reddish-pink granite — stood out starkly. The path opened out into a wide clearing, in which were set several simple dwellings made of wooden stakes and brushwood as well as a collection of squat, ground-hugging little cottages made of the local granite. On the far side of the settlement there was a path whose edges were marked with stones; this led off into a particularly dense area of forest, where tall trees — pine, birch — overshadowed holly, broom and gorse. Watching Joanna closely, Josse saw her turn to the entrance to the secret path and give a low bow of reverence.

Then she slid off Honey’s back; he wondered whether to do the same — wasn’t it good manners to wait to be asked? — but then she looked at him and gave a quick nod, so he dismounted as well, reaching up and taking Meggie in his arms. Joanna was walking slowly up to the largest of the stone cottages and just as she put out her hand to tap on the partly opened door, it was flung wide and a man appeared in the entrance.