Alys Clare - Whiter than the Lily

No, that could not be right. Because she had gone to Hawkenlye to ask for help in conceiving. And anyway she had already been carrying a baby when she died.

With a sense of defeat, Josse leant his back against the wooden wall of the hut and slowly sank down to a sitting position. He had done so much, he thought miserably, to trace Galiena. He had even found the very place where she had been born and discovered who her father was. But, despite all that, still he was no nearer to solving the mysteries of who had fathered her own child and who had poisoned her.

He put his face in his hands and rubbed hard at his eyes, which were still smarting from the smoke. But the silver-eyed man must have misinterpreted the gesture, for he said in a hypnotic voice, ‘Soon you will sleep, Josse d’Acquin. And sleep will bring dreams and oblivion.’

Peering through his fingers, Josse saw the man walk stealthily to the door, which he pushed closed behind him. There was the sound of a latch of some sort being dropped home.

And Josse heard the soft thump of the man’s footfalls as he strode away.

He found a spy hole in the plank wall and sat for some time breathing in the sweet air from outside. The swimming sensation cleared and his eyes, nose and throat, although still feeling red and raw, began to smart less.

After a time he stood up and went to try the door. It was firmly fastened. He had his short knife in his belt and, inserting the blade in the crack between door and frame, he eased it upwards until it encountered the latch. I believe, he thought with excitement, that I could get out of here.

But there seemed little point at present, for surely someone — the silver-eyed man — would instantly put him back inside again, possibly more firmly secured and perhaps even chained like the poor girl in the other hut was. No. It seemed better to wait for darkness. Or, if providence looked down kindly on him, a nice, thick, concealing blanket of mist.

In the meantime, the best he could do was to go on breathing in the mind-clearing fresh air in the hope that by the time he was called upon to anything more active, he would be fit and ready.

He could hear voices. There had been the sound of a fast horse arriving, then the rider had called out to someone in the settlement. A voice had answered — Josse thought it sounded like the silver-eyed man — and then there had been an exchange which finished with something about the hunters being engaged on the far side of some boggy ground and held there by the mist.

Providence, it seemed, was on Josse’s side.

He waited to hear if the rider would leave again but there was nothing. Maybe he was seeing to his horse — he had come into the settlement at quite a pace.

He put his eye to the knothole and peered through it. Aye, he could see the mist for himself now, swirling up from the marsh and beginning to obscure the trunks of the trees and the feet of the scrubby undergrowth. Soon, he thought. And silently he spoke to Brice: come soon.

He stood up and went back to the door. He inserted the knife blade again and this time went on pushing steadily even after he began to feel resistance. There was a sudden clank — too loud in the silent encampment! — and, as the latch came free of its holder, the door opened.

Holding the edge of the door tightly, Josse pushed it open just a crack. The mist was inching around the buildings now and growing deeper by the minute; he watched a woman on the far side of the enclosure pulling a child by the hand, urging it to hurry up and get indoors. The woman appeared to be wading in creamy milk and the only part of the child that was visible was its head.

Josse waited until there was nobody about outside. Then he opened the door more widely and edged carefully through the gap. Naked without his sword, he looked around in the hope that the silver-eyed man had stowed it somewhere near. He thought at first that his luck had failed this time but then he saw the sheath, lying across the top of a wooden barrel placed a short distance out from the end wall of the hall, presumably in a spot where rain water channelled down off the reed thatch.

With a quick prayer of thanks, Josse tiptoed over and carefully retrieved both sheath and sword, buckling on his sword belt and clasping it for a moment, as if for reassurance.

I must act quickly, he thought. If Brice has taken his cue from the mist’s descent and is on his way, then I need to be ready for him.

He made for the other hut and, as he had done before, eased the wooden bar out of its supports. He opened the door and went inside. The girl lay in almost the exact same position that she had done before; with a stab of alarm he put his fingers to the place in her neck where there should be a pulse and, relief flooding him, felt a faint beat. There was no time to check further on her condition; he bent instead to examine the shackle on her ankle.

His enforced spell of waiting in the other hut had allowed him to have a look around at its contents. It had indeed been a workroom and he had helped himself to a stout pair of pincers and a small adze. Calculating that a girl with a shackle on her ankle was not as much of an impediment to freedom as a girl still chained to the wall, first he attacked the chain. Using the adze, he flattened the chain across a large stone on the floor and brought the thick iron blade down hard on a link of the chain. It bent, but did not break. Josse hammered away at it repeatedly and, at last, it gave. Hastily he pulled the crushed ends apart with the pincers, then turned his attention to the shackle.

It consisted of a wide bracelet of iron, hinged on one side and fastened on the opposite side by a bolt thrust through two pairs of loops. The bolt was firmly bent over at each end to hold it fast and, without the pincers and Josse’s strong hands, it would have been quite impossible to remove.

The atmosphere seemed oppressive, somehow. Alert to every small sound, he had to concentrate hard in order to keep his hands steady. The providential mist could disappear as quickly as it had crept in and then-

No. He must not think about that.

He worked on the bolt until both ends were straight enough for it to be slid out from the loops. When at last it gave, he was distressed to see that the girl’s narrow ankle was raw from where the iron shackle had bitten into it. It looked, he thought, as if she had been chained in the hut for several days, an impression that was heightened by the full bucket of human waste that stood on the far side of the hut. Someone must have been coming in regularly to help her squat over the bucket to relieve herself. Had the same person fed and watered her, putting another dose of whatever was keeping her comatose into her drink?

It was no way to treat a girl.

Putting his pity aside — that emotion was no help to her now, when what she needed from him was action — he extended his arm behind her shoulders and lugged her into a sitting position. Her head lolled forward and the dirty, tangled hair fell like a curtain, concealing her face. ‘Come on, my girl,’ he whispered encouragingly, ‘I’ll get you out of here!’

She stirred, mumbled something, then slumped against his chest. ‘Can you not stand up?’ he muttered. ‘No’ — he answered his own question — ‘I will have to do it for you.’

He straightened up, still holding her to him, and got her on her feet. But her legs were like rope and seemed to fold up beneath her, so he picked her up, one arm round her shoulders, one under her knees, and carried her out of the hut.

The mist was heavy now and small droplets of water settled on Josse and the girl, soaking into the rough sacking of her single garment and the filthy hair. Every inch of her flesh left exposed by the makeshift smock was as dirty as her hair and she smelt dreadful. She was going to get very cold, he realised, and that might be dangerous to her in her semi-conscious state. Slipping back inside the hut, still with the girl in his arms, he stretched out a hand and picked up whatever it was that her head had been resting on and shook it out. There was a strong aroma of wet dog but he could ignore that; he wrapped the old blanket securely round the girl like a hooded cloak, covering her head and face. It would have to do. Then he fastened the door of the hut and, trying to look in every direction at once, he crept away.