Alys Clare - Fortune Like the Moon

‘Not well. He-’

‘No, he wouldn’t be. Nor will any be among them what has the misfortune to depend on him, neither. The master isn’t here,’ she said, abruptly changing to the practical. ‘He’s gone to Canterbury, sir.’

No explanation followed — indeed, Josse thought, why should it? — so he repeated, with a delicate note of enquiry, ‘Canterbury?’

‘Aye. To bare his soul before the good Brothers, do an honest penance, take his punishment and say Mass for her, God rest her soul.’

‘Amen,’ Josse said. What, he wondered, mind seething, had Brice to do penance for? But it wouldn’t do to ask — wasn’t it likely that he’d get more confidences from this old soul if he pretended he was already in the know? ‘He’ll rest more easy in himself after that, I dare say.’

She gave him a swift look, as if assessing how much of the background he really knew and how much he was guessing. After a fairly uncomfortable pause — the deep-set brown eyes were disturbingly penetrating — she appeared to accept him at face value. ‘Well, I dare say,’ she agreed grudgingly. ‘No knowing how these things affect a man, that’s what I say.’ Another long, considering look, under which Josse did his best to make his expression bland and faintly earnest. The picture, he hoped, of a distressed family friend come to pay his respects.

It must have convinced her. Turning back towards the house, she yelled, ‘Ossie? Get yourself out here, lad!’ Too soon for him to have been anywhere but eavesdropping behind the door, a boy of about fourteen appeared, gangly, slightly spotty, hanks of greasy hair hanging limp over the low forehead, the epitome of young adolescence. ‘Take the gentleman’s horse,’ the woman ordered, ‘see to it’ — it! she obviously didn’t concern herself overmuch with such equine matters such as gender — ‘and then get you back to the stove. Don’t you dare let it stick, or it’ll be you as cleans my pan!’

‘No, Mathild.’ The boy flashed a quick grin at Josse — he had, Josse observed, a broken and discoloured front tooth, which must surely soon start giving the boy agonies, if it wasn’t doing so already — and Josse dismounted and gave the boy the reins.

Then, with a jerk of her head as if to say, this way, Mathild led Josse into the cool hall of Rotherbridge Manor.

‘You’ll take some ale, sir?’ she offered, going to where a covered pewter jug stood ready on a long side table. A hospitable house, this.

‘Aye, thank you.’

She filled a mug, and watched as he drank. ‘Thirsty day,’ she remarked. ‘You’ve come far?’

She was probing, he decided. ‘I put up last night at Newenden.’

‘Hm. Found a place to lay your head that didn’t make your skin crawl, did you?’ Then, before he had a chance to answer, ‘You knew her well, my lady Dillian?’

‘I didn’t know her at all,’ he replied honestly. ‘It was Gunnora I knew.’ That was not so honest. In fact, it wasn’t honest at all.

‘Gunnora.’ Mathild nodded slowly. ‘Went in a convent, she did.’

‘Aye, Hawkenlye Abbey. I know the Abbess.’ That, anyway, was truthful. ‘My mission here is primarily to discuss with Sir Alard the disposal of the poor girl’s body.’

‘Aye, and he’ll have told you, do what you please,’ Mathild said with devastating accuracy.

‘More or less,’ Josse agreed. Then, taking a step in the dark, ‘A shame, that they never made it up before she died.’

‘Aye, aye.’ He’d got it right. ‘No one should die with bad blood between them and their kin, sir, should they?’

‘No,’ he agreed gravely.

‘Not that it was entirely his fault, mind. She were a difficult girl, Gunnora. Wouldn’t have liked the care of her, I wouldn’t. Now Dillian, she were different.’ The creased face took on a softer expression.

Mathild, Josse thought, was at the stage of mourning when there is a great need to talk endlessly about the deceased, singing their praises as if that might weigh with the delicate business of the judgement of their soul. Like an ongoing prayer for those in purgatory.

But it was not to discuss Dillian that he had come. Not entirely, anyway.

When Mathild paused for breath — she didn’t seem to need to do so all that often — he interjected mildly, ‘Gunnora was — let me see — two years older?’

‘Four.’ Mathild took the bait. ‘But you’d have said more, I reckon. Old in her ways, she was. Mind, she had responsibility put on her young, what with her mother dying like that.’

‘Aye,’ Josse said, nodding as if he knew all about it. ‘Never easy, for a young girl to lose her mother.’

‘That it isn’t.’ Mathild leaned forward confidingly. ‘She was an odd child, though, even before it happened. And she never let him spoil her like he did her sister. Blamed him and his wealth for her mother’s death, I shouldn’t wonder. Stands to reason, really. The Lady Margaret shouldn’t have had another child, but, there you are, a man wants a son to inherit, and that’s an end to it. Except it wasn’t a son, it was Dillian.’ She sighed deeply. ‘Dillian never blamed him, but then she was so little when she lost her mother, under a year old, she can’t have any memory of the lady Margaret except what others told her. But in Gunnora, it came out in her rejection of all he had to give. And that, of course, is why she wouldn’t have Sir Brice. For one thing, it was her father planning for her again — she’d never have that — and, for another, it would have been more of the same. She’d have gone from being a rich man’s daughter to being a rich man’s wife. And it was that which she reckoned saw off her dear mother.’

Yes. The reasoning was sound. It would be, Josse thought, in this observant old woman. ‘Poor Gunnora,’ he murmured.

‘Poor?’ Mathild put her head on one side as if considering. ‘Aye, to die at a murderer’s hand. But if she’d married Lord Brice, sir, she might have died like her sister did. As it was, Dillian died in her place.’

And that, Josse thought, looking at the resentment in the old face, was, to Mathild’s mind, unforgivable.

He said, ‘How did Dillian die?’

If Mathild was surprised that he didn’t know, it was not apparent. ‘They’d been arguing again, her and Brice,’ she said quietly. ‘They were always at it. Well, it was him started it.’ She shot Josse a quick look, as if to assess how he would react to hearing a servant criticise her master. He smiled encouragingly. ‘I hate to say it,’ she plunged on, obviously not about to let that put her off, ‘but she wasn’t the same girl as what she was when she married him. He’s a tough man, the master, likes his own way. Used to being obeyed, he is, and, being that much older than Dillian, he thought all he had to do was say jump, and she’d jump. Didn’t allow for her spirit, he didn’t. She went along with him to begin with — I do reckon, sir, that she loved him, or leastways thought she did, which amounts to the same result — and she tried hard to please him. But there wasn’t any give in him — all the pleasing and the accommodating was one way. And, soon as she started standing up to him, that was that.’ Again, the sigh. ‘It was a shock, when she first realised what he was like. Shocked him and all, when she changed. The shouting began, then he started to knock her about. Many’s the time I treated her cuts and bruises, poor lass. And’ — she cast a quick glance around as if to ensure they really were alone — ‘he used to force her. You know.’ Josse was all too afraid he did. ‘Wanted a child, he did. A son. And her, poor Dillian, well, even if she’d have liked a child, she didn’t like what brings a child into being, not with him, anyway. That was what they were fighting about that morning. Ran out of the bedchamber in her wrap, she did, hair all over the place, marks of his fingers on her poor pale cheeks where he’d slapped her, and she was crying out, “I’m not staying here with you! I hate you!” Flew down the steps to the yard, she did, and, as evil chance would have it, the first horse she sees is the master’s, still standing there from when he came in from his early morning ride — he liked to ride early, sir, then come in and eat, then go up to Dillian.’