Alys Clare - Fortune Like the Moon

Either way, he plunged on and asked his question.

‘Your brother, Olivar,’ he began.

‘My brother.’ Brice sighed, sticking his legs out straight in front of him and regarding his boots. As if he, too, now felt able to speak of more personal matters, he added, ‘My poor suffering brother.’

So he did know of Olivar’s grief!

‘Suffering?’ Josse echoed innocently.

‘Indeed. He laments her every waking minute. All his hopes gone awry, all he’s waited and prayed for these three years or more.’ He sighed again. ‘I blame her, although I know it is wrong to speak ill of the dead. But she was ever a cold fish. Calculating, so that you never knew whether her actions had an honest motive. Me, I’m sorry to admit it, but I usually suspected the opposite. She was a devious woman. I can’t understand what the attraction was, but it was there all right. He adored her.’

‘His hopes?’ Josse had no idea what Brice was talking about. Had Olivar concealed a private love for Dillian? Hoped — although surely it must have been hopeless — that one day he would win her? But no, that couldn’t be right — nobody had suggested Dillian was a cold fish; quite the contrary. And, if he were speaking of his late wife, would Brice sound quite so offhand?

‘Yes.’ Brice frowned. ‘I thought you knew? Thought they would have told you?’ The frown deepened. ‘No. Of course they couldn’t have done. They didn’t know. Nobody did, except the three of us.’

‘Three.’ Brice, Olivar, and-

‘They kept it hidden from everyone,’ Brice said. ‘I only knew because Olivar confided in me. He felt bad, I think, because she’d turned me down. Not that I minded!’ He laughed briefly. ‘Only my pride was hurt. I was prepared to marry her, as I said earlier, but, in all honesty, I never really cared for her.’

‘Three,’ Josse said again. He wished he had not drunk so much ale; just when he needed his wits, here they were all fuddled.

‘Yes.’ Brice’s dark eyes were on him again. ‘My brother and me, naturally, and her.’ Then, as if Josse could possibly still be in any doubt, ‘Gunnora.’

As if fully aware that this new topic meant his guest was in for quite a long spell of sitting and listening, Brice got up and refilled Josse’s mug.

‘Had you, before we met,’ he asked his guest, ‘formed an impression of Gunnora of Winnowlands?’

Josse, who had quietly and, he hoped, unobtrusively, pushed the full mug out of his reach, considered. ‘To some extent,’ he said. ‘I sensed, from what I was told, that she was self-contained, lacking in warmth, manipulative.’

‘How astute,’ Brice murmured. ‘She was all of those. I knew her from childhood — my father’s lands bordered Alard’s, and it was inevitable that our two families should be on terms of some intimacy. Gunnora was several years my junior, but, nevertheless, it was she with whom I learned to dance, she with whom I harmonised when we were summoned to sing our little songs for our parents.’

‘You did not like her,’ Josse said.

‘Not greatly. I respected her, for she was intelligent and, when she put her mind to the task, capable. But’ — the heavy brows drew down in an expression of intense thought — ‘there was ever an air of superiority about her, as if privately she was thinking, “I am better than you. I only join in these inane activities because, just at present, it pleases me to do so.”’ He glanced at Josse. ‘She could be cruel. One of her father’s serving women had fallen for a groom — a handsome fellow, but brainless, some years younger than her — and he let her down. Gunnora, pretending to console the poor wretched woman, said that someone of her years and her looks would do better to set her cap at a man her own age.’

‘Sound advice, surely?’ Josse said.

Brice smiled grimly. ‘Indeed. Except that she didn’t content herself with that. She went on to suggest a suitable man, a half-blind old fool who was fat, stinking, and chronically indolent. Said he needed looking after, and Cat — the woman’s name was Catherine — could do the job.’

‘A little heartless.’

‘More than a little, if you could have seen the two men, the one so attractive, the other so foul. Gunnora made it clear to Cat that she considered Cat’s own looks more akin to the old man’s.’

‘I begin to see what you mean,’ Josse remarked. It sounded like a gratuitous piece of spite. ‘And Gunnora, was she beautiful?’ He had seen her in death, and her features had seemed regular enough: But a dead face gave no clue to how it had appeared in life, when it was animated, crossed with a dozen emotions, and-

‘She could have been beautiful,’ Brice said. ‘Her hair was thick and dark, her skin was perfect, and her eyes were large and deep blue, like her sister’s. But her chin was too small. That alone would not have detracted seriously from her looks, but, in conjunction with her pursed, prim mouth, the effect was too strong to miss.’

‘You studied her closely,’ Josse observed.

Again, the quick grin. ‘She was meant to be my wife.’

‘But she was in love with your brother, and would not have you.’

Brice considered that. ‘My brother, definitely, was in love with her. As for her…’ He seemed at a loss.

‘When did it start?’ Josse prompted. Often, he had observed, people told a story better when encouraged to begin at the beginning.

‘Well, when she had her eighteenth birthday, her father told her it was time that her betrothal to me should be formally arranged. My late father had long since persuaded me that the match was in my best interests, since, once I inherited Rotherbridge, an alliance with Gunnora would unite our estates with Winnowlands. It was a sound suggestion, I could readily understand that. And, as for marrying Gunnora, I had no particular feelings either way. There was no other woman I was in love with, but that, in any case, would not have been strictly relevant. And, as I have said, she was intelligent, good looking and capable.’ He shot Josse a shrewd look. ‘What more can a man ask for in a wife?’

‘What indeed,’ Josse murmured.

‘But Gunnora wouldn’t have it. She acted as if the whole thing was a total surprise, which it surely couldn’t have been. Then she said she did not wish to marry me, and, when pressed for a reason, said she did not care for me as a husband. That was not enough for Alard, who began a campaign to make her change her mind. He shut her in her room, threatened to beat her, took away her pretty clothes and left her with cast-offs to wear, all of which she greeted with the same sort of twisted, self-punishing delight as a martyr shown the means of her martyrdom. She was bright enough to realise that, if she acted as if this punishment were satisfying some strange, perverse desire in her instead of driving her towards surrender, then it would probably stop. Which it did — Alard was a simple man, poor sap, and no match for his elder daughter.’

‘And, all along, you think her real reason for refusing you was because she was in love with your brother?’

Brice looked puzzled. ‘I don’t know. It must have been, mustn’t it? I mean, no matter what she might have said about not wanting to be a rich man’s wife and plaything — and I was a rich man by then, my father having passed away — there had to be more to it than that. She knew me well enough to be aware I wouldn’t try to make a plaything of her!’ he burst out suddenly. ‘I might not have had any love for her, but I respected her. And life as a rich man’s wife is, I assure you, better than the alternative.’

‘You don’t have to convince me,’ Josse said. ‘Why didn’t she say she wished to marry Olivar instead? Assuming he had asked her?’