Fair, Bright, and Terrible Read online

  But to think of the end was to remember the beginning. It was remembering the way he had looked at her with a shining admiration she had never seen from a man. “You are made of spices that tempt a man’s tongue,” he had said to her, and an unholy thrill had run through her. She could only dimly recall the sensation now, but she did not forget its power. He had looked at her mouth and she was filled with an aching thirst, as though she would die of it as one in a far and scorching desert.

  He had seen it, and let her go. That was the moment, she thought years later. That was when her heart began to slip away from her, escaping her control and landing squarely in his hands. Why? Because he did not reach to take her, but allowed her to reach for him. Because he had not flinched from her vehement political posturing. Because he did not see her as a great lady or an obedient wife or an indulgent mother. He saw only a woman, and desired her. It was a lure she could not, in the end, resist.

  “Young Godfrey could not take his eyes from you,” Eluned had made a point to say to Mathilda. This was important to remember, lest she fall into a belief that she had been an innocent seduced. Also, it served to remind herself that she had always been cunning, even then.

  Robert had come to Torver to woo the young Mathilda and when he abandoned pursuit, the girl seemed likely to make trouble for him. So Eluned had pushed Mathilda into the path of a boy from the household guard. She whispered to the boy that he was not wrong to hope, and she sighed with Mathilda over how handsome and gallant Godfrey was, until Mathilda was ripe for the plucking.

  “Wear your red gown,” she urged the girl one night, “and leave your throat bare. See if you cannot tempt him!”

  And while Mathilda’s eyes were thus turned to some utterly forgettable boy, Eluned slipped away from the feast and was kissed. Her first kiss, after nine years of marriage and two children. It was intoxicating. All of it, even that first time with him, naked in a patch of sunlight, when she was so nervous she shook like a leaf through it all – every moment with him had gone to her head like the strongest wine.

  That was her great mistake, and her greatest delight: to have lost herself in it so completely. It had required planning and discretion, but it was easy enough to devise a way to see him. She would make the excuse of exercising her mount, sometimes, or her falcon – or she would make no excuse at all. Lady Torver was old, and there were enough other ladies to sit with her and embroider and pray the day away. Two or three times a week, Eluned would contrive to meet him, and leave the signal for him. She would take the little pink stone he had found that first time in their secret place, and put it carefully on the narrow sill under the stained glass Jesse tree.

  He would find it tucked into that corner under the bright blues and reds and golds, and then bring it back to her. Every few days, he would see her and slip it into her hand as they kissed. Then her clothes came off, and for the next hour she could stop thinking of planning and hiding and hoping. When she was with him, there was no need to think about anything at all. She could give herself completely to lust.

  But it wasn’t all lust. This was important to remember, too. Even all these years later, she could easily recall the feel of her heart swelling when he spoke so casually of his father’s disdain. Robert had been born a twin, his brother older by only an hour and dead of a fever when they were four. Yet his father had decided, for unfathomable reasons, that the younger could never be what the original heir would have been.

  “No son will ever please as well as the dead and sainted one,” Robert told her with a heartbreaking shrug. “I have decided it is foolish to try. He will call me wayward and useless in any case. So because wayward and useless is so much more diverting than faithful and industrious,” he said with a wicked grin and a kiss to the upper slope of her breast, “and he will despair of me no matter the course I take, I have decided he can curse me while I enjoy life.”

  “Do you miss your twin?” she had asked. “Do you remember him?”

  He directed a small, sad smile at the trees that surrounded them and answered, “I remember little of him except how wrong it felt when he died. It is a strange feeling, like there is a hole in the world that only I can see.”

  “Do you not think your father sees it too?”

  He waited a long time in silence before he answered. “Ah yes, my clever cariad, you have the right of it. It is all he sees when he looks at me. He sees what is missing.”

  She had wanted to say something then, about fear and emptiness and what it meant when a child was lost. But he had kissed her throat and moved his hand between her bare legs and murmured, “All I see is you.” Then she thought of nothing at all. She only felt the sunlight on her skin, the warmth and life spreading through her limbs as his hands touched her everywhere.

  There were other things, too, that had naught to do with the forbidden delight of his kisses. She remembered them well. How he was ever mindful of her comfort, always solicitous and attentive to the smallest detail, forever finding new ways to take care of her. Her petty jealousy when he had singled out a shy maiden and danced with her, to still the cruel tongues of the other girls. His instinctive compassion to a scared beggar boy who had stumbled upon their hiding place, which contrasted so sharply with her own impatient reaction to the unwelcome child. Little details that were unimportant now, except that they showed he was a good man. Better than her, she knew. Less selfish, more warmhearted. She remembered him.

  And she remembered the feel of those stolen hours, days and days of it, where she lost herself in him. It was never enough. She could not get her fill of it, of him, of who she was with him.

  Only her daughter had anchored her to reality every day. Gwenllian was eight years old then, and looked to her mother for how to behave. So Eluned was careful, in the hours she was not hidden among the trees with Robert, to act a proper and chaste woman. Pleasant banter was accepted, courtly gestures and a certain kind of flirtation were allowed. Everything else between them was hidden in their secret meeting place, where she went while Gwenllian played with her cousins and was none the wiser.

  “For you, my favorite daughter,” she had said one day when she came back from an afternoon in Robert’s arms. She handed Gwenllian a handful of little purple flowers.

  “I am your only daughter, and your hair is different,” observed Gwenllian with a small frown. Eluned told her that she preferred this new style because it was so much less fuss. And it was. That was not a lie. She did not say that it was Robert who braided her hair after she had let it down to fan all around them, that it was he who coiled the braid and caught it up in a net before laying the linen veil on it. She wore it like that all summer, because it was so easy to take down and up again.

  She told Gwenllian that the flowers were bruisewort, so named because the leaves put in a poultice would help bruises to heal. Gwenllian asked what the flowers did, and the stems.

  “I know not,” answered Eluned, relieved that her daughter was more interested in the plant than where it came from. “But the roots of it can be given in a tea to cure a sore throat.”

  Then of course nothing would do but Gwenllian must have the roots. Eluned began to gather some new plant on her way to or from meeting Robert, and soon Gwenllian demanded to see where they all grew. So every day was spent gathering flowers with her daughter, or meeting her lover in their secret place. Was there ever such an enchanted summer?

  That had been her life for a season. She had never forgotten it. But it felt more like a story that had been sung to her long ago, so many times that she knew it by rote. He had loved that girl who was so confident it would all turn out well, who was so happy and alive, whose world was, briefly, an enchanted place.

  She had been that girl, once. Then it all went wrong.

  Forget at your peril. Think back now, she urged herself, unsure if she could. Back to the time when she believed her husband was only a harmless fool to be outwitted. Back to a time when there were only wide-open possibilities in all directions, ins
tead of scraps to be foraged in a small and airless room.

  She remembered the argument with Robert, how reality had at last begun to intrude on the space reserved for their love. It should have woken her from the dream, but it did not. Instead as she rode back to Ruardean, she was only fearful he would stop loving her because she must lie with Walter. In the nights away from Robert, she relived their argument obsessively and was mortified that his last sight of her was as she walked away awkwardly, her shoe loose from a missing button and half-falling from her foot.

  Then she arrived home and Walter came shortly thereafter, and the little haven in the hills she had shared with a lover seemed impossibly distant. Her husband had always been subject to whimsical moods, sometimes deeply troubled by sadness and other times so filled with a fevered energy that he barely slept. Now he was fevered, agitated with a religious fervor that was sparked by Montfort’s defeat.

  “God Himself has spoken at last,” he told her with shining eyes. “The cause of the king is righteous, and Montfort was naught more than a trick of the Devil that would test men’s souls.”

  She did not debate him when he was like this. But neither could she bring herself to nod meekly and agree, even if it was wiser to play that part. She only waited to see if he would come to her bed, half of her afraid that he did not and the other half relieved. They had been lucky so far, she and Robert. But to depend on luck in the matter of pregnancy was a lethal stupidity, and so she waited for a husband who never came to her bed. She should have gone to him, but somehow she never did.

  Within a fortnight he was gone again, setting off on a long pilgrimage to Aix-la-Chapelle where he would see the great relics, and he never touched her. Her fear over what might happen if a babe grew in her belly while he was away was nothing to her joy at knowing he would spend all the winter in the Rhineland.

  She sent word to Robert. They would have months and months together, alone. She would contrive to make him part of Ruardean, give him a place as a knight of the garrison. She would find a way to make it work.

  Remember this, she told herself now as she sat in the cold darkness of her bower. Remember how sure you were, and that you schemed even before Walter came back. It was too easy to fall into the belief that Walter’s actions alone had shaped her. And though she might lie to anyone else when it suited her needs, she must not lie to herself.

  She had schemed. The ladies who attended her most closely were not her friends or kinswomen. They could not be trusted and so she had begun to gather tidbits about them, prepared to bribe any of them if they saw too much and sought to expose her one day. She had not known these precautions came too late, because one of the servants who traveled with Walter let slip the observation that the lady of Ruardean was uncommonly happy in her time at the Torver estate, that she had been quick to laugh and too often danced with one particular young knight. In all her preoccupation, she had overlooked the crucial detail of which servants had been at Torver with her, which would go with Walter, and what they might reveal. Above all, she had not anticipated Walter’s reaction.

  Walter returned to Ruardean three days before Robert arrived there. Her husband found her in the tilting yard, where she was watching the men practice while trying to explain to Gwenllian why girls could not, in fact, ever become knights. She had been saying something about the gallantry of noble men when he grasped her gown from behind, pulled her up and dragged her away. This she had remembered vividly over the years: Gwenllian running after them, clinging to her mother’s belt as she was dragged along and sending vicious kicks at Walter until young Madog intervened. She could not forget, ever, the look on her daughter’s face when Madog said in Welsh that they could do nothing, that they must let this happen.

  “You will not tell falsehoods before Our Lord,” Walter declared as he thrust her into the chapel.

  What a fool he was. Of course she would tell falsehoods. How easy it was to swear innocence. It was even easier as the hours wore on. His suspicion was only sparked by a passing comment; there was no evidence to dispute. But avowals of innocence were just the beginning. He made her kneel for hours before the statue of the Virgin and dwell on wifely virtue.

  “For I have seen defiance in your eyes, wife,” he said, as though it caused him great anguish, “and I fear for your very soul.”

  So she knelt until her knees ached. At his command she lay prostrate on the stone floor through the night, her husband stretched next to her because he swore he would not abandon her to the evil spirits that he saw at her shoulder, which sought to steal her soul. He hissed at his visions that they would not take her. She turned her face to the floor and thought, My husband is mad.

  Mad or holy, it did not matter which. It only mattered that she submit to his visions, and survive.

  In the morning she begged him tenderly to let her go and bring them food and drink, but he would not let her interrupt their vigil. She began to feel faint at midday, but when she dared to show it Walter clutched her slumping shoulders and shook her hard, and shouted that she must fight the demons. She began to fear him a little then, because he had never handled her roughly before this. As the second night came on and she knew he would still not relent, hopelessness rose up in her. Her husband’s voice was all around her, for hours. It was soft and threatening as distant thunder. It turned her joy to shame.

  She thought of Robert. She saw his golden-brown hair in the sun, against her bare breast. She thought of the adoring look he gave her when he spied that same defiance in her eyes. It was sin. All of it was sin, and she felt the weight of it as Walter wanted her too.

  As her lips moved to recite the Pater Noster in the small hours of the second night of prayer, she spread her knees apart under her skirt to relieve the pain of kneeling so many hours. And though it was the surest sacrilege to do so, she remembered herself on her knees under the trees with Robert, legs spread wide as he took her from behind – like animals. They were like animals and she had loved it. Her arm had clutched around a tree to steady herself against his glorious pounding as she, panting, had looked out over the lake and smiled to think there were people below, oblivious to their ecstasy. So many people who merely drifted through life’s duties, obedient and safe and small. Never again will I be that, she had vowed in that moment.

  In the chapel, she glanced at her husband and then back to the Virgin, reciting prayers of forgiveness on her knees, remembering that vivid scene, and it all suddenly changed in her mind. The focus shifted away from those imagined people below and moved to the landscape itself – the bright lake, the distant hills, the great wide world. In the midst of it she was but one person, one burning heart. And everywhere there were churches, cathedrals, fortresses, armies. There were men in power here and in Rome and on every inch of soil between. She knew now that all these structures, those she could see and those she could not, were built to confine her, to stop the very thing that brought her joy.

  Then she had understood that it was not a world of endless possibility. Some dreams could not be made real. She could not have what she wanted.

  It was at that moment that Walter looked hard at her and called on her to renounce Satan, and a great hatred burst inside of her. She screeched. She struck out at him. Her hands clawed at his face while she spewed every vile curse she knew and wished him to Hell.

  But Walter was a large and powerful man. He caught her hands away from him with ease, took her throat in his fist, and called on all the saints to aid him in ousting the demon that possessed her. He let her go only when she began to swoon from lack of breath.

  “Eluned?” His voice was uncertain. His look was gentle and sane. She nodded, spots swimming before her eyes, and he seemed relieved.

  When he asked her to proclaim her innocence again, she only inclined her head. When he told her she must beg forgiveness for all her sins, she made no answer. His fingers tightened hard on her jaw, forcing her face up to look at him, leaving bruises that she felt years after they faded. He was so tall a
nd broad that he filled her vision. Mad or holy, the world was built for men like him. He had all the power over her, because he was her husband and because he could crack her like an egg.

  She begged forgiveness for all her sins. Over and over again, until she had no voice left. Until he was pleased.

  And then she went about the business of seducing him into her bed.

  Her fingertips had turned blue with the cold. She stood now, agitated, and blew on her hands as she paced the room. There was no need to remember the details of her marriage bed. Walter was not cruel to her, and she had always done her wifely duties without complaint. But she could not forget that it had made her feel possessed of a demon in truth, to carefully manipulate him into her bed while the bruises of his gripping fingers were still fresh along her jaw. It must be done and quickly, not because she might already carry a child, but because she knew by instinct it would gentle him, tame the wildness in his eyes and kill the suspicion in his breast if she bedded him in this mood. So she did it, because she valued self-preservation more than her scruples.

  She had used his guilt and his godliness against him, careful hints and suggestions that his long absence from her bed left room for the Devil to enter. It was easy to make him think it was his idea, that he corrected his own bad behavior by taking her to bed as God intended for man and wife. It only took the rest of that day, between reassuring her daughter she was well and carefully sending a kinsman to intercept Robert before he came to the castle, to steer her husband to her bed that night.