Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 36
“Shouldn’t it, my dear?”
“I don’t know, Lady Mary.”
We sat on benches drawn to a wooden table with trestles, John and I across from Ruth and Stephen. My husband and I had been served in the great hall by nimble, soft-toed squires who received the dishes from kitchen menials. After his death, however, I began to dine in the solar instead of the hall. For the last year I had been served by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the three illegitimate sons of my cook, Sarah. As a rule, I liked to dine without ceremony, chatting with the sons—identical triplets with fiery red hair on their heads and arms, and thus their name: they seemed to have stepped out of a furnace. But tonight, for the sake of my guests, I had ordered Sarah and her two illegitimate daughters, Rahab and Magdalena, to prepare, and her sons to serve, a banquet instead of a supper. The daughters had laid the table with a rich brocade of Saracen knights astride their swift little ponies, and they had placed among the knights, as if it were under seige, a molded castle of sugar, rice-flour, and almond-paste.
After I had said the grace, the sons appeared with lavers, ewers, and napkins and passed them among my guests. Stephen lifted a laver to his mouth and started to drink, but John whispered frantically:
“It isn’t soup, it’s to wash your hands.”
“There’ll be other things to drink,” I promised.
“I haven’t felt this clean since I was baptized!” Stephen laughed, splattering the table with water from his laver.
Both Ruth and John, though neither had eaten from dishes of beaten silver, were fully at ease with knives and spoons; they cut the pheasant and duck before they used their fingers and scooped the fish-and-crab-apple pie with the spoons. But Stephen watched his friends with wry perplexity.
“I never used a knife except to hunt or fish,” he sighed. “I’ll probably cut off a finger. Then you can see if I’m a Mandrake!”
“We’d know that already,” said John. “You’d look like a hedgehog and somebody would have chopped you up a long time ago for aphrodisiacs. You’d have brought a fortune.” His gruesome remarks, I gathered, were meant to divert me from the fact that he had furtively dropped his knife, seized a pheasant, and wrestled off a wing. His motive was as obvious as it was generous. He did not wish to shame his friend by his own polished manners.
I laughed heartily for the first time since the death of my son. “Knives were always a nuisance. Spoons too. What are fingers for if not to eat with? So long as you don’t bite yourself!” I wrenched a drumstick and thigh from the parent bird and felt the grease, warm and mouthwatering, ooze between my fingers. “Here,” I said to Stephen. “Take hold of the thigh and we’ll divide the piece.” The bone parted, the meat split into decidedly unequal portions. Half of my drumstick accompanied John’s thigh.
“It means you’re destined for love,” I said.
“He’s already had it,” said John. “Hay-lofts full of it.”
“She doesn’t mean that kind,” said Stephen, suddenly serious. “She means caring—taking care of—don’t you, Lady Mary? I’ve had that too, of course.” He looked at John.
“Then it means you’ll always have it.”
“I know,” he said.
John smiled at Stephen and then at me, happy because the three of us were friends, but silent Ruth continued to cut her meat into snail-sized portions and lift them to her mouth with the fastidiousness of a nun (her fingers, however, made frequent trips).
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego scurried between the solar and the kitchen, removing and replenishing, but it looked as if John and Stephen would never satisfy their hunger. With discreet if considerable assistance from Ruth, they downed three pheasants, two ducks, two fish-and-crab-apple pies, and four tumblers of mead.
“Leave some for us,” hissed Shadrach in Stephen’s ear. “This is the last bird.” Stephen looked surprised, then penitent, and announced himself as full as a tick on the ear of a hound. Shadrach hurried the last bird back to the kitchen.
After the feast the boys told me about their adventures, encouraging rather than interrupting each other with such comments as, “You tell her about the stream with the pepperwort, John,” or “Stephen you’re better about the fighting.” John talked more because he was more at ease with words; Stephen gestured as much as he talked and sometimes asked John to finish a sentence for him; and Ruth said nothing until the end of the story, when she recounted, quietly, without once meeting my gaze, the episode of her capture and bargain with the Mandrakes. I studied her while she spoke. Shy? Aloof, I would say. Mistrustful. Of me, at least. Simple jealousy was not the explanation. I was hardly a rival for the kind of love she seemed to want from Stephen. No, it was not my beauty which troubled her, but the wisdom which youth supposes to come with age; in a word, my mature perceptions. There was something about her which she did not wish perceived.
“And now for the gifts,” I said.
“Gifts?” cried John.
“Yes. The dessert of a feast is the gifts and not the pies.”
“But we have nothing to give you.”
“You have told me a wondrous and frightening story.
No jongleur could have kept me more enthralled. And for you, I have—” I clapped my hands and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego appeared with my gifts, some musical instruments which had once belonged to my son. For Ruth, a rebec, a pear-shaped instrument from the East, three-stringed and played with a bow; for the boys, twin nakers or kettledrums which Stephen strapped to his back and John began to pound with soft-headed wooden drumsticks.
Ruth hesitated with her rebec till Stephen turned and said, “Play for us, Ruth! What are you waiting for, a harp?”
Then Ruth joined them, the boys marching round and round the solar, Stephen first, John behind him pounding on the drums and thumping the carpet with his feet, and finally Ruth, playing with evident skill and forgetting to look remote and enigmatic. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had lingered in the doorway, and behind them Sarah appeared with her plump, swarthy daughters. I was not surprised when they started to sing; I was only surprised to find myself joining them in the latest popular song:
Summer is a-comin’ in, Loud sing cuckoo. Groweth seed and bloweth mead, And springs the wood anew. Sing, cuckoo!
In an hour the three musicians, their audience departed to the kitchen, had exhausted the energies which the meal had revived. Ruth sank in the chair beside the hearth. The boys, thanking me profusely for their gifts, climbed into the window seats. Stephen yawned and began to nod his head. John, in the opposite seat, gave him a warning kick,
“Come,” I said to them, “there’s a tittle room over the kitchen which used to belong to my son. The hall was too big, the solar too warm, he felt. I’ll show you his room while Ruth prepares for bed. Ruth, we’ll fix you a place in the window. You see how the boys are sitting opposite each other. I’ve only to join the seats with a wooden stool and add a few cushions to make a couch. Or”—and I made the offer, I fear, with visible reluctance—”you may share my own bed under the canopy.”
“The window seats will be fine.”
I pointed to the Aumbry, a wooden cupboard aswirl with wrought-iron scroll work, almost like the illuminated page of a psalter. “There’s no lock. Open the doors and find yourself a night-dress while I show the boys their room.”
My son’s room was as small as a chapel in a keep, with one little square of a window, but the bed was wide as well as canopied, and irresistible to the tired boys.
“It’s just like yours!” John cried.
“Smaller. But just as soft.”
“At home I slept on a bench against the wall, in a room with eight other boys—sons of my father’s knights. I got the wall bench because my father owned the castle.”
“I slept on straw,” said Stephen, touching the mattress, sitting, stretching himself at length, and uttering a huge, grateful sigh. “It’s like a nest of puppies. What makes it so soft?”
“Goose-feathers.”
“The geese we ate tonight—their feathers will stuff a mattress, won’t they?”
“Two, I suspect.” I fetched them a silk-covered bearskin from a small, crooked cupboard which my son had built at the age of thirteen. “And now I must see to Ruth.”
I am not a reticent person, but the sight of the boys— Stephen in bed and sleepily smiling goodnight, John respectfully standing but sneaking an envious glance at his less respectful friend—wrenched me almost to tears. I did not trust myself to say that I was very glad to offer them my son’s bed for as long as they chose to stay in the Manor of Roses.
I could only say: “Sleep as late as you like. Sarah can fix you breakfast at any hour.”
“You’re very kind,” said Stephen. “But tomorrow, I think, we must get an early start for London.”
“London!” I cried. “But your wounds haven’t healed!”
“They were just scratches really, and now you’ve cured them with your medicine. If we stayed, we might never want to go.”
“I might never want you to go.”
“But don’t you see, Lady Mary, we have to fight for Jerusalem.”
“You expect to succeed where kings have failed? Frederick Barbarossa? Richard-the-Lion-Hearted? Two little boys without a weapon between them!”
“We’re not little boys,” he protested. “I’m a young swain—-fifteen winters old—and John here is a—stripling who will grow like a bindweed. Aren’t you, John?”
“Grow, anyway,” said John without enthusiasm. “But I don’t see why we have to leave in the morning.”
“Because of Ruth.”
“And Ruth is your guardian angel?” I asked with an irony lost on the boy.
“Yes. Already she’s saved our lives.”
“Has she, Stephen? Has she? Sleep now. We’ll talk tomorrow. I want to tell you about my own son.”
I returned to the solar heavy of foot. It was well for Ruth that she had changed to a nightdress, joined the window seats with the necessary stool, and retired to bed in a tumble of cushions. Now she was feigning sleep but forgetting to mimic the slow, deep breams of the true sleeper. Well, I could question her tomorrow. One thing I knew. She would lead my boys on no unholy Crusade.
A chill in the air awakened me. It was not unusual for a hot summer day to grow wintry at night. I rose, lit a candle, and found additional coverlets for myself and Ruth. Her face seemed afloat in her golden hair; decapitated, somehow; or drowned.
I thought of the boys, shivering in the draft of their glassless window. I had not remembered to draw the canopy of their bed. In my linen nightdress and my pointed satin slippers which, like all the footwear expected of English ladies, cruelly pinched my toes, I passed through the hall and then the kitchen, tiptoed among the pallets of Sarah and her children stretched near the oven, and climbed a staircase whose steepness resembled a ladder.
Lifting aside a coarse leather curtain, I stood in the doorway of my son’s room and looked at the boys. They had fallen asleep without extinguishing the pewter lamp which hung from a rod beside their bed. The bearskin covered their chins, and their bodies had met for warmth in the middle of the bed. I leaned above them and started to spread my coverlet. John, who was closer to me, opened his eyes and smiled.
“Mother,” he said.
“Mary,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“That’s what I meant.”
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
“I’m glad. You came to bring us a coverlet, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Won’t we wake your brother?”
His smile broadened; he liked my acceptance of Stephen as his brother and equal. “Not our voices. Only if I got out of bed. Then he would feel me gone. But once he’s asleep, he never hears anything, unless it’s one of his hounds.”
“You’re really going tomorrow?”
“I don’t want to go. I don’t think Stephen does either. It’s Ruth’s idea. She whispered to him in the solar, when you and I were talking. But I heard her just the same. She said they must get to London. She said it was why she had come, and why she had saved us from the Mandrakes.”
“Why won’t she trust me, John?”
“I think she’s afraid of you. Of what you might guess.”
“What is there to guess?”
There was fear in his eyes. He looked at Stephen, asleep, and then at me. “I think that Ruth is a Mandrake. One who has passed.”
I flinched. I had thought: thief, adventuress, harlot, carrier of the plague, but nothing so terrible as Mandrake. Though fear was a brand in my chest, I spoke quietly. I did not want to judge her until he had made his case. He might be a too imaginative child, frightened by the forest and now bewildered with sleep. He was only twelve. And yet, from what I had seen, I had thought him singularly rational for his years. Stephen, one might have said, would wake in the night and babble of Mandrake girls. Never John. Not without reason, at least.
“Why do you think that, John?”
His words cascaded like farthings from a purse cut by a pickpocket: swift, confused at times, and yet a thread of logic which made me share his suspicions. Ruth’s mysterious arrival in the Mithraeum. Her vague answers and her claim to forgetfulness. Her lore of the forest. Her shock and disgust when he and Stephen had told her about the Mandrake hunters. Her strangely successful bargain with the crucifix.
“And they kept their word,” he said. “Even when they thought Stephen and I had killed one of their babies. It was as if they let us go so that she could use us.”
“It’s true they’re Christians,” I said. “I’ve found their stone crosses in the woods around my Manor. They might have felt bound by their word. An oath to a savage, especially a Christian savage, can be a sacred thing. Far more sacred than to some of our own Crusaders, who have sacked the towns of their sworn friends. Ruth may have told you the truth about the crucifix.”
“I know,” he said. “I know. It’s wicked of me to suspect her. She’s always been kind to me. She brought me strawberries in the forest once! And Stephen worships her. But I had to tell you, didn’t I? She might have passed when she was a small child. Grown up in a village. But someone became suspicious. She fled to the forest. Took shelter in the Mithraeum where Stephen and I found her. You see, if I’m right—”
“We’re all in danger. You and Stephen most of all. You have been exposed to her visitations. We shall have to learn the truth before you leave this house.”
“You mean we must wound her? But if she passed a long time ago, we would have to cut to the bone.”
“We wouldn’t so much as scratch her. We would simply confront her with an accusation. Suppose she is a Mandrake. Either she knew already when she first met you or else her people told her in the forest. Told her with pride: ‘See, we have let you grow soft and beautiful in the town.’ Tomorrow we shall demand proof of her innocence. Innocent, she will offer herself to the knife. The offer alone will suffice. But a true Mandrake will surely refuse such a test, and then we will know her guilt.”
“It’s rather like trial by combat, isn’t it?” he said at last. “God condemns the guilty. Pricks him with conscience until he loses the fight. But this way, there won’t be a combat, just a trial. God will make Ruth reveal her guilt or innocence.”
“And you and I will be His instruments. Nothing more.”
“And if she’s guilty?”
“We’ll send her into the forest and let her rejoin her people.”
“It will break Stephen’s heart.”
“It will save his life. Save him from Ruth—and from going to London. Without his angel, do you think he’ll still persist in his foolish crusade? He will stay here with you and me. The Manor of Roses has need of two fine youths.”
“You won’t make him a servant because he’s a villein? His ancestors were Saxon earls when mine were pirates.”
“Mine were pirates too. Blood-thirsty ones, at that. No, you and Stephen shall both be my sons. You adopted him. Why shouldn’t I?”
“You know,” he said, “when you first spoke to us at the hedge—after we had come from the forest—you said we’d come to the Manor of Roses. At first I thought you meant the manner of roses. Without the capitals.”
“Did you, John?”
“Yes. And it’s quite true. Of the house, I mean, and you. The manner of roses.”
“But I have thorns to protect the ones I love. Ruth will feel them tomorrow.” I knelt beside him and touched my lips to his cheek. It was not as if I were kissing him for the first time, but had kissed him every night for— how many years?—the years of my son when he rode to London.
“You’re crying,” he said.
“It’s the smoke from the lamp. It has stung my eyes.”
