Читать книгу The Season of the Beast - Андреа Жапп - Страница 10

SUPPER was a lengthy affair. The table manners of Agnès’s half-brother revolted her. Had he never heard of the eminent Parisian theologian Hugues de Saint-Victor, who over half a century before had explained the rules of table etiquette? In his work he specified that one should not ‘eat with one’s fingers but with a spoon, nor wipe one’s hands on one’s clothes, nor place half-eaten food or detritus from between one’s teeth on one’s plate’. Eudes gorged himself noisily, chewed with his mouth open and used his sleeve to wipe away the flecks of soup on his face. He belched profusely as he finished off the last crumbs of the fruit pudding. Sated by the supper Mabile had managed to make delicious despite the lack of meat – forbidden on this fast day – Eudes said all of a sudden:

‘And now … Gifts for my lamb and her little beloved. Send for Mathilde.’

‘She is surely sleeping, brother.’

‘Then let her be woken. I wish to perceive her joy.’

Agnès obeyed, curbing her irritation.

A few moments later, the girl, her clothes thrown on in haste, came into the vast hall, her eyes glassy with sleep and with desire.

Eudes walked over to the big wooden box covered with hessian, which the page had carried in earlier. He relished carefully untying the ropes as his niece’s expectancy mounted. At last he pulled out an earthenware flask, declaring enticingly:

‘Naturally, for your toilet I have brought vinegar from Modena, ladies. They say its dark hue turns the skin pale and silky as a dew-covered petal. The finest Italian ladies use it in abundance.’

‘You spoil us, brother.’

‘And what of it? This is a mere trifle. Let us move on to more serious matters. Ah! What do I see next in my box … five ells* of Genovese silk …’

It was a gift worthy of a princess. Agnès had to remind herself what lay behind her half-brother’s extravagance in order not to run over and feel the saffron-coloured fabric. But she could not stop herself from crying out:

‘What finery! My God! Whatever shall we use it for? Why, I would be afraid to spoil it with some clumsy gesture.’

‘Just imagine, Madame, that the dream of all silk is to caress your skin.’

The intensity of the look he gave her made her lower her eyes. He continued, however, in the same playful tone:

‘And what might this heavy crimson velvet pouch contain? What could give off such a heady fragrance? Do you know what it is, Mademoiselle?’ he teased, leaning towards his gaping niece.

‘I admit I do not, uncle.’

‘Well, let us open it then.’

He walked over to the table and spread out the blend of aniseed, coriander, fennel, ginger, juniper, almond, walnut and hazelnut, which the wealthy liked to sample before going to bed to freshen their breath and aid their digestion.

‘Épices de chambre,’ breathed the girl in an admiring, mesmerised voice.

‘Correct. And for my beloved what have we in our treasure trove? For I do believe your birthday is fast approaching, is it not, pretty young lady?’

Choked with emotion, the excited Mathilde pranced around her uncle, twittering:

‘In a few weeks’ time, uncle.’

‘Perfect! Then I shall be the first to congratulate you, and you’ll not object to my haste, will you?’

‘Oh no, uncle!’

‘Now then, what have we here that might make a birthday gift worthy of a young princess? Ah! A silver and turquoise filigree brooch fashioned by Flemish silversmiths. And from Constantinople a mother-of-pearl comb that will make her even prettier and the moon grow green with envy …’

The ecstatic child hardly dared touch the piece of jewellery shaped like a long pin. Her lower lip trembled as if she were about to burst into tears before such beauty, and Agnès thought again how the simplicity of their lives would soon become a burden to her daughter. But how would she explain to this girl, who was still a child, that in a few years’ time her charming uncle would see in his half-niece a new source of pleasure. Agnès knew that she would stop at nothing to avoid it. He would never touch her daughter’s soft skin with his filthy paws. Fortunately, as a boy, Clément was safe from such desires – and a lot more besides. Rumours concerning the strange tastes of other lords had reached Souarcy, but Eudes only liked girls, very young girls.

‘And lastly, this!’ he declaimed histrionically, as he pulled from the saddlebag a sack made of hide and fashioned in the shape of a long finger. He undid the thin piece of cord and took out a greyish phial.

Mathilde let out a cry of joy:

‘Oh my lady mother! Sweet salt! Oh, how wonderful! I have never seen any before. May I taste it?’

‘Presently. Show a little restraint, now, Mathilde! Take my daughter back to her room, will you, Mabile? It is late and she has already stayed up far too long.’

Before reluctantly following the servant, the little girl politely took her leave, first of her uncle, who kissed her hair, and then of her mother.

‘Well, brother, I admit to being no less impressed than my daughter. They say that Mahaut d’Artois, Comtesse de Bourgogne, is so partial to the stuff that she recently purchased fifteen bars of it at the Lagny fair.’

‘It is true.’

‘Yet I thought her poor. Sweet salt is said to be worth more than gold.’

‘The woman pleads poverty loudly while possessing great wealth. At two gold crowns and five pennies the pound, fifteen bars, each weighing twenty pounds, represents a small fortune. Have you ever tasted sweet salt, Agnès? The Arabs call it saccharon.’8

‘No. I only know that it is sap collected from a bamboo cane.’

‘Then let us rectify the situation at once. Here, lick this, my dear. You will be amazed by the spice. It is so smooth and combines well with pastries and beverages.’

He lifted a long grey finger up to her lips and a wave of revulsion that was difficult to control caused the young woman’s eyelids to close.

The evening stretched on. The stiff posture Agnès had obliged herself to maintain since her half-brother’s arrival, in order to discourage any familiarity on his part, was taking its toll on her shoulders. Her head was spinning from listening to Eudes’s endless stories, the sole aim of which was to show him in a good light. Without warning he exclaimed:

‘Is it true what they tell me, Madame, that you have built bee yards9 for the wild swarms where your land borders Souarcy Forest?’

For a while she had only been half listening to him, and his deceptively casual question almost threw her:

‘You have been correctly informed, brother. In accordance with common practice we hollowed out some old tree stumps with a red-hot iron, installing crossed sticks before depositing the wild colonies.’

‘But raising bees and harvesting honey is a man’s work!’

‘I have someone to assist me.’

Eudes’s eyes burned with curiosity.

‘Have you seen the king of the colony yet?’10

‘I confess I have not. The other bees guard him bravely and fiercely. Indeed, the idea of producing honey came to me when one of my farm hands was badly stung while helping himself to a free meal in the forest.’

‘Such petty theft is considered to be poaching and is punishable by death. I know that you are a sensitive soul, and it is a charming attribute of womanhood. All the same, you could at least have ordered his hands to be cut off.’

‘What use would I have for a farm hand with no hands?’

He responded to her remark with a hollow-sounding laugh, and she had the impression that he was trying to catch her out. Vassals were obliged to hand over two-thirds of their honey and a third of their wax to their lord – a levy Agnès had neglected to pay since she set up her bee yards two years before.

‘Let me sample this nectar, then, my beauty.’

‘Sadly, brother, we are still novices. Our very first harvest, last year, was a great disappointment. The continual rains turned the honey, making it unfit to eat. That is why I sent you none – for fear of making you and your servants ill. We fed it to our pigs, who tolerated it. On top of which I managed clumsily to spill one of the two pails. This year’s harvest only yielded three pounds of poor quality – barely good enough to flavour the wine dregs. Let us hope that the harvest will be better this summer, and that I shall have the pleasure of sharing it with you and your household,’ she said, feigning a sigh of despair before continuing, ‘Oh, my sweet brother Eudes, I do not know how we would survive without your continued goodwill. The soil at Souarcy is poor. Imagine, I have only been able to replace half our draught animals with plough horses – oxen being so slow and clumsy. These bee yards should allow us to supplement our meagre everyday fare. Hugues, my dear departed husband, didn’t … Well, he wasn’t …’

‘He was just a senile old man.’

‘As you will soon be,’ she muttered under her breath, and lowered her head as though out of embarrassment.

‘That was an unwise decision of my father’s if ever there was one. Marrying you to an old man of fifty, whose only claim to glory was a rash of battle scars! War does not make a man, it betrays his true nature – striking down the coward who hitherto employed a wealth of cunning to escape the slightest wound.’

‘My father believed he was acting in my interests, Eudes.’

Since the beginning of their exchange she had attempted to adjust her speech, to emphasise their blood relationship – which he was at great pains to keep out of his own discourse, always addressing her as ‘my beauty’, ‘my Agnès’, ‘my lamb’, and occasionally as ‘Madame’.

Nonetheless, Eudes’s hesitation was palpable. Agnès cultivated it as best she could, in the knowledge that her only salvation lay in this final reticence. As long as he doubted his half-sister’s awareness, he would continue to paw at the ground without daring to take the last guilty leap. On the other hand, the day he discovered she was wise to his deplorable lechery … Well, she did not know how else she could try to stop him.

She stood up from the bench and with a smile offered him her hand.

‘Let us pray together to the Holy Virgin, brother. Nothing would give me greater pleasure, besides your presence here tonight. It would make Brother Bernard, my new chaplain, so happy to see us kneeling side by side. And afterwards you must rest. I regret being the motive for your undertaking such a long journey.’

He did not notice that she was taking leave of him, and was obliged reluctantly to do as she said.

When at last the following morning after terce* she watched Eudes and his page disappear across a field, Agnès felt exhausted and her head was spinning. She decided to make an inspection of the outlying buildings, more as a way of dispelling her continual unrest than out of any real necessity. Mabile, who was staring mournfully down the empty track, mistook Agnès’s mood and remarked in a sorrowful voice:

‘Such a short visit!’

Her face was pale and drawn, and Agnès reflected that for Eudes and his servant the night must have seemed even shorter.

‘Yes indeed, Mabile, and yet how pleasant while it lasted,’ she lied with such ease that she felt an almost superstitious fear creeping through her.

Was lying and cheating really that simple despite all the Gospel’s teachings? Undoubtedly – or at least when it was the only existing form of self-defence.

‘How right you are, Madame.’

Only then did Agnès notice the strip of dark-purple muslin draped over the girl’s shoulders. She had not seen it before. Was it payment for services rendered or for favours granted?

‘Let Mathilde sleep. She was up so late. Clément will accompany me – if and when he reappears.’

She hadn’t seen the child since the previous evening. Was this coincidence or guile? Whatever the case, he was wise to keep away from Eudes’s prying eyes.

‘I am right behind you, Madame.’

She turned towards the soft voice, amused and at the same time intrigued. She had not heard him arrive. Clément would come and go, disappearing for days at a time without anyone knowing where he was, only to reappear suddenly as if by magic. She really should order him to stay by her side, for the surrounding forest was an unsafe place, especially for one so young, and indeed Agnès was constantly afraid that someone might come upon him bathing in a pond or a river. On the other hand, Clément was cautious, and his independence inspired Agnès – perhaps because she herself felt spied upon, trapped.

He followed noiselessly a few steps behind her, flanked by the two guard dogs, and only drew closer when Agnès, confident that they were out of earshot of the inquisitive Mabile, enquired gently:

‘Where do your roamings take you?’

‘I do not roam, Madame, I watch, I learn.’

‘Whom do you watch? What do you learn?’

‘You. Many things – thanks to the sisters at Clairets Abbey. And thanks to you,’ he added.

She looked down at him. His strange blue-green almond-shaped eyes stared back at her gravely, and with a flicker of suspicion. She said in a hushed voice:

‘Clairets Abbey is so far from here. Oh, I don’t know whether it was right of me to insist that you attend lessons there. It is almost a league away – too far for a child.’

‘Half that if you go through the forest.’

‘I don’t like to think of you in that forest.’

‘The forest is my friend. It teaches me many things.’

‘Clairets Forest is … Well, they say it is sometimes visited by creatures, evil creatures.’

‘By fairies and werewolves? Tall stories, Madame.’

‘You mean you don’t believe in werewolves?’

‘No more than I believe in fairies.’

‘And why not?’

‘Because if they existed and were so powerful, Madame, at worst they would have already killed or eaten us and at best made our daily lives a hell.’

He smiled, and for the first time it occurred to Agnès that he only ever allowed himself to express amusement or joy with her. Clément and Mathilde’s relationship was restricted to a good-natured selflessness on his part and an ill-tempered arrogance on hers. It was true that her daughter considered him a sort of privileged servant, and on no account would she have lowered herself by treating him as an equal.

‘Upon my word, you have quite convinced me. And I am greatly relieved for I would have hated to come face to face with a werewolf,’ she exclaimed jovially and then, growing serious again, she added in a worried voice, ‘Will you be careful about what we have discussed, Clément? No one must know. Your life, and mine, depends on it.’

‘I know that, Madame. I have known it for a long time. You need have no fear.’

They continued their dialogue in silence.

The village of Souarcy was built on a small hill. The alleyways leading up to the manor were lined with dwellings that twisted and turned, making it difficult for the hay-carts to manoeuvre without damaging the roofs of the houses. The positioning of the higgledy-piggledy buildings was entirely random, and yet they appeared to be huddled together as though seeking warmth. Souarcy, like a good many other manors, had no right to hold weaponry. At the time it was built, the English threat weighed heavily over the region and defence was the only option – hence its raised position in the middle of a forest. Indeed, the thick outer walls, within which peasants, serfs and craftsmen dwelled, had resisted many an attack with calm impudence.

Agnès replied with a perfunctory smile to the greetings, bows and curtseys of those she encountered as she made her way up to the manor via the muddy pathways, slippery with yellow clay after the recent rains. She stopped at the dovecote, but did not draw any of her usual pleasure from it. Eudes and his possible machinations were constantly on her mind. Even so, the magnificent birds welcomed her with a torrent of gently excited warbling. She glanced at the large, puffed-up male whose proud strutting always brought a smile to her lips. Not today. She had baptised him Vigil – the Watchful One – because at first light he liked to perch on the ridge beam of the manor house, cooing and watching the day break. He was the only bird who had a name. Yet another gift from her half-brother, who had brought the animal from Normandy the year before to inject new blood into her dovecote. He stretched out his muscular dark-pink neck, flecked with mauve, and she favoured him with a brief caress before leaving.

It was only after she had returned to the great hall at the manor that she realised Clément had cleverly avoided answering her question. It was too late now. The boy had disappeared again, and she would have to wait to ask him to explain the nature of what was increasingly keeping him away from the manor.

Eudes, too, was exhausted. He had only slept for an hour between Mabile’s thighs. The strumpet was unstinting when it came to taking her pleasure. Happily – since her engagement in Agnès’s household had yielded precious little else of any interest to her master. Unable to trap the mistress, he had tupped the servant. Scant compensation for the handsome piece of silk and the morsel of sweet salt, which alone had cost a small fortune, but it would have to do for the time being.

God, how his half-sister detested him! In Agnès’s eyes he was insufferably conceited, boorish and depraved. He had come to realise that she loathed him some years before when she believed herself finally rid of him thanks to her marriage. The passion, the corrupt desire he had conceived for her when she was just eight and he ten had changed into a consuming hatred. He would break her and she would grovel at his feet. She would submit to his incestuous desire – so repugnant to her that sometimes it made the colour drain from her face. He had once hoped to conquer her love and that it would be strong enough to make her commit the unpardonable sin, but this was no longer the case. Now he wanted her to submit, to beg him.

He took out his vicious ill humour on his page, who had fallen asleep and was threatening to topple forward onto his gelding’s neck.

‘Wake up! Why, anyone would think you were a maid! And if indeed you are a maid I know how to make a woman of you.’

The threat had the desired effect. The young boy sat bolt upright as if he had been whipped.

Yes, he would break her. Soon. At twenty-five she had lost none of her beauty, although she was no longer a girl. And anyway, she had given birth, and it was well known that pregnancy spoiled a woman’s body, in particular her breasts – and he preferred them pert, as was the fashion at the time, like little rounded apples, their skin pale and translucent. Who was to say that Agnès’s had not been ruined by purple stretch marks? Perhaps even her belly was withered. In contrast, Mathilde was so pretty, so slim and graceful, just like her mother had been at her age. And Mathilde adored her extravagant uncle. In a year’s time she would come of age and be ripe for the taking.

The thought cheered him no end, and he gave a loud guffaw: two birds with one stone. The worst revenge he could imagine taking on Agnès was called Mathilde. He would caress the daughter and destroy the mother. Of course, she would not leave the way clear for him. Despite his general lack of respect towards the fairer sex, Eudes was forced to acknowledge his half-sister’s intelligence. She would strike him with all her might. A pox on females! All the same, the challenge could be exciting.

Upon further reflection, this particular stone would kill not two birds but three, since the Larnay mine, which assured his wealth and relative political safety, would soon be exhausted. Certainly, the earth’s depths contained more hidden riches, but to get at them would require deep mining and neither his finances nor the geological conditions were favourable. The clay soil would give way at the first attempt to dig.

‘Agnès, my lamb,’ he murmured through his clenched jaw, ‘your end is near. Tears of blood, my precious beauty, tears of blood will run down your sweet cheeks.’

Yes, he had been worrying about the mine for some time now. He decided to go there and check the progress of the iron-ore extraction.