He held his breath for a moment, thinking of Alysse’s breath, now forever drowned out by the breathing of the baby. He felt the gorge rise in his throat. It would be so easy to drop the child. Or wrench its neck. Who would know? He could call it an accident.
As deep as it was, this reaction was also fleeting, a momentary pause in the normalcy, and it raised an equally fleeting revulsion within him. How could he have thought such? But the death of Alysse had not been normal; nothing would ever be normal. Not now. How was he to raise a child without Alysse?
“. . . Father Athanasius.” Sister was saying something.
“What? What was that you were saying?”
“I said to have one of the children bring Athanasius.” As she said this she bent over Alysse’s body and quietly closed the eyelids. She crossed the girl’s hands above her heart.
“Yes. Father Athanasius . . .” Fletcher said, and left the midwife to the sorry holy work of cleaning up after the birth and the death, preparing Alysse’s body to be moved to the monastery church to await the funeral mass and after that the spring thaw when the ground would open up to receive all that remained of his dreams and hopes and happiness.
Thus had begun a long nightmare of grief. Was this what the priest had called The Dark Night of the Soul, this asking questions for which there are no answers, this waiting to forget but never forgetting, this wound that would never heal, just as Alysse herself would never return to him no matter how—or how long—he waited; this loving the child because it was Alysse’s dying gift to him yet hating it too because of the terrible price it had exacted by its birth?
Already by nature a private man, Fletcher withdrew more deeply into himself, closing off the wound from light and air and healing. Is it right even to want to be healed from such a wound? The loss had changed him, and that had been the infant’s doing too. To be healed of such a wound was to release his wife to the past, and he could not bring himself to do that. Worse, it was to forgive God, and he did not want to do that either. But then, who was he to think such thoughts? The wound did not fester, did not torment him, did not leave him crippled or ashamed, not like that bookbinder had left him ashamed, but it did not heal, either. It was a sweet dark place within him, a cave for the soul, a kind of hermitage where he could escape alone into the quiet comfort of his grief.
Even now, sixteen years later, Fletcher still slept on his own side of the canopy bed he had made as a marriage gift for Alysse, the bed in which she had come to him as a bride and then had left him as a mother—victim of her own infant. He still woke up at night listening for her gentle breathing or the soft crackling of the straw in the ticking as she shifted her body in her sleep. What he had instead was the girl, sleeping in her own bed, filling the air with the ebbing breath of early womanhood.
Sometimes the girl awakened him with night terrors. Once when she was maybe six she had cried out, “Mama!” in her sleep. That was an odd thing. How could the girl miss a mother she had never known? Elspeth had never smelled her mother’s hair, or tasted her sweet kisses, or dreamed with her of growing old together. For that matter the girl had never known her father the way he was before he had been forever changed by her mother’s death. How could she understand what she had taken from him? The cry had left Fletcher hollow inside, aware more than ever that what he had to give was not what the girl had needed.
So now, sixteen years after Alysse had been taken from him, when the girl was nearly a woman and was apprenticed to that bookbinder’s son and his seamstress wife, still she filled a void inside him. How old would Alysse be now? He had kept track—count nineteen years from the age of the child. The girl, three; Alysse, twenty-two. The girl, seven, Alysse, twenty-six. When the girl turned sixteen, Fletcher thought of Alysse: thirty-five. What would Alysse have been like at thirty-five? Would her body have rounded and softened with age as had the bodies of the other wives in the village, many of them her childhood playmates, whose children played with her daughter? Would her eyes have crow’s feet, as theirs had crow’s feet? Would her voice have deepened in tone? What of her laugh? The dying of her laughter had taken the summer breeze from his heart. As a child the girl had laughed like her mother and had never been able to understand why such laughter should move her father to tears.
Sometimes when he thought the girl was not looking, Fletcher found himself gazing at her. She had Alysse’s same dark Welsh hair, worn long and braided down her back like her mother, but at night cascading loose in a way that framed her mother’s dark eyes; she had her mother’s tight build, with wiry arms and the long, slender fingers that had so easily mastered the seamstress’ craft. In her apprenticeship she was learning two trades—with equal facility she was learning to stitch dresses for ladies or quires for books, however the need arose. Alcera, the seamstress who was teaching her to sew, had also taught her to read—Alysse had been able to read, and had dreamed as much for her child and how could he deny his dead wife her single strongest wish? But that had been a disaster because it had quickly filled the girl with ideas about moving beyond her station, ideas that Fletcher knew were stupid and dangerous, especially for a woman born and raised a peasant.
He had tried to do right by Alysse, and hoped that he had raised a daughter Alysse would have been proud to own. Recently he had managed to arrange a marriage for the girl with a good Welsh boy named Meurig something from Aberystwyth, a tradesman with a good skill, the son of a silversmith, but Elspeth had said something about his having no more authority over her than what she might give him of her own free will, and that she counted the betrothal a mistake. Fletcher blamed the books for that. Such things make a woman proud and give her ideas about being better than her man, and more than once he had threatened the seamstress with physical harm if she did not desist.
Alcera had proven difficult on this question of teaching the girl to read, insisting that she had every right to train the girl’s skills as she pleased, and that she, Alcera, had given Alysse her solemn promise while the baby was still in the womb. An obstinate woman, Alcera, and no model for his daughter to copy, but in the end it had been Fletcher himself who had finally relented out of respect for the wishes of his wife, and the semblance of friendship with Alcera’s husband Levente. He and Levente had grown up in the same household, if not as brothers or even as friends, at least as two boys who had both been shaped by the same man—Levente’s father had been Fletcher’s master, and a hard taskmaster to them both.
But there had been compensations, too. Levente and Alcera also allowed the girl to return home each night to the hut in Wharram since there was no grown woman in the house to tend to the needs of her father. Fletcher believed that this apparently generous arrangement on Levente’s part benefited the giver more than the recipient because it allowed him the benefit of the girl’s service without the expense and trouble of maintaining her board.
Fletcher paused long enough at the gatehouse to file a verbal report that he had spotted the wolf in the forest, but had lost the trail in the thinning light. He arranged for a hound and its handler to be ready at first light, then headed to the hut that he shared with his daughter in the village of Wharram, nestled in a hamlet a mile beyond the foregate.
It was quite dark by this time, and he made his way home by the light of a torch he had taken from the sheriff’s storehouse of weapons and equipment. In his left hand he carried a loaded crossbow. He threaded his way among the rows of half-timbered houses owned by the merchants, out along the lane past the cottages, and then the huts that ringed the outskirts of the town.
Just before he turned down the path to Wharram, he stopped for a flagon of ale at a dimly lighted storefront at the edge of the town. It could hardly be called a tavern, more a small thatched hut where one could buy ale. A crudely lettered sign above the door gave name, though neither Fletcher nor any of the other patrons could have read the words: The Pint and Ploughman. The windows were shuttered to ward off the evening chill. A bit of light came from several candles set out in a row along the
