It must have shown in her voice, for Catriana looked quickly back over her shoulder. The two women exchanged a look in silence. Catriana sighed. ‘I’m hard to make friends with,’ she said at length. ‘I doubt it’s worth your effort.’
‘No effort,’ said Alais quietly. ‘Besides,’ she ventured, ‘I may need your help tying Selvena down later.’
Surprised, Catriana chuckled. ‘She’ll be all right,’ she said, sitting on one of the beds. ‘Neither of them will touch her while they are guests in your father’s house. Even if she slithers into their room wearing nothing but a single red glove.’
Shocked for the second time, but finding the sensation oddly enjoyable, Alais giggled and sat down on her own bed, dangling her legs over the side. Catriana’s feet, she noticed ruefully, easily reached the carpet.
‘She just might do that,’ she whispered, grinning at the image. ‘I think she even has a red glove hidden somewhere!’
Catriana shook her head. ‘Then it’s roping her down like a heifer or trusting the men, I guess. But as I say, they won’t do anything.’
‘You know them very well, I suppose,’ Alais hazarded. She still wasn’t sure whether any given remark would earn her a rebuff or elicit a smile. This was not, she was discovering, an easy woman to deal with.
‘Alessan, I know better,’ Catriana said. ‘But Devin’s been on the road a long time and I have no doubt he knows the rules.’ She glanced away briefly as she said that last, her own colour a little high.
Still wary of another rejection Alais said cautiously, ‘I have no idea about that, actually. Are there rules? Do any of them . . . do you have problems when you travel?’
Catriana shrugged. ‘The kind of problems your sister’s longing to find? Not from the musicians. There’s an unwritten code, or else the companies would only get a certain kind of woman to tour and that would hurt the music. And the music really does matter to most of the troupes. The ones that last, anyway. Men can be quite badly hurt for bothering a girl too much. Certainly they’ll never find work if it happens too often.’
‘I see,’ said Alais, trying to imagine it.
‘‘You are expected to pair off with someone though,’ Catriana added. ‘As if it’s the least you can do. Remove yourself as a temptation. So you find a man you like, or some of the girls find a woman, of course. There’s a fair bit of that, too.’
‘Oh,’ said Alais, clasping her hands in her lap.
Catriana, who was really much too clever by half, flashed a glance of mingled amusement and malice. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said sweetly, looking pointedly at where Alais’s hands had settled like a barrier. ‘That glove doesn’t fit me.’
Abruptly Alais put her hands to either side of her, blushing furiously.
‘I wasn’t particularly worried,’ she said, trying to sound casual. Then, goaded by the other’s mocking expression, she shot back: ‘What glove does fit you, then?’
The other woman’s amusement quickly disappeared. There was a small silence. Then: ‘You do have some spirit in you, after all,’ Catriana said judiciously. ‘I wasn’t sure.’
‘That,’ said Alais, moved to a rare anger, ‘is patronizing. How would you be sure of anything about me? And why would I let you see it?’
Again there was a silence, and again Catriana surprised her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Truly. I’m really not very good at this. I warned you.’ She looked away. ‘As it happens, you hit a nerve and I tend to lash out when that occurs.’
Alais’s anger, as quick to recede as it was slow to kindle, was gone even as the other woman spoke. This was, she reminded herself sternly, a guest in her house.
She had no immediate chance to reply though, or to try to mend the rift, because just then Menka bustled importantly into the room with a basin of water heated over the kitchen fire, followed by the youngest of Rovigo’s apprentices with a second basin and towels draped over both his shoulders. The boy’s eyes were desperately cast downwards in a room containing two women as he carried the basin and the towels carefully over to the table by the window.
The garrulous fuss Menka inevitably stirred up wherever she went broke the mood entirely—both the good and the bad parts of it, Alais thought. After the two servants left, the women washed up in silence. Alais, stealing a glance at the other’s long-limbed body, felt even more inadequate in her own small, white softness and the sheltered life she’d lived. She climbed into bed, feeling as if she’d like to begin the whole conversation over again.
‘Good night,’ she said.
‘Good night,’ Catriana replied, after a moment.
Alais tried to read an invitation to further conversation in her tone, but she wasn’t sure. If Catriana wanted to talk, she decided, she had only to say something.
They blew out their bedside candles and lay silently in the semi-darkness. Alais watched the red glow of the fire, curled her toes around the hot brick Menka had put at the foot of her bed, and thought ruefully that the distance to Selvena’s side of the room had never seemed so great.
Some time later, still unsleeping though the fire was down to its embers, she heard a burst of hilarity from the three men downstairs. The warm, carrying sound of her father’s laughter somehow worked its way into her and eased her distress. He was home. She felt sheltered and safe. Alais smiled to herself in the darkness. She heard the men come upstairs soon after, and go to their separate rooms.
She remained awake for a while, with an ear perked to catch the sound of her sister in the hallway—though she didn’t really believe even Selvena would do that. She heard nothing, and eventually she fell asleep.
She dreamt of lying on a hilltop in a strange place. Of a man there with her. Lowering himself upon her. A mild moonless night glittering with stars. She lay with him upon that windy height amid a scattering of dew-drenched summer flowers, and in the high, unknown place of that dreaming Alais was filled with complex yearnings she could never have named aloud.
It was bitterly cold in the dungeon where they had thrown him at last. The stones were damp and icy, they smelled of urine and faeces. He’d only been allowed to put back on his linen underclothing and his hose. There were rats in the cell. He couldn’t see them in the blackness but he had been able to hear them from the beginning and he’d been bitten twice already as he dozed.
Earlier, he had been naked. The new Captain of the Guard—the replacement for the one who’d killed himself—had permitted his men to play with their prisoner before locking him up for the night. They all knew Tomasso’s reputation. Everyone knew his reputation. He had made sure of that; it had been part of the plan.
So the guards had stripped him in the harsh brightness of the guardroom and they had amused themselves coarsely, pricking him with their swords or with the heated poker from the fire, sliding them around his flaccid sex, prodding him in the buttocks or the belly. Bound and helpless, Tomasso had wanted only to close his eyes and wish it all away.
For some reason it was the memory of Taeri that wouldn’t let him do that. He still couldn’t believe his younger brother was dead. Or that Taeri had been so brave and so decisive at the end.
