Godfrey caught Nest at the foot of the stairs and squeezed another kiss on her reluctant hand. “Goodnight, fair one. I shall dream of you!”
“Sh-shall you?” And she fled, tripping on her gown.
In bed she lay open-eyed and miserable, pressed back to back with Angharad, who had shared the big four poster with her ever since her mother had died.
Once upon a time the simple fact of Angharad’s warm, ample presence had been enough to scare away all Nest’s night terrors and calm her fears. But she wasn’t seven years old any more, and it was a long time since she had told Angharad her troubles.
Godfrey.
She didn’t like him. With a shrinking of every fibre in her body, she knew she never would. His kiss lingered on her hand like the touch of a snail.
And he thought she was dull. Somehow she hadn’t expected that. Tears of humiliation prickled in Nest’s eyes. The last glimmer of a hope she had barely admitted even to herself — a hope that some miracle would happen, that she and Godfrey would fall headlong in love as her parents had done — vanished like a twist of candle smoke. Have you ridden far today? She buried her face in the pillow, muffling a gasp of agony. How stupid she had been! But he made her stupid. When he looked at her he didn’t see Nest. He saw Lady Agnes: plain, tongue-tied and boring.
She tossed and turned. Something else, think of something else…
Halewyn.
That was no better. What was he up to? And why? He was funny, he was clever, he was popular — at least, Nest acknowledged bitterly, Wolf seemed to like him —but what sort of a person turned up on All Hallows’ Eve to conjure burning roses out of nowhere, and to sing love songs he had no right to sing — songs that disturbed everyone so? As for that tale tonight, the tale of the dead woman who came back — it was as though he had made her father look deep into a dark mirror. Had he cast a spell over Hugo? Was he really a wandering jongleur — or some sort of magician? Why had he come?
Think of something else.
Godfrey…
Maybe he won’t marry me.
But of course he would: it had been arranged for too long. Neither of them could break it off now without causing terrible offence to the other’s family. Besides, love and liking had nothing to do with it. She was her father’s heir, and the wide lands of La Motte Rouge would pass with her to Godfrey, after her father’s death. That was why he was courting her; that was why he was saying all those slimy things…
The thought made her shudder. She turned over, drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped tense arms around them. Sweet blessed Saviour, help me to want to marry Godfrey.
But it was no good: she didn’t want to want to marry him.
What do I want?
She rolled over again. Beyond the bed curtains, her mother’s map of the world was no more than a dark blotch on the wall. She couldn’t make out any details. But it glowed in her mind’s eye like a landscape seen from a high window — patched with seas and islands, ringed with ocean, guarded by angels. Braided with rivers running out of Paradise — Nilus and Ganges, Tigris and Euphrates. Sprinkled with cities: Rome, Jerusalem and Babylon. Inhabited by marvellous peoples — by Jews and Christians and Saracens, by giants and pygmies. Bursting with wonderful creatures — giraffes and camels and dragons, lions and unicorns and talking trees.
Oh, I want the world! And I want to go on learning new things as long as I live!
A floorboard creaked.
Nest’s heart jerked. She prised herself up on her elbow and peered over the edge of the mattress, hooking back the curtain. A black shape moved away from her across the dark space of the room. Her father had come out of his room, wrapped in his mantle. With a squeak and a thump he pushed open the shutters of the north window and knelt there, elbows on the sill, gazing out and upwards. She heard him groan.
He’s looking at the hill, Nest thought. Looking at Devil’s Edge and thinking Mam’s hidden away there, somewhere underneath it.
And I’m still not supposed to know.
She was suddenly furious. Wolf knows, Rollo knows. I’m his daughter — and Mam’s too. Why hasn’t he told me? He ought to have told me!
Now was the chance. No one else awake, no one to overhear. A chance to talk to him properly. She swung out of bed and her bare feet landed silently on the floor. She was wearing her nightgown, and her unbraided hair tumbled over her shoulders. She tiptoed over the boards. Mustn’t wake Angharad. As Hugo knelt with his back to her he almost blocked the small window, but rivulets of icy air flowed past her ankles and she heard a wolf howling somewhere on Devil’s Edge.
“Sir,” said Nest in a whisper. She laid a hand lightly on his shoulder.
He twisted around so suddenly she jumped. Still on his knees, he stared up at her, mouth and eyes dark and startled.
“Eluned?” It was a harsh, unbelieving whisper.
Nest turned to ice. “No!” And she felt for the first time, dimly, that something in Hugo was broken, past mending. “It’s not her. It’s me. Agnes. I wanted to talk to you.”
“Agnes?” said Hugo as if awakening from a dream. He added, “Nest — don’t cry.”
He’d not used her Welsh name in years. “Dada,” Nest whispered.
They sat on Hugo’s bed. He pulled the curtains closed, and it was like being in a dark and private tent. Nest curled up her feet, and her father tucked the fur cover around her shoulders. “Or you’ll freeze. Now, what’s the matter?”
She said in a quick, breathless voice, “Dada. Is it true you think Mam was taken by the elves?”
“I overheard someone talking.” You.
He didn’t answer for a moment. “Do you never dream of her, Nest?”
Her heart thumped. “Not often. Or if I do, I don’t remember.” She hesitated, knowing the answer, asking anyway. “And you?”
“Constantly. She comes to me constantly.” His voice was quiet. “Just now, before I woke, I dreamed I was underneath Devil’s Edge, in a great hall crowded with people. They were all richly dressed, but not one of them would speak to me. Each one moved aside as I approached, or turned his face away.” He gripped her hand. “Then I saw that many of them were men I used to know, men who died of disease in the siege. Some were maimed, horribly injured. Their faces were all mottled with blood. In the middle of them, I caught sight of your mother. She was very pale, and gazed at me reproachfully. I tried to reach her, but she disappeared into the crowd and I couldn’t find her. Do what I could, I woke. I left her there!”
“Oh, father—” Nest longed to comfort him. “It was a dream. Only a dream! She’s not really under Devil’s Edge…”
“What else can the dreams mean?” Hugo paused. “Elves!” he said with hatred. “Thieving, hungry elves, stealing away what we love! Especially at the in-between times, the hours between life and death, between night and day — like that New Year’s Eve seven years ago when your mother lay sick. Seven years! Seven wasted, stolen years!” He struck the bed with his fist. “I’ll do anything — anything at all, to bring her home!”
Nest felt a shudder of awe. Almost she believed him. Between Heaven and Hell, Earth and Elfland, where was her mother now? In the double darkness of the curtained bed she gasped, “But it’s dangerous!”
He put his arm around her, and she leaned against him. “Yes, it will be dangerous.” He hesitated. Was he wondering whether to tell her the rest of his fears? She felt him decide against it. “But if I went all the way to the Holy Land to fight for Christendom, I can venture into Elfland and come back again.” He paused. “And if I never come back, at least you won’t be alone. You’ll be safe, Nest. Married, with Godfrey to look after you.”
Nest sat up with a jerk.
I don’t want Godfrey to look after me!
She couldn’t say it straight out. Maybe there was a way of leading up to it.
“How did you meet my mother?”
He said vaguely, “Oh, there was a council at Gloucester to make peace with the Welsh princes. A number of marriages were arranged. My father and hers made the agreement between them. It was a way of building alliances.”
“I see,” said Nest bleakly. “And hadn’t you ever seen her before?”
“Never.” A smile came into his voice. “But when I did — beautiful? She took my breath away. As beautiful as Helen or Blanchefleur out of the old tales. From that day on,” he added formally, “my heart was in her keeping.”
It sounded like something Godfrey would say. But Hugo meant it.
“What if you hadn’t liked her?”
“How could I not have liked her? Agnes —” he spoke gently but firmly “— everything will be all right for you, just as it was for us. You know this has been arranged for years. Your mother wanted you to marry Godfrey; that’s why she had the boy come to visit us. You’ve met him before, remember?”
“But it was ages ago,” Nest said in a small, incredulous voice. “I was five.”
And she suddenly understood.
Mam never intended this to happen. She meant there to be lots of visits, I’m sure of it. She wanted me and Godfrey to get to know each other slowly, and if I didn’t like him, she would have arranged something else. But then she died, and Father went on the Crusade, and there were no more chances.
He’s making me marry Godfrey because he thinks she wanted it. And because he wants me safely out of the way.
Anger rose in her like thin smoke.
He may have loved her, but did he really know her? Any more than he knows me? She wasn’t Helen of Troy, and she wasn’t Blanchefleur. She was my Mam.
Eight years ago she was in this room painting the map of the world, humming cheerfully, and pretending to dab gold paint on Nest’s nose.
It’s all about him, isn’t it? His songs, his love, his grief. Mam was clever and funny and real. She painted pictures and read and wrote. She taught me about the stars and the planets. But nobody thinks of that now. Nobody sees her except through his eyes. He’s made her into a dream, a shadow, a sad storybook lady. He hopes he can bring her back from the underworld, but the more he talks about her, the less real she gets. A shadow, that’s what he’s chasing. That’s what he’s looking for, and that’s what he’ll never find.
She opened her mouth to say so.
And from outside in the dark yard there came a succession of agonising, blood-curdling shrieks, and a man’s voice shouting in angry terror.
Hugo was out of the room and down the stairs before Nest could even blink. She grabbed her cloak and ran out after him, just as Angharad sat up in the big bed, crying, “Nest, Nest?”
“I’m with Father!” Nest called over her shoulder. She paused on the landing, looking down on a Doomsday scene as waking rows of sleepers sat up, shaking off their blankets, scrambling to their feet. Outside, the screaming and shouting continued. Some of it sounded very piggy to Nest; but now there were other noises too: dogs barking, and the horns of the guards blowing, and even a disturbed cockerel crowing its head off in the dark.
She dashed downstairs and threaded her way across the floor. Hugo had left the Hall door open in his haste. A cold draught rushed in, brightening the embers. She hurried after him.
And it was snowing. For a second she stopped, caught up in childish excitement. Flakes spun into the light from the doorway and blew away in flurries over the hard-packed mud. Nest ran along the side of the Hall towards the chapel, where all the noise was coming from. As she reached the corner something caught her cloak. A voice near her knees said in gruff alarm, “Oy, missis — watch out!”
Morwenna the pig bolted past with an ear-splitting squeal and a drumming of hooves. Nest reeled, fended herself off against the house wall and looked down. The hearth-hob peered up out of a patch of dead weeds. Its eyes glowed like eerie wandering sparks. “What you doin’ out here, missis?” it muttered hoarsely. “This an’t no place for you.”
“Don’t you start telling me what to do,” Nest hissed. “I want to see what’s happening!” She tugged her cloak out of its fingers and stole silently into the black shadows under the eaves of the granary. The hob melted after her, grumbling.
The chapel yard was alive with shadows and silhouettes and flaring torches. Lord Godfrey was there — Nest pulled her hood further over her head — and Hugo and Rollo and Geraint, and even old Howell, all shouting at once in an indecipherable tangle of Welsh and French. A shriek rose above it all.
“The Devil! The Devil in the shape of a pig!”
Nest stood on tiptoe to see Brother Thomas backed up in the chapel porch, waving his arms wildly. “Devils! Devils and pigs!” he screeched. The torchlight gleamed on the whites of his eyes.
The cry was taken up at once. “The Hwch ddu gwta! He’s seen the Black Sow!”
No, he hasn’t!. It was Morwenna, Nest thought.
Hugo grabbed Brother Thomas by the shoulders. “Splendour of God! Calm down, man. That was no devil!”
“It was Morwenna,” shouted Rollo roughly. And Howell nodded his frail white head.
“Morwenna — t’was only Morwenna, my good pig…”
“Good pig?” screamed Brother Thomas. “I was surrounded! A ring of little black piglets with fiery eyes, dancing on their hind legs! Imps of the pit, mocking me…”
Fiery eyes? Nest turned suspiciously. The hob was crouching just behind her. Sure enough, its eyes cast a faint glow on the ground, for the snow was beginning to stick, whitening the frozen mud. She could just see its scrawny limbs, clad in some tattered garment of balding rabbit fur.
“Did you do this?”
“Go on, blame me,” muttered the hob sourly. “No I never! And missis, I’m telling you, you want to watch out—”
Then Nest saw Halewyn and Wolf. They were on the far side of the crowd, and even from here, even in the dim light and the dizzying flakes of snow, she could see that they were laughing, clutching each other’s arms, almost falling against each other.
So they had done it. Nest didn’t know how, but they were obviously enjoying some trick they’d played. Why hadn’t Wolf told her? Did he think she wouldn’t approve?
“Oy!” The hob was plucking at her cloak with urgent, twiggy fingers, but she ignored it. She felt cold and defeated. Perhaps Wolf was right to think so. Perhaps all of them were right, him and Lord Godfrey and her father and everyone. Perhaps she was just stupid and stiff and proper, and only fit to be married off.
Brother Thomas yelled something more about devils over the buzz of arguing voices, and she saw Wolf hide his laughing face against Halewyn’s shoulder. He wasn’t looking for her; hadn’t missed her. She didn’t want to be here any more. She stepped back.
“Oy!” yelped the hob. “Mind your great feet, missis; I an’t got toes to spare.”
Nest turned on it with tears in her eyes. “Stop saying Oy! Stop calling me missis! Stop tugging at my cloak! And if I stepped on you, it’s your own fault for creeping about under my feet. I’m going in.”
The hob grabbed a double handful of her cloak and hung on, growling like a dog. The growling frightened her a little. She realised at last that the hob was both scared and angry. It hauled on her cloak, fist over hairy fist, till she had to bend down.
“You an’t going to leave your friend Wolf alone with that jester feller?” it whispered.
“Why not?” said Nest, bitterly.
“Use yer head, gal! You only got to look at them two to see who’s behind all this, plain as all that writing you likes to bury yourself in. Din’t you see Morwenna? Tarrified out of her skin, she was. I reckon that lad’s in trouble. Piglets with fiery eyes? How d’you suppose they done it?”
“Well, but—” Nest remembered the burning rose that Halewyn had given her, and hesitated.
The hob was nodding: its hair stood on end like a small haystack. “Ar! Think about it — ask yourself!”
That rose. Not a shrivelled little bud, but a full-blown rose breathing an air of confident summer. And it had burned her fingers…
“He’m a wrong un, I reckon,” the hob whispered. It tugged her cloak to make her bend down even further. “Why do he wear that comic cap with the ears, eh? He even sleeps in it, and it an’t that cold by the fire at night. What d’you reckon he’s hiding?”
Nest shivered. “What do you mean?”
The hob prodded two fingers up past its own sloping forehead and waggled them. “Pokey, pokey!”
“What — do — you — mean?” Nest said between her teeth.
“You ask young Wolf if he’s ever seen what’s under it, that’s all,” the hob said wildly. “I an’t accusin’ anyone, mind! I an’t saying nothin’ more!”
It was snowing harder. Though Brother Thomas was still ranting about devils in the chapel porch, a stream of less interested spectators had begun hurrying back to the warm Hall. As the yard emptied, the wind came moaning through, brushing the dry snow up into everyone’s eyes in a tingling scatter of cold, white flakes.
Crouching at Nest’s feet, the hob clawed its hair and groaned. “Ach! Now we’re for it, an’ no mistake. Pore foolish creature, an’t she got no sense at all?”
For as the spray of snow cleared, there was something in the yard that hadn’t been there before. Glowing faintly, wrapped in a mist of twinkling icy dust, the White Lady stepped silently towards the chapel, with that unsettling air of not quite touching the ground.
Brother Thomas saw her. He made a strangled noise. As she drew nearer and nearer he pressed himself back against the door of the chapel, groping for the door handle. Not fast enough. The White Lady reached him, paused, leaned forward, and murmured something in a voice like the barely audible tinkle of a brook at midnight.
Brother Thomas found the handle. “Succubus! Begone, foul spirit!” he howled; and as the door swung open he fell backwards through it. As he vanished into the candlelit interior, the White Lady peered bemusedly after him. The light from the doorway shone through her and lit her whiteness to a moony glow.
“How-ell-ll!” yelled Geraint urgently, and Nest saw her father look around and beckon. “Howell, where are you? Howell, you deal with this…”
Old Howell hobbled forwards. “Come along now, my dear,” he began. “You come your ways. There’s nothing in there for you.”
The White Lady turned her head right round on her shoulders, like an owl. Some of the Blanchland men backed hurriedly with hisses of fright. “I can’t get in…” she moaned, and now her voice was like the wind whining under the door on the darkest night of winter. “I can’t remember. I can’t get in… I can’t remember.”
“Never you worry,” Howell soothed her. “You come with me. I know where you belong. You’ll feel fine after a little splash in the cistern. You come with me.” He set off across the yard, still talking comfortingly, and she drifted slowly after.
The hob relaxed. “There you go. Get along with you, go with Howell,” it muttered. “There an’t much left of her nowadays, but she’s bin here longest of us all. Longest of us all!”
Brother Thomas leaped through the chapel door, clutching a candle in one hand, a cup in the other. “The place is accursed — plagued with devils!” he shouted. “First the piglets — then the succubus! But I shall banish her, as I banished them!”
Shouts broke out. “Leave her alone!”
“Go for it, Thomas — get her!”
“That’s no succubus! That’s our ladi wen!”
“It is a succubus!” shouted Brother Thomas. “But fear not. See?” He waved the cup. “Holy water!”
And he threw the entire cupful over the White Lady.
A terrible scream streaked through the night. For a moment after it stopped everyone stood with hands clapped to their ears, as if their heads might suddenly split in two.
And something fled across the yard, sobbing heartbrokenly and dwindling as it went. As it passed her, Nest was sure it was a woman, the White Lady with her face hidden in her hands. But then it was no bigger than a thin child, or perhaps a very old, bent little woman, hobbling away. Before it reached the corner of the Hall it was more the size of a bounding white hare, which changed in mid-leap to a little scuff of snow, which fell away into powder. And there was nothing left.