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In the morning she told the kind falconer there was no need to hurry, that she would wait while he attended his duties. In truth she need not wait for him at all, now that she knew where to find her sister. She told herself that she was weary from an almost sleepless night, that she preferred to have the falconer with her – a man of consequence, thoroughly respected and respectable – when she walked into her sister’s world.
She told herself many things, and none were the truth. It was not the rain that made her pause, nor the pleasurable sight of the Welshman in the yard training one of the falconer’s birds to a lure. It was dread at what she might find.
Never would she have believed that she would pause at this last step toward her sister. It was not that she was a whore – many times she had thought Bea might have been forced to prostitute herself. In some ways, it was the best she could have hoped for, the least evil of many fates that could befall a girl of her station. Not starving or dead, just a common whore.
Now she could see that she had always imagined saving her sister. That’s what had been in her mind, that she would find Bea and carry her away somewhere safe. It’s why she had gone looking for her in the first place. But if what Aunt Mary said was true, then Bea did not need to be saved. There was no great urgency in the task.
So Nan hesitated, agreeing to wait until morning, delaying departure, nervous of what she might find. Afraid there was no more of her little Bea, and she must learn to love this Bargate Bettie. But no matter her fears, the day would not wait.
It was midmorning when they crossed the bridge amid a crowd of people and carts and animals. The falconer had said there was a small market just beyond the bridge, near to where her sister could be found, and he had some business there. The Welshman came too, and she felt the tug of his attention with every step. It had been her constant companion these many days, from the moment he had first seen her, and she would be free of it soon. It should make her glad. It should be a relief.
At least she need not be burdened with worry for him, so changed was he in the presence of his friend. It seemed to her as if he had found a lost piece of himself in the moment his friend had said his name. If he had regained his confidence as they left Wragby, now he had found his full ease and comfort. He had come back to himself. As they passed through this market, among all these people and their noise, he did not flinch or stare or shrink. He was well. He would be well.
At the edge of the crowd she paused to look at the few buildings ahead, along this road that stretched from Lincoln to London. It had the look of the sort of place where common whores did their trade, where she was like to find her sister. Suddenly she was remembering their mother. Her thin face rose up in Nan’s mind, how she looked in those last hours. Care for your sister and brother, she had said. Oh, how Nan had failed at that.
A sharp tug at her arm caused her blood to race, her hand to jerk out the knife and brandish it too quickly. It had been years since she had last been taken by surprise, and in a crowd at that. She wheeled around to find the shocked face of a young woman peering at her. Ruddy cheeks and yellow hair and wide-set, bright blue eyes that looked a little wild.
“Nan?”
She felt a tickle of recognition. Her body seemed to know before her mind did, her fingers going slack and her knife falling to the ground. Then all at once she was flooded with certainty.
“Bea.” She blinked up at her. Up. At her little sister. “Little Bea.”
She watched her sister shake her head in disbelief. “Nan. You’re Nan.”
She nodded. All of her felt numb. She thought she might never move from this spot. But even as she thought it they were embracing, a fierce and desperate clinging to one another. There was nothing else left in the world but her arms wrapped tight around her sister. Her sister who should be dead. Her sister who was tall and sturdy and grown to womanhood against all odds.
“Look at you.” Bea pulled back a little to look into her face, knocking Nan’s hood down, touching her hair. “You’re the spit of her, but in full health. God forgive me but I forgot her face until I seen you.”
Nan grasped her sister’s shoulders, frantically looking her up and down. Arms and legs, her body whole and sound, no illness or injury evident. She felt the hot rush of tears tumbling down her face.
“Look at the flesh on you.” She was sobbing now. Anyone would think it a tragedy, the way she wept, when it was the best thing she had ever seen. She gripped Bea’s arms, strong and healthy and perfect. “You’re not starved. I prayed for it.” There was no stopping the tears, no hope of speaking sensibly. “I prayed and prayed.”
Bea shook her head, her face screwing up in that way she had when she did not want to weep. Nan thought her heart might burst at the sight of it, so familiar and so heartbreaking. She dragged a sleeve across her own face to wipe the tears away even as more tumbled down, then wrapped her arms around her sister again. They were a spectacle in the street and her knees might fail her at any moment and leave her in the dirt – and she did not care at all.
“I’m here now, Little Bea.” She spoke into her sister’s ear, fierce and certain. “I’m here, and there’s no one can take me away from you, not never again.”
They were in the common room that served as kitchen when she began to understand that the uncomplicated joy would be a fleeting thing, never to return. Still, she was content with her journey’s end as she sat in this house that Bea managed.
Not Bea, she reminded herself over and over again – it was Bargate Bettie who ran this place. And she was struggling to understand Nan’s life.
“I serve the lord and the lady, however they should need me,” Nan explained. Some of the women who lived here had come for their meal, and Nan did not like to speak of the business of Morency where they could hear it.
Bea gave a knowing grin.
“We’ve been known to serve lords too, but never their ladies. Is he a kind one, then? He must be, to let you leave his bed and come here. But for all that you look well, I see more bone than flesh on you.”
She pushed another of the small loaves across the table to Nan, who was mortified by this assumption – less for herself than for Morency. Nan’s place there was strange enough, even without her humble birth, and defied simple explanation. She should not have tried to tell it so soon without considering her words. Her sister had never served in castle or manor, nor had she much knowledge of great lords and ladies, so she was only guessing the best she knew how. That didn’t save Nan from feeling the affront.
“Morency is ruled well by Lord Ranulf. He’s a good knight and true. Nor would he never dishonor his lady, and there are few enough lords I can say that about.”
She would have said more but she was distracted by a young girl who stood at her elbow, trying to get her attention without interrupting. It reminded Nan of herself when she was that age – perhaps ten years or so, the same age as when her father traded her to the weaver for a handful of coins. But this girl, with her black hair and eagerness to please, was not starved or dirty. She held out Nan’s knife, the one that had dropped to the ground when she saw Bea.
Nan took it and thanked the girl, but the knife prompted more questions from her sister. She spent the rest of the afternoon explaining that she had learned the knives for defense, never saying it was Lady Gwenllian who had taught her. Instead, she told how she served Gwenllian in the herb-house, and with needle and thread, and many other household duties. Those women who stayed and listened seemed as overly impressed as Aunt Mary had been.
But Bea only seemed a little amused.
“It’s no astonishment to me, making yourself the favorite of a great lady.” She laughed in a way that was a little mocking, the barbed tease of a true sibling. “You always did love to be a good girl.”
Nan looked down at her hands where they were folded neatly in her lap, withstanding the wave of memory. She had not forgotten all their sisterly bickering when they were girls, but she had forgotten that this was ever the chief complaint. She hadn’t understood her sister’s resentment then, and she didn’t understand it now. Why should she not want to be good?
“And you loved to take all the butter, and then pretend I ate your share.”
For the barest instant it was like they were children again – she saw the angry denial rising up in Bea’s face, and felt her own protest forming. But then Bea’s face softened and her mouth quirked up. In a blink it was gone and they were grown again, looking back on that life together.
“It was rare enough there was butter to fight over, nor even bread to put it on. It’s no wonder you’re a little thing, and all bones.”
“Not for lack of eating.” Nan smiled. “Lady Gwenllian, she says I’ll never eat enough to make up for the years my belly was empty, but I may as well try.”
Bea pushed the last scrap of the loaf at her again, then turned to send the other women off to their duties. The youngest girl who had retrieved Nan’s knife was too young to do the work of the older women, and her role was to clean and fetch and serve. Nan tried not to think how one day she’d likely become a whore like the rest of them. Not for the first time, she said a silent prayer of thanks for Aunt Mary. If her aunt had not insisted on finding Nan a good place to serve, there was no knowing what might have become of her.
When all the others were gone and she was left alone with her sister again, she asked one of the harder questions.
“Did our father do well by you with the money he gained from selling me off?”
The weaver had paid the equivalent of six years’ wages to take her into service. Nan had gone gladly, knowing the coin was meant to feed her sister. It had seemed a fortune to her, and an even greater fortune that she’d gone to live and work in a place where her own belly did not grumble and ache every day.
“He bought me shoes.” Bea smiled fondly, remembering. Then a hardness came into her face. “But you must know he drank it, no matter that he tried to do right. It was Mary who wrested a few coins from him and gave it to the miller so he would put aside a bit of something for me every day.”
That was the best that could be hoped for, from their father. He had never been the same after that terrible year when their mother died. Nan counted it a blessing he was only weak and useless, and not cruel. She listened to her sister tell the story of what had happened after Nan was gone. It was all just trying to find work in the fields where they could, as they’d always done – but now their father drank even more, and there was little work to be had. After a few years, Bea had found a kindly alewife who had given her a place to sleep and enough work to keep her in one place.
“Then I took up with the candlemaker’s son and we run off here to Lincoln. I went round to the shops once to ask after you, but you weren’t nowhere to be found.”
By that time, Nan calculated, the weaver had died and she had been sent to Chester – or maybe on to Rhuddlan to serve in the king’s hall. If things had happened differently, if a depraved lord had not sent her life in a new direction or if she had thought to go looking for Bea sooner, then it might all be different now. She might have kept her sister from resorting to this whore’s life.
She listened as Bea went on to describe how she fell out with the candlemaker’s son and found a mason who was happy to pay her for what she’d previously given for free. Then there were more men who paid, including a priest who was her best customer. “I still warm his bed sometimes, when he is lonely for me. Fergus don’t mind it.”
Fergus was the man she had met a few summers ago, and he had told her she had a good head for business. This was his place, an inn where a few whores had already been plying their trade when he met Bea and invited her to come here and make a proper business of it. She had brought in more women – seven in total now, and always more wanting to come work here where they were sure to find a safe and prosperous place.
As her sister spoke, Nan felt an increasing sadness. It was not that Bea was a whore and a bawd, nor even that she seemed proud of it. Aunt Mary judged it foul and sinful, but Nan could not think so harshly of anyone who turned to whoring. It was only one of many necessary evils for the poor and the lowly. It was to be avoided if at all possible, of course, but when you had no name and no real home, no notion of where your next meal might come from, then it was no easy thing to avoid. For the whole of her own life she had barely escaped it. Sometimes she even thought her brief marriage to Oliver was not much different, for she had always known she must give herself to some man if she was to have any hope of surviving.
Her sadness came from the discovery of how different she was from her sister, who did not seem as if she had tried very hard to avoid this life, nor did she mind it so much. In this way, it was as Aunt Mary had said: they were so different that none would believe they were sisters. Nan could not imagine ever being happy to bare her body to a strange man – to many men – and let him do what he will. Even before that terrible lustful lord had made it seem a terror to her, she had been that way.
But Bea was different. Bea was Bargate Bettie, a thriving bawd even at this young age. And there was more as the day went on that made Nan feel more alone than she had expected to, if she ever found her sister.
Even while she was glad Bea was not a timid little thing, she was loud and brash in a way that grated on Nan’s nerves. Her man Fergus arrived, and though Nan had known worse men by far, she could find nothing pleasing about him. His wit was slow and stupid, and he stank as though he’d not washed in a month. Even had he not looked over Nan with lascivious eyes when her sister’s back was turned, she would have thought him unworthy of Bea. Yet her sister clearly loved him well.
Most disagreeable of all were the little things Bea said from time to time that made Nan feel an unaccountable shame. When asked, she described the comfits she had tasted for the first and only time at Morency last year – only to have Bea sniff and say, “Well, it’s a fair fine life you lead.” And Nan thought to tell her sister about her best friend at Morency, but when she said Robin was the son of a minor lord, Bea asked if she had any friends who were not gentry.
Nan turned her face down at this, hoping to hide how her sister’s resentful tone wounded her. It was not envy of her life, she thought, but just a different flavor of the same sentiment she had felt from Aunt Mary. She had no words for it, but she knew it was a way of letting her know that she was not like them. That she did not belong in their world, at least not for longer than a visit.
But where did she belong, if not with the last of her family? Unbidden, the Welshman came to her mind, and the way he talked of his home. It was lost forever because even if he stood on the same soil again, too much had changed. The home he remembered – the place and people and feeling – was gone, and he was doomed to long for something that he could never have again.
As evening came on, the house became busy with the comings and goings of customers. Bea must attend to business now, and she called for the little black-haired girl to take Nan to a room for the night. “It ain’t as grand as you are used to, I’m sure,” she said, again with that faintly hostile air, “but it’s away from grunting and the sweating, and there’s enough room to stretch your legs out.”
There wasn’t room for much more than that, but Nan was glad of this small space where she could close the door against the sounds of the brothel. Because she could not sleep, she thought over the long day, amazed that it had begun in the home of the friendly falconer.
She had not even said a farewell to the Welshman. The joy of finding Bea had wiped out all thought of him. Now she remembered the outline of his face against the glowing grate as he reproached himself for repaying her charity with dishonor.
It was the first time a man had ever said anything like that to her. There were men aplenty who had taken more than she wanted to give, but this was the only one who was sorry for it.
Sleep would not come to her, weary as she was. There was too much to consider. She spent long hours contemplating the vast distance between the sister she had sought and the sister she had found. It seemed impossible to bridge the space between them, until the door of her room opened and Bea was there. She came in quietly as Nan admonished Fuss to silence, and slipped under the blanket to lie next to Nan in the dark.
“Do you think of him still?” she whispered, and Nan could hear tears in her voice. There was no question who she was talking about. “I think of him most days.”
Her hand found her sister’s and their fingers intertwined.
“Aye, how could I not?” She felt her own tears leaking out but, as she had when Bea was just a little girl, she did her best to hide them. “I promised her to look after you both.”
“There weren’t no way to save him, Nan. I’ve thought of it over and over. He were too little for anything but a wet nurse, and us with no way to pay one, and starving ourselves.”
She felt Bea’s face press into her shoulder. This was the inescapable truth of sisters, of siblings. No matter how different they were, no matter how far apart life took them, there was no one else who shared these memories. The same early sorrows filled their hearts, and the same joys. When they slept, the same places and faces appeared in their dreams. Only the two of them remembered the brother they had had for a little while, and only they could whisper his memory between them.
“It’s like I told you, little Bea. He’s our own angel in heaven now, for how could he be anywhere else.”
“I hope it’s so.”
“It is,” she insisted, suddenly more sure of it than ever. “How else can we both still be alive, and doing as well as we are? We’ve had more than our share of good fortune. It’s him looking out for us.”
She felt Bea’s arm wrap around her waist, strong and full of life, holding her close as they had used to do when they were girls.
Her sister. She had found her sister. It was all she had wanted, and here it was, holding her in the dark and sorrowful night.
