The Water Devil (2 page)

On the floor of the chamber, beneath the gallery, Duchess Isabella's sewing women were at work. Seamstresses in heavy wool gowns clustered around a smoky little fire of green wood built in the great fireplace of the chamber. Yards of plain white linen were spread across their laps as they sewed the endless expanse of hems on a set of sheets. An old woman, nearly blind, recited, or half- chanted, the tale of the false steward, Sir Aldingar, as she spun by touch. At the end of a trestle table set up in the center of the room, a well-dressed dame with scissors addressed another woman who held a knotted cord. On the table, a length of fair linen, as smooth and luminous as baby's skin, was laid out ready for cutting.

“Dame Isabella says they must be cut three inches longer than the old ones, for her daughter grows apace,” said the lady with the scissors.

sang the old woman in her tuneless voice, as a half-dozen needles flashed in and out of the sheets in tiny, precise stitches.

“It is the length Dame Petronilla brought from the Mistress of the Robes,” answered the other. Away from the fire, the air fogged as they spoke.

“Then it cannot be cut whole on the bias on this piece, as she requested. Are you sure this is the length the Duchess wanted made up?”

“Perhaps she has made an error. It measures short. We must ask before we cut.” Again, they held up the long girl's shift that was their model, and measured off the inches with knotted string.

“If Dame Petronilla has made an error,
I
, for one, certainly don't want to be the one to point it out,” said the sewing woman.

“Then I'll go look for Dame Katherine myself,” said the lady. Laying down her scissors and departing through the open door, she left the sewing woman to puzzle over the material, wondering just how it might be pieced in such a way that the different stitching might never be noticed.

“What do you mean, the piece is too short?” came a sharp voice through the open door. “Are you accusing me of cutting it off? Oh, I see, a
mistake.
I do not make mistakes.”The needles by the fireside paused, and the sewing women looked at one another.

“Lady Petronilla,” said one.“Why did our good duchess ever make
her
assistant to the mistress of the robes?” Rapid footsteps passed by their little circle, accompanied by a sort of icy breeze which was not so much a breeze as a feeling of chill. They looked up to see the
back of Dame Petronilla de Vilers's rigid form moving toward the table, the train of her heavy black gown slithering across the tile floor behind her.

“I heard that the Duke dispatched to Dame Isabella from France a list of wives of his knights to whom she should give preference in her household.”

“Is Lady de Vilers's husband dead, then?” whispered another seamstress, casting a look at the black dress.

“No, she lost a son, they say.” “She doesn't seem old enough to have lost a son in France.” “No, an infant. Sir Hugo, her husband, was devastated at the news, and when she asked to be sent away from the place where he had died, he used influence to have her sent here, where company could distract her from her loss.”

“An infant? And for that she goes all in black? That is much for only an infant.”

“Ladies are different from us, I suppose.”

“As different as she is from ladies,” came the catty, whispered response.

The woman in black looked scornfully at the length of cloth laid out on the table. “You'll have to piece it—or send for more—that was the last length from London in the chest.”

“But—but—Lady Isabella wanted it whole, and ready in time for Easter—”

“Then have it ready,” said Dame Petronilla, turning abruptly to go. She was just above the medium in height, with hard blue eyes and narrow, even features marred only by a nose slightly flattened and off center, as if it had once been broken. She wore a thick, black wool gown beneath a furlined surcoat of imported black velvet,
decorated with dark green silk embroidery. Her heavy, honey blonde hair was braided and coiled tightly beneath a fine white linen veil. It was very fine, very fine indeed. I wonder—thought one of the sewing women, glancing at the beautiful length of linen that lay on the table, the linen that had been taken from storage for Lady Blanche's new Easter shift.

“Don't disturb me again with your incompetence. You have delayed me on my way to my prayers.”A heavy gold crucifix, the agonized corpus of silver gilt upon it dabbed with red enamel and fixed with rubies, hung on her bosom. At her waist, beside her purse and the keys with which she was entrusted, hung a black-beaded rosary that ended in yet another cross, this time in silver, heavily tooled and ornamented. Hands folded before her chest, her eyes glittering strangely, she hurried, erect and cold, from the room.

A very holy lady, thought the woman with the scissors. So many hours in prayer. Why, she even brought her own confessor with her from the country. For a moment her eye caught on the light, airy movement of the veil as its owner stepped through the door into the draft that whirled down the passageway. Impossible, she thought. Besides, all white linen looks alike. Forgive me, Lord, it must be envy. It was I who wanted to be named assistant to the Mistress of the Robes; if only my husband had greater rank and preference, the way the de Vilers family has, the honor would have been mine.

C
ECILY, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO YOUR hair? Even the tangles grow tangles. I swear, it promises to eat the comb alive! Mother Sarah, is Peregrine dressed yet?”As Peregrine's infant wail joined his older sister's in sympathy, I felt a tug on my sleeve. The morning sun had just peeped over the horizon and the cold lay like a blanket along the floor. From downstairs came the clatter and crash of pots, the sound of hurrying footsteps, and the first acrid smell of the fire being built up on the kitchen hearth.

“
My
hair's combed, Mama.” My second girl, Alison, still pudgy with baby fat at seven and a half, held up a long, silky strand of her strawberry blonde hair for my inspection. Her voice was smug.

“I'm sure that's lovely, dear—” “That's because yours is all straight—yow! And God made mine curly because it's
better,
that's why!” Cecily squirmed away from the comb as her face turned red with indignation beneath its freckles. Not yet ten, knobby-kneed, rebellious, and as full of troublemaking ideas as an entire sackful of monkeys, she was my oldest, and my despair.

“Hold still, hold still,” I said as I attacked her wild, red curls again with the ivory comb. “What's this I see here? A twig? Cecily, you've been climbing again. How will you ever be a lady if you keep climbing trees?”

“I don't
want
to be a lady. I want to be a—a—”

“I don't want to hear that you wish to be a boy because you
can't
be one, and that's that.”

“—a
dragon,
so there!”

“Ha! Cecily wants to be all green and scaly and UGly—”

“Girls, girls, that's enough. Alison, is that a grease stain on the front of your good dress? You can't wear it that way. Change to the blue one at once, before you make us late.”

“But it's not
pretty
,”Alison's wail joined the grief stricken cries of her sister and baby brother. Why is it always so hard to get to church in time for mass? Especially on a feast day like this, Saint Augustine's day in May of the Year of our Lord 1360, when the whole world will be looking with serpents' eyes to see who's lazy enough to come ill clad? You'd think God would grease the way to mass, and make it easier than other things, instead of making the way all thorny with snares. And if it were all meant to be a test of faith like some saint in the desert being tempted, wouldn't it be grander, something like yawning pits and fiery flames, and not just children howling and Mother Sarah losing Peregrine's left shoe? I intended to take that up with God sometime when I wasn't dressing children.

“Your pattens, girls, it's muddy outside—no, not a word. I don't care if it stopped raining last night. I say it's muddy, and muddy it is.”

There was a time long ago in our great prosperity, when Cecily and Alison's father was alive, that he arranged to have a poor knight's widow give them lessons in French and manners. But Madame was so stiff and proper she could barely manage to lower herself to teach a mercer's daughters, no matter how great their father's wealth and propriety. And when I remarried after his death, she considered it such a ghastly breach of etiquette that she departed in a cloud of disdain.

The French language, however, seemed to stick with the girls better than Madame did, especially since it is spoken in my new husband's family. I cannot say the same for the manners, which wore away faster than the knees of a little boy's hose. Well, if they can't act like ladies, then let them at least look like ladies, I thought, especially at church on holy days. But already Perkyn had thrown open the heavy front door. I checked them as they went out. Eyes hardly red anymore, and fixed properly on the ground. Steps grave. Clothes clean, hands folded across their stomachs. Peregrine, in
Mother Sarah's arms. Perkyn, solemnly closing the front door and following behind. All in order. Good. Perhaps today, no one would ever know that I had raised a pair of little red-headed terrors.

The last pink shades of dawn were still shining in the muddy puddles that filled the gutter down the center of Thames Street. Mud and wet stones made the uneven paving before the houses treacherous. The air was still fresh and cold, and filled with the rolling sound of the bells of Saint Botolphe's calling the parish to mass. Bundled figures were still hurrying in the direction of church. Praise heaven, we wouldn't be the latest. Halfway there, I turned to check over the household again.

“Put your hood up, Cecily. Alison, don't step in the puddles on purpose. Oh, Lord in Heaven, where's the baby?”

“Coming, coming, my lady. Perkyn's carrying him through the mud. It's too slippery for me. He's had to go slower. See? There he is now.” There, rounding the corner into Botolphe's Lane, was my littlest darling, just past two years old, the only heir to the house of de Vilers, pink cheeks shining in the cold, brown curls tucked under his pointed red hat, chattering like a magpie to old Perkyn, who carried him in his arms.

The dark, shadowy narthex was still crowded with people jostling their way into the nave. The smell of wet wool and city mud mingled with the heavy odor of their bodies. Amid the clatter of pattens and the sound of greetings exchanged, I could make out catty women's voices:

“Well, look there,
Lady
Margaret de Vilers. I remember when Mistress Kendall was too good for her. No family at all. Came from nowhere.”

“She just goes from scandal to scandal.” “Just look at her there, parading with her servants and that fur- trimmed surcoat. Who does she think she is?” I tried to hurry by, but a large man in pepperer's livery blocked my way. Behind me, the family was packed together by the crowd.

“I
heard that she'd eloped with her husband's copy clerk, and his body hardly cold.” I looked to see who was talking. Through the
crowd, I could make out a bobbing white veil—another—a whole cluster of them.

“Disgraceful, I say.”

“Some unfrocked monk named Gregory—a worthless loafer and beggar who copied letters in taverns.” The white headdress turned, and I caught a glimpse of a red, spiteful face. The cord- wainer's wife. No one I'd seen in church in recent memory.

“Gregory? I thought she married Sir Gilbert de Vilers. What happened to the beggar?”

“That's another scandal. He purchased a knighthood with her money and shed his religious name quicker than a snake sheds its skin.”

“It was family connections. Mistress Godfrey told me that he was a younger son cast out by his family as a wastrel. Of course, once he got money, they took him back.”

“Well,
I
heard that the Duke of Lancaster just dotes on him, though for the life of me, I don't understand why—”

“Sh! She's looking this way. You don't think she overheard, do you?”

“Of course not, dear, she's much too far away.” The problem with holy days, in my opinion, is that they bring out the Sunday sleepers, who think they can raise themselves up in godliness by speaking ill of everyone else. Besides, they have to make up for lost time for all the gossip they missed at the masses they slept through. I gave them a nasty stare as we passed.

We found our spot in the corner near Master Kendall's chantry, where the crawling light from the rising sun through the rose window made patterns on the floor in front of us. Around the stone pillars of the nave, clusters of tradesmen and goodwives conducted business and traded ideas on the pruning of fruit trees, the repair of shoes and harness and such like, while the faint droning of the priest at the altar was lost like the humming of bumblebees in a summer garden. Latecomers scurried past the marble font, hastily blessing themselves and inserting themselves among the press of people as if they had been there all along. I put my thoughts on God, and the
noise and bumble vanished. I used to think that one must pray like a priest, or God wouldn't listen, but luckily He taught me otherwise. Lord of the universe, You who are love itself, bring my love home safe. Let the campaign end in France, and bring him back.

Margaret, I don't organize the affairs of nations to please one woman.

Surely, Lord, there is more than one of us. Margaret, for every person who prays for love and peace, there are a half-dozen who pray for war and glory. What do you think of that?