Shroud of Shadow (24 page)

He brooded for a moment, obviously uncomfortable with his heat, but inspiration struck again, and his white eyebrows and his index finger all rose simultaneously. “Why, even Wenceslas himself would have been haled before a tribunal, since—returning to your name, Natil (I beg your pardon, but it's a good example)—since among the pages of his diaries he wrote about something that was neither good nor evil, but which, he claimed, existed outside of such categories. He called it . . . um . . . well . . . Elves. And Natil, he said, was an Elf.” He shrugged. “He wrote of them as though they were people. I confess I don't understand why he did so.”

Natil stifled her tears. “I believe that Brother William of Occam and Brother John Duns Scotus thought much the same separatist way, although they used different metaphors and different figures of speech. Distinctions of that sort are, after all, the very basis of the
via moderna
.”

“Anti-Thomism. Just so.” Albrecht brightened. “A learned woman! A jewel for your household, Mister Jacob.”

Jacob sat back with a satisfied—and, to Natil's eye, somewhat bitter—smile. “A jewel among the clinkers. I only
buy
the best, Excellency.”

“Of course, dear harper,” Albrecht hastened to add, “none of these good and evil and Elf questions have anything to do with you. Wenceslas wrote a hundred years ago. You could have no possible connections with the Natil of his diary.”

Natil remembered to curtsy, remembered not to cry. “Of course not, Excellency.”

“But just think,” said Albrecht, plainly distressed. “Even Wenceslas would be considered heretical. It's terrible. It's just . . . terrible.”

Natil looked at Jacob. Jacob looked at Natil. Here, then, was an ally. “Have you . . .” Jacob considered his words carefully. “Have you brought this up, Excellency? With . . . perhaps . . . Rome?”

“With Rome?” Albrecht smiled tiredly, rubbed at a knot of furrows that had suddenly descended upon his brow like a flock of crows on a weathervane. “I am afraid that Rome is more interested in revenues than in religion. Rodrigo Borgia . . . ah . . .”

Natil thought it. Jacob said it. “. . . has to pay off the bribes that elected him.”

Albrecht coughed. “Oh, dear, Mister Jacob! Really!”

“Well, it's true.”

The bishop's coughing metamorphosed into barely suppressed laughter, which itself seemed in danger of mutating into tears. “Dear God, yes . . . it's true.”

“And he's too busy playing politics with the Papal States to worry about his Church, isn't he?”

Albrecht calmed himself with a swallow of wine. “True, true. I am sorry—heartily sorry—to say that it's all true.” He sighed. “I do my best with what has been given me, but there is so much wrong in the world, and so little that I can do about it.”

Natil's eyes were on the floor. So little that could be done. By anyone.

“Play something for us, Natil,” said Jacob suddenly. “We're two old men having a glass of wine together and remembering . . .” His voice caught, and there was a hint of tears in his eyes. “. . . the good old days.” But his eyes, tears and all, turned miserly. “Play something. Show us what you're worth.”

Natil curtsied again and took her place on a stool near the hearth, glad of the chance to lose herself in her music. While she played, Jacob and Albrecht chatted about Furze and the wool cooperative. Albrecht was wholeheartedly in favor of the entire affair, and he did not hesitate to express his feelings:

“God bless you, Mister Jacob, but I'm glad you've come to help.”

“Hmmph,” said the merchant. “I don't recall that the agreement has been signed yet.”

Albrecht looked at Jacob with a patient expression that set the latter to laughing. “All right, then,” said Jacob. “Thank you, Excellency. We'll have Furze running like a well-made loom in another year.”

Albrecht sat back, beaming, genuinely happy.

But after the bishop left—on foot, as he had, apparently, come—in the company of his chief clerk (who had waited patiently in the corridor all this time), Jacob stood at the window, watching him hobble away down the street. “I don't understand it, Natil?”

A creak at the closed door told Natil that, with the departure of the servants, Francis was listening again. “Understand what, master?”

“Albrecht. Shrinerock Abbey poor as a mouse, indeed! As if he himself wasn't reduced to darning his own stockings! And that pathetic cathedral!” Jacob shook his head, bewildered. “He shows up in the middle of the afternoon, just drops in on me to say hello and thank me for my interest in Furze. And that's all. And him with a cathedral to be built.”

“You mean,” said the harper, “that he did not ask for a donation?”

“Never even mentioned it. Never mentioned it at all.” Jacob stared after Albrecht, shook his head in wonder. “I admire that. I really do. Dear God, he night get me into a monastery yet!”

Another creak at the door. Natil felt Francis's fear even through two inches of solid oak.

With the arrival of May, Adria began to green in earnest. Trees leafed. Daffodils covered forest meadows. Hyacinths burst out in violet clouds. The pastures between Furze and Belroi lost their last recalcitrant patches of brown, and people began to travel with some assurance that they would neither be soaked nor frozen in the middle of a long trek.

The gypsies were on the move again, too. A hundred years ago, they had been a novelty in Adria, but now their small wandering bands were a common sight, and they joined the wayfarers and the traveling merchants and tradesmen, the narrow wooden wheels of their caravans churning up the roads and byways, sending dust into the air like smoke from a plodding fire.

They never stayed. They only passed through. They were always only passing through, with nowhere to go save the next stop, the next horse fair, the next encampment. They kept to themselves and to their own ways, picking up seasonal work sometimes, or trading, or, occasionally, stealing from the complacent
gadja
who certainly owed
someone
a living because it simply was not right that anyone have so much and not share it.

At night, daring girls from nearby towns might sneak into their camps so as to consult with a dark-skinned seer—the matter of a future husband, perhaps, or perhaps how best to be rid of the present one—but the Romany took their money and listened to their problems with a detachment born of chronic separateness. Who cared about these silly white folks, anyway? Laboring, laboring, laboring . . . and for what? Hardly better than the horses that pulled the caravans. Just gullible idiots, really. Why, they clung to their priests and churches like a child to mama's skirts. And as for any sense of proportion . . . well!

This year, a band came up from Italy, picked up the north road near the ruins of a village that had once been called Saint Brigid, and headed up toward the coast. They called at villages and hamlets, sharpened a few knives, told a few fortunes, made off with a few chickens, and packed up in the morning. They paused at Furze only long enough to water the horses—because those who had nothing for themselves had nothing to give to anyone else—spent a week at Belroi, and wound up camping near Ypris on a Friday afternoon.

Ypris—independent, wealthy, and staunchly bourgeois—had no time for gypsies. The dark-skinned strangers who had suddenly appeared, whether singing and dancing for pennies in the town square or looking for odd jobs among the shops and houses and sheepfolds, were, in the opinion of the townsfolk, hardly better than beggars. Just human trash, really. Why, they hardly gave more than lip service to the Church. And as for any sense of property . . . well!

And so, in a spirit of mutual exploitation and intolerance, the gypsies and Ypris coexisted. Odd jobs turned up. Missing chickens did not. The strange songs in an even stranger language became an accepted part of Yprisian life . . . at least for now.

But there was an old woman among the Romany who kept much to herself: an odd occurrence among such a communal people. She wore the dress and jewelry of a gypsy woman, and she covered her hair with a bright kerchief like a gypsy woman, but though she moved deliberately, almost with a sense of defiance, she never seemed to be all of a piece, never seemed to really know quite how one should act when clad in such a kerchief, such jewelry, such dress. There was the look of a stranger among strangers in her blue (blue?) eyes, and the hair the escaped its cloth confines was the dirty gray color of a faded blonde.

Wandering apart from her fellow wanderers, she walked alone through the streets of Ypris, slowly becoming a strange and barely tolerated part of this strange and barely tolerated Romany visitation. “Oh, that's her,” the townsfolk would say. “The one they call Reinne. She's an odd one.”

And some would turn away from her because they thought that she was a witch. And some would give her money and food because she was old and tired and had a cough that told of lungs worn threadbare with consumption. And others simply ignored her, getting on with their busy lives as Yprisians always did.

Reinne, though, wandered, and if she asked about Jacob Aldernacht, no one thought very much of it. Jacob Aldernacht was, after all, famous. Everyone knew about Jacob Aldernacht. The kings of France borrowed money from Jacob Aldernacht. Of
course
this old, consumptive gypsy woman would ask about him . . . and that meant that she was up to no good, you could be sure of it!

Her inquiries, though, never actually reached the Aldernachts themselves, for about their house were walls and gates with guards who were paid to keep people like Reinne outside in the street where they belonged. Old Eudes slammed and locked his wardrobe doors as soon as he heard about the gypsies, Claire did not want to even look at them (children of God though they might be), and Josef, unable to reconcile such gap-toothed, straggle-haired people with his ill-understood humanistic beliefs, and unwilling to allow something like Reinne any part in the ethereal womanhood he worshipped, personally made sure that the servants knew to keep intact the privacy of the Aldernacht household.

And so Reinne wandered, and chickens did not turn up, and May continued, the countryside greening, the sheep bleating . . . and the Aldernacht household even more introverted than usual.

By the end of the first week, most of the children of Ypris were singing gypsy songs.

***

Omelda was moving stiffly these days, a condition brought on by muscle strains, rope burns, bruises, bite marks, and frequent and violent encounters with the metal toys that Edvard and Norman utilized in their sexual play.

The two young men were clever, bright, and observant. In the course of only a few days, they had noted that when the church bells rang the Office Hours, Omelda might resist their advances and their uses of her, but it would be at most a vague, fuzzy, half-hearted resistance. This they did not mind in the least. Much better, though, was her complete, doll-like compliance with their every wish
in between
the Hours.

And so they invariably came to her when she most needed privacy, when she was relishing her freedom to think, to consider, to float in the vast silence of clarity. And this, despite the intrusions of Francis's sons, she continued to do, ignoring with the studied practice of twenty years of introversion the externals that were forced upon her. The ropes. The blunt cylinders. The clubs. The hot wax and putty.

She did her work—Eudes and Martha had no complaint—but she did her work in pain. Nor did any thought of reporting her abuse ever occur to her, for Edvard and Norman had made it very clear that, in the absence of their father and their grandfather, they were the masters of the house. And, in any case, what was the word of a servant against that of the heirs of the Aldernacht estate?

So she complied, and she suffered. She salved her wounds with herbs, washed shit and sperm out of herself late at night with a cup of warm water and a cloth, and tried hard come morning not to look at herself in the mirror. She complied, and she suffered, as, ox-like as she had ever been, she plodded through the hours and the days, her inner sight more often than not fixed upon Natil's return as obsessively as a tired draft animal might stare at the far side of a field.

At the end of the week, she met Dinah, a taut little athletic whore who seemed forever to have the corners of her mouth turned up and the corners of her eyes turned down. Eager and cheerful, she did as she was told for money, as Omelda did what she was told because she was owned. Together, separately, in and out of costume, the nun and the prostitute mingled their bodies with one another and with those of Jacob's grandsons, submitting—willingly and unwillingly, it did not matter—to whatever demand was made upon them.

Dinah appeared to almost relish her own debauchery. “I'm paid, and I'm well paid,” she declared defiantly to Omelda one day. “Why shouldn't I enjoy it while I'm at it?”

Strapped to one another, the two young women lay with their faces inches apart. Omelda's legs were spread, Dinah's lashed together from ankle to thigh: a travesty of heterosexual coitus. To make the fantasy complete—or perhaps more tawdry—Omelda's skirts had been pulled up to her chin, and the breeches into which Dinah had been ordered were down about her knees. A country rape: milkmaid and young gallant. Edvard and Norman would, as was their practice, enjoy the little charade and push and prod and masturbate before they would allow both Omelda and Dinah to be women again . . . and use them as such.

Today, though, the young men had been called away by a quick tap on the door and a whispered message from a servant. They had obviously been expecting something of the sort, and had fastened up their clothes and rushed out of the room without a word to their playthings. And so Omelda and Dinah were left alone, one to fight for the sanctity of her mind, the other to wait patiently for further orders . . . and for money.

“It's my body,” Dinah continued, “and I can do as I please. And if I get a little shit in my crook, why, God gave me a crook . . . and He gave me shit, too! I'll tell that to the priests any day of the week!”