Winter Song (40 page)

The proof of this, she thought, was that he had rushed back
into his mistress’s arms as soon as Lucie was within reach. That was why he had
not used the passage. That was why he had ordered Alys to live in the south
tower. It was not to protect her from his mother, but to keep her from finding
out he had another woman more to his taste. Surely he had told his daughters
not to mention their mother and had told Lucie to hide herself. No wonder the
woman had been so frightened. No wonder Raymond had been so appalled when he
saw her with Fenice and Enid, so reluctant for her to take them into her care.

The contradiction between Raymond’s surprise at seeing his
daughters with Alys and her assumption that
he
had ordered them not to
speak of Lucie did not occur to Alys in the fever of rage and pain that burned
her. A flicker of logic briefly cast a gleam of doubt on the edifice of
nonsense she was erecting when she wondered why Raymond had revealed the
passage to her if he did not intend to use it. She doused that small flame of
truth quickly in a wet blanket of misery. Naturally he did not intend to desert
her bed completely. He needed a legitimate heir, and Lucie could not give him
that.

The day passed in adding useless embellishments to this
monster of misinterpretation. Once Alys roused herself to send Bertha to fetch
the children as she had promised, but she told the maid to keep them with her,
see to their supper, and put them to bed. Another time she was pulled from the
morass in which she was allowing herself to sink when Bertha brought her an
evening meal. But Alys would not take the hand held out to rescue her. When
Bertha deliberately idled about, relaying what she thought were innocent bits
of gossip about the doings of the keep, Alys told her sharply to go.

Bertha’s pleasure in her new situation only compounded Alys’s
self-inflicted pain. Alys alternately raged and wept until she was exhausted.
Since she had slept hardly at all the preceding night, she was barely able to
pull off her clothes and tumble into bed before she was deeply asleep. Bertha’s
entry later to fold her clothing and light the night candle did not wake her,
nor, some hours after that, did the calls of the sentries and the answering
cries of Raymond’s men demanding entrance to Tour Dur. This was most
unfortunate. Had Alys wakened, it would have been apparent to her that Raymond
had stopped only long enough to take off his armor before he came to her.

As he carried his candle through the dark passage, Raymond’s
mood was exactly the opposite of Alys’s. This was literally true because his
euphoria was equally compounded of true and false emotion. There were real
reasons for him to be happy, but a good part of his high spirits was owing to
the fact that he was so tired that he no longer felt it.

The first small break in Raymond’s mood came when he pushed
the wall open and Alys did not stir. Somehow he had expected that she would
either be awake or that the creak of the pivot would wake her and she would
spring up to welcome him with a cry of joy. However, he suppressed this small
disappointment and went to close the door Bertha had left open in case her
mistress should call her in the night. Then he threw off his night robe and
soft slippers and crept in beside his wife. He pulled her into his arms and,
still asleep, she turned to him, but limply and without real consciousness.
That, again unfortunately, was not enough for Raymond.

All the way home he had been imagining his welcome and it
was not working out at all as he had planned. He wanted Alys to be glad he was
there. He wanted her to appreciate that he had ridden all the way home and
given up a second night’s sleep just to be with her. Moreover, his previous
experience of making love to a somnolent wife had left a decidedly bad
impression. He shook Alys gently, then bit her ear.

“Raymond?” she mumbled.

In that first hazy moment of waking, before she remembered
her rage and anguish, Alys tightened her arms around Raymond, as if by reflex,
and tried to turn her head to find his lips. The latter gesture pulled her ear
harder against his teeth. Memory returned in the instant that she felt the
slight pain. It was nothing. If all her imagined misusage had not flooded into
her mind at once, the tiny discomfort would have acted as Raymond intended it, as
a sharp spur to passion.

Instead it seemed an ugly confirmation to Alys that Raymond
would rather hurt than fondle her. She pushed him away with all her strength,
using both legs and arms. Since Raymond was not expecting this kind of violent
response, he was not braced against it. Moreover, he was at the very edge of
the bed because Alys had been sleeping more in the center than to the side. He
slid, teetered, and fell off.

“Lecher!” Alys shrieked, sitting up and clutching the covers
to her as if threatened by a ravisher. “Do not dare touch me. I am no clout to
be used to wipe up your dirt and be tossed away. You will get no heir on me
while your love and your pleasure belong to another woman.”

Raymond listened to this while lying on the floor. He had
not been hurt when he fell because thick carpets padded the planks on each side
of the bed, but he was too surprised to move. When he heard Alys’s accusation,
he was further stunned. It was so impossibly far from reality that it did not
touch him at all. Alys was his pearl without price. Another woman—it was too ridiculous!
He had been as faithful as a celibate priest vowed to Holy Mary. He had
probably been more faithful, he thought, for he had never even thought of
another woman since he had taken Alys to his bed. He had actually refused a
freely offered bedmate without a moment’s hesitation. And he had never been a
lecher. As a man, he had had women, but they had not been, until Alys entered
his life, of great importance to him.

Raymond rose to his knees, rubbing the arm he had bruised in
falling. He shoved the bed curtain farther aside so that the light of the night
candle penetrated into the recess of the bed, and he stared at Alys. He was far
too surprised to feel any other emotion.

“What is wrong with you?” he asked mildly. “What are you
talking about?”

The mildness was a further affront. Had he been innocent,
Alys reasoned, he would have been angry. “Where were you last night and the
night before?” Alys screamed.

“Have you run mad?” Raymond countered, still kneeling and
staring at his wife’s inflamed face. She was very beautiful with her cheeks
flushed and her eyes brilliant with rage. “I told you I was going to my aunt,
and last night I was with my father.”

“For how long?” Alys raged. “And with whom did you go to
bed?”

“You
have
run mad!” There was now an edge to
Raymond’s voice, and he got to his feet. His shock was beginning to recede,
making room for other feelings, and they were not pleasant. Still the total
lack of reality in Alys’s accusations armored him to some extent, for it is the
truth that really hurts. “I slept alone at my aunt’s manor,” Raymond continued.
“Do you think I would casually dishonor one of her maidens? And last night I
did not go to bed at all.”

“Liar!” Alys spat, hardly waiting for him to finish.

Now indignation roused Raymond. “I do not lie!” he snapped. “Why
should I? What business is it of yours with whom I sleep? I would not deign to
lie—”

“You yellow-bellied cur, you do lie!” Alys flung herself out
of bed at an angle so that she could better confront her husband. “I have found
your mistress, though you bade her hide from me, and I do not deny she must be
richer meat than I am. Go to her bed! Feast well! But do not think you can
throw me scraps from that feast and thus content me.”

“Mistress! What mistress?” Raymond roared, the shock of
hearing his wife call him a yellow-bellied cur having kept him silent just long
enough for Alys to finish her tirade. “I have no mistress here nor in any other
keep! And what if I had? It is not your place to tell me how to regulate my
life.”

“Is it not?” Alys was no longer screaming. Her voice was
low, but clear and deadly cold. “Perhaps not, but I can regulate my own. I will
not take between my legs a man who has so little love for me, so little sense
of decency in his own behavior, that he will keep a mistress in the same house
to which he brings his new-wed wife.”

“I tell you I have no mistress!” Raymond bellowed,
thoroughly enraged.

Now the other side of the coin was showing. Before,
knowledge of his own innocence had prevented Alys’s shafts from hurting him.
Conversely, however, once he began to be angry, he became much more angry
because he was unjustly accused.

“And I tell you I found Lucie, despite your orders to her to
hide from me. I will not permit you to use me to father legal sons while you disport
yourself for pleasure elsewhere.”

“Permit? Who are you to permit or not permit? It is a wife’s
duty to bear sons no matter what her circumstances.”

Alys’s unwise tone of arrogance deprived Raymond of his last
remaining shreds of self-control. He had not slept in forty-eight hours, and in
that time he had killed a man and had a soul-shaking confrontation with his
father that swung him from despair and bitterness to euphoric happiness. He had
come home to share that happiness with the dearest treasure of his life,
certain of a joyful and passionate greeting from her. Instead he had been
rejected and foully missaid.

Disappointment, rage, and fatigue swirled together and
blocked all his ability to think. There was nothing left of rational humanity
in Raymond, and the frustrations and hatreds of years of dealing with his
mother, of feeling helpless and controlled, exploded in him. Reacting like an
animal whose prey was escaping, he struck at Alys. The blow would have felled
her unconscious, but she had stepped back, frightened by the distortion of his
features. Moreover, fatigue had thrown off Raymond’s aim and timing.

The blow fell glancingly on Alys’s shoulder but was still
strong enough to knock her off her feet. She scrambled away on her knees, but
Raymond on his feet was much faster. He leapt at her, hit her again, then
seized her and shook her so hard that he nearly broke her neck. Alys struck
back at him feebly, for the blows and the shaking had made her dizzy, but that
served only to incite Raymond further. Mad with frustration and rage, he now
had no real awareness of himself or Alys as people. She was only a creature
that he knew he must subdue. He cast her on the bed and threw himself atop her.

Her momentary weakness past, Alys struggled fiercely. She
struck and scratched at Raymond’s face, but he seized her wrists. Then she made
a fundamental mistake and tried to kick. Raymond’s legs slipped between hers.
She writhed and heaved, trying to push him off, but his weight was far more
than she could lift. Actually, when Raymond struck and seized Alys, he had
desired conquest, not rape. But now, of course, the form of conquest Raymond
desired had been made plain to him. The twisting and plunging of Alys’s body, a
grotesque mockery of sexual intercourse, served to stimulate him into animal
rut.

He pulled one of her arms brutally across her face so that
he could seize both her wrists in one hand. With the other he reached down to
position himself, but Alys tried to bite his hand. She kicked, dug a heel into the
back of his knee, twisted her hips desperately to prevent him from settling his
shaft properly. Her efforts were in vain and worse than vain because they only
served to anger and excite Raymond more and more.

However, Alys’s struggles produced one advantage. By the
time Raymond impaled her, he was so inflamed that only a few thrusts brought
him to climax. He was aware, in those few seconds, of Alys still writhing to
free herself and screaming with hatred and revulsion, but the words, if there
were words, were meaningless to him, and with the outpouring of his seed the
last flicker of energy left him. He was instantly so deeply asleep that his
condition differed little from unconsciousness.

Alys wrenched her wrists from her husband’s relaxed grasp
and heaved. He was limp, a dead weight, and she was exhausted, but her outrage
would not let her rest. She pushed and twisted until at last she was free. At
this point Alys was little more rational than Raymond had been. All she could
think of was driving him away, and she stood gasping, looking for a weapon.

Her riding crop lay on a chest, and she ran and seized it.
As she reached for it, however, the bruises on her shoulder and back twinged.
That was warning enough. Alys knew that Raymond could wrench so pitiful a thing
from her hand and use it on her. She needed something he could not grab. Her
eyes ranged the room and suddenly she gave a small, sharp cry of joy and ran to
the wall. The towers, being used far more often for storage than for living
quarters, were furnished with torches. Alys took one and thrust its
pitch-soaked head into the embers of the fire. When it was blazing brightly,
she advanced on the bed, her lips drawn back in a feral snarl.

The curtains were still pulled back as Raymond had left
them, and he lay facedown, his smooth, dark-skinned back exposed. Alys lifted
the hand that held the whip and for just an instant she could not bring it
down. Raymond often slept on his belly, and the sight brought back to her many
sweet mornings when she had bent to kiss his back and so wake him to another
happy day. If she struck him and drove him off, it would be the end of all such
joy. No, it was ended anyway, she realized. She could not love a man who forced
her.

The whip came down then, as hard as she could strike.
Raymond gasped and jerked. Alys struck again. He pushed himself upright,
cursing. Alys stepped back out of reach and extended the blazing torch toward
his face.

“Out!” she shrieked. “Out of my bed and out of my life. No
man who forces a wife is fit to have one.”