After that she went down to Corvesgeat again and again, while winter turned to spring and spring to high summer. She watched the Morrismen dance in the bailey Midsummer’s Eve, fed the hobbyhorse with coins its clacking wooden teeth couldn’t hold; once Robert, the Bentley in dock with a smashed front spring after some spree, damnblasted a butterfly car as far as Lyme Village before, his temper shattered, he fulfilled his own threat to push the thing off Golden Cap. Through the year the notes would come to Durnovaria, brought by a soldier or a bailiff on his rounds. Margaret puzzled the future Lord of Corfe, maybe worried him a little. She wasn’t of his blood; but neither did she think like a commoner, the serfs he would blow from his path with blasts of the Bentley’s horn. She didn’t blush and simper, giggle like a village slut when he stroked her breasts; she was grave and quiet and always it seemed had some sadness in her eyes. For her part Margaret felt unspoken things to exist between them, understandings deeper than words. In his own way, under the blustering and hell-raking, he needed her; one day, formally, he would ask her to be his wife.
She shuddered, remembering the end of her world. An August night, the grasshoppers making their endless shrieking; the sound seemed to soak into brain and blood, compelling with its insistent strangeness, now heard, now unheard and heard again. The castle bulked high in the warm dark and all round, in the baileys, on the walls and motte, far below in the tree-grown wet ditch, the glow-worms burned like lime-green sequins stitched onto the black velvet of the grass. She cupped one in her hand; it glowed there still, distant and mysterious. There was a smell in the air, warm and heavy, the tang of early autumn. A breeze touched her face; it seemed to her excited fancy the wind blew from some strange past.
Robert was brooding, silent, in a mood she hadn’t seen. A fire was burning up by the kitchens, the glow wavering on stone, limning the huge pile of the donjon. Flakes of ash were whirled up sparkling in the sky; he said to her they were like the souls of men moving through endlessness, shining awhile then vanishing in the dark. He didn’t use his born language; instead he spoke an old tongue, a clacking gutteral she’d never realised he owned. She could answer him; she stood close giving sentence for sentence, trying to comfort. She spoke of the castle. ‘Rude, ragged nurse,’ she said, ‘old sullen playfellow for tender princelings…’
He seemed surprised at that. She laughed, her voice muted in the night. ‘One of those minor Elizabethans, we had to do him at school. I forget his name; I thought he was rather good.’
‘How does it finish?’
‘Use my babies well… ‘ She spoke almost wonderingly, aware for the first time of the chill under the words. ‘So… . foolish sorrow bids thy stones… . farewell…’ It made him angry, unaccountably. ‘Auguries,’ he said, and spat. ‘You’re like a priest in a bolt-hole, mumbling bloody spells…’
‘Robert…’ She was close to him, she moved closer. She laid her face against his, lips parted to let tongue and teeth touch his jaw, trying to stop the sadness in him, feeling his hands move tracing beneath her thin dress the course of her spine. She’d touched him often enough and kissed; his fingers used her familiarly, enjoying her as his eyes enjoyed the keen head of ‘a hound or the flight of a hawk, as his mouth savoured the taste of food and good wine. She thought, this time it is different. If he goes on now, and if I let myself go on, there’ll be only one end. And is it so important after all?
She swallowed, closing her eyes; and it seemed then for the first time the turning and twisting, the falling, the sense of dimensions and Time skewed, plagued her. She clung tighter whimpering, feeling herself not standing on solid turf but bowled solemnly end over end through a void, haunted by all dead things and sorrows and future fears, lumped and bundled and blown along a Norman wind. She thought, perhaps I shall saint. What’s happening to me…
She tried to call up images to set against the dark; her father, Sarah, her uncle Jesse, people she’d known back at school, even old Sister Alicia. It seemed to her obscurely that what she wanted to do involved more than herself, her body and her pain. It was to them, all the people she’d ever known, she had to answer; for their sake her choice had to be right. She felt a hotness on her cheek and knew it was a tear; though whether for herself or Robert or all humankind she couldn’t say. She lay with him that night, coming to him again and again, comforting and being comforted, sometimes mother-giving, sometimes a child wrapped away from the dark; till even her lover drifted from her, lost behind a sleep too deep for dreams.
Lord Edward’s seneschal roused her — he of all people — with the story that Robert had been called off on the King’s business, that he was to see her home. She lay quiet in the bed, still half dazed with sleep; and slowly the anger grew. She read in his queer eyes and chiselled-cat face, the face she could oddly never recall once he had turned away, what she already knew deep inside. That the enchantment, if it was enchantment, had ended; that she’d sold herself for a pretty song, that Robert was in his senses now, that a Lord of Purbeck would never mix his blood with a girl of the rank and file. She drove the seneschal away snarling and spitting, rose and looked at herself, turning the mirror to show her new slut’s body; she washed herself, splashing the water from the ewer angrily on the floor. The bed was marked; she wrenched the covers back raging, left them for all the world to see. She swore at the seneschal when he fetched her, stamping and vowing revenges she knew she could never call down; not herself, not her father, not the mighty firm of Strange with all its money and power. Because there was no law in this land, not for commoners. Rich and poor alike they held their places by the whim of their lords; and the lords got theirs in feoff from the English King, and he sat his throne by the grace of the Throne of Peter. The demicannon, glaring out there through the gates, that was the law…
In the outer bailey she thought a houseservant smiled; if she had had a weapon in her hand she would have killed. She left riding like the wind, slashing her horse till the blood ran, hurting herself in the jolting saddle, the seneschal pacing her impassively twenty yards behind. They’d marked her up, like they’d mark a split crate off the road trains; soiled goods, return to sender… She turned a mile away. from the castle, saw it watching her and cursed. There were tears on her face again and on her throat; but they were tears of rage.
‘FOR THEE AND FOR THY ANGELS IS PREPARED THE UNQUENCHABLE FIRE; BECAUSE THOU ART THE CHIEF OF ACCURSED MURDER, THOU ART THE AUTHOR OF INCEST… GO OUT. THOU SCOUNDREL, GO OUT WITH ALL THY DECEITS… GIVE HONOUR TO GOD, TO WHOM EVERY KNEE IS BENT…’
Why, thought Margaret haggardly, he’s talking about me… The journey and the castle had been in her mind; the tears were real. They ran down hot, wetting her neck. Is this the best you can do? she asked Father Edwardes silently. To plague this old man with your mumming while I sit here free who’ve brought the evil and the wrong into this house? Of course, her mind answered itself scornfully. Because he like the Church he serves is blind and empty and vainglorious. This God they prattle on about, where’s His justice, where’s His compassion? Does it please Him to see dying people hounded in His name, does He snigger at His bumbling priests, is He satisfied when men drop dead chopping stone out for His temples, twisted little God dying tepid-faced on a cross…