A Lady Under Siege Read online

  A Novel

  B.G. PRESTON

  © Copyright 2013 B.G. Preston

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  Edition ISBNs

  Trade Paperback: 978-0-9918618-0-4

  Digital Formats:

  978-0-9918618-2-8 (Epub)

  978-0-9918618-1-1 (Kindle)

  First Edition 2013

  This edition was prepared by

  The Editorial Department

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  Cover images © iStockphoto

  Cover design by Kelly Leslie

  Book design by Morgana Gallaway

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  To Nilanjana, for all time

  1

  In a clothes chest in her bedchamber Sylvanne found the stub end of an old candle. With a shock she remembered the luxury of fire—the smell of cooking, the sensation of heat in the mouth, warming the throat all the way down to the welcoming belly. Such thoughts had once sparked angry pangs of hunger, but now her belly felt as a void, resigned and resentful of its emptiness. She brought the waxy little remnant down to the Great Hall and found a tinderbox by the fireplace. Fumbling to strike steel to flint, she teased a spark to ignite the tinder, and finally cupped the candle and its delicate wee flame in her hands.

  She craved more. A broom of rough twigs leaned by the hearth. She took it, upturned it, touched its tips to the flame, and dreamily watched as a burst of purple and orange leapt from stalk to stalk. So beautiful, she thought, like a suitor’s beaming face at the dance. How my suitors once beamed.

  Her maidservant Mabel entered the hall and stopped short at the sight of black smoke curling up to the tall timbered ceiling, and Sylvanne holding the flaming broom like a lover. It wasn’t the fire that shocked her so much as her Mistress’s illuminated face. For a moment she thought she was looking upon a ghost, for it was otherworldly how Sylvanne held the broom so close—it seemed she must surely kiss the flames as they devoured the tinder-dry stalks.

  “Madame, what insanity is this?”

  She yanked the broom from her mistress’s hands, and stamped the flames out on the floor. Sylvanne’s eyes still shone with fire. “The cooking beyond the walls tempted me, it smells of unfettered gluttony. Like a great feast,” she said.

  “Enough of such talk,” answered Mabel. “Hunger’s more keenly felt when the conscience dwells upon it.”

  “Do you count the days, Mabel? Do you know how many days this siege has now held?”

  “I wouldn’t, Ma’am. I’m not accustomed to counting days.”

  “When my husband fell ill and stopped his own counting, I tried to number them, but it’s unnatural for me. In Lent I always left track of days to the Friar.” She hung her head, looking down upon the soot-smudged broom on the floor. “A single day is but a bead on a necklace, given sense only when followed by another, and another. A thousand small suns strung upon a chain of time,” she said dreamily. “The seasons are my truer measure, imposing their changes upon my sisters, the fields and forests.”

  “Fields and forests your sisters? Don’t talk strange.”

  “The lands beyond the ramparts belong to my husband, as do I. That makes us equals, them and I, like siblings,” Sylvanne insisted. “I rank highest among us, because he would surrender all his lands before he will surrender me.”

  “My Lady, I beg you, don’t talk strange,” Mabel repeated. It pained her heart to see her Mistress, once so widely admired for her grace and beauty, now so pallid of skin, and gaunt. The fine velvet daydress she wore, one that Mabel knew as part of her Mistress’s dowry, had become shabby and dirty, and hung from her shoulders like a starveling’s shroud. Her lovely hair was unwashed.

  “In this season the fruits of the fields and orchards will be full and ripe, and ready for the harvest,” Sylvanne continued. “I want to look upon my sisters.”

  At the end of the hall a staircase led to the ramparts. Sylvanne strode toward it with great purpose. Mabel, weak with hunger herself, had no will to pursue her and only enough energy to cry out after her, “You’re not to do that! The enemy men keep camp there. M’Lord forbids you to look upon that rabble.”

  A THIN FOG MADE for a shadowless morning, but for Sylvanne, indoors all these many weeks, even this muted natural light of the outside world blinded her eyes at first. She walked unsteadily along the uneven stone ramparts of the castle. The smell of cooking fires wafting in the open air was almost too much to bear. From below she heard a voice call out.

  “Dear lady, dear lady, come down! Descend and join us in some hot mint tea. We’ll gladly share with you our bread and eggs, and the herbs that give savour to such humble nourishment.”

  She peeked down over the side through a gap in the teeth of the crenelated parapet. Back from the walls she could make out a ragged encampment, home to the two hundred men at arms laying siege to her husband’s small castle. She saw a soldier wave toward her, and others turn their heads to look up at her. One held up a plate upon which fried eggs and boiled potatoes steamed. She ducked back out of sight.

  “Come out my pretty, don’t be shy! Grant us a glance at your lovely visage. Why the delay in revealing yourself? Our master longs to gaze upon your celebrated beauty, to possess it for himself, which stands as the sole reason for these many weeks of fruitless siege.”

  Sylvanne showed herself again, leaning out from behind the parapet. More soldiers had abandoned their morning tasks to gaze up at her.

  “That’s better,” said their spokesman. “Oh, you are a beauty indeed. Pity you’re imprisoned by your own choice. Double’s the pity, for there’s grumbling of mutiny within those flinty walls of yours, or so we hear from the deserters who’ve descended to surrender themselves to our mercy. Is your husband wavering at last from his stubbornness, is he finally giving way to common sense?”

  “Speak you not i
ll of my husband,” Sylvanne cried out, but she was shocked that the words sounded little more than a whisper.

  “Pardon me? Didn’t catch that,” was the answer from below. “I am sorry, m’Lady, but your dainty voice took wing on the wind. Unpractised, is it? And by the way, my name is Kent, and I am very pleased to finally meet you.”

  “I said, speak you not ill of my husband,” Sylvanne repeated, in the loudest voice she could muster.

  “I speak ill of no one, Madame. I pity the man, is all, and I pity you too, and ask that you pity us the same—we have our homes, and a harvest to attend to—please don’t keep us any longer. Our wheat and barley plead for the scythe.”

  Another of the soldiers piped up, “And our wives plead for the prick!” The rest laughed heartily, and muttered things Sylvanne could not make out.

  “Shut it, boys,” Kent shouted. They grudgingly fell silent, and he turned his attention back to the lonely figure high on the parapet.

  “M’Lady, this siege has attained forty-seven days. The mind can but imagine the loveliness you must have owned when it began. Many say it was your haughty beauty that sparked our master’s obsession, but now you’ve grown thin and pale, my dear. Your beauty is a gemstone in need of polishing. You’re curling up like a worm in vinegar, desiccating like those flowers we call annuals, when autumn brings finality to their natural cycle. But we humans are not annuals, ma’am, mortal though we may be. We’re meant to be hardy perennials, to survive many a season in cycle, to bloom again each spring. Before autumn capitulates entirely to winter, can you not act a sweet, benevolent Lady, and entice your husband to waver from his obstinacy? Can you not convince him to surrender you to us?”

  Sylvanne felt weak, and dizzy. She summoned all her strength to answer. “We stay behind these safe walls with good reason, with righteousness as our ally and solace. We do not intend to dismiss these days, forty-seven by your count. A timid surrender now would make mock of our forbearance.”

  “But you look so tired, my lovely,” Kent pleaded. “Won’t you come down to the fire and share a morsel? We know you’re eating cold sup these many nights, it’s been weeks since a wisp of smoke has risen from your chimneys. Have reason, Mistress. Think of the suffering you inflict upon the loyalists locked up there with you. Is it your ambition to watch them die, merely for the sake of your own modesty, or your husband’s wounded vanity?”

  “I worry more for my husband’s wounded heart. His love for me is what keeps him from parting with me.”

  “Fa! And so your husband will die a starveling, and you too, you’ll all die for love, you and everyone else cooped up within. And you, Madame, could save them all. You alone are the singular source of misery within those walls, and the source of ours without. We have no quarrel with your people. We’re neighbours, near enough. Look how we’ve spared the free men, and the villeins, the thanes and tithing men, their wives and children, all citizens of your husband’s modest dominion, who we’ve left in peace to live on as normal, even as we encamp in their midst. That’s on orders from our Lord. We’ve been on faultless behaviour.”

  Another soldier, a fat oafish fellow, interjected, “Bloody torture, it’s been, too. A siege without spoils is like dinner with no meat! What point in soldiering without the rape and pillage?”

  Kent swivelled about and shouted at him. “Shut it!” Turning back toward Sylvanne, he called out, “Now Madame, if you—Madame? Madame!”

  But she was gone.

  2

  Derek was drunk again. He leaned against the rickety old picnic table in his backyard and lit a couple of dollar-store candles shoved into wine bottles. He and his bud Ken had managed to lure two college girls home from the bar, and he was trying to create a little atmosphere, hoping to bring a cozy blush to a tabletop littered with empty beer cans, bottles, paper plates and chicken bones.

  “You can’t beat candlelight,” he crowed. “It makes you girls look straight out of some Renaissance painting. But girls, girls, girls! In the bar you said you were up for just about anything, am I right? Padding your bohemian resume by slumming with older eccentric-type guys, am I right?” He gestured to a derelict hot tub in the back corner of the yard, filled for the moment with dusty old tires. “Wish my hot tub was up and running—we’d be bobbing for panties by now! Assuming you wear panties—I should check that—”

  “I do, but not into hot tubs,” said the drunker of the two girls, Kaitlin by name. She made a playful little show of lifting her short skirt and pretending to wriggle out of her underwear. Derek was mesmerized by the candlelight flickering across her thighs.

  “Good answer! I’m liking you more and more,” he grinned. “Shit—I wish that hot tub did work. Have a drink, there’s wine I think”—he rummaged around the table, shaking various bottles experimentally—“two shots of Limona here if we’re lucky, half a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps if we get desperate, there’s Bourbon around here somewhere, and I know there’s more wine in the house—”

  “Drop the voice, Derek,” said Ken, busy rolling a joint on the underside of an overturned plate. “You’ll wake the neighbours.”

  “Fuck the neighbours! Hurry up and spark that sucker, the girls are getting impatient, aren’t you girls? Remind me your names again—you’re both brunette and gorgeous, I’m having trouble telling you apart.”

  “Violetta. She’s Kaitlin.”

  “Fantastic names—love em! Look at that beauty of a moon, you two. Matched by you! Oh Luna, Oh Isis, or Toth, or Thoth, or whatever the hell the ancient Egyptians called you, bestow us with your blessings!”

  “The Egyptians had ten moon goddesses,” Kaitlin said.

  “Whatever!” Derek hooted. “Bloody goddess gridlock was their downfall. Monotheists kick ass, you understand? It’s human nature—big eat small till one God rules all. How do you know about goddesses, anyway? You study them at that high-priced college of yours?”

  “She’s on full scholarship,” said Violetta.

  “Hurray for you! These days only an idiot would pay for an education, when you can get it for free just going to Google Books and reading the classics. Epictetus, Cicero, de Sade, Dostoevsky, all there, all free!”

  “That’s not exactly how it works,” said Kaitlin. “In our course packs they give case studies that aren’t online or anywhere. Like, I’m majoring in development—”

  “Development? Of what?”

  “You know. The Third World, how to help them, how to improve conditions in places where—”

  “Hail Mother Teresa here! Ken, what the fuck! Spark that motherfucker and pass it around!”

  “I’m not Mother Teresa,” Kaitlin protested, “But I can’t look at suffering and inequality—”

  “Have a glass of wine, my dear. It’s an old joke, but children in Africa are going to bed sober.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Fate handed me this life, I didn’t choose it, just as the starvelings of Somalia didn’t choose theirs. Better luck next time.”

  “Next time I’m coming back as Penelope Cruz,” said Violetta.

  “I thought you were her,” Ken said, handing her the unlit joint. “Do the honours.”

  “Aren’t you sweet?” she purred. “But I do honestly believe in reincarnation. It’s like a karma redistribution mechanism.” She held her long hair back gracefully with one hand while she lit the spliff from a candle.

  “Good for you,” Derek applauded. “If it brings you comfort, cling to whatever flotsam bobs along the ocean of your mind. May we all live forever among the harp-playing angels of heaven, and may the afterlife be one giant after party. For now, we’re still in the party party, and let’s all get down in the earthly, earthy, deliciously dirty dirt of it.”

  Violetta held out the joint to him. He took it from her and inhaled ferociously. The girls watched his face puff up pink as diaper rash. He held it in for an eternity, then unleashed a smoky explosion of phlegmy hacks and coughs, exaggerated for comic effect. “Smooooth,” he
croaked.

  THEN FROM A HEIGHT, from the shadows, came a woman’s voice. “Excuse me, can you be quiet? I have a ten-year-old with school tomorrow.”

  It took them a moment to locate her. A second story window in the townhouse next door. There she was—a face, pretty but scowling, thirtyish, blonde hair. Derek extricated his legs from under the picnic table, stretched himself unsteadily to his full height, tilted his head back and snarled, “So who asked you to procreate? The planet’s overpopulated and it’s your fucking fault! Get the kid some earplugs!”

  For a moment there was silence. An ambulance could be heard faintly in a distant street. The woman answered, in a low, level voice, “I’d love to keep shouting, but I don’t want to wake my child.” She added, with a quiet, whispered fury, “You’re a monster. You’re not human.” Then she closed the window, and was gone.

  “Just ignore her,” Derek said.

  “New neighbour?” asked Ken.

  “Yeah. Uptight bitch.”

  “Cute though.”

  Derek shouted up at the empty window, “You’re cute when you’re angry!” In a softer voice he muttered, “Uptight bitch.”

  Violetta said, “Maybe we should go.”

  Kaitlin made a pouty, disappointed noise.

  “You wanna stay?”

  She nodded.

  “You don’t have to win.”

  “What’s that mean?” asked Derek.

  “We had a bet—that she was going to get some tonight,” Violetta said.

  “Vi!” Kaitlin yelped.

  “That’s the spirit,” Derek cried gleefully. “I’m the last man standing, and by candlelight and moonlight on this gorgeous night I could almost be mistaken for George Clooney, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe,” Kaitlin murmured.

  “George Clooney doesn’t live in a junkyard,” said Violetta.

  “I’ve got grand ambitions for this night,” said Derek, ignoring her. “I’m going to tip all the shit off this table, and you’ll see. Before sunrise, I swear!”

  “You want to do it on the table?” asked Kaitlin, giggling doubtfully.