A Lady Under Siege Read online

  The dutiful daughter had agreed to marry Gerald under intense pressure from her father, and after marriage she transposed that sense of obligation to her husband. She became the dutiful wife. Did she love him? She told herself she would, with time. There were reasons to love him, for he was tender with her, and kind-hearted, though he had an impetuous streak and was terribly unwise with money. She scolded him for it, but he laughed it off as none of her concern. As a year of marriage turned to two, then three and four, and they remained childless, cracks began to show in his kindness toward her, for he expected from her the son that was essential to keeping his bloodline intact. Sylvanne’s mother, with her expertise as a midwife, gave her all manner of herbal concoctions to help her conceive, but to no avail. In all corners of Christendom a barren womb could only be spoken of in public as a woman’s shame, but in private, in a rueful whisper so soft God might overlook it, her mother put the blame on a caprice in Gerald’s bloodline. Such a failing called for discreet cures, and the remedies she concocted to make the husband more virile had to be slipped by Sylvanne into his food and drink surreptitiously. Each remedy in turn raised her hopes and expectations, only to disappoint. She remained childless.

  Her marriage, forged in great expectations for happiness, had slowly begun to metamorphose into one wherein happiness grew ever more elusive, as the essential contract at its heart was neither fulfilled nor satisfied. She lived in a kind of stasis, awaiting resolution. Then one day, out of the blue, came a messenger, an envoy from Thomas of Gastoncoe, a powerful Lord with abundant lands two days ride to the east. Lord Thomas wished a private meeting with her, an unheard of thing for any man to ask of a properly married woman. The request had aroused in Gerald a horrible suspicion, and for the first time he had struck her in anger. Lord Thomas was denied, yet persisted in his demands for a meeting, and Gerald in his jealousy could not be placated. She took this as a sign that he truly loved her, and loved him a little more in return. She worked hard to regain his trust, for she had done nothing wrong, and fully supported her husband when he rudely dismissed each new entreaty from Lord Thomas.

  The strange desire of this Thomas to meet with another man’s wife then took on the appearance of single-minded insanity—he raised among his subjects a sizable company of soldiers, and sent them to lay siege to Gerald and Sylvanne in their little castle, with its granary still not properly replenished since the wedding, its larder nearly bare. Thomas’s soldiers encamped outside the gates, and poor Gerald, “the young fool with no proper counsel,” had no powerful ally to call upon. He and Sylvanne and their loyal retinue became prisoners of the worst sort, prisoners without provisions. Rationing was required almost immediately, food was scarce and poor. A few weeks later Sylvanne missed her monthly cycle, and she had rejoiced at first, and rushed to tell her husband, who was greatly pleased that she had finally conceived him a child. Shortly thereafter she came to realise that every female besieged alongside her was suffering a similar symptom, for severe hunger makes a woman cease to menstruate. When she told Gerald, it was the most painful admission of her life, and it seemed to break something inside him. An unnamed illness began to sap his will to live, his resolve to endure and prevail over his besiegers. From that day forward she never heard him express confidence, or optimism, never saw him smile, or even look a little healthy, for his every word and gesture spoke of fatigue and resignation. Then his very body began to waste away, much more obviously than the rest of them, who also suffered hunger and deprivation. And now he lay upon the bed, unspeaking, looking as much like a corpse as a living being. “Live for me,” she whispered to him. “Please live for me.” She told herself now that she loved him, but more than that she could not imagine life without his protection. And she could not imagine what strange obsession could have compelled Lord Thomas to perpetrate this siege that was killing her husband.

  YOUNG ETHELWYNNE POURED A pitcher of lukewarm water over Sylvanne’s shoulders. She shivered as the water ran down her naked body. Mabel, sleeves rolled up, scrubbed her skin so harshly it hurt.

  “You murder me,” Sylvanne muttered.

  “I’m sorry Madame, I’ve never seen dirt so well-entrenched.”

  “Concentrate on the parts of me that will show when I’m clothed,” Sylvanne said. “All that matters is my hands, forearms, my face and neck, and as much of my bosom as the dress displays.”

  “You’ve lost weight, ma’am,” Mabel remarked. “The display won’t be so ample as it once was. Luckily, I’m an expert in the artifice such an occasion calls for.”

  “Just get me clean, Mabel. Stop scraping at my thigh with that course soap, and attend to the principle places.”

  There was a loud knocking upon the door. Ethelwynne went to investigate and came back wide eyed.

  “Ma’am?”

  “What is it?”

  “He moves.”

  There was no time to get properly dressed. She ordered Mabel to wrap her body in one of the white linens used for drying, then to drape her in two finer sheets from the bed, one over each shoulder like sashes. To hold it all together they took the first belt that came to hand, meant for a lavender dress, and tied it snug under her breasts. Thus arrayed she hurried toward her husband’s room, little caring that one of the sheets had slipped from her shoulder, and that her long hair hung loose instead of coiled and hidden beneath the barbette expected of a married woman. At the doorway it seemed that virtually the entire remaining populace of the castle had assembled. They parted like cattle, deferentially, but without hurry.

  The room smelled of meat cooked on the flame. The ratcatcher was busy by the fireplace. At the bedside, the priest rose to give her his place. Sylvanne knelt, grasped her husband’s hand, and held it to her breast. His eyes were open. He studied her with an immense weariness. He was trying to speak, she could tell, but no words came.

  “Has he said anything to anyone?” she asked.

  “No,” said the priest. “Yet his eyes move about. He sees.”

  Sylvanne leaned close and kissed him on the mouth. He seemed to draw strength from it, and ever so weakly, he whispered her name.

  “I hear, my love. Speak to me.”

  He looked up at the ceiling as though it were the sky.

  “So he’ll have you after all,” he said finally.

  “I’ll die first.”

  His eyes met hers.

  “It is I who am dying,” he whispered.

  “They’re cooking you a rat—a mouse.”

  He laughed a feeble, soft cough. A faint twinkle shone in his eye.

  “Likely it’s as skeletal as I,” he mused.

  “I should have told you it’s rabbit,” Sylvanne attempted in a light, jaunty tone. “Apparently that’s been the protocol around here for some time.” But she was fighting tears.

  “I’ve no appetite,” Gerald murmured.

  “Taste it first.”

  He shook his head. His body shuddered, and when he spoke again it was with great effort.

  “Do you know your Bible?”

  Sylvanne began to cry. She wiped her tears on the white linen and pretended a laugh.

  “You know I never troubled with it. Many’s the time you scolded me for that.”

  “Ask the priest how Judith slew Holofernes.”

  “You tell me,” she said.

  His eyes grew wide for a moment, as if he’d seen something beyond this earth. A faint wheeze, the soft rattle of death, issued from his mouth.

  “Tell me,” Sylvanne pleaded. “Tell me. Tell me!”

  She took his hand, pulled it to her breast, and began to weep. The crowd in the doorway pushed closer for a better look. Mabel lifted a corner of linen and wiped her Mistress’s eyes, then her own. The ratcatcher, oblivious to all but the fireplace and the skinned carcass cooking there, now turned and announced excitedly, “It’s ready, Madame, it’s ready!”

  5

  Meghan awoke and felt her face wet with tears. She stumbled downstairs to the kitchen i
n a trance, opened the refrigerator and squatted there, grabbing anything that came to hand—pita bread, grapes, a block of cheddar— stuffing bits from all of them into her mouth. Ravenous, she yanked the lid from a half litre of yogurt and tipped it up to her lips to suck at its runny thickness. Yogurt dribbled down her chin.

  “What are you doing?”

  Her daughter Betsy, in pyjamas, stood barefoot on the cold kitchen floor, taking in the sight of her mother tearing at food like a stray dog. Meghan instantly became self-conscious, thinking how strange she must look at this moment. She wiped her face and mouth with her sleeve, and put the yogurt back in the fridge without its lid.

  “I—I woke up starving,” she said.

  Betsy picked the yogurt lid off the floor and set it on the counter. “Dreaming your dream again?”

  Meghan nodded.

  “What happened this time?”

  Meghan tried to say it calmly: “Her husband died.” She felt weak. She closed the fridge door and slumped with her back against the cabinets below the counter. “He died. Oh God. He died,” she whimpered. Tears welled in her eyes. She tried—and failed—to hide them from her daughter.

  “You’re scaring me,” Betsy said.

  “Don’t be scared. It’s just a silly dream,” she lied. It was more vivid and intensely felt than any dream she’d ever known, and the strange, painful emotions of grief and loss that gripped her now were a token of its power. But for her daughter’s sake, she attempted a light tone. “As if I don’t have enough going on in my life, I’ve got to cry over someone else’s.”

  Betsy got herself a bowl and some cereal from the cupboard. “If the husband is dead, then the siege should be finished, right? And that’s good, right?”

  Drying her face with the back of her hand, Meghan said, “It would be good if I stopped dreaming.”

  Betsy stepped over her to get to the fridge. “I need milk.” Pushing at Meghan’s leg with her foot to make room for herself, she looked down at her mother, all puffy-eyed and distracted.

  “Are you going crazy?” she asked.

  “What? No—why? Don’t think that.”

  “Daddy said he left because you were driving him crazy. But maybe it was ’cause I drove him crazy. And now I’m driving you crazy.”

  “No, no, no,” Meghan protested. She pulled herself together, stood up, rinsed yogurt and tears from her hands at the sink, then came to Betsy. She straightened a loose strand of her daughter’s hair.

  “Your father is full of it, which is one of many reasons he doesn’t live with us anymore. I’ll have to talk to him about how he’s explaining things to you. And you’d better eat up quick or it’ll end up being the usual sprint to school.”

  “Pro D day,” she said.

  “Shit.”

  “I told you.”

  “I forgot. I’ll have to juggle.” She thought for a moment. “I can get away with working here most of the day,” she said. These days she actually preferred it. Working from home gave her a break from the toxicity of office gossip. She was an illustrator and graphic designer with a well-known book imprint, part of a publishing conglomerate that was by all accounts teetering on the verge of financial ruin. “I’ve got one meeting this morning first thing I can’t cancel,” she remembered. “Hopefully I’ll be gone a couple of hours, max. That’s the one positive thing I can say about this house—I’m so much closer to work here. But we’ll still have to get someone to come be with you. Your dad, maybe.”

  Betsy made a face. “No fun.”

  “How about a play date at Brittany’s?”

  “Her mom is psycho.”

  “Good. You can help her cope.”

  “I’d rather stay here—I’ll keep the doors locked and won’t answer any phone numbers I don’t know.”

  Meghan hesitated. “You’re giving me one more thing to stress about.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “I don’t know if I can. You’re ten. Have you ever been alone in your life?”

  “No. But I feel like I’m alone, lots of times.”

  Looking at her daughter’s troubled face, Meghan felt herself dissolve into guilt and sympathy. “Give me a hug,” she demanded. She didn’t want Betsy to see it, but she was crying again.

  6

  Sylvanne invited the priest into a small anteroom off her husband’s bedroom. She didn’t close the door. She could hear and see her loyal servants, maids and men, paying their tearful respects to her dead husband laying upon his bed. She stood by a narrow gothic window, little more than a slit, through which she could also hear sounds of the besiegers below. The news had reached them, it was clear. They were shouting and whooping, in high spirits, calling on those inside the castle to surrender. “On our Lord’s good word, no harm will be done you. No judgment. No reprisals. You are free to come out in peace.” She had asked her servants to wait while she composed herself. She didn’t want that rabble pouring in and seizing her like some living bauble. The gates would be opened soon enough, she’d told them, but on her own terms. First, there would need to be a simple, immediate funeral for her husband, done with regrettable haste but as much dignity as possible. Before that, she wanted answers from the priest.

  “You heard my husband’s dying words,” she addressed him. “You heard me tell him that my knowledge of the Good Book is limited. He spoke of Judith. What is her story, and how might it affect me?”

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t make too much of such words as issue from a dying man’s mouth, m’Lady,” the priest answered. “In that feverish moment he may not have been in his right mind. Judith’s tale barely merits inclusion in our Bible. A most inappropriate fable, really. Quite unworthy of the Prince of Peace.”

  “Still, I wish to hear it,” said Sylvanne.

  “So be it. It’s like this, Madame. An Assyrian army, under the great and fearsome general Holofernes, laid a strangulating siege to the Israelites at the walled city of Bethulia. Now within those walls, the widow Judith, a Jewess of great beauty, hatching a plan, shed her widow’s sackcloth, washed her body, anointed her skin with perfume, attended to her lovely hair, put on bracelets and rings, and altogether clothed herself in her finest attire. Thus adorned, she could surely captivate any man who might look upon her. She and her maid, a loyal woman named Abra, snuck out of the city, and presented themselves to Holofernes’s camp.

  “Now Holofernes, charmed by her, invited her to sup with him, in the tent that served as his bedchamber. Encouraged by her, he drank a great many cups of wine. He dismissed his servants, leaving himself alone with the beautiful young widow.”

  The priest hesitated, for effect, letting the implications of his words sink in.

  “Continue,” Sylvanne bade him. “I’m not such a delicate flower as that.”

  “Yes, m’Lady. The scripture is not exact as to what transpired between the two. It states only that after some time Holofernes, sodden with wine, lay back upon his bed. He was thus defenseless, and brave Judith took up his sword, unsheathed it from its scabbard, and raising it high, struck him on the neck. She cut off his head! Bone and flesh and gristle, all was severed by her, using his own blade against him. Then she coolly rolled that great general’s head into a sheet, and gave it to loyal Abra to carry away, tucked under her arm. Together they fled from the murderous bed, and hurried through the night, back to the city of Bethulia upon the mountain. In the morning the Assyrians looked to the city, and saw the bloody head of their own supreme leader displayed to them, high upon a long pike above the walls. They fell into panic at the sight. At that moment the gates to the city burst open, and the Jews in their armor poured forth from Bethulia, and smote their confused and trembling enemy.”

  The priest fell silent. “There’s no more,” he said at last.

  Sylvanne spoke in a solemn whisper. “I fear I’m not so brave, or strong. I’ve never used a sword. I’ve never tried to hurt anyone.”

  “The Lord gives strength where needed, m’Lady.”

&
nbsp; “Then let him hoard some, and give it all to me in that moment.”

  7

  Meghan hurried home from her meeting to find Betsy sitting happily at the computer in the upstairs office, exactly as she had left her ninety minutes earlier.

  “Did you even move a muscle?”

  “No. I’ve been chatting the whole time, with Brittany.”

  “Is her mother still psycho?”

  “That’s exactly what we’ve been chatting about!” Betsy chirped excitedly. “Did you know her mom smokes pot?”

  “No, but I’ll definitely keep that in mind next time a sleepover is discussed.”

  “She goes outside to do it.”

  “Oh, that makes it okay then,” said Meghan. Betsy looked at her quizzically. “I’m kidding, kiddo. It doesn’t make it okay, but I guess there are worse things in the world.”

  The doorbell rang. She went back downstairs to answer it. On the front steps she found Seth, come unannounced, for a quick talk, as he put it. Seth was Meghan’s husband, “my soon-to-be ex-husband,” as she had taken to describing him to friends. Meghan let him in and led him through to the kitchen. “Come have a cup of whatever,” she said.

  “You’re being very civil,” said Seth. He was carrying a shopping bag, the paper kind with handles, from a sporting goods store.

  “I have to be,” she replied. “Betsy’s upstairs, and likely to come bounding down any minute. I’ve gone to great pains to paint this whole business as amicable, to convince her she’s got two parents who love and care for her, and even, on some level, still care for each other. You’d better be doing the same when she’s with you.”

  “Yeah, sure. Maybe if we say it enough, it’ll even come true.”