“What do you want of me?” Callie asked Lady Alida, her eyes hard, her anger barely kept in check. She knew without a doubt that this woman was responsible for every thought Edith had in her empty head.
“My, my, but you sound angry. How can you be angry at one who has treated you as her own daughter?”
This was certainly true, Callie thought, since both John and Alida Hadley treated their daughters as though they were diseased lumps they had to abide with. “What do you want of me?” Callie repeated.
Alida dropped all pretense of being the girl’s benefactor. Well she knew that this child was her own daughter, but Alida also knew she had to be sacrificed. Give one daughter up for the good of the others. Besides, what great harm was she doing? All she meant to do was prevent the marriage of these two children. Later, after she got rid of Talis, she’d find this girl a very nice husband.
“You are making a fool of yourself over my son and I’ll not have it.”
At that Callie gave her a hard look. “Then perhaps I will leave your house forever.” As she turned toward the door, she was halted by the words of this woman.
“Then you will go alone. My son will stay here. He cannot be allowed to spend his life with a girl who works on a farm. My son will become a knight; he will marry a lady.”
At those words, Callie turned back, looked hard at the woman, then quietly sat down on the offered chair. Callie knew that what the woman was saying was true. If she wanted Talis, then she had to remain here, had to do whatever this woman said she must. “What am I to do?” Callie asked softly.
“Stay away from my son,” Alida said simply.
Callie paled at those words. How could she stay away from Talis? It would have been easier if the woman had asked her to stop breathing.
“Oh come now, do not look at me as though I am an ogre. I know he is your childhood friend and I have sympathy for what the two of you have been through, living as you did in that hovel. Living with animals, illiterate people such as those—”
“Do not!” Callie said. “They were good to us.”
There was something in the way the girl spoke that made Alida halt her words. Had she been less intent on her goal, she might have realized that she was looking into a mirror and seeing a younger version of herself. Just as Alida would do anything for people she considered her family, so would Callie.
“What do you want of me?” Callie repeated.
“Not much, just to stay away from my son.”
“And to reach this end you have sent me to care for poisonous plants.”
“Poisonous plants! How sinister you must think I am. I thought you might enjoy the garden as you have spent your life outdoors.”
Callie said nothing. Never in her life would she tell this woman that she would enjoy working in the garden. She would love being outdoors all day, away from the rigid rules and ridiculous schedules imposed on the unmarried women in this oppressive house. She would like the freedom to daydream and make up stories in her head.
But most important, she would be free to see Talis whenever possible. Now, she’d tell this woman whatever she wanted to hear, that she’d never see Talis again. If necessary, she’d make sacred vows never to see him again. She’d do whatever it took to appease this woman, then she’d go and do what she wanted to do—which was to see Talis.
Lady Alida began to talk, telling Callie all manner of things about honor and reputation and “saving herself” and whatever else she could think of to try to impress Callie that she must, must stay away from Talis. Talis needed to learn to be a knight, needed experience in life, needed…
Callie didn’t bother listening to much of it. She’d learned to put on her “listening” face, the one she used with Meg when she was saying something Callie found uninteresting. While her face looked as though she were listening, Callie let her mind wander onto a story, fantasizing that Talis would come to her in the garden. Just the two of them, alone, no one else around. Yes, she liked this duty of taking care of the garden and being alone.
It took Callie a moment to realize that her ladyship had paused. And from the way she was looking at Callie, Alida knew her daughter had not been listening.
Alida grabbed Callie’s chin in her hand, hurting her. “Do you not know that the way to get a man is to ignore him? If you chase him, he will never want you.”
Callie smiled in an ageless way at the woman. “Talis likes what I am and what I do.”
“Oh?” Alida said. “Then why is he not asking for your hand in marriage? If he wants you so much, then why is he not demanding to be allowed to marry you? Is it because he sees you for the greensleeves that you are?”
Alida smiled when she saw that she had at last made an impression on the girl. So, Alida thought, it was not what the girl felt for Talis; her concern was what Talis thought of her.
Knowing she had made her point, Alida abruptly dismissed the girl.
When Callie was gone, Alida called Penella to her.
“That girl is a problem,” Alida said. “She has no honor.”
Penella looked at her mistress quickly, as though to say, Look who’s calling the kettle black.
“Something will have to be done with that girl. I’ll not have her parading herself before my son. I won’t have her sneaking about with him at night as though she’s a harlot.”
For a moment, Penella paused with a cherry tart halfway to her mouth. Lady Alida was speaking of the boy Talis as though he really were her son—and as though this hard-headed girl belonged to someone else.
“I shall have Abigail Frobisher send her youngest son to me,” Alida said.
At that Penella nearly choked. Abigail Frobisher’s son was an eighteen-year-old boy whose only goal in life was to cause trouble. He was a very pretty lad, without a moral in his body, and he had been impregnating serving girls since he was fourteen. On his last visit, he had even put his hand on Edith’s waist!
“Yes,” Alida said, “I will have the boy come to stay and I will give him money if he will entice that girl to…to whatever.”
Penella finished the tart, making no comment whatever to these arrangements. Her ladyship did not want Talis and Callie to marry and she was certainly seeing to it that they didn’t. The old wet nurse had said that the children were jealous of each other. If anyone could cause jealousy, it was Lady Abigail’s youngest son.
But in Penella’s opinion, Lady Alida was going to more trouble than was needed to keep the children apart. There was more here than the woman was telling. But it was none of Penella’s business—she had learned the hard way to keep her own counsel.
“Go and ready my belongings for the journey to see Gilbert Rasher,” Alida said. “We will ride tomorrow. I have business to attend to.”
“Yes, my lady,” Penella said, slipping the rest of the tarts into her pocket.
31
It is done,” Alida said, her entire body shaking from fatigue as Penella undressed her and put her to bed. Alida’s health had greatly deteriorated in the last weeks of traveling. Two weeks ago she had been coughing only rusty bits of blood, but now she often brought up great clots from her lungs.
But it all had been worth it, she thought as she tried to sip the hot liquid Penella handed her. But she brushed the woman away, not wanting to see her, wanting only to be alone with her thoughts and her memories.
She and her small household had ridden hard for days to reach that filthy old castle Gilbert Rasher called home. And she had been greeted by a man eaten with hatred and a lust for revenge. When he had been told that she was John Hadley’s wife, it had been difficult to get him to stop raging long enough to make him understand that she wanted the same as he wanted.
Across a dirty table, his breath so heavy with the fumes of liquor that she felt faint, she finally made him understand that she was trying to help him.
After she told him that his son was alive and living at her house, it had taken an hour of shouting to keep him from jumping on a horse and ri
ding to get the boy.
“He is of no use to you,” Alida shouted. “He is untutored. He has no social graces, no table manners. He cannot sing or even play a lute.”
Gilbert looked at her as though she had lost her mind. “What do these things matter to a man?” he bellowed at her. “A man needs none of these things.”
“A man at court does,” she shouted back, sure that he was the stupidest man ever created. He seemed to have made up his mind about life on the day he was born and nothing or no one had ever made him think differently.
“Court?” he asked, as though he’d never heard of the place.
“Listen to me,” she said, doing all she could to refrain herself from calling him all the names she wanted to. “Do you forget that you are related to the queen? It is a distant relationship, I know, but it is there.” When his witless face registered no hint of understanding, she continued.
“The queen is fifty-four years old. She has yet to name her successor. Do you recall that she has a cousin who has some claim to the throne? Bess of Hardwick’s niece, Arabella Stuart. The girl is ten years old now and it is said that Bess keeps her prisoner, always looking for the proper husband for her.”
Alida leaned toward the old man with his gray, grizzled whiskers, his greasy hair, his food-stained clothes. “Bess wants her niece to marry a man who could be king.”
“King?”
Alida was so tired of ignorant men. Could they not see the simplest things? Taking a breath, she tried to calm herself, but she was going to be brutally honest with this man. His mind was not up to subtlety.
“Gilbert Rasher, you breed beautiful sons. Big, intelligent sons, quite gorgeous actually, but then they are exposed to your lack of morals, to your primitive ideas of discipline, to your crude ideas of education, and they become animals like you. You ruin what could be a valuable product.”
While she said this, he sat there staring at her with a curled upper lip, looking at her as though she were something to be put on a plate and served to him, his for the taking. But he said nothing, as he was at last beginning to realize that she had a reason for coming to see him.
“This son,” she continued, “had the good fortune to be taken away from you at birth.” She did not say so but she also thought it was good fortune that Talis had been raised away from John also.
Alida gave Gilbert a little smile, knowing she was still a handsome woman, faded perhaps, but not unpleasant looking. “You should see this boy: tall, proud, excellent at his studies, kind, polite. He is a beauty in every way.”
At this Gilbert raised one eyebrow, his mind, as always, in the gutter.
“Do not look at me so. I am not after the boy. But there is another woman who likes beautiful young men very much.”
When Gilbert looked blank at this she silently cursed his ignorance. “The queen! Now the Earl of Leicester’s stepson, that Robert Devereux, is at court, a young man of only twenty-one and I hear he charms the queen night and day. Talis, your son, is better-looking than Devereux, and more charming. Furthermore, Talis has not a dishonorable bone in his body. I hear that that Devereux is as ambitious as his mother.”
There was still no enlightenment shining in Gilbert’s drink-dulled eyes, so Alida simplified her explanation. “You and I have the same purposes in mind. I want your son out of my life. I do not want my husband to give everything that he has and that came to him on our marriage to a boy who is not mine.”
At that, Gilbert’s eyes did light up.
“Do not think he will inherit and then you will take everything from him,” she said, accurately guessing what was in his mind. “From the look of you, you will not live the year out, while my husband is the picture of health. You must leave your son with us for two more years, then you must come to take him. By then he will be trained for court; he will please the queen greatly, and you must petition her to make a great marriage for him. If I were you, I would ask for Lady Arabella Stuart. Who knows? With your connections to the throne and his, perhaps when she dies she will leave England to him.”
“I will take him now,” Gilbert said, starting to rise. “I will make him king now.”
“No!” she half shouted. “He is not ready. I told you this. If your purpose is for him to go to court and shoe horses then he is ready.” She calmed herself. “Shoeing horses is not what the queen likes. Before he goes to court he must first learn the finer things of life, to play and sing, to dance, to court a woman.”
“Is he good on a horse?” Gilbert growled. “Can he hold a lance? That is all he needs.”
“All he needs if he is to live with you and spend his life terrorizing the peasants,” she spat at him. “If you were to present him as he is now, in his present raw state, the queen would laugh at you…” She looked at him. “Again.”
Gilbert sat back down. He had never said so, but it had hurt his pride when the queen had laughed at him when so many people had declared that they had wanted his son dead. For all his crudity, in a way, Gilbert loved his sons and he missed the boy. The boy had been a great drinking companion.
“What do you get out of this?” he asked her.
“The happiness of my husband,” she said.
At that Gilbert laughed. “If you do not tell me the truth, I will do nothing that you want.”
Alida took a moment to breathe deeply and in that time she decided to tell him the truth. “Perhaps I want revenge.” She looked at him. Gilbert Rasher was not the person one would have chosen for a confidant, but then perhaps he was the best sort. Nothing on earth, not any motive, would shock him. He understood and indulged himself in any vice he wanted. And Alida knew he would not waste time on sympathy.
“I married my husband for love. Not for money, but because I loved him. I was very young, very naive, and I thought he loved me too. He did not. For all of my youth I tried to make him love me, but all he cared about was that I produced a perfect son for him. I did not.”
She paused. “Perhaps he never would have loved me, I do not know. I do know that I have lived in hell most of my life because I did once love him. I have watched my daughters go without husbands and turn into fussy old maids because he would not part with the gold needed for a dowry. I have seen him ignore all that was around him in his foolish attempt to get something that he thought was all he wanted in life.”
She looked at Gilbert. “Now he has his precious son. He has the boy he has always wanted. You should see this Talis. He is like a dream come true, beautiful, kind, so very, very good. And my husband worships him, truly worships him.”
She rose from her chair, taking a few steps across the filthy floor, littered with the remnants of hundreds of past meals. “I am dying. At most I have two years to live, and on my deathbed I want to hurt my husband as he has hurt me. I want the only thing he has ever loved taken from him, just as the only thing I ever loved was taken from me. After I am dead I want him to hear of that boy he has grown to love so much. I want him to hear all the country talk of Gilbert Rasher’s glorious son, not John Hadley’s son.”
She turned back to Gilbert. “Do you understand? I am using you as an instrument of revenge.”
Being used did not bother Gilbert; what interested him was what he was going to get out of it. “What money do I get from this?”
“For two years you will receive nothing. But when you come in two years’ time, my husband will give you everything in an attempt to keep the boy.”
“And the boy will stay with him. I know his kind. He will think Hadley is his father. There is great loyalty from father to son.”
Alida smiled, thinking that perhaps Gilbert was not quite as stupid as she’d thought. “I am taking care of that.”
“Oh?” Gilbert asked and poured her a flagon of wine. It was cheap wine, nearly undrinkable, and the pewter mug looked as though the dogs had been chewing on it, but, for him, it was extreme generosity. He had not offered her or her servants so much as a crust of bread upon their arrival. “What are you doing
to break this loyalty?”
“The boy wants to marry one of my daughters. You remember, the one I gave birth to the night Talis was born. They have lived together all these sixteen years with the wet nurse and her husband and they are attached to one another.”
“He cannot marry her,” Gilbert said. Already he was beginning to think of himself as the father of the King of England. At last his enemies would be his to punish. In essence, he would be the next King of England. He would cut off heads at a rate that would flood London.
“No, of course he cannot marry her. It cannot be allowed. And when the time comes, the boy will leave John readily enough.”
“And how have you managed that?”
She toyed with the pewter mug, not even seeing the food encrusted on it. “My husband thinks the boy stays because he wants to be a knight, because he likes all the riches my husband has to offer. But the boy stays for the girl. She is his only reason for doing anything. Quite simply, I will take that reason away from him. Already, I am separating them. By the time I get through with them, they will not remember each other.”
And that is for the better, she thought. Even if she had no other interest in this, she knew she could not allow her daughter to marry a man she loved. Alida’s parents had been too weak and had given in to their daughter when she had cried and begged to be allowed to marry John Hadley. And look where it had gotten her. If she had been married to another man it would not have killed her soul when he turned against her.
“I have separated the children and I am making sure they see other people. I want to surround them with other people. They have spent their lives only with each other and therefore think they love each other. It is only because there has been no one else.”
It didn’t matter to Gilbert what the woman did to either of them, as long as he came out the winner. “I must be given something while I wait,” he said, and Alida could not help but admire his single-mindedness. The man cared only for himself and he never forgot that what he wanted was the only thing of importance.