Wessex Tales: "Schelin's Daughter" (Story 14)

  Chapter 2

  Thus it was, one afternoon, when her father returned to the hall from supervising fieldwork, they found their several wills as far apart as ever was.

  “It’s not just for the family’s honor, girl, but for your sake that I made this match. The old man fought at Hastings with a retinue of forty-seven knights! He’s got eleven manors in this county, not to mention Fleet on the coast by the great gravel bank, and fifty-some in Somerset. Who better to wed, for God’s sake, than a son of old de Mohun?”

  “Lionel bores me.”

  “Bores you! Ha, I’ll tell you this. You’ll be bored with poverty quicker. Ham-Mohun is one of the most fertile manors in Dorset.”

  “It floods.”

  “The better the crop.”

  “Father, why do you always talk of gain?”

  “Gain sustains us, child. Gain of the earth, and fruit of the womb.”

  “O Daddy, I shan’t hear such things!” Marguerite blocked her ears. “I shall be the virgin bride of Christ!”

  “You and how many biddies besides?”

  “Brides, Father, of Christ.”

  “Women who can’t set their cap to a husband by hook or by crook, that’s what! The whole pack of them would be destitute crones but for the abbey’s charity.” The situation looked grave to Schelin. Potential disaster was staring the family fortunes in the face. If the Church laid its grasping hands on Marguerite, it wouldn’t be a simple matter of raising a dowry. There would be tithes, tithes, tithes from here to eternity. From those within the Church’s clutch it took, and it took, and it took. “Look, girl, at what we can offer you. Your sisters are well placed, but you’ll be better wed—and you’re the youngest of the lot! You’ll live out your life not three miles from our home. Think about it.”

  “I have been thinking, Father. I’ve been thinking till it hurts my head. You never let me stop. But I reject the values of this world.”

  “I’m your father, daughter, and you’ll not reject me, or my will!”

  “O, but I do. I have a greater father still.”

  “You shan’t throw out a thousand years of custom. And the law!”

  “O, pooh! Now you’re being old-fashioned.”

  “Old fashioned, am I? If the law is old, so much the better for the law.”

  “God’s law says I am free to choose. He is my greater father, and I choose to wed His Son.”

  Schelin briefly considered reminding his daughter of the incestuous nature of her proposed match, but to his credit he held his tongue.

  Now, the narcissistic mind rejects out of hand the notion that it is locked within itself in a self-reinforcing prejudice. Indeed, it never considers such a possibility, but may rather imagine itself attaining the richest influences of the outer world intuitively, by osmosis perhaps, without effort. Narcissus knows. And if the world revolves around Narcissus, that is surely the purpose for which the world was born: it is there to serve the important being. Do not the sun and moon, the wandering and fixed stars, and all the seven heavens, revolve around this very Earth, and in particular the patch of earth on which the central being stands? Marguerite would have her way, and her way was, as her young mind saw it, at the epicenter of it all.