Souls Dryft Page 9

Wearily, she muttered, "He inquired if anything might be done to prevent her stealing plums from his orchard this summer, as the addition of several inches to his cobblestone wall, last spring, had no effect. In my opinion…" She broke off. We both knew, full well, what any woman’s opinion was worth in this world.

  My uncle loomed over Agnes, casting a shadow across her pale face. "Can you help tame the Scrapper, Mistress Spooner, or not?"

  "What good is any attempt at discipline, when all is undone by you, patting her on the head, as if she is one of your hounds after a good day’s sport? You speak of her as if she is a child. Do you know how old she is, my lord?"

  His big face was rumpled as an unmade bed. "She must be – why – fifteen, or seventeen years at most. No more than eighteen. Or one and twenty."

  "Bob Salley says she was born when—"

  "What my steward knows is as soon forgot!"

  "But Broad Bess told me the girl is—"

  "My cook can’t count no higher than the number o’ fingers on one hand. After that ‘tis all twenty. Twenty she’ll say, to any sum you ask her what makes more than five."

  Undaunted, Agnes continued, "The sooner Genevieve is married off again the better. She needs to learn her place at the hands of a man who—"

  "She’ll be took care of, just as soon as Captain Will Carver comes back."

  "Ah yes. The elusive Captain, who has not shown his face in these parts for thirteen years, nor been heard from in three." She took another sharp breath. "There are few men who would sink so low. Certainly, no sane, sensible man would subject himself to such a wife."

  It was true. The Captain must be slightly deranged to consider taking a bride, sight unseen. Should he ever return, I was certain he might be persuaded to change his mind. Although it may surprise you to hear it, I could make myself very disagreeable when required.

  My uncle bellowed, "’Tis true the feller’s ugly as sin, got a short temper and bad ruddy manners, but I shall say this – he’s a practical feller with a level head and two good eyes, open wide, not likely to git the fleece pulled over ‘em by that girl’s saucy, wicked fingers."

  "Let us hope he does not change his mind then."

  "He better ruddy not, or I shall make the feller a geldin’ and not with a sharp knife either." However, she had forced an unsavory morsel into his mind and he chewed over it, as he would a tough piece of gristle. He seemed drained and tired suddenly. I did not like to see my uncle bested by the likes of Agnes Spooner. He had become a rock of sorts in my world, a stout, sturdy fortress, buttressed by the wings of his own fulsome pride and fortified by too much wine perhaps, but always predictable. At last he exploded with a renewed burst of fury. "You come whining to me, about what must be done, yet you en’t capable o’ doin’ the job yourself. I always said the birch rod were better for wenches than any heducation."

  Agnes lost her temper. "There are some things that no amount of schooling can erase. She’ll end up like her mother."

  Now his voice was low, deceptively calm. "She shall not suffer my sister’s fate. I stake my life on it. I’ll see to it that my niece is provided for by a proper husband this time!" He shook his head. "Now, Mistress Spooner, I hope you’ve another tune to play, or is this windbag wheezing all you can muster?"

  Her reply was curt. "In my opinion, you’d best hire someone skilled in the breaking and mounting of wild horses." With that she turned on her heel and marched away.

  He called after her, "There en’t many wenches – in my ho-pinion – who wouldn’t benefit from a firm breakin’ in, nor from a good mounting neither!" Enjoying the satisfaction of hearing her gasp of outrage, he grinned broadly, always right glad to have the final word.

  She left on a cart bound for the Norwich road, as soon as her coffer was packed. Another enemy successfully routed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The fortress in which we lived consisted of a jumble of buildings, all built on over the years, showing their age by the thickness of the moss, or ivy, growing up the walls. Here we had a cookhouse, a dairy, the great hall itself with a solar above it, barns across the courtyard, dovecote, stables, and a buttery— all overlooked by the imposing tower keep, rising up into the Norfolk sky to dominate the courtyard with its grim shadow. At dusk, one could see bats flying in and out of the battlements and, during the day, they hung suspended against the flint walls. Along the very top of this tower there was a walkway, the door to which was kept locked in winter, in case any of us should feel the sudden desire to go up there, slip around on the ice and fall tragically to our deaths. As women, we could not be left to our own good judgment.

  I have mentioned already the pines surrounding my uncle’s property on three sides, but on the fourth there stood the solitary figure of a gatehouse, the remnant of less settled times. Beyond that, a rutted lane, overgrown with brambles, led the way to Rufus Carver’s crooked house, Souls Dryft. It was only a quarter mile down the lane and, on most clear nights, their rush torches could be seen from our tower window. Above the low, broad doorframe of his stolen house, Rufus had erected an ostentatious crest, featuring a hooded falcon and a message in Latin. My uncle, interpreting his own thoughts into the words carved there, insisted the inscription read: "Herein lies a Shiftless Rogue." He said it with such booming conviction that nobody dared argue with the translation.

  From the very beginning, that house held a special fascination for me, and I could not stay away. After all, it may be said that a house is merely bricks and mortar, but then this book you hold was merely paper and ink until you opened it and began to read the words.

  My vivid imagination must surely be at fault and it was induced to even lower depths of wickedness by books; a mysterious force, drawing me to their pages despite, or perhaps because of, my uncle’s opinion that women and literature made a profoundly disturbing, dangerous brew. I devoured any book I came across, especially those forbidden us. Women, you see, having a greater tendency toward wickedness than their male counterparts, were too easily distracted and thus corrupted.

  Although he provided a governess and considered himself a "forward thinkin’" gentleman – no doubt having heard the phrase from someone he admired and finding it convenient as an excuse for his lazy indulgence of two daughters and a wayward, opinionated niece – there remained boundaries to the education my uncle actually wanted us to glean. Suffice to say it seldom involved books, those shady instruments through which other men attempted to get inside our minds and thereby sow their suspect ideas in innocent, but fertile ground.

  Had he known how many hours I spent scribbling stories of my lusty pirate, he would have been horrified.

  * * * *

  At supper that evening, my uncle ate with a sturdy appetite. A good argument, such as the one he’d enjoyed with our governess, always made him right hungry.

  Mary, his eldest daughter, ate her supper with rapid, mincing bites, a scornful smirk never far from her lips. She was a handsome, statuesque woman, considerably taller than her father. A fact that daily tried his patience and his nerves. Occasionally he cast her a puzzled frown, as if trying to remember where she came from, whether or not he was responsible and why she still hung about the place. Mary, you see, had forfeited her Great Opportunity, and for that her father would never forgive her.

  Many years before I arrived at the Keep, he called in a few favors to win her a place at Court as a maid-in-waiting. Mary had no desire to go, but dutifully obeyed her father’s wishes, primarily, I suspect, because it irritated her younger sister to such a degree. Even now, all these years later, Millicent Bagobones still pouted about the injustice of such an opportunity going to the one sister who did not appreciate it.

  No one thought Mary would know how to flirt, should her life depend upon it, so it was a shock to learn that she caught the King’s amorous eye. When she came home, earlier than expected, and her father demanded, in his usual brusque manner, what the Devil she was doing back again before she was wanted, Mary gave the unlikely ex
cuse that she was homesick.

  When the true reason was discovered, my uncle attempted to reason with his eldest daughter and, according to rumor, berated her thus: "You ungrateful gell! It would not cost you much to wink at him, now would it?" He saw the Boleyn family benefit greatly from throwing their daughters into the King’s path, and so he envisioned all the favors he might win by encouraging his own daughter likewise.

  Mary, however, proclaimed it would offend her scruples to wink at a man while he was wed to another woman, whether he be king or court jester.

  "Screw pulls?" he had roared at her. "What the Devil do screw pulls have to do with it?"

  She dug in her heels and her father, a man of more bark than bite, could not change her mind. Everything bad that happened to him, from then on, was blamed upon Mary’s reluctance to oblige her King and Country. Now, when Bagobones complained that she needed a new gown, he would shake his head. "Things might have been different, if only your sister Mary Sourpout could have spared a thought for others…" When Parson Bartleby grumbled about the state of the chapel roof, he heard the same excuse. Mary Sourpout was a handy scapegoat.

  Lately, however, she could return his accusing stare with a bold smile, for we all knew what became of Mistress Anne Boleyn, who might have enjoyed a few years of fine frocks, while she kept the King’s fancy, but her lips were not laughing anymore, now that they were cold and still and severed from the rest of her body.

  For a while that evening, the only sound came from the dogs, squabbling for scraps under the table, interspersed with gusts from my uncle’s windy stomach. I waited for my lecture on today’s mischief, but before he could begin, Bagobones exclaimed, "Papa? Is it true that Scrapper is a by-blow?"

  He sputtered into the dregs of his stew.

  "Agnes Spooner called her one," she said smugly. "What does it mean?" She knew very well what it meant. It was a game they played, in which she feigned ignorance of certain things and he pretended to believe her innocent. And all the time they both knew otherwise.

  "A by-blow is a child born out of wedlock," Mary explained with exaggerated patience – she too being familiar with their little game. "A bastard, if you will."

  Her father winced.

  "If I were to have a lover," I declared, "I should take better care not to bring some poor child into the world and have it called such. There are ways of preventing it."

  He roared at me, "You mind your tongue, before I fetch a scold’s bridle to it! And, while we’re on the matter – you’d best stop chasing good fellers away when they come for Bagobones!"

  I laughed. "Bollingbrooke? Surely you can get better for Bagobones, your prize sow."

  Millicent protested at being compared to a farmyard beast, but it was the way he viewed her. Prize breeding stock to be sold.

  He grumbled into his wine. "Aye, so much for ol’ Bollybrooke and other lily-livered toe rags! We must start looking about for new victims, eh? Time is runnin’ out and chances slim with no coin for dowries. Not even a pittance from that ol’ nag Maude."

  Finally he broached the matter of Great Aunt Maude and his inheritance.

  "The ol’ trout raises herself up orf the mattress and says," here he raised his voice to a mousy squeal, "You’ll only ruddy squander my good coin – just like your father. So guess what she ruddy went and done with it? Give it all to the church, didn’t she? Wanted to pay her way in through the gates o’ Saint Pete!" Again he assumed that high-pitched squeak. "They tell me ‘tis easier for a mule to pass through the eye of a needle, than it is for a rich feller to pass into Heaven." He spat a tough piece of meat over his shoulder, and the dogs dived for it, snarling and snapping. "So that’s it! Not a groat from the ol’ nag. And now we’ve lost Bollybrooke." He sighed. "We must hope for rich blood to come our way, before you’re all past it."

  Bagobones gave an exaggerated sigh. "I wish I could go to London. Grandmamma promised to take me to Court."

  "And who do you think shall pay for that, eh?" he snapped at her. "All the new frocks and fripperies you’d want to put on a good face? O’ course," and here he sighed, "things might have been different if only Sourpout—"

  "But papa," Bagobones whined, "I would never miss such a Great Opportunity." Having exhausted the local supply of eligible suitors, scant as it was, my cousin was desperate. Two betrothal contracts made in youth already fell by the wayside, neither boy surviving the rigors of childhood. Then, lately, there was sudden death in Norwich marketplace, robbing my cousin of her third choice.

  While she sniveled into her pottage, her father stared off into the distance, fingers clasped around his goblet. "I shall find some feller who en’t so easily scared orf as ol’ Bollybrooke. I shall find a couple o’ fellers, a whole passel o’ likely husbands, even if I must drag ‘em here and get ‘em cup shotten."

  She muttered sulkily under her breath at the suggestion that brute force and deception might be necessary to get her a husband.

  "Aye," he continued, "what we need is some feller with a head for coin – the means o’ making it and the habit o’ keeping it." He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and then suddenly remembered me. "I shall find one for you too, Scrapper."

  "Bring fifty of the buggers, uncle, if you will. Bagobones may have them all."

  "You’ll take what you can get, and if one of ‘em should take a fancy to you—"

  "I’ll stick him in the belly and watch his entrails come oozing out."

  As he and I argued back and forth, he declared that three years was long enough to wait for the Captain to come home and fetch me to the church door. In addition, he reminded me, I was not a boy, but a girl, unfortunate and inconvenient as it might be for both of us, and I would, one day, be a well-behaved young lady and a married one again at that, whether my Captain returned or not.

  "You won’t stay ripe forever, girl." His eyes flashed across to his eldest daughter. "Look at Sourpout – surely seven and twenty and Still Unwed," he grumbled. "Still bloody-well underfoot!" The target of his scorn said nothing, but calmly continued her supper. Spoiling for a fight and riled that she would not rise to his bait, he turned his attention back to Millicent, a far easier target and much more satisfying to tease. "And don’t pull that face at me, Bagobones!"

  "What face, Papa?"

  "That one." He pointed. "Reminds me too much o’ your mother. And eat your damn supper. Put some meat on that scrawny carcass. Your mother aged poorly too. I never would have married her in the first place, if I’d known she’d go downhill faster than a one-legged whore chasing sixpence!" He turned his critical gaze upon me next. "And what are you laughing at?"

  I shrugged, my eyes downcast.

  He continued, "I see I must find husbands for you all and soon."

  "Not on my account," I said firmly. "I mean to have lovers."

  He choked on his wine, a great wave of scarlet spittle flying through the air.

  "And plenty of them," I added.

  "Keep up this jiggery pokery and there’s only one other choice for you." He waited for me to ask his meaning, but I played with the dogs, feeding them tidbits, so he added, "I shall lock you up in the dungeon and keep you out o’ mischief."

  "There is no dungeon here."

  "Aha!" Leaning toward me, eyes twinkling, he said, "But there is, so there!"

  We were accustomed to his idle threats; my uncle’s method of guardianship mostly involved the warning of fantastic punishment, in some form or another, which was never carried out.

  "Do you never hear the prisoners at night? A-wailin’ and a-sobbin’ when you lay in your girly bed, high up in the tower?" he whispered. "You never heard the lost souls, dancing in their chains?" Snatching my knife, he rattled it against his pewter goblet. "Or felt the trembling of the old stones as the spirits come up the windin’ staircase to find you?" He tapped the side of his nose. "I cannot tell you where it is, but once a feller goes in, he never comes out. Know what the French call it? An oubliette. A little place for forgetting. A bloody con
venient thing to have, especially with so many troublesome, saucy tongued wenches about."

  There was not much to choose between my uncle’s dungeon, or the prospect of another husband. However, there was no arguing with him in this mood, disappointment heavy on his broad shoulders. My uncle’s barony and the fortress in which we lived, was granted by charter and could only be inherited by sons. As he reminded us daily, with a great deal of bitterness, he had no sons, only mealy-mouthed daughters.

  Four hundred years ago, the great warrior Remy St. Denis took the remains of an old Roman fort from the estuary of the river Yare and ordered all the stone sailed down river, to stand fierce guard over the spoils of war granted him by William the Conqueror. Since then it remained, a darkly forbidding sentinel, watching over the serfs on his land and keeping the defeated Saxons in fear of their Norman lord. All the proud St. Denis ancestors – or Sydney, as time and tongue refashioned them – must be moaning in their graves, now that the family came to the end of its natural line.

  Leaving the table, my uncle threw one last threat over his shoulder. "I shall find some fellow for you, Scrapper. A fellow in desperate need."

  "I daresay I can find a foolish old bugger to pay my rent and keep me in wine and marchpane comfits. What need have I for another husband?" Thanks to the cookhouse gossip, I knew about Beth Downing, his mistress in nearby Caister.

  He shook his finger in my face. "I shall find some feller to take you in hand, Scrapper, see if I don’t! Spare the rod and spoil the hussy!"

  Sourpout followed her father out, but Bagobones remained, her temper sorely pricked by his refusal to send her to her grandmother. The steady deterioration of her father’s affairs was a thorn in her pride, his rough manners an embarrassment she suffered daily, but never silently.

  "Well, Scrapper," she exclaimed, "you have put my father in a temper again. Now we will all suffer."

  I treated her to my best gargoyle face.

  Daintily patting her lips with a kerchief, she pushed back her bench. "I hope he takes the first offer he gets for you."