Death and the Lady Read Free Page A

something
else,” I said. “Can you do it, Celine? And tell Mère Adele that I’ll be back as
soon as I can?”
    Celine thought about it. I held my breath. Finally she
nodded. “I’ll take Perrin and Francha to Mère Adele. And tell her you’ll come
back. Then can I go play with Jeannot?”
    “No,” I said. Then: “Yes. Play with Jeannot. Stay with him
till I come back. Can you do that?”
    She looked at me in perfect disgust. “Of course I can do
that. I’m grown up.”
    I bit my lips to keep from laughing. I kissed her once on
each cheek for each of the others, and once on the forehead for herself. “Go
on,” I said. “Be quick.”
    She went. I stood up. In a little while I heard them go,
Perrin declaring loudly that he was going to eat honeycakes with Mère Adele. I
went into the kitchen and filled a napkin with bread and cheese and apples, and
put the knife in, too, wrapped close in the cloth, and tied it all in my
kerchief.
    Mamère Mondine was asleep. She would be well enough till
evening. If I was out longer, then Mère Adele would know to send someone. I
kissed her and laid my cheek for a moment against her dry old one. She sighed
but did not wake. I drew myself up and went back through the kitchen garden.
    oOo
    Our house is one of the last in the village. The garden
wall is part of Messire Arnaud’s palisade, though we train beans up over it,
and I have a grapevine that almost prospers. Claudel had cut a door in it,
which could have got us in trouble if Messire Arnaud had lived to find out
about it; but milord was dead and his heirs far away, and our little postern
was hidden well in vines within and brambles without.
    I escaped with a scratch or six, but with most of my dignity
intact. It was the last of the wine in me, I was sure, and anger for Francha’s
sake, and maybe a little honest worry, too. Lys had been a guest in my house.
If any harm came to her, the guilt would fall on me.
    And I had not gone outside the palisade, except to the
fields, since Claudel went away. I wanted the sun on my face, no children
tugging at my skirts, the memory of death far away. I was afraid of what I went
to, of course I was; the Wood was a horror from my earliest memory. But it was
hard to be properly terrified, walking the path under the first outriders of
the trees, where the sun slanted down in long sheets, and the wind murmured in
the leaves, and the birds sang sweet and unafraid.
    The path was thick with mould under my feet. The air was
scented with green things, richer from the rain, with the deep earthy promise
of mushrooms. I found a whole small field of them, and gathered as many as my
apron would carry, but moving quickly through them and not lingering after.
    By then Sency was well behind me and the trees were closing
in. The path wound through them, neither broader nor narrower than before.
    I began to wonder if I should have gone to fetch the Allards’
dog. I had company, it was true: the striped cat had followed me. She was more
comfort than I might have expected.
    The two of us went on. The scent of mushrooms was all around
me like a charm to keep the devils out.
    I laughed at that. The sound fell soft amid the trees.
Beeches turning gold with autumn. Oaks going bronze. Ash with its feathery
leaves, thorn huddling in thickets. The birds were singing still, but the quiet
was vast beneath.
    The cat walked ahead of me now, tail up and elegantly
curved. One would think that she had come this way before.
    I had, longer ago than I liked to think. I had walked as I
walked now, but without the warding of mushrooms, crossing myself, it seemed,
at every turn of the path. I had taken that last, suddenly steep slope, and
rounded the thicket—hedge, it might have been—of thorn, and come to the sunlit
space. It had dazzled me then as it dazzled me now, so much light after the
green gloom. I blinked to clear my eyes.
    The chapel was as it had been when last I came to it. The
two walls that stood; the one that