“No, no,” he gasped at last, putting me away from him. “This is not proper. You are a virgin girl.…”
I laughed. I reached for him, clung to him, said I wasn’t. I was married, a mother, married to Edward of Wellingford. I babbled, holding on to him like a cat to a tree. He went white. He loosened my hands. He backed away from me.
“Married,” he whispered. It was as though he had said, “Dead.”
I stopped talking and looked into his eyes. There was no lack of love there, but I knew that, when I told him I was married, I had lost him. Giles was an honorable man. He was a religious man. He was a chivalrous man. I had lived so long in the twentieth, I had forgotten about honorable, chivalrous men. But Giles was! Not merely in words, but in deeds. He would no more cuckold another man than he would strike an opponent from behind, for such would not be virtuous, and he longed for virtue. Would he have obeyed Father Raymond and gone from me else?
“Giles …” I whispered. “Oh, Giles. Don’t leave me. I need you.”
He warded me off, as he might have warded a curse. “I love and honor Beauty, the only woman I will ever love,” he said. “But she whom I loved was a girl whom I had the right to love.” He went away from me, turned and ran for his horse, and I think I heard him sobbing as he went.
I screamed his name. I stood there, screaming his name, the tears running down my face. I threw myself on the ground and wept. When I looked up next, he was gone. I thought I might have imagined him, but then I saw him, far below, riding full tilt across a clearing, away, away.
When I could, I returned to Wellingford, to Elly, to Ned, to my life. I felt that I had died, and only my shell was there.
As Elly had grown, so had Ned’s love for her. He loved me, too, but as he might love an ornament, a thing fragile and fair which he might brag of having, a thing barely utilitarian. He owned a crystal cruet some knight had brought from the Holy Land, and he spoke of that cruet much as he spoke of me. My lovely Beauty. My Beauty without compare. And then, “Mother of my Beloved …”
When he said that, something cracked. Anger spurted out like blood from a new wound. So, I was the mother of his beloved. I was always something to do with someone else’s beloved. Edward’s beloved or my father’s beloved. And Giles, my beloved, would not have me because I was the mother of Ned’s beloved. I went to my bed and cried, and the longing to get away began to grow in me. The longing for someone of my own kin possessed me.
I remembered that while a year and a half had passed in the twentieth, three had passed in the fourteenth. I wasn’t sure how old I was. Was I seventeen? Or nineteen? My mama had said to come before I got any older, but I was older. Still, if I spent some time searching for Mama, it might seem only a little time to little Elly and to Edward, for time was different in different places.
I wrestled with my conscience as Jacob wrestled with the angel of God, paining myself in the sport until I could not sleep at night. I wandered about the place all that night, half the night spent traversing the walk to the chapel, there and back again. I went through the still room stores, counting and recounting the cordials, the jams. Through the cellars, totting up the wine. Through the linen closets. As I was counting the linens, it became too much to bear. I locked the closet and went to the nursery.
She was asleep in her cradle beside the fire. The heat had made her rosy. Her hair tumbled in dark curls about her head. Her thumb was in her mouth. Her eyes were shut, but I knew if she opened them, I would see Jaybee once more.
[“Now,” I said. “She is coming now.”
“She is,” said Israfel. “At last.”]
I was wearing a simple kirtle. I snatched up my cloak and took my boots from the pocket, dropping the linen closet key deep into the pocket as I did so. I traded the boots for the shoes I had on, putting the shoes in the pocket also. As I went out the door, I picked up a sunshade one of Edward’s craftsmen had made for me. It would do to keep off the sun or rain and to keep dogs at a distance. Outside the front door, I said, “Boots, take me to my mama.”
The vertiginous darkness swept me up in its embrace. I heard Elly crying from a great distance, a brief, pained cry, and then I knew nothing more.
17
CHINANGA: TIME UNKNOWN, PERHAPS TIME IRRELEVANT
When at last the darkness passed and the boots were still, I stood on a spit of sand that extended like a finger into an expanse of water which seemed, at first glance, to be limitless as the sky. It was full day with a hot sun half hidden behind rising mists. Behind me dark trees full of noises and vines thrust up through the water to make a shimmering wall. Before me the water moved slowly, glossed with metallic lights and sullen ripples. Across the flow were other trees, laced with more vines and
