CHAPTER I: THE SUITOR

“He’ll have you without a dowry,” Joan’s father said from where he lay in his bed beside the window. “We won’t see another offer like it.”

Joan bit her cheek and tasted blood. The air in her father’s bedchamber was suffocating, rank with the smell of his rotting leg. The curtains were drawn. Coals glowed hot and sullen on the hearth. Leeches squirmed on the pale, swollen trunk of his thigh. 

Her mother stood beside the fire, a vision, youthful face framed by her coif, her light grey dress a prelude to the widow’s white she’d wear.

“Godfrey will have me,” said Joan. She sucked the blood from her cut cheek back through her teeth. “I’ll keep his house and be his steward.”

“Godfrey will marry.” Her mother’s voice was the steadiest Joan knew. She never shouted; she never whispered. She was a millstone. Smooth. Inexorable. “Do you want to be the yoke your brother staggers under all his life?”

Joan imagined it for a moment, her brother bent double beneath her, toiling on his hands and knees. Yes, she thought. Fuck him. Fuck his wife, whoever she’ll be. Why should she have a place here? I was born in that bed your husband’s dying in, you fuck. You miserable old fuck. Old. Old. Old. You’re both rotting in front of me. You’re the useless ones, you and father, soon for the ground, finally silent. You’re fucking useless, and if I am too then it’s your fault.

“No,” she said.

“Sir Arsène has land,” her father wheezed. “He keeps the king’s roads safe from bandits and wolves. He has flocks; a hearth. He’ll make a good husband. You’ll raise his bastard and he’ll give you sons.”

“Christ will give you the patience to temper him.” 

“When does he want me?”

Her mother went to her father’s bedside and knelt down on the stones. With tender hands she plucked the leeches from his dying leg, their fat, wet bodies stretching as they suckled with vigor at the old man’s flesh. As though he were their mother, the red weals their mouthparts left behind his swollen teats. She dropped them into a clay jar of brackish water. One by one. The last sons of his flesh.

“A fortnight from yesterday,” he said, closing his eyes. He looked lost among his sleeping furs. When he spoke again, though, his voice still snapped like a whip against bare flesh. “Will you go to him?”

Her face and neck felt warm and itched. “Yes, father.”

Her mother plucked the last of the leeches from her husband’s leg and the sound was clear and true in the stillness. A kiss ending; dry lips parted. It joined its kin in the jar. 

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In the hall outside her father’s sickroom Joan stood and caught her breath a moment before fear that her mother might emerge drove her down the well-worn steps and past the chapel to the crumbling arcade overlooking the courtyard where the Norman messengers were saddling their horses. The castle’s last groom had died of the pox at the end of summer and the stable boys had gone with Godfrey to join the king’s hunt. 

She watched them for a while through the narrow windows, scabbed over with the ivy that throttled the castle’s west-facing walls. They were blond and dully handsome, the kind of restless, thoughtless men who were everywhere when there was no war to fight in. Joan wondered if they’d have raped her, had she given them the chance. But then if sir Arsène would accept a bride without a dowry, perhaps he’d take a soiled girl with a bastard in her belly just as readily. Mother would know, too, she thought. She’ll look before I go, to make sure.

The Normans mounted their horses, one of them laughing at something the other had said, and rode out through the rotting gates which had not been closed in Joan’s memory. 

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In her bedchamber above the kitchens Joan sat by the window as a light rain began to fall over the heath. The smell of marrow hung in the air. She could taste it on her tongue; butter and flesh, cream and soil. She imagined cracking one of Old Tom’s big knobby beef bones in her jaws, the suety melt within pouring down her chin to stain her dress. Her teeth grinding against burrs and ridges in the bone.

She worried at her cut cheek with her tongue. The torn flesh was tender; it smarted when she probed its ragged edges. A fortnight left. A little less, and then he would be in her, the fat worm between his legs deforming, squeezing up into her body, filling her like sealing wax. Or maybe he’d use his fingers, like the scullery girl who had died in the plague, and tease her little mouth until it drooled and spasmed. Ugly or beautiful, cruel or kind? Joan bit her lip and stubbed her toes against the stones. A gust of wind drove rain against the window in a clattering salvo. 

Her mind itched. Thoughts chased one another through it like the rats that nested in the midden, scratching and burrowing, breeding and dying. He might reject her. He might see her face with its sunken cheeks and crooked chin, her close-set eyes, her rotted teeth, and leave. Even when there had been a dowry, disgust had sent more than one man fleeing back across the dismal heath. Now there was nothing.

She had heard from the alchemist who had come and gone last year in the heart of winter that Norman knights lived like beasts or Danes in dirt-floored halls, that they ate offal and crickets and snakes, that they buried their stillborn babes beneath their hearths. That strange man had left a bare week later. Lead he might have changed into gold, he claimed, but on empty coffers he could work no transformation. Joan’s father, deep in his cups, said he was a fraud and a liar. Her mother, who had prayed fervently in the chapel each night the alchemist remained under her roof and refused to let the man sit at the high table, said nothing.

Joan snickered. All her tutors’ labors, her mother’s careful instruction, her father’s rages would come to nothing. No ledgers to keep, no servants to manage, no fine gowns to sew. I’ll be the lady of his dunghill, she thought wryly as she sucked at the tear in her cheek. Raw ribbons of flesh tickled her tongue. There was spinning to be done, but she couldn’t muster the will to do it. And besides, why should she care if the work went undone or not? The castle was no longer her home. Its crumbling stones would surrender her without a fight. It would not remember her. Not in the chapel she’d cleaned so many times on hands and knees, nor in the kitchen where night after night she’d gorged herself in secret on bread and sweetmeats, nor in the privy where she’d brought up every midnight feast up in great reeking heaves and belches. 

Godfrey would remember her, she thought. Her fearless little brother would hold her in his heart. Maybe he’d even send for her once her husband-to-be had grown grey and died, let her live out her last empty years in this cramped and doorless little room. More likely it would be the nunnery for her. Her father’s fields were unworked, his people gone off to die in the rebellions or else culled by fever or starved to death in last year’s bitter winter, and the Norman king’s taxes were steep. Godfrey would inherit dust.

Somewhere in the dark reaches of the forest to the north, her father’s wood where no man could hunt without his leave, a wolf howled. The midnight chorus of the wolves had always set Joan’s teeth on edge. That sad, lonely sound rose up as though from the darkest pits of the earth, and as its echoes faded others took it up until it was a hundred-throated beast grieving its dead young. Gooseflesh prickled her arms and the back of her neck as the howling rose and fell, rose and fell, and faded into the sound of the rain and the distant crash of thunder.  

She took up the spindle she’d set aside that morning, picking away the ruined twist of wool she’d carelessly left wound around it, and teased a new thread down over the hook before tying it in place. She passed the afternoon in lonely silence, watching the strands coil tight around the spindle as rain hissed against the windows and the light retreated gray and slow across the floor. 

The singing of the wolves grew louder as the sun sank behind fat, dark clouds. Joan looked out across the heath at the shadows of the trees as worry for her brother grew in the pit of her stomach. Beautiful Godfrey. His babyhood was over, his plump cheeks and strangely serious expression, his soft blond curls and the smell of milk that clung to his skin. Sometimes she didn’t recognize the quiet, long-limbed youth who tilted at rings in the courtyard under the watchful eye of the master at arms. A month ago she had caught sight of his back as he washed himself in the baths below the keep, all that was left of the great Roman fort that had once stood upon the cold and solitary hill. A strange desire had moved her, a need to hold him as a babe again, to give him her nipple as she had seen the wet nurse do. Flushed and suddenly ashamed, she’d left the swirling steam and the flat mineral smell of the baths and stolen away to walk the castle walls awhile in the clear spring air.

The memory of his high, sharp shoulders, of the lean muscles of his arms, brought back that shameful ache. She felt her cheeks color and her breath quicken and catch in her chest. Sir Arsène might look like that, she thought. Older, with a man’s shape, but not so different. She thought again of the scullery girl, Elaine, and her soft arms and fat belly and thick golden hair. She let the spindle fall to the floor. Her feet scuffed over stone as she squeezed her thighs together against the heat building between them, as though she could hold it inside. The rain beat quick and hard against the window.

He might…

He could…

It doesn’t count with servants.

Her fingers found their way under her skirts to squirming warmth and wetness, rooting through coarse hair for the bud of her cunt and the shivering innervation of release.

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Her mother’s bare shoulder, smooth as soap in the wan light falling through the window. Moths beating themselves like rain against the glass. She bent and pressed her lips against it. Warm skin to cold. 

“Are you dirty, Joan?”

She’s going to see.

“No, mama.” A cool hand settled on her thigh as she feathered her mother’s neck with kisses. It crept to the fork of her legs, raising gooseflesh in its wake. “I’m clean.”

“What will I find when I look?”

A terrible, wriggling joy rose up from the roots of Joan’s privates like a tree mapping air with new boughs. She felt her cheeks redden as blood suffused her face and she hid her shameful smile against her mother’s slender throat. “Nothing, mama.”

There was a dark and distant thrill of fear and the smell of bile filled Joan’s nostrils as her mother’s nails slid into her. I cried, she thought, but she didn’t stop. The moment of lucidity went as fast as it had come. Her mother’s hand burned cold inside her, first two fingers, then three. Joan ground her teeth and clung tighter to the older woman, pressing her face into the sweet-scented hollow of her throat. The ache of fullness built. A fourth finger slipped inside and she felt as though she would tear, as though her body would come apart along some as yet undiscovered seam.    

“Muck inside you,” said her mother. “Filth.”

“No.” Joan shook her head, pressing her face harder into the older woman’s neck. Her thighs trembled. Spasms tore at her belly like scrabbling fingernails. She could feel thick discharge oozing out around her mother’s wrist, but she dared not look. To look would be to make it real, to fall back down the shaft of time and kneel trembling and naked in a puddle of her own vomit, skinny shoulders hunched against the blows of her mother’s willow switch. 

Her mother’s thumb slid inside. The pain was unbearable. She clung like a child to the other woman, begging in breathless, whining gasps for an end to it. It seemed her mother’s hand crept farther back with every breath Joan took, scrabbling like a spider up into her belly, finding purchase among coils of gut. Tears streamed down Joan’s cheeks. She cried out, retching as a horrible sucking noise heralded her mother’s withdrawal, some vital flesh clutched in her grasp. I will tear, she thought wildly. I will tear. She will tear me. 

Her mother’s free hand seized her hair and jerked her head back, forcing her to look up into the gnashing teeth and dripping lips of the cunt that bloomed in the center of her mother’s empty face and the threadlike tendrils of flesh that squirmed within that orifice. A ring of white fire blazed like a crown behind her head and mucoid juices ran from her cleft to hang in strings from her chin like an old man’s dribble.There were no eyes, only teeth and the feathery caress of the tendrils as they uncurled, fronds dripping with nameless slime.

The sullied hand emerged, intestine curled around its wrist and squeezed in its grasp, a new cord to rebind what had been cut, and Joan felt herself begin to empty out, to implode in a tide of unmoored flesh. Skin ripping free of bone as her skeleton swung loose in the flaccid wineskin of her meat. Closer to her mother’s face, to the cunt-thing drooling and champing, and from the corner of her eye the sight of that blood-smeared claw dragging its fleshy garland under her mother’s skirts, up to the dark from which it had sprung. 

Outside, beyond the window where the moths still circled, dashing themselves against the light, the wolves were singing.