Lapvona(20)

‘Let them grieve, I think,’ the priest advised.

‘One day is enough,’ Villiam said. ‘Tell them tomorrow to get back to work.’

The priest nodded. ‘And how is your son today?’ he asked. ‘I saw him walking through the pasture this afternoon. Is he still feeling restless?’

‘Restless and rude,’ Villiam yawned. ‘Jacob is very boring.’

Villiam wasn’t very fond of Jacob. The boy was unwilling to be wowed by his father’s eccentricities. He called his father ‘a spoiled brat’ and refused to visit with any girls that Villiam invited from nearby provinces to entertain the boy. Villiam was also a little frightened of Jacob. He was larger and stronger than Villiam. They couldn’t have been more different. Jacob liked hunting, was built more like a servant than a lord. His mother worshipped him, and Villiam resented that. Dibra was not like her husband. She was perfectly content to spend her days riding her horse with Luka. Her quarters were on the opposite side of the manor from Villiam’s. Husband and wife met once a day for lunch and barely spoke to one another. Villiam had a general distaste for the female voice. All the singers who traveled from afar to perform for Villiam were male.

‘Do the trick with your eyes again, Klarek,’ Villiam had requested one last time that evening, the words drowsy with wine. The carriage tour had tired him out.

Villiam had fallen asleep and dreamt of Klarek’s mouth forming words that floated like puffs of smoke across the fire, lips dripping of wine and melted suet. He woke up in the morning to Jacob’s servant, Lispeth, poking him in the shoulder, her finger digging into the thin flesh covering his scapula. He felt it and went back to sleep. But she kept pressing, and the pressure sent a pain through a nerve down to Villiam’s foot and up to his head, and he rose with a cry and an immediate request for suet dumplings.

‘What have you brought me and why am I awake?’

‘Something horrible has happened, my lord.’

‘What, no more suet? Go get some and wake me later.’

‘No, not that. Please, come down and see.’

The girl was crying, which Villiam found moving.

‘You’re crying, poor girl.’

‘Yes.’

‘Let me cry along with you, for God’s sake,’ Villiam said. He made the sign of the Cross over his bare, bony chest and began to weep.

‘My lord,’ Lispeth said, wiping her eyes. ‘You must come down.’ She was used to Villiam’s befuddling eccentricities. ‘There’s so much more to cry over downstairs,’ she said.

Villiam sighed and pulled the silk robe from her hands and tearfully requested she do a little dance as he got out of bed. This was not unusual. Lispeth curtsied and stepped from side to side, lifting her arms aloft and crying as Villiam pulled his long, bony legs from under the cover and stepped into his red velvet slippers.

‘Fine, fine,’ he croaked. ‘Now a bit of wine. I’m sorry the dancing didn’t cheer us up.’

Villiam preferred wine from the north until midday, a sweet white wine that was crushed by blond children. The stronger, drier white wine was crushed by teenaged boys from the south, and Villiam liked to drink that after his repast with Dibra in the late afternoons because her company bored him so, made him feel limp and trapped. Why had he married her? Because he’d needed an heir. Villiam’s mother had insisted he take Dibra as his wife shortly before she died. ‘Her father won’t try to steal our dirt now,’ was all she’d said.

‘How about a little song?’ Villiam asked Lispeth.

Lispeth stopped dancing. ‘Later, my lord. It’s Jacob.’

‘What about him?’

‘Come and see,’ she said and ran from the room to lay out the red carpet that Villiam demanded be rolled out for him every morning, through the hall from his bedchamber and down the central stairs to the great room where the servants would line up to say good morning, however late he’d gotten up, and to tell a joke that each of them had invented overnight.

Now Villiam tied his robe clumsily and shuffled out of his room down the hall as the red carpet rolled farther and farther. He was still half asleep, his throat parched. He heard a cry come from down in the entry room, like a wounded animal, or a monster. It was Dibra. Villiam flinched and paused, considered plodding back upstairs. But then he heard another voice, a small child’s. ‘I’m sorry!’ it said.

Villiam hurried toward the entry room, delighted and curious to see what young visitor had come and upset Dibra enough for her to wail so dramatically. He nearly tripped on the tails of his robe down the red stairs. ‘No! No! Nooooo!’ Dibra cried, a bit less convincingly now, as though the strength of her performance had weakened as Villiam drew near. She was forever disappointing him. Villiam was so accustomed to being entertained that any drama, however real it was, seemed to him as one staged for his private amusement. He had been living in perpetual diversion for so long, he could only conceive that this demonstration within his home was a farce. While tales of bandits marauding through the village may have given an honest lord cause to bang a fist on a polished table, Villiam’s hand was forever limp and unsurprised. He knew it was all planned, all theater. Death wasn’t quite real to him. He never once left the manor to see where the dead were slain or buried. He barely left the hilltop at all.