Lapvona(64)

‘Do you think they’ll tell?’ Villiam wondered aloud.

‘Probably,’ Marek answered. ‘People like to gossip.’

‘Will they say I was sloppy with the torch?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then what good are you?’ Villiam snapped. ‘I thought you knew these people.’

‘If you ask me, it was the horseman who did it.’

‘The horseman started the fire?’ Villiam rubbed his pale chin. ‘Yes, yes. I think you’re right. My cousin. He is a rather rough type, no? I’ll go tell them.’ Villiam turned to go out again. ‘Should I put the horseman in the stockade, Marek? Would that make the story more true?’

‘They might kill him then,’ Marek said. He wasn’t opposed to that idea. His father had died once before. Maybe this death would teach him to be kind.

‘No, you’re right,’ Villiam said on his way out. ‘That would only make more of a fuss.’

Marek watched through the window as the lord approached the young couple, straining with the buckets toward the fire. Villiam barely noticed the heat and smoke. The northern man had burned his hand and wrapped it in his wife’s veil. ‘God trusts your honor not to gossip,’ Villiam shouted over the crackling flames. ‘The poor horseman didn’t mean to spark this inferno. Let’s leave it at that, all right?’

The villagers coughed and wiped the cold sweat from their faces and promised they would only say that they’d had a beautiful Christmas Eve at the manor, and that they would cherish the memory as long as they lived.

Of course, it would be impossible not to gossip, as everyone was awaiting a report, and the young family were not liars but good honest Christians.



* * *




*

In the morning, Lispeth cleared the table of the feast, which had been left overnight to feed the ghosts, as was tradition. She saw that someone had eaten the bread and the cakes, but the pheasant had been untouched and was stiff and coagulated on its platter. She poked at it in disgust, then carried it into the kitchen. Her eyes were sore after the long night and she wet them with a few tears as she tilted the platters of food into the slop buckets. Then she carried the buckets out to the pigs. She could tell by the look of the pigs that they were angry. They turned their asses toward the slop. Lispeth was apologetic. The largest of them, a pretty sow with black ears, had been slaughtered and was now roasting on a spit in the kitchen, in celebration of Christmas. Clod had been put in charge of that.

‘Happy Christmas,’ Marek said to Lispeth later as she passed by the door to the great room on her way to wake Villiam.

She said nothing, just kept walking up the stairs. There was no good in speaking to the boy. Even opening her mouth toward him made her feel she had done too much. His face looked to her even more twisted and ugly than before, its flesh like the cold fat jiggling off the pheasant she had just thrown to the pigs. Lispeth felt in her heart that he was not long for the manor. She couldn’t picture him living into the future. Something would happen to free her of his face—the persistent reminder of Jacob’s absence. She ought to kill Marek herself. She’d thought about it many times.

She knocked twice on Villiam’s door and went in and opened the curtains. It was past noon, and the next guests would be arriving soon. Christmas lunch was the most work-intensive meal of the holiday. The girls would have to set the table with the usual implements, bring out the courses one by one. That was normal. But on this day, the tablecloth would have to be changed after each course, and the bowls for handwashing would have to be cleaned and refilled. All of this to do, and when it was over, the servants would go down to the cellar to eat their cabbage and silently sing their prayers. Lispeth was hungry. At least she could rest on that virtue.

‘Get up,’ she now said to Villiam as she pulled the blanket off his body. He wore a white nightshirt to sleep, and he had been sweating under the heavy wool covers. Lispeth could see the dark triangle of his pubis through the wet cloth. He turned and pressed his bones into the down mattress.

‘Go away,’ he said.

‘It’s Christmas, my lord,’ she said.

‘Come wake me when the food is on the table.’



* * *




*

Grigor and his family were already on their way up the hill by then. They had been stunned that morning when Klarek had knocked on their door. Grigor was suspicious of the invitation but said nothing as Jon and Vuna scurried to ready themselves for the festivities. They had only scraps left from Vuna’s holiday cooking a few days earlier, and the food hadn’t been any good to begin with. They were all hungry, and it was a long walk up to the manor.

Nobody in the village had heard from the family selected for the feast the night before. In fact, Klarek had directed the young couple and their children to wait until morning and take a back route down into the village so that they would not meet Grigor, Jon, and Vuna on the road on their way up. The soot on the children’s clothes and the bedragglement of them all would surely give cause for alarm. He gave the northern man a gold ducat.

Jon was nervous about the visit. He was afraid of saying the wrong thing and embarrassing himself, or looking unfit. He had suffered a bruised thumb from swinging his hammer a few days earlier, and it pounded and throbbed still as he walked. He complained of it to his wife.