= Whispers =
“She’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“The Kyteler woman.”
“On the riverbank.”
“At the end of their garden.”
“As if asleep.”
“Killed, wasn’t she?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“Just the daughter left now.”
“The father, a usurer. The daughter, his muse.”
= January 1279 =
A girl comes of age clasped in the jaws of the beast. She must learn to tame it. To stroke its silken fur. To sing it lullabies. To feed it raw meat, and somehow still look beautiful slinking away, whenever it gets too close.
My mother was just fourteen when she married my father. On their wedding day, her purse was empty except for a handful of flame berries plucked from a rowan tree. Her protection against death. She brought with her a rough wooden chest filled with bags of seeds, sprouting bulbs and vials of cures. My grandmother had taught her that the blood moon rising foretells many regrets by sunrise and that a brew of yew needles will slow a heart. None of this my father knew, nor did he care to. She was a woman, his wife. Her purpose was children. Her purpose was me, except she ought to have birthed more than just me, but when I was nine years old I had no brothers and no sisters, and I heard Alma, my mother’s servant, tell the cook that the mistress no longer bled. Even then, I knew what that meant. She had lost her value. Even then, I feared for her.
My mother was always quiet. When she did speak, her words described the taste of rain or the shrill call of the blackbird. If I got near her, she smelt of damp green earth, but mostly she was at a distance, digging weeds in the garden or standing beside the deep black waters of the River Nore. It was there, the evening after I met my lynx, that she was strangled.
g
She is dead seven years now, and not once since then have I met my wildcat again.
These days when I snatch a morning away from the warmth and labour of my father’s workroom, I go in search of memories of her or better yet my wildcat, who I sense swallowed some part of my mother on her death and now roams the forest in search of the daughter she has lost.
It’s just after sunrise, the sky still pink. I drag my feet through the snow. Sheep scatter ahead, bleating with fright. I ought to hurry before Father sends someone to search for me. Still, I turn back just once to catch a glimpse of a furred head peeking from behind a bush, or the dimples of paw prints in the snow, but all I see are the trees, quiet and cold and distant.
I step onto the slush-churned road. Ahead, the city walls rise grey and damp from the snow, only relieved by the open gate. Kilkenny has nine, which allow for brief escapes by daylight before curfew hits and we must be home, apparently safe in our own beds. There have been no raids by the Gaels, who are after us settlers since before I was born, but no matter. Each night we are locked in.
As I enter Kilkenny I make my back rigid, firm my jaw and fix my gaze straight ahead. Like the city, I must armour myself, not against the blades of enemies, but instead as protection from the whispers of the watchers. I am sixteen years alone in this skin, and with each season, their hunger for me increases.
I pass the castle, obnoxiously bulbous and large, seat of the Marshalls to whom we all must pay our unquestioning gratitude for building Kilkenny up from a mere monastic town to the grand place it is now, flame for the moths: the merchants, knights and all those seeking gold and wool.
This is Kilkenny. Every morning, our guard dog is beaten awake. Every afternoon, I watch the fish seller drag his cart of silver bodies: mackerel two pennies, salmon twelve pennies, a shark your soul.
Standing outside the cloth merchant’s guild, my father’s friends are wrapped in furs. To avoid their attention, I look up at the roofs which here, unlike most of the city, are too far apart for a cat to jump between. All the merchants pretend gentle godliness, but each of them, in their way, has grasped for my flesh, and I have escaped them all with a smile, a compliment to his clothes, or a vicious remark, depending on what I judge to be his particular frailty. Before they can stop me with their lisping compliments about the colour of my cheeks in the snow, I turn into an alley, where the air is dense with the smell of rotting fish. I hurry down it, stepping into the clearer air of the wider street below. I pass the main door of my family’s establishment, Kyteler’s Inn. Travellers from all over the world pass through our rooms. Any one of them might be convinced to take me away to live in a land where the air tastes of citrus and raisins, but Father has refused them all. I shake off the impossible and head towards the side entrance, which is accessed by crossing a shitbrook. The garden door appears shut, but I left it unbolted when I slipped out before sunrise. The planks over the ditch have rotted over winter and groan beneath my tread. I glance into the piss runnel, assessing the fall, and see a mass of fur half-covered with snow. I kneel and search for a movement, even slight. There are four, no five, kittens. The mother’s eyes are grey, glazed.
“Alice Kyteler.” A bright, violent voice shatters the ice air.
The space above me has shifted to make room for something new. Slowly, I stand. A monk wearing a grey woollen tunic lounges in the arch of the wall, the door to the garden hanging open behind him. He has the strange wild look of a sleepwalker, and like all those who inhabit the dreaming, I sense I ought not to startle him.
“You don’t look like a killer,” he says.
He means the cats.
“Well, you don’t know me,” I say and stare.
His relaxed stance tells me he knows he’s pleasing to look at. I suspect he’s three or four years older than I. His skin is uncommonly clear, no pockmarks embedded on his cheeks; nor do any hunger lines frame his mouth. He has the face of a rich man. I know him from somewhere. I just can’t yet place him. But I know his type. I have dealt with men who worship at the altars of themselves all my life, and like most of them he wants me to gaze at him with adoration, and so I stare now at the dead cats. Soon, a dog will rip out their eyes and tongues and the bright squishy innards beneath their soft fur.
“I was just speaking with your father about you,” the man dressed as a monk says.
Half the unwed men in Ireland have come on their knees to my father, begging for my hand as if I were Heaven and Father the priest who can be bribed for salvation.
“I always knew I was capable of turning a holy man to Satan.”
“What vanity,” he says. “Your father mentioned you. Not I. You assume I would lower myself to your kind.”
We lenders are always hated, but still. I cannot help but glare, and, of course, he laughs.
“As if I would marry into your family,” I say. “Oh, yes. I know who you are.”
“A man of God.”
I point at his shoes which are sewn with delicate embroidery. No monk would ever own such a pair. His smirk broadens, and I hate that I can’t seem to pull my gaze away, and this is when the faces of his family appear in my mind’s eye.
“Le Poer’s your name,” I say.
“Caught.”
He is John, the son of a baron who is landed in Waterford.
“I don’t care which one you are,” I say. “A criminal or a baron. You’re all the same. Murderers and thieves, the lot of you.”
Now, I am smirking.
I expect his face to turn red with fury, but he just rubs his forehead, and suddenly I see the child in him, the boy attempting to convince his father of his quick intellect and strength to hold his title.
“You want to know why I’m dressed as a monk,” he says.
“Not really,” I say. “Now, move, so I can go into the garden and no longer have to look at you.”
He beams. His teeth are uncommonly clean. “Did you never wish to know what it is to be ordinary, unseen?”
“No, and I certainly never will.”
I step forward to force him to stride back or sidle around me, but he does neither, and so we’re both standing, face to face, inside the narrow doorway. He rests his hand on the wall just above my head. His breath is warm and smells of beer and cloves, and I am almost tempted to take his hand, run now to the church and never return to my father’s side. But I don’t move. He is the one who reaches inside his tunic and pulls out a small, dark cake. Before I can refuse, he presses it into my hand.
“Bite,” he says, and I do.
It’s gritty and sweet and cloying. His lips soften into a smile, his mouth almost vulnerable, and I think I could press the tip of my knife against his ribs and he would let me slide it between his bones.
“One day,” he says, stepping out of the doorway. “Alice Kyteler.”
I cannot help myself. I watch him kneeling on the planks, his hand lost inside the pile of dead fur. I watch him pull out a flame-coloured, mewing kitten. I watch him as he strides towards the river, whistling, one hand holding the kitten against his chest.
g
I vomit into the rosemary bush.
My mother’s garden is all black and white. At the far end, the dark branches of the rowan tree are dressed in snow. It is pale as a maiden on her wedding day. I try to picture my mother now in Paradise. I see her happy, head turned to the sky, eyes wide and clear and unafraid, but my imagining is extinguished. I was trying to picture a woman who never lived.
I hear someone laugh inside the inn, the clatter of a dropped pewter plate. I wipe my mouth and step through the back door, passing the kitchen without glancing in. A servant in the dining hall is brushing up the dirty rushes. Soon she will replace them with fresh reeds strewn with lavender. Overhead, guests argue in one of the sleeping quarters. We have three. One is large with twelve sleeping pallets. The other two are smaller, each with a big bed, a trundle and a chest. These we keep for the richest travellers, but all guests must have coin, all must arrive on horse, or they will be sent away. By night, I sleep in a tiny attic room with my servant, Old Alma, snoring beside me, and at the door, a boy, armed with a knife, to threaten the drunken guests or anyone else who might stray from their bed.
I stop outside the open workroom door. It is lit by tallow candles and rushlights. The walls are sheathed in tapestries sewn with wolves and bears, and lynxes bleeding. Beneath these hunters’ eyes is where I spent all seasons of my childhood. Always taking notes, pushing beads across the counting board, passing a merchant a cup of wine, smiling to ease the sting of the interest on a loan. Always my father was at my side, his eyes sliding over my body, assessing, judging, admiring. Always, I was swift to distract him with a question about solving a calculation, even though I already knew the answer. Next, I would turn his attention to a tendril of useful gossip about a visiting bishop and his mistress. When Mother died, I encouraged him to tutor Roger Outlaw, the son of a banker, three years older than me and almost as clever. His enthusiasm for everything distracted Father and me and brought a lightness to our days. Roger and I studied our trade in the homes and shops of Kilkenny’s merchants. A wine seller’s wife adopted me for several weeks and taught me Italian. Latin reading, Roger and I gleaned from a lonely monk. All the rest, the note taking, the coin counting, the deal making, we learned from my father. Roger loves my father, and I don’t blame him. I do too. Mostly. Joseph Kyteler gets under your skin. His infectious laugh, his ease of manner, his quick compliments, his polished appearance. How could I not love him?
Now, Father is bent over his ledger, humming tunefully. He is seemingly the perfect banker: solid, immovable, all frozen angularity. His jaw is cut with firm lines, his skin white as limestone, and just as powdery, yet beneath the table his feet, nested in fur-lined slippers, tap an incessant, agitated dance. I clear my throat, and he looks up, his face transforming from posed lender into warm, doting father: a common guise.
“Daughter,” he says, “you frighten me with this flitting outside the walls. What if a Gael were to grab you?”
I laugh, shake my head. “I’m in more danger between our own four walls.”
He rounds his table, approaching me with arms open. He reaches a hand towards my face but stills it before touching my cheek so it hovers, vibrating close to my ear.
“I worry,” he says.
I remain still, eyes on the floor, examining every speck of dirt on the chevron planks. I cannot move until he moves, and as is routine with him, he sighs and steps away from me, resting himself with ease against his table.
“I have had another request for you,” he says, lacing his fingers behind his head, smug, and I have an urge to shatter his smirk with a biting remark.
“I already know. John le Poer.”
Copyright © 2024 by Molly Aitken. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
