Chapter 4
Ethelberta must have seen the advantage, too, for she came to Schelin’s hall to wait upon the board with jugs of mead and ale, looking for all the world like fair Aquarius on high. And she was fair this day! She had cleaned her coarse dress and teased it with teasels; bathed her young body in the clear water of the Stour; and combed her hair with her mistress’s horn comb, borrowed in a stolen moment, until now it lay as smooth and undisturbed as lovers’ meditations, long as the reach of lust, and bright, to catch and spread the light thrown by the fire. Around her head—May all the Company of Saints deliver men from such a wantonly abandon!—a chaplet of wild flowers, and at her throat and wrists a daisy chain.
Whether Ethelberta served Elfrida’s nettle-seeds in mead to Marguerite we may well doubt. She served herself, though. Not with drink, for she needed a clear head, but with the privy knowledge that the aphrodisiac of powdered ash would fetch the hitherto indifferent Lionel into such a lather of lust that he dare not stand.
The intended object of his lust, the reluctant Marguerite, sat directly across the board from him, their feet beneath the table close enough to touch, the seating arrangement contrived that way.
At first, the vestal Marguerite was irritated by the sheer coarseness of it all, by the shouts and laughter, by the ribald gaiety, and, longing for an end to such foolishness, she prayed secretly for the supposed calm of the convent. Lionel, on the other hand, thanks to generous libations of ash-seed in mulled wine, developed an unaccustomed passion for his lady worthy of a stud-bull.
As the repast progressed, the Saxon wench continued her perambulation around the board, filling Lionel’s cup from time to time, murmuring to his ear as she did so, in rough but serviceable Norman French, “Come, sir, the fire is hot. Let me quench it with mulled wine.” The whilst she spoke to him her body and her breath exuded herbal scents of fields and hedgerows, redolent of fairest May. And if her breasts pressed into Lionel’s back as she bent forward to serve him, well, it might just be a matter of cramped space, not indiscretion. Between her rounds she stood across from him, directly behind Marguerite, her eyes for no one else but Lionel, waiting on him in another way.
Not half the evening passed before the sighing Marguerite, the unbroken filly in the bunch, sensed what was going on and felt herself a woman scorned. Ah, scorn, a better physic to arouse the listless soul than any potion! Even Elfrida had not anticipated what happened next. How a body scorned can hate! Within the span of a twig’s life in the fire, pale Marguerite had cast aside fond thoughts of cloisters and of tapers carried in processionals, even of Christ! The flaming candle she must now win back from this Saxon bitch was Lionel’s!
So she sat, fighting the other for him, her little feet addressing his below the board, her soft hands contriving to touch his as the company passed things back and forth. Her words, that these past months had been but studied indifference, discovered a new interest, hinting—nay, suggesting—even love.
We may imagine what Lionel de Mohun felt, the poor wretch tugged between two objects of this new, sudden, and inexplicable desire; the ash-seed potion straining, swelling in his loins, attacking his head, besieging his heart. The hall for him held but two points of focus, two sets of eyes, two blue, two brown. And all the while these two addressed their beauties to his every darted look across the board: the Saxon standing, stroking down her hair; the Norman sitting, not so proud as artful, needing no opiate of nettle seed to taste her first rush of desire, and to excite it in return.
How it ended we may wonder. What is certain is that Schelin, at the head of his board, missed nothing, mistaking Marguerite’s newly discovered desire, and Lionel’s lust, for old Elfrida’s handiwork. And he was half right. He correctly ascribed Lionel’s blatant fascination for Ethelberta to the effects of the ash-seed in wine. On the other hand, he was not to know that his daughter’s new-found passion was due to jealousy and had nothing whatsoever to do with the prick of nettle seeds.
Nor did Schelin have to work hard to persuade himself that young Ethelberta was endowed with more than her fair share of feminine charm. From that point on, his all-consuming thought was, “By God, that Saxon girl is lovely!”
Ethelberta was a pragmatist. Sensing she must lose young Lionel’s fire to the newly roused Marguerite, she made to find another mark.
Schelin watched Ethelberta go around the table, once, and then twice, and then thrice, until quite without warning she came up behind him and, in whispered tones that fused the litany of Nature’s fires and wooded vales, cool grass, and harbingers of Spring, she asked...
“Mulled wine, my lord?”
“Fill up my horn, my dear!