besides. Rumours concerning the strange tastes of other lords had reached Souarcy, but Eudes only liked girls, very young girls.
‘And lastly, this!’ he declaimed histrionically, as he pulled from the saddlebag a sack made of hide and fashioned in the shape of a long finger. He undid the thin piece of cord and took out a greyish phial.
Mathilde let out a cry of joy:
‘Oh my lady mother! Sweet salt! Oh, how wonderful! I have never seen any before. May I taste it?’
‘Presently. Show a little restraint, now, Mathilde! Take my daughter back to her room, will you, Mabile? It is late and she has already stayed up far too long.’
Before reluctantly following the servant, the little girl politely took her leave, first of her uncle, who kissed her hair, and then of her mother.
‘Well, brother, I admit to being no less impressed than my daughter. They say that Mahaut d’Artois, Comtesse de Bourgogne, is so partial to the stuff that she recently purchased fifteen bars of it at the Lagny fair.’
‘It is true.’
‘Yet I thought her poor. Sweet salt is said to be worth more than gold.’
‘The woman pleads poverty loudly while possessing great wealth. At two gold crowns and five pennies the pound, fifteen bars, each weighing twenty pounds, represents a small fortune. Have you ever tasted sweet salt, Agnès? The Arabs call it saccharon.’8
‘No. I only know that it is sap collected from a bamboo cane.’
‘Then let us rectify the situation at once. Here, lick this, my dear. You will be amazed by the spice. It is so smooth and combines well with pastries and beverages.’
He lifted a long grey finger up to her lips and a wave of revulsion that was difficult to control caused the young woman’s eyelids to close.
The evening stretched on. The stiff posture Agnès had obliged herself to maintain since her half-brother’s arrival, in order to discourage any familiarity on his part, was taking its toll on her shoulders. Her head was spinning from listening to Eudes’s endless stories, the sole aim of which was to show him in a good light. Without warning he exclaimed:
‘Is it true what they tell me, Madame, that you have built bee yards9 for the wild swarms where your land borders Souarcy Forest?’
For a while she had only been half listening to him, and his deceptively casual question almost threw her:
‘You have been correctly informed, brother. In accordance with common practice we hollowed out some old tree stumps with a red-hot iron, installing crossed sticks before depositing the wild colonies.’
‘But raising bees and harvesting honey is a man’s work!’
‘I have someone to assist me.’
Eudes’s eyes burned with curiosity.
‘Have you seen the king of the colony yet?’10
‘I confess I have not. The other bees guard him bravely and fiercely. Indeed, the idea of producing honey came to me when one of my farm hands was badly stung while helping himself to a free meal in the forest.’
‘Such petty theft is considered to be poaching and is punishable by death. I know that you are a sensitive soul, and it is a charming attribute of womanhood. All the same, you could at least have ordered his hands to be cut off.’
‘What use would I have for a farm hand with no hands?’
He responded to her remark with a hollow-sounding laugh, and she had the impression that he was trying to catch her out. Vassals were obliged to hand over two-thirds of their honey and a third of their wax to their lord – a levy Agnès had neglected to pay since she set up her bee yards two years before.
‘Let me sample this nectar, then, my beauty.’
‘Sadly, brother, we are still novices. Our very first harvest, last year, was a great disappointment. The continual rains turned the honey, making it unfit to eat. That is why I sent you none – for fear of making you and your servants ill. We fed it to our pigs, who tolerated it. On top of which I managed clumsily to spill one of the two pails. This year’s harvest only yielded three pounds of poor quality – barely good enough to flavour the wine dregs. Let us hope that the harvest will be better this summer, and that I shall have the pleasure of sharing it with you and your household,’ she said, feigning a sigh of despair before continuing, ‘Oh, my sweet brother Eudes, I do not know how we would survive without your continued goodwill. The soil at Souarcy is poor. Imagine, I have only been able to replace half our draught animals with plough horses – oxen being so slow and clumsy. These bee yards should allow us to supplement our meagre everyday fare. Hugues, my dear departed husband, didn’t … Well, he wasn’t …’
‘He was just a senile old man.’
‘As you will soon be,’ she muttered under her breath, and lowered her head as though out of embarrassment.
‘That was an unwise decision of my father’s if ever there was one. Marrying you to an old man of fifty, whose only claim to glory was a rash of battle scars! War does not make a man, it betrays his true nature – striking down the coward who hitherto employed a wealth of cunning to escape the slightest wound.’
‘My father believed he was acting in my interests, Eudes.’
Since the beginning of their exchange she had attempted to adjust her speech, to emphasise their blood relationship – which he was at great pains to keep out of his own discourse, always addressing her as ‘my beauty’, ‘my Agnès’, ‘my lamb’, and occasionally as ‘Madame’.
Nonetheless, Eudes’s hesitation was palpable. Agnès cultivated it as best she could, in the knowledge that her only salvation lay in this final reticence. As long as he doubted his half-sister’s awareness, he would continue to paw at the ground without daring to take the last guilty leap. On the other hand, the day he discovered she was wise to his deplorable lechery … Well, she did not know how else she could try to stop him.
She stood up from the bench and with a smile offered him her hand.
‘Let us pray together to the Holy Virgin, brother. Nothing would give me greater pleasure, besides your presence here tonight. It would make Brother Bernard, my new chaplain, so happy to see us kneeling side by side. And afterwards you must rest. I regret being the motive for your undertaking such a long journey.’
He did not notice that she was taking leave of him, and was obliged reluctantly to do as she said.
When at last the following morning after terce* she watched Eudes and his page disappear across a field, Agnès felt exhausted and her head was spinning. She decided to make an inspection of the outlying buildings, more as a way of dispelling her continual unrest than out of any real necessity. Mabile, who was staring mournfully down the empty track, mistook Agnès’s mood and remarked in a sorrowful voice:
‘Such a short visit!’
Her face was pale and drawn, and Agnès reflected that for Eudes and his servant the night must have seemed even shorter.
‘Yes indeed, Mabile, and yet how pleasant while it lasted,’ she lied with such ease that she felt an almost superstitious fear creeping through her.
Was lying and cheating really that simple despite all the Gospel’s teachings? Undoubtedly – or at least when it was the only existing form of self-defence.
‘How right you are, Madame.’
Only then did Agnès notice the strip of dark-purple muslin draped over the girl’s shoulders. She had not seen it before. Was it payment for services rendered or for favours granted?
‘Let Mathilde sleep. She was up so late. Clément will accompany me –