Out of the Dawn Light by Alys Clare Read Free Book Online

spread. It was said that a man could not cram a morsel of meat into his hungry mouth unless someone else was on hand to swat the flies away.
    Rochester surrendered. The rebellion had failed.
    Without waiting to hear more, Romain swung into action.

FOUR
     
    I ought to have realized that Goda would become steadily more intolerable as her pregnancy went on. She was my sister after all and I’d known her my entire life. Had she ever shown the tiniest amount of courage in adversity? Had she just once endured discomfort of any kind with a saintly silence and a brave little smile on her lips? Of course she hadn’t. She was Goda and she always found something or someone to blame for her own suffering, even when that suffering had been brought about by nobody other than herself.
    Well, she was suffering now because, either before or immediately after she married Cerdic, on at least one occasion she had made love with him. Unless he had taken her by force – unlikely because she’s a well-muscled woman with a fierce temper and a heavy right fist and he’s a gentle sort of a man – then she must have wanted the lovemaking and, not being an idiot, known that it could lead to conception. So, she’d brought it on herself. Nevertheless, she had to blame someone and that someone was me.
    She made a hell of my life such as I had never experienced before (and not since, either; I don’t make mistakes like letting myself be used by people such as my sister anymore). The odd thing was that if just for a moment she’d stopped being so horrible to me, my sympathy would have come rushing back and I’d have looked after her willingly. You see, she really was in a bad way. As she entered the last couple of months of her pregnancy, she swelled up like a leather bag slowly and steadily being filled with water. The skin of her vast belly stretched and something in its structure must have broken, for long, dark-red lines began to snake across her white flesh as if there was something living in there. Well, of course there was – a baby, and a pretty large one at that – but that’s not what I mean. Goda has always been lazy and now that she had got so big she barely left her seat by the hearth. As June came, often she would not even get out of bed.
    She was pale and, despite my ministrations with the wash cloth and the bowl of water, she was dirty and she stank. Her filthy hair was tangled and I could not get the comb through it, or rather, I could but she pinched my arm so viciously when I pulled at the tangles that I stopped trying.
    Her favourite punishment was to box my ears. I usually tried to dodge so that she hit the left one, which she had already damaged. That way I might emerge from my time with her still with one good ear.
    I don’t know what poor Cerdic made of it, although I can make an accurate guess. He was, as I’ve said, a good worker and there was always plenty for him to do. Goda was demanding, forever wanting to be brought something new for her house or some little personal present, and in a way that made it easier for him because to acquire the things she wanted he had to earn more money. She was quite capable of working that out for herself and so could not complain if her husband was out far more often than he was in. As far as she knew, he was off on a job somewhere.
    If I knew different – and I had my ways of keeping an eye on what was happening around me – then I kept it to myself. Goda did not really deserve a man like Cerdic and in her present state she offered no inducement whatsoever for him to come home in the evening until after she was in her bed and snoring (with advanced pregnancy she had to sleep on her back and made a noise like a boar being throttled). No, I didn’t blame Cerdic for avoiding his wife. I only envied him from the bottom of my heart because that option was not available for me.
    I fought self-pity all the time, and never more so than when Midsummer’s Eve was approaching. I