Women in the Wall by Julia O'Faolain Read Free Book Online Page B

made for it!”
    “That’s what Chlodecharius said.”
    “He did?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, he knew more than I gave him credit for.”
    Agnes began to cry.
    “No more of that now!”
    The nurse was angry. Crying, she reminded, never mended broken pots. What was needed now was to get Agnes married. She had no kin to protect her. The sooner she found some the better. Mummolus, the king’s major domus, a Gallo-Roman distantly connected with Agnes’s dead father, would help. Once married, Agnes would be all right. Meanwhile she must wear her amber necklace because amber had magic properties and … Agnes stopped listening. Yes, that would probably all happen. She would be married. She supposed. But her mind could not latch on to the idea. It remained dangerously empty and while it did in came the very image she had wanted to keep out: the pale, taut face of Chlodecharius. Very earnest, talking in nervous spurts, not laughing ever but touching her as cautiously as he had the dragon-fly he had caught one day as it hung, foolishly poised above a pond.
    “Like a courtier,” he had said. “It sees the dazzle, not the danger. I should talk! I should have left Clotair’s court long ago!”
    “Would you leave your sister?”
    “If she won’t come with me.”
    “She is married to the king.”
    “Do you know how many wives he’s thrown out? What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I keep telling her. Sooner or later she’ll fall out of favour and then …” Chlodecharius stroked Agnes’s hand.
    “I wonder what will become of you, little Agnes? Will you marry one of Clotair’s leudes? Some great strapping Frank with hair bursting out of his nose like a prawn’s feelers?”
    “No I won’t,” Agnes laughed and shivered.
    “Ah, but my sister said ‘no’ too. Only when she ran away, Clotair came after her and got her back. It only made him madder for her. What does my sister teach you, Agnes?”
    “Prayers. Latin.”
    “She’s trying to turn you into a copy of herself. But you’re not like her. She torments herself. Do you know why? Because she can’t live as she wants to so she chooses to live worse. That way the choice at least is hers. It’s pride. She’s proud as the devil.”
    “What am I like?”
    “Nothing yet. You’re still at the tadpole stage. You might become a frog—or a butterfly. If you’re nicely treated and petted and looked after then you’ll be a very lovely butterfly. I wish I could take you with me to Constantinople and see it happen.”
    “Can’t you?”
    “No.”
    But on other days he had said he could and would and had described the city as full of gold and spices and strange, domed, majestic palaces. While he spoke he held her hand and Agnes had the feeling he was saying a long, slow goodbye. She was not sure she really liked being with Chlodecharius who was so gloomy and a little dull. She might have had more fun with someone jollier but then, there was no jollier person around. Besides, she was really a little young for courting so it was flattering to be kissed and told in his sad, renunciatory way, that she, unlike himself, was made for happiness. He sounded sure. “You’re like water,” he told her, “you’ll flow where the stream-bed carries you. Radegunda and I are stubborn. Weapons jangled at our birth. Our stock is bloody. Did you know that her name means ‘Council in Combat’? Clotair’s means ‘Famed in Battle’. Well-matched, you see.”
    There was always a vague apprehensiveness about him, a halo of blackness such as clings to things after one has been staring at the sun, but Agnes wasn’t sure he hadn’t manufactured it himself by his own wild glaring at doom. He puzzled her and she always left him with a feeling of relief, giddiness and a sense of something left unfinished. The way back to her own apartment led past the courtyard where boys from the palace school took their recreation and sometimes she paused there to chat and cast