Page 25

Bea pushed the last scrap of the loaf at her again, then turned to send the other women off to their duties.

The youngest girl who had retrieved Nan’s knife was too young to do the work of the older women, and her role was to clean and fetch and serve.

Nan tried not to think how one day she’d likely become a whore like the rest of them.

Not for the first time, she said a silent prayer of thanks for Aunt Mary.

If her aunt had not insisted on finding Nan a good place to serve, there was no knowing what might have become of her.

When all the others were gone and she was left alone with her sister again, she asked one of the harder questions.

“Did our father do well by you with the money he gained from selling me off?”

The weaver had paid the equivalent of six years’ wages to take her into service.

Nan had gone gladly, knowing the coin was meant to feed her sister.

It had seemed a fortune to her, and an even greater fortune that she’d gone to live and work in a place where her own belly did not grumble and ache every day.

“He bought me shoes.” Bea smiled fondly, remembering. Then a hardness came into her face. “But you must know he drank it, no matter that he tried to do right. It was Mary who wrested a few coins from him and gave it to the miller so he would put aside a bit of something for me every day.”

That was the best that could be hoped for, from their father.

He had never been the same after that terrible year when their mother died.

Nan counted it a blessing he was only weak and useless, and not cruel.

She listened to her sister tell the story of what had happened after Nan was gone.

It was all just trying to find work in the fields where they could, as they’d always done – but now their father drank even more, and there was little work to be had.

After a few years, Bea had found a kindly alewife who had given her a place to sleep and enough work to keep her in one place.

“Then I took up with the candlemaker’s son and we run off here to Lincoln. I went round to the shops once to ask after you, but you weren’t nowhere to be found.”

By that time, Nan calculated, the weaver had died and she had been sent to Chester – or maybe on to Rhuddlan to serve in the king’s hall.

If things had happened differently, if a depraved lord had not sent her life in a new direction or if she had thought to go looking for Bea sooner, then it might all be different now.

She might have kept her sister from resorting to this whore’s life.

She listened as Bea went on to describe how she fell out with the candlemaker’s son and found a mason who was happy to pay her for what she’d previously given for free.

Then there were more men who paid, including a priest who was her best customer.

“I still warm his bed sometimes, when he is lonely for me. Fergus don’t mind it. ”

Fergus was the man she had met a few summers ago, and he had told her she had a good head for business.

This was his place, an inn where a few whores had already been plying their trade when he met Bea and invited her to come here and make a proper business of it.

She had brought in more women – seven in total now, and always more wanting to come work here where they were sure to find a safe and prosperous place.

As her sister spoke, Nan felt an increasing sadness.

It was not that Bea was a whore and a bawd, nor even that she seemed proud of it.

Aunt Mary judged it foul and sinful, but Nan could not think so harshly of anyone who turned to whoring.

It was only one of many necessary evils for the poor and the lowly.

It was to be avoided if at all possible, of course, but when you had no name and no real home, no notion of where your next meal might come from, then it was no easy thing to avoid.

For the whole of her own life she had barely escaped it.

Sometimes she even thought her brief marriage to Oliver was not much different, for she had always known she must give herself to some man if she was to have any hope of surviving.

Her sadness came from the discovery of how different she was from her sister, who did not seem as if she had tried very hard to avoid this life, nor did she mind it so much.

In this way, it was as Aunt Mary had said: they were so different that none would believe they were sisters.

Nan could not imagine ever being happy to bare her body to a strange man – to many men – and let him do what he will.

Even before that terrible lustful lord had made it seem a terror to her, she had been that way.

But Bea was different. Bea was Bargate Bettie, a thriving bawd even at this young age. And there was more as the day went on that made Nan feel more alone than she had expected to, if she ever found her sister.

Even while she was glad Bea was not a timid little thing, she was loud and brash in a way that grated on Nan’s nerves.

Her man Fergus arrived, and though Nan had known worse men by far, she could find nothing pleasing about him.

His wit was slow and stupid, and he stank as though he’d not washed in a month.

Even had he not looked over Nan with lascivious eyes when her sister’s back was turned, she would have thought him unworthy of Bea. Yet her sister clearly loved him well.

Most disagreeable of all were the little things Bea said from time to time that made Nan feel an unaccountable shame.

When asked, she described the comfits she had tasted for the first and only time at Morency last year – only to have Bea sniff and say, “Well, it’s a fair fine life you lead.

” And Nan thought to tell her sister about her best friend at Morency, but when she said Robin was the son of a minor lord, Bea asked if she had any friends who were not gentry.

Nan turned her face down at this, hoping to hide how her sister’s resentful tone wounded her.

It was not envy of her life, she thought, but just a different flavor of the same sentiment she had felt from Aunt Mary.

She had no words for it, but she knew it was a way of letting her know that she was not like them.

That she did not belong in their world, at least not for longer than a visit.

But where did she belong, if not with the last of her family?

Unbidden, the Welshman came to her mind, and the way he talked of his home.

It was lost forever because even if he stood on the same soil again, too much had changed.

The home he remembered – the place and people and feeling – was gone, and he was doomed to long for something that he could never have again.

As evening came on, the house became busy with the comings and goings of customers.

Bea must attend to business now, and she called for the little black-haired girl to take Nan to a room for the night.

“It ain’t as grand as you are used to, I’m sure,” she said, again with that faintly hostile air, “but it’s away from grunting and the sweating, and there’s enough room to stretch your legs out. ”

There wasn’t room for much more than that, but Nan was glad of this small space where she could close the door against the sounds of the brothel. Because she could not sleep, she thought over the long day, amazed that it had begun in the home of the friendly falconer.

She had not even said a farewell to the Welshman. The joy of finding Bea had wiped out all thought of him. Now she remembered the outline of his face against the glowing grate as he reproached himself for repaying her charity with dishonor.

It was the first time a man had ever said anything like that to her. There were men aplenty who had taken more than she wanted to give, but this was the only one who was sorry for it.

Sleep would not come to her, weary as she was.

There was too much to consider. She spent long hours contemplating the vast distance between the sister she had sought and the sister she had found.

It seemed impossible to bridge the space between them, until the door of her room opened and Bea was there.

She came in quietly as Nan admonished Fuss to silence, and slipped under the blanket to lie next to Nan in the dark.

“Do you think of him still?” she whispered, and Nan could hear tears in her voice. There was no question who she was talking about. “I think of him most days.”

Her hand found her sister’s and their fingers intertwined.

“Aye, how could I not?” She felt her own tears leaking out but, as she had when Bea was just a little girl, she did her best to hide them. “I promised her to look after you both.”

“There weren’t no way to save him, Nan. I’ve thought of it over and over. He were too little for anything but a wet nurse, and us with no way to pay one, and starving ourselves.”

She felt Bea’s face press into her shoulder.

This was the inescapable truth of sisters, of siblings.

No matter how different they were, no matter how far apart life took them, there was no one else who shared these memories.

The same early sorrows filled their hearts, and the same joys.

When they slept, the same places and faces appeared in their dreams. Only the two of them remembered the brother they had had for a little while, and only they could whisper his memory between them.

“It’s like I told you, little Bea. He’s our own angel in heaven now, for how could he be anywhere else.”

“I hope it’s so.”

“It is,” she insisted, suddenly more sure of it than ever. “How else can we both still be alive, and doing as well as we are? We’ve had more than our share of good fortune. It’s him looking out for us.”

She felt Bea’s arm wrap around her waist, strong and full of life, holding her close as they had used to do when they were girls.

Her sister. She had found her sister. It was all she had wanted, and here it was, holding her in the dark and sorrowful night.