‘How did he die?’ she asked again, her eyebrows raised. ‘What did it look like?’ Her only curiosity was in the morbid details, Marek thought. And it was true. Lispeth got some pleasure now in asking, knowing that it must sting, ‘Did he die from an accident? Like Jacob?’ She turned in her chair toward him. Marek’s eyes were open, his face half sunk into the dent in the pillow that she herself had made. She felt him bristle. ‘Did you throw a stone at him, too?’ she asked and gripped the seat of her chair on both sides, fully expecting that Marek would lurch up and strike her. She braced for it.
But of course Marek did nothing. He simply turned away from her in the bed and cried some more. His self-pity was his best comfort.
‘It’s easy to kill people,’ was all Lispeth said. That was as far as her sympathy could reach.
* * *
*
Since the drought, no entertainers had visited the manor. Invitations were declined or dismissed; nobody had the strength to be entertaining. But Villiam said he wanted the singer from Krisk to come, a renowned master of the lullaby. He sent Luka to deliver his fee, an outrageous sum to ensure he’d agree, and to bring the singer back. It was dangerous for Luka to embark on such a journey in the heat, but he had no choice. Nobody could say no to Villiam, especially Luka, as Villiam had known of and permitted the horseman’s affair with Dibra for well over a decade. It was widely understood in the manor that Dibra and Luka were lovers, that he slept in her chambers a few nights a week, that nobody but Luka could calm her nerves or even approach her when she was in the throes of mourning early on after Jacob’s death. For Luka to refuse Villiam’s order would have been to admit to the adultery. The same went for any expression of grief over the death of Jacob. Had Luka expelled a single tear for the boy, anything more than Clod or the cook might give, a sentimental frown, Luka would have been openly confessing to his paternity and calling Villiam a cuckold.
In the months since Jacob’s death, Dibra had rarely emerged from the still, airless room in her corner of the manor. Only Luka and her handmaid, Jenevere, went in to see her. Nobody wondered at Dibra’s grief—she had lost her child. All that was left of him were the stuffed animals mounted on the wall. Only once did Dibra and Luka go into Jacob’s room together, visiting the heather cock, the fallow deer, the wolf, the snipe. It was too sad. Those little noses and eyes. All the death. The world was so sweet and cruel. Shame. Luka and Dibra each felt that they had it worse than the other. Dibra had been Jacob’s mother. He had come from inside her body. A part of her had died, the life smashed and dragged away, and nobody could acknowledge the incredible tragedy of that, her beautiful boy, her child who was the promise of some better life, who had said, ‘When I’m old enough, I’ll take you away from here.’
And Luka had been deprived of the son he had never been able to claim in the first place. For him, there was a doubling of loss. A few times, Jacob had snuck out to accompany Luka on his horse, and father and son would converse over the clobbering of hooves against the ground or snow in winter. They traded stories of animals they’d spied, vultures and crows, mice that acted funny, deer and elk and other game that Jacob liked to hunt. Luka never dissuaded Jacob from hunting. He was, technically, Jacob’s servant, and couldn’t pass judgment or try to impose his loyalty to nature onto the young man. He never let on that he was the boy’s real father—to do so was a death sentence for both him and Dibra. The couple had often fantasized when the boy was little of riding off into the sunset with him. ‘I have enough gold left in my dowry to buy a small bit of land on the coast, where the people are freer,’ Dibra said. But they’d never summoned the courage to go. It seemed impossible, a fairy tale they told each other in bed at night. ‘Maybe one day . . . ’ Dibra learned a little of Luka’s faith and why the servants worshipped only by night. ‘The stars are God’s, Luka told her. ‘How else do you explain such light in the darkness?’
She was, to him, a holy grace, far more powerful than any priest or nun. God lived in her eyes. That was how he had fallen for her—like a religious conversion. It had struck him the moment he’d seen her, a profound, eternal love, the kind that occurred by cause of fate, against reason. Luka had been the one to fetch her from her home in Kaprov and deliver her to Villiam when she was sixteen. Luka was seventeen. He had carted up the gold-hinged trunk holding her dowry. She kissed her parents goodbye and strode out to the carriage, lifting her bridal veil to look at Luka, who held his hat in his hands. That was the moment. He was tall, with broad shoulders, eyes a bit far apart, his jaw strong and angular, his face wide and flat, his hair always shorn close to his skull because the horses had mites and the dogs in the stable fleas. ‘I love you,’ she had said as he held her hand to help her into the carriage. It was that obvious and simple. The ride back to Lapvona felt infinite. Time stopped, although the horses kept moving. Luka looked back at the carriage as he rode. Nobody had loved him before.