Villiam sat and immediately reached for a leg of lamb. ‘Sit there, sister,’ he said to the nun, pointing with the meat to the chair across from the priest. Father Barnabas was licking his fingers—he never waited for Villiam to sit before he started eating. The servants brought the capon roast and twisted bread.
Dibra sat silently at the other end of the table, trying to block out Villiam’s face with the candelabra so she would not have to watch him eat. Villiam was fine with that. Dibra wasn’t looking her best. She was underdressed for the occasion, and she didn’t care. It was still too hot to wear the customary dining gown, so she wore a simple yellow kirtle of thin linen. Her armpits were wet and clammy, the fabric tight around her bosom, which seemed to swell unusually on the left, as though her heart had become enlarged. Ironically, she felt her heart had gotten weaker and smaller recently. She was not self-pitying, however. ‘Women have lost children since the dawn of time,’ she told herself. She imagined women everywhere, all the stories she’d heard of children going missing, or children dying of fever or pox, babies dying in their cradles, strangled by their own lungs. If those women could go on, so could she. But only barely. She had nothing to distract her from her grief, nothing of any consequence—no needs or habits or work or interests. There was Luka, but his loyalty made him boring, actually. Until this moment. He was never late.
‘Is the singer not joining us?’ Dibra asked, masking her worry as mild curiosity.
‘He must be lagging on his journey back from Krisk,’ the priest answered.
‘It has never taken so long to fetch the singer before,’ Dibra said.
‘Well, today it has.’
‘The horseman left at dawn as usual?’
‘Who cares, Dibra?’ the priest said. He was deflecting in order to spare Villiam her distress about this other man, not knowing that Luka was good as dead. ‘And anyway, we have a nun instead.’
‘Yes, thank God for the nun,’ Villiam said and raised his cup.
‘Give me a nun any day,’ the priest said and raised his cup, too.
‘Of course,’ Dibra said and raised her cup.
Agata seemed to blush and lifted her cup. They all drank.
‘What is your name, sister?’ Dibra asked.
Agata opened her mouth, pointed inside, then waved her finger back and forth. The nun’s tongue had been cut out, they all saw.
‘Is that what they’re doing to girls now, Father? Cutting out their tongues?’ Dibra asked.
‘I don’t think so, no. She is not typical.’
‘But she must have some party tricks,’ Villiam said, a little concerned. ‘If she doesn’t talk, what does she do?’
‘Maybe she dances,’ Dibra said.
‘A dancing nun? Of course, that’s wonderful,’ Villiam said with his mouth full.
Now Marek made his presence known, trudging into the great room with his ruined shoes. Nobody turned to greet him. Lispeth followed him to the table, gently pulled out his chair, waited for him to sit, and pushed it in. Like a little child, Dibra thought. Helpless and full of himself at the same time. Oh, Dibra hated him. But there was something strange about his face tonight. It, too, looked scorched, like the nun’s. Preoccupied. Lispeth poured Marek a cup of wine and went out. Another servant came forth to dish out the roast lamb around the table.
Marek put his hand on his plate.
‘I don’t want meat,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ Villiam said.
‘I don’t want to eat meat anymore.’
‘Give him the whole platter,’ Villiam said, nodding to the servant. ‘No son of mine will starve.’
But Marek did not eat. He looked carefully in the candlelight toward the nun.
‘Is she the singer tonight?’ he asked.
Dibra thought his question a bit forward. Marek hardly ever spoke at the dinner table and certainly never asked anything before. It was his role to be quiet and accept without question anything that happened at the manor. Marek was surprised by his question, too, and immediately covered his mouth to apologize. He had asked it automatically, without thinking. He looked down at the plate of lamb set before him. It smelled of the pasture—dead flesh cooked in the hot dirt. He didn’t want to eat it. Especially not now, in front of the nun.
‘Eat your meat,’ Villiam said. And to the nun he asked, ‘Do you sing, sister?’
‘You idiot, she’s mute,’ Dibra said.
‘Temper, temper,’ Father Barnabas said.