‘Marek, you be Mary,’ he said.
‘Me?’
‘Go on. Don’t get fussy.’
Marek didn’t want to be Mary. He froze. It was, perhaps, the first time in his life that his judgment was good. To play a pregnant woman was a perversion he simply could not entertain. ‘Where’s my mother?’ he asked.
Villiam opened his mouth, ready to deliver some grand speech, but he was interrupted.
‘I’ll be your Mary.’ It was a male voice that spoke from the dark corner of the stable, muffled under the pawing of the horses against their sleeping hay.
‘Who said that?’ For a moment Villiam pictured Luka in the corner, back from hell or wherever he’d gone. ‘Who goes there?’
Jude didn’t answer aloud, but it seemed he spun the air at that moment, and a wind swirled through the stable, lifting a flame from Villiam’s torch and spilling fire onto the pile of hay at his feet. Within an instant, the crèche was burning. The little Jesus doll crackled in the flames.
‘Goddamnit!’ Villiam cried again, dropping the torch and running out. ‘Lissss! Peth!’
* * *
*
Much of the stable burned, but none of the animals were hurt. All the servants and visitors exhausted themselves spilling the buckets of water that Jude and the stableboys loaded back and forth from the reservoir on the horses. Marek and Villiam watched through the windows of the house for a while. Thank God Villiam was unharmed. But he was worried that the visitors—who were still putting out the fire—would go down to Lapvona and report that he had burned the crèche on purpose. He wasn’t sure what had happened.
‘Do you think they’ll tell?’ Villiam wondered aloud.
‘Probably,’ Marek answered. ‘People like to gossip.’
‘Will they say I was sloppy with the torch?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then what good are you?’ Villiam snapped. ‘I thought you knew these people.’
‘If you ask me, it was the horseman who did it.’
‘The horseman started the fire?’ Villiam rubbed his pale chin. ‘Yes, yes. I think you’re right. My cousin. He is a rather rough type, no? I’ll go tell them.’ Villiam turned to go out again. ‘Should I put the horseman in the stockade, Marek? Would that make the story more true?’
‘They might kill him then,’ Marek said. He wasn’t opposed to that idea. His father had died once before. Maybe this death would teach him to be kind.
‘No, you’re right,’ Villiam said on his way out. ‘That would only make more of a fuss.’
Marek watched through the window as the lord approached the young couple, straining with the buckets toward the fire. Villiam barely noticed the heat and smoke. The northern man had burned his hand and wrapped it in his wife’s veil. ‘God trusts your honor not to gossip,’ Villiam shouted over the crackling flames. ‘The poor horseman didn’t mean to spark this inferno. Let’s leave it at that, all right?’
The villagers coughed and wiped the cold sweat from their faces and promised they would only say that they’d had a beautiful Christmas Eve at the manor, and that they would cherish the memory as long as they lived.
Of course, it would be impossible not to gossip, as everyone was awaiting a report, and the young family were not liars but good honest Christians.
* * *
*
In the morning, Lispeth cleared the table of the feast, which had been left overnight to feed the ghosts, as was tradition. She saw that someone had eaten the bread and the cakes, but the pheasant had been untouched and was stiff and coagulated on its platter. She poked at it in disgust, then carried it into the kitchen. Her eyes were sore after the long night and she wet them with a few tears as she tilted the platters of food into the slop buckets. Then she carried the buckets out to the pigs. She could tell by the look of the pigs that they were angry. They turned their asses toward the slop. Lispeth was apologetic. The largest of them, a pretty sow with black ears, had been slaughtered and was now roasting on a spit in the kitchen, in celebration of Christmas. Clod had been put in charge of that.
‘Happy Christmas,’ Marek said to Lispeth later as she passed by the door to the great room on her way to wake Villiam.
She said nothing, just kept walking up the stairs. There was no good in speaking to the boy. Even opening her mouth toward him made her feel she had done too much. His face looked to her even more twisted and ugly than before, its flesh like the cold fat jiggling off the pheasant she had just thrown to the pigs. Lispeth felt in her heart that he was not long for the manor. She couldn’t picture him living into the future. Something would happen to free her of his face—the persistent reminder of Jacob’s absence. She ought to kill Marek herself. She’d thought about it many times.