She knocked twice on Villiam’s door and went in and opened the curtains. It was past noon, and the next guests would be arriving soon. Christmas lunch was the most work-intensive meal of the holiday. The girls would have to set the table with the usual implements, bring out the courses one by one. That was normal. But on this day, the tablecloth would have to be changed after each course, and the bowls for handwashing would have to be cleaned and refilled. All of this to do, and when it was over, the servants would go down to the cellar to eat their cabbage and silently sing their prayers. Lispeth was hungry. At least she could rest on that virtue.
‘Get up,’ she now said to Villiam as she pulled the blanket off his body. He wore a white nightshirt to sleep, and he had been sweating under the heavy wool covers. Lispeth could see the dark triangle of his pubis through the wet cloth. He turned and pressed his bones into the down mattress.
‘Go away,’ he said.
‘It’s Christmas, my lord,’ she said.
‘Come wake me when the food is on the table.’
* * *
*
Grigor and his family were already on their way up the hill by then. They had been stunned that morning when Klarek had knocked on their door. Grigor was suspicious of the invitation but said nothing as Jon and Vuna scurried to ready themselves for the festivities. They had only scraps left from Vuna’s holiday cooking a few days earlier, and the food hadn’t been any good to begin with. They were all hungry, and it was a long walk up to the manor.
Nobody in the village had heard from the family selected for the feast the night before. In fact, Klarek had directed the young couple and their children to wait until morning and take a back route down into the village so that they would not meet Grigor, Jon, and Vuna on the road on their way up. The soot on the children’s clothes and the bedragglement of them all would surely give cause for alarm. He gave the northern man a gold ducat.
Jon was nervous about the visit. He was afraid of saying the wrong thing and embarrassing himself, or looking unfit. He had suffered a bruised thumb from swinging his hammer a few days earlier, and it pounded and throbbed still as he walked. He complained of it to his wife.
‘You’re only nervous,’ she said.
‘Hold your hand up, the blood will drain down,’ Grigor told him.
‘You’re the one who’s nervous,’ Jon said to Vuna. The two of them had been irritable and angry for weeks now. They blamed each other for their bad moods, but really it was an effect of energy put upon them by Grigor. He was the one who made them irritable and angry. He was like a raven, judgmental and repetitive, staring down from the rafters and asserting over and over again that the world they lived in was a sham. ‘But it doesn’t bother me. I’m free,’ he proclaimed. His freedom was grating on them all. Finally, they had told him to keep his freedom to himself, and he had agreed.
‘I am nervous,’ Vuna confessed. She had good reason to be. She was pregnant—she could feel the thing inside her, like a gnarled fist twisting in her womb—but she hadn’t told Jon yet. She wanted to wait until she was sure. She had miscarried before, and Jon had blamed her. A week of silence and snubbing, his cold back turned to her in the bed, no warmth or comfort, only shame. He had sneered at the blood in the water when she did the washing, tears and snot dripping down the poor girl’s face. This time, she hoped, the babe was more certain. Keeping the secret made her feel powerful and ornery, a feeling she didn’t often allow herself. ‘I’m nervous because you hurried me out the door!’ she said to Jon. ‘And now my cap is crooked.’
‘What do you care about your cap? You’re a married woman. And you barely have any hair.’
‘It’s Christmas,’ Vuna hissed. ‘Everyone wants to look their best on Christmas.’
Grigor held his tongue. He and his wife had bickered, too, of course, but they’d had an easier time of life. They’d had only one son on the first try. Jon’s mother had been smart and hearty. Vuna was more delicate, quick to blush and fume and cry, but not weak, no. She had a wisdom that nobody could recognize; the deaths of her children hadn’t torn the innocence from her heart, but had calloused her against her own rage. She knew that fighting was pointless. As a woman, she would always lose. It was not her place to stage a battle, but to back away to preserve what life she had left to live. Grigor felt sorry for her. In his eyes, her passion had been depleted. But he pitied his son more, as Jon had no clue how ruinous his rage was to his own spirit. Grigor could see him aging day by day, the creases in his brow deepening like burrows, or like tracks from the plow. Good that Jon’s mother died before the grandchildren were slain. She would have been bitter until the end, would have talked ceaselessly about the injustice, turned hard and rancorous. Nobody would have been capable of putting up with her fury. Grigor’s angst was nothing in comparison. There was no right way to deal with grief, of course. When God gives you more than you can tolerate, you turn to instinct. And instinct is a force beyond anyone’s control.