Couched Work

At first sight, Anna had seemed a promising addition to Daviau’s brothel.  The woman was clean, with reasonably attractive features and all her teeth. Her clothes were of good wool, nicely woven and neatly sewn.  The gown was unfaded blue, with bands of fancy stitching round the neck and cuffs, cinched by a belt; the shift underneath, which nearly covered her stout leather shoes, was grey; and she wore a russet wimple that covered her head and shoulders.  The style might be a bit different from the usual; but the overall impression—at least to Janette’s eye—was that of any decent housewife.  Wherever had Daviau got her, Janette wondered?  There was, of course, no point in asking him.  She posited that the woman was some knight’s leman.  Perhaps he had tired of her, perhaps he was dead.

She ventured to ask her name.  At first, the only answer was an annoyingly blank look.  Then, with more focus, came a hesitant response.  “Min nama … is Friðugyth.”

This earned the woman a cuff on the ear that shocked her into frozen silence.

“In French, you poxy pig!” Daviau ordered.

The response was stammered with an accent so heavy that Janette had trouble understanding any of it.  “I am called Friðugyth, daughter of Anna.”

“God’s balls!  What a tongue-twister!” sneered Daviau.

“Fridoo-git?” Janette stumbled.  No, more like, “Frizzoo-giff.”

“We’ll call you Anna,” Daviau said flatly.

The mother of Mary.  Well, Janette thought, it was not a common name, but familiar from the priest’s stories of the Christ child’s family.

So Anna she became.

Whatever her history, though, Janette soon realized that the new woman had not come to the brothel by choice.  When Daviau ordered her to lie down so that he might try his purchase, she struggled against him.  Indeed, she even drew her belt knife.  He hit her, snatched the knife with his longer reach while she was half stunned, and tossed her on the palliasse.  There he hied up her skirts, pried her legs open, and used her as hard as he could so that she would know what she was for.  She tried to bite, and he hit her again.  Then he went out, taking the money that Janette’s clients had paid that day, and barred the door behind him from the outside.  Anna would have no chance to run; and Janette realized resignedly that she herself was left behind to serve as jailer.

There was half a loaf of bread and the end of a smoked sausage.  She used her own little knife to slice them onto a wooden plate and poured out a small jug of thin wine.  When she went to share the food, though, she found Anna crumpled on the palliasse with her face pressed into the ticking, crying too hard to eat.  Janette ate the whole meal herself; yet, despite feeling uncommonly well filled, she was annoyed.  Why on earth had Daviau picked a woman who was clearly no experienced whore?  The clients would expect to get what they’d paid for without having it wept over; and, if Anna went on like this when put to work, the men would complain.

Yes, they would indeed, she thought, looking at the weeping lump.  And Daviau had a temper.  So it would be better for Janette herself if the woman learned her place as quickly as possible so that life could return to normal.

This was not how she had envisioned her evening.  Usually, when she and the others had finished with clients and Daviau was in a good mood, they would all go to a tavern for music and a late supper of good stew and bread.  There would be plenty of wine to wash it all down; and they would come back happily tipsy.  Often enough, indeed, he would be too tipsy to want to tup one of them—which was fine, in Janette’s estimation, for she got enough of that from the paying customers.  She glanced again at the palliasse, where the sobs seemed to have died to a long whimper.  When Daviau had said that afternoon that he would be bringing back another whore, Janette had thought to be glad of new company.  Right now, though, Anna was nothing but a nuisance.

The sobs rose again, only slightly lessened from their first volume.  Janette went over and sat down.  At the sound of her step and the weight on the straw, Anna looked round.  Then, clumsy and sore, she sat up and shifted over a little to make room.  Her cheeks were wet, her nose snotty, and her eyes blank with shock.

“You’ll get used to it,” Janette said comfortingly.  “Just don’t fight him.  He doesn’t like it; and you’ll get hit again.”

“Why does he want me?” Anna said.  Her accent was thick, but the words were simple enough to make out.   “He has you,” she added; and then, after a considering pause, “Are you his sister, then?”

“Well,” said Janette, stating the obvious, “with another whore, he’ll make more money.”

For a moment, Anna looked puzzled.  Then, slowly, her face shattered with comprehension.  “No!” she cried, and scrambled away across the bed as if Janette herself were about to mount her.

Janette got annoyed.  Well, after all, what had Anna thought Daviau had brought her here for?

“I knew something was wrong,” Anna muttered, almost to herself.  She had gone very pale.  “But Egbert said to go with him; and I was a good wife and obeyed.”  She focused on Janette.  “What shall I do?”

It was a true appeal; and Janette responded.  “Well, if I were you, I’d do what you’re told.  It’s always easiest that way.  Please the men:  then they’ll pay well, and Daviau will be happy with you.”  After a moment, seeing that Anna was clearly not responding to simple sense, she added more tartly, “For the love of Mary, don’t fight the men the way you did Daviau!  If you do, he’ll just find clients for you who like that sort of thing.  They’ll probably pay him more; but you’ll really hate serving them!  I don’t want to see you finish up in the Seine!”

Most of this good advice obviously passed right over Anna’s head:  her poor French meant she understood barely half of it, if that.

“I have money,” she said to Janette.  Her face was still marred from her bouts of weeping; but she wiped her eyes, and fished a short length of linen from the sleeve of her shift to blow her nose.  “Not here,” she corrected.  “My family has money.  If I can get word to them….”

“You are in Paris,” said Janette bluntly, “not wherever it is you come from.”

“London,” said Anna.

“In England?  Across the Channel?” said Janette in surprise.

“My husband—Egbert—he is a merchant.  He said that this time he wanted me to travel with him, on the ship, on his journey.  He—”

“Wanted to get rid of you?” asked Janette.   But it was not truly a question.  “Why?  Are you barren?”  She asked in a matter-of-fact tone; but it would, she thought, explain much.  Then, seeing the blank look on Anna’s face and remembering her poor French, she said simply, “You could not have a baby?”

Almost a year before, she herself had become pregnant—by which client she had no idea.  Daviau had hit her before throwing her the money for the midwife.  She could almost taste the foul-tasting herbal concoction she had had to down; feel the contractions, the ache in her belly when she returned to work two days later.

Anna was well off in her barrenness, to Janette’s mind.

But she saw the other woman’s face flush with shame.  “Oh, I wanted to give him a son; I wanted it so much.”  Anna bit her lip; and winced, for it was swollen where Daviau had hit her.  “I need to get home,” she said, more to herself than Janette.  “I need to get home.”

“Why?” asked Janette bluntly.  “It does not seem to me that there is anything for you there, not now.  Anyway, Daviau will never let you out alone on the other side of a barred door until he can be sure you won’t try to run.”

“Could you take a message?” asked Anna hopefully.

“To London!”

“To any English merchant who is here in Paris now.  My family is known.  You will be paid, I promise you.”

“Paid by Daviau, you mean,” said Janette.  Anna could be saying any lie to get the door open.  “I do not like to be beaten, anymore than anyone else does.  He probably paid good money for you.”

“I am no thrall!” said Anna.  And, sore as she was from Daviau, she straightened her back.  “My family may not be thanes—” (not a word Janette understood) “—but we are free—” (which she did) “—and with a good trading business, too, I tell you!”

From the change in her demeanour, Janette began to suspect that it might even be true.  That did not, however, in any way alter Anna’s situation, nor Janette’s.  This was Paris, not London.  The other woman’s family was not known here; nor was there any practical way to get word to them.  And Daviau’s fury would be certain.

A few days later, and Anna had become silently wary when Daviau was around and ceased to struggle.  Janette knew he would think her ready to work; and, sure enough, a day later there was a man at the door with chinking coins.  With a gesture to Janette to follow, Daviau left them to it; and, if the client complained afterwards, neither woman heard about it, which—to Janette’s mind—indicated that Anna had been adequately compliant.  And so the English wife became a French whore.

Once Daviau decided that Anna could be reasonably trusted not to run, he handed over coin to Janette and told her to take the new woman to the market so that she could buy a change or two of shifts, and such other things as women find necessary.  This immediately generated a fine argument between the two women.  Janette headed for the door with her hair around her shoulders, as was the custom for prostitutes, while Anna—all outraged Christian decency—began automatically to don her russet wimple, and expected Janette to produce a similar head-veil.  The two of them finally left the building with Anna bare-headed and rather pink in the face.

The city was large, with several markets; and Janette led the way through the narrow streets to the nearest, pointing out the route as they went so that Anna would know the landmarks for the future.  To her irritation, instead of visiting the cheaper stalls, Anna promptly headed for a shop selling bolts of new cloth which they could neither afford nor make up.  As best she could in the simple words the Englishwoman understood, Janette tried to explain that they needed secondhand garments, instead, and then took Anna from stall to stall to pick over what linen was on hand.  It was, Janette thought, just as well that she had been told to accompany the woman (even though she suspected that Daviau had ordered it primarily lest his new whore get lost or belatedly try to run off).  Left to shop on her own, there was no saying what Anna might think to buy.  Indeed, even looking at used clothes, she was hard to please.  Janette held up a shift dyed a pretty soft pink, holding it up to see the length, only to have the other woman take the cloth in both hands, snap them apart to test the quality, rub the weave, and shake her head.

“Poor quality stuff,” she said scornfully.  “I would not give it to a servant.”

Instead, she pulled a larger bleached-white shift from the pile, proclaiming it worth at least bargaining for.  “Though there is wear along the hem,” she said, with an eye to the stallholder, “which counts against the price I will pay.”

“It is much too large,” Janette protested.

“But if we buy some thread, I can take it in,” said Anna, simply.

And so Janette found herself stammering her inability to sew, and had to face Anna’s surprise that she did not know so basic a skill of her sex.  Nevertheless, they did purchase the thread; and, when they returned to their room, she was intrigued to see Anna measure herself with a cord, pin in the sides of the shift, and take needle and thimble from her belt pouch, before carrying a stool to the window where she sat in the last of the afternoon sun, a shaft of light gilding her brown hair as she worked her neat stitches.  If, at times when Anna thought no one saw, a strained misery showed on her face, Janette took care not to notice.

Of course, the work had to be set aside when the first client arrived.  But, since the men came most often when the cycle of their trade left slack time, there was a pattern to the lives of the whores in the brothel.

Anna finished the new shift two days later; and, when she finally changed, putting the dirty garment aside to be taken for laundering, Janette marvelled at the trim fit she had achieved.

“Why it’s just plain sewing!” said Anna in surprise.  “Not bléocræft.” As Janette looked puzzled at the unfamiliar word, Anna touched the fancy bands that trimmed the neckline of her gown.  “I made these myself,” she said, with a touch of pride, and then added shyly, “If I had coloured thread, I could make some for your gown, too.  If you like them.”

Janette did, very much.

It was not only Janette who noticed Anna’s skill with the needle.  After she had taken Janette’s brown gown and embroidered the neckline richly with dyed wool thread, Daviau suggested that she spend her idle time in further sewing.  He even handed over coin for the purchase of woven bands for her to embroider, and wool thread—even sometimes threads of silk—tinted rose and blue, yellow and green with dyes made from madder, woad, and weld, and even the expensive scarlet of kermes.

If, at first, Anna had hopes that her skill would earn her freedom from serving clients, she was quickly disabused.  Daviau, of course, simply saw her as doubly valuable.  As he had bought her, so he owned her work.  He took the bands as they were finished, sold them, and gave Anna only the smallest part of the money they brought; and, of course, still sent her clients to service.

Nevertheless, though her personal profit was slight, the work itself seemed to give Anna satisfaction.  That pleased Janette, who wanted her settled and happy.  On sunny days, as the Englishwoman sat by the window to work, she could chat gossip with her of the town, and the clients, and the other women in the brothel.  Anna’s company became quite a habit.  Indeed, Janette would have called her friend, if it were a word she had ever dared to use of anyone

As for Daviau, he was a cocky, merry man when his life went well:  it was how he brought clients to his whores, and how he wooed whores to his brothel.  As his brothel prospered, so he bought rounds in the tavern and became ever more popular with the men there—and not unpopular with the women, as long as his mood remained good.  With more money coming in, he invested some of it in a wooden bed.  A real bed!  Secondhand, of course; and far from ornate.  It was undoubtedly purchased to impress the clients.  Still, it was a luxury at which Janette marvelled, which pleased him.

Anna’s enthusiasm was rather more muted.

“A really truly bed!” Janette pointed out, with excitement.

“Yes, I see,” said Anna.  Then, politely (for she could see that Daviau expected more, and did not want to annoy him), she added, “a very fine bed indeed.  We shall be comfortable in it.”  And so, indeed, they were—especially when Daviau had stayed out late carousing, and no client had paid to spend the night.  Then, it was just the two women together, with the fire covered and the rushlight blown out, whispering in the dark.  By now, just as Anna’s French had improved, Janette had picked up a few words of the English tongue.  It was their secret language.

So life continued, in the pattern of their hours and the cycle of their days.

It was perhaps half a year later, shortly after a noonday client had left and they had eaten their dinner, that Anna took out her latest embroidery, sorted out the wool she wanted, and threaded her needles.  She had begun a long band of twining vines, with fronds of leaves in their curves, set alternately from one side to the other, each leaf split and pointed.  The full length had now been outlined in neat stem stitch.  Now, she laid down threads back and forth across one of the leaves to fill in the space, before picking up a needle of blue to couch the threads down in neat small stitches, binding them to the woollen band.

“Fine enough for a knight or his lady,” commented Janette.  “Or a bishop’s cope.”

Anna looked up.  “At home, I helped with a cloth for the altar of our church.”  Her tongue caught at the final words, tears came to her eyes, and she looked away, blinking hard.

Janette feigned not to see, and hoped the mood would pass.

Instead though, Anna asked in a low voice, “Oh, Janette, I may fill my time with bléocræft.  But that does not mean that I am content with this life.  How can you be?  Why do you not leave?  You cannot like being a whore!”

“Leave!  But it is better here!”  After her mother’s death, Janette had been left alone on the streets to scrabble for what she could find.  It had been a hard, cold, hungry time from which Daviau had come as saviour.

“Ah,” said Anna softly.  “I am sorry for you.”

Janette hesitated, and then put out her hand to cover Anna’s, where it rested on the cloth with the threaded needle forgotten.  “I should be sorry for you,” she said.  Clearly Anna was less resigned to her lot than she had thought.  “This is my good life, now with Daviau.”  She was a little ashamed that she had not wanted to recognize Anna’s unhappiness:  of course, for someone who had been born into a good family, who had been mistress of her own house and knew fancy embroidery, life in the brothel would be a great change.  “But you know,” she paused, drawing back a little, knowing the next words would be hard for her friend to hear, “it would be better if you tried to forget, it really would.  Just suppose, somehow, that you were to leave Paris, make it to the coast, sail across the water to England, and get back to London?  What would you do once you arrived there?  Any dowry you took to your marriage belongs now to your husband, who will surely never take you back.  Your family probably has been told that you are dead.  In any case, they will not own you, not after this!”  Anna was looking at her strangely; and, emboldened, Janette continued, “What could you do in London but be a whore there, as you are here?  I know this is not what you want to hear; I know it isn’t fair; but you have no other life now, Anna, not any more.”

Anna gave her an odd little smile.  For a moment, Janette thought it meant her words had got through.  Then Anna spoke.

“Janette, if I could get home, then I would leave Egbert and take my property back from his control.  My family would avenge the wrong done me—done them!  And if, afterwards, they felt shamed to have me under their roof, I have my skill with my needle.”  She lifted it slightly for emphasis.  “I could keep myself quite well as a byrdicge … a … what would you call it in French? … a ’brouderess.”

Janette was startled at such naïveté.

Anna looked out of the window.  “This may be your ‘good life’, Janette; but it is not mine.  Still, I accept that life here could be worse, much worse.  There are many who suffer … have suffered … no doubt will suffer, far worse than I.”  And then, under her breath she added something that Janette could not quite catch:  “Þæs ofereode, þises swa mæg.”  And, after a long pause, she turned back to couching the threads that filled in the leaves twining along the woollen band.

But, from Janette’s point of view, these were the good times.  Indeed, her life had never been so happy.

It could not last:  her whole life’s experience should have told her that.

In such close quarters, it was always clear when their blood-time came.  Most men would not lie with a woman then, considering her unclean; so, despite the nuisance of washing out the fleece-lined pads, it was in some ways a few days of holiday.  At first, Janette simply thought that her friend’s courses were late.  It could be nothing more since, after all, Anna was barren.

The monthly bleeding was women’s business; and, on the whole, they both tried to keep it private from Daviau, since it embarrassed a man to see a woman deal with menstrual blood.  So, perhaps, he didn’t notice that first missed month.  Perhaps not the second, either:  after all, he too knew Anna to be barren.

Yet Anna had had a delicate stomach for weeks:  such an obvious sign.  Afterwards, Janette was furious with herself for not realizing:  of course, she should have guessed!  But, at the time, it did not even occur to her, except in passing as something that she knew could not be true (since Anna was, after all, barren).  So instead, she worried that her friend was ill, with who knew what pox or plague.

In the end, it was the stall owner in the market from whom they bought their Friday fish who finally said in words aloud what Anna had been keeping holy in her heart for the past few months.  “So when are you due?” she asked.  And Anna replied, “In August, I think.”  And Janette’s heart sank.

“You must get rid of it,” she said immediately they got behind the closed, latched door.

Anna was horrified.  “My blessed babe?  My miracle?”

“Daviau will not think it a miracle,” Janette warned.

“Then do not tell him!”

“Do you think him a fool?” Janette hissed, keeping her voice as low as she could manage.  “He is bound to see—and sooner rather than later, if you are due in August.  You are hardly the first whore to conceive a child.  And yes, some do bear their children, I suppose:  bear them, and then raise them to be whores!  But I can tell you that Daviau will not want to lose the money that you earn!”  And she told Anna of her own lost pregnancy and Daviau’s reaction, and the herbs that the midwife had given her:  wild carrot and periwinkle in hot strong wine.

“I am sorry,” said Anna, staring.  “I did not know.”

“I am not,” said Janette.  “Better to lose it fast and early than be put out on the street and live like that again.  Go to the midwife, Anna.  Your babe has not quickened yet in your womb:  she will still help you.  Use your own coin, instead of asking Daviau; and then he need never know.”

Anna simply shook her head.  “I cannot, Janette.  I cannot.  I have longed for a child; I have yearned for one.  It changes everything, do you not see that?”

“Yes,” said Janette bluntly.  “If you do not get rid of it, then it certainly will change everything.”

“I cannot.”

“Then you must leave.”

“And go where?”

“I don’t know.  But you cannot stay here.  Once Daviau knows—”

Anna simply stared at her, with a lost helpless look that made Janette want to shake her.   Could she not see how angry he would be?

But, to Anna, the thought of being alone in a strange city in a strange land was far more terrifying than Daviau, for by now she thought she knew him.  So simply shook her head.  Then she went to the chest and took out her latest embroidery, sat on the stool by the window, and set to work.  She had already completed the rose pink fleurs de lys.  Now she bent her head to the green ground of the roundels that surrounded them, carefully couching the threads.  In close attention to her stitches, she could lose the world around her and be content.  Her face smoothed, and her mouth relaxed, and she almost looked happy.

It was the first time that Janette had found her friend’s skill less fascinating and more frustrating; and she flounced out of the room.

Not two months later, Anna’s condition finally became obvious to Daviau; and he was furious.  Not so much at the pregnancy itself, which was an occupational hazard, but that Anna had kept it from him for so long.  It was not yet, he insisted, too late for her to abort the child.

Anna refused; and, even as he smacked her across the face, staunchly repeated her defiance.

“You turd-headed daughter of a heathen!” he yelled.  “Do as I say, or I’ll beat you so hard you’ll miscarry anyway!”

Anna backed away, arms down to protect her belly, and received a punch in the chest that left her gasping desperately for breath.  Daviau then proceeded to slap her, back and forth on each side of her head, boxing her ears till she was dazed and silly.

“No, no!” cried Janette, trying vainly to cling to one of his arms and make him stop.  “No, leave her alone!”  He simply shoved her back, so hard she nearly fell.  She caught herself in time, looked wildly round for someone to come to their aid, and then hung back dithering.

Finally, Daviau gave Anna one final clout on the cheek and swivelled on his heel.  “Bring her to her senses,” he ordered Janette, and stalked out of the door.

Anna was almost too dizzy to stand and had to be helped to the bed, where she sank onto the sheets, sobbing for breath.  Biting her lip at the sight, Janette sat down beside her, rubbing her shoulder and patting her back until her breathing eased.  “I did warn you,” she said.

“I know,” Anna said.  She began to cry, almost with the ceaseless heavy sobs of her first day at the brothel, and finally had to blow her nose loudly.

“I hate him,” said Janette, in a low hard voice.  “If you want to have your baby, why not?  You earn him enough with your embroidery:  why can’t that be enough?”

“And if I could not sew?” asked Anna, pointedly.  “Why can’t the child be enough in itself?”

To that, Janette had no answer that her friend could accept.  She could offer nothing but her sympathy, and her newfound resentment of Daviau’s control over them.

He left them alone for a couple of hours, and then came swaggering back to see if Anna had changed her mind as ordered.  When he found her still obdurate, he hauled Janette out of the room, telling her to see her clients elsewhere.  He then barred the door to their room so that Anna could not leave.  In another room, therefore, Janette perforce had to entertain the men she was sent, all four of them, smiling and flirting to rouse them to their pleasure, while her mind wandered all the while to the room with the bed.  Where might Daviau be?  Was he downstairs running the house or gone to the tavern?  Or had he returned to their room to try to ‘convince’ Anna once more.

Later, much later, she was free to go back, and found the door unbarred.  She lifted the latch not knowing what she might find, and was relieved to see Anna lying alone on the bed—relieved, that is, until she heard her friend’s weak voice.  In the dim light, she had not made out the state Anna was in; but at closer quarters, her face was clearly bruised, her lip split.  Daviau must have returned to beat her again.  What injuries lay under the covers Janette could not see; but the fact that Anna did not rise to greet her was itself frightening.

“I hate him,” Janette said passionately.  “Look what he’s done to you!  Is it very bad?”

Anna shifted painfully, trying to conceal how much it hurt.  “It’s my fault,” she said in a low, painful rasp.  “I should have gone away before he found out.”  She shifted again, only slightly; but it brought a wince.

Oh! thought Janette.  What a woman will suffer for a child!  All this pain, and long before the pangs of birth, too.  And yet, and yet … Anna would bear all this and the suffering to come—and yet more if need be!—and do so in joy.  “What’s it like, this baby?” she asked, wonderingly.

“You’ll find out one day,” said Anna, with a fond little smile.  Then she added, wrily, “If I’d found out sooner, I’d still be married and living in England instead of a prostitute in Paris.”

“So then,” responded Janette tartly, “you would be lying down for one man instead of twenty.”  She could see no difference:  least of all where Anna’s Egbert was concerned.  Her anger rose—at the English merchant who had sold his own wife, at the pimp who had bought her, at the men who rented her by the hour.  “Is it really better?” she asked.  “If it’s not one master, it’s another, eh?”  Then, more softly, she added, “But at least this way we have each other.”

Anna looked at her with affection, but then gasped again as the pain shot through her.  The irony was too much.  “My husband put me out because I couldn’t conceive a child.  Now Daviau will put me out because I did.”

“No.  No, he can’t,” came the instant protest.

“I can’t earn my keep like this,” Anna pointed out.  Beaten and injured as she was, she could see no clients:  soon, big-bellied as she would be, none would want her.

“I can,” said Janette fiercely.  “I can earn enough for both of us.”

“Then you’d better get started.”  Janette started in shock at the sound of the voice behind her, and found herself spun round hard.   “If you want your next meal,” Daviau added with light contempt, “you’ll go where your customers are.”  And he flung her toward the door.

She caught herself before she fell.  He did not expand on his words, but turned his head back to glare at Anna, helpless on the bed.

“She needs a doctor,” said Janette, knowing that Daviau would never spend the coin.

Daviau leered, “No, she’ll need a priest!”  And he laughed at the jest.

Sheer despair harshened Janette’s voice as she cried, “How can you do this?  You’re killing her!”  Yet, even as Daviau hustled her out of the room, she could not truly believe that he intended Anna’s death.

Once outside, he again barred the door to the room.  Then he twisted her arm behind her back and told her brusquely to get out of the brothel.

“What?” she cried.

“Troll the taverns for a man or two.  Get their coin and earn her keep, and then you may come back.”

She stared at him in disbelief.  He ran a high-class brothel:  it had separate rooms; the clients were sent to her, unless she paraded below to catch their eye.  Sometimes, true, there would be a man who wished a whore in his own bed—all night, perhaps—but, in that case, she would be escorted to his house by Daviau, especially if it were after dark.  She was no streetwalker, had not been since the day she had followed him.

He glared at her and swore vilely; and she realized that this was punishment for her support of Anna.  He truly meant it:  she had no choice.  She would have to go out, dark though it was, a woman alone at night.

She hurried through the empty street, shying from the shadows, eager to get to the light and company of the tavern.  Even so, before she had gone more than a block, she was accosted by a pair of men.  Soldiers, they called themselves:  part of some lord’s retinue she supposed, perhaps even that of the Count himself.  At any rate, they handled her lewdly, calling for a “free one”.  She pulled away, affronted and afraid.  Yet, only moments later, something made her glance nervously over her shoulder; and she saw one of the soldiers hotly after her.  She quickened her pace.  Surely, she hoped, she would be safe once inside the tavern.  There would be other men there to whom she could appeal, men who would pay for her time; and the soldier, if he started trouble, would be thrown out before a fight could start.

Yet even as her heart rose at the sight of the sign swinging in the light from the unshuttered window, the soldier caught up with her and grabbed her shoulder.  She twisted away and ran, doubling back and down a side street.  She ran … ran … ran … as fast as her legs could take her, skirts flapping round her shins, panting from her speed.

She cut suddenly sideways down the narrowest of alleys, hoping to lose him in the dark; but the clatter of her shoes on the cobbles betrayed her.

She came from the mouth of the alley into a better part of town, where she passed row upon row of shops, with their shutters up.  No hope here:  she could hammer like thunder, but none of the bolted doors would open for her.

And then she saw salvation.  Ahead was the convent of Saint Scholastica, its gate ajar even at this hour; and beyond she could see the nuns filing to the church for their nightly prayers.  She darted past the gatekeeper and fled inside; and the soldier, thrusting the older man into the gutter, followed at a hard run.

Almost incoherent in her terror, Janette ran to the nuns.  She was an apparition from the darkness, astonishing them; she begged them to help and could not seem to get them to understand.  She darted from one to the next, tugging at a sleeve, imploring.  And then, and then—oh, no!—the soldier was upon her, he was there; and the beadle who accompanied the black nuns—no! no!—they were talking, talking man to man, calling her a common woman unfit for the nuns’ protection.

“Help me!” she cried.  “Help me!”  But she was borne off, kicking and screaming, away to a dark corner, far from the nuns, where the soldier could have his way with no affront to their holiness.

She struggled; but he punched her hard in the stomach, harder than Daviau had ever hit her.  He shoved her against the wall, and began to hike her skirt, trying to kiss her, pushing his knee to part her legs—

With her final strength, she bent her head and bit.  Hard upon his neck, until he jerked back.

And then her knee.

He doubled over; and she tore free, gasping, and fled again.

At the end of the passage, when she heard no following steps, she paused and looked back to see if he had given up his pursuit.  It was foolish—even as she did it, she knew it was foolish—but she turned, clinging to the railings of the church.  Behind was a dark so dim that there were only shapes; but she could make out a man in a long hooded cloak.  His head was bent; and then he shifted just enough for her to see a glint.  The thing he held wore mail.  And then it was let go, and dropped like a sack of meal.

Dimly her mind sorted sense from the shapes.  The ‘sack’ in mail … was her attacker.  Who now lay … a corpse.  The hooded man must have … stabbed him.  It was too incredible—who would want to save her?—and yet, because of him, her attacker now was dead.

The hooded man turned; and she saw his face in a shaft of light.

She bolted.  If she saw him, then he saw her.  But, even as she ran, there was a part of her that knew him for her saviour.

It was the next night, after the second beating, that the bleeding began.  It started as a dark trickle down Anna’s leg.  She felt it, hoisted her gown slightly to see, and then screamed.  Janette helped her to the bed, but did not know what to do.  In no time, so it seemed, the bedclothes were sodden.

She clenched Anna’s hand hard, seeing the fear in her friend’s eyes.  Yet the fear was not for herself.

“Oh, please!  I do not want to lose it … him … her,” she sobbed.  “Oh, Janette, save my babe.  Please, please, save my babe!”

In desperation, Janette picked away the fingers that clung to her hand and ran out of the room.  She did not bother with the other whores, who were busy with the first clients of the night, but fled next door.  It took long knocking before a shutter above was opened and an angry male voice asked what was wrong.

“My friend Anna!” Janette called.  “She is losing the baby.  There is so much blood.”

The man’s voice began to berate her for disturbing them; but he was pushed aside and a woman’s face appeared.  “The English whore from next door?” she asked.  Turning to her husband, she said, “Perrot, run for Dame Hersendis,” and then, to Janette, “I’ll dress and be out to you.”

Janette ran back to Anna, passing Daviau in the hall.  When she told him what was happening, he laughed.

“I’ll leave you bitches to your bleeding, then,” he said, “and about time, too.  Tell her, I expect her to be ready to work the day after tomorrow.”

Her fury must have been plain.  Before he could hit her, though, she was past him and halfway up the stairs, calling back that the midwife was on her way.  She saw him shrug and turn away.  It was women’s business now.

When she got to the room, the taint of blood hung rich in the air.  Two of the other whores, Ansgor and Hysabel, had pulled off the bloody sheets, laid pads of old rags under Anna, and brought logs, dirty from the stack, to raise her hips in the hope of lessening the flow.  Still in shock, Janette could only thank them, and then go and hold her friend’s hand for comfort.  A few minutes later, the neighbour woman bustled in to set a pot of water on the fire; and shortly thereafter the midwife arrived, with her basket of linens, her scissors, and her birthing stool.

“Though from the look of you,” she said, with an eye to the size of Anna’s belly, “we’ll not get a live baby from you.”  Then, to the neighbour, “Thank you kindly for sending your husband, Letilda.  He and one of the town guards saw me safely here.  Will you stay?”

She hoisted Anna’s skirts to take a good look, and clucked at the sight of the bruises.

“Who did this,” she asked.

“I fell,” said Anna weakly.

“Well, we shall see what we can do,” said Hersendis.  “Still,” she added helpfully, “with God’s aid perhaps you may yet conceive another, who can say?”

The baby was expelled some time later; it was tiny and misshapen.  Hersendis seized her scissors, needing only a short sharp press on the slender spring to cut the cord.  She did not bother to tie it off.  Letilda wrapped the little corpse in a cloth and whisked it away.  Janette did not see it again.  It never breathed and died unchristened; and there could be no Christian burial for it.

After that, the women waited for the afterbirth.  It duly came; but the blood still did not stop.  Janette missed the message that passed between the midwife and her helpers.  She had taken the hand kerchief from the sleeve of Anna’s shift, dipped it in the hot water in the pot on the hearth, and was using it to wipe the sweat off her friend’s forehead.  It came as a surprise, therefore, when Hersendis yanked the skirts higher and, with Letilda’s help, lifted and parted Anna’s legs before rolling and stuffing strips of linen inside her.

Anna cried out at this and began to struggle; Hysabel and Ansgor pressed Janette into service to help hold her down.

“We must stop the blood,” panted Letilda as she handed Hersendis another strip of cloth; but Janette could not help with that.  All she could do was call repeatedly to Anna that it was all being done for the best.

Her words must have got through, for the struggles stopped.  Anna trembled violently.  Janette caught her desperate eyes, and held them with her own.  “I promise,” she said, direct to her friend’s ears while she held her shoulders; but what she was promising she could not have said.  “I promise,” she repeated.  Behind her, Hersendis pulled out one sodden cloth and replaced it, and shortly thereafter replaced it again.

All too quickly, Anna bled white and went strangely limp; Letilda gently closed her knees.  To Hersendis, she said, “I’ll send for the priest.”  It was only as the door closed that the words hit Janette; and she turned to the midwife and cried, “No!”  But the other woman looked at her, gently but firmly, and replied, “While she can hear you, you had best say whatever words you want her to take with her.”

Dawn came, and Janette opened the shutters as the priest came in.  While he was busy with the Last Rites, she turned away, unable to bear hearing Anna’s faint responses, and occupied herself in moving around the room, fetching out her secret coins.  If the other whores saw the hiding places, it didn’t matter.

Shortly afterwards, Anna died.  But she died shriven.  After paying Dame Hersendis, Janette pressed the rest of her hoard on the priest—to pay for his coming to Anna, and her burial, and prayers thereafter.  Looking at Janette’s distress, he took the money.  It was not, he said, enough for a mass; but prayers, yes, those he would say.

The bloody pads were stripped from the bed and burned, and the wood scrubbed down with salt and ash.  A palliasse of straw replaced the mattress, and clean linen was laid on the bed.  Anna’s body was washed, the eyes closed and weighted, and the jaw tied shut.  She was dressed in her better gown, the English one, and laid out.  Before she was coffined, though, Janette took her friend’s little scissors and carefully cut off the embroidered bands to keep.  If Daviau had been present, he would no doubt have taken them from her and sold them.  However, none of the other whores ever told him, nor objected.  They knew that Janette and Anna had been close.

Daviau did not attend the funeral.  Anna had not said to witnesses that he had hit her, and there was no proving it in a court of law.  Still, the line of guilt was straight and true.  Everyone in the brothel knew what he had done, though no one would tell on him.  As for Janette, she hated him with a passion that surprised her:  he had cost her her only friend:  he should be hanged at the crossroads for the crows to pick.  Yet he was still her protector; and she did not think to leave the brothel.  Paris was not an easy place for a whore on her own.

Life then resumed, almost as it had been before Anna came to the brothel.  Oh, Janette’s gown was now embellished with the embroidery her friend had done, bright with couched coloured threads.  And the room seemed smaller for the size of the big bed, now so large and empty in the darkness of each night.  But the bed and the embroidery were the only reminder of all she had lost.

Sometimes, though, near twilight as she hurried home dutifully to her clients, Janette thought she was being followed.  Not by Anna’s ghost:  by a man.  And not a man of the town, who might be thinking of going to Daviau and buying an hour of her time.  No, she thought she saw her strange saviour, the man in the hooded cloak.  Each time, though, when she looked round, he was not there.

Finally, she decided she was simply spooked by Anna’s death, and her sudden revulsion to Daviau and the life she still led.  It must surely have been simply some passing thief who had stabbed the soldier as he reeled, easy prey, from her blow to his balls.  Certainly, no hooded man could be following her around the streets of Paris!  She was just seeing boogeymen in the dark.  Indeed, once she came to that sensible conclusion and truly believed it, she ceased to see him.

Then one day, weeks later, as the daylight faded and she lit candles to brighten the room for the evening clients, she was startled by the step of someone behind her just as she blew out the taper.  She turned, and was astonished to see the man in the hood.  “I know you,” she said.  “You have been following me.”  And felt a fool for doubting his reality.

With bated breath, she waited to hear what he would say.  Then came, “Daviau tells me that you are of noble blood,” and her heart sank.  This was no saviour, no hero.  He was just a man like any other, just her client of the hour.

Dismayed but dutiful, she told him meekly, “I am whatever you want me to be.”

He laughed at her whore’s words.  “I want you to be so much more than mere ‘nobility’,” he said, and touched her cheek.  “Come with me.”

She hesitated.  Almost, almost, it sounded as though he were asking her to go with him in truth, to depart forever.

There was a long moment as she strove for common sense.  He was a client, that was all.  He was a client, so that meant he must mean … ah! that he did not want her in the brothel but in his own home (though it was unusual for such a man to fetch her himself).  “If you meet Daviau’s price,” she said, still meek, and waited to hear that he had already paid.

“What I offer cannot be bought or sold,” he said, with a stern dignity.  (Whatever that could mean!  There was nothing in this world that was not bought and sold.)

“You must choose,” he went on—to her, who had never had choice.  “Stay here and die like your friend, as all these women will.  Or come with me, and without your permission, no mere mortal will ever dare touch you again.”

To be untouched.  Her heart burned with that temptation.

“You’ve heard it said that living well is the best revenge.  Au contraire. Living forever is the best revenge.”

He put out his hand.  And she took it.

Later, after he had bitten deep and drained her blood, and she had come back from the threshold of death to drink from his wrist and seal their bond; later, after he had taken her to the room that she had shared with Anna, and she had pinned her pimp to the wall with one strong hand, and lowered him to her teeth and drunk him dry; then, bold in the knowledge that he had been wrong, she turned to her master.

“La meilleure revanche c’est la revanche,” she said, her voice thick with the blood she had drunk.  She let Daviau’s body slide to the floor.  Her eyes glowed with the fire of her fury; and she could tell from the answering gleam in his own that the hooded man was pleased with her.

Then the light in her eyes dimmed.  She went over to the bed, looked down at the empty pillow, and ran her hand sadly over the rumpled quilt.

“Are you satisfied with your vengeance?” her saviour purred behind her.

She gave one last glance at the bed as she turned.  “Almost,” she said.  “Not quite.  I want to go to London.”  Then she hesitated, and added crestfallen, “But I don’t know how.”

“We fly,” he said.

The doors to the hall of Egbert Egmundsson were barred, for the sun had set on the short day and the sky was already darkening into night.  The tables had been set out and linen covered the boards; bread had been broken, stew ladled into bowls; platters of meat were steaming on the merchant’s high table; and the ale flowed freely.  From high to low, all were warm, despite the season.  The wooden walls were thick and hung with sewn and painted cloths; the thatch was newly furbished; and the hearth fire burned high in the centre of the floor.  All sat at their ease, safe and warm, chattering to their seat-mates as they ate their evening meal.

And then she left, vanished faster than the eye could see.

“Very nicely done,” said her new master, who bore the unlikely name of La Croix.

Janette, who had found herself mysteriously fluent in Anna’s English tongue as soon she had fed on the foreign side of the Channel, smiled a small and rather personal smile.  It was unpleasant to behold—the more so since her fangs were still fully in view, and she had not yet wiped quite all the blood from her mouth.

“And are you now satisfied with your vengeance?”

“Yesssss.”  Her smile deepened, and she licked her lips.  Egbert’s blood tasted of terror and guilt, and was delicious.

“Then it is time now for you to leave your past behind you,” La Croix told her.

“But I can never forget,” Janette told him.  Indeed, she found now as a vampire that her memories—from the day she had first met Friðugyth to the day of Anna’s death—lay clear in her mind in every detail in a way that could never have been possible before La Croix had brought her over to her new existence.

“No,” he echoed, “one never forgets.  But still one must move on.  On from here, and on from now; through the years to the decades, and the centuries to millennia.  You have eternity, Janette.  Grasp the future, and be free.”

He held out his hand, as he had done before; and, as before, she took it.

“Yes,” she said, and met his eyes.  “For eternity, to be free.”