One day when she was ten, she’d gone to the well to draw water. A troubadour visiting the town had been sitting with a young woman on a bench, and beside the well, unattended, was his lute. Alyx had never touched any musical instrument before, but she’d heard enough and seen enough to know basically how to make a lute play. Within minutes, she’d plucked out one of the hundreds of tunes chorusing through her head. She was on her fourth song before she realized the troubadour was beside her, his courting forgotten. Silently, without a word between them, needing only the language of music, he had shown her how to place her fingers for the chords. The pain of the sharp strings cutting into her small, tender fingertips was nothing compared to her joy at being able to hear her music outside her mind.
Three hours later, when her father, with a resigned air, went to look for his daughter, he found her surrounded by half the townspeople, all of them whispering that they were seeing a miracle. The priest, seeing a wonderful possibility, took her to the church and set her before the virginals. After a few minutes of experimenting, Alyx began to play, badly at first, a magnificat, a song of praise to the church, softly speaking the words as she played.
Alyx’s father was thoroughly relieved that his only child wasn’t light in the head after all, that it was just so filled with music that sometimes she didn’t respond to everything said to her. After that momentous day, the priest took over Alyx’s training, saying her gift was from God and as God’s spokesman, he would take charge of her. He didn’t need to add that as a lawyer, her father was far away from God’s holiness and the less she associated with such as him, the better.
There followed four years of rigorous training in which the priest managed the loan of every instrument created for Alyx to learn to play. She played the keyboard instruments, horns, strings with and without a bow, drums, bells and the huge pipe organ the priest shamed the town into buying for the Lord (and for him and Alyx, some said).
When the priest was sure she could play, he sent for a Franciscan monk who taught her how to write music, to record the songs, ballads, masses, litanies, whatever she could set to music.
Because she was so busy playing instruments and writing down notes, it wasn’t until she was fifteen that anyone realized she could sing. The monk, who was nearly ready to return to his abbey, since Alyx had learned all he could teach her, walked into the church very early one morning and was surrounded by a voice so powerful he could feel the buttons on his cloak trembling. When he was able to convince himself that this magnificent sound came from his very small pupil, he fell to his knees and began to give thanks to God for letting him have contact with such a blessed child.
Alyx, when she saw the old monk on his knees at the back of the church, holding his cross tightly, tears running down his face, stopped singing immediately and ran to him, hoping he wasn’t ill, or, as she suspected, offended at her singing, which she knew was dreadfully loud.
After that, as much attention was paid to her voice as to her playing and she began to arrange choral groups, using every voice in the little walled-off town.
Suddenly, she was twenty years old, expecting any day to grow up and, she desperately hoped, out. But she stayed little, and flat, while the other girls her age married and had babies, and Alyx had to be content to sing the lullabies she’d written to teething infants.
What right did she have to be discontent, she thought now, hanging onto the apple tree? Just because the young men all treated her with great respect—except, of course, John Thorpe, who too often smelled like what he hauled—was no reason to be discontent. When she was sixteen and of marriageable age and not so old as now, four men had offered her marriage, but the priest said her music was a sign that she was meant for God’s work and not some man’s lust and therefore refused to allow any marriage. Alyx, at the time, was relieved, but the older she got, the more she was aware of her loneliness. She loved her music and especially loved what she did for the church, but sometimes... like two summers ago when she’d had four glasses of very strong wine at the mayor’s daughter’s wedding, she grabbed her cittern, stood on a table and sang a very, very bawdy song, which she made up as she went along. Of course, the priest would have stopped her, but since he’d had more wine than anyone else and was rolling in the grass, holding his stomach with laughter at Alyx’s song, he certainly wasn’t capable of stopping anyone. That had been a wonderful evening, when she’d been a part of the people she’d known all her life, not something set aside by the priest’s command, rather like a holy bit of St. Peter’s skull in the church, awe inspiring but far from touchable.
Now as she always did, she began to turn her thoughts to song. Breathing deeply, spacing her breath as she’d been taught, she began a ballad of life’s loneliness, of a young woman seeking her own true love.
“And here I am, little songbird,” came a man’s voice from behind her.
So intent on singing—and, indeed, her voice would have covered the sound—she had not heard the young men on horseback approaching. There were three of them, all big, strong, healthy, lusty as only the nobility could be, their faces flushed from what she guessed to be a night of revelry. Their clothes, the fine velvets and fur linings with a jewel winking here and there, were things she’d seen only on the church altar. Dazed, she looked up at them, didn’t even move when the largest blond man dismounted.
“Come, serf,” he said, and his breath was foul. “Don’t you even know your own lord? Allow me to introduce myself. Pagnell, soon to be Earl of Waldenham.”
The name brought Alyx alive. The great, greedy, ugly Waldenham family drained the village farmers of every cent they had. When they had no more, the farmers were thrown off the land, left to die wandering the country, begging for their bread.
Alyx was just about to open her mouth to tell this foul young man what she thought of him when he grabbed her, his hideous mouth descending on hers, his tongue thrusting, making her gag.
“Bitch!” he gasped when she clamped her teeth down on his tongue. “I’ll teach you who is the master.” With one grasp, he tore her cloak away and instantly his hand was at the collar of her dress, tearing easily, exposing one small, vulnerable shoulder and the top of her breast.
“Shall we throw such a small fish back?” he taunted over his shoulder to his friends, who were dismounting.
The reference to her lack of physical endowment above the waist was what changed Alyx’s fear to anger. Although she may have been born this man’s social inferior, her talent had caused her to be treated as no one’s inferior. In a gesture none of the men expected, Alyx pulled up her skirt, raised her leg and viciously kicked Pagnell directly between the legs. The next instant pandemonium broke loose. Pagnell bent double in pain while his companions desperately tried to hear what he was saying as they were still much too drunk to fully comprehend what was going on.
Not sure where she was going or in which direction, Alyx began to run. Her lung power from her many years of breathing exercises held her in good stead. Across cold, barren fields she ran, stumbling twice, trying to hold her torn gown together, the skirt away from her feet.
At the second fence, the hated sheep enclosure, she stopped, slumped against the post, tears running down her face. But even through tears she could see the three horsemen as they combed the area looking for her.
“This way!” came a voice to her left. “This way!”
Looking up, she saw an older man on horseback, his clothes as rich and fine as Pagnell’s. With the look of a trapped animal, she began to run again, away from this new man who pursued her.
Easily, he caught up with her, pacing beside her on his horse. “The boys mean no harm,” he said. “They’re just high-spirited and had a little too much to drink last night. If you’ll come with me I’ll get you away from them, hide you somewhere.”
Alyx wasn’t sure if she should trust him. What if he handed her over to those lecherous, drunken noblemen?
“Come on, girl,” the man said. “I don’t want to see you hurt.”
Without another thought, she took the hand offered to her. He hauled her into the saddle before him and kicked the horse into a gallop, heading toward the faraway line of trees.
“The King’s forest,” Alyx gasped, holding onto the saddle for dear life. No commoner was allowed to enter the King’s forest, and she’d seen several men hanged for taking rabbits from it.
“I doubt Henry will mind just this once,” the man said.
As soon as they were inside the forest, he lowered her from his horse. “Now go and hide and do not leave this place until the sun is high. Wait until you see other serfs out about their business, then return to your walls.”
