Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore

Author:Alan Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781603090353
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions

The sudden yet half-hearted tapping on my chamber door now rouses me from out my arid reveries, and when I bid the one who knocks to enter, there is Maud, with young John fidgeting and shifting in discomfort by her side until he is dismissed, closing the door behind him as he goes.

She stands composed there in the creeping silence, gazing on me without kindness, nor with fellow feeling. Next she stares down at my chamber-jug and makes a face, so that I hide it back beneath my bed before I turn once more to face her.

‘I would have you sit.’ I gesture here towards the chair, halfway ‘twixt bed and door to aid my passage to and fro across the room.

‘As my Lord wishes.’ Now she brushes off the seat before she sits, as if to rid it of contaminations. In this manner is she wont to craft all of her words and deeds into some subtle, ill-concealed rebuke. As if her cunny does not reek. As if her shit were made from gold.

‘How fares my son?’

The look she gives me in reply, blank and unfathoming, is in truth all of the reply I might require: she neither knows, nor cares to know. The child is in the charge of nurses, somewhere in the castle’s eastern mass. His mother took against the child from birth and will not see him, hating as she does the man who got him on her and the manner of that getting.

Now she glances to the side and speaks, indifferently. ‘The young Lord Simon, I am told, has been afflicted with the grippe, yet otherwise fares well, if it should please my Lord.’

Her eyes, hoar-frosted with disdain, cast insolently back and forth across such few effects as I have gathered in my chambers here: a casket with four angels of Mohammedan attire in gold relief upon its lid; a Merlin stuffed with shavings and a Tartar’s finger on a fine, bright chain. With every piece, with every look, she judges me.

After the death of Waltheof, William the Bastard was concerned that I should take up Waltheof’s position here. More than position: it was meant that I should take Waltheof’s widow, Judith, as my wife, so that my claim to all his lands was given strength. Now, she was William’s niece and had until that time obeyed her uncle’s every charge, and yet at this she balked. Judith, who with false witness had her husband parted from his head for no more reason than it was the Bastard’s will. Judith, who knew should she refuse her Liege that all her land and titles should be forfeit. Judith, who would sooner copulate with goats than lose her uncle’s favour.

Judith would not marry me.

She said it was because I had a halten foot, and yet in this I know she lied. What is it that they see in me, these women?

Maud is watching me from where she sits. She waits for me to speak, or to dismiss her.

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