(A sample from Blood by Moonlight.)
© 2009 asotir. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
1. Of Master Aengus & His Love
THERE IS A LAND that is nearest the moon; and there in that land was once a fine young lady, bargained her way into a great manor house, and was the envy of the county by the banks of the Bride. The lady lived with the old lord of the manor, and some called her the old lord’s ward, and some called her his wife.
The lady passed her time in reading, though mostly only novels, and one most of all, and the spine of it all worn smooth, the way it was her best-beloved. She took down and opened this old book one time, and started reading in the middle. And all at once she pushed the book away and said, ‘Ah, and the like of that will never be happening to me.’
And there was a poor, proud farmer, loved the fine young lady. But his love was so cursed that even the wind in the sedge by the desolate lake would be crying out to him, Never, never…
‘Let her come back to this place, then!’ Master Aengus would shout.
But the wind in the sedge cried, Never, never…
So Master Aengus left the lake behind. His fields, his farmhouse and his milch-cow went untended, and his dog cried from the post in vain.
He was a strange one, Master Aengus: not the everyday run of a farmer at all. His hands were long, with knuckles round as quail’s eggs, and sparse black hairs growing upon the backs, like reeds bent by the wind. And he had a gap in his right eyebrow, where a pale scar ran. And there was a lock of white hair grown out in his dark locks above his left ear.
On the road he passed a stream, and stopped to watch the millwheel turn. Round and round went the quern, grain before it, meal behind it. The rain feeding the stream, the stream raising the millwheel, the millwheel turning the quern, the brown grains grinding, and all the world against him. Master Aengus left the mill and miller, and went up on the hill.
Where he sat on an old, broken millstone at the cross-roads, and waited in the rain. Until the damned day fled, and the golden green rain dissolved in black mist.
The lady then was dining, and laughing with her friends.
In the night Master Aengus slipped around the village, climbed the high stone wall, and tracked up the path he knew so well.
Where he found the rut of seventeen paces, where like a dog he padded up and down. Until a candle gleamed in the window above, and a small pale hand unlatched the casement.
She looked out of the casement into the deep night. Then she looked down and saw him. He was standing in the worn place in her garden, there where he always stood, with his blushes and rude ragged hair.
She stood quite still when she saw him. She was afraid of him. She was afraid most of all of his eyes.
Then Master Aengus said to her:
‘Agatha beloved, make the wind a liar, come down to me here and delight my heart!’
‘No, Master Aengus, I’ll not do that tonight.’ Lady Agatha said, and turned behind her fan into her chamber, and closed the casement. She felt her heart beat very fast.
From her shoulders she let fall her India muslin wrapper, and she slid with a whisper into pallid golden sheets, and gave herself to dreams.
In her garden a great slashing stroke cut down a lady’s-rose in the night. And he stole away, did Master Aengus, across hay meadows to the wood in the park, the lord’s preserve. Where he lay against a hazel log, and held the flower on his breast.
‘Oh, Agony,’ Master Aengus sighed. Her given name was Agatha, but in his heart he called her Agony, for she was that to him.
Come first light Master Aengus woke. There was six days’ beard on his cheek, but the lady’s-rose was still wrapped up tight in itself. And he heard a winding horn, the lord’s horn calling up the green and golden dawn.
That morning she rose out of bed and bathed and dressed herself, just as she always did. But that morning it seemed to her she saw something different about the light, and the shadows in the corners of her room, and the worn book lurking on the nightstand by her bed.
She went down to breakfast, and found the others there before her: ‘Have I been sleeping overlong?’ she asked.
Lady Felicia, her closest friend, laughed and answered, ‘Scarcely that! But it’s a wonder you could have slept, my dear, through the clatter that went on.’
‘A bit harsh, my dear,’ muttered dear old Sir James.
‘Sir James awoke early, still in the night, really, and insisted on breakfast straightaway,’ said Dame Letitia.
‘Oh, I was hungry, and fancied a bit of bacon,’ muttered Sir James. And at that Lady Agatha, Miss Cecily, and even Mr Humphreys laughed. And even the laughter of her friends struck Lady Agatha as odd and precious on that morning.
The old lord walked in, came up to Lady Agatha and put his arm about her waist. He kissed her cheek nicely, taking his rights of her, and turned to his friends and guests to say, ‘I’ve been up for hours already, while you’ve been laying abed.’
‘Oh, but when weren’t you the first to be rising?’ asked Lady Felicia. ‘Sometimes I wonder if you sleep at all.’
‘Tonight,’ he answered, ‘was special – and today is too. Drink and eat heartily, my friends,’ he said, ‘the way it’s a day for celebrating. Today is Agatha’s birthday, and she is twenty-one today, and tonight,’ he added, drawing her closer to him in his long, thin arm, ‘tonight she shall come into her estate, and her dream will be realized.’ At this all the gentlemen tapped their glasses and chorused, ‘Bravo!’ and the ladies stepped forward to offer Lady Agatha heartfelt felicitations, to which she could only reply, blushing happily, ‘I’d forgotten all about it.’
The old lord loosed his grip of her, strode to the doors and threw them open. ‘Mac Bride! Mac Bride!’ shouted he. The old countryman appeared in the gravel of the drive, tall, dark, and waiting.
‘Do you now,’ commanded the old lord, ‘Mac Bride, wake up the master of the hunt, let the horses be saddled, and unleash the hounds! By God, we’ll hunt on this fine morning of the Lady Agatha’s birthday!’
The old countryman bowed and answered, ‘Aye, my lord,’ and vanished to do his master’s bidding.
So the old lord whistled up a hunt, and they went riding in his park. First went the portly master of the hunt, and followed the old lord’s guests and friends, the wealthy men and their well-fed ladies, and the old lord himself on his stallion.
Behind them rode Lady Agatha in a green riding habit, looking about her and delighting in the fineness of the day. And then she saw the farmer standing in her way.
She drew up rather than ride him down, and he caught her reins in his brutal hands with the great round knuckles and the sparse black hairs.
‘Agatha, now make the wind a liar, come down to me here, hide me from the world behind the curtain of your hair!’
She laughed: that was nerves and breathlessness. ‘No, Master Aengus, I’ll not do that today!’
He let go her reins, and she left him standing there. Lady Agatha spurred her milk-white mare on, flashing through the trees, faster, faster.
Master Aengus stood watching her. The golden dawn lit up the half of his face, its bristles and hard lines, and his glittery cold wise eyes.
He held up his sword, that his father had won at Boyne, where he had lost all else. ‘If I could only hate you, Lady, and be free! But it’s the world I hold condemned, for it’s put you up on a milk-white mare, and left me only a rusted blade.’
Cursing he put back his father’s sword, and left the lord’s preserve.
In the blue west a fiery moon was falling: Beltane Moon she was, and it May Day Eve. Beltane is a favoring fire, the way at one time the Druids made fires with spells, driving cattle between them against evil. Master Aengus kissed to the moon a golden guinea on a chain at his throat. Then he went away.
And it was a day and more than a day, and no man heard tell of him.
And that night, while the others lay sleeping, Lady Agatha could not sleep. There was a burning in her breast, and her thoughts and hopes racing round and round, at all the promises the lord had made her, and all those he had already fulfilled. She took a lamp down the hallway, past all the doors of the bedchambers of their friends and guests, sleeping soundly. At the sound of Sir James’ trumpetous snore, she smiled.
But in her mind’s eye there flashed the sight of the brutal hands with the great round knuckles and the sparse black hairs.
She went into her own room and quietly closed the door. Upon her pallid golden bed she sat, and picked up her book, and stroked its smooth spine before she let it fall open on the counterpane: there on that page she let her finger fall, and there on that word she began to read: ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘and let you return to me on the morrow, at this very hour, Master Aengus. And then – may be! – I’ll go down to you.’
So she slept, but months went by, and he never came.
