Jane of the Shadows: Chapter 2--The Road

I have learned that I do not like driving. In fact, I’ve fervently wished that I am the witch they call me I am so I could probably fly to the port rather than drive through the treacherous road southward.

My body hurts. Doubly on the areas where my Mayor’s hands held me a little too tight. Frightened of my leaving, he used me a little too hard before he allowed himself to drive me out of that miserable little town where I was born. He’s insisting he would drive me to the port. I do not like it. I want him gone.

But I didn’t try to dissuade him especially since I’ve discovered that my body does not agree with this long journeying. I ache. How I ache. Mostly on my bottom and my lower back. So I’ve decided to use him as much as he could be of use. Indeed, I question in hindsight my initial plan of having him drive me only to Wiltshire. I was too naïve and nice.

I told myself I would start using people, but there I was freeing a willing slave. It’s a good thing he hates to see me go. Poor, poor man. His appetite had brought him so low that now he would rather lick my feet than see me go.

When I imagine leaving him by the port, I find that the image… satisfies me. More than his warm touches and possessive kisses, the idea of leaving him broken buoys my spirit.

Oh, how I like this new me.

But enough about my lovely Mayor.

I am writing this, reader, to tell you of that miserable rider we happened upon two nights ago at a rugged posting inn.

He looked like a mean man. I do not remember much of his visage, but I remember that he frightened people as he passed by.  This made me curious about him. As I sat there at the farthest corner of the common room, eating my stale soup and dark bread, I stared at him.

I must have been staring at him for a long time, for slowly, as if he was looking for someone, he turned and scanned the room until his eyes fell on mine. I did not look away. No. I do not do that anymore. Remember, I have learned the power of my stare.

He held my eyes, and then he nodded at me.

I looked at him a little longer. Marveling at the diagonal scar bypassing half of his face. It was stark white against his darkened skin. His eyes were piercing grey. Or at least that was how they appeared in that darkened room. They could have been dark blue. Maybe green. But I liked them grey so I would assume they are so.

I nodded at him, too.

Without waiting for another cue, he walked straight to my table, uncaring of my Mayor who was staring daggers at him. Beneath the table, he enclosed my legs, rendering me immobile and unable to rise as the grey-eyed man stood in front of me.

“You, sir, are not wanted here,” bit out my Mayor. I looked at him with my blank eyes, making him flinch a little, before I slowly turned to the outsider.

“I need to talk to your daughter,” said the grey-eyed man—I would call him Grey from now on as I’ve never learned his name aside from his childhood nickname, Ilonyl, which I do not like. Too feminine. There was nothing feminine about him.

“You impudent, pup!” growled my Mayor as he shot to his feet, almost toppling the wooden chair from which he sat. “How dare you talk of my—my wife—as so! You leave us now or I would be convinced you are needing of some discipline!”

I felt a little smug when I heard my Mayor call me his wife. So. Now he claims me his wife? The truth is that his wife was back in the village, busy philandering and sullying his good name while he claimed he needed to visit his brother in Oxfordshire so he could drive me to the port. I could almost believe that he’s indeed in love with me.

But what do I care? I do not need love. Not anymore.

So I just looked at him and then looked at Grey again. Of course I say nothing, but I raised one of my eyebrows in question.

Dismissing my Mayor with a nonchalance that must have been bred into him, he focused on me and said, “I think you can help me, madam. What say you about that?”

Louder growls sounded from my Mayor. I stretched and put my hand over his, stilling him, even as I urged him to leave us alone. He didn’t like this and sent me one of his glares. But I touched his hand again, turned it, and wrote a message on his palm. One of the codes we’ve developed over the years. He started to shake his hand, but I repeated the code and with a hard “Ten minutes and not a minute more!” he left us alone.

As soon as he exited the common room, which was as rowdy as it was before Grey walked into our table, Grey took the vacated seat and said: “It is true then, that you cannot speak.”

I nodded my yes.

“But it seems like your hearing is well, despite what people say.”

I touched my finger to my temple and waved my hand.

“Yes. A lot of people are fools. Just looking at you, I can see that you are not the town fool they make you out to be. Are you a witch?”

My lips moved into a semblance of a smile. She used to be infuriated with this smile of mine. She always raged that I was looking down on her. Maybe I was. Maybe she deserved it.

But Grey was not infuriated. In fact, he laughed. “So you’re no witch as well, are you? What are you then? How can someone like you—someone who cannot speak—manage to bewitch the town's esteemed mayor?”

I lifted one of my brows.

“Did you think people won’t know? For years, gossip about the town mayor sniffing after the town fool has filled many a houses. The so-called nobles find it salaciously entertaining. The baseborns and superstitious calls you a witch—daughter of incest—daughter of evil.”

And you? I mouthed at him.

He looked uncomfortable for a moment but it passed quickly and he said, “I think you’re a smart woman. There’s no way a fool would be able to have the vicar ripped from his position so adroitly.”

I moved my head.

“No, don’t bother denying it. Unless you haven’t noticed, I am not one of the fools who call you a fool. I wouldn’t follow you here if I thought that.”

I didn’t move. Instead, I stared at him. The stare which made people talk.

And he wasn’t immune to it.

He reached beneath his dark, travel dusted cloak and placed a heavy leathery string bag on the table. Coins. Probably gold coins based on the heaviness I’ve perceived.

“I want you to kill my stepfather,” he said boldly.

I could tell from the tautness of his features as he waited for my answer that he wasn’t joking. Nor was he trying to catch me. I recognized someone who had the same boiling rage beneath the surface like I did. While my rage ran cold, Grey’s rage was boiling hot just beneath the surface.

Ah, to find a soulmate while on the road to my new life.

It was rather…quaint.

I held my hand palm up and he placed the bag on it. I bounced it once. Twice. I felt the shapes inside. Silver and gold. Possibly pure.

I dropped the bag in front of him again and turned to my side. Opening the cracked leather satchel which was the only present I received from my father, given when I started bringing home books from the town library, and placed the slate-board on the table while I held a small piece of chalk on my writing hand. The board was a gift from my Mayor after he learned that I could hear. I remember him getting excited because we could finally “communicate.” Nevermind that he’d been communicating with my body since I was too young to even bleed.

I wrote one word in my trained cursive: “Why?”

He grinned then and crossed his arms on his chest as he—almost nonchalantly—leaned back on the chair’s back. “Why do I need to tell you?” he asked me.

I stared at his eyes and saw the flame of anger burning even brighter there. I picked up my slate and wrote “You don’t” even as I started to get-up.

The pinprick pain at the bottom of my spine reared again and I had to swallow back the vomit that quickly rose up to my throat.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

I ignored Grey, my soulmate. If he wasn’t willing to give me the answers that I wanted, he would get nothing from me. Besides, my pain was slowly flooding my brain, disallowing further communication.

Suddenly I felt his hand on my arm and, instantly, the pain receded and I was deathly calm. Almost as if I was watching my body move from outside of myself, I saw my arms and legs move simultaneously, hitting Grey on his most vulnerable areas and finally my fist connected on his face.

I saw him fall sideways on the straw-littered floor and hit the left side of his face in slow motion.

I stood there and watched him struggle to catch his breath. Maybe we’re not that much of a soulmates. I would never be that easy. She would have had killed me long before if I was that vulnerable.

If there was one thing that I was thankful for her—and which prohibited me from actively harming her—it was that she made me strong. The crazier she got, the stronger I was.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and saw that it was my Mayor. I nodded to him and allowed him to stir me from the now silent room. Everyone was gaping at us—at me. The little woman in the well-used and years-dated dress who brought a six-foot man to his knees—or his face, if you want to be literal.

 A few paces after, I heard Grey cry-out my name and against myself, I felt my heart turn-over. I looked up to my Mayor and wrote on his palm.

His brows came together and a negative answer was on his lips. But I stood on my toes and gave him a quick kiss. Immediately his resistance melted and he nodded.

He kept his arms around me until we reached our room and he gently led me to the bed. After helping me disrobe, he smooth his large, calloused hands over my face and smoothed back the angel hairs from my face. Kissing my forehead, he told me to relax and that he would take care of everything.

He brought me a glass of water, and after I drank a little, he moved and left the room. I knew he would be back late. Maybe at the crack of dawn.

I touched my slightly distended stomach. I knew, too, that I was losing his child. Child he had no idea I bore. Would never know. It doesn’t matter anyway. I would leave him soon, and without the child, he would have no hold over me. While I—I will always have hold over him.

As I started to bleed, I blocked the pain by recalling her face after she struck me with the jagged edge of the wooden dipper we had at her house. Again and again she hit me with it after she caught me coming back late in the night.

You whore! she called me again and again. You whore, everytime the dipper struck me. It hurt but, as usual, I had no tears to shed anymore. Later that night as my father wrapped my back with steaming rags to ease down the welts, I started feeling the pain.

I knew then, that sooner or later, I would lose the child. The child I had wanted to bring to the New World. The child I secretly cherished because it belonged only to me.

Another wave of pain seized me as I clutched the scratchy linen cover. By body stretched and bowed from the bed. I could hear animal sounds come out from my usually silent mouth.

I could feel sweat covering my body all over as I turned and tossed. Then, finally, that electric pain which stretched for long minutes that it felt like I was suspended in a forever kind of pain.

Everything turned black afterwards. Then my senses slowly came back and all I could smell was blood.

My dead child.

##

RM

JANE OF THE SHADOWS will return next Monday. Please stay tuned and enjoy!

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