“I had no desire,” she told him. “If anyone had asked me—but nobody speaks of such things on Foulmire—I would have said that I was one of those women who feel no desire. For me, it was always pain and harsh treatment. Zachary said that I was cold as stone to him, and I thought there was no other way to be. I never knew that it could be like this.”

He smiled at her and touched her warm cheek with his finger.

“When I delivered a baby sometimes, and the woman asked me when she could lie with her husband again, I never understood why she would want to. I would tell her she must wait for two months, until she was churched, and I used to wonder why she complained that it was so long.”

“Would it seem long to you now?”

“A day would seem too long a time to wait, now.”

“So now you understand love?”

“For the first time.” She smiled at him. “So it is the first time for me too, in a way.”

He kissed her hand. “The woman of stone has melted?”

“I’ve become a woman of desire.”

Later in the night they woke, ravenously hungry, and ate the rest of the bread and cheese, good white bread from the Priory bread oven, smooth hard cheese with a salty crust from the Priory dairy.

“Zachary spoke of something,” James said tentatively, afraid of the darkening of her eyes, of her turning away.

“Oh, he’s one that never stopped speaking,” she said, with a smile. “He thundered like the tide mill at every low tide.”

“He said that Ned had a wife . . .” he began.

His words were like a blow. He had knocked the smile off her. At once she went as white as guilt.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . Don’t say anything,” he begged her. “You need say nothing. It was just . . .”

“Did you believe him? Will you repeat to Sir William . . . what he said? Whatever it was he said? Are you bound by your vows to tell the minister at St. Wilfrid’s?”

“No, I’ll never say. I wouldn’t have said anything now but . . .”

“But he made you wonder,” she said slowly. “For all your learning, and your languages, and your knowledge—for all your faith!—he made you wonder. He made you . . . afraid.”

“I’m not afraid!” he started up, but she put a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“If the world was as Zachary sees it, we would all be afraid,” she said gently. “For like a poor fool he has peopled it with monsters to frighten himself. He speaks of me as a woman who lies with faerie folk. He denies his own children. He says I cast a spell that unmanned him. He says that I killed my poor sister-in-law, Mary. You know, if people around here believed just one of these things, they would test me as a witch?”