Read Women in the Wall for Free Online

for her, groaned as his hand came in contact with icy skin, then, dreaming perhaps that he had come to the bed of an ice-maiden or one of those accursed princesses forced to wear scaly fish-tails, rolled his hot, confident, hairy body on top of hers. Radegunda, remembering that she had a favour to ask of him in the morning, allowed him to probe for the magma inside her frozen flesh. Again her cries were muffled in the bed-furs which were made from the skins of red foxes whose relatives were probably hunting at this moment in the snowy landscape outside.
    Afterwards they slept or rather Clotair did while Radegunda woke and dreamed in an ebb and flow so coherent that she could not tell which bits were dreams and which not. She dreamed she was embracing Chlodecharius, hotly kissing him, weeping, begging his forgiveness for her harshness of a while before. Again she held him in her arms as the four-year-old baby she had held on her lap in the wooden wain which brought them, swaying and jolting over the old Roman roads, into Gaul. It was so easy to talk to a child. She marvelled at her ease and at his crows of pleasure. She was telling him the story of the little princess in the swan’s-down coat who flew away over the frozen marshes which the wain was crossing, back across silver lakes and sighing reeds to Thuringia. Then she was telling Agnes the same story, little Agnes, a Gallo-Roman girl whose father had died in Clotair’s service and whom Clotair had given her to bring up. Wind shook the bones of the place. Branches skittered against its planks. Clotair moved towards her again and she awoke and pushed him from her, dozed and found herself caught in the middle of a hot embrace between Chlodecharius now grown distastefully to manhood and the childish Agnes. She pushed them violently apart; her hand landed in something clammy. Then she was really awake and Agnes was beside and then on top of her, shaking her and shrieking: “He is dead, Radegunda, they killed him! Wake up! He crawled into my bed to die, to die, Radegunda ! Oh God, oh God! I put my arms around him like this, Radegunda, like this and I felt … Jesus, Mary, help me! I shall die …”
    Agnes’s arms were around Radegunda’s neck. She was lying on her and there was a thick clamminess between their breasts. The child’s weight pinned the fur cover down across the queen’s thighs. Agnes wailed. Clotair leaped from sleep, reared in the bed and yelled a war-cry. Henchmen rushed in the door and all was pandemonium.
    When the screams had subsided and a shutter had been thrown open to let in the daylight, Agnes was found to be soaking in blood. At first they thought she was wounded and it was only when a wail raised in another part of the palace told them that Chlodecharius had been found in Agnes’s bed with a knife in his back that they understood what had happened. A bloody track led from Agnes’s bed to the little room where Radegunda’s kneeler and coffer were kept.
    “How did it happen?”
    “Who?”
    “Why?”
    Radegunda did not join in the panic. She held Agnes, letting the child pant out a story which she recognized almost before it was told.
    “I woke up, Radegunda, and there he was stumbling towards my bed. Chlodecharius! He had never come before but still I wasn’t surprised, because … He let out a sort of sigh. And fell down beside me. ‘Agnes!’ he said. Like that. I thought it was a game. I put my arms around him and felt the … the knife-handle. And the blood. Radegunda! I didn’t understand. Even then, I didn’t. I tried to shake him. To get him to say what was the matter. And why he wouldn’t say anything. I tried to tease him, to tickle him even, oh Radegunda, I …”
    The child fell silent. Her stomach pumped in and out and small pants were strangled in her throat. The henchmen ’s exclamations were checked. Eyes slid quick glances at Clotair. Radegunda stared straight at him. He frowned. His eye dodged hers and he began to