She stood up, hands raised in a gesture of submission.
The peasant girls ran toward her over top of the walls, surefooted as goats. They were laughing, which Tess took as an encouraging sign.
“Oh, fie, it’s not Mumpinello at all,” said the taller and stouter of the girls, gathering her homespun skirts and leaping down to stand by Tess. “State your sneaky business, stranger,” she said, tossing her fair braids behind her shoulders, “and submit to our righteous judgment.”
“This is the court of the shepherdesses,” said the smaller, darker one cheekily. She stayed atop the wall, her crook leveled at Tess’s head. “Behave, villain. I’d hate to have to scream for my da.”
“I can assure you—” Tess began, but the short one swatted her on the head.
“None of your oily talk,” said the lass beside Tess, putting her hands on her broad hips. “We ask the questions. Why were you spying on us? If it were for lecherous purposes, I warn you, we will string you up.”
“By your walnuts,” cried the shepherdess on the wall, the tiny dog barking loudest.
“I can assure you”—some instinct helped Tess dodge another swing of the crook—“I have no vile designs upon your persons.”
Here the shepherdesses looked unexpectedly crestfallen. Tess blinked at the pair of them, uncomprehending. “I—I only wanted some bread,” she said. “I’m hungry.”
“So you thought to rob us!” cried the small, elevated one, shaking her crook menacingly.
“Our father will thank us for catching a robbing bastard,” said the bigger girl at Tess’s elbow, practically purring in Tess’s ear. “You’ll never persuade me and Blodwen to let you go.”
“Actually,” said Tess, whose father was a lawyer, “it would have been theft, not robbery. Robbery implies violence, and I am not prepared for violence in any way.”
Blodwen, on the wall, threw up her hands; the girl beside Tess snorted disgustedly. There was some game they were trying to play with her, Tess suddenly realized. Her capture was the most exciting thing since Mumpinello, whoever that was, and now she was disappointing them.
“B-because I’ve given up my former violent ways,” Tess added hastily, improvising. “After killing that man. I vowed never to be violent again, and went to become a priest.”
The girls pricked up their ears and exchanged a meaningful look. “Old Father Martius,” said Blodwen from the wall, nodding portentously. “He’s probably a killer, too, Gwenda.”
“So many priests have secret pasts,” said Gwenda, her wheaten brows arched mournfully. “But what did you do, Father? Was it a crime of passion or of cold-blooded calculation?”
Tess, secretly amused to be called Father, molded her mouth into a frown with some difficulty. “Passion, of course,” she said.
The shepherdesses clapped and grinned with morbid glee. Tess realized they would not be satisfied until they’d wrung every gory detail from the tale. She cleared her throat. “It’s a long story, and I could tell it better if my throat weren’t so dry.”
The girls eagerly took the hint. Blodwen pranced along the wall to fetch Tess a drink, while Gwenda led Tess over a stile into the sheep enclosure where they might sit in the shade and resume tending lambs while Tess talked. Blodwen returned with a rough-hewn cup of barley water—you could never be sure if a priest would drink beer—but it was cooling and delicious and Tess couldn’t complain.
Tess licked the last drops off her lips. She’d had time to think of a good story. “I fell in love with Julissima Rossa, wife of the Duke of Barrabou, and she with me.”
It was a Dozerius the Pirate tale; they surely didn’t have imported Porphyrian storybooks out here. The girls listened raptly to how Tess had gone half mad and attacked the duke with a sword over breakfast, only to have Julissima Rossa repent her infidelity when she saw the old man bleeding into his porridge.
“You cruel, terrible man,” cried Julissima Rossa, putting a jeweled dagger to her ebony breast. “You’ve killed my husband and ruined me, and I curse you for it.”
The shepherdesses gasped at Julissima Rossa’s suicide and clutched at their hearts in pity to hear that her family had barred Tess from the funeral.
“The duke’s son still pursues me,” said Tess in conclusion. “And he will continue unto the ends of the earth until he has vengeance, a bill paid in my very blood.”
“Won’t the church protect you, Father?” said Blodwen with tears in her brown eyes. “Does it mean nothing that you’ve repented?”
“It matters not a jot,” said Tess, her voice breaking slightly, overcome by her own imaginings. “What’s done cannot be undone. A moment’s lapse in judgment, and you’re lost forever. I should probably lie down in a ditch and wait for my fate to overtake me.”
“Never!” cried Gwenda, with such vehemence that three nearby ewes, startled from their grazing, trotted away across the green. “Blodwen, fetch Father…um…”
“Father Jacomo,” Tess offered helpfully, feeling a little foolish to be invoking Jeanne’s brother-in-law yet again. She needed a deeper well of emergency names.
“Fetch Father Jacomo some bread,” said Gwenda, hauling herself to her feet. “I know which stores Auntie Dee won’t miss.”
The girls rushed off and returned with bread, eggs, and a jar of pickled beets bundled into a clean kerchief. Tess felt a pang of guilt: this was a big gift from people who couldn’t spare much. She began to stammer an apology, but the girls wouldn’t hear it. They walked Tess to the edge of the hamlet, eyeing the road in both directions as if expecting any moment to see the junior Duke of Barrabou thundering toward them on a charger.
“Ah,” said Tess, pressing a hand mournfully to her heart, “if things were different, and I hadn’t taken orders, I’d give you each a kiss for your generosity.”
“You joined a celibate order?” cried Blodwen, apparently disappointed.
“Of course he did, stupid,” said Gwenda, swatting her. “He’s genuinely penitent, and his crime was amorous as well as violent.”
“I belong to St. Vitt,” said Tess, flashing a pained smile. “No half measures for me.”
“As must be, Father,” said Gwenda, bowing her head. “Heaven mind your road.”
“When your enemies come looking, we won’t tell them where you went,” piped up Blodwen as Tess turned to go. “We never saw you here.”
Tess walked backward, waving goodbye, and then set her face southward again.
* * *
The shepherdesses’ merriment wore off, and Tess found herself curiously unhappy, itchy in her very soul. Fields of buttercups nodded under the noonday sky; Tess drifted past, unseeing, spooling out uncomfortable feelings like a weaver untangling her weft.
She’d been so wrapped up in her story that she’d inadvertently told the girls something true: it mattered not a jot that she’d repented. A moment’s lapse in judgment, and her future had been lost forever.
The shepherdesses, though, had forgiven her transgressions—or rather, Father Jacomo’s transgressions. He’d killed a man in a fit of passion, he was a murderer, but the sin was adorable on him because of course he hadn’t meant to, poor darling. He was the victim of his own strong emotions, which made him terribly romantic.
And the worst was, Tess had felt it, too. She’d been as caught up as the shepherdesses—the story was an old favorite, in fact—but at the same time something had changed. Some part of that tale galled her. She felt like she was seeing with two different eyes: an eye full of stars that still saw the romance, and a new eye, one she’d acquired while walking, an eye full of…
It was full of fire, she decided. Her second eye saw the flesh of this story burned away, held the bones up to her own story, and saw the injustice.
She’d committed a crime of passion, too, but hers had created life, whereas Father Jacomo—Dozerius the Pirate, really—had taken life. In fact, accounting accurately, the pirate had two lives on his hands: he’d driven Julissima Rossa to kill herself.