The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett [365]
The worst of it was, she had never made love with Alfred.
After that awful first night, he had tried again three times: once the following night, then a week later, and again a month after that when he had come home particularly drunk. But he was always completely incapable. At first Aliena had encouraged him, out of a sense of duty; but each failure made him angrier than the last, and she became fightened. It seemed safer to stay out of his way, and wear unappealing clothes, and make sure he never saw her undressing, and let him forget about it. Now she wondered if she should have tried more. But in truth she knew it would have made no difference. It was hopeless. She was not sure why—perhaps it was Ellen’s curse, perhaps Alfred was just impotent, or perhaps it was because of the memory of Jack—but she felt certain Alfred never would make love to her now.
So he was bound to know that the baby was not his.
She stared miserably at the old, cold ashes in Richard’s fireplace, wondering why she always had such bad luck. Here she was trying to make the best of a bad marriage and she had the misfortune to be pregnant by another man, after one single act of intercourse.
There was no point in self-pity. She had to decide what to do.
She rested her hand on her stomach. Now she knew why she had been putting on weight, why she kept feeling nauseated, why she was always so tired. There was a little person in there. She smiled to herself. How nice it would be to have a baby.
She shook her head. It would not be nice at all. Alfred would be as mad as a bull. There was no knowing what he would do—kill her, throw her out, kill the baby.... She had a sudden, terrible foreboding that he would try to do harm to the unborn baby by kicking her in the stomach. She wiped her brow: she had broken out in a cold sweat.
I won’t tell him, she thought.
Could she keep her pregnancy secret? Perhaps. She had already taken to wearing shapeless, baggy clothes. She might not get very big—some women didn’t. Alfred was the least observant of men. No doubt the wiser women in the town would guess, but she could probably rely on them to keep it to themselves, or at any rate not to talk to the menfolk about it. Yes, she decided, it might just be possible to keep it from him until after the baby was born.
Then what? Well, at least the little mite would have been brought safely into the world. Alfred would not be able to kill it by kicking Aliena. But he would still know that it was not his. He was sure to hate the poor thing: it would be a permanent slur on his manhood. There would be hell to pay.
Aliena could not think that far ahead. She had decided on the safest course for the next six months. She would try in the meantime to figure out what to do after the baby was born.
I wonder whether it’s a boy or a girl, she thought.
She stood up with her box of clean rags for Martha’s first monthly period. I pity you, Martha, she thought wearily; you’ve got all this in front of you.
Philip spent that winter brooding over his troubles.
He had been horrified by Ellen’s heathen curse, uttered in the porch of a church during a service. There was no doubt in his mind now that she was a witch. He only regretted his foolishness in ever forgiving her for her insult to the Rule of Saint Benedict, all those years ago. He should have known that a woman who could do that would never really repent. However, one happy consequence of the whole horrifying business was that Ellen had once again left Kingsbridge and had not been seen since. Philip hoped fervently that she would never return.
Aliena was visibly unhappy as Alfred’s wife, although Philip did not believe that the curse was the cause of that. Philip knew almost nothing about married life but he could guess that a bright, knowledgeable, lively person such as Aliena would be unhappy living with someone as slow-thinking and narrow-minded as Alfred, whether they were man and wife or anything else.
Aliena should