The following is from Molly Aitken’s Bright I Burn. Aitken grew up on the south coast of Ireland. Her first novel, The Island Child, was longlisted for the Authors’ Club First Novel Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, for which she won the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, and has been dramatized for BBC Radio 4. She is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing and History at Sheffield Hallam University.
May 1280
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No, Kilkenny has never seen a bride like me. I’m dressed all in scarlet. I have sewn two coins and a hazelnut into my hem, for wealth and luck. The day is bright and cold like the polished silver chain I wear around my neck. The pendant is small, just a sapphire impressed onto a silver square, and on each corner is stuck a pearl. If my husband had asked me, I would have chosen a ruby, to match my wedding tunic, inset in gold, but he will learn my tastes soon enough.
Side by side now, we are an eye-catching pair. Me in my red, him in his deep blue. I have the strong jaw and high cheekbones of one of the stone knights carved on top of St. Canice’s tombs, while my husband has the delicate features of one of the saints. He is Theobald of Provins, Giovanni Gualberto. No, no, he is Aurelia, made out of glass and standing frozen in a cathedral window. This heavenly breakable face now looks at me, and I don’t smile up at him. I have no need to, and that is a relief. Unlike most of the other men I know, he’s never threatened me with his eyes nor his words. He’s always been distant, gently kind, and when I was a child, he acted like I was too young to be noticed.
The whole of English Town has come to watch me marry him. The women in clean white wimples, the merchants in their brightest tunics, and the children still damp from washing. Girls, smelling of milk and earth and longing, press meadow flowers into my hands. I drink in their envy, their eyes hungering for my silk cyclas and slippers—my husband. Behind me, men congratulate each other. Money, that’s what’s on their lips, while the mouths of the girls shape fast to courtly poems, to the wedding night, to the morning after. Blood, I hear them hiss. I smile, pretending ignorance, but I am an innkeeper’s daughter; I know just what happens between two bodies at night. The girls’ tongues flatten to laugh. I hold my breath, release it in small spurts and give them all my distant, mighty smile. They look away, understanding their place again.
I lead the girls out of the graveyard, steering them by the cleanest route so my wedding slippers are preserved in near spotlessness. The sky feels close and smoky now, twilight falling on us. I hear his name and mine entwined by whispers in tones of awe and fear. Alice Kyteler. Alice Outlaw. Together our names spell fortune. Together we spell power.
The girls tell me I look happy, and I tell them I am, and I am. I am richer than I was this morning. I am the envy of the town. I am tied now to a man more beautiful than most, and tonight I shall undress for him and see his eyes widen in fright and pleasure. I shall touch him, press my lips to his, and something I don’t yet know will open inside me.
The girls leave me on the threshold of my husband’s three-storey house, gasping their “good lucks” and laughing to each other as they prance away.
My husband’s street door is well oiled; there’s no growl of complaint as he opens it.
He doesn’t take my hand, and so I step inside in front of him.
*
In my new dining hall, three tables have been pushed end to end. At the centre are four roasted capons, their balls sliced off by the butcher’s boy before they’d found their adult cock-a-doodle-doos. I take in the room, noting the average quality of the wall hangings depicting the lumpen men spearing each other. Tomorrow, I will send servants to get mine. The tables are polished to a high sheen. I click my fingers at a servant and instruct him to bring cloths, or if they cannot be got, rushes, to cover the wood. There will be much drinking tonight, many spills. Men’s voices in the hall interrupt me. I stand at the end of a table near the door, from where I can easily sweet-talk the merchants and churchmen and watch them cast eyes of jealousy and appreciation at my husband. I arrange my tunic so it falls straighter and look for Roger in the crowd but cannot find him. I didn’t see him outside the church either. When the news was announced in town that I was marrying his brother, he left for Dublin, and for days my mind flitted away from Kilkenny, up the coast to him, wondering if our next words would be loaded with loathing for each other’s separate futures, wondering if now he would decide to remove himself from Kilkenny for ever in order to forget me.
“Wife,” Outlaw says.
“Husband,” I say boldly, as if the word is familiar in my mouth.
We watch the men of Kilkenny surge through the door, eager to demolish our food and lick up every last drop of our wine. The churchmen first, always the greediest, dressed in their finest cassocks. Next, the merchants and knights and their assorted wives, all shiftily looking about to see how much coin we spent to impress them. And finally there he is. Roger. Smiling. Yes, he’s smiling, and at me. I find my husband is being led away by a priest, and, for a moment, I shut my eyes. When I open them, Roger is in front of me.
“Hello,” I say.
“You’ve married into a family of crooks,” he says. I purse my lips and cross my arms.
“You know,” he says, “because of our name. Outlaw.”
“I swear I’ve heard that joke before. I pray you find a better one for your own wedding day.”
“I told you, I don’t plan to marry for many years.”
I want to start over, but it’s too late. “I am sorry,” he says.
“For what?”
“For your father. I learned so much from him. I hope one day to be like him.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Tell me what’s wrong, Alice.” He steps a little closer, but when I step back he doesn’t try to close the gap. “You fought with him?”
“I—” I thought Roger had known. I’d thought he’d noticed. I had hoped it was unsaid between us, but it was just me, and Alma, who knew after all.
“You won’t kneel to me?” I say.
“What?” His thick eyebrows shoot together, bridging his nose. In the past, he could always keep up with me. Now, he’s limping behind.
“It’s customary,” I say, “when you enter someone’s house to kneel, if you are beneath them. What will people think of you slighting your sister-in-law so?”
For a moment, his mouth hangs open. “That’s really what you want?” he says.
“It is.”
But before either of us can move, him to kneel and I to strut away, William Outlaw is beside me again.
“Your wife,” Roger says, “was just trying to convince me to take an action I find repellent.”
I feel my neck turn warm, and for the first time today I regret the colour of my clothes.
“She was telling me I ought to marry,” Roger says, staring at me, and so I glare back at him and rest my hand on my husband’s sleeve.
“My brother is young yet,” William says to me. “He puts his life in danger so regularly by travelling that any wife would be severely distressed.”
I smile now at William. “You’re right. A wife could never handle the tormented freedom of having her husband away from home.”
Roger coughs. I don’t look at him. I cannot tell if he is disguising a laugh. William’s face is unchanged. I can’t tell if he is touched or believes I am in jest.
“When you do marry, Roger,” William says, “I hope your wife is like mine.”
“As near perfect as our Lord’s mother?” Roger says.
“You flatter me,” I say. “Mother Mary is perfection itself, but I find it irritating that she and virgins like her are the women we always praise. What of the wives? Most women can’t remain virgins. How would we continue to people Ireland without women carrying the burden of children?”
Both my husband and his brother are looking studiously away from me.
“I’m not sure faultless women like Mother Mary truly exist,” I continue, “but still, Roger, I wish, when you choose a wife, and I don’t doubt it will be within a year, that yours will be perfect.”
“Let me get you both a cup of wine,” Roger says.
With an exaggerated hand gesture and a tight smile, he bows to me and steps away. I have wounded him, but I don’t feel elation, only the weight of knowing that on this day I have perhaps forever lost a friend.
*
The meal is over. Bones litter plates, rice is only half dug out by spoons, and ale is spilled across the lot. The revellers walk my husband and I to the stairs, cheering as we begin to ascend. Before we have reached the top, I turn back to wave at them, but they have all returned to the dining hall to eat and drink without us, all except John le Poer, dressed in a deep purple tunic. I hadn’t noticed him enter the throng, nor did I see him outside the church, although I did scan the many men to see if he was among them. Now, he slowly lifts his hand to his mouth, kisses it and blows up to me. Before I can respond, he turns away, into my new dining hall, singing a song too bright and melodious.
*
Candles sputter in the draught, throwing the light about so I can’t see the details of my new bedchamber.
I step out of my slippers, shed my scarlet cyclas, leaving a red pile at my feet. My husband bends and folds it, neater than any of my servants have ever done. I step out of my wool inner and stand naked, watching him.
By the half-light, it looks as though his face has turned red. My body has the power to change the colour of his skin.
“Shall I kiss you?” I ask.
He wets his fingers at his lips and walks about the room, the candles hissing out at his touch. In the dark, I lie on the bed and listen to the patter of his feet, the sigh of the bed as he sits on it.
This is the moment. The hands will grasp, the breath will become ragged, insistent. But my hands lie still on my chest and my breath is steady. I am waiting for him to take me in his arms and do what he must. I am terror and also, yes, curiosity, and even excitement. I have seen dull and steady women transformed into wild creatures. They are what I’m waiting to become.
But I wait and wait until the morning comes.
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From Bright I Burn: A Novel © 2024 by Molly Aitken. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from Bright I Burn: A Novel by Molly Aitken, read by Avena Mansergh-Wallace. © 2024 Molly Aitken ℗ 2024 Penguin Random House, LLC.