“It’s stopped,” Frevisse said. “We’ve stopped it.” She kept her voice low, pitched for reassurance, but Lady Ermentrude’s eyes remained frantic, demanding. Without changing tone, Frevisse said, “Someone tell Dame Claire to hurry. And find Father Henry.”
Neither Lady Ermentrude’s lady-in-waiting nor the maid, cringed back against the wall beside the bed, moved, probably in fear of setting off the screaming again. Frevisse understood the fear; she was standing quite still herself. But she risked looking away, toward Sir John and Lady Isobel. They had been trying to help bring Lady Ermentrude to bed when the frenzy started. Now they were standing against the far wall, Lady Isobel pressed close to her husband, held in the protective circle of his arms though his own face was strained with shock.
Beyond them, in the doorway, were Martha Hayward – of course, Frevisse thought – and Thomasine. Neither of them had had sense enough to close the door; staring faces crowded behind them, no one looking as if they had the wit to help.
“Martha,” she said, still careful of her tone. “I need Dame Claire and Father Henry. Go now.”
“Demons,” Thomasine interrupted in a loud whisper. “She was seeing demons.”
“She wasn’t,” Frevisse said firmly, her attention quickly back to Lady Ermentrude, who was still clinging to the crucifix, her eyes now tightly shut.
“Demons,” Thomasine repeated and came nearer, still clutching the bowl, her pale face narrow and intent in the frame of her white veil. “She’s evil and demons have come for her soul.”
Lady Ermentrude began to whimper. All though the room and in the doorway hands moved, crossing themselves.
Frevisse said forcefully, “They have not.”
Lady Ermentrude’s maid gave a dry, terrified sob. “But she was seeing hellfire. She said so. And she couldn’t stop screaming until you gave her the crucifix. We saw it!”
Lady Ermentrude began to wail softly, and Frevisse said, fiercely now, “If there were demons here the cross would keep them at bay! Martha, I told you, we need the priest and Dame Claire!”
Martha nodded wordlessly and backed out of the door, but they must have been already in the guest hall; she was hardly out of sight when Father Henry’s voice was heard saying, “Yes, yes, Martha, you wait out here.” And a moment later, spreading the crowding servants aside, he came in, tall and comforting, already wearing his priestly stole and carrying the small box that held all the articles needed for the Last Sacrament. Dame Claire, small behind him, carried her own box of medicines, and Frevisse could not have said which of them she was more pleased to see.
Father Henry closed the door on the avid faces, including Martha’s. Lady Ermentrude’s wail subsided into a faint moan, and Frevisse said slowly, smoothly and low-voiced, to Dame Claire, “She’s drunk. She came riding in drunk a half hour or so ago and then fell into the screaming and raving.”
“It’s demons,” Thomasine said.
“If you say that again, I’ll see Domina Edith has you on bread and water from now to All Hallows,” Frevisse said in the edged monotone she used when at the end of her patience.
Dame Claire, ignoring both of them, came to the bed, silently assessing Lady Ermentrude.
.“She’s m-mad,” said Lady Isobel, the second word drawn out, thinned and broken. She hid her face against her husband’s shoulder.
“Perhaps,” Dame Claire answered in her deep voice. She reached out to feel Lady Ermentrude’s face. “It is true that those who have drunk for years often come to be bothered with evil visions. She has a fever, too.”
She touched the backs of her hands. Lady Ermentrude flinched, her knuckles whitening as her grip on the crucifix tightened.
“No, here, on her hands, she’s clemmed with cold.” Dame Claire looked at Frevisse. “Was she like this when you tried to undress her?”
Frevisse nodded. “Hot as new baked bread, cold as autumn earth.”
Dame Claire looked to the lady-in-waiting beyond the bed, a handsome woman, probably, when not terrified. “Have you ever seen her this way before?”
The woman shook her head. “No, madam, but I’ve been with her this past week only.” She was one of the women who had ridden in with Lady Ermentrude the half hour ago. Though plainly frightened, she was calming a little at the need to answer Dame Claire’s questioning. Her wits come somewhat back to her, she continued, “She had a single bottle of wine with her on the road this morning. I don’t know how much she’d drunk when she dropped it and split the leather on a sharp stone, wasting the rest.”
Martha, putting her head around the corner of the door no one had seen her open again, spoke up. “I was with her for seven years, and I can say she could drink several bottles at a sitting, but it was usually of an evening, at her own fireside. And she might grow boisterous at it, but I never saw her taken like this. When I heard that shrilling start and my heart went up into my mouth, I knew my lady was taken in pain like she’s never been before.” But she was staring at Lady Ermentrude with ghoulish satisfaction.
Frevisse caught her eye and frowned a hush at her. Martha frowned back, but retreated, pulling the door not quite shut.
Dame Claire looked at Lady Isobel and Sir John. “She was with you last night? Was she drinking then? What did she eat? Was she drinking before she left you this morning?”
“She drank a cup of wine at supper, and she ate very little of what we all had,” Sir John answered. “She was in a rage, too busy ranting at us to eat or drink much. She left without breaking her fast this morning, only took some wine and rode off.”
“We were afraid for her,” Lady Isobel said. She spoke rapidly, eyes shining with unshed tears. “She kept talking at us, not listening to our replies. She said wild, impossible things. Ugly things.” Her head sank, and Sir John held her more closely, looking at the listeners as if his lady wife’s trouble was their fault. Taking courage from his embrace, she lifted her chin and continued, “We tried to quiet her – the servants, you know. They will gossip, repeating all they overhear. But it was no use. She went at us until late in the night and again this morning. I doubt she slept much if at all, because she was in the same fury this morning. We tried to have her stay but she rode off still furious at us. We were afraid for her, John and I, riding off like that. Afraid she might be taken ill on the road...” Isobel gestured vaguely. “Her heart. Or a fall. She can be cruel to a horse when she’s in a temper. She’s not young, and not always careful of herself. We followed after her as soon as might be. And now Thomasine says she came here swearing she’d have her out of the nunnery. I saw a madman once. It was awful. It was like–” She looked toward Lady Ermentrude and fell eloquently silent.
“Whatever this is, she’s very ill with it,” Dame Claire said with flat calm. “And not in her mind only.” She had gone on examining Lady Ermentrude as far as she properly could with men in the room. Now she gently urged her to straighten and lie flat, to be covered. “It’s not her heart or she’d not be so violent. Or apoplexy because that leaves its victims helpless, and that she obviously is not. It may be a fever. But it’s a strange fever that leaves the hands and feet cold.” Dame Claire was clearly thinking aloud.
“Perhaps she is only drunk then,” Sir John suggested hopefully.
“Drink can take people in different ways.” Dame Claire nodded. “This could well be one of them. But whatever it is, she’s quiet now and needs to be kept that way lest she make worse whatever is already wrong. Thomasine.” She looked to where Thomasine still stood at the bed’s foot.
Slowly Thomasine drew her eyes away from her great-aunt, to look at the infirmarian. “Thomasine,” Dame Claire repeated, “I want the box from the far shelf in the infirmary. The gray one with borage flowers painted on its lid. You helped me make the compound, remember? Valerian for nerves and borage for melancholy. Bring it. And it needs to be given with wine. There’s none left in the infirmary so you’ll need all three keys to the wine chest. You’ll have to ask Domina Edith for hers, then
Dame Alys and Dame Perpetua.
Lady Isobel stirred in her husband’s arms. “We have some malmsey with us. We brought it on the chance we could make peace with her. It’s one of her favorites. I’ll go for it.”
But Sir John said with a gesture, “Wait. Malmsey may not be right for this.”
“It should be fine, and save us time,” Dame Claire said. “My thanks. Only the box then, Thomasine. What’s that you’re holding?”
“A milksop, my lady.”
“Good. Leave it; we may want it. Now go. Be quick.”
Frevisse reached out to take the bowl from the girl’s stiff hands. Thomasine made the correct curtsey to Dame Claire, then backed away from the bed as if afraid to turn her back to Lady Ermentrude. Not until she bumped into the door frame did she turn to fumble the door open and leave so quickly she seemed as much in flight as in obedience.
Frevisse set the bowl carefully on the table along the wall. Father Henry, who had been standing to one side of everyone this while, praying under his breath, now lifted his head and asked, “Will she live?”
“I don’t know. She’s very ill,” Dame Claire answered. “But blood and heart and breathing are all strong. And she’s quiet now. That’s to the good, if her mind stays unconfused.”
Lady Ermentrude made a small moan and turned her head toward the sound of Father Henry’s voice, keeping her eyes closed. “Az devil ‘rhongst us,” she croaked.
“Then you want our priest’s prayers,” said Frevisse sensibly.
Father Henry came to stand by the bed, fumbling his way into anxious Latin as he gestured a cross over it. “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, amen,” he intoned.
Lady Ermentrude, with a deep, spasmed effort, broke one hand’s grip from the crucifix and reached out to him, groping until she found his arm and dug her fingers into his sleeve. Her mouth worked, the cords of her neck stretching with tension, but all she managed was a gargling croak. Her eyes bulged with her effort and panic. The gargling changed to a hiss. Dame Claire moved as if to quiet her, but something in the sound made sense to Father Henry. Leaning toward Lady, Ermentrude, he said, “Sin. It’s sin that frightens you?”
Lady Ermentrude’s head twitched in agreement. Her throat worked, straining.
“We all live in fear of that, my lady,” Father Henry said. He patted her hand where it clung to him. “But I’m praying for you. Do you wish to make confession?”
“Sssinsss,” Lady Ermentrude hissed. “Wwwwurrsss sssinns...” Anger darkened her face, and her gaze crawled around the room. Her hand twitched away from Father Henry to claw at her throat. “... thannn minnnne,” she whined, high off the back of her mouth. “‘Wwwurrss.”
There was fear mixed with the anger. It glistened in her eyes as she brought them back to the priest. She let him take her hand into his own as he said soothingly, “All sins come to God in time, and there are none that can’t be forgiven, if we but ask. It’s your own we need to care for now. Would you have me give you absolution?”
Unsteadily, Lady Ermentrude jerked a nod. Father Henry opened his wooden box and took out two small beeswax candles already in silver holders. He put them on the table, flanking the bowl of milksops, and Frevisse brought a scrap of kindling from the fireplace to light them while he took a small glass bottle of chrism, another of blessed water, and a fist-sized wad of fresh bread, his practiced movements somehow reassuring. In the few years Father Henry had been at St. Frideswide’s, Frevisse had found that neither his mind nor faith went very far, but were strong so far as they went; and it was strength Lady Ermentrude needed just now.
Quietly Frevisse gestured to Lady Ermentrude’s women, and Lady Isobel and Sir John, that they should go now. None of them seemed willing, until Dame Claire took Lady Isobel gently by the elbow and urged her toward the door. Sir John, his arm still tenderly around his wife, went with them, the maid close at their heels. Only the dark-haired lady-in-waiting continued to hesitate, until Frevisse made a sharper, demanding gesture at her. With a sidelong look at her mistress, she went. Frevisse followed to make sure no one lingered within eavesdropping distance.
The cluttering knot of servants outside the door drew back reluctantly, leaving them a little space. Dame Claire said to the lady-in-waiting and the maid, “She will not need you for a while. Go reassure the others that she’s alive and quiet now, that she was in a nightmare, nothing else. We don’t need foolish rumors running through all the priory.”
The maid curtsied, but the lady-in-waiting said firmly, “I’m the lady of her chamber today. I’d best stay and go in again when we’re able. You do as the lady bids,” she added to the maid.
Clearly glad to obey, the maid walked away, immediately surrounded by the other servants. A little wave of low-voiced questioning followed after her, and Frevisse knew that despite Dame Claire’s words, by dark word would have run all the way to the village that Lady Ermentrude had been surrounded by dancing demons and the flames of Hell and that Father Henry had driven them away with prayers and holy water.
Dames Claire and Frevisse started away from the door. Sir John stopped, putting his hand to his jaw and wincing. He asked, “She’ll live?” in a voice stiff with pain.
Dame Claire thought before answering slowly, “There seems no reason why she shouldn’t. Her heart and pulse are strong. It’s her mind that seems gone most awry, and that will mend of itself if it’s only drunkenness.”
“Then she’ll be all right?” Lady Isobel insisted.
“I think there’s a goodly chance, though we may not know until morning. Or later. Thomasine, bless you for your speed.” She held out her hand for the box Thomasine handed her, a little breathless with her haste. “There is this at least to bring on sleep, and that can be a better cure than most.”
“The wine, I nearly forgot.” Lady Isobel drew away from her husband. “I’ll bring it.”
“No, I will,” he offered quickly, but winced again, and she placed a hand on his arm and smiled up at him.
“You don’t want the outside air on that tooth. Besides, I know where in the saddlebags it is. You wait here, love.”
Beyond the cloister walls the bell began to ring for late afternoon’s Office of Vespers. Dame Claire said, “You go, Dame Frevisse. Thomasine can stay to help me. When Father Henry is through I want to give her the medicine and see if she will eat some of the milksop. We’ll come when we can.”
“I’ll stay, too, by your leave,” Martha Hayward put in, thrusting her way into the knot around Dame Claire. “I know her ways as well as any and can fetch things for her from the cloister better than her present people. That’ll save the sister’s feet a bit.”
“And when I’ve brought the wine, I’ll bide with her, too,” Lady Isobel said. “Or we can be with her in turns. Whatever is the matter, she’s my aunt and we owe her that much. If you think it all right?”
“Assuredly,” Dame Claire said. “And good.”
Frevisse, with the thought that they seemed to have the matter well in hand without her, nodded her own agreement and left for the church.
Vespers was one of each day’s longer Hours, with four psalms to be sung among its prayers. In her first months in the nunnery, as a novice with ideals but little knowledge, Frevisse had resented its intrusion into the routine of every afternoon. All the other Offices had made sense and been a gladness to her, even Matins and Lauds, the twin Offices that dragged her from bed at midnight. Prayer then in the dark watches of the night, the church seeming full of otherworldly shadows lurking around small hollows of gold candlelight beside the altar and along the choir stalls, and her mind withdrawn by sleep from everything but the need to chant the psalms and prayers, was a wondrous time, with God present all around them.
But Vespers came in busy late afternoon, with the nuns hurrying in to it from all parts of the priory and Frevisse almost always having to leave some task half-done behind her, and needing to go back to it, distracted, later. She had done silent penance for her res
entment, but when that did not cure it, she had been finally forced to admit her feeling to Dame Perpetua, newly come then to being mistress of novices.
“It intrudes,” she had complained. “It’s in the way of whatever I’m about.”
“But isn’t prayer what we’re supposed to be about?” Dame Perpetua had asked. She had an instinctive skill for knowing the best way to teach, based on a novice’s needs and strengths. Some needed leading, others prodding. A very few could be challenged. “You have some business for being here other than serving God perhaps?”
Frevisse, goaded into looking at her mind and its habits, had come – less than graciously at first – to admit there were reasons for Vespers at the busy end of afternoons: a need to remember there were matters more important to the undying soul than the passing needs of the everyday.
“A solis ortu usque ad occasum, laudabile noman domini.” From the dawn of the day until sunset, praised be the Name of the Lord.
They sang the words in Latin, but Frevisse turned them to English in her mind, having never felt that understanding the glory of the words as she chanted them could be sinful, no matter how she came by that understanding. She wove her voice with the other nuns into a curtain of praise, familiar and practiced, warm in the gray shadows of the afternoon church.
She knew when Dame Claire joined them, her surprisingly sweet, clear alto as precise on every note as she was precise with her medicines.
“Non nobis, Domine, non nobis: sed monini tuo da gloriamo.”‘ Not to us, Lord, not to us, but glory to your name, for your true love. Amen.
The last of the office sounded softly among the raftered roof and stone walls, then fell away to silence. Slowly, with the stiffness of age and sitting, Domina Edith rose, and they rose after her and in a hush of skirts and slippered feet made a procession out into the cloister. There would be supper soon, a familiar pittance of cheese and apples, with any bread saved from midday dinner, then a chance to rest or walk in the little garden or the orchard, to reflect on the day, and, by a relaxation of the Rule, to talk among themselves. Today, though, duty would take Frevisse back to the guest halls, to see to what needed doing there. The day’s last office, Compline, would come after that, and then bed.
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