by Alison Adare
In the end, they stayed three nights in the port, all sleeping in the same room in the inn to save coin. When they started back Janet’s purse was light but the wagons were heavy: with oats and wheat and beans, rather than wool. She’d laid in salt, as well, and barrels of smoked ocean fish to give their meals some variety. She had even a crate of apples, tart and sweet and utterly delicious, and high hopes that saving the seeds might give Brinday an orchard, if land could be found.
Well, trees grow well enough on that slope beneath the walls. Hard labor to clear it, but it could be done.
Despite the drizzle, as they made their way back up to Brinday Janet found herself smiling. When the drivers and guards struck up a cheerful chorus, she understood the spirit if not the words. We’ll make it through the winter. In comfort, even.
And next year, with a little more planning, we’ll do better again.
If there was some way to scrape together the coin to set up a proper dying operation … if they could afford the large coppers, build the separate building … even looms …
And then the coin would roll in. Janet imagined Tom’s face as she returned from the market two years from now, maybe three to be realistic, with a great fat purse to put in his hands. There are your walls, Sir Thomas, she’d say with a grin, and he’d smile, and say I don’t know what I would have done without you, Jack.
She’d be long gone by then, of course. Tom himself would oversee the restoration of Brinday’s fortune, if it was to be restored at all. But he’d remember that it was her idea, her efforts … perhaps if duty brings him to court, he might try again to seek me out … In her imagination, he wasn’t shocked or horrified to see her in skirts. He’d be pleased, even. I have an heir, my lady and I live as friends … come back with me to Brinday, Janet, as yourself. We can be together.
Even in her daydreams, she recognized that as an impossibility, and hastily recast it into something she could vaguely conceive actually happening. Give a message to your brother Jack, Miss Cooper …
The miles to Brinday passed quickly in pleasant, if unlikely, reverie. Janet was so busy embroidering the detail of Tom’s praise that she was surprised to see the fort looming up in front of them as they rounded the last bend into the valley.
Their welcome was subdued, not what she’d expected given she came laden with much-needed supplies. The men and women who came to unload the wagons were grim and worn.
Janet swung down from Masie, tossed the reins to one of Lew’s boys, and strode up the stairs to the great hall.
It was empty, a fire smoldering down to embers on the hearth. Mud tracked in during the day had dried on the floor, and though the morning meal had been cleared away, crumbs still littered the table. None of it was right, not in a house that Caris had the managing of. Janet turned in a circle on her heel. “Hello?”
“Jack.” She turned again to see Tom leaning in the doorway of Davith’s office. “We looked for you days past. I was beginning to think you must met trouble on the road.”
“Just mud,” Janet said, crossing to him. “The roads are bogs. Tom, we got a decent price and I’ve come back with supplies for the winter. Wheat, oats, some fish, salt enough to put meat by, if you’re lucky with the hunts. And —” Close to, she could see the pallor of his face, the new lines around his mouth.
“Hunting might have to wait a little,” Tom said, and slid down the door-frame to the floor all of a sudden.
Janet lunged forward and caught him in time to slow his fall. “Tom!” Cupping his cheek, she felt no fever in his skin, and turned to shout, “Braelyn! Caris!”
“Get back from me, Jack,” Tom said, trying to pull away from her. “Braelyn is with the others. And Caris … is one of the others.”
She refused to let him go. “And why are you not resting in your bed?” she demanded. “How long have you been sick? How many others? Is it the same as before? Is —”
Despite the pain that marked his face, Tom summoned the ghost of a smile. “Give a man a chance to answer you, Jack, for pity’s sake.” Leaning heavily on her shoulder, he hauled himself to his feet. “There are too few able to do any work for any of us to shirk,” he said. “It began a few days after you left. There’s hardly anyone without some sign of it in the fort. And for some, it’s like to the pestilence that struck after the shearing, but not all.” Another faint twitch of humor. “I’m still in my right mind, although as I watch Brinday crumble around me that seems less of a mercy. But—” He held his free hand out to her, showing her blistering skin, peeling in places. “This is common, at least in the beginning. Feet, also. And then the rot begins.” He paused. “Glyn has lost one of the fingers on his right hand, and the rot still spreads. Braelyn says she doesn’t know what to do for it. She’s never seen it before.”
“Are you sure she’s telling the truth about that?” Janet asked, helping him back into the office with her arm around his waist. “Who better than the … wise woman of Brinday to bring down a curse like this?”
“She’s telling the truth,” Tom said. “Emlyn is taken with it, Jack. And Braelyn herself is showing the same signs I am.”
“Christ’s cod,” Janet said. “How is the village?”
“Few ill, and those not badly. The tenants have done their best to make up the difference, to see us all fed, tend to the animals. But some of those who came up to help were struck down, and now the others are afraid to come often, or for too long.”
She lowered him into his chair. “Some humor in the walls here, maybe. Or the water in the well, I did tell you, it’s an unhealthy habit.”
“Braelyn thought the same. We carried some of the worst off down to the village, to her house, with supplies of small beer as well as food. None of them have improved. One has died.”
“Who?”
“Braith. From the kitchens.”
Janet crossed herself. “I remember her.”
“Jack, I want you to take everyone still well, take them up to the high pastures. The weather’s foul, I know, but if anyone can pull shelter for a few dozen people from their pocket, it’s you. Whatever reason God has for afflicting us, it’s the fort that’s the center of it. It’s in His hands whether we survive, but at least some must — or Brinday will be a graveyard.”
“I agree,” she said slowly, “that as many as we can find who aren’t sick should go, as far away as they can. But me, I’ll stay.”
“Jack—”
She hitched her hip on the edge of his desk and folded her arms. “I won’t leave you alone in this.”
“Jack. Lady Modron is still well. She must go, also, before this … curse seizes her as well. And there’s no-one here I’d trust with her comfort, and her safety, as you.”
Janet rubbed her forehead. “Saint Theodosia’s teats! And leave you here with no-one to help you but the sick and the mad?”
“Jack.” He put his hand on her arm, gripped it. “Please.”
“If you let me help you to bed,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
As she’d thought, he heard the agreement he wanted in her prevarication. “Thank you.”
“Now, up,” she said briskly, stooping to draw his arm over her shoulders.
His chambers were too far for him to manage. She put him to bed in the guest room instead, and tried not to remember that the last man who’d slept there had been Davith.
Then she went to investigate the state of the rest of Brinday.
Tom had not exaggerated. More than half the servants were too unwell to rise from their beds, blisters spreading from hands and feet to their limbs, skin peeling and, all too often, flesh blackening. The rest were suffering as well, if not so badly, limping and hobbling through such of their duties as they could manage with little cries and gasps of pain. Any hope Janet entertained that the Lord’s mercy might yet relieve them was shaken when she discovered that Father Donnic was among the worst affected, carried down to the village to see if in leaving the fort he could escape the curse.
&nbs
p; But he, and the others, had not — although whatever this pestilence was, it spread more slowly, if at all, outside the fort’s walls. When she went down to the village, Janet found only a small number of tenants with the careful, wincing gate, the tell-tale reddened hands. All of them, she ascertained with slow and careful questions, had been among those who’d turned their hands to the tasks at the fort left undone as the sickness felled more and more people.
She was no physician, but it seemed to her that they were less severely affected than many of those at the fort, and their families had come to no harm from nursing them. So it is the fort, where this illness grows. When she asked, with her limited vocabulary augmented by dumb show, if they had gotten sicker since they left the fort, the answer was clear — if startling. None had worsened. Almost all were improving.
She walked back up the hill, thinking hard. Those from the fort carried down to the village have continued to ail — those from the village have not. It was not the water, for those nursed in Braelyn’s house drank only small beer, in case of it. And it could not be the food. Something spoiled in the kitchen or the stores would explain why only those from the village who had spent long enough at the fort to take a meal there had gotten sick, but Tom had said Lady Modron was not ill. Was it a curse laid on the fort itself? But no, that too would affect Modron as well, surely?
Crossing the great hall on her way to the kitchen she met Lynn, one of the younger cooks, hobbling toward Lady Modron’s chambers, holding a tray with a cloth spread over it in reddened hands.
Janet took it from her. “I will,” she said in the local language, nodding her head in the direction of the door. “Sit. Rest.”
Lynn was eager enough to do just that, and Janet carried the tray to Lady Modron’s door. She had to balance it carefully to open the door, and nearly dropped it when the door failed to yield to her push. “My lady,” she called. “Your meal.”
A sentence came back in an unfamiliar woman’s voice, in the local language.
“My lady, it’s Steward Cooper. I don’t know what’s being said. I have your meal here.”
“Leave it by the door,” Lady Modron’s melodious tones came. “My ladies will carry it in when you are gone.”
“I’m not —” sick, she was going to say, and then stopped. She set the tray down. “My lady, are none of you ill?”
“We have been preserved by God’s mercy,” Modron said.
“None of you at all?” Janet pressed.
“Why would I lie about it, Steward Cooper?”
Is the curse laid on some part of the fort, then? On the great hall … no, she would eat there in the evenings, before. And her food is still prepared in the kitchens. On the courtyard? She would have to go into it, to go to church. And for the same reason, it cannot be on some part of the church. “I don’t think you’re lying, my lady. I just need you to be very certain. None of your ladies could be concealing any signs of illness?”
A pause, a torrent of local words. “None of them, Steward Cooper, I assure you.”
Janet took the cloth from the tray and studied it, trying to see if there were any protective marks embroidered into it that might counteract evil in the food, but the embroidery seemed unremarkable to her, if of very fine quality. Absently, she folded it. Of course, there is one obvious explanation for immunity to an illness that strikes all others indiscriminately.
And that is that Lady Modron herself has laid the curse.
But would she? Oh, they had joked, she and Tom, on the road, about his betrothed being willing to put poison in his cup or a knife between his ribs. And though Modron had seemed to be warming to Tom …she may very well be less resigned to her circumstances than she seems.
But would she really unleash such a hideous pestilence on her own people? What would she gain, if Tom’s death left her once more holding Brinday, but in such circumstances as to make her Lady of Graves and little more?
Of course, history was full of cautionary tales about those who dealt with devils to strike down their enemies and unleashed wider catastrophes.
“Have you finished your interrogation, Steward Cooper?” Lady Modron asked from the other side of the door.
Janet felt her jaw tighten. Half her people likely dying and she grudges questions about it because it delays her meal. Deliberately, she twisted off a hunk of the fine, white loaf on the tray. “I am, my lady. Thank you.”
She spread the cloth back over the tray and went off down the corridor, popping the chunk of bread into her mouth. Nothing but the best for my lady, of course, she being too delicate to eat coarse rye like the rest of us. Even Tom is served the same as his men, and he’s the lord of Brinday, but does he complain? No, he’s eaten enough spoiled salt pork and moldy barley to know that honest food is nothing to turn your nose up at —
She stopped dead, and then went for the kitchens at a run.
Without Donnic or Emlyn to interpret for her, it took Janet long, agonizing minutes to make herself understood to Lynn, who was all that was left of the kitchen staff, and Cadog, who was helping her. Eventually she dragged them both into the storerooms. Modron, she said over and over again, pointing to the single sack of wheat flour that had been all that was left of Brinday’s supply until her own return, pointing to the sheaves of rye. Modron, this, Modron, this?
Eventually Lynn gathered what she was asking, put her blistered hand firmly on the sack of wheat. “Modron,” she said, then pointing to the rye, “No.”
“Thank you,” Janet said fervently. Modron and her ladies are too fine to eat common rye bread. That’s the only difference between them, and everyone who’s sick.
Whether the rye had spoiled in some way, or was cursed, Janet didn’t care. “Bad,” she said, slapped the sheaves of rye for emphasis. “Bad. Sickness, rye, sickness. Leave it.”
She raced back to Lady Modron’s chamber and pounded on the door. “My lady! My lady!”
“What is it? Is it Sir Thomas?”
“No, my lady, it’s the rye bread. That’s what’s causing it. I need your help. I can’t explain it to anyone. Please! The sheaves, the flour, must be taken out and burned. I need you to tell everyone that.”
There was a pause. “How can bread cause such a plague?”
“I don’t know, but my lady, think. You drink the same water. You live in the same walls. Your stew or pottage comes from the same pot, your meat from the same haunch on the same spit. But your bread, my lady, your bread is made from wheat — and you are not ill, your women are not ill, I think you are the only people inside the walls of the fort who are entirely well. Except for me, and the men who went with me — because we have not been eating the bread baked here, either.” She thumped her fist on the door. “Please, my lady. If I’m right, people will start to get better, like the tenants who began to recover when they became too ill to come up to the fort and were no longer taking meals here during the day. Sir Thomas will get better.” That could be a poor argument … “Caris, and Glyn, and the others. I can’t just start carrying the stores out to the courtyard and making a bonfire of them, people will think I’ve taken the sickness myself and am out of my wits. I need someone who can explain it.” Silence, on the other side of the door, and Janet raised her fist to pound again, and then unfolded it, rested her palm gently on the door and her forehead beside it. “Please, my lady. If I’m right, no harm will come to you from coming outside. If I’m wrong … it’s only a matter of time before everyone is too ill to bring you your meals and you’ll have to come out then, anyway. Won’t you?”
There was another long pause, and then the bolt drew back. “Stand away from the door,” Lady Modron ordered.
Janet stepped well back. “Yes.”
The door opened slowly, and Lady Modron peered out over the cloth she held in front of her mouth and nose. It was so heavily saturated in perfume that Janet could smell it from where she stood. “If you are wrong about this, there will be hunger this winter. The people will blame you, and Sir Thomas.
”
“There’s wheat, and oats,” Janet said. “Brought up from the port. And, Lady Modron, if I’m wrong about this, there may not be many left to starve.”
The cloudy green eyes widened. “So bad, then? Sir Thomas said it was no worse than any summer fever.”
“Perhaps he didn’t want to worry you, my lady,” Janet said. “Although he and I saw half a camp laid low by a summer fever, in the army, so perhaps you misunderstood his meaning. But it is bad, very bad. And all I can think of is —”
“The rye bread, yes, you said. Very well. Go ahead, Steward Cooper, I will follow you.”
Janet led the way to the kitchen, where Lady Modron, holding her skirts fastidiously clear of the floor with the hand that wasn’t keeping the scented cloth clamped to her face, spoke at length to Lynn and Cadog. Janet recognized enough of the words she had unfortunately had to become familiar with — words like sickness — to understand that Lady Modron was being as good as her word.
Lynn and Cadog both looked dubious, but nodded obediently when Lady Modron gestured to the storeroom. A moment later and they were carrying the first sack of rye flour up the stairs to the great hall between them.
“Thank you, my lady,” Janet said. “But we must tell as many — you must tell as many people as possible.”
In the end, it took less time than Janet had feared, for once Lady Modron had explained the need to drag the flour and the sheaves into the courtyard for burning to a few, they were quickly able to explain it to others. One went running down to the village to tell Braelyn to stop using the fort’s cursed bread to feed her patients there.
Lady Modron retreated to to the very edge of the courtyard steps, watching over the top of her scented cloth as Janet and the others heaved and dragged the heavy sacks, hurled armfuls of sheaves onto the pile. The noise roused Tom, and Janet left off her labors long enough to explain her reasoning to him and to utterly refuse to countenance his doing anything more to help than standing propped against the wall looking approving. Good man, she heard him saying as people passed him, well done. Keep going. Nearly finished.