A Conspiracy of Wolves

by Candace Robb

  Lighting a spirit lamp for the close work, she instructed him to rest his injured arm on the table. With care, she slipped a hand beneath it so that she might move it about in the light to study the wound. The dog had sunk its teeth in deep into what remained of his forearm, a four-finger expanse. The teeth had gone clear to the bone. ‘How did you manage to get it to release you?’

  ‘I – shouted and – I could not tell you what convinced it I was not its dinner. All I could think of was retrieving what’s left of my arm.’

  ‘You did not attempt to attack it in turn?’

  He looked at her as if she were a half-wit. ‘I should think it plain my fighting days are over.’

  ‘Forgive me for my thoughtless question.’

  ‘We locked eyes as we each backed away.’ He shivered to describe it.

  The experience had unsettled this large, powerful man. She wondered what he had done to so anger the dog for it to attack. And the earlier baying. Why did he deny what he must have heard?

  She reminded herself that a healer must put the good of the patient before her curiosity. He must not feel compromised. She took a deep breath. Enough talk.

  ‘Some brandywine before I clean it and stitch the flesh together? My ministrations will worsen the pain before relieving it, the worst of it.’ And the brandywine should calm him. She needed him steady.

  ‘I would welcome it.’

  Slipping away to pour him some, she also fetched warm water for the calendula drink. With such a deep wound, best to give him that now, and send him home with enough for a day, as well as packing the wound with a paste of betony. And boneset, in case the bone had been damaged.

  She sensed his intense eyes following her hands as she worked, but he kept still and silent. Nary a jerk or a wince, as if accustomed to sudden, sharp pain. Well, the arm. Of course.

  It was only when Alisoun was tying the bandage that he spoke again.

  ‘You are young to have such skill.’

  ‘Our queen was younger than me when she took on the role of the king’s helpmeet and mother to all the realm. And Princess Joan—’

  ‘I did not mean to insult you. I wish only to thank you for your gentle, healing touch.’

  Alisoun was glad only her hands were in the lamplight as she blushed. Apparently she was too quick to recite her litany of females who had been treated as grown women by the age of sixteen.

  ‘I pray you,’ she said, ‘I would thank you not to mention my outburst to Dame Magda.’

  Crispin nodded. ‘And I would ask that you tell no one of this incident,’ he said. ‘Not even Dame Magda.’ He neither raised his voice nor seemed excited, yet he made it clear he expected her to agree. Something in his eyes.

  ‘That will be difficult if she returns before you are healed.’

  ‘I am confident that you will find a way.’

  ‘But why? People should know of the danger.’

  ‘I have my reasons. I pray you, respect my request.’ A slight smile that did nothing to warm his wide, dark, thickly lashed eyes. An interesting face, unscarred, yet with the uneven color and roughened texture of someone who spent much time at sea. His heft was characteristic of a muscular man going soft as he aged and grew less active. Magda had called him a merchant adventurer – though more the latter, suspecting he earned more of his wealth by eliminating his partners’ competition than by his eye for a bargain. For such a man to be so disquieted by an encounter with a dog, and now this secrecy. What had so shaken him? And why must it be a secret?

  Secrecy added cost to treatment for those who had the coin – Magda’s rule, as it afforded her the means to care for those who were unable to pay her.

  And, indeed, when Alisoun named her fee, Crispin did not object, drawing the silver from his scrip without comment.

  She handed him the pouch of calendula powder, with instructions.

  ‘I am grateful to you, Mistress Alisoun. May God bless you for the work you do.’

  She stepped out the door after him, glad to see that she had worked quickly enough that the tide was just beginning to come in and his crossing should be easy even in the dark.

  ‘Did you encounter the dog nearby?’ She hoped it a sufficiently innocuous question. ‘I thought to forage for roots at dawn. But having tasted blood, it might be keen for more.’

  ‘Near enough,’ he said. ‘But if you have foraged in the forest all this while without mishap, I should think you will be safe. May God watch out for you, Mistress Alisoun.’

  Crispin bowed to her and set off across the rocks, his boots getting only a little wet in the slowly rising water. I should think you will be safe … Why? Had someone set the dog on him? He’d said he would have been a fool to challenge it. Yet why else would it attack? And why had it not simply kept its distance as wild animals commonly did in such encounters? All this, and his denial of the earlier baying, unsettled her.

  As she lingered in the doorway staring at his back, she caught a movement to her left, upriver. A figure stood at the edge of a stand of trees. Forty, fifty paces up the riverbank. Watching Magda’s house? Or Crispin Poole?

  When he did not seem to notice the watcher she thought to warn the injured man, but he had already reached the bank. She might wade across, but why? He’d not endeared himself to her, with his selfish refusal to alert the community. She had fulfilled her duty as a healer, tending his wound.

  Glancing back toward the stand of trees, Alisoun saw no one. ‘My imagination?’ she asked the sea serpent. No response. Not a good sign. Once inside she strung her bow and set it near the door, with a quiver of arrows. The tide might be coming in, but she would take no chances.

  A week later, Alisoun woke shortly after dawn, having dreamt of Crispin Poole being savaged by a hell-hound, a giant creature, black, with blazing eyes. Shivering, she stoked the fire, lit a lamp, and checked the young woman on the pallet by the fire, grateful for an absorbing task. Young Wren’s head was cool. No fever, God be thanked. A miscarriage, the bleeding afterward perhaps more than what might be expected, nothing worse. And, for this serving girl, a blessing. A child would bring only grief.

  Gently shaking the girl awake, Alisoun helped her sit up so she might drink the honey water laced with herbs to stop the bleeding.

  ‘If I hurry, my mistress will never know I was gone the night,’ said the girl in a hoarse whisper. Her throat was dry from the herbs. The honey in warm water should help that.

  ‘Drink that down,’ Alisoun said. ‘Then we will talk.’

  The girl tilted back her head and drank it down, holding out the empty wooden bowl for inspection, her pale eyes watching Alisoun’s face for a sign of argument. ‘I need the work. I’ve nowhere else to go.’

  This is how it was. ‘Of course. You’ve no fever. Let’s see if you can stand.’

  With Alisoun’s assistance, the girl swung her feet down and rose with nary a wobble, even taking a few hesitant steps. ‘Oh!’ She lifted her skirt, saw the watery blood trickling down the inside of her short, fleshy legs.

  ‘Tend it as you do your courses and no one’s the wiser,’ said Alisoun. ‘Your womb is empty.’

  ‘Was it—?’

  Alisoun shook her head. ‘Too early to know aught.’

  ‘Will you help me to the riverbank?’

  She would prefer that the girl lie abed for a day. This was the hardest part for Alisoun, keeping her counsel. Thine opinion is naught but interference, Magda would say. If thou wouldst care for her again, do what she asks and no more. She must allow the girl to return to the house where her master lay in wait, and he would continue to lie with her until she again conceived a child and carried it long enough for his wife to discover her condition, tossing her out onto the street as a Magdalene.

  Unless the charm worked. Alisoun had whispered it over the girl as she slept, a charm said to render a man impotent when he touched her. Magda was not here to chide Alisoun for using it. Even so, she had shivered as she whispered the words, imagining Magda’s sharp
eyes watching from afar. No one knew the extent of the Riverwoman’s powers.

  A risk. But Magda had said that Alisoun must find her own way …

  ‘Will you?’ the girl repeated, tugging on Alisoun’s sleeve with the dimpled hand of a child.

  ‘If that is what you wish, come along while the tide is low. I have prepared a powder for you to add to ale or water and drink down if the pain returns.’

  ‘I cannot be lazy …’

  ‘This is not so strong that you cannot work as usual. You need not be in pain.’ Alisoun pressed it into the girl’s hand.

  Once she had escorted the child safely through the ankle-deep water, Alisoun returned to the hut and sat down by the fire to dry the hem of her gown while planning her day. She should see Muriel Swann, make certain that the flutters she had felt days ago were indeed the child moving in her womb. Not a young woman, this was the first time Dame Muriel had carried a child long enough to feel it quicken, and the experience had both excited and frightened her. Alisoun added to her basket a calming potion for Muriel’s headaches, and a tisane to increase her appetite.

  A memory teased her, dogs barking in the night, and a man’s cries. Terror. Agony. The girl had awakened, calling out in fear, and Alisoun had risen to comfort her, assuring her it was just a bad dream.

  But it had been no dream. Had she been alone, Alisoun might have stepped outside, listening in order to gauge whence came the cry, then set out at first light to see if she might be of help. But the girl had been her first responsibility.

  Now she gathered the same remedies she had administered to Crispin Poole a week earlier. As it was light, she might walk upriver, see if she came across someone lying injured. She placed the basket with all she might need on the small chest by the door, then fetched her bow and a quiver of arrows. Poole had not returned, nor had she seen him or heard anything of him, and that silence, that absence made her uneasy.

  A soft rain in the night had freshened the late-summer foliage in the meadows and woodland along the road from Freythorpe Hadden to York and tamped down the dust, for which Owen was grateful. He knew the misery of riding for hours blinking away the dust in his one good eye, a scarf protecting his nose and mouth. For Lucie and the children, riding in the cart ahead of him, there was still the discomfort of a bumpy ride, but he heard no complaints.

  For a while they had traveled behind a group of players who serenaded them with songs and japes, a felicitous arrangement, though he hoped that his eight-year-old daughter Gwenllian would forget the bawdier lyrics. Now that the players had moved on, the monotonous rattle of the cart and horses was punctured occasionally by sounds of reapers and gleaners in the fields, though not as many as on their journey to Freythorpe. Harvest was almost over. Adding to the monotony, his companion droned on and on about something – Owen had stopped listening to Geoffrey a while back. Chaucer was shaping one of his poems aloud, replete with mythical palaces, gods, fantastical creatures, which might be entertaining but for his pauses to play with language, trying a phrase this way and that. Owen was perhaps to blame, having insisted that Geoffrey not address the mission that had brought him to York until they returned to the city. He’d hoped the man might ride in silence, but he’d know that was too much to ask of the chattering jay.

  In her wisdom, Magda Digby might have found a way to delay Geoffrey’s departure. Thou art needed in the city, she had told Owen as they sat beneath an oak the previous evening, drawing down the day. Depart in the morning.

  But Lucie …

  Agrees with Magda. She has readied the children.

  How do you know?

  Not the question, Bird-eye. She had turned to him, pressing her forefinger to the spot between his eyes. Open thine eyes. Trust thyself. The wolves circle their prey. Thou hast the sight to see what awakens.

  He’d questioned the wolves. They came only in winter, the wolves that the steward of the Forest of Galtres swore no longer bided in the land.

  What do folk see when they see a wolf, Bird-eye? The animal? Think again.

  Magda Digby, his guide, his tormentor. In his mourning for John Thoresby, Owen had sought her out, confided in her all that was in his heart. Long she listened, holding his hands, looking into his eye. Open thine eyes, she repeated, and corrected him when he argued that he had but one. He did not understand, and she did not explain. Her last words to him on departing Freythorpe, Trust thyself, Bird-eye. Thou art called.

  Trust himself. Open his eyes. He was called. Called from a year of mourning, a year of doubting his judgment, his worth, a year of questioning all – all but his devotion to his family. He had failed in his last task for Archbishop Thoresby, keeping the peace at his deathbed. Failed by missing signs of a trusted comrade’s discontent, so certain was he of the man’s loyalty when the impending death of their patron rendered his future uncertain.

  He’d spent the past year grieving for Thoresby and the end of a career that had given Owen purpose, and now he mourned the death of Philippa, a woman of strength and heart who had endeared herself to him over a decade. Philippa’s death had taken him by surprise. Though she had suffered for years of a palsy, her strength and memory failing, her end was sudden. One morning she simply did not rise from her bed. She was missed.

  Wolves circling their prey. The sight to see what awakens. Something that had already been stirring in York before Philippa’s death? He had been preoccupied with his own life the past months, helping out in the apothecary and the medicinal garden while Lucie sat with her failing aunt, riding out to familiarize himself with his new property, a manor in the gift of the Bishop of Winchester, the deed transferred to Owen on the late archbishop’s urging. Thoresby’s last gift, and, as ever, a double-edged sword. He must clear his mind of all that now.

  He had a vague memory of a rumor of wolves in the wood. There were always rumors of wolves in winter, but this time it had continued through the spring and summer. Wolves prowling the yards at night, stealing chickens and pigs. Mauley, sergeant of Galtres, had been incensed by the claims. Though his immediate predecessors had performed their duties with deputies, rarely coming north – king’s men, the status a gift – Mauley was often in York, biding with his daughter in the Fenton house on Coney Street. He was proud of order in the forest. Owen searched his memory for more, but he could not think clearly with Geoffrey’s jabbering. He’d made his excuses this morning, asked Geoffrey to stay at Freythorpe Hadden with Magda, who was to remain behind a while. But Magda had scoffed at that suggestion. She was not always Owen’s friend.

  ‘Spare me your poetic struggles,’ Owen grumbled.

  Geoffrey’s retort fell on deaf ears. A plume of dust on the road ahead caught Owen’s attention. Riders were to be expected on the southern approach to York, but something about this pair imparted a sense of urgency. He urged his horse forward, nodding to Lucie and the children as he passed the cart.

  ‘Are they for us?’ Alfred, his former lieutenant in the archbishop’s household guard, called out from his driver’s seat as he steadied the cart horses.

  ‘I’m riding ahead to see.’ As Owen grew closer he shook his head at the strange pairing approaching them.

  ‘Can that be Brother Michaelo?’ asked Geoffrey, catching up. ‘I thought he had agreed to stay as Archdeacon Jehannes’s secretary. But if he is on the road …’

  Upon Archbishop Thoresby’s death his secretary, Brother Michaelo, had found himself without a home, without a purpose. A Benedictine, he had left the Abbey of St Mary’s in York during the incumbency of the reasonable Abbot Campion. Unfortunately, the current abbot, knowing of Michaelo’s penchant for handsome young men, and a long-ago attempt to poison the abbey infirmarian, refused to receive him back into the fold. An earlier plan to return home to Normandy and seek a place in a modest priory near his ancestral home was one Michaelo had pursued with reluctance. Seeing the monk’s wretchedness and believing there must be work for a man of Brother Michaelo’s experience in the city, Jehannes, Archdeacon of Yo
rk, had invited the monk to bide with him for a time. He himself had need of a secretary, though the work was intermittent, not enough to keep Michaelo regularly engaged. Jehannes hoped to find other clerics who might need some of the monk’s time. But Michaelo’s reputation preceded him, and so far clerics proved reluctant.

  ‘It is indeed Michaelo,’ said Owen, ‘accompanied by Bartolf Swann, if I am not mistaken.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Coroner of Galtres Forest,’ said Owen.

  ‘What business would Michaelo have with such a man?’ Geoffrey asked a little breathlessly, as if anticipating a good tale. ‘Do you suppose they are taking ship together?’

  ‘I very much doubt it,’ said Owen. ‘Michaelo would drive Bartolf mad with his fussing.’

  The elderly Bartolf was far more likely to be riding south to consult with Magda Digby about one of his mysterious ailments, which, according to the Riverwoman, were merely signs of aging in a man who moved as little as possible and drank wine to the point of passing out every night. Though he’d been a man of sufficient status and wealth to be appointed coroner, he had suffered a series of setbacks and had perforce handed the business to his son some time before Owen’s arrival in York ten years earlier. His son Hoban had managed to restore the family fortune and, acting as his father’s banker, ensured the mayor and the king’s officers that his father now had sufficient wealth to perform the duties of coroner without danger of compromise – as much as any coroner for the crown. Even so, the man dressed more like a laborer except on official occasions, his clothes ill-fitting as he shrank with age, his copious white hair kept somewhat under control by a felt hat crammed low over his forehead, his pale eyes peering out through a snowy, greasy thicket. Many a widow in York yearned to clean him up – he had once cut a fine figure, when his wife was alive, and many remembered him with fondness. Today, he looked as if his horse had dragged him much of the way.

  Owen dismounted. ‘Master Bartolf, Brother Michaelo, good day to you,’ he called out as the riders drew up beside him.