A Feast of Sorrows, Stories

by Angela Slatter

  There is a knock on the door, and Mistress Alys calls the Misses away. Before she goes, Orla makes us form pairs and gives each couple a bowl of sticky, soft, brightly coloured balls the size of small marbles. We are to take turns, one hurling the projectiles and the other deflecting them with her fan. As soon as the door is closed behind our instructresses, Serafine begins to chatter, launching into a discussion of wedding matters, dresses, bonbonniere, bunting, decoration, the requisite number of accompanying flower girls, honour-maids, and layers of cake. She efficiently and easily distracts Adia, who will need to learn to concentrate harder if she wishes to graduate from St Dymphna’s in time for her own wedding.

  “It seems a shame to go to all the trouble of marrying someone just to kill him,” muses Adia. “All the expense and the pretty dresses and the gifts! What do you think happens to the gifts?”

  “Family honour is family honour!” says Serafine stoutly, then ruins the effect by continuing with, “If you don’t do anything until a year or two after the wedding day, surely you can keep the gifts?”

  The pair of them look to Veronica for confirmation, but she merely shrugs then pegs a ball of red at me. I manage to sweep it away with my fine sandalwood construct.

  “What has your fiancé done?” asks Adia, her violet eyes wide; a blue blob adheres to her black skirt. “And how many flower maids will you have?”

  “Oh, his great-great-grandfather cheated mine out of a very valuable piece of land,” says Serafine casually. “Five. What will you avenge?”

  “His grandfather refused my grandmother’s hand in marriage,” Adia answers. “Shall you wear white? My dress is oyster and dotted with seed pearls.”

  “For shame, to dishonour a family so!” whispers Veronica in scandalised tones. “My dress is eggshell, with tiers of gros point lace. My betrothed’s mother married my uncle under false pretences—pretending she was well-bred and from a prosperous family, then proceeded to bleed him dry! When she was done, he took his own life and she moved on to a new husband.”

  “Why are you marrying in now?”

  “Because now they are a prosperous family. I am to siphon as much wealth as I can back to my family before the coup de grace.” Veronica misses the green dot I throw and it clings to her shirt. “What shoes will you wear?”

  I cannot tell if they are more interested in marriage or murder.

  “But surely none of you wish to get caught?” I ask, simply because I cannot help myself. “To die on your wedding nights? Surely you will plot and plan and strategise your actions rather than throw your lives away like . . . ” I do not say “Lady Carew,” recalling their unstinting admiration for her actions.

  “Well, it’s not ideal, no,” says Veronica. “I’d rather bide my time and be cunning—frame a servant or ensure a safe escape for myself—but I will do as I’m bid by my family.”

  The other two nod, giving me a look that says I cannot possibly understand family honour—from our first meeting it was established that I was not from a suitable family. They believe I am an orphan, my presence at the school sponsored by a charitable donation contributed to by all the Guilds of my city, that I might become useful tool for business interests in distant Lodellan. I’m not like them, not an assassin-bride as disposable as yesterday’s summer frock, but a serious investment. It in no way elevates me in their estimation.

  They do not know I’ve never set foot in Lodellan, that I have two sisters living still, that I was raised in Cwen’s Reach in the shadow of the Citadel, yearning to be allowed to be part of its community. That I have lived these past five years as postulant then as novice, that I now stand on the brink of achieving my dearest wish—and that dearest wish has nothing to do with learning the art of murder. That Mater Friðuswith said it was worth the money to send me to St Dymphna’s to achieve her aim, but she swore I would never have to use the skills I learned at the steely hands of the Misses Meyrick. Even then, though, anxious as I was to join the secret ranks, the inner circle of the Little Sisters of St Florian, I swore to her that I would do whatever was asked of me.

  As I look at these girls who are so certain they are better than me, I feel that my purpose is stronger than theirs. These girls who think death is an honour because they do not understand it—they trip gaily towards it as if it is a party they might lightly attend. I feel that death in my pursuit would surely weigh more, be more valuable than theirs—than the way their families are blithely serving their young lives up for cold revenge over ridiculous snubs that should have been long-forgotten. I shouldn’t wonder that the great families of more than one county, more than one nation, will soon die out if this tradition continues.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” says Veronica, not unkindly, but lamely. I hide a smile and shrug.

  “My, how big your hands are, Mercia, and rough! Like a workman’s—they make your fan look quite, quite tiny!” Serafine trills just as the door opens again and Fidelma returns. She eyes the number of coloured dots stuck to each of us; Adia loses.

  “You do realise you will repeat this activity until you get it right, Adia?” Our teacher asks. Adia’s eyes well and she looks at the plain unvarnished planks at her feet. Serafine smirks until Fidelma adds, “Serafine, you will help your partner to perfect her technique. One day you may find you must rely on one of your sisters, whether born of blood or fire, to save you. You must learn the twin virtues of reliance and reliability.”

  Something tells me Fidelma was not far from the classroom door while we practised. “Mercia and Veronica, you may proceed to the library for an hour’s reading. The door is unlocked and the books are laid out. Orla will question you about them over dinner.”

  She leaves Veronica and me to pack our satchels. As I push in the exercise book filled with notes about the art of murder by fan, my quills, and the tightly closed ink pot, I glance at the window.

  There is Gwern, leaning on a shovel beside a half dug-over garden bed. He is not digging at this moment, though, as he stares through the pane directly at me, a grin lifting the corner of his full mouth. I feel heat coursing up my neck and sweeping across my face, rendering my skin as red as my hair. I grab up my carry-all and scurry from the room behind Veronica, while Serafine and Adia remain behind, fuming and sulking.

  “Nothing fancy,” says Mistress Alys. “They like it plain and simple. They’ve often said ‘Bread’s not meant to be frivolous, and no good comes of making things appear better than they are,’ which is interesting considering their business.” She sighs fondly, shakes her head. “The Misses got their funny ways, like everyone else.”

  I am taking up one end of the scarred oak kitchen table, elbow-deep in dough, hands (the blue tint almost gone) kneading and bullying a great ball of it, enough to make three loaves as well as dainty dinner rolls for the day’s meals. But I prick up my ears. It’s just before dawn and, although this is Adia’s month of kitchen duties, she is nursing a badly cut hand where Serafine mishandled one of the stiletto-bladed parasols during class.

  The housekeeper, stand-offish and most particular at first, is one to talk of funny ways. She has gotten used to me in these past weeks and months, happy and relieved to find I am able and willing to do the dirtiest of chores and unlikely to whinge and whimper—unlike my fellow pupils. I do not complain or carp about the state of my perfectly manicured nails when doing dishes, nor protest that I will develop housewives’ knee from kneeling to scrub the floors, nor do I cough overly much when rugs need beating out in the yard. As a result, she rather likes me and has become more and more talkative, sharing the history of the house, the nearby town, and her own life. I know she lost her children, a girl and a boy, years ago when her husband, determined to cut the number of mouths to feed, led them into the deepest part of the forest and left them there as food for wolves and worms. How she, in horror, ran from him, and searched and searched and searched to no avail for her Hansie and Greta. How, heartbroken and unhinged, she finally gave up and wandered aimlessly until she found
herself stumbling into Alder’s Well, and was taken in by the Misses, who by then had started their school and needed a housekeeper.

  I’ve written down all she has told me in my notebook—not the one I use for class, but the one constructed of paper scraps and leaves sewn into quires then bound together, the first one I made for myself as a novice—and all the fragments recorded therein will go into a Book of Lives in the Citadel’s Archives. Not only her stories, but those of Adia, Serafine, and Veronica, and the tiny hints Alys drops about Orla and Fidelma, all the little remnants that might be of use to someone some day; all the tiny recordings that would otherwise be lost. I blank my mind the way Mater Friðuswith taught me, creating a tabula rasa, to catch the tales there in the spider webs of my memory.

  “Mind you, I suppose they’ve got more reason than most.”

  “How so?” I ask, making my tone soothing, trustworthy, careful not to startle her into thinking better of saying anything more. She smiles gently down at the chickens she is plucking and dressing, not really looking at me.

  “Poor pets,” she croons, “Dragged from battlefield to battlefield by their father—a general he was, a great murderer of men, their mother dead years before, and these little mites learning nothing but sadness and slaughter. When he finally died, they were released, and set up here to help young women such as you, Mercia.”

  I cover my disappointment—I know, perhaps, more than she. This history is a little too pat, a tad too kind—rather different to the one I read in the Archives in preparation for coming here. Alys may well know that account, too, and choose to tell me the gentler version—Mater Friðuswith has often said that we make our tales as we must, constructing stories to hold us together.

  I know that their mother was the daughter of a rich and powerful lord—not quite a king, but almost—a woman happy enough to welcome her father’s all-conquering general between her thighs only until the consequences became apparent. She strapped and swaddled herself so the growing bump would not be recognised, sequestered herself away pleading a dose of some plague or other—unpleasant but not lethal—until she had spat forth her offspring and they could be smuggled out and handed to their father in the depths of night, all so their grandfather might not get wind that his beloved daughter had been so stained. This subterfuge might well have worked, too, had it not been for an unfortunate incident at a dinner party to welcome the young woman’s paternally approved betrothed, when a low-necked gown was unable to contain her milk-filled breasts, and the lovely and pure Ophelia was discovered to be lactating like a common wet nurse.

  Before her forced retirement to a convent where she was to pass her remaining days alternatively praying to whomever might be listening, and cursing the unfortunate turn her life had taken, she revealed the name of the man who’d beaten her betrothed to the tupping post. Her father, his many months of delicate planning, negotiating, strategising, and jostling for advantage in the sale of his one and only child, was not best pleased. Unable to unseat the General due to his great popularity with both the army and the people, the Lord did his best to have him discreetly killed, on and off the battlefield, sending wave after wave of unsuccessful assassins.

  In the end, though, fate took a hand and the Lord’s wishes were at last fulfilled by an opportune dose of dysentery, which finished off the General and left the by-then teenage twins, Fidelma and Orla, without a protector. They fled, taking what loot they could from the war chests, crossing oceans and continents and washing up where they might. Alas, their refuges were invariably winkled out by their grandfather’s spies and myriad attempts made on their lives in the hope of wiping away all trace of the shame left by their mother’s misdeeds.

  The records are uncertain as to what happened, precisely—and it is to be hoped that the blanks might be filled in one day—but in the end, their grandfather met a gruesome death at the hands of an unknown assassin or assassins. The young women, freed of the spectre of an avenging forebear, settled in Alder’s Well, and set up their school, teaching the thing they knew so well, the only lesson life had ever taught them truly: delivering death.

  “Every successful army has its assassins, its snipers, its wetdeedsmen—its Quiet Men,” Orla had said in our first class—on the art of garrotting, “And when an entire army is simply too big and too unwieldy for a particular task one requires the Quiet Men—or in our case, Quiet Women—to ensure those duties are executed.”

  “One doesn’t seek an axe to remove a splinter from a finger, after all,” said Fidelma as she began demonstrating how one could use whatever might be at hand to choke the life from some poor unfortunate: scarf, silk stockings, stays, shoe or hair ribbons, curtain ties, sashes both military and decorative, rosaries, strings of pearls, or very sturdy chains. We were discouraged from using wire of any sort, for it made a great mess, and one might find one’s chances of escape hindered if found with scads of ichor down the front of a ball or wedding gown. Adia, Seraphine and Veronica had nodded most seriously at that piece of advice.

  Mistress Alys knew what her Misses did, as well as did white-haired Mater Friðuswith when she’d sent me here. But perhaps it was easier for the dear housekeeper to think otherwise. She’d adopted them and they her. There was a kind of love between them, the childless woman and the motherless girls.

  I did not judge her for we all tell ourselves lies in order to live.

  “There he is!” She flies to the kitchen window and taps at the glass so loudly I fear the pane will fall out of its leadlight bedding. Gwern, who is passing by, turns his head and gazes sourly at her. She gestures for him to come in and says loudly, “It’s time.”

  His shoulders slump but he nods.

  “Every month,” she mutters as if displeased with a recalcitrant dog. “He knows every month it’s time but still I have to chase him.”

  She pulls a large, tea-brown case with brass fittings from the top of a cupboard and places it at the opposite end of the table to me. Once she’s opened it, I can see sharp, thick-looking needles with wide circular bases; several lengths of flexible tubing made perhaps of animal skin or bladder, with what seem to be weighted washers at each end; strange glass, brass, and silver objects with a bell-shaped container at one end and a handle with twin circles at the other, rather like the eye rings of sewing scissors. Alys pulls and pushes, sliding them back and forth—air whooshes in and out. She takes the end of one length of tubing and screws it over a hole in the side of the glass chamber, and to the other end she affixes one of the large gauge needles. She hesitates, looks at me long and hard, pursing her lips, then I see the spark in her eyes as she makes a decision. “Mercia, you may stay, but don’t tell the Misses.”

  I nod, but ask, “Are you sure?”

  “I need more help around here than I’ve got and you’re quiet and accommodating. I’ll have your aid while I can.”

  By the time she returns to the cupboard and brings out two dozen tiny crystal bottles, Gwern has stepped into the kitchen. He sits and rolls up his sleeves, high so that the soft white flesh in the crooks of his elbows is exposed. He watches Alys with the same expression as a resentful hound, wanting to bite but refraining in the knowledge of past experience.

  Mistress Alys pulls on a pair of brown kid gloves, loops a leather thong around his upper arm, then pokes at the pale skin until a blue-green relief map stands out. She takes the needle and pushes it gently, motherly, into the erect vein. When it’s embedded, she makes sure the bottom of the bell is safely set on the tabletop, and pulls on the pump, up and up and up, slowly as if fighting a battle—sweat beads her forehead. I watch as something dark and slow creeps along the translucent tubing, then spits out into the bottom of the container: green thick blood. Liquid that moves sluggishly of its own accord as the quantity increases. When the vessel is full, Alys begins the process again with the other arm and a new jar which she deftly screws onto the base of the handle.

  She pushes the full one at me, nodding towards a second pair of kid gloves in
the case. “Into each of those—use the funnel,” she nods her head at the vials with their little silver screw tops, “Don’t over-fill and be careful not to get any on yourself—it’s the deadliest thing in the world.” She says this last with something approaching glee and I risk a glance at Gwern. He is barely conscious now, almost reclining, limbs loose, head lolling over the back of the chair, eyes closed.

  “Is he all right?” I ask, alarmed. I know that when I lay down to sleep this eve, all I shall see is this man, his vulnerability as something precious is stolen from him. Somehow, witnessing this has lodged the thought of him inside me.

  She smiles, pats his cheek gently and nods. “He’ll be no good to anyone for the rest of the day; we’ll let him sleep it off—there’s a pallet bed folded in the pantry. You can set that up by the stove when you’ve done with those bottles. Shut them tightly, shine them up nice, the Misses have buyers already. Not that there’s ever a month when we have leftovers.”

  “Who—what—is he?” I ask.

  She runs a tender hand through his hair. “Something the Misses found and kept. Something from beneath or above or in-between. Something strange and dangerous and he’s ours. His blood’s kept our heads above water more than once—folk don’t always want their daughters trained to kill, but there’s always call for this.”

  I wonder how they trapped him, how they keep him here. I wonder who he was—is. I wonder what he would do if given his freedom. I wonder what he would visit upon those who’ve taken so much from him.

  “Hurry up, Mercia. Still plenty to do and he’ll be a handful to get on that cot. Move yourself along, girl.”

  When I hear a board creak, I glance at the two hands of glory, and notice that of the seven fingers I lit, only six still burn and my heart ices up.