by Jay Ruud
“Perhaps they wanted to kill them both,” I suggested. “They might have been working together to plan it, and wanted to destroy both family enemies at once.”
Sir Dinadan shook his head. “Much as my gorge rises at this family’s overinflated pride, and much as I wish I had a pin to prick it with, I have difficulty believing they would have plotted together in such a way. Isolde’s attitude toward her brother doesn’t suggest it.”
Merlin nodded, murmuring “Granted” in a thoughtful way.
“Kaherdin maintains that he saw nothing, no foul play regarding La Belle Isolde either on the boat or in the city, and he is supported by both Melias and Andred,” I contributed. “And it’s not clear how either of them could have gotten to Isolde while at sea if what they say is true. But it seems to me clear that both Melias and Andred would lie in whatever way necessary to protect their master.”
“I’m not sure I agree,” Merlin answered, sipping thoughtfully on what was left of his ale as we passed a side street which seemed to be lined with blacksmith shops. “Sir Andred perhaps—he is one bitter man who seems to trust no one. The squire Melias, however, I thought much more amenable, and as far as I could tell seemed to be concealing nothing.”
“I have to admit, that is my view as well,” Sir Dinadan answered. “And…” with this he grimaced and rolled his eyes upward, “to give the Devil his due, I have no personal knowledge of Kaherdin showing any ill will at all toward Tristram. He admired him and, if it can ever be said that he loved anyone, he loved Tristram as his closest friend. At his death…he wept as if it had been his own brother who died. I can’t believe Kaherdin had ought to do with Sir Tristram’s death. Kaherdin was truly close to Tristram, despite his other shortcomings. And they are legion, believe me.”
“So,” Merlin moved on. “The case is not so obvious anymore, eh? But Gildas, your bringing up the lady Rosemounde certainly roused the grieving widow, did it not? I admit I did not anticipate that.”
“Nor did I, my lord,” I answered. “The lady Rosemounde certainly harbors only the most familial of feelings toward her sister.”
“Or at least wants the world to think so,” Merlin mused, though I did not like him speaking so of my lady. “In any case, if Isolde of the White Hands did lift her hand in violence at any time, it is difficult to consider whether she believed it was her father or her husband she was killing. Or whether it even mattered to her which one.”
“Yes, and realistically, she clearly couldn’t have stabbed Tristram, unless she had an ally who was part of the cavalry. Nor, for that matter, could she have poisoned Isolde, if that’s what happened, since she was never near her before she died,” I reasoned. Then, thinking back to Merlin’s earlier comments, I changed the subject. “But what was your concern about Captain Jacques?”
“We must speak with some care in this city,” Merlin cautioned me. “Everyone who deals with us is not necessarily our ally. I don’t know how far to trust Captain Jacques, but one thing I know for certain is that he is under the command of Sir Kaherdin as part of the city’s garrison. That does not necessarily make him our friend.”
“I did notice a kind of change in his demeanor after we had visited Kaherdin,” Dinadan agreed. “Do you think it may have been because he had seen how unwelcome we were to his commander?”
“I can’t say why,” Merlin mused. “Maybe we’ll be able to feel him out when we meet him later at the Cock and Bull.”
“It would almost certainly be to our advantage,” Dinadan proposed, “to have a conversation with Sir William of Caen. He is dull as pondwater, it’s true, but as intelligent a knight as there is in this city. And one of Kaherdin’s inner circle. He has a reputation for honesty, and may know things or have seen things that he’d be willing to tell us about.”
“And we can trust him?” I asked. “If he’s as close to the ruling family as you say, and as devoted to Kaherdin as he says himself, how can we believe him?”
Merlin shrugged. “If he lies, I think we will see through it. But Dinadan has a point. He may be a good witness, and the parchment I have from Kaherdin should convince him to talk to us. We’ll have to find a time to question him.”
“What about his companion, that Sir Neville?” I asked.
“Too strange for my blood,” Dinadan muttered.
And Merlin seemed to agree, but changed the subject: “But look, we seem to be here!”
The Cathedral of Saint Vincent of Saragossa was named for a fourth-century martyr who, like most fourth-century martyrs, had died by the hand of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. I observed now at closer range that the single tower we had seen from a distance was an old Roman tower that rose above the transept of the church. Most of the rest of the structure was fairly new, built of white and red sandstone in thick Romanesque walls. There was no elaborate west work, but only a fairly simply portal into the nave. The west portal, like the tower, seemed of a much greater age than the rest of the church.
Ancient or no, the western portals of churches always hold a fascination for me. That was always where you found the Last Judgment tympanum. And there it was. The old sculptor, hundreds of years earlier, was no genius with stone but had rendered a passable semblance of Christ sitting in judgment, of a large group of souls on his right being led by an angel into eternal bliss, and a large group of sinners on his left, goaded by a hideous demon into a great fiery hellmouth. And there, at Christ’s upper right, my favorite image of all: father Abraham sitting in paradise, lifting his robe so that he revealed the tiny, innocent souls spending eternity in Abraham’s bosom. That’s where I wanted to wind up, I always thought. There, in the bosom of the patriarch—if I could somehow remain innocent, uncorrupted by the world of the Tristrams and the Isoldes. And the Kaherdins and the Marks. And the Hoels. And the Arthurs, I thought, remembering the birth of Mordred.
Merlin and Dinadan stepped into the darkness of the cathedral, and I followed. Inside, the nave was dark, lit only by a pair of high windows on the side walls. There were two aisles supported by six rectangular stone columns. The apse in the chancel was flat. There had been some small attempt to decorate the church with frescoes over the years, and I could make out on one wall along the side aisle what appeared to be a procession of martyrs, led, apparently, by Saint Vincent himself, carrying his palm. The other martyrs all seemed similarly Roman in their provenance. I understood from Captain Jacques, who had discussed the cathedral with me on our crossing from Southampton, that the abbey attached to the cathedral was allied with the Marmoutier order—monks from an abbey founded by that other most Roman of saints, Martin of Tours. No mention anywhere in the cathedral of the city’s founder, Saint-Malo, who as a companion of Saint Brendan would have brought a Celtic form of Christianity among the Celtic people of Brittany, and whose monastery would have followed the ancient Celtic rule, rather than that of the Roman Benedict. Were there any adherents of the old ways still active in Saint-Malo any more, I wondered, even after some centuries? Such things were not unheard of, this clinging to the old ways, especially in places like Saint-Malo, where anyone who was not of Celtic heritage was a recent import.
“Hello!” Merlin called to the empty church. “You’d think there’d be a sacristan at least around somewhere, wouldn’t you?” He asked us, looking about with his hands on his hips. He called out again: “Is there anyone here?”
I caught a sudden movement out of the corner of my eye, and looked to see a face, peeking as it were from behind the rood screen in the front of the cathedral. I pointed, and called out, “Are you the Sacristan?”
The head shook and spoke, “Oh no, I’m not. Saw you approaching though. Have a pretty good idea who you are.”
Squinting into the darkness, Sir Dinadan announced. “That, gentlemen, is Master Oswald. We’ve found our man.”
“Looking for me I guess?” Master Oswald came from behind the rood screen and bustled his way up the
left side aisle to meet us. “Sir Dinadan, such a delight to see you again.”
“And you, master.” Dinadan smiled down at the diminutive monk. “Master Oswald, this is the lord Merlin, famed counselor from the court of King Arthur himself.”
“Ooo,” Master Oswald cooed, his brown eyes growing round with enthusiasm.
“And this,” Dinadan continued, “is his assistant, the squire, Gildas of Cornwall.” I nodded to the monk. He was quite short, a good two inches shorter than me, and I was the shortest of our group. But what Oswald lacked in height he made up for in girth, for his body was nearly as round as his tonsured head, and the black Benedictine robe that swathed it must have taken the wool of a significant number of Breton sheep to construct. Master Oswald wore no belt; I suspected he could find none large enough to encircle his perimeter.
“Cornwall, hey?” Master Oswald reflected. “Some personal interest in this business here that’s gone on in the past weeks? That’s why you’re here with Dinadan?”
“Not exactly personal,” I replied. “But certainly an interest. That’s why Merlin and I are here…” I said, looking up at the mage.
“The king has asked us to inquire into the rather unquiet deaths of Tristram and Isolde,” Merlin began, as diplomatically as possible. Pulling out the parchment that the squire Melias had prepared for him, he also showed that to Master Oswald. “As you see, the lord Kaherdin has given us leave to question people in the city as we look into the case. Our understanding is that you were there when they died—indeed, other than the lady Isolde of the White Hands, the only one who was present for the deaths themselves. In addition, of course, you tended Sir Tristram during his debilitating illness following on the wound that poisoned him. How much do you know about poisons, Master Oswald?”
“Ah,” the rotund monk cried. “So that’s the way of it, eh? We’d better be seated then. I suppose this may take some time. Come, please,” and he motioned us to sit on the small benches available for congregants who chose to sit through mass. We gathered four of the seats into a circle, Master Oswald’s looking as though it may collapse at any moment. And then he began, as if we were all old friends exchanging stories.
“How much do I know about poisons, you ask, my lord Merlin? Well, certainly more than any man in Saint-Malo. And I would venture to say as much as anyone in all of Brittany. This is not boasting. I am herbalist to this monastery, and have spent every day of my life growing and gathering plants and herbs of remarkable variety, to keep my cupboards stocked. Been doing it now for twenty years. I know what every one of those herbs and plants does because I’ve used them, tending the sick in the abbey and the town when called upon, as I was in the case of Sir Tristram. Don’t just rely on trial and error though, no, no. I have manuscripts of Pliny, Dioscorides, an Anglo-Saxon herbal, a Latin manuscript of Avicenna, and a new treatise by a German nun, Hildegard, called A Book of Simple Medicine. All of this is me. But does Tristram trust me to cure him? No. He calls for his old girlfriend. Isolde of Ireland, whose reputation is she’s the greatest healer in the world. And on she comes, to save the day.”
“Well, she had cured him of a similar wound before, hadn’t she?” I ventured.
Master Oswald scoffed. “In Ireland, not? Sure, he was wounded by a poisoned blade. In Ireland. A blade borne by her own brother. She knew exactly what the poison was that her brother used, and so she knew precisely what the antidote was. It doesn’t take a great herbalist to do that. It just takes somebody’s sister.”
“But isn’t it likely to be the same kind of poison, if it’s used on a weapon?” I asked. “I mean, how many different poisons are there that somebody would envenom a blade with?”
“Dozens,” Oswald answered. “That is, unless that was a rhetorical question. Look, it’s really a pretty unusual thing for someone to be poisoning their weapons anyway. Why do it? It takes a particular streak of cruelty. You want to make sure that you maximize the kill, that if you just slightly wound the enemy, he’s going to die. A person like Marholt might do it: his job was to defend Ireland single-handedly, so even if he lost, there was a chance he’d prevent the enemy from entering his country. But why should a Norse raiding party do it? They care about plunder and then about getting away. What do they care if one of the defenders dies long after they’ve left? He wasn’t their target. But I guess I’m off on a tangent here. The point is, you make your poison from what’s available. In this case they used snake venom. The toxic venom of the asp viper.”
“You’re sure of this?” Merlin asked. “How can you be certain?”
“By the symptoms,” Oswald shrugged matter-of-factly. “Acute pain. Swelling due to edema. Discoloration. Heavy internal bleeding. Some loss of vision, difficulty breathing and swallowing. And by the end he’d lost all feeling in his right leg, the leg with the wound. It was snake venom. No doubt. Now, answer me this. There are no snakes in Ireland, is that not so? Saint Patrick cast them all out, like demons, isn’t that what they say? So if there are no snakes in Ireland, how was Isolde of Ireland going to know what to do to save Tristram? Huh? How?”
Merlin pursed his lips, then frowned and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, well, she couldn’t.
“Of course she couldn’t. If I were a betting man, I’d say he stood a better chance with me than with her. Of course, I’m not a betting man,” Oswald laughed. “Gambling is probably a sin. In fact the odds are three-to-one that it is, I’d say. If I were a betting man. But then, look, it gave him some hope to think she was coming. That might have bought him a few days. But trust me, he was a dead man from the time he got that wound. All we did was stave off the inevitable.”
The loquacious monk had a tendency to talk all around a topic before finally putting it out of its misery, but Merlin did seem not only to be amused, but to be getting something out of Master Oswald’s ramblings. “Tell me, Master Oswald. In your opinion, did Isolde’s lie about the black sail play a part in Sir Tristram’s death?”
“A part? Oh dear me, I suppose it might be said to. Not a major part, certainly, but if his hope had allowed him to hold on that long, taking the hope away from him did send him into his death throes. But I’d say it may have hastened his death by only a few minutes. Once he had actually seen his Isolde of Ireland, the hope would have been achieved, and it couldn’t have sustained his life any more. No, white sail or black, the man was dead, I can tell you for a certainty.”
“Well answer me this then,” Merlin continued. “In your professional opinion, what do you think killed La Belle Isolde?”
The monk smiled wanly. “A broken heart, what else? She comes in after the long journey, after being separated from the love of her life for three years, and thinking it would be forever, and what does she find? Only that he has died, but scant minutes before. How else could the story end? She must die. The story calls for it.”
Merlin smiled back sadly. “An oddly romantic notion for a consummate professional like yourself, wouldn’t you admit?”
“Well, as to that,” Master Oswald looked down. “Sometimes there is no reason to disturb the common belief. Let the people have their story as they want it. Besides,” he went on in a conspiratorial tone, “I had no time or opportunity to examine the body. The thing was done, the stage must be cleared and struck before the next farce began.”
Merlin folded his arms and leaned back to study the little round monk’s face. “If you were a betting man,” Merlin challenged him. “What would be your best guess as to what killed La Belle Isolde?”
Oswald licked his lips, looked around, and whispered rather loudly to Merlin “She was poisoned as well. Five will get you ten it was with Belladonna. It’s the most toxic plant found in Europe. Now when she came in, she was shielding her eyes against the light. Dilated pupils and a sensitivity to light are symptoms of Belladonna poisoning. She was also flushed, staggering, seemed unbalanced, seemed to have blurred vision because she didn’t
look like she was seeing clearly, had slurred speech, and then fell in a great convulsion to the floor.”
“All symptoms that would seem consistent with broken-heartedness,” I ventured.
“But more clinically, all symptoms consistent with Belladonnna poisoning. Twenty years of experience, young Gildas, and you know what I’ve never seen? I’ve never seen anyone die of a broken heart. The odds are…well, they’re not even worth considering.”
“So she was poisoned,” Merlin concluded.
“She was absolutely poisoned,” Master Oswald affirmed. “And it was done not long before her disembarking from the ship.”
“But how is that even possible,” Sir Dinadan wondered, “when the faithful Brangwen was with her every step of the way from Cornwall to Saint-Malo?”
“Or so Kaherdin and his friends told us. But here again, we have only their testimony. How much can we believe what they say?” Merlin reasoned. “Is it really possible for the two of them never to have parted company that entire week? I mean, we would say ‘she never left her mistress’s side,’ and be sincere about it, even though we know that at some point she must have gone off to use the necessarium, or to stretch her legs while perhaps her mistress was sleeping, or any one of a number of excuses that would cause her to leave her mistress unattended for a few seconds, even a few minutes at a time. That is all that would have been necessary for a poisoner to do his work.”
“Well,” Master Oswald said thoughtfully as he scratched the side of his close-shaven face. “I think maybe if I was you boys, I’d want to talk to the lady Brangwen then.”
“Well of course we’d like to…” Merlin began to snap at the monk, and then realized: “Wait, Master Oswald, are you saying that the lady Brangwen is here? Now? In Saint-Malo?”
The monk shrugged. “Where else would she be? I mean, she was left pretty much alone and friendless when her mistress collapsed, and no one had taken much thought as to what to do with Brangwen when it was all over. She is trying to find passage on a ship that will take her back to Cornwall, although it may turn out to be much faster for her to go back on the ship that takes the three of you to Southampton, since she can probably get overland escort to Cornwall from Camelot. Likely granted to her by the king himself, known the world over for his generosity.”