“We’ll discuss it later, Ma,” she said firmly. “Ulf and Rosa won’t want to hear about that now; I think they’ve got enough to worry about.”
The cottage was barely recognizable from her last visit; desolation and despair were manifest almost everywhere she looked, from the unchanged rushes on the floor to the dirty cups and bowls littering a table nobody could be bothered to clear.
“I’ll set a fire,” said Adelia, closing the window shutters that had been left to flap in the breeze. “You’ll freeze to death else.”
Ulf didn’t seem to care whether he did or not and sat silently, head bowed, forearms on the table, palms down, gazing miserably at his spread fingers, while Rosa stood at the window gazing blindly out over the marsh.
Their desolation was palpable; Allie could hardly bring herself to look at them. But while Adelia busied herself with practical things, she stood around redundantly, struggling to think of anything to say. She was no stranger to grief and had seen the effects of it before—otherwise healthy people physically diminished overnight—but this was the first time she had ever been so keenly and closely touched by it.
When the neglected chores had been seen to and Adelia was satisfied that order had been restored—although nobody seemed to care—she went to Rosa by the window and put her arm around her.
“We will find her, you know,” she told her, and Allie, sitting with an arm around Ulf, had to stifle the rejoinder: Yes, but she might well be dead by the time we do.
The body was still on the wall when they went past the church on their way home. Only this time Father Edward, arms upraised, was trying to disperse the now-sizeable crowd that had gathered busily and noisily around it.
“Just . . . Just go home, everyone,” he pleaded, to no avail. “There’s nothing to be done and nothing more to see. An interdict has been passed!”
But the villagers didn’t know what an interdict was and cared even less, and simply ignored him, apparently mesmerized and immovable from the scene, until a young girl, in visible distress, came rushing through the graveyard, astonishing everybody when she dived to the ground, prostrating herself at Father Edward’s feet.
“What do you suppose the matter is?” Adelia asked, unable to hear what the girl was saying through her convulsive sobs and the disapproving mutterings of the crowd.
“I don’t know,” Allie said, shrugging off her hood to hear better. “It’s . . . something to do with . . .” She craned her neck in concentration, then turned anxiously. “Oh, Ma! She’s asking him for the viaticum. She says her mother’s dying!”
They watched Father Edward carefully extricate the hem of his robe from the girl’s fingers and turn away, just as the onlookers, suddenly mindful of duties elsewhere, began to drift off.
“We have to help her!” Allie said, grabbing Adelia’s wrist and pulling her through the dispersing crowd to where the girl was lying motionless on the ground.
“But how, Allie? We can’t administer the viaticum!” Adelia said as she was reluctantly dragged through the church gate behind her.
“No, of course we can’t,” Allie snapped. All the suffering she had witnessed that day had taken its toll on her temper. “But if we’re quick we might be able to stop it from becoming necessary.”
As they approached, the girl got to her knees, clasping her hands imploringly at Father Edward’s retreating back, but when he didn’t turn back, she collapsed onto the ground again with a whimper of despair.
She was sobbing so hard by the time Allie knelt beside her that she seemed not to notice her presence. Only when Allie tapped her gently on the shoulder did she respond, rolling onto her back like a submissive puppy, peeling a dank curtain of grubby hair out of her eyes and staring up at her warily.
When Allie had introduced herself and carefully explained that she and Adelia were there to help her if they could, her expression softened, and in an impenetrable Fenland accent, she told them that her name was Epona, that her mother was desperately ill and that they should follow her.
A moment later, she scrambled to her feet and led them back through the village at speed, stopping every few yards to make sure they were keeping up and to chivvy them when she thought they were flagging.
It was a punishing journey, especially for Adelia, who was puffing hard and close to exhaustion by the time, a mile or so beyond Elsford, they arrived on the outskirts of a hamlet, not much more than a straggle of tiny huts built high above the marsh on stilts. Epona stopped at the furthest hut in the row and, with her foot on the bottom rung of a ladder, gestured frantically to them that they should follow her up.
The climb felt like an ascent into hell, only colder, Allie thought, stooping through the doorway at the top into a godforsaken room where Epona’s mother, wrapped from head to foot in a bundle of filthy rags, lay motionless in a corner.
At first sight it looked as if they were too late, as if she were already dead, but when Allie knelt down and put her hand to her forehead, she saw a faint flickering of her eyelids. She hurriedly took off her mantle and rolled up her sleeves while Adelia looked around them in despair, wondering how on earth good health could possibly be restored in such an environment.
“First things first, we need to get her fever down,” Allie said to nobody in particular, peeling back the filthy layers of swaddling so that Adelia could begin her examination.
It didn’t take long.
The moment she opened the woman’s mouth, an abscess, so engorged that it was pressing dangerously on her trachea, glistened at the back of her throat like a fleshy ruby.
Now for the tricky bit. Adelia rocked back onto her heels, wiping her brow with the back of her hand, which, despite the cold in the room, was beaded with sweat.
“Quinsy,” she mouthed at Allie, then turned to Epona, who was hovering anxiously behind her, and barked: “Don’t just stand there, girl! If you want to save your mother’s life we need to act quickly and you must do exactly as I say.”
Epona gulped and nodded emphatically.
“Good. Well, first things first, you must light a fire,” Adelia said, flinging out an arm to point at an untidy mound of ash in the middle of the room. “For what I’m going to have to do here I will need plenty of boiling water.” She broke off and wiped her forehead again before adding, “You do have a trivet, I take it?”
The girl nodded again.
“Good,” said Adelia. “Well, that’s something at least. And when that’s done, you’re to go to the well and fetch a bucket of water.”
She looked around the room, groaning with despair as she was reminded of the dreadful conditions that would make the procedure she was about to perform even more perilous than it needed be. In spite of the cold, the air in the room hung heavy and fetid, and the pervading stench—which she was reluctant to identify—encouraged economy of breath. And yet, there was no doubt about it, she was going to have to do something, and soon. In the short time since they’d been here the woman’s breathing had become increasingly labored as the abscess in her throat grew inexorably and threatened to close it.
When the fire was lit and Epona dispatched to the well, Adelia got up and started to ransack the room.
“I need a needle or a knife,” Allie heard her muttering as she flung wide the various cupboard doors and turned out all the pots and pans inside, tipping them up and shaking every implement she found. “Where on earth am I going to find something like that in a hellhole like this?”
Allie looked at her blankly for a moment, hoping for inspiration, until she remembered the knife Penda had lent her on the night Hawise went missing and which, in all the confusion, she had forgotten to give back. Snatching up her mantle from the floor, she started rummaging around in the lining.
“Will this do?” she asked when she had found it, holding it up like it was a miniature Excalibur.
“Oh, my darling,” Adelia said, “where on earth did you find that? That will do perfectly.”
It was a moment of serend
ipity and she was grateful, but it wasn’t sufficient to quell her nerves, because although the procedure itself was moderately straightforward, her lack of practice worried her.
It had been many years since her last operation; in fact, she had not done one since the appendectomy she had performed on the princess Joanna, which seemed a lifetime ago now. Suppose the intervening years had blunted her skill? Or that her ageing fingers had lost their dexterity? And even if they hadn’t, what if this unaccustomed bout of nerves got the better of her and her usually steady hand shook at the critical moment? And yet, she had no choice. Without prompt intervention the woman would almost certainly choke to death, and, by the looks of things, quite soon.
“Ma.”
She looked up.
Sensing this crisis of confidence, Allie was gazing at her with an expression of such tender reassurance that her nerves melted away in the glow.
And, as it turned out, she needn’t have worried anyway. The woman, by the time Adelia came to open her mouth again, had been rendered almost insentient with the pain and fever and stayed still and mercifully silent throughout, and Allie, the perfect assistant, held her as steady as a rock, one hand holding her body propped in her lap, the other holding her mouth open long enough and wide enough for Adelia to perform her miracle: one deft stab with the tip of the knife and the abscess popped, releasing a satisfying bolus of pus.
“Spit,” Adelia told her, and, when she had, gave her a solution of saline to gargle with, then wrapped her in Allie’s mantle to keep her warm and laid her gently back on her palliasse to sleep.
She knelt beside her, crippling her knees on the earthen floor, until she was satisfied that she was out of danger and breathing freely again, then got up.
“These will have to be washed,” she said, turning to Epona with an armful of grubby rags, only to find that, in the meantime, the hut had filled with a brood of ragged-looking children, Epona’s siblings, by the look of them, all anxiously and silently watching her every move. “Very good,” she said, disconcerted by their number and their rapt attention and grateful that she hadn’t been aware of it earlier. “Lots and lots . . . and lots of you. Well . . . In that case, it won’t take long to get this place cleaned up.” She stared at them for a moment, then, fixing each in turn with a stare of pedagogic menace, told them:
“Your mother is suffering from an infection, which may not mean much to you, but it’s caused by being dirty and living in dirty conditions. So, my advice, if you don’t want her to die and you don’t want to catch it yourselves, is that you will have to make damn sure that every inch of this room is scrubbed until it squeaks.” She stopped for a moment as another thought occurred to her before adding: “And, actually, that applies to you, too. You should all be scrubbed from head to toe, until you squeak. Do you understand?”
The children nodded.
“Good,” said Adelia. “Then our work here is done. From here on in your mother’s survival depends on you.”
It wasn’t strictly true. Inevitably, she would return within a day or two to check up on her—conscience would dictate that she do so—but in the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to encourage them to adopt more sanitary habits.
It was dusk by the time they got back to Elsford, shuffling and shivering under their shared mantle, to find Penda waiting anxiously at the gatehouse, her hands on her hips, staring menacingly into the night.
Allie recognized her stance and its implication and, too tired to be brave, dropped behind Adelia and let her go first.
“Where’ve you been?” Penda demanded, anxiety giving way to irritation with relief that they were back safely at last. “We’ve been worried sick, I was expecting you hours ago.”
By the time they had explained what had happened, describing Epona and her mother, the sibling brood, the hamlet and the fetid little hut, they were halfway across the courtyard.
“Christ’s teeth!” Penda’s gimlet eyes opened wider than Allie had ever seen them. “You know who they are, don’t you?”
She shook her head.
“The Wadlow family! That’s who!”
Chapter 46
During the endless hours of her captivity, Hawise worked hard to make sense of her surroundings to create a picture of them in her mind.
Whether it was an accurate portrait or not didn’t matter—she never expected she would see them—but her sanity depended on furnishing this prison with her imagination, to soften the edges of the darkness and make it habitable.
Barring the rope around her ankle, she was physically comfortable. He had provided her with a palliasse to sleep on, warm blankets and a regular supply of clean clothes—sheathlike robes that felt expensive to the touch and smelled of lye and an herb she didn’t recognize—and he always brought two buckets: one for her privy and one to wash herself.
Over time she learned the pattern to his visits and realized that he only ever came at night.
When he came she would wake to the sound of approaching footsteps, hear them pause beside the privy bucket; then a stifled breath of disgust, footsteps receding, keys jangling, a door opening—a postern perhaps—water lapping on stone and a sloosh as the bucket emptied into what she assumed was the river . . . But, other than the candle he carried, she never saw any light.
When the postern door closed and the footsteps returned, she would brace herself, closing her eyes when he was close enough that she could feel his breath on her face. And yet, despite the unabating terror, he never touched her; instead, he would kneel beside her, almost worshipfully, addressing her as his “lady,” and sometimes, sometimes, he would feed her sweetmeats.
At other times he would reach out to touch the hem of her robe and sing softly to her, and always, when he had finished, would settle down beside her like a child at his mother’s knee and ask her for a story.
So far she had been able to rise to the challenge, stifling the panic that threatened to blank her mind and silence her, but always, in the back of her mind, was the nagging feeling that one day either her voice or her imagination or both would fail her and it would prove fatal.
But not, thank God, tonight. Tonight, she felt strangely excited. She had a new story ready for him.
In the darkness a rare smile crept over her face.
“I think you’ll enjoy this one,” she told him. “I think, perhaps, it’s the best of all.”
Chapter 47
“Oh!” said Adelia. “Visitors?”
They were on their way to the hall for breakfast when two unfamiliar male voices rang out from it.
She looked at Allie, surprised and a little irritated to see that she was blushing.
“Oh. I take it you know them, then,” she said.
“Yes,” Allie replied, the blush rising as she started straightening her skirts and fussing at the gauze around her wimple, looking, to Adelia’s sharp, maternal eye, uncharacteristically coy. “I think I do.”
So Adelia wasn’t entirely surprised to discover that at least one of the voices belonged to an unusually handsome young man.
Both were around Allie’s age, dressed in hunting leathers, each carrying an exotic-looking falcon and deep in conversation with Penda.
“Mistress Adelia,” Penda said when she saw her come in, “allow me to introduce Lord Peverell of Dunstan and his steward Sir William.”
The men bowed politely.
“Greetings,” said Adelia, uncomfortably aware of a frisson in the room and that the scrutiny of all eyes in it was on her.
“Lord Peverell’s very kindly come to warn us about the interdict,” Penda continued, and—Adelia could have sworn—blushed like a girl as she did so. Something about the friendlier of these two young men seemed to be having a peculiar effect on both Allie and Penda.
“How very kind of him,” she said. “But actually quite unnecessary. We learned about it yesterday. We saw the notice on the church gate and the body on the wall.”
“Ah,” said Penda. “Well, it’s not just that, he’s
offering us the use of ’is icehouse, in case like—”
“At least, I hope it won’t be necessary, of course,” Lord Peverell interrupted her. “But, as Lady Penda says, just in case . . .”
“That’s very generous of you,” Adelia said, racking her brain as to why his name seemed familiar, until she remembered the conversation between Rowley and Penda at the Wolvercote feast.
So, it’s you, she thought, regarding him with renewed interest.
So that was what all the fuss was about! Well, he was certainly handsome, she’d give him that, with his leonine hair and large, heavily lashed brown eyes; in fact, now she came to think about it, he was reminiscent of Rowley in his youth, although this boy’s bones were finer, as the English aristocracy’s tended to be. He was also tall and he carried himself with confidence, and just for a moment she wondered if there might be a hint of arrogance or vanity there, too.
Perhaps.
But, on second thought, perhaps not; that scar on his cheek—which, from a beholder’s point of view anyway, added something to his looks—mitigated it.
Aware that he was shifting uncomfortably under the forensic gaze she had allowed to linger for longer than was polite, she looked away kindly.
“As you say, Lord Peverell,” she continued, smiling with, she hoped, benevolence, if not, perhaps, benediction. “Let us hope that it won’t be necessary. In fact I’m hoping that we might be able to nip this damnable business in the bud. I happen to be on good acquaintance with the bishop of St. Albans and shall be writing to him immediately to enlist his help in getting the interdict lifted.”
Her last statement was met with a murmur of approval that she barely noticed; her mind had already moved on to other matters, chief among them the information she had so obviously been denied about Allie and everything that had gone on in her absence.
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